More than 300,000 families evicted; huge cuts in social budgets; the only amendment to our constitution and legislative changes that have recentralized power —both in Madrid and in Brussels— robbing the citizenry of sovereignty… All this with one factor in common: debt as the main tool of submission.

What are we talking about when we talk about debt?

Possibly the answer to this question, so difficult to find, corresponds to how difficult it has been for the anti-debt movement of the Spanish State to achieve mainstreaming and the social scope to unite the necessary forces in this very important fight. Debt is the main tool for subjugation and domination of those who have exercised and controlled power throughout history. But it does not end there. It is also a moral support that has permeated all phases of the anthropological evolution of the human being and of societies; a basic pillar to sustain the status quo of those people who occupy privileged steps in their social structures.

Not only has this situation not changed, but the social mantra so anchored in the collective imagination of "debts are paid" or the pointing out to the debtor who does not fulfill his "duty" as if he were a "sinner" ”, continues to be established in the canon and the moral and ethical imaginary of today's society.

Given the growing atheism and loss of power of religious beliefs that, on many occasions, are responsible for frightening the debtor, new gods have been created. Under the baton of capitalism, these new deities are the ones who now impose the law of debt —hand in hand with other sacred commandments of this predatory belief: free trade or the rejection of state interventionism in the economy— and prevent democratic decisions prevail over their religion.

Dressed in black suits, the gods of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) or the World Trade Organization (WTO) are in charge of imposing their religion and punishing the pagan who dares to contradict it. The global financial system, as the executing arm of said belief, has taken care of attracting new adherents to its dogma by spreading its spider web, credit.

Anyway, this church is also losing followers. And among these laymen, a network of people is being woven all over the planet who have decided to stand up to the “debt system”, its consequences and those who control it and use it as a tool of dispossession and subjugation. It is a global movement that mutates and transforms according to the territory and the context of each struggle, but which has a common denominator: the rejection of illegitimate debts, those contracted behind the backs of citizens and in favor of a minority.

The Spanish State, which has more than 20 years of activism in repudiation of the debt both from the position of creditor and debtor, and taking advantage of tailwinds such as the 15M social movement, born in 2011, and the citizen municipal candidacies, has formed one of the most stable and developed anti-debt movements in the world.

Coronavirus

Cancel debts to deal with the Covid-19 crisis

City Debt Audit Platform (PACD)

More than 150 social organizations from around the world unite in an international call for the cancellation of the debts of impoverished countries as part of the strategies so that they can face the Covid-19 crisis.

A million people against the debt

On Sunday, March 12, 2000, at the same time that the candidate of the Spanish right, José María Aznar, obtained an absolute majority in Parliament, in the In the streets of more than 500 towns in the country, ballot boxes and ballot papers with three questions showed another face of democracy. "Are you in favor of the Government of the Spanish State completely canceling the external debt that impoverished countries maintain with it?", read the first one.

It was about the Social Consultation for the Abolition of the Foreign Debt. The most important milestone, but not the first, in the social fight against debt. More than 20,000 volunteers, coordinated in more than 1,400 groups, carried out a civil disobedience exercise to make that emergency visible through an exercise in direct democracy.

That consultation produced another result that lasted over time: the creation of the first anti-debt social movement in Spain. The Citizen Network for the Abolition of the External Debt (RCADE) was born in the year 2000, bringing together various aspects of activists to work together. In 2005, RCADE became the campaign 'Who owes whom?', and the focus was broadened to be able to debate and develop a vision that went beyond the economic.

They begin to work and discuss the terms of historical, ecological, social debt and somewhat later, gender debt. If today the terms "ecological debt" or "gender debt" (the historical debt owed to women for the support of life) are used normally by social movements and political parties in the Spanish State, it is without no doubt, thanks to the work of the anti-debt movement during that time and the years that followed.

Municipalism

Showcase cities, square cities

Guernica Facundo

What kind of city do we want? A question inseparable from these others: “What kind of people do we want to be? And what kind of social relationships do we want to prioritize?”.

From creditors to debtors

The social and economic context, that of a real estate and financial bubble that raised salaries and reduced unemployment, was a demobilizing factor for the vast majority of social movements during those years. Until the bubble burst and, as on previous occasions, the debts fell on those at the bottom while those at the top were bailed out unscathed. Debt was used again as that subjugation tool, but this time it was our turn. While thousands of people lost their homes to the banks for not being able to pay their debts and the country saw its external public debt increase (which rose from 40 to 100 percent of GDP) with the corresponding social cuts to correct and rescue those same banks, a new general feeling of protest and rebellion was forging.

