AS if the summer vacations were a cloak of oblivion to dissipate the brutality of the economic crisis, the media have attempted to distract us with the European Football Cup, the Olympics and the summer adventures of the famous, in order to forget that a new round of cuts is approaching and the second rescue of Spain will be more damaging socially. But they have not achieved the goal, among other reasons, because the audacious blows of Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo and the Andalusian Workers Syndicate (SAT) have broken the spell and maintained the social alert. Autumn is going to be hot.

In a public conversation with the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman in August we agreed on the need to break away from the dominant pessimism in our society, disillusioned with traditional politics. We must stop acting as individual and isolated subjects and become agents for change, interconnected social activists. "We have a duty to take control of our own lives; we are living in a moment of serious uncertainty where citizens don’t really know who is in command, and this is making us lose confidence in traditional politicians and institutions. The effect on the population is a constant situation of fear, of insecurity…" affirmed Bauman. "Politicians influence citizens to maintain them in a state of fear and thus control them, restrict their rights and limit individual liberties. We are at a very dangerous moment, because the consequences of all this are affecting our daily lives…"

If citizens no longer know who is in command it is because a bifurcation between power and politics has occurred. Up until recently, politics and power have been confused. In a democracy, candidates elected by the political route were the only ones who could exercise power or delegate it with legitimacy. Now, in neoliberal Europe, this is not the case. A president’s electoral success does not guarantee him or her exercise of real power. Because, over and above the political mandate (in addition to Berlin and Angela Merkel), there are two non-elected supreme powers which dictate conduct, European technocracy and the financial markets.

These two instances impose their agenda. Eurocrats demand blind obedience to European treaties and mechanisms which are genetically neoliberal. For their part, markets sanction any indiscipline which departs from ultra-liberal orthodoxy. Thus, prisoner of the course of these two rigid banks, the river of politics obligatorily flows in one direction with barely any margin for maneuver. In other words, without power.

"Traditional political institutions are steadily less believable, because they are not helping to solve the problems in which citizens have found themselves ensnared. There has been a collapse between democracies (for which people have voted) and dictates imposed by the markets, which are threatening people’s social rights, their fundamental rights," observes Bauman.

We are witnessing the great battle of the market and state. We have reached a point at which the market, in its totalitarian ambition, wants to control everything: the economy, politics, culture, society, individuals. And now, in association with the mass media which functions as its ideological apparatus, the market also wants to dismantle the edifice of social advances known as the welfare state.

Something fundamental is at stake: equality of opportunity. For example, education is silently being privatized (in other words, turned over to the market). The cuts are going to create a low level public education system in which working conditions are going to be structurally difficult, both for teachers and students. Public education is going to find it more and more difficult to favor the emergence of young people from modest backgrounds. On the other had, for well-off families, private education is going to enjoy an increase. Once again, privileged social categories are going to be created with access to the country’s commanding positions, and a second category, with access only to positions of obedience. This is intolerable.

In this context, the crisis probably acts as the shock to which sociologist Naomi Klein refers to in her book The Shock Doctrine: an economic disaster is utilized to allow for the imposition of the neoliberal agenda. Mechanisms have been created to keep watch over and control national democracies, in order to implement (as is the case in Spain and before it, Ireland, Portugal and Greece) ferocious adjustment programs under the surveillance of a new authority, the troika made up of the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank; non-democratic institutions whose members are not elected by the people. Institutions which do not represent citizens.

Nevertheless, these institutions, with the support of part of the mass media in obeisance to the interests of economic, financial and industrial pressure groups, are responsible for creating the implements of control which are reducing democracy to a theater of shadows and appearances, with the complacent complicity of the major government parties. What difference is there between the cuts policies of Rodríguez Zapatero and those of Mariano Rajoy? Very little.

Both have bowed down to financial speculators and have blindly obeyed Eurocrat slogans. Both have liquidated national sovereignty. Neither of them took any political decision to halt the irrationality of the markets. Both considered that, faced with Berlin’s dictates and the speculators’ attack, the sole solution – resembling an ancient and cruel myth – consists of sacrificing the population as if the torment inflicted on societies could calm the avarice of the markets.

In such a context, do citizens have any possibility of reconstructing politics and regenerating democracy? Doubtless, social protest will continue to grow and social movements demanding change are going to multiply. For now, part of Spanish society still believes that this crisis is an accident and that things will soon go back to how they were. This is an illusion. When this doesn’t happen and they realize that these adjustments are not crisis related but structural ones which have come to stay, then social protest will probably attain a significant level.

What will those protesting be demanding? Our friend Zygmunt Bauman is clear about that, "We have to construct a new political system which allows a new model of living and a new and genuine democracy of the people."