The 15M movement in Spain has faced repression from the very beginning: 24 young people were arrested and beaten by police in the demonstrations organized by Democracia Real Ya on May 15 last year, which is a large part of why several dozen people decided to camp that night in Sol square, turning the demonstration into an encampment. That first night, the Legal Committee of Sol was created by lawyers and laypeople; similar groups emerged in other camps around the country in order to give legal support to the movement. This has never been an easy job, but it has only been getting harder. Continue reading…
Category Archives: Democracia Real Ya/Indignados
Spain’s general strike is also a day of action for the 99% | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Spain is about to experience huge austerity cuts that may prove explosive. On Friday Mariano Rajoy, the prime minister, is set to announce what even he describes as a “very, very austere budget” to reduce the deficit. According to El País, the EU is demanding cuts larger than those of Greece, Ireland or Portugal: “There is no comparable adjustment in [our] economic history,” says the paper.
As a result of this and recent changes to labour laws, only four months after the new conservative government took power, Spain’s two largest unions have called for a general strike on the day before the budget announcement. Continue reading…
Catalan police as protesters inside demo in Barcelona! | Take The Square
On Saturday afternoon over a hundred thousand people participated in the rally against the cuts the Catalan government. The demonstration was called by trade unions, the Catalan Social Forum, 15M movement and other groups. Continue reading…
“The pitchfork movement” – Sicily paralyzed | Take The Square
Today is the third day of protest in Sicily. The island is almost paralyzed.
In the island are protesting truckers, farmers, fishermen, craftsmen associations and merchants. Students are organizing demonstrations in solidarity, occupying roads and harbours. In Gela they close the entrance to the refinery, threating the port operations. Hundreds of trucks are at Villa San Giovanni harbour trying to ship to the big island with tons of goods (fruit vegetables and dairy supplies) will soon putrefy because the trucks cannot reach the shores of Sicily island. This stop is having a price on Sicily in terms of loss in their economy. The stocks of fuel are scarce and in many areas of the island are over, same for food, with empty shelves in supermarkets and some smaller business are already closed. People are starting to fear the food that comes from the black market. Truck inventory is escorted by the police. Continue reading…
Lisboa November 24, Who are the violents? | Take The Square
Our Platform 15 October, which is international, non-partisan and peaceful, demands the restoration of justice and truth with regard to the events of November 24th, and declares:
We witnessed and denounced the presence of police officers, who were not identified and not uniformed at the demonstration on November 24th in front of São Bento. These persons, hidden among the protesters, incited violence by words and actions, contrary to what has been stated “unequivocally” by the Minister of Internal Affairs. Read more…
The tactics of occupation: Becoming cockroach | Nomadic universality
The global occupy protest movement is proliferating by “contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes”.[1] Furthermore, it materialises and disperses in multiple ephemeral processes of transformation that construct a common for the multitude of protestors. The common produced by the global occupy movement is not a mutually shared opposition to the capitalist crisis, nor a collective identity (of the “indignados” or of the 99%), nor a consensual political project (for real, authentic democracy). The common does not even embody an identical strategy of occupying public space, but rather to a series of becomings that question established categorizations and taxonomies that normalize the production of subjectivities and the organisation of life.
More so, the common is not produced in a genealogical, linear fashion, evolving from past forms of mobilisation and protest but rather it emerges directly out of the exceptional material circumstances of crisis contagion and catastrophe that spread like an epidemic in different territorialisations.
In order to perform this argument, we will attempt to trace forms of becoming cockroach in the context of the global occupy movement. Read more…
Democracy in revolution: the Mediterranean moment | openDemocracy
By showing us the possibility of democracy in revolution, they have ignited a revolution in democracy, one that is redefining the meaning of both terms. Read more…
The road to Europe: movements and democracy | openDemocracy
Europe’s crisis is a crisis of democracy. The ‘democracy of the experts’ cannot deliver: representative democracy is incapable of channelling demands in the political system. More participatory and deliberative democracy is needed, as argued in Europe’s public spaces by the movements of ‘ indignados’. Read more…
Becoming cockroaches @Syntagma square | Nomadic universality
Since yesterday, June 28, we live like cockroaches in Syntagma square. We are sprayed continuously with chemicals by the Greek police regardless of what we do or what we say, but we persist. We leave Syntagma square for a while to catch our breath and keep on coming back. We rest a bit and return to the square. Even before the chemicals began exploding yesterday morning, we were just sitting on the pavement and the riot police stormed and arrested a person seating nearby. When we protested against the arrest, the riot police responded by arresting another passerby who was just exiting a coffee shop with a coffee in his hand. To be just standing close to Syntagma square seems dangerous and certainly suspicious. The arrests are being enacted to disperse the crowds, but we keep on moving closer to the square instead of leaving. Read more…
The Spanish protests and the need for politics and conflict | openDemocracy
The demonstrators in Madrid and other cities have declared their determination to continue the occupations of public squares and spaces for another week following Sunday’s local and regional elections, which saw heavy defeats for the ruling Socialist party. As others have noted, the occupation of public space in itself isn’t sufficient to challenge the centres of economic and political power. But the “indignados”, as they have become known, have the potential to galvanize a broader movement of resistance to neoliberalism across Spain and Europe. Read more…
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