A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneration: How to numb the bravery of a people: from popular force to parliamentary force. By XESTA ORGANIZACIÓN ANARQUISTA GALICEGA (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Popular power also implies an idea of duality of powers: not waiting for 
the providential day of "assaulting the state", but building, in the 
present, another power that rivals the existing one and gradually 
replaces it. ---- The people have already learned to burn. They burned 
with a stick in their hands, with smoke in their lungs, with water in 
their hearts; they rose up when everything indicated that they should be 
silent. They organized, took to the streets, created networks and 
responded with dignity and strength. But, while that collective energy 
grew, a parallel dynamic appeared, invisible to those who do not want to 
see: transforming mobilization into management, protest into a process, 
popular organization into a controlled platform. What is born from below 
ends up being measured, moderated and redirected towards institutional 
frameworks that do not question anything fundamental. It is sold as 
responsibility and political maturity, but the real effect is something 
else: less autonomy, less capacity for our own decisions, more 
dependence on those who speak on our behalf. And therein lies the 
central question of this article: how did it go from a brave popular 
force to a parliamentary force that lulls the people it claims to represent?

Trajectory of a movement

If we want to understand where we are, we need to look back. Galician 
nationalism organized around the UPG was born with an explicitly class 
discourse and a Marxist inspiration that spoke of rupture, 
anti-capitalism and self-determination. For years, this tradition was 
presented as the political expression of a people in movement. But over 
time, the process of institutional "normalization" and adaptation to the 
1978 regime changed the DNA of the project: the horizon of confrontation 
with the state and capital was replaced by a strategy of management and 
a stable presence in the institutions. What previously intended to 
combat power ended up assuming the rules of the game and playing to be 
the best possible version of the administration of the existing one. 
Thus, the BNG became a parliamentary force that not only channels 
discontent, but also manages it and frequently deactivates it, turning 
social conflicts into problems of political procedure. However, this was 
not the only path taken by Galician independence in these years. There 
was a retreat of people who declared themselves opposed to the 
constitution and even splits that opted for armed struggle.

The electoral consolidation of the BNG, far from translating into a 
strengthening of the autonomous workers' movement, usually coincides 
with its qualitative weakening: an attenuation of the radicality of the 
discourse and an increasing subordination of the production of common 
meanings to institutional mediation. It is the old social democratic 
logic repeated once again: promising structural changes and delivering 
limited reforms; speaking in the name of the working class while 
reducing the capacity of the class itself to decide and act for itself. 
This is where the key concepts explored in this article come in: 
capitalization and phagocytization. We are not talking about open 
repression, but about a much more sophisticated mechanism: integrating, 
absorbing and neutralizing social struggles by introducing them into 
institutional and electoral frameworks that deactivate them politically. 
A moth-eaten, friendly and harmless pactist hegemony is thus 
constructed: an inclusive discourse, a symbolic radicality that does not 
compromise the essential and a managerial practice that administers what 
exists. A model that does not push the working class to organize itself 
as an autonomous, political and revolutionary subject, but rather to 
delegate its strength to a representation that speaks of it, but rarely 
gives it real power back. A logic that, far from changing its material 
reality, moves the frameworks of common sense to the right, selling 
itself as the only left-wing alternative and therefore leaving other 
radical alternatives on the margins.

But this criticism cannot be directed only outwards: it also challenges 
us as a libertarian movement. In recent decades we have seen how 
left-wing parties have progressively turned their political frameworks 
towards increasingly neoliberal policies, assuming the logic of the 
market, governance and "responsible" management as insurmountable 
limits. The 15M cycle - just as an example - ended up leading to the 
institutional "new politics", which repositioned all that energy in the 
state and in purely reformist proposals. This opportunity, like many 
others opened up in moments of tension and contradiction of capitalism, 
was wasted by the libertarian movement as a result of our strategic 
orphanhood: we were unable to offer a credible alternative for 
transformation, an organised proposal of libertarian institutionality, 
of a political and social model that could contest hegemony on the 
margins of the state and capital. The traditional left-wing parties, 
plus the later party-movements, imposed an agenda in the face of the 
lack of an organised revolutionary alternative. And that is a 
responsibility that we must assume if we want to be up to the task of 
what is coming.

