Review: An October in Catalonia

I can still remember hastily typing the headline: ‘A republic is born’.

Less than a month after a referendum that was an act of defiance in and of itself, Catalan lawmakers assembled and voted by a majority of 70 to 10 in favour of a motion cementing a declaration of independence signed only two weeks before, despite threats from the Spanish Government that all who did so would be prosecuted. The motion read: “We hereby constitute the Catalan republic.”

I knew, even then, that not all republics last. That understanding did not undercut the monumental events that seemed to be transpiring, day by day.

Other memories emerge from that strange and frantic year: watching the exiled Catalan minister Clara Ponsati go from an Edinburgh police station – at which she arrived with significantly more dignity than the media scrum awaiting her – to an SNP conference where she received greater applause than the first minister who introduced her; stealing five minutes with Carlos Puigdemont on a rainy afternoon in Innerleithen while he was still simultaneously the president of Catalonia and an international fugitive to discuss the resilience of Francoism under the gaze of his Bond villain-esque bodyguard…

Now, less than ten years later, there are those within the Scottish independence movement who speak of Catalonia the way old hippies spoke of Woodstock – even if they weren’t there, they felt like they were, and by god, they bought the album.

With the benefit of hindsight, it should be acknowledged that the Scottish perspective was also a jaundiced one; Catalonia’s struggle for liberation was viewed through a lens coloured by the experiences, limitations, failures and distinctive character of Scotland’s own. It was why many found Catalonia’s grand experiment thrilling, whilst others came to regard it as deeply dangerous.

It also renders Josep Maria Antentas’ An October in Catalonia all the more necessary; not for the lessons it might teach us – though there are no doubt many in need of them – but to help us understand and appreciate the Catalan struggle from a distinctly Catalan perspective, placed in the context which those outside of it may only be dimly aware.

This is not a romantic book; that, I suppose, is to its credit. If romance alone were enough to ensure the success of a liberation movement, no nation or people on Earth would suffer for lack of self-determination. It is instead an attempt to soberly dissect the currents and crises which led to Catalonia’s outlaw referendum of 1 October, 2017; to apply Marxist analysis to its consequences, the interplay between strategy and circumstance, the clash of rebellion and repression, and try to ascertain what conclusions may be drawn.

The book’s format is interesting enough to be worthy of comment: in addition to being broken up into chapters and sections, every paragraph is numbered and acts, in the author’s words, as “autonomous reflections”. This is no simple stylistic novelty; it reflects the fact that many of the developments and events leading up to and following the Catalan referendum can be regarded in isolation, whilst also being seen as an erratic, multifarious continuum. If switching from one point of view to the other, the conclusions reached may not align.

Antentas notes that there were those on the Catalan and Spanish Left who highlighted the myriad contradictions of the independence movement in order to justify remaining “opposed or aloof”. Antentas, conversely, does not shy away from them – rather, they are precisely what he seeks to illuminate:

“The days leading up to 1 October were certainly paradoxical. Parties of rebellion called for order and calm. Leftists trusting in the Catalan police. Right-wing forces calling for institutional disobedience (albeit elegantly dressed up as complying with the new Catalan legality). Alternative and/or libertarian activists wanting to vote. People not in favour of independence voting for it. Left-wingers used to being on the front lines of conflicts occupying a discreet and uncomfortable position in the background. Reactionary governments accusing those wanting to hold a referendum of carrying out a coup.”

Against such a chaotic backdrop, when events threaten to overtake our ability to comprehend them even as we experience them, Antentas argues that “any strategic thinking that does not want to become fossilised almost before it is born must plunge into a situation replete with contradictions” – only then can such thinking be stimulated into overcoming those challenges instead of being disarmed by them. Not incorrect, but easier said than done.

Still, it briefly appeared as if Catalonia had struck an impossible balance that might temporarily satisfy those elements of its independence movement that might otherwise have found themselves at cross-purposes: a genuine attempt to work within the strictures of an ostensibly liberal democracy, whilst at the same time mounting an unashamed rebellion against the Spanish state, in which much of Catalan civil society would become participants, comrades and de facto outlaws. It was valiant, but it was not to last.

The Catalan Government and independence movement made the plunge into contradiction Antentas writes of with the passing of the Referendum Law in September of 2017. “From then on Catalonia officially entered into a situation of dual legitimacy… which, by its very nature, could only last until the balance came down definitively on one side or the other.” Yet this conflict was, to put it mildly, asymmetric. Antentas pointedly recalls the words of Marx: “Between equal rights, force decides.”

It was not just the aspirations of the Catalan people who voted in favour of independence that day in October which animated the solidarity displayed so powerfully in Scotland and beyond, but also the force which so brutally greeted them. Conversely, it is worth remembering that, when insurgent democracy was met with the kind of state brutality that not only recalled but actively emulated Spain’s Francoist past, many ostensible liberals were still wringing their hands over the plebiscite’s debatable ‘legitimacy’.

Antentas can state plainly what was once considered controversial: that the Spanish judiciary was and is a political actor, a cudgel that was wielded against the independence movement, and in the months following the referendum, “judicial violence then appeared as the continuation of police violence by other means”.

It is nevertheless jarring to read Antentas argue that the numerous Catalan independence leaders who faced trial and imprisonment for their role in the referendum “did not behave as one would be expected of conscious political prisoners who embody a collective cause and subordinate their personal fate to general political interests”, but instead as a group of individuals who would rather not spend years in jail.

“Their strategy from the trial can be understood from a human point of view,” Antentas grumbles, “but it is politically indefensible”. Antentas’ judgement here not only seems outrageously harsh – none of the independence leaders facing prison sought to avoid it by betraying either their cause or anyone else within the movement – but unrealistic. Any political strategy which seeks to cut itself off entirely from the humanity of those who must embody it is doomed from the outset.

To the non-Catalan reader, much of the book will seem like inside baseball; to the Scottish reader in particular, it will also be a bittersweet reminder of what once seemed possible there, if not here. Yet the conclusion Antentas draws in his afterword will likely sound all too familiar, with both Catalonia and the Spanish state trapped in a “general impasse”. Yet Antentas, though unforgiving at times, is no pessimist. The future will depend “on the foundations consolidated in the current phase and on the degree of understanding of the limits of the previous one.”

In other words, Catalonia’s story isn’t over yet.

An October in Catalonia: Paradoxes of the Independence Movement by Josep Maria Antentas. Published by Resistance Books, £18.00.