Our today's guest was defined in 1992 as the brightest British marxist.
Be aware that at that time E.P. Thompson, Ralph Miliband
Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm were still alive.
Today we fly at the height of the storming skies.
On Otra Vuelta de Tuerka, Perry Anderson.
Today Perry Anderson is with us here on Otra Vuelta de Tuerka,
but we're going to change our format. In order to have him here on the program,
I had to agree that he could interview me, and if there's time afterwards
he'll accept a few questions.
For us it is an honor and from here on out I'm at your service, Perry.
I think that in the world of the Cold War it was relatively easy to identify
national political actors as belonging to a sort of international family.
It was easier to understand political conflicts, it allowed us a series
of geopolitical certainties, the traditions of the Second and Third International,
even the different dissidences generated in what might be the Eastern Bloc
served to locate and identify the different expressions of the Left
when the idea of the Left
was clearly expressed in the terms of the Cold War.
The end of the Cold War produced a series of conceptual difficulties
when it comes to identifying political actors.
It also produced a crisis in the traditional actors.
It is clear that this affected the Social Democrats, but especially
what we might call the post-Communist tradition and this makes it more difficult
to identify the actors that arise in different national spheres.
With respect to La France Insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, however,
there are a series of affinities that come from a long way back.
Before we founded Podemos, we already admired Jean-Luc Mélenchon
as a very peculiar figure, a strange one, an old colleague of Mitterand,
a Minister under Jospin, who nevertheless had a perspective very similar to our own
on what was happening in Latin America. At that time we had a debate, I remember,
on La Tuerka, about the French presidential elections five years ago,
before Podemos existed. We really liked what Jean-Luc Mélenchon said.
Today we talk about Mélenchon, Front de Gauche candidate,
who surprised all political annalists with his third place on all polls
for the french elections, overtaking the extreme right movements.
Mélenchon's speech is far from traditional left's,
somehow inspired by Latin American's new left positions.
It sounded more like and I say this with all due caution,
a kind of Gaullism from the Left that we liked.
At that moment we too were looking to Latin America
for answers to the situation of crisis in our own Left.
The crisis of our own Left had to do with elements that are common
to Left-organizations in all countries, but also with our own particular history:
the Spanish Civil War, the consequences of the Transition,
and the pluri-national character of Spain which made it very difficult for
the Left to defend "Spain" as such, to use this patriotic language,
like what we were seeing in Latin America.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon was, for us, a very interesting point of reference.
From that time on we've had our own unusual history:
a political organization that arises out of a group of university researchers
who had been experimenting in the field of communication, with television programs
at a very small scale, and with my participation in mainstream programs,
experimenting with political discourses that we saw we might open the field
of the traditional Left to sectors who were experiencing
what in Spain we call a "crisis of the 1978 political regime".
It opened opportunities to create a new political grammar that
didn't express itself just in the classic cultural terms of Left and Right
but that might allow us to occupy a much broader political space.
I believe that La France Insoumise of Mélenchon has understood
that in France too there is a crisis of regime, and the French
can theorize this much more clearly when they speak
about the transition from the Fifth to the Sixth Republic.
There are obvious differences between our two countries that condition
the ways our respective Lefts do politics, and that condition the way
we relate to the national and the popular.
We've seen in the campaign of La France Insoumise
how they have reclaimed the values of the French revolution
and dispute the terrain of French Republicanism as a terrain
they might be able to occupy with the political action of La France Insoumise.
Here, we have it a bit more difficult. Here there were no Jacobins,
there was no unified construction of the State, our State is pluri-national.
Here there was no bourgeois political revolution,
we didn't win the Second World War, here we lost it... and this poses
greater difficulties when it comes to defining a genealogy of the homeland
that might allow us to define the terrain that's being disputed.
But the key thing that explains what is going on in the majority
of the European countries, but also in the United States,
is a political moment, a moment in which political expressions,
lets accept, for the moment, Wallerstein's term "anti-systemic movements".
There is a crisis of liberal political systems,
like what happened in the 1930s in Europe.
And this has expressions in the extreme Right,
like the Front National or Donald Trump, it has expressions that cannot be translated
in terms of Left-Right, like Cinque Stelle in Italy,
and it has expressions that arise, culturally, from the Left,
like La France Insoumise or like Podemos in Spain.
I believe the key thing in understanding these two movements is to understand
the situation of exceptionality that European political regimes
and the US, are experiencing.
I believe that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are expressions
of the same political moment, even though they have nothing in common.
Jeremy Corbyn is also an expression, in his genre, in his own way,
that he represents within the Labor Party, of this exceptional
political moment that Europe is experiencing.
But of course the differences between France and Spain are enormous.
We are often envious because we don't have discursive resources
as effective as the ones they have in France,
although we have the good fortune not to have an extreme Right in Spain
like the Front National.
Two of the elements you point out might essentially have to do
with the superstructural conjuncture that differentiates France from Spain,
they have a presidentialist system.
When we were looking for points of reference in Latin America,
we liked Ecuador very much,
in particular the experience of Alianza País and of Correa.
As a presidentialist system, they could, in a sort of political blitz,
reach the presidency and immediately call for a constitutive assembly
and re-establish the Republic.
To some extent this would be possible in France too,
as a presidentialist system, and they very nearly made it.
It was not at all impossible that they reach the second round.
Macron and Mélenchon or Le Pen and Mélenchon,
and this probably would have opened up a very different political scenario
in which, almost through a blitz,
Jean-Luc Mélenchon might have become president of the Republic.
That would have entailed possibilities
totally different from what would be possible in Spain,
within a parliamentary system and with an electoral system
that was designed for conservative purposes.
