Among other things, Insurgent Notes is dedicated to the proposition that it’s necessary to look below the surface to understand what’s going on in the world. We hope that many of our articles over time have helped our readers to do just that.

At the moment, we’d like to point out just a few current instances where “All That Glitters is not Gold” appears to be an apt analysis. Two such instances are the subject of articles in our new issue.

The first concerns the Foxxcon miracle in southern Wisconsin announced with much fanfare some months ago. Dave Ranney has two articles on the matter which illuminate the ways in which the miracle is more “con” than anything else. Even in the months since Dave authored his first analysis, every aspect of the deal appears to be worse than was previously thought.
This is nothing new for Foxxcon which does its damage all over the world. As Dave notes, it would be quite encouraging if the prospective victims of the “con” in Wisconsin became able to make common cause with actual victims elsewhere.

The second concerns events in Catalonia, Spain. It’s hard to find an American traveler who doesn’t return from Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, with glowing tales of the wonderful city. Unfortunately, much of what is being relied upon to support those favorable impressions is a relentless gentrification which has driven workers out of the city and transformed what was once a vibrant center of working class culture and learning into a Disney-lite spectacle show turned on for tourists. Zhana Kurti has interviewed a Barcelona activist to provide us with a glimpse of events below the spotlights. One of the important insights in the interview concerns the way that apparently blameless tourism drives the further gentrification of the city. “Let the tourist beware!”

While gentrification has been making its way in Barcelona for some time, recent reports from Catalonia have been focused on calls for Catalan independence—calls that are often received in many quarters as exciting and evidence of a renewed militance among the Catalan population. Our correspondent, Teo Maldo, remains quite skeptical and points out the numerous ways in which the independence campaign reflects little more than a maneuver by elite Catalan forces to obtain more power than they currently enjoy under the existing Spanish state and to use that power to enrich themselves. That perhaps requires little explanation. What does require explanation is the apparent willingness of many who should know better to fall for the scam. The author observes that self-deception on the part of all too many workers is common across Europe (the United Kingdom, France, Hungary, Poland) and the United States. Without underestimating the challenge, he argues that the “recomposition of critical social and political cooperation” is indispensable to the development of an “anti-capitalist counter-power.”1

Here at home, in the wake of the much-trumpeted Trump tax cut, employers have been rushing to announce employee bonuses as they share some of the newfound wealth they’ll have due to lower taxes. Often enough, the promised bonuses appeared to be $1,000. It turns out, however, that in many instances, the amount of the bonus is tied to time on the job. At places like Walmart, Lowe’s and Home Depot, the $1,000 maximum only goes to workers who have been with the company for twenty years or more. As readers can well imagine, such workers at those companies are close to an extinct species.

But that scam is only part of the bigger scam. Keep in mind that bonuses are not raises. If you’re earning $30,000 a year and you get a $1,000 bonus, your gross pay is $31,000. But, for next year, your pay once again becomes $30,000. No bonus next year means a loss in income. But let’s be fair to our corporate neighbors. Let’s imagine that they continue to award $1,000 bonuses year after year on what remains a $30,000 wage. After ten years, the total income would be $310,000. But, if instead, the workers got a $1,000 raise each year for ten years, their total income after ten years would be $355,000. It’s hard to believe that they didn’t think of that before we did. Oh wait! They did.

For more than two decades, employers have been replacing wage increases with bonuses. According to the New York Times, in 1991, bonuses accounted for 3.1 percent of total compensation and salary increases accounted for 5 percent. By 2017, bonus payments amounted to 12.7 percent and wage increases to only 2.9 percent. The only change the tax law made was that it gave companies an opportunity to get some cheap publicity.

And now we turn to the stock market. After all too many months of going higher and higher, the various Wall Street indices went a bit crazy in the couple of weeks before we write—but mostly down and then back up. We’re reluctant to predict what will happen next but we feel obligated to point out that the constant growth in stock market values largely reflects an over-supply of money in banks, insurance companies, unions and various institutional investors (like pension funds) looking for ways to make more of itself with too few opportunities to make it “the old-fashioned way.” With interest rates barely above zero and bond rates (meaning long-term borrowing, especially by the government) not much different, those looking for a good deal had only one place to look—stocks, stocks, stocks. Alas, in spite of itself, the goose was worried about its future in laying golden eggs and those in the know, mostly anonymous algorithms in the houses of grand finance, wielded by those kind of people you see in cable tv ads for technology companies, began selling geese.

To end with a different note, we turn to an instance where there is no possibility of gold or glitter (unless you’re thinking of the little stuff that kids play with on glue). We’re thinking of the nation’s national security and intelligence forces. Since the arrival of the Trump administration, the mainstream news media, with the exception of the drivel-driven Fox News, has been absorbed by the administration’s disrespect for the nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It may well be impossible to view an episode of Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow on msnbc without seeing some drooling defense of those who work to keep our nation free and safe. We have only one word in response: bullshit. The fbi and the cia (and all those other agencies with initials) have been responsible for untold crimes (assassinations, murders, coups, economic sabotage) against people across the world and in this country. For a small sample of those crimes, we suggest that readers consult the report of the Senate’s Church Committee in 1975. That’s what the friends of national security had to say. And here’s the fbi’s own public account of its cointelpro program.

We have no hesitation in insisting, unlike the liberal supporters of “anything but Trump,” that we are no friends of national security and no friends of counter-intelligence against oppositional forces. We believe that view is as good as gold.

• 1The issue also includes three other articles—the first, some critical reflections on the October 1917 Russian Revolution by Loren Goldner; the second, a short report from a correspondent in South East Asia on the situation in that part of the world, and the third, a brief review of the new book by Mitch Abidor on the events of May ’68 in France. Insurgent Notes previously published an article on the topic by Mitch in June 2016.

The year 1917 is most closely associated with the Russian Revolution, but it is more important to locate that revolution in the global tidal wave of working-class struggle from 1917 to 1921 (continued up to 1927 in China), which forced the end of the first inter-imperialist world war (1914–18).

This tidal wave included the German Revolution (1918–21), the factory occupations in northern Italy (1919–20), the 1919 nationwide strike wave in Britain, revolution in Hungary (1919), and important strikes in France in 1919–20, in Spain from 1919 to 1923, and in the United States (1919).

These struggles continued and amplified the pre-war ferment associated with the iww in the United States, the syndicalist strike wave in England, Ireland and Scotland from 1908 to 1914, the “red week” in Italy in 1914, and above all the Russian Revolution of 1905–07, which put workers’ councils and above all soviets on the historical agenda as the practical discovery of the working class in struggle, the product of no theoretician.

As such an unlikely witness as England’s King George vi put it, “Thank God for the war! It saved us from the revolution.”

And these are only the upsurges in Europe and the United States. It is often forgotten that the period from 1905 to 1914 appeared to contemporaries as an era of mounting revolutions, including Iran (1906), Mexico (1910–20), China (1911), and an uprising in India (1909).

These struggles in the semi-colonial and colonial world continued after World War I with the long period of ferment in China, culminating in 1925–27, the Japanese rice riots of 1919, the (rather problematic) South African general strike of 1922,1 a left-wing officers’ coup in Brazil in 1922, the wave of struggles in Turkey up to 1925,2 the Gilan soviet in northern Iran, and a left-leaning, pro-Soviet coup in Afghanistan.

I see the best legacy to the present of these revolts and revolutions as the so-called left communists, of both the German-Dutch and Italian variants, most closely associated with figures such as Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek and Amadeo Bordiga. What both variants had in common was their assertion that, unlike the worker-peasant alliance which made the “dual revolution” in Russia, the working class in the west stood alone, and could not ally with the peasantry, which already had land. There were also Russians who agreed with the western currents, such as the Workers’ Group around Miasnikov.

(Assessing in any depth the ambiguous roles of Lenin and Trotsky, who were indeed great strategists, but whose theories and practice of organization gave the counter-revolution its point of departure, would unfortunately double the length of this short essay.)

The left-communist currents were buried, in the ebb of the world revolutionary wave, most memorably symbolized in the crushing of the Kronstadt soviet of 1921, by decades of hegemony of the Russi-centered Third International and the Stalinist counter-revolution it spread worldwide. What had been a sideshow, a country in which the working class was at most 10 percent of the population in 1917, became the main show, for an epoch.

To these currents, I must add the name of Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg was killed too early (January 1919) to define a clear post-1918 perspective fully breaking with Social Democracy. But her writings on the mass strike after 1905, her rejection of nationalism, and her two works on the critique of political economy are as relevant today as when they were written. Not to mention the remarkable humanity shown in her letters from prison during the world war.

I don’t agree with the left communists who say (or came to say, e.g., Otto Rühle) that the Bolshevik Revolution was a bourgeois revolution from Day One. This characterization evolved by the early 1920s; during the Russian Civil War (1918–21) itself, the left communists in the west were blowing up trains carrying weapons and ammunitions to the Russian Whites. Quite aside from the brief power of the soviets, 1917 marked a vast expansion of the Russian peasant commune, which controlled 98 percent of Russian territory until Stalin’s “collectivizations” in 1930.3

All in all, while most of these names and currents may seem, for the present, little more than fossils preserved in amber, they point, as a guidepost for today, to a possible synthesis of the best of the German-Dutch lefts with the Italian Communist Left (the “Bordigists”). (This in full recognition of the fact that the two currents loathed each other.) These elements would include the soviet, i.e., the regional body of working, unemployed and retired proletarians which overcomes the division of labor materialized in the individual workplace (Bordiga’s critique of Gramsci’s vaunted factory councils); workers’ councils as an adjunct to the soviet; the theory of the “dual revolution” to characterize the Russian 1917, and the insistence on working-class political independence from any “cross-class” alliances.

I also lean toward Bordiga’s characterization of the Soviet Union (and later spinoffs, up to China and Vietnam today) as a “transition to capitalism.” This avoids the peremptory and to my mind facile term “state capitalism” while also rejecting the Trotskyist concept of the “workers’ state.”

All this said, there is no unbroken thread of orthodox continuity we can retrieve for the present, but rather only guidelines. The new international synthesis is a work in progress, to which this is one contribution.

One Hundred Years After the Earthquake of 1917

In 2017, in the world of Trump, Putin, Xi, Duterte, Modi, Erdogan, Assad and Netanyahu, it may seem “non-contemporary” in the extreme to talk of the next world working-class upsurge.

To correct this reticence, one need, however, only look to Asia, with China in the lead, with more and more “incidents” (i.e., confrontations) every year (150,000 in 2016), including several thousand strikes; Vietnam, with three or four general strikes in the past decade; Cambodia, with strike upon strike4 ; Bangladesh, with numerous strikes and riots in the textile and clothing export sectors, in which women predominate; and India,5 such as at Maruti Suzuki.

The task is to locate the “invariant” that, in every revolutionary upsurge since 1848, has “compelled” the wage-labor proletariat to seek and implement new forms of struggle. If the world today is dominated by the accumulation of capital, the global wage-labor proletariat is its “dark underside,” the collective practical subject further inverted into alienated forms by a post-1970s strategy of fragmentation, culminating in the ongoing attempted “Uberization” of the class. The world dominated by profit, finance and real estate (ground rent) is one in which the results of human labor seem to walk on their head, and only in the exceptional conjunctures of rupture does the “class for itself” of those whose daily alienated activity underpins those forms, stand upright and stride toward reality in seven-league boots.

The Franco-Prussian War that sparked the Commune, the Russian defeat in the 1904–05 war with Japan that led to the eruption in both Russia and Poland of 1905–07, the German sailors in Kiel who in 1918 mutinied rather than face certain death against the British blockade, are past instances of proletarians pushed to the limits by the logic of the system, and who instead upended it. A war today of the dimensions of the two inter-imperialist world wars would be an unspeakable catastrophe, and would probably answer definitively the question of “socialism or barbarism?” in favor of the latter. Today, and for a long time, the barbarians have been winning. To take only the sad example of the United States, we see the “world’s richest country” regularly leading the “advanced capitalist” world in deaths on the job. The ratio of ceo to workers’ income has increased from 40:1 in the 1970s to 200–300:1 today, with workers’ share of gdp at a post-1945 low. The current (September 2017) massive hurricanes Harvey and Irma underscore, just for the United States, the upward slope of “climate events” as further evidence, if evidence were needed, of climate change.

Nevertheless, because we see communism first of all “as the real movement unfolding before our eyes” (Communist Manifesto), we can point, in addition to the above-mentioned ongoing strike waves in Asia, to the movements of the Argentine piqueteros of 2001 and since, to the black youth of Ferguson, Missouri, who in 2014 went into the streets day after day following the shooting of Michael Brown, to the ongoing French worker and youth resistance to the gutting of the country’s labor laws, now high on the agenda of Macron, to the ongoing labor militancy at Egypt’s key Malhalla textile plant and the bread riots in that country in March 2017, to the years of strikes and riots against European Union austerity in Greece, and to the miners’ strikes in South Africa. We can point to the violent nationwide resistance to yet another increase in the price of gasoline in Mexico in early 2017, and Vietnamese workers who attacked factory guards in March 2017.6 These are just a few of the examples indicating that the “old mole” is not dead.

