"The 15-M phenomenon is something more complex than a social movement"

For me, it is a historic change, a revolution. The best definition in this sense was given by one of the speakers, Amador Fernández-Savater, when he referred to the "climate" that the phenomenon has created for different things. What allows the 15-M phenomenon to be a historic moment is the Internet and the technological changes that it has ushered in, just as other historic changes arose due to the advent of the printing press or the spread of industrialization. It is thus a bit of all these things. In short, the 15-M phenomenon is not a social movement in the sense that such movements have been understood in the past, but rather something far more complex, in which the change agents are organized in different ways. Yes, I imagine it will be the same as when the printing press was invented. Before the printing press, propaganda was done differently. These are changes in era. What the Internet has done is disintermediate our relationships with power, with information, which has changed our capacity to become empowered and proactive, allowing us to better understand our environment. Consequently, I don't think there's any turning back. Yes, exactly. The Internet can have an enormous impact on how we think, but the transformations in our actual living environments must come about as a result of and within the real world. The 15-M "climate" has created active units on many fronts. One of these fronts, in which a number of the current change agents are involved, is the electoral front, even as other units are tackling legal issues, basic rights, etc. So, yes, I think the conditions are right to make the electoral leap. No. The system would have us believe that to enter the electoral arena we need to be a traditional party, but that's like saying we have to be an auditing firm to question the debt or a bank to take on the banks. The Partido X (Party X) is running without specific faces precisely so as to avoid the logic of personal politics and representativeness. There are battles we have to fight, and we will use the best tactic for each one, but we will always remain faithful to our ways. What line of thinking would that be? Voting is not an act of democracy: you're given a list of awful candidates, and you have to choose the least bad among them. In this sense, the 15-M movement hadn't planned to do anything. In fact, the assemblies continued to conduct their activities despite being aware of the likely outcome of the elections. At the time, there were still no plans to deal with this issue, because we wouldn't have had the strength, consensus or capacity to do it. In contrast, today this perspective has changed, and there is a desire to shatter this ceiling. In reality, the largest electoral force is the one consisting of all the people who didn't vote, and the 15-M movement is largely made up of precisely these people who were not inclined to play that game. I made that joke in reference to the fact that foreign analysts often refer to us as perroflautas; however, the news item in the ABC daily reported that a hundred intellectuals had attended the event. It is quite frequent, and it is always a problem. It happens in all social movements. Once a movement has finished a cycle and moved on to something else, it leaves behind a vacuum that is filled by people who are less capable, more dogmatic, ill-intentioned or simply lacking in political vision. They tend to occupy frameworks that were once successful, but that are no longer relevant or useful. One example for us was when the 15-M movement decided to evolve and leave the occupied squares, but a minority of people, none of whom had been among the first to set up there, wanted to stay. Yes, that's what makes these freeloaders dangerous. They move in to fill the empty spaces left by others. However, the 15-M movement didn't cease to exist when it left the squares. On the contrary, that was when the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH in Spanish) or the 15paRato movement, among others, truly came into their own. That is why, in my opinion, the 15-M movement is alive and well. Unfortunately, some people insist on perpetuating the old, empty structures, which leads to a negative image. And that is what the system wants. These kinds of freeloaders are a problem for social transformations, but they must be taken into account, because they are always there. One of the reasons we are less and less able to speak about the 15-M movement is precisely because there are more and more paguros. Instead of wasting time trying to get these paguros to leave the assembly and let you work, you end up leaving the forum behind yourself and trying to build something else. That's why the media still talk about the 15-M movement when, in reality, the movement's current strength lies in a series of active catalysers working on specific issues, such as the PAH, Partido X, the Marea Blanca (White Tide), the Primavera Valenciana (Valencian Spring), etc. People no longer talk about the 15-M movement because it is so full of freeloaders and because so few of the forums that use that name still offer and promote the true climate of the original 15-M. That is why conferences like this one are so important, because they allow those of us who are actually in the movement to write the narrative. Otherwise, it is written by historians and journalists, people who are not actively involved in the movement and are thus slower to discover these changes and, as a result, unable to properly explain them, which affects public opinion. Also, it is quite difficult to interpret. We are dealing with a new phenomenon that is hard to define, that has no visible faces and that speaks in multiple voices, etc. The new is always hard to explain and understand.