After the fall of the Soviet Union in the mid-nineties,  there was much talk of pensée unique, singlemindedness or “single thought”^[1]: a discourse affirming market democracy as the only imaginable and discernable framework for common life. As Noam Chomsky would caution, the only strategy for assuring the uptake of this narrative would be the concentration of information and media, meaning, the consolidation of the voice and the imagination of what is possible. It was the belle époque of neoliberalism.

In her book, Networked Activism and Connected Multitudes (Activismo en red y multitudes conectadas:Comunicación y acción en la era de Internet), Guiomar Rovira tells the story of how that unitary discourse was questioned to open up new possibilities. It began with the emergence of activist networks that, taking advantage of the internet’s open and decentralized infrastructure, created new technological tools to share images, words and feelings distinct from the official narrative. These were the times of Zapatismo and anti-globalization. Later, with Web 2.0, the politicized use of networks became socialized, providing access to anyone. This was the time of connected multitudes, including 15-M and other movements spawned by the crisis.

#YoSoy132

Guiomar’s account distinguishes itself from regular academic production in two ways. To begin with, the book is fundamentally affirmative, rather than critical. It affirms the political power of technologies once people have seized their ownership. The author does not view the world from the angle of power: she does not reinforce our impotence, or how dominated and manipulated we are, nor does she victimize us. On the contrary — she speaks about what’s been done, what’s being done and what can be done. She contemplates the world from the perspective of potentiality.

Secondly, it is a lived book. The author’s personal experiences – through punk, Zapatismo or Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement – form a basis for reflection. Guiomar Rovira is a Catalonian journalist and writer living in Mexico since 1994. She is the author of numerous essays and a teacher in Mexico City’s UAM-Xochimilco University.

Amador Fernández-Savater: “Activist networks” is how you characterize the first historical period described in your book. One of its fundamental ingredients was punk, something that you personally experienced while living in Barcelona during the eighties. How did punk influence the creation of these networks?

Guiomar Rovira: I like it that you want to start there. “No future” is one of the most important messages in punk. In a way, contemplating that “there is no future” opens up a new politics, a much more prefigurative politics. It’s no longer a question of waiting and dreaming of utopias, but of doing what we need to do here and now, and in the ways we can and want to. We’re not waiting for further instructions or permissions to get started. We will take ownership of music and spaces. In punk, anyone can pick up a guitar while someone else starts singing, speaking, doing. This is where we find the DIY spirit, with whatever you have at hand. The cultural becomes political: it is a way to exit the defined boundaries of the system that constantly procrastinates and sacrifices in service to the promise of a non-existent future.

In that sense, from fanzines to squatting, punk is very rich. There is no future, so we have to live. Now. There is no housing, so we have to squat buildings. It’s a movement that also becomes transnational, not embedded in state or national structures but in the spaces in the cities, in the creation of networks. An extended sense-making community. A global movement with its local appropriations, one that needs not ask permission to build a politics and ways of making culture and communicating. A movement where anyone can say what they want to say.

In a way, punk prefigures the hacker mentality. At that time, I was part of a magazine called Lletra A. We made it by cutting and pasting the whole thing manually. We also had a very important network for occupying houses in Barcelona. We opened our modest self-organised social center, el Anti. The idea was, “there is no future, let’s build our lives now”. It wasn’t limited to counter-information, it was about creating a distinct ecosystem.

Zapatismo and the Hope International

Amador: There is a second social movement that would be central to the creation of those activist networks. I’m referring to Zapatismo which, unlike punk, wouldn’t be a “dark” movement. Zapatismo opens a horizon of hope, removed from the metropolis. What can you tell us about the relation between Zapatismo, technologies and communication?

Guiomar: We have to take into account that in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and we lived in a unipolar world marked by the “end of history”. But suddenly, from the most surprising and unexpected place, there is rebellion, hope, and a movement that speaks to us, and where I found myself.

I feel that the significance of Zapatismo is that it allowed for a global common framework. This was a moment marked by despondency across all struggles: the global left was despondent, the Latin American guerrillas were in the doldrums, and so on.  Suddenly, an interpellating framework that rescued us from isolated processes of resistance was born. A framework for active mobilization that allows many different struggles to have a shared sense of identity and a common foe. It is humanity against neoliberalism, the Zapatistas say. And who proposed this framework? The indigenous peoples of Chiapas, the most forgotten, the smallest, coming from a corner of the world where many weren’t even aware that there were indigenous communities, or resistance, or the possibility of struggle.

This was still a global media event, accordingly relayed by traditional mass media (newspapers, radio, television). The World Wide Web was barely a year old, hardly anyone was using it. After a few days, though, the newspapers and radio dropped the story. Nevertheless, people sought ways to keep abreast and intervene in what was happening in Chiapas, supporting this rebellion as a locus of hope for the world.

Amador: This is when the appropriation of the Internet takes place. At that time, it was a new means of communication. How did that come about?

Guiomar: The appropriation was almost natural, spontaneous even. Given the lack of information from the traditional media, alternative media moved to occupy that space. Like many others present, I was participating and publishing in hegemonic media, important newspapers…but I was also sending a wealth of information to alternative radio stations, alternative media, fanzines…

In the midst of all this, these gringos (sometimes gringos can also bring about good things!) kept telling us, “you have to use the Internet”. They were the first hackers, tramping around with their spiky hair, installing modems and strange artefacts in your computer. We had no clue what those maniacs were on about. Less than three months later, we were all using the Internet. When I say “all”, I’m referring to the journalists, the NGOs, the activists. The first websites covering the revolution in Chiapas appeared spontaneously. Some US students decided to follow the situation and began publishing the EZLN’s communiqués. These were sent by fax and then published in the website (called Ya Basta). More people turned up spontaneously and started translating to English, French…

That is how information began to be shared and an informational scaffolding was built around the situation in Chiapas. This was huge: at that time the Mexican government was still quite invested in pushing a positive image internationally (that is no longer the case). But information was not the only thing circulating; many people were travelling to Chiapas, visiting the communities, and generating even more information. There were inputs and outputs, a communicative atmosphere supporting an indigenous rebellion and indigenous rebellion proposing the idea that another world is possible. An interpellation finding resonance in many places around the world and allowing for common action, aside from any differences in our ways of doing.

Walter Benjamin: Power above all things

Amador: I want to pose a question a bit beyond our conversation about activist networks and connected multitudes, about the support you find in the classic author Walter Benjamin. What is it about Benjamin, what kind of ally is he?

Guiomar: What I find in Benjamin is a profound metaphorical, poetical and political inspiration. In the darkness of his time he was able to see the light, more so than any other member of the Frankfurt School. Benjamin helps me understand this need of mine to find the power in each moment, each place.

Technique is not our enemy. It also represents the possibility of living in a fuller world, where our covenant with nature is not hostile, nor does it force the violence by which we survive or perish. Predatory capitalism, based on artificially created pain and scarcity, undermines the potential of technique. The blame for the expulsion of life and accumulation through dispossession lies not with the Internet, but with a montage, a global system, that takes technique and, rather than put it in the service of humanity, gifts it to capitalism and the predatory production of scarcity. Benjamin invites us to conceive of another, non-capitalist modernity.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin sees the democratizing possibility enabled by the fact that we can all take ownership of technique, become authors, and have fuller lives, our own voices. There is another idea of his, which appears in Theses on the Philosophy of History, the concept of jetztzeit: the radiant moment that constellates a kind of epiphany in the here and now where everything opens. This is the idea of the constellation, which I keep coming back to in the book. Those that precede us implore us to see that justice is done. At the same time, there isn’t a single genealogy for all movements. Rather, every movement constructs its own history, shines a light on its radiant moments and, from there, articulates its own destiny. It is a tremendously creative way of understanding that the political also represents an opening to the past.

Benjamin is an inspiration. He died in Portbou, my grandparents’ village. This summer I went to see his grave. He lived a terrible life and never achieved the recognition he deserved. Still, he was the most optimistic, the most creative of the intellectuals of his time. It’s ironic that the one who suffers the most is more able to see the openings, the possibilities, the power.

Connected Multitudes: Technology in anyone’s hands.

Amador: First there is networked activism, the appropriation of technology by activists (punk, Zapatismo, the anti-globalization movement), but then there would be a second movement marking a radical transformation from networked activism, which would be the “connected multitudes”. I would like you to tell us about that transition.

Guiomar: The communicative environment of networked activism remains permeated and populated mainly by militants — people with political consciousness. The shift to connected multitudes is highlighted by the fact that the leading voices are no longer limited to those coming from activism. Anyone using a social network has a voice, without necessarily having been previously politicized or part of any specific activist space. And this can happen in politically incorrect spaces like Twitter, or Facebook or YouTube, which are privative networks.

For example, take Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement. Not all the Ibero-American University students that started the protests were already politicized, but they did feel aggravated, and used tools to voice that discontent and be heard in the media after remarks were made about president Peña Nieto’s visit to their University. The video they uploaded to YouTube had impressive consequences, generating a wave of indignation that many sorts of people felt identified with. Everybody wondered how it was possible that such an important movement hadn’t come from the UNAM^[2], or from the groups that had been cutting their teeth for years, denouncing unjust situations. Instead, this came from a totally unexpected, unpredictable collective.

In those protests we see a phenomenon that Manuel Castells calls Mass Self Communication: everyone becomes an information producer, a remixer, a retweeter. Everyone takes part in conversations and strengthens the movement with his or her own ability, for example, graphic arts. The processes of putting out and taking in become fuzzy; the entrenched notions of origin, authority and attribution become somewhat “lossy”.

Amador: The book highlights the positive character of the shift between these two stages of alternative communication. This is a process of democratization: if networks had previously been in the hands of activists, now the political use of technology is in the hands of anyone. But, doesn’t this mean that we’ve also lost sight of the importance of technological infrastructures and technological sovereignty? These elements, crucial to the hacker mentality, seem to have been sidelined in favor of “ease of use” in the distribution of content, thanks to social networks made freely available by the same system we are trying to undermine.

Guiomar: While what you’ve mentioned is undoubtedly important, I can’t fully agree with your assertion of what it is we’ve lost. I think that we’re shifting from a very uninformed and automatic use of networks to a more conscious usage due to the Snowden or Wikileaks revelations on spyware. I think that we’re seeing the emergence of a new movement that is far more aware about surveillance, control and data appropriation in social networks. This awareness is something new and we’ve reached it thanks to the work of certain hackers. I see Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange as hackers. They’ve shown why we need to be careful and use Tor, use free software, why we need to have secure passwords and use the web responsibly. We’ll see what comes of that.

Doing it together

Amador: Instead of intellectuals raising a finger to tell us: “be careful, this is not going well”, what we need is more social appropriation of technology, more learning, more technological literacy, more hacklabs. I think that this is one of the key messages in your book. You acknowledge that the Internet is taking a somber turn, while asserting that the solutions will not be found outside the Internet.

Guiomar: Discursive critiques of technology never solve anything. How can we teach ourselves about sociability in networks? By appropriating spaces, constructing them collaboratively, sharing what we know…by doing what we feel like doing, in ways we feel like doing it, and generating new ways. This is what, in my book, I describe as “hacker unfolding.” This is not just a technological possibility; to me, the concept of hacking goes far beyond technology. The hacker takes something apart to then build something new, deconstructing what is offered as a black box to open new possibilities. And this is not limited to technology, it can be done anywhere. Widen your scope and construct new potentials, whether it’s in the university, or in human relations. As Fernanda Briones, the hackfeminism expert, says “Let’s do it together”.^[3]

Amador: How do you consider of the relation between technology and bodies, between the world of bytes and the world of atoms.

Guiomar: My position is that, beyond the differentiation between online and offline worlds, everything occurs on-life. Seen this way, the corporeal experience of encountering is the key. Going out, looking at each other, experiencing the body-to-body connection. Physical encounters, opening spaces for emergence, experimenting with the body’s vulnerability, all of this is essential. The very logic of networks stresses the commonality of how impossible it is to live under the conditions imposed by this expropriating capitalism. This encounter is the quintessential political moment of our times.

To me, this dimension that deals with the vulnerability of the body, this exposition, has transformed voluntary activism into something more alive, less predetermined. The body becomes visible; it interacts and creates convivial, caring spaces while simultaneously politicizing what is private. My current thesis identifies a feministization of connected multitudes, a kind of free appropriation of feminism, a feminism that becomes inevitable. No emancipatory movement can ignore the widely varied approaches to women’s struggles and feminist struggles over the course of time. All of this happens through the body.

Internet feminista y redes libres – Liliana Zaragoza Cano (Lili_Anaz)

Bodies in the street and communication through networks; I can’t think of these as separate. We are a type of cyborg: we carry our own technological extensions. When I think about politics, technology becomes part of collective action. It’s not something additional, or different. If you pay attention, the most important cyberspace and network actions have always taken place within a context of street mobilization. Acting is communicating and vice versa. Everything happens in the on-life dimension. Our brains are the ultimate platform. There is nothing non-physical. The idea that networks are beyond physicality is just dead wrong, and I have put my mind to opposing it.

This text was transcribed from an interview during Guiomar’s book launch. It took place on September 19, 2017 in UAM-Xochimilco. The original Spanish interview was transcribed by Gerardo Juárez and edited by Amador Fernández-Savater.

^[1] Pensée unique, a term coined by French journalist Jean-François Kahn refers to hegemonic ideological conformism. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

^[2] Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México or National Autonomous University of Mexico, one of the world’s highest ranking University in R&D. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

^[3] “Hagámoslo juntas” in the original. Spanish is gendered, “juntas” is the female form of “together”. Female (as opposed to the “default” male) grammatical forms have become more commonly used after the 15M movements, such that people of any gender identity more frequently choose to use the female form to describe mixed gender groups.

Republished from Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratel

Lead image from It’s Going Down

Original article published at eldiario.es

The post No Future: From Punk to Zapatismo and Connected Multitudes appeared first on P2P Foundation.

AureaSocial’s entrance

SELF-MANAGEMENT SPACE OPEN TO THE WORLD FROM 2O11

We date back to 2011 when the Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC) was consolidated after a year of work and having actively participated in the mobilizations of the 15M, a movement formed by people who are free and independent from the political parties, which made the possibility of practicing self-organization resonate in the minds and consciences of many people and made it possible to remember that only people save people.

In this context, we found that the CIC’s permanent assembly began to run a space which a family with close affinity to social movments had ceded to them, to stop the Banco Popular from evicting the property. This bank was attempting to halt the mortgage agreement that they had with this family business.

As it was all done confirming to legality, after some time the court of Barcelona issued a judicial resolution where the Xarxa Integral de Profesionals y Usuaries SCCL, a cooperative tool of the CIC became the holder of the rental contract until 2023.

Here began a new stage based on self-management, which meant without subsidies nor from the state neither any regional or municipal aid of any kind.

During all this time, Aurea Social, a local of 1400 squaremeters located in the Poblet neighborhood (Sagrada Familia) is linked to, related with and  visited by all kinds of activists, communication and media channels, researchers of many different fields coming not only from Catalonia and Spain but from all over the planet earth.So much so that we have received visits and invitations to explain our self-managed experiences to places all over Europe, America, Asia, Africa and even Oceania.

Anthropologists, Sociologists, Political Scientists, Journalists, Universities, Cooperative Federations from all over the world have visited and communicated with us. We have been in touch with many different people, even with those who have not invented anything but have simply decided to make reflections, decisions and action for a way of life with parameters opposed to capitalism from a constructive and inclusive attitude with those people and collectives who understand that the real revolution is not possible without an individual and collective transformation based on mutual support, assembly, and horizontal and non-hierarchical organization

In this journey we have tried to be honest and sincere with ourselves and we have promoted and continue to promote individual and collective self-managed projects and the concept of the common as theoretical and practical reference.

In fields such as Health, Housing and Education we have collaborated with many people who wanted and felt the need to manage their lives from the sovereignty and not from the submission to the criteria of the system. Not everything has been a success, precisely in these aspects that we have been most self-critical and we have observed that our proposals in this respect without the necessary resources were simple intentions.

For this reason, the bet of giving shelter to productive projects throughout Catalonia when many of them were not viable within the capitalist system,within the networks generated by the Integral Cooperative became possible, it could be said that in these years we have put our legal tools at theservice of more than two thousand projectsto many different types of activities that one can imagine…

This is where our self-management strategy has proven most effective.

We have promoted a social economy outside the capitalist system in social currency that has moved the amount of 400,000 units only in last year

Today, after 7 years we are at a crossroads.

The Capital is once again putting pressure on the self-managed organizations and on our spaces.

We want to make a call to all the organizations of activists, self-managemened projects, anti-authoritarians, foundations, grassroots organizations, popular and libertarian associations from all over the world to support Aurea Social in this moment of attack of the Bank (Banco Popular /Santander) and the Capital against the self-managed spaces.

Now more than ever we need your support and not only your political but also your financial support to face this attack that wants to expel the Cooperativa Integral from a neighbourhood of Barcelona where we the witnesses that another way of life is possible.

We have generated an oasis of self-management in the midst of a capitalist, gentrified and submissive context with the forms and customs of domination that we neither share nor promote.

We need spaces where freedom of expression can be guaranteed, where in order to be free it is not necessary to be submissive to the authorities that are daily violating civil rights in Catalonia and in the Spanish state, in the present situation and in the future it is very important to maintain liberated spaces that do not depend on the state or in any of its instances in order to ensure that the culture of freedom is not threatened by the economic power of Capital.

We, therefore urge you to participate within your best ability in the crowfunding that we have set in motion which aims to raise funds for the collectivization of AureaSocial so that it does not become the property of the Bank.

Union, Action and Self-Management!!!

Photo by Fotomovimiento

The post Solidarity with Aurea Social, the Catalan Integral Coop’s open, self-managed space appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sam DeJohn: Recently, Pablo Soto Bravo, Madrid City Council Member, computer programmer and the city’s lead for public engagement, spoke at an event in New York on “Restoring Trust in Government” on the occasion of the United Nations General Assembly. “Why should we trust government,” he asked, adding “the people don’t trust governments…they’re right not to trust the government.” Like many Spaniards, Soto had joined the 15-M movement in 2011 to protest the government’s austerity measures and rising levels of corruption.¹ With trust in government having declined over twenty percentage points since 2007,² Soto used his programming skills to champion the adoption of digital technology to give the public a greater voice in a traditional two-party governing system from which the average person had generally been excluded. But, as we shall explore in this three-part series, Decide Madrid, a pathbreaking civic technology platform co-designed by Soto to force “the administration to open their ears” (El Mundo), is evolving from a protest tool designed to challenge the status quo into a more mature platform for improving governance.

In Part 1, we will explore the platform, which is among the best-of-breed new generation of open source civic technologies, and its myriad features. In Part 2, we will draw on open data from Decide to focus in more depth on how people use the site. In Part 3, we focus on recommendations for improvements to Decide and how to test their impact on the legitimacy and effectiveness of decision-making.

What is Decide?

The Ahora Madrid coalition (which was founded with support from the Podemos political party³) created Decide in 2015 to enable citizens to propose, deliberate and vote on policies for the city and ensure transparency of all government proceedings within the municipality.  An information page on the Decide website further elaborates the program’s focus. “One of the main missions of [the platform] will be to ensure the inclusion of everyone in the participatory processes, so that all voices and wills form a part of them and no one is left out.” The website, which utilizes the free software Consul as many other administrations are now doing, allows Madrileños to influence the City’s planning and policy-making through voting, discourse, and consultations with the goal of empowering citizens, promoting transparency, and fostering open government practices. The site is composed of four distinct features to address these areas of desired impact. Of these components, two processes stand out as having the most potential for direct citizen influence: a proposal section where individuals may propose new laws and subsequently vote on them, and a participatory budget section where citizens decide how a portion of the City’s budget is distributed among different projects. The other two features include a consultation process where citizens are asked to offer, and vote on, opinions about City proceedings and finally a debate process which does not directly lead to action but rather deliberation for the City to assess public opinion. These processes are all designed with the intention “to create an environment that mobilizes existing collective intelligence in favor of a more hospitable and inclusive city.”