We can thus best acknowledge the centennial of the Russian Revolution, in the larger context of the eruptions of 1917–21, not in beatific contemplation of a historical rupture far in the past, but by contributing to the unification of the struggles of today and tomorrow, of the coming revolt of the class that “is the answer to the riddle of history, and knows itself to be that answer.”

• 1The South African strikers raised the slogan: “Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa.”
• 2See my article on this period.
• 3See my article on the agrarian question.
• 4See Art Mean’s new article in Insurgent Notes no. 15.
• 5See the Kamunist Kranti article in Insurgent Notes no. 15.
• 6I thank the blog “Nous sommes les oiseaux de la tempete qui s’annoncent” for these examples and more.

We asked our Southeast Asia Correspondent to consider the possible similarities between events in the broad south Asian area today and the great ferment that took place in Eastern Europe in the years before the October Revolution in 1917. This is his report.

–The Editors

I just passed through Vietnam. There are big strikes from time to time, and even some very militant, but I only know what I read.

I’m mostly limited to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) so I never see anything in terms of struggle. Saigon is devoid of that, but it is developing quickly in terms of growth. The center of the city now looks infinitely better than nyc with tree-lined parks and beautiful marble sidewalks with a new sidewalk being constructed underneath. It is filled with Gucci, Prada, and Versace shops, and massive shopping malls that sell everything from Godiva chocolate to half million–dollar Maserati cars. Some stuff you can’t make up. There’s a high-end gourmet French restaurant called “Le bourgeois” around the corner from City Hall that flies the hammer and sickle.

I’ve been to the impoverished south and Mekong Delta where the ethnic Khmer are, but it, like most of Cambodia, looks desolate and hopeless.

I haven’t been to the central highlands or the north, where apparently a lot of things happen. A lot of the factories are an hour out of Ho Chi Minh City.

On the other hand, I passed yet another big demo in Cambodia on the way out of there. It was at the same place the big strike wave of 2012–13 ended when special police shot up a bunch of people. This demonstration was over unpaid bonuses, but it might mean an end to the fear that issued out of that crackdown.

Unfortunately, I have not seen anything that indicates any move beyond temporary economic struggles in Cambodia at all since 2013. There’s no workers’ movement or anything in Cambodia, but there are constant strikes and protests. A lot of isolated fights break out all over the country: land fights, strikes, environmental fights, etc. The only time they are ever united in any way recently was after the 2013 election when the opposition went into the streets to a limited degree and tried to gather all the various forces into a catalyst to put themselves in power after they lost the election.

I could be missing something in terms of potentials of the workers. Apparently the rulers are scared. They (including the Prime Minister) do speeches to groups of factory workers almost every day. Whether they want to criticize the (now disbanded) opposition or cheer China for its support, they do it in front of mostly female garment factory workers. And the reforms are coming too: they are opening public transport for factory workers, introducing social healthcare for them, creating a pension system, and now the latest move is to require each factory to build a clinic inside for the workers. Of course this could also just be good marketing. Unable to compete with the slave wages in Myanmar, Bangladesh, etc., Cambodia has long promoted their factories as being superior to sweatshops in the region. This appeals to liberal consumers and those in charge of aid in the West. The Cambodian rulers, who are in power in thanks to the un, are experts at satisfying foreign donors in words while doing something else in deeds.

I know next to nothing about India. Bangladesh strikes seem to get pretty militant with occupations, attacks on managers, etc., but that seems to be more of a cultural thing. Every election there are huge violent demos, plus there are always violent brothel raids, honor killings, kidnappings, etc. That’s not present in places like Cambodia or Vietnam.

There’s no real movement in Thailand at all after Thaksin sold out the red shirts and the military took over, except for some isolated “propaganda of the deed” actions and (so-far) empty calls from renegade red shirt leaders in exile.

The main “movement” in Myanmar at the moment is the ongoing Buddhist-nationalist pogrom against the Rohingya.

How does any of this compare to the run up to the October Revolution and associated wave of uprisings? I’m no expert on Europe pre-1917, but I seem to recall that there were big social democratic parties, people reading and discussing documents like the Communist Manifesto, big public meetings, the Second International, socialist and radical émigrés connecting across borders, strike waves stretching across borders, people singing “The Internationale” in multiple languages, workers flying red flags at strikes, people recognizing themselves as workers and as part of an exploited working class.

I see none of that at all in Southeast Asia. What I see is only occasional outbursts of industrial action. Sadly, immense national animosity is much more prevalent than any socialist or even more general working class consciousness, which is totally absent.

I could be wrong, and indeed I hope I am.

From an Iranian comrade.

This time is much different than 2009.

The new wave of demonstrations started on Thursday, December 28, in Mashhad, the second-largest city of Iran, which is one of the most conservative cities in Iran. Some people (including the “reformist” faction of the regime) claim that the protests in this city were initiated by the competing (“conservative”) faction which lost the presidential election to “moderates” and “reformists”; but soon it got out of their hands. Whether this is the case or not, this new wave of protest demonstrations is undoubtedly spontaneous, and reflects the great discontent among the masses which no force has been able to control.

On the streets, in contrast to 2009, there is no sign of religious slogans whatsoever, of illusions in this or that faction of the regime, or of any leadership over demonstrators.

What it has in common with 2009 are nationalist slogans such as “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran.”

Up until now, demands are mostly focused on economic relief, political freedoms, overthrowing of the existing regime; and some few slogans here and there in support of a monarchy.

Right before these last five days of demonstrations, there was a new wave of workers’ strikes (mostly small, but numerous in a number of workplaces/strikes/protests) almost all over the country—with no connection to each other. Workers’ demands were (and still are?) mostly defensive; defending their basic rights and wages; very few—if any—offensive demands.

And right now I hear much less about strikes, and more about the demonstrations—though there are calls (not only from parties or politicians, but from the streets) for general strikes. The scene seems ready for a massive workers’ strike.

The number of dead is increasing. According to authorities, up until now, 20 demonstrators have been killed (10 of them last night) in the clashes between protesters and repressive forces of the regime. One can surely assume this number is much higher as they always reduce heavily the number of casualties on such occasions when reporting. The number of killed is expected to increase in the following days as the authorities since yesterday threatened openly to suppress the protesters hard, and as there is no sign of easing up on the side of protesting people. The demonstrations are ongoing in numerous cities as I am writing these lines.

The Cambodian People’s Party (cpp) has ruled Cambodia for nearly four decades. Prime Minister Hun Sen has been in charge since 1985. The cpp, a Doi Moi/Perestroika–styled “Marxist-Leninist” party until it saw the “end of history” in 1991, came to power when the Vietnamese army and Khmer Rouge defectors like Hun Sen drove Pol Pot and company out of the capital in 1976.1

Under cpp rule the capitalist economy has regained some level of stability and in recent years has grown by several percentage points annually. A large part of this growth has been driven by the garment sector which employees some 700,000 mainly female workers with roots in the rural countryside. As described in a previous piece published by Insurgent Notes in 2016, the country has seen numerous strikes and mass demonstrations.

In 2013, a united opposition—the Cambodia National Rescue Party (cnrp)—nearly won the national elections, the first time the prime minister’s party was really challenged in decades. The results were widely challenged as fixed and the opposition led huge rallies through the streets of the capital that just happened to coincide with massive protests by garment workers for a raise in minimum wage. It was all eventually shut down after a park that was home to an Occupy-style encampment was cleared by force, demonstrations were banned, and specialized military forces were called in to a picket line in front of a garment factory complex where several were shot dead.

In the months and years that followed, opposition party members were beaten and jailed, one of two main leaders was convicted in absentia and exiled, and the other went into hiding after details of his personal relationship with a mistress were blasted out over the Internet. The latter eventually re-emerged though the former is still in exile and has been banned by law from leading the party. A law passed recently even required that his image be removed from the countless party signs and banners displayed all over the country. Stalin airbrushed people out of history. Hun Sen airbrushes them out of the present.

Things continued to simmer until 2016. With the 2017 commune elections and public talk of another raise in the minimum wage for garment and footwear workers approaching, things started to heat up in more ways than one.

In July 2016, prominent activist Kem Ley was shot dead in a Phnom Penh gas station in broad daylight after he commented on a report that came out detailing some of the prime minister’s family’s many business interests in interviews on Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. Hun Sen’s daughter, a fabulously wealthy woman who controls several media outlets, publicly wished that the English-language newspaper, the Cambodia Daily, would be held “liable” for giving the aforementioned report coverage. More on that later! Around a hundred thousand people attended Kem Ley’s public funeral procession.

As us corporations continued to make inroads into the Cambodian economy, the Cambodian government increased its rhetoric against foreign interference. In December, at a Coca Cola factory opening, Hun Sen, an avid supporter of Donald Trump, referenced resistance to Trump’s election.

“There are always demonstrations after elections in Cambodia,” he said. “This time after the election, demonstrations erupted in the United States in many states.”

Later that month, the Cambodian government suspended routine joint exercises with the us military just weeks after it held the largest joint exercises with the Chinese military in Cambodian history.

In February 2017, Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan claimed Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and the Voice of Democracy “incite the population against the government,” which is of course to some extent true.

Days later, Hun Sen again pointed to us President Donald Trump as an example of relations between the state and the media.

“Donald Trump sees that these groups cause chaos. That’s why he doesn’t allow them access,” he said. “Now it’s the turn of the United States itself as cnn and others are no longer allowed to enter the White House. Will you accuse Donald Trump of being a dictator?”

In March, the Cambodian military canceled a planned joint exercise with the Australian military. Defense Ministry spokesman Chhum Socheat said, “I wish to state that every exercise is under the sponsorship of China.”

In April, the us Navy Mobile Construction Battalion was ordered to leave the country after being present since 2008. The official schedule for the naval group showed it was set “to build six school bathroom facilities and two maternity wards.” No official reason was given for the order, and government officials publicly denied it was even given.

In May, Defense Minister Tea Banh publicly threatened to crack down violently on any pro-opposition protests in the wake of the scheduled commune elections.

“If they lose, but do not accept that loss, and come up with this or that demand—maybe soon we will smash their teeth,” he said.

Two months later he would be granted the honorific title of “samdech” by the king. He joined the six other “samdech” in the country, which include Hun Sen and his wife.

The commune elections were held in June. The cpp won 50 percent of the votes, compared with nearly 62 percent in the 2012 commune elections. The opposition won 44 percent of the votes and picked up a large number of seats. Because of the way seats are allotted, the cpp ended up winning 70 percent of the commune councils, though this is still a big drop from the 97 percent they won in 2012.

Some irregularities were claimed in the election but, for the most part, the results were accepted by all involved. Interestingly, the opposition kept publicly claiming before and after the election that they expected to win “sixty percent of the vote.” More on that later, too!

The ruling party was not pleased with the election results, though it did not immediately react. Instead, it resorted to a sort of salami tactics aimed to destroy the opposition and tide over the organized workers.

Starting on August 21, several radio stations that rent airtime to the us-backed Voice of America and Radio Free Asia along with the Voice of Democracy (vod) were shut down. vod representatives cried government interference, but a government minister claimed the stations simply ran afoul of the rules regarding registration and tax payments.

The same day, the prime minister publicly denounced the Cambodia Daily, an English language newspaper which has been published since 1993, as a “thief” and demanded it pay $6.3 million in back taxes or shut down by September 4.

On August 23, the us Department of Homeland Security announced that Cambodia and three African countries would face visa restrictions as a result of their refusal to repatriate citizens convicted of crimes in the United States. The Cambodian government refused the return of Cambodian felons from the us in April, claiming it was a violation of “human rights” to separate them from their families.

Earlier that day, the Foreign Affairs Ministry had ordered the us-backed National Democratic Institute (ndi)—an infamous weapon of American imperialism—to close within seven days after documents showing that it was aiding the opposition party in preparation for the upcoming election came to light. According to the papers, the ndi helped the opposition party develop a strategy to win the 2018 national elections. Part of the strategy was reportedly to claim that the party expected to win 60 percent of the votes according to its surveys. If it didn’t win 60 percent (remember that number from earlier?) in the actual election, it was supposed to claim that it was cheated. The official reason behind the shutdown of the ndi’s operations in Cambodia was that the ndi had not registered with the tax department.

On August 24, us State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert criticized “a biased approach on the part of the government” in response to a question about the media purge in Cambodia. The us Embassy in Phnom Penh also decried the “deterioration in Cambodia’s democratic climate,” in a rare statement critical of the ruling party.

