What is happening in Spain?

iberia | community struggles | opinion / analysis Tuesday August 21, 2012 08:30 by José Luis Carretero

Today "Cunning Hired Knaves" publishes the first part of the beehive-report about the current Spanish situation, with brief articles of Jorge Moruno, Ramón Espinar, Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop, Pablo Bustinduy, José Luis Carretero Miramar, Jesús Gómez Gutiérrez, Lola Matamala and Jónatham F. Moriche Vázquez, -the responsible-, with the excelent (as usual) translation of the comrade Richard McAleavey.

The heat beats down on the asphalt in the streets of Madrid, but this is not just one more torrid summer. The temperature is high, indeed, getting higher all the time, but this can't simply be blamed on the Sky King. Now, in the middle of August, the streets also burn with the railworkers' strike, the taxi drivers' protests, the public servant demonstrations, the ever more explicit expressions of a multitude that has had its fill of betrayals and unanswered aggression.

The cutbacks, the intervention, the new adjustments, the next bailout...the memorandum that is never the last one and which is always followed by a new memorandum, whilst the mountain of external debt is indefinitely piled higher and higher thanks to the enormous (strictly speaking, incalculable) amounts of private debt, belonging to financial entities and big businesses, that are going to be socialised.

Class struggle is waking up angry in the same the same streets that, not so long ago, denied it through an arrogant glorification of consumerism. They are looting us. It is that simple. Working conditions, social services, health and education infrastructure, public goods..all is coercively transformed into money, the same money that registers on shiny computer screens so that it can be sent virtually to fill the unfathomable holes in the balance sheets of national and foreign financial entities.

We are witnessing a radical redistribution of wealth in favour of the enormously wealthy, carried out by a ruling class that yearns for the abyss that its own blindness makes ever more probable.

It is a torrid summer. We have said so already. But it is not just any torrid summer. Today the streets vibrate with the texture of a dignity revisited, of a creativity regained, of a beautiful and precarious solidarity that manifests itself despite the opaque glow of police shields.

The streets are full of people. People who, sooner rather than later, will demand their primordial right to a new type of abundance: that of a direct, real and deep democracy in a liveable future for the many.

José Luis Carretero