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There’s no reason to venerate the framers of the US Constitution. The document they created was explicitly designed to check the democratic will of ordinary people and protect the plutocratic interests of the propertied elite.

The US Constitution was designed to protect capitalist social relations from democratic challenge. (Getty Images)

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the notorious far-right congressperson from Georgia, recently made headlines for her call for a “national divorce” between red and blue states. This did not stop her, of course, from showing up in lower Manhattan to protest the arraignment of former president Donald Trump and to garner more media coverage for herself.

Whether the likes of Taylor Greene actually believe what they say is somewhat beside the point. Such calls for a national breakup are a recurrent feature of US politics — we fought one of history’s bloodiest civil wars in the 1860s — and remind us of the uneasy compromises that underpinned the drafting of the Constitution in 1787.

US political culture venerates the Constitution for its supposed genius in setting up a system of government that could last forever, if only we could abide by its timeless wisdom. The conflict and dysfunction that plagues our political system, in this view, stems from a heedless disregard of the framers’ intentions, not the system itself.

This view still predominates, but there seems to be a growing sense that a constitutional framework established in the late eighteenth century may not be up to dealing with the challenges of the twenty-first. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, for example, has been writing a running commentary on our “constitutional stagnation” and what might be done to break out of it.

Robert Ovetz is a lecturer in political science at San José State University. His new book, We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few, provides a detailed but accessible critique of the Constitution as a system designed to protect capitalist social relations from democratic challenge. Our constitutional system, Ovetz argues, cannot address the many crises we face because it was designed precisely to frustrate and contain collective action, not facilitate it.

He spoke to Jacobin’s Chris Maisano about the book, whether meaningful change can be achieved through the current political system, and potential alternatives rooted in decentralized, directly democratic political institutions.

Chris Maisano

There seems to be renewed interest in constitutional questions on the Left today. Why do you think that is?

Robert Ovetz

We’re seeing a resurgence of class struggle in the United States. I think there’s some dissatisfaction following the past two elections and the failure to get important legislation passed. Many of the people who have been involved with electing democratic socialists to Congress and trying to get Bernie Sanders the Democratic presidential nomination are turning toward labor organizing because they see things are blocked in terms of being able to elect the right person and having that result in meaningful changes in policy.

Also, the long-running crises we face continue to go unaddressed — gun violence, climate catastrophe, homelessness, explosion of housing costs, low wages, anti-union repression. As a result, people are looking for a more systematic explanation and analysis for why we can’t get things done. We’re starting to look at the design and organization of the political process itself.

Chris Maisano

Walk us through some of the main themes and arguments of your book.

Robert Ovetz

We can’t understand our undemocratic constitution without understanding our capitalist constitution. Many who write about the Constitution don’t take its political economy into account. As someone who teaches political science, we often focus on the rules, procedures, and processes.

But what I argue in the book is that the framers (who are also called the “Founders” or “Founding Fathers,” a term I greatly dislike) designed a system that protects the interest of property. There are what I call “minority checks” throughout the Constitution that constrain political democracy and prevent economic democracy. The “minority” they sought to protect are not who we think of today as ethnic, racial, and gender minorities, but the minority of the propertied elite.

We can’t understand our undemocratic constitution without understanding our capitalist constitution.

Chris Maisano

The Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, the country’s first system of government after the end of the Revolutionary War. Historians call the 1780s the “Critical Period” because there was a lot of social, economic, and political conflict that put the future of the new country in question. Why did the framers feel the need to come up with a new system to replace the Articles?

Robert Ovetz

The Critical Period was a time when economic elites were kicked back on their heels in many states. They were losing some significant battles in what I call the three insurrections.

First, there were slave rebellions, which escalated during the revolution. Remember that most of the slaves that ran away joined up with the loyalists and the British, and the rebellions continued when the fighting stopped. Next, there was organized Native resistance to white settler colonialism. Out in the West, Native peoples were getting organized into a confederation to resist the theft of land and genocidal attacks.

Finally, there were uprisings of small white subsistence farmers, who for the most part were outside the cash economy. They grew what they ate. They were in conflict with large commercial farmers, merchants, bankers, and traders. And in some states, they were a powerful force to be reckoned with.

They organized their own political parties, and if they could meet the property requirements to serve in office, they or their allies would get elected. They were able to pass some significant forms of economic democracy in their state legislatures under the Articles of Confederation — things like debt relief and land banks that provided cheap loans to small farmers using their land as collateral. They issued paper money and allowed it to be used to pay private and public debts. Some states taxed imported goods from other states to generate revenue and lower taxes on the local population.

The framers were extremely concerned about these three insurrections. They referred to the economic majority as the “meaner sort of people,” or my favorite phrase, the “people out of doors.” They thought the people who were literally outside working with their hands and getting them dirty should not be inside the meeting rooms with their hands on the levers of power.

The framers thought the people who were literally outside working with their hands and getting them dirty should not be inside the meeting rooms with their hands on the levers of power.

This was a short period after a revolutionary period of upheaval when ordinary people shared power with elites. Because some states were unicameral with short terms, few had an executive veto, and none had judicial review, it was easier to pass new laws quickly. State laws were the final word because Congress didn’t have “supremacy” power or judicial review. While they still had property requirements to run for and serve in office, these democratic elements are mostly missing from our current Constitution. This is not to idealize the states but to show how the Constitution was a reactionary outcome to the revolution.

