by Paul Mason
‘Another Europe is necessary,’ Gordillo tells me. ‘A Europe of the people; a Europe of the ones who have nothing. The unemployed, the poor, the people who demand a new reality.’
But Gordillo has become articulate with actions, not words. The expropriations have started to be repeated, like a meme. There’s already been heavy fighting in the northern mining region of Asturias, where the miners made their own RPGs out of dynamite and sky-rockets and lead piping, and showed no hesitation in firing them at the cops.
It is the physical demographic of the Gordillo movement that has brought so many Guardia Civil onto these ribbons of melting tarmac in the high hills. These protesters are working-class; they have roots in society; they have more to lose than the young indignados. There are not many red flags on display; Che, as always, is the patron saint of the t-shirt. The flags are mainly Andalusian regional flags and union banners.
‘They say I’m the Spanish Robin Hood,’ Gordillo tells me. ‘I prefer William Wallace, like in Braveheart. He was a true revolutionary—he came from the lower classes and fought and demanded real change for his people.’
‘But he was defeated,’ I interject.
‘Well, in the struggle you always have winners and losers; but the one battle you never lose is the battle for Utopia.’
Barcelona, Catalonia. ‘When you go on a Catalan national day demo,’ says journalistic folklore, ‘your risk assessment has to include the danger of getting blinded. By the diamonds.’
The mass demo on the Catalan national day in September 2012 attracted the usual mixture of the bourgeois and the proletariat. Right-wing nationalists from the Convergence and Union Party, left-wing and communist workers; ladies with Gucci handbags; indignados with the word ‘fuck’ liberally scrawled on their placards. But when 1.5 million people from all walks of life go onto the streets, you can’t ignore it.
It certainly riled Francisco Alamán: ‘Independence for Catalonia? Over my dead body … and those of many soldiers,’ he told a right-wing website. It’s a view quite strongly held in Spain. But Alamán is a serving soldier, a colonel in the Spanish army. And it wasn’t the only incendiary thing he said. In the week tens of thousands of protesters surrounded parliament, he also observed that: ‘The current situation is very similar to 1936, but without blood. Unfortunately, the data indicate that the situation will only get worse in the coming months and years.’
As a journalist covering the aftermath of a financial crisis, you learn to ask yourself a very brutal question as you parachute into the latest theatre of conflict: you look for the social silence. You ask: what is staring me in the face, that nobody wants to talk about?
Colonel Alamán had answered the question. 1936 was the year the Spanish Popular Front government was attacked by rebel forces under General Franco, beginning a three-year civil war in which 300,000 died on the battlefield, and the same number again were murdered off it.
During the early years of Spanish democracy, forgetting about the Civil War was not just a psychological necessity—it was a political choice. The ‘pact of silence’ instituted after the death of Franco was seen as a price worth paying for rapid, peaceful transition to a functioning democracy—a democracy that, moreover, found space to accommodate a strong, previously clandestine Communist Party alongside the rapidly moderating socialists of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party). The approach was codified into law, with the 1977 Amnesty Law guaranteeing blanket immunity from prosecution for those suspected of crimes against humanity during the Franco era and the Civil War.
But with Spain now reeling from austerity, its riot police dispensing truncheon blows and rubber bullets against demonstrators and passers-by, the ‘pact of silence’ was falling apart. The images of violence—not all of them made it onto mainstream television, but the Internet did the job—were forcing Spanish people to confront historical memory in a way the various campaigns and lawsuits about the Franco era had not. For the austerity, and the protests, had summoned the spectre of a clash that defined Spain in the modern period: the clash between liberal modernity and religious, monarchic hierarchy: ‘A dead, hollow, worm-eaten Spain and a new, eager, ambitious Spain that tends toward life,’ as the historian Santos Juliá put it.
It’s clear now that these two cultures within Spain—as visceral and rooted as the ‘southern’ and ‘liberal’ cultures in the US, or the ‘intellectual versus peasant’ problem in Russia—never went away. But the culture war had seemed suppressed by wealth: the booming economy, the rapid liberalization of society, and the massive investment in modern infrastructure allowed the two Spains to coexist.
By the eve of the Lehman crisis it was a different Spain—a modernized economy linked to the European core by its single currency and the Schengen agreement, and benefiting on top of that from its links to the rapidly expanding economies of Latin America. When the economy took a nosedive, and the first austerity plans were launched, it was striking that the political and social settlement seemed actually to be helping mitigate the effects. People moved in with their parents, borrowed their grandmother’s car; in small towns and villages, barter systems sprang up. Spain’s regional government system would also act as a safety net for the needy.
But as the situation worsened, in rapid succession, numerous signifiers of political crisis appeared: acute class divisions, regional politics, street violence, outright civil disobedience in the Gordillo mould, and unaddressed corruption. The removal of migrants’ rights to free health care; the sight of uniformed firefighters clashing with riot cops, helmet to helmet, on the streets of Madrid. Such images of fracture feed the resurgence of references to the bloody conflict in which the ‘two Spains’ tried to destroy each other.
