Via Renewal Editors and Dan DiMaggio (who provided the translation) this speech by Pablo Iglesias of Podemos, made to a Syriza rally in October, makes fascinating reading. Iglesias is clear and deliberate in raising Salvador Allende as his strongest point of reference. What is so striking about a party that gets painted as belonging to the far left is the conscious modesty of the demands - a kind of revolutionary social democracy very close in spirit to Allende. Winning the elections is far from winning power. That’s why we must bring everyone who is committed to change and decency together around our shared task, which is nothing more than turning the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into a manual for government. Our aim today, unfortunately, is not the withering away of the state, or the disappearance of prisons, or that Earth become a paradise. But we do aspire, as I said, to make it so that all children go to public schools clean and well-fed; that all the elderly receive a pension and be taken care of in the best hospitals; that any young person—independently of who their parents are—be able to go to college; that nobody have their heat turned off in the winter because they can’t pay their bill; that no bank be allowed to leave a family in the street without alternative housing; that everyone be able to work in decent conditions without having to accept shameful wages; that the production of information in newspapers and on television not be a privilege of multi-millionaires; that a country not have to kneel down before foreign speculators. In one word: that a society be able to provide the basic material conditions that make dignity and happiness possible. These modest objectives that today seem so radical simply represent democracy.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 22:43:27 +0000
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