Report from Madrid

i don't even know where to begin. i have never seen anything like this. a peruvian friend said today: "you don't even recognize it, but this is what a pre-insurrectional state looks like." maybe. anyway, something like that.

friday there was a demonstration in front of the US embassy. the demonstration converted, again, with joy and incredulity at our own numbers, into a march, and several thousand filled the main avenue of madrid, stopping all traffic. like the day before, the multitude was tremendously diverse: old and young, families, celebrities, school groups, etc. a few kilometers later the demonstration tried to turn up the street leading to the headquarters of the government party and was met by a mass of riot squads, who shot rubber balls into the crowd and then charged, dividing the demonstration and breaking several heads. this began a process which lasted most of the night of people grouping in various plazas of the center then being chased and beaten by the police, scattering and grouping again. and again. and again. the center of the city was converted into a visibly militarized zone, with hundreds of riot vehicles and police patrolling for hours.

this extreme visibility is clearly a strategy on the part of the police to frighten people until only the young and politically organized dare to demonstrate, and once they are isolated, to accuse them of violence, provocation, terrorism, whatever: thus breaking this emergent movement.

and so when this afternoon, saturday, not a few hundred or a few thousand but hundreds of thousands showed up to yet another demonstration and once again took over the streets-- all the streets -- of the center, it was a major (short term) victory. the demonstration was so massive that there was no way for them to break it until almost everyone had arrived at Sol, the central plaza, and only the tail end of the demonstration was still arriving. this tail end the riot squads separated from the rest, cornered, and began to attack with particular brutality. they then went on to charge against the mass of people in Sol, but were rebuffed several times by the crowd who, hands in the air, refused to disperse. so to the sound of a well-known poet reading from an impromptu stage, the police tear-gassed the crowd, breaking it up and beginning again the scenario of the night before: cat-and-mouse throughout the city, burning barricades, urban war.

and saturday night, writing this, i'm at home and i'm listening to the radio and on all the major stations they barely mention that there have been demonstrations, but emphasize that there are 'violent elements' in the city, endangering the police. not to be naive, but truly it is incredible.

sorry to tell battle stories -- its not the most interesting, you are far away, and there are other things going on. but these local stories are important, and we need to think about them.

i would love to know what is happening in all the many places you are. this is an unprecedented moment: the world has never seen such a wave of coordinated resistance on all levels. now we need to be very intelligent, very careful, very passionate, guiding this moment...

here it is clear that this is not only a massive protest against the war in iraq and spain's participation in it but a crisis of legitimacy of the state and of representative democracy as a system. once marginal radical chants, like "they call it democracy but its not" and "they don't represent us" are now generalized, in the mouths of everyone. moreover, the crowd is audibly associating the rage about the war with rage about the privatization of the universities and other services, the precarization of work, etc. the major unions are debating a general strike. in the dizzying talk of global economy, access to petroleum and grand geopolitical gambles, both the discourses and the tactics of the global movement against capitalism are being adopted by an enormous public. where will this go? will this fizzle, get exhausted, return to a slightly uncomfortable normalcy? or will we push on, persistent, creative, more and more massive?

i, frankly, am terrified. terrified by this sense that there is no one to appeal to, no checks on power at any level: not the UN, not the citizens within any given nation-state. that bush bombs if he likes in the same way that the police attack if they like, and then they tell the story however they find convenient on the media which they control, and if the public doesn't buy it, it doesn't make any difference anyway. in a state of global emergency, and with the carte blanche of a "war on terrorism" one feels that anything could happen. but perhaps it is naive to imagine there were ever checks on power, perhaps it is good that the situation is clear, visible, evident, even here in europe and in the US where we are accustomed to a certain comfort, a certain faith in the ability of our institutions to limit abuses.
(perhaps i'm being apocalyptic: i've just gotten home from a very long night. we'll see about those institutions, if they can be salvaged or if they have to be scrapped.)

we don't know where this will go. but the sure thing is that we're in a terrible, precious, historic moment of transformation. the macro-geopolitical panorama has never looked so grim and yet i have never had so much faith in an active, coordinated, decentralized multitude all over the world.
listen to me, i sound like a populist. clearly i need to go to bed.