[Reader-list] Notes from Madrid

[Jeebesh]

dear all, here is an extensive set of writings from madrid. the surge  
is very deep. jeebesh
-------------
May 20, 2011
Notes from Madrid

A friend sent this note and the texts below it.
its an amazing moment in madrid. i don’t have my head about me to  
write anything right now, so i’ve quickly translated a few short texts  
coming out of these days in order to share a little bit of the  
atmosphere, some of the debates. i’m afraid they’re not very  
descriptive for those who are not here in the midst of all this and  
might need some background, but they’ll do for now, to get some sense…  
pass them along.

this is very exciting. who knows where it will all go, but it is  
certainly amazing, a sense of something culminating and something  
beginning. the whole country is freaking out. the press in english is  
either ignoring this or saying silly irrelevant things.

Notes from #acampadasol (1)

Amador Fernández Savater

A friend told me that the Greek historian Herodotus summarized his  
method in the following way: “I write down everything I don’t  
understand.” That is to say, Herodotus took note of what remained to  
be thought about, he wrote it down so it wouldn’t get lost. In these  
“notes from the camp” I have proposed to do the same, take note of  
what I don’t understand: the details, the scenes, the situations at  
acampadasol which ask questions of me. But also of the things which  
amaze me about what is happening and that I feel resonate in this new  
thinking+sensitivity about the political which some friends and I have  
been exploring since March 11th, 2004. I can only link myself with  
what is happening through this fragmentary writing, the notes jotted  
down in the notebook I always carry.

“The key is in Sol”

A friend says to me, “Now its not a matter of taking the streets, it’s  
a matter of creating the square.” She says this as if she’s pointing  
out a decisive difference. We have to understand it.

What do we have in common, those of us who are in the square? Not a  
specific demand, more like the sharing of a problem. The problem is  
representation. We didn’t want the Sinde Law [against downloading of  
copyrighted material] and the politicians imposed it. We don’t want  
that those who have the least pay for the crisis, but this is what is  
happening. People should rule, representation should be  
representative. That is why “The call it democracy but its not” and  
“they don’t represent us” and are the two hit slogans here. Beyond  
that, an abyss. I wander around Sol and see three posters in a row:  
“Self-management”, “Reform the electoral laws”, “We don’t want corrupt  
politicians, we want efficient managers”.

Another friend: “Its like everyone is in love, look what smiles”

 From the first day I was very impressed with the seriousness which  
runs throughout the camp, the extremely high degree of maturity and  
organization. There is abundant food and coffee (much of this donated  
by neighbors of Madrid). Cleaning is done with care and we are  
continually reminded that “this is not a party.” On Thursday there  
were a couple of play areas for children with cardboard floors and  
lots of kids playing and painting. In the groups and the commissions  
which are meeting all over the place there are astonishing levels of  
listening, as if it were clear to all that it is less important what  
each one brings with him or her than what we can create together.  
“Here a person can live!” says someone near me. The collective effort  
to take care of the space builds during a few days a little habitable  
world with room for all of us. It is what I read about Tahrir a few  
months ago.

“Don’t vote, Twitter”

It seems that in the plaza in the center of Sol, where the working- 
groups operate, money is not accepted. Any collaboration or donation  
is welcome, but not money. Is this an effort to ward off any  
possibility of corruption? It might be, the movement knows very well  
that its stregth depends on radically distancing itself from anything  
related shamed politics.

“The democracy we want is already the organization of the square itself”

Blessed be those who decided not to budge from Sol after the  
demonstration. I thought it was planned by those who called for the  
demonstration, but I’ve learned that that was not so. I think a lot  
about this gesture. It is one of those incredible gestures that make  
things happen against all predictions. I received a text message with  
the news at one o’clock in the morning and didn’t pay any attention.  
“It won’t work,” I thought. I should have a look at this cynicism.  
Because it is ingenuity which changes things.

