On May 15^th 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 evicted 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.

Nylon Threads. From the Movement against the War to 15-M
Madrilonia

They All Have to Go. Let’s build our own world
Santiago López Petit

The Challenge after May-15: Reinvent Democracy
Madrilonia

Sol, or when the impossible becomes unstoppable
Marta Malo

It’s the Real Democracy, Stupid
Emmanuel Rodríguez and Tomás Herrero

Notes from #acampadasol
Amador Fernández Savater

It’s not just Indignation. Inventing new ways of doing politics.
Montserrat Galcerán

Seven key words on the Madrid-Sol experience, 15M
Guillermo Kaejane

The Left at the Abyss of Democracy: Between 11-M 2004 and 15-M 2011
Marcelo Expósito, Tomás Herrero and Emmanuel Rodríguez

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IT’S THE REAL DEMOCRACY, STUPID
Emmanuel Rodríguez and Tomás Herreros, Universidad Nómada
Originally in Spanish

15^TH May, from Outrage to Hope

There is no doubt that Sunday 15^th 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.

First, the criticisms that have been raised by the 15^th 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?

Second, the 15^th 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 22^nd 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[1] 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.

Third, the 15^th 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 15^th 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 15^th 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.

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Notes from #acampadasol (1)
Amador Fernández Savater

A friend told me that the Greek historian Herodotus summarized his method in the following way: “I write down everything I don’t understand.” That is to say, Herodotus took note of what remained to be thought about, he wrote it down so it wouldn’t get lost. In these “notes from the camp” I have proposed to do the same, to take note of what I don’t understand: the details, the scenes, the situations at acampadasol which ask questions of me. But also of the things which amaze me about what is happening and that I feel resonate in this new thinking+sensitivity about the political which some friends and I have been exploring since March 11^th, 2004. I can only link myself with what is happening through this fragmentary writing, the notes jotted down in the notebook I always carry.

“The key is in Sol.”

A friend says to me, “Now its not a matter of taking the streets, it’s a matter of creating the square.” She says this as if she’s pointing out a decisive difference. We have to understand it.

What do we have in common, those of us who are in the square? Not a specific demand, more like the sharing of a problem. The problem is representation. We didn’t want the Sinde Law [against downloading of copyrighted material] and, yet, the politicians imposed it. We don’t want those who have the least to pay for the crisis, but this is what is happening. People should rule, representation should be representative. That is why “They call it democracy but it’s not” and “they don’t represent us” and are the two hit slogans here. Beyond that, an abyss. I wander around Sol and see three posters in a row: “Self-management”, “Reform the electoral laws”, “We don’t want corrupt politicians, we want efficient managers”.

Another friend: “It’s like everyone is in love, look what smiles.”

From the first day I was very impressed with the seriousness which runs throughout the camp, the extremely high degree of maturity and organization. There is abundant food and coffee (much of this donated by neighbors from Madrid). Cleaning is done with care and we are continually reminded that “this is not a party.” On Thursday there were a couple of play areas for children with cardboard floors and lots of kids playing and painting. In the groups and the commissions which are meeting all over the place there are astonishing levels of listening, as if it were clear to all that it is less important what each one brings with him or her than what we can create together. “Here a person can live!” says someone near me. The collective effort to take care of the space builds during a few days a little habitable world with room for all of us. It is what I read about Tahrir a few months ago.

“Don’t vote, Tweet.”

It seems that in the plaza in the center of Sol, where the working-groups operate, money is not accepted. Any collaboration or donation is welcome, but not money. Is this an effort to ward off any possibility of corruption? It might be, the movement knows very well that its strength depends on radically distancing itself from anything related to shamed politics.

“The democracy we want is already the organization of the square itself.”

Blessed be those who decided not to budge from Sol after the demonstration. I thought it was planned by those who called for the demonstration, but I’ve learned that that was not so. I think a lot about this gesture. It is one of those incredible gestures that make things happen against all predictions. I received a text message with the news at one o’clock in the morning and didn’t pay any attention. “It won’t work,” I thought. I should have a look at this cynicism. Because it is ingenuity which changes things.

“I like it when you vote, you’re like absent.”

