01.06.2011

Tahrir Square comes to Madrid

It is essential to critically engage with movements like Democracia Real Ya, argues Maciej Zurowski

“Rallies are boring,” said one activist characteristically at the ‘open organising assembly for June 30 strikes’ in central London. The May 23 meeting may have been attended by more than 100 activists from various tendencies, but it was certainly decentralised direct action groups such as UK Uncut that set the tone. Particularly visible in recent months through their spectacular occupations of banks, Topshop outlets and the like, the group is a pole of attraction to the freshly radicalised, and there can be little doubt that many of them will stick around for a while.

“One of the most respectful, dynamic and inspirational meetings in a long time” is how one activist described the meeting in retrospect. This was true in that the room was buzzing with rapid-fire ideas, ‘jazz hands of agreement’, and a consensus-driven, Zabriskie point-style atmosphere very much to the taste of the largely student crowd (as well as the odd survivor from the class of 1968). It was also true that there was no sectarian squabbling between the various tendencies, the implicit notion being that anarchists, communists, socialists and the less ideologically solid might cooperate as long as we keep our politics to ourselves and stick to the lowest common denominator of opposing the cuts.^[1]

Consequently, members of groups such as the Socialist Workers Party were careful not to push their agenda too aggressively, while others urged trespassers not to make it “too political”. The most frenetic eruptions of ‘jazz hands’, meanwhile, were reserved for a small handful of Spanish students who introduced themselves as London representatives of the Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now) movement, sending some of those present into what appeared like a state of rapture. Inspired by the Arab spring, the movement has been staging permanent occupations of central squares in all major Spanish cities in the months leading up to the regional and local elections. Following their calls to “bring Egypt to London” earlier this year, groups such as Counterfire and the SWP have already begun placing their bets on this new social movement: “Bring the spirit of Spain to the streets of Britain,” exhorted Socialist Worker,^[2] while ‘Real Democracy’ spin-off groups have been forming everywhere from France to Greece.

Echoing proclamations on Democracia Real Ya’s various websites and blogs, the Spanish students at the May 23 meeting made a point of declaring themselves to be a “totally non-violent” as well as “non-political” group. The latter is, to some extent, analogous to the attempts of the ‘open organising assembly’ hosts to preserve ‘unity’ by suppressing political differences. More crucially, though, it is the expression of a generation’s disenchantment with electoral politics - particularly in a country where the centre-left PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party) and trade union bureaucrats have been either carrying through or in effect excusing the savage austerity programme. Translate this disenchantment into a generalised anti-political, anti-party stance, and you might just arrive at the notion that only a broad social movement operating at street level, uncontaminated by ‘ideologies’, might effect change. How exactly that will happen, nobody is sure.

‘Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it: I wanna protest peacefully’, then, is how a cynic might sum up the ‘spirit of Spain’ in a song - perhaps ending on the chorus, ‘... ’cause I wanna be democracy’. The neurotically contrarian Spiked magazine poured nothing but scorn on the Spanish protestors,^[3] denouncing them as essentially apolitical kids who happen to enjoy a night out on the square. Much though the article smacked of the author’s indignation at the idea that the masses might start a protest movement without asking him for permission, he certainly had a few points, however. It is true that a ‘non-political’ or ‘anti-political’ stance will, sooner or later, lead any movement down a blind alley; instead of suppressing politics for the sake of unity at any cost, they should be brought out in the open, so that an effective strategy might be formulated.

It is not the job of communists, however, to grumpily stand on the sidelines or, worse still, attempt to “subsume or subdue”^[4] spontaneous struggles, however theoretically naive they may initially appear. An elemental, vaguely anti-capitalist outbreak of anger at a bourgeois establishment that presently condemns more than 21% of the Spanish population to unemployment,^[5] the Real Democracy movement is a justified and positive development.

Moreover, one would have to be completely blinded by dogmatism not to appreciate the high level of organisation and cooperation on display at Madrid’s Plaza del Sol. From communal cooking and educational/debating groups and spontaneously established free public libraries, the scenario portrays an intuitive communism wholly at odds with what we are being told all our lives: that human nature is intrinsically selfish and territorial. Likewise, the fact that the word ‘democracy’ is put up for open-ended debate in a nominally democratic western hemisphere is a welcome step forward - particularly so in a climate in which imperialism is scrambling to import its own idea of ‘democracy’ into the rapidly changing Arab world.

What communists can offer such spontaneous movements is a coherent theoretical outlook to “give voice to their various concerns within the framework of a comprehensive theory”, as Karl Kautsky referred to Marx’s work in the First International - even if that entails facing the same difficulties that the early Marxians confronted and weeding out the same petty bourgeois ideas and non-solutions all over again. After all, our goal is to make the dream enacted in the Plaza del Sol become reality and not just an ephemeral, utopian adventure.

As the history of 20th and early 21st century anti-capitalist movements demonstrates, the same old ideas tend to reappear again and again in new guises, inevitably condemning their followers to repeat the mistakes that had rendered their predecessors politically impotent first time around.^[6]
Nowhere is this truer than with cross-class, politically diverse ‘social movements’ and tendencies that advocate political abstentionism.^[7] In my interview below, it is apparent that a political party which provides the collective memory of the class is indispensable if we do not wish to get caught up in perfectly avoidable dead ends. For the left, to uncritically herald every new movement as ‘showing the way’ or to pander to an anti-political consensus in the hope of signing up a few dozen recruits is irresponsible and short-sighted - to critically engage with these movements, on the other hand, is imperative.

On the weekend of May 28, just a week after the conservative Partido Popular’s victory in the local elections, I visited some 30 activists at the Spanish embassy in Knightsbridge, where they had been camping in solidarity with the protests in their native country. They referred me to Esther, who acts as the London-based press spokesperson for Democracia Real Ya. Together with a chap simply known as Hugo, Esther was recently touted by the Education Activist Network as one of the “main activists”^[8] in what by and large appears to be a structureless movement. I spoke to her about what they were doing and where Democracia Real Ya was headed.

Notes

1. Though certainly more creative in their application of the direct action credo than the po-faced poseurs of the anarchist black bloc, the commendable militancy of groups such as UK Uncut is not necessarily matched in radicalism by the political content of their actions. The austerity measures are “bad for economic growth”, we are told on the UK Uncut website. UK Uncut essentially limits its demands to taxing the living daylights out of banks and cracking down on corporate tax-dodging.
   The logical political conclusion to this approach is to call for a strongman centre-left government enforcing law and order against the ‘worst’ capitalists: ie, the kind of government that is the stuff of old Labour dreams. But can we realistically hope for any government, let alone the Miliband-led Labour government that would inevitably follow on the heels of a successful general strike, to implement such measures as long as capitalism exists? Was this, in fact, even the case in the ‘golden age’ of Labour, upward mobility and the welfare state? Ralph Miliband and John Saville’s 1964 essay, Labour policy and the Labour left, makes for an interesting read vis à vis such myths (www.marxists.org/archive/saville/1964/01/labour.htm).
2. ‘Spanish protests show the way ... revolt against austerity’ Socialist Worker May 28.
3. ‘Spanish protests: Viva, err... what exactly?’(www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10540).
4. See the lessons drawn from the Paris Commune by Nick Rogers in his article, ‘Inspirational feats and heroic failure’ Weekly Worker May 26.
5. www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-29/spanish-unemployment-rate-rises-to-more-than-21-as-inflation-accelerates.html
6. See M Macnair Revolutionary strategy p16.
7. Ibid pp30-33.
8. May 23 entry at educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com