Demotix/Marcos del Mazo. All rights reserved.To grasp
how stunningly Podemos burst onto the political scene in recent Spanish
history, one must understand and reflect upon an idea that has already been
explored in politics: namely that the hitherto leading role of the working
class, as well as its historical role in social struggles, should be taken into
consideration alongside other emerging
social forces of similar ‘critical’ relevance.

Outside of the factory, other potential alliances can
be discerned with transformative forces, unconventional from the point of view
of the traditional and orthodox Left. Hence our interest in revisiting, in this
new historical context–the crisis of a neoliberal hegemony–Gramsci’s reading
of the European situation and its diagnosis after the defeat of the left by the
reactionary, fascist forces that had erupted at that moment in European
history.

In a moment of systemic crisis, in which, to once
again quote Gramsci, ‘the old is dying and the new is not yet ready to be
born', it is politically ineffective to search for clear and distinct sectors
and forces in the social topology. We must rather, if tentatively, as Gramsci
put it, in these ‘morbid’ situations, work with complex, ambiguous compositions.

If, in this time of crisis, we accept the logic of hybridization
over that of purification–which requires the authentication of behaviors and the segregation
or demarcation of impure identities–the need for a more experimental communication strategy becomes clear. Our strategy must
have a greater sensitivity to the phenomena of mass psychology and the importance of social networks. Our strategy must have a greater sensitivity to the phenomena of mass psychology and the importance of social networks.These new tools have already been tested in university and cooperative spaces
in recent years, and are the result of a learning process different to anything
that went on before.

 ***

Podemos assumes affirmatively and experimentally its
role in this ‘morbid’ situation in a moment of transition when so-called
anomalies, dysfunctions and setbacks emerge in a wholly new light.

This
is not just because
failing to contest the battle within this uneven and ambivalent political field
would simply concede the ground to the forces of reaction and the inertia of
decomposition. But it is also due to the need to expand the emancipatory space
for what is possible from within a contaminated and contaminant discourse, that
is, from a different place to that of classical left discourse, much too enamored
with its own pure rationality and theoretical superiority over ‘the masses’.

It would be a political error to simply
discard and abandon impurity, or
to seek withdrawal in any stance closer to the orthodox Left. It has become necessary
to step back and abandon the discourse of ‘explosive’ myths, hysteric illusions
about the withdrawal of the social, typical of their activist, movements-style.

It
is this raw political
insolence of Podemos that has given it its status as ‘illegitimate child’, so
to speak, in relation to other political formations. This does not come into
play from the ‘necessity’ of
a fait accompli, or from the set
point of the ‘concentration’ of any given and potential social forces, but
rather firstly from the contingency of a very specific emergency situation and,
secondly, from the desire for an extensive new articulation of social demands
and frustrations. This is what gave rise to Podemos’ strategy of inserting
itself into the cracks of existing normalized spaces.

Another
question that Podemos puts on the table is whether the limits of militancy and
political activism, important as these are, should also be the limits of
political action. Today, the factories, community centres and squares are no
longer the only political spaces, even if they are and remain of distinct relevance.
Neither is the democratizing technological device of social media, despite its
broad reach, capable of generating by itself a new political common sense, as has
already been illustrated by the mixed results of Party X in the last European elections in Spain.

The
excitement of ‘we can’ from Podemos cannot be understood as a form of voluntarism
suspended over or removed from given social and economic realities. There would
be no appeal to such a flexible and fluid subject without the existence of a serious situation of emergency today.
This is rooted in a neoliberal ideology for so long successful in hegemonizing illusion
and individualizing any sense of discomfort, either by reducing it to private
complaint or using it as an incentive for better self-entrepreneurship (‘there are no bad crises that
cannot be successfully ridden by good self-entrepreneurs!’).

