Spain

The “15M” Movement in Spain – it takes its name from the date it was created, May 15th – is highly important because of its unique characteristics. This article will recount the significant episodes and at each point draw lessons and perspectives for the future.

The May 15 movement in Spain (15M) initiated by Democracia Real Ya (DRY), which is backed by the ‘alternative world’  group ATTAC, has also had some offspring in France, notably in Paris, with the objective of “taking the Place de la Bastille”. In the assemblies in Paris, some ICC militants went to defend class positions and not as simple “citizens” claiming “real democracy now” in the framework of preserving the capitalist system.

A inoffensive protest was called against the new Valencian Regional Government. It asked the politicians not to be corrupt and to listen to the citizens: it was thus caught up in the folds of the illusion that the state “expresses the will of the people”. The response of the state was very salutatory: demonstrators were beaten, dragged about, and subjected to arrogant and brutal treatment: 18 wounded and 5 arrested. They were not treated as “citizens” but as subjects.

Over recent weeks the squares of the main Spanish cities have seen thousands of people coming together in assemblies where anyone who wants to can speak and can talk with confidence about the lack of a future we are faced with and what we can do about it. And they will be listened to with respect. There is discussion everywhere, in little groups, in bars, between the different generations, the young and the retired; and this has created a collective sense of excitement, of unity, creativity, reflection and discussion around the need to come together in order to understand what we can do about the “no future” capitalism offers us.

The social movement that has swept Spain since mid-May is of historical significance. The poor and the working class, especially its youth, are now reacting to the massive onslaught brought on by the economic crisis. But even more than the immense anger being manifested, it's the organisation of the struggle in general assemblies and the reflection that drives the debates that demonstrate a real advance for the struggles of our class. That is why the bourgeoisie, with an iron fist, have ochestrated an incredible media blackout on an international scale. Information about what is really happening on the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, Terrassa isn't filtering out. This collection of articles therefore intends to contribute to breaking this silence. We will try to update it as often as possible with translations of articles, videos and eye-witness reports.

This article has already been published on our site here.

While the media has been full of Obama’s ‘triumphant’ visit to Europe, or the scandal about Dominique Strauss-Khan, they have not told us much about the real earthquake hitting Europe: a vast social movement which is centred in Spain but which is having an immediate echo in Greece and threatens to break out in other countries as well.

Our comrades in the Alicante Encounter and Solidarity Network (Red de Encuentro y Solidaridad) and in the L'Escletxa collective organised a meeting to discuss and support the workers' struggle on 11^th and 12^th February. They examined the experience of the struggles in France and Barcelona. The declared aim of this meeting was: “To work together for the development of the class struggle”.

We are publishing a statement written by the comrades of the CREE (Coletivo Revolucionario Espartaquista Estudiantil) about the Madrid Metro workers’ strike at the end of June, in response to wage cuts and tax increases imposed by the local authority.

The following statement was written by the ICC’s section in Spain to express our warmest solidarity with the workers of the Madrid metro dring their strike against wage cuts.

Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, France, Germany, Britain...everywhere the same crisis, everywhere the same attacks. The ruling class is revealing its true colours. Its cold and inhuman language boils down to the same basic message: ‘if you want to avoid the worst, if you don't want total economic break-down, you are going to have to pull in your belts like never before'.

 

This article, from the printed edition of World Revolution, has already been published online here

Thanks to a contribution by a comrade on the 3rd Febrary on the comments section of our Spanish language site, we have learnt about the joint struggle of unemployed and shipyard workers in Vigo in Spain.

In what follows, we publish Alicante Health and Social Services Workers Assembly's solidarity communiqué with two workers collectives in struggle: Vigo metal workers (see "Vigo: Los Métodos Sindicales Conducen a la Derrota") and Vesuvius de Langreo workers (who published this communiqué on their blog: http://vesuviussomostodos.blogspot.com).

The Ferment Ouvrier Revolutionaire is a component part of the revolutionary milieu. It is one of the rare groups to defend communist positions (against the unions, parliamentarism, national liberation struggles, frontism, state capitalism, etc...) and to intervene with them in the class struggle. For this reason it is worth while making a political balance sheet of this group, whose positions are not very well known in the proletarian milieu.

 

The young generation of the working class faces some of the worst attacks on its living standards, shows the tendency to search for solidarity with other workers, to organise itself in assemblies. Recent student struggles in France and Barcelona reinforce the lessons of struggles in Greece last December and against the CPE in France three years ago.

In the previous articles in this series we have shown how the FAI tried to stop the definitive integration of the CNT into the structures of capitalism. 

In 1934 however there was a fundamental change: the PSOE made a spectacular about face and, led by Largo Caballero, along with its companion union , the UGT, raised the flag of the "revolutionary struggle" pushing the workers of Asturias into the dreadful trap of the October insurrection. The Republican state used a new orgy of death, torture and prison deportations, which matched the savage repression meted out in previous years, to liquidate this movement.

 

Anarchism took the lead in this resistance to the integration of the CNT into the bourgeois state apparatus as a tool to control the class struggle, when the majority of anarchists in the CNT regrouped to form the Iberian Anarchist Federation (Federacion Anarquista Iberica - FAI) in 1927. The aim of this article is to assess this attempt to preserve the CNT for the proletariat.

The death of 41 people and serious injuring of 40 more on the 3rd July due to a metro accident in Valencia Spain will not be well known to many reading this. In Britain, on the day it happened, this terrible disaster did not receive headline attention on news programmes on the TV or radio on the day...

We want to welcome and express our solidarity with the struggle that the metal workers of Vigo in NW Spain have been waging since 3 May. The official media, union websites and those of so-called ‘radical’ groups maintain almost total silence about this strike. It is important that we discuss this experience, draw its lessons with a critical spirit, and put them into practice, since all workers are affected by the same problems: precarious working, increasingly unbearable working conditions, sky high prices, lay-offs, the announcement of yet more cuts in pensions…

We are publishing an account of our intervention in the SEAT workers’ struggle against redundancies. The central axis of this intervention was to support the beginning of an authentic workers’ struggle and to denounce the union sabotage of this expression of workers’ militancy and solidarity...

On 23 December, in the SEAT car factory in Barcelona, the workers on the morning and afternoon shifts spontaneously went on strike, in solidarity with 660 comrades who the day before had received dismissal letters from management. It was the beginning of a response to a criminal attack on their living conditions...

The bombings in Madrid

Thursday, 11th March, 7 o'clock in the morning: bombs blast a train in a working-class district of Madrid. The bombs of capitalist war have once again struck a defenceless civilian population, just as blindly as they did when they dropped on Guernica, or during the bombardments of World War II. The bombs “dropped” indiscriminately against men, women, children, adolescents, and even against immigrants from “muslim” countries who in some cases - to render tragedy still more tragic - did not even dare to come forward to claim the bodies of their dead for fear of being arrested and expelled from the country as a result of their illegal status.

Two hundred dead and more than 1500 hundred wounded, four trains destroyed, human bodies so horribly torn apart that they could only be recognised by their DNA - this is the terrifying balance sheet of the terrorist attack on the so-called 'Train of Death' which violently shook the morning of 11 March in Madrid.

Presentation

Anarchism today has the wind in its sails. Anarchist ideas, in the form both of the emergence and strengthening of anarcho-syndicalism, and of the appearance of numerous small libertarian groups, are getting off the ground in several countries (and are getting more and more attention from the capitalist media). This is perfectly explicable inperfectly explicable in the present historic period.