Indignados: Re-Asserting The Human Right To Dream

[polly7]

By Marta Sánchez

Source: Roarmag.org

Saturday, August 18, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/indignados-re-asserting-the-human-right-to-dream-by-marta-s-nchez

This is the second article by Marta Sánchez written as part of a research project on the 15-M movement at the Center for Human Rights in Nuremberg.

Filling the Vacancies of the System
As I pointed out in my previous article, it is the struggle for people’s economic and social rights that underlies the protests and mobilizations of the Spanish indignados. This first dimension of the movement can be characterized as a phase of denouncement in which the flaws in the system are identified and pointed out. But there is a second dimension, one which is still a work in progress, but which can tentatively be defined as the process of experimentation with new ways of ensuring human rights. Two aspects are crucial to this emerging state of affairs: first, the process of filling the system’s vacancies, and second, the collective, self-determined protection of human rights.

......We could define this as a project of self-organization enlivening a parallel power structure, one in which rights are produced collectively, and one in which rights are possessed only insofar as we managed to build together with others the collective capacities to exercise them. As the activist Andrej Kurnik expresses it, this is a politics of small steps to accumulate new forms of alternative power. This conception of rights is linked to the alternative view of democracy that theindignados movement upholds: democracy starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that sense of care, taking responsibility both for oneself and for one’s family, community, country, people in general, and the planet as a whole. This responsibility to care lies at the root of the movement’s networks; the responsibility that we all have as a community or collective to ensure that people meet their needs, are respected and included, and free of coercion.

Work in Progress: Creating Alternatives
We have aimed to show here that indignados are currently engaged, interacting with a wide range of well-established, long active social organizations and collectives, in the formulation of alternatives to the current system; alternatives that would help bring about a human rights-centered society. In this sense, it would be wise to leave behind the public/private binary that recognizes only two unequally satisfactory options (state or market control), and to recognize that new alternatives are being proposed, mainly based in a decentralized, community-based, democratic management of commons, politically, socio-economically and culturally inspired rather than financial-economically motivated.

The indignados are attempting to create their own communal spaces under the principles of solidarity and self-organization. They are experimenting with new ways of ensuring human rights as part of a larger political struggle. They have unleashed a radical imagination with the aim of liberating the collective consciousness of every sector of society to challenge the current structure of power, and replace it with civilized, horizontal, and self-determined alternatives.

This article is part of research undertaken by the author at the Center for Human Rights in Nuremburg, Germany.