At a
certain point, however, this euphemistic ‘I can’, capable of leading one to
euphoria or plunging one into depression, was fractured and 15-M was able to emerge.
The 15-M movement was instead characterized by a ‘Yes, we can’ slogan, which quickly
began to reveal the cracks in this inexorable mirror held up by the bipartisan
horizon, thus ushering in a radically different political force to any previous
neoliberal formations. And so was born the ‘we can’ of Podemos, the culmination
of a collective concatenation of pain and sufferings, that had until that point
been unable to find political articulation. And so was born the ‘we can’ of Podemos, the culmination of a collective concatenation of pain and sufferings, that had until that point been unable to find political articulation.

In
a social body fragmented and wounded by crisis, this concatenation of
discomforts should be best understood both as a ‘suture’ of an incumbent sense
of powerlessness and passivity and as an aggregation of powerful demands. It
should also be understood as a tentative process of political learning where,
in a performative sense, discourses give meaning to interests and interests
open the path for new discourses, creating new opportunities for intervention
within the existing social reality and its groups.

‘Is it possible (asked Gramsci) that a
“formally” new conception can present itself in a guise other than the crude,
unsophisticated version of the populace? And yet the historian, with the benefit
of all kinds of perpsective, managed to establish and to understand the fact
that the beginnings of a new world, rough and jagged though they always are,
are better than the passing away of the world in its death-throes and the
swan-song that it produces.’ It
is tempting to see this time in Spanish history, in the light of what Gramsci said,
as the hour of the battle between a new (more social) politics, one yet not
fully sketched out but steadily emerging, and the swan songs of the ’78 Regime,
whose downfall today is illustrated not only by the proliferation of defensive
attitudes, but also the symptomatic sophistication and theoretical
proliferations of a politically sterile end.

The
fact that the space between these two paradigms is reducing is probably a sign
of our times, but so are the dynamics of this new zone of uncertainty where proposals
for regeneration from within the old paradigm can also flourish–as illustrated
by Ciudadanos, a party aimed at
absorbing the current discomfort, but ultimately working to reinforce the status quo.

 ***

Just
as deep as the yawning chasm opened up in recent Spanish history between the
language of the political elites of the Transition and the people they are
supposed to represent, is the divide between the people and a traditional Left retreated
into its own programmatic bubble – a position it has reached again in the
twenty-first century just as it did in the Weimar of the thirties.

The
existence of these deep cleavages comes to show us that all transformative
political initiatives today that aspire to base themselves in reality, a
reality that is neither naïve nor opportunistic, are required to lower
themselves to and make themselves understood in a more basic, yet experimental,
emancipatory language that places little emphasis on identitarian aspects.

This
a basic requirement if we want to avoid repeating the error of giving the
social monopoly of communication to the new ‘barbarians’ of the Right,
particularly in a socially fragmented world where there is a high chance that
anger and discontent could take the form of neo-fascist and anti-political
resentments.

To
avoid and neutralize this latter possibility requires both tentative scouting
trips into ‘the enemy camp’ with a less apocalyptic sensitivity that takes on
the discourse of mass society, and embraces a new analysis of the dynamics of
‘populism’–this phantasmatic appearance-form of our times–which would require
a reassessment of the lessons to be drawn from Latin American politics. It is at
this fascinating crossroads that the Podemos project emerged in Spain as a means
of social-cultural transformation and as a political instrument for the people.

Only time will tell if its proposals contain the
necessary elements to fundamentally reshape the political physiognomy of Spain,
or if it is just yet another surface expression and manifestation of the crisis
of the ’78 Regime. So far, its popular-hegemonic position has clearly allowed
it to develop a refined cartographic instrument, equipped to better account for
the complex processes of sedimentation in today’s map of social transformation,
to grasp its inertias and subjective formations without any illusions about the
complex challenges of building a new popular power, this power that is subject
to a radical process of construction rather than simple recuperation.

This
is a Podemos (and ‘yes, we can’) that, while not removing itself from the
historical failures arising from defeat in the confrontation with the
neoliberal offensive in operation since the 1970s, does attempt to articulate
and to be faithful to an emerging emancipatory desire.