North America Regional Municipalist Summit

New York City July 27-29, 2018

A growing movement across the globe is seeking to democratize and feminize political institutions at the level closest to our day-to-day lives: the municipal level. Weaving together social movements, participatory tools, solidarity economy, concrete wins, and the confluence of diverse political forces into a more direct form of democracy.

Join us in New York City from July 27-29 for the Fearless Cities North America Regional Summit, the first ever municipalist summit in North America. This regional Fearless Cities will include comprehensive participation from Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Greater Caribbean and will be rooted in the international network coalesced by last year’s Fearless Cities international summit.

Register Here

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In Spain’s municipal elections of May 2015, a constellation of new political forces emerged. For the first time in almost 40 years of Spanish democracy, the country’s major cities would no longer be ruled by either the Partido Popular (PP) or the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), or any of the other long established political forces, but by new “Municipalist Confluences” such as Ahora Madrid, Barcelona en Comú, and Cadiz Si Se Puede, to name just a few.

While each of these Municipalist Confluences is the product of specific local contexts, with its own languages, traditions, and cultures, together they represent the possibility of a sea change in the politics of Spain and beyond. Especially in light of the existence of a strong, post-Francoist right, which has committed itself to the “culture war” of Spanish nationalism, these confluences point toward the possibility of creating a new political subject capable of breaking the impasse that has characterized so much of national politics in the age of austerity.

Bringing together political parties new and old, nationwide movements and hyper-local social initiatives, and a mass of disaffected voters with long-organized neighborhood groups, these confluences are a sort of radical experiment conducted at the municipal level. They have not only restructured established political processes and practices, but also shifted notions of power in order to grant traditionally underrepresented groups, including women, access to the political domain. The election of Ada Colau is a case in point. As the first woman to hold the office of Mayor of Barcelona, Colau’s political work highlights the connections between gender equality and other forms of social, political, and economic justice.

Author Vicente Rubio-Pueyo is a professor at Fordham University. He has written extensively, both in academic contexts and in the press, on the current social and political conjuncture in Spain, and on political forces including Podemos and the Municipalist Confluences. A Spaniard living in the US for more than ten years now, Vicente has also been active in building connections and mutual understanding between these forces and their counterparts in North America.

In this excellent study he analyzes the Municipalist Confluences, how they came to be, and where they can take politics in Spain and beyond. Drawing on a deep knowledge of history, combined with astute theoretical and political analysis, Rubio-Pueyo provides an international audience with everything it needs to know about municipalism in Spain. His work brings us up to the minute, and is sure to have value for years to come.

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT  (English)

Photo by BarcelonaEnComu

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How can democracies use technologies to strengthen themselves? Answers are emerging around the world, with the central theme being that technology can make politics more engaging, successful and legitimate by enabling people to become active producers of political outcomes instead of passive consumers. 

Devin Balkind writes about how technology can advance participatory democracy practices while citing policy-led examples in Taiwan and Madrid. Originally published in Education Update Online.

Devin Balkind: Democracy in the United States was established nearly 250 years ago when news travelled at the speed of a horse and real-time collaboration required sharing a physical location. Today, ubiquitous internet access, smartphones, social media, and online collaboration tools have transformed how we work, play and consume, but the basic structure of our politics remains the same.

The result is that during an era of massive innovation, our static politics have disempowered the public and made our representative democracy feel more like a “consumer” one. Parties are brands; politicians are products; and our job as consumer-citizens is to purchase “our” politician with our votes. U.S. media and education systems strengthen the notion of “consumer democracy” by obsessing over the theatrics that motivate people to vote instead of educating people about the issues, policies and processes that impact all our lives. The public is not pleased. Congress and the President’s approval ratings are at record lows, as are voter participation rates.

How can democracies use technologies to strengthen themselves? Answers are emerging around the world, with the central theme being that technology can make politics more engaging, successful and legitimate by enabling people to become active producers of political outcomes instead of passive consumers. 