To the right, we find people like Col Alamán. To the left, the camiseta republicana. It’s a version of the Spanish soccer team’s red and yellow strip, with the addition of a big swathe of republican purple: the colours of the flag Franco tore down in 1936. I’d first spotted these shirts on Gordillo’s march in Colmenar. They started being produced in 2011 as a limited edition for enthusiasts; now, they are close to becoming the dress code on some protests.
Beneath this battle of signifiers, there is a serious potential for fragmentation in Spain. Once it had been refused a favourable fiscal deal, the Catalan government called snap elections. The ruling party—the Convergence and Union Party—contains a strong minority that advocates outright independence. The far left in Catalonia also supports independence. As the second richest region, with a GDP of €220 billion a year, it’s always been seen as an empty threat for Catalonia to go for full independence. Cynics say its flirtation with secession is mere posturing to gain a better settlement with Madrid. In view of the 2012 Independence Day march, however, others on the ground are saying: ‘This time they mean it.’
Before the austerity hit, there were a whole series of unthinkables in Spain: that the Civil War wounds, of right and left, could ever be reopened; that the military could ever again intervene into politics (the last time this happened, the attempted Civil Guard coup of 1981, descended into farce); that the modernization and growth that Spain enjoyed could ever be reversed; that the federal state could ever shatter. But numerous unthinkables have already begun to happen.
Madrid. To get into Felipe González’s HQ you have to be ID’d and searched by a plainclothes cop. Then you step into a rickety elevator, and ascend a few floors of the old mansion block. The air conditioning is basic, so when the man himself greets me, in a denim shirt, we are both perspiring.
González is one of the architects of the Europe that is falling apart. Emerging from the socialist underground after the death of Franco, he put together the PSOE, and after 1982 led the fourteen-year-long socialist administration that made Spain what it is today. He was, towards the end, mired in allegations of corruption and of unleashing a dirty war by police death squads against the Basque separatists. But to some, Felipe is still the Mandela of Spanish democracy.
He r
ails at Angela Merkel. Germany, he tells me, has become a German Germany, not a European Germany. He still believes Europe can become competitive without trashing the welfare system and dirigiste investment model that Spain relies on.
‘But it’s in danger, the welfare state. If this economic model disappears, social cohesion is going to suffer, without a doubt. That’s what’s in danger. People feel the loss of something that they didn’t cause—and they’re right. But they’re not being offered an economic model that permits social cohesion.’
Social democrats like González are seeing their preconceptions hollowed out. The capitalism that could offer a ‘social Europe’ is disappearing, putting the political consensus in jeopardy: ‘The scale of disaffection for the national government, it’s enormous. For the autonomous governments it’s enormous. There’s disaffection with politics—it’s quite universal. Representative democracy as we know it is in crisis.’
González led the Spanish left through a peaceful transition away from fascism. The deal was that the old elite would populate both sides of the political spectrum—but without any formal accounting of the events during fascism. Today it is hard not to see that compromise as one of the roots of the corruption that, as an ABC editorial claimed two years ago, ‘is drowning Spain’. There is heavy and open nepotism in the appointment of business executives; there is—say foreign business people—an unstated regulatory bias in favour of Spanish-owned large companies. And there has been mismanagement of resources, leading to the wasteful spending and lax planning that I found in Valencia.
The problem is not that Spain is a ‘young democracy’: young democracies can be vigorous, culturally revolutionary, fun places to be. No, the problem is that, as Spaniards gaze at TV images of metre-long truncheons being wielded against passers-by in a Metro station, the dis-course tends to head straight to where, for thirty years, they have managed to keep it from heading.
I put it to González that Spain is now paying the price for the compromises made during the transition. He winces. ‘That’s wrong. We’re paying the price for failing to modernize. It’s the people who didn’t live through Franco who have a lot of difficulty evaluating what we achieved.’
Spain has the potential to explode in a way that Greece does not. It is a major global economy. Its post-fascist political settlement is weakening. Catalan and Basque independence calls mean its survival as a federal state is under threat. Once Mario Draghi decided to save the euro by buying unlimited amounts of Spanish and Italian bonds, in September 2012—Spain knew that even if it avoided bankruptcy it would have to face years of austerity and stagnation.
Faced with all this, what the indignado movement represents may correctly be called a ‘counter-power’ to the old elites, whose money has dried up but whose hands remain firmly on the levers of state. But it is only a counter-power.
It is, of all the mass movements thrown up during 2011–12, probably the one with greatest persistent social weight in its own country. It is one where, until now, non-violence has been rigorously adhered to—and it has forged the strongest links with ‘real life’: with local cultures, endemic labour movements, popular milieus. Juanjo García, the young activist who took me into the Coralla Utopia occupation in Seville, explains the challenge like this:
‘Right now we are so close to disaster that we have to stick to two objectives. One is doing stuff like this, taking over the apartment block—to focus attention on the problems of real people. To show it can be done. But then we have to offer an alternative. We have to force the government to pass new laws that help the people, not the banks.’
With his wispy beard and flip-flops and t-shirt reading ‘La Huelga’ (The Strike), this twenty-odd-year-old is the kind of person the future outcome of this crisis is going to revolve around.