“I like it when you vote, you’re like, absent”

Debate with an activist friend. He says the language being used  
irritates him. He finds it very poor: “democracy,” “citizenship,” etc.  
I argue with him: ever since “no to the war” it has been this kind of  
“flat” statements which open up spaces in which we all fit, in which  
things really move. Its true that I think “you’re not going to have a  
house in your whole fucking life” is a stronger slogan that “we are  
not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers.” But today it  
seems clear that words are powerful not so much for what they say as  
for who says them and from where.

“Without housing there’s no living”

All the time I have this intense interior sensation: I have already  
lived some part of this. In the “no to the war”, on March 13th, in “V  
de Vivienda”… There are many, many resonances: all were movements  
which didn’t find their strength in an ideology or a program but  
rather a first person involvement which doesn’t make sense in the left/ 
right dichotomy, which rather try to escape from it in order to  
interpelate everyone, anyone. The base their strength precisely in the  
creation of a “we” which is open and inclusive, which doesn’t announce  
another world possible but which activate in order that this one world  
which does exist and which we share doesn’t come undone… It seems  
clear to me that May 15th has to do with V de Vivienda, March 13th,  
the “no to the war” but… how? What does it pick up from those, what  
new things does it propose we think about? What does all this mean for  
the future?

A boy, under 20, in the square at 3am with a poster stuck to his  
chest: “respect”

Stereotypes are a strategy for governing. The put a label on those who  
protest (“anti-system”, for example) and that way separates them from  
the rest, as if they had nothing in common. The movement is very  
intelligent about this: “we are not anti-system, the system is anti- 
us.” Fantastic.

Everything which is divisive remains outside the square: from big  
organizations to violence.

A friend summarizes the situation like this: “Democracy 2.0 has killed  
the Culture of the Transition.”

A discussion in a facebook chat:

- i still have the sense, kind of old fashioned, that twitter is not  
what happens but a way of telling about what happens

- and to organize it, no?

- or, in other words, tw is only interesting in composition with  
something else

- i agree

- but sol+twitter is interesting

- the plus of the potency of bodies

* and an open situation

———————-

IT’S NOT JUST INDIGNATION. Inventing new ways of doing politics.

Montserrat Galcerán

It’s true that we’re indignant. But not just that. If it were just  
indignation that brought us together in the streets and squares of our  
cities, the movement would have less force. Once the moment of  
excitement had passed we would have gone home. That is not what is  
happening. After the demonstrations, groups – some larger, some  
smaller – have camped in the squares and after being evicted, have  
returned again and again. This shows a will to be heard which goes far  
beyond mere indignation, a will which is opening up new means of doing  
politics on the basis of the idea that “politics” is not only nor  
principally a profession – the “business” of the so-called political  
class – but rather that politics is the only way we have to resolve  
problems collectively. The capture of politics by those professionals  
who have turned it into their exclusive terrain, reducing it to a  
matter of representation and exercising it against the interests of a  
large part of the population, takes out of our hands those tools  
without which we are doomed to savage competition amongst ourselves,  
war between the poor.

The increasing intensity of the crisis has made this model of politics  
blow up. It has shown clearly that the current politicians use the  
legitimacy which the voting box grants them in order to make citizens  
ever more impotent against the demands and requirements of a global  
capitalist class which the politicians either do not know how to or do  
not want to tame. No one said things were easy. What we are saying is  
that we need the tools of politics, of a new kind of politics, in  
order to find solutions to the current situation.

The partial movements that have emerged recently give us hints in this  
direction. All of them, from platforms like “Victims of Mortgages”,  
“Real Democracy Now”, “Youth with no Future”, to the offices of social  
rights, the social centers, and the assemblies of the unemployed as  
well as many others have shown a tremendous capacity to oppose the  
measures imposed by the public administration, to construct partial  
alternatives and to attempt to disrupt the privatization measures and  
impoverishment which are underway.

So here we have a social Left which does not coincide with the  
political “Left.” The latter has been absorbed by economic elites to  
such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish between the  
recommendations of the big business groups and the decisions of the  
politicians. The narrow filter of party democracy impedes meaningful  
participation. This is why it is now time to get our imagination  
rolling and seek new forms of articulation which reinvent the  
political community, putting our collective intelligence to the test.  
The internet networks are at work; they give shape to the new virtual  
political space. But we need more: popular citizen assemblies, open  
encounters, public discussions, institutions which supervise and  
control the political parties… it is our future, this is our moment.