We went from being creditors to debtors, to feeling in our own flesh that pain that years before the anti-debt movement had denounced that we caused the countries of the South as creditors. That anger and discontent crystallized on May 15, 2011; the 15M movement was born to say “We don't owe, we don't pay”.

Debt and citizen audits were one of the main discursive lines of the 15M. The people —who packed those squares— identified the economic and social symptoms of supranational governments and institutions bent on neoliberalism with a financial system that emerged practically unscathed from the crisis that they themselves had engineered and provoked. The dogma “debts come first” was the cause of the social cuts; of the modification of the Spanish Constitution and of thousands of people losing their homes while the bankers were bailed out. It also meant that powerful countries condemned the countries of the new south, those on the periphery of Europe, to a setback in all their hard-won rights.

The 15M had arrived to break those dogmas and demand responsibilities. The refusal to pay debts considered illegitimate and the audits with citizen participation were common and global goals of the entire movement. Many of the activists who had participated in 'Who Owes Who?' or in RCADE now met with other people to shape the Citizen Debt Audit Platform (PACD). The new social movement, which in a short time created territorial nodes in more than 10 cities throughout the State, demanded what the government was not willing to do for obvious reasons: analyze the causes of the crisis and the policies applied before and after. the public indebtedness caused, among other things, by the rescue of the financial system; indicate which debts should be repudiated and clarify responsibilities.

“We don't owe, we don't pay”, the motto of the PACD, resounded from the megaphones and was read on the banners of the almost daily demonstrations in those months after 15M. Talks, debates and workshops on debt multiplied. The PACD assemblies had dozens of people from all over the State and reports, tools and speeches were developed that repudiated the debt system. It was undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements to date of the Spanish anti-debt movement: those economic concepts, so difficult to understand at times, were translated into a language that everyone could understand.

The moral and dogmatic imaginary about debts was broken before a citizenry tired of being the one who pays the consequences. The neoliberal story was broken before a lot of people who were fed up and who no longer fell for the siren songs that tried to convince us that we had "lived beyond our means." Another of the slogans said “it is not a crisis, it is a scam”, and the PACD managed to make visible that the main tool of that scam was debt.

They no longer only wanted to repudiate it, they demanded to know how we had come to such a situation. Responsibilities were demanded and a tool was needed that, from below, from the people, would arm arguments and empower the fight to repudiate illegitimate debts. Infected by similar processes and social movements in other corners of the planet, the idea of ​​citizen audits was proposed and embraced.

Since 15M, citizen audits of the debt have been the main proposal by the anti-debt movement led by the PACD, conceived as a process of citizen empowerment to better understand how the system works and not as a simple analysis and study of what happened.

The aim was for the public to understand how these clientelist networks, corruption, indebtedness mechanisms and pressures from financial capital, large corporations and neoliberal institutions worked: all of this placed at the service of power. The aim was to learn how this situation had come to be in order to design among all of us a future in which it would be more difficult to use the same mechanisms again, and it would be easier for those below to repudiate those techniques and the illegitimate debts used for that purpose. .

Without a doubt, the greatest achievement of the anti-debt movement of the Spanish State, headed by the PACD, has been that the demand for citizen audits of the debt is heard so often in political programs, proclamations, debates, articles, in different sectors (health, education or energy) or in the voices of people now sitting in the Congress of Deputies. It is a legacy that is likely to live on and be adopted by other social movements in the future.

The work of the PACD during those years after 15M was frantic. The activists of the anti-debt movement held dozens of talks and workshops and international networks were woven with anti-debt movements from other countries to create the International Citizen Audit Network (ICAN for its acronym in English, and in Spanish it can be read as Red Internacional por las Citizen Audits), which brings together citizen platforms from countries such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, Portugal, Greece or France. Another notable line of work was the development and creation of Municipal Citizen Observatories (OCMs). With the development of open source programmed software and a standardized methodology, the activists of the PACD guided groups of organized citizens that emulated a municipal transparency and citizen participation portal. By this means, the population of the municipality was invited to get involved in the accounts of their council and to demand greater transparency and explanations about the functioning of the local public economy.