Later that day an article appeared on the ruling party aligned Fresh News website claiming a mass protest at the us Embassy in Phnom Penh—reminiscent of a 1964 rally turned riot—was in the making. The article referenced the leader of a group aligned with the ruling party, who last led a rally in 2015 where two opposition officials were beaten to a bloody pulp. The article contained pictures of an infamous protest at the us Embassy decades earlier. At the 1964 protest, largely suspected to have been organized by king-turned-civilian head of state Norodom Sihanouk, the windows were busted out of the embassy building and vehicles were burned to the ground by a raucous crowd chanting slogans like: “us Go Home.”

Government officials also made public statements. Hun Sen’s son and chief of the General Directorate of Intelligence wrote “You need to respect the sovereignty, law and regulation of the host country.” An Interior Ministry undersecretary who also happens to be an “adviser” of the government-aligned cnc television channel added: “Historians have agreed that the us cost the Cambodian people so much bloodshed in the 1970s which contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge genocide.”

“We are left to wonder why your ‘style’ of democracy is bloody and brutal?” he wrote. “We wish to send a clear message again to the us Embassy that we defend our national sovereignty.”

The cpp justifies its rule on its Vietnamese-backed overthrow of the Khmer Rouge and the “stability” it has maintained ever since. The idea that the United States, which backed the overthrow of Norodom Sihanouk, bombed eastern Cambodia to bits, and later backed the Khmer Rouge as a weapon against the Vietnamese-aligned Cambodian government, is a partisan of democracy and human rights in Cambodia is of course laughable, but the rhetoric coming from the ruling party as ngos and media outlets are closed in the run-up to national elections is something relatively new in the post–United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia society.

There is a genuine sense that outside interference is aiming for another “color revolution” in Cambodia, and the opposition has done nothing to dispel those notions. Back in 2015, opposition party co-leader Kem Sokha even told an audience in Australia “there is a powerful democratic country which is helping the cnrp to organize policy and political platform for the party in order to rule the country.” Opposition members also started wearing black clothing one day a week, but the ruling party quickly put an end to that. There will be no “black revolution” in Cambodia under their watch.

There has been a long and apparent transition away from the Western powers that played a large role in reestablishing the Cambodian state after the civil war in recent years. China has taken on an increasingly important role in the country, and the local rulers are no longer concerned enough about threats to aid to pay much lip service to countries like the United States and Australia.

As one commentator put it, “At this point, it looks like the United States is losing leadership by default and China’s gaining it by design.”

Countries like South Korea also play a role. Rumor has it that South Korean businessmen requested the violent crackdown on workers in 2014. Coincidentally, the “democratic” South Korean government was one of the first in the world to congratulate the cpp on its victory in 2013, even as the election was being challenged.

While the opposition and anyone viewed as friendly to it is being given the stick, the rulers are dangling carrots for the large and restive working class, although everyone knows a stick waits for them too.

This month the prime minister announced a rise in the monthly minimum wage to $168 per month “at least” for apparel workers, and plans to institute free public bus rides and company paid healthcare. The pm also promised the creation of pensions by 2019, but was at pains to attribute these improvements in conditions to an increase in foreign investment that come courtesy of low labor costs and labor peace. Pressures from the opposition or earlier strikes and mass marches had nothing to do with it, according to the strongman.

Government-aligned unions praised the announcements as was to be expected. Other unions called for a raise to the minimum living wage of $224 monthly. These unions sometimes operate in the same places and some unions have been known to cross picket lines and even battle each other.

The head of the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia seemed to acquiesce to yet another minimum wage increase but said: “Hopefully it’s the last time it’s this big.” The World Bank recently attributed a slow down in garment export growth to increases in wages without corresponding increases in productivity. The writing is on the wall even as the cpp tries to placate workers at least until 2018 is over.

A draft law on minimum wage for all workers in the works includes language that would ban “any protest, advocacy or objection to the minimum wage rate—as well as any independent research into the issue by unions, ngos, journalists or academics.” The ex-Stalinist government now looks to become an arbiter above society to set wages without conflict annually à la Mussolini’s pnf.

The prime minister has encouraged workers to cast ballots near their factories rather than traveling home to their provinces as they did in the past. New laws passed allow this, which is seen as a move to concentrate votes for the opposition in places where they already have support.

From a communist perspective, the results of the upcoming election might not mean much. Thirty years of cpp rule have not been able to put an end to strikes, including wildcats that often spread and had a real potential to get “out of hand.” The opposition cnrp occasionally makes promises to the workers, and in the past had strong ties with assassinated union leader Chea Vichea, but it also has severe xenophobic tendencies and never misses a chance to place the blame for any and all problems on “the youn” (a derogatory, but popular, word for the Vietnamese).

Although the cnrp has gained support in recent years, many now seem to regard it as another group of power-hungry bureaucrats looking for self-enrichment. More than a few have publicly asked the leaders why they run away time and time again rather than confronting the cpp. Still, the opposition represents a real danger for the working class. In the past opposition rallies have merged with workers’ protests and strikes. The cnrp is an anti-Vietnamese party whose rallies have sometimes led to attacks on Vietnamese people. There are hundreds of thousands of ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia. In the past there have been many attacks against them.

Any successful movement for the emancipation of Cambodian workers from wage slavery and the globalized capitalist system would require a more or less immediate spread to neighboring countries. The many Vietnamese in the country could serve as a bridge to neighboring Vietnam, just as the many Khmer workers in Thailand could serve as a bridge to that country. Overcoming the historical animosity that the cnrp feeds upon would surely be a difficult task, but it can be done by a working class motivated by its conditions to liberate itself and all of humanity in the process. Besides, we’ve been trying to do away with capitalism for over a century. Even a struggle that goes nowhere beats a life of servitude.

• 1Doi Moi is the name given to the economic reforms initiated in Vietnam in 1986 with the goal of creating a “socialist-oriented market economy.”

A gush of political hot air accompanied the announcement in late July that Foxconn, a Taiwan-based electronics manufacturing giant, would locate a new plant with 13,000 workers near Kenosha, Wisconsin.

President Trump blustered that this is another step toward “making America great again by bringing in ‘middle class’ jobs.” He went on to predict that Foxconn would ultimately bring 50,000 new jobs to the American homeland. Governor Scott Walker proclaimed that this was “a once in a century opportunity.” But he cautioned that the deal is contingent on his re-election, claiming that a previous deal with Foxconn in another state was quashed when its governor was defeated.

Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal includes $200 million in taxpayers’ cash going to Foxconn each year for 15 years, adding up to $2.85 billion. In addition there is a sales-tax exemption for the purchase of construction materials that is estimated to be worth another $150 million. The state has also agreed to waive the required environmental impact assessment as well as the need for permits to dump dredging waste in nearby wetlands. In return for all of this, Foxconn is to build its facilities on a 1,000-acre piece of land near Lake Michigan and the border of Illinois, initially employing 3,000 workers. Eventually, once everything is up and running, they claim they will hire a total of 13,000. The dollar cost comes to about $17,300 per job if the goal of 13,000 is reached. If the total is only 3,000 the figure is $39,200 per job. To put the size of the subsidy into perspective, average national job incentives paid to corporations in the past year are only $2,457 per job. Furthermore, the Wisconsin State Legislative Budget offices estimates that even if Foxconn lives up to its promise of 13,000 jobs, it will take at least 25 years for additional state revenues generated by the deal to balance the massive financial incentives it is offering.

Foxconn is the largest electronics manufacturer in the world. Most of their business is through contracts with firms like Apple, Nintendo, and Sony. They have 12 factories in nine Chinese cities that employ over a million workers and also operate factories in Brazil, the eu, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico and the United States. They produce iPhones and iPads for Apple, computer games for Nintendo and flat-screen tvs for Sony among other things. The proposed Wisconsin facility will be manufacturing the flat screens.

There are many reasons to question the wisdom of this deal. Some are specific to Foxconn. But the problems extend to the general strategy of states trying to buy jobs. But let’s start with Foxconn.

Labor and Human Rights

Foxconn has a notorious history of labor and human rights abuses. In 2012 Foxconn’s ceo Terry Gou reportedly said: “Foxconn has a workforce of over a million world wide. And human beings are also animals. To manage one million animals gives me a headache.”1 According to Want China Times, a short time later Gou invited a zoo director to participate in the company’s annual review and “spoke to his executives about how to manage animals based on their temperaments.”

Foxconn makes most of the iPhones in the world in a massive industrial complex in Longua, located in the Shenzhen area of southeast China. In 2010, it was reported that 38 workers there began attempting suicide by jumping off of the high-rise dorm buildings. Twenty workers were talked down but another 18 actually jumped and 14 of these died. Their suicide notes and some of the survivors claimed the “immense stress, long workdays, public humiliation for mistakes by harsh managers, unfair fines and un-kept promises of benefits,” were simply unbearable. Investigative reporter Brian Merchant documented conditions in the Longua complex after he was able to sneak inside the compound and observe the brutal treatment of Gou’s “zoo animals.” An excerpt from Merchant’s book on what he found was recently printed in The Guardian.2

Gou’s response to this was to put nets around the buildings to catch the falling “animals” (perhaps on the advice of the local zookeeper?) Steve Jobs, then ceo of Apple wasn’t much better. He was reported to say that the rate of suicides at Foxconn was within the national average of China.

One worker at the Longhua facility told Brian Merchant: “It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying. Every year people kill themselves. They take it as a normal thing.” Since the 2010 incident, workers have been forced to sign an agreement that they won’t kill themselves.

According to Merchant, each month 24,000 workers, 5 percent of the workforce, quit. In 2012, 150 workers threatened mass suicide after they gathered on the roof of a net-free building. The company agreed to negotiate so the workers didn’t jump. The result of those negotiations is unknown. But Merchant’s observations suggest that the conditions causing the suicides and the suicide threats are unchanged.

Broken Promises

Beyond this grim report about working conditions in Foxconn’s iPhone factory in China there is another cause to be concerned about the Wisconsin deal. The company has also made of habit of taking government incentives and opening and closing factories when they can find a better deal. This is what happened in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 2013. The company agreed to build a plant there and create 500 jobs in return for $30 million in incentives from the state. It never happened. Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker blamed it on the voters who failed to re-elect the governor. But according to an article on Foxconn found on Wikipedia, the opening and closing of factories has been a regular practice, particularly in India.

Technological Change and Product Markets

But this concern raises a deeper question not unique to Foxconn. Technologies and markets for such things as flat-screen televisions and computer screens, cellphones, e-pads, e-readers, and video games, the products that Foxconn and similar firms make, are highly volatile and rapidly changing. As Bloomberg News recently stated: “lcd flat panel screens are part of an industry plagued by sluggish demand, rising competition, rapidly changing consumer tastes.”

The problem of uncertainty and volatility is compounded because the decisions on industry direction and priorities are not made by Foxconn. Rather, decisions that impact Foxconn’s bottom line are made by the firms it contracts with like Apple, Sony, Amazon and others. In addition, Bloomberg News reports that the electronics industry is ripe for an automation regime in which people can be replaced easily by robots. As a result, it is foolish to take promises to create a certain number of jobs in the future very seriously, certainly not seriously enough to shell out $3 billion in taxpayers’ money. And Foxconn’s record suggests that they don’t take their promises seriously. Moreover, the company’s labor and human rights abuses and the kinds of products they make means taxpayers in Wisconsin shouldn’t either.

Capitalism and Industrial Location

But there is an even deeper problem with the practice of extending corporate welfare to manufacturing firms to induce them to locate on a particular site. This problem isn’t specific to Foxconn or the electronics industry. But it is specific to capitalism at this stage.

The Foxconn deal is, as the baseball great Yogi Berra once famously said, “a case of déjà vu all over again.” In the mid 1990s, the state of Illinois was all agog when in response to an offer of $35 million in incentives, Motorola Corporation and the governor announced plans to build a major cell-phone factory in the small, worn-out dairy community of Harvard, Illinois. It is located on the edge of the Chicago metropolitan area and just to the south of the Wisconsin border. At that time, Motorola was the number-one producer of cell phones.

The $35 million was used to build roads to service the 400-acre site and to install infrastructure on that site. A 1.5 million square-foot plant was built and opened in 1997 employing 3,000 workers. Five years later it was closed, and the production of the cell phones was moved to Chihuahua, Mexico. The company claimed that increased competition had lowered the demand for their phones and they were forced to trim their us workforce in order to cut costs. The plant was sold to a firm that planned to develop a water park on the site. That firm went bankrupt and the building sits empty to this day. A few months ago it was announced that the building was sold to an undisclosed Chinese company that makes smart phones.

The Motorola/Harvard, Illinois, story has been played out all over the United States for two decades now. During that time, local and state governments have fallen all over themselves to give away the moon and the stars to corporations in order to induce them to locate in their territory. The federal government has, at times, chipped in as well. The result has been more than 20 years of a massive corporate welfare program.