If we were to come to power it would always be by coming
to agreements with other political powers,
and with mechanisms for constitutional transformation
that are strictly regulated and very slow.
Lets say that the constitutive project has more institutional obstacles in Spain
than in the French Republic.
The question of the City Halls, on the other hand, as you point out.
The advantage we have is that we are the principle political force
in the most important municipalities in Spain.
We govern in Madrid, in Barcelona, Compromís governs in Valencia,
we're in Cadiz and three important cities in Galicia...
and it's true that this establishes us as a real alternative in government,
it even permits us to set up a series of team with
real experience in forming governments.
But the essential thing here is what you mentioned
with respect to the more radical political program
that La France Insoumise appeared to have.
This no doubt has to do
with the geopolitical importance of the French State.
In France, an electoral victory for Jean-Luc Mélenchon
would entail a total redefining of the EU,
and I think I'm erring on the side of caution when I speak
in terms of "redefining", it could entail the end of the European Union
as we've known it to date, because they were openly saying that
they intended to reconsider all the treaties.
France, in the end, as you explain in your book 'The New Old World',
was the political heart of the EU,
it was the State called upon to bear the political,
diplomatic and military weight of the European Union project,
together with the economic power of Germany
and weight of what the german mark meant.
This correlation has changed and the political force in the UE
comes from Germany.
A change in the French State
talks about a State that forms part of the Security Council,
that is still a first-rank economic power,
and a first-rank political power, with a national spirit which...
I think we can propose a series of transformations impelled by the State
that are surely more exhaustive than what could be proposed
by a State in the south of Europe, even Spain,
which is the fourth economy in the Euro-zone and is a State
that is stronger than Portugal, stronger than Greece,
almost at the level of Italy in many regards.
But the fact of being situated in the South of Europe implies a relationship,
even a narrative of what Europe means,
which is very different from the narrative in France.
The EU does not represent necessarily, for the French people,
an improvement in their national expectations,
it's in constant contradiction,
and the referendum on the European constitution made that quite clear.
In Spain, Europe was a promise of modernization, a promise of prosperity,
a promise even of democratic normalization after the dictatorship.
Even, following Ortega's words about Spain being the problem
and Europe being the solution,
the historical subalternity of Spain within Europe means
that the possibilities of radical transformation driven by the State
appear with different characteristics than what we might see in France.
That said,
I believe...
the State is still the fundamental institution for political transformation,
despite the limits imposed by a post-national geopolitical reality
that limits ever more the capacity of Governments to act,
given a series of limited State instruments.
But I think the difference with our French colleagues
has to do with a difference of what it means to be in the South of Europe.
This too is a challenge for us, to create a sort of patriotism of the South
that serves to reclaim the dignity of a country that has been constructed,
in recent years, in a sort of European periphery,
specialized in tourism and construction,
that renounced its industrial fabric,
that renounced research and innovation,
that took on a sort of role within Europe that subalternized our country.
We are very much aware of this,
but also aware of the objective political difficulties
that go with doing politics in a country in the periphery of Europe.
The first thing is that I don't think we'll ever be able to construct
a social theory that says: "If these things occur then necessarily
the Socialist parties will have to disappear".
If there is unemployment, if the Socialist parties have experienced corruption,
if they've experienced some equivalent of Tony Blair's Third Way,
if there are enough of these elements then the Socialist party will have to disappear.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
There are political factors that are, let's say, unexpected.
The French Socialist Party, until recently, had a president in the Republic in France.
And certainly just some months ago no one imagined what was going
to happen in recent months.
There was even certain elation at the thought that Benoît Hamon
might be the great white hope that would revive socialism in France.
And yet what has happened could almost be called
a Pasokization of the French Socialist Party.
Just this morning Jean-Luc sent me a message
with the predictions for the legislative elections.
They're saying La France Insoumise will get 16% or 17% and the Socialist party about 6%.
If these predictions are confirmed...
- Right now? - Right now.
- OK - If these predictions are confirmed,
we'd be talking about a Pasokization of the French Socialist Party,
which is not something that could have been predicted a little over a year ago.
In Spain,
the Socialist Party is in the worse electoral situation in its history,
practically since the Spanish Civil War.
It is worse off now than in 1977, than in 1979,
worse than in any moment of the political system of 1978.
Even they themselves are theorizing the possibilities of their own...
not disappearance but yes reduction.
I think the Socialist Party will survive.
It will not survive everywhere, but it will in the South of Spain
and in the two Castillas. But I think it will have a very hard time
surviving in the large cities and lets say, in Catalonia, Valencia,
he Balearic Islands, the Basque Country, in Galicia where we've already
overtaken them and we are the second or first political force.
I believe that the demographic composition of Spain, with the social pyramid,
an inverted demographic pyramid, guarantees that the Socialist Party
will continue enjoying important support, especially from older people,
who as a generation have a hard time supporting us.
With all that, I think the PSOE is in an unparalleled moment, historically.
It was the great party of the 1978 political system.
In France, the system of the Fifth Republic is not understood
solely through the Socialist Party.
Gaullism, the French Right, are absolutely fundamental in understanding
the political system, and even the Socialist Party was the one that...
Let's say the failure of the joint program of the Left of Mitterand
was a way for the Socialist Party to situate itself in its system
in which it didn't bear the enormous burden
that the Socialist Party here in Spain did.
It is the most important party in the last 40 years,
the party associated with modernization, the party that in some ways
embodies the incorporation of Spain into Europe,
the extension of public services, even a certain cultural project.
It is the party of the regime par excellence.