Debate with an activist friend. He says the language being used irritates him. He finds it very poor: “democracy,” “citizenship,” etc. I argue with him: ever since “no to the war,” it has been these kinds of “flat” statements which open up spaces in which we all fit, in which things really move. It’s true that I think “you’re not going to have a house in your whole fucking life” is a stronger slogan that “we are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers.” But today it seems clear that words are powerful not so much for what they say as for who says them and from where.

“Without housing there’s no living.”

All the time I have this intense interior sensation: I have already lived some part of this. In the “no to the war”, on March 13^th, in “V de Vivienda”… There are many, many resonances: all were movements which didn’t find their strength in an ideology or a program but rather a first person involvement which doesn’t make sense in the left/right dichotomy, but rather tries to escape from it in order to interpelate everyone, anyone. They base their strength precisely in the creation of a “we” which is open and inclusive, which doesn’t announce another world possible but which becomes active in order that this world which does exist and which we share doesn’t come undone… It seems clear to me that May 15^th has to do with V de Vivienda, March 13^th, the “no to the war” but… how? What does it pick up from those? What new things does it propose that we think about? What does all this mean for the future?

A boy, under 20, in the square at 3am with a poster stuck to his chest: “respect”.

Stereotypes are a strategy for governing. They put a label on those who protest (“anti-system”, for example) and that way separates them from the rest, as if they had nothing in common. The movement is very intelligent about this: “we are not anti-system, the system is anti-us.” Fantastic.

Everything which is divisive remains outside the square: from big organizations to violence.

A friend summarizes the situation like this: “Democracy 2.0 has killed the Culture of the Transition.”

A discussion in a facebook chat:

- i still have the sense, kind of old fashioned, that twitter is not what happens but a way of telling about what happens

- and to organize it, no?

- or, in other words, tw is only interesting in composition with something else

- i agree

- but sol+twitter is interesting

- the plus of the potency of bodies

• and an open situation

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IT’S NOT JUST INDIGNATION. Inventing new ways of doing politics.
Montserrat Galcerán, Universidad Nómada

Originally in Spanish

It’s true that we’re indignant. But not just that. If it were just indignation that brought us together in the streets and squares of our cities, the movement would have less force. Once the moment of excitement had passed we would have gone home. That is not what is happening. After the demonstrations, groups – some larger, some smaller – have camped in the squares and after being evicted, have returned again and again. This shows a will to be heard which goes far beyond mere indignation, a will which is opening up new means of doing politics on the basis of the idea that “politics” is not only nor principally a profession – the “business” of the so-called political class – but rather that politics is the only way we have to resolve problems collectively. The capture of politics by those professionals who have turned it into their exclusive terrain, reducing it to a matter of representation and exercising it against the interests of a large part of the population, takes out of our hands those tools without which we are doomed to savage competition amongst ourselves, war between the poor.

The increasing intensity of the crisis has made this model of politics blow up. It has shown clearly that the current politicians use the legitimacy which the voting box grants them in order to make citizens ever more impotent against the demands and requirements of a global capitalist class which the politicians either do not know how to or do not want to tame. No one said things were easy. What we are saying is that we need the tools of politics, of a new kind of politics, in order to find solutions to the current situation.

The partial movements that have emerged recently give us hints in this direction. All of them, from platforms like “Victims of Mortgages”, “Real Democracy Now”, “Youth with no Future”, to the offices of social rights, the social centers, and the assemblies of the unemployed as well as many others have shown a tremendous capacity to oppose the measures imposed by the public administration, to construct partial alternatives and to attempt to disrupt the privatization measures and impoverishment which are underway.

So here we have a social Left which does not coincide with the political “Left.” The latter has been absorbed by economic elites to such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish between the recommendations of the big business groups and the decisions of the politicians. The narrow filter of party democracy impedes meaningful participation. This is why it is now time to get our imagination rolling and seek new forms of articulation which reinvent the political community, putting our collective intelligence to the test. The internet networks are at work; they give shape to the new virtual political space. But we need more: popular citizen assemblies, open encounters, public discussions, institutions which supervise and control the political parties… it is our future, this is our moment.

