Demotix/Marcos del Mazo. All rights reserved.To grasp how stunningly Podemos burst onto the political scene in recent Spanish history, one must understand and reflect upon an idea that has already been explored in politics: namely that the hitherto leading role of the working class, as well as its historical role in social struggles, should be taken into consideration alongside other emerging social forces of similar ‘critical’ relevance.
Outside of the factory, other potential alliances can be discerned with transformative forces, unconventional from the point of view of the traditional and orthodox Left. Hence our interest in revisiting, in this new historical context--the crisis of a neoliberal hegemony--Gramsci’s reading of the European situation and its diagnosis after the defeat of the left by the reactionary, fascist forces that had erupted at that moment in European history.
In a moment of systemic crisis, in which, to once again quote Gramsci, ‘the old is dying and the new is not yet ready to be born', it is politically ineffective to search for clear and distinct sectors and forces in the social topology. We must rather, if tentatively, as Gramsci put it, in these ‘morbid’ situations, work with complex, ambiguous compositions.