———————

Seven key words on the Madrid-Sol experience, 15M

Guillermo Kaejane

“I don’t want a new iPad, I want a new life” (graffiti painted during  
15 May mobilization)

1- Time. Time accelerates. The senses are agitated. Fear paralyzes the  
senses, vertigo makes them acute. The permanent camp in Sol is pure  
vertigo. Hours pass rapidly between one gathering and the next, but  
then time slows down. The nights are loooong. Time contracts and  
expands, moved by a sea of people (principally but not only young  
people). It feels like we’ve been here for years, and it hasn’t been  
more than three days.

A revolt is real when it modifies space-time.

The space-time created in the last days has one single obsession:  
continuity. Paradoxically, this is only possible to maintain through  
intermittancy. Through a physical entering-and-leaving of Sol. Keep  
the experience alive even though you are not present. For this reason  
(and so many others) the camp at Sol cannot be understood without the  
social networks. The continuity of the experience is achieved by  
deterritorializing it. I am in Sol even though I am at home. I am in  
Sol because I keep talking about it, because I can’t concentrate on my  
work, because I can’t get it out of my head. And when I can, I go  
there. I go running there, and again join in the “social connector”,  
so others can go rest.

The classic conceptualization of social revolts is a scenario in which  
continuity is linked to accumulation of force. If we continue longer,  
there will be more of us. If we hold out, the tyrants will fall. This  
mystification has something to do with a simplification of what  
happened in Egypt and other Arab countries. Experiences which we heard  
about towards the end of their processes, not at their beginnings, not  
through the years of visibility and invisibility, failed experiments,  
dead ends and turning back.

What is happening these days is not the end, it is not the decisive  
moment, it is just the start.

2. Communication. Communication is a form of political organization.  
People become the media. Social networks are not the means so much as  
the expressive and organizational terrain. Common sense is woven in  
the form of flux and of memes. From the logic of shared trust on  
facebook to the logic of live recounting via twitter.

A slogan circulates, multiplying. With no official versions, rumours  
blaze. The traditional media bump up against a dadaist cacaphony which  
is impossible to interpret. They grab hold of what they can, and from  
there project their own ideas.

The self-narration of the process is not, for the moment, going  
through viral streaming but rather then need to tell about it, to  
narrate what we are living, the “I was there!” becomes more intense.

The media’s obsession with broadcasting demonstrations “from inside”  
as if from the perspective of a participant, betrays their anxiety  
about their own loss of centrality. Experts and analysts show how  
incapable they are to think with their own heads, and speak (both on  
the left and the right) in one voice. The sensation for the spectator  
who is living the experience is like that of those fans of Lost who  
watched television commentators try to make sense of the series’  
ending: a mixture of stupor, shame and giggles.

3. The powers. In these moments there is an enormous expressive  
capacity in which anyone who is gathered in a group feels that they  
are the representation of everything. The sensation of empowerment is  
so great that one comes to believe that what each one of us is doing  
is representing all the others. It is a reasonable logic, and  
difficult to get rid of, but it is important to deactivate it. The  
power of this movement comes from its unrepresentability. They don’t  
represent us, as the slogan goes… because they can’t.

As in any dispersed network, there is a multitude of different centers  
of which none is “the center” but rather each is a repeater, receiving  
and sending out proposals and meanings. Creativity is of the essence.  
The hegemony of who is at the helm in any given moment (The ‘Real  
Democracy Now’ platform? The assemblies in the square? The commissions  
within the assemblies? Twitter? Me and my friends?) is changing all  
the time.

The assemblies are not a space in which one meaning is being defined  
but rather a collective catharsis. An enormous desire to talk and talk  
and talk. Memorized language (“The people united will never be  
divided”) mixes with new forms of expression (“Error 404- system  
failure”, “Downloading democracy”, “Its not a crisis it’s a rip-off”. )

On an institutional level craziness reigns. In 72 hours we have seen  
absolutely the entire political class go from “this is not happening”  
to “this is not important” to “this is dangerous” and in the last few  
hours, “we are you!”. Again, grotesque. The impossibility of framing  
the mobilization in the clear “left-right” terms which have been the  
foundation of social consensus since the Transition [to democracy  
after Franco] begins to reveal a new logic of conflict: “above and  
below.”