The (re)start strategy

This drift of the BNG is not accidental or improvised: it responds to a 
very specific political strategy. Instead of promoting autonomous 
popular organizations, with real capacity for decision-making and 
conflict, a constellation of platforms, coordinators and "unitary" 
spaces is built around institutional nationalism that serve to 
hegemonize a social democratic common sense, quiet and apparently 
plural, but totally empty of transformative content. Their strategy 
involves capitalizing on some struggles and, therefore, the fagotization 
of these becomes their central tactic: being only in the mobilizations 
that can offer them the most political and electoral performance, and 
not necessarily in those they believe in the most, nor in those that 
involve a greater level of real confrontation. They do not seek to 
create movements to change the correlation of forces from below, but 
rather a Keynesian management of the conflict: creating structures that 
allow the conflict to be managed, framed, made predictable, tamed and, 
finally, made harmless.

These platforms tend to share very recognizable features. First, they 
have politicized leaderships, organically or ideologically linked to the 
BNG, which function as transmission belts between the social base and 
the party's institutional interests, interpreting and moderating social 
demands unilaterally. Second, they operate within deliberately limited 
frameworks of demands, which avoid questioning the system as a whole and 
reduce conflicts to technical demands or partial improvement. Third, 
they practice the systematic avoidance of structural conflict: they do 
not focus on rupture or the accumulation of self-managed popular force, 
but on negotiations, symbolic gestures and controlled pressure. Finally, 
there is a replacement of the real class organization by a "movementist 
brand": instead of combative unions, strong territorial assemblies or 
community structures with their own lives, we have vertical, dependent 
and ephemeral "platforms" and "coordinators", which serve interests that 
are alien to those of the cause they defend.

Fires in Casaio
The result is evident: participation without power, people summoned but 
not organized, mobilization that does not generate autonomy or class 
independence. Fighting becomes a safe and controlled exercise; 
protesting, a civic ritual that does not question the logic of power. 
What could be a space for the accumulation of popular force is thus 
transformed into a mechanism of political containment perfectly 
functional to the system. A useful disobedience for an adaptive system 
such as capitalism, capable of learning from each of these small 
rebellions and weaving responses, defenses and counteroffensives.

This is exactly the opposite of the construction of popular, class and 
self-management power. Because it creates political dependence: people 
learn to delegate to a party, to a leadership, to an external structure, 
rather than to themselves and their own collective capacities. Because 
it eliminates autonomy: movements that are formally active, but without 
real decision-making capacity, without their own strategy, subordinated 
to institutional rhythms and interests. Because it lowers the political 
horizon: from social conflict and structural transformation, one moves 
to the most sterile possibilism, to the management of discontent, to 
partial improvements that do not alter power relations. Because it 
replaces organization with representation: the working class does not 
need to organize itself, because there are already those who speak for 
it; it does not need to fight as a subject, because there are already 
those who politically capitalize on its pain, its anger and its needs.

So that this does not remain in theory, a few examples are sufficient. 
The case of Prestige is perhaps the most paradigmatic. Nunca Máis and 
Burla Negra concentrated an immense popular force, a capacity for 
massive, transversal mobilization full of dignity. There was anger, 
converted into collective organization. But that potential ended up 
being redirected to a fundamentally moral and symbolic framework: 
indignation was transformed into a story, social force into cultural and 
political management of trauma. No autonomous structures were 
consolidated, no stable popular organization, no will for duality of 
power. The "never again" that should have meant rupture and collective 
learning became, over time, a neutralized political memory, useful for 
building national identity and institutional legitimacy, but not for 
strengthening the people as an autonomous political actor.

Something similar happens in internationalism with Palestine and spaces 
like the Galician Coordinator of Solidarity with Palestine . What could 
be a political school of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist solidarity is 
reduced, in practice, to humanitarian and symbolic solidarity, full of 
ethics, but lacking in real politics. The revolutionary, classist and 
strategic dimensions of the Palestinian struggle are deliberately made 
invisible; reflection on imperialism, on armed resistance, on 
internationalist popular power disappears. Instead of building popular 
organization and deep political awareness, institutional protagonism, 
public gestures, "responsible" acts and an internationalism of gesture 
rather than combat predominate.