Key Features

Propuestas: Citizen Proposals Enable More Direct Democracy

The proposals feature was designed as a way to allow citizens to utilize the full power of direct democracy and shape government actions. According to Pablo Soto Bravo and Miguel Arana Catania, Director of Participation for the City Council of Madrid and Project Director for Decide Madrid, the proposals feature is by far the most important aspect of the platform as it has the greatest potential for impact. It has definitely generated interest as almost 20,000 proposals have been submitted since the launch of Decide in 2015.

This feature enables citizens to create and directly support ideas for new legislation. Registered users⁴ can propose an idea by simply clicking the “Create a Proposal” button and submitting a title and description. Proposals range significantly in terms of length and content, but gravity of the topic does not seem to influence popularity as two of the most supported proposals currently active on the site are “Penalty for those who do not collect the feces of their pets” and “Replacement of public lighting by LED lights.” Once a proposal is submitted, anyone with verified accounts can click a button expressing their support for said proposal.⁵ Each proposal is given twelve months to gather requisite support to advance in the process.

Screenshot from the “proposals” home page on the website

Example of an ongoing proposal

In order to move forward for consideration, a proposal must receive the requisite support, represented by 1% of citizens of Madrid over 16 years of age (~27,000 people currently). The process is designed this way to ensure that every citizen has the opportunity to submit proposals but that the administrators do not have to waste time considering proposals that fail to attract minimal backing.

Proposals that receive the necessary votes advance to the decision phase, which affords time and opportunity for citizens to get educated about the issues and make informed decisions. The site announces whenever a proposal reaches this phase and it is grouped with others that are in the same stage of the process, thus beginning a 45-day period of deliberation and discussion before the final voting phase. The managers of the platform do not provide background information other than what is posted by users, so citizens are responsible for conducting their own research and perusing the site for debates and comments about the proposal. Afterward begins a seven-day period where anyone over 16 years of age and completely verified in the municipality of Madrid can vote to either accept or reject the proposal.

It is important to note that proposals that receive majority support are not automatically implemented, as the Spanish Constitution does not permit binding referenda. Instead, the Madrid City Council commits to a 30-day study of any such proposal, during which they will determine if it is to be implemented. During this examination, the proposal is evaluated based on its legality, feasibility, competence, and economic cost, all of which are highlighted in a subsequent report that is openly published. If the report is positive, then a plan of action will be written and published to carry out the proposal. If the report is negative, the City Council may either propose an alternative action or publish the reasons that prevent the proposal’s execution.

Although it is understandable that the administration wants to ensure that only popular, viable proposals are presented before them, the hurdles that each proposal must clear are proving to be a significant obstacle. While it is difficult to determine the reason, the undeniable fact that only two proposals have even reached the final voting phase suggests a serious flaw in the system and a possible deterrent for future participation. However, on a more hopeful note, the two successful proposals (one calling for a single ticket for all means of public transportation and the other an extensive sustainability plan for the city) reached majority support in February of this year and in May the Council approved them and posted implementation plans.

Presupuestos participativos: Participatory budgeting

This feature was created to allow citizens a substantial say in how their taxes are being spent. Specifically, it permits them to decide where a designated portion of the City’s budget is going to be allocated. In the first step, individuals registered in Madrid can submit expenditure projects which will be posted publicly on the website. Spending projects can be submitted for either the entire city or for an individual district. One key difference between this process and that of proposals is that authors of similar projects are contacted and offered the possibility of submitting joint projects as a way of limiting the volume of projects and ensuring cost-effectiveness.

The next phase consists of a two-week period where qualified voters are authorized ten support votes for city-wide projects and ten for projects in a district of their choosing. After this period, all projects undergo an evaluation by the City Council either confirming or denying that the projects are valid, viable, legal, and includible in the municipal budget. Following the evaluation, both approved and rejected projects are published with their corresponding reports and assessments. The “most supported” projects then move on to the final voting phase, but the administrators are unclear about this term’s definition as they do not specify how many projects are permitted to advance.

In the final voting phase, the total available budget and the final projects along with their estimated cost (produced by the City Council during the evaluation phase) are published. Qualified voters can vote for any number of projects for the whole city and one project from the district of their choosing but the projects they support cannot exceed the total amount of funds available in the budget.

Projects are then listed in descending order of votes received, both for city-wide projects and district projects. They are then selected down the line from highest number of votes to lowest number of votes, making sure each additional proposal can fit within the total available budget. If the estimated cost of a project would cause the budget to be exceeded, that project is skipped and the next viable option is selected. Finally, the selected projects are included in the Initial Project of the General Budget of the City of Madrid (Participatory Budgets).

This feature is making impressive progress consistent with its goals. From 2016 to 2017, the amount allocated to these projects rose from €60 million to €100 million and the total number of participants rose by almost 50% from 45,531 to 67,132 people. With each project’s status and details available in a downloadable file on this page of the site, transparency is not an issue for this component. Pablo Soto Bravo and Miguel Arana Catania have indicated that citizens should start seeing concrete results from the 2016 projects very soon, which should lend credibility to, and faith in, the process.

Screenshot of Downloadable Project Spreadsheet

Debates and Consultations

In addition to the proposed actions which actually go through a voting process, the site contains sections that are intended more for simple deliberation, promoting communication and information-sharing. Debates do not call for any action by the City Council but are instead used to assess the public’s opinion and general consensus on a range of topics.

There is also a consultation process where users can voice their opinions about certain proceedings throughout the city. They can answer questions, make suggestions, and praise or denounce measures or activities that are already happening instead of creating new proposals. For example, the City Council currently plans on remodeling several squares and plazas throughout the city. Thus, there is a section where citizens are able to answer three questions created by the City Council pertaining to the revitalization of each area. City officials can comment and debate as well, allowing them to directly engage users on the site. There is no indication as to how seriously the public’s opinions are taken into consideration, but it is implied that their ideas are valued. At the very least, the highlighted names of politicians appearing on the debate space creates the appearance that they are taking an interest in these concerns.

Membership Levels

Because Decide has the potential to cause such a grand impact on Madrid’s citizens, government, and economic prosperity, there are certain security precautions to encourage participation while protecting the integrity of the process. The platform has a sliding scale of permissions with stronger authentication enabling access to more features of the site to create the incentive for more accountable participation. The site is open to anyone with internet access and users may create an account simply by providing a username and valid email address. While anyone can submit proposals, additional authentication is necessary to access other capabilities. There are three levels of authentication, each with differing rights of access.

• Registered users, who provide a username, email address, and password but do not verify residence, are able to:
  • Participate in discussions
  • Create proposals
  • Create expenditure projects
• Basic verified users must verify residence online by entering their residence data. If it is correct, they will be asked to provide a mobile phone number in order to receive a confirmation code to activate their verified account. People may also elect to do this in person at a Citizen Assistance office. These users are able to:
  • Participate in discussions
  • Create proposals and expenditure projects
  • Vote for proposals and expenditure projects in the support phase
• Completely verified users must fully verify their account in person at a Citizen Assistance Office or via mail. If done by mail they will receive a letter containing a security code and instructions to carry out the verification, which they must send back to a Citizen Assistance Office. These users are able to:
  • Participate in discussions
  • Create proposals and expenditure projects
  • Vote for proposals in the support phase
  • Vote for proposals in the final decision phase

Conclusions

Although the concept of Decide is consistent with the highest ideals of open government, the execution falls short in practice as, with the exception of participatory budgeting, there is no evidence that the site leads to improved decisions. We will discuss these shortcomings in more detail in part two, however, on the surface it is seems that Decide has not yet accomplished its ultimate goals, as its creators acknowledge. Soto and Arana want Madrileños to understand and fully utilize the power of direct democracy. With only two proposals reaching the voting phase of the process, it is clear that neither citizens nor Madrid’s institutions are taking advantage of this novel system and it has yet to achieve a significant impact on governance in Madrid.

The platform’s design is innovative and impressive and has been inspiring many other administrations to adopt similar programs. Indeed it bodes well for Madrid, and the rest of Spain, that various cities throughout the country are being inspired by the same political aspirations to replicate this process, such as decidm.barcelona which uses the same Consul software. However, like many others, Decide still has its flaws. In the next installment, we will address how Decide handles the keys to a successful digital democracy, such as advertising, incentivizing, and stakeholder analysis. We have identified the strengths and weaknesses at its foundation, so the next step is to examine the results it is producing.

¹ 2016 marked Spain’s worst year on Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index since its launch in 1995, as they scored just 58 on the 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (highly clean) scale.

² Trust and Public Policy: How Better Governance Can Help Rebuild Public Trust, OECD, http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/4217051e.pdf?expires=1492821633&id=id&accname=ocid177224&checksum=6C5097C12FAE130455255C94D249CA20 (Mar. 27, 2017)

³ Podemos did not formally run in the most recent local elections. However, it has been the driving force behind local platforms that share the same political agenda.

⁴ See “Membership Levels” below for detailed explanation

⁵ Note: in order to maximize citizen participation and accommodate those without internet access, most actions that take place on the website can also be done in one of Madrid’s 26 Citizen Assistance Offices with the help of trained staff.

This post by Sam DeJohn is reposted from Featured Website, GovLab Blog

Photo by grantuhard

The post Beyond Protest: Examining the Decide Madrid Platform for Public Engagement appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Urban Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 16 “Talk of the Town: Exploring the City in Europe”. In this instalment, Lorenzo Marsili of DIEM25 interviews Joan Subirats, founder and director of the Institute for Government and Public Policy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Lorenzo Marsili: A spectre seems to be haunting Europe: the spectre of the cities. Why do you think there is such symbolic power in what you are doing in Barcelona?

Joan Subirats: There are certainly various factors. One general factor is the transformation to a more platform-based capitalism – a monopolistic, digital capitalism – in which states have lost the ability to respond because the big players are the investment funds, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. States are then trapped in the logic of debt and austerity policy. At the same time, the population faces increasing difficulties and there is a sense of uncertainty and fear, a feeling of not knowing what will happen in the future; what will happen to my standard of living, what will happen to my country, and what will happen to us? Many years ago, the philosopher Karl Polanyi talked about the movement towards commodification and the countermovement of protection. Where do you turn today for protection?

Many would still argue to the state.

Yes, the state is the classic place to turn to demand protection. Following a more conservative, closed, and xenophobic logic, the state is still a space where you can claim protection, in many cases by closing borders and closing societies. However, cities are different in nature because they were born to be open. “The city air makes us feel free”1, as the adage goes. Cities are spaces that gather opportunities and possibilities. The proximity of city authorities and political actors offers another kind of protection, much closer and tangible to citizens, albeit admittedly with fewer policy competences and powers than the nation-state. This means that cities seem to be a space where some things – but not everything – can change and change for the better.

Speaking of Polanyi, the philosophy professor Nancy Fraser claims that the second movement, the movement of protection, is one that historically defended primarily the male, white, Western breadwinner against women, minorities, and the Global South. And so she introduces the need for a third movement: one of autonomy and emancipation. To what extent can the ‘protection’ of the city differ from traditional state protection?

It’s a very good question, because it links in with the Ada Colau factor, the Barcelona factor, the PAH factor [Platform of People Affected by Mortgages], and the antieviction movement. There is a specific type of change happening in relation to the PAH, which I think is highly significant. When someone goes to the PAH saying they are having problems and cannot pay the mortgage, and that they will be evicted, they meet others facing the same problems who tell them: “We are not going to solve your problem. You have to become an activist, so we can solve our problems together.” This means that you are not a client of the PAH – you must become a PAH activist, so that you can change things together. And this is a process of emancipation, not a process of service provision, and it does not follow the outsourcing logic of unions or political parties: “Come and delegate your issues to us, then we will defend your ideas in your name.” This delegating approach does not exist in the PAH. The PAH involves making people more active.

How does this become institutionalised? To what extent do these processes of politicisation, of activation – which are also at the basis of the discourse on the commons in the end, with co-ownership and co-management – end up in the policies of the administration?

This is the big initiative that started in May 2015. There were four basic points in the Barcelona en Comú manifesto in the elections, and these could be adopted by other similar platforms elsewhere in Spain. The first was to give control of institutions back to the people, institutions have been captured, and they are not serving our interests. Secondly, people are being put in an increasingly precarious situation, financially and socially. Inequality is increasing, basic social protection mechanisms are being destroyed. We still need to recover the capacity to provide protection, so there is a social emergency that demands a response. Thirdly, we have to build up a more participative democracy that does not delegate. It is not easy, but we must make people more involved in the decisions that affect them. That is where you get onto co-production of policy, co-creation of decisions, etc. The fourth point is that we have to end corruption and cronyism in politics, which people perceive as privilege. Salaries need to be reduced, things have to be done transparently, mandates must be limited – in short, there needs to be more morality in politics.

And how is it going?

To start with, I would say that the most significant progress has certainly been made on the second point: making better thought-out policies to respond to the social emergency. This has in some ways restored legitimacy on the first point: recovering institutions for a different type of politics. Secondly, there are no corruption scandals anywhere in the ‘cities of change’. The rather difficult point that I think still poses difficulties is making institutions more participative, and developing co-production of policy. This is because the traditions, routines, and working methods of the institutions are a long way from this approach. Our institutions have a very 19th and 20th century approach, they are very pre-digital, and discussing ‘co-production’ involves talking about methods for including collective intelligence in such processes – it’s not easy.

There is a very interesting international debate on technological sovereignty, moving beyond a system where all data and all social interactions are monetised by the giants of Silicon Valley. What exactly are you are doing on the digital commons?

We have begun changing the base of proprietary software used by the municipal council, and ensuring that contracts made between the council and software providers do not cede the data used for those services to the companies. This also means ensuring that, in a city that is home to Smart Cities and the Mobile World Congress, technological innovation alters the city’s approach, whilst at the same time changing the thinking behind these forums, although this is no easy task. This is why we appointed a commissioner for innovation and technological sovereignty. For instance, we are working on a new contract for a joint transport card to cover trains, buses, and the underground. This card will be manufactured by a provider, and the contract should specify that the local public transport data of all the residents of Barcelona will be controlled by the public authorities. It is a debate about sovereignty – not state sovereignty, but energy, water, food, and digital sovereignty. Those are the public priorities and the needs that are being debated.

I like the concept of ‘sovereignty of proximity’ or ‘sovereignties’, as too often sovereignty is equated simply with national sovereignty. But many constitutions, such as the Italian one, state that “sovereignty belongs to the people”, not to the nation-state! Yet, in constitutional arrangements the role of cities is still very limited; their actual competences are narrow. Wouldn’t any attempt to place the city at the centre of a renewed governance require a national-level political fight to change the allocation of competences between the different levels?

I like talking about the question of the ‘level of responsibility’ of municipalities, which is high because they have very broad agendas, in terms of responding to the demands of citizens. However their ‘level of powers’ – what they are able to do – is much lower. Not everything can be solved locally, it is obvious. And surely, that is why Barcelona en Comú is trying to build a movement across Catalonia. It is called Catalunya en Comú and it works within a logic of federal alliances with Podemos. This is because if you are unable to have influence at the level of Catalonia itself – where education and healthcare policies are decided – or at the state level, you are not able to act. But at the same time, it is true that at the local level, you are able to intervene more than your powers may suggest. My political mobilisation can reach further than my powers. In other words, the conflict is not only legal, but also political. For example, you may not have powers regarding housing in Catalonia. In Barcelona, these powers are in the hands of the autonomous Generalitat or the state. But you can also take it to the streets with political mobilisations to solve housing problems, and there you can make alliances against Airbnb – with Berlin, with Amsterdam, and with New York. That dynamic will force Airbnb to respond, even though the Spanish, U.S., and Dutch states are unable to solve the problem. So I think we should not be limited by the idea that there are no legal powers.

The opposition between city and state is interesting here. We have a paradoxical situation, as you know, where many cities across Europe – Barcelona is one of them – would like to welcome refugees and yet their nation-states often block this. The Spanish government is no exception. Could we envision a disobedient act, where a city would unilaterally welcome a certain number of refugees? Interestingly, you would be disobeying the national government but paradoxically you would be obeying the European scheme on refugee relocation that the national government is itself disobeying in the first place.

Yes, that is a good example and I think it could be implemented. It would certainly have more political effect than real effect, as you would not solve the big problem of refugees. However you would be sending a very clear message that it is possible to do things at city level and that people are prepared to do things, and it would not just be rhetoric. Certainly, in other cases similar things could be done. In fact, action has been taken here, for example on the ability of property investment funds to buy buildings. The municipal council of Barcelona cannot legally break the law, but it has made it more difficult in many ways for investment funds to make those deals. In some cases it has even foiled these purchases by buying a building itself to prevent it becoming a target for speculation.

German politician Gesine Schwan is bringing forward a proposal to directly connect the European-level relocation of refugees with municipalities, by essentially bypassing the nation-state. Do you think that we need to review the institutional levels that currently govern the European Union, which are mostly organised according to a ‘nation-state to European Union’ structure, thinking instead of a ‘municipality to European Union’ structure?

Yes, I think that this is an area where we can connect existing experiences. There are organisations like EuroCities that have been created for benchmarking and learning between cities. There are working groups dealing with mobility, social policy, and so on. I think that we should follow up more on this approach of coordinating at local level, and we should look for opportunities to have a direct dialogue with the European Union, skipping the state level. I think it will not be at all easy because nation-states have captured the European decision-making structure. So even if cities had an ally in the European Union, it would not be easy, but it could be done. I believe that the European Union would be rather reluctant to take that step. I think the way would be to create a European forum of local authorities, which would grow in strength, and would be able to make the leap in this area.

Can you imagine a European network of cities of change that acts a bit as a counterpower, as much to the European Union as to nation-states?

I think it is not only possible but desirable. I think that the Barcelona municipal authority is already moving in that direction. Many years ago, Barcelona made Sarajevo its eleventh district, and there is also a strong collaboration between Barcelona and the Gaza Strip in Palestine, including a very close relationship with municipal technical officials working in Gaza. The municipality of Barcelona’s tradition of international cooperation is well-established, so building on this would be nothing new.

There seems to be a particularity about Europe, namely the existence of a transnational political structure that governs the spaces that we happen to inhabit. The political theorist Benjamin Barber proposed a global parliament of mayors – which clearly is a very interesting intellectual proposal at the global level because there is no global government. But in Europe we do have at least a simulacrum of a European government. Do you think one could envisage creating an institutionally recognised space for cities, like a European parliament of cities?

It could be done but for it to be really constructive and powerful and for it to make progress, it should not be shaped initially by institutions, bureaucrats, or organisations. It should rather work on the basis of encounters from below and building the legitimacy of mayors that have made an impact (in Naples, Madrid, Barcelona, etc.). It should be seen to be a process working from the bottom up, without any desire to make quick political capital from above. This would be much more resilient and it would ultimately be powerful.

Building a European and international role for cities is a very demanding task. Often when I go and advocate for these ideas with city administrations I notice that municipalities very often lack the staff and the offices to deal with this more political or diplomatic work. If we posit a new global or European role for cities then cities need to invest in an institutional machinery that can actually perform this work.

