💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › crimethinc-from-15m-to-podemos.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:31:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: From 15M to Podemos
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: April 5, 2016
Language: en
Topics: 15M, democratic socialism, democracy, Spain
Source: https://crimethinc.com/2016/04/05/feature-from-15m-to-podemos-the-regeneration-of-spanish-democracy-and-the-maligned-promise-of-chaos

CrimethInc.

From 15M to Podemos

I. Emergence

Spring 2011.

“This is our revolution! No barricades, nothing romantic like that, but

what do we expect? It’s a piece of shit, but we already knew this is the

world we live in.”

I was shoulder to shoulder with a friend, pushing through the swarming

crowds, the tens of thousands that had coalesced out of the democratic

desolation to fill Plaça Catalunya, Barcelona’s central plaza. We were

on our way back from a copy shop whose employees, also taken up in the

fervor, let us print another five hundred copies of the latest open

letter with a huge discount, easily paid for with all the change people

were leaving in the donations jar at the info table we anarchists had

set up.

In less than an hour, all the pamphlets had been snatched up, we’d met

more people who shared some of our ideas, had another couple engaging

debates, another brief argument. Decades of social isolation had

suddenly been washed away in a sudden, unexpected outpouring of social

angst, anger, hope, a desire to relate. A million individual needs for

the expression of collective needs: Yes, I need that, too. A million

solitary voices recognizing themselves in a cry they all took up

together: Yes, I am here, too. A million stories of loneliness finding

themselves in a shared alienation: Yes, I feel that, too. It was hard

not to get carried away. We felt it too.

But in that commune of alienation we also felt a certain cynicism. It

was more than just arrogance, not merely looking down our noses at these

people as they shouted every evening, “aqui comença la Revolució!”—the

Revolution begins here. The truth is, we doubted the popular

understanding of what a revolution would actually entail.

And our doubts were not without reason. Being out alone in the streets

for years, trying to spread critical ideas, trying to open small spaces

of freedom, getting handcuffed or beaten, when no one else gives a crap,

when everyone else seems content to stare into their TV screens while

the world dies around them, can certainly make you arrogant. It can make

you bitter, and cynical, and superior, and completely oblivious to

unexpected changes that rock the system you’ve spent your whole life

fighting. But it can also give you perspective. It can make you ask, Why

are these people in the streets now, only when their own social benefits

are threatened, while they didn’t lift a finger when it was other people

on the chopping block? It can provoke the question, Why is the media

giving so much attention to this phenomenon, even if it’s often negative

attention, when they’ve been ignoring our struggles for years?

When the plaza occupation movement broke out on the 15th of May (15M),

2011, throughout the Spanish state, we threw ourselves into it. A few

anarchists dismissed it outright, unable to find traction in that

chaotic, unseemly jumble of a movement, and others uncritically gave

their stamp of approval to anything that appeared to have the support of

a mass. But we refused to surrender the perspectives and experiences won

through years of lonely struggle when few others were insisting that the

system we lived in was unacceptable.

We didn’t all interpret those experiences the same way, just as we did

not develop the same strategies in the midst of the plaza occupation

movement. I can only give one account of this story; nonetheless it is a

story we helped build collectively, struggling side by side and also

disputing one another’s positions. There is no consensus history of the

movement, and not even of anarchist participation in it, but at the same

time, no one arrived at their particular version of events alone.

One element we all shared was a critique of democracy. There was a

history to our position. In 1975, Francisco Franco died. A fascist

dictator who was supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and more discreetly

by the British, US, and French governments, his open acceptance by the

West in 1949 revealed yet again the tolerance a democratic world system

can have for dictatorships that succeed in preventing revolutions. In

1976, the Basque independence group ETA blew up Franco’s handpicked

successor. The country was awash in wildcat strikes and protests. Armed

actions were multiplying, but there was no vanguardist group with the

hope of controlling or representing the whole movement. No figurehead

that could be co-opted or destroyed. It was the beginning of the

Transition.

Perceiving the inevitability of democratic government, the fascists

turned into conservatives, constituting the Popular Party, and in

exchange for legalization and a chance at power, they enticed the

communists and the socialists into negotiations, giving birth to a new

legalized, institutionalized labor union, CCOO, and a new political

party, the Socialist Workers Party of Spain (PSOE). The PSOE ruled the

country from 1982 to 1996, and in 2010 they were again in power when

European Union bureaucrats and bank financiers demanded austerity

measures. They quickly complied.

But back in the mid–70s, not everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Many

people rejected negotiations with fascists, or rejected any kind of

government and any form of capitalism altogether. As the years turned

into decades, these holdouts became ever more isolated, until they had

been consigned by institutional, judicial, and media marginalization

into a reduced political ghetto. By this point, the “irreductibles”

could mostly be found within an anarchist movement that was much weaker

and more infirm than it had been before the Civil War that put Franco in

power.

These anarchists kept fighting, largely developing an antisocial

character as a tool to help them resist the psychosocial effects of

extreme marginalization, and to facilitate a critique of democratic

society as a majoritarian, mediatic control structure. But as revolts

started breaking out in neighboring countries several years before the

onset of the economic crisis, some anarchists started becoming attentive

to the possibilities of a widespread social revolt, and they began

changing their methods and analyses to be able to encourage and

participate in such revolts, in the seemingly unlikely chance that one

should break out here. But in a few short years, coinciding with the

beginning of the crisis, the revolts multiplied, coming closer—if not

geographically, then ideologically.