Chris Maisano

People on the Left have usually seen the state and local governments as bastions of reactionary power and sought federal government intervention against them. The Constitution created the federal government that has often played a progressive role in US history, in relation to the states in particular.

Robert Ovetz

During the 1950 to 1960s, the center left looked to the courts and the federal government. But conservatives also used federal power to intervene against liberal or progressive states to shoot down what they were trying to do. Each side uses Article VI federal “supremacy” power when they have it to intervene and suppress any attempts at innovation by the other side.

We should forget about the partisan use of supremacy power and think about why the federal government has it at all. The center left sees supremacy power as something we can use to push our policy demands forward. But the reality is that the framers inserted the supremacy power into the Constitution because they wanted to give a minority check to propertied interests to block innovations at the state level that threatened property.

Instead of deciding which level of government is “best,” we need to look at why the federal government gets the final say in our system. This was intentional, because the framers wanted to have a brake on democracy from below to prevent any movement that today we would call socialism.

Chris Maisano

You briefly mentioned the national debt earlier, but it was such an important issue that we should talk about it in more depth. The country had huge debts coming out of the Revolutionary War and was having trouble paying them off. Why did the framers feel they needed an entirely new federal government to address the national debt?

Robert Ovetz

The revolution was very costly. They borrowed, by Alexander Hamilton’s estimates, several hundred million dollars — and that’s the valuation from the 1780s, not adjusted dollars.

The states and Congress issued multiple types of IOUs and paper money. They also borrowed money from the Spanish, the Dutch, and the French. The Confederation Congress actually defaulted on a loan by the French shortly after the revolution ended. Because there wasn’t enough gold and silver in circulation, paper money was needed to get economic activity going. Furthermore, economic elites were on a capital strike because they refused to borrow or invest, and foreign loans stopped. This was a period of deep fiscal and financial crisis.

An early 20th-century portrayal of Daniel Shays’s forces fleeing from federal troops after an attempt to lay siege to the Springfield Arsenal in Amherst, Massachusetts. (Wikimedia Commons)

Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress didn’t have the power to tax. So they would tell the states, this is how much you have to contribute to the national treasury — what was then called “requisitions.” They didn’t even have a good way of figuring out what each state’s share should be. Each of the states pretty much paid its share during the revolution, but when the fighting stopped, most stopped paying in full or at all. As a result, Congress couldn’t pay its debt and went into default with France. Only a few of the states were able to pay off all or some of the debts by using internal tariffs called “imposts.”

In some states, like Massachusetts, the conservatives tried to impose numerous taxes on the economic majority to generate the revenue to repay creditors. That triggered the famous Shays’s Rebellion in 1786, by small white subsistence farmers who were Revolutionary War veterans. When creditors tried to foreclose on their farms and meager possessions, they put on their old uniforms, took up arms, and marched on local courthouses in the western part of the state to shut them down.

The taxes were very unpopular because many farmers were mad they were never paid for fighting in the revolution — they were “paid” with those IOUs. Desperate for cash, many small creditors sold their IOUs to creditors, and soon most of those IOUs ended up in the hands of a very small number of rich speculators. One of the most famous speculators was Abigail Adams, the wife of soon-to-be-vice-president John Adams. Although they bought the IOUs for pennies on the dollar, the speculators demanded them to be paid at their face value from when they were originally issued, not at what they paid or their depreciated value.

There was a lot of political opposition to raising taxes to enrich the speculators. This was widely seen in class terms as an attempt to redistribute wealth upward that would result in many losing their land and being forced into wage work — what Karl Marx later called “primitive accumulation.” Also, the Congress was unable to pay not only rank-and-file soldiers but also officers, which almost resulted in an attempted coup by military officers when the fighting stopped.

This all leads to the Constitutional Convention, in which the issue that’s discussed over and over is how to address the demands of the creditors. This is achieved in the Constitution by establishing a stable government that can set up, manage, and protect the capitalist economy. In Article I, the regulation of interstate and foreign commerce and contracts and the establishment of bankruptcy laws are moved from state to federal authority. Now Congress exclusively has that power. Authority to repay debts and the power to issue money is taken from the states and given to Congress, preventing the states from printing or coining their own money anymore. Article VI says that all debts are the responsibility of the new federal government and must be paid by it.

Once Hamilton became the first secretary of the treasury, the national debt became the means of creating what he called the public credit system, which allowed the federal government to roll over outstanding debts. Hamilton received approval from Congress to consolidate the debt and roll it over into new interest-bearing bonds at very generous rates. This transformed the economic elites of the separate states with various competing interests into a single ruling class with shared economic interests.

The Act of the Maryland legislature to ratify the Articles of Confederation, February 2, 1781. (Wikimedia Commons)

Hamilton also got Congress to authorize the creation of the First Bank of the United States, a semiprivate bank that held all the federal revenue and debts of the federal government. The federal government would now collect taxes and use that revenue to pay the creditors — the same way it works today. From that revenue they also vastly expanded the military and ensured the consolidation of a stable national government.

And as Hamilton argued, this public credit system — in actuality, a publicly funded private financial system — was a prerequisite for creating a new empire. The first targets of the newly expanded, tax-funded military were the native peoples arming themselves in the West against genocidal settler colonialism and insurrectionary white subsistence farmers resisting primitive accumulation. To understand why the United States became the dominant economic and military power in the world, you have to understand how the Constitution provided the tools by which such power was created, and Hamilton immediately put them into action.

