The longevity of a social movement is not so much a result of its operational, organizational, or self-reproductive capacity as its ability to mutate and keep up with the times. In this sense, the 15-M movement, captured by the ideas reflected in the manifesto Democracia Real Ya (‘Real Democracy Now’), is a paradigmatic case, one that has brought about a cycle of mobilization with few precedents in Spain.
15-M arose as the fruit of popular weariness and disillusionment with a political system that turned its back on the socioeconomic problems and demands of the social majority. Taking over the squares of all the big cities in Spain were the constitutive acts of this social movement, which subsequently underwent various mutations. These changes are considered mutations not because they were planned at those encounters in the streets and squares, but because they fit in precisely with the repertoire of demands emanating from the assemblies in the square.
The proliferation of so-called social centres, critical publishing houses, and the opening of centres for alternative culture constituted the first phase of what later on crystallized into movements of disobedience against the thousands of evictions occurring almost daily across the country. Even as the separation of the social from the political remains a wholly liberal concept, the truth is that this entire movement, with its new political culture, had not yet been translated into an option that sought to influence the institutional and/or party system.