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Seven key words on the Madrid-Sol experience, 15M
Guillermo Kaejane

Originally in Spanish

“I don’t want a new iPad, I want a new life” (graffiti painted during 15 May mobilization)

1- Time.

Time accelerates. The senses are shaken. Fear paralyzes the senses, vertigo makes them acute. The permanent camp in Sol is pure vertigo. Hours pass rapidly between one gathering and the next, but then time slows down. The nights are loooong. Time contracts and expands, moved by a sea of people (principally but not only young people). It feels like we’ve been here for years, and it hasn’t been more than three days.

A revolt is real when it modifies space-time.

The space-time created in the last days has one single obsession: continuity. Paradoxically, this is only possible to maintain through intermittancy. Through a physical entering-and-leaving of Sol. Keep the experience alive even though you are not present. For this reason (and so many others) the camp at Sol cannot be understood without the social networks. The continuity of the experience is achieved by deterritorializing it. I am in Sol even though I am at home. I am in Sol because I keep talking about it, because I can’t concentrate on my work, because I can’t get it out of my head. And when I can, I go there. I go running there, and again join in the “social connector”, so others can go rest.

The classic conceptualization of social revolts is a scenario in which continuity is linked to accumulation of force. If we continue longer, there will be more of us. If we hold out, the tyrants will fall. This mystification has something to do with a simplification of what happened in Egypt and other Arab countries. Experiences which we heard about towards the end of their processes, not at their beginnings, not through the years of visibility and invisibility, failed experiments, dead ends and turning back.

What is happening these days is not the end, it is not the decisive moment, it is just the start.

2. Communication.

Communication is a form of political organization. People become the media. Social networks are not the means so much as the expressive and organizational terrain. Common sense is woven in the form of flux and of memes. From the logic of shared trust on facebook to the logic of live recounting via twitter.

A slogan circulates, multiplying. With no official versions, rumours blaze. The traditional media bump up against a dadaist cacaphony which is impossible to interpret. They grab hold of what they can, and from there project their own ideas.

The self-narration of the process is not, for the moment, going through viral streaming but rather then need to tell about it, to narrate what we are living, the “I was there!” becomes more intense.

The media’s obsession with broadcasting demonstrations “from inside” as if from the perspective of a participant, betrays their anxiety about their own loss of centrality. Experts and analysts show how incapable they are to think with their own heads, and speak (both on the left and the right) in one voice. The sensation for the spectator who is living the experience is like that of those fans of Lost who watched television commentators try to make sense of the series’ ending: a mixture of stupor, shame and giggles.

3. The powers.

In these moments there is an enormous expressive capacity in which anyone who is gathered in a group feels that they are the representation of everything. The sensation of empowerment is so great that one comes to believe that what each one of us is doing is representing all the others. It is a reasonable logic, and difficult to get rid of, but it is important to deactivate it. The power of this movement comes from its unrepresentability. They don’t represent us, as the slogan goes… because they can’t.

As in any dispersed network, there is a multitude of different centers of which none is “the center” but rather each is a repeater, receiving and sending out proposals and meanings. Creativity is of the essence. The hegemony of who is at the helm in any given moment (The ‘Real Democracy Now’ platform? The assemblies in the square? The commissions within the assemblies? Twitter? Me and my friends?) is changing all the time.

The assemblies are not a space in which one meaning is being defined but rather a collective catharsis. An enormous desire to talk and talk and talk. Memorized language (“The people united will never be divided”) mixes with new forms of expression (“Error 404- system failure”, “Downloading democracy”, “Its not a crisis it’s a rip-off”. )

On an institutional level craziness reigns. In 72 hours we have seen absolutely the entire political class go from “this is not happening” to “this is not important” to “this is dangerous” and in the last few hours, “we are you!”. Again, grotesque. The impossibility of framing the mobilization in the clear “left-right” terms which have been the foundation of social consensus since the Transition [to democracy after Franco] begins to reveal a new logic of conflict: “above and below.”

Unable to control what is happening, the mechanism of control over the movement is a simple question, a constant question: “So, what do you propose?

