Real democracy on the march

In a bold and inspired move, Spain’s Real Democracy Now! movement is taking the struggle to towns and villages throughout the country, so that the issues they have raised can be presented and developed by many more people.

The movement (DRY or M15) is organising marches from towns in the north, east, south and west of Spain: Valencia, Barcelona, La Rioja, Galicia and Andalucía. It is in line with the desire of the democracy campaigners to be as inclusive, to break down barriers and to have the widest possible debates about the way forward.

Two legs are already underway, with over 100 marchers setting off from Barcelona earlier this week. Despite soaring temperatures, the protesters hope to walk 21 kilometres each day. The Valencia route is around 500 kilometres long. The plan is for all the marches to arrive in Madrid on July 23 for a rally and the presentation of demands to parliament.

Last Friday, as the Spanish parliament passed new laws against the rights of unions, democracy collectives agreed to begin planning for a general strike on October 15 to coincide with other direct actions.

The M15 campaigners are not, however, asking the largest trade unions – the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) to call strike action. They feel that these unions are too closely aligned with the Socialist Party (PSOE) government.

DRY has been holding rallies, assemblies and encampments in city centres since May. The occupation of Madrid’s Puerta Sol saw tens of thousands of demonstrators – young and old – gather to reject the country’s established political parties, the PSOE and the right-wing Popular Party (PP).

With slogans like “They don’t represent us”, and “Don’t Vote for Them”, the DRY movement denounced the privileges of the ruling elites, insisting that “the current status of our government and economic system does not take care of these rights and is in many ways an obstacle to human progress.”

Assemblies in Barcelona, Madrid and elsewhere have posted lists of demands ranging from greater democracy and political change to basic rights to jobs, quality of life, housing, public services, respect for the environment, reduced military spending and the abolition of the monarchy.

The call for a general strike poses the question of what such an action is for. Showing politicians and businesses that “if we stop, everything stops”, as a spokesperson from the M15 movement suggests, will not be sufficient to achieve the aims of the marchers. And, whilst rejecting their politically-compromised leadership, the members of the major unions cannot be ignored, if a general strike is to succeed.

A general strike as a protest – such as the two-day strike starting in Greece today – cannot by itself reverse the course of events, politically or economically. Both are inextricably linked and driven by a globalised crisis of the capitalist system of production as a whole.

Just as the unrepresentative political elites are inseparable from the system of private ownership of the means of production, so the financial system sits on top of the system of production for profit. Changing that means addressing the issue of ownership and power.

For true economic and political liberation, the issue of the state and power cannot be evaded. As A World to Win has noted: “The present state has to go and power has to change hands, from the minority to the majority, in revolutionary practice. Corporate and financial power could be co-owned and controlled and exercised through a network of people’s assemblies.”

In our view, that is the precondition for establishing real democracy now in place of the capitalist version that is discredited in the eyes of large sections of ordinary people. This is an urgent question because undoubtedly the far right is waiting in the shadows with own sinister plans of its own to “clean up democracy”.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Police above the law

The refusal of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to quit over the killing – or, more precisely, execution - of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station in 2005 verifies one thing above all: the capitalist state and its institutions consider themselves above the rest of society and see no reason why they should be made accountable for their actions.

While ordinary workers can get fired on a pretext, or for some minor misdemeanour like stealing some paper clips or discarded materials, the police, MPs, ministers, judges, senior civil servants, MI5 and MI6 spies and the like can and do get away with almost anything. Police can kill innocent people going about their business, cover up their actions, block inquiries, while ministers break election promises, take secret decisions to go to war and authorise the infiltration and destabilisation of legal organisations.

All these actions are sanctioned because they carry the authority of a state that is there to rule over people and maintain the status quo. That, above all, means the perpetuation of private property rights. We’re not talking about people’s houses but the legal right to form companies, employ labour, sell products and services and keep the profits. What is generally known as capitalism. Try taking over a factory or office in defence or jobs and you are doing something illegal which strikes at the heart of private property. And the state will be down like a ton of bricks to restore the owner’s “rights”.

So Blair’s refusal to quit his job is no surprise. After all, no one in the Metropolitan Police has admitted responsibility for the shooting dead of a Brazilian electrician while he sat in a Tube carriage quietly reading his paper. In this sense, the police are above the law. They have a shoot-to-kill policy (nodded through in secret by the toothless, pathetic Metropolitan Police Authority) similar to the one adopted by the British army against Republicans in the north of Ireland.

So long as they think there is a danger to themselves or the public, they can kill someone – and there’s no comeback. The case of Harry Stanley, shot dead in 1999, is typical. He left a pub in Hackney carrying a chair leg in a bag. Someone phoned the police to say he had a weapon. Police arrived and minutes later Stanley was dead. No one was prosecuted. After all, police thought he had a weapon. De Menezes, despite police disinformation in the wake of his death, did not wear bulky clothes that might have concealed a bomb, did not leap over the Tube ticket barrier, behaved calmly and was given no warning before being shot. But Blair did attempt to block an independent inquiry, during which time the police involved wrote up their notes so that they told the same story.

It can only get worse as the state introduces ID cards, a national DNA database, extends the scope of what constitutes a criminal offence, monitors phone calls and e-mails and continues stop-and-search aimed at minority communities. This kind of state is beyond reform. Struggling for a new, democratic state, in which all institutions are subordinate and accountable to popular control, is the best way to remember Jean Charles de Menezes


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor