The following is a translation of the text “A la mierda el parlamento y sus leyes. Por un verdadero movimiento autónomo del proletariado” written by Grupo Barbaria and Balance Y Avante.
In these last weeks, the brutality of capital has been revealed in all its severity in the suicide of a woman facing eviction and the terrible eviction of another. Within a sea of constant assaults and families being stripped of their precarious homes, these events are further inflaming a social climate already inundated by misery and repression at the hands of professional politicians who serve only the interests of the wealthy.
All this has sparked mobilizations that combine the genuine, widespread exasperation and concern of the working majority with a political and trade union leadership who direct their actions towards legislative changes and parliamentary hopes—with or without “pressure from the streets.”
We take as our point of departure the premise that such changes are unrealistic. The very system that generates misery cannot, even if it wanted to, halt an automatic process that obeys its own laws of market accumulation. No matter how much the advocates of these dead rights might deny it, within this system governed by money, housing—and along with it, every human need—is a commodity, and it will remain so as long as we continue to live under the boot of this system.
In light of the current mobilizations—with the Puerta del Sol as their epicenter—we find it necessary to pose three fundamental questions as we begin discussing a genuine class-based movement:
- The housing crisis is just one of many, yet it is as desolating as the rest. Brutal, unstoppable price hikes; precarious, unstable employment with wages that fail to guarantee even the most basic subsistence; the repression of migrants and the population in general; a Right and a Left that divide the task of managing and reproducing our everyday poverty… all of these form part of the same problem: the social relations that have been imposed upon us, which is to say, capitalism.
- Struggles waged in isolation and separation against this or that phenomena that do not address their need for unity are doomed to defeat. In these times, there are struggles and strikes—such as that of teaching staff in the Community of Madrid—whose convergence with housing mobilizations is necessary to give a more broader significance to the struggle.Current mobilizations are often framed as a step beyond the 15M movement. But unlike the current ones, 15M was rooted in a broad vision that encompassed our many difficulties and problems within a single framework, even if it was not always conscious of this fact. This it what characterizes any class-based movement, even the weakest ones: the expansion and generalization of their aims. For these mobilizations to truly transform into a class movement, to genuinely transcend the civic and institutional limits of 15M, and to demonstrate that we learn from our defeats, it is vital that they expand and generalize, converging with the distinct struggles emerging at both the national and international levels. This cannot be forced through slogans or organizational formulas. We will only succeed if we move beyond the logic of partial demands, which divide us from one another, and address the common source of our problems.
- Yet, none of this will matter if we do not hold the reins of our own movement. It is crucial that the struggle be guided and oriented by the assemblies; that these assemblies become the foundation of the proletariat’s autonomous struggle, refusing to allow anyone else to decide their course of action. They serve as a unified space where thinking, organizing, and acting take place, all at the same time. Through them, we prevent our activity from being steered by party or union organizations that have their own agendas.
We must learn from the unions’ capacity to halt the Airbus strike, despite the opposition that was voiced by many workers within the assemblies. Without territorial assemblies possessing decision-making power, assemblies that organize the movement and give expression to the unified strength of our class, any call for a general strike will amount to nothing more than yet another repetition of the usual union-led parades designed merely to cast the sell-outs, the very same people who sanctioned our precariousness through labor reform and our misery through pension reform, as the legitimate representatives of “popular pressure” on the government. We do not want the general strike championed by the CCOO and UGT that is applauded by the Left and far-Left of capital. We want a mass strike guided by territorial assemblies, the only formations capable of forging a genuine mass movement that can overcome the violence and misery which this system subjects us to.
Unless we take ownership of our struggles, acting without intermediaries, refusing to leave our fate in the hands of politicians or union officials and placing no trust in laws or parliaments, we are doomed to move from disappointment to disappointment, without ever becoming conscious of what we are or of the historic power of our struggle as a single global class.