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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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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