[governance] Fwd: The ‘Viral’ Revolutions Spread Across Europe

[parminder]

Hi All

The article below from India gives a southern view of the current 
political impacts of the internet and the deeper politics behind it.

Important to notice how the key issue here was economic but it turned 
into a demand for political change and new practices of 'real 
democracy'. We dont necessarily have an alternative model here, but it 
is such new institutional possibilities of participatory democracy  that 
may have become available today that are exciting and must be explored. 
Regret to say, the simplistic notions (involving co-option) of  
multistakeholderism that we hear so much about as the next political 
system is not at all the right direction. In fact, in the form it mostly 
gets spoken of and practised in IG arena, it is very much the wrong 
direction. Parminder

http://kafila.org/2011/05/30/the-viral-revolutions-spread-across-europe/

The ‘Viral’ Revolutions Spread Across Europe
May 30, 2011
tags: austerity measures 
<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/austerity-measures/>, democracy 
<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/democracy/>, Greece protests 
<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/greece-protests/>, Indignants 
<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/indignants/>, Spain 
<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/spain/>
by Aditya Nigam

*The New Democratic Upsurges*

The mainstream Western media that celebrated the democracy movements in 
the Arab world not very long back, is relatively silent now. For, then 
it was the Arab youth’s striving for the ‘western values’ of democracy 
that it was celebrating. Now that the cry of ‘democracy’ is arising from 
its very midst, it does not seem to quite know what to do. From May 15 
on, for almost two weeks Madrid and other Spanish cities have been 
witnessing some of the largest demonstrations in recent memory. 
Protesters have thronged the Puerta del Sol, virtually camping there. As 
government forces started cracking down, demonstrations began to grow in 
an ever expanding scale spreading to many other Spanish cities. When the 
government moved to ban demonstrations on May 20, in the run up to the 
regional and municipal elections, the protests acquired an even more 
militant form. A ‘snapshot’ of the rallies in defiance of the ban:

The initial protests against the planned multibillion euro bailout plan 
for banks, austerity measures and against high unemployment almost 45 
percent among the youth), according to reports, were not very large but 
when the government responded by arresting several activists and 
demonstrators, things started going out of hand. That was the ‘spark 
that lit the prairie fire’. As Ryan Gallagher’s report 
<http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/05/puerto-square-spanish-work> in 
the /New Statesman/put it:

    A demonstration against the arrests was organised in the city’s main
    square, Puerta del Sol, and numbers soon snowballed when word got
    out over the internet. What began as a group of fewer than a hundred
    activists reached an estimated 50,000 within less than six days.

    The protesters whose arrests had sparked the initial demonstration
    were released and immediately returned to the square. By the time
    they arrived, the demonstration was no longer just about their
    treatment at the hands of the police. It was about government
    corruption, lack of media freedom, bank bailouts, unemployment,
    austerity measures and privatisation.

Here is another video of a fierce battle being fought on the streets of 
Madrid:

According to a report in Der Speigel 
<http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,763836,00.html>,

    The protesters have occupied the square for days now, with some
    comparing the gatherings to those that took place on Cairo’s Tahrir
    Square earlier this year, and demonstrations also continued for the
    fifth day in a row on Thursday in Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao and
    Santiago de Compostela. Spaniards living abroad have also set up
    protest camps outside the country’s embassies in Berlin, Paris,
    London and Amsterdam. Most of the events have been organized online.
    After organizing demonstrations in around 50 cities last Sunday, the
    Real Democracy Now (the name of the movement that coordinates the
    Spanish struggle – AN) movement became a household name virtually
    overnight.

By the end of May, the movement had now spread to Greece where, for the 
fifth consecutive day yesterday, an estimated 100, 000 people were 
demonstrating at the Syntagma square in Athens. Below the parliament 
building they stood, chanting ‘thieves’, ‘thieves’ and carrying placards 
that said ‘Poverty is the greatest abuse’.  Initially calling themselves 
the ‘indignants’, the protesters in both Spain and Greece gradually 
coalesced into this loose federation with a website and a Facebook page 
by the name of Real Democracy Now (see their Manifesto in English 
translation here <http://www.democraciarealya.es/?page_id=814>) that 
rapidly had over three and a half lakh members signing up. And virtually 
in tandem with the Spanish movement’s call for ‘real democracy’, the 
Greek movement too has transformed the struggle against austerity and 
bailout measures into /a struggle for a changing the political system 
itself, into a struggle for radicalizing democracy/.