Unable to control what is happening, the mechanism of control over the  
movement is a simple question, a constant question: “So, what do you  
propose?”

4. Proposals.

The demand for proposals is a mechanism of control. A way of filling  
the vacuum of the unrepresentable. A mechanism not exclusive to the  
media or the political class, as some of the expressions of the  
movement itself participate in it. Having a response means you can  
pigeonhole the rebels, say “Ah, they are utopic” or “Oh, they are  
populists” or “Oy, they are leftists” or “Ay, what they want is  
impossible” or “Ha, how naïve” or “Nah, they’re not radicals” or “Hm,  
they say a few reasonable things…”

Nonetheless, there is silence. Or something very much like silence,  
which is a cacaphony of apparently contradictory signs.

As much as it may cause us anguish, perhaps a good point of departure  
might be to say: “Unlike you who pretend to know everything, we don’t  
know yet”. Those who want to get somewhere specific are in a hurry.  
This is not the case.

In the square, the discussion itself is more important than its  
conclusion. The responsibility is to defend and extend this. Continue  
discussing. Continue talking. Trust the same common sense which has  
brought thousands of people into the street for days. So far, its not  
going badly.

5. Real Democracy Now.

This logo, this slogan which is present throughout the mobilization  
and forms one of its constituitive parts and which therefore the media  
and the political class have decided to pretty much ignore. But it is  
fairly easy: “democracy”, but not any old democracy, a real one. The  
real is that which is opposed to the simulated. This means that the  
logo (or one of the logos) under which this movement is being built  
says that the thing which institutional power calls “democracy” is a  
lie. And it demands the construction of something different that  
breaks with the simulacrum. But it doesn’t pose this problem in  
distant, utopic terms. We want it now. “Now” means urgency, “now”  
means nerviness, “now” means we have to be able to touch it, that it  
has to be in every part of our lives, that it is not just words but  
construction. That it doesn’t exist and therefore has to be made.

6. And… tomorrow?

It is very difficult to think about tomorrow when you are wrapped up  
in the events of today. It is even more difficult because the rhetoric  
of the political class has always held forth on ‘tomorrow’. In this  
movement, tomorrow is unthinkable for the moment. There is only now.

For institutional power, the elections on Sunday the 22nd of May are a  
moment to recuperate legitimacy. A moment to restitute governability.  
A moment to put their feet down and redraw the map of the possible.

The elections has functioned for the moment as a diffuse element,  
perhaps unifying at a symbolic level. But in the camp, in the  
meetings, etc. the words we most hear are “connect”, “extend”,  
“construct”.

The 23rd of May will begin to resolve this question, as one graffiti  
said.

“I don’t want a new iPad, I want a new life”

PS: Number 7. Joy, joy, joy

————————–

It’s the democracy, stupid. May 15th, from indignation to hope

Emmanuel Rodríguez and Tomás Herreros

About May 15th we might say that it marks an important point of  
inflection: from the networks to the street, from the conversations at  
home and in the street to mobilization, but above all, from  
indignation to hope. Dozens of thousands of people, brought together  
through the web, ordinary citizens, have taken the streets in a vivid  
demand, loaded with hope: a demand for real democracy, not a democracy  
at the service of big interests, but of people. An unremitting  
critique of the political class which, since the beginning of the  
crisis, has governed with its back to the people, following the  
dictates of the euphemistically named “markets”.

In the coming weeks and months we will see how this demand takes form,  
and how the slogan “real democracy now” extends. Everything indicates  
that its power will crescendo. The best proof of this is how city  
squares are being taken over and camp-outs are commencing in different  
cities. The social networks boil over with support for the movement,  
and the response in the streets and squares makes this stronger yet.  
So far, and without making any predictions, we can pose a few questions.