Other groups related to the movement were also created, such as the 15MpaRato group, which managed to seat former Economy Minister and former IMF director Rodrigo Rato on the bench, implicated in the IPO of Bankia (an entity that emerged from the merger of several boxes and that had to be rescued) or sectoral groups such as Audita Sanidad.

Assaulting the skies, but starting from below

While in those squares there was talk of external debt, financial markets or large economic figures, it was quite difficult to find solutions, if possible in the short term, to the problems and immediate context. The demand for non-payment of illegitimate debts was the final objective, the utopian goal that allowed us to continue fighting, but a new intermediate strategy was needed. The PACD needed to draw up a more strategic plan that, although perhaps temporarily abandoning more global objectives, could reach and seduce many more people at that moment of citizen political explosion.

Then, the movement changed its strategy and turned a large part of its forces towards the municipalist plan. It was necessary for citizens to understand the mechanics of debt at a more local level in order to later be able to understand and learn from each other how to fight debt at higher levels. An approach that, on the other hand, was much more conducive to the political situation that was brewing an assault on the institutions of the Spanish State by the citizenry.

The municipalist leap of citizenship

In May 2015, hundreds of citizen electoral groups presented themselves in the municipal elections. The rise of political participation and the “they do not represent us” of 15M (coupled with the decision of Podemos not to attend the municipal electoral appointment) led to a wave of creation of political parties made up of citizens that collapsed the Ministry of the Interior.

These parties that were created collected the demands and needs that were discussed and debated in the squares and demonstrations in previous years, to give a voice to citizens tired of being "commodity in the hands of politicians and bankers." Practically all of the political programs presented by those electoral groups raised a common demand: "Carry out a citizen audit of the debt." The discourse and the main tool of the anti-debt movement entered the institutions by the hand of many of those parties; it entered the town halls and a range of possibilities opened up in the new scenario of municipalism.

The months following that citizen assault on the municipal institutional life put the anti-debt movement back on the political agenda of many of these new parties, imbued with that 15M spirit. In that enriching scenario, a question arose that ran through the meetings of those new parties: "How is a citizen audit of our town hall carried out?" The activists of the PACD began to be claimed by the municipalist political parties. The political talks or presentations of analysis reports were transformed into more practical workshops that were attended not only by activists, but also by councillors, mayors and technical personnel from the local administration related to those parties.

Those workshops put into practice all the knowledge acquired over the years by anti-debt activists and in the territorial nodes that the PACD had promoted by municipalities throughout the State. The theory was transformed into reality, in groups of organized people who opened the drawers of their town halls to audit the policies, spending and indebtedness of previous decades; it became citizen empowerment to reject those debts. All that work ended up being reflected in a book, written by the author of this article: “Decipher your debt. Municipal citizen audit guide”. This text includes the practical and theoretical dimensions of municipal citizen audits, but also the character and political approach necessary to continue promoting the anti-debt culture.

Debt

“The municipal debt has served to rescue banks”

Martín Cúneo1

The journalist from El Salto and El Salmón Contracorriente Yago Álvarez premieres the documentary Who has mortgaged my city ​​hall? The story of a municipality that could be yours, a debt story that tries to explain how the public coffers of many of the country's municipalities have reached a bankruptcy situation.

Municipalism organizes against debt

However, that scenario and those workshops showed a lack: the new political parties lacked a common structure that would allow them to share experiences and knowledge, as well as unite forces. More collaboration, training and discussion on common strategies was needed. See each other's faces, recognize each other and join forces. This is how in November 2016, the PACD, together with the Committee for the Cancellation of Illegitimate Debts (CADTM) and the electoral group Somos Oviedo, organized the first Municipal Meeting against Illegitimate Debt and cuts in the Asturian city. There the Oviedo Manifesto was presented.

This text directly rejected the austerity policies imposed on local corporations; He called for citizen audits of the management of previous governments as a tool to purify responsibilities and repudiate debts in the face of a corrupt financial system; demanded an end to cuts. Likewise, it pointed out the common enemy of local and regional corporations: the Law of Rationalization and Sustainability of Local Administration and the Organic Law of Budgetary Stability and Financial Sustainability —also known as Montoro Laws—, in honor of the Minister of Finance of the Popular Party back then, Cristóbal Montoro. These laws brought the austericide of European policies to the local level, using council debt and financial power to intervene in municipal accounts and, in the same way as with the IMF restructuring, force local corporations to cut back and privatize their services.