Athens demonstrations

Athens Syntagma square, image courtesy Greek Reporter

*The Question of ‘Politics’*

This mutation of the essentially ‘economic’ struggle against the bailout 
plans and austerity measures into a political struggle for the 
transformation of the very terrain of democracy tells us something 
serious about the relationship of traditional forms and institutions of 
politics and their growing conflict with popular aspirations.  The call 
for ‘real democracy’ comes in a context where the political parties and 
the formal political domain is being seen as highly corrupt and deeply 
implicated in the politics of predatory corporations and banks. By and 
large, not only political parties but often, even the unions have been 
bypassed by the mass mobilizations – an index of the relative redundancy 
of these structures of formal democratic politics. A report in the 
l’Humanité <http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article1782> put it:

    /No trade union, let alone a political party. The workings of
    traditional dispute are outmoded, and even deliberately excluded./
    Internet, through the exchange in real time via social networks and
    chats, has allowed the emergence of a spontaneous free and radical
    protest movement by a generation that’s had enough…

    The Internet has become a structural element of the movement. /What
    is expressed is anger, a desire for radical change and a rejection
    of all traditional forms of politics. Which explains the refusal to
    be co-opted by any political party or trade union and calls to spoil
    ballot cards or vote blank./ Confidence in the Spanish democratic
    system is broken; the indignants have the impression that their
    voices are never heard. The descent into the street came naturally,
    as an extension. The street is also where they want to be heard.

Many observers see the protests in Spain as a continuation of the May 
Day demonstration earlier this year. Interestingly, the May Day 
demonstration itself, according to Gemma Galdon Clavell 
<http://browsertunnel.info/page/000000A/687474703a2f2f626c6f67732e65756f627365727665722e636f6d2f67616c646f6e2f> of 
the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, was organized independently of 
the mainstream political parties and trade unions and was ignored by the 
media. The point is itself worth some serious thought for it clearly 
indicates that even those formally bearing the legacy of the Left and 
the workers’ movement, were clearly quite out of sync with large 
sections of the youth who also aligned themselves to the legacy of the 
Left  through the May Day demonstration.  That is why the entire 
atmosphere in these protests was said to be permeated by an 
anti-politics sentiment and with a contempt for all political parties. 
Once the movement acquired the form of a huge mass movement, obviously 
things must have changed further. No longer would the movement have 
consisted only of left-wing supporters of the workers’ struggles. People 
with different political/ ideological inclinations, people with no 
particular political preferences, all started joining into this mass of 
‘the indignant’.  The manifesto of Real Democracy Now emphasized this 
apparently nonpolitical character of the movement when it underlined 
something to the effect that ‘we are believers and nonbelievers, we have 
different political convictions but the thing that unites us is that we 
are angry at economic the state of affairs’.

*The Arab Virus*

What we see playing out here in Spain and Greece is not simply an 
aberration. The resonances of the struggles in the Arab world are very 
obvious and widely acknowledged. Activist-organizer Beatriz Pérez, 29, 
underlines: ‘Egypt and Tunisia was a very important catalyst for the 
movement in Spain’, which constituted an inspiration and a trigger, 
apart from inspiration of the recent student demonstrations in the UK. A 
report in Hurriyat Daily News 
<http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=a-bird8217s-eye-view---the-revolution-spreads-north-2011-05-27>, 
recently recalled its own speculations sometime ago, about the 
possibility of the North African and Middle Eastern revolution engulfing 
Europe – a possibility that it now saw becoming a reality. The 
resonances however, are not simply limited to the fact that the Internet 
and Facebook etc became the major vehicles of organizing the protests. 
These similarities are in fact linked to some other quite significant 
issues – those that pertain to the ‘implosion of the political’. 
Throughout  the Arab world, this was in a very different context, 
precisely the situation of the formal domain of politics. Political 
parties lay at the feet of the establishment or had reduced themselves 
to complete inefficacy. In country after country across North Africa and 
West Asia, we have seen people in their hundreds of thousands march at 
the head and parties follow. The vanguards – Leninist and non-Leninist – 
all reduced to the ultimate pathos of ineffective, closed sects in some 
cases; or to political instruments in service of bankers and 
corporations. In earlier times, there was no way of communicating 
without the mediation of these organizations and their leaders. Things 
have changed now and direct communication and discussion has become 
possible through the Internet. A lot of discussion now happens there. 
But the Arab revolutions also have a ‘spiritual’ effect over these 
movements insofar as they are equally invested in the values of democracy.

