The writing on the wall: “No hay pan para tanto chorizo.”
(There is not enough bread for so much pork.)
Spain has witnessed in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008 what Henri Lefebvre would call an “eruption” of liminal spaces of possibility, new spaces of social insertion, new spaces of self-spreading flows of new elective affinities. These are spaces of a new becoming. First, there is disaffection from the political class and financial elites complicit in the post-Franco Transition State constituted by the Moncloa Pacts of October 1977. Second, there are rights claims that characterize a new sense of the “social” (cf. Donzelot, 1984; Castoriadis, 1978; Castel, 1995): a sense resisting the statist rhetoric of social protection and the “social washing” of professional spin masters.
The authors first met in Madrid in the summer of 2012, sharing in the 15-M movement occupying the Puerta del Sol as well as other central plazas in other major Spanish cities, and finding remarkable Ada Colau’s anti-evictions movement in Catalonia. Since then, we have been daily witnessing and studying the unfolding of a movement redefining practices within a struggle of grassroots municipalism. A moving – as Colau notes – from “occupy to planning democracy in Spain.” That movement is decentered and non-totalizing in the resilience of its interurban and interregional social “pact-ing,” and its plurinational reframing of the Spanish peoples.
For the 15-M movement and the PAH: Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages), there is a perceived manifest decline in trust in the politicians of the Transition State as well as in the financial services industry, turned to for triggering a mirage of sustainable economic growth. Spurred by Stéphane Hessel’s 2010 pamphlet-style call to action, Indignez-vous!, this is the outrage of a lost generation.
They are Los Indignados: cut off and massively unemployed youth – cut off from the circuits of capital accumulation, workplace habitus, and the pillars of social democracy. The outraged grandchildren of the Spanish welfare state confront the complicity in, and culpability for, the austerity policies provoked by the bursting of the 1992–2007 credit bubble economy, itself generated by the investment algorithms of financial market actors and credit rating agencies.
The Outraged represent alternative experienced forms of life within what Gilles Deleuze refers to as horizontal and rhizomatic networks. Therein these new spaces are fugitive flashes of a prefigurative reciprocal solidarity – apart from Emile Durkheim’s functionally differentiated organic solidarity. These flashes are glimmers of a fugitive intersubjectivity taking control of possibility, rather than some totalizing remaking of society.
The Indignados recall André Gorz’s meditation on 1968: Farewell to the Working Class. They are the actualization of Gorz’s prescient sensing of a coming precarious non-class in a farewell to the middle class.
The Transition State was not a revolutionary break with the past, but a further evolution of Francoism through a series of negotiated pacts acknowledging and warranting the rights of opposition. After Franco, Adolfo Suárez – in guiding the Moncloa Pacts – sought an increased pluralism with a restricted state. This was actually concertation rather than statist corporatism of the Catholic chambers legacy. These were not “social pacts” but political pacts involving political party elites consulting with their constituents in emergent so-called civil society associations (Pérez-Diaz, 1993). Yet Suárez sought to eliminate Marxists from the economic ministries, and business elites. He resisted the possibility of the state executing any form of socialist economic program (Encarnación, 1997: 409). For critics like Ramón Cotarelo et al. (2015: 167-71, 176) and Juan Carlos Monedero (2011), these were not pacts to rupture with the past, but a recursive return to a path along el Camino Real, a veritable Bourbon Restoration, if not its persistence. Such a new fashioning of a persistent form was accepted so long as benefits were capable of being provided to so many.
A consolidation of the young Spanish democracy seemed achieved with the victories of the Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) under Felipe González, first in October 1982, followed by wins in 1986, 1989, and 1993, and accession to the European Economic Community, soon to be renamed the European Union (EU). However, González would mine the cult of personality (personalismo), a staple of Spanish political culture. And Felipismo became easily entangled in the recurrent paths of corrupt cronyism of regime-supporting family networks. By 1987–8, hope for a more German social partnership form of concertation (see Lehmbruch, 1998) – of a state with civil society associations – broke down as González’s PSOE-led government divorced itself from the UGT (Unión General del Trabajo) and its call for a general strike (Encarnación, 1997: 413).
Like Gerhard Schroeder’s SPD in Germany and Blair’s New Labour in Britain, González’s PSOE adapted to the embeddedness of neoliberalism in the global political economy. In the three years after 2008 – the last three years of the government of the next PSOE prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero – there were difficulties in evoking a sense of institutional trust. Zapatero and his government’s austerity policies would be seen as responding less to the social rights achievements of his party, and more to the demands and interests of transnational economic actors, and especially the Troika of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and both the European Commission and European Central Bank (ECB) within the EU.
Cascading legitimation crises buffeted Spain: the crisis of stagnant wages of the middle class; the crisis of rapidly expanding inequality; the crisis in sustaining the welfare state; the crisis of continued low economic growth; the crisis of the decline in labor unions’ power and capability; the failure of the education system to adapt to technology and market needs; and the crisis of the Transition State’s credibility itself. The discredited Transition State’s difficulty in evoking institutional trust had become a significant causal factor.
What has been revealed is a strategy of Confluence of disaffection, legitimation claims, and collective identity. Los Indignados is not some prefigurative moment or early stage in the coming of a political party called Podemos (Yes We Can!). It is a movement of municipalist and interurban platforms and cooperative projects that become aligned with an anti-eviction movement, and a movement of over 50% youth unemployment (the Precariat).