Before the 15M movement started, Barcelona had already witnessed a

one-day general strike with majority participation, in which

anticapitalist discourses were frequent if not predominant, and which

resulted in large scale occupations, rioting, looting, and clashes with

police, constituting an important step in the reappropriation of street

tactics that would make other victories possible in the following years.

A combative May Day protest had abandoned the typical route through the

city center to snake through several rich neighborhoods, sowing

destruction and a small measure of economic revenge.

The 15M movement broke out just two weeks later, and its official

discourses called for total pacifism and symbolic citizen protests to

achieve a better, healthier democracy through constitutional reform.

Almost no mention was made, within this official discourse, of the

conditions of daily life, of collective self-defense against austerity

and the direct self-organization of our survival. But where did this

official discourse come from, and how was it produced in such a huge,

heterogeneous crowd?

15M wasn’t huge from the beginning. In fact, the first assembly in

Barcelona, the first night on Plaça Catalunya, there were just a hundred

people present. Some of these were adherents of “Real Democracy Now,” a

new group based in Madrid that had produced the original call-out for

the countrywide protests and occupations. Their discourse was extremely

reformist and made no mention of the growing waves of real protest and

social conflict that had been growing in Spain, building off a tradition

of struggle that contained a great deal of collective knowledge. This

history was absent from their perspective, which was perhaps the only

way they could feasibly call for a movement based on pacifism and legal

reform. They did mention the “Arab Spring,” above all the uprising in

Egypt, but only in the most condescending, manipulative way. They

described it as a nonviolent movement, and they portrayed it as having

already won its objectives, when, as is clear now and was clear then for

anyone with a radical perspective, the struggle had only begun.

In that first assembly, they took up an old Trotskyist tactic.

Distributing themselves throughout the circle, they tried to push the

group to adopt a pre-ordained consensus that matched the directives that

had come down from Madrid. But it was clear that these activists were

not experienced in such tactics, for they were all wearing identical

“Real Democracy Now” t-shirts. The minute someone from the leftwing

Catalan independence movement said that the Barcelona occupation should

set out on its own path rather than following Madrid, the crowd agreed.

There were very few anarchists that first night, but those present also

made sure that the reformist activists were not able to limit the

movement from the outset.

“Who is in favor?” asks the person with the microphone, her voice

booming out from concert-quality speakers. A few thousand people raise

their hands.

“Who is against?” Some fifty people raise their hands. Pro forma, a few

people make a rapid count. It’s doubtful their numbers match up, but it

doesn’t matter. It is clear that the “no” votes aren’t enough to be

considered important. It takes a hundred to block a measure.

“Who wants more debate?” A dozen hands go up. Again, short of minimum

necessary to send the proposal back for more debate.

“The proposal passes.” The moderators pause a moment before moving on to

the next item. The crowd, perhaps ten thousand strong, waits, sitting

with a tolerant but bored patience.

“What did we just vote on?” I hear one young student ask another.

Without exaggerating, I think it is one of the most common questions in

that month of occupation.

Just a week into this grand experiment in direct democracy, abstention

had already carried the day. In most votes, abstention reached

proportions that equaled or surpassed the percentage who opt out of

voting in the elections and referendums of a typical representative

democracy.

It’s no surprise. Empowerment was little more than a slogan in the

plaza. With even a hundred people in an assembly, not everyone can

participate. Once the number of participants grew from the hundreds to

the thousands, commissions and subcommissions started popping up like

mushrooms after a rain. Experienced moderators began directing the

assemblies, putting in practice techniques for a modified consensus

process that had been developed during the anti-globalization movement.

Proposals were developed and consensed on in commissions, then they had

to be clearly read out to be ratified by the general assembly. A hundred

people, if I recall correctly, could block a decision, and a smaller

number could send it back to the commission for more debate.

To truly have any meaningful influence on a decision, someone would have

to spend two to four hours during the day at a commission meeting to

draft the proposal, in addition to the several hours that the nighttime

general assembly lasted. More difficult proposals were in commission for

days or a whole week, and in any case you had to go to the commission

meetings every day if you wanted to make sure that the old proposal

wasn’t erased by a new one. Clearly, only a small number of people with

a certain level of economic independence could participate fully in

these directly democratic structures. Even if everyone enjoyed economic

independence, the structures themselves necessarily function as funnels,

limiting and concentrating participation so that a large, heterogeneous

mass can produce unified, enumerated, homogeneous decisions. In any

given assembly or commission, certain styles of communication and

decision-making are favored, while others are disadvantaged.

Direct democracy is just representative democracy on a smaller scale. It

inevitably recreates the specialization, centralization, and exclusion

we associate with existing democracies. Within four days, once the

crowds exceeded 5000, the experiment in direct democracy was already

rife with false and manipulated consensus, silenced minorities,

increasing abstention from voting, and domination by specialists and

internal politicians.

