OWS Now What? Insight from Spain's Indignados.

http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/day-after.html



In his famous speech at Occupy Wall Street, Slavoj Žižek offered the people in attendance (and curious internet users around the world) an important warning in the form of friendly advice. “Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We’re having a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?” For the indignados of the 15-M movement in Spain, the general election results of November 20th marked the start of the metaphorical day after.

That the right-wing Partido Popular would take an absolute majority of the government with only a minor increase in votes due to the spectacular disintegration of popular support for the outgoing Partido Socialista was no surprise to anyone, especially the indignados. What may have surprised some, however, is the relatively low intensity of mobilizations since the right wing took office and, slowly but steadily, announced that they would implement the same neoliberal policies and violent austerity imposed by technocratic regimes in Greece and Italy. As Amador Fernández-Savater recently put it, the questions on a lot of peoples’ minds seem to be, “Where are all those people who occupied the plazas and neighbourhood assemblies during the spring? Have they become disenchanted with the movement? Are they incapable of making lasting compromises? Are they resigned to their fates?“

Fernández-Savater doesn’t think so. “With no study in hand and generalizing simply based on the people I know personally and my own observations of myself, I think that, in general, people have gone on with their lives… But saying that they’ve gone on with their lives is a bad expression. For once you’ve gone through the plazas, you don’t leave the same, nor do you go back to the same life. Paradoxically, you come back to a new life: touched, crossed, affected by 15-M.“ And as he so eloquently puts it, 15-M is no mere social organization, but “a new social climate“. But how does a social climate organize itself? What new possibilities have revealed themselves after months of self-management, cooperative civil disobedience and massive mobilization, and what remains to be done?

Over time, the wave of mobilizations that first hit the shores of the Mediterranean and extended outwards over the course of 2011 has overcome its initial, expressive phase. This phase managed to substitute the dominant narrative with our own. We now know that the problem is not some mysterious technical failure we call a crisis but the intentional crimes of a cleptocracy. This distinction is crucial: while the first suggests a management dilemma that opposes left- and right-wing approaches to the crisis, the second draws a line between the 1% who abuse power in order to steal from the people and those who refuse to consent and choose to resist in the name of the other 99%.