Will the Spanish working class destroy the euro?

It took less than 100 days in power for the right-wing Popular Party (PP) government led by Mariano Rajoy to face its first general strike, on March 29.

The strike was mostly called by minority unions; the major ones, the opportunistic and bureaucratic CCOO and UGT, have been in bed with the powers that be for years.

The strike was a response to Rajoy’s EU-imposed labour market reforms that, according to Antonio Carretero from the CGT union, are “a counter-reformation that erases with a single stroke many labour and union rights acquired by the working class in decades and generations”. That includes extremely harsh cuts in health, education and social services.

Predictably, the spin war was relentless. Madrid insisted “only” 800,000 workers took part in over 100 demonstrations nationally. According to unions, 900,000 people marched in Madrid, 800,000 in Barcelona and hundreds of thousands more in 111 cities, especially Valencia and in the Basque country (the unionist vanguard in Spain). In Zaragoza, a city of 700,000, at least 150,000 people may have been in the streets; it certainly looked like it by late afternoon.

Spain strikes over austerity measures

The country virtually stopped – at a 77 per cent overall rate (much higher than the 18 per cent predicted by corporate media). In the manufacturing sector, it was 80 per cent; in mining and construction, a whopping 97 per cent. Only 30 per cent of the national transportation system was active. And even though scores of cities kept the streetlights on all day – or used other tricks to bump up the numbers – consumption of electricity in Catalunya, for instance, fell by 24 per cent.

Austerity ergo sum

The catalogue of Spain’s “austerity” is the usual catalogue of neoliberalism in trouble. A previous, nominally socialist and now an ultra-conservative government have furiously decimated unemployment, retirement and severance benefits; turned virtually all labour contracts into precariousness hell; steeply raised fees for education and transportation; vastly militarised the police; and spent fortunes to bail out banks.

Spain inevitably follows the post-modernist mantra that democracy controls protest and rebellion by managing it – sort of. That’s where the cooption of those unions, CCOO and UGT, fits in; as they had already tamed rebellion in exchange for funds from Madrid, they called the strike virtually at the last minute.

Corporate media – and Spain is a small market run by monopolies – also fit in with the usual script. There will be violence by “anarchists”. The strike will be bad for tourists. Everyone has the right to work. No one will show up for this strike.

In Zaragoza, repression was harsher in the dead of the night and in suburbs, with no cameras watching. Morning pickets concentrated on banks across its mini Wall Street, driven by Brazilian-style samba drums and demonstrators dressed up as bankers. That sparked an internal debate among the protesters; with many shouting that this was not a party, in the end the samba drums were sent packing.

By late afternoon, during the massive main demonstration that crisscrossed the city centre, everyone and his neighbour seemed to be there – immigrants, whole middle-class families, the unemployed, the precariously employed, anarchists, socialists, progressives, and every indignado in town.

In powerhouse Barcelona, there were riots but mainly sparked by people’s rage against infiltrated cops [SP], some of them chased down and beaten up.

Significantly, more people in Barcelona took part in a spontaneous protest in landmark Catalunya square than in the official union protest. In Barcelona, and to some extent in Zaragoza as well, it was clear that the strike was not a union thing, but a collective effort of a loose network; neighbourhood assemblies; workers’ assemblies; smaller anti-authoritarian unions like the CNT and CGT; groups that sprang up out of the indignados movement – the precursor of Occupy Wall Street.

In Zaragoza and Barcelona, there were flyers, posters and stickers all over town. Neighbourhood assemblies and average workers went door to door – and shop to shop – to talk about the strike; and crucially, there was as much criticism of the major unions as criticism of the government...

from anarchy and chaos