The reason for this is important. A deep global capitalist crisis that started in the 1970s forced the entire capitalist system to change the way it accumulates and distributes the value labor creates. Beginning in the 1980s firms in industrialized nations, particularly those based in the United States, began to take advantage of deliberate changes in transportation and production process technologies that had made capital highly mobile. Large-scale mass production was no longer necessary. It became possible to break the production of a product into pieces, producing one piece in one location and others pieces in other places. Finished products could ultimately be shipped in huge containers that could be moved from truck to ship to rail. Global institutional mechanisms like the World Trade Organization (wto), the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), and conditions placed on World Bank and International Monetary Fund (imf) loans opened up the world to corporations who could now establish a global production process. Many of these agreements declared certain environmental and labor rights rules an “unfair trade practice,” making governments liable to corporations for damages caused by lowered profits. The finance industry was also “liberalized” so money capital could easily move around the world, which made globalized capitalism even more mobile.

The result has been devastating to the working class of industrialized nations and their communities. Since 1979 when us manufacturing employment peaked, the United States has experienced a loss of over 7 million factory jobs. The Chicago Metropolitan Area suffered a net loss of 150,000 manufacturing jobs in the decade of the 1980s alone. Most of the job loss in the Chicago area was the work of corporate parents of local manufacturers who have operations in at least four countries.3 That loss in Chicago accelerated during the 1990s and continues to this day. Throughout the United States, mass production in major industries—electronics, automobiles, steel, chemicals, plastics, food processing, shoes and wearing apparel—to name a few, has been broken apart and moved around the world.

More recently there has been a countertrend where firms based in other nations, particularly China, are beginning to locate in the United States. But they are paying wages comparable to those prevailing in their home countries. Geographic labor markets in which workers are forced to sell their capacity to work used to be configured in large regions. The Chicago labor market was considered to be a region that stretched from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to northeast Indiana. But now, in many industries the labor market is worldwide. us workers are competing with their counterparts around the world, including China. A recent article in Forbes points to stagnant wages in the United States and growing wages in China, and attributes it to a growing labor supply since China was admitted to the World Trade Organization.4 But what that article does not acknowledge is that workers in China have organized to demand higher wages and better working condition. Nor does the article recognize the ascendance of highly mobile firms with flexible production processes. In the pursuit of profits and high exploitation rates, global corporations have made the entire world their playground. Their ability to move all or parts of a production process enlarges the geographical labor market to encompass the entire world and drive down wages in the higher wage countries.

The leveling of wages and the high mobility due to technological and institutional changes then allows a firm like Foxconn, based in Taiwan, to move production to the United States if its Chinese workers continue to jump off buildings demanding better wages and working conditions. Foxconn’s zoo is global. In fact, many of the firms that moved out of the United States in the 1990s have continued to move their operations around the world seeking higher rates of exploitation. Many firms that located in the Mexican industrial zones known as “maquiladoras” since nafta came into being in 1994, have since moved to China, Korea and Vietnam. They may come back to the United States in the future, but only if us workers are willing to sell their labor at a lower price.

Hot Air

It is hard to believe that the staffers in the us Department of Commerce, the White House, and the Wisconsin governor’s office don’t know these things. Yet the ongoing political con game of giving taxpayer money to corporations in return for “jobs” goes on. “Making America great again by bringing back middle class jobs” and all the huffing and puffing coming from Scott Walker’s office in Madison is nothing more than hot air, likely contributing more to global warming than to Wisconsin workers.

For more of Dave’s writing, see his website, david-ranney.com.

• 1Patrick Marley, “Foxconn ceo compared workers to animals,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 3, 2017.
• 2Brian Merchant, “Life and death in Apple’s forbidden city,” The Guardian, June 18, 2017.
• 3David Ranney, “Transnational Investment and Job Loss: The Case of Chicago,” University of Illinois Chicago Center for Urban Economic Development, 1992.
• 4Ken Rapoza, “China-like wages now part of US employment boom,” Forbes, August 4, 2017.

In 1974 a woman going by the name of “Linda Taylor” was arrested in Chicago and charged with 31 counts of fraud, perjury and bigamy. It turned out she had used over 80 aliases and had represented herself as being white, black, Asian, Native American, Hispanic and Jewish. She also claimed to be various ages from the 20s to the 50s. And she picked up more than one husband along the way. Ultimately she did five years in prison for welfare fraud and perjury. A reporter for a black-oriented magazine, Jet, termed her the “welfare queen.” Ronald Reagan picked up on this in his 1976 Presidential campaign making the term “welfare queen” into an ugly, racist stereotype for single black women on public assistance. While Reagan railed against public welfare and all the “welfare queens,” it was ultimately Bill Clinton who killed the welfare system, keeping the welfare queen stereotype delicately in the background but present nonetheless.

Social scientists who have studied the welfare system before and after the Clinton era welfare “reforms” have exposed the notion that women on public assistance were “welfare queens” as a myth. But if a “welfare queen” is defined in terms of Linda Taylor’s exploits, and if fraud and perjury in these terms means taking government money under false pretenses and lying about it, and if bigamy means more than one spouse, and if corporations are persons (as they most certainly are in this country) and countries serve as their spouses, then Foxconn is the greatest welfare queen of all time. In fact the exploits of Foxconn, a k a Hon Hai Precision Product, go way beyond what Linda Taylor could have even dreamed about.

In my August 2017 article “The Foxconn Con,” I focused on the plan for the state of Wisconsin to subsidize Foxconn to build a major industrial “campus” to assemble and manufacture flat-screen television sets on a massive site in southeastern Wisconsin. I noted in that article that Foxconn’s practice of gathering subsidies, their human and labor rights abuses, and the ease with which they can build and then close massive industrial facilities is global. But I did not know the extent to which this is the case.

Some responses to my August essay were illuminating. Foxconn operations are being monitored by labor activists in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Brazil, and Mexico. For examples, see iSlaves’ Struggles.

The monitoring of both corporate practices and worker resistance reveals extremely abusive labor practices and a penchant to take government money and use it to build and then close plants around the world. In India, for example, Foxconn was involved with a massive operation in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu between 2006 and 2014. They closed the facility due to shifts in the market for the products they were making. That resulted in the loss of jobs for 25,000 workers. Then in 2015 they announced that they had plans to open another 12 plants in other Indian locations. All of these were subsidized by state and local governments. As one writer told me, “It is this competition between states (in India) that is exploited by Foxconn and like companies to get the best deal.” But once the subsidies are collected they always seem ready to move on.

Foxconn’s many cons around the world are summed up in TNLabour India, a publication coming out of the state of Tamil Nadu: “Foxconn: Conning and Rising” (November 8, 2017).

These activities have enabled Foxconn to grow from a minor contractor with major electronics corporations to the largest manufacturer of electronic goods in the world. A ranking of the largest economies, including both countries and corporations, in the world measured by total revenues finds that Foxconn (going by the name of Hon Hai Precision Industries) ranks 51st in the world with revenues of us $141 billion. That is just a tad smaller than Argentina (us $143 billion) and a tad larger than General Electric (us $140 billion). To compare them with a few other familiar names: Verizon ranks 56th with $132; Finland is 57th with $131; Costco 66th at $116 and the United Arab Emirates is only in 70th place with $110.

Its major contractors include Acer, Amazon, Apple, Blackberry, Cisco, Dell, Google and Hewlett-Packard.

As my article last August indicated, Foxconn is using a similar approach to launch a major presence in the United States. They had the neighboring states of Wisconsin and Illinois in a hot bidding war that was won by Wisconsin. Since my August essay, there have been some new developments with the Wisconsin project.

The total value of the subsidies being given by the Wisconsin taxpayers to Foxconn is much larger than originally reported. I stated that it was $3 billion. But a recent analysis puts the figure at $4.5 billion. This breaks down as follows: state tax credits $2.85 billion; local government incentives $764 million; improvements to us Interstate 94 $408 million; utility subsidies $140 million; state sales tax exemption $139 million; local road improvements and construction $134 million; worker training costs $20 million; local government grants $15 million.

Another important amenity given by the Wisconsin state government to Foxconn involves water. Part of the appeal of the Wisconsin site is the availability of water that can be used in the manufacturing process. It seems that the Foxconn facility and related businesses will need about 12.2 million gallons a day. The source is Lake Michigan. The removal of water from any of the Great Lakes in the United States is regulated by a legally binding agreement known as the Great Lakes Compact that includes eight us states and two Canadian provinces. Communities or corporations outside a geographically defined area called the Great Lakes Basin cannot take water from the Great Lakes without a special permit. About half of the Foxconn site is in the basin and half is outside. So it is possible to get around the compact regulation through a special permit from the State of Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources, and it appears that the permit will be forthcoming. The infrastructure for the water diversion with the needed 12.2 million gallons per day capacity is already under construction.

Of course Foxconn isn’t the only modern-day welfare queen; just the most successful to date. For example, a new bidding war to see which government can give the most of their taxpayer dollars away has been opened by Amazon in its competition for a site for its second corporate headquarters. Amazon has announced that 20 different us bidders have made the finals. What the state and local governments are offering in the latest giveaway is presently a secret. Apple and Microsoft are also following Foxconn’s lead by promoting bidding wars of their own.

It is fair to say that fraud, perjury and bigamy is the current strategy of corporations the world over. The tax money being extorted through this global shell game comes out of workers’ paychecks. So corporations like Foxconn are facilitating the expropriation of hard-earned wages. The proceeds of this fraud enable these corporations to open and close plants at their pleasure. In the process they not only steal from working people, but dump them when they have used them up as so much trash leaving lives and the environment in a shambles.

The resistance to this fraud, however, is also worldwide. From China to India to Mexico to Wisconsin, usa, workers and environmentalists are organizing to put an end to the abuses that go with this system. The struggle in Wisconsin is just beginning. To get a sense of the direction of the Wisconsin resistance, readers may want to check out the Facebook page “Wisconsinites Against the Fox Con” or the website The Political Environment.

The urban city has become an important site of capital accumulation and class struggle. In this interview with the Barcelona-based collective Etcétera, we examine the processes of urban development in Barcelona, one of the fastest gentrifying cities in Spain and their implications for potential movements and struggles.

It’s summer 2017. The tree-lined promenade of Las Ramblas is crowded with kiosks selling newspapers, Gaudí paraphernalia, souvenirs and flowers. Street performers, pavement cafés and restaurants entice the tourist crowds. In Roman times, Las Ramblas was a channel for the rainwater flowing from Collserola and marked the medieval walls of the city. Centuries later, Las Ramblas became the center of city life in Barcelona. During the Spanish Civil War, its boulevards saw street fighting between Republican government forces and the POUM. It’s hard to imagine that it was here in the heat of July 1936 that the first shots in what would become the Spanish Civil War were fired. The street of Las Ramblas has changed since George Orwell first wrote about it in Homage to Catalonia. When Orwell arrived in the city in December 1936, he found red and black Anarchist flags hanging from buildings and loudspeakers in Las Ramblas “bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night.” By the spring, when he returned, the old class divisions reappeared. He wrote, “Fat prosperous men, elegant women and sleek cars were everywhere…. The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people wolfing expensive meals.”

By the 1930s, the Barcelonian proletariat had grown in size. They were separated geographically from the well-to-do. The poor gathered around Las Ramblas, particularly packed in the neighborhood of El Raval and the wealthy up in the hills in Tibidabo. It was in El Raval where Salvador Seguí, an anarcho-syndicalist with the CNT, was shot and killed. Next door to the poum executive headquarters, now Hotel Rivoli, stands Café Moka. There, the Republican’s government Guardia Civil had barricaded themselves in, poised to attack. Today, tourists sit on its terraces, sipping overpriced Vermouth and watching passersby.

The remnants of the Spanish Civil War are hidden in the bullet-scarred walls of the Saint Felip Neri church. The social centers around Barcelona keep part of this history alive, and new generations learn about anti-fascist resistance and autogestion, or self-management, a crucial framework of political organizing and decision-making that underpinned the long history of squatters’ movements and struggles in the city. Yet, today besides the Catalan referendum, which will be taken up in another piece shortly appearing on Insurgent Notes, another slow and protracted war is taking place. Life in the city is expensive—rising rents have pushed many people out of their neighborhoods. Barcelona today has been converted into a tourist theme park.

The heat and humidity combined with the throngs of tourists walking around with their selfie sticks makes the city insufferable in the summertime. Seeking refuge in narrow streets of El Raval, one immediately encounters young men, mostly African and South Asian, peddling cerveza for a euro, young Muslim women carrying groceries, and teenagers milling around. Tourists walk around el Raval, clasping their purses, looking left and right, meeting the smiling faces of Dominican drug dealers, poised to help them find the best heroin Barcelona has to offer. When the sun falls, policemen walk around the streets, armed. Outside the buildings, older men stand, smoking cigarettes, others crossing their arms, looking at the life around them.

