Spain, in the of 15M, has become a laboratory of radical political thought and practice. Debates and gestures resonate in multiple and proliferating communites of resistance and autonomy. What follows is but one example, but an example rich in consequences: the effort to think a politics of the commons that challenges capitalism. From the Madrilonia Collective and Periodico Diagonal, a defense of the commons (in translation) …
The state of exception is not a dictatorship, but a space devoid of law.
Giorgio Agamben
Into the Fire: The Hidden Victims of Austerity in Greece, by Guy Smallman and Kate Mara, chronicles the plight of immigrants in Greece. But the story that it tells is not just about Greece; it is the story of increasingly large parts of the worlds’ peoples being reduced to the state or status of superfluity, of excess. They are the contemporary world’s nameless, les sans papiers; a humanity stripped naked, which reveals in its very humanity, that it is disposable. Without resistance, we, the citizens, are their hell and they are our future.
As 15M approaches its second anniversary, it is an occasion to reflect on its young and yet rich history, on its present, and possible future. Far be it from us however to suggest any kind of omniscient or final judgement about the matter, as the movement(s) that comprise 15M are far too heterogeneous and changing to be summarized in a any simple political frame.
(From Take the Square/Al final de la asamblea, a celebration of two years of rebellion in spain, in the wake of 15M).
In the past two years we have completely reinvented the way we try to transform the world into a place where life does not hurt. The old demonstrations, so grey and limited, become obsolete and useless, and have given way to an infinity of possibilities. We rethought the action, the complaint, the relationships, the public, the common, and our imagination has completely overwhelmed the space of what is possible, building already new worlds inside the old structure of this one. We collect here a list of dozens of actions and constructions that we have organized during these two years, sharing all of them that brightness of the new, that smell so special that returns us the confidence in us, and announces what is to come. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.
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(Illustration by Santiago Grasso)
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. …This delusion is the love of work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. … Work ought to be forbidden and not imposed.
Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy
There is no desire for revolution, as there is no desire for power, desire to oppress or to be oppressed; but revolution, oppression, power, etc., are the actual component lines of a given assemblage.
Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues II
David Graeber has recently argued that part of the neoliberal political project involves inculcating in those governed, by whatever means, the impossibility of alternatives to the existing political-economic regime that is Capitalism. The result “is a relentless campaign against the human imagination”. Imagination, desire, individual creativity, all that was unleashed in the great revolution of 1968, these things “were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished.” (David Graeber, “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse”, The Baffler, 22).
Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of revolution …, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible … Everything is played in uncertain games, ‘front to front, back to back, back to front …’. The question of the future of the revolution is a bad question because, in so far as it is asked, there are so many people who do not become revolutionaries, and this is exactly why it is done, to impede the question of the revolutionary-becoming of people, at every level, in every place.
Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues II
In the last weeks of March, various occupations of residential buildings marked an expanding shift in the politics of occupations in spain. The brutal housing crisis of the country, with hundreds evicted daily, while hundreds of thousands of houses sit empty and while banks, the housing creditors, are saved by billions in public money, has led to a growing radicalization of the many affected by the violence of the crisis and of the social movements which have sought to give voice/organize the generalized indignation.
From the working group of 15M-Madrid, Política a Largo Plazo, comes the following reflection on the assembly as a space for horizontally and freely creating human community, a reflection on what is here is called asamblearismo. The translation from the original spanish text is ours. (The text is also posted on the Acampadasol website).
En vez de productividad, propongo vitalidad; en vez de competitividad, cooperación, y frente a esa innovación que consiste en inventar cosas para venderlas, creación.
José Luis Sampedro, Elpais (12/06/2011)
On the 9th of April, economist, novelist, essayist José Luis Sampedro died. He leaves behind him the example of a life of intellectual rigour and courage, of free and personal creativity, and of a permanent critical engagement with our world. This is our modest testimony to his passing and to his on-going presence.
Year 02: 15M’s spain
For the so many whom 15M has brought forth, for the enormous passion and creativity that this movement has engendered, for the extraordinary generosity and love that so many show as they build together, for its beauty and its freedom, we celebrate its second year. Yet not with nostalgia, not for the love of self that critics blindly see here, but with the desire to continue. Gilles Deleuze speaks of creativity as the making of spaces and times. 15M has and continues to struggle for the space-times of human autonomy, autonomies of resistance to a politics and an economy were any and all can be rendered superfluous. It is this that is celebrated and lived in spain’s new spring.
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