Spain. On the attempted pogrom and raids against immigrants in Torre Pacheco. There is only one way forward: class struggle, above all national, ethnic, or racial differences.

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There is only one way forward: class struggle, above all national, ethnic, or racial differences

In Torre Pacheco, in the region of Murcia, after several weeks of alleged violent incidents — always blamed on Moroccan immigrants (in some cases these were false reports spread by far-right groups on social media) — there was a “racist outburst of violence” in which hundreds of residents, joined by hundreds more far-right supporters who had come to the town specifically to take part in the unrest, clashed with Moroccan immigrants, searched for them in their neighbourhoods, attacked them in the streets, assaulted their shops, and so on. The immigrants, especially the youth, responded decisively, confronted the demonstrators and the police, resulting in several injuries and several arrests. If one is to believe the bourgeois press — and the no less bourgeois social networks — then the far-right extremists, who had openly announced something akin to a flash ethnic cleansing in the town, paid for their bravado with their own skin, and not even the assistance of the police, gendarmerie, and sympathetic media spared some of them from ending up in hospital.

There is nothing accidental about these events. Something like this had been in preparation for several weeks: first came a failed attempt by a neo-Nazi group to hold a rally outside a juvenile detention centre in Hortaleza (Madrid), then a demonstration protesting the rape of a woman by a Malian man in Alcalá de Henares (also Madrid), and finally Torre Pacheco. And throughout that entire period, posters appeared in several villages and small towns across Spain, calling for the defence of “residents' safety” and a “fight” against alleged Moroccan attackers... All of it bears the unmistakable character of a pre-planned campaign that had long been waiting for a pretext to unleash something like the events of last weekend in Murcia.

Torre Pacheco is one of the Spanish municipalities with the lowest per capita income. According to data from the National Statistics Institute, it amounted to only €9,016 in 2022. This is indeed a very low figure, considering that the town is one of the most important agricultural municipalities in the region of Murcia and has a thriving industry focused on the processing of agricultural products, fruit growing, and vegetable farming (both for domestic consumption and for export). How can this apparent contradiction be explained? In Torre Pacheco — just like throughout the southern Mediterranean from Almería to Murcia — there lives one of the lowest-paid layers of the proletariat in the country. The region’s statistical poverty in fact reflects a very pronounced social polarization and economic conditions stemming from the fact that the propertied class, made up primarily of medium and small-scale farmers who own the land and the capital necessary to work it, employs wage labourers for starvation and poverty wages. These statistics give a distorted picture of generalised poverty, whereas in reality there exists the misery of the proletariat and the wealth of the bourgeoisie.

Moreover, Torre Pacheco — like the entirety of the Spanish countryside, both the inland areas based on large-scale intensive agriculture and the peri-urban zones dominated by ultramodern greenhouse cultivation — is undergoing a deep crisis. This crisis is causing many enterprises to become unprofitable due to the entry of new African and Latin American producers into the global market. Since 2012, the cultivated area in the municipality has decreased by 52%, from nearly 15,000 hectares to just over 7,000. According to data from the Ministry of Economy of the Region of Murcia, this decline in cultivation has led only to a slight reduction in agricultural employment, which has employed approximately 14,000 people here since 2012. Outside of agriculture, however, recent years have seen a significant increase in employment and thus a decrease in unemployment: industrial employment has risen by 70%, construction by 45%, and the service sector by 50%. As a result, unemployment in the municipality has fallen by 60%.

These official figures, based on employment data, show that the economy of Torre Pacheco is shaped by two opposing forces. On the one hand, there is the restructuring of productive sectors, which for many years has affected large parts of the Spanish countryside, reducing the profitability of small-scale agriculture and leading to the closure of many agricultural enterprises each year. On the other hand, there has been a revival of non-agricultural production compared to the levels during the 2012 crisis, resulting in rising employment and a related influx of workers through both legal and/or illegal immigration. The situation is the same across Spain: the economic recovery — the so-called capitalist “prosperity” — is not unfolding without imbalances. Frictions arise between productive sectors, reflected in conflicts between different layers of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. Moreover, capital’s demand for extremely cheap labour (whose wages are the only factor ensuring a return on investment) increases social tensions, as the bourgeoisie sharpens competition among proletarians — using all its strength and resources to do so — stirring up clashes and providing cover for all nationalist, racist, and xenophobic currents... not with the aim of expelling the immigrants it so desperately needs, but rather to discipline the new proletarians and place on them the burden of social discontent generated by the capitalist system itself.

Do you want an explanation for the recent violence? Here it is. The bourgeoisie — especially the Spanish bourgeoisie, which has historically managed to maintain its competitiveness on the international market only through the extremely low wages of an exploited proletariat —needs imported labour in order to fuel competition with the native working class and keep wages down. It imports this labour legally and illegally, stripping it of all rights — except the right to be maximally exploited.