Two examples of “participatory democracy” are taking place in Taiwan and Madrid. In Taiwan, the “vTaiwan” project encourages the public to participate in a multi-month, multi-phase “consultation process” where citizens give issue-specific feedback offline and online. They use that feedback to create their own legislative and administrative proposals, and the most popular proposal are ratified and implemented by the government. Over the last three years, tens of thousands of people have participated, resulting in more than a dozen new laws and administrative actions. In Madrid, city government built a platform that enables citizens to debate issues and propose legislation. If that legislation meets a popularity threshold, it automatically becomes law.

Surprisingly, there are few if any truly participatory political projects in the United States. While New York City has “participatory budgeting,” its many restrictions and limited scope makes it fundamentally different than the open-ended participatory processes practiced overseas.

New York City’s Public Advocate is supposed to be the voice of all New Yorkers. As such, it’s the perfect position to bring a technology-enabled collective decision-making process to our City. Since it’s democratically elected, the Public Advocate can give “participatory democracy” real legitimacy. And since it has consultative status with the City Council and many city agencies, the Public Advocate can bring the public’s will directly to the people who run our city.

I’m running for Public Advocate to put “participatory democracy” on the ballot in November. With your help, we can put the Public exactly where it should be — directly in charge of the Public Advocate.#

Devin works at the intersection of the nonprofit sector, the open-source movement, and grassroots community organizing to share and initiate best practices. He currently serves as president of the Sahana Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization that produces open source information management system for disaster relief and humanitarian aid. He is running for NYC 2017 Public Advocate.

Photo by transnationalinstitute

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Anyone interested in survival in today’s Europe, should read this book.”

Srecko Horvat, Philosopher, DiEM25

This is the press release for European Alternative’s recently published Shifting Baselines of Europe. It’s a very readable tome which includes, among many outstanding contributions, an edited version of my interview with Ahora Madrid’s heads of Citizen Participation and Transparency. You can download the book from this link: Shifting Baselines of Europe.

European Alternatives: With contributions by Etienne Balibar, Ulrike Guérot, Gesine Schwan, Renata Avila, Barbara Spinelli, Andreas Karitzis, Lorenzo Marsili, Jonas Staal, among others, and interviews with city governors from Madrid to Naples. 

What if another Europe already exists? The new book of European Alternatives follows this question and explores a Europe beyond Neoliberalism and Nationalism. Etienne Balibar opens the book, asking for “Our European incapacity”. In her reply Ulrike Guérot reflects on what “Our European capacities” could be. Together they tackle the fundamental crisis underlying the European integration process, the missed opportunity to become a Union of Citizens by giving up on national sovereignty.

The publication is inspired by a meeting of 80 activists, researchers and artists from across the continent which took place in 2016. European Alternatives invited them to its biannual Campus to develop strategies for an open and democratic Europe. Many of the projects presented at the Campus are to be found in the book:  from the municipal level to the level of transnational media, from technology and counter-surveillance to a concrete proposal to revive the European refugee policy.

The book  proves that a shift towards a new way of thinking and doing politics is not only possible, but actually already happening.

About the Authors

European Alternatives works to promote democracy, equality and culture beyond the nation states. With offices in four European countries and a network of activists and local groups stretching to over fourteen, the organisation is unique in being at once a breeding ground for new ideas and proposals for politics and culture at a European level and in being a political and cultural actor with a truly transeuropean activity, staff and support base.

Daphne Büllesbach is Managing Director of European Alternatives and curator of Transeuropa Festival, a bi-annual cultural, political and arts event. She holds degrees in Political and Social Sciences from London, Paris and Cambridge.

Marta Cillero is responsible for Communications at European Alternatives. She studied media studies, journalism and communication in Madrid, Istanbul and Chicago, and has a background in gender studies.

Lukas Stolz is special projects collaborator at European Alternatives and previously worked as a campaigner with Democracy International. His research interest lies in the intersection between politics, cultural theory and art and he holds a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Witten/Herdecke.

