[Marxism] Re. Venezuela: the grassroots revolution and the managerial class (note on Spain)

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The article 'Venezuela: the grassroots revolution and the managerial
class' posted by Fred Fuentes is interesting, but contains a reference
to Spain, which, although really no more than a footnote, requires
correction.

The article says this:

"Closer to home, in Spain, 97% of the population opposed Aznar's
alignment with the US and UK in Iraq. They took to the streets in huge
numbers independently of political parties. All were involved, from
nursery children to pensioners. They hung banners on their balconies and
banged pots and pans night after night in a symphony of protest. Vox
populi vox dei. When the Madrid bombing killed nearly 200 people on
their way to work, 11 million marched accusing Aznar of lying for
political gain. Aznar lost the election. Within weeks Spain withdrew its
troops from Iraq."

This is, I'm afraid, complete fiction.

In the first place, the antiwar movement was not 'independent of
political parties' - one of the reasons it was so big was precisely -
and unusually - because it was supported by the political parties,
including PSOE, and all the trade union federations. And I don't know
where this '97%' comes from. There was one opinion poll, now rather
famous, in February 2003 that put opposition to the possibility of
military intervention in Iraq at 91 %, but to what degree this was a one
off I don't know. The war was unpopular, sure, but there's no need to
invent numbers.

Second, this 'pots and pans night after night in a symphony of protest'
business is pure invention. It would have been nice, but it didn't
happen in the Spain I live in.

Third, to characterise the post 11 March mobilisations against the
Atocha bombings as based on an understanding of 'Aznar lying for
political gain' is absurd wishful thinking. The reality is much more
complex and its legacy rather more troubling. My own take on these
mobilisations (and I was there) was this:

"Once the scale of the carnage became known that Thursday [11 March],
the government had called mass demonstrations throughout Spain for the
Friday evening under the slogans of 'With the Victims, With the
Constitution, For the Defeat of Terrorism.' This is enormously revealing
of what was happening. Why 'With the Constitution'? If the attacks had
been carried out by an al-Qaeda type group, or by anyone else in the
whole wide world other than ETA for that matter, what could the
constitutional implications have been? No: 'With the Constitution' and
'Against ETA' can only function here as synonyms. But there was
practically no opposition from the mainstream parties to this
shoehorning of popular solidarity with the victims into the political
framework of defence of the Constitution. From PSOE, on this question,
there was only support for the government. From [the moderate Basque
nationalist] PNV, support, with the proviso that the Basque Country's
mobilisations be carried out without any political slogans at all. IU
[the Communist party's electoral front], at least, argued that 'With the
Constitution' was 'inappropriate' for a demonstration of solidarity with
the victims, on the grounds that this latter should not be dependent on
support for the former. But this was to miss the point of the
ideological structure then making itself felt. 'With the Constitution'
was not a peripheral issue at this point, unnecessary ideological
baggage that could be safely left out. 'With the Constitution' was in
fact the central ideological feature of developments.

"For what was happening now was this. Once the it-was-ETA line had
became fixed, by around midday on Thursday, and it was fixed out of
practically unanimous all-party consensus, a political momentum was
built up that was simply impossible for anyone to stop, a momentum which
carried all along with it. Fundamentally, what now drove the process was
a recrudescence of simple Spanish nationalism, and the way that all
shades of Spanish state politics had bought into the totems of
Constitution, democracia, and estado de derecho as the concrete living
manifestation of everything Spanish about Spain propelled a
self-fulfilling logic which saw to it that once this holy trinity was
deemed to have come under attack, and by definition it could only have
come under attack from within the Spanish state, not from outside, a
deluge of patriotic reaction was unleashed which practically, no-one,
whether they wanted to or not, could have stopped.

"The thirty years of la democracia had sown the wind; what was now being
reaped was the hurricane. What had happened was that from the PP,
through PSOE, to IU and the Communist Party, the reification of the
Spanish nation as expressed as la democracia made it inevitable that
they could not stand against the flow of mass nationalist sentiment -
unleashed through the mutual effort of all with their denunciation of
ETA 'nazis' and 'barbarians' intent on destroying 'democracy' (and for
'democracy' here we are compelled to read 'Spain'). 'With the
Constitution' was not an independent issue at all those days, separate
from the bombings and the mass reaction to it, but a question, once the
tidal wave of mass nationalism had been unleashed, that stood right at
the heart of developments. The only response open to all political
forces to such a shocking event turned out to be a nationalistic one:
and Spanish nationalism, in its modern form, as we have seen, is forged
above everything else on opposition to irredentist nationalism in
general and Basque nationalism in particular. If for Doctor Johnson
patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel, in Spanish politics,
nationalism - liberal constitutional, democratic, post-Franco
nationalism - is the last refuge of practically everybody in a crisis as
deep as that unleashed that Thursday morning. It was not that the
conviction that ETA was responsible for the bombing that made the
explosion of Spanish nationalism inevitable, but the other way around:
that the only fundamental common political discourse remaining within
Spanish state politics is nationalism meant that by default ETA had to
be blamed - be it directly, or indirectly - before the facts, and
independently of them; not that 'Against ETA' necessarily meant 'With
the Constitution', but that 'With the Constitution' meant 'Against ETA'.

"As it turned out, the demonstrations of that Friday night were truly
enormous.  All over the Spanish state the flag of the Spanish monarchy
was being displayed - in shops, in people's windows, on lapels - and on
the demonstrations of that Friday evening themselves, possibly the
biggest popular mobilisations seen in Spain since the days of the Second
Republic, the mood was aggressively nationalistic: 'España, unida, jamás
será vencida' - 'Spain, united, will never be defeated' - was a common
chant. Now, one could say that it is merely churlish to focus on this
overt display of nationalism - for it was nothing worse than what is
seen at the average football match - and miss what was essentially a
display of popular solidarity with the ordinary working class victims of
the bombings. But this would be to miss the point. For sure, solidarity
with the victims was one of the sentiments that motivated people into
going on the demonstrations, but it is cardinal to see that the dynamic
unleashed here was not solidarity with innocent victims of mindless
slaughter per se but Spanish victims of an attack on Spanish democracy,
on Spanishness itself, a dynamic symbolised by the unity of political
forces - Communists, Socialists, neoliberals, the Church, the Royal
Family - heading the marches. The mood was on the whole frankly ugly,
and depressing, and not just because of the events of the previous day:
a complete contrast to the enormous mobilisations against the war of the
previous year."

Full (where I go into these things in more detail):
<http://www.geocities.com/edgeorge2001es/mywritings/atocha.html>


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