4. Proposals.

The demand for proposals is a mechanism of control. A way of filling the vacuum of the unrepresentable. A mechanism not exclusive to the media or the political class, as some of the expressions of the movement itself participate in it. Having a response means you can pigeonhole the rebels, say “Ah, they are utopic” or “Oh, they are populists” or “Oy, they are leftists” or “Ay, what they want is impossible” or “Ha, how naïve” or “Nah, they’re not radicals” or “Hm, they say a few reasonable things…”

Nonetheless, there is silence. Or something very much like silence, which is a cacaphony of apparently contradictory signs.

As much as it may cause us anguish, perhaps a good point of departure might be to say: “Unlike you who pretend to know everything, we don’t know yet”. Those who want to get somewhere specific are in a hurry. This is not the case.

In the square, the discussion itself is more important than its conclusion. The responsibility is to defend and extend this. Continue discussing. Continue talking. Trust the same common sense which has brought thousands of people into the street for days. So far, its not going badly.

5. Real Democracy Now.

This logo, this slogan which is present throughout the mobilization and forms one of its constituitive parts and which therefore the media and the political class have decided to pretty much ignore. But it is fairly easy: “democracy”, but not any old democracy, a real one. The real is that which is opposed to the simulated. This means that the logo (or one of the logos) under which this movement is being built says that the thing which institutional power calls “democracy” is a lie. And it demands the construction of something different that breaks with the simulacrum. But it doesn’t pose this problem in distant, utopic terms. We want it now. “Now” means urgency, “now” means nerviness, “now” means we have to be able to touch it, that it has to be in every part of our lives, that it is not just words but construction. That it doesn’t exist and therefore has to be made.

6. And… tomorrow?

It is very difficult to think about tomorrow when you are wrapped up in the events of today. It is even more difficult because the rhetoric of the political class has always held forth on ‘tomorrow’. In this movement, tomorrow is unthinkable for the moment. There is only now.

For institutional power, the elections on Sunday the 22^nd of May are a moment to recuperate legitimacy. A moment to restitute governability. A moment to put their feet down and redraw the map of the possible.

The elections has functioned for the moment as a diffuse element, perhaps unifying at a symbolic level. But in the camp, in the meetings, etc. the words we most hear are “connect”, “extend”, “construct”.

The 23^rd of May will begin to resolve this question, as one graffiti said.

“I don’t want a new iPad, I want a new life”

PS: Number 7. Joy, joy, joy

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THE LEFT AT THE ABYSS OF DEMOCRACY
Between 11-M 2004 and 15-M 2011

Marcelo Expósito, Tomás Herrero and Emmanuel Rodríguez, Universidad Nómada

Originally in Spanish

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 street. 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. To put it another way, 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!” 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 Madrid, 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 condition of possibility of his victory, perhaps he would have tackled the economic crisis in a substantially different way. Perhaps he would not have negociated with economic and supra-institutional powers such a set of undesirable measures––cuts designed to foreclose any hope in our future—he would not have waited until the last minute to look back at his voters, he would not have needed to trump everything on the fear of the right. Those who Zapatero failed to govern, social counterpowers, the potency for democratic mobilisation that is always latent in society, have regained their shape to say, 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 instead 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 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 our 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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Sol, or when the impossible becomes unstoppable
Marta Malo

Originally in Spanish

Write to orient oneself, at the velocity imposed by the moment. Between poetics and theory, write to offer something to the con-fabulation of the world, to contribute, from inside, to the creation of the square, to prolong the event which is Sol. Because yes, Sol has been an event: one of those unexpected occurrences which redraw the map and reopen the horizon of the possible.

In the demonstration the 15th of May, overflowing with joy at the size of the demonstration and its fresh atmosphere, a Radio Mobile Unit interviewed some of those present. “What does the future look like to you?” Despite all the energy circulating, many of the interviews were clearly pessimistic: “It looks grim.” On Monday, when news of the camp in Sol started to blow like gunpowder in the social networks, in a list for exchanging goods and services someone wrote: “What does it matter if some people are camping, as long as others are shopping at the department store next door?” It does matter, because this wasn’t just any camp: the bold gesture of a few became a signal to the many: it was “now or never” and the hunger for doing was set loose, the hunger to speak.

