About Spiral/pt

Spiral pretende formular um corpo de ética consistente, uma ideologia contemporânea, que amantes da liberdade possam aplicar às suas vidas e projetos. Nós coletamos e conectamos causas e ações em um esforço colaborativo, aberto a todas as contribuições.

The answer to What is to be done? keeps being hard to formulate and apply. However, plenty of good ideas have been formulated in the past years and centuries. Many people is putting them in practice today. Many more would join them if they would only know who and why. The starting point and common denominator to everything we do is the Spiral principle.

Spiral made a fresh and multilingual start in the Summer of 2013, but we have a bit of history...



Espiral was born in 2001 as a political party, in the heat of antiglobalization protests, subvertising, September 11, the crisis in Venezuela and worldwide democratic decline. The basic idea was to infiltrate as a sort of Trojan horse in the political, media, and corporate spheres, using their own tools.



This is how we run in several Spanish elections, together with the Motivados party. The aim was to get millions of ballots printed and distributed for free in hundreds of election booklets, showing to voters the message "Another Democracy is Possible", with the image of a hand placing a ballot in the toilet. We organized a mass email directed to the Spanish congressional deputies, asking their personal opinion on the bombing of Iraq. We designed a First Aid Guide against Lack of Time, that modern epidemic. We began a Dennouncements Workshop (counter-advertising ads). And other projects.

In our experience, the main problem we encountered was the dissemination of projects. Only "Another Democracy is Possible" was able to mobilize a thousand people in different cities, and in the end, we ran up against organizational fatigue. Around 2005 the first phase was gone and we closed the (political) party.

More than a decade later, the world is the same, or worse. Although almost a generation of activism has passed, and though the mobilizations and themes of today have different styles and tactics, under the surface the root causes of problems continue almost unaltered. In the same way, these are almost the same root causes targeted by civil protests throughout the 20th century, and earlier.



For this reason, we have decided to reactivate and update one of the actions begun by spiral: the spiral of values. The idea was that, to react and protest is not good enough, if you don't have your own agenda. To follow political, media, and corporate agendas in several parts of the planet is an exhausting effort. What matters is to have your own agenda, based on solid values, and to ally oneself with those who share this agenda and these values, to accomplish your goals.

Therefore, today the Spiral project is focused on finding and connecting causes, actions, and interesting projects.