Il movimento operaio in Catalogna e la questione nazionale

Abstract

The Workers’ Movement in Catalonia and the National Problem

Both the national question as the social question, and its answers, Catalanism and the workers’ movement, must be studied in its respective historical process and within the common context. In the second half of the XIXth Century, when are taking shape the essential lines of organization and ideological structuring of the workers’ movement, the latter set itself in the forefront of the claim of a federal organization of the State for reasons of democracy and of political and social equality; nevertheless it refused the proposal of the nationalists, who in a large majority took an hostile attitude towards the workers’ movement. Catalanism’s social spread gave birth to instances towards the merging with the workers’ movement, that remained however a minority in its field; whilst within the workers’ movement the mass immigration of the last decades of the XIXth and beginning of the XXth Century, strengthened the reactions of mistrust and even of mutual hostility. Notwithstanding this the fight against common enemies, the Restoration’s monarchic régime and the Lliga Regionalista’s hegemony, bound with the social and political revolution’s expectations flourishing in the inter-war period, brought nearer the workers’ movement and the catalanist left; even if it was always from the workers’ movement positions towards the refusal of nationalism, and of the newly born movement supporting independence, and the recovery of the proposal of the federal treaty between regions born in the XIXth Century. Since then, the relationships, complicated and with fluctuations, between workers’ movement and catalanism never abandoned the former assent to the federal solution, that in its extreme point could be considered in confederal terms.