Airtime

But what Podemos valued far more than organisation was communication – or perhaps “airtime” would be more accurate. Our leaders, like those of Syriza, were deeply influenced by the Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau, who argued that populist movements could bypass traditional party structures through the canny use of media. This idea was obviously seductive: why invest in the slow work of organising when you could reach millions through television? But there was a pitfall we didn’t really see at the time: you could win power through airtime, but you couldn’t govern with it. And perhaps our own change in status, from upstarts into people in power, had happened too fast for our leaders to internalise our success. ¹

This is a sad story of a popular movement turning into populist politics.

The only point where I don’t agree with the writer is the moment when things started turning stale and bound to betray the movement’s own roots. It happened much earlier in my view. In fact, the only surprising element to me is the speed at which it all got hijacked. The naive, “popular” phase could have, should have lasted longer as it could have yielded more longterm results in popular culture, in a good way. Yes, I’m aware that social media and TV have become home to popular culture, that’s why politics wants to go to bed with them. If cheap TV shows and comment wars on social media are the epitomy of popular culture though, I’m outta here. Not interested. And we all know they count a lot, they might be a hotbed (ha!) but they are not the essence of popular culture, at least that’s what I’d like to think.

To use an example from the last years of Franco’s regime in Spain, home to Podemos:

Las manos en los bolsillos o aquí llueven las hostias – dice con voz atronadora el guardia civil, con bigote y tricornio, desde la ventanilla del coche patrulla, a esa chica y ese chico que bajan cogidos de la mano por la loma del Castillo de Santa Catalina, en Jaén. ²

The simple fact that some people still remember this story is proof that airtime can only be a hotbed, not the essence. But do we make a conscious attempt to differentiate between communication/airtime and governance every time we go to the polls and between them? Do we go out and try to listen to the stories that emerge from the living memory of our “popular culture” and see what they can teach us? I think we should.

Here’s one from Eastern Europe my neighbour told me a few weeks ago. Men in a field, in uniforms of two different colors. One color has guns, the other has spades. Everyone is starving. One of the diggers finds a beetroot and starts munching on it, barely separating soil from food …

You have guessed the ending, right? It’s local but the deeper you delve into the local, the faster you end up in the universal, as the cliché goes. One interesting detail is, there are no words of any human language uttered throughout this story.