This is certainly true. The shortcomings that you mention could certainly be addressed if we worked with a more metropolitan approach. The term municipality does not always refer to the same thing: Madrid covers 600 km2 and Barcelona 100 km2. Paris is divided into the City of Paris and Greater Paris. If we worked to build the concept of a Greater Barcelona rather than the City of Barcelona, this would mean moving from 1.5 million inhabitants to 3.5 million. The 25 town councils that make up the metropolitan area would certainly agree to invest resources to foster international processes. Paris may already be working on this, and it has a metropolitan dimension that could be strengthened. It is certainly true that there is a lack of staff and tradition. People think in global terms without stopping to think that cities always have to go through the state to work internationally. This situation would be eased by focusing on the metropolis.

Let’s close with the global dimension proper. More than half the world’s population lives in urban areas, while the top 100 cities produce just under half the world’s GDP. In June 2017, Barcelona hosted a global summit, Fearless Cities, bringing together mayors from across the world to commit to joint initiatives to tackle precisely the global challenges that national leadership seems increasingly unable to address. How do you see this developing further? What concrete actions could be put in place?

In my opinion the best way would be to work with a concrete agenda, and to find the issues that can most easily draw cities in and connect with them. For example, the issue of redistribution, the question of the minimum wage – which has sparked debate in London, Seattle, and New York – and issues of housing, primary education, energy, and water. We could start with issues like these, that are clearly cross-cutting and global, affecting everywhere in the world, and start linking agendas across Europe in a more specific way. This would facilitate the political and institutional side, and we could make the leap more quickly. When people see the shortcomings in the area of policies, this will highlight the shortcomings in the area of polity.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 1st article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

1 After ‘Stadtluft macht frei’, a German medieval dictum describing a principle of law that offered freedom and land to settlers who took up urban residence for more than “a year and a day.”

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Today’s show features music interludes composed, recorded, and performed by our guest, Stacco Troncoso. Overlaid are excerpts from a talk Stacco gave at Prix Ars in 2016. The page header illustration is from the Commons Transition Primer website, by Mercè Moreno Tarrés. Our opening song is Foreman’s Dog by Fugazi.

Opening today’s episode, Rushkoff looks at the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. In his “by any means necessary” moment, why does Trump even bother to deny collusion with Russians? And is media’s obsession with the Russia story distracting us from Trump’s dangerous policies and appointments?

If you enjoyed this episode, dig deeper:

• How can I take part in the Commons Transition
• Commons in the Time Of Monsters: How P2P politics can change the world, one city at a time.
• ​​Short: Q&A-style illustrated articles presenting some of the P2P Foundation’s main positions
• ​​Long: In-depth, longer articles
• ​​Library: Downloadable PDF versions of P2P Foundation research publications
• ​​More: Video, audio and other content, plus site information and other links
• http://www.guerrillatranslation.org/

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Update on the political context in Catalunya (November2017)

Since this interview took place last April shortly after the founding of Catalunya en Comu, events in Catalunya have considerably transformed the political landscape there and have projected this new organisation into the electoral fray much sooner than anticipated. The referendum on independence held on October 1 was declared illegal and severely repressed by Madrid; indeed, the Rajoy administration even went so far as to arrest the leaders of two civil society organisations that had organised the massive pro-independence demonstrations, accusing them of ‘sedition’ and refusing bail. In response, the Catalan parliament, controlled by pro-independence parties, declared independence triggering the destitution of the Catalan government by Madrid, the arrest of its elected political authorities and the announcement of new regional elections for December 21. 

During the entire period, Catalunya en Comu remained true to its founding principle of support for the ‘right to decide’ of the Catalan people, defending the right of all Catalan citizens to vote in the referendum (even though they had opposed holding it in such precarious conditions) and actively participating in the broad movement rejecting Madrid’s intervention and political persecution of pro-independence leaders, despite having taken a stance against the unilateral declaration of independence. It will be one of the seventeen parties and movements on the ballot on Dec. 21, but is the only one not principally defined by its stance on the issue of independence.

The pro-independence government of Catalonia recently sparked a political crisis in Spain by proposing to call a referendum on independence by the end of 2017 with or without the approval of the central government. In contrast, “Catalonia in common” defines itself as an innovative political space of the Catalan left. Initiated by Barcelona in Comù a little less than a year after its election to city hall, ​​the initiave was launched in October 2016. A short manifesto explained its raison-d’être and presented an “ideario politico” (a political project) of some 100 pages for broad discussion over 5 months which culminated in a constituent assembly last April 8.

This new political subject defines itself as “a left-wing Catalan organisation that aims to govern and to transform the economic, political and social structures of the present neo-liberal system.” Its originality in the political panorama of Catalonia and of Spain is its engagement with “a new way of doing politics, a politics of the commons where grassroots people and communities are the protagonists.” In response to those who see its emergence only in the context of the impending referendum, it affirms: “We propose a profound systemic, revolutionary change in our economic, social, environmental and political model. “ 

We interviewed Joan Subirats a few days after the Constituent Assembly of Catalunya in Comu took place. Joan is an academic renowned for his publications and his political engagement. A specialist in public policy and urban issues, he has published widely on the Commons and on the new municipalism. He is one of the artisans of Barcelona in Comù and has just been elected to the coordinating body of “Catalunya en comu”.

NT: Tell us about the trajectory of the development of this new initiative: a lot of people link it to the 15-M, but I imagine that it was more complex than that and started long before.

By Directa (youtube) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Going farther back, there is a phase of intense social mobilisation against austerity policies between 2011 and 2013. If we look at the statistics of the Ministry of the Interior on the number of demonstrations, it is impressive, there were never as many demonstrations as during that period, but after mid-2013 they start to taper off. There is a feeling that there are limits and that demonstrations can’t obtain the desired changes in a situation where the right-wing Popular Party (PP) holds an absolute majority. So the debate emerges as to whether it’s a good idea to attempt to move into the institutions.

Podemos chooses the most accessible scenario, that of the European elections, because these elections have a single circonscription, so all of Spain is a single riding, with a very high level of proportionality, so with few votes you get high representation because there are 60-some seats, so with one million votes they obtained 5 seats. And people vote more freely in these elections because apparently the stakes are not very high, so they are elections that are good for testing strategies. In contrast, here in Barcelona, we chose the municipal elections as the central target because here there is a long history of municipalism.

So this sets the stage for the period that began in 2014 with Guanyem and Podemos and the European elections and in May 2015 with the municipal elections where in 4 of the 5 major cities – Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Zaragoza – alternative coalitions win that are not linked to either of the two major political parties (PP and the Socialist Party – PSOE). And in the autonomous elections[i] a new political cycle also begins, in which we still are. If we go farther back, to 2011 – there are a couple of maps that show the correlation between the occupation of plazas in the 15-M with the number of alternative citizen candidacies at the municipal level.

So Podemos and all the alternative citizen coalitions all refer to the 15M as their founding moment. But the 15M is not a movement, it was a moment, an event. You must have heard the joke about the stranger who arrives and wants to talk to the 15M – but there is no 15M, it has no spokespersons and no address. But everyone considers it very important. But what was there before the 15M?

There were basically 4 major trends that converged in the 15-M :

First the anti-globalisation movement, the oldest one, very interesting because a large number of the new political leaders have come out of it, with forms of political mobilisation different from the traditional ones.

Then there was the « Free Culture Forum » linked to issues regarding internet which was very important here in Barcelona – with Simona Levy and Gala Pin, who is now a municipal councillor – that is important because here digital culture, network culture, was present from the very beginning, something that didn’t occur in other places.

The third movement was the PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) which emerges in 2009 and had precedents with Ada Colau and others who organised « V for vivienda » (like the film « V for vendetta », but in this case vivienda – housing), an attempt to demonstrate that young people were excluded from social emancipation because they didn’t have access to housing. Their slogan was « you’ll never have a house in your whole f’king life ». And the forms of mobilisation were also very new, for example, they occupied IKEA because at that time IKEA’s advertising slogan was « the independent republic of your home », so they occupied it and slept in the beds there. So this was more youthful, alternative, more of a rupture, but then in 2009 with the creation of the PAH they started to try to connect with the immigrant sector and people who were losing their houses because of the mortgage hype, it was very important because it’s the movement that tries to connect with sectors outside of youth: the poor, immigrants, working class… with the slogan ‘this is not a crisis, it’s a sting’. So the PAH is very important because it’s the movement that connects with sectors of the population outside of youth: workers, immigrants, the elderly… For example, here in Plaza Catalunya in 2011 the only major poster rallying people who weren’t youth was that of the PAH.

And the fourth movement – the most ‘authentic’ 15M one – was that of the « Youth without future ». People who organised mainly in Madrid, typical middle-class university sector with post-grad studies, who suddenly realised that they wouldn’t find jobs, that it wasn’t true that their diplomas would open doors for them, they were in a precarious situation.

So those were the four major currents that converged in the basis of the 15M. But what made it ‘click’ was not just those 4 trends, but the fact that huge numbers of other people recognised the moment and converged on the plazas and overwhelmed the movements that started it. The most surprising thing about the moment was that those 4 movements – that were not all that important – were rapidly overwhelmed by success of the movement they started and new people who spontaneously joined. That was what really created the phenomenon, because if it had been just those 4 movements, if it had been like ‘Nuit debout‘ in Paris where people occupied the plaza but without the sensation that people had steamrollered the leaders. So, when the plazas are evacuated, the idea becomes ‘Let’s go to the neighbourhoods’. So all of a sudden, in the neighbourhoods of Barcelona and Madrid, assemblies were organised where there was a mixture of the old neighbourhood associations that were no longer very active and whose members were older (my generation) and new people who brought new issues like ecology, energy, bicycle transport, cooperatives, water and a thousand different things and who created new spaces of articulation where people who had never thought that they would meet in the neighbourhoods began to converge.

I think this explains the re-emergence of municipalism that followed: people begin to see the city as a place where diverse social changes can be articulated on a territorial basis: many mobilisations are taking place in isolation, in a parallel manner and don’t have a common meeting-point. Water as a common good, energy transition, sustainable transport, public health, public space, infant education… All of a sudden there was something that brought people together which was to discuss the city, the city we want – David Harvey mentions in an article that the modern-day factory is the city. That is, we no longer have factories, the city is now the space where conflicts appear and where daily life becomes politicised: issues like care, food, schooling, transport, energy costs – and this creates a new space for articulating these issues that hadn’t been previously envisaged.

So I think this is the connection : 15-M as a moment of overwhelming, the end of a cycle of mobilisation – remember that there had been a petition of a million and a half signatures to change the mortgage legislation, that Ada Colau presented in the national Congress, where she accused the PP deputies of being assassins because of what they were doing – but that mobilisation had no effect in the law. A PP deputy declared ‘If these people want to change things, then they should get elected’. So people started thinking ‘OK, if that’s the way it is, then let’s get ourselves elected’. This is the initial change of cycle in 2014. So the 4 movements were present in the meetings of Guanyem and BComun, as well as some progressive intellectuals and people from other issue areas like water, transport, energy etc. That was the initial nucleus here in Barcelona – in Madrid it was different. There the Podemos generation had a different logic.  Here, from the beginning, we wanted to create a movement from the bottom up and to avoid a logic of coalition of political parties, this was very clear from the outset. We didn’t want to reconstruct the left on the basis of an agreement amongst parties. We wanted to build a citizen movement that could impose its own conditions on the parties. In the case of Podemos it was different: it was a logic of a strike from above – they wanted to create a strong close-knit group with a lot of ideas in a very short period and as a result an electoral war machine that can assault the heavens and take power. Here, on the other hand, we foresaw a longer process of construction of a movement where we would start with the municipalities and after that, we’ll see.

So Guanyem was created in June 2014, 11 months prior to the municipal elections, with a minimal program in 4 points: we said, we want to take back the city, it’s is being taken away from the citizens, people come here to talk about a ‘business-friendly global city’ and they are taking it away from the citizens, we have lost the capacity to control it, as the first point; secondly,  there is a social emergency where many problems don’t get a response; third point, we want people to be able to have decision-making capacity in what happens in the city, so co-production of policy, more intense citizen participation in municipal decisions; fourth point: moralisation of politics. Here the main points are non-repetition of mandates, limits on salaries of elected officials, etc. So we presented this in June 2014 and we decided that we would give ourselves until September to collect 30,000 signatures in support of the manifesto and if we succeeded, we would present candidates in the municipal elections. In one month we managed to get the 30,000 signatures! Besides getting the signatures on internet and in person, we held a lot of meetings in the neighbourhoods to present the manifesto – we held about 30 or 40 meetings like that, some of them small, some more massive, where we went to the neighbourhoods and we said  « We thought of this, what do you think? We thought of these priorities, etc’. » So, in September of 2014 we decided to go ahead; once we decided that we would present a slate, we began to discuss with the parties – but with the strength of all that support of 30,000 people backing us at the grassroots, so our negotiating strength with respect to the parties was very different. In Dec 2014 we agreed with the parties to create Barcelona en Comun – we wanted to call it Guanyem but someone else had already registered the name, so there was a lot of discussion about a new name, there were various proposals: Revolucion democratica, primaria democratica, the term Comu – it seemed interesting because it connected with the Commons movement, the idea of the public which is not restricted to the institutional and that was key. It was also important that in the previous municipal elections in 2011 only 52% of people had voted, in the poorer neighbourhoods a higher number of people abstained and that it was in the wealthier neighbourhoods where a larger proportion of people had voted. So we wanted to raise participation by 10% in the poor neighbourhoods more affected by the crisis and we thought that would allow us to win. And that was what happened. In 2015, 63% voted, but in the poor areas 40% more people voted. In the rich areas, the same people voted as before.

So it was not impossible to think we could win. And from the beginning the idea was to win. We did not build this machine in order to participate, we built it in order to win. We didn’t want to be the opposition, we wanted to govern. And as a result, it was close, because we won 11 of 41 seats, but got the most votes so we head the municipal council, the space existed. From the moment Guanyem was created in June 2014, other similar movements began to be created all over Spain – in Galicia, in Andalucia, in Valencia, Zaragoza, Madrid… One of the advantages we have in Barcelona is that we have Ada Colau, which is a huge advantage, because a key thing is to have an uncontested leader who can articulate all the segments of the movement – ecologists, health workers, education professionals…. If you don’t have that it’s very difficult, and also the sole presence of Ada Colau explains many things. In Madrid they found Manuela Carmena, who is great as an anti-franquista symbol, with her judicial expertise, very popular but who didn’t have that tradition of articulating movements, and as a result now they are having a lot more political problems than here.

AA: So now Catalunya en comu defines itself as a new political space on the left for the whole of Catalonia. But in recent Catalan history that’s nothing really new: there have been numerous political coalitions on the left, such as the PSUC[ii] in 1936 followed by many others. So what is different about this initiative?

JS: If we open up our perspective and look at things more globally, I think that what justifies the idea that this is a new political space is the fact that the moment is new, we’re in a new phase so it’s very important to understand that if this new political moment reproduces the models and the conceptual paradigms of the old left and of the Fordism of the end of the 20th century, we won’t have moved ahead at all. The crisis of social democracy is also a crisis of a way of understanding social transformation with codes that no longer exist. As a result the measure of success of this new political space is not so much in to what extent it can bring together diverse political forces, but rather its capacity to understand this new scenario we find ourselves in – a scenario where digital transformation is changing everything, where we no longer know what ‘labour’ is, where heterogeneity and social diversity appear as factors not of complexity but of values, where the structure of age no longer functions as it used to – where everything is in transformation, so we can no longer continue to apply ideas – to use a phrase coined by Ulrich Beck – ‘zombie concepts’, living dead, no?, we forge ahead with our backpacks full of 20th-century concepts, applying them to realities that no longer have anything to do with them. It’s easy to see the defects of the old, traditional concepts, but it’s very difficult to construct new ones because we don’t really know what is happening nor where we are headed. The example of the debate in France between Valls and Hamon – at least, I read the summary in Le Monde, where Valls maintained that it would be possible to come back to a situation of full employment and Hamon said that is impossible, that it’s necessary to work towards the universal basic income; in the end, Hamon is closer to the truth than Valls, but Hamon isn’t capable of explaining it in a credible way – and it is very difficult to explain it in a credible way.

Here, we are working at one and the same time on the Commons and the non-institutional public sphere, we are demanding greater presence of the public administration when probably it wouldn’t really be necessary, but since we don’t have a clear idea of how to construct this new thing, we are still acting sort of like slaves of the old. So that’s where I think the concept of the Commons, of the cooperative, the collaborative, new ideas regarding the digital economy, are more difficult to structure, because we’re also conscious that capitalism is no longer only industrial or financial but now it’s digital capitalism, and it controls all the networks of data transmission and at the same time the data themselves, probably the wealth of the future. So, sure we can do really interesting things in Barcelona, out of Barcelona en Comun, but we have GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft), and GAFAM has its own logics and that complicates things. So we have to create a new political subject – and it’s obvious that we need something new – but what isn’t so obvious is what are the concepts we need to create this new subject. So if you look at the documents published by Un Pais en Comu[iii] that’s what you’ll see: a bit of different language, a different way of using concepts, but at the same time a trace of the heritage of the traditional left. The journal ‘Nous Horitzons’ has just published a new issue on ‘Politics in Common’[iv] which brings together a lot of these elements. The impression that some of us had in the assembly the other day in Vall d’Hebron (the inaugural assembly of the movement) was that the old ways were still weighing us down, that there was a difficulty to generate an innovative dynamic.

NT: That was clear in the composition of the audience.

JS: Yes, well, the Podemos people weren’t there, of course… they didn’t come for various reasons, because probably not everybody was in agreement with Albano-Dante[v] but they saw there was a lot of disagreement and so they preferred not to come, and that’s a type of public that, as well as filling the hall, also changes the type of dynamic – so it was more the traditional-style organisations that were there (Iniciativa or EUIA[vi]), there was more of the old than the new probably. Perhaps that’s inevitable, but what we have to do now is to see if we can change that dynamic.

AA: When one reads the ‘Ideario politico‘ (the political project of Catalunya en Comu) it’s a sort of lesson in political economy, political philosophy as well, but also a vast programme, and the left has never put forward this type of Commons-inspired programme before, be it in Catalunya or in Spain or probably internationally. How do you see its contribution in the context of the Commons ecosystem? There have been experiences of the Commons without the Commons label, as in Latin America …

JS: Yes, in Catalunya the anarcho-sindicalist movement…

AA: Of course, but more recently, the idea of ‘Buen Vivir’ …

JS: Yes, but when you go to Latin America and you talk about that, it all revolves around the State. But here, we try not to be state-centric. We are trying to avoid the idea that the only possible transformation needs to depend on the State.

AA: But in the ‘Ideario’ a lot of discussion is devoted to public services as well, this implies that the State has to exist. And in the Commons vocabulary there is the concept of the ‘partner-state’, but it doesn’t appear in the Ideario…

JS: Yes, there’s a margin there: the resilience of the new politics depends more on the capacity to create ‘muscular’ collective spaces – public, collective, common – than on the occupation of the institutions. But without the occupation of the institutions, it’s very difficult to construct those spaces. The example that comes to mind for me is from Copenhagen: there it was the cooperatives of the workers’ unions that built the big housing coops that exist now; also, the municipal government when the left was in power built a lot of public housing; then when a right-wing government came to power, it privatised all the public housing but it couldn’t privatise the cooperatives. So in the end, things that are strictly state-based are more vulnerable than when you build collective strength. So if we are able to benefit from these spaces in order to build ‘collective muscle’, using our presence in the institutions, this will end up being more resilient, more stable over time than if we put all our eggs in the State basket. So the Barcelona city government has civic social centres that are municipal property, but what is important is to succeed in ensuring that these centres are controlled by the community, that each community make them its own despite the fact that the property is officially that of the municipality, but they must be managed through a process of community management. So you need to build in the community a process of appropriation of institutions that ends up being stronger than if it were all in the hands of the State.