‘Sometimes,’ says Juanjo, ‘it seems like we’ve created a collective intelligence that can move very quickly—we can solve big problems in minutes because the situation we found ourselves in demanded it. But we need victories, we need hope, we need to do things that make people think there is a solution. That’s what made people from different ideologies, movements, strategies work together in a project like this. Before this we never had such objectives—it’s new—but it’s because the situation is really critical.’
* * *
* Since the original version of this book was published the Occupy movement took centre stage in the USA, the Russian protests went through the entire cycle of flowering and repression, and important movements such as those in Chile and Canada took place. I’ve spent the past twelve months trying to cover these events firsthand, mainly as part of my day job as a TV reporter. In the next four chapters I revisit Greece and Spain, survey the impact of the Russian movement up to the jailing of Pussy Riot, and offer a critical re-reading of my original blogpost ‘Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere’.
12
Developments in Greece: Love or Nothing
Of all the operas written during Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919–33), probably the most haunting is the last. Kurt Weill’s The Silver Lake, written with playwright Georg Kaiser, tells the story of two losers—a good-hearted provincial cop and the thief he has shot and wounded—as they make their way through a society ruined by unemployment, corruption and vice.
In 2012, after spending a week in Greece amid riots, hunger and far-right violence, I finally understood it. The opera was meant to be Weill’s ticket back into the mainstream. It was his first break from collaborating with Bertolt Brecht, and was scheduled to open simultaneously in three German cities on 18 February 1933.
But on 30 January, Adolf Hitler was appointed Germany’s chancellor. The first performances of The Silver Lake were disrupted by Nazi activists in the audience, and on 4 March 1933 it was banned. The score was torched, together with the set designs, in an infamous book-burning ceremony outside the opera house in Berlin.
It is easy to see why the Nazis didn’t like The Silver Lake. Weill being Jewish, their theatre critics found the music ‘ugly and sick’. Moreover the plot contains an allegory of the political situation on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power. But there is something else about The Silver Lake that goes beyond politics. Something hard to fathom. Spending time in Greece, as the far-right Golden Dawn Party was breaking up theatre performances with impunity, and street violence was rife, I finally understood what that something is.
The Silver Lake is ultimately about how people feel when they switch from resistance to hopelessness, and about how strangely liberating hopelessness can be.
Greece right now is a place with a lot of hopelessness. Its own prime minister, Antonis Samaras, has compared the current climate to that of the late Weimar Republic. ‘Greek democracy stands before what is perhaps its greatest challenge,’ Samaras told the German newspaper Handelsblatt. He said social cohesion is ‘endangered by rising unemployment, just as it was toward the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany’.
The comparison seems plausible on several fronts. There are far-right gangs meting out violence on the streets (a report in October 2012 identified more than half of all officially recorded racial attacks as perpetrated by people in paramilitary uniform). Every demonstration ends with tear gas and baton charges. There is mass unemployment. There is the collapse of mainstream parties. The press and broadcast media are struggling to remain independent, indeed solvent.
Yet the comparison with the ‘end of Weimar’ only holds if you know nothing about the Weimar Republic itself. Sadly, this condition is common. School students are rightly taught a great deal about Nazi Germany, but not very much about how it came into being.
In the elections of 1928, the Nazis, who had—like Golden Dawn in Greece—been reduced to a splinter group in the years of economic recovery, got just 2.7 per cent of the vote. But in March 1930, as the Wall Street Crash cratered the German economy, a cross-party coalition government of the centre-left and -right collapsed. It was replaced by the first of three ‘appointe
d’ governments, led by Hein-rich Brüning and designed to prevent either the communists or the now-growing Nazis gaining power. Faced with a recession, Brüning followed a policy of austerity while keeping Germany’s currency pegged to the Gold Standard (much as Greece as follows a policy of austerity dictated by euro membership). This made the recession worse.
As unemployment rocketed, so did the Nazi vote: in a shock breakthrough they came second in the elections of September 1930, with 18 per cent. But Brüning was determined to maintain order: he cracked down on both the right and left, banning the Nazi paramilitary organization, the sturmabteilung, along with the rival communist uniformed groups.
As recession worsened, the Nazis grew massively: they came first in the election in 1932, gaining 14 million votes (37 per cent). Although the socialists and communists combined polled higher, while the parties of the centre collapsed, the presidential system of appointing governments nevertheless allowed the remnants of conservatism to go on ruling Germany—now under a new Chancellor, the aristocrat Franz von Papen. Von Papen unbanned the Nazi stormtroopers in June 1932 and, as street clashes escalated, a low-level civil war took off.
By the end of 1932, with the communists now also growing rapidly, the political establishment made one final attempt to pre-empt the move to outright fascist rule—by appointing a right-wing militarist, Kurt von Schleicher, and further constraining democracy. Schleicher had written:
I am really glad that there is a counterweight [to the Social Democrats] in the form of the Nazis, who are not very decent chaps either and must be stomached with the greatest caution. If they did not exist, we should virtually have to invent them.1
Schleicher was appointed Chancellor, and tried to form a government with the support of everybody from the left wing of the Nazis to the Christian trades unions. But this too failed, opening the door to Hitler. The historian Ian Kershaw has written of this fiasco: