Global Spring met by police aggression

Demonstrations around the world for the anniversary of the 15M Spanish political movement have brought thousands onto the streets to protest against austerity and neo-liberal economics.

In Spain, a population fed up with conservative policies from Mariano Rajoy’s PP have taken to the streets around the country with police violently removing protestors as they tried to re-occupy main city squares like the one in Plaza del Sol in Madrid. Despite various violent arrests, indignados have continued to descend on the square to hold assemblies.

Catalans were out in force in their capital Barcelona with over 20,000 people taking the streets of the city. Plaza Catalunya has been re-occupied for assemblies to take place which co-ordinate with others around the country and even in the local neighbourhoods of the city. 

The Occupy movement has also been out in numbers in UK as over a thousand supporters hit London streets on a “tour of shame” which ended with police making around a dozen violent arrests. 

“The political policing of the day, the lack of adequate communication with protestors, disproportionate and unlawful force employed, plus the subsequent arrests which increasingly appear to have targeted specific individuals, highlight a crackdown on lawful protest activities ahead of the Olympics and Jubilee, reminiscent of the ‘pre-crime’ arrests around the Royal Wedding last year, for which a Judicial Review has been granted and will take place on the 28 May,” said Occupy London on their website.

The response has also been rousing in the US where thousands more met with violent police attacks in New York, Oakland, Seattle and Los Angeles on May Day. The onus on a decentralised horizontal model of organisation has made these demos hard to control as a surge of revolutionary spirit takes over the disaffected hearts of the 99% across the pond.

And the shift from liberalism to more activist and labour union alliances has happened in a way that has not in UK. David Graeber recently commented on this radicalisation: “In endorsing a vision of universal equality, of the dissolution of national borders, and democratic self-governing communities, nurses, bus drivers, and construction workers at the heart of America’s greatest capitalist metropolis are signing on to the vision, if not the tactics, of revolutionary anarchism.”

A similar process has taken place in Germany too with the Bloccupy to kick off actions in the big financial centre of the west, as Frankfurt prepares to receive a mixture of radical left groups on 17^th May. 

In Spain, Occupy Barcelona’s protests are organised through their website (in Spanish).

The editorial unit