The two world wars and the catastrophes of the period between (victory of Nazism, Stalinism, the Spanish Civil War) hardly leave the cumulative vision of historical meaning and progress intact. Nietzsche, Péguy and Sorel already vigorously rejected historical fetishism and the ideology of progress that puts vigilance to sleep in the face of an inevitable accumulation of facts. 

Walter Benjamin had a profound understanding of the intimate links between conceptions of positivist origin and the representation of mechanical time, ‘homogeneous and empty’. 

Well beyond its own marginal activist circles, Situationism, of which Guy Debord was the central character, coloured the spirit of the times in the 1960s and had a diffuse but important influence on the movements of 1968. Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), in which he developed a critique of consumer society, urban alienation and generalized commodity fetishism, could be read as a precursor of the 1968 movements. 

The complexity and the limits of the 2017 Catalan independence movement force us to (re)think it in a broader sense and ask ourselves how else the events could have gone. This question takes us back to the foundational shortcomings of the independence movement and the lack of synergy between it and the social movements in previous years. 

1. On the dialectics of productivity, relations of production and emancipationⁱ

‘De kapo is verantwoordelijk voor de werkprestatie van de gevangenen, hij voorkomt sabotage en zorgt ervoor dat alles ordelijk en schoon is. Als soldaat zal het u aanspreken. Wanneer we niet meer tevreden zijn, is hij kapo af en slaapt hij weer bij zijn mannen. Hij weet dat hij de eerste nacht door hen zal worden doodgeslagen,’ aldus Heinrich Himmler, leider van de SS, in 1944 tot zijn generaals.