We have a dream: towards a Euro-Mediterranean social strike
We have a dream: towards a Euro-Mediterranean social strike
This text was written by Madrilonia, a Madrid-based blog that writes about and participates in social movements. Madrilonia has been involved in the 15-M movement, which began with the mass protest organized by Real Democracy Now on the 15th of May 2011 and inspired Europe with the occupation of plazas across Spain. This text imagines a new form of strike across Europe and the Euro-Mediterranean region, a strike which is up to the task of confronting contemporary forms of exploitation and control.
Translated by Mick O’Broin, the Provisional University. The original Spanish language version is available here.
Here at Madrilonia we recently woke up with an inspiring dream: a vision of the Euro-Mediterranean region paralyzed at the level of re-production and inserted in a process of irreversible change, a dream that might just awaken us from an apparently endless neo-liberal nightmare. This dream, still cloudy, poses new questions and suggests new answers with respect to the increasing plausibility that the 15-M movement and the grassroots trade unions call a general strike in the coming months.
Now that our movement has overcome public opinion, taken the streets, and articulated, via assemblies, an incipient counter-power, we can begin to imagine the opening up of yet untraveled paths. On these paths we will find, as we walk, the fundamental importance of a dream governed by our collective unconscious, by that common sense (or sense of the common) which has served us so well until now. Dreams don’t allow us to see or feel with the same clarity as the cold light of reality, but they do allow us to enter, without fear, into the unknown, wherein we confront something as simple, yet definitive, as waking up.
If we decide to dream collectively and journey together in the unknown, we might just redefine the limits of the possible. To those who tell us that a Euro-Mediterranean strike is impossible, we respond that the path that has led us this far is made of such impossible dreams: taking the squares (Tahrir, Sol, Syntagma), creating virtual networks of collective intelligence, stopping evictions, assemblies in our neighborhoods, sit-ins, mass demonstrations, etc.
The question isn’t whether or not we can do it. The question is how to make it happen: how to turn this dream into a reality? The best way of beginning that process is to ask better questions: what will this strike look like?
Read the rest here.
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