Now we are discussing citizen heritage, how the city government can use its property – houses, buildings – and it can cede them for a certain period in order to construct collective spaces. For example, 8 building sites that belong to the municipality have been put up for auction on 100-year leases for community organisations to build housing cooperatives. This doesn’t take property away from the public sphere and at the same time it generates collective strength. But a certain sector of the political left here, the CUP, criticises this as privatisation of public space. They think Barcelona en Comun should build public housing instead, state-owned housing. That’s a big difference. And people are aware of that, but at the same time there are doubts about whether this makes sense, whether there is sufficient strength within the community so that this can work. Or, for example, the most common criticism is that “you have an idea of the public, the collective, the Commons, that implies capacities in the community that are only present in the middle classes that have the knowledge, the organisational capacity… so it’s a very elitist vision of the collective because the popular sectors, without the backing of the State, won’t be able to do this.” Well, we’re going to try to combine things so it can work, but we don’t want to keep converting the public into the ‘state’.

Nancy Fraser wrote an article on the triple movement – looking at Polanyi’s work on the ‘double movement’ in the Great Transformation, that is the movement towards mercantilisation, and the opposite movement it stimulated towards protection. Polanyi talks about the confrontation of these 2 movements in the early 20th century, and the State – in its soviet form or in its fascist form – as a protectionist response of society which demands protection when faced with the uncertainty, the fragility the double movement engenders. Nancy Fraser says that all that is true, but we’re no longer in the 20th century, we’re in the 21st century where factors like individual emancipation, diversity, feminism are all very important – so we shouldn’t be in favour of a protectionist movement that continues to be patriarchal and hierarchical. We need a movement for protection that generates autonomy – and there resides what I think is one of the keys of the Commons movement. The idea of being able to get protection – so, a capacity of reaction against the dynamics of the market attacks – without losing the strength of diversity, of personal emancipation, of feminism, the non-hierarchical, the non-patriarchal, the idea that somebody decide for me what I need to do and how I will be protected. Let me self-protect myself too, let me be a protagonist too of this protection. And this is contradictory with the state-centric tradition.

AA: The first theme of the ‘Ideario’ is the economy – you are an economist, amongst other things – how do you see this proposal in terms of the Commons? For example, there is a lot of discussion now about ‘open cooperativism’, etc. What you were saying about the cooperative movement here, that it is very strong but not sufficient…

JS: In some aspects no. For example, the city wanted to open a new contract for communications (telephone, internet) – now there are the big companies Telefoncia, Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, etc: there’s a cooperative called ‘Som Connexion’ (We are connection)- or ‘Som Energia’ (We are energy) that’s a lot bigger – it has 40,000 members – but these cooperatives, it would be fantastic if the city were to give them the contract for energy or for communication, but they aren’t capable of managing that at the moment. So if they take it, we’d all have big problems: faulty connections, lack of electrical power – because they’re growing for sure but they don’t yet have the ‘muscle’, the capacity they need to take this on.

So we have to continue investing in this, it’s not going to take care of itself. On the other hand, in other areas, like home services for the elderly, we do have very strong cooperatives, Abacus for example is a cooperative for book distribution that has 800 000 members, so that is a coop that’s very powerful, and there are others. But in general, the more powerful the coop, the less politicised it is – they tend to transform themselves into big service companies. But now they are understanding that perhaps it would be in their interest to have a different vision; there has been a very politicised movement in the grassroots level coops that is contradictory with the entrepreneurial trend in the big coops. So we’re in this process right now: yes, there are very big, very strong coops and there are also smaller, more political ones but they don’t have sufficient muscle yet.

AA: When we look at issues of participation, co-production of policy and such, it is also a question of culture, a culture of co-production that doesn’t exist. In the neighbourhoods, yes there is a trend to revamping participation, but when we talk to people in the local-level committees they say ‘Sure, people come to the meetings, but because they want a tree planted here…’ and they don’t have that vision of co-creation. So first there has to be a sort of cultural revolution ?

JS: There are places where there has been a stronger community tradition that could well converge with this. Some neighbourhoods like Roquetes for example, Barceloneta or Sants, have very strong associational traditions. If you go to Roquetes to the meeting of the community plan, everybody is there: the people from the primary medical services centre, the doctors, the schools are there, the local police, the social workers – and they hold meetings every 2 weeks and they know everything that goes on in the area, and they transfer cases amongst themselves: “we detected this case, how do we deal with it?” etc. The community fabric in those neighbourhoods functions really well. So what can you add to that fabric so that it can go a bit further? On the other hand, in other neighbourhoods like Ciutat Meridiana, in 5 years 50% of the population has changed, so it’s very difficult to create community where the level of expulsion or change is so high. In Sants, in Can Baro, there was a very interesting experience where people want to create a cooperative neighbourhood – it’s a bit polemical – they want to create a public school without using public funds, instead using money from the participants themselves, because the coop tradition in Sants is very anarchist, libertarian – so they promote the idea of a public school, open to all, but not using public funds. And it would have its own educational philosophy, that wouldn’t have to submit to standard educational discipline. And groups have appeared in different neighbourhoods dedicated to shared child-raising where there are no pre-schools for children between 0 and 3 years, or people prefer not to take the kids to public pre-schools because they find them too rigid, so they prefer generating relationships amongst parents. So what should the role of the city government be with respect to such initiatives? Should it facilitate or not? There’s a debate about how to position the municipality with respect to these initiatives that are interesting but then when, inside Barcelona en Comu or Un Pais en Comu, the person who is in charge of these issues comes with a more traditional union perspective and says “This is crazy, what we need to do is to create public schools with teachers who are professional civil servants. These experiments are fine for gentrified zones, but in reality…’” And they are partly right. So we’re in that sort of situation, which is a bit ambivalent. We’re conscious that we need to go beyond a state-centric approach, but at the same time we need to be very conscious that if we don’t reinforce the institutional role, the social fragilities are very acute.

AA: Another high-profile issue is that of sovereignty. The way it’s presented in the Ideario is criticised both by those who want a unified Spain and by those who want Catalan independence. Sovereignty is simply another word for independence in the view of many people. But the way it’s presented in the Ideario is more complex and comprehensive, linked to autonomy at every level …

JS: Exactly: it’s plural, in lower case and plural: sovereignties. The idea is a bit like what I said earlier about the city, that we want to take back the city. We want to recover the collective capacity to decide over what affects us. So it’s fine to talk about the sovereignty of Catalonia, but we also need to talk about digital sovereignty, water sovereignty, energy sovereignty, housing sovereignty – sovereignty in the sense of the capacity to decide over that which affects us. So we don’t have to wait until we have sovereignty over Catalonia in order to grapple with all this. And this has obvious effects: for example, something we are trying to develop here: a transit card that would be valid on all forms of public transit – like the “Oyster” in London, and many other cities have them – an electronic card that you can use for the train, the metro, the bus: the first thing the Barcelona city government did on this was to ask the question “Who will own the data? “. That’s sovereignty. The entity that controls the data on who moves and how in metropolitan Barcelona has an incredible stock of information with a clear commercial value. So will it belong to the company that incorporates the technology? or will the data belong to the municipality and the municipality will do with it what it needs? At the moment, they are installing digital electricity metres and digital water metres: but to whom do the data belong? because these are public concessions, concessions to enterprises in order that they provide a public service – so who owns the data?

This is a central issue. And it is raised in many other aspects, like food sovereignty. So, we want to ensure that in the future Barcelona be less dependent on the exterior for its food needs, as far as possible. So you need to work to obtain local foodstuffs, control over the products that enter – and that implies food sovereignty, it implies discussing all this. So, without saying that the sovereignty of Catalonia isn’t important, we need to discuss the other sovereignties. Because, suppose we attain the sovereignty of Catalonia as an independent state, but we are still highly dependent in all the other areas. We need to confront this. I don’t think it’s a way of avoiding the issue, it’s a way of making it more complex, of understanding that today the Westphalian concept of State sovereignty no longer makes much sense. I think we all agree on that. We are very interdependent, so how do we choose our interdependencies? That would be real sovereignty, not to be independent because that’s impossible, but rather how to better choose your interdependencies so that they have a more public content.

AA: Talking of interdependence, there is the issue as well of internationalism. Barcelona en Comu puts a lot of emphasis on that, saying ‘There is no municipalism without internationalism’ etc. From the very outset of her mandate, Ada Colau in 2015 in her inaugural speech as mayor said that ‘we will work to build a movement of cities of the Mediterranean’, and as time goes on the approach is becoming clearer, for example with the participation of Colau and the vice-mayor Gerardo Pisarello in the major international city conferences. What do you see as the importance of this internationalism within the Commons ecosystem?

JS: There are 2 key aspects for me. First, cities are clearly the most global political space and zone of social convergence that exists. Apparently when we talk about cities we’re talking about something local, but cities are actually very globalised. Benjamin Barber wrote a book about ‘Why Mayors should govern the world’. And he set out an example I think is very good: if the mayor of Montreal meets with Ada and the mayor of Nairobi and the mayor of Santiago de Chile and the mayor of say Hong-Kong, after 5 minutes together they’ll all be talking about the same things. Because the problems of cities are very similar from one place to another despite their different sizes. Questions of energy, transport, water, services, food… If we try to imagine that same meeting between Heads of State, the complexity of the political systems, cultural traditions, constitutional models and all will mean that the challenge of coming to a common understanding will be much more complex. That doesn’t mean that cities are the actors that will resolve climate change, but certainly the fact that Oslo, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Paris agree that in 2025 there will no longer be cars circulating that use diesel will have more impact than a meeting of Heads of State. With AirBnB Barcelona is in constant confrontation, the city has fined them 600 000 euros, but Barcelona on its own can’t combat AirBnB. But New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam and Barcelona have come to an agreement to negotiate jointly with AirBnb: those 5 cities together can negotiate with them. But it isn’t the problem for States, it’s much more a problem for cities than for States. And AirBnB uses digital change to enter spaces where there is a lack of precision – it’s what happens too with Uber, Deliveroo and other platforms of so-called ‘collaborative economy’, which is really extractive economy, but which use the reglamentary voids. The people who work for Uber or Deliveroo aren’t employees, they are independent entrepreneurs but they work in 19th century conditions. Tackling this problem from the level of the city can produce new solutions.

I think when we decided in 2014-2015 to attempt to work at the municipal level in Barcelona, we were aware that Barcelona isn’t just any city: Barcelona has an international presence and we wanted to use Barcelona’s international character to exert an influence on urban issues worldwide. Ada Colau participated in the Habitat conference in Quito in October 2016, before that in the meeting of local authorities in Bogota, she is now co-president of the World Union of Municipalities. So there’s an investment that didn’t start just with us but that started in the period when Maragall[vii] was mayor, a very high investment by Barcelona in participating in this international sphere of cities. This reinforces Barcelona in its confrontations with the State and with private enterprise as well. It plays an important role. There is an international commission within Barcelona en Comu, they are constantly working with other world cities – they have been in France, they have a strong link with Grenoble and will be going to a meeting of French cities in September to talk about potential collaboration, they often go to Italy, they’ve gone to Belgrade, to Poland…

AA: And they’re organising this meeting of Fearless Cities in Barcelona pretty soon ?

JS: Yes, June 9-11 there’ll be a meeting, and the organizers have a very clear vision of the global aspect. So the global dimension is very present, and at the level of Spain as well. The problem there is that there is political interference, for example in Madrid, which is very important as a city, but within the municipal group “Ahora Madrid” they’re very internally divided, so sometimes you speak to one and the others don’t like it. We have really good relations with Galicia: A Coruna and Santiago de Compostela, also with Valencia, but Valencia also has its own dynamic. Zaragoza. Each city has its own dynamic, so sometimes it’s complicated to establish on-going relations.

AA: What about Cadiz?

JS: Of course, Cadiz is also part of this trend, but the group there is part of the Podemos anti-capitalist faction, so there are nuances.

NT: You mentioned 2 points regarding internationalism…

JS: Yes, first there was the general global perspective on cities and the second is Barcelona’s own concrete interest. So the first is more global, that is, any city in the world today has many more possibilities if it looks at its strategic global role and if it wants to strengthen its position, it has to work on the global level. In the case of Barcelona specifically, there is also a will that’s partly traditional, because it was begun by Maragall, you have to remember that here in Barcelona there are 10 districts, and during the war of the Balkans, Maragall created District 11, which was Sarajevo: city technicians went to Sarajevo to work with them, and still today there are municipal technicians who travel regularly to Gaza to work there, or with La Havana – in other words there’s a clearly established internationalist stance in the municipality. Also, the headquarters of the World Union of Local Governments is in Barcelona. The international headquarters of Educating Cities is in Barcelona, so there has constantly been a will to be present on the international scene since Maragall, and now this is continuing but with a new orientation as well. Perhaps there used to be the idea of exporting the Barcelona model, branding Barcelona, but that is no longer the case.

There’s very intense organisation globally, probably if Ada accepted all the invitations she receives, she’d be travelling all the time.

NT: I am struck by the fact that every time we refer to the initiative of Un Pais en Comu, you respond by giving the example of what’s happening in Barcelona: do you see Barcelona as the model for Un Pais en Comu?

JS: No, it’s not that it’s the model, there is even some reticence within Barcelona en Comu that this new political initiative may have negative consequences for Barcelona en Comu. The Barcelona in Comu experiment has worked really well: within BeC political parties continue to exist (Podemos, Iniciativa, EUIA, Guanyem) and all agree that it’s necessary to create this subject, because it’s clear – there’s a phrase by a former mayor of Vitoria in the Basque country who said “Where my capacities end, my responsibilities begin” – that is, clearly, cities are developing roles that are more and more important, but their capacities continue to be very limited and especially their resources are very limited – so there’s an imbalance between capacities and responsibilities. Between what cities could potentially do and what they really can do. Refuge-cities – a thousand things. So within Barcelona en Comu there is an understanding of the interest of creating Un Pais en Comu in order to have influence in other levels of government. And to present candidates in elections in Spain with En Comu Podem because to be represented in Madrid is also important. But of course, sometimes this expansion can make us lose the most original aspect, that is the emphasis on municipalism, in the capacity to create these spaces – so there’s a certain tension. And obviously, when you go outside Barcelona in Catalonia, the local and territorial realities are very different, you find… you no longer control what kind of people are joining and so you can end up with surprises – good and bad ones – so there are some doubts, some growing pains. You have to grow, but how will that affect what we have so far? our ways of working and all that… I always refer to Barcelona en Comu because we have existed for longer, we have a sort of ‘tradition’ in the way we work, and on the contrary, the other day we held the founding assembly of Un Pais en Comu and – where are we headed? how long will we be able to maintain the freshness, avoid falling into the traditional vices of political parties? Xavi (Domenech) is a very good candidate, he has what I call a Guanyem DNA, but it’s not evident that we can pull this through. That’s the doubt.

AA: Coming back to the issue of sovereignty vs independence and “the right to decide”, how does this play out?

JS: The issue of independence is internally very complex with different positions. I think there is a general agreement on 3 things, ie: 1. Catalonia has its own demos and therefore is a political subject which must be recognised, 2. it has to be able to decide how to articulate itself with the other political subjects in Spain and in Europe, it has to have the right, the capacity to decide; 3. this requires the construction of a State of its own. It is on the fourth point that we are not in agreement: whether that State should be independent or whether it should be in some way linked, allied, confederated with the rest of the Iberian Peninsula or with Europe. These 3 initial points are sufficiently important and they are the basis for the fact that Un Pais en Comu or Barcelona en Comu is part of the broad sovereigntist space in Catalonia. What it isn’t part of is the independentist space in Catalonia. Despite the fact that I would say some 30-40% of the members are pro-independence, but the rest not. And that is an issue which divides us. But what we are trying to do is to work out this debate on the basis of our own criteria, not on those of other movements. The criteria of the others are ‘you are independentist or you are not independentist’. Our own criteria are: yes, we are sovereigntists, we discuss sovereignties and we’ll see. Since we agree on what is the most important (that is – an autonomous political subject, the right to decide, an autonomous State), let’s discuss how we can articulate. We have fraternal relations with 4 million people in the rest of Spain who agree with us on the first 3 criteria. So the key question probably would be: Does Catalonia want to separate from the rest of Spain or from this Spain? The standard response would be “We have never known any other. We’ve always seen the same Spain, so there is no other Spain”. So the debate we can have is over “Yes, another Spain is possible”. Sort of like the debate right now over whether to leave Europe: do we want to leave Europe of leave this Europe? But is another Europe possible or not?

NT: How do you assess the results of the founding assembly of Un Pais en Comu? Are you happy with what came out of it?

JS: Yes, I’m satisfied, although I don’t think the results were optimal, but we are squeezed by a political calendar that we don’t control. It’s very probable that there will be elections this year in Catalonia, so if that happens… what would have been preferable? To reproduce the Barcelona en Comu model, take more time and work more from the bottom up, hold meetings throughout the territory – we did hold about 70 or 80, but a lot more would have been better – do things more slowly and look around, build links with local movements, the same ones as in Barcelona but on the level of Catalonia – energy, water, etc: reconstruct the same process. But sure, they’re going to call elections or a referendum in 2 days. What is clear is that we can’t do the same thing as with ‘Catalunya si que es pot’[viii], which was a coalition but it didn’t work. So all this has meant that the process – despite the fact that I think it has been carried out well, is not optimal: within the realm of the possible, I think it was done with great dignity.

NT: And with respect to the deliberative process that was used to arrive at the final document?

JS: Basically the same thing: it could have been done better, with deeper debates in each area, it was done very quickly, a lot of issues in a short period of time. The task was very complex, and I think the result is worthy. We tried to avoid standardised jargon and parameters, to make it a bit different. So now we’ll see – yesterday the Executive met for the first time, and on May 13 will be the first meeting of the coordinating group of 120 people[ix]. So we’ll have to see how this all is gotten underway. I am not convinced that it will all be functional in time for the Catalan elections, for me the key date is May 2019 which are the next municipal elections. Then we’ll see if this has really jelled and if we can have a significant presence throughout the territory. This territorial vision is very important in order to avoid a top-down construction. The key thing in Catalonia is to do it with dignity and not to become entrapped in this dual logic of independence or not, to be capable of bringing together a social force that is in that position.

[i] Autonomous elections are those held in the 17 Autonomous Communities of Spain created by the 1978 Constitution.

[ii] The Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia or PSUC: Founded in 1936, it allied the main parties of the Catalan left around the Communist Party. It was dissolved in 1987.

[iii] “A country in common”.  The process, carried out in a transparent and well-documented manner, began with a negotiation with certain left-wing parties and movements, and encouraged discussion and new proposals at popular assemblies throughout the region and in online discussion open to the public. More than 3,000 people participated in 70 assemblies and more than 1,700 proposals and amendments were made online with the webpage registering nearly 130,000 hits. The Assembly discussed and voted on the various amendments and agreed on a transitional structure composed of a coordinating body of 120 members and an executive committee of 33 members, each with a one-year mandate to propose an ethical code, statutes, an organizational structure and political options in the unfolding conjuncture.