Chris Maisano

Every US movement for social change after the founding period has run into the question of what to do about the Constitution. There were huge debates, for example, in the abolitionist movement over whether the Constitution was a proslavery or antislavery document. People like William Lloyd Garrison denounced it as a “covenant with death,” but others like Charles Sumner and Frederick Douglass argued that it provided resources to restrict the growth of slavery and ultimately end it.

Robert Ovetz

The abolitionist debate is essentially repeated in every powerful movement of every generation: does the Constitution allow for systemic change, or tinkering around the edges with reforms that do not threaten the structure of political power and the capitalist economy? If the Constitution does not allow us to make the changes we need, should we try to bypass it and go a different direction?

Here I fall on Garrison’s side. He made the excellent point that slavery was well protected throughout the Constitution — it’s mentioned about twenty different times without actually using the word “slave” or “slavery” anywhere. They use all kinds of euphemisms, like “Person held to Service or Labour” in Article IV and “other persons” in other places.

This all leads to the Constitutional Convention, in which the issue that’s discussed over and over is how to address the demands of the creditors.

Remember that we got the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, at the end of the Civil War, when the Confederate states were outside the union. The film Lincoln gets a lot of things wrong, but it shows how hard it was to get the amendment through Congress even when most of the slave states weren’t in Congress. Abolition ultimately required this rupture that we call the Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed, many more maimed for life, and half of the country burned to the ground to overcome the impediments the Constitution put in the way of abolishing slavery.

Fast forward to today: when we attempt to change policy at the state level it’s overturned at the federal level because the courts use the supremacy clause. In the last two chapters of the book, I ask what we can do about the Constitution. We essentially have three choices. Two of the options are in the Constitution itself. Article V establishes the process for amending the Constitution and for calling a constitutional convention. But those are really long shots because of the high supermajority thresholds for all four methods. We’ve had over ten thousand officially introduced constitutional amendments in our country’s history, but only 27 of them were successful — about one-quarter of one percent. The extremely high threshold in the Article V amendment process is an effective minority check that has rarely been overcome.

The same goes for calling a constitutional convention. Right now, there’s an effort to call a constitutional convention backed by the last active living Koch brother. That’s very dangerous for the Left. If they succeed, we are likely to be beaten badly. They are outorganizing and certainly outspending us. A constitutional convention is not going to make any changes in our favor right now.

Instead, we need to use the same strategy the framers did when they bypassed the Articles of Confederation. We need to design a new system of direct democratic self-governance. Instead of creating a new constitutional system, I argue, we can design a decentralized confederation of local and regional worker-controlled economic democracies. It would involve people organizing themselves to take over the economy in a general strike and transform it through direct democracy to serve the interest and the needs of the many rather than the interest of property.

Abolition ultimately required this rupture that we call the Civil War, in which half of the country burned to the ground to overcome the impediments the Constitution put in the way of abolishing slavery.

Chris Maisano

I can imagine a reader agreeing with your critique of the Constitution while also being very skeptical of the alternative strategy you just proposed.

Robert Ovetz

It’s occasionally possible to make change under the Constitution if it doesn’t threaten the supremacy of property. We have to be careful about how our demands get diffused, diluted, and translated as they are transformed into regulations. When laws are passed, we tend to forget about them and move on to the next issue. But in the meantime, they get challenged in the courts and the regulatory bodies create new administrative law. And over time, those laws get transformed and turned into something very different.

Before we advocate for reform, we need to address the problem of why so many people become dissatisfied with the political process. Every election cycle we become hopeful and energetic. We get involved and we elect people to office who have the intention of doing many great things. And even if we do get good things done, they ultimately don’t turn out to be what we expected them to be.

The Constitution was designed with all these pitfalls and roadblocks that make it very difficult to get the changes we need unless we give the economic elites what they want so they no longer block it. This is how the economic minority is empowered by the Constitution to impede political democracy and prevent economic democracy.

I live in California, where we’ve been hit by several atmospheric rivers in the last few months. We don’t have time to negotiate with the fossil fuel companies, because they have blocked everything that has been proposed or gutted it when it gets passed. We have to understand the Constitution as the main impediment to making urgently needed systemic changes. We are long past due for a new political strategy that bypasses the constitutional system altogether if we are going to survive.

The Farmer-Citizen Movement topped last month’s Dutch elections, claiming to stand up for overlooked rural populations. Yet the party is really a creation of a marketing agency — and its political agenda is a call to allow multinationals to go on polluting.

Farmer-Citizen Movement (BoerBurgerBeweging) leader Caroline van der Plas speaks during a brunch at the party office a day after the provincial elections in Colmschate on March 16, 2023. (Sem van der Wal / ANP / AFP via Getty Images)

In last month’s provincial elections, the right-populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) took Dutch politics by storm. It took fifteen seats out of seventy-five, making it the single largest force in the country’s Senate. While the breakthrough had been expected, it was a major blow to Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s liberal-conservative coalition government.

