[unomada-info] The left at the abyss of democracy

[Infos de la Universidad Nomada]

THE LEFT AT THE ABYSS OF DEMOCRACY

Between 11-M 2004 and 15-M 2011


Marcelo Expósito, Tomás Herreros and Emmanuel Rodríguez (Universidad
Nómada)

http://universidadnomada.net


Written on Thurdsday, May 19, 2011


On March 11, 2004 ten simultaneous explosions blew up four trains in
Madrid, killing almost 200 people, injuring nearly 2000 and spreading
terror in the city. In the hours that followed, the Partido Popular
government, led by president José María Aznar launched an exercise in
mass confusion in order to politically capitalise on the pain.
Meanwhile, mobile phones started to receive text messages: "let’s meet
in the streets". Crowds of people took over public spaces in
decentralized and spontaneous demonstrations, demanding to know the
truth. This was the May 13, the day before the elections, a day when
political campaigning was not allowed. The following day, the majority
of votes went to the PSOE candidate José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, giving
him an unexpected victory. Let say it clearly, it was a social movement
that put Zapatero in power. The newly elected president publicly
promised: “I won’t let you down”. Let’s dwell on that image for a
moment.


Sunday May 15, 2011. A march that has been organised on web-based social
networks grows beyond all expectations: tens of thousands of people
gather in sixty different Spanish cities under the common slogan “Real
Democracy, Now!” (Democracia Real Ya) behind which a whole constellation
of statements are also brought into play: “We are not commodities in the
hands of bankers and politicians”, “They don’t represent us”. The
marches generate such a sense of euphoria that hundreds of people occupy
the main squares in their towns and cities, starting with the most
emblematic one, the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. With just a few hours to
go before the municipal and regional elections in Spain (Sunday, May
22), in the midst of a lamentable electoral campaign, the so-called
Movimiento 15-M has restored the meaning of the word “politics”. Let’s
say this clearly, everything seems to indicate that president Zapatero
will leave the Spanish government surrounded by a social movement that
was triggered by a growing sense of outrage at the way he dealt with the
economic crisis and has now turned into a demand that democracy is
re-established on a different basis.


We propose a simple operation of montage: let’s put these two images
together. These two social movements divorced from any political parties
and spontaneously generated that signal the entry and exit points of a
president on whom many progressive hopes were placed. What has happened
in between these two images? What sense can be produced by contrasting
them? How has that trust in the vote as a tool for change been replaced
by the current rabid dissatisfaction?


The explanation lies in the fact that president Zapatero has ruined a
historical opportunity: the conditions under which he was elected opened
the possibility of a renewed political exercise that would take into
account the potency of an organised society. However, he insisted in
keeping to a civic republicanism whose progressivism could only go as
far as understanding citizens as individual voters endowed with rights
from above. This meant he misunderstood the complexity of a society
where traditional systems of political representation and delegation of
popular sovereignty through the vote have reached an irreversible
crisis. Had he understood that current tension between social powers and
counter-powers was the actual condition of possibility of his victory,
perhaps he would have tackled the economic crisis in a substantially
different way. Perhaps he would have done something different from
negociating with economic and supra-institutional powers such a set of
undesirable measures––cuts designed to foreclose any hope in our future—
in order to wait until the last minute to look back at his voters,
trumping everything on the fear of the right. Those who Zapatero failed
to govern with, social counterpowers, the potency for democratic
mobilisation that is always latent in society, have regained their shape
to say ya basta!, this is enough!


Between the two images (2004-2011) there are seven years in which the
street has been shaken up by a right that has become aware of the
collapse of democratic representation and exploits it shamelessly,
taking like a fish to water to corruptions and lies, turning the
population against the same political institutions in which the right is
thriving in, in order to benefit the most powerful and richest sectors
of society, manipulating social dissatisfaction, promoting a civil war
among those in the middle and those who are weaker than them. The left
has taken on board concepts like cuts, reforms or austerity in order to
return to economic “normality”. But we have already seen that this
crisis is, above all, a crisis of politics as we know it.


A crisis for which the parliamentary left bears an inexcusable
responsibility, as it has been unable to reconceive effective mechanisms
of the redistribution of income or new social rights. The left-centre
governments of Catalunya, Galicia or the Balearic Islands as well as
those of some major cities, have not attempted to think through other
forms of democracy, other relations to the State or to the social body,
they have not implemented any policies that depart from those written in
the handbooks of territorial administration and management. All this
despite the fact that their own window of opportunity for institutional
management was opened thanks to the new cycles of movements and
citizens’ campaigns that preceded the 13-M: the mobilisations against
neoliberal globalisation and against the war, the Nunca Mais movement,
and the local battles against the plundering of land and water.


It is in this context that the 15-M is validated: the time for
delegating trust and accepting promises is over. Only a concrete wager,
one that invents another ethics, another politics beyond nostalgia and
resignation can push the left forward into its next cycle. New rights
that take on board the productive capacities and wealth-generating
potentials of urban interactions should be in its future programme. The
task of reinventing democratic politics demands the support of new
social struggles and conquests. Struggles by the poor and by new
citizens. Struggles where poverty is constructed as a potency coming out
of scarcity. The open themes of urban mobilisations do not need to be
fictionalised: they are already stated in the agenda of the movements
and the citizens’ demands. The Manifesto of the Movimiento 15-M puts it
quite clearly “The priorities of any advanced society have to be
equality, progress, solidarity, free access to culture, environmental
sustainability, development, and the welfare and happiness of the
people”. 


A Charter of New Rights could be a way of reprogramming the welfare, a
political and economical project that appeals to any party that declares
itself a left-wing one. And yet, the formula for left-wing parties would
never be to “represent” the people. Citizenship is today constituted as
a tendency towards self-representation. Migrants, women, people affected
by the mortgage crisis, by environmental destruction or by the
degradation of public services, communities formed around singular
lifestyles, social networks and a large etcetera of emerging clusters
have found a way of speaking for themselves, without the mediation of
outmoded institutional or representative apparatuses. It is now time for
the institutional left to rehearse new proposals that accept the limits
of its own ability to represent and to cooperate with social movements
and new forms of aggregation emerging in new urban textures. They need
to listen to the need for housing, the right to health and care, the
recognition of the commons, the right to education and free movement.
These are powerful demands that resonate like the subterranean clamour
of new times to come, that are echoed in the daily practice of new ways
of inhabiting the city. They are practical programmes and proposals put
forward by a real movement that invalidates and leaves behind the
current state of affairs, demanding that local governments stop
submitting to economical and extra-democratic powers and devote
themselves to serving the urgent needs that new social movements have
already pointed to. 

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