Recently, the southern Spanish city of Seville hosted a cultural and literary festival which included a series of speeches and panel discussions on the topic of irregular migration. Titled ‘Spain: Europe’s Border,’ the occasion focused on Spain’s migration crisis.
This event was hosted by the prominent journalist Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and featured renegade politician Macarena Olona. A one-time prominent member of VOX, she abandoned her post as the party’s representative in Andalusia following a shoddy campaign that led to electoral underperformance. She has since been attempting to build an alternative brand, accusing her former colleagues of extremism.
The panel in question also included one Roberto Vaquero, the leader of Frente Obrero (‘Worker’s Front,’ or F.O.), a hard-left patriotic group defined by its young membership and mounting notoriety. Among his several books, Vaquero has published a series of recollections from a period he spent incarcerated on account of having gone to Syria to fight against the Islamic State.
The F.O., for its part, made the news cycle not too long ago over raucous confrontations with mainstream leftists politicians, including the mayor of Barcelona and Podemos’ long-time leader, Pablo Iglesias, interrupting one of the latter’s speeches with the cry of vende-obreros, (‘worker-seller,’ accusing him of selling out the working man’s interests). Iglesias himself had long defended the use of such tactics.
Vaquero considers Podemos (no less than the socialist party and its separatist allies) to be a post-modern, intellectually bankrupt agent of bourgeois decadence and elite interests, who benefit from the breakdown of borders, traditional morality, and solidarity, in the place of which they seek to cultivate psychological fragility and consumerism.
During his speech in Seville, he recommended patriotism as one of the correctives to this elite project: “We are a warrior people.” Said Vaquero, “Spaniards have always been warriors. Look at our history. From the Romans to our struggle against Napoleon … Nothing is lost, not so long as even one of us is standing.”
He makes the same point in one of his books, History of Revolutionary Spain, writing that
the 2nd of May [Madrid’s popular uprising against Napoleon] represents the struggle of the popular classes against the Napoleonic invaders, a struggle against an invasion which the aristocracy, for the most part, supported … This fighting spirit is the spirit of the struggle of the people rising up against oppression and foreign domination. Its memory should be used to encourage the masses to fight against the domination of capital today.
During the more conversational segment of the event, Olona asked Vaquero whether he would like to see the country’s security forces deploy “legitimate, proportional force” to clear out some of the no-go neighborhoods in Spanish cities.
He responded by reminding the crowd of his willingness to organize an armed brigade and travel to Syria to fight the Islamic State: “if I was willing to do that over there, imagine what I would be willing to do here.”
Thinking he had walked into her trap, Olona retorted that the firebrand had missed her point: the question concerned using the security forces, not a non-state militia. Of course, being every bit the statist, Vaquero had no problem with this.
“I’m glad I’ve extracted an admission on the necessity and legitimacy of the state’s law enforcement bodies from you.” She smiled. It seems Olona believed herself to be speaking to the sort of faux anarchist, anti-military, anti-cop, anti-patriotic Podemos types she has debated before. Vaquero’s belief in the state, patriotism, Spanish unity, and the use of force against criminal elements did not fully register.
I suspect the mismatch between the rhetoric of the F.O. and its opponents on the Right will endure a bit longer. Given how long the Left has been defined by the ‘cultural struggle,’ sectional identities, and now, wokism, there may be some difficulty in recalibrating.
As for its enemies on the Left, these have already identified the newcomers to the political landscape as reactionaries, and predictably, persistently, refer to Vaquero as a fascist on social media.
Frente Obrero’s (F.O.) Program
Vaquero himself is a Marxist-Leninist and has participated in commemorations honoring Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha, whose legacy, together with that of Josef Stalin, he considers instructive in the face of Maoism and other deviations.
F.O., however, does not present itself as a communist group, but as a common front, per its name, whose aim is to bring ideologically disparate people together, so long as they are willing to work together towards specific goals.