At the end of the meeting, the constitution of the Municipalist Network Against Illegitimate Debt and Cuts was decided in the last assembly. A new step was taken in the fight against debt in the Spanish State. This meeting was followed by a strengthening of said network. More than 300 electoral groups, political parties and social movements adhered to and signed the Manifesto. Politicians from all institutional levels, activists and cultural personalities also signed it. The one in Oviedo was followed by another three in the cities of Cádiz, Rivas, Vacia Madrid and Córdoba. Campaigns and working groups were carried out to address issues such as repudiation of the cost of the bank bailout, denunciation of perverse legislative mechanisms and other campaigns and issues related to municipalism and the consequences of the debt system having also taken over the public administration. , the step closest to citizenship.

Montoro Law

Cádiz brings together more than 70 municipalities that decided to stand up to Montoro

Yago Álvarez Barba Representatives of municipalities from all over the State have declared themselves in default against the Montoro laws, the debt and haircuts.

The walls we ran into

That process of neoliberalism to seize public administrations and debt as its tool, which dates back to the Thatcher and Reagan times, was “tied and tight” , as the dictator Francisco Franco said on his deathbed. Public administrations are made up of those same powers, by that same juridical and legal web that acts as a wall to hinder the actions of those people who enter politics with the intention of changing things. The bureaucracy, the legislation, the executive bodies, their mechanisms, everything is organized so that the liberal machinery finds no brake. Debt and commercial contracts are above human rights. Banks are above political parties. Neoliberalism is above democracy.

Our municipal Greece, the Madrid City Council, governed by Ahora Madrid during the 2015-2019 legislature and with an anti-debt activist at the head of the Department of Economy and Finance, Carlos Sánchez Mato, fought against the Montoro Law and the Central Government to reverse the disastrous consequences of this regulation on citizens and to recover the economic and social sovereignty that the Network claimed. The Madrid City Council became the spearhead of the Municipalist Network against Debt and the entire municipalist anti-debt movement , anti-austerity and anti-cuts. The Ministry of Finance, governed by the right, knew this and put the state machinery and the media focus on that battle. Those laws prohibited municipalities from spending the surplus of their accounts on investment or social spending, and forced them to repay debt early. With this they favored, once again, the financial sector.

The word “disobedience” was used a lot in those municipal meetings, but that legislative framework, used as a sword of Damocles against the insurgent municipalities, did not give many options. The hierarchy of administrative power, city council / State / European Union, gives less and less room for action to the lower echelon to centralize power in the upper echelons, where corporate power and its lobbies roam free.

After two years of media and political confrontations, Madrid now gave in to the pressures of the Popular Party, accepted its conditions (an Economic Financial Plan that penalized social spending in favor of paying off debt with the banks) and dismissed the councilor. As it happened with Greece, the spearhead of the fight against the debt was defeated by a bureaucratic machine of centralized power and with it the movement and the Network were weakened. The structures of the legislative and financial power showed their power and the movement municipalist seemed incapable of breaking the legislative corset that binds the city councils.

The movement was affected, but not sunk. The Municipalist Network lost some of the important cities in the following local elections, but the story against illegitimate debt and corporate, financial and recentralizing power in Europe has permeated municipal citizen politics and the social imaginary. The new struggles are clear: the movements against the privatization of healthcare or against vulture funds point to debt as one of the main tools of power to fight against. The two movements that right now have global articulating power, environmentalism and feminism, rescue the struggles against the ecological and gender debt. The future will bring new debt crises, but this time the movement will be more experienced than ever and ready to fight a new battle.

Coronavirus

The urgency of abolishing the illegitimate debts of the countries of the South

ReCommonsEurope

This text is part of the publication entitled "The impact on the South of European financial policies and development cooperation strategies and possible alternatives”, prepared within the framework of the ReCommonsEurope project.

The article series Cities VS Multinationals is published by ENCO - European Network of Transnational Observatories, a network of European media and civil society organizations dedicated to investigating transnational corporations and corporate power. The publication has been coordinated by the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), Observatori del Deute en la Globalització (ODG), Observatoire des multinationales and Transnational Institute (TNI). "The complete collection of articles is available for download in Passerelle nº20, published by Ritimo", and in the ENCO web spaces.