[Campaignforrealdemocracy] (no subject)

[Mark Barrett]

 IT’S NOT JUST INDIGNATION. Inventing new ways of doing politics.


It’s true that we’re indignant. But not just that. If it were just
indignation that brought us together in the streets and squares of our
cities, the movement would have less force. Once the moment of excitement
had passed we would have gone home. That is not what is happening. After the
demonstrations, groups – some larger, some smaller – have camped in the
squares and after being evicted, have returned again and again. This shows a
will to be heard which goes far beyond mere indignation, a will which is
opening up new means of doing politics on the basis of the idea that
“politics” is not only nor principally a profession – the “business” of the
so-called political class – but rather that politics is the only way we have
to resolve problems collectively. The capture of politics by those
professionals who have turned it into their exclusive terrain, reducing it
to a matter of representation and exercising it against the interests of a
large part of the population, takes out of our hands those tools without
which we are doomed to savage competition amongst ourselves, war between the
poor.


The increasing intensity of the crisis has made this model of politics blow
up. It has shown clearly that the current politicians use the legitimacy
which the voting box grants them in order to make citizens ever more
impotent against the demands and requirements of a global capitalist class
which the politicians either do not know how to or do not want to tame. No
one said things were easy. What we are saying is that we need the tools of
politics, of a new kind of politics, in order to find solutions to the
current situation.


The partial movements that have emerged recently give us hints in this
direction. All of them, from platforms like “Victims of Mortgages”, “Real
Democracy Now”, “Youth with no Future”, to the offices of social rights, the
social centers, and the assemblies of the unemployed as well as many others
have shown a tremendous capacity to oppose the measures imposed by the
public administration, to construct partial alternatives and to attempt to
disrupt the privatization measures and impoverishment which are underway.


So here we have a social Left which does not coincide with the political
“Left.” The latter has been absorbed by economic elites to such an extent
that it is difficult to distinguish between the recommendations of the big
business groups and the decisions of the politicians. The narrow filter of
party democracy impedes meaningful participation. This is why it is now time
to get our imagination rolling and seek new forms of articulation which
reinvent the political community, putting our collective intelligence to the
test. The internet networks are at work; they give shape to the new virtual
political space. But we need more: popular citizen assemblies, open
encounters, public discussions, institutions which supervise and control the
political parties… it is our future, this is our moment.


Montserrat Galcerán of the Nomad University

www.universidadnomada.net
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