In one example, anarchists in the Self-Organization and Direct Democracy

Sub-Commission wanted to organize a simple debate about nonviolence. The

initiative almost failed because the Sub-Commission needed days to

debate and consense on exactly how they wanted to do it. In the end, two

people decided to ignore the commission, and joining with another

anarchist who was not participating in Self-Organization, the three of

them self-organized a successful talk and debate in just a day,

accomplishing what a group of fifty people had failed at over the course

of a week.

It was not that easy, however, because of the many obstacles that the

democracy activists put in the way of any direct action that did not

have their stamp of approval. Twice, we reserved the sound system and

the central space in the plaza in order to debate the nonviolence policy

that had been forcibly imposed on the whole movement. Each time, our

reservation mysteriously disappeared, and after the second time, the

sound system was reserved for another event at the same time we had

scheduled our debate. Defeated, we decided to hold the debate with just

a megaphone on the edge of the plaza. It would be smaller, effectively

marginalized, but we were insistent on registering our disagreement with

a position that really only a small minority of activists had

successfully imposed.

We went to the Activity Commission tent to again inform them of our

plans. In a story worthy of Kafka, the kid at the table looked down at

his form, a crappy little piece of paper written up in ballpoint pen,

and told us we couldn’t have our event in the spot where we wanted.

“Why?” I asked, getting ready to go ballistic. Was this yet another

trick by the new specialists of direct democracy to protect their false

consensus around nonviolence?

The response was far more pathetic than I had expected.

“Because our forms are divided into different columns, see, one column

for each space in the plaza, but that space over by the staircase, well

that’s not an official space.”

“That’s okay, we don’t mind, just write it down.”

“But, but, I can’t. There isn’t a column for it.”

“Well, make a column.”

“Um, I can’t.”

“Oh Christ, look, which one’s open—look, here, ‘Pink Space,’ just write

our event down for the ‘Pink Space’ and when the time comes we’ll just

move it.”

Within two weeks, without any prior training, the Spanish Revolution had

created perfect bureaucrats!

Examples of the manipulation of process abound. In the very beginning,

the assembly made the very anarchist decision to not release unitary

manifestos speaking for everyone. Subsequently, people spoke their own

minds in the assemblies and in informal spaces throughout the day. We

anarchists set up a literature table where we distributed open letters

and pamphlets, publishing new texts every day. We were content to

express ourselves in dialogue with the rest, rather than trying to

represent the whole movement. But the grassroots politicians in the mix

craved some unitary manifesto, some list of demands with which they

could pressure the politicians in power. They only saw the huge crowds

as numbers, means to an end.

Subsequently, they formed a Contents Commission in order to formulate

the “contents” or the ideas of the movement, as though the whole plaza

occupation was just an empty vessel, a mindless beast waiting for the

assembly to ratify a list of common beliefs and positions. At the

anarchist tent, we debated whether or not to participate in the

commissions. Some of us were staunchly against, but as anarchists, we

didn’t seek consensus. Those who wanted to participate did not need our

permission. And at least one good thing came out of their participation:

many more examples of the intrinsic corruption and authoritarianism of

democracy at every level.

When the anarchist participation prevented the Trotskyists, Real

Democracy activists, and other grassroots politicians from producing the

sort of unitary demands and manifestos that the general assembly had

earlier vetoed, the Commission was broken up into a dozen

sub-commissions. Every single day, in multiple sub-commissions, the

grassroots politicians made the same proposals that had been defeated

the day before, until one meeting when none of their opponents were

present. The demands were passed through the commission and subsequently

ratified by the general assembly, which ratified nearly every proposal

passed before it.

On the other hand, after a week of debate, anarchists in the

Self-Organization and Direct Democracy Sub-Commission reached a hard-won

consensus with the proponents of direct democracy for a proposal to

decentralize the assembly, meaning that heterogeneity and differences

would be respected, and the assembly would be turned into a space for

sharing proposals and initiatives, but not for ratifying them, because,

in the new system, everyone would be free to take whatever actions they

saw fit, and wouldn’t need some bureaucratic permission. The proposal

would have meant the utter defeat of the grassroots politicians, because

the assembly would no longer be a mass they could control for their own

ends. Everyone would be free to organize their own initiatives and make

their own decisions. The funnel would be turned into an open field.

The anarchist proposal to decentralize the assembly was voted on twice,

and each time achieved overwhelming support, but curiously was defeated

on technicalities both times. The moderators hemmed and hawed, delayed

and threw up obstacles. When they could no longer prevent a vote, the

proposal received a greater majority than perhaps any other item in

those weeks. Their tactic of trying to scare people away from the

proposal, insisting that it be read several times, that everyone made

sure they understand its implications, and that an extra day be granted

to reflect on it backfired. In the end, this was one of the few

proposals that everyone in the assembly paid attention to, discussed,

and voted on with total awareness.

Only about fifty people voted against. The same fifty people voted for

more debate, even though they had absolutely no intention of

participating in the debate, and the proposal was effectively shelved.

It has already achieved a consistent consensus in the Sub-Commission.

More debate would change nothing. It would only come back before the

general assembly where it would be blocked again. Thanks to direct

democracy, fifty people could control twenty thousand.

This action demonstrated that we were right, we had lots of support, and

the assembly was a sham—that, in itself, was a victory. But direct

democracy cannot be reformed from within. It has to be destroyed.

Many people took the commissions and the general assembly more seriously

than they warranted. True, fruitful debates in groups of fifty or a

hundred people took place in the commissions, and the assembly partially

served as a platform for strangers to air their grievances and construct

a sense of collectivity. But the only worthwhile position was to subvert

those structures of bureaucracy and centralization, to criticize the

power dynamics they created and create something more vibrant and free

in the shadow of the general assembly.

There was a lot more to the plaza occupation than these frustratingly

bureaucratic structures. The official center, in fact, was tiny compared

to the chaotic margins. These margins were all the spaces in the plaza

outside of the commission tents and the couple hours of general assembly

every evening. All throughout the day, the plaza was an extensive,

chaotic space of self-organization, where people met their logistical

needs, sometimes going through the official channels, sometimes not.

There was a library, a garden, an international translation center, a

kitchen with big stoves and solar cookers, and at any time there were a

couple concerts, workshops, debates, and massage parlors going on, along

with innumerable smaller conversations, debates, and encounters. People

drank, argued, celebrated, slept, made out, made friends.

It was chaos, in the literal sense that patterns emerged and faded, and

there was no central space from which everything could be perceived,

much less controlled. Consider the officially recognized program: one

only had to go to the Activities Commission tent to see the whole

schedule. From that one point, a police detective could register all the

events taking place, what was being talked about, what was being

organized. A new person wishing to take part could come and learn where

to get involved, their introduction taking the form of a piece of paper,

a schedule, rather than a new friend. A grassroots politician could

monopolize the more important spaces and times, giving priority to

certain meetings or events and marginalizing others (or they could even

make undesired events disappear, as happened with our nonviolence

debate). It is absolutely no coincidence that the interests of state

control from without, the interests of hierarchical control from within,

and the interests of impersonal or rational efficiency all converge in

the structures of direct democracy.

In contrast, the unofficial margins were much livelier and more dynamic.

Most new friendships and complicities, most meaningful, face-to-face

conversations, and most of the satisfying communal experiences that kept

people coming back occurred in the chaotic margins. A handful of people

could organize a debate or a small concert without having to exhaust

themselves going through commissions and subcommissions. Saving their

energies for what really mattered—the actual activity—a few individuals

could prepare a quality event on their own initiative, and a crowd of a

hundred or even five hundred people might spontaneously gather and take

part.

Even during the general assemblies, the chaotic margins could not be

extinguished. Many thousands of people boycotted the votes. Some of us

refused on principal, as anarchists, to legitimate such farcical

exercises of authority in the name of the people, a collective whole

that was only effaced by the artificial imposition of unity. Many others

didn’t vote because they found the assembly boring (much like the child

in the classroom who daydreams, not because she is unintelligent, but

because she is, in fact, more intelligent, because she is not engaged by

the authoritarian, pacifying method of education). Others because, once

the crowds had surpassed fifty thousand, they couldn’t get close enough

to hear. The margins of the plaza became an unruly country of whispered

conversations, criticisms, and occasional heckling.

Weren’t all these other spaces also decision-making spaces? Don’t we

make decisions in every moment of our lives? Why is the formalized,

masculine space of an assembly more legitimate than the common kitchen,

where many decisions and conversations also take place? Why is it more

legitimate than the hundred clusters of small conversations and debates

that take place during the day, on a small scale, allowing people to

express themselves more intimately and more fully?

Even if we participate in every formal decision, are these the same

decisions we would arrive at in spaces of comfort, spaces of life rather

than of politics? Is it possible that our formal selves become a mere

representation, a manipulation produced during a few boring hours of

meetings that is used to control us during all the other moments of our

lives?

“Don’t do that,” says the self-appointed leader to the person who has

started to spray-paint a bank, “this is a peaceful protest.” The former

speaks with all the legitimacy of a popular mandate. Supposedly, there

is consensus on the question of nonviolence, for this protest was

organized by the plaza assembly. Yet, what kind of consensus needs to be

continually enforced? Why is it that people who took part in the

assembly so frequently rebelled against the decisions that supposedly

represented them?

Needless to say, the proponents of direct democracy and its official

structures did whatever they could to suppress the chaotic zones in the

plaza. The anarchist tent, for example, never had official permission,

and on the first day we set up, they tried to kick us out. We made it

clear that they would have to use force to get us out, and then everyone

would see what their democracy consisted of. They would have done it, if

we hadn’t been numerous, and fierce, and honed by the years of

streetfighting behind us. Instead, they set up some commission tents on

our spot early the next morning. But we just found another spot.

The “Convivencia” Commission (“Living Together,” a classist, often

racist term that is systematically used by the city’s administrators)

busied itself trying to eject people who were drinking in the plaza—but

not the young white students, only the older, typically immigrant

homeless men who were sleeping in the plaza. They also repeatedly tried

kicking out the undocumented immigrants who had to work selling beers or

purses in the streets, and who often had to run from the police. The

Commission members tried to deny these immigrants access to the safe

space we all had created in the plaza, until some of us got up in their

faces, called them racists, and threatened them with physical violence.

Calling the 15M movement imperfect doesn’t cut it. All the oppressive

dynamics, all the habits of passivity and authoritarianism in our

society followed us into the plaza. But there, in that collective space,

we had the opportunity to confront them. The structures of direct

democracy only masked or exacerbated those dynamics; they were feeble

attempts to control the underlying chaos. Even some anarchists failed to

see this. Like many others, they got distracted by the aura of

officiality—the titles and processes, commissions, schedules, and

diagrams. All that was a farce. The imposition of an official framework

was intended to redirect our attention just the same as it sought to

control our participation. Next time, hopefully, we will know not to

take it seriously.

In time, the 15M movement subsided, blending back into the social

conflicts that gave birth to it, which continued unabated. For a while,

many anarchists in Barcelona participated with thousands of other people

in the neighborhood assemblies that replaced the Plaça Catalunya

occupation. Home defense protests against foreclosures gained frequency.

There were occupations of schools and hospitals against austerity

measures. General strikes and riots. Protests against new repressive

laws. Waves of arrests and counterprotests. The struggle continued.

The rise of these movements taught us a number of things. Their origins

confirmed certain anarchist theories about social conflict. They were

not mechanically triggered by material conditions, as they tended to

precede the crisis or the worst economic effects of austerity. I would

say that material conditions do not exist, only people’s interpretations

of their conditions. (In fact, the whole category of the “material”

seems more like a crude attempt to appear scientific, though it relies

on a dichotomy that stems from the origins of Western, Christian

civilization.) The true triggers of the movements and revolts were a

collective empathy for or seduction by revolts happening in other

countries, a collective sense of insecurity or evaluation that the State

had become weak, a collective outrage in response to government measures

seen as insulting to people’s dignity and threatening to their

wellbeing, and a collective interpretation or prediction of worsening

conditions.

Institutional responses showed us that governments often react clumsily

to emerging movements, provoking growth and radicalization, whereas

reformist or power-hungry participants are the most effective and astute

in establishing statist organization within the movements and preventing

them from developing revolutionary perspectives.

Additionally, a number of hypotheses regarding pacifism were confirmed:

our society trains people to uncritically favor pacifism in social

movements, and the predominant current of pacifism moves progressively

away from a practice of social change to a practice of total

pacification; that media, police, and would-be movement leaders conspire

to enforce pacifism; and that the natural evolution of movements leads

them to break with nonviolence and develop more forceful tactics. But

events also gave us the opportunity to see how would-be leaders of

social movements, if the crowd leaves them too far behind, will abandon

their commitment to nonviolence and support or at least passively

condone certain illegal or destructive tactics.

In contrast, the leaders’ commitment to democracy runs deeper, and it

was a shared esteem, a blind support for the values of democracy that

best allowed them to assert their leadership over what had been an

anarchic movement.

Real Democracy Now did an excellent job of formulating a mediocre

politics defined by its populism, victimism, reformism, and moralism. By

using common, value-laden terms such as “democracy” (good) and

“corruption” (bad), they created a discursive trap that garnered

overwhelming support for all their proposals while deflecting or falsely

including proposals that went further. Their stated minimums included

revolutionary language and the highly popular sentiment that “we’re

going to change everything,” while offering a ladder of demands that

basically signaled the prices, from cheap to expensive, at which they

would sell out. It started with reform of the electoral law, passed

through laws for increased oversight of the bankers, and reached, at its

most radical extreme, a refusal to pay back the bailout loans.

Everything was structured around demands communicated to the existing

government, but prettied up in populist language. Thus, the popular,

anarchist slogan Ningú ens representa, “No one represents us,” was

distorted within their program to mean, “None of the politicians

currently in power represent us: we want better ones who will.”

However, to carry out this balancing act, they did have to adopt vaguely

antiauthoritarian organizing principles inherited from the

antiglobalization movement, such as a commitment to open assemblies and

a rejection of spokespersons and political parties. Proposals centered

on direct action or sentiments containing a rejection of government and

capitalism were easily neutralized within this ideological framework.

The former would be paternalistically tolerated as cute little side

projects eclipsed by the major projects of reformist demands, and the

latter would be applauded, linked back to the popular rhetoric already

in use, and corrupted to mean an opposition to current politicians or

specific bankers.

The only way to challenge this co-optation of popular rage was to focus

critique on democracy itself. We quickly discovered that the idea of

direct democracy was the major theoretical barrier that protected the

existing representative democracy, and direct democracy activists,

including anarchists, were the critical bridge between the parasitic

grassroots politicians and their social host body.

The experience in the plaza taught us in practice what we had already

argued in theory: that direct democracy recreates representative

democracy; that it is not the features that can be reformed (campaign

finance, term limits, popular referendums), but the most central ideals

of democracy that are inherently authoritarian. The beautiful thing

about the encampment in the plaza was that it had multiple centers for

taking initiative and creating. The central assembly functioned to

suppress this; had it succeeded, the occupation would have died much

sooner. It did not succeed, thanks in part to anarchist intervention.

The central assembly did not give birth to a single initiative. What it

did, rather, was to grant legitimacy to initiatives worked out in the

commissions; but this process must not be portrayed in positive terms.

This granting of legitimacy was in fact a robbing of the legitimacy of

all the decisions made in the multiple spaces throughout the plaza not

incorporated into an official commission. Multiple times, self-appointed

representatives of this or that commission tried to suppress spontaneous

initiatives that did not bear their stamp of legitimacy. At other times,

commissions, moderators, and internal politicians specifically

contravened decisions made in the central assembly, when doing so would

favor further centralization. This is not a question of corruption or

bad form; democracy always subverts its own mechanisms in the interests

of power.

