Faced with the fight for housing and 29-N: Let's stand up a radical left alternative

Early elections will not solve any crisis. It is necessary to build a new consistent political alternative, both for struggles and for elections.

By Ruben Tzanoff

Defined electoral agenda

Pedro Sánchez decided to advance the general elections to Sunday 29 of November, ending early a legislature that was in intensive care. The Council of Ministers formalized the dissolution of the Cortes and the electoral calendar was opened: presentation of candidatures between 21 and the 26 October, definitive proclamation 2 of November, campaign of 13 al 27 and day of reflection 28.

The advance cannot be explained solely by the parliamentary defeat of the housing decrees. It is the result of a sustained political crisis and growing social unrest that reached its most acute expression with Ceuta and Maricarmen., two issues related to the treatment of immigrants and housing that the government could not resolve and generated massive mobilizations.

A parliamentary defeat that precipitated the advance

The immediate trigger was the rejection in Congress of the decrees related to housing. PSOE and Sumar failed to gather the necessary votes compared to the PP coincidence, Vox and Together. The episode is significant. Housing has become one of the main social problems in the country, especially for young people, workers and popular sectors subject to rents and prices that grow much faster than their incomes. Sánchez intended to present his measures as a response to this situation, but he failed to impose them even in Congress.

Sánchez was cornered

We all know that Sánchez is an electoral maneuverer and that until now he has risen from the ashes several times like the “Phoenix”; but this time, beyond the maneuvers, He acted with few options because he was left without support from his partners and cornered by protests in the streets.. Sánchez's defeat came after massive mobilizations for the right to housing, that express a social pressure that no government can ignore indefinitely.

The massive mobilizations against the eviction of Maricarmen that led to the camp in Sol and the demonstrations on Saturday 3 October, over housing and the parliamentary blockade have ended up accelerating the exhaustion of the legislature. For sure, the case of Maricarmen and the mobilizations that continue in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia y en todo el Estado abrieron una coyuntura distinta, They were a hinge in the political situation.

An exhausted legislature

The electoral advance also expresses the exhaustion of the parliamentary formula on which the Government relied.. During these years, Sánchez governed through variable agreements with Podemos, Add and different nationalist and independence forces. That majority allowed him to approve important measures, but always on an unstable basis and subject to negotiations and permanent friction. moment, that formula came to an end.

The PSOE does not have its own majority. Sumar is going through its own management and recomposition crisis. Podemos and IU, who were the “left leg” and the face washers of the PSOE are getting worse and worse before the vanguard and the masses. To your right, PP and Vox maintain a strategy of permanent attrition of the Government. And Together, far from functioning as a stable ally of Sánchez, uses his parliamentary position to defend his own reactionary interests. The result is an exhausted legislature.

PP, Vox and Together: an opposition that also has its project

The PP will seek to turn the elections into a plebiscite against Sánchez. Its objective is to recover the Government by presenting itself as a management alternative against the “progressive bloc”. Vox, meanwhile, will try to push the political debate even further to the right, exploiting social discontent, the immigration issue, insecurity and rejection of the social and territorial policies of the institutional left. But it would be a mistake to reduce the opposition to a simple sum of parties. PP and Vox represent, with differences and contradictions between them, an orientation favorable to preserving business interests and property-owning sectors in the face of social demands that question the current distribution of wealth. Junts is increasingly reactionary and right-wing. Their parliamentary performance will be fundamentally determined by their own political and national interests., and not for the construction of a social alternative for the working majority.

What is Sánchez looking for??

Sánchez is betting on taking the polarization with the right and the extreme right to the extreme as an orientation that will allow him to recover the political initiative. Your speech is already defined: “either retreat or advance”, “ultra-right or social justice”. It is a known strategy: present the PSOE as the dam against PP and Vox and ask the popular classes to vote for the "Lesser evil". But there are two problems, one is that this policy has marked limits. Another is that Sánchez comes from governing disastrously and has lost credibility.

This is not a minor fact, as is being seen in Brazil and other countries, It is precisely the disaster of the reformists in power and the disillusionment they cause in the masses due to their inability, corruption and government for the rich, which opens the way to the extreme right that they claim to combat. If the PSOE wants to present itself as a defender of housing, you will have to answer why, after years of government, Access to decent housing continues to be a central problem. And he will have to explain how far he is willing to really confront the big owners., investment funds, banking and the set of economic interests that benefit from the real estate business. The elections can allow Sánchez to recover votes and eventually form a new Government. But they cannot resolve by themselves the social contradictions that have led to this crisis..

