Social movements, both here and abroad, had high visibility this week. There were specific initiatives, partnerships, anniversaries, demonstrations ... As viewed from above or on the opinion pages, they appear as a nuisance, a disturbance. It is believed that they are at a dead end. But the opposite isn't really explored: that they have found a way out of the alley.
As is confirmed daily in Mexico, throughout the world, disillusionment with political parties and governments is spreading. Even in cases where popular demonstrations succeed in changing officials and even entire governments and modifying the entire political and ideological symbol of the new, they don't succeed in changing the policies that motivated the protests.
In this context, the initiatives of social movements are intensified. The people channel concerns and rages that the political parties are unable or unwilling to deal with. But increasingly they confront such a deadend. There are governments that open dialogue and use it to wear down the protest until by means of secondary concessions the protesters fade away. Others react with repression from the beginning, or they apply it when the dialogue or the pretense of dialogue underway, is unable to continue. Apparently, throughout the entire world, governments have learned to ignore citizens.
Under these conditions, it is often suggested that social movements are unable to represent an authentic alternative to the current situation. Their vitality and legitimacy is recognized. It is known that the vast majority have strong reasons for taking up their initiatives, and that they wage struggles "courageous, heroic, constant", as Guillermo Almeyra just wrote in these pages. Along with the celebration appears a disclaimer: they will not be able to get very far. They get only partial support; therefore, they will fail to eliminate the system and structures that are at the root of the protests.
It seems important to explore the hypothesis that, although many social movements still belong to traditions and earlier habits, while others arise from immediate demands, increasingly innovative initiatives are creating options of transformation that no political party dares take on and no government can accept, options that from below are dismantling what must be eliminated.
In specific cases, coalitions of emerging movements can make up the critical mass of political force that obliges governments to satisfy, even partially, the demands that motivate their demonstrations. Such coalitions are important not for just this result: they are also part of a process of a very promising accumulation of forces.
But there are many coalitions and alliances that contain other content. Faced with increasingly serious threats by what has been called extractivism, those affected join together not only to offer mutual support and give more strength to the resistance. They begin to practice a form of popular sovereignty and to take specific initiatives that contain an embryo of the future. These initiatives already represent the future result they are fighting for. This result is no longer made up of trying to put an end to the apparatus of oppression through social engineering from above; the social movements have been learning the futility of this endeavor in the current circumstances. Now they try, from below, to dismantle the very foundation of these mechanisms, their underlying rationale, their foundation.
One way to express this new way of being is to emphasize that it matches the conviction that it is necessary to abandon the separation between means and ends, and that, in fact, the fight must take the form of the result sought. If it comes to creating a society that is not grounded in violence, then the struggle itself must avoid violence.
Faced with the horror that stalks us, this new practice seems increasingly necessary. The extractivism spreads and deepens in all its forms .... As resistance becomes generalized, it is increasingly accompanied by counter-insurgent forces that impose extractive policies. Faced with this double horror, which generates new dangers, past strategies no longer work. It is no longer the old disputes over value and surplus, or of traditional demands. It is a struggle for survival and life itself, which can only succeed with a radical transformation of the struggle itself, concentrating itself on creating a new society. In this way, such movements begin to represent a genuine alternative. Spanish original