From a European perspective, the financial meltdown of 2008 was the prologue of a full-scale, continent-wide crisis. The US-made financial debacle triggered a complex chain of unexpected events throughout the old continent, contaminating all spheres of social life and resulting in a radically new landscape plagued by political and economic crisis.

As Ada Colau, the newly elected mayor of Barcelona and head of a coalition inspired by the indignados, says: “No one will come out unchanged from this crisis. What awaits us is a feudal horizon, with a sharp increase in inequality, an unprecedented concentration of wealth, new forms of insecurity for the majority of citizens. Or, a democratic revolution, where thousands of people are committed to change the film’s ending.”

We are very likely arriving at this historical turning point. The landslide victory of No in the July 5 Greek referendum indicated that the popular classes want a halt to decades of neoliberal European integration. This reopening of what Auguste Blanqui called the “chapter of bifurcations” is taking place in the middle of tectonic shifts shaking a continent that has fallen into a spiral of rancor and resentment not seen since the middle of last century.