The party was established in 2019, following a series of farmer protests. The immediate cause was a ruling by the Dutch Supreme Court that led the government to enforce European Union standards, according to which nitrogen emissions have to be reduced in protected natural areas. The ruling was the consequence of years of campaigning by environmental NGOs, which have filed countless lawsuits against the government for its neglect of ecological matters. Because building work emits nitrogen, construction permits were suspended — a major problem in the ongoing Dutch housing crisis. Yet the agricultural sector is responsible for the highest national emissions. Although the Netherlands is a small country, it is the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products, exporting especially to neighboring EU countries such as Germany. Intensive livestock farming is responsible for the highest nitrogen emissions in Europe, causing, among other things, soil acidification. In order to reduce emissions, livestock numbers need to be halved.

The ruling led, from October 2019, to waves of protests. Farmers headed out with tractors to The Hague (the country’s political capital), blocked highways and supermarket distribution centers, and intimidated politicians. These protests soon became a cause célèbre of the global conservative movement, making it to Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. This March, on the brink of the elections, a demonstration was held in The Hague, heavily curtailed by restrictions imposed by city hall (of the announced one hundred thousand protesters, only a quarter as many were allowed to participate). The same day, Extinction Rebellion blocked a major highway.

Though emerging from this farmer revolt, the BBB was in fact launched by a marketing agency. Lead by Caroline van der Plas, a journalist on agricultural issues, the party claims to speak up for the neglected countryside and the “ordinary citizen.” Its purported aims are to reverse the environmental policies of the Dutch government and to safeguard nature. Yet ironically, for all its apparent concern with protecting the countryside, the party in practice defends big multinationals’ right to pollute it.

New Right-Wing Populism

The 1990s saw the consolidation of neoliberalism in the Netherlands, and the final abandonment of the idea of the Keynesian welfare state. Since 2010, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) has been the largest party, making Rutte the longest-sitting premier to date. As a champion of neoliberal reforms, the VVD is characterized by a top-down, highly technocratic approach to politics. Rutte routinely refers to the country he leads as “the Netherlands Corp.”

Once known for its social progressivism, in the last decade the country made a further shift to the right. Far-right populist forces like Geert Wilders’s Islamophobic Freedom Party (PVV) and Thierry Baudet’s elitist Forum for Democracy (FvD) have succeeded in pushing the whole spectrum in this direction. Within this context, the massive victory for the BBB has reshuffled the Right. Whereas the PVV and FvD mainly focused on classic far-right themes such as immigration, Europe, and the culture wars, the farmers’ party seems to address a broader array of concerns of “ordinary citizens.”

Van der Plas, the party leader, embodies the cherished Dutch self-image of “normality”: conservative, unassuming, and above all very reasonable. Compared to Wilders, with his visions of an eschatological struggle with Islam, or Baudet, whose popularity with the electorate has plummeted due to his autocratic party leadership and his open advocacy of conspiracy theories (spanning from the “Great Reset” to the world dominance of malignant “Reptilians”), this represents a major advantage. It enabled the party to draw voters from across the political spectrum: not only from the radical right, but also from the VVD, the Christian Democrats (CDA), and the Socialist Party (SP). The party’s list of candidates also has drawn former members of the VVD and CDA.

Since its entrance into parliament with one seat in 2021, the BBB has voted along with the Right on cultural issues (such as migration) and with the Left on social issues (such as health care and youth policies). But though it describes itself as a “social left wing,” there should be no illusions about the reactionary elements of its program. Until very recently, for instance, it plead for a hotline at schools to report teachers who “spread ideology in the classroom.” And while it does not deny climate change, the party consistently employs a rhetoric that undermines the idea of an ecological crisis. In a parliamentary debate, Van der Plas recounted that a rare species of moss had been spotted in a national park, concluding: “nature is not collapsing.”

Nothing could be more misleading than this movement’s grassroots image, since it maintains close ties with the agricultural lobby.

Although a European directive concerning nitrogen emissions was laid down as early as 1991, the Dutch government and the powerful agricultural lobby have long tried to downplay and deny the problem. The technocratic way in which the government presented its plans to enforce the regulations in 2019, combined with extreme media exposure, explains the explosive character of the farmer protests. As an antiestablishment party, the BBB presents itself as the mouthpiece of this popular revolt. Yet nothing could be more misleading than its grassroots image, since the movement maintains close ties with the agricultural lobby. The social media platform from which the party emerged was founded by Van der Plas and ReMarkAble communicatie BV, a marketing agency employed by several food giants. This includes the multinationals Vion, SAC, and Bayer. Even more importantly, the agency also funded the entire election campaign. Some of its staff even occupy prominent positions in the party.

Commentators have pointed out how the BBB’s election victory signals a return of agrarian populism. It is reminiscent of the Dutch Farmers’ Party, which achieved success in the mid-1960s through its protest against government interference. At the same time, it is a form of rural populism typical of European countries with a historically large agricultural sector. In terms of program, it has affinities with Scandinavian agrarian centrist parties, such as the Norwegian Senterpartiet, or the Finnish Suomen Keskusta.

The Myth of the Countryside

In his book The Country and the City, Raymond Williams discusses how literary works since antiquity have employed the urban-rural distinction. With the rise of capitalism, an ideological view has appeared that holds that the “innocent” countryside is exploited by the “corrupt” city. It is ideological, not merely because the property relations on the countryside lead to the exploitation of people and nature, but additionally because the city also plays host to the interests of the rural elites. Fiction written about the city and the countryside often served, Williams noted, “to promote superficial comparisons and to prevent real ones.”