Photo by 15mmalagacc

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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.

Instead of trying to use the hierarchical structures of parties and government in the usual ways to “represent” the people, the new local parties in Spain are trying to transform government itself and political norms. Inspired by Occupy-style movements working from the bottom up, local municipal parties want to make all governance more transparent, horizontal, and accessible to newcomers. They want to make politics less closed and proprietary, and more of an enactment of open source principles. It’s all about keeping it real.

To get a clearer grasp of this phenomena, Stacco Troncoso of the P2P Foundation recently interviewed two members of Ahora Madrid, a city-based party comprised of former 15M activists who forged a new electoral coalition that prevailed in Madrid in 2015. (The full interview can be found here.)  The coalition’s victory was important because it opened up a new narrative for populist political transformation. Instead of the reactionary, anti-democratic and hate-driven vision embodied by Brexit, Trump and the National Front, this one is populist, progressive and paradigm-shifting.

Below, I distill some of the key sights that surfaced in Troncoso’s interview with Victoria Anderica, head of the Madrid City Council’s Office of Transparency, and Miguel Arana, director of Citizen Participation. The dialogue suggests how a social movement can move into city government without giving up their core movement ideals and values.  Implementation remains difficult, of course, but Ahora Madrid has made some impressive progress.

First, a clarification:  To outsiders, the political insurgency in Spain is usually associated with the upstart Podemos party.  That is a significant development, of course, but Podemos is also much more traditional.  Its party structure and leadership are more consolidated than those of Ahora Madrid, which considers itself an “instrumental party.”  It qualified to run in the 2015 elections as a party, but it does not have the internal apparatus of normal parties.

Ahora Madrid realized that the formation of political parties can actually make a movement’s goals more vulnerable.  As Arana explained, “We won [the election] because we were in the streets for all these years, thinking about the things we wanted to do and change – being really clear, building the movement without leaders, without faces, without laws….Outside, you’re a lot more resilient against attacks because it’s about the ideas, not the people.  It’s about the ideas of how the country should be.”

In its early days, Ahora Madrid avoided the vulnerabilities of having high-profile leaders become synonymous with the party. “Leaders can be attacked, which could make it look like the whole thing is destroyed,” said Arana. “We’re very happy we didn’t make that mistake in the first years.  We built something serious, and now we can enter the [political] institutions.”

To devise a party that avoids hierarchical control, centralized power and celebrity-leaders, Ahora Madrid developed an open process that invites anyone to join and participate.  One tool is an online proportional voting system called Dowdall – the same one used for a European singing contest, Eurovision. The system allows citizen-voters to give differently weighted points to people running for different positions in the government. The party leader cannot automatically dictate the party’s slate of candidates. This allows for a wider diversity of party leaders. Ahora Madrid’s people in city government include ecologists, political independents, traditional party people, and others.  Ahora Madrid’s party program was similarly built through an open, collaborative process, said Arana.  There were working groups and then Internet voting on the proposed agenda.

Of course, the Madrid City Council remains structured as a vertical, hierarchical system that operates in a traditional way.  Ahora Madrid’s solution is to “bypass the hierarchy as much as we can,” said Arana.  He conceded that this is “really difficult in the end because there is a small group of people making a lot of the decisions.”

While this systemic problem cannot be fully avoided for now, there is a city department specifically dedicated to “Citizen Participation, Transparency and Open Government.”  Its explicit mission is to solve these problems by inventing entirely new sorts of processes. The office recognizes that it is not enough to throw information onto a website as PDF files.  Information must be easy to locate and translated from bureaucratese into ordinary language.

“If you go to the transparency portal of the state and search for ‘salaries,’ you won’t find anything, said Victoria Anderica.  “You have to put in a very specific word, ‘remuneration’ or whatever, to find the salaries.  That’s very stupid!  And that’s just the most basic thing.  We want to work with the portal so that questions are answered very easily.”  Achieving this goal requires that the city’s software platforms use open source software and open technical standards.

