The other day, May 1, was Workers’ Day.
Leaving a café that morning, I saw some posters pasted up on a bus stop.
Apparently, there was a protest happening later that day, just two or three blocks from my house.
Since part of my writing process involves going to events in order to report on them, I went.
Don’t get me wrong: I was sure I wasn’t going to enjoy the Workers’ Day protest. And I wasn’t hoping I’d meet any interesting people there. But I might get ideas for the blog or podcast.
Anything for my fans.
So after Chinese lunch with Morena, a brief nap, and some coffee with heavy cream, I headed down to the plaza outside the church to see what those feisty syndicalists were up to.
It’s 5:30 PM, May 1st 2026… and you are listening to Radio Free Barcelona.
Labor Unions and Collective Bargaining in Spain
The reason for the protest being here in the Barrio del Clot is that there’s a new labor union office nearby, on Carrer de Aragó: Sindicato de Comisiones de Base.
Co.bas (as it’s usually called, and stylized with a lowercase “c” if not at the beginning of a sentence) is a union formed from a split within Comisiones Obreras, Spain’s largest labor organization.
According to their website, it seems that a faction of former members decided that the leaders of CC.OO. were getting too cozy with the government and the business associations, and they had lost touch with the concerns of actual workers.
Co.bas hopes to re-ignite the working-class struggle with a more democratic, grassroots union.
In Spain, most people work under some sort of collective bargaining agreement made by the labor unions, in negotiation with business associations and the government.
So if you’re working in a Spanish company, you’ll hear about this: los sindicatos (the unions), el patronal (the association of business owners), and el convenio (the collective bargaining agreement).
When I was an English teacher, back in my Madrid days, I worked under el convenio de enseñanza no reglada – an agreement for the sort of unofficial teaching that’s not recognized by the Ministry of Education.
Salaries and working conditions are set according to these convenios. And unions (in theory) negotiate on behalf of the workers – although when I was working I wasn’t a union member, and never talked to anyone who was.
All this to say: it seems to me like the larger unions here in Spain are pseudo-government bureaucracies, and that they may well be far removed from the “class struggle” of people earning 1200€ a month.
So co.bas probably has a legitimate complaint with CC.OO.
The May 1 Protest in Barcelona
Back at the Workers’ Day protests, there’s a girl walking around wearing a Palestinian scarf tied around her midsection as a sort of improvised top. She seems to be one of the organizers.
Most of the people who have come out look like the type who become public school teachers – they’re dressed in the typical Spanish leftist fashion with mullets and colorful hiking outfits, despite being on a normal plaza on a warm spring afternoon.
There are a couple hundred people total. Three younger guys are sitting on the church steps, dressed in full punk regalia, with mohawks, tight pants, combat boots, and belts made of rifle bullets.
A girl hands me a flyer about an upcoming event.
It’s in Catalan, but from what I gather, the event will explore the housing situation through the lens of feminism and “dissident identities” – apparently, that means people who don’t conform to the cisheteropatriarchal gender binary.
All the other flyer people look me up and down, decide I’m not Catalan, and just ignore me.
(I’ve actually worn my orange fleece jumper to “blend in” here at the protest – I got it for 9€ from Decathlon and it’s the most leftist thing I own. But apparently I still stick out like a sore thumb among real Catalan syndicalists.)
Some guy in a black hoodie pulls out a can of paint and starts spraying graffiti across the front of the church. “Free the Anarchist Political Prisoners” is the basic gist of it.
He writes the As in the message as little anarchy signs, with circles around them.
Syndicalists Take the Streets of Barcelona
Around 6 PM a guy who seems to be in his early 20s hops onto a flatbed truck with speakers on it, and the protest moves away. I stay on the Plaza for a bit: the merch tables where you can buy communist stickers or the works of Marx and Lenin in pamphlet form start to pack up.
I briefly consider asking the guy with the Karl Marx beard if he’ll give me a copy of The Communist Manifesto for free, because of socialism, but I decide against it.
Police cars escort the group down Meridiana, where I catch up with them. Protest flags wave. There’s a big “No to NATO” banner, and two or three people leading chants with bullhorns.
They’re doing multiple chants simultaneously, which may be a metaphor for the current state of leftist thought, or just bad planning.
The main one, at first, is “Visca la lluita de la classe obrera!”
That means, basically, “long live the working class struggle”.
A lot of the people marching down Meridiana are wearing co.bas stickers on their t-shirts.
