15M: Something Constituent This Way Comes Available to Purchase

What we can reasonably call the uprising that began on May 15, 2011, was the most important political and social event in Spain since the end of the dictatorship and the beginning of the “democratic transition” codified in the 1978 constitution. No other event, movement, or sociopolitical process has been comparable in terms of democratic radicalism and a broad social spectrum of mobilization. Some have rightly said that a “second transition” has begun, this time liberated from the fear inscribed on bodies after forty years of bloody dictatorship. The struggle against the Franco dictatorship—fundamental for the transition process launched after the dictator’s death—was the work of specific minorities, for the most part workers and students (and we should not forget the price paid in lives, prison, and torture). In contrast, 15M was, in different degrees of intensity, the first large experience of the politicization of millions of anybodies or whatever people [personas cualesquiera]. That does not mean that the social or labor composition (and within it, what we might call the technical composition) did not matter or was irrelevant for minimally understanding 15M. Indeed, in this essay, we shall see how they were decisive for understanding how something like this was possible.