PSM: 50 years of love in the country and universal generosity

PalmOn the afternoon of February 18, 1976, in an apartment on Catalunya Street in Palma, the Socialist Party of the Balearic Islands was presented to the media. A light rain barely touched the pavement, while a group of police officers from the Political and Social Brigade lay in wait outside. Barely three months had passed since the dictator's death. A wide range of citizens with a firm and active commitment to anti-Francoism had participated in the creation of the new party: members of Bandera Roja (who came from the Communist Party of Spain, which they had joined a year earlier), the Popular Socialist Party, and other leftist organizations, all gathered around the idea. Finding an organizational model capable of uniting all these different tendencies and political families was no small matter. One attractive formula was that of the French Socialist Party, which encompassed a broad spectrum of the French left. The proposal didn't go as far as the French model, since some people with a "weak" track record under the dictatorship had been excluded or put on hold. The truth is that the PSI was an organization still in the process of formation, but the proposal was timely, necessary, and also inspiring. This initial enthusiasm would, in part, shape its future development.

Model of social democracy

To better understand the proposal, it's important to remember the international context of the time. The social democratic model was triumphant, and in Europe, it had also been largely endorsed by Christian Democratic parties. But as early as 1972, President Nixon launched his first attack on the global equilibrium established by the Bretton Woods Agreements (in 1944, while World War II was still ongoing) and on the welfare state model that provided stability and economic and social progress to the new world order. Then came Margaret Thatcher (1979) and Ronald Reagan (1981), who would definitively advance the neoliberal agenda. Capital, surreptitiously, began its path toward deregulation. Over time, this would lead to the offshoring of production and the imposition of neoliberal globalization, in which growth has become synonymous with destruction. Inevitably, all of this was bound to lead to an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and to global and social inequality unlike anything ever seen before.

The PSI and other similar parties represented principles radically different from those of neoliberalism: the defense of inclusive progress, rooted in the nation, to achieve the most universal values ​​in solidarity and generosity across all nations. The proposal was not to isolate themselves from the global world, but to reconcile with the world of the people, with individuals as the center of politics and emancipatory humanism.

As I said, there was still much to be built. The PSI, together with other parties (Socialist Party of Catalonia - Congress (PSC-C), Socialist Party of the Valencian Country (PSPV), Galician Socialist Party, Eusko Sozialistak, Socialist Party of Andalusia, Socialist Autonomist Party of the Canary Islands, Socialist Party of Aragon, and Socialist Convergence of Madrid (CSM)), and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), which was attempting to regain its historical prominence at the Suresnes Congress (1974), had a weak structure of active militancy within the State, something that the parties of the Federation, entrenched in the clandestine struggle, did possess. At the Suresnes Congress, the PSOE, under the guidance of Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra and influenced by the anti-Franco struggles in the State, incorporated as a proposal the "full recognition of the right to self-determination." The term would remain in the socialist maximalist program. until the 28th Congress in 1979, finally disappearing in 2019 when any referendum on self-determination was explicitly rejected as unconstitutional. Time would prove that the "pragmatism" of one (Felipe González) and the Jacobinism of the other (Alfonso Guerra) were incompatible with a federal model without adjectives.

But, at that time, the proposal helped some sectors in Mallorca, originating from Bandera Roja (Red Flag), with a strong working-class component, to join the Socialist Party. However, the nationalist soul of the new party remained intact and quickly became the organization's motto. We are unable to ascertain the extent to which this episode, already as the PSM (Socialist Party of Mallorca), shaped the subsequent coalition strategy, initiated in 2003, which has led to the current MÉS per Mallorca party, a benchmark of progressive Mallorcan nationalism.

Proposals authoritarian

Today, the proposal retains the same initial validity and consistency. Now, especially, in a world where the neoliberal model has entered a path of continuous 'multi-crisis'. Capital fears the streets, social movements, everything concrete and close to people. It is determined to remove collective memory and everyday reality from the debate, replacing them with an alienating information product. Authoritarian proposals are proliferating, fostered by the so-called techno-oligarchs and a populist-fundamentalist and authoritarian far-right international movement that has been incubating since the last century, within a framework where the great powers are led by figures with imperial ambitions. It is the perfect catastrophe, where capital is leading us to a world in which the great enemies seek to become invisible, protected by a colossal information apparatus.

Articulating a progressive alternative at this time is not easy. But there is no doubt that the path remains anchored in the people's land, in a lasting sense of class consciousness, far removed from the prefabricated formulas of the market's demonic consumerism and close to the real things that give meaning to human life: insisting on the concrete in order to be generously universal. Fifty years of existence demonstrate that this progressive and federal proposal was necessary and, today, it is still a source of hope.