El Raval is one of the fastest gentrifying neighborhoods; foreign investors are attempting to purchase entire blocks of buildings and convert them into Airbnb’s. In the middle, not too far from the CNT bookstore and El Lokal, a small leftist info-shop, stands an open-air squat. The space was occupied in 2013 by area residents in response to the police murder of Juan Andrés Benítez. In the summer months, neighborhoods around Barcelona prepare to host block parties, bringing area residents together. The Àgora Juan Andrés Benítez is hosting its own alternative block party, and people come in and out of the space, to help set up for the various events that will take place. It is here that we meet members of Etcétera, a collective started between the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, which periodically publishes a magazine, Correspondencia de la Guerra Social (“Correspondences from the Social War”). Some of its members help run and maintain the space. We ask them to help us understand how Barcelona has become a global city catering to the tourist industry, the price that working-class folks have paid, and what sort of struggles we can imagine unfolding in the near future.

In your most recent piece (see Etcétera 57) you tackle what you term the commodified city, referring to the gentrification in Barcelona. Yet, gentrification could easily apply to just about every major city in the world today from Brazil to New York. Can you tell us a little bit about what you see as specific to the Barcelona model of urban development?

Capital, in its tendency to turn everything into a commodity, reaches even space itself. Also the space of the city, the urban land, has acquired an increasing level of importance for capitalist businesses. The flows of surplus capital are invested speculatively in the real estate and urban development sector. Investments in land and buildings, as well as their successive rezonings, the urbanization of large areas of cities, with their cycle of destruction and reconstruction, and the speculation that all this generates, gives enormous benefits to the flow of speculative capital that circulates throughout the world—an important part of which stops in the global city, which is of interest to capitalists in this particular moment. The process of urban speculation is a global phenomenon that has been developing and affecting most cities for decades. It does not occur at the same time in all parts of the world but it does have the same characteristic: the dispossession and expulsion of people from the places they inhabit and their condition as residents of the neighborhoods in which they live. Precisely what makes any city livable is the fact of the daily life of its residents. This is what urban speculation prevents through the process of “accumulation by dispossession.” Opaque economic organizations appropriate large urban areas and expel the inhabitants who live there—a process known as “gentrification” and that is repeated and spread throughout the planet.

The commodified city produces space as an exchange value, preventing its realization as use value, that is, making it impossible to satisfy the needs of its inhabitants. This process has accelerated more in recent decades with the latest capitalist mutation of so-called neoliberalism, mainly as a result of technical determinism and the application of new technology that also allows moving large monetary masses at high speed—a vision and treatment of space on a large scale.

This global speculative process also affects the city of Barcelona to a large extent and, fundamentally, it differs little from the others; the differences arise from the same development of the process in each place. Beginning with the 1992 Maastricht treaties, the Spanish financial sector, which dominates the economic development of Spain, attracted a large amount of the global speculative capital flow to the real estate and construction sectors. This influx of capital, the majority coming from the drug business and the sale of weapons, generated in order to be laundered, and led to a real estate bubble that erupted in 2008 causing an unprecedented crisis. The Spanish state rescued the financial system and the working class was negatively affected, with very high rates of unemployment which even now are among the largest in the world (17 percent in general; in some communities 25 percent, youth unemployment which affected more than 50 percent of the population and is currently at 40 percent), a high cost of living that is speeding up, a reduction of wages and increased job insecurity, etc.—a crisis that continues and whose effects we will feel for a long time.

As Barcelona was integrated into the eu, it was affected by a very important process of deindustrialization. The medium and small companies that make up the productive fabric of Catalonia and that occupied an important part of the urban fabric of the city, either disappeared, closed or were forced to leave the city and settle in the periphery. In these circumstances the announcement of the arrival of the spectacle of the Olympic Games meant, for the bourgeoisie, the perfect alibi to start a great speculative business cycle that promised immense benefits.

What role did the events of 1992 summer Olympics play in transforming the city?

Before beginning to analyze the impact on urban speculation of the 1992 Olympic Games in the city of Barcelona, we have to contemplate a factor that we believe has also greatly altered the social composition of the city. During the twentieth century, Barcelona had essentially been a proletarian city, where the number of officials was comparatively scarce, for example when compared to other cities, such as Madrid. This changed with the adoption of the model of the autonomous governments and later with the entry into the eu and its “economic aid for development and modernization” which increased the numbers of officials in Catalonia and, above all, in Barcelona significantly. For example, in addition to the state officials that already existed, more were added to fill the posts of the autonomous government of Catalonia (called Generalitat),1 but also those of the municipality of the City Council and the Diputación2 that acquire very considerable proportions of the overall officials’ count. To this must be added the closure or transfer of factories and urban workshops to outlying areas outside the city limits. Thus, broadly speaking, in the post-Franco period, Barcelona went from being a proletarian city with a productive industry to being postindustrial, a city of civil servants and dominated by the tertiary services and leisure industry.

In 1992, the Olympic Games were the justification and the alibi for the capitalist modernization of the city: the dismantling of the industrial city and the reconstruction of the city of services, leisure and tourism. The industrial society that shaped the Barcelona of the early and mid-twentieth century, gives way at the end of the century to a city of administrative, cultural and media services, a city of financial transactions that seeks, in real estate speculation and construction, the greater profitability of capital. This speculative capital has to overcome the people’s resistance against the aggression. The lure to achieve the necessary consensus, apart from more repressive legislation (quick trials, greater penalties…) and a more effective police (which suppress any response), were the Olympic Games. Under the pretext of sport, the Administration manages to silence the protest of the people, and to have the necessary capital for the great infrastructure works that will be carried out: the belts, with the knot of the Trinity; the city of journalists in the Hebron Valley; the transformation of the maritime façade with the Olympic Village.

But this process has been seriously hindered by the impact of the economic crisis of 2008, the bursting of the housing bubble, and bankruptcy and major problems in the financial system, a fundamental sector for the functioning of the Spanish economy. To this, we must also add the great corruption that affects, endemically, all the estates of the state and the Spanish administration. In Barcelona, a large part of the great works started were paralyzed, leaving huge areas with a sinister aspect of devastation. For example, take the works of the railway station in the Sagrera neighborhood that occupy some 200 hectares and resulted in an immense trench that took almost ten years to make the separate districts of Sant Martí and Sant Andreu; or the large extension of the works of the Plaça de las Glorias, affected by corruption; or the large number of blocks whose buildings, many industrial, were destroyed and today are fenced off lands full of weeds and garbage… This gives Barcelona the appearance of an unfinished city, in permanent works, always under construction not to finish anything and leaving everything half-done, so that the large construction companies always have work to perform and maximum benefits to win. This is the true added value of the Olympic spirit of ’92.

What can you tell us about how Barcelona is branded to tourists? What is the relationship you see between the tourist industry, urban speculation and the role of the Spanish state? And the Catalonian government? And the mayor of Barcelona?

All commodities have to be endowed with a glorious story to increase their fetish and thus be able to sell them in the best conditions. Each commodified city creates its own story through advertisement and branding, which aid its depiction of itself as simulacrum: where the represented appearance intends to hide the reality. The “Barcelona brand” is just an advertising slogan, similar to the one used by many other commodified cities, designed by the publicists of the municipality to attract tourism and sell abroad an image of the city, a fleeting flash that dazzles and hides the true urban realities.

The Spanish productive industry has always been weak, compared to the most industrialized countries in Europe. During the “developmentalist” stage of the military dictatorship (1960–1973), the state decided to promote the tourist industry, which has expanded exponentially to become, in many places, almost a monoculture. The tourism industry is closely linked to the construction and urbanization of huge tracts of land. You just have to travel the long kilometers of coastline and see the destruction and aberration that has been done in it to realize that tourism is the first industry. The coasts are urbanized down to the seafront.

Starting in 1982, when the Socialists (psoe) were in power, Spanish politicians laid the legislative foundations to enable the great speculative real estate wave that would skyrocket after Maastricht, with the governments of Aznar and the Popular Party (pp) and the entry of the euro as the single currency for the eu. The municipal politicians unfortunately quickly joined the rezoning invitation and until 2008 there was a speculative madness in which the financial oligopoly of the Spanish banks played a decisive role.

The long period when the Barcelona City Council was governed by the Socialists (psc) represented a management model for the interests of capital. With them began this process of real estate speculation and gentrification, the commitment to mass tourism that has resulted in a great increase in the high cost of living, the expulsion of thousands of neighbors, job insecurity…which has imposed on the majority of inhabitants of Barcelona a true state of discomfort. Also, the governments of the Generalitat, during decades dominated by the autonomist right, have safeguarded only the interests of the Catalan elites, while applying the harshest neoliberal policy to the majority of the population. Despite the intense institutional propaganda about both the “Barcelona brand” and the “Catalunya brand,” the precariousness that greatly hinders the survival of large sectors of the population, mainly after the crisis of 2008, is an irrefutable fact.

Has tourism and how Catalan elites approach tourism changed in the past decade? Are there new people which tourism is now catering to?

We assume that the tourism industry, like any other, seeks the greatest profitability, obtaining the maximum benefits. To do so, it seeks so-called mass tourism, as well as that of economically powerful elites or classes, and also that of fairs and congresses or other kinds of events, such as sports, musical, cultural, etc. It only needs the production of certain specialized spaces, the zoning of places or environments, some very exclusive, for each class, public or occasion.

What have been the effects of tourism on the everyday lives of people in Barcelona? How do working class people Barcelona relate to the tourist industry? How have their lives been changed by it? What are some key neighborhoods that have been remade by tourism and gentrification?

Currently the tourism industry is the primary gentrifying agent of Barcelona. In a good number of neighborhoods: Ciutat Vella, Raval, Ribera, Barceloneta and large areas of the Eixample neighborhood life is almost impossible. An example to illustrate the problem, according to data from the Fem Plaça collective3 : in the Plaça Reial of the Ciutat Vella in Barcelona there are eight chairs placed by the municipality for people to sit and rest, they are scattered to favor isolation and there is no possibility of just being sociable. In contrast there are 1,669 chairs from the 490 tables belonging to the bars and restaurants that fill the place.

The increase in the cost of living is incessant. The price of housing in Barcelona has increased 150 percent from 1997 to 2015, while the increase in wage income did not reach 35 percent; In this year, the price of apartments increased by 20.6 percent in Barcelona compared to the previous year, in Madrid the increase is 15.5 percent, while in Bilbao it is 2.1 percent and in San Sebastian it is 0.9 percent. The rents of apartments, in the districts crowded by the tourism are almost impossible to find, because of the problem that constitutes the apartments of rent for tourists; in other neighborhoods such as the Eixample the price ranges from €800 to €1,000. Nowadays Barcelona is one of the most expensive cities in Europe.

The tourism industry that is considered “fundamental for the development of Spain” and that so much government propaganda generates, accounts for 12 percent of gdp but only occupies 9 percent of the active population. Most jobs are very precarious, with short contracts of days and even hours, and many under the table, very low salaries and hard and stressful work. This extreme labor exploitation has already led to the hotel maids and cleaners being organized in the Las Kellys collective to face this precarious salary and work.

It is also a fact that the tourism industry generates great environmental destruction and has devastated the landscape of the coasts and parts of the mountains. The millions of tourists are in need of large amounts of infrastructure, energy and water. So the benefit that they say that tourism generates remains in the hands of a few and for the most part we have precariousness and dispossession. On the other hand, it cannot be forgotten that tourism is not a productive industry but rather a service industry that is conditioned by its great volatility. For example, in recent decades tourism has increased in Spain in part due to various geopolitical factors that have affected the Mediterranean: first was the Balkan War and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, and then the instability generated by the state of war induced by Western powers in North Africa and the Near East.

Walking around El Raval one can’t help but notice the signs of gentrification. Yet it seems the neighborhood is holding on and fighting back. Can you tell us a little bit about how gentrification is transforming this historic neighborhood?

When saying that “the neighborhood is resisting and counterattacking” we have to specify that it is some minorities of the same that do it. Most people see it as a fatality that must be resigned, or to which it is impossible to cope given that the prevailing legality prevents any other way out, so that impotence and resignation are the most widespread characteristics among the affected residents.

The gentrification that looms over the neighborhood does not differ much from that which has reached most other neighborhoods and cities. The Raval has been forgotten for many decades by administrations and only when it has been seen that due to its geographical centrality and its social history could it become a powerful axis of rapid, immediate, surplus value generation, has it been decided to operate in it. The beginning of this operation has to be located with the opening of La Rambla del Raval at the early 1990s. The operation was financed 95 percent with European funds. This meant the demolition of 790 homes and 140 commercial premises, many of them craftsmen.

The purchase price of second-hand housing in 1996 was €866/m2, becoming in the year 2000 of €1,585/m2; today it is around €5,000/m2. These prices are obviously unaffordable for people who have lived in these years. As for the rental apartments, it is difficult to find them below €1,000. It must be borne in mind that most of the Raval families are earning around €1,000 (term called mileurista), and not even mentioning the case that all of their members are not employed.

