On 15th May 2011, around 150,000 people took to the streets in 60
Spanish towns and cities to demand “Real Democracy Now”, marching
under the slogan “We are not commodities in the hands of bankers and
politicians”. The protest was organised through web-based social
networks without the involvement of any major unions or political
parties. At the end of the march some people decided to stay the night
at the Plaza del Sol in Madrid. They were forcefully evacuated by the
police in the early hours of the morning. This, in turn, generated a
mass call for everyone to occupy his or her local squares that
thousands all over Spain took up. As we write, 65 public squares are
being occupied, with support protests taking place in Spanish
Embassies from Buenos Aires to Vienna and, indeed, London. You
probably have not have read about it in the British press, but it is
certainly happening. Try #spanishrevolution, #yeswecamp, #nonosvamos
or #acampadasol on Twitter and see for yourself. What follows is a
text by Emmanuel Rodríguez and Tomás Herreros from the Spanish
collective Universidad Nómada.
IT’S THE REAL DEMOCRACY, STUPID 15TH May, from Outrage to Hope
There is no doubt that Sunday 15th May 2011 has come to mark a turning
point: from the web to the street, from conversations around the
kitchen table to mass mobilisations, but more than anything else, from
outrage to hope. Tens of thousands of people, ordinary citizens
responding to a call that started and spread on the internet, have
taken the streets with a clear and promising demand: they want a real
democracy, a democracy no longer tailored to the greed of the few, but
to the needs of the people. They have been unequivocal in their
denunciation of a political class that, since the beginning of the
crisis, has run the country by turning away from them and obeying the
dictates of the euphemistically called “markets”.
We will have to watch over the next weeks and months to see how this
demand for real democracy now takes shape and develops. But everything
seems to point to a movement that will grow even stronger. The
clearest sign of its future strength comes from the taking over of
public squares and the impromptu camping sites that have appeared in
pretty much every major Spanish town and city. Today––four days after
the first march––social networks are bursting with support for the
movement, a virtual support that is bolstered by its resonance in the
streets and squares. While forecasting where this will take us is
still too difficult, it is already possible to advance some questions
that this movement has put on the table.
Firstly, the criticisms that have been raised by the 15th May Movement
are spot on. A growing sector of the population is outraged by
parliamentary politics as we have come to known them, as our political
parties are implementing it today––by making the weakest sectors of
society pay for the crisis. In the last few years we have witnessed
with a growing sense of disbelief how the big banks received millions
in bail-outs, while cuts in social provision, brutal assaults on basic
rights and covert privatisations ate away at an already skeletal
Spanish welfare state. Today, none doubts that these politics are a
danger to our present and our immediate future. This outrage is made
even more explicit when it is confronted by the cowardice of
politicians, unable to put an end to the rule of the financial world.
Where did all those promises to give capitalism a human face made in
the wake of the sub-prime crisis go? What happened to the idea of
abolishing tax havens? What became of the proclamation that the
financial system would be brought under control? What of the plans to
tax speculative gains and the promise to stop tax benefits for the
highest earners?
Secondly, the 15th May Movement is a lot more than a warning to the
so-called Left. It is possible (in fact it is quite probable) that on
22nd May, when local and regional elections take place in Spain, the
left will suffer a catastrophic defeat. If that were the case, it
would be only be a preamble to what would happen in the general
elections. What can be said today without hesitation is that the
institutional left (parties and major unions) is the target of a
generalised political disaffection due to its sheer inability come up
with novel solutions to this crisis. This is where the two-fold
explanation of its predicted electoral defeat lies. On the one hand,
its policies are unable to step outside a completely tendentious way
of reading the crisis that, to this day, accepts that the problem lies
in the scarcity of our resources. Let’s say it loud and clear: no such
a problem exists, there is no lack of resources, the real problem is
the extremely uneven way in which wealth is distributed, and financial
“discipline” is making this problem even more acute every passing day.
Where are the infinite benefits of the real estate bubble today? Where
are the returns of such ridiculous projects as the airports in
Castellón or Lleida, to name but a few? Who is benefiting from the
gigantic mountain of debt crippling so many families and individuals?
The institutional left has been unable to stand on the side of, and
work with, the many emerging movements that are calling for freedom
and democracy. Who can forgive Zapatero’s words when the proposal to
accept the dación de pago# was rejected by parliament on the basis
that it could “jeopardise the solvency of the Spanish financial
system”? Who was he addressing with these words? The millions of
people enslaved by their mortgages or the interests of major banks?
And what can we say of their indecent law of intellectual property,
the infamous Ley Sinde? Was he standing with those who have given
shape to the web or with those who plan to make money out of it, as if
culture was just another commodity? If the institutional left
continues to ignore social movements, if it refuses to break away from
a script written by the financial and economic elites and fails to
come out with a plan B that could lead us out of the crisis, it will
stay in opposition for a very long time. There is no time for more
deferrals: either they change or they will lose whatever social
legitimation they still have to represent the values they claim to
stand for. Thirdly, the 15th May Movement reveals that far from being
the passive agents that so many analysts take them to be, citizens
have been able to organise themselves in the midst of a profound
crisis of political representation and institutional abandonment. The
new generations have learnt how to shape the web, creating new ways of
“being together”, without taking recourse to ideological clichés,
armed with a savvy pragmatism, escaping from pre-conceived political
categories and big bureaucratic apparatuses. We are witnessing the
emergence of new “majority minorities” that demand democracy in the
face of a war “of all against all” and the idiotic atomisation
promoted by neoliberalism, one that demands social rights against the
logic of privatisation and cuts imposed by the economical powers. And
it is quite possible that at this juncture old political goals will be
of little or no use. Hoping for an impossible return to the fold of
Estate, or aiming for full employment––like the whole spectrum of the
Spanish parliamentary left seems to be doing––is a pointless task.
Reinventing democracy requires, at the very least, pointing to new
ways of distributing wealth, to citizenship rights for all regardless
of where they were born (something in keeping with this globalised
times), to the defence of common goods (environmental resources, yes,
but also knowledge, education, the internet and health) and to
different forms of self-governance that can leave behind the
corruption of current ones.
Finally, it is important to remember that the 15th May Movement is
linked to a wider current of European protests triggered as a reaction
to so-called “austerity” measures. These protests are shaking up the
desert of the real, leaving behind the image of a formless and silent
mass of European citizens that so befits the interests of political
and economical elites. We are talking here of campaigns like the
British UKUncut against Cameron’s policies, of the mass mobilisations
of Geraçao a Rasca in Portugal, or indeed of what took place in
Iceland after the people decided not to bail out the bankers. And, of
course, inspiration is found above all in the Arab Uprising, the
democratic revolts in Egypt and Tunisia who managed to overthrow their
corrupt leaders.
Needless to say, we have no idea what the ultimate fate of the 15th
May Movement will be. But we can definitely state something at this
stage, now we have at least two different routes out of this crisis:
implementing yet more cuts or constructing a real democracy. We know
what the first one has delivered so far: not only has it failed to
bring back any semblance of economic “normality”, it has created an
atmosphere of “everyman for himself”, a war of all against all. The
second one promises an absolute and constituent democracy, all we can
say about it is that it has just begun and that is starting to lay
down its path. But the choice seems clear to us, it is down this path
that we would like to go.
Tomás Herreros and Emmanuel Rodríguez (Universidad Nómada)
(hurriedly translated by Yaiza Hernández Velázquez)
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