The political economy of the Spanish Indignados: political opportunities, social conflicts, and democratizing impacts

ABSTRACT

The 15-M mobilizations shook Spanish society and placed the demand for ‘real democracy’ at the center of political debate. In order to better understand the scope and impact of the Indignados’ democratizing endeavors, this article aims to address an issue that has not received much attention: the connection of this protest cycle with the political economy. To this end, both the opportunity structure generated by the economic crisis and the class and generational conflicts shaping the mobilizations are analyzed. The article proposes that the symbolic and short-term success of 15-M in re-politicizing distributive conflicts contrasts with its medium-term inability to materially democratize the political economy. This relative failure can be explained by the confluence of several factors: on the one hand, 15-M’s organizational weakness and its disconnection from a somewhat declining labor movement; on the other, the lack of responsiveness of Spain’s political institutions to street politics and the powerful structural inertia of economic dynamics created by decades of neoliberalism. The findings of this case study aim to contribute to scholarly debates on the impacts of social movements and their connection to political economy and social classes.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• political economy
• class
• social movements
• Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. According to data from the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) the percentage of people who had no confidence in unions grew from 21% in 2008 to 41% in 2010. On a scale of trust from 0 (none) to 10 (a lot), those declaring none went from 15% in 2007 to 42% in 2014.

2. Methodological cautions must be adopted in the interpretation of this discourse given the scarcity of written manifestos, the ambiguity of slogans, and the sampling bias of oral testimonies.

3. According to a survey, 90% of citizens agreed with this measure (‘Los desahucios unen a los votantes’, El País, 17 February 2013).

4. By middle classes we mainly refer to the so-called ‘new’ middle classes: wage earners that, by virtue of their expertise and/or organizational authority, enjoy more power and income than other workers (Wright, 1985). According to sociological class theory, the differences between the material interests and life chances of the middle class and those of the working class – in terms of economic as well as cultural and social capital (Bourdieu, 2002) – are a source of distributive conflict and shape political mobilization (Oesch, 2006; Wright, 1985).

5. Perhaps the clearest example is the Madrid-based network Juventud Sin Futuro (Youth with No Future), which was created from university student associations and played an important role in 15-M and then in Podemos (Montañés & Álvarez-Benavides, 2019).

6. Data from a CIS post-election survey (number 2920) conducted six months after the emergence of the Indignados (between November 2011 and January 2012) with a sample of 6,082 interviews.

7. This quote from a young woman of low-income background illustrates these obstacles: ‘Then, of course, when I saw Almudena [an activist from Juventud Sin Futuro] doing so many things, I did feel like participating […] but the truth is that later […] I didn’t know how to really get into that kind of dynamics […] The truth was that I felt quite insecure, because they were people who knew a lot and I […] had no idea’ (in Gil & Rendueles, 2019, p. 44).

8. Only four out of ten young Spaniards, aged between 25-29, have university studies, and only one out of six has a master’s degree or equivalent.

9. Other economic issues, however, have remained outside the public debate: the most striking is that of the Euro, probably explained by Spaniards’ high degree of Europeanism.

10. According to data from the CIS, the percentage of people who had no confidence in banks grew from 38% in 2008 to 43% in 2017. See, also, Fundación BBVA (2013).

11. See also, Gerbaudo (2017) or Caruso and Cini (2020) for similar characteristics of anti-austerity protests as a conflict between citizens defending popular sovereignty and oligarchies, or between participative-mobilization and regressive-oligarchic poles.

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by the Spanish State Research Agency [grant number PID2019-104078GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033]

Notes on contributors

Eduardo Romanos

Eduardo Romanos is Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His main research interests are in the areas of political sociology and historical sociology, with a particular focus on social movements and protest. He is co-author of Legacies and Memories in Movements (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Late Neoliberalism and its Discontents in the Economic Crisis (Palgrave McMillan, 2017).

Jorge Sola

Jorge Sola is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology: Methods and Theory at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and researcher at TRANSOC Institute. His areas of interest include economic sociology, political sociology and social theory. His research has focused in the precarization of labour markets and the class dimension of political change. He is co-author of Le sfide di Podemos (Manfiestolibri, 2017) and Strategic Crossroads: The Situation of the Left in Spain (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2018).

César Rendueles

César Rendueles is Tenured Scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He has published, among other, the following books: Sociophobia. Political change in the era of digital utopia (Capitán Swing, 2013, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014, Columbia University Press, 2016); Capitalismo canalla (Seix Barral, 2015; Suhrkamp, 2018); En bruto. Una reivindicación del materialismo histórico (Los Libros de la Catarata, 2016), Los (bienes) comunes (Icaria, 2016) and Le sfide di Podemos (Manifestolibri, 2017).