So if the party of the regime par excellence, the one that has governed
for the most years, the one that has most experience in administration,
the party that, moreover, was capable of integrating Spain territorially:
it was the party that in General Elections could win simultaneously
in both Andalusia and in Catalonia.
It was, in some ways, the party that represented
the territorial plurality of Spain.
That this party is left in a practically subaltern position in Euskadi
in Catalonia, that it is behind us in Galicia and in the large cities,
means that its role in the future is going to be a completely different one.
I don't believe that they will drop below an electoral base-line
of 3.5 or 4 million voters, that would mean the Pasokization of the party,
but I do see that its role in the future is going to be different.
I don't think it will go back to being the party with 10 million votes,
with 40% or 35% of the vote, I think it will play a different role.
That said, contingency in politics...
there are unpredictable elements, depending upon who wins
the primaries very different things could happen.
The capacity of parties to self-destruct through internal dynamics
is enormous and undeniable. So I'd say there's not a recipe,
an economic situation that determines whether socialist parties
cease to exist or not. Of course, neo-liberalism in Europe narrowed
the margin for success of the socialist parties,
of course Blair's Third Way narrowed their possibilities of governing
as managers of the welfare State.
All of these factors have done them tremendous harm,
and the economic crisis in Spain has hurt them.
But just as I feel that our emergence in Spain was not
an inevitable consequence of the situation: Podemos exists,
but it could have not existed if we hadn't taken the initiative and had some luck.
What happens with the Socialist Party will depend upon the ability of its leaders
to get it right, or their clumsiness.
My impression is that if they were capable of making a political
reflection on the country, they would understand
that it would be in their interest to seek out an alliance with us.
But that would entail thinking about Europe, thinking about what the CETA means,
thinking about what it means to be a social democracy in a post neo-liberal world.
I think the failure of Blair's Third Way is evident, and I think that
the European social democrat parties don't have much political room
if they don't differentiate themselves from the conservative parties.
The shift to the right in Europe puts the parties of the old social
democratic tradition in a tight position. But who knows?
There are a lot of socialists in Spain who reclaim Macron,
who say that Macron seems great to them... who knows.
It's decisive. It's a taboo subject, still
in the political conversation in Spain, it's a discussion that
hasn't been normalized.
The verbal violence of the Right, still, when they talk about the Spanish Civil War,
or the fact that it's a subject that...
is never studied in schools.
This has ideological consequences that...
I'd dare to say, are very conservative.
Probably the error of strategic analysis of the Left throughout the Transition
was to not realize that, as a result of the Civil War,
Francoism was able to create a Spanish society that was
tremendously conservative.
The Left, organized clandestinely, principally in the Communist Party,
saw the mobilizations of workers, students, neighborhood associations...
as an expression of its strength.
Later it had to reckon with an electoral reality that revealed some of the successes
of Francoism, in the sense that it had created a society
that was more conservative than the Left had believed.
The Civil War consolidates a power block in Spain.
A power block in the sense that Tuñón de Lara, one of our greatest historians,
has defined as a block that has been gradually constructed since the 19th Century
and that was challenged by different styles of resistance.
Liberal resistance by the Spanish Republicans in the 19th Century
Even at the beginning of the 19th Century there are Liberal tendencies
in the Spanish army.
The emergence of the workers' movement in Spain,
a very peculiar workers' movement, because industrialization in Spain
is very late and is concentrated principally in Catalonia and the Basque Country.
Probably the power of anarcho- syndicalism in Spain has to do
with this delay, a country that is principally agrarian in structure,
such that anarcho-syndicalism has a lot of weight, for example in the countryside
in Andalusia, as well as in Catalonia.
All of these tensions, expressed in the project of the Second Republic,
which is a project that faces many difficulties in achieving hegemony
and, in some ways, this leads to a military coup and a civil war,
in which the destruction of the political organizations of the working class,
of the Republicans and the very best of our homeland, was complete.
This consolidates a power block that, through surnames that don't change
and business-oriented structures of property and the conversion
of the State into private estates, has extended all the way to the present.
The families that continue to distribute amongst themselves
what is left of the large public companies that are being privatized,
a large part of the spaces of the administration, are all the surnames
of the winners of the Civil War.
Even the cohort of economists that worked with Solchaga,
the Minister of Economy under Felipe González,
was formed in the Bank of Spain under the dictatorship.
In Spain there is a national 'patrimonialism' with respect to the State
that has to do with the result of the Civil War:
the victory of one political and economic block
which was able even to control the Transition itself.
Vázquez Montalban said that more than the expression of a balance of forces,
the Spanish Transition was a balance of weaknesses.
This balance of weaknesses that Vázquez Montalban is talking about
reveals who had the power, if not the legitimacy, that was the Francoist elite,
and who had the legitimacy, although they didn't hold the power
which was the democratic Left.
Lets say that these structures of power have been maintained,
much as they have been modernized, much as Spanish capitalism has evolved,
has been financialized, much as the processes of privatization have meant
that a large part of the economic power in Spain is now held
by investment firms in the US like BlackRock,
but lets say that the governing class has, somehow, maintained itself,
and that has to do with the result of the 20th Century in Spain.
The 20th Century in Spain is exceptional.
The essential difference from a country that in many respects is very similar,
like Italy, is that in Italy in some way...
the Second World War was won by the good guys,
there was a constitution that was basically a pact between the party of Stalin
and the party of the Pope, but that at least is an anti-fascist constitution,
that allows them to talk about anti-fascism as a shared heritage of Italian democracy.
That, in Spain, doesn't happen. And the problems we have
with historical memory and the politicization of society
continue to be terrible.
We are an expression of this.
