Understanding Podemos

introduction to pablo iglesias As emergency policies have hardened into a new political order, Europe’s two- party system has come under increasing strain. The discredited centre lefts of the Socialist International have been deserted by their core electorates, who have shifted both to the right and to the left. For the most part, popular anger has found expression through existing anti-establishment parties: ukip and the Front National in England and France, the snp and Sinn Féin in Scotland and Ireland, Syriza in Greece. In Italy and Spain, however, anti-austerity parties have been set up from scratch—the first mass-based left parties to be founded anywhere since the Brazilian pt in 1982. In Greece, Troika manage- ment has forced the Syriza government to confront the German-led Eurozone regime head-on; for Spain’s Podemos and Italy’s Five Star Movement, the principal target is still the national system and its ruling order, which both call ‘the Caste’. Unlike the Five Stars, however, Podemos has a mass protest movement behind it: the May 2011 indignado occupations and the two years of direct action against evictions and cuts that followed. In generation and for- mation, too, the leaderships are quite distinct. The core group of Complutense University lecturers who founded Podemos in 2014 are thirty years younger than M5S’s directors. Intellectuals and publicists, they were radicalized in the nineties, amid swirling currents of Negrian political theory and alter-globalism; their presentational skills were first honed on communitytv . The hands-on confidence gained working with radical governments in Bolivia, Ecuador or Venezuela helps explain the audacity of their bid to mobilize the discontent of the indignados in a national political project. Pablo Iglesias, Podemos general secretary, was born into a leftist madrileño family in 1978, and cut his teeth as a schoolboy activist in the pce. Iglesias read law, then politics and film studies; moving from post-autonomism—his doctoral dissertation was Multitude and Collective Post-National Action—to Gramscian cultural criticism: Machiavelli before the Big Screen (2013) offers readings of A Few Good Men, Dogville, Katyn´, Ispansi, Amores Perros and Kubrick’s Lolita through the lenses of Gramsci, Said, Agamben, Wallerstein, Brecht, Harvey, Butler. Disputar la Democracia (2014) was a tightly written manifesto excoriating the corruption of Spain’s political order as consubstantial with a development model based on real-estate speculation. On the eve of the May 2015 Spanish regional elections, Iglesias sets out the strategic thinking behind Podemos and, below, responds to nlr’s questions about the project. Santander Bilbao FRANCE Oviedo NAVARRE ASTURIAS CANTABRIA Vitoria- Santiago de Gasteiz Compostela Pamplona Communities Spain, showingAutonomous GALICIA BASQUE COUNTRY Logroño LA RIOJA Zaragoza CATALONIA Valladolid CASTILLA Y LEÓN ARAGON Barcelona MADRID D S Madrid A N S L PORTUGAL I Toledo I C R A Palma de Mallorca E Valencia L CASTILLA-LA MANCHA A EXTREMADURA VALENCIA B Mérida MURCIA Murcia CANARY ISLANDS ANDALUSIA (at half-scale) Seville Santa Cruz de Tenerife A S E N Las Palmas N E A E R R A de Gran Canaria 0 100 miles M E D I T New Masses, New Media—8 pablo iglesias UNDERSTANDING PODEMOS he explosion of the 2008 financial crisis has produced a series of unforeseen political consequences, in Europe in particular. How can the forces of the radical left best respond to this unprecedented challenge? The aim here is to explain the Tanalysis that has informed Podemos’s political strategy in Spain: who we are, where we’re coming from and where we want to go—the full- est reflection on these questions that I’ve been able to set down since being elected leader of Podemos last November. It’s also an opportunity to speak in my own voice, outside the format of mainstream media inter- views. Of my combined roles as party General Secretary and political scientist and theorist, the first would not have been possible without the second. This is one of the defining characteristics of Podemos. Faced with the unprecedented political situation created by the Eurozone crisis, our starting-point was a recognition of the twentieth-century left’s defeat, already registered by nlr.1 Hobsbawm’s ‘short century’, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall, saw the horrors of fascism, war and colonial violence, but was also an age of hope and social progress. After 1945, social programmes in the advanced-capitalist countries brought a limited redistribution of wealth and higher liv- ing standards for major sectors of the working class, especially where trade unions were strong. The Russian and Chinese revolutions proved incapable of combining economic redistribution with democracy, but produced undeniable advances in modernization and industrialization; Soviet military strength, primarily responsible for the defeat of Nazism, was also proof of economic development. In the post-war period, the ussr represented a real counter-weight to us interventionism. If