THE
ROVING EYE The Arab spring conquers
Iberia By Pepe Escobar
But to live outside the law you must be
honest Bob Dylan, Absolutely
Sweet Marie
"No one expects the
#spanishrevolution." That's one of the signs in
Madrid's iconic - and occupied - Puerta del Sol
Square; Monty Python revised for the age of
Twitter.
"I was in Paris in May '68 and
I'm very emotional. I'm 72 years old." That's one
of the signs in Barcelona's iconic - and occupied
- Plaza Catalunya. The barricades revised as a
Gandhian sit-in.
The exhilarating northern
African winds of the great 2011 Arab revolt/spring
have crossed the Mediterranean and hit Iberia with a
vengeance. In an
unprecedented social rebellion, the Generation Y
in Spain is forcefully protesting - among other
things - the stinging economic crisis; mass
unemployment at a staggering 45% among less than
30-year-olds and the ossified Spanish political
system that treats the citizen as a mere consumer.
This citizens' movement is issuing
petitions that get five signatures per second; it
can be followed on Twitter (#spanishrevolution);
streaming live from Puerta del Sol at Soltv.tv; to
see its reach, click here.
Reverberations are being felt all across Spain and
word-wide - from Los Angeles to Sydney. A
mini-French revolution started at the Bastille in
Paris. Italians are planning their revolutions
from Rome and Milan to Florence and Bari.
Outraged of the world, unite They call themselves los indignados -
"the outraged". Puerta del Sol is their Tahrir
Square, a self-sufficient village complete with
working groups, mobile first-aid clinic, and
volunteers taking care of everything from cleaning
to keeping an Internet signal. The May 15 movement
- or 15-M, as it's known in Spain - was born as a
demonstration by university students which
spontaneously morphed into an open-ended sit-in
meant to "contaminate" Spain via Facebook and
Twitter and thus turn it into a crucial social
bridge between Northern Africa and Europe.
They were only 40 people at the beginning.
Now there are tens of thousands in over 50 Spanish
cities - and counting. Soon there could be
millions. Crucially, this is without the support
of any political party or institution, trade union
or mass media (in Spain, totally exposed to
ridicule by political power). That's extraordinary
in a country not exactly known by its tradition of
dissent or the power of citizen organization.
The outraged are pacifists, apolitical and
altruists. This is not only about the unemployed,
"no future" youth - but an inter-generational
phenomenon, with a middle-class crossover. This
full stop to Spanish inertia - as in the sign "the
French and the Greek fight while the Spanish win
on soccer" - implies a profound rejection of the
enormous abyss between the political class and the
population, just like in the rest of Europe (Greek
and Icelandic flags are seen side-by-side with the
Egyptian flag.)
The outraged want citizens
to regain their voices - as in a participative
democracy embodied by neighborhood associations,
and in favor of the right to vote for immigrants.
Practically, they want a reform of the Spanish
electoral law; more popular say on public budgets;
political and fiscal reform; increased taxes for
higher incomes; a higher minimum wage; and more
control over big banking and financial capitalism.
Early this year, students in London
protested en-masse against the rise in university
tuition costs. The potential for protest is huge
all across Europe. In Mediterranean Europe, the
lack of prospects is absolutely bleak - from
Generation Y to unemployed thirty-somethings
stacked with diplomas. Even though the context is
markedly different - in Northern Africa the fight
is against dictatorships - the Arab Spring has
shown young Europeans that mobilized citizens are
able to fight for more social justice.
The
Spanish left has tried to co-opt the movement.
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodrํguez Zapatero -
badly bruised by these past Sunday elections,
obviously boycotted by 15-M - said they must be
listened to. The right, predictably, privileges a
Hosni Mubarak approach, even asking the Ministry
of Interior to go Medieval, as the former Egyptian
president did. Right-wing media accuse the
outraged of being communists, anti-system, urban
guerrillas and having relations with the Basque
separatists from ETA. The only thing missing was
an al-Qaeda connection.
The outraged
respond they are not anti-system; "it's the system
that it's against us." Their original manifesto
condemned the Spanish political class as a whole,
plus corporate media, as allies to financial
capital; those that have caused and are benefiting
from the economic crisis. The outraged
J'accuse includes the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, the European Union, financial risk
agencies and the World Bank.
The Spanish
economy is in fact being controlled by the IMF.
Whether or not he was a reformer, the IMF under
disgraced Dominique Strauss-Kahn's unleashed major
social devastation over Spain, Greece and
Portugal. It's not only the unemployment rate of
45% for under-30-year-olds in Spain; it's pensions
and wages reduced by 15%. The IMF is leading the
way for the economies of southern Europe to, in a
nutshell, regress.
It's as if the 15-M
movement had been electrified by that famous
dictum by Polish Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg -
according to which capitalism is unredeemable in
its antagonism to true democracy. The record shows
that's exactly what's happening in the
industrialized North as well as in the global
South.
The new 1968 So this
goes way beyond a student revolt. It's a revolt
that lays bare a profound ethical crisis
convulsing a whole society. And it goes way beyond
the economy; this is a movement seriously
inquiring over the place of human beings in
turbo-capitalist society.
No wonder baby
boomers - the parents of Generation Y - cannot but
be reminded of the late, great German philosopher
Herbert Marcuse. Compared with this breath of
fresh air amid the asphyxiating social and
economic landscape in Spain and great swathes of
Europe, how not be reminded of Marcuse in a
conference in Vancouver in 1969, talking about a
worldwide student rebellion.
Marcuse then
evoked how French existentialist philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre was asked the same question - why
these rebellions everywhere? Sartre said the
answer was very simple - no sophisticated
reasoning necessary. Young people were rebelling
because they were asphyxiated. Marcuse always
maintained this was the best explanation for this
rebel yell denouncing a structural crisis of
capitalism.
Marcuse was an ultra-sharp
analyst of the degrading of culture as a form of
repression, and the necessity of a critical elite
capable of smashing the totalitarian opium of
consumer culture (the outraged are also performing
this role).
Marcuse identified the French
and the American 1968 as a total protest against
specific ills, but at the same time a protest
against a total system of values, a total system
of objectives. Young people didn't want to keep
enduring the culture of established society; they
refuted not only economic conditions and political
institutions but also a rotten, global system of
values. In 1968, they were realists; they
were demanding the impossible. Today, one of their
signs read, "If you don't let us dream, we won't
let you sleep."
Bob Dylan turns 70 this
Tuesday. In Bob We Trust; he won't tell us, but
deep in his heart and mind he knows where los
indignados are coming from. If, as he wrote in
Absolutely Sweet Marie, to live outside the
law you must be honest, los indignados
couldn't be more honest themselves, because they
refuse to live under this law that is in fact
killing them as well as most of us.
That's
why it feels so great to be stuck inside of Madrid
with the Cairo blues again.
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