Politics of Indignation: Radical Democracy and Class Struggle beyond Postmodernity

Abstract

This article analyzes the social impact, dynamics, and political organization of the Spanish revolt of the Indignados. The article starts with the emergence of the 15M in Spain, criticizing the representation of the movement in the media and exposing the political and economic conjuncture of Spain at the date of the revolt. Then it analyzes the Indignados sociopolitical phenomenon as an articulation of social movements linked by one method of political decision and association: the assembly. After this, it tries to explore the limits and advantages of a noninstitutionalized approach towards social conflict, exposing the social changes the movement has introduced into the Spanish society. Finally, it points out the real obstacles for the 15M as a post-Fordist class movement in an attempt to understand the role of the Indignados like an alternative for political change in Spanish society.

Keywords:

• Indignados
• Spanish Revolt
• Class Conflict
• Neoliberalism
• Social Movements

Acknowledgments

To Hékate García and the Assembly of Ciempozuelos and Titulcia, for a revolutionary summer. To my brother Raúl de Pablos and to Ian Seda-Irizarry for their great generosity and friendship.

Notes

¹For an interesting analysis of these subjects see Harvey (2007).

²On 6 March 2011 the Sinde Law—called Sinde because of the surname of the former cultural minister—was approved in the Spanish Official Bulletin of the State (BOE) as the 43rd disposition of the organic Law of Sustainable Economy (LES). This disposition regulates Internet download traffic, prohibiting sharing content with any type of copyright, under penalty. In the law, companies’ “intellectual property” is protected against users in an attempt to ban the P2P systems and portals used in cultural file sharing (films, books, music, etc.). Several associations of consumers and users have criticized the law, arguing it was only another step in the privatization of the Internet's free space. Finally, the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (PSOE) decided not to apply the law. However, on 1 March 2012 the law was fully applied by the government of Mariano Rajoy (PP), banning many webpages where one could download materials for free.

³The labor reform announced by the government of Rodríguez Zapatero in 2011 was a pack of measures to make the job market more flexible, with the aim of reducing unemployment. But the previous reform of 2010 had revealed the true meaning of “making more dynamic” the labor market: cheaper dismissals for employers, the weakening of collective negotiations and trade unions’ power, less legal justifications for dismissal, etc. The reform of 2011, approved in the middle of social conflict, continued the line of the law of 2010: abuse of the internship contract in employment (with minimum salary or without it), more limits to collective negotiation, and unlimited temporality in contracts.

⁴“Sun Encampment.”

⁶See, for example, the press release of the PCPE about the 15M, insisting on Leninist forms of organization and criticizing the 15M as an interclassist movement: http://www.pcpe.es/comunicados/item/268-sobre-las-movilizaciones-iniciadas-el-15-m.html.

⁵I refer to the way Marx and Engels use this term in their classic The German Ideology: “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it” (Marx and Engels [1932] 1968). Therefore, the ideology of the dominant class is one of the main ideological mediations in the production of social subjectivity. A distorted social image of the Indignados has been constructed by the hegemonic Spanish media, which is sponsored mainly by capitalist companies and financial corporations. Even El País, one of the most popular periodicals traditionally associated with the Left, is now another tool of an increasingly repressive and homogeneous system. Nevertheless, thanks to the counterinformation of the movement and some marginal media, the “social common sense” has understood—as the last polls affirm—that many of the demands of the 15M are legitimate and necessary. See, for example, this index of public opinion: http://www.simplelogica.com/iop/iop12011.asp.

⁷“Emotion is unstable and inappropriate to construct something coherent and lasting” (Bauman 2011, my translation).

⁸As Fredric Jameson has pointed out, postmodernism—as the “cultural logic” of late capitalism—involves the spheres of mass cultural production/consumption and also the sociocultural values of the people. Therefore, postmodernity produces political subjectivity because the workers and citizens of different strata live their everyday lives through its discourses, aesthetic appreciations, and ideological and affective standards. We can talk about a moment of de-differentiation inside society, in which the economic, cultural, and political structures start to blur its limits. The cultural sphere seems to be commodified from its roots thanks to an expansion of the society of consumption, and affectivity, creativity, and knowledge are—at the same time—subsumed by capital. The effects of this subsumption are the loss of temporality; consumption represents for the people an eternal and mobile present without direction except for capital's accumulation—the blurring of social and political references for individuals, including the concept of class—and a brutal commodification of their way of life. As we can see, it is the perfect “cultural superstructure” for neoliberalism, credit, and financial capital. See Jameson (1991).