The Citizen Participation office has been developing a new platform for improving political deliberation, proposals and deciding.  Drawing upon the wisdom of other projects around the world, the coalition has used a software program called Consul to develop the Decide Madrid platform.  The city is sharing the platform with other cities, including Barcelona, Oviedo and A Coruña, and has spoken about it with dozens of other cities in Spain and worldwide.  Could this be the kernel of a new type of open-source municipal governance?

“The basic process is the citizens initiative process,” Arana explained.  “Anyone can enter the platform and propose something in common language.  Anyone can support the proposals.  Once a proposal reaches the threshold, which is 2% of the census of 50,000 people, it goes to a referendum one month later.  Then, if there are more people voting ‘yes’ or ‘no’, we take it as binding and we fulfill the proposal.”

The process depends upon the goodwill of Ahora Madrid because the Spanish constitution forbids binding referendums.  But the party is committed to respecting the will of the people as determined by votes on Madrid Decide.

The City of Madrid also has a system of participatory budgeting that lets citizens decide how to allocate 60 million euro in municipal investments.  Ahora Madrid is also trying to develop new mechanisms to give citizens greater access to and participation in the city council and other parts of the government that use traditional, closed systems of decisionmaking.

One reason that Ahora Madrid has succeeded electorally is that its openness has earned public trust.  Arana said:  “We were really open and our attitude was, like, ‘OK, you take control of it!  You can control the campaign…control everything.  It’s your party.  You can do whatever you want!’  And that’s how we built trust; people really trusted this.  They trusted the process and supported us massively.  In one or two months, we had a very good shot of winning –= and with no money.  The money we had we raised through crowdfunding, and it wasn’t all that much, either.  We did it without the support of the media, without any of the kind of power that everybody assumes is necessary to win elections.”

The best argument for the Ahora Madrid approach may be the cautionary example of Podemos, which pursued a more traditional party approach in regional and national elections, and lost.  “This happened in every region and every province of Spain,” said Arana.  “At the same time, the ‘local versions’ of these parties won in all the major cities.  We won in Madrid, Barcelona, Cádiz, A Coruña, Zaragoza.”

“So this is very clear:  this is the way you do it.  You have to share control with everybody else.  If you make it look as if you’re opening up, but you’re not really doing it in the end, people see through that straight away.  If you don’t open up and share your control with everyone, you lose that potential,” said Arana.  “People will not support you because they understand it’s more your game, and not theirs.  They don’t feel the need to engage.”

The local urban parties won because they were open to everyone, driven by participatory decisionmaking, and animated by social justice as a core priority.  Democratic participation as a strategy for winning elections:  What a concept!

Lead image adapted from one of the many brilliant campaign images from the Movimiento de Liberación Gráfica Madrid featuring Manuela Carmena.

The post Reinventing Politics via Local Political Parties appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This year we’ve been talking about the municipalist uprising in Barcelona and, more recently, in A Coruña and Valencia. But what about Madrid, the state capital of Spain and a conservative stronghold for 2 decades? How did a bunch of 15M activists form an electoral coalition which, after lagging in the polls, finally had a breakthrough victory? A win that shatters the chronic neoliberal narrative and forges an alternative path bearing little resemblance to the Brexits, the Trumps, to all that we’ve been conditioned to endure, if not expect.

We see the networked, humane logics of P2P and the Commons reflected clearly in these civil-society led electoral platforms. Against all odds, they upend the power structure and challenge the establishment clique. But is it about winning power, or more about reexamining it? What happens when you find yourself taking that power, as an individual working towards change from within – does your life change? Do you find yourself feeling absorbed by the system, or can you manage to hack it from within?

