In some 80 cities in spain, over one million people protested the latest government budget cuts. Called by the principal labour unions of the country, minority unions, social movements and 15M joined the protest as a "critical bloc", to distinguish themselves from the policies and demands of the two larger unions (UGT and CCOO).
For details, see: Periodico Diagonal, Kaos en la red, Kaos en la red (photos and video), Roarmag, Tercera información, elpais (photos)
This summer, the Québec student union CLASSE (La Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale) sets out across the province to share/explain to as many as possible the reasons for, the goals and hopes, of the student movement …
“…the demand for the eruption of the marvellous into the ordinary will become the most ringing, poignant & tumultuous of all political demands …”
Hakim Bey, Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy
The politics of the marvellous, what to make of it? In our times of resource calculation, utility, nothing would seem more pointless and foreign. And yet it perhaps summarises Bey´s anarchism like few other ideas, he who would defend poetic terrorism, amour fou, art sabotage, organising a strike in school or the workplace “on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty”.
Between the coal miners’ strike and protests, spontaneous and organised, against the spanish government’s most recent efforts to reduce spending (increase in sales tax, reduction in the salaries of civil servants, reduction in unemployment insurance, and the like, adding up to a 65,000 million Euro cut, over a period of two years) (el pais), and the ongoing march of the unemployed on Madrid, to arrive this 21st, one may be forgiven for believing that the country is on the verge of a revolution.
“We do not struggle as working class, we struggle against being working class … . Our struggle is not the struggle of labour: it is the struggle against labour. …There is nothing good about being members of the working class, about being ordered, commanded, separated from our product and our process of production. Struggle arises not from the fact that we are working class but from the fact that we-are-and-are-not working class, that we exist against-and-beyond being working class …”
John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power
The arrival of the coal miners in Madrid on the 10th of July was to be followed on the 11th with a protest march on the Ministry of Industry in the morning and latter in the evening by a solidarity march from Atocha square to Peurta del Sol. What would in fact transpire were police beatings, shootings, arrests of protesters and anyone else who happened to be about (at least a hundred people wounded and hundreds more arrested), all in the name of order, normality.
The spanish state/police, in dealing with the miners' strike, does not limit itself to confronting the miners, but also their families in their neighbourhoods and in their homes. The miners' have lost their fear and it is the task of the police to reinstate it. As the miners enter Madrid, each will know that the struggle will not end tomorrow and that it is a struggle that will have to be decided, fought, by everyone and everywhere.
On the 25th of April, building number 94, São Lázaro Street, in Lisbon was okupied. The okupation was brought to an end on the 31st of May, by order of the city government. Dozens of municipal police were mobilised for the effort, and even more riot police were called in the put an end to a protest march against the original police intervention. Thousands of buildings sit empty in the city Lisbon, unused and rotting, while the homeless population increases daily.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", Marx and Engels wrote in 1848, a truth that continues to resonate to our own day, whether in the Asturias or elsewhere. The coal miners' strike of spain is but only a recent example among many from our past and present. But the courage with which the miners have confronted the state, through protests, okupations, blockades, is inspiring. However corrupt the union leadership of the miners has been over the years, however problematic a blind defence of coal mining that some defend is, however limited a politics is which begs from the state, the miners fight is a fight for dignity, the dignity of not being treated as a simply valueless, no longer exploitable resource. Their response is the first step towards something greater, a general challenge to capitalism itself …
"In a world which really is topsy -turvy, the true is a moment of the false."
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
One of the remarkable features of 15M spain is the okupation/proliferation of media, as both a source of counter-information, but also of creation. In our madness, it is not sufficient to speak the truth … one must make it …
Governing for freedom: Werner Bonefeld on the Bourgeois State
Werner Bonefeld’s work on the role of the state in the creation of a liberal economic order, that is, capitalism, is of great value. Often understood as a simple tool of the bourgeoisie, anti-capitalist politics is then conceived of as either aiming to change how the tool is employed or at its’ the appropriation. But should by contrast the state be conceived as an intrinsic part of capitalism (such that it makes sense to speak of a bourgeois state), then it is not a mere tool, but rather that which makes it possible for capitalism to exist. In sum, the state is an active and constant agency that creates the moral and legal conditions for the individual competition for property that defines capitalism. It is the destroyer of the commons and of the proletariat; the alternative to capitalism is thus finally a call for the destruction of private property, wage labour, and the capitalist state.
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