⁹The John Holloway-Enrique Dussel debate, one of Latin America's most important political discussions, may illustrate some differences between representation and participation. Holloway presents a well-founded critique towards the state as a capitalist space, submissive to the logic of capital below a perverse liberalist mask. The state is not a tool for the classes and social groups in struggle, the state is another enemy to beat because it tends to reproduce the logics of hierarchy, control, and social exclusion. We have to think of other ways to organize society. Dussel, however, criticizes Holloway's point of view with a more moderate Gramscian perspective. Without the state, we will give all the power to capital because neoliberalism seeks the destruction of all public institutions. We have to create nonliberal institutions to unify the people in a process that seeks to arrive at direct democracy. Participation in the state is, for Holloway, a betrayal and an impasse for social movements; a critical approach that tends to participation—and not only to representation—seems to be Dussel's choice. These two ways of thinking are present in the 15M, which is maybe nearer to Dussel's point of view than Holloway's. The problem in the Dussel perspective—and this is a problem of the 15M too—is that creating new institutions, including the state, presupposes both a true regeneration of democracy and massive social participation. And this also requires a radical transformation of the society of consumption, capital, and people's ways of living. A general abstract of the Dussel-Holloway debate can be seen at: http://gacetahumanidades.blogspot.com.es/2012/03/dialogo-entre-el-john-holloway-y.html.

¹⁰ Class is not a static category of analysis; it has to be understood as a historical and social process constructed by agents and different kinds of pressures or conditions: mainly economic and political but at the same time ideological and cultural too. Conflict between people and social pressures creates class in the truest sense, that is to say, in a political and cultural way. Consider, for example, that sources of income, salaries, types of occupations, or inequalities in access to consumption are not the best elements to define class. Class, as Karl Marx said, is rooted in the mode of production, in the way surplus value is produced and distributed inside the society. The division of labor is, at the same time, the social division between owners and exploited people, a schism of inequality that gives birth to the first features of class. But this means that only class an sich—in itself—exists, not class für sich—for itself. Class, in a concrete sense, links the position of the productive force in the mode of production with the political and social organization of the workers, with their subjective dynamics and strategies to understand social conflicts and act through them. The common consciousness of these conflicts and the customs, ideologies, discourses, and cultural symbols of recognition create class, but only when they are embodied in practice by workers against capital. If we understand class as a concrete relationship between agents and conditions, and if we understand it as a process, not as a reified subject—with more or less willpower—or a static structural field, we can pass from an abstract concept of class to a more concrete definition. This means to historicize class and understand it as an overdetermined web of agency in the process of social reproduction and social struggle. For a selection of different positions in this classic debate, see Lukács (1971), Althusser (2005), and Thompson (1991).

¹¹For example, seminal Western Marxists such as Louis Althusser, whose contributions played a major role in the reformulation of Marxist epistemologies in the midsixties of the twentieth century, have assimilated the concept of classes to the more general concept of “productive forces.” In Pour Marx, Sur la Reproduction, and other texts, Althusser defines the concept of productive forces as the “sum” of the means of production (an object of work and the means of work) and working forces or agents. He suggests that the division of classes is rooted, as Marx said, inside the process of production and the process of work: the division of labor is not a problem of the technical division of work, but it is fundamentally a matter of class division. This is true, but in trying to understand what class is, this seems to be a very limited perspective. Althusser tends to “jump” from his structural definition of the productive forces inside capitalist production relations—agents here are only trägers of a process by their position in the mode of production—to the political field without a serious consideration of power, organization, or the culture of classes. And when Althusser tried to do something like this, he produced a semifunctionalist theory of reproduction and subjectivity. His theory of ideology cannot explain agency, political action, or revolution; only subjection and social reproduction are the focus. Maybe this is a handicap inherited from French structuralism and its anéantissement of the modern subject, but its effects are very profound in his theory. Class is not only a “structural effect,” but it is also a process of action, consciousness, and conflict. Nicos Poulantzas, who is with Étienne Balibar the best thinker of Althusser's school, criticized in Pouvoir politique et classes sociales de l’état capitaliste the “economic” point of view in the understanding of social classes. Nevertheless, he thinks that class is a “structural global effect” of all the spheres of the mode of production, not only the economic one, and although he tried to focus on the political foundations of class, he fails to understand agency and subjectivity because he thinks about them only as an “anthropological” or “functionalist” problem. Class, as we have commented in another note, is an agency process involving history, cultural ideology, and political positions. Above all there is an organization of dissent and indignation through conflict, which is at the same time economic, political, and cultural. Without the embodiment of class in actions, organization, and consciousness, it would only exist in theory or an sich. See Althusser (1995) and Poulantzas (1982, 1978). See also, in a critical way, and near our own point of view, Meiksins Wood (1982).

¹²To see different but complementary perspectives on this matter, see Cano (2012), Sainz Pezonaga (2012), and Moreno-Pestaña (2012).