In Barcelona, there have been various protests against tourism and gentrification, ranging from marches to attacks on tourist cycles and buses.4 What struggles do you think are the most useful to fight against gentrification? How do you see them unfolding?

Beyond the spectacular, these two specific attacks that you mention in your question and whose importance lies in that they had their second glory on tv and in the media press that have not been repeated, is the continued struggle of some neighbors and groups in their respective neighborhoods or areas of influence. It should also be noted that lately the issue of the so-called nationalist Procés de Catalunya has covered and hidden other social problems, such as job insecurity, the constant rise in the cost of living index, the social cuts in health and education made by its own nationalist governments. However, the mobilizations of solidarity against the evictions continue, the Platform of Affected by the Mortgage (pah)5 continues its activity, although it is true that the entry of some of its members into the institutions seems to have diminished their strength in their struggle, but there they are facing a repressive reality such as the evictions of the neighbors of their apartments.

We should mention the Kellys, the association of hotel cleaners who, since they were organized in 2014, are fighting against job insecurity in their sector. It should also be noted, now that tourism promotes an escalation of prices that makes it impossible to access a home, the long struggle of the squatter or okupa 6 movement in Barcelona.

But neighbors against the tourism industry and the process of gentrification have manifested themselves in many neighborhoods. The mobilizations of the neighbors of Barceloneta began in the summer of 2014 and have continued until now, this working-class and working-class seamen district, where there are neither companies nor almost fishing fleet, has been invaded by real estate speculators and, due to its proximity to the beaches, also by tourists and bars. The Port Vell, which is the dock for luxury yachts, is a preserve for the neighbors, an example of zoning and classification of space, only rich owners can walk around it. The residents of the Sagrada Familia neighborhood have also protested against the tourist agglomeration. In May 2017, a series of different groups and also neighbors constituted the Sindicat de Llogaters (Union of Tenants), which held their first Assembly of affiliates on November 4…

• 1Spain is divided administratively into 17 autonomous communities and 2 autonomous cities (Ceuta and Melilla). Every autonomous community has its government that, in the cases of Catalonia and Valencia, is called Generalitat. Each autonomous community is divided into provinces, similar to counties in the United States. Every province has a diputación which is responsible for the administration of municipal activities. The diputaciones promote the economic-administrative interests of the provinces. The Spanish territorial administration is a system very close to the United States federal system where in the Spanish version each state is an autonomous community.
• 2La Diputación provincial de Barcelona is the provincial/county government that lends direct services to cities and provides technical, economic and technological support to the City Council and to the 311 municipalities of Barcelona.
• 3Between 2014 and 2016, the Fem Plaça (“let’s make a square”) collective held monthly events in different squares of Ciutat Vella, one of the oldest neighborhoods, considered the center of the city, where Plaça Catalunya is located. The organizers promoted the strategy of neighbors going out in the street to have a good time—as a way to call attention to the privatization of public space.
• 4On August 1, 2017, a video was posted on Twitter showing an unidentified protestor slashing the tires of rental bicycles in Barcelona and slapping “Arran” stickers on them. The video was accompanied by the message: “We are fed up with the occupation by tourist companies of the public space of the neighborhood.” A week prior, the anti-capitalist group Arran claimed responsibility for holding up an open-top tourist bus. Masked men stormed the bus and wrote “tourism kills neighbourhoods” on the front of the bus.
• 5The Platform of Affected by the Mortgage (pah) started in 2009 in Barcelona to fight mortgage foreclosures and evictions. In Spain, the current law states that once homeowners purchase property, they are only freed once that debt has been repaid. The homeowner is liable even after the bank has repossessed the property. After three months of mortgage arrears, the bank can initiate proceedings to evict the borrower and take over the property. The bank can also ask for full repayment of the loan even after taking over possession of the property. This affects many people across Spain for instance—which tends to be a buyer’s not a rental market. pah is an assembly-based grassroots movement which provides emotional support to people facing difficulties paying back their mortgages and or facing the threat of an eviction. One of its most interesting components is the direct action tactics it employs to stop evictions. Its founding member is Ada Colau, now the major of Barcelona.
• 6The okupa, or squatter’s movement, has a strong history in Barcelona, starting after Franco’s death and energized by anarchism as well as punk and other counterculture movements of the 1980s. It’s a form of squatting where participants take over a space or building and use it as housing, and often times open up a self-organizing social center. The okupa movement rose again in the 1990s due to the housing crisis spurred by the ’92 Olympics. Today, there are a few hundred remaining squats in Barcelona, some of which are used as social and cultural centers. The most famous of these is the Can Vies social center in the Sants neighborhood. It was occupied in 1997 by a group of youth that turned it into a social center. In 2014 riots erupted to stop the eviction of the squatters.

Once again, although with certain peculiarities, we are faced with the historical problem posed by Vicens Vives when emphasizing the historical contradictions between center and periphery in the culturally and politically diverse Spanish state.1 This problematic, in the current period, has taken the form of a struggle between two heterogeneous powers. One, a consolidated power, is the Spanish state. The other, an emerging power, drives the project to create a state of its own, a project promoted by nationalists and pro-independence currents. These include a fraction of the divided system (PdeCat, erc and cup2) and some social organizations (the Catalan National Assembly, Omnium Cultural and some trade unions3)—with the support of an important part of society. Their proposal—the so-called “process”—is orchestrated from above and is populist, and has little or nothing has to do with what would be a critical revolt against power or one that questions an essential aspect of vibrant capitalism.

The Sui Generis Democracy of the Spanish State

To break down the basic ingredients of this mess, we will refer, initially, to one of the characteristic features of one of the contenders, the Spanish state. In this regard, already before the repression by the state police on October 1st, 2017,4 we knew that this state was an authoritarian democracy, or a pseudo-dictatorship. Arguments to support this claim are many. First, the form adopted by the transition5—reform without any rupture, agreed upon by the entire spectrum of the party system, from the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party of Spain (psoe) to the Union of the Democratic Center and Convergence6—which led, in one way or another, to the perpetuation of many of the structures of the dictatorship, a continuity strengthened by the Constitution of 1978: these structures include the army, the police system, the Bourbon monarchy, and the Court of Public Order, renamed the “National Court.”

After Cambodia, Spain is the country with the most “disappeared” since the coup d’etat of 1936 and a long etcetera.

More recently, in the area of social control, we could cite the “Organic Law” of 2015 (popularly known as the “Gag Law”7), or migration policy; and, in economic terms, successive labor reforms, approval by decree to limit the public deficit to 3 percent, acceptance without prior debate of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (ceta), the Canada-eu Treaty or the austerity policies sponsored by the Troika, as well as those of the European Commission (ec), the European Central Bank (ecb) and the International Monetary Fund (imf).

With regard to Catalonia, we see a lack of interest and incompetence in managing the complex heterogeneity of this region, except by resort to the legal-political path, motivated in part by the dependence of the judiciary on politicians, as in the usa. Although the state could, in principle, have authorized a referendum, as was done with the Statute of 2006—approved by the Cortes Generales (Parliament) and backed up by the referendum convened that same year or, could at least have tolerated something along the lines of the “Consultation” of November 2014 (a non-binding referendum).

However, in this case, the approach, despite its inconsistencies, was much more elaborate and would have required a desire for dialogue difficult to imagine, as well as a reform of the Constitution. On this issue, we should also say, from the legal point of view, except for a small group of states (Lichtenstein, Ethiopia, etc.), constitutions generally (usa, Italy, France, Germany, Norway, et. al.) consider the territorial state as an indivisible unit.

On the other hand, the authoritarianism of this democracy, forged in the management of the contradictions and limits of capitalism itself, is congruent with the evolution that the forms of government have resulted from the economic and political restructuring of the ’70s and ’80s. This is the authoritarianism of democracies that we have found in the same way in different states: antiterrorist laws; authorization for “indefinite detention” and approval of the “Patriot Act” in 2001, in the United States; the Socialist government declared the state of emergency in 2010, in Spain, to end the strike of the air-traffic controllers; the proclamation in Belgium of the state of exception between 2015 and 2017; the state of emergency in France from 2015 till 2017. In the opinion of Giorgio Agamben, the state of exception (emergency, war), in addition to being included in all democratic constitutions, implies that at any given moment, basic constitutional guarantees can be suspended and this “tends to present itself as the paradigm of dominant government in contemporary times.”

Neoliberal Capitalism in Catalonia

With respect to Catalonia and the independence parties, it is never irrelevant to cite some historical precedents. First of all, many of those who were, after 1978, Convergencia mayors, i.e., from the party of Puigdemont,8 had previously been mayors under Franco. In addition, we cannot fail to mention that prominent members of the Convergencia party, such as Roca Junyent, participated in the elaboration of the so-called 1978 Constitution, which includes Article 155.9 Further, we cannot overlook that one of the “virtues” of the Generalitat10—especially in the periods of Convergéncia government (1980–2003 and 2010–15) and of the Convergéncia/PDeCAT–erc alliance plus the votes of the cup—has been its ability to be an apt pupil in the application of neoliberal policies: the privatization of health care; subsidies to private education, in large part to schools of the Catholic Church; deepening the regressive nature of taxation (a tax rate reduction, fit for a fiscal paradise, applied to the casinos and the Formula 1 circuit, from 55 percent to 10 percent11); job insecurity in private companies and in public institutions; unconditional support for the privatization of transport and infrastructure; multiple evictions and almost no public housing policies; there is, further, hardly any environmental policy. An outstanding aspect of this spoliation would be the long list of cases of corruption, should be highlighted. With regard to repression, with Arturo Mas12 as president, the Generalitat government led the charge against some of the members of the “Aturem el Parlament” (Let’s stop the Parliament) campaign, and the “movement of the outraged,” for which the prosecution requested 5 years in prison. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that, long before October 1, we had experienced the harsh repression by the “mossos d’esquadra” (police of the Catalan government): Esther Quintana lost one eye; there were various deaths from bullets or other causes, as happened with Benitez del Raval (in the city center) and with mental patients; there was the brutal eviction of the March 15th camp from Plaza Catalunya13; there were extrajudicial executions following the attack of August 17, 2017, in Barcelona; repression of May Day demonstrations; and evictions.

The Process

Regarding sovereignty, there is no doubt that in this country there have always been sectors involved with Catalanism and with aspirations for self-government, although it is also true that until recently, despite increases for several reasons (economic crisis, repression by the state police, the application of Article 155), nationalism and independence have always been very minority currents.

However, in recent years, in a context characterized by a lack of responses to cuts in public policies and to the effects of the resumption of the capital accumulation process, after the recession crisis of 2007–09, the “convergence summit,” led by Arturo Mas, in 2010, in the wake of the Constitutional Court ruling on the Statute of 2006, accelerated the turn towards independence. Patriotic revitalization was strengthened with the massive turnout on September 11, 2012, the commemoration of the alleged struggle of Catalonia against the Bourbon invasion (when in reality it was part of an international conflict between monarchies, the Bourbons, the Hapsburgs and their respective allies), giving rise to the belief, among nationalists and pro-independence forces, that the time had come to focus strategy on sovereignty and to set aside minor issues such as the “fiscal pact.” This would make it possible, by the bye, to pass over in silence the problems of corruption as well as the illegal financing of the system and its political parties, and would ensure the continuity in power of Convergéncia. This was a qualitative leap that ended, starting in 2015, with the neo-conservative governance of Junts pel Si (PdeCat, erc plus the votes of the cup), and the participation, for a social dimension, of the anc,14 the Omnium and the farce of the “Municipalities for Independence” (self-defined by independence, when in fact they represent a plurality of political positions).

In addition, a fundamental aspect of this political shift lies in the proposals for the “right to decide” and for the referendum which subsequently led to the events of October 1, the simulated referendum with an alleged participation of 2,286,217 (the total electoral body is 5,510,713 voters), not validated by any independent institution, and to Parliament’s subsequent approval of the declaration of independence in the form of a Catalan, virtual Republic, on October 27, 2017. This was an enigmatic culmination—Catalan Republic? Yes? No?—of “the process”; and the making explicit of an alleged mandate, based on the events of October 1, that had to lead to separation. This was a real or symbolic break that was preceded by the Laws on Referendums and Transition of September 6 and 7—the first stone of the new state—approved by a parliamentary majority (Junts pel Si, the alliance PdeCat, erc, and cup), but not by votes of the electoral lists, thanks to the d’Hondt Law.15 These are laws typical of a banana republic, as in the Law on Referendums, where declaring independence only requires that there be more affirmative than negative votes.

