Ballet of Tears

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of last year’s eight million strong Spanish indignados movement to the new paradigm of networked, technologically enabled protest. Most obviously, it provided the meme and the template for Occupy in its attempt (for better or worse) to form a pluralistic mass movement that said no to market fundamentalism, repudiated the corruption inherent in our parliamentary democracies, and sought to create Democracia Real Ya (real democracy now).

In January this year, while searching for a communist utopia in the middle of the Spanish countryside, I spent some time in Sevilla, capital of Andalucia, a region with a staggering 34% unemployment. By then the indignados movement had devolved into smaller local chapters working together on local battles and alternatives, time banks and economics classes, but keeping the network bonds tight so they were ready to coil back in again when the moment was right. I went to one of these meetings on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Forty-odd activists gathered in Plaza del Altozano in Triana, the city’s historic gypsy quarter, the home of flamenco – and working class radicalism.

At the end of the meeting, as they rounded things up, that week’s chair, Juanjo, turned and said in Spanish loud and clear enough for me to understand all too well, that there was an English journalist present. “Now,” he says grinning at me, “he will make a speech to us.” Oh great. When Bakunin’s lieutenant Giuseppe Fanelli made his legendary proselytising addresses about anarchism in Spain, he did so in Italian and French. Even though none of the Spanish workers spoke these languages, the force of his presence, and the tumult of his rhetoric, tipped the first rocks tumbling in the anarchist avalanche. I am not Giuseppe Fanelli.

It’s was not covered in Michel Thomas’s Basic Spanish, not in the bit I’ve got to anyway. Module 1: asking the way to the train station. Module 2: rabble-rousing demagogic address to close a proto-revolutionary assembly. So I stumbled through in broken Spanish, with Juanjo graciously translating the words I didn’t know – the problems of el movimiento are, um, similarrr en Ingleterra, muchas personas at the big marches, muchas personas at Occupy Londres, but then what do we do when the energy dies down? Lo que es proxima? What is next? – They didn’t know the answer either.

Having survived this embarrassment, we went to a nearby tapas bar to discuss the future more. Juanjo was a handsome, dark-haired guy in his early 30s with a broad moustache and a goatee, and an elegance at odds with his casual clothes. He looked like a musketeer who had woken up in a grey and orange zip-up hoodie by accident. He worked with under 18s as a community educator, he explained, and added a quintessentially 2012 job title: “I’m also an unemployed economist.”

I told him that I couldn’t believe that with 50% youth unemployment, there had not been Greek levels of disorder already. Look at Sevilla – it’s so calm! He gave me a smile as placid as the river behind him. “I know it seems crazy that there has not been a revolution, or riots. But it is because of the family, I think. The traditional family model in Spain is about sharing everything, so now there are a lot of people living with their parents.” Is it difficult making the money stretch? He nodded. “We have nothing, but we share it.” And I don’t suppose anyone is expecting the welfare state to save them?

“The way of thinking about the state is different here. In Spain the state was normally the enemy of the poorest people. Then when the dictatorship ended, and we got democracy and we started to join Europe, people started to actually believe in the system. After fifteen or twenty years of development and rising national income, I think most people don’t want to wake up from the dream, from the capitalist dream. They say we just have to wait until those good times come back again.”

It’s not going to happen, I said. “I know – but they are still waiting!” Juanjo laughed. There was, he said, only one thing even more important to explaining Spanish stoicism than the multi-generational family support unit.

“Also I think there is a cultural point in Spain, a Catholic way of thinking,” he said. “They say that life is a valley of tears.” Because the letter ‘v’ sounds virtually the same as the letter ‘b’ in Spanish, it sounded like ‘ballet of tears’, which is perhaps even more poignant – dancing the ballet of tears. However you pronounce it, Catholic endurance is tremendously powerful, to the point of masochistic pride. “We have been in all this richness!” Juanjo exclaimed, gesturing at the river and the ornate city around him. “But now! Now the people think: it is time for the valley of tears.”

“The people that are now in power,” he went on, “50 or 60 year-old business people, they have grown up with fascism, they are used to just obeying.” If you’re not used to criticising, how can you improve, he said. How can you change the discourse? “There is one important difference among Spanish people now: the older people believe in the system, and the younger people don’t.”

That was the middle of January. Since then there has been a nationwide general strike, mass student protests in Valencia, and a miners’ strike in Asturias which saw them firing rocket launchers at riot police. The mayor of my obscure little communist utopia is suddenly front page news after leading expropriations of food supplies from supermarkets, and doling them out to the unemployed. The valley of tears has absorbed the Spanish crisis so far, and done so to a remarkable degree. With a staggering €65bn of spending cuts to be made over the next two years, it will be a miracle if it can hold on much longer.

Dan Hancox is a freelance writer whose work appears in the Guardian, New Statesman and Q Magazine, among others. This article is partially adapted from ‘Utopia and the Valley of Tears: A journey through the Spanish crisis’, available now as an ebook.