In the most brutal and repugnant cases of this process, children are taken from their parents, minors are imprisoned together with adults, and criminal organisations — thriving on human trafficking, extortion, and murder — are given free rein. In short, immigrants are treated like animals.

There is no reason to be surprised by this violence. The blame lies with a single social group: the bourgeoisie, the criminal class par excellence. This applies both to the Spanish bourgeoisie, which exploits, oppresses, abuses, and murders immigrant proletarians, and to any other bourgeoisie — especially the Moroccan one, which for decades has sought to maintain strict control over its “subjects abroad” and has built an extensive system of surveillance and repression through mosques and members of the petty-bourgeois merchant class. Both play their part in the exploitation of the proletariat.

The events in Torre Pacheco were no accident — they were deliberate and nearly premeditated. Even in times of relative economic growth and a certain, very limited, stability, capitalism can exist only by producing disorder, chaos, and suffering. It needs such situations — these raids incited and amplified by the media — in order, on the one hand, to release the pressure that inevitably builds up within its society and which it always seeks to redirect into some form of violence against the proletariat; and on the other hand, to use such conflicts and acts of violence to discipline and subjugate, through fear, the thousands of new proletarians who arrive in Spain to be exploited in both countryside and city. Torre Pacheco shows them what awaits: hard labour under harsh conditions and constant exposure to violence, which can erupt against them at any moment under any pretext. In this case, it was “popular” violence (carried out by sons of the petty bourgeoisie), but always, on every occasion, there is also institutional and police violence. And this policy is not the domain of just one segment of the bourgeoisie.

The entire bourgeois class shares and supports this policy, each segment playing the role that best suits its interests and its own development. Nationalist groups like VOX and their street thugs openly incite attempts at pogroms. The leftwing PSOE–SUMAR coalition government, however, lets things unfold freely, tolerates the mobilization of far-right groups, resists deploying the police—and when it does, it gives orders to act against the immigrants who defend themselves, not against the fascists who want to “hunt” them. The alignment — and even technical coordination — of all forces of the bourgeoisie is a fact: the events in Torre Pacheco would not have happened had they not been permitted by the Ministry of the Interior under Fernando Grande-Marlaska Gómez of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party—the same man who ordered the arrest of more than 25 metalworkers in Cádiz.

The events in Torre Pacheco closely resemble those that took place in El Ejido 25 years ago. Back then, similar acts of violence occurred, just like last week — North African workers were hunted down for several days, their homes were set on fire, there were attempted murders… all with the silent support of the authorities, who at the time also deemed it necessary to give this segment of the proletariat a lesson and teach them what it means to “coexist.” But 25 years ago, the proletarians of El Ejido and part of Campo de Níjar responded with a force no one expected: they declared a wildcat strike across the region, walked off the job, and managed — at least temporarily — to push back the violence inflicted upon them. In response to the attacks by the local petty bourgeoisie, the owners of land, factories, and shops, they answered with the proletarian weapon par excellence: the strike.

The workers’ victory was, of course, not permanent. A certain type of attacks may have ceased, but the violence continued — and continues to this day. Reports regularly emerge of fires in shantytowns where workers live, of migrant women being raped, of young people being assaulted… These are demonstrative acts carried out by the local bourgeoisie, aimed at sowing fear among the proletarian masses.

The proletarians of Torre Pacheco — just like anywhere else, whether native or foreign-born — have only one way to confront events like those of recent days: class struggle. This struggle means recognising that there are common interests that transcend race, nationality, gender, or age, and that unite the entire working class: the need to resist capital, to oppose its demands, which will always lead to greater exploitation and worsening living conditions. But it also means understanding that class solidarity — the refusal to cooperate with the ruling bourgeoisie, with the bosses, their parties, and their repressive forces — is a duty from which the native proletariat, enjoying better economic and social conditions than its immigrant class brothers, cannot withdraw. Under no circumstances must it show solidarity with the interests of “its” bourgeoisie, nor form a common front with “its” employers against those workers who find themselves in worse conditions, in the hope of preserving slightly better living standards at the expense of the suffering of the rest of the proletariat.

Unfortunately, the policy of class collaboration has influenced—and continues to influence—a significant part of the Spanish proletariat, having become common practice for far too long. This is why some proletarians even support racist and xenophobic slogans, which are expressions of cross-class solidarity, and mobilise alongside representatives of other social classes from whom they hope to gain certain social benefits. In reality, the bourgeois class fears the immigrant proletariat, which expands the ranks of the Spanish working class but does not enjoy the social benefits of this collaboration that the native proletariat has enjoyed from for decades. This makes migrants more likely to rebel against inhuman living conditions, against the brutal exploitation to which they are subjected — and to point the way forward in the renewal of proletarian struggle for the exclusive defence of proletarian class interests: the path we call class struggle.

There is only one path against pogroms and all forms of bourgeois violence: class struggle!

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