Finally, an element essential to clarify is that we are not facing a new version of autonomy between politics and economics, but rather dealing with political (political-economic, political-cultural) divergences that reflect different readings of “territorial place.” This is a problem that manifests itself as a contradiction between fractions of the political and institutional sphere: the pro-independence option and the Spanish state. This is an argument that makes it possible to highlight the close link (the subordinate relationship, but not the autonomy, that exists between politics and economics, and the instrumental dependence on the forms of government and state regarding the economy) that lies in the governance established in the European Union and by the international treaties, which move from the super-state to the municipality. Further, in the case before us, there is no rejection of the function of the forms of government as guarantors of the conditions of reproduction of the capital relation. This has not prevented it from causing collateral damage in the economic situation as a result of the climate of crises, legal uncertainty and politics. Still, we must not underestimate the enormous value added, for capital and for the state, of the very serious social-implosive fracture—and of the retrograde influence of the content of the sovereignty debate as an antidote to the recurring episodes of social and political confrontation.

Words and Things

Magritte’s picture, “This is not a pipe,” in its apparent simplicity, contains an enormous complexity, the distinction between words and things; a differentiation to which we could add more elements: meaning, sense, and discourse. If we apply these considerations to “the process,” we will see that, in it, certain language games, the relationship between words and things (manipulation, lies and propaganda) have prevailed over in-depth reflection about the pro-independence process and its consequences. In the hard core of this debate, this would be, in effect, the handling of notions such as “nation,” “people,” or “independence.” The “process” uses some terms whose meaning it emphasizes immediately, without omitting the existence of different versions of the thematic (currents linked to the Enlightenment, such as bourgeois revolutionary discourse, romantic vision, the notion of the “Volkgeist,” Stalinist interpretation), which deals with the synthesis of cultural and historical features, an ideological construct—“false consciousness”—unitary, transcendent, in which they dilute and erase the relationships of power, valuation, and the underlying class contradictions.

These are systemic notions and discourses that convey judgments deemed indisputable, with a powerful emotional charge and blind faith in the leadership to achieve an idyllic community: the citizens of the republic. It constructs a narrative with features of a sect—full of explicit and implicit ingredients—supremacist prejudices (genomization of differences, presumption of superiority of the native, the “foreign” as a parasite, racism). This is a story that also includes a proposal for a state, similar to the states in our environment; conceptions broadcast repeatedly over years through various channels (media, public-funded political and cultural organizations). This is a state project, more specifically a neoliberal and capitalist state, that includes, not without reason, a critical, harsh, state centralism, but which then reproduces in its “interior” multiple centers and peripheries.

In another order of things, where the republican model is concerned, it is indispensable to emphasize that, in this case, there is no conception, really, despite the seemingly discordant verbiage, of any other possibility than the foundation of a bourgeois republic. If we do not look too closely at historical events, we forget the anti-social and anti-worker character of the Second Republic (repression of the miners of Figols, Barcelona, in 1932; massacre of Casas Viejas, Cádiz, in 1933, repression by a colonial army of the Asturian miners in 1934). In the Catalonia of the Second Republic, we recall the comment of Lluis Companys of the erc, president of the Catalan goverment, referring to the Raval, a working-class district with an important presence of revolutionaries: Companys said that if he could, he would have destroyed it with “cannon fire.” And, with regard to the concept of “independence,” there is no doubt that, in the colonial framework and from anti-imperialist positions, it is a key, indisputable part; but this is not the case of Catalonia; here, to be exact, we would have to talk about the colonization of the Iberian Peninsula, Europe, etc., by large multinational corporations.

On the other hand, we could also apply this disquisition about words and things to the proposals of the “right to decide” and to the referendum, in which it has always been assumed that the public and autonomous institutions were going to promote the decision-making power of society and that the question to be elucidated was only independence. However, we can ask ourselves: do we really decide, or is it just a mirage? Why not consider other issues as priorities: austerity policies, laws on social control, public policies or international agreements? There is no doubt that, unlike, for example, in Greece, no other alternative was contemplated here; the debate and political management have been monopolized by “sovereignty.” In any case, we do not have to magnify the terms we use. Concepts such as “referendum,” “democracy,” “assembly,” and “demonstration,” like any other word or expression, are polysemic, and admit multiple meanings—one thing and the opposite. As Benedetti claimed: “when they say peace, they mean war.” Without going any further on the term “referendum,” even Hitler organized one, in 1938, in Germany, and newly annexed Austria voted for the new makeup of the Reichstag with 99 percent participation.

Finally, in this endless dynamic of subterfuge, one of the great fallacies has been that “the process” would be free of difficulties, something almost festive; a naive image in which two million people believed. The most palpable evidence that this was not going to be the case has been given to us by two of the pillars of this social formation based on the market economy. One is the lack of support from international institutions of importance (the states of the eu, usa, ec, ecb,16 imf). The second pillar would be the economy itself: the decline in the Ibex 35 quotations17; Standard & Poor’s warning that Catalonia could enter recession; more than 3,000 companies have moved their headquarters outside Catalonia and 1,000 have moved their tax offices; two of the largest Catalan banks (CaixaBank and Sabadell) have changed their headquarters and tax offices. Another factor to take into account is the distorted view that has been given of historical processes that were supposed to be points of reference for “the process,” one of which has been called the “Slovenian way.” In this regard, we cannot ignore that the independence of Slovenia, in 1991, was not a peaceful event. There was a war, which, fortunately for that country, was short, although not for the rest of Yugoslavia (Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Serbia), which was involved in prolonged bloody wars and conflicts.

The Fetishism of the Polls

It is also significant, however, that the word “democracy,” turned into a fetish, an almost magical artifact, has been one of the most recurrent terms. In this sense, when referring to the concept of “democracy,” or in reality to “representative democracy” at the center of this vortex, one should remember what historical experience has shown us, time and time again, namely that democracy based on the system of representation, as a political-ideological mechanism essential for capitalist governance, has been a fraud. While, on the one hand, it fed the spectacle of participation and the belief in the commitment to link the party with the social system; on the other hand, programs were diluted, but, above all, the objectives, projects and decisions were designed elsewhere, above the social formations, while counting on the collaboration, in one way or another, of the party system, converted into an indispensable, functional mechanism of this dichotomy. This is a fetishized revival of commodified democracy and the control that dazzles us, periodically, with the presumed benefits of the ballot box and the vote. This is a simulation that erodes or dismantles practices and critical social subjectivities, the ability to question delegated, neoliberal democracy, and the critique of politics. This distortion, the synthesis of a link of power and domination, was printed on a small poster scattered around the city, saying: “Vote and you will be free,” which brings to memory, for its familiarity, the slogan “Work will make you free,” inscribed over the gate at Auschwitz.

Emerging from a fiction, not at all fortuitous, which points, in its most recent stage, to the defeat of the critical sector of March 15th and other positions, and to the emergence, as a relay, of “another way of doing politics,” are the informal and flexible democrats, the new snake charmers (Podemos, En Comú Podem18), who aspire to replace the discredited traditional party system and take part in the distribution of the pie of political power by becoming efficient co-administrators of the interests of big capital and small local lobbies (commerce, hospitality). These are modifications that refer to a long process of reconfiguration of democratic and state forms, where the disarticulation of the potentially critical, subversive social and political forces acquire a special form; a redefinition of the political, legal and economic framework, in which the individual state has its powers cut off, where the classic nation-state has been relegated to the trunk of memories, and turned into an irreplaceable piece of a macro-system, a supra-state, that surpasses its own contours, into which the real nuclei of strategic power are inserted (lobbies, multinational corporations, investment funds, ec, bce, fmi, bm…) of a global and local capitalism. There is the functioning of the European Commission, which imposes political and legislative changes on the member states (the long shore law, gmos, laws on competitiveness). It appoints prime ministers, as was the case, in 2011, of the prime ministers of Italy (Monti, ex–Goldman Sachs) and of Greece (Papadomus, ex-bce), perfectly exemplifying the uniqueness of the new scenario.

In this situation, the independence movement, which has never had the majority, which has not been troubled in always maintaining its opposition, until that became an axiom, and now affirms that the mock referendum of October 1 was a legitimate mandate of unilateral rupture with the state: this is at the least an act of pure and simple prevarication. Indeed, if we stick to the data: in the illegal consultation of November 9, 2014, more than 33 percent participated and 80.7 percent voted yes; in the autonomy vote of 2015, considered as a plebiscite by the pro-independence movement, 77.4 percent of the electorate participated and “independence” obtained 36.5 percent of the votes (abstention is not only legitimate, but legal, and therefore it must also be counted); and, the “referendum” of October 1, 2017, in which more than one third of the electorate participated, and not even the international observers considered it valid.

However it may be, in the background, what all this reveals, besides the undoubted weight of the ideological factor and the economist opportunism, is the belief that an independent state can bring about an improvement in the economic situation, is the deep and generalized ignorance, premeditated or not, of what characterizes, in an essential way, the really existing world: the world of the market, of the state and of supra-state powers; this is ignorance, and—why not—self-deception, in relation to those elite powers, which have used their privileged position in the autonomous administration of the state to favor the market and the control of the social.

A Gregarious Movement and a Smoke Screen

At this point, it is striking, on the other hand, that, although within the scope of the state, there have been, to a greater or lesser extent, mobilizations with a protest component (struggles in defense of public health in Madrid and elsewhere, strikes in factories such as Coca Cola, neighborhoods such as Gamonal and universities); in the case of Catalonia this has been different, especially since 2011; the Panrico strike and the neighborhood mobilizations against tourism and urban speculation in Barcelona have been more the exception than the rule. There has been less conflict, but rather nationalism and independence, led by those who have dominated the socio-economic and political plunder (Convergéncia/PDeCAT-erc with the collaboration, with retouches, of the cup); these have managed to mobilize a large mass of the population and provoke a serious state crisis, showing, once again, the failure of the political and culturally diverse state project, which in turn has been used as a smokescreen to hide the “internal contradictions.” In this way, we can ask ourselves what has happened that allows this gigantic pyramidal mobilization to take place, as well as the demonstrations of “September 11th,” organized by a predatory power; a sort of collective, gregarious catharsis, which, globally, cannot be qualified in any other way than reactionary.

What happened in Catalonia broadly shows great similarity to the Brexit and Trump votes of the white workers; this is an expression of discontent, in this case mainly of middle layers and for different reasons (degradation of socioeconomic status, end of the “social elevator”), one of whose elements lies in their seemingly anti-establishment appearances, but which, in fact, is pro-establishment. Finally, it is worth mentioning that, since the reform without rupture of 1978 and the economic restructuring of the ’70s and ’80s, there has been a progressive, effective weakening of those of social struggles and organizations that constitute their support, which was consolidated with the crisis-recession of 2007–09.

In all this, however, there are two other factors that have led to the outbreak. On the one hand, in Catalonia the parliamentary left has had the habit, in an uncritical way, of acting as a “fellow traveler” of nationalism; and, on the other, the extra-parliamentary left, which generally has not considered nationalism and independence to be priority issues; although there have also been some, who, for some time now, have joined the independence cadre, thinking, naively or opportunistically, that after the rupture with the Spanish state, in the shadow of the new state (which would be, undoubtedly, neoliberal and authoritarian, but smaller—such as Andorra, Luxembourg or Guatemala)—they were going to be able to build their own happy Arcadia.

After the Elections of December 21

Finally, under the protection of Article 155, applied after the beginning of the process with the independence movement’s break with the Constitution, entailing the temporary suspension of self-government in Catalonia, the state called for autonomous elections on December 2119 with the purpose of relaxing political tension and facilitating the return to the constitutional order. In spite of everything, after the elections, the scenario that is emerging does not seem to indicate that the problems that led to this mess have been solved. To begin with, what the results of the elections show us regarding secession is a repetition of the division in two large blocks: roughly, 2 million votes in favor of independence and 3.5 million that do not support it. However, at the same time there have been some changes. In the first place, it is still surprising, in terms of the loyalty of those who sympathize with the project of the Catalan Republic, which despite the fact that things have happened to us (much less than their promoters predicted), the secessionist vote has not been seen severely eroded, but rather the opposite. Secondly, it has been verified that the party that has obtained more votes (1,102,099), has been a conservative party, Citizens, similar to the one that governs the state, the Popular Party (pp). The pp, even in the years of crisis and recession, pushed an economic policy (austerity plans, regressive taxation) that impoverished the majority of society while favoring the enrichment of the economic elite of the Ibex 35. What is significant, moreover, is that the conservative vote has not only occurred in high-income areas, but mainly in the working-class districts of Barcelona and Tarragona, where most of the working-class population of Catalonia is concentrated. Probably this has had to do, not only with the weight of the dominant ideology or with the disenchantment with the complicity or absence of confrontational initiatives by the traditional left (parties, trade unions), but also because the agenda of those who have hegemonized the centrality of “sovereignty” did not include any hint of change in the established neo-conservative model. All this highlights that not only do we have a country split over sovereignty, but one also listing to the right, since the two options with the largest number of votes, the pro-independence forces and Citizens,20 have an element in common: namely neither one proposes anything but the continuity of austerity policies and a political-economic approach or a model of society in no way different from neoliberalism.

