Commentary
In Spain and beyond, spontaneous solidarity is a threat to the elites’ grip on power
Carlos Mazòn's efforts to keep volunteers from acting on their solidarity can be adequately explained by the awareness that events like those in Valencia are bound to happen again and multiply. And with them, there will be a consolidation of the solidarity networks.
It’s no wonder that the President of the Autonomous Community of Valencia, Carlos Mazòn, is trying to block the caravans of young people and people driven by solidarity who are rushing to the flood-affected areas to bring help: water, food, dry clothes, blankets, medicine. And to shovel the mud, recover the bodies of those trapped in it, save everything that can still be saved. “To the volunteers, I have this to say: go home,” he said. Why?
First and foremost, because Mazòn is a right-winger and a climate denier, and he does not want direct impressions of the scale of the disaster to spread, which is turning out to be far worse than what had been estimated. He is someone who, as Altan says, believes that “so-called ‘climate change’ has been catching us off guard for years.” So, in his view, nothing extraordinary has happened so as to justify the presence of those volunteers.
Then, he wants to make people forget that he failed to sound the alarm and, indeed, reassured his fellow citizen and constituents that they were safe, when he could have saved many of them. Instead, he is sounding the alarm now in an attempt to block relief efforts: “The roads could collapse,” he warns, and the emergency is not over.
Further, it might also be because he wants to control everything. He has even prevented firefighters from the much-hated Catalonia from coming to help; the local ones are enough, he said, although they didn’t take well to that statement.
But, most importantly, he is doing this because he fears the volunteer impulse, bottom-up initiatives, popular mobilization, and especially youth activism; because active solidarity fosters relationships, organization, community, critical spirit and autonomy. These are all the prerequisites for an alternative political orientation to the kind of subjection that allows those in charge to run things as they please. And for a radically alternative perspective to the inertia that the climate deniers (but not only) exploit to pursue their own interests, trying to hide the inherent risks to everyone's lives and coexistence.
Our thoughts inevitably turn to the Italian example of the so-called “mud angels”: the tide of young people who rushed spontaneously to help with the damage caused by the 1966 Florence flood, a mobilization that shocked those who were disparaging the consumerism, disinterest and passivity of the youth of sixty years ago, much as they do now. But in that mobilization, one could see the recognizable – although largely unrecognized – signs of what would turn out to be the explosion of '68: first in the universities and schools, then among young factory workers, then throughout society.
That process was first interpreted as a revolt, not without sympathy among the bien-pensants, then framed as the “ideological degeneration” of that revolt, only to be finally dismissed as the “years of lead.” But what eluded the commentators back then, and still eludes their intellectual offspring who still denigrate the '68 phenomenon, was the fact that alongside the revolt and conflict – and as their inspiration and support – there was the discovery of solidarity, of the value of non-formal relationships among equals, the creation of a community spirit and a critical culture that would allow those mobilizations to continue for almost 10 years and even longer: particularly in Italy, but to some extent all over the world. This explains the years-long global efforts to discredit, dampen and then scuttle that spirit.
If we look closer to our time, beside many other episodes, we had a foretaste of what is happening today in Valencia with the L'Aquila earthquake. It was a deliberate underestimation by the authorities of the impending risk, for reasons of maintaining their electoral support, which sent hundreds to their deaths; then an indefatigable effort (and, sadly, a successful one) to crush the form of organization, led mainly by young people, that had been arising in the displaced persons camps to counter and compensate for the criminal mismanagement of the post-earthquake fallout by Berlusconi and his gang.
The floods in Romagna also saw a great wave of active solidarity, especially from young people. That’s when La Russa, failing to notice this phenomenon, had condescendingly demanded that “young people” go shovel mud instead of defacing monuments at protests. But the young people were way ahead of him: they were doing both, because they knew that in addition to repairing the damage caused by the climate crisis, everything possible must be done to force governments to prevent it.
Today, a similar grassroots sprouting is likely to come up again, in and around Valencia, and Mazòn's efforts to keep volunteers from acting on their solidarity can be adequately explained by the awareness that events like those in Valencia are bound to happen again and multiply, albeit in other forms, in other places and at other times; and with them, there will be a consolidation of the solidarity networks. This is an awareness shared both by those who want to fight the damage being caused by the climate and environmental crisis, especially young people, and the climate deniers who build their support on the false promise that nothing is going to change.
But everyone now grasps the notion – even if not clearly formed – that the solidarity, relationships, spirit of initiative and autonomy that develop in a mobilization such as the one that started in Valencia, if they succeed in consolidating themselves, can be the embryo for an alternative – social and cultural first of all, political second – that would be able to reckon with the true scale of the environmental and climate crisis.
In recent years, we have seen a movement of young people, set off by Greta Thunberg's “strikes” and then joined by other organizations and networks engaged in the same struggle, who have put the climate and environmental crisis on the agenda as an existential challenge for their generation and all those to come – albeit in different ways and with different degrees of success. S
o far, they have not found an opportunity to consolidate into a process that would be able to ensure its own continuity or its adoption of more effective forms: but the frequency, intensity and severity of the climate disasters that lie ahead are destined to become just as many opportunities to impose a radical shift in the official policies, which are still responding to the environmental crisis with inertia and a “business as usual” attitude.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/dalla-solidarieta-nasce-lalternativa-per-questo-fa-paura on 2024-11-05