We have been seeing for months the severe storms affecting the Asturian industry due to investment spending on decarbonization and the need for light-intensive companies to have stable and interesting prices for electricity to be able to operate under rigged conditions. Arcelor Mittal’s apparent threats to block its facilities in Asturias, which generate 12% of our GDP, being the largest industrial company in the country in terms of turnover and employment, are shaking up the entire Asturian economy. The idea is clear: if you found Arcelor Mittal you would found Asturies.
Long gone are the times in Asturias when the Spanish State was the main capitalist businessman in the country through ownership of the great engines of the Asturian industrial economy: mining and metal. Thirty years have passed since what an Asturian president dared to call a “positive crisis”, which consisted of killing sweet mining and privatizing the metal sector with the sale of Aceralia, the former ENSIDESA, to a Luxembourg group, Arbed, to end up within a few years in the hands of the multinational Mittal, named after the Indian millionaire who ye’l so amu. The Government of Spain effectively disengaged from the company, renounced having any action in it, unlike other European states that privatize public property, and Asturies was thus left without the opportunity to touch the country’s main company, always at risk of leaving a ermu in the contours of Avilés and Xixón. Thus, if privatization was, theoretically, so that the state would not intervene in the economy, in the best neoliberal orthodoxy, it continued to do so by providing public aid without any concrete commitment in return. The Principality has just granted 36.4 million euros, which are added to the 450 approved by Brussels, making it the private company that receives the most public aid. Private capital, no matter how much we lack the benefits of the free market, continues to be the maximum exponent of a miagon capitalism, which parasites public resources in the form of public works and direct aid, as Juan Ponte clearly demonstrates in his book “Capitalism does not exist”
Mittal, while you fight for more dogs, threaten to leave, as other multinationals such as Danone and Alcoa already did in recent years, leaving three of them idle and territorial and social disarticulation.
The response of the Asturian left to this situation is, to say the least, complex. There remains a permanent fear of state intervention in the economy, and if now there are more voices timidly calling for intervention, it is because the threats of collapse are beginning to become possibilities, with fear of the abyss that this implies. The neo-liberal mantra caught on so strongly that we are not even aware that many of the continent’s largest multinationals also have public capital, from the automotive sector to the automotive sector.
In Asturias we give dogs to palaes and we give up asking to be co-owners of those companies that receive resources that come from the purse of the Asturian people. From the Asturian Left (IAS) we propose that state intervention in all levels of economic activity is not the primary resource but rather the first. It is a necessary condition for a republican program of wealth redistribution. That is why we call on the Asturian Government to establish a common front, together with the government of the Kingdom and the European Union, to declare steel production strategic and transform it into a public company, in the case of Arcelor and public capital, Asturian, state, and from the EU itself, in the rest of the production plants on the continent. The objective is to lead production worldwide, guarantee environmental sustainability, decarbonization, quality of employment and be at the technological forefront in the sector. Only with the public reconversion of the steel producing companies can these premises be guaranteed. The rest is the story of the good pipe to which we are subjecting the company, not an insolent push and pull. It is impossible, he says, to achieve the environmental objectives previously set, unless in all public spheres they continue to pursue dogs day in and day out.
It is evident that steel production is a strategic sector, and it is evident that it has to assume the cost of recycling to comply with the environmental standards set by the EU, but that goes for Mittal as well as for everyone else, and it is also true that lletrointensive industries require stable electricity prices. FADE itself explains it, but be careful not to say how. Another round, neoliberalism from the outside and defense of the free market, but minimizing public intervention when appropriate. The alternative is very clear to us: public intervention in the electricity market through an Asturian public company that operates in terms of social profitability, providing stable prices for individuals and companies without a speculative spirit, financed by a white Asturian public company that operate as a strategic engine of our economy, as we have been defending since our foundation as a party. Not that it’s Mittal’s turn, it is essential to decide the entry into the shareholding of all the public institutions that supported Mittal: the Asturian government, the Spanish government and the EU itself. Furthermore, a public company of this size and characteristics could well dare to test formulas of co-management between the administration and the workers themselves, taking the path not only of simple stateization, but of socialization.
The trends that emerged with the crisis of financial capitalism that began in 2008 and ended with a post-life shock that we were still paying for, created a panorama of deindustrialization and suicidal relocation for a Europe where the reasonable horizon would not be a “return to the origins”, but a bet on public ownership of strategic sectors, where the two most important would have of being the energetic and the metallurgical. The Kingdom of Spain was an avant-garde student in the neoliberal frenzy that led to the privatization of public companies. Now we look at the states that did not run as far and still maintain some state control over these sectors, such as the German states, Luxembourg, Portugal or France itself, where the State still has the power to make strategic policies.
In January the Italian government announced the renationalization of Acciaeria d’Italia, which although it was sold to Mittal some time ago, still had 38% public capital. The author of the operation is a government with little suspicion of leftism. Renationalization, yes, with the idea of privatizing again when a more reliable buyer is found. The French Republic also threatens intervention, while here we continue giving away-and dogs or thinking about how to give away-and more.
Outside the EU, Kazakhstan nationalized ArcelorMittal on its territory this December 2023, paying 286 million euros compared to the 3,500 it asked for initially.
We miss a braver stance from the Spanish and Asturian governments. We miss a more curious union response, organizing mobilizations and seeking the support of the population of the affected councils, as happened with ALCOA. But this time it does not have to be to ask that the company stay here, but rather to say loud and clear that Asturies has to continue having integral steel, and that if there is no will and signed commitment on the part of Mittal, public intervention will be imminent. . Let the EU then say why what is valid elsewhere is not valid here. If steps are not taken in this direction, the risk of ending up like all the companies that came from Asturies is great, but with much more serious consequences.
Public money must be used to finance activities whose objective is to benefit those who finance them, that is, the Asturian citizens. The opposite, the liberalism of palu, is to take out the people to finance private businesses that have no attachment to the territory that surrounds them and, for that reason, as soon as they arrive they collect. We have been seeing a lot of that in Asturies these decades, given the passivity of the administrations. And it was worth it.
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