Torniamo a proporre articoli della stampa estera sui movimenti di protesta contro l'austeriy in Europa. In passato abbiamo parlato a lungo di Grecia, oggi raccontiamo qualcosa sulla Spagna e sullo sciopero del 14 Novembre che in Italia ha trovato spazio sui giornali solo grazie agli scontri in centro a Roma. Ci furono scontri anche a Madrid, con la polizia scatenata nella caccia al manifestante, incattivendosi anche sui bambini. Ma più in generale lo sciopero spagnolo dimostra come la Grecia non sia un caso isolato. La Spagna sta affondando con la disoccupazione alle stelle e lo Stato tutto impegnato a difendere le banche degli amici del PPE. I movimenti di protesta si stanno moltiplicando, con le organizzazioni tradizionali come i sindacati che vengono ora affiancati dai network informali, come quelli degli indignados. Un mondo nuovo, che spesso i partiti della sinistra (cosiddetta!) tradizionale non riescono a interpretare. Il motivo è presto detto: sono deecenni, quando non quasi un secolo che in Europa non si assisteva ad un ritorno così violento e così fulmineo della povertà. Precari, studenti, disoccupati non sono la tradizionale classe operaia organizzata da sindacati e dai vari partiti socialdemocratici. Nessuno, al momento, li rappresenta. Ma è proprio attraverso di loro che potrà nascere un futuro migliore per il vecchio continente.
Il seguente articolo di The Nation racconta la giornata campale del 14 Novembre e gli animi, i sentimenti e le divisioni all'interno dei manifestanti.
di Julia Ramirez Blanco
THE NATION
The insistent thrum of the helicopters patrolling overhead began
early in the morning. The sound has become familiar in Madrid, a
stand-in for the police surveillance and repression that has increased
in tandem with the austerity-steeped city's newfound penchant for
regular, raucous protests. On this particular morning, though, the
government had reason to worry: it was the day of the eighth general
strike in Spain’s democratic history, and already the second one under
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, whose conservative government was barely
one year old.
The strike was called by the main trade unions of Spain, along with the Cumbre Social,
a summit of some 150 organizations including Amnesty International, Red
Cross, Save the Children, and Greenpeace. Non-traditional unions, like
the anarchist Confederación General de Trabajadores (General Workers' Federation), as well as members of the 15M social movement, joined forces for the day’s demonstrations.
I. HALTING THE CITY
The organizing demand of the strike did not seek specific benefits,
but rather an official referendum asking the Spanish population if it
agrees with the measures adopted by Rajoy's governing conservative
party, the Partido Popular (PP). Do the Spanish people support projects
like the so-called “flexibilization” of working conditions and recent
deep cuts in social spending? The strikers wanted to put it to a
national vote.
The economic steps taken were never part of Rajoy’s election
manifesto, they said, which amounted to “an infringement of the
electoral contract that was established between the PP and their
voters.”
A straight-forward chant began the day: “They leave us without
future/There are culprits/There are solutions.” The slogan was clearly
borrowed from the rhetoric of another Spanish activist group, Juventud
Sin Futuro [Youth without a future], the powerful student platform which
turned the punk idea of having 'No Future' into a galvanizing political
statement.
From the outset, Rajoy's government dismissed the whole idea, and the
main conservative newspapers in Spain printed their headlines to match:
“General Coercion” ran at the top of La Razón, and “Strike Against Spain” decked ABC.
Streetlamps in Madrid were turned on in bright sunlight, burning
needlessly in a blatant effort to increase electricity consumption for
the day given that one of the clearest ways to measure a drop in
industrial production—a metric of success for the general strike's work
stoppage—is to measure electricity use.
According to the Sindicato de Estudiantes [Students’ Union], the
strike had a massive following within several high schools. In the
universities, the strike's following was inconsistent, but two of the
most important centers – the Autónoma and Complutense universities of
Madrid – were almost empty on the day of the strike.
By noon, assessments of the strike were predictably different based
on who was doing the assessing. While the unions considered the day a
success, the CEOE employers’ association called the turnout “almost
null” and the strike “ill-timed and harmful.” The polling agency
Metroscopia calculated that 44% of the working population went on
strike, 10% of workers wanted to go on strike but could not do so, and
2% intended to go to work but were unable to.
But was 14N a general strike in the traditional sense? Antonio G., a
member of Madrid’s creative activism group Gila Grupo de Intervención,
says not quite. He commented on the difficulty of organizing a general
strike “in a society where people no longer work in a factory-system.”
Others linked to the15M movement chimed in, saying that the general
strike, as a form of protest, is an old way of fighting and does not fit
with the conditions of the modern city. With an unemployment rate of
more than 20% and a new labor reform that makes it easier to dismiss
workers, those who have a job live with the fear of losing it.
In this context, for many, the demonstrations that took place
throughout the day were more important than the actual halting of
activity. Traditional forms of protest largely organized by the labor
unions – such as the picket lines, marches and the strike itself – took
place together with examples of direct action and civil disobedience,
linked to the newer tradition of social movements. Some well-known
actors shut themselves inside Madrid’s Teatro Español to display their
rejection of cuts in culture subsidies. Hundreds of people spent the
night inside hospitals, high schools and universities to protest cuts in
social spending.
II. MOVING THE STREETS
In the morning, a march made its way to various centers of
“exploitation and resistance” in Madrid, under the slogan, “From the
right to housing to the right for health/If they steal our future, we
block the city.”
The first stop was at Acampadabankia, a protest camp in front of the
offices of Bankia, a major Spanish bank in Plaza Celenque, where
protesters railed against evictions of mortgage defaulters, demanding
social rent and payment in kind.
The march continued to the Princesa Hospital, one of Madrid's main
public health centers. Princesa has recently been at risk of being
turned into a private geriatric hospital, and has become a focal point
in the fight against privatization of the healthcare system.
On the way to the hospital, the march made stops at businesses that
prevented their workers from joining the strike. Marchers, insisting on
the right to protest, tried to force those shops to close in what
sometimes were coercive gestures. Journalist and activist Marta G.
thinks that this may be a dire failure of the protest effort, because
the shopkeepers, who are also enduring a precarious economic climate,
bore the brunt of those actions. The strikers, she thinks, may have lost
potential allies in the same political fight.
In the evening, disorganization mingled with violence and chaos. The
protest group “Coordinadora 25S,” which made the call to surround the
parliament building during the protests of September 25, had made the same call on November 14. The police violence and rioting of 25S
was very much at the forefront of everyone's collective memory this
time around. Cristina Cifuentes, the government delegate for Madrid,
moved to forbid demonstrations in the area of the parliament building,
which was now heavily guarded with police. Confrontations between the
police forces and protesters began shortly after nightfall. A Kentucky
Fried Chicken restaurant and a La Caixa bank office near the area were
set on fire. The glass windows of McDonalds were broken, and various
groups set rubbish containers alight, to burn in the middle of a main
street. A six-foot-tall barricade was placed across the city's Paseo del
Prado, a main artery lined with museums and shops. A scene like this
had not been lived in Spain’s capital city for many years, and some
people see in the scent of smoke a shocking similarity with recent
protests in Greece.
Journalist Ana Requena Aguilar, from eldiario.es, thinks that the
distance between trade unions and social movements was reduced on the
day of the strike. Unions have radicalized their discourse in recent
months, and some weeks prior to the strike major unions held a meeting
with the group called “Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca,” or “Platform of People Affected by Mortgages.” At the level of their administration, the unions and the indignados of the 15M movement
have completely different tactics: the unions conduct dialogue with
government institutions, while the indignados mostly operate within
tropes of direct action and civil disobedience. But at the level of
their organizing, the overlap between the two is steadily growing. Many
union-affiliated people who did not particularly identify with the
radical rhetoric of their 15M counterparts took part in protests and
forms of action that go beyond the discourse of the trade unions they
belong to.
This is most strikingly apparent in the existence of groups called “mareas,”
or “tides,” which anthropologist Adolfo Estalella sees as a radically
new form of street protest. Demarcated by specific colors, each “tide”
defends a sector of the endangered welfare state, and show up
periodically at large marches, each supporter dressed in the group's
representative color.
A sea of healthcare workers dressed in white mobbed the street on 14N, chanting “La sanidad no se vende, se defiende,”
or, “healthcare is not to be sold, it is to be defended.” Four days
later, on November 18, this white “tide” began a series of marches that
coincided with days of strikes at hospitals and health centers. The
Asociación de Facultativos Especialistas de Madrid [Madrid Association
of Specialist Doctors] has called for an indefinite strike until the
regional government halts its privatization plan.
Public education is defended by the green tide, who have adopted a similar slogan: “la educación no se vende, se defiende.” Early in the day, a group of students dressed in green managed to temporarily blockade Madrid’s A-6 motorway.
At Madrid's Universidad Complutense, one of the most prestigious
universities in Spain, there is particular interest in this tide:
Complutense faces impending government intervention.
Meanwhile, the central government says it is not going to change any
of its policies. However, the strikers in Spain have seen small
victories: a new law on house evictions keep the most vulnerable
families in their homes for two years, and (at least for the time
being), the privatization process of Madrid's Princesa Hospital has been
put on hold. Many consider these measures to be insufficient. But they
are something, and Paris R. is still hopeful.
“It feels like we are living in a historic moment,” he said.
Recently, a group of activists in Barcelona met with Nicholas
Mirzoeff, a professor of media culture at NYU. Asking how he could
translate for Americans the animating sentiment behind the events of 14N
and Spain's recent near-perpetual state of protest, the activists
responded: “Tell them we are defending what you could have: public
healthcare, public education.”
fonte: http://www.thenation.com/blog/171670/how-strike-back-14n-dispatch-madrid#
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