One graffiti read: “The impossible becomes unstoppable.” There is no better description of the event that is Sol. Generosity is deployed, smiles everywhere, groups of friends decide to “go to the square together.” Others, no longer strangers to each other, have become companions in a common movement, the square as an irresistable magnet… One afternoon, the son of some friends, just a year and a half old, started shouting “Sol! Sol!”: we had walked away from the square and he was looking for that Sol which has so affected all of us these days. Ten days ago no one could have imagined that Sol could be anything but the touristic and commercial center of a European capital city.

Sol, not as a geographic place but as an unexpected event, has come along to shatter two of the pillars upon which the state of things was based: on the one hand, it broke the consensus established after the Transition, according to which the current party system is the best system of government imaginable, and to question that is to open the doors to chaos and the darkness of dictatorship (against the “We must not fall into the temptation of questioning the present democratic system” of the comentator Angels Barceló, the movement insists: “They call it democracy but it isn’t.”) On the other hand, it rejects the interpretation of the crisis that makes it seem a meteorological accident, faced with which there is no choice but to tighten our belts. Against the political management of the economic crisis, the square shouts: “They aren’t bail-outs, they’re blackmail!” and points to those responsible, the governing politicians and bankers.

Excited, unable to believe that in fact “something is moving”, anxious to discredit it before it has the capacity to make a real impact, the politicians throw back to the square the blackmail of “alternatives”: “You say no, but you don’t have any proposals.” What they don’t know is that, for generations with no future, uncertainty about what is to come is an everyday matter, and Sol allows us, at least, to live this uncertainty together with others.

It seemed clear that the effect of the Sol-event, and in general, the May 15th movement, was not going to do anything but deepen the already existing electoral tendencies: and indeed, the debacle of the Socialist party has been resounding, even in cities already governed by the Popular party, like Madrid. Now what?

The camps (not just the one in Sol, but the ones set up in so many cities) continue. One friend said: “It’s not a matter of taking the street anymore, it’s a matter of making the square.” Based on that intuition, I’ll throw out an hypothesis: the square is only created by insisting, digging deeper into those elements which made it possible: the critique of political power (“Real democracy now!”) and its management of economic power (“The crisis should be paid for by those responsible for it!”) as a minimal common denominator; the cooperation of many as a practical force which makes the square real and tangible, which makes this minimal common denominator not only habitable but delightful, something which makes it worth pushing for. Against the (self)representation of the thousands of pre-existing collectives and struggles, with the corresponding risk of Balkanizing the square, the Sol-event invites us to look for a point of connection, a place from which we can contribute to this common, starting from who we are – of course – but also from a commitment to that which brings us together.

Not only that. May 15th confirms the force of that unpredictable actor, which we might call “Pass it along!”, because it self-organizes with this simple and proliferating phrase. “Pass it along!” has a geneology: from the mobilizations against the war, March 13th, V de Vivienda. With no structure beyond the networks of friends and social cooperation, without big organizations or programs, with simple, direct slogans, reacting against an external event which serves to bring people together, marking time, making it urgent to go into the streets (the war, the bombings of March 11th, the elections…). From its first appearance, many are those who have attempted to make use of it, circulating various dates on the internet, but “pass it along” is a skittish actor, particularly for organized groups. Child of decades of political demobilization and non-affiliation, it insists on the power of “people”, “persons”. It is only interested, we might say, in peer-to-peer calls for action.

One boy who arrived from Bilbao at the camp in Sol after days of being fascinated with what was happening there, was asked: “Now what?” He responded: “We don’t have to be afraid of the camps loosing steam. Sometimes activists, when they get excited about something, pour themselves into the thing and they exhaust it, like an overprotective mother with her child. I am not an activist, I will leave here and go back to my life, and when another thing comes up, I’ll reappear.” “Pass it along” appears and disappears. How to contribute without overwhelming. How to inhabit the (predictable) diastole of the movement without heartbreak. How to learn to come together as a part, a tiny part, but a part nonetheless, of this unpredictable actor. Questions which Sol leaves on the table.