That we have had to construct a series of signifiers and political symbols
that mark a distance from the political symbols of the Left
that was defeated in the Civil War and in the Transition
means that we acknowledge that the ingredients of political transformation
in Spain cannot link directly into a series
of defeated identities.
One of the most lucid and at the same time also sad,
elements of the analysis we make of our country:
we think there is enormous potential for political transformation in Spain,
but this will never come about as a sort of revenge of those
who lost in the 20th Century,
whether in the Civil War or in the Transition.
The paradox is that our enemies and our adversaries know perfectly well
where we come from, they know us, but when they try to name us
or to accuse us of being communists or of trying to construct socialism,
the paradox is that they come up against a society
that finds all this language alien.
In other words, the historical defeat of the Left in the 20th Century
in our country has given us the opportunity to construct
a grammar of political transformation with goals that are very similar to
those of the Left in the 20th Century, but with a style, a language,
and a series of symbols that often are new and different.
There is a difference that you highlight, clearly:
the devastating result of the Civil War in Spain that initiates a regime of terror
and when you look at the comparative results,
after the War, the number of people shot by firing-squads,
the extermination...
This configures what kind of army it is.
The Spanish army is completely different from the Portuguese army,
which in some way, because of its colonial experience in Angola,
politicizes a series of democratic sectors.
Lets say that in the Portuguese army something takes place
that was relatively frequent in peripheral countries.
That is, a progressive politicization of the middle-ranking officers.
This makes the Portuguese transition completely different
from the Spanish Transition, because of what the Carnation Revolution represented.
It was a failed revolution, but it set a sort of birth mark
that was completely different upon the new Portuguese political system.
With a Left that is very different also. The Portuguese Communist Party is,
with all due respect, because I have friends in the Portuguese Communist Party,
but it's an oddball within Europe.
They are only comparable to the Greek Communist Party,
which would be in ultramontane positions. And it's a very curious party
because the Portuguese Communist Party,
not only in its historical links to the Soviet Union, being a pro-Soviet Party,
but its distribution through the country that is odd.
It is a party with a rural electoral base.
To some extent it's reminiscent of the Communist Party in Andalusia,
not at all like the political forces of the radical left in Europe
that normally have an urban and middle-class base of support,
among enlightened sectors of the population.
This reveals a very different social structure in Portugal,
with a very traditional kind of Left.
The Bloco comes, generally, from portions of the Portuguese far-left,
has a style much more similar to our own.
But there is a key element for understanding
why a government pact has been possible in Portugal.
That is because the Bloco represents 10% of the electorate,
the Portuguese Communist Party another 10%,
while the Portuguese Socialist Party has over 30% of the vote.
And they are not in the Government.
They've come to a sort of minimal agreement with the Socialist Government.
The problem in Spain is not so much the Socialist Party we have.
It's that the Socialist Party and Podemos are two forces
that were almost exactly neck and neck in terms of electoral support.
What that means for the elite, for the power block in Spain,
that a political force like ours might enter into the Government
with positions in Ministries,
was something that they're not prepared for psychologically.
This is not just what we think; we know this.
Pedro Sánchez himself, on a television program
after they threw him out of the position of General Secretary,
acknowledged that he had been pressured to say, "we accept any formula
but in no case may Podemos enter into the Government."
I'm talking about César Alierta and about some other people,
who indeed worked hard in order to get
a conservative government in our country.
They did all that just to prevent you to reach an agreement with Podemos?
This has a lot to do with the patrimonialist concept of the State in Spain,
and that they consider that the State is not equivalent to one
of the autonomous regions or a municipality.
What happened in Greece, and Greece is very different from Spain,
and we could discuss whether the Greek government had other choices,
but it is also a process of political demolition of the experience
of a political force from the Left, with a program different from that of Maastricht
and the European treaties,
in the Government of one of the countries of the Union.
It might be that Tsipras made mistakes, it might be that Syriza made mistakes,
but what is evident is that all the forces of the European elites have operated
to destroy that government and to claim that it was unviable,
that voting for a political force with a different European political agenda
was unacceptable.
The example of Portugal enters within what Europe can tolerate:
a Socialist Government that comes to a series of programmatic concessions
with a series of political forces from the Left that are subaltern,
that don't enter into the Government.
What we're talking about here in Spain is different.
As you know, I have just visited the head of State.
Without further ado, I'm going to inform you that I told him
about our intention to form a progress government with PSOE and United Left.
A plural government, with a proportional composition to the results of the election
that took place on December 20th, the results of PSOE, Podemos
and convergence parties and also United Left.
When we say to the Socialist Party, "we're willing to govern
with you, but with you."
Not supporting you with abstentions so you can keep doing the same things, no.
We are saying that we're aware that only
from inside the administrative structures can changes be made
that in some way shift the direction that our country has been taking
since the economic crisis of 2008.
This is very difficult to accept for the European elites.
And what is happening in Portugal, while it' s very interesting,
is still within the framework of the acceptable.
There's a Social Democrat executive
that has had to make a series of concessions,
but at the end of the day we're talking about Portugal.
Yes, in reality that is how it is.
If we were a political force with 10% of the vote,
the Socialist Party would have no problem coming to an agreement with us.
The problem is that I'm not interested in that kind of political model.
We said from the beginning: we don't want to be political force
of the 10%.
In fact our critique of the United Left Party back then
was that we did not want to be a political force
that was subaltern to the Social Democrats.
And subalternity to the Social Democrats is not only measured by your attitude,
its measured by the electoral power you have.
We want to be a political force that they can look as equals.
We've developed a way of speaking and being that is different.