It is not necessarily small farmers but big multinationals that have the most to lose from the green transition to a more ecological, socially sustainable agriculture.

The same holds true for the narrative of the BBB. In its election program it talks nostalgically about the threatened “unique landscape” of the Dutch countryside, of which farmers and horticulturalists are said to be the guardians. At the same time, it notes the disappearance of “age-old rural traditions.” It wants to bring back “common sense” and a “healthy countryside.” The party thus builds up the myth of an authentic and idyllic countryside, bravely resisting the technocratic interference of The Hague.

Since the mechanization of the postwar years, the number of workers in the Dutch agricultural sector has steadily dropped. In 2019, around 0.6 percent of the labor force was employed in this sector. One in five farmers is a millionaire, and agriculture is heavily subsidized. Contrary to what is suggested by the phrase “No farmers, no food” — a slogan appearing everywhere during the protests — the proposed measures will not so much impact local food provision as agricultural exports (which in any case only account for a small part of Dutch GDP — in 2020, for instance, just 1.4 percent). Therefore, it is not necessarily small farmers but the big multinationals that have the most to lose from the green transition to a more ecological, socially sustainable agriculture.

Agricultural workers only make up a small part of the electorate that voted BBB; a large part of its base consists in the population from peripheral areas and voters from urban centers voicing their protest against the government. The BBB voter is typically working class and over fifty years old. As the Dutch writer Menno ter Braak once remarked, the farmer is often used as the imaginary “other” of civilization. Many Dutch working-class voters perceive the farmer as the opposite to the vegetarian “oat-milk elite”: the self-satisfied urban middle and upper classes.

Looking beyond the clever rhetoric of the farmers’ party, there are two important factors that have contributed to its success. The BBB is capitalizing on the way national politics has neglected many peripheral areas. Characterized by capital flight, and thus a shrinking population, some regions have been in steady decline for decades. With its neoliberal policies supporting the urban centers, the winners of globalization, the Dutch government has neglected to economically invest in these forgotten regions and to provide social services, leading to ever-increasing inequality. Public transport disappears; schools and libraries are closed. Another important factor lies in the failures of the Rutte government across many fields: the childcare scandal, the housing crisis, the gas-extraction crisis, and the way in which it handled the COVID-19 pandemic have all become a breeding ground for popular resentment.

A Laboratory for Right-Wing Populism

The BBB combines a populist appeal with a successful mythologization of the interests of the small famers and the big food multinationals. It has caused the CDA, the traditional representative of the agricultural sector, to plunge into an identity crisis. It also reveals how for years the left-wing flank of Dutch politics — the social democrats, the greens (GroenLinks), and the SP — have structurally failed to address regional concerns. That the social democrats and the greens (despite their recent alliance meant to reestablish a strong left-wing front) have remained more or less the same size can be considered a defeat.

With its apparent moderate tone, the BBB manages to draw both from the far right and right-wing liberals and conservatives. Its victory in the Dutch regional elections marks a significant development. It reveals what could happen when a technocratic government, after decades of denial and dithering, tries to hastily enforce the green transition. The recent farmer protests that have swept across Europe — in France, Germany, and Belgium — originate from a similar discontent. In this sense, the Netherlands might just become a laboratory for further forms of European right-wing populism. For the Left, an important lesson can be learned: if climate measures are perceived as technocratic fixes favoring the middle and upper class, it leaves space open for the Right to capitalize on frustration.

“A tyrant needs above all a tyrant-state, so he will use a million little civil servant tyrants who each have a trivial task to perform, and each will perform that task competently, and without remorse”

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Spain’s labor minister Yolanda Díaz is a Communist — and her success restoring workplace protections has made her the country’s most popular politician. Now her new electoral platform Sumar is trying to use that popularity to revitalize the Spanish left.

On April 2, Spanish labor minister Yolanda Díaz launched her candidacy for the new left unity platform Sumar. (A. Perez Meca / Europa Press via Getty Images)

“I want to be this country’s first female prime minister,” Spanish left-wing leader Yolanda Díaz announced on April 2 as she launched her candidacy for the new left unity platform Sumar. Since taking over from Podemos founder Pablo Iglesias as Spain’s deputy prime minister in April 2021, Díaz has repeatedly polled as the country’s most popular political leader — even outperforming prime minister Pedro Sánchez, of the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE).

A labor lawyer from Galicia and a rank-and-file member of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), Díaz did not enjoy a high profile nationally before she took up her ministerial role in January 2020. But she quickly gained prominence for her negotiation of the Spanish state’s COVID-19 furlough scheme, which guaranteed the wages of 3.5 million workers. Since then, her labor ministry has continued to spearhead some of the PSOE–Unidas Podemos coalition’s most impactful policies, such as the landmark 2022 progressive reform of Spain’s labor laws.

Polling now suggests that a reorganized and united left under her leadership could make important gains in this December’s general election — with Sumar currently projected to secure between 15 and 16.5 percent of the vote (compared to Unidas Podemos’s 13 percent and former ally Màs País’s 2.3 percent in 2019). This would translate into between forty-five and fifty-three MPs.

If the Left did come out in a stronger position, after its four-year term as PSOE’s junior partner, this would be an impressive achievement — not least because it looked a somewhat exhausted force when Iglesias stood down in 2021. But internal divisions are now placing such advances in doubt. Relations have deteriorated between Díaz and the Podemos leadership over the last year as the former has sought great autonomy of action from the latter.