First of all, the May 15th movement is accurate in its criticisms.  
Politics as we know it, as it is applied by the political parties  
(that is, making the weakest parts of society pay for the crisis), has  
brought a growing part of the society to the point of indignation. In  
the last few years we have watched with astonishment the multimillion  
euro bail-outs of the big banks at the same time as social cut-backs,  
aggressions against basic rights, and covered-up privatizations which  
have rapidly diminished the already scrawny Spanish welfare State. No  
one can doubt that this policy is a danger to our present and our  
immediate future. Specifically, the indignation becomes explicit when  
it comes up against the cowardice of the politicians, incapable to  
reign in the governance of finance: What happened to those promises of  
the ‘humanization of capitalism’ after the subprime crisis? What  
happened to shutting down the tax havens? What became of controlling  
the finance system? And what about taxing income from speculation? And  
what about ceasing to fiscally subsidize those who already have the  
most?

Second, the May 15th movement is much more than a call to attention  
for the so-called left. It may be (in fact it is probable) that May  
22nd, the day of local and some regional elections, the left gets a  
thrashing. In that case, it might be a prelude to what will occur in  
the general elections [next year]. What we can be sure of right now is  
that the institutional left (the political parties and big unions) is  
object of a generalized political disaffection thanks to its total  
incapacity to present new proposals in the context of the crisis. And  
there is where we find the double explanation of its electoral defeat.  
On the one hand, its policies have not been capable of escaping from a  
completely tendentious reading of the crisis itself, a reading which  
accepts – even today! – that the problem is a lack of resources. Let  
us say it loud and clear: there is no problem of scarcity, the problem  
is rooted in the extreme inequality of distribution of wealth,  
accented every day by financial discipline. Where are the infinite  
profits from the real estate bubble? And from pharaonic public works  
like the airports of Castellón and Lleida, to name just a few? Who  
profits from the gigantic problem of debt which plagues so many  
families and people? On the other hand, the left doesn’t know how to  
set aside its own protagonism and work with the emerging movements  
which demand democracy and liberty: Who doesn’t remember what Zapatero  
said when he presented the proposal for the cession of payments? Who  
served as his counterweight in this: the millions of mortgaged  
citizens or the big banking interests? And what can we say about the  
indecent Sinde Law [on intellectual property]? Whose side was he on,  
the side of those who give shape to the web or those who want to make  
it into a business, as if culture were just one more commodity? As  
long as the left is not capable of stepping aside at the service of  
citizen movements, as long as it is incapable of escaping from the  
script written for it by the financial and economic elites, proposing  
a Plan B to get out of the crisis, it will be stuck in the opposition  
indefinitely. There is not time for an extension: they must simply  
change or die as legimate social actors with the principles they claim  
to represent.

Third, the May 15th movement shows how the citizenry, far from being  
passive as so many analysts think, has shown its ability to self- 
organize and self-educate in a period of abandonment by the  
institutions and a serious crisis of political representation. The new  
generations have shown that they can create a network, creating new  
ways of “being together” without recurring to ideological clichés,  
armed with a wise pragmatism, fleeing preconceived political  
categories and the great bureaucratic apparati. We are witnessing the  
construction of “majority minorities” demanding democracy against the  
war of “all against all”, the idiot atomization proposed by  
neoliberalism; that demands social rights against the logic of  
privatization and adjustment imposed by the economic powers. And here  
it is likely that preestablished schemes don’t serve (or serve very  
little), the impossible return to the past together with the State and  
full-occupation, as preached by most of the left, from the most  
radical to the most lukewarm. Reinventing democracy requires at the  
very least new forms of distribution of wealth, citizenship for all  
irrespective of their place of origin (that is, in accord with our  
global times), the unstinting defense of the common (of environmental  
resources but also knowledge, education, internet, health) and other  
forms of self-governance of the multitude which might overcome the  
corruption of the present ones.