Thus Dick Nichols of the Green Left Weekly 
<http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/47731>, reports from Barcelona:

    The central plazas of dozens of cities and towns across Spain bear
    an uncanny resemblance to Tahrir Square in Cairo. They have been
    taken over by thousands of demonstrators demanding a “new system”.
    As of May 29, dozens of other central plazas in Spanish cities and
    towns look the same — taken over by thousands of ordinary people
    demanding “a new system.

As speculations mount about Greece defaulting on its loan repayment from 
the IMF, the pressure has been building up on the government from 
international financial and corporate circles. In earlier times, such 
pressure would have worked and all political parties, seduced by the 
logic of neo-liberalism would have fallen in line. Not any more. It is 
clear here, to ordinary people as well, that if austerity measures a put 
in place after the debt is repaid, that will lead to further cuts in 
salaries and pension and result in further increase in unemployment and 
homelessness. That is no longer acceptable. And as the Hurriyat report 
underlines, if Greece defaults, that will not be the end of the story; 
it will most certainly be followed by Portugal, Ireland and Spain – with 
Italy not very far behind.

Here too, the link with the Arab revolts is quite obvious – though the 
issues may not be quite the same. But whatever the differences between 
the European and the Arab situation, one thing is quite clear: the 
question of livelihoods is central here and the fact that increasingly 
decisions about peoples’ lives are being taken away from their hands and 
manipulated in the name of some abstract notions of well-being which 
ultimately amount to the enrichment of some at the cost of vast 
majorities of populations.

*Democracy in Practice*

There is no doubt that none of the great movements sweeping the world in 
this part of the twenty-first century has any attachment to or any 
fixation with a programme. On the contrary, it cares two hoots about 
those who have. For those who have made programmes behind closed doors 
and do not want them to be discussed democratically, there is nothing 
but contempt in these movements. Yes, they do want to transform things 
but the critical question here is, rather than capture power and start 
mimicking the erstwhile powerful, one of creating new ground rules. The 
critical thing is to enunciate a different political practice so that 
whoever comes to power – the bourgeois or his Leninist mimic – will all 
have to be governed by those new ground rules. Not revolutionary? So be 
it. That is the fantasy of revolutionaries, not of the masses. It never 
was. Meanwhile, Puerta del Sol has been converted into a huge popular 
assembly where policies are being debated. Different commissions are 
drawing out policy proposals that are then discussed in the assembly, 
which has itself become a huge training camp, in between fighting street 
battles with government forces. Here is a glimpse from the /New 
Statesman/ report:

    The protesters at Puerta del Sol are interested only in action, not
    rhetoric. In the square, they built a makeshift campsite, including
    everything from a children’s nursery and a library to a kitchen
    offering free food donated by local businesses.

    In the space of a few days they had created separate working
    commissions to form proposals for change to current government
    policy. A social and migration commission would look at immigration
    policy, the health commission would focus on how to deprivatise
    health-care services. Other commissions were formed to handle
    politics, education, the economy and the environment.

    Among the camp’s immediate demands were calls for electoral reform,
    the dissolution of the Spanish parliament’s second chamber, and an
    end to a much-despised policy of “salaries for life” for politicians.

    The movement itself has no single leader or figurehead; all
    decisions are made by consensus at general assemblies, held twice
    daily. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, attend the meetings, and no
    decision is taken until every single person is in agreement.

    The meetings are long and laborious – occasionally lasting more than
    four hours at a time – but seem so far to have been successful.

Do you get a whiff of anti-Leninist, anti-vanguardist, anarchism? How 
can the people ever discuss and decide! They can and they do. Maybe that 
is where the twenty-first century will reverse the perversions of the 
twentieth.



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