And this is what the current leaders of the United Left have come to understand:
when I talk to Alberto Garzón
he uses a phrase to refer to certain leaders within his party
whom he points to as a sort of left-wing of the regime.
As long as the radical Left stays between 5% and 10% of the vote,
it doesn't present any problem at all for the regime.
If you're able to build a political and socialblock that has
other elements of identity, that perhaps uses a different discourse,
but reaches over 20% of the vote, that is a serious transformation.
For that reason, what is happening now in Europe is so important.
Because in some way the old balance of power of the old parties has changed.
The German example of the Green Party: I think it's intensely frustrating.
Beyond whatever we might think about the shifting positions of Joschke Fischer,
has the presence of the Green Party as a third party in the German Governments
led to some change in the style, in the direction of the European policies? No.
And as long as the radical Left, irrespective of its hard-line language,
has between 5% and 10% of the vote and doesn't exceed that,
it remains perfectly acceptable to the system.
What the system can't stand is that there be a real vocation to govern.
For this reason, with all due respect to our colleagues in Portugal,
and with the Bloco we have a magnificent relationship,
it is not the same to come to an agreement with the Socialist Party
when you're a minor political force and to do so when you are its equal.
Es listo
This is something that Enric Juliana said, he's a very astute Catalan journalist,
he referred to Suárez and Acosta as leaders
with a foresight very different from that of the Socialists in Spain.
That is one of the elements of the Spanish peculiarity,
that has to do with the style: comparing Alvaro Cunhal with Carrillo...
It's clear. We know what we're talking about.
But this forms part of the history of our country and the history
of our intellectuals and the grey matter
within the working class organizations in Spain.
We shouldn't forget that in the Civil War the Communist International
had to send Togliatti to head the Spanish Communist Party.
It's true they established a very sophisticated Republican-type strategy,
strategy, it was very intelligent, but then they had to send
Ercoli and Stepanov to govern. Well, that forms part of our history.
We said from the beginning that the 15M was the sign
of a crisis in the political regime of 1978.
We were aware at that time that talking about a crisis of regime
was different from talking about a crisis of State.
The States of the European Union, perhaps with the exception of Greece
which at the moment is a protectorate
and in which we can perhaps talk about a State crisis,
in the rest of the countries of the Union and particularly in Spain,
the institutions of the State function well.
I think there is an irrefutable proof of this regime crisis,
that goes beyond the 15M movement,
which is the change in the system of political parties.
The elections of December 2005 expose an unprecedented reality in Spain,
which is the presence of four large parties
or three large parties and a fourth that is very strong,
which is something that completely blows up
the political mechanisms of stability that defined the regime of 1978.
The political system of 78, shored up by an electoral system
perfectly designed within the Francoist court
to over-represent the most conservative sectors,
produces a system of two major national parties,
but at the same time includes two more political forces
that are key to understanding the stability of the political system in Spain.
One Catalan political force that is, moreover, backed up by the Spanish elites,
which is Convergencia i Unió,
which is capable of defeating the only Communist Party in Spain
that could be compared to the Italian experience,that is, the PSUC,
which in the beginning has electoral results approaching 18 percent.
But, in the end, in Catalonia there is a political space of the Catalan
economic elite very closely allied with the Spanish elites, that is,
Convergencia i Unió, which is embodied in one person, Jordi Pujol.
The other party is the Basque nationalist party,
perhaps the most traditional political party,
capable of achieving hegemony in the Basque autonomous region,
and establishing a sort of stability
that allows it to corner the phenomenon of ETA terrorism even more.
This model, constructed territorially through the model
of the "State of Autonomous Regions", which is an institutional
peculiarity of Spain, very odd because it accords a similar statute
to regions or territories that did not have the same historical dimensions
as the nations without States such as Catalonia
or the Basque Country and Navarre or Galicia.
In the 1980s and 90s
there is an unquestionable political stability to the structure of parties.
Terrorism exists and produces hundreds of deaths,
but it doesn't really challenge the State and doesn't challenge the party system.
This is linked to an idea of modernization and prosperity
that has certain key symbolic moments,
like 1992 in Spain or the moment of entry into the European Economic Community,
which are constructed upon new middle classes.
When we talk aboutnew middle classes we're always talking
more about their aspirations and ideology than about their situation
within productive processes, but it operates, politically.
So the structural foundation of this stability of the party system,
with the arrival of the economic crisis of 2007-2008 in Spain,
is blown out of the water: the collapse of the real estate bubble
and the loss of expectations of a large part of those middle-class sectors.
This is what explains the 15M.
This is well-documented in social sciences: if you touch the middle classes,
the effects this might have are decisive.
And tremendous levels of precarization.
This has forced the party system in Spain to change, principally for two reasons:
because of the emergence of Podemos and the Confluences
with an electoral power that the designers of the 1978 political system
could never have imagined and because of the Catalan challenge.
The Catalan challenge was a tension, reasonably pacified
or normalized under the management of Convergencia i Unió
it was a hinge-party that could come to agreements to govern
with the Socialist Party but also with the Popular Party,
but it gets blown out of the water because of very clumsy management,
basically by the Popular Party.
Zapatero tried to establish a solution to guarantee calm
for the next 15 or 20 years, which was a new Statute,
but that was rejected by the Supreme Constitutional Court.
This opened a procés, no one is entirely sure where it is going,
but it situates the tension of the pluri-national State as one
of the absolute problems of the party system,
that has situated the Popular Party as an absolutely marginal figure in Catalonia
and the Socialist Party as a much weakened force,
and us as the principle political force in Catalonia
in the two General Elections, and governing in the City Hall.
