The blind growth of the system leads to the growth of cities, of industry and of the transport and energy infrastructures which increasingly damage the land. This expansion of capitalism leads to the marketisation of more and more aspects of life, including the privatisation and increasing cost of the most basic necessities, such as food, education or health.
Globalisation, one of the faces of this growth, entails the relocation of production to other countries and an exponential growth in the differences between Western countries and the rest.
Faced with all these attacks, the most direct way of intervening is through mobilisation.
Creating social movements is the way that people who lack economic power, and who don’t have enough institutional influence, can defend what they believe in. Without their actions, the situation would be much worse than it already is.
They are often defensive actions to prevent a specific situation from getting any worse. Whether or not this objective is achieved, such actions serve to create consciousness and debate, and to extend new meanings and collective values.
At the beginning of this decade, and now more recently in the face of institutional manoeuvres which take advantage of the drought, the struggle against the transfer of water from the Ebro River has not only achieved its specific objective thanks to a mass mobilisation; it has focussed reflections and proposals for a new water culture. Also, over the last decade, dozens, maybe hundreds, of platforms have appeared around the country, in defence of natural, rural or cultural spaces. There are dozens of examples, such as Save Empordà (Salvem l’Empordà), Save Montserrat, Save Can Ricart… All this saving the land has led to a new slogan: for a new land culture.
At the time of writing, there is am increasingly solid and widespread struggle against the MAT —the Very High Voltage electricity connection between France and the Spanish State— a symbol of the energy-based growth that leads us nowhere; and with this idea of solidarity between peoples, we’ve learnt to say “no to the MAT, here or anywhere; neither underground cables nor overhead lines”.
Often, mobilisations are for the defence of or access to basic rights such as housing, healthy food, education, or our rights over our own bodies.
In this field, there have been important mobilisations by V de Vivienda, to re-establish housing as a right, at a time when rents and mortgages have become so expensive that in order to pay them, millions of people have to let themselves be exploited in badly paid jobs. In the area of food, we should mention the We Are What We Sow campaign (Som el que sembrem), which has collected 105.896 signatures in a Popular Legal Initiative to demand that Catalonia be free of genetically modified (GM) food and for clear labelling of those food products which do and don’t include GM ingredients. It remains to be seen how the Catalan parliament responds to this demonstration of social participation and citizens’ consciousness.
In the field of education, over the last few years, the so called Bologna Process to establish the European higher education area has brought a threat to the public university, reinforcing its dependence on private companies and on the earning potential of students. Many groups of students, researchers and university staff are opposing the process.
Finally, since the beginning of 2008 and faced with a judicial offensive against abortion rights, diverse groups have mobilised to defend our right to our own bodies and for the decriminalisation of abortion, for it to be free and included as a normal part of health care.
Following these mobilisations, over the last few months struggles have emerged in defence of the employment and other rights of migrant people.
On 9 June 2008, European employment ministers approved a modification of the Working Time Directive of the European Union, to permit the extension of the working week to up to 60 hours for all workers, and up to 65 hours for some specific groups. This would happen through agreements between individual workers and the company, thus also attacking the right to collective bargaining. Since then, various groups and alternative unions have begun to mobilise, and are preparing responses which they will soon make known.
A few days later, on 18 June, the European Return Directive was approved, to permit the expulsion of undocumented immigrants. This directive, popularly known as the “shame directive”, legalises the detention for up to 18 months of a person without a residence permit, followed by their expulsion. Once outside the EU, it prohibits their return for a period of 5 years. Once again, many groups of the people directly affected and solidarity groups, as well as some well known personalities, have come out against the directive, and the mobilisations against its approval are continuing.
In all these actions, the social movements follow different strategies, often combining several in order to achieve their legitimate aims. The most visible ones are usually demonstrations, rallies, sit ins and other participative methods of going out onto the street to express protest or a demand around a specific issue. The most committed strategies may be acts of civil disobedience, in which the individuals or groups involved risk their physical integrity, or their liberty, in defence of their beliefs. For example, direct actions, which are frequent in the defence of the land, have been used to stop the destruction of the environment when other methods have failed.
When the occasion requires it, options such as legal actions and Popular Legal Initiatives are also still used to defend and promote the ideas and proposals of the social movements.

One example of the events which accompany these struggles was the Catalan Social Forum, in January 2008, a meeting place in which many seminars, talks and workshops contributed to deciding the diverse strategies to be followed and a calendar of mobilisations.

There are other strategies which we will not mention, so as not to lengthen this section excessively.
To sum up, it is important to emphasise that, in general, there are not many differences in the ways of acting of the different social movements. Often, the same people use different strategies depending on the time and the opportunity. It is generally understood that all these strategies are positive, if there is the human and economic capacity to carry them out.

Precisely the existence of so many different struggles to defend ourselves against the diverse attacks of modern day capitalism is often used as proof that the social movements are disorganised and lack an alternative model of society. That may have been true once, but over recent years there has been a great process of convergence, which perhaps hasn’t been visible in the street, but is taking shape in the daily life of many towns and neighbourhoods. This process has been accompanied by the delegitimation of the political parties and the institutions of this supposed democracy, which has reduced to below minimum the hopes that change can come via these bodies, at the same time as we dare to imagine and begin to build other ways of changing the world.

Only at municipal level is there still debate about the use of institutional methods, encouraged by the growth of Popular Unity Lists (Candidatures d’Unitat Popular, CUP), which share with social movements the will to change things from a local level.

On the other hand, over recent years, many projects have been started and consolidated which allow us to transform, here and now, at least some aspects of our reality. And there are more and more every day!

In the following pages, we will go more deeply into the peculiarities of this movement of movements, a movement which, though the media allow it to appear fragmentarily from time to time, they never even hint that it could be the seed of a global alternative to the present system.