the new left review 93 may june 2015 7 8 nlr 93 Cold War generated Eastern-bloc satellite states devoid of any real sovereignty, it also opened up space for anti-colonial movements to defy us hegemony, and helped to buttress welfare states and the extension of social rights in the West. From the 1970s, Washington and the other Western powers wagered on a new set of policies to address the gathering problems of their economies: beating back trade unions, empowering financial sectors, privatizing public assets and accelerating the relocation of production to low-wage zones, along with the establishment of the fiat-dollar system. The fall of the Soviet bloc was an enormous boost for the Washington Consensus, but also for the preponderance of finance capital within the European Union. This took constitutional form in the Maastricht Treaty, whereby member states agreed to surrender monetary sovereignty to an ‘inde- pendent’ European Central Bank. The convergence criteria and Stability Pact hedging the new single currency signalled the growing hegemony of a united Germany within the European project; national macro-economic policies were restricted to reducing public spending, imposing wage restraint and promoting privatization—or emigration. Many of the struggles of the past decades in Europe can be seen as defensive stands against the ongoing attrition of national sovereignty. In this context of defeat for the existing lefts, critical thought was largely separated from political praxis—in stark contrast to the organic links between theoretical production and revolutionary strategy that characterized the early twentieth century. It became the work of professionalized university teachers, rather than radical political leaders. Indeed the themes of contemporary critical thinking are intimately related to historical defeat. Nevertheless, despite the narrowing of political possibilities due to the hollowing of state sovereignty, the past fifteen years have seen the emergence of new adversaries for neoliberalism, not just in the form of social movements but also at state level. In Latin America, in conditions of severe economic and political crisis, popular and progressive formations won electoral victories which they transformed into projects for the recuperation of sovereignty, both in national and regional terms. 1 ‘The only starting-point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat’: Perry Anderson, ‘Renewals’, nlr 1, Jan–Feb 2000. Anderson called for a stance of uncompromising realism, refusing any accommodation with the ruling system and rejecting any consoling understatement of its power: pp. 16, 13–14. [This and subsequent footnotes: nlr] iglesias: Podemos 9 While the context that produced these processes differed in numerous respects—economic, social and cultural structures, strength of the state, geopolitical situation—from that of Europe, let alone the us, there was one similarity. Latin America too had seen the historic defeat of the old left in the disastrous years of the seventies and eighties. The emergence of these new forces was a reminder that politics, as a stage for struggles in constantly shifting conditions, never comes to a halt, however hard the conditions in which it operates. Even without the threat of the old spectre, the world order has entered into a period of geopolitical transition over the past fifteen years, an expression in part of the displacement of the industrial balance between the North Atlantic and East Asia. Washington’s unilateral predominance has been qualified, at least, by the emergence of great powers, old and new, whose interests may not easily be subsumed into those of the us. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms demonstrated the viability of a state-planned ultra-capitalism, converting the land of the Cultural Revolution into the world’s foremost productive zone and a powerful international actor. In the ‘pivot region’ of Eurasia, Putin’s semi-democratic Russia continues to demonstrate that Moscow is back on the world stage. Faultlines The 2008 crisis has now produced unexpected new political openings, in southern Europe in particular, in forms that few could have predicted. State bailouts for bankrupt financial institutions led to ballooning national debts and soaring interest-rate spreads. The emergency policies to ‘save the euro’ imposed—and soon normalized—by the German- led bloc have had disastrous effects in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, where millions have lost their jobs, tens of thousands have been evicted from their homes and the dismantling and privatization of public-health and education systems has sharply accelerated, as the debt burden was shifted from banks to citizens. The eu has been split along north–south lines, a division of labour that mandates a low-wage work- force and cheap goods and services for the Mediterranean countries, while the young and better-trained are forced to migrate. The 2014–20 eu budget represents a victory for this line.

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