These elements speak to us of a completely new political system.
A completely new political system that functions, at the moment limping along,
with a de facto alliance
between the Popular Party, Ciudadanos and the Socialist Party,
and to some extent with the Basque Nationalist Party.
But this is not a stable alliance,
and it is wearing, especially for the Socialist Party,
but it also makes difficulties for the PNV
and is pretty uncomfortable for a party like Ciudadanos
that aspires to substitute the Right.
Are we experiencing a transition to a new political system?
We think so.
And this has to do with two elements that will continue to move forward:
the pluri-national question, which I believe will have to be admitted at some point.
We defend the referendum and we defend seeking a way of fitting
Catalonia into Spain at a constitutional level as a different nation
and at the same time as a country that we can govern.
This is something the elites will eventually have to accept.
Because we aren't a political phenomenon that just came about
thanks to the tactical prowess of a little group of professors.
That phase is past, we're done with that.
We're a political force with tremendously broad support among young people,
especially in the large cities. We're a political force with a strong future.
If Spain were a country with a distribution of population
like that of a developing country, we'd probably already be governing.
This means that even if we do things really poorly, we're a political force
that has come to stay, that is already governing in municipalities.
These two elements, the resolution of the pluri-national question
and that we be able to govern, with all that entails in terms of the European project.
We aren't proposing a particularly radical plan of government.
We're proposing simply a slower reduction of the deficit,
that there be a more redistributive fiscal reform, forms of reindustrialization
of our country and trying to propose
different relations with the EU.
It isn't a program that should scare anyone so much.
We're very conscious of the limits upon the transformation of a country
in the South of Europe right now.
But at this moment this represents a challenge to the European establishment.
In France what happened in the end is that
the elites have saved themselves through an operation worthy of the The Leopard,
they'd to destroy the French Socialist Party and another political force had to arise,
which was unimaginable just a year ago: Macron's En Marche.
This implies a change in the French political system.
And with the National Front more and more consolidated
as a real alternative government.
What remains to be seen in the coming years in Europe is
the evolution of the Demo-Liberal political systems.
It's clear that the Demo-Liberal political systems in Europe
are not going to be able to continue functioning with the same partisan reality.
In Italy, it's more and more clear that Cinque Stelle
has a real chance of governing.
It's a political force that aspires to win elections.
And the Democratic Party is completely scattered, with the leadership of Renzi.
It seems unimaginable that this party be the natural inheritor
of the old Italian Communist Party.
In UK it remains to be seen if indeed the Laborism of Corbyn
will become the alternative to the Conservatives.
One gets the impression that the most stable country, politically, is Germany.
But of course they have good reasons for maintaining the stability:
they are the country that dominates the EU and the one that, despite difficulties,
has managed to maintain some of the institutions of its welfare state,
something that is not occurring in most of the rest of the European countries.
And there the problem is that politics is always...
a contingent element is always difficult to calculate, what could happen.
We're proud that the expression of the crisis of the European political systems
in Spain has to do with the emergence of a political force like ours
and not with something like what the National Front represents in France.
That is a very important question. It's true that the capacity
for investigation of the Italian judges has nothing to do with
the tradition of magistracy in Spain.
And it's true that the levels of political intervention in public prosecution
and in the magistracy are enormous and appalling.
And its true that the magistracy in Spain, unlike in Italy, has historically
had a very conservative cast, despite being a professional category
that is attained through public service examinations,
which is a step in the right direction.
I believe that a strategic change of ours in recent years
might serve as a way to explain the relationship with corruption in Spain.
In the beginning we used the term "caste", which was an incredibly
effective term, politically, but with a limited ability to really explain reality.
There is a moment on television, a success of ours, that serves to explain
why we did so well in the beginning.
We were on a television program right before the European elections,
and next to me was a representative of Vox,
an extreme right-wing group.
He was a former leader in the Popular Party, a Member of the European Parliament.
And the question arises of whether the Members of the European Parliament
should travel in business class or tourist class.
So Alejo Vidal-Quadras, for the Popular Party said,
"Of course I travel in business class, what does that have to do with European policies?
What does it have to do with the cutbacks that I travel in business class:
the European parliament pays for it."
For all that I have explained before I currently travel in business class
and I will continue doing so in the future, as long as
the Parlament allow me to do it.
In that moment he committed suicide right there on the stage,
permitting me to say, "Well, we'll oblige our delegates to travel in tourist class
because it is a shame that a public representative travel in business class
while ordinary people ride the subway."
And that went over really well. That discourse was perfect,
and connected with a popular sentiment of rejection of the political elites
who were identified as people with special privileges.
The problem is that if this discourse stays there, it becomes dangerous,
because in fact Alejo Vidal-Quadras was right in saying that
"whether I travel in business class or not is a totally secondary question
because what we're talking about are the policies being determined in Europe."
The flip side of electors who vote out of indignation with the immoral behaviour
of the elites who travel in business class, is that they might easily naturalize,
by way of a sort of anthropological cynicism, that political elites rob
and that they are corrupt in their personal human behaviour.
We no longer talk about "caste"; now we talk about the "weave".
It's a more complex concept, but it tries to explain that corruption
is not just a matter of personal activities.
It is not just a question of individual moral behaviour.
Rather it's a whole fabric of power relations, power relations that permit
that people who are not running for office really control things.
There is the obscene surface: privileges, dinners in expensive restaurants,
cigars, expensive clothes... but the fundamental thing is not this.
The essential thing is the plundering of public wealth, privatizations,
and at the end of the day, the fact that there are economic elites
who have mechanisms by which they can buy and direct the political elites.