Again and again in the plaza, we saw a correlation between democracy and

the paranoia of control: the need for all decisions and initiatives to

pass through a central point, the need to make the chaotic activity of a

multitudinous occupation legible from a single vantage point—the control

room, as it were. This is a statist impulse. The need to impose

legibility on a social situation—and social situations are always

chaotic—is shared by the democracy activist, who wishes to impose a

brilliant new organizational structure; the tax collector, who needs all

economic activity to be visible so it can be reappropriated; and the

policeman, who desires a panopticon in order to control and punish. I

also found that numerous anarchists of various ideological stripes were

unable to see the crucial theoretical difference between the oppositions

representational democracy vs. direct democracy/consensus and

centralization vs. decentralization, because the first and second terms

of both pairs have been turned into synonyms through misuse. For this

reason, I have decided to rehabilitate the term “chaos” in my personal

usage, as it is a frightening term no populist in the current context

would use and abuse, and it relates directly to mathematical theories

that express the kind of shifting, conflictual, constantly regenerating,

acephalous organization anarchists are calling for.

II. Ossification

Fall 2015.

Junts pel Sí, the pro-independence coalition that combines the major

right-wing and left-wing political parties in Catalunya, has won the

regional elections. Together with the CUP—a grassroots activist platform

that makes decisions in assemblies, and which emerged from the social

movements to seize over 10% of the vote—they have a majority in the

Catalan parliament, and they have announced that they will make a

unilateral declaration of independence, turning the parliament into a

constituent assembly for a new constitution, breaking away from Spain.

Meanwhile, the Popular Party and Socialist Party, which until four years

ago ruled the country in an unshakeable two-party system, threaten legal

action from Madrid. Podemos, an activist political party modeled on

Syriza, promises a referendum on the question of independence for

Catalunya, the Basque country, Galicia, if only they are voted into

power. They hint at the possibility of a new constitution, transforming

Spain into a nation of nations. The newspapers and the TV are full of it

every day. Everyone waits, expectantly.

In the spring, activist platforms, some of them barely a year old, won

the elections in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona. In Donostia, the newly

legalized Basque independence party, Bildu, was already in power. These

constitute four of Spain’s most important cities, including the two

largest.

The new mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, had been a housing activist who

once got arrested in a highly publicized act of civil disobedience to

stop an eviction. People everywhere talk about whether she will deliver

on her promises and protect all the families who can no longer pay

mortgages from getting kicked out their houses. Will she create

dignified employment? Will she halt the ravages of tourism that are

remaking the city? Everyone waits, expectantly.

A new anarchist text from Barcelona, “A Wager on the Future,” argues

that these new political parties are the result of the death of the 15M

movement. The would-be leaders did not succeed in directly turning the

movement into a new political party, although they certainly tried.

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of people gave

self-organization in assemblies a chance. And on the face of it, they

achieved exactly nothing. A couple years later, in a climate of general

disappointment, passivity, and demobilization, Podemos and the other new

political parties, like Barcelona en Comú, were formed. Preexisting

activist platforms-turned-political-parties, like the CUP or Compromís

in Valencia, geared up to seize a bigger slice of pie. The few remaining

neighborhood assemblies or 15M assemblies, bare skeletons, became

recruiting tools for one party or another.

Spanish democracy has been regenerated. People, having failed

themselves, are once again ready to place their trust in politicians, as

long as they are new faces making new promises. Direct democracy has

revealed how fully it transforms back into representative democracy as

it scales up.

At this juncture, we can see how direct democracy protected and

revitalized representative democracy. Coherent with its emphasis on

formal, superficial, and regulated participation in an alienated space

of politics—the central assembly as the arbiter of all social

decision-making—the direct democracy movement pushed for a set of

demands based on institutional reform and social consensus.

What does this mean in the details of everyday life and struggle? Like

all other forms of government, direct democracy preserves and even

celebrates politics as an alienated sphere of life; in fact,

politics—the management of the polis—is in its origins directly

democratic. In one of the original alienations, people are made

spectators to the decisions that determine how they live.

Assemblies are a great way to make certain decisions in specific

situations, but direct democracy gives precedence to the general

assembly over the affinity group, over the kitchen, over the study

circle, over the workshop, and over a thousand other spaces in which we

organize ourselves. This is an exact parallel to how all governments

bestow an exclusive legitimacy on whatever form of decision-making they

control within institutional channels. A government run by charismatic

statesmen will give precedence to a congress or parliament, a government

run by technocrats will give precedence to central banks and state

commissions… and a government run by grassroots activists on their way

to professionalization will give precedence to the assembly.

In one of the genre-setting revolutions of the modern era, the

Bolsheviks made use of the soviets—which functioned as democratic

assemblies and which contemporary anarchists like Voline pointed out

were ripe for co-optation—until they had consolidated their bureaucratic

state enough to no longer need the earlier structure. The compatibility

between what was a direct or at least a federated democracy and the

“democratic centralism” that latched onto the former and took it over

should not escape us. It’s not ancient history, but a pattern that keeps

repeating.