Fourth and last, it is obligatory to recall that the May 15th movement  
links itself to a current of demands which are taking place in various  
parts of Europe, based on a rejection of the so-called austerity  
plans. One demand, one mobilization that begins to corner the desert  
of the real, the dream of that mute and amorphous Europe to which the  
political and economic elites aspire. We’re talking about the UKUnCuts  
campaign against the policies of Cameron, the mobilization of the  
Geraçao a Rasca in Portugal or what has occurred in Iceland after the  
refusal of the citizenry to pay the financial bail-outs. And at the  
same time and perhaps most of all, it is inspired by the so-called  
“Arab Spring”, which through the democratic revolts in Egypt and Tunis  
managed to bring down their corrupt leaders.

We don’t know, obviously, what will be the final outcome of the spirit  
of May 15th. But what we can say, with total certainty, is that there  
are now at least two plans against the crisis: social cut-backs or the  
invention of a real democracy. Of the former we know the results: they  
have not only returned us to economic “normality” but they have also  
led us to “all against all” and “each man for himself.” Of the second,  
which promises a politics of absolute democracy, constituent  
democracy, we can only say that it has just begun, and that it marks  
our path. We’ll take that one.

Tens of thousands protest throughout Spain, defying government ban
By Alejandro López
21 May 2011
Tens of thousands protestors continue to occupy Madrid’s Puerta del  
Sol and have gathered in the main squares of another 162 towns and  
cities across Spain in protest over unemployment, government austerity  
measures and a political system that serves only the banks and big  
business.
The demonstration in Barcelona
Calling for “Real Democracy Now”, the protests are also known as the  
M-15 movement, the day they were first called by social network and  
internet groups, drawing a massive response from younger workers,  
students, the unemployed and broad sectors of Spanish working people.
The protests continued into their sixth day Friday in defiance of the  
Madrid Electoral Board, which banned demonstrations in the capital  
ahead of Sunday’s municipal and regional elections.
On Thursday night, Spain’s central election commission passed a  
resolution prohibiting rallies throughout the country for Saturday,  
which is designated as a pre-election “day of reflection”, and for  
Sunday, when the vote takes place for municipal and regional  
governments.
The resolution was passed by five votes in favour, four against and  
one abstention. It explicitly prohibits any demonstrations for  
Saturday, declaring that “our legislation prohibits any act of  
propaganda or electoral campaigning on the day of reflection.” As for  
Election Day itself, the board ruled that the law bans “forming groups  
susceptible to obstructing, in any way, access to the polls, as well  
as the presence in the vicinity of the polls of those likely to  
interfere with or coerce the free exercise of the right to vote.”
Other local electoral committees have followed suit, banning  
demonstrations and camps set up in Seville and Granada.
Demonstrators in Puerta del Sol, where a small tent city has been  
erected surrounded by tens of thousands of protesters, greeted the  
news of the new ban with jeers and whistles, chanting “No nos  
moverán”, or “We shall not be moved.”
The legality of the ban on demonstrations is far from clear. The  
highest court in Spain, the Constitutional Court, endorses the right  
to hold demonstrations on the day of reflection, provided that the  
influence on the electorate is “remote”. The resolution was taken  
after the High Court of Justice of Andalucía banned a demonstration  
celebrating International Women’s Day, one day before the elections in  
2010. It also declared that the “mere possibility” of infringing on  
the right to vote was not enough to suppress the right to meet and  
protest.
Those participating in the largely spontaneous May 15 Movement have  
made it clear from the outset that they are hostile to all of Spain’s  
major political parties and that they are not making “propaganda” or  
“obstructing the right to vote”, as the electoral boards claim.
Spanish law also demands that any protest be announced with ten days  
notice so that they may be officially authorized, but the protestors  
insist they have not called any demonstration, but are merely  
exercising their right of assembly guaranteed under Article 21 of the  
Spanish Constitution.
There is considerable nervousness within ruling circles that a too- 
heavy hand will only serve to inflame opposition to the government and  
the austerity measures it is imposing. The narrow vote of the Madrid  
Electoral Board itself reflects divisions within the ruling elite over  
how to react to the demonstrations. The five votes in favour came from  