With these and other questions in mind, I paid a visit to the Madrid city council’s citizen participation, transparency and open government department, and sat down with Victoria Anderica, head of Transparency, and Miguel Arana, director of Citizen Participation. Their shared office is spacious and well-lit, nothing to take for granted in an unsurprisingly institutional government building. Like protective amulets against the dire aesthetics, they’ve peppered the walls with 15M protest posters and Ahora Madrid cartoons. Some booklets on free healthcare for undocumented immigrants and refugees are strewn about the desks. “Yes, Madrid cares for you”, they read.

Among other things, Victoria and Miguel spoke about citizen participation, transparency, the Commons, a 60 million-euro participatory budget, the persistent misunderstanding that Podemos equals Ahora Madrid or Barcelona en Comú, how to bring “open source logics” to city governance, and the difficulties of institutional encroachment for those used to consensus-oriented assembly spaces. Although recorded separately, we’ve edited the interview to read in-line. We hoped that in doing this, the answers to the questions I asked both Victoria and Miguel form a fuller picture of their municipal – and personal – experiences.

Victoria Anderica and Miguel Arana

Stacco Troncoso: There were some meetings two years ago, in a well-know Madrid squat/social center called Patio Maravillas, among other places, where people made a statement: “We’re going to take power”. That was Ganemos. They were called crazy, yet one year later, you took power. I’d like to hear your view of these last two years – first, the transition from Ganemos Madrid to Ahora Madrid, and then the second, the year since the election.

Victoria Anderica: Well, I was working in Access Info Europe, fighting for transparency in Europe. Our offices are here in Madrid, so, we’ve had a big campaign here in Spain. I was in touch with people in the movement because they were interested in promoting and including transparency within the electoral program, which we were very happy about. So I knew about the movement, but I wasn’t personally involved in the creation of the Ganemos movement. I was just hoping, as someone who lives in Madrid, that Manuela Carmena, the mayor, was going to win. But it really was a surprise at the end.

Miguel Arana: OK. First, one important word is power. When social movements think about power, they think about institutions. That’s where power resides: you just have to enter the building, become the one who gives the orders, and then things will change. One thing I love about Spain in this recent period is that from the very beginning of the movements on the streets, the idea was that we’re not going to the institutions. That was wonderful – we were out there for three or four years in the streets, in the squares, the assemblies, the “citizen tides” (mareas) green, white, etc. – the Stop Evictions movement – and the idea then was, “We don’t care about institutions! We’ll get together and think about how to change everything, press on and make all these crazy actions and ideas and everything we can imagine”. And then, just in this last phase, after we tried everything else (laughing) we said, “…ok, maybe we could also try to enter the institutions. Some part of the power is there – we should get inside”.  I think this is an important remark. When people are looking from the outside – from other countries – it’s difficult to understand what’s been happening all these years. It’s very easy to focus just on this last part: “ok, they built a party, finally, they got into the institutions – now they’re changing things…”

Stacco: “Now they’re serious…”

Miguel: Yeah, “now they’re serious” and it’s like…no, no, no (laughing), it’s the opposite. We got to the institutions because we spent four years building something really strong, really powerful, and that’s what allows us to enter them now. This is also important because the game in the institutions is a difficult and special one. To some degree, it’s designed so you usually can’t win when you come from outside. We won because we were in the streets for all these years, thinking about the things we wanted to do and change, being really clear, building the movement without leaders, without faces, without laws – everything. Now, we can be in the institutions and face the attacks, which are really crazy. Outside, you’re a lot more resilient against attacks because it’s about the ideas, not the people. It’s about the ideas of how the country should be. When you’re inside, they only focus on the people. They just focus on the subtle things, crazy things, you know?

One of the many brilliant campaign images from the Movimiento de Liberación Gráfica Madrid featuring Manuela Carmena.

Stacco: Can you clarify who you mean by “they”, or, the attacks?

