Above Photo: PopularResistance.org.
The latest brochure by German activist collective AK Malaboca focuses on the political developments in Spain, from the perspective of the local activists at the center of the storm.
AK Malaboca, a collective of German activists focusing on the developments and strategies of contemporary social movements, have released a report about their recent trip to Spain. The report consists of six interviews with Spanish activists involved with different initiatives, organizations and struggles.
Earlier this year, AK Malaboca published a similar report about the situation in Greece and their discussions with local activists about Syriza‘svictory, just one month old at the time.
Below you find AK Malaboca’s introduction to their report: Preguntando Cambiamos – Strategies of social movements in Barcelona and Madrid.
In February this year, two weeks after Syriza’s victory in the Greek elections, we spoke to many activists in Athens. Despite the many different assessments of the situation, the mood was reserved but optimistic. After more than four years of austerity, with increasingly harmful effects for most sections of the Greek population, the new government was welcomed as much needed “breathing space”.
It’s now ten months later and we have to conclude that, unfortunately, it are the worst fears that have been realized and the political climate is starting to suffocate again. The strategic hope that parliamentary representation would allow the social movements to become the real actors of social change has been destroyed. In the end, it is irrelevant whether Tsipras and his allies deliberately planned this course of action from the start, or whether their project collapsed under the enormous pressure of the Troika’s neo-liberal hegemony – with a key role reserved for the German government.
Of course, many activists now argue that this development was foreseeable and its outcome was intended from the start. We consider this position as wrong, and believe that such processes always count. An I-knew-everything-beforehand-attitude allows people to ignore their responsibility to try and shape history, and, even worse, to look down on those who accept the challenge to provoke change.
It is much more important to learn from these experiences and generate strategic debate. Whilst it is crucial to continue to ask questions, we still have to carry on. With this in mind, in the late summer we packed our bags to visit Barcelona, Sabadell and Madrid. Just like in Athens in February, we were lucky to be able to talk to people who have summoned-up the courage and passion to keep asking questions, and keep movign forward, rather than to give in to hopelessness and despair.
Similar to the situation in Greece over the past few years, the widespread public anger reached a boiling point in Spain too. When it erupted, hundreds of thousands of people starting occupying the squares of the country’s major cities on May 15, 2011. Their prime demand was “real democracy now!”.
Podemos, Ahora Madrid and Barcelona en comú, as well as and other leftist parties and regional coalitions, grew in strength and won many of the biggest town halls. These were the democratic results of that eruption of anger. Several mass demonstrations with hundreds of thousands people in the streets together with a strong independence movement in Catalonia, and many regional and national campaigns against the political establishment have together created this “new democracy”.
Away from the parliaments and the squares our comrades in Spain had many debates about how to use the momentum to convert this temporary eruption of popular anger into a long term resistance struggle at the grassroots level.
In our interviews with Spanish activists the aims was to find out more about this process, as well as tp explore a range of other strategic questions. We are also driven by a desire for a debate about the orientation of emancipatory forces in times of permanent crisis and crisis-management. In Spain, different forms of solidarity evolved as a result of the dramatic developments.
During our investigation of these forms of solidarity, we often found ourselves in social centers. Four out of six of our conversational partners considered these places as an important starting point of their political development. The two others, both local groups of the PAH did not start from a social center, but organized most of their work in, and with social centers. It’s impossible to deduct a homogeneous political “strategy of the social centers” just from the thoughts and ideas of our conversational partners.
On the contrary, what we saw were very diverse, and sometimes even controversial strategies that all in their specific way materialized in the form of a social center. Their commonality probably lies in their intention to localize and embed their political practice over a long time in a defined area, and also to give support to those not willing to give up – instead, they are ready to fight for a better life.
The main aim of this brochure is to give expression to this many-voiced resistance and their different strategies.
Those who still have hope must carry on asking about how we can organize a life away from domination, coercion and poverty. Within this debate of the left, the political developments in Spain (from our point of view of discussions about Germany) needed more clarity. The reasons for that may be many, but an intensified debate about the local developments seem to us to be even more important.
We chose the interview as the form of presentation so as to give voice to the activists themselves – they contain a variety of positions on the many different issues that were discussed.
Our work has simply been to translate and edit these impressions.
Many thanks to everyone who participated, for your trust, confidence and hope – you inspired us.
Moreover, we cannot hope to list the many people who helped us to produce this brochure.
All of you… who motivated us, who invested their time in this project, who gave us a place to sleep, who translated for us, who took us to places we had never been before…
Thank you so much! It would have never been possible without you.
Enjoy reading it. See you on the streets!