In Spain, the revolution doesn’t start till after teatime. It’s 4pm on a Saturday and I’m wandering through Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the main city square that was occupied last May by thousands of anti-austerity activists, to find just two folding tables piled with leaflets. Behind one of them, some earnest young people in their late twenties are collecting votes for a people’s referendum they have organised, involving some three million people across Spain, to decide what the 15O movement behind the evening’s planned protest is actually demanding.
“In May, we asked everyone for proposals and suggestions for the change they wanted to see,” says Rai, an eager 29-year old software developer helping to co-ordinate this referendum. “In the end we had about 11,000 suggestions. That was too much, and we couldn’t get everyone to agree, so a group of four hundred made them into just five suggestions.”
The referendum is so broad that the edges are hard to see — participants are required to vote yes, no or abstain to “less political corruption” and “a more sustainable economy”, alongside more specific demands for greater representation for smaller parties within Spain’s current two-party system. Most people I speak to believe this is an improvement on the terms of the upcoming General Election, whose results are seen as a foregone and depressing conclusion — more austerity, with a little less mitigation and no real choice for voters.
Rai wears a t-shirt saying “citizen of the new world”. As protests begin to be coordinated across the planet, the shape of that new world is still uncertain although behind us in Sol, four or five young activists are doggedly constructing a giant globe out of bamboo and papier mache. I ask Rai if he expects many people to be here tonight. “I don’t know,” he says, admitting to a loss of radical energy in Spain’s movement over the summer. “A few, maybe.”
Four hours later the square is crammed with over 60,000 people, a vast, stamping, shouting human mass. “I’m here because I am indignados!” One girl shouts at me in broken English. “We are angry!”
As more demonstrators press their way into the square, chanting about the failure of representative democracy and calling for, among other things, the dismissal of the local governor, there is literally no room to turn around. Some activists break into an empty building on one side of the square and begin to drop banners: “somos los 99 percent”, reads one, echoing the slogan of the “occupy” protests around the globe, as news pours in about sister demonstrations in New York, Boston, Lisbon, London and almost a thousand other towns and cities around the world.
This is a global protest, and it seeks to address a global problem: the monopolisation of wealth by the elite and the failure of free-market capitalism to create a liveable future for humanity.
The alternatives for that future are unformed, but they are at last being debated in open people’s forums around the world. The giant papier-mache globe has now been completed and actually looks quite impressive, glittering with red and green LEDs at points of global occupation as it hangs in the middle of the noisy twilit square.
Like most of the occupations around the world today, Puerta del Sol is a peaceful protest. As each banner drops, the crowd cheers it cacophonously; those packed into the sidestreets can’t see the banners, so they don’t even know why they’re cheering, but they cheer anyway, a thunderous roar reverberating back through the crowd and through the heart of the Spanish capital.
“Maybe people don’t listen to us now, but in the future they will have to,” says Eva, 18, as the night draws in and the crowd settles down for an enormous general assembly. “They can’t ignore us. We are the 99 per cent.”
In every wing of this protest movement I have reported from, one common theme is the fetishisation of form and process over ideology. In Madrid, as in London and New York, all decisions, from the smallest breakout circle to general assemblies of thousands, are made using the “consensus” model of direct democracy, waving hands in various simple signals and operating with discussion facilitators rather than leaders, a system that some say originated in the Quaker movement several centuries ago.
There are different dialects of hand-signal consensus in different countries-in Spain they wave their hands higher, in New York a system called “progressive stack” is designed to ensure that minority voices are heard — but the principle is the same.
It’s a principle of democracy done at ground level, and people involved in this “consensus” process find it incredibly empowering — a refreshing contrast to the alienating remoteness and weary predictability of parliamentary representative democracy, which most people here see as totally irrelevant to their real lives.
The sense of collective engagement overwhelms the multiplicity of different strategies and suggestions within the movement: everyone turns up with their own problems and grievances, but the process of engagement becomes just as important . “I do not come here to affirm who I am already,” one visiting Spanish activist in New York said last week, “I come here to discover who I can be with other people. This is a new kind of politics.”
I believe that what we are seeing here is the beginnings of a substantive change not just to the nature of modern politics, but to the way in which it is done, demanded and delivered, a change shaped by network technology just as the printing press changed politics six centuries ago.
It baffles the hell out of the press, and not even those who have been involved deeply from the start pretend to be able to see the end game, but one thing’s for sure — it would be a grave mistake to write off this unique movement before it has really begun.
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