the professors of Law elected by the right wing Partido Popular  
(Popular Party—PP), which currently controls the Madrid regional  
government, while those opposed and the abstention came from those  
elected by the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers Party PSOE.
The President of the Electoral Board had declared on Wednesday that  
the demonstrations were illegal, but his decision was not binding.  
Five hundred riot police were deployed on the side streets of the main  
square of Madrid, but limited themselves to demanding identity cards  
of all those going into the square and warning them that it was  
illegal. Minister of Internal Affairs Pérez Rubalcaba of the ruling  
Socialist Workers Party declared, “The police are here to resolve  
problems, not to create them”.
President José Zapatero declared, “The Minister of Justice is studying  
the resolution by the Electoral Board. We are going to see its effects  
and see what happens this Saturday. The government and the Minister of  
Internal Affairs are going to act well, with intelligence. This is  
what we want, to guarantee the rights and to respect the day of  
reflection.”
Fearful that a violent dispersal of the peaceful protest would have a  
backlash and make the movement stronger, like the demonstrations in  
Tahrir Square in Egypt, Rubalcaba and Zapatero have not yet publicly  
ordered the police to intervene.
Despite this, there are reports of police acting brutally towards  
protesters.
Miguel, an unemployed architect from Barcelona, told Britain’s Channel  
4 News that plain-clothes policemen were attacking those camped out in  
the city’s Plaza de Catalunya.
“They are wearing normal clothes, often dressed like many of the  
protesters, with protest slogans on their t-shirts, and break the  
tents up, waking people up and dragging them out of the square.
“Some of the people have said they were hit with batons when they  
refused to move.”
Real Democracy Now, the protest organisers, have said that in Madrid,  
State Security Forces acted “excessively.”
In a statement, the group said, “We condemn the brutal police  
repression and show our solidarity with those injured and the  
unreasonably detained for acts of peaceful resistance without any  
provocation, for which we demand the immediate release without charge.”
In an attempt to appease the protestors Zapatero gave an interview in  
which he insisted that the austerity measures implemented by his  
government were necessary to prevent a Greek-style bailout that would  
entail even more savage cutbacks. He likewise defended the bailout of  
the banks. “We have funded the banks, but we are charging them  
interests and fees. We have earned 3,300 million euros from the banks.  
The citizens’ money, public money, has not gone to the banks.”
In reality, Zapatero has imposed one of the most brutal austerity  
programmes in all of Europe, introducing a 15 billion euro package of  
spending cuts, including a 5 to 15 percent cuts on civil servants’  
salaries, raised the retirement age from 65 to 67, and introducing a  
new labour law reform that eliminates whatever remained of workers’  
protection. The cuts in healthcare and education by the regional  
governments come on top of this. In some cases such as Catalonia, the  
cuts represent 10 percent of last years’ budget.
Meanwhile, the official unemployment rate is over 20 percent, while  
for workers under the age of 25, it is 45 percent.
The PSOE has tried to gain influence over the latest demonstrations,  
without success. Tomás Gomez, a candidate of the PSOE in Madrid’s  
regional government elections, contacted one of the organizers to find  
out how he would be received in the main square. When organizers  
presented the proposed visit over a microphone, demonstrators booed it  
down.
The Popular Party, supported by the right wing-media, is calling for  
the immediate dispersal of all the “illegal” demonstrations. PP  
General Secretary Maria Dolores de Cospedal insisted, “The Spanish  
people have the right to ensure that the reflection day is guaranteed”.
The president of the regional government in Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre,  
went further, claiming that the PSOE is behind the demonstrations. She  
insinuated that there was a parallel with the spontaneous movement  
that erupted against the PP government after the bombings in Madrid in  
March 2004. “Both were against the right wing,” she said.
Thousands more poured into the square after the resolution was passed,  
with demonstrators chanting, “The voice of the people is not illegal”,  
“We will not pay for this crisis”, “This will not finish with the  
elections” and “Where is the left? Essentially on the right.”
There have been solidarity rallies held throughout Europe and around  
the world in support of the Spanish protesters, with some of the  
largest taking place in Paris, France, Rome and other Italian cities  
and in the Plaza del Mayo of Buenos Aires, Argentina.