Pablo Iglesias on the issue of the working class I know. I know that the key to understand the history of the last five hundred years is the formation of social categories called classes. Of course I know it. I will tell you a story: when the 15M movement in the Puerta del Sol square started, some students of my faculty, of the faculty of politics - who are very politicized students who read Marx and Lenin - participated for the first time in their lives in assemblies with people. Normal people. And they got desperate and they were saying They dont understand anything. And they shouted You are an exploited worker even if you dont know it! And the people looked at them like they were aliens, and they were very sad when they went home afterwards because they thought they dont understand anything. So I asked Dont you realize that the problem is yours? That politics doesnt have to do with being right, but with being successful. You can have the best diagnosis, and you can come home and understand the key of the political development since the sixteenth century, understand that the historical materialism is the key to understand the development of social processes. But what do you want to do, yell it to the people? You are exploited workers even if you dont know it!. There is the enemy wanting to to laugh at you. You can wear a shirt with the hammer and sickle, you can even bring a huge flag which is meters and meters long to the demonstration and go back home with your flag while the enemy is laughing at you. Because the people, because the workers prefer him. They believe him, they understand him when he speaks and dont understand you. And it may be that you are right. You can ask your children to put a plaque on your grave He was always right although nobody ever knew. But when you study the successful experiences of the transformation movements, you realize that the key of the success is to achieve the establishment of a certain identification between the diagnoses and the sentiment of the majority. And that is very difficult, it means being able to ride contradictions. Do you think I have any ideological problem with a huge strike of 48, of 72 hours? But the issue is that organizing a strike doesnt have anything to do with the desire that you or me may have to do it - it has to do with the strength of the labor organizations. And here I suspect that you and me have no business at all. So you and me can desire that the earth would be a paradise, homeland of mankind. We can desire whatever we like and paint on our shirts whatever we want, but politics has to do with power, not with the desires, with what is being said on an assembly. And in this country there are only two labor unions with the ability to organize a general strike and they are the CCOO (Workers Committees) and the UGT (General Workers Union). Do I like this? No, but this is what we have. And to organize a general strike is a very difficult thing. I was in Madrid on a picket line in Cocheras and early in the morning, you know where they had to go? To work. Because otherwise they would have been fired because they didnt have labor organizations which could defend them. Because the workers that you can defend, like the shipyard workers, the miners, have strong unions. But the youngsters who work as telemarketers or in Tele Pizza, or those who work in shops, cant defend themselves. They will be fired the next day and neither will you nor me, nor any labor organization be there to guarantee that they can sit together with boss and say You better dont fire this persons for exercising the right to strike, otherwise it will be more expensive for you, but that does not happen, however much enthusiasm. Politics is not what one wants it to be, it is what it is and it is terrible. And thats why we should talk about popular unity, and thats why one has to be humble. Because sometimes you have to talk with people who perhaps dont like your language and perhaps dont identify with the terms you use to explain things. And what do this reveal? Well, a years-long defeat. Losing always mean that. Losing always implies that the general common sense of the people is different, but this is not something new, this was always known by the revolutionaries. And the key is to make the common sense go in a direction of change. Cesar Rendueles, who is sharp as a needle, says that the majority of the people is against capitalism and dont know it. The majority of the people defend feminism without having read Judith Butler or Simone de Beauvoir. When you see a father washing the dishes or playing with his daughter, or when you see a granddad teaching his grandson that toys have to be shared, there is more social transformation than in all the red flags you want to bring to the demonstration. We either understand this, or they will continue to laugh about us. The enemy want us to be this way, the enemy want us to be small, to use a language nobody understands, to be a minority, to be refugees in our usual symbols. They are happy because they know that this way we dont pose a danger. We can have a very radical discourse, state that we want to organize a monstrous strike, the people taking arms, the strongest symbols, we can bring to the demonstrations the pictures of great revolutionary leaders. They are happy, they laugh about us. But when you bring hundreds or thousands together, when suddenly what you are saying is convincing the majority, even those who voted for them before, then they start to be afraid. This is what making politics mean and this is the main lesson to be learned. There was a comrade who talked of the Soviets in 1905, that one bald head with a patch on the head who was a prodigious mind. What he understood was the concrete analysis of the concrete situation. In a war time in which power was at rock bottom in Russia, he said a very simple thing to all the Russians, whether they were soldiers, peasants or workers. He said: Peace and Bread. And when he said Peace and Bread - which was what everyone wanted, namely the end of the war and to have something to eat - a lot of Russians who had no idea if they were on the left or the right thought well, this bald head is apparently right. And the bald head did well. He didnt say dialectical materialism to the people of his country, he said Peace and Bread and thats one of the main lessons of the twentieth century. And when one tries to transform things copying history, copying symbols, what one ends up doing is - with all due affection and respect - making a fool of oneself. There will be no country, no concrete experience to be repeated just like that. The key is to analyze the processes, the lessons of history and understand what Peace and Bread means in each different moment. If that has no relation to what the majority of the people feel, then it is a reproduction in the form of a farce of what a tragic victory may have been in certain moments. thanks to Una Gatito for the translation.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Jun 2014 01:24:04 +0000
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