Sometimes we forget how small impulses can cause giant changes in a society. Back in 2011, the population of this country suffered the consequences of a systemic crisis that affected global capitalism. In 2008, suddenly, the reliability of banks, rating agencies, and stock markets blew up in the United States, closing the tap on investments around the planet. Everything seemed like it was going to stay the same, but the images of agitation and turmoil on Wall Street crossed Spain without much fanfare. In the following weeks, news showed how hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless due to abuses and junk mortgages from a large part of the banking sector, not only in the United States but also nationally. The crisis undermined credit confidence on the planet, and the system retreated, collapsing stock market constructions and, therefore, the economy of most Western countries.
In Spain, the global crisis affected banks, as many of them were financed through risky and real estate investments. This country was built on the "Spain is doing well" of former Prime Minister José María Aznar, in a bubble of unprecedented urban and real estate speculation in the country's history. Everything was construction, investing in housing, in apartments, in assets to speculate and continue fueling a bubble that inflated too much. Large companies built endless rows of developments, hiring a number of people who abandoned their studies, their training, and their expectations to dedicate themselves to construction and masonry. The workers earned money, a salary that banking institutions desired to grow faster, and thus the so-called junk mortgages were born. We Spaniards saw ourselves as the center of the world, living an illusion based on the wildest marketing. The 2008 crisis impacted everything, and although most politicians believed that the system would not fall, it collapsed and produced the great global recession from 2008 to 2014.
The economy had specialized so much in speculative construction that when credit ran out, unemployment went from 7.95% to 27.16% of the population in the period from 2008 to 2013. Let's remember that youth unemployment (under 25 years old) became 57.2%. Young people were doomed to a systemic failure that led to an unprecedented existential flaw. The savage capitalism that had been established in the period between (1982-2015) exerted a siren song that linked politics with the highest levels of corruption in our recent history. With no complex parliamentary arches, a plurality of views was not exercised in consensus, and power was exercised by a single political force far above the others.
When I was a kid, between 1998 and 2001, I remember going from my grandmother's house in Yaiza to Papagayo beach in Playa Blanca. I always liked to look at the landscape, and the memory of dozens of huge cranes occupying the entire ground and the hundreds of construction trucks fueling the uncontrolled growth of the urban areas of Lanzarote has been imprinted in my memory. The traffic was not only logistical but also of employees who soon became indebted and mortgaged, thinking that this bubble would last forever, but nothing could be further from the truth, it burst.
In 2011, I was in my first cycle of university studies, pursuing a degree in Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. I went to the University by bicycle, and on my way, I passed under the Plaza de España. The panorama I saw was desolate due to the number of people sleeping there without the possibility of going to a municipal shelter in the city of Madrid. There were many discussions in the faculty, especially due to the lack of funding it received to function properly, as well as the increase that the Community of Madrid was adding to university tuition fees at that time. Many classmates had to leave the university. The situation became unbearable.
On May 15, something happened that awakened the collective consciousness of an entire generation. Our elders were always fighting, demonstrating, and demanding improvements, but the generation that lived through the real estate bubble woke up. A heartbeat spread throughout Spain, bringing to all the squares of each city in the state the demands, reflections, debates, and proposals of the society that was beginning to suffer the precariousness that the cuts generated. In this way, everything began to grow and form organically. The 15M became a kind of citizen agora, where mutualism and respect for the equality of people were practiced. The movement grew so much that dozens of commissions were formed, such as those for equality, feminism, ecology, environment, LGTBIQ+ movement, politics and labor advice, social action, culture, digital activism, among many others. The squares became a utopia, a proposal for a just world where society would do politics and demand from the parties a social agenda that at that time was moving away by leaps and bounds from the concerns of Spaniards. In those squares, people organized themselves, even creating popular libraries. The 15M was resistance to the cuts, it was reflection on housing policy, it was a breath of fresh air for Spanish democracy, it meant the opening of the political ecosystem to forces of different kinds and thoughts, it was the awakening of citizenship and the demonstration that when the people unite and demand changes, they manage to articulate substantial improvements from the perspective of equity, equality, solidarity, and critical thinking.
The 15M was a vital movement in a specific moment of Spain's recent history, but as many predicted, it did not die. It reached the existing political parties, generated new political formations, brought environmental problems to the public agenda, among many other things. The movement of the indignant, of the squares as agoras of thought, evolved and was formed in the tides, such as the green tide whose demand was the defense of a quality public education, the white tide that defended a public and universal health system for all people, the platform of those affected by the mortgage whose purpose was to protect those people in precarious situations who were going to be evicted, and also the struggle of our elders defending decent pensions.
Is the 15M dead? Not at all. This movement marked the beginning of an awakening that is still valid today in many neighborhood associations, in environmental groups, in political parties, in unions, in feminist associations, in the LGTBIQ+ movement, in agricultural groups of the so-called "Empty Spain", in the solidarity of anti-racist movements. It is alive in the entire social movement that continues to make politics better with its struggle. The 15M was not something spontaneous, it was the culmination of decades and decades of social movements. Its achievements are not revolutionary but paradigmatic, since on the one hand it renewed Spanish politics, achieving today the first coalition government in almost a century, making plurality and active debate the matrix of political activity. It has made corruption not something that happens and that's it, but that it is looked at with the seriousness that this type of actions and behaviors generate in society, it has made us look at education and health as engines of our welfare state and among many other things it has made people talk, debate and demand improvements from their leaders.
For me, participating in this movement was a vital impulse to focus on issues that until then seemed liturgical and dogmatic to me. In one way or another, it made me trust that through active as well as peaceful struggle, society manages to gradually make a fairer world.
Let's continue going to the squares and talk about politics, let's continue talking with our neighborhood about the problems that happen where we live, let's talk with the elders, with the children and try to find solutions that are heard by our representatives. Let's demand improvements in our world, improvements that lead society to be more just.
J. David Machado Gutiérrez
Expert in Contemporary Culture
