Activities increasingly go beyond protest, to become the autonomous practice of a new society

The social movements today

As we have seen in the preceding pages, we live in a society where the powers that be control the formal channels of political participation and of public life: government, elections, parties, the media, the judicial system. It’s under these conditions that diverse groups of people, organised independently of the market and the state, emerge and gradually try to win space for acting and living, with the aim of denouncing the current social model and at the same time searching for and strengthening alternatives. These are what we call social movements.
We can recall from the past certain social movements which sought and in some cases achieved specific improvements in the system without changing its basic structure (for example, trade unions, the ecologist, feminist and antimilitarist movements). But now a critical mass is being generated which doesn’t just mobilise for a single issue or to pressurise the state to legislate and carry out concrete measures. Instead, it mobilises to express a critical vision of the capitalist system as a whole and to put into effect a radical transformation, which, beyond writing about it in books and documents, it tries to put into practice day to day in those aspects of life where this is possible, which are more and more all the time.

Currently, most of the emerging social movements are organised on the basis of local groups, with autonomous and assembly-based structures. They have very diverse and dynamic identities, a wide age range among their participants, and create genuinely new practices and discourses.

In these new social movements, we want to practise real democracy, where the decisions are taken by those who are affected by them. We think that the alternatives which we offer, between us all, can not be absorbed by capitalism, this system which tries to influence everything in our life. We don’t think that things can be sorted out by proposing reforms which aim only at improving existing institutions and laws. There are many proposals of that type, and there have been for a long time. The point is that these changes would have to be carried out by the political forces which stay in power and govern thanks to the power of transnational corporations, especially the banks. We think that the paralysis of institutional politics, tied down as it is by all the tiers of power within the system, is more than established, and we reject this avenue as a means to social transformation. The parliamentary political parties thus represent a point of view different from ours.

We do not only have maximum demands for the global transformation of society. We also believe that certain concrete actions can be useful steps forward, bringing us closer to these demands. But as we do not believe in the political will of governments to take on board our demands, we reaffirm our commitment to civil disobedience, autonomy and self management as forms of struggle, experimentation and construction of real alternatives; as has been the practice of various social movements in recent years.

Below, we present diverse examples of the mobilisations and struggles which are currently being generated by the social movements.