Direct democracy is differentiated from other forms of government

through an emphasis on the principle of “self-government.”

Anti-authoritarians who advocate direct democracy might avoid this term,

but in fact it is quite accurate. Direct democracy involves people in

their own government, which is to say their alienation from social

decision-making. We can see this in how people in Plaça Catalunya ended

up abstaining or going through the motions in the nightly assemblies. By

being given an opportunity for self-government, they were being

reeducated, in a very direct, accurate, and hands-on way, as to exactly

what government means. It is no coincidence that in the aftermath, a

huge proportion of these masses were once again ready to support a

political party and reproduce all the same problems of disempowerment

and alienation that had brought them out into the plazas in the first

place.

When we anarchists direct our anger and criticism at the proponents of

direct democracy, it is not because we are so dogmatic, so infatuated

with navel-gazing or with purifying our tiny spaces of dissidence that

we would rather attack an ally than go up against the real bad guys in

the banks, board rooms, and parliaments. On the contrary, it is because

the movement for direct democracy constitutes the most effective

appendage of the State within our struggles for liberation. After all,

we are not victims. We live in an oppressive society because every day

we help to reproduce that oppression. It is for this reason we

criticize. Just as a limited “self-management” in the workplace turns

you into your own boss, self-government turns you into your own ruler,

and there is nothing sadder than being the active agent in your own

alienation. In sum, self-government means being your own worst enemy.

That is why it was logical for a movement based in direct democracy to

advocate demands based on institutional reform and social consensus: the

movement’s sights were already fixed on seizing centralized power—the

power that stems from our alienation and powerlessness—rather than

destroying it. Instead of proposing an end to the ruling institutions,

direct democracy activists proposed ways to fix them. Rather than

seeking the abolition of hierarchical society, rather than choosing

sides in the antagonisms of class, colonialism, and patriarchy, they

sought social unity. After all, society is the machine that politicians

wish to drive, so it makes no sense for would-be politicians to try to

dismantle it.

This reformist bent diverted the movement from a collision course with

authority. The values of direct democracy suppressed a more radical

conflict that had been brewing, as seen in the riots during May Day, the

general strikes, and so on. And it is that conflict which serves as a

laboratory, as a cauldron for revolution. By limiting the conflict, the

movement for democracy put a handicap on our collective learning process

and robbed us of the experiences that might have offered a glimpse of a

revolutionary horizon, one without rulers, without exploitation, without

domination.

The reformist promises of the would-be leaders achieved something else.

By redirecting attention to the question of the bail-outs, public funds,

government corruption, and so on, they distracted people from the vital

possibility of responding to austerity on the terrain of daily life,

with the collective self-organization of our needs. And because no

reform was achieved through the assemblies, most people experienced them

as failures. Interesting and inspiring, but failures nonetheless. Surely

the pragmatists were right in saying that self-organization on the scale

of society is an idealistic utopia.

This bait-and-switch blinded many people to the advances that the

assemblies did achieve. They constituted an important first step—meeting

one another, starting the great social conversation—towards the

self-organization of life. And they served as a tool to increase our

power, our ability to take over public space and transform it into

communal space. In the struggle for our lives, this is a huge victory.

But the thinking behind direct democracy does not propose putting power

back in our hands on any more than a symbolic, formalistic level,

because for self-government to work, power must remain centralized,

alienated.

We can blame democracy and its naïve proponents for selling out this

stillborn revolution, for failing to realize, after so many similar

failures before them, that revolution is never pragmatic or cautious,

that it must carried beyond our horizons into the country of the

unpredictable, the uncertain, the furthest bounds of our imagination, or

it will die.

But we were not passive spectators to this failure. I think that on the

whole, we—here I simply refer to myself and the friends I was in closest

contact with in those days—quickly learned how to keep would-be

politicians from taking over or centralizing the new assemblies. Or in

the case of the Plaça Catalunya assembly, which quickly became too

massive to function in an empowering way, we learned how to make its

failings evident and how to draw out the potential of other spaces of

organization and encounter. Often, this meant opposing the model of the

centralized assembly based on unitary decision-making with our own model

based on difference, on plurality, on multiple pathways of

decision-making, and on total freedom of action, meaning that anyone

could do what they wanted without permission from an assembly, as long

as we cultivated mutual respect so that the inevitable conflicts between

the different currents of activity were constructive rather than fatal.

What we did not learn how to do, I now see in hindsight, was to launch

proposals that a large part of the assembly could get excited by and

participate in; proposals arising from a radical analysis; proposals for

solutions to austerity based in direct action and the immediate

self-organization of our needs, outside and against the impositions of

capitalism.

As the aforementioned text argues, true, it is not our responsibility as

anarchists to come up with solutions for the rest of society, but if we

ourselves are not capable of figuring out how to use heterogeneous

assemblies to advance anti-authoritarian projects based on mutual aid in

response to people’s real needs, how can we expect anyone else to do so?

It is in this sense that the assemblies ended up being useless. No one

dared take the step of using them to fulfill our collective needs.

Capitalism and democratic government were waiting, as always, to step in

and offer their own solutions.

This failure could be the subject for an entire book, or more

appropriately, for a collective learning process involving thousands of

dreamers and revolutionaries and spanning generations. In conclusion, as

a simple gesture to point out other ways forward from this impasse, I

will mention two components I found lacking: imagination and skills.