Miguel: Especially the media and the other parties, the traditional parties – the way they interact with you is by not focusing on problems or solutions; they only focus on you, personally. It’s like, “you did this…” or, “you’re coming from this world”, or – whatever. And it’s a totally different kind of debate. Previously, when we were not a party, when we weren’t the people inside, we never talked about ourselves. We just talked about the problems (laughing), that was the important thing!  All the things we talked about for four years, now we can go inside and try to put these ideas into practice. Solve things, and face these attacks with some strength. If we had built a party the first year, it could have been very easily destroyed. Back then, we would have had some leaders; leaders can be attacked, which could make it look like the whole thing is destroyed. We’re very happy we didn’t make that mistake in the first years. We built something serious, and now we can enter the institutions.

So this last phase, building the party, was really different. The values that the movement held as important before — horizontality, avoiding structures, no hierarchies — well, once you get inside, you are required to build some kind of hierarchy. Things are not as horizontal as you would like anymore. Of course this is problematic. You have to understand, and imagine how you want to solve these things. I think we’ve been able to get through some of the main problems, for example, building the electoral list. That was done in Ahora Madrid, in a very open way. Anyone could just join…

Stacco: Could you explain that, because people may not be familiar with the lists.

Miguel: It was an open process where any person could propose him/herself on a list with other people. Then we had an online voting process where people could register and vote. We used a proportional system called Dowdall [1] —  the same kind of system, just to explain it in common terms, that’s used in Eurovision…

Stacco: The Eurovision song contest?

Miguel: (laughing) Yeah. If you give one point to the first one, one half to the second, one third – you give different weighted points to the people you vote for. That was important because usually, when there are lists competing in a system, people know the head (or the “leader”) of the list, but they don’t know the rest. Sometimes a prescribed list can take total control of the structure without voters wanting everyone actually in that list to be there – maybe they want the leader, they trust the leader. The leader usually – or sometimes – is the one who chose the others on the list. So, the democracy of this system can get a bit lost.

Stacco: Right, because in the end you have this unitary list, but what you proposed, what happened, was more diversity – you had different voices, complementary…

Miguel: Since you’re giving different powers to all the lists, all the lists get mixed. Even if one of the lists gets 70% of the vote, they don’t have 70% of the upper position, the most important positions. So, with this system, all of the lists get mixed and then you have real diversity there. That worked really wonderfully. Now, in the city government, there are ecologists, people from the traditional parties, the independent people, people from the communist party, as examples…

Stacco: Wow…

Miguel: I mean, real diversity, and they all have different kinds of power, and they have to survive together. This is wonderful. We have seen other situations during this last phase of electoral experiences where this has not been done. Or, there have always been online voting systems where anyone could propose anyone, but if you don’t control the way it’s done, one single list can take all the power.  In the end, the effect can be just as if it was done in the traditional way, as if the leader prescribed the candidates on the list, and so on. Despite the institutional requirement to build a recognizable hierarchy and settle on the those who would take the roles of power inside the city council, we still managed to find a system where it was done in the most open and democratic way of ways. To me, this is key.

Also, the party program was, essentially, built in an open, collaborative way. There were working groups deciding the main issues for the program, it was open on the internet for people to vote, etc. It’s a difficult problem – maybe one of the most difficult problems to solve in collective process – to draft such a complex text including ideas for the long term. It’s not easy to be absolutely sure that everyone agrees with the ideas. That’s a problem we still haven’t solved. But at least it was done with the tools we have, where people could vote, and have opinions.

But then, of course, once we were inside the institutions, things got more “traditional”. Now, there are councilmen and councilwomen, they have the power and decisions, it’s quite vertical – but, since most of us are not really coming from the traditional political field, we’re coming up with different ideas of how to do this.

Stacco:  So, would you say there’s something of a nominal hierarchy – because there are “boxes” which people must fit inside – but that informally, you bypass that hierarchy? And they know that they’re representing the people but also their other co-workers in the party?