As far as the electoral results are concerned, once again, one of the postulates of the pro-independence forces has been negated, i.e., that the vast majority of Catalans support secession. Similarly, there is no coherence among those who, until now, have shown their total opposition to the Spanish Constitution, and who, instead of proposing a boycott, submitted to an election called by the central government under the umbrella of Article 155.

In any case, a more detailed examination of the results of these elections, allows us to observe some interesting details. First, it confirms the existing division between the different political options, i.e., the independence candidates, who ran separately this time (Junts per Catalunya, JxCat, the new denomination grouping members of the PdeCat and independents, erc and cup), got 2,063,361 votes; 3,447,352 votes did not support independence (Citizens, psc, Cec Podem, pp, blank ballots, abstention). These figures give a result that, if we take as a reference the total number of the electoral census (5,510,713), only 37.44 percent represent pro-independence votes. Regarding seats, the distribution in the Parliament is the following: the independence block JxCat (34), erc-CatSí (32) and cup (4); for the anti-independence bloc. Citizens (36). psc (17), CeCPodem (8) and pp (4). Now, checking the number of votes and seats confirms that there is no proportional relationship between them. Indeed, as already indicated, the electoral regulations themselves—the Organic Law of the General Electoral System (based on the Ley d’Hondt)—produces a non-correspondence between votes and seats, giving greater representation to less populated areas, more inclined to vote conservative, to the detriment of the large urban concentrations; this system historically has harmed the left but in these elections, it favored nationalists and independentistas, while a significant part of the urban vote went to the new right of Citizens.

Putting figures to these concepts will allow us to understand the reason for this disproportion of votes and seats. Thus, for example, to obtain a seat according to locality the following number of votes is needed: Barcelona, 38,496; Girona, 23,963; Lleida, 16,008. Thus, even though they have a smaller number of votes, the separatists have obtained more seats and can form a parliamentary majority.

However, behind the controversy of votes/seats and the relative victory of the independence movement, there are certain elements that can contribute to weaken that bloc.

On the one hand, on January 15 the sentence in the “cas Palau”21 (part of the “3 percent case”) will be made public, which will surely hurt the PdeCat and, of course, Artur Más. On the other hand, a summary of the alleged illegalities committed in the exercise of government—with accusations of rebellion, sedition and embezzlement of public funds—in which for now the list could reach 40, including former President Puigdemont, who is in Belgium as a fugitive; it is not possible to omit, also, that the intense political and media activity displayed by the former president has had the support of the Flemish conservative nationalists of the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (n-va), the first party of Flanders with links to the neo-Nazi extreme right.

Unpredictable Horizon and Lost Causes

One way or another, a priori, the rise of political conservatism, with a few exceptions (micro-conflicts), mainly in the subaltern sphere (wage earners, precarious workers, unemployed) is worrisome. However this is not a rarity. We have seen it repeated, in recent years, in different places: from the electoral victories of Trump, Merkel, May and Macron, to mention some extremely relevant cases, the transformation of the “red belts” of Paris and Marseille into “black belts” with the vote for the National Front of Le Pen, the advance of the extreme right-wing Party for the Freedom of Holland or the expansion of the Hungarian Movement for a Better Hungary. This is a turn whose roots would have to be sought, preferably, apart from the effects of nationalist and pro-independence ideological bombardment, in the continuation of the dismantling by capital of the institutions of governance.

In this sense, another of the foreseeable consequences of this scenario is that a significant portion of society, much of it ascribed to the subaltern sectors, with the focus on sovereignty, the conservatism of Citizens or with another type of decoys (psc, Podemos), avoids confronting the deep contradictions, the problems that really concern them (increase of socioeconomic inequalities, social and labor precarization, privatization of public services, regressive taxation, urban speculation, environmental degradation) as they gradually take away social rights.

Anyway, everything points to this stage representing just another chapter of this pathetic saga. A chapter in which, in the weeks before December 21 and with the application of Article 155, it seemed that there was going to be some important rectification in the road map of the independence movement, as is clear from the statements of some of the champions of this tragicomedy: “not being sufficiently prepared (for the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, dui) is a mistake” (Ponsati); “the government was not prepared to develop the Catalan Republic” (erc). On the other hand, after the elections, something that had already been latent was evident, and that is that the independentistas do not form a uniform, monolithic bloc. There are deep divergences that materialize in different positions, linked to the question of who and how to take the reins of power and with a central theme: independence; among them, these stand out: the “tv-preacher” way that proposes a telematic link with Catalonia (Puigdemont and followers), to avoid the possible arrest (activation of the Euro-order); those who insist on the project of the Catalan Republic and rule out retaking the Autonomic System (cup); and those who opt to accept as inevitable acting within the constitutional framework, without renouncing the achievement of independence in the future (Mas). On this, there is no doubt that the legal problems arising in this adventure, coupled with the fact that the expectations of this delirious project (support of international institutions, attracting investors, number of voters) have not been met. This allows us to foresee that, in the future, things will not happen exactly in the same way as before. Thus, in this area, although some can abide by constitutional legality, others, however, can provoke the repetition of some of the ingredients of that absurd loop that in the past allowed the independence movement to obtain political dividends by exploiting the matrix of victim action/repression, in order to increase its still very insufficient social and institutional support, both in Catalonia and internationally.

This is an unpredictable horizon in which, certainly, some or many of the most negative features of the past will persist. These include the social fracture and disorientation caused by the state and by “dogmatic sovereignty,” with deep repercussions on sociality and social subjectivity, which means that it will take a long time to reverse the situation; the recomposition of bonds of critical social and political cooperation forming an anti-capitalist counter-power.

Finally, it is necessary to point out, at the same time, the existence of another reality—the invisible ones—that would encompass those who do not agree with the state or with capital, since we think that the state, whatever the size or color, constitutes in essence a structure of domination and oppression. As Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “The state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. It is cold even when it lies…. I, the State, am the people.” This perspective also entails a very different, antagonistic concept of independence, if we compare it with that advocated by the institutions or the “new democrats”; a conception that understands independence as a capacity for self-determination and self-valorization of the social with respect to the prevailing power. In short, a deconstructive vision of sovereignty and the mercantilized and police cosmos, which emphasizes the need to de-sacralize practices and concepts, for which a first step could be, here and now, to mention, with irony, Leopold Bloom, the character of Joyce’s Ulysses, who defined the nation as “the same people, who live in the same place.”

1. Vicens Vives was one of the most influential Catalan historians of the twentieth century.↩

2. The PdeCat is the political party created by the pro-independence Junts per Si; the erc is the Republican Left Party; the cup is the Candidatura d’UnitatPopular, a far-left anti-capitalist pro-independence party.↩

3. The Catalan National Assembly was founded in 2011, Catalanist and pro-independence. Omnium Cultura was created in 1961 to promote the Catalan language and culture; also pro-independence.↩

4. October 1, 2017, was the day of the referendum on Catalan independence, declared illegal by the Spanish government, in which about 40 percent of the eligible population voted overwhelmingly for independence. The referendum had no binding effect. The Spanish police attacked a number of polling stations to prevent the vote, with little success.↩

5. The transition in question is the transition in the Spanish state after the death of Franco.↩

6. The Union of the Democratic Center and Convergencia are the two main right-wing parties in Catalonia.↩

7. A law, as the popular name makes clear, greatly restricting advocacy of independence.↩

8. Carles Puigdemont, from the largest and most right-wing pro-independence party, was the head of the Catalan Parliament, was charged after the October 1 referendum with breaking various laws, and fled to Belgium, where he remains.↩

9. Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 is the basis for the state of emergency allowing the central government to assume direct control of Catalonia.↩

10. The Generalitat is the Catalan parliament.↩

11. Creation of a tax haven.↩

12. Arturo Mas is a right-wing Catalan politician.↩

13. An occupation of the main square in downtown Barcelona.↩

14. Again, the Assemblea Nacional de Catalunya.↩

15. A method of assigning seats to the Generalitat based on election results, skewed toward rural areas.↩

16. The eu is the European Union, the ec is the European Commission and the ecb is the European Central Bank.↩

17. The Catalan stock exchange.↩

18. New left-wing formations moving into the vacuum created by the decline of the Communist Party and the psoe (Socialist Party of Spain).↩

19. The elections of December 2017 returned a majority of pro-independence seats for the Generalitat but also showed a significant anti-independence majority of votes.↩

20. The largest right-wing anti-independence party.↩

21. Major corruption and looting scandal involving the two major right-wing parties.↩

The following is something between a notice and a short review, primarily intended to inform people about a very good new book on the May 1968 uprising and mass strike in France. In this year of anniversaries (of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the 1918 German Revolution, and the fiftieth anniversary of “1968”) this book should stand out both for English-language readers politically aware at that time, and for the younger generations discovering revolutionary theory and history today.

Abidor’s book consists of interviews he conducted recently in France with people who “came of age” politically and socially in “1968.” Not only does he find people all across the left-wing political spectrum, from Stalinists to anarchists by way of Trotskyists, but he finds them all over France, in cities such as Rouen, Lyon and St. Nazaire. And they are not exclusively “gauchistes” (roughly, far-leftists) radicalized in the ongoing, often festive events and meetings in the Paris Latin Quarter and around the country, but also blue-collar workers who repeatedly underscore their distance from that part of the movement. Not only was the Stalinist Georges Séguy, then general secretary of the cgt (Conféderation Génerale du Travail, the largest and mainly Communist Party–controlled union federation) roundly booed down by the workers at the big Renault auto plant at Billancourt, the (now mothballed) “worker fortress” just outside Paris, but the “Grenelle Accords,” the mediocre agreement with the employers which Séguy went there to sell, was voted down three times. Yet a number of workers interviewed by Abidor expressed their ongoing agreement with the French cp’s role in limiting the strike, and one or two people had actually joined the party after May, having tired of the libertarian milieu in which they started out. On the other hand, most agree that May signaled the beginning of the end of the pcf, once one of the largest cps outside the Soviet bloc (not to mention China), which by the 1990s had declined to 5 percent of the vote, from its earlier postwar average of 20 percent.

Another merit of Abidor’s book is that he generally avoids “stars,” with the exception of the Trotskyist Alain Krivine. In the libertarian-inflected milieu from which I emerged, Krivine was routinely denounced as a bureaucratic “recuperator” from one of the small “groupuscules” (small vanguard groups, Trotskyist in Krivine’s case, Maoist in others). He and his Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (the libertarians pointed out that the name was ideology run amok, since they were neither young, nor communist, nor revolutionary), like most other groups attempting to bridge the gap between the largely middle-class “soixante-huitards” (68ers) and blue-collar workers, were mainly rebuffed (on occasion violently) or simply ignored when they tried to connect with workers on strike. On one occasion (not in the book) Krivine was greeted at a factory gate with worker chants of “Krivine a l’usine!” (“Krivine, go get a factory job!”) By the time Abidor interviewed him 1–2 years ago, Krivine and his (several times renamed) group had been seriously deflated by decades of social ebb, and were active in the multi-tendency Nouveau Parti Anti-capitaliste (New Anti-capitalist Party, the npa). Most of Abidor’s interviewees had “stayed in the trenches” of social activism in one way or another, again across a wide political spectrum in this once highly politicized country that even today still occasionally emerges as an international beacon, in keeping with the old canard that “when France sneezes, Europe catches cold.”

In addition to avoiding stars, Abidor also, as mentioned, goes to the provinces to find people and their stories. When, after weeks of street battles and strikes, the Gaullist state had somewhat regained its balance, the snap parliamentary elections called in June 1968 returned a right-wing majority even stronger than the previous one, confirming, for some, another street chant of May, “Elections, piege a cons!” (elections/a trap for idiots). The festive atmosphere of the Latin Quarter revolt had spread to similarly inclined youth throughout France, along with militant strikes, some of the latter building on tough, militant strikes from 1967 (I once heard a story of a small factory in the Paris suburbs that had struck in April, 1968, whereafter the workers were of course stunned to find 10 million strikers joining them a few weeks later). From abroad, the ebb of May ’68 into the right-wing electoral victory of June seemed to confirm the historic antinomy of Paris and the rest of the country, one which had been manipulated as far back as Louis Napoléon in the 1850s. But Abidor’s interviews in the provinces show people there as well whose lives were turned inside out by May (hence his title, from one interviewee, who said “I didn’t make May ’68, May made me”).

In the “sixties” in the United States, “1968” was preceded by a growing crescendo of the radicalizing black movement, mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the spread of student activism in the wake of Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement, and the emergence of the hippie counterculture. France had in fact been highly polarized in the last years of the losing war in Algeria (which ended in French defeat in 1962). But there was little or anything, before May, of the rapidly rising mass ferment in the United States after 1964. Abidor’s book does a good job in capturing the explosion, seemingly from nowhere (despite small, little-noticed tremors) that turned hundreds of thousands of peoples’ lives inside out in 1968, after which, as was often said, “nothing could ever be the same again.”

Note: Further interviews which Abidor, for lack of space, had to leave out will be available as of February 20 under “More Made Me” at marxists.org.