BarcelonaOn Tuesday, a group of activists threw red paint at Pilar Rahola to denounce the journalist’s “complicity” in the “genocide” of Palestine during the inaugural conference of the Martí l’Humà University Foundation in La Garriga. But who were the authors of the attack? Although he has not been vindicated, the Socialist Youth Organization (OJS) of Catalonia uploaded videos echoing the action and accusing Rahola of having “blood on his hands” and urging him to “fight the enemy that we have at home.”
In February, the leader of Aliança Catalana, Sílvia Orriols, was already attacked, in this case with flour, by the OJS for denouncing “the rise of fascism” and also for her support for the Jewish state in its crusade against Islam “The people of Ripoll don’t need anyone to get on the train to tell us who we should vote for,” replied the far-right leader.
The OJS is the youth branch of the Socialist Movement (implemented throughout the State) and is a split from the left of Arran, the youth of the CUP, which in 2015 already lost some assemblies in disagreement with the veto in the ANC and that would end up creating the Forge. The break now occurred two years ago because of the “limitations”, said its founders, which “assume nationalism and interclassism”. The assembly of Arran that promoted this movement was that of Valencia, expelled a month earlier due to internal tensions, and ten others joined it. “The bulk of the militancy is people who break with the pro-independence left,” admit sources in the formation.
This new organization does not define itself as pro-independence and is limited to defending the right to self-determination. “We don’t want a bourgeois state, we want a Catalan socialist state”, they emphasize. The OJS therefore takes the same path that young militants of the abertzale left undertook, who broke with it because of “social democratic positions incompatible with the socialist revolution”. The bet on the social side has been made evident with the creation of the Socialist Housing Union of Catalonia, which enters into competition with those that already exist, which they accuse of being subservient to some formations.