No representatives of Podemos attended Díaz’s candidacy launch, as party leader Ione Belarra insisted a bilateral agreement between Sumar and her formation on left primaries and the internal distribution of funds would be needed to secure her presence. In the wake of this public display of disunity, both sides have gone on the attack in the media ratcheting up tensions further.

Yet in an interview with Jacobin’s Eoghan Gilmartin, PCE leader and Izquierda Unida MP Enrique Santiago argues that the Left is ultimately “condemned to work together.” For his party, Sumar represents an opportunity for a broader reorganization and renewal of the Spanish left ahead of December’s general election. Santiago believes that if the Left manages to bury its differences, it is capable, under Díaz’s leadership, of fundamentally altering the balance of power in the country’s politics.

Reorganizing the Spanish Left

Eoghan Gilmartin

Over the last three and a half years, Spain has had its first left-wing coalition since the civil war of 1936–39 — an administration that includes two members of the Communist Party, Yolanda Díaz and Consumer Affairs Minister Alberto Garzón. In terms of the positives, Unidas Podemos has advanced a series of important gains around workers’ rights, increases in the minimum wage, and state pensions, as well as implementing historic feminist legislation. But at the same time, you have had to swallow various reactionary policies from core ministries of state controlled by PSOE, such as those around immigration and defense, and Sánchez’s recognition of the Moroccan occupation regime in Spain’s former colony Western Sahara. How do you assess the Left’s balance sheet in office?

Enrique Santiago

In 2019, we had a major debate about whether we should enter government as a junior partner, and across all the organizations that make up the Unidas Podemos alliance, there were distinct positions over this question. Within Podemos, there was a large majority in favor, but it was not unanimous. In Izqueirda Unida and the Communist left, there was a majority in favor of a parliamentary pact with PSOE but not formally entering government, while within Catalunya en Comú, there was a 50-50 split. But right now, nobody even within the Communist Party regrets having entered the government coalition.

We are proud of our record. Particularly within the context of having to govern in the face of a global pandemic and the war in Ukraine — a situation of near-permanent exception. We have overseen a raft of social protection measures that have clearly distinguished our response to the current crises from that implemented in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. Back then, you saw billions of euros transferred to the banks, whereas during the pandemic, the coalition guaranteed the wages of 3.5 million workers through the furlough scheme as well as introducing various new welfare schemes and new workers’ and women’s rights.

Right now, nobody even within the Communist Party regrets having entered the government coalition.

The current Spanish government has also been instrumental in shifting the consensus, however modestly, within the European Union away from a strict austerity agenda and opening up a certain space within which to question neoliberal dogmas. For example, the 2022 labor law reform, which cracks down on short-term precarious work contracts and secures new trade union protections, was not vetoed by the EU. Or after the European Commission repeatedly told us that we could not intervene in the energy markets, it ultimately had to accept the so-called “Iberian Exception” [under which Spain and Portugal passed a partial cap on the cost of electricity production].

For us, these are social democratic and Keynesian policies, many of which are designed primarily to stimulate the economy. They are very far from the policies that we would defend in strategic terms. We aim for a society in which the means of production are socialized and that is organized free from exploitation. But we are also aware of the world in which we live and the existing balance of power in which we operate.

So, with the limited power at our disposal, we have concentrated on protecting the incomes of working people and expanding their rights.  You have to remember that we only had 10 percent of the MPs in Parliament in 2019 and had to accept PSOE’s red line in the coalition negotiations around not demanding posts in the four ministries of state: foreign affairs, defense, interior, and finance. Our major criticisms of government policy have been in the first three of these areas.

In these ministries, we have seen the least change in government policy, and this reflects deeper issues around the democratic nature of the state. Freely elected governments do not have sufficient capacity to implement policy changes because of permanent state structures. Spain is one of the oldest states in the EU, with five hundred years of history, and one that also underwent a very particular transition to democracy in the 1970s. This has meant that very powerful institutional and administrative apparatuses, which operate beyond democratic control, are able to reproduce and protect themselves.

In Spain, very powerful institutional and administrative apparatuses, which operate beyond democratic control, are able to reproduce and protect themselves.

 

It is clear that PSOE does not have the courage to confront such undemocratic structures. And this has been proven time and again in the last three years. Among Western European states, Spain is probably the most pro-NATO, and our lack of strategic autonomy on defense was decisive in terms of PSOE’s ill-judged move on Western Sahara. It is also impeding Spain from pushing for a different approach within the European Union on the war in Ukraine.

We have to clearly distance ourselves from such policies while also trying to ensure PSOE meets its commitments in other areas where we are better placed to enforce the coalition’s program.

The polls are very tight, but any renewed progressive majority after December’s elections will likely have a more favorable balance of power, and so we will be in a much stronger position to negotiate joint ministerial teams in these portfolios.

Eoghan Gilmartin

Yolanda Díaz is a lifelong member of PCE, though she holds no formal position within the party leadership. What is her particular political trajectory?

Enrique Santiago

Yolanda grew up in the labor movement. Her father was a leading figure in the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) trade union, and she became involved in social and political activism from an early age, before going on to work as a labor lawyer. This background means she not only has a clear sense of working-class identity but also has extensive professional experience of working with the unions and understands the fundamental role they can play in society.

