[unomada-info] It's the real democracy, stupid

[Infos de la Universidad Nomada]

On 15thMay 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 Puerta 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,#nonosvamosor #acampadasolon Twitter and see for yourself.
What follows is a text by Emmanuel Rodríguez and Tomás Herreros from the
Spanish collectiveUniversidad Nómada.

                    IT’S THE REAL DEMOCRACY, STUPID

                     15THMay, from Outrage to Hope


There is no doubt that Sunday 15thMay 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 nowtakes 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 thatthis movementhas put on
the table.


Firstly, the criticisms that have been raised by the 15thMay 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 15thMay Movement is a lot more than a warning to the
so-called Left. It is possible (in fact it is quite probable) that on
22ndMay, 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 pago1was 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 15thMay 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 15thMay 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
UKUncutagainst Cameron’s policies, of the mass mobilisations of Geraçao
a Rascain 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 15thMay
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)

                         please feel free to distribute, copy, quote... 

1 Dation in payment or datio in solutionem, the possibility of handing
in the keys to a property in lieu of paying the debt accrued on its
mortgage.



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