Explained like this, I believe we have the opportunity to...
make clear why the government is inefficient and why corruption
is the flip-side of worsening public services, reduced public spending,
deteriorating health care system, deteriorating education...
because this is what is behind the pillaging of the public trust and the privatizations.
If we get stuck in moral outrage against corruption,
conservative logic will normalize the notion that corrupt people
might be good managers and that the familiar person, even if he's corrupt,
is better than the unfamiliar populist and then we're going to have a very hard time.
It's true that in Spain there is a conservative sentiment,
especially, I'd say its not universal,
in this sense there is a new Spain of younger people,
educated in the democracy, with different work experiences,
that thinks differently.
But it is true that there are very conservative sectors
that can naturalize corruption perfectly well, on the basis
of a kind of anthropological cynicism,
understanding it as a problem in human nature.
If we pedagogically we manage to communicate that corruption
is the political form of neoliberalism in Spain,
I think we have real possibilities of cornering a government and a party that
has appalling levels of support if one takes into account
all that has been demonstrably proven.
The fact that the president of the Government of Spain
has to go to the National High Court to make declarations
about the illegal funding of his party is something that
a different political system in Europe wouldn't tolerate.
There is a certain orientalism in how the character of the Spaniards is seen,
often provoked by the images of Spain that some Spanish intellectuals
have offered up.
From Bizet's 'Carmen' to Woody Allen movies like 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona',
they present this Mediterranean character impulsive, explosive of the Spaniards.
Which would be questionable from the perpective of our pluri-national reality,
that is, comparing Andalusia with Catalonia or the Basque Country,
there are surely emotional styles that are very different.
And I don't know to what extent it's a matter of Mediterranean cultures,
in this case Spain, though as I said I think its questionable whether
we could refer to it as a Mediterranean culture,
the Basques are not Mediterranean, the Galicians are not Mediterranean,
or something that has more to do with collective action.
I think collective action has to do with the mechanisms available for exercising it.
It isn't true that there are more strikes when the economic situation is bad;
there are more strikes when the economic situation is good
and the workers have more means to organize themselves and to protest.
The sectors of the working class that protest the most are not the ones
in the most precarious situations, because those ones lack the resources
to be able to organize themselves and protest.
These are resources in terms of social networks of politicization
and of political socialization.
Massive levels of unemployment and precariousness provoke
a type of social suffering that often doesn't have political channels
through which to express itself.
If the social injustice were to have a direct relationship to protest,
the countries of the Third World, the developing countries
would be countries, all of them, with pre-revolutionary political situations.
This is not the case.
I believe that it is even more difficult to mobilize oneself
when the social situation deteriorates and the levels of unemployment
and precariousness are higher.
Normally, the sectors that have the most ability to protest
are those that can maintain certain networks of solidarity and can organize themselves.
Even so, in Spain we can be reasonably satisfied with the fact that,
despite the enormous weakness of the unions and this is a problem
for our country, the "mareas" have existed,
social movements in defense of public health care, public education,
and in particular the movement against evictions, the whole platform
of persons affected by mortgages, from which many of our leaders emerged.
Ada Colau comes from that movement, Rafa Mayoral and Irene Montero too.
I believe there have been respectable levels of organization and mobilization
beyond the 15M movement.
But the political project of the Popular Party
is basically to normalize both corruption and precariousness.
In Spain there is almost a third of the population that is practically
a situation of social exclusion.
Those who are in a situation of social exclusion have great difficulties
when it comes to mobilizing themselves, to organizing themselves,
to expressing what we might call coherent political behaviour.
It is very difficult.
The working class has much better chances of fighting for its wages
when it already has reasonably good conditions.
In places where there is no union organization,
in which protesting might mean getting fired, organization is very difficult.
And even so, in Spain there have been and there continue to be
important social mobilizations and there have been political expressions
that have been almost without parallel in Europe.
I think we are one of those expressions.
Despite the attacks in the media to which we are subjected,
we continue to enjoy the support of some 20%, in some cities much more.
I think that this shows there is
a structural undercurrent of change and protest against the situation
that runs very deep in Spain.
The 1930s were probably the moment of the greatest degree of organization
of the subaltern classes in Spain, through extremely powerful unions
with a tremendous will to impel political transformation.
A moment of enormous political and social organization.
Exactly, but also of the branches of the Right.
It is false to think that Francoism didn't have broad
and well-articulated social support, ideologically articulated
around Catholicism and what the Catholic Church represented,
even their attempts to organize Catholic Agricultural Unions.
We can say that in the 1930s Spain was a very articulated society.
Spain today doesn't have social organizations,
but I think this is a characteristic it shares
with other States in our European surroundings.
Such broad levels of organization of civil society: this is a challenge to us.
We think our parliamentary action is insufficient,
and that it is necessary to contribute to making sure civil society
has spaces for organization, autonomous organization,
which is what is behind the capacity for mobilization.
When I was talking just now about the economic situation:
who are the workers who best organize themselves in Spain?
The longshoremen, the miners,
the workers in industrial sectors that still have forms of union organization
that permit them to organize, protest and negotiate the terms of their work.
It is very difficult for telephone operators, who work in circumstances
of tremendous precariousness, to organize themselves.
And this does occur and there are very valuable
efforts of self-organization of chambermaids,
self-organization even of renters.
Just recently in Barcelona a union appeared that brings together renters
in order to organize themselves against the owners of the buildings where they live.
This is a challenge for us: try to help and
foment social self-organization, which is essential for political change.
It's true that we can be proud
of the tremendous levels of tolerance of Spanish society,
not only with the phenomenon of immigration.