Some Argentinian friends insist: “This is all very interesting, but it is not like 2001 in Argentina. In 2001 who took over the city were the most dispossessed by the crisis. Here it is not that, we barely see signs of the crisis.” It is not interesting to think about a movement in terms of “what it is lacking,” but it is important to think about how Sol effects those most hard-hit by the economic crisis: those who have lost their homes, the chronically unemployed, those who have been definitively pushed into the informal economy, those who don’t have papers and have no hope of regularizing their situation for lack of a contract, or those who have lost their papers because they couldn’t pay the social security… those social terrains most penetrated by “social intervention,” most effected by political dis-affiliation… they are the great unknown in this new phase which Sol ushers in. How will they involve themselves?

There is a long way to go, but the paralysis has ended. We can smile.

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The challenge after May-15: reinvent democracy
Madrilonia

The events of the last days have happened quickly, almost without time for us to take them in. The encampment and assemblies in the Puerta del Sol have allowed us to find each other, to talk and to imagine what so many bodies and minds are capable of when put together. When politics awakes, when it leaves the farce of the fossilized parliamentary system that is often called democracy, new horizons open up for discussion and goals that once seemed out of reach. Therefore, we propose some notes that can help us to understand, collectively, how much has been achieved and how much more we are capable of achieving.

1. The most widely heard chant was: “they call it democracy but it’s not.” Because democracy means government of all the people, the open and direct participation in public affairs. When democracy is identified with elections, a Constitution, the right to representation, it becomes nothing more than an empty instituion. To say democracy is to refer to participation and the common discussion of public affairs, before referring to elections, laws and professional politicians. The first thing we notice about these days is that there is much more democracy taking place in the Puerta del Sol than in the electoral fights and statements of the major political parties.

The institutional reform we propose, our revolution, so to speak, must not be limited to making the electoral system more proportionally representative, to introducing open and unblocked lists, or to increasing the penalties for corrupt politicians. Although all of the above could be included, our reform goes through the process of regaining the public power to direct participation, in open bodies with referendums, through mechanisms of democratic control of the commons and all sorts of new decision-making technologies.

2. There can be no democracy without freedom and equality. Democracy is a ridiculous hoax when limited to a consumer choice between two brands, which, although with different packaging, are basically the same product (PP-PSOE). It is even more pathetic and false when “democratic” institutions are only at the service of a few. The crisis has taught us that politics (and the party-dominated system) is at the service of the markets: that first it is necessary to ensure the profits of investors and only then (much later) to ensure the welfare of the population; it is more important to rescue major financial institutions than to maintain or extend social rights. The absence of equality and freedom is now clearly visible: in the exercise of a law that is not equal for all, in the use of debt to maintain a life that is increasingly impossible due to declining wages. Even here, in the encampment and demonstrations: how many undocumented immigrants can participate without fear of being arrested on the outskirts of the square? What freedom do you have when your life is chained to a mortgage, which by the grace of the Spanish legislation you will have to keep paying even after being evicted?

This is already a statement of intent. Our demand could be as simple as: “We want equality and freedom so that there can be democracy,” “We want freedom and equality because without them there can be no democracy.” Meeting these demands does not only require prosecuting corruption, but also ensuring a minimum of equality and freedom. Freedom for migrants to move freely and not be under constant harassment. Freedom to declare bankruptcy (which is accepted as payment in kind) when you can’t pay your mortgage. It requires equality, an equality that can only be guaranteed through equal education for all, managed and decided by all (no more public money to private education), through equitable access to healthcare (not the health business), through the right to care when you are unable to care for yourself and others (childcare, health care, adequate pensions). Above all, equal conditions for a dignified life that can only be obtained through an equitable distribution of existing wealth, the radical control of speculative finance capital and the democratic control of public resources. So that nobody suffers the misery of unemployment or the insecurity and brutal exploitation of the labor market simply in order to live.

3. These three days have also taught us an important lesson: the legitimacy and consensus that gives professional respresentation (basically the political parties) the sole right to think and to participate in politics is as weak and fragile as a sandcastle before the rising tide. Tens of thousands of people in the street and a clear message (“we want democracy and this is not it”) is enough to cause, at first confusion, and then the hysterical reaction of politicians and media. Today, yesterday and probably tomorrow, the newspaper El Pais and some of the Prisa journalists tell us to think about the dangers of shouting “there is no democracy.” They throw us their arguments in defense of the current institutional setup and they threaten us with a choice little more than between “a parliamentary government or totalitarianism.” Undoubtedly, they, these champions of the great achievements of the Transition, forget the main thing: institutions and laws are worthless if they only serve to maintain privileges, and democracy is first of all the daily and direct act of participation.