Miguel: Yeah…we’re bypassing the hierarchy as much as we can (laughing). It’s really difficult to bypass. In the end, there is a small group of people taking a lot of the decisions. Every week, they have to take a lot of decisions, it’s crazy. The system is not really well thought out, so you can’t really open the process and ask citizens a lot of questions, get their feedback – this is not done. Even if you wanted to, it’s not really possible with the system as it is now. Something totally different would need to be thought of. The government works in a really traditional way, but it’s the will of the people inside to do it differently. So they’re really open: the doors of the councilmen and women are open, it doesn’t matter if you’re a collective or a person – doesn’t matter who you are, they’re meeting everybody, every day, every hour, and making a strong effort to be able to solve this problem.

Stacco: So, they’re exhausted (laughing)…

Miguel: Yeah, they’re totally exhausted, working like 14 hours a day, every day, weekends…it’s a bit beyond human forces, I mean, you can’t do it. The system is not designed to solve this. We’re somewhat lucky because we’re in a specific department, which is the Citizen Participation, Transparency and Open Government department, so our role is to solve that problem. We don’t have to produce some specific content to decide specific laws – just to make these laws or rules to listen to the people. Perhaps we don’t suffer as much as other departments. I think we’re starting things to solve and bypass this problem in a real way. We’re starting all these new processes – Direct Democracy processes…

Stacco: Yes, I’m going to ask about that, but first I want to backtrack. Just tell us what your specific roles are, Victoria and Miguel, within the Ayuntamiento, and if you can tell us about your personal trajectory before you got into office. Let’s start with you, Victoria…

Victoria: Nowadays, I’m the head of transparency for the city of Madrid. We’re putting all kinds of measures into place that we consider essential to ensure and promote transparency within the city. Before that I was a transparency advocate, working at Access Info for almost 6 years, trying to get governments to improve transparency policies. So basically, now I have to do it myself! It’s quite a challenge, but I think we’re getting there. In one year, we’ve done a lot. We’ve based the first step in ensuring that everything we’re going to do is going to last. This means having rulings — not laws, we don’t make laws — but making sure that whatever we do is not only because we want to, but ensuring that the following government will also be transparent. For most of our first year, we’ve published a lot of information and put a lot into practice, but mainly we’re also making sure that it’s going to last, that it’s not something that this government does for four years and then after that, everything’s just going to go back to where we were.

Stacco: So, what you’re saying is you’re making actual legal rulings; you’re embedding it in the “code” so it carries on itself?

Victoria: Exactly, so it can’t be changed. If there’s another government which has absolute majority and they want to change it, well, there’s nothing we can do. But obviously, it’s not very sexy for a government to say “no” to transparency.

Stacco: (laughing) Say “yes” to opacity.

Victoria: Yeah.

Stacco: Miguel, what can you tell me about your specific role within City Hall, your trajectory and how you got here?

Miguel:  OK. My position is director of the Citizen Participation project. The department is divided into two: participation and transparency (that’s me, and Victoria is the director of transparency). I come from science, I’m a doctor of theoretical physics – nothing to do with politics – and I was working in that field until I came here. At the same time, I was working in the University, finishing my PhD, and I was very involved in the movement in the squares and 15M. Most of us had parallel lives during these last years. We had some kind of job, and at the same time, we were trying to use all the time we had to be involved in the movement, because we were absolutely clear that this could change everything. In the last phase, it became really absorbing! We were full-time, because of course here you can’t be part-time. You use up all your free time. Some of us decided to be here full time. But the most important part of my trajectory was probably the experience we had in the squares.

Stacco: That’s great  – for me, it’s not your labor history, but where you’re coming from. OK, I’m going to ask about the various platforms. First of all, I’d like to talk about transparencia.madrid.es. What are your plans for it, how will it work, and how has it been received so far?