It's curious that in a country with a Catholic background
the law legalizing gay marriage was such a success, and demonstrated
the total lack of ability of the Catholic Church to compete in this question.
It's true that there have been some manifestations of xenophobia,
located for example in Catalonia,
in a political force likePlataforma per Catalunya that held a few municipalities.
Or else the Popular Party itself in some cases, as in the City Hall of Badalona.
Or even a Popular Party that has been capable of making such aggressive proposals
with respect to immigration that they have served sort of as a vaccine against
the possible rise of a xenophobic political force.
When Mariano Rajoy was Minister of the Interior he justified
the very aggressive Immigration Law they passed saying,
"We don't want a National Front in Spain".
In some ways, the Popular Party has been aware that if someone
has to make a xenophobic discourse it should be the PP itself.
There are also reasons that have to do with culture.
On the one hand, an important part of the immigration
to Spain is from Latin America.
I think this means there is a different relationship.
And I think we have a society that is much more tolerant than other European societies.
I don't know how to identify the historical reasons,
or if this has to do with the pluri-nationality of Spain,
if that explains why racism hasn't reached the levels in Spain
that it has in other European countries.
I don't want to try to explain it all on the basis of cultural arguments,
or the components of the immigration.
There have been very serious cases of xenophobia,
but it's true that they're not as extended as in other European countries.
I think it is something we should be proud of,
having a society that is very advanced in certain questions.
That could be one explanation.
To say that the construction of the enemy outsider,
the outside that constitutes the identity itself,
for the right-wing in Spain might be the figure
of the pro-independence Basque or Catalan, or even the populist of Podemos,
rather than the figure of the immigrant.
I wouldn't go so far as to make this the sole explanation,
because immigration is a social and economic factor
that is too politically determinant for us to understand it solely
as a discursive resource of the Right.
It's true that this might be part of it,
but I think it's a factor that is going to be decisive in the future.
I think the policies of ghettoization in Europe have failed,
the multiculturalist policies that proposed the separation of groups
that are supposedly internally homogenous in cultural terms:
I think this is a barbarism that covers over a very deep racism.
I think in Spain there have been more
interesting integration policies, but it doesn't cease to be a source of tension.
For example when the Popular Party defends the system of charter schools,
what it is really defending is a filter in order to avoid
that students of migrant origin study together with Spanish children.
There is institutional racism in Spain that doesn't reach the truly alarming levels
it does in some other countries in Europe, in particular in France, but it does exist.
It may be true that in the discourse of the Right the construction
of the threatening Other has internal elements.
This is also a constant in the history of Spain.
In Spain the military structure of our army was never conceived,
from the 19th Century on, to confront external enemies
but rather to confront internal enemies.
The Spanish disasters in Africa, in the Philippines,
in the United States, in Cuba all ended up showing that we had an army
that was organized and conceived to repress its own population
and not to confront an exterior enemy.
I don't know, but I wouldn't go so far as to say
that it is the only element that explains it.
For me that is the key question
in the constitutive challenge we have in our country,
with respect to territorial issues.
Spain is a country in which the pluri-national tension is permanent.
In Spain, the Bourbons did not create a single unified State
that imposed a single language or a single legal structure.
In Spain there weren't Jacobins, so our reality is clearly pluri-national.
And this has had political manifestations in all the democratic periods:
in the First Republic, in the Second Republic,
and the Constitution of 1978 itself already distinguishes between
the regions and the "nationalities".
To include the term "nationality" is an implicit
acknowledgement of the constitutive pluri-nationality of our country.
I believe that Catalonia clearly demands its right to decide
and we think that a different constitutional way of fitting together,
and a process of constitutional transformation is something
I consider inevitable.
The attitude of the Popular Party and of Ciudadanos and of many sectors of the PSOE
not all of them, because the Socialist Party in Catalonia
has on some occasions proposed formulas of referendum and
have understood the fact of pluri-nationality
they're playing the ostrich, with their heads in the sand,
and political problems don't go away when you ignore them.
I believe we are maintaining a very Statist position,
beyond whatever that word might mean.
This requires a political response and I think it must be a democratic one.
At the end of the day, the Catalan citizens right to choose their legal
relationship to the rest of the State is surely something
that sooner or later will be inevitable, because of what Catalonia is and because
the will of a society is being expressed very clearly.
I don't believe that nations are something that pre-exists modernity.
I don't believe in the primordialist authors,
who look to the origins at the dawn of time...
I think nations are a phenomenon that accompanies modernity,
and that has to do with changing collective will.
That have different legal solutions that cannot be ignored.
I think the position of Lenin in this case was more pragmatic.
Lenin was a revolutionary who understood perfectly
that the struggles for national liberation of the colonized peoples had,
lets say, a key role in the struggle against capitalism.
He understood something that later theorists have developed,
like Wallerstein or David Harvey,
which is the political dimension of capitalism as a system
not only of oppression in terms of class but also of oppression in terms of nation.
How the central powers oppress the colonies and how this might entail
certain alliance between the working class,
as political subject of transformation in the central countries,
and the colonized peoples.
This idea will later be developed in fascinating ways, by Franz Fanon and others.
To say that our position is a Leninist one...
Exactly.
I wouldn't have a problem, Lenin is one of the
most admirable political figures of the 20th Century,
the nicest thing they've written about me is when Enric Juliana said
I was a "Pop Leninist", I feel comfortable with that.
But in this case I think it's a position that is simply democratic.
We want to create a pluri-national state that recognizes Catalonia as a nation.
We don't want Catalonia to go, but we're democrats
and we accept that the right of the Catalans to decide their own future
is a democratic right that should be exercised.
Thank you.
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