[iv] “La Politica de Comù” in Nous horitzons (New Horizons) No. 215, 2017. Originally titled  Horitzons, the magazine was founded in 1960 in clandestinity and published in Catalan abroad by intellectuals linked to the PSUC. It has been published in Catalonia since 1972. It recently opened its pages to other progressive political tendencies.

[v] Albano Dante Fachin, member of the Catalan parliament, is the head of Podem (the Catalan wing of the Podemos party). He opposed the participation of his party in the constituent assembly of Un Pais en Comù thus creating a crisis in the ranks of Podemos at both the Catalan and national levels. Party leader Pablo Iglesias did not disown him, but delegated his national second-in-command Pablo Echenique to represent him in the assembly.

[vi]  Coalitions of the Catalan left since the transition period of the 1970s have been numerous and complex for the uninitiated. “Iniciativa for Catalonia Verts” dates from 1995 and was composed of the Green party with Iniciativa for Catalonia, itself a 1987 coalition of the left parties around the PSUC and the former Catalan Communist Party. EUIA (United and Alternative Left) is another coalition in 1998 which includes the first two and all the small parties of the radical left. EUIA is the Catalan branch of Izquierda Unida (United Left) the new name of the Spanish Communist Party.

[vii] Pasqual Maragall, member and later president of the Catalan Socialist Party, became mayor of Barcelona in 1982 with the support of the elected members of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC). He remained in this position for almost 15 years without ever having a majority in the municipal council. He then became President of the Catalan government in 2003.

[viii] Catalunya Sí que es Pot (CSQP, “Yes Catalonia Is Possible”) is a left-wing coalition created in view of the Catalan elections in the autumn of 2015. Barcelona en Comù, itself a municipal coalition, was elected in May 2015 but decided not to run in the autonomous elections.

[ix] The election result was no surprise: ‘A country in common’ founder Xavier Domenech will preside the Executive Committee and Ada Colau, the current mayor of Barcelona, is president of the coordinating body. The membership, via an internet vote, chose on May 20 a new name  preferring “Catalunya en Comù” to “En Comú podem”, thus distinguishing itself from  the 2015 Catalan coalition with Podemos, also called “En comu podem” and signalling a reinforcement of the “Barcelona en Comù” wing with respect to the supporters of Podemos in the new entity. The rejection of the earlier name ‘Un Pais en Comu’ may also denote a desire to distance itself from a pro-independence stance.

 An earlier version of this interview was published in June.

Originally published on remixthecommons.org, where the interview is also available in French.

Photo by christopher.berry

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Kevin Stark: The word Decidim translated from Catalan means we decide, and it’s the name of Barcelona’s digital infrastructure for participatory democracy. One part functional database and one part political statement, organizers say Decidim is key to a broad digital transformation that is taking place in Barcelona — its institutions, markets, and economy. Organized by the Barcelona City Council, Barcelona’s citizens participate in a new digital commons, and its organizers hope that technology can improve democratic participation and foster good government. The open-source platform allows the public to participate directly in government as they would a form of social media, and they have had early success. The city council hosted several organizing events to decide on a strategic plan, and nearly 40,000 people and 1,500 organizations contributed 10,000 suggestions.

Decidim was born when a young protest movement in Spain swept into power, according to Xabier Barandiaran, a project leader, who compares the fledgling political party to the Occupy movement in the U.S. Its leadership’s first goal was to create a platform for open strategic planning for the city. “People were in the streets and saying let’s participate in democracy, let’s write a strategic plan,” Barandiaran said.

What developed was an open-source software that embodied the group’s transformation plan, a digital common where citizens can have a say in government — the code is available on Github. “We decided how we would decide,” he said. The leadership is still hosting public meetings once a month as well as large conferences — the next one is on October 26-28. I spoke with Barandiaran about Decidim and its origins. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.

Kevin Stark: What was the context in which Decidim was born?

Xabier Barandiaran: It started in Barcelona and Madrid because there was a change of government that resulted from the indignados movement [sometimes called the 15-M Movement or anti-austerity movement], which was connected to the Occupy movement in the U.S. — for your American readers to make a connection. The political movement became a political party and then institutionalized. There was a change in politics that was motivated by a change in society and its mindset, and on the demands of the people.

It was really targeted towards politicians. And among these demands, perhaps, the most important one was to open-up democracy. Not to let it in the hands of the political parties and the establishment. So, once these new political parties or movements went into power in different cities in Spain — particularly Barcelona and Madrid — one of the earliest projects was to enhance all the means for participatory democracy, including the potential of technology to speed up and make possible a more complex participation.

I live in the city of Chicago. In my neighborhood, we have participatory budgeting — once a year my neighbors gather to decide what roads will be paved, street lights installed, or where we want to paint a mural. What is the Decidim vision of participatory democracy? What sort of change is made possible through the digital platform?

Budgeting is one part of participatory democracy but there are many others. Decidim makes possible almost all of them. It is only limited right now because we are still developing the software and new features are coming out every week. We have learned a lot. We have gathered collective intelligence from different expert citizens. All hackers, public servants, academics, people interested in their government. We run workshops and open citizen meetings. We came out with a wider spectrum of possibilities for participatory democracy, other than participatory budgeting. There are budgeting pilots in Barcelona. But we did not put all our eggs in that basket. We felt it was more important to identify the problems, to bring people together to speak about public services.

Everybody understands the potential of social networks. Often for silly things. Mostly for kittens and fancy photos and things. The potential for open knowledge like Wikipedia, or information spreading like Twitter, or intense relationships like Facebook, also applies to politics. But it does so with high controversy (post-truth, lack of privacy, democratic deficit, no-transparency, etc.). With Decidim we talk about a new generation of political networks that are oriented to decision making, commitment, and accountability. This new generation of social or political networks has to be open source, guarantee personal privacy and public transparency, sovereignty of the infrastructures, independence from private corporations and they have to enforce, by design, digital rights and equity. This is what Decidim provides.

Decidim is open-source software. But that’s not the only way the software is democratic. Decisions about the software are made democratically — it was built democratically. But there must be barriers for people who don’t have access or technological experience. How do you address that?

This is a very common worry. But the digital divide is no bigger than other barriers or gaps. Like the precariousness gap — people don’t have time to show up to a meeting, or they are have to combine different low paid jobs and are too busy to participate. The cultural gap, people need sufficient information and knowledge so that people can think of better policies. Or the gender gap — women are excluded from public participation. There are many gaps and the digital gap is the smallest of all the gaps.

It turns out that, with Decidim platform, we can close or reduce the impact of some of the other gaps (improve available information, flexible participation, gender imbalances, etc.). This being said, we take the digital divide very seriously and we have two programs that are important to us. One is the digital mediation program that we are launching soon so that citizens can get direct help at any library or civic centers to access the platform. We also have a training program. We have run some pilots, and we will have training workshops throughout the city next year to train and empower people of the potential of digital technologies for self-organization, democratic participation, data privacy protection, and digital rights.

There’s a video circulating online of you discussing Decidim in which you say that representative democracy is in crisis and “the political system that hasn’t changed in 200 years. Youth were living in a precarious situation and change had to happen.” What was the experience of being a young person in Barcelona and how Decidim is addressing issues?

We suffered (and we are still suffering) an economic crisis, but it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a political crisis. It was easy to see that it was coming. There was a lot of speculation of housing, and a very suspicious collaboration between political parties and the banks. Many of us could see it coming. It was going to explode. There was a big gap between the rich and the poor and that could only be filled with debt, but debt has a limit. There are physical limits in terms of time (you can’t pay a mortgage for more than 50 years) and the kind of jobs that were created where far from sustainable. It is regular people who paid for the foreseeable catastrophe and the existing democracy did not protect their basic rights. It was a failure of democracy altogether.

Hundreds of thousands of people joined the 15M protests all across the country, we had very specific demands and proposals to change politics, economy and society but the government failed to listen and to open the doors to public participation against the crisis. There was a generational change challenging the establishment and no means to channel the transition. There is a serious structural problem behind. Voting every four years is clearly not enough.

Democracy needs an update 200 years after its original design during the French Revolution. Moreover, while socio-technical innovations are disrupting our societies continuously (AirBnB rising the housing prices even higher, Google delivering free-of-charge services in exchange of our privacy, etc.), public institutions and political democracy was being left behind, creating an even greater democratic deficit on our societies. This is the situation that Decidim is progressively changing. This is what is new in Barcelona (and other cities like Madrid, Zaragoza, a Corunha): People can channel their collective intelligence into public administration, policy making and politics, We can propose, decide and monitor public policies with flexibility, with a fluid online-offline interaction, from our mobiles or from our neighborhood meeting.

But there is more to this story on the global landscape. We inherited the legacy of the Smart City. Barcelona hosts the Smart City Expo and it is ranked among the three smartest cities in different international rankings. We found a profound weakness of democracy and public institutions on this project: big tech corporations are taking city data and shaping our city life with private algorithms. This is a form of algorithmic governance that was progressively capturing the public sphere. There are two fundamental problems with this.

First, people, not machines, know much better how to solve their daily life problems, the only unsolved problem is to coordinate the potential of the collective intelligence of 1.5 million people. Second, a smart device can optimize a solution, but cannot define what is a problem to be solved, or fix the goal. The vision of our city is not something a machine or a corporation can do, it is something we need to build democratically. Decidim, as a platform for collective intelligence, is here to challenge this legacy and solve these problems, to show that democracy is smart. And we are doing so with the people, designing, testing and programming the software in an open and collaborative manner. We use Decidim to design Decidim. We call this community process MetaDecidim, and everybody is welcome to join and share.

This Q&A was updated on Sept. 6, 2017, with clarifications from Xabier Barandiaran.

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This week I had the privilege of joining the Fearless Cities conference, hosted by Barcelona en Comú, a citizen platform founded by 15M and PAH activists in 2014.

The conference announced a global municipalist network, featuring delegates from more than 100 cities around the world.

Municipalism is a movement of cities taking power from states, and using that power to transform politics from the bottom up. For a good intro, check out this recent article from Kate Shea Baird: A new international municipalist movement is on the rise — from small victories to global alternatives.

The conference named two goals for the municipalists:

• to feminize politics — developing new ways of organising based on horizontal collaboration, collective intelligence and the politics of everyday life, and,
• to stop the far right — combating the politics of hate and fear with local policies that reduce inequality and promote the common good.

The speakers were hugely inspiring. To give you a taste, I’ve extracted quotes from the four sessions I attend.

Democracy from the Bottom Up: Municipalism and other Stories

I found myself nodding along with everything shared by Debbie Bookchin, daughter of the original municipalists, Beatrice and Murray Bookchin:

All ecological problems are social problems. We can’t address ecological problems without resolving our addiction to domination and hierarchy. We need to fundamentally alter our social relations. How do we bring an egalitarian society into being? The municipality is a logical arena to start. […]

Social change won’t occur by voting for the candidate who promises a minimum wage, free education etc., only an activated citizen movement can transform society. […]

Local assemblies transform citizens. We are made new humans by participating. We grow beyond capitalist modernity.

Ritchie Torres from the NYC Council, opened with two questions about the US context:

• How do we achieve progressive municipal governance in a world of federal divestment?
• How do you bring participatory politics while so deeply entrenched in two-party politics?

They said their greatest achievement in NYC “is that we’ve brought into mainstream a new idea of municipal government. It’s common sense now that local government is not just for filling potholes, it can be a force for equity. […] We’re not just a legislature, we’re a vehicle for community organising. Being merely a legislature, you will be undermined by legislative and financial activism from the right. But if you’re organising communities, you can make headway.”

Sinam Mohamad was greeted by a standing ovation from the crowd, inspired by stories from Rojava, the autonomous region in the north of Syria:

We in Rojava have built decentralised, democratic self-rule in an extremely difficult situation. Economic embargo, besieged, terrorist attacks, chauvinist mentalities… In spite of all this, we built our municipalism. […]

Kobanî faced an attack from ISIS; a city full of fear, everyone frightened by the attack. Fear means you are dying while you are alive. Turkish bombs in our cities, villages. Children sleeping with fear. Mothers afraid for their families. We struggled for peace, which we have achieved now. We built a democratic administration together. Not just Kurds but a mosaic of religions and nations: Turkmen, Arabs, Syrians, Assyrians, Muslim, Yezidi, Christian, and so on. All agree to coexist in this area. This is our aim, to live together without fear. All the people come together and agree to the social contract.

If you don’t have an organisation that is very well organised for equal gender, you won’t have a free society. Free women = free society. Constitutionally we have equal genders, 50–50 participation. Co-president system means we have Mr and Mrs Presidents.

See my full notes from that session here.

Sanctuary and Refuge Cities

On Sunday morning, we joined a panel on Sanctuary and Refuge Cities. Speakers included city officials from Barcelona, NYC, Berlin, Kilkis (Greece), and Paris. Some highlights:

Daniel Gutierrez from Interventionistische Linke in Berlin explained how they created an anonymous health card so migrants can access services without fear of deportation. The same is happening in Barcelona and parts of France. Ignasi Calvó explained that the Barcelona ID is a municipal (not national) register of citizens, so they can bypass the racist laws of the Spanish state, but it still carries state validity, conferring automatic rights to anyone carrying it in the EU. He warned though, “If you’re going to use civil disobedience, you have to ensure the consequence will be on the city, not on the migrant.”

Each of the speakers reiterated the same simple point: that everyone should have access to the same rights. They argued against categorical distinctions between migrants, refugees, and other residents, as these categories create exclusion.

Amélie Canonne from Emmaus International explained how the state fuels radicalisation: “Repression creates radicalisation, both within migrant communities and in the activists working in solidarity with them. In EU, food distribution is banned, activists are arrested, trialled, radicalised.”

Comments from the audience revealed the huge intelligence in the room. For instance, one commenter shared their concerns about the elephant in the room: the question of race. “This has been a colourblind discourse, forgetting the racial aspect, treating migrants as foreigners rather than people of colour. In the US, white nationalism is one of the main drivers working against migrants.” For more on this, see my recent article on white nationalist militias resisting migration from Latin America.

A city councillor from Philadelphia agreed, explaining how systemic bias is compounded against people with intersecting identities, not just “people of colour”, but “low income, migrant, people of colour.”

A Lebanese participant shared some broader context: “We have been receiving refugees for 60 years, maybe 2 million of them. We have a lot to say about the experience! Are these European cities connecting with the history of refugees in Lebanon? We have made so many failures, and success stories too. Many European cities are coming at this for the first time, learn from us!”

It was inspiring to hear so many cities taking radical steps to resist the racist policies imposed at the national level. See my full notes from that session here.

For the closing plenary, Kali Akuno shared razor-sharp analysis from their experience in Jackson, Mississippi.

“In Jackson we talk about the “Syriza trap” — thinking that our leftist forces can manage the contradictions of capitalism. Thinking we can transform capitalism without transforming society. Where has that ever happened? We need to transform society from the bottom up in a participatory way.”

They reiterated “proximity”, a theme woven throughout the conference:

“Direct contact with your neighbour. Find out their interests, hopes, desires, fears, then organise for what you want, and to not be subject to those fears. You will have to confront racism, sexism, xenophobia: you can overcome that at the local level and create a practice to open your neighbourhood to new people.”

The map of participants shows the global extent of this emerging movement

We then heard updates from delegates from around the world. The UK delegate received enthusiastic applause throughout their short speech:

“Use political office as a resource to support the transformation from below. We’ve learned the lessons from feminism, we change the order when we refuse to participate.”

A panel discussion with no white men. How has this never happened before?

Finally, at the end of the day we enjoyed a one last panel — a furious, joyful, incendiary lineup of speakers. I took fairly comprehensive notes, which you can read here.

Yayo Herrero was one of the most incredible speakers I’ve ever seen. Their transformation recipe is worth quoting in full (that is, my transcription of the English translation of the recipe):

“Acknowledge the very clear reality: that material reduction is not catastrophe. It is a catastrophe to not address this with equity and justice.

“We are obliged to think about freedom and a framework of rights that is not just individual but has a relational sphere.

“We need to imagine an ecologist feminist alternative that is anchored in the land, and in our bodies. Put life and sustainability as a political and economic priority. Expel markets as the centre of the political logic. Challenge the perverse logic that if we don’t keep on feeding this exploitive system we won’t grow wellbeing.

“We need a different way of science and technology. We need to expel the part of science that is based on fantasy, promoting things that are not possible, or only possible for a few. Put science in the service of life.

“We need social organisation where men and women and institutions are co-responsible for care. Life must be cared for, it’s not just a job for women.

“We need alliances that allow us to organise a sabotage to this historic plan. Feminists, entrepreneurs, ecologists, trade unions… build a complicated diverse alliance of majorities.”

Activist philosopher Vandana Shiva spoke last, concluding beautifully:

“Nature is intelligence, diversity, and self-organisation. Municipalism is self-organisation at the level of cities.”

And with that, we were ejected out into the warm Barcelona evening. Reviewing these notes, I’m stunned by the quality of all these speakers. The conference felt very much like a sequel to last year’s Democratic Cities conference in Madrid, where I was first introduced to the idea that cities can offer hope in an age of hopeless states.

The conference organisers got a couple of simple things right which made a profound difference to the mood and the content: they made the event accessible with €20 tickets, and they ensured the majority of speakers were women.

However, with respect, I do want to offer a criticism: every session I attended shared the same linear format, with one person speaking, and a room full of intelligent, engaged, creative people simply listening. We can do so much better than this! As Vandana said, municipalism is self-organisation at the scale of the city — I’m hungry for self-organisation at the scale of the conference. We can use horizontal collaboration structures like “Open Space Technology” to unlock the collective intelligence of all the participants. We can intentionally design for relationship-building, rather than hoping for it to emerge passively in the hallways and lunch breaks. This Thursday my partner Nati and I are hosting a workshop on self-organising at the scale of 10s to 100s of people; perhaps we can convince some of the conference organisers to join us and the next Fearless Cities event will have a format to match the content.

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How bad is our present political landscape? Let’s take stock. The crush of “lesser-evilism”? Check. Alt-right’s metastatic spread? Check. Once-radiant left options (like Syriza or Podemos) now tarnished, in part by their inability to make good on promises? Check. Overall, pretty bad.

The excesses of neoliberal capitalism may have finally eroded any remaining trace of its intellectual credibility. However odious, these excesses had become comfortable for many people, offering a false sense of security and predictable margins of action. Prolonged austerity politics and the pillage of the welfare state have left large numbers of people frustrated, hopeless, and angry, though, and the awakened right-populist movements have exploited this with alarming consequences. But without an apparent alternative, political engagement can seem limited to a pointless choice: scramble on loose rocks over the familiar but shifting ground of globalized capitalism, or hitch one’s wagon to a careening carload of 21st century hubris, i.e. Brexit, Trumpism, the alt- or far-right. Is it time to give up on the representative democracy experiment, or are there any active models for more humane, participatory politics?

The political context described above has been outlined in a good many contemporary books and articles, but sadly, there are seldom any viable alternatives offered to stem the tide of inevitable ruin. This article describes an attempt to reimagine our political systems emancipated from rollercoaster markets and bureaucracies. Based in existing, effective political movements that have been winning elections in a variety of locations, this is an account of radical innovations in governance, production, care work, the stewardship of our cultural, digital and natural heritage, and of a politics that lays a bedrock for bottom-up system rebuilding. This is the politics of the commons and peer to peer (P2P), an expansion on the shared creation and management of common resources, and its recent successful eruption in municipal governments.