Financial actors, politicians and the media have been overrun by the fear that the king will finally be seen naked, that the great business of political representation is shown for what it is: a simple transaction in the hands of charlatans in the pay of large companies. The political parties, recently displaced (for the first time!) from the center of social and political protagonism, have reacted by trying to appropriate the new situation. Their positions oscillate between an incipient attack on the new right to a movement, in which they neither have nor ever will have any possibility becoming part of, and the institutional Left’s pathetic attempts to incorporate the movement into their electoral dynamics. Parameters, remember, that have completely failed, that have very little chance of achieving their objectives and are precisely what triggered the current mobilization. Faced with this disorientation of the institutional forces, the M-15 movement has already achieved a first victory: rather than endure another dull electoral campaign, full of shitty candidates and parties that don’t decide anything of any importance, the entire social and political spectrum is now forced to address and take positions on issues that had seemed closed to debate: “What is democracy? Who has social rights? Who owns the wealth we produce collectively?

The path forward from May 22, after an election that will not change anything that matters, will be long. After the temporary settlement in Sol, we will have to put our intelligence and our imagination together once again to further open spaces where it is possible to do real politics, that is, a politics that is capable of producing significant changes in the reality we live.
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They All Have to Go. Let’s build our own world
Santiago López Petit, Espai en Blanc

Originally in Spanish

The phrase, “that’s life” was the capitalist slogan that for years marked neoliberalism’s triumph over our bodies. In hospitals, in schools, in factories… confronted with any demand, their reply was always the same: “that’s life”. In other words, shut up, obey, put your head down… because what is coming will surely be worse. This sensation of generalized impotence had found its way deep inside, like a worm feeding on us, even up to our own will to live. What is there to fight for? What to fight against? What can I do alone?

The unease grew bit by bit. The indignation and rage at seeing our lives being crushed on a daily basis, turned into a kleenex to be used and then thrown away. Meanwhile, the Arab world caught fire. What had seemed impossible was suddenly happening. My uneasiness is also yours, and yours and his and hers… the politicization of the uneasiness outside of the traditional codes allows us to move beyond the impasse in which we were stuck. The marvelous phrase, “real democracy, now” is a good start to the rebellion. It is only a scream, and a scream does not need explication. A scream of disgust against this world, and, at the same time, a scream full of life that forces shut the mouths of all the politicians, that interrupts their monologues, sinking them like the frauds that they are.

Taking the plazas was a collective delirium against common sense – the common sense that like the Jiminy Cricket of our conscience keeps saying to us, what is this for? – it is the street talking. We are talking. Then we see that we do not need flags and banners to identify ourselves. We are simply those that say, enough, we want to live.

This wanting to live is not mine alone, but is what I share in the knowing smile across the packed plaza, in the joy of being together. What is the Puerta del Sol? What is the Plaza Catalunya? What are all these open plazas? A space of anonymity, a black hole. The self-organization of a collective force. The concrete and practical invention of another world. Of another way of living, of thinking, of loving. This is what scares Power the most, now that it can’t control it. This force of resistance and creativity that expresses itself through so many invented phrases, in discussion groups, in the multitudinous meetings, in the kitchens, in each and every corner. They introduce policies to stop us whenever they can. Or journalists to ask us, but what do you want? Who are your spokespeople? Experts and pundits, cheap thinkers, paid to deactivate any collective force that emerges. No, they will never know who we are. This makes them tremble. Them. Them, the same people that have declared us in the plaza to be illegal. They will not know who we are nor will they know what we want. We don’t have to give alternatives. This is not a show of weakness, but of true force. Alternatives are always a trap because they are given within what already is, but we, in turn, reject what is. What we want is what we are already doing. What we want is for the world we have opened in every plaza to spread like the wind of liberty. In the occupied plazas, words go back to having their original meaning: dignity, rebellion, us… and then the State of the Parties appears to us like a completely degilitimized empty shell.