Others are carrying flags for the local tenants’ unions, which have been threatening to go on rent strike due to the housing crisis.
And of course, there are Catalan senyeras, a few hammers and sickles, and a couple of Palestinian flags waving gently in the breeze.
The next chant starts up: “Ah! Anti! Anticapitalista! Ah! Anti! Anticapitalista!”
The Catalan Working Class
Are these people working class?
Does a Catalan working class still exist at all?
I have my doubts about this. Most of the traditional “working class jobs” these days are done by immigrants from countries much poorer than Spain.
Immigrants also do the new jobs that just suck (Amazon delivery people, Uber Eats riders, etc). There are a lot of Pakistanis riding bikes around Barcelona, with boxes of croissants on their backs, for home delivery to the breakfast in bed types… Not many Catalans are doing jobs like that.
And I’m not convinced by class in the Marxist sense anyway. There may have been a time in which society was neatly divided between bourgeoisie and proletarians. But these days, things are more complicated. And they probably were back in the 19th century, too.
Karl Marx assumed that the urban proletariat was the only true revolutionary class. He didn’t guess that some day most people in Europe would identify as middle class, and own homes, and work in air-conditioned offices.
Marx was – and I’ll never tire of pointing this out – wrong about virtually everything.
On Redistributing the Wealth
The co.bas labor union has a list of demands for May 1st up on their website.
Basically, it amounts to a higher minimum salary, a 35-hour work week, and retroactive raises for everyone to reflect the rising cost of housing.
There’s also a bit about how capitalism is drowning us, and it’s all the fault of imperialist wars.
The solution? Redistribute the wealth.
That’s a popular thing to say, of course: redistribute the wealth. But the math doesn’t really work out.
People like to think that if global wealth were redistributed, they would end up with more than they have now. But the chances are, they wouldn’t.
I’ve been to Asia. I’ve seen the slums in Mumbai.
If global wealth were redistributed, everyone in Asia and Africa would get a few thousand bucks each, and you and me in the West would be left with next to nothing.
The Spanish Left and the Israel Question
After a few blocks the protest turns left on Carrer de Badajoz, in order to walk the empty streets of Poblenou.
It’s an odd route to take, because nobody is around Poblenou on weekends or holidays. The only people in sight are the security guards who come out of the office buildings to watch the column go by.
The guy up front, on the flatbed, is leading another chant about la classe treballadora.
Back where I am, the “No to NATO” people start a new chant themselves: a full-figured individual with short purple hair and a high squeaky voice leads them in “des del riu fins al mar, Palestina llibertat.”
That’s where I decide to check out. I’m mostly tolerant of these sorts of people, even if I don’t agree with them, but the casual attitude towards antisemitism on the Spanish left drives me up the wall.
(It doesn’t help that the antisemitism is usually mixed in with anti-Americanism, and – these days – an attack on several other aspects of my identity. I guess I’m not intersectional enough.)
Rebellion for Sale – 30% off!
When I was younger, I tended to sympathize with Marxists and anarchists.
The whole thing was an edgy pose that late-teenage me adopted, unburdened by any information about how the economy works, or the actual history of communist states and anarchist movements.
Basically, it annoyed my parents and teachers, so I believed it. I did a book report on Vol 1 of Das Kapital for AP English class. I had a Vladimir Lenin t-shirt that I bought online.
But Karl Marx thought that capitalism would inevitably create more poverty, and as I mentioned earlier, he was wrong. In fact, capitalism made the average person much richer.
Rich enough to care about work-life balance, and faraway geopolitical conflicts, and whether their sexuality is being celebrated by local businesses and governments.
Rich enough to buy a keffiyah made in the West Bank, or a punk belt made of rifle bullets, or a Vladimir Lenin t-shirt.
Rich enough that their lives would seem like an unimaginable luxury to a working-class person in 1848.
Yours, with proletarian solidarity,
Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo
P.S. George Orwell sure seemed to think that society was bourgeoisie vs proletarian, when he visited Barcelona during the Civil War. You can read more about that in my article on Homage to Catalonia. And while we’re on the topic I’ve also got articles about Spain’s tense relationship with Israel, and about social class in Spain.
P.P.S. A guy named Alan Grabinksy, over on Tablet Magazine, has an article about Spain’s Jewish Question. It’s a big topic, of course, going back hundreds of years. I wrote something lighter touching the same issues in my article on Pork Politics. Enjoy!
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