Catalan ‘Independence’ – A Tool of Capital Against Labour

Dear Catalonians, what are these nation destroyers Qaeda lovers doing here?! Kick them out in order to protect your protest.. pic.twitter.com/skX8rXeROW
— Fares Shehabi (@ShehabiFares) October 4, 2017

Spain’s rich Catalan region has erupted in violence. After a much-disputed referendum on independence where less than 40 percent of the Spanish region’s inhabitants voted, Catalan’s local government has said it will declare independence this week. Many on the left support Catalan independence. In fact, they claim that those who oppose it are Francoists and fascists.
Communists understand fascism to be rule by the dictatorship of financial oligarchy and it is in such a context that one must view events in Spain in terms of the class alliances behind the independence movement. In order to see whether the Catalan independence movement represents the interests of labour or capital, we need to place Catalan nationalism in the context of capitalism’s global power configuration.
Eurotopia
In 1992 billionaire and EU activist Freddy Heineken designed a map of a federal Europe. The new map proposed dividing European states up into 75 regions or state-lets under the central control of a European federal government.
The idea came from economist and philosopher Leopold Kohr who taught at the London School of Economics. Kohr advocated a form of anarcho-capitalism. He believed that the smaller the polity, the more democratic its institutions. Kohr proposed a return to Europe’s medieval micro-states as the best way of creating a supranational European federation.

This post was published at 21st Century Wire on OCTOBER 4, 2017.