Many of us ask ourselves how to go forward. In reality, it’s easy because with the plaza occupied everything becomes very simple. We have to continue taking apart those institutions that organize the submission and exploitation of our lives. We have to defend our slogans, “nobody represents us,” “we are not merchandise”… until the end, because this is the life we have won today. Let this destituent power that lies inside of us act as the incessant rain that soaks the ground. But let’s be smart. Let’s build a strategy with targets based on all of our discussions that will allow us to better articulate our rage, that enables us to stay true to our word. But let’s not forget, that this targeting strategy can only be imposed by the force of its radical simplicity and through direct action. For this the plazas must overflow and become a counterpower. It is custom to say that the path is made by walking. That’s not true. The path is made by fleeing the path. Let’s always remember that what defines us is the dark power (potencia) of life and what unites us is the force of anonymity.

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Nylon Threads. From the Movement against the War to 15-M
Madrilonia

Traditionally, the memory of workers’ struggles, those struggles that won many of the rights that are now being taken away, takes a historical sense through narratives that unite the progressive cycles of struggle. In making that link it is common to resort to the metaphor of the thread, black (in the case of autonomous or anarchist struggles) or red (in the case of the Communists), which referrs to the background of continuity of those decades of struggles.

Today, when every event is presented as a unique historical novelty (fragile, vaporous or fashionable), it is also worth tracing these ties, however tentative, that allow us to connect the similar logics of different processes. This is what happens with the Movement 15-M, which, despite many of its members not having been part of demonstrations such as No to War, 13-M or V for Vivienda, those mobilizations and practices are reproduced in speeches that reverberate, as their own slogans, among themselves.

In these cases we can not say that the unifying factor of all the struggles of the last decade is the story of the same class, or even a simple generational identification. What unites them all is a set of binding threads that have made ​​demonstrations dispersed in time respond to a collective subterranean memory of those that have derived a set of practices and ways of doing politics and being in the streets.

These nylon threads, transparent but strong, are what allow us to see that there are new forms of social networking, where the internet plays a central role and where political organization does not pass through a central organization, be it a party or union, nor a petrified political program. But above all, we can observe that these ways of acting, far from being victims because of this, as many have argued, are able to accumulate these experiences, draw lines of continuity and tie them together with a similar logic in very different political and economic moments.

These simple premises are why we have witnessed several waves of protests in recent years that have repeated arguments against political corruption, against the government’s lies, and against false democracy. And while these arguments have been attacked for being too vague and general, seen as the typical tantrum of youth who do not propose alternatives, they have ended up erupting into pulic space with great force.

It is true that they have not formed a political agenda, because one of the basic tenets of these movements is precisely not to have a program in the strict sense. The fact remains that the political class itself, which insists in demanding an alternative program, is consistently failing and lying in their own programs. The starting point of all these movements has not been politics seen as a noble art, as Rajoy strives to defend, but rather to start from the undeniable fact that politics has been discredited. So what politics can you believe in today? The answer is that you can only believe in grassroots politics, in real democracy.

A belief in real democracy was not developed in the theoretical plane, but through the strength of the facts. How can we believe in a political class that invades countries against the will of 90% of its citizens? How can we believe in governments that play games with the truth about a bombing in order to stay in power? How can we believe in a system that lets the market control the constitutional right to adequate housing? How can we not take to the streets against governments that rescue the bankers and the powerful at the expense of impoverishing the majority?

The legitimacy of these movements, beyond the slogans in the press, is that they all began with the defense of an unquestionable truth and attacked those outrageous lies. Iraq was attacked for the better governance of the global economy, ETA did not carry out the bombings of M11, housing is not a right, and the weakest are paying for the crisis. Would anyone in their right mind say otherwise? These truths have not done more than to reveal that politics covers itself with a the cloak of lies, corruption and the interests of the powerful. This affirmation is not a pledge to radicalness, it has been publicly confirmed, it will not come out freely, there must be consequences.

These days we see that the political class has fallen into total disrepute. The self-organization of the social body has opened up a political front of networks and anonyminity, with global dimensions, that kicks, screams, protests, organizes and, when possible, overthrows governments. At this point, nobody doubts that this is for real.