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

[Rui Correia]

Perhaps NATO will send in the planes to defend civilians from the brutality
of the Spanish security forces? Some no-fly zones? Set up an opposition
government for the Basques in the Basque Country?

Rui

2011/6/2 parminder <parminder at itforchange.net>

>  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*.
> [image: 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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Rui Correia
Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Consultant
Angola Liaison Consultant

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