By Dick Nichols, Barcelona



May 11, 2015 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- If some people I know from the more cynical or disillusioned end of the Spanish left spectrum were to reflect on the topic of our discussion tonight---“Grassroots democracy and the movements against capitalism: lessons from Spain”—they might be tempted to make a rather acid commentary, maybe something like this:

“Grassroots Democracy? However much of that was expressed in the indignado movement of the squares—that began four years ago now (on May 15, 2011), when millions came out in over 80 cities and towns—it’s more or less evaporated by now.

“Movements against capitalism? Where are they? If we’re not talking about marginal revolutionary groups, there are no movements against capitalism worth talking about. What we’ve got is an uneven pile of movements of resistance, usually unsuccessful, against different aspects of capitalist austerity.

“Lessons from Spain? Only one—don’t get yourself into the awful mess we’re in now. Here, despite the fact that support for the two major parties that arose from the post-Franco dictatorship transition, the ruling conservative People’s Party (PP) and the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), has collapsed from over 80% to around 40-50%, no clear alternative for a progressive government that fights capitalist austerity instead of implementing it is yet on the horizon.

“That’s means—horrible thought—that the two-party system could even recover, or that the establishment will have time to organise its “spare wheel”, the Spanish-centralist and anti-Catalanist Citizens party. This is the supposedly civilised alternative to the corrupt, socially reactionary and semi-clerical PP. A recent poll shows 46% of ‘big investors’ support Citizens,.”

This hypothetical observer might be tempted to add that Spain isn’t Greece, neither objectively nor subjectively, and justify that judgement like this:

“First, the economic crisis, although deep, is nowhere near as catastrophic as in Greece. Indeed, Spain is now getting brownie points from the European Commission for its economic recovery.

“Second, there is no SYRIZA in Spain. There are forces on the left who thought they were already SYRIZA, like the United Left (the traditional left alliance to the left of the PSOE, centred on the Communist Party of Spain but with other forces, and having been around since the mid-1980s).

“And there’s Podemos, which aspires to be the Spanish SYRIZA, but as yet has nothing like SYRIZA’s presence at all levels of society nor its levels of organisation.

“If what’s happening in Podemos is anything to go by, its most recent attempts to win the so-called ‘middle ground’ as shown by its framework platform for the May 24 regional elections (in 13 of Spain’s regional governments), shows that it is becoming like the parties of the ‘political’ caste that it has been denouncing.

“That’s what Juan Carlos Monedero, co-founder of Podemos with Pablo Iglesias, said when he left the party on April 30, saying he felt ‘deceived and betrayed’.”

Well, how accurate would such an assessment be? My reaction from living here in the Spanish State for over four years would be a series of “Yes, buts”.

First, it’s true that the economic crisis has not been as deep as in Greece, but that’s actually not saying much—the criminal shrinking of the Greek economy by the bailout conditions imposed by the Troika (the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) has set a world record in policy-induced downturn that will last for decades--greater than anything since the Great Depression.

However, Spain shares with Greece a youth unemployment rate of more than 50%—not surprisingly one of the organising groups within the indignado movement was called “Youth Without a Future”—and is being subject to the same Eurogroup austerity recipes as Greece.

What’s more, the demolition of workers’ and trade union rights that the SYRIZA government is refusing to accept in its present negotiations with its Troika creditors, is already under way in Spain, with results like €2-an-hour wages and “your rights at work” that have simply vanished.

The Spanish economic crisis didn’t generate the 30-plus general strikes we saw in Greece from 2010-early 2013, but it generated the vast outpouring of popular outrage that was the indignado movement. And that was also driven by specifically Spanish horrors—like taxpayers’ €61.2 billion bailout of the collapsed banking system (done in this form to prevent a repetition memorandum in Europe’s fifth-largest economy of a Greek, Portuguese or Irish-style Troika).

These policies, expressed in the oxymoronic “expansionary austerity”, introduced from 2010 by the Troika powers, produced in Spain a notorious 2011 constitutional amendment that put repayment of interest on government borrowings above all other budget priorities—around €35 billion annually—helping devastate economy and society.

This resultant social crisis has given rise to the famous Mortgage Victims Platform (PAH) and the white and green “tides”, the movements of public health and education workers and users against privatisation of services and against the truly brutal cuts to funding (such as the 20% cut we’ve had over five years here in Catalonia).

Differently from Greece, these “tides”, in which mass assemblies of the workers involved replaced, or worked in parallel with, existing trade union structures, have had two major victories. The white tide of health workers in Madrid stopped practically all PP privatisation of the regional health system, and the green tide on the Balearic Islands put an end to the crude attempts of the local PP government to replace the Balearic variant of Catalan with Castilian (Spanish) as the language of school instruction.

The Mortgage Victims Platform is Spain’s most implanted and respected social movement, self-organising the resistance of families marked for eviction by the banks and putting the whole question of the real-estate finance-sector nexus in the forefront of political consciousness.

Indeed, we could say that its slogan, “Rescue People, Not Banks”, has become the motto of the present phase of social resistance and breakdown of the old two-party system.

(For a good idea of the work check their website for a very vivid, just-released documentary, subtitled in English, on a week of its work in Barcelona in March 2014).

Impact and lessons

It is these “new movements”---that sprung into being outside the traditional organisations of the working class—especially the rather bureaucratised main Spanish trade union confederations that just gave up on organising resistance after a couple of national days of action in 2010 and 2011—that have given Spain its most recent experience of mass grassroots democracy.

They schooled a whole new generation in political action, revived older generations of activists and created a political culture that drew on and updated very Spanish left traditions (like “assemblyism”, decision making by open mass meetings).

I don’t have time to convey the extraordinary richness, complexity and contradictory dynamics of these movements, but here is a summary of the main impacts.