Commons in the Time of Monsters

As Gramsci said (or didn’t say ^[1]), “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. After nearly 40 years of progressive neoliberalization and social decomposition, contemporary politics has been very publicly upended by a misogynistic, xenophobic and financially privileged “new right” intent on coupling its politics of hate onto the apparatus of state power.

So, where is the margin for action, if change from within is effectively blocked by the structural constraints of statist politics and the electoral arena? The Leninist notion of achieving state power with or without popular consent, and as a certain precursor to equitable and lasting social change, has proven misguided: the next system won’t just fall into place at the pull of a lever.

Amid this increasingly bleak political landscape, affinity-based networks and communities using P2P dynamics and building commons have been taking action. Small-scale innovations in many fields are paving the way for true, sustainable resource management and grounded social cohesion. In governance, food growing, service provision, science, research and development, education, even finance and currency, these community-enabled developments demonstrate how differently our lives could be organized. Many of these place-based efforts are being documented and replicated worldwide through the Internet, in the process re-seeding the knowledge Commons from which they draw. This is done through commons enabling, aka P2P (peer-to-peer, person-to-person, people-to-people) technologies, which are gaining momentum as forces for constructive change. They enable small group dynamics at higher levels of complexity and enable the reclamation of power.

Unfamiliar with the Commons? Click here to enlarge.

With this power, people can create innovations in production, open book accounting, and the stewardship of natural, cultural or digitally derived commons — but also in governance. Together, all of this forms the building blocks of a truly bottom-up system. Could all this really coalesce into something that, in the future, might be called “post-capitalism”? Only if those who identify as commoners recognize, promote and develop these systems and increase their cultural and, vitally, their political influence, while remembering that there are other players already on the field using similar means towards very different ends.

Prefigurative social arrangements and provisioning approaches are some of the key components for constructing sensible alternatives, but they are not developed in isolation. Instead, they are built within the constraints of existing systems. Likewise, whether through the enclosures ^[2] brought on by neoliberalism or through authoritarian, exclusionary hate politics, the ‘normal’ conditions people expect or aspire to will undoubtedly shrink. This would affect things people have taken for granted to some degree, including job security, pensions, unemployment, sensible working hours and conditions, fairness. As an effect, the ‘wiggle room’ assumed for the operations of those productive communities will inevitably compress.

Seen from outside the Western context, this wiggle room could be considered as ‘privilege’. Under the market-maximizing dictates of Brussels, such privileges seemed like they were on their way out in the EU. But the man behind the curtain was revealed in 2008, and a sudden flare of counter-political activity reached its peak of public attention in 2011. In 2017, the question is not theoretical, but hands-on practical: how do we build the new world in the shell of the old – and before the shell squeezes shut.

The post-2011 protest movements never quite got it together, politically speaking, well or quickly enough to counter the rising hate wave from the right. The contemporary European political landscape shows a populist reaction against global capitalism, but by harking back to a past that never was. Adding insult to injury, we see these xenophobic constructs have built their social base not just with deft internet and social media skills, but also by using P2P tactics. That’s a bit of salt in the wound, given that P2P tactics and tools have largely been promoted by people working for a more inclusive and just world, not one that seeks to “otherize” and exclude.

We cannot afford to forget that financial interests will always favor extreme right wing or fascist options that safeguard their stake, and that any redistributive political options will be harshly and publicly ridiculed, or worse. With the noxious spirit of the thirties rebounding, there’s not a moment to spare; patience now would be a deadly strategy. It’s time to occupy the collective cultural imagination with compelling and practical political alternatives and expose the normalization of neoliberalism as deadly propaganda; to expose the numbing spectacle (Brexit, Trump, etc.) as yet another synthetic opioid addiction.

This is why it’s time for the Commons movement to become more overtly politically active. Beyond self-organized production, care work, ecological stewardship, even beyond ethical generative markets, it’s time for more effective political engagement, not only to protect the essentials of the welfare state model, but to transcend it with a radically reimagined politics that facilitates social value creation and community-organized practices. There are models for this commons-oriented political engagement in Spain’s municipal movements, which the rest of this article will outline. To be clear, “political” describes not only political representation, but also the actionable rights of all those affected by political decisions – the public sphere. There’s a false dichotomy between wanting to build new alternatives now and wanting to enable change by hacking existing political channels. Both approaches, prefigurative and institutional, can work together.

Vanguardism: a 21st century cautionary tale

Now it’s time to look back at the origins of a particularly visible political party, one that offered the promise of a more inclusive, commons-oriented political process, but which eventually failed to deliver. The spirit of the commons was present in its nascence, though, in public assemblies. This factor is one to keep in mind while considering the eventual rise of municipalist parties.

In January 2014, a group of political science professors from the Autonomous University of Madrid found themselves gaining some popularity on Spanish national television. They announced the formation of a new political party, one that would demand:

“…a politics that goes back onto the streets that talks like the majority of people who have had enough. (…) Our demand for a greater generosity from representatives, for a greater horizontality and transparency, for a return of the republican values of public virtue and social justice, for the recognition of our plurinational and pluricultural reality is more real than ever. It is decades since our desire for making our own decisions and answering our own questions was so real.” (Mover Ficha Manifesto)

In the European Elections four months later, the new party won 5 seats in the European Parliament with more than 1.2 million votes.

Of course, that party is Podemos, whose trajectory indicates what a commons-oriented political party can — and more pointedly, should not — do. Their early months impart what is politically feasible in urgent circumstances, and show the power that can be harnessed by appealing to people’s’ hopes while articulating their needs and desires. The early success of Podemos is due to their work on two distinct-yet-related levels: mass media and network media.

Having cut their teeth on prime-time TV debates, Podemos’ most visible figures (chiefly male) made for great entertainment, clobbering the arguments of the chronic political class, which they dubbed la casta (“the caste”, a jibe implying a privileged class).

It wasn’t all show business. They were savvy enough to capture the networked, horizontalist politics of the 15-M movement. A staggering number of geographical- and interest-based assemblies (called “circulos”) were enabled and bolstered online through tools like Reddit, Loomio and others.

With its legion of tactics, Podemos became a totem appealing to many types. One type is the once politically apathetic actor, who sees in Podemos’ secretary general, Pablo Iglesias, a contrarian avatar through which to channel their disdain for the middle-class destroying “casta”. Next would be the old guard leftist, disenchanted with the Social Democrat (PSOE) party’s devotion to neoliberalism and austerity politics. Similarly, there are those who had been disillusioned after placing their bets on the more leftist outgrowths of the Spanish Communist Party. The last type, obvious but worth mentioning, is the activist, who found or rediscovered their political voice in the squares during 15-M and/or the preceding alter-globalization movement.

Of course, we’re not here to tell the story of Podemos. That story has turned darker and duller over time. Once high on the taste of popularity and leadership in the polls, the Podemos ruling committee slanted towards becoming a vanguardist “electoral machine”, taking power on behalf of those left behind. It began to look like Podemos would win the elections at all costs and bring liberation to the silenced masses — whether the masses wanted this imposed from above, or not.

Three years later, the results are plain to see. Surpassed by both the Social Democrats and the somehow-still-ruling Popular Party (a den of Franco apologists and Brussels bootlickers), Podemos failed to make “fear change sides”, as once they boasted.

Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, Greece proffers another cautionary tale: SYRIZA, the party from the “little country that said ‘no’”. Except that, after saying ‘no’, the little country’s political representatives, now disconnected from the social movements that lofted them to power, kept on playing the rigged game rather than build one fresh.

The story does not end here. A new political milieu arose between 2014 and 2015, led by the third profile mentioned above: the post 15-M activists, stepping up and into politics. They wanted to be the creators of representative politics, not its recipients, and to act as facilitators for many other voices to be included. The genesis of Spain’s municipalist coalitions tells a new story, describing keys to a successful commons-based political strategy that creates tangible change.

Proclamations of a movement’s death, greatly exaggerated

The origins of this other story lie in the apparent decay of the 15-M movement. The word “apparent” is key here – as long as we are speaking of visibility, we must acknowledge the Occupy movement as part of this disappearing act.

In 2011, Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” was not Donald Trump, but the protester. This marked the apex of media-visibility for the networked movements demanding attention by standing their ground and announcing their presence through encampments, which provided a compact mass of human profiles against a mainstream media-friendly backdrop. Here, we should draw a distinction between how the 15-M and Occupy encampments disbanded and were disbanded.

In Spain, the activists took a page from the Art of War and voluntarily dispersed their large-scale occupations, decentralizing them into neighborhood assemblies. In the US, the FBI coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, private sector players (notably banks), local law enforcement, and mayors of several prominent cities to first infiltrate and then violently dismantle the occupations. If we limit the import of Occupy to those few, highly visible months in the squares, we can see that it had not so much “died” as it was assassinated.

In both Spain and the US, the media — behaving as if geospatial proximity is the only thing holding affinity networks together— rushed to pronounce these and all their sister movements worldwide to be defunct. So much for the person of the year in 2011! This was not a natural passing but a brutal attempt at disappearing a large movement. However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, “proclamations of the movement’s death have been greatly exaggerated”. If these movements still live and breathe, though, we must ask ourselves with whose complicity and consent they have been labeled “failures”.

Think of a sugar cube. Held in your hand it is compact, with a recognizable shape and texture, easy to measure and describe. Drop the sugar cube into a coffee cup and stir that around. Magic! The cube has disappeared. Take a sip, though, and you’ll agree that the flavor has changed.

In a nutshell, this describes the argument that the 15-M/Occupy/Syntagma/various local movements are alive and well, albeit in distributed and less immediately apparent ways. For those willing to look, their effects are readily identifiable. Remember that not even six years have passed since the occupations; this is not a tale of hippies turning into yuppies. This is the story of a movement that refuses to take the news of its own demise as a binding contract.

In the US, you can perceive how Occupy infused the Bernie Sanders campaign (also undermined by entrenched interests), and recently we can see its influence in the Women’s Marches, strikes and parts of the anti-Trump movement.

In Spain, however, these activists, people with real memories and lived experiences, chose to politically organize, and they actually won – not once, but multiple times in multiple locations.

The Rise of the Urban Commons

In the spring of 2014, spurred on by Podemos’ success in the European elections, a group of activists met in el Patio Maravillas, one of Madrid’s most prominent occupied social centers. “We’re going to win this city”, they announced. They began organizing, enabling unprecedented levels of citizen participation and facilitating a common space for previously unaffiliated and disaggregated political actors. Anyone who agreed with the basic principles and wanted to be present could propose him or herself as a candidate on fully open and participatory electoral lists.

A month or so earlier, activists from Barcelona launched a manifesto to invite existing social movements and political organizations to converge around four fundamental objectives:

1. Guaranteeing the citizenry’s basic rights and a decent life for all,
2. Fostering an economy that prioritizes social and environmental justice,
3. The participative democratization of institutions,
4. To meet an ethical commitment towards citizens.

The call for convergence was an astounding success, and Guanyem Barcelona, publicly represented by anti-eviction and right to housing campaigner Ada Colau, begins its yearlong mutation into Barcelona en Comú, an “instrumental” electoral coalition comprising a variety of actors from social movements and anti-establishment political parties working together to take back the city.

Ignored or decried in the popular media, these coalitions, much like the 15-M and Occupy encampments, replicated themselves in other locales, forming alliances and swarming around shared values and beliefs. The process was messy, effervescent and busy. No one had tried this before and there is no instruction manual; in practice, it can only be written together.

Against poll expectations, a hostile media, and entrenched political interests, these parties overwhelmingly won in Spain’s main cities, not only Madrid and Barcelona, but also in Valencia, A Coruña, Zaragoza, and Cadiz. Podemos, although a participant in many of these coalitions, chose to run the regional (as opposed to the city) ballot on their own. The result? Zero victories in all the places where the citizens’ coalitions had triumphed. In the city of Madrid, where the same census group could vote for the city (Ahora Madrid) and regional (Podemos) ballot, Podemos got just half the number of votes won by Ahora Madrid.

Image by Maria Castelló Solbés. Click here for more on the origin of Spain’s municipalist movements.

Spain’s municipalist coalitions were the result of a number of movements representing changes in cultures, mindsets and relations to power. The most notable among these is 15-M and, unlike Podemos, the coalitions can be considered its true political byproducts. Prior to the 2014-2015 electoral cycle, 15-M had also developed strong transversal relations with movements around housing, public health and education and culture. Known as “las mareas”, or “citizen’s tides”, these were characterized by self-organized protests and capacity building that, although inclusive of traditional actors such as labour unions and political parties, were truly multi-constituent in nature. For example, the public health marea would include healthcare professionals, patients, civil workers, health reformers, hospital staff, specific disease-focused associations and help groups, etc., as well as all supporters of the public health service. 15-M itself was also a product of already existing tendencies, with people who had been working in digital activism, free culture, de-growth, the commons and a host of other movements.

Today, the municipalist platforms coordinate among themselves to share resources and best practices, functioning as trans-local affinity networks. Although mainly focused on providing real world solutions to their constituencies, the coalitions share a number of notable features. One of the most refreshing is that their attitude towards political discourse is considerably more feminized, a contrast to the old guard and masculine attitudes typically found in institutional politics.

The municipalist focus on participation and radical democracy, honed through many street assemblies, has been refined into a shared “código ético” or ethical code, which shapes the platforms behaviors within the institutions. The code acts as both a glue and draw for the participants, again not limited to party staff, but to all who want to feel involved. The main features are as follows:

• No revolving doors (no cycling through public/private positions)
• Salary cuts
• Participative program
• Open primaries — no party quotas, and open to anyone
• Voluntary/citizen self-financing, and rejection of institutional or bank financing

Beyond their local concerns and trans-local alliances, all the municipalist platforms have their eye on the transnational dimension in order to form a network of “Rebel Cities”. This, as a practice, mirrors the locally embedded but globally networked practices of P2P productive communities. In addition, the multi-constituent approach seen in the citizen tides is mirrored within the coalitions, which, although inclusive of established political parties, are notably non-partisan as they all reflect the interests of wide breadth of civil society actors.

And they lived happily ever after? Of course not: the activists-turned-political representatives face an unwaveringly hostile media environment, which exaggerates their blunders (or invents them when convenient) while burying their achievements. After four years of precarity and engaged activism, these individuals face 60+ hour workweeks while clashing against the entrenched realities of horizontalist bureaucracy, holding minority seats within electoral alliances with Social Democrats. The pluralistic nature of the citizens’ coalitions have unsurprisingly led to incoherencies and gaffes and, perhaps worst of all, a noticeable abandonment of direct-action tactics and counter-power building efforts. Still, they soldier on, and the list of benefits and advances (cancellations of public contracts with multi-nationals, participatory budgeting, more gender-balanced literature and representation, increased public spending, anti-gentrification strategies, basic income pilots, direct-democracy mechanisms…) is plain for all to see.

The best of the truly good news is that Spain’s municipalist coalitions are not alone. Progressive cities worldwide are enabling and empowering the act of commoning. Rather than directing what the citizenry can do for itself and its environments, these “Rebel Cities” or, “Fearless Cities” as a recent event called them, are listening to commoners’ voices and creating spaces for ordinary people to roll up their sleeves and manage those matters that concern them most directly. Cities like Ghent, Belgium; Bologna, Italy; Amsterdam, Holland; Frome, England; Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Naples, Italy; Montreal, Canada; Jackson, USA; Lille, France; Bristol, UK and Valparaiso, Chile are examples. Their people are increasing transparency, enabling participatory budgeting, turning empty lots into community gardens, co-creating skill and tool sharing programs, and facilitating the creation of social care co-ops among many other actions relevant in their local contexts.

Beyond the city level, we now also find pan-European efforts to bring the practices of commoning to the institutions, while not losing sight of the necessary mutual recognition needed for the Commons movement to emancipate itself from markets and state as it radically re-imagines these. In November 2016, a group of 150 commoners from all over Europe gathered in Brussels to lay the foundations for a united and strong movement, and the European Commons Assembly was born. Building on several weeks’ collective work in policy proposals, the Assembly sat in European Parliament to explore the ECA as a platform and the commons as a powerful paradigm for policymaking.

Commons Transition: Building the political lexicon of social governance from below

The lexicon and practices of commoning are evident in how these coalitions, Rebel Cities and transnational assemblies have formed and are articulating their governance. With a focus on transparency and citizen participation, and taking advantage of open-source P2P technologies, they prefigure many aspects of the politics of a better future. The challenge ahead lies in applying the network logics that have been so successful in Spain to recover the latent power of Occupy and 15-M and build resilient, more feminized and ethically coherent, transnational political movements.

In the same way that prefigurative strategies incorporate social and environmental priorities into their informal constitutions, without waiting for markets or state to deal with such ‘externalities’, the municipalist ethical code can form the kernel of a set of political guidelines to be hard-coded into commons-oriented coalition principles, bringing fresh accountability to contemporary politics.

Potential success is also about keeping it real and relatable. The old left has traditionally communicated in abstracts, which tends to create rather than solves problems. At the same time, the “new” populist left of Syriza, Podemos and Bolivarian Socialism seems satisfied making grand paternalistic promises, resorting to throwing blame rather than proposing participatory, unalienated and feasible actions. In a culture where the elderly self-organise affinity groups through social networks and informal, participatory communities emerge to address the shortcomings of a decaying welfare state, people are demonstrating that they want to have a say in how things are run. They do not want to have someone paid exponentially more to say it on their behalf. Can a Commons politics address and support this shift towards self-organization?

The vision is to develop the emerging commons and P2P political movement at higher levels of complexity — the regional, national and transnational levels — while preserving the characteristics of local, real-place dynamism. By engaging the creativity and input of those communities most affected by political processes, commons-based practices can nurture a sense of identity that can be harnessed for effective political action. The integrative narrative of the Commons invites citizens’ direct political engagement outside the restrictive bureaucracies of the market state and economies.

Imagine a radically reconfigured and democratically accountable structure. One that, while preserving the more desirable characteristics of the Welfare State — social and public health provision and large infrastructure management and upkeep — radically democratizes them. It would do away with the State’s cozy symbiosis with market entities, while deconstructing its pernicious monopolies over money creation and exchange, and property and judicial rights. A second radical set of measures would prohibit the structural enforcement of inequality and the often violent repression of emancipatory alternatives. This structure would function in much the same way as foundations do in the Open Source software economy: providing the infrastructure for cooperation and the creation and upkeep of commons but not directing the process of social value creation and distribution. In other words, it would empower and protect the practice of commoning.

This enabling metastructure — often referred to as “The Partner State” — would also take on new functions derived from already existing P2P/Commons practices. Among these, we would see a promotion of real, needs-oriented entrepreneurship, bolstered by explicit recognition and support of bottom-up productive infrastructures, such as Open Coops, mesh wireless networks or community renewables through public-Commons partnerships. It would allow commoners to repurpose or take over unused or underutilised public buildings for social ends while giving legal recognition to the act of commoning, whether through copyleft-inspired property-law hacks or through a longer process of gradually institutionalizing commons practices. Its grassroots democratizing ethos would create new financing mechanisms and debt-free public money creation, which, alongside social currencies, could fund environmentally regenerative work and the creation of new, distributed Open-source infrastructure. These would be supported by taxation schemes favouring the types of labor described above, while penalizing speculation, parasitic rents and negative social and environmental externalities. The overall system has to be kept in check through a pervasive culture of participatory politics — made feasible through its attendant pedagogy — to involve a newly enfranchised citizenry in the deliberation and real time consultation of political and legislative issues and budgeting. In issues of power, the Partner State shifts to being a fluid facilitator to assist and emancipate the bottom-up counter-power that keeps it in check.