In the field of housing, the Galician Platform Vivenda Xa is another 
clear example. The rhetoric is social, forceful and necessary. But not 
only what it does is wrong, but also how it was born: there are already 
specific housing movements and organizations in Galicia, with 
experience, practice and real implementation, and they were barely 
counted on to build this platform. It was preferred to create a new, 
controllable and politically aligned structure, rather than strengthen 
what already existed from below. When we later observe the practice in 
the municipalities governed by the BNG, the contradiction becomes even 
more evident: continuous urban policies, absence of confrontation with 
the real estate market, again, management rather than transformation. 
The fight for housing is not promoted as a class struggle movement with 
real pressure capacity, but as a kind of soft, orderly social lobby, 
acceptable to the system. And, in the meantime, fundamental tools 
continue to be absent: strong tenants' unions, community defense against 
evictions, organized squatting, spaces for self-management of housing. 
An enlightened despotism characteristic of the social democracy heir to 
those reformist Marxisms.

The conflict between Altri and the Ulloa Viva Platform shows, in the 
present tense, the same pattern. The opposition to the macro-project was 
born as a strong popular space, with social legitimacy and a real 
capacity for dispute and transgression. However, when such a movement 
threatens to overflow the limits of what is "politically controllable", 
the maneuvers arrive: attempts to recruit, introduction of moderation 
dynamics and pressures to redirect the conflict to frameworks that can 
be assumed by the institutions. The process of changes in direction and 
orientation does not fall from the sky: it responds to the need to 
prevent the people from taking the lead and the struggle from going 
beyond what certain forces are willing to allow. The objective is not to 
gain popular strength, but to prevent it from becoming dangerous for the 
existing order.

Popular and class power: BNG's waste

This is where we need to say it clearly: popular, class and self-managed 
power is not a pretty slogan, nor a big word to adorn speeches. Galicia 
frees, popular power is (or should be) a concrete strategy for building 
strength from below. It means understanding the people, the workers, as 
an autonomous, revolutionary political subject, not as a mass that 
supports or as an electoral base that legitimizes. It involves a 
conscious and sustained accumulation of forces through real and material 
tools: combative unions that defend class interests; cooperatives and 
self-management spaces that begin to create another economy; housing, 
feminist or environmental movements with political independence and 
pressure capacity; revolutionary organizations that give strategic 
coherence to that set.

Popular power also implies an idea of duality of powers: not waiting for 
the providential day of "assaulting the state", but building, in the 
present, another power that rivals the existing one and gradually 
replaces it. Where the state commands, organize ourselves; where capital 
decides, self-manage; where there is delegation, practice direct 
democracy. It is a commitment to organization over representation, 
collectivization over privatization of participation, to federalism, to 
direct action and to a real democracy that is not limited to voting from 
time to time, but decides, manages and creates action on a daily basis. 
That is the path that builds a strong class; everything else, no matter 
how progressive it may appear, only serves to ensure that the people 
continue without commanding (or learning to command) their own lives.

If this is the diagnosis, the conclusion is clear: it is not enough to 
denounce institutional capitalization and phagocytosis; it is necessary 
to participate in real social movements, to be in them, to be part of 
them and to encourage them to be stronger, more autonomous and more 
combative. Not to control them, not to replace them, but to contribute 
to their full potential. This is where the role of revolutionary 
militancy comes in and what, from Xesta and Social and Organized 
Anarchism, we call organizational dualism: organizing specifically in a 
conscious political project and, at the same time, participating in 
grassroots organizations. This means clarifying something fundamental: 
it is not leadership. We are not in the movements to command, nor to 
impose lines, nor to turn them into transmission belts, because that is 
precisely what we are criticizing here. We are to participate from 
within and at the same level as the rest, collaborating to ensure that 
there is more autonomy, more collective decision-making capacity, more 
political radicality and more real organizational strength.

The goal is not to capture spaces, but to strengthen them, to make them 
more difficult to neutralize, more resistant to institutional capture 
and more useful for the class struggle. It is about building power, 
community, roots, a living social fabric; creating structures that 
remain when the campaigns pass, when governments change and when the 
lights go out. Because the fire, the slush and the pollution of the 
rivers are suffered from below, in the skin and in the daily life of the 
working class. The umbrellas in the squares, the screams in the streets 
and even the arrests are also put by the working class. From Xesta, 
Organización Anarquista Galega, we fight to raise this people, so that 
they recover their voice and their class power, while others come only 
to put them down and return them to order. We do not want a grateful 
people: we want a people that orders.

Inés Kropo, activist of Xesta

https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/04/24/como-adormecer-a-bravura-dun-pobo-da-forza-popular-a-forza-parlamentaria/
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