Her long involvement in labor struggles also means she has honed her skills as a negotiator and, above all, is able to distinguish what is fundamental in politics from secondary issues. In government, she has centered her efforts on material issues impacting people’s lives, and it is around such an agenda that a new majoritarian consensus can be built in the current moment.

Yolanda Diáz grew up in the labor movement. Her father was a leading figure in the Comisiones Obreras trade union, and she became involved in social and political activism from an early age.

When Pablo Iglesias resigned as deputy prime minister in 2021, after years of intense pressure and dirty-tricks campaigns against him, the leadership of the Left naturally fell to Yolanda. She was not only the person who could attract the most support within Unidas Podemos, but is also capable of reaching out to other progressive parties that have broken away in recent years and, most important, of attracting new voters and wider layers of society to our project.

Eoghan Gilmartin

Is it fair to say her broad popularity, even among center-left voters, is tied to her strong institutional profile as a minister and a certain moderation of discourse? In this respect, Sumar seems a somewhat unusual left-wing platform in that it is being built from government — in contrast to Podemos, which was the electoral expression of a new wave of popular mobilization around the 15M movement.

Enrique Santiago

Sumar as a political project is not about moderating political discourse or renouncing principles but rather widening the Left’s limits to form a majoritarian project capable of changing the political balance of forces in this country. We want to win the votes not only of those who explicitly question the current system but also those who have been hurt by neoliberal policies or realize we need well-funded public services and a strong welfare state.

At the rally to launch Díaz’s candidacy earlier this month, there were representatives of fifteen parties, as well as the leaders of both the Party of the European Left (PEL) and the European Greens. The key to uniting this broad political spectrum will be the platform’s program. Sumar is fundamentally about articulating a project for a new country, with a series of proposals coming from parties, unions, and social movements, and which will reflect and build on our experience in office.

But while we are in government, Sumar is not a project being built from government. We are trying to build on the popularity of Díaz so as to open up new spaces of citizen participation beyond the existing party structures. In this sense, Sumar is an electoral alliance between left-wing formations but one that is also seeking to open up a new cycle of popular mobilization. In contemporary societies, which are ever more complex, parties alone only have a certain social reach; but new processes of political aggregation require opening up participatory mechanisms beyond internal party structures.

Unlike in France, no one here is going to take to the streets around pensions, when our recent pension reform protects existing retirement rights and when we passed an increase in public pensions of 8.5 percent this year.

We are also responding to a certain contradiction here. For us, social and labor mobilization is a strategic component of our politics and necessary for tilting the balance of forces in our favor. But one consequence of the current coalition government having dealt with social issues in a progressive manner has been a drop off in mobilization. Unlike in France, no one here is going to take to the streets around pensions, when our recent pension reform protects existing retirement rights and when we passed an increase in public pensions of 8.5 percent this year. To offset such demobilization, Sumar must constitute itself as a participatory movement capable of engaging people around a new political proposal for the country.

Eoghan Gilmartin

How do you see the role of the trade unions here? The two major unions, CCOO and the General Union of Workers (UGT), have gained a renewed centrality in Spanish politics since the pandemic, above all as key social allies of the coalition government, and in particular they have offered strong support to Díaz’s legislative agenda. Many prominent trade unionists from CCOO also seem to be playing a role in Sumar’s launch. But as you said, at the same time, we have not seen the type of strike waves that have taken place in France and the UK, even as salaries in the private sector are stagnating and real wages are being badly hit by inflation.

Enrique Santiago

We view the two major class-based unions as strategic allies, who have played an essential role in advancing the government’s social and labor agenda. Above all, we in Unidas Podemos would not have been able to advance a series of key measures, such as the Rider Law [regulating false self-employment in the gig economy] or the labor law reform without their clear backing.

The coalition has also worked with the unions to secure a public sector wage agreement and historic increases in the minimum wage, while also implementing anti-inflationary measures that have seen Spain register the lowest inflation rates in the EU. The latter include major reductions in the cost of public transport, even making commuter trains free of charge. But yes, it is also true that employers’ representatives have taken a political stance ahead of the elections, aligning with the Right so as to block a national pay agreement. We have, however, seen the unions secure various collective bargaining agreements at the regional level that have resulted, at least partially, in a recovery in the real value of wages.

We have seen a reduction in social conflict because people know that this government is working to advance the welfare of the social majority. Only recently we have passed a new housing law [which will see the introduction of rent controls and offer new protections around evictions].

Divisions

Eoghan Gilmartin

According to the polls, the Left has the chance to emerge in a stronger position electorally from its term as PSOE’s junior partner, potentially winning up to between fifteen and twenty more seats with a unity Sumar ticket. This will be vital if the wider progressive bloc is to secure victory over a highly mobilized right. But such a result is being placed in doubt by internal divisions and a power struggle between Díaz and the Podemos leadership.

You mentioned the fifteen formations that attended Díaz’s candidacy launch, many of which are smaller regional forces, but the major party of the Spanish left, Podemos, did not attend and has so far resisted being integrated into the Sumar platform. What has happened over the last year and a half to produce this conflict, which could hand the elections to the Right?

Enrique Santiago

The Spanish left is in a period of transition. Does this mean that Podemos has lost its hegemony [on the Left]? Not necessarily. Rather, we are in a situation of greater shared hegemony in which existing political organizations have ceded certain of their weight to new cadres coming from the unions and other social movements. In PCE, we view this reorganization not in terms of starting from zero but building on the existing Unidas Podemos alliances and expect that all those that form a part of this grouping will remain close allies and form a part of Sumar.