Is this narrative Utopian? No more than the “what are their demands…?” proposals of Occupy and 15-M. In fact, many of the Partner State practices described above are already being enacted by the Fearless Cities. Accusations of utopianism are used dismissively to enclose the commons of the imagination. People need courage (and encouragement) to imagine something better in human nature, more than inevitable conflict and self-interest. History, despite its observable patterns, is not deterministic. Nothing suddenly materializes from detailed concepts into fully formed realities; there was no group of wise men sitting around in 15th century Florence proclaiming: “…and we shall create Capitalism! And it will progress through creative destruction! And we shall have high frequency algorithmic trading!” or any such nonsense. Instead, if we look, we can identify various socio-technological trends including the rise of the merchant class, the printing press, double book accounting, all of which would proceed from the 18th century to form what we recognize now as “capitalism”.

Back in our present-day chaos, applying a Commons Transition to the field of politics entails creating a new, inclusive political narrative that harnesses the best practices of three distinct progressive trends: Openness (e.g. Pirate parties), Fairness (e.g. New Left) and Sustainability (e.g. Green parties). The optimal game plan for building a new political vision fit for the challenges of our time involves building bridges between these three trends, precisely what the municipalists have achieved and translated into political and legislative power.

This vision for a new politics must also promote other underplayed concerns such as race, gender, and reproductive justice, and radically diversifying political representation in response to increased interest in balance — at the least, being sure that the representative picture is not always and only straight, white men, particularly in leadership roles. Take into account that women spearheaded the municipalist candidacies that triumphed in Barcelona and Madrid.

There is a need for deeper respect towards rural and deindustrialized areas, where P2P dynamics can usher in workable solutions and grounded, bio-regionally based political engagement. Inclusive by nature, the Commons as applied to politics can enable grassroots political participation by affected individuals and communities. However, this new narrative must be grounded in scalable, existing best practices that are accessible to change makers and civil-society organizations, not only to existing institutions.

Taken together, these successful municipalist occupations of power structures show that the logic of the Commons, coupled with democratic, participatory relations enabled by P2P systems, can reinvigorate and instill a new sense of purpose in today’s political field. If we can imagine a commons-oriented future including a commons politics, it practically becomes a moral imperative to do everything in our power to bring that better future to reality. In this fight in the time of monsters, the fight between David and Goliath, why not be David?^[3] He won after all and, after seeing what the municipalists had to overcome, perhaps so can we.

This article expands on themes showcased on Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer, a short publication from the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute examining the potential of commons-based peer production to radically re-imagine our economies, politics and relationship with nature. Download it here.

Images: Francisco de Goya, Choon Goon, Melissa Stanley, TOr ghEH, Elena Martínez Vicente, Barcex, Time Magazine, Maria Castelló Solbés, Ars Electronica, Scott Webb,

Footnotes

^[1] Did Gramsci actually say that? This hotly contested quote nonetheless captures the current world juncture.

^[2] From 1776 to 1825, the English Parliament passed more than 4,000 Acts that served to appropriate common lands from commoners, chiefly to the benefit of politically connected landowners. These enclosures of the commons seized about 25 percent of all cultivated acreage in England, according to historian Raymond Williams, and concentrated ownership of it in a small minority of the population. These “lawful” enclosures also dispossessed millions of citizens, swept away traditional ways of life, and forcibly introduced the new economy of industrialization, occupational specialties and large-scale production. Nowadays we use the term “enclosure” to denounce heinous acts such the ongoing privatization of intellectual property, the expropriation and massive land grabs occurring in Africa and other continents, the imposition of digital right management digital content, the patenting of seeds and the human genome, and more. This modern tendency towards enclosures and turning relationships into services, and commons into commodities, has been described by Commons scholar David Bollier as “The great invisible tragedy of our time”.

^[3] This idea was originally voiced by anti-fracking activist Sandra Steingraber.

Originally published at commondreams.org

The post Commons in the time of monsters: How P2P Politics can change the world, one city at a time appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The pro-independence government of Catalonia recently sparked a political crisis in Spain by proposing to call a referendum on independence by the end of 2017 with or without the approval of the central government. In contrast, “Catalonia in common” defines itself as an innovative political space of the Catalan left. Initiated by Barcelona in Comú a little less than a year after its election to city hall, ​​the initiave was launched in October 2016. A short manifesto explained its raison-d’être and presented an “ideario politico” (a political project) of some 100 pages for broad discussion over 5 months which culminated in a constituent assembly last April 8.

This new political subject defines itself as “a left-wing Catalan organisation that aims to govern and to transform the economic, political and social structures of the present neo-liberal system.” Its originality in the political panorama of Catalonia and of Spain is its engagement with “a new way of doing politics, a politics of the commons where grassroots people and communities are the protagonists.” In response to those who see its emergence only in the context of the impending referendum, it affirms: “We propose a profound systemic, revolutionary change in our economic, social, environmental and political model.”

We interviewed Joan Subirats a few days after the Constituent Assembly of Catalunya en Comú took place. Joan is an academic renowned for his publications and his political engagement. A specialist in public policy and urban issues, he has published widely on the Commons and on the new municipalism. He is one of the artisans of Barcelona in Comú and has just been elected to the coordinating body of the new space named recently “Catalunya en comú”.

The Genesis of a New Political Subject

NT — Tell us about the trajectory of the development of this new initiative: a lot of people link it to the 15-M, but I imagine that it was more complex than that and started long before.

By Directa (youtube) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

JS — At the outset there was Guanyem, which was in fact the beginning of Barcelona en Comú: the first meetings were in February-March 2014. Who was involved? this is quite simultaneous with the decision by Podemos to compete in the European Parliament elections in May 2014. Podemos organises in February 2014; Guanyem begins organising in February- March 2014 to compete in the municipal elections of May 2015.

Going farther back, there is a phase of intense social mobilisation against austerity policies between 2011 and 2013. If we look at the statistics of the Ministry of the Interior on the number of demonstrations, it is impressive, there were never as many demonstrations as during that period, but after mid-2013 they start to taper off. There is a feeling that there are limits and that demonstrations can’t obtain the desired changes in a situation where the right-wing Popular Party (PP) holds an absolute majority. So the debate emerges within the social movements as to whether it’s a good idea to attempt to move into the institutions.

Podemos chooses the most accessible scenario, that of the European elections, because these elections have a single circonscription, so all of Spain is a single riding, with a very high level of proportionality, so with few votes you get high representation because there are 60-some seats, so with one million votes they obtained 5 seats. And people vote more freely in these elections because apparently the stakes are not very high, so they are elections that are good for testing strategies. In contrast, here in Barcelona, we chose the municipal elections as the central target because here there is a long history of municipalism.

So this sets the stage for the period that began in 2014 with Guanyem and Podemos and the European elections and in May 2015 with the municipal elections where in 4 of the 5 major cities – Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Zaragoza – alternative coalitions win that are not linked to either of the two major political parties (PP and the Socialist Party – PSOE) that have dominated the national political scene since the return to democracy in 1977. And in the autonomous elections^[1], a new political cycle also begins, in which we still are. If we go farther back, to 2011 – there are a couple of maps that show the correlation between the occupation of plazas in the 15-M with the number of alternative citizen canadidacies at the municipal level.

So Podemos and all the alternative citizen coalitions all refer to the 15M as their founding moment. But the 15M is not a movement, it was a moment, an event. You must have heard the joke about the stranger who arrives and wants to talk to the 15M – but there is no 15M, it has no spokespersons and no address. But everyone considers it very important because it transformed the political scene in its wake . But what was there before the 15M?

There were basically 4 major trends that converged in the 15-M :
First the anti-globalisation movement, the oldest one, very interesting because a large number of the new political leaders have come out of it, with forms of political mobilisation different from the traditional ones.

Then there was the « Free Culture Forum » linked to issues regarding internet which was very important here in Barcelona – with Simona Levy and Gala Pin, who is now a municipal councillor – that is important because here digital culture, network culture, was present from the very beginning, something that didn’t occur in other places.

The third movement was the PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) which emerges in 2009 and had precedents with Ada Colau and others who organised « V for vivienda » (like the film « V for vendetta », but in this case vivienda – housing), an attempt to demonstrate that young people were excluded from social emancipation because they didn’t have access to housing. Their slogan was « you’ll never have a house in your whole f’king life ». And the forms of mobilisation were also very new, for example, they occupied IKEA because at that time IKEA’s advertising slogan was « the independent republic of your home », so they occupied it and slept in the beds there. So this was more youthful, alternative, more of a rupture, but then in 2009 with the creation of the PAH they started to try to connect with the immigrant sector and people who were losing their houses because of the mortgage hype, it was very important because it’s the movement that tries to connect with sectors outside of youth: the poor, immigrants, working class… with the slogan ‘this is not a crisis, it’s a sting’. So the PAH is very important because it’s the movement that connects with sectors of the population outside of youth: workers, immigrants, the elderly… For example, here in Plaza Catalunya in 2011 the only major poster rallying people who weren’t youth was that of the PAH.

And the fourth movement – the most ‘authentic’ 15M one – was that of the « Youth without future ». People who organised mainly in Madrid, typical middle-class university sector with post-grad studies, who suddenly realised that they wouldn’t find jobs, that it wasn’t true that their diplomas would open doors for them, they were in a precarious situation.

So those were the four major currents that converged in the basis of the 15M. But what made it ‘click’ was not just those 4 trends, but the fact that huge numbers of other people recognised the moment and converged on the plazas and overwhelmed the movements that started it. The most surprising thing about the moment was that those 4 movements – that were not all that important – were rapidly overwhelmed by success of the movement they started and new people who spontaneously joined. That was what really created the phenomenon, because if it had been just those 4 movements, if it had been like ‘Nuit debout’ in Paris where people occupied the plaza but without the sensation that people had steamrollered the leaders. So, when the plazas are evacuated, the idea becomes ‘Let’s go to the neighbourhoods’. So all of a sudden, in the neighbourhoods of Barcelona and Madrid, assemblies were organised where there was a mixture of the old neighbourhood associations that were no longer very active and whose members were older (my generation) and new people who brought new issues like ecology, energy, bicycle transport, cooperatives, water and a thousand different things and who created new spaces of articulation where people who had never thought that they would meet in the neighbourhoods began to converge.

I think this explains the re-emergence of municipalism that followed: people begin to see the city as a place where diverse social changes can be articulated on a territorial basis: many mobilisations are taking place in isolation, in a parallel manner and don’t have a common meeting-point. Water as a common good, energy transition, sustainable transport, public health, public space, infant education… All of a sudden there was something that brought people together which was to discuss the city, the city we want – David Harvey mentions in an article that the modern-day factory is the city. That is, we no longer have factories, the city is now the space where conflicts appear and where daily life becomes politicised: issues like care, food, schooling, transport, energy costs – and this creates a new space for articulating these issues that hadn’t been previously envisaged.

So I think this is the connection : 15-M as a moment of overwhelming, the end of a cycle of mobilisation – remember that there had been a petition of a million and a half signatures to change the mortgage legislation, that Ada Colau presented in the national Congress, where she accused the PP deputies of being assassins because of what they were doing – but that mobilisation had no effect in the law. A PP deputy declared ‘If these people want to change things, then they should get elected’. So people started thinking ‘OK, if that’s the way it is, then let’s get ourselves elected’. This is the initial change of cycle in 2014. So the 4 movements were present in the meetings of Guanyem and BComun, as well as some progressive intellectuals and people from other issue areas like water, transport, energy etc. That was the initial nucleus here in Barcelona – in Madrid it was different. There the Podemos generation had a different logic. Here, from the beginning, we wanted to create a movement from the bottom up and to avoid a logic of coalition of political parties, this was very clear from the outset. We didn’t want to reconstruct the left on the basis of an agreement amongst parties. We wanted to build a citizen movement that could impose its own conditions on the parties. In the case of Podemos it was different: it was a logic of a strike from above – they wanted to create a strong close-knit group with a lot of ideas in a very short period and as a result an electoral war machine that can assault the heavens and take power. Here, on the other hand, we foresaw a longer process of construction of a movement where we would start with the municipalities and after that, we’ll see.

So Guanyem was created in June 2014, 11 months prior to the municipal elections, with a minimal program in 4 points:

1. we said, we want to take back the city, it’s is being taken away from the citizens, people come here to talk about a ‘business-friendly global city’ and they are taking it away from the citizens, we have lost the capacity to control it, as the first point;
2. there is a social emergency where many problems don’t get a response;
3. we want people to be able to have decision-making capacity in what happens in the city, so co-production of policy, more intense citizen participation in municipal decisions;
4. moralisation of politics. Here the main points are non-repetition of mandates, limits on salaries of elected officials, anti-corruption and transparency measures, etc.

So we presented this in June 2014 and we decided that we would give ourselves until September to collect 30,000 signatures in support of the manifesto and if we succeeded, we would present candidates in the municipal elections. In one month we managed to get the 30,000 signatures! Besides getting the signatures on internet and in person, we held a lot of meetings in the neighbourhoods to present the manifesto – we held about 30 or 40 meetings like that, some of them small, some more massive, where we went to the neighbourhoods and we said « We thought of this, what do you think? We thought of these priorities, etc’. » So, in September of 2014 we decided to go ahead; once we decided that we would present a slate, we began to discuss with the parties – but with the strength of all that support of 30,000 people backing us at the grassroots, so our negotiating strength with respect to the parties was very different. In Dec 2014 we agreed with the parties to create Barcelona en Comun – we wanted to call it Guanyem but someone else had already registered the name, so there was a lot of discussion about a new name, there were various proposals: Revolucion democratica, primaria democratica, the term Comu – it seemed interesting because it connected with the Commons movement, the idea of the public which is not restricted to the institutional and that was key. It was also important that in the previous municipal elections in 2011 only 52% of people had voted, in the poorer neighbourhoods a higher number of people abstained and that it was in the wealthier neighbourhoods where a larger proportion of people had voted. So we wanted to raise participation by 10% in the poor neighbourhoods more affected by the crisis and we thought that would allow us to win. And that was what happened. In 2015, 63% voted, but in the poor areas 40% more people voted. In the rich areas, the same people voted as before.

So it was not impossible to think we could win. And from the beginning the idea was to win. We did not build this machine in order to participate, we built it in order to win. We didn’t want to be the opposition, we wanted to govern. And as a result, it was close, because we won 11 of 41 seats, but got the most votes so we head the municipal council, the space existed. From the moment Guanyem was created in June 2014, other similar movements began to be created all over Spain – in Galicia, in Andalucia, in Valencia, Zaragoza, Madrid… One of the advantages we have in Barcelona is that we have Ada Colau, which is a huge advantage, because a key thing is to have an uncontested leader who can articulate all the segments of the movement – ecologists, health workers, education professionals…. If you don’t have that it’s very difficult, and also the sole presence of Ada Colau explains many things. In Madrid they found Manuela Carmena, who is great as an anti-franquista symbol, with her judicial expertise, very popular but who didn’t have that tradition of articulating movements, and as a result now they are having a lot more problems of political coordination than here.

A New Political Subject for a New Political Era

AA — So now Catalunya en comu defines itself as a new political space on the left for the whole of Catalonia. But in recent Catalan history that’s nothing really new: there have been numerous political coalitions on the left, such as the PSUC^[2] in 1936 followed by many others. So what is different about this initiative?

JS — If we open up our perspective and look at things more globally, I think that what justifies the idea that this is a new political space is the fact that the moment is new, we’re in a new phase so it’s very important to understand that if this new political moment reproduces the models and the conceptual paradigms of the old left and of the Fordism of the end of the 20th century, we won’t have moved ahead at all. The crisis of social democracy is also a crisis of a way of understanding social transformation with codes that no longer exist. As a result the measure of success of this new political space is not so much in to what extent it can bring together diverse political forces, but rather its capacity to understand this new scenario we find ourselves in – a scenario where digital transformation is changing everything, where we no longer know what ‘labour’ is, where heterogeneity and social diversity appear as factors not of complexity but of values, where the structure of age no longer functions as it used to – where everything is in transformation, so we can no longer continue to apply ideas – to use a phrase coined by Ulrich Beck – ‘zombie concepts’, living dead, no?, we forge ahead with our backpacks full of 20th-century concepts, applying them to realities that no longer have anything to do with them. It’s easy to see the defects of the old, traditional concepts, but it’s very difficult to construct new ones because we don’t really know what is happening nor where we are headed. The example of the debate in France between Valls and Hamon – at least, I read the summary in Le Monde, where Valls maintained that it would be possible to come back to a situation of full employment and Hamon said that is impossible, that it’s necessary to work towards the universal basic income; in the end, Hamon is closer to the truth than Valls, but Hamon isn’t capable of explaining it in a credible way – and it is very difficult to explain it in a credible way.

Here, we are working at one and the same time on the Commons and the non-institutional public sphere, we are demanding greater presence of the public administration when probably it wouldn’t really be necessary, but since we don’t have a clear idea of how to construct this new thing, we are still acting sort of like slaves of the old. So that’s where I think the concept of the Commons, of the cooperative, the collaborative, new ideas regarding the digital economy, are more difficult to structure, because we’re also conscious that capitalism is no longer only industrial or financial but now it’s digital capitalism, and it controls all the networks of data transmission and at the same time the data themselves, probably the wealth of the future. So, sure we can do really interesting things in Barcelona, out of Barcelona en Comun, but we have GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft), and GAFAM has its own logics and that complicates things. So we have to create a new political subject – and it’s obvious that we need something new – but what isn’t so obvious is what are the concepts we need to create this new subject. So if you look at the documents published by Un Pais en Comu^[3] that’s what you’ll see: a bit of different language, a different way of using concepts, but at the same time a trace of the heritage of the traditional left. The journal ‘Nous Horitzons’ has just published a new issue on ‘Politics in Common’^[4] which brings together a lot of these elements. The impression that some of us had in the assembly the other day in Vall d’Hebron (the inaugural assembly of the movement) was that the old ways were still weighing us down, that there was a difficulty to generate an innovative dynamic.

NT — That was clear in the composition of the audience.

JS — Yes, well, the Podemos people weren’t there, of course… they didn’t come for various reasons, because probably not everybody was in agreement with Albano-Dante^[5] but they saw there was a lot of disagreement and so they preferred not to come, and that’s a type of public that, as well as filling the hall, also changes the type of dynamic – so it was more the traditional-style organisations that were there (Iniciativa or EUIA^[6]), there was more of the old than the new probably. Perhaps that’s inevitable, but what we have to do now is to see if we can change that dynamic.

AA — When one reads the ‘Ideario politico’ (the political project of Un Pais en Comu) it’s a sort of lesson in political economy, political philosophy as well, but also a vast programme, and the left has never put forward this type of Commons-inspired programme before, be it in Catalunya or in Spain or probably internationally. How do you see its contribution in the context of the Commons ecosystem? There have been experiences of the Commons without the Commons label, as in Latin America …

JS — Yes, in Catalunya the anarcho-sindicalist movement…

AA — Of course, but more recently, the idea of ‘Buen Vivir’ …

JS — Yes, but when you go to Latin America and you talk about that, it all revolves around the State. But here, we try not to be state-centric. We are trying to avoid the idea that the only possible transformation needs to depend on the State.

