Tied hands and feet

One of the things that most upsets me is that social demands systematically ignore the framework of fiscal predation in which our country lives. Perhaps there is no need to go into the history of this abuse, which Ramon Trias Fargas and his team have done with sufficient detail and rigor. Narration of a premeditated asphyxiation,A work whose first edition will be forty years old this year. We're content with the figures that the administration itself accepts as true: the famous 22 billion euros that we Catalans in the Principality pay each year in taxes and that never come back.

It doesn't matter if it's a doctors' union loaded with good reasons about the degradation of what had been an internationally admired healthcare system, an education lobby focused on educational equality, an old employers' association that wants more support for innovation, or if it's the tenants' "union," and so many others. It's incomprehensible that in their demands on the Catalan government, these organizations don't always, always, always bear in mind that most of the deficits they denounce have their origin in a fiscal asphyxiation that places the country far below what it should have based on its capacity to produce wealth.

I find the exact same thing happening to me with defenses of the Catalan language that simply appeal to the will of the speakers. They are right: it is the speakers, speaking to them, who wage the battle for the language. After all, the thermometer of Catalan's health is always placed under the tongue of the speaker. But a fever does not reveal the cause of the infection. It is true that the battle is fought wherever the Catalan speaker who orders a café con leche and the waiter who doesn't understand him confront each other, or between the Amazon delivery person and the recipient of the goods who assumes that a poorly paid worker is unlikely to speak Catalan. But the war is being waged by other generals on other fronts. In other words, there is a structural relationship of unequal power between the Spanish and Catalan languages, tenaciously maintained, and that is what explains our battles, our setbacks, and our defeats.

Perhaps we wouldn't find a clearer example of this inequality of power in the oft-repeated refrain that Catalan shouldn't make itself unpopular. We don't hear it said about the Spanish language, which apparently has the right to impose itself in schools by filing lawsuits or belittling its customers. And, on the other hand, it is said when we want to enforce our own laws in businesses and companies, because it's obvious that imposing a penalty would make us unpopular, oh! The inequality between those who can afford to be arrogant in order to impose their will and those who must be friendly to avoid upsetting others is the most genuine expression of a system of domination that, if it doesn't want to call it colonial, can call it whatever it wants.

But no. What revolts me most is not that the Spanish State has a national project of cultural and linguistic homogenization and that it is voracious toward its colonies in the economic sphere. What surprises and outrages me is the ease with which both fiscal and linguistic abuse are ignored here. It seems that, because they are the result of structural situations, they should be taken for granted. In practice, the mental framework from which criticisms are made, but also of the responses given to them by the autonomous power structures, assumes as inevitable the domination associated with the fiscal and linguistic violence exercised. It is a fiscal and investment injustice on the part of the State, and a linguistic arrogance embedded in this chip of Hispanic identity, which we now know is a cultural umbrella that makes it possible to avoid having to distinguish between foreigners and Spaniards, which are intrinsically incorporated into the letter of autonomy and the spirit of the autonomous communities.

I am in favor, true, of street battles to preserve Catalan. And also in favor of pacts to achieve, even if it's close to the day of reckoning, better individual funding for all the autonomous regions. And even, if necessary, I'm willing to let Europe transfer all management of linguistic diversity to OpenAI—for all languages, of course—and allocate the savings to promoting their diversity.

But no one should forget that in the fight for economic prosperity, for social justice, for cultural and linguistic vitality, we Catalans across the entire linguistic spectrum are tied hand and foot. And everyone should be aware that ignoring this, not repeating it over and over again, is becoming an accomplice. Yes: collaborationism, conscious or unconscious, also has us tied hand and foot!