What is constituted discursively is what Charles Tilly (2008) calls a trust regime wherein there is an imaginary framework with which to reconfigure institutional practices. This Confluence can be understood as a social ontology of what William Connolly (1987: 157–60) refers to as articulated “discordances in the unities we seek.” This antagonistic discordance is discerned as a feeling of righteous breaking-off and provocative counterpoint to the referents, rhythms, and resonance of the post-Franco Transition State. The Confluence is a diffuse and multiscalar reconfiguring of spaces with transversal negotiations and projections. It can be understood as the Plural Social Subjects of Rights, rather than the time-honored Marxist Social Subjects of Rights, bearers of rights claims rather than bearers of structural forces and supports. The Confluence involves a social pacting from the bottom up. It swells, overflows, and displaces the limits of the Transition State. The social pacting among the diverse movements is a complementary institutionalizing – not just some overlapping consensus. Mutual emancipatory purposes are pursued in a reinforcing and sustaining manner.
The Indignados movement of Confluence against a perceived unrepresentative and unresponsive Transition State amounts to more than effervescence. It is the conflating – bringing together – of the legitimation claims of Social Subjects of Rights: on the one hand, contesting and intent on remaking the field of power relations; and on the other, manifesting an unfolding emergent intersubjectivity of mutual assistance. There is a reciprocal willingness to share in the responsibility of adapting to, pooling, and managing risk and vulnerability. Flesher-Fominaya (2015a, 2015b, 2015c) notes that the tides of social insertion – for example, in Madrid, Barcelona, Galicia, Valencia, and Aragon – make possible new types of credit pools and mutual enterprises.
The movement for a socially pacted democracy in Spain is a broad signifier foreshadowing a more confederal frame of thinking which can imaginatively anticipate and project a more flexible institutional architecture for a polycentric and plurinational Spain. It is one where citizens weave themselves together into a confederated cooperative meshwork wherein legitimation claims/rights claims can be leveraged for bargaining, as Frances Fox Piven (1977, 2008) reminds us. It is an unfolding/enfolding revaluation of meanings and commitments, initiating and opening up learning spaces, and even evolving into a permanent institutionalizing presence; a movement in reaction to perceived social looting that first builds connections, then elective affinities and popular assemblies, and then mutually organized alternatives.
This is a resilient movement of mutual assistance grounded in a new form of social pacting, no longer imbricated in either a cartelized Franquist husk or a social partnership subverted by González’s accommodations with neoliberalism. It amounts to a co-production and insertion of the social as a mutually referential network of mutual assistance, autonomous interdependencies, and social media platforms – what the Indignados refer to as the “Tides of Social Insertion.” These are interlinked movements grounded in a new kind of pacting, a hybridized one that is more horizontally constituted and transversally negotiated across the scales, resisting the assujetissement (subjectification) of neoliberal dispositions and frames of thinking. Beyond resisting, theirs is an effort to scale up the sharing of local initiatives of social assertion and social insertion.
Social insertion is understood as a new form and as a new space:
• It is understood as an embodied form of knowledge, and as a new mediated form of politics: an ensemble of new interpretive frames embedded and lodged both alongside and within a new Transition State. Thus, Indignados is a movement constituted by its own asserted and inserted social frameworks of knowledge and their signifying meaning.
• It is also understood as a new social space of possibility: a space of flows, a new moral economy, a new political ecology of social praxis. This is an imaginatively created symbolic space for posing and trying alternative forms of life: new discursive opportunities, new manners of speaking, new participation codes, and, most importantly, new trust networks (Flesher-Fominaya, ibid.). Trust-producing resources provide the “glue” Peter Marcuse (2011) sees as vital in holding together the Movement for Social Insertion: resources that are regenerated as bonds, as shared values and norms, and as realized new capabilities.
In leveraging and scaling up movement initiatives and mobilization, the Indignados made use of social media online platforms – engaging in what is becoming known as “platform politics” in the trust network they had been building for the “horizontal democracy” (horizontalidad) they proclaimed. These complemented institutionally the movement’s horizontalist/heterarchical assemblies of deliberative democracy – or “circles” (circulos) as Podemos would call them and make part of their brand. Interface was now digitally intersubjective as well as eye-to-eye discursively intersubjective. This was especially so in the early years of PAH and the municipalismo revival.
Digital interface between laptops, smartphone devices, and their programs became a new point of conjuncture, and an expansion of spatial capability and autonomy in the development and dispersion of prefigurative movement conceptions, designs, rallies, and occupations. This amounts to spatial reorganization – in varieties of “parallel spaces”: the development of new alternative infrastructures of political communication and the production of social learning. Network nodes were not centrally coordinated; they were becoming increasingly decentered/decentralized. Trust networking – increasingly called “paranodality” – involves more than a single dominating code.
This is the making use of a new disposition to blog contentiously: asserting legitimation in rights claims; redrawing space and boundaries; renegotiating relations with the state. Blogging diarists become activists to persuade co-producers of the social reassertion/insertion in mutually referent networks. Confluence of tides is grounded in digitally empowered public space where sustainable community-based organizations are devised and put into effect with a more socialist than capitalist sense of a shared economy – a sensibility grounded in solidarity-based exchanges and networks. Economists in the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) have come to brand this new form as sustainable community movement organizations (SCMOs).