EUSKADI: AN ATYPICAL CASE OF SEMICOLONY
It is true that Euskal Herría is one of several exceptions to the behaviour norm dictated to the international bourgeoisie by the law of value in the late stage of the bourgeois production system, with regards to matching national self-determination with trans-nationalization and the international unity of the capitals. As a fact and by the law imposed to the residents of Basque origin that continue claiming their legitimate historical rights to self-determination, this piece of land at both sides of the frontier between France and Spain, continues being an atypical case of semi-colony. Why atypical?
1) Because in this region of Europe there isn’t the smallest trace of pre-capitalistic relations of production
2) Because if something distinguishes Euskal Herría it isn’t precisely its relative economic backwardness but the highest degree of development reached by the productive social forces under capitalism to the interior of the Spanish State;
3) Because as in or even more than in any other part of the European geography, long ago has the proletariat already constituted itself in absolute majority of the active Basque population.
4) Because the Basque wage earners are not submitted in Euskadi to any super exploitation regime by the Spanish State, a typical situation of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, as it is the case of the Ulster nowadays. According to data provided by the INE for 1999, the average of the annual salary cost for worker/year in Euskadi is in 4.444.900 pesetas, almost six points above the national average (3.817.000), and only one below the CAM with 4.561.000 pesetas for worker/year. In Navarra it is of 3.863.100.
In terms of the historical interest of the working class or –what is for us the same - of Marxism-Leninism, these objective conditions, even more than in countries such as Ireland, in any way bring about that the Basque proletariat must go through the national self-determination of Euskal Herría before seeking its own self-determination as a class, but on the contrary, because it has already been fulfilled the historical process by which the capitalist relations of production have embraced the whole of Euskadi.
For the Basque bourgeoisie - including the small and medium- that this process has been fulfilled through the Spanish language and with Euskadi as part of the Spanish State is meaningless as long as it does not mean an idle profit but the opposite. Under the most favourable economic conditions, the bourgeoisie doesn’t care in what language it must think and accomplish the enlarged reproduction of its capital. Therefore, the right to the self-determination of Euskal Herría has ceased being a bourgeois democratic right to become a “general” democratic right, this condition can only be fulfilled through the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Now then, we also agree with Marx and Lenin in that:
1) For the conscious workers, for the communists, any democratic demand (including self-determination) must be subordinated to the supreme interest of socialism and,
2) Socialism will be accomplished in an organically associated action, by the proletariat of those countries where capitalism has reached the highest degree of development.
According to these principles, given the context of socio-economic conditions in which the conflict between Euskal Herria and the Spanish and French States develops, the struggle to make a reality the right to national self-determination of Euskal Herría must be inscribed in the struggle for the social emancipation of the proletariat; but not only in Euskadi but, at least, in the territories encompassed by the Spanish and French States. Such is the internationalist spirit of the policy that - according to the theoretic perspective passed on by Marx and Engels from the times of "League of the Communists" and by Lenin within the Bolshevik party - the Basque, Spanish and French communist, should simultaneously project to the interior of the workers movement in their own countries.
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