With billions of euros in public money going to save spain's banks (and trillions to save the banks of the US, UK, Ireland and Greece, to mention but these countries), while salaries, pensions, education, health and other public services are butchered (in what is in this country and globally, one of the largest transfers of public wealth to private hands in history), reasons for protesting are not lacking. The 13th of October demonstrations are called throughout the world to challenge and work towards putting an end to this theft. (The Manifesto of the spanish protests is here. It defends a moratorium on the payment of the national debt and a citizens audit of it; the creation of a public bank under social control; redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, persecuation of tax fraud, and an end to fiscal paradises; regulation of the real-estate market to end speculation; end of recent liberalising labour reform; abrogation of EU treaties promoting the interests of business).
Imagining/Creating Autonomy: Abraham Guillén
The struggle to imagine and put into place an autonomous, self-managed society is at the heart of anarchism, and for anarchists, something that is present in any revolutionary politics, whether of the past or the present. During the spanish revolution of 1936-39, some of the most noteworthy examples of such efforts were made. One of the most important spanish writiers on the subject was Abraham Guillén (1913-1993). Guillén's activism would take him from the spanish revolution to numerous struggles in south america and his intellectual concern with autonomy, reflecting his militancy, would be expressed in work from anarchist economics to armed revolution. And with the imperative of autonomy again before us in new social movements contesting Capital and the State, it is important to return to the work of Guillén.
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