The right wants to capitalize on the wear and tear; the institutional left, contain it

The perspective of PP and Vox is clear: take advantage of the wear and tear of the Government to seize power and exercise it with more brutality towards ultra-reactionary and right-wing measures. That of PSOE and Sumar is to prevent it and maintain a parliamentary majority that allows them to continue governing., with some kind of complicity from Podemos and IU. Between them an intense campaign will be developed to mobilize their respective bases electorally.. But for the workers and popular sectors there is a different issue.: Who represents your interests independently of all these blocks?

The absence of a strong revolutionary alternative

The political crisis exists, but there is still no sufficiently strong and rooted revolutionary alternative that can dispute the political direction of this crisis.. The mobilizations for housing, union struggles, feminist demands, youth struggles, The demands of the neighborhoods and the different expressions of international solidarity show that there is an important capacity for social mobilization and recomposition. Nevertheless, These struggles appear fragmented and, especially, they lack a revolutionary political expression with sufficient force to dispute the general meaning of the situation. The risk is that all that energy ends up channeled into the electoral logic of the “useful vote.”: vote for the PSOE or Sumar to prevent the right from governing.

We are not unaware of the danger that a PP Government with Vox represents. But the fight against the right cannot mean subordinating the demands of the workers to the electoral strategy of the PSOE.. If the only alternative offered to the working class is to choose between a reactionary right and an institutional left that administers capitalism, the crisis will continue to reproduce itself over and over again, feeding each other in a vicious circle that needs to be broken.

Let's continue in the streets, that the general strike takes place

There is an undeniable issue: The housing crisis did not begin with the defeat of these decrees nor will it be solved simply by voting for the PSOE. The problem has much deeper roots: housing is subject to the logic of the capitalist market, when it is a right that is denied to millions of people who need access to decent housing as a social right and not as a business. Emergency measures are needed: rent control, expropriation of homes of large owners to build a public housing stock, effective prohibition of evictions without housing alternative and break with housing as a speculative business.

It is essential to continue the fight, what, as has been shown it is very strong, to the point that it forced CC. AND. and UGT to call the first general strike after 14 years, as the housing mobilizations demanded, Now we must demand that they specify the date, make it an active strike, with mobilizations, prepared from below with worker assemblies and continuity. It is necessary to prevent them from using the general strike as a mere resource to decompress the situation and rearrange themselves in the face of popular demands..

The fight for housing must continue, extend and serve as an amalgamation with other claims for: wages, pensions, public services, health, education, labor rights, equality and defense of democratic freedoms; until leading to the realization of the general strike. Our confidence is placed in the capacity of workers and popular sectors to mobilize..

An alternative and independent policy

We do not place any political trust in the Government or in any of the employer blocs; confrontation between the right and the ultra-right. Faced with the discourse that “there is no alternative”, we propose the opposite: there are sufficient resources and wealth, but they are concentrated in the hands of a minority of the privileged. That is why our perspective is not limited only to changing one Government for another.. It is necessary to establish a political alternative for workers, independent of the bourgeoisie and its parties, capable of uniting the different struggles and disputing the power of those who today control the economy and the institutions.

On 29-N we will have to intervene in the electoral process. But we must do it with our own perspective. Not to give Sánchez a blank check. Not to trust the right-wing opposition. Not to turn the elections into the only area of ​​dispute. The campaign must be used to denounce those who intend to unload the crisis on the social majorities, to strengthen the struggles that already exist and to advance the construction of a different alternative to the existing ones. Because the problem is not only who wins the elections 29 of November. The decisive question is who has the strength to impose a way out of the crisis and in the service of what social interests..

We need an alternative to break with the government, the '78 regime and the capitalist system, not the mere caricature of the “institutional left” that the PSOE has been configuring, We can, IU, summer, ERC, the Broad Front and others. From SOL we consider that the CUP should participate, like Anticapitalists, Izquierda Revolucionaria, Revolutionary Current of the Workers, Red Stream, Internationalist Struggle, IZAR y La Aurora, from a location of class independence, of support for the struggles and with a program of transitional and substantive proposals, like the one we raised from SOL “Against Fortress Europe, against austerity for imperialist wars, for workers' governments and for a Socialist Europe".  Adelante Andalucía and other formations that are considered anti-capitalist, Leftists and progressives could also take a step forward as long as they move away from any expression with conciliators and reformists..