Imagination. The capacity to create imaginaries: visions of other worlds

in which our desires and projections can reside, or even thrive, at

times when capitalism permits no autonomous space in which communal

relations might develop. It is no coincidence that today’s revolutionary

movements lack imaginaries of other worlds, nor that a great part of

capitalist production supplants imagination among its consumers,

offering imaginaries that become more elaborate every day, more visually

stimulating, more interactive, so that people no longer have to imagine

anything for themselves because a thousand worlds and fantasies already

come prepackaged. All the old fantasies that used to set us dreaming

have now been fixed in Hollywood productions, with convincing actors,

fully depicted terrains, and emotive soundtracks. Nothing is left for us

to recreate, only to consume.

In the current marketplace of ideas, it seems that the only imaginaries

that describe our future are apocalypses or the science fiction

colonization of outer space. Incidentally, the latter is the final

frontier for capitalist expansion, now that this planet is rapidly

getting used up, and the former is the only alternative capitalism is

willing to concede outside of its dominion. We are being encouraged to

imagine ourselves in the only worlds that can be conceived from within

the capitalist perspective.

The revolutionaries of a hundred years ago continuously dreamed and

schemed of a world without the State and without capitalism. Some of

them made the mistake of turning their dreams into blueprints, dogmatic

guidelines that in practice functioned as yardsticks by which to measure

deviance. But today we face a much greater problem: the absence of

revolutionary imaginaries and the near total atrophy of the imagination

in ourselves and in the rest of society. And the imagination is the most

revolutionary organ in our body, because it is the only one capable of

creating new worlds, of travelling outside capitalism and state

authority, of enabling us to surpass the limits of insurrection that

have become so evident in these last years.

Today, I know very few people who can imagine what anarchy might look

like. The uncertainty is not the problem. As I hinted earlier,

uncertainty is one of the fundamentals of chaotic organization, and it

is only the authoritarian neurosis of states that obliges us to impose

certainty on an ever shifting reality. The problem is that this lack of

imagination constitutes an absence from the world. A vital part of

ourselves is no longer there, as it used to be, on the cusp of the

horizon, on the threshold between dark and light, discerning,

modulating, and greeting each new character that comes into our lives.

The world of domination no longer has to contend with our Worlds Turned

Upside Down, the various forms of heaven and reward promised by the

authorities no longer have to bear the ridicule of our Big Rock Candy

Mountains, and the great shadows cast by the structures of control no

longer contain a thousand possibilities of all the things we could build

upon their ruins; now they are only shadows, empty and obscure.

Our prospects, however, are not irremediably bleak. Imagination can

always be renewed and reinvigorated, though we must emphasize the

radical importance of this work if people are once more to create,

share, and discuss new possible worlds or profound transformations of

this one. I would argue that this task is even more important than

counter-information. Someone who desires revolution can always educate

herself, but someone who cannot even conceive a transformation will be

impervious to the best-documented arguments.

Skills. Complementary to our lack of imagination is a lack of skills,

though not so complete as the former. Since World War II, deskilling has

been an essential feature of capitalism. The skills we need to survive

in the capitalist marketplace are completely redundant, utterly useless

for survival in any other mode. Without the skills to build, to heal, to

fix, to transform, to feed, mutual aid and self-organization cannot be

anything more than superficial, hollow slogans. What are we organizing?

Just another meeting, another protest? What sort of aid are we

mutualizing? Sharing our misery, sharing the garbage that capitalism

hasn’t yet figured out how to commercialize?

Fortunately, some people still know how to heal, how to tend, how to

feed, how to build, and more people are starting to learn. Yet on the

whole, these are not treated as revolutionary activities, nor are they

deployed in a revolutionary way. Anyone can learn natural therapies or

gardening and turn it into a business, and capitalism will happily

oblige such a limited reskilling—as long as there are enough wealthy

consumers to serve as patrons.

It is only when these skills are put at the service of a revolutionary

imagination and a collective antagonism towards the dominant

institutions that the possibility of creating a new world arises.

Simultaneously, we must let our imaginaries change and grow as they come

in contact with our constructive skills and the antagonism we cultivate.

And the practices of negation, sabotage, and collective self-defense

that have been learned in that space of antagonism must be put at the

service of our constructive projects and our imaginaries, rather than

masquerading as the frontline or the only serious element of struggle.

The regeneration of democracy, here and elsewhere, has given a new lease

on life to the structures of domination that so many people were losing

faith in. Grim futures loom, and if anything we are only getting further

away from any possibility of revolution. But the chaotic reality of the

universe offers us a promise: nothing is predictable, no future is

written, and the most rigid structures are broken, ridiculed, and

forgotten in the wild, rushing river of time.

Seemingly impervious orders crumble and new forms of life emerge. We

have every reason to learn from our mistakes, renew our conviction in

the theories that events have confirmed, and once again offer an

invitation to any who would partake in this dreamer’s quest for total

freedom. The easy solutions and false promises offered by the

self-styled pragmatists—some of them sincere, others hungering for

power— will only lead us into a defeat that we have suffered too many

times before. People will learn to recognize this, if we don’t let the

memory fade.