We are condemned to work together and to reach an agreement. There is no other option. One Podemos leader told me the other day, as we were negotiating coalition for May’s local and regional elections, that “we don’t like that you are sitting down with splinter groups that broke off from us [such as Íñigo Errejón’s Más País].” My response was, “You were formed as a splinter group from us, and we are constantly working with you.” And if we go back far enough, we are all splinter groups from the Socialist International!

The real issue is that we are in a transitional phase. It is the Gramscian dilemma: the old has yet to die and the new has yet to be born, and this is resulting in internal turmoil and conflicts [on the Left]. But I am convinced this will be solved, and we can come out of this with a stronger project.

Eoghan Gilmartin

I presume part of the issue here is also the lack of collective institutional structures that could act as shared rules of the game. In this respect, one of the sticking points for Podemos is that it wants assurances on holding open primaries. Can you expect the party to sign up to Sumar without meaningful guarantees that its weight will translate into proportional representation?

Enrique Santiago

This whole debate around primaries being a red line for Podemos has really surprised me, because everyone is in favor of open primaries. How else are we going to work out electoral lists with so many groups involved? The real issue is that there is one sector that wants to concentrate on the makeup of electoral lists nine months out from the poll and on securing its internal status within the platform while another wants to put the emphasis on our collective project and the hopeful vision we can offer the social majority.

These tensions always exist in political movements, but it is interesting that this is the inverse of what happened in 2015. Then Izquierda Unida wanted guarantees around its status, while Podemos’s focus was on trying to make a qualitative leap and redraw the Spanish electoral map. Eight years later, Podemos is now in a more institutionalized position and its nervousness around losing its standing is understandable in that sense.

Eoghan Gilmartin

One of Podemos’s other grievances is Yolanda Díaz’s unwillingness to use her political capital to push for unity lists in May’s local and regional elections. Was it not possible to roll out Sumar for these elections, or some equivalent, and avoid damaging rival lists in certain regions?

Enrique Santiago

Spain has a particular state model that has to do with the fact it is a multinational territory. This creates further differences and divisions, which have historically been used by the Right and the country’s oligarchy to take advantage of a divided left bloc to govern against the interests of the social majority. Across these national and cultural differences, we are all exploited by the same oligarchy, and our only path to governing is reaching agreements among a plurality of left identities so as to work together.

I am sure you would agree that municipal elections are not the best place to begin such a unity project when you are faced with working across so many local differences. It is a much easier objective to achieve in the general elections.

Eoghan Gilmartin

That is certainly true in places like Valencia, where there are distinct regional dynamics; but for example in Madrid, the only reason for Más Madrid to go it alone against Izquierda Unida and Podemos is furthering its own particular interests. There are no meaningful differences beyond discursive tactics.

Enrique Santiago

Totally. I am very critical of Más Madrid in this respect — and you cannot place all the responsibility for the difficulties that have arisen on Podemos. There are many political formations that are not acting as they should when faced with the need to defend our people from a potential right-wing government that would include Vox. But you don’t get to choose your allies. You have to work with what there is.

In this respect, throughout its history, PCE has always assumed its responsibility when confronted with the rise of the extreme right. During the Francoist uprising against the Second Republic, when Spain was faced with international aggression from European fascist powers, we were willing to place the struggle for democracy above the struggle for socialism. This is because when faced with the fascist threat, we knew how to distinguish what was fundamental in that moment from what was secondary.

Eoghan Gilmartin

We’re having this conversation on April 14, the ninety-second anniversary of the Second Republic. What does it mean to be a republican in Spain in 2023?

Enrique Santiago

Republicanism is imperative for the democratic health of Spain. As I mentioned at the beginning, the existing state structures in this country are highly conservative. We have seen throughout the last four years that in moments of crisis, particularly during the pandemic, state bodies such as the police, and their unions, along with the judiciary and diplomatic corps, have been the real opposition to a democratically elected government.

Republicanism means creating another state. It means a democratic renovation of Spain, in which the oligarchies that have plagued the country for centuries disappear, and where we generate a new set of democratic institutions that are much more open to transparency and equal treatment for all. Other European countries managed to undertake such a renovation after World War II, but we had the terrible luck to be the only state that did not have this opportunity, and this has left us with major structural problems around institutional corruption.

Republicanism means creating another state. It means a democratic renovation of Spain, in which the oligarchies that have plagued the country for centuries disappear.

So the republic is about modernization, ethics, equality, and a deepening of democracy. It is also about memory and ensuring that, against the Right’s anti-communism, nobody is able to erase the role countless PCE activists played in the struggle for democracy.

Eoghan Gilmartin

And right now, a right-wing Popular Party–Vox coalition risks a serious democratic regression.

Enrique Santiago

Yes. You have to remember Vox tabled two laws during this parliamentary term to outlaw [pro-independence Basque and Catalan] parties it did not agree with. This is the threat we are up against, and behind that a whole network of economic, media and religious institutions with deep roots in Spanish society that back this extreme-right agenda. The struggle for democracy in Spain is not simply a historic one. For a party like ours, which during our hundred-year history has suffered decades of repression, this threat is not an issue to be taken lightly.

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