¡Indígnate!: The 2011 popular protests and the limits to democracy in Spain

Abstract

We are the unemployed, the poorly remunerated, the subcontracted, the precarious, the young … we want change and a dignified future. We are fed up with antisocial reforms, those that leave us unemployed, those with which the bankers that have provoked the crisis raise our mortgages or take our homes, those laws that they impose upon us that limit our liberty for the benefit of the powerful. We blame the political economic and economic powers for our precarious situation and we demand a change of direction. ¡Democracia Real YA! website, 2011 Thus explains one of the principal organisations behind the ‘movement of the indignant’ that has re-awakened popular political consciousness in Spain since 15 May 2011. 1 From its origins in a network of activists utilising new social media to coordinate a series of protest marches in cities across Spain, the ‘15-M’ movement has since staged camp-outs in several main city squares, and in the space of a month mobilised 40,000 protestors in Madrid and 80,000 in Barcelona to march against high unemployment, the policies and conduct of Spain’s political class, and to demand ‘real democracy NOW!’ As an important case of potential interest to Capital & Class readers in its own right, but also as one example of contemporary European mass movements like that of the aganaktismenoi in Greece, this report explains the motives and actions of los indignados, while also contextualising it within a critical materialist analysis of the political economy of Spain since the mid-20th century. It concludes with some open questions about the limits to the movement itself and its demands for real democracy and systemic change.