Activist Post: This Spanish Spring is the Real Thing

Activist Post: This Spanish Spring is the Real Thing
THE FLASH MOB MOVES NORTH:
Thousands are now camped out in central Madrid along with 60 other sites nationwide, creating temporary cities of the dispossessed. The mainstream media in Britain and the West have chosen to largely ignore this phenomenon, perhaps because they fear that “it could happen here”.This century, Spaniards have moved to the forefront of alternative culture, the shackles of convention and Catholicism that governed their parents and grandparents lives permanently binned. They seem to realise more than any other western nation that the dog and pony show of replacing the “left” party with the ‘right” endlessly is little more than a hypnotic charade. They have taken the “Arab Spring” a step further by rejecting the periodic plebiscites that the West clings to as its claim to democracy, instead starting to demand real change – to economic structures, to political representation and even to the way we treat each other.
At the camp in the “Puerta del Sol” in Madrid, free food is handed out. What’s being demanded is a new society, not just papering over the cracks of the old one. The movement itself has no single leader or figurehead; all decisions are made by consensus at general assemblies, held twice daily. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, attend the meetings, with no decision taken until every single person is in agreement. This is real synarchy in action, the genus of genuine political change and it should be applauded. It represents a major challenge to the old order of “representative democracy” focused on personality and privilege and is arguably