The first page of the F.O.’s program positions the group in opposition to the wider political context:
The Frente Obrero arises during a period of backwardness and crisis for the worker movement. The Left has become part of the system … It stopped worrying about the needs of workers in order to deal with “new struggles” that, in reality, only operate to defend the dogmas of the system … These “struggles” are, at best, alien to the real needs of the country and of the workers.
A country that faces,
Pressing problems, such as job insecurity, unemployment, lack of sovereignty, deindustrialization, the situation in the countryside and migration. However, the Left prefers to focus on quotas, gendered language, and the “non-binary.” Meanwhile, workers cannot make ends meet … the price of electricity and gasoline skyrockets as the government bows to the pressures of the European Union and Morocco. This is Spain’s reality.
The conclusion, which will resonate across the political spectrum, is that “The Left-Right dichotomy is no longer valid. We see how the system’s Left and Right alternate, changing nothing essential. They are two sides of the same coin.”
The group is aiming to constitute itself into a political party and stand for office. However, it also maintains that it opposes the parliamentary system:
We do not want to mislead anyone. We do not hide what we are: To us, elections are nothing more than a form of agitation meant to raise consciousness and gather up forces for the coming battle over the worker and our homeland. Spanish representative democracy is a swindle … that favours big capital. We do not intend to enter that game … we are going to use it to our advantage.
The rest of its program contains measures that the average VOX voter would largely agree with, such as a section concerning natalism and the need for the birthrate to exceed replacement levels, including welfare for large families, more free daycare, and longer paternity leave. Likewise, in terms of geopolitics, this document proposes the aggressive pursuit of the end of the British colony in Gibraltar, closing the border with Morocco, and supporting Western Sahara independence. It also advocates for an immediate exit from the EU and NATO, which will be met with more skepticism by many voters.
Domestically, re-industrializing and energy independence, including nuclear plants, align well with a general, rising Left-Right consensus in Spain. Of particular interest is the idea that agricultural cooperatives should proliferate, as this is a step towards the rehabilitation of the commons we should be aiming for (but which a Marxist-Leninist analysis would likely—ultimately—consider reactionary).
There is also likely a good deal of popular support for the F.O.’s policy of equalizing the competencies of different regional administrations in Spain (at present, special Statutes in Catalonia and the Basque Country favor these over the rest of the country).
This would specifically entail placing healthcare and public education in the hands of the central government, which is not the case at present, as well as eliminating posts that occur at national and regional levels and merging municipalities when possible to reduce the size of the public sector.
However, the F.O. also proposes turning Spain into a federation, an ambiguous measure, given that sub-national administrations already enjoy more ambit than those in nominal federations, like Germany. F.O. has also defended referenda in regions with strong separatist movements, in order to silence these voices, a policy it has been criticized for, as it is unclear what the legal or philosophical basis for “the right to self-determination” of these regions would be.
Closing Thoughts
We may confidently augur a continued rise in popularity for the F.O. and Vaquero, or, should something derail them, of their talking points at least. Economic precariousness among middle and working classes, together with a general assault on identity, from gender to nation, was bound to elicit a patriotic, labor-focused platform from someone.
This does not have to take the form of an old leftist ‘popular front,’ with communists at the head. Yet, VOX’s recent strategy has been one of normalizing itself vis the political mainstream, making the democratic transition of the late 1970s and the country’s constitution into its banner, despite these being viewed with skepticism by a very large segment of the country. We may also refer to the prominence of U.S.-style economic liberals within the party, which has resulted in its left-flank being more or less wide open to attack. Finally, there has been some lack of willingness to bring in new blood and replace VOX leaders with younger, more charismatic, more agile figures.
Ultimately Marxist-Leninism has no aura, no aesthetic draw. Its historical materialism falls afoul of the identity crisis facing the West. Precarious employment and falling purchasing power are accompanied by a desire to re-enchant the world through a coherent account of human flourishing, civilizational normalcy, and virtue ethics. But insofar as concrete policies are concerned—and even before these can be implemented, so far as the galvanizing of oppositional energies is concerned—the field is still wide open.