AA — But in the ‘Ideario’ a lot of discussion is devoted to public services as well, this implies that the State has to exist. And in the Commons vocabulary there is the concept of the ‘partner-state’, but it doesn’t appear in the Ideario…

JS — Yes, there’s a margin there: the resilience of the new politics depends more on the capacity to create ‘muscled’ collective spaces – public, collective, common – than on the occupation of the institutions. But without the occupation of the institutions, it’s very difficult to construct those spaces. The example that comes to mind for me is from Copenhagen: there it was the cooperatives of the workers’ unions that built the big housing coops that exist now; also, the municipal government when the left was in power built a lot of public housing; then when a right-wing government came to power, it privatised all the public housing but it couldn’t privatise the cooperatives. So in the end, things that are strictly state-based are more vulnerable than when you build collective strength. So if we are able to benefit from these spaces in order to build ‘collective muscle’, using our presence in the institutions, this will end up being more resilient, more stable over time than if we put all our eggs in the State basket. So the Barcelona city government has civic social centres that are municipal property, but what is important is to succeed in ensuring that these centres are controlled by the community, that each community make them its own despite the fact that the property is officially that of the municipality, but they must be managed through a process of community management. So you need to build in the community a process of appropriation of institutions that ends up being stronger than if it were all in the hands of the State.

Now we are discussing citizen heritage, how the city government can use its property – houses, buildings – and it can cede them for a certain period in order to construct collective spaces. For example, 8 building sites that belong to the municipality have been put up for auction on 100-year leases for community organisations to build housing cooperatives. This doesn’t take property away from the public sphere and at the same time it generates collective strength. But a certain sector of the political left here, the CUP, criticises this as privatisation of public space. They think Barcelona en Comun should build public housing instead, state-owned housing. That’s a big difference. And people are aware of that, but at the same time there are doubts about whether this makes sense, whether there is sufficient strength within the community so that this can work. Or, for example, the most common criticism is that “you have an idea of the public, the collective, the Commons, that implies capacities in the community that are only present in the middle classes that have the knowledge, the organisational capacity… so it’s a very elitist vision of the collective because the popular sectors, without the backing of the State, won’t be able to do this.” Well, we’re going to try to combine things so it can work, but we don’t want to keep converting the public into the ‘state’.

Nancy Fraser wrote an article on the triple movement – looking at Polanyi’s work on the ‘double movement’ in the Great Transformation, that is the movement towards mercantilisation, and the opposite movement it stimulated towards protection. Polanyi talks about the confrontation of these 2 movements in the early 20th century, and the State – in its soviet form or in its fascist form – as a protectionist response of society which demands protection when faced with the uncertainty, the fragility the double movement engenders. Nancy Fraser says that all that is true, but we’re no longer in the 20th century, we’re in the 21st century where factors like individual emancipation, diversity, feminism are all very important – so we shouldn’t be in favour of a protectionist movement that continues to be patriarchal and hierarchical. We need a movement for protection that generates autonomy – and there resides what I think is one of the keys of the Commons movement. The idea of being able to get protection – so, a capacity of reaction against the dynamics of the market attacks – without losing the strength of diversity, of personal emancipation, of feminism, the non-hierarchical, the non-patriarchal, the idea that somebody decide for me what I need to do and how I will be protected. Let me self-protect myself too, let me be a protagonist too of this protection. And this is contradictory with the state-centric tradition.

A Commons Economy, Participation and Co-production of Policy

AA — The first theme of the ‘Ideario’ is the economy – you are an economist, amongst other things – how do you see this proposal in terms of the Commons? For example, there is a lot of discussion now about ‘open cooperativism’, etc. What you were saying about the cooperative movement here, that it is very strong but not sufficient…

JS — In some aspects no. For example, the city wanted to open a new contract for communications (telephone, internet) – now there are the big companies Telefonica, Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, etc: there’s a cooperative called ‘Som Connexion’ (We are connection)- or ‘Som Energia’ (We are energy) that’s a lot bigger – it has 40,000 members – but these cooperatives, it would be fantastic if the city were to give them the contract for energy or for communication, but they aren’t capable of managing that at the moment. So if they take it, we’d all have big problems: faulty connections, lack of electrical power – because they’re growing for sure but they don’t yet have the ‘muscle’, the capacity they need to take this on.

So we have to continue investing in this, it’s not going to take care of itself. On the other hand, in other areas, like home services for the elderly, we do have very strong cooperatives, Abacus for example is a cooperative for book distribution that has 800 000 members, so that is a coop that’s very powerful, and there are others. But in general, the more powerful the coop, the less politicised it is – they tend to transform themselves into big service companies. But now they are understanding that perhaps it would be in their interest to have a different vision; there has been a very politicised movement in the grassroots level coops that is contradictory with the entrepreneurial trend in the big coops. So we’re in this process right now: yes, there are very big, very strong coops and there are also smaller, more political ones but they don’t have sufficient muscle yet.

AA — When we look at issues of participation, co-production of policy and such, it is also a question of culture, a culture of co-production that doesn’t exist. In the neighbourhoods, yes there is a trend to revamping participation, but when we talk to people in the local-level committees they say ‘Sure, people come to the meetings, but because they want a tree planted here…’ and they don’t have that vision of co-creation. So first there has to be a sort of cultural revolution ?

JS — There are places where there has been a stronger community tradition that could well converge with this. Some neighbourhoods like Roquetes for example, Barceloneta or Sants, have very strong associational traditions. If you go to Roquetes to the meeting of the community plan, everybody is there: the people from the primary medical services centre, the doctors, the schools are there, the local police, the social workers – and they hold meetings every 2 weeks and they know everything that goes on in the area, and they transfer cases amongst themselves: “we detected this case, how do we deal with it?” etc. The community fabric in those neighbourhoods functions really well. So what can you add to that fabric so that it can go a bit further? On the other hand, in other neighbourhoods like Ciutat Meridiana, in 5 years 50% of the population has changed, so it’s very difficult to create community where the level of expulsion or change is so high. In Sants, in Ca Batlló, there was a very interesting experience where people want to create a cooperative neighbourhood – it’s a bit polemical – they want to create a public school without using public funds, instead using money from the participants themselves, because the coop tradition in Sants is very anarchist, libertarian – so they promote the idea of a public school, open to all, but not using public funds. And it would have its own educational philosophy, that wouldn’t have to submit to standard educational discipline. And groups have appeared in different neighbourhoods dedicated to shared child-raising where there are no pre-schools for children between 0 and 3 years, or people prefer not to take the kids to public pre-schools because they find them too rigid, so they prefer generating relationships amongst parents. So what should the role of the city government be with respect to such initiatives? Should it facilitate or not? There’s a debate about how to position the municipality with respect to these initiatives that are interesting but then when, inside Barcelona en Comú or Catalunya en Comú, the person who is in charge of these issues comes with a more traditional union perspective and says “This is crazy, what we need to do is to create public schools with teachers who are professional civil servants. These experiments are fine for gentrified zones, but in reality…’” And they are partly right. So we’re in that sort of situation, which is a bit ambivalent. We’re conscious that we need to go beyond a state-centric approach, but at the same time we need to be very conscious that if we don’t reinforce the institutional role, the social fragilities are very acute.

The Commons and Issues of Sovereignty, Interdependence and the “Right to Decide”

AA — Another high-profile issue is that of sovereignty. The way it’s presented in the Ideario is criticised both by those who want a unified Spain and by those who want Catalan independence. Sovereignty is simply another word for independence in the view of many people. But the way it’s presented in the Ideario is more complex and comprehensive, linked to autonomy at every level …

JS — Exactly: it’s plural, in lower case and plural: sovereignties. The idea is a bit like what I said earlier about the city, that we want to take back the city. We want to recover the collective capacity to decide over what affects us. So it’s fine to talk about the sovereignty of Catalonia, but we also need to talk about digital sovereignty, water sovereignty, energy sovereignty, housing sovereignty – sovereignty in the sense of the capacity to decide over that which affects us. So we don’t have to wait until we have sovereignty over Catalonia in order to grapple with all this. And this has obvious effects: for example, something we are trying to develop here: a transit card that would be valid on all forms of public transit – like the “Oyster” in London, and many other cities have them – an electronic card that you can use for the train, the metro, the bus: the first thing the Barcelona city government did on this was to ask the question “Who will own the data? “. That’s sovereignty. The entity that controls the data on who moves and how in metropolitan Barcelona has an incredible stock of information with a clear commercial value. So will it belong to the company that incorporates the technology? or will the data belong to the municipality and the municipality will do with it what it needs? At the moment, they are installing digital electricity metres and digital water metres: but to whom do the data belong? because these are public concessions, concessions to enterprises in order that they provide a public service – so who owns the data?

This is a central issue. And it is raised in many other aspects, like food sovereignty. So, we want to ensure that in the future Barcelona be less dependent on the exterior for its food needs, as far as possible. So you need to work to obtain local foodstuffs, control over the products that enter – and that implies food sovereignty, it implies discussing all this. So, without saying that the sovereignty of Catalonia isn’t important, we need to discuss the other sovereignties. Because, suppose we attain the sovereignty of Catalonia as an independent state, but we are still highly dependent in all the other areas. We need to confront this. I don’t think it’s a way of avoiding the issue, it’s a way of making it more complex, of understanding that today the Westphalian concept of State sovereignty no longer makes much sense. I think we all agree on that. We are very interdependent, so how do we choose our interdependencies? That would be real sovereignty, not to be independent because that’s impossible, but rather how to better choose your interdependencies so that they have a more public content.

AA — Talking of interdependence, there is the issue as well of internationalism. Barcelona en Comú puts a lot of emphasis on that, saying ‘There is no municipalism without internationalism’ etc. From the very outset of her mandate, Ada Colau in 2015 in her inaugural speech as mayor said that ‘we will work to build a movement of cities of the Mediterranean’, and as time goes on the approach is becoming clearer, for example with the participation of Colau and the vice-mayor Gerardo Pisarello in the major international city conferences. What do you see as the importance of this internationalism within the Commons ecosystem?

JS — There are 2 key aspects for me. First, cities are clearly the most global political space and zone of social convergence that exists. Apparently when we talk about cities we’re talking about something local, but cities are actually very globalised. Benjamin Barber wrote a book about ‘Why Mayors should govern the world’. And he set out an example I think is very good: if the mayor of Montreal meets with Ada and the mayor of Nairobi and the mayor of Santiago de Chile and the mayor of say Hong-Kong, after 5 minutes together they’ll all be talking about the same things. Because the problems of cities are very similar from one place to another despite their different sizes. Questions of energy, transport, water, services, food… If we try to imagine that same meeting between Heads of State, the complexity of the political systems, cultural traditions, constitutional models and all will mean that the challenge of coming to a common understanding will be much more complex. That doesn’t mean that cities are the actors that will resolve climate change, but certainly the fact that Oslo, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Paris agree that in 2025 there will no longer be cars circulating that use diesel will have more impact than a meeting of Heads of State. With AirBnB Barcelona is in constant confrontation, the city has fined them 600,000 euros, but Barcelona on its own can’t combat AirBnB. But New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam and Barcelona have come to an agreement to negotiate jointly with AirBnb: those 5 cities together can negotiate with them. But it isn’t the problem for States, it’s much more a problem for cities than for States. And AirBnB uses digital change to enter spaces where there is a lack of precision – it’s what happens too with Uber, Deliveroo and other platforms of so-called ‘collaborative economy’, which is really extractive economy, but which use the reglamentary voids. The people who work for Uber or Deliveroo aren’t employees, they are independent entrepreneurs but they work in 19th century conditions. Tackling this problem from the level of the city can produce new solutions.

I think when we decided in 2014-2015 to attempt to work at the municipal level in Barcelona, we were aware that Barcelona isn’t just any city: Barcelona has an international presence and we wanted to use Barcelona’s international character to exert an influence on urban issues worldwide. Ada Colau participated in the Habitat conference in Quito in October 2016, before that in the meeting of local authorities in Bogota, she is now co-president of the World Union of Municipalities. So there’s an investment that didn’t start just with us but that started in the period when Maragall^[7] was mayor, a very high investment by Barcelona in participating in this international sphere of cities. This reinforces Barcelona in its confrontations with the State and with private enterprise as well. It plays an important role. There is an international commission within Barcelona en Comú, they are constantly working with other world cities – they have been in France, they have a strong link with Grenoble and will be going to a meeting of French cities in September to talk about potential collaboration, they often go to Italy, they’ve gone to Belgrade, to Poland. In June they’re organising a meeting of Fearless Cities, with the participation of many mayors from major cities in Europe and around the world.
So there is a very clear vision of the global aspect. So the global dimension is very present, and at the level of Spain as well. The problem there is that there is political interference, for example in Madrid, which is very important as a city, but within the municipal group “Ahora Madrid” they’re very internally divided, so sometimes you speak to one and the others don’t like it. We have really good relations with Galicia: A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela, also with Valencia, but Valencia also has its own dynamic. Zaragoza. Each city has its own dynamic, so sometimes it’s complicated to establish on-going relations.

AA — What about Cadiz?

JS — Of course, Cadiz is also part of this trend, but the group there is part of the Podemos anti-capitalist faction, so there are nuances.

NT — You mentioned 2 points regarding internationalism…

JS — Yes, first there was the general global perspective on cities and the second is Barcelona’s own concrete interest. So the first is more global, that is, any city in the world today has many more possibilities if it looks at its strategic global role and if it wants to strengthen its position, it has to work on the global level. In the case of Barcelona specifically, there is also a will that’s partly traditional, because it was begun by Maragall, you have to remember that here in Barcelona there are 10 districts, and during the war of the Balkans, Maragall created District 11, which was Sarajevo: city technicians went to Sarajevo to work with them, and still today there are municipal technicians who travel regularly to Gaza to work there, or with La Havana – in other words there’s a clearly established internationalist stance in the municipality. Also, the headquarters of the World Union of Local Governments is in Barcelona. The international headquarters of Educating Cities is in Barcelona, so there has constantly been a will to be present on the international scene since Maragall, and now this is continuing but with a new orientation as well. Perhaps there used to be the idea of exporting the Barcelona model, branding Barcelona, but that is no longer the case.
There’s very intense organisation globally, probably if Ada accepted all the invitations she receives, she’d be travelling all the time.

AA — Coming back to the issue of sovereignty vs independence and “the right to decide”, how does this play out?

JS — The issue of independence is internally very complex with different positions. I think there is a general agreement on 3 things, ie:

1. Catalonia has its own demos and therefore is a political subject which must be recognised,
2. it has to be able to decide how to articulate itself with the other political subjects in Spain and in Europe, it has to have the right, the capacity to decide;
3. this requires the construction of a State of its own.

It is on the fourth point that we are not in agreement: whether that State should be independent or whether it should be in some way linked, allied, confederated with the rest of the Iberian Peninsula or with Europe. These 3 initial points are sufficiently important and they are the basis for the fact that Catalunya en Comú or Barcelona en Comú is part of the broad sovereigntist space in Catalonia. What it isn’t part of is the independentist space in Catalonia. Despite the fact that I would say some 30-40% of the members are pro-independence, but the rest not. And that is an issue which divides us. But what we are trying to do is to work out this debate on the basis of our own criteria, not on those of other movements. The criteria of the others are ‘you are independentist or you are not independentist’. Our own criteria are: yes, we are sovereigntists, we discuss sovereignties and we’ll see. Since we agree on what is the most important (that is – an autonomous political subject, the right to decide, an autonomous State), let’s discuss how we can articulate. We have fraternal relations with 4 million people in the rest of Spain who agree with us on the first 3 criteria. So the key question probably would be: Does Catalonia want to separate from the rest of Spain or from this Spain? The standard response would be “We have never known any other. We’ve always seen the same Spain, so there is no other Spain”. So the debate we can have is over “Yes, another Spain is possible”. Sort of like the debate right now over whether to leave Europe: do we want to leave Europe or leave this Europe? But is another Europe possible or not?

The Challenges of Scale

NT — I am struck by the fact that every time we refer to the initiative of Catalunya en Comú, you respond by giving the example of what’s happening in Barcelona: do you see Barcelona as the model for Un Pais en Comú?

JS — No, it’s not that it’s the model, there is even some reticence within Barcelona en Comú that this new political initiative may have negative consequences for Barcelona en Comú. The Barcelona in Comú experiment has worked really well: within BeC political parties continue to exist (Podemos, Iniciativa, EUIA, Guanyem) and all agree that it’s necessary to create this subject, because it’s clear – there’s a phrase by a former mayor of Vitoria in the Basque country who said “Where my capacities end, my responsibilities begin” – that is, clearly, cities are developing roles that are more and more important, but their capacities continue to be very limited and especially their resources are very limited – so there’s an imbalance between capacities and responsibilities. Between what cities could potentially do and what they really can do. Refuge-cities – a thousand things. So within Barcelona en Comú there is an understanding of the interest of creating Catalunya en Comú in order to have influence in other levels of government. And to present candidates in elections in Spain with En Comú Podem because to be represented in Madrid is also important. But of course, sometimes this expansion can make us lose the most original aspect, that is the emphasis on municipalism, in the capacity to create these spaces – so there’s a certain tension. And obviously, when you go outside Barcelona in Catalonia, the local and territorial realities are very different, you find… you no longer control what kind of people are joining and so you can end up with surprises – good and bad ones – so there are some doubts, some growing pains. You have to grow, but how will that affect what we have so far? our ways of working and all that… I always refer to Barcelona en Comú because we have existed for longer, we have a sort of ‘tradition’ in the way we work, and on the contrary, the other day we held the founding assembly of Catalunya en Comú and – where are we headed? how long will we be able to maintain the freshness, avoid falling into the traditional vices of political parties? Xavi (Domenech) is a very good candidate, he has what I call a Guanyem DNA, but it’s not evident that we can pull this through. That’s the doubt.

NT — How do you assess the results of the founding assembly of Catalunya en Comú? Are you happy with what came out of it?

JS — Yes, I’m satisfied, although I don’t think the results were optimal, but we are squeezed by a political calendar that we don’t control. It’s very probable that there will be elections this year in Catalonia, so if that happens… what would have been preferable? To reproduce the Barcelona en Comú model, take more time and work more from the bottom up, hold meetings throughout the territory – we did hold about 70 or 80, but a lot more would have been better – do things more slowly and look around, build links with local movements, the same ones as in Barcelona but on the level of Catalonia – energy, water, etc: reconstruct the same process. But sure, they’re going to call elections or a referendum in 2 days. What is clear is that we can’t do the same thing as with ‘Catalunya si que es pot’^[8], which was a coalition but it didn’t work. So all this has meant that the process – despite the fact that I think it has been carried out well, is not optimal: within the realm of the possible, I think it was done with great dignity.

NT — And with respect to the deliberative process that was used to arrive at the final document?

JS — Basically the same thing: it could have been done better, with deeper debates in each area, it was done very quickly, a lot of issues in a short period of time. The task was very complex, and I think the result is worthy. We tried to avoid standardised jargon and parameters, to make it a bit different. So now we’ll see – yesterday the Executive met for the first time, and on May 13 will be the first meeting of the coordinating group of 120 people^[9]. So we’ll have to see how this all is gotten underway. I am not convinced that it will all be functional in time for the Catalan elections, for me the key date is May 2019 which are the next municipal elections. Then we’ll see if this has really jelled and if we can have a significant presence throughout the territory. This territorial vision is very important in order to avoid a top-down construction. The key thing in Catalonia is to do it with dignity and not to become entrapped in this dual logic of independence or not, to be capable of bringing together a social force that is in that position.

Originally published on remixthecommons.org, where the interview is also available in French.

Photo by christopher.berry

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