Victoria: Well, the website hasn’t changed very much since we arrived, at least formally. We’ve added a lot of information which was not there before we arrived, but the site itself hasn’t changed. The way people interact with the website, and can – or can’t, in many cases – find information, hasn’t changed yet. That’s going to take more time. For us it was more important, as I said, to start by establishing the foundations of what a transparency system should be. So, the next step would be to actually change the portal. We have some ideas to have a site where people could find information very easily, but we also want to have a portal which goes beyond displaying the data. It has to be possible for anyone to understand it. That’s a key aspect of what we want from these four years of transparency.

We don’t want to just publish documents that no one understands. Normal people – I’m including myself, of course – we just don’t speak the administrative language. We need to find information in the way that we normally find it…here’s a very silly example. If you go to the transparency portal of the state and search for “salaries”, you won’t find anything. You have to put in a very specific word, I don’t know if it was “remuneration” or what, to find the salaries – that’s very stupid! And that’s just the most basic thing. We want to work with the portal so the questions are answered very easily.

Cartoon images of Ahora Madrid working. Original art by Enrique Flores.

Stacco: What kind of outreach are you doing with non-digital natives, or for people who might not have access to the internet?

Victoria: Well, the transparency systems are divided into two parts. One part is the right of every person to request information. That’s something that is, and has been, implemented and ensured for anyone who wants to request it via computer, or anyone who wants to come in personally, or send by mail, a request for information which is put in a register. For the practical application, it’s a fact that for transparency, the evolution of new technology has been essential.  It wouldn’t be possible without a transparency portal. It’s not possible to have a room with all that information printed, so that anyone could publish it. So, we don’t have a physical bureau, but anyone can request information and receive it in a printed version. If anyone requires it, they will get it, by law. But, that said, the reality is that most of the people who request information do so digitally, because that’s how we interact with each other nowadays.

Stacco: Let’s talk now about the citizen participation portal, Decide Madrid. Tell us how it works, how long it’s been up, and what the general reaction has been.

Miguel: OK. Before coming into the institutions, one of the main problems we faced was that the moment you want to open the movement to everybody and have them make decisions, you start facing the complexity of the situation. If you want to have 20 people debate and decide something, it’s easy. You make an assembly, like we had in the squares, you talk, and that’s it. If you want to have 100 – or 1,000 – people, maybe you can still have an assembly or some kind of a more complex system, but if you want to scale up, it’s impossible.

Stacco: Say, how many people are in the census, in Madrid?

Miguel: We have 3.2 million people, something like that…

Stacco: They won’t fit in a squat…(laughing)

Miguel: Yeah, it’s totally impossible, anywhere! You also want to build an effective system. You don’t want just one decision in four years, you want to take all of the important decisions, every day. We believe that this can only be solved through the internet with a digital platform where all the physical barriers disappear, and where you can have thousands of people talking, deciding, proposing, whatever. This whole year, we’ve been thinking about the tools we had available, trying and experimenting with everything that was on the internet. We learned a lot, tried a lot of platforms and got a lot of experience. But still there is no set, proper platform really capable of allowing all these direct democracy processes that we want. Nothing fits what we really need.

So, we decided from the beginning to design a platform that collects our years of experiences and similar experiences we’ve heard about from all over the world, and build something that allows us to produce mechanisms and reproduce the democratization we want to see. We started with this new platform. The software is called Consul and the platform is called Decide Madrid.

• From Citizen Data to the Wisdom of the Crowds: The Case Study of Decide Madrid from Pablo Aragón

We started from scratch in June, it got built very fast. In September of last year, we opened the first very basic process for the platform to start to work. It’s a free software platform, we’re sharing it with different cities. Barcelona, Oviedo and A Coruña are using it. We’ve already spoken with 40 or 50 cities who are interested, in Spain but also in other countries. Complutense in Madrid, the city’s largest university with one-hundred thousand students, they’re installing the platform – so it’s really spreading. It’s great because we’re not building it alone. The core developers team is here in Madrid, plus others in Barcelona and other places who are really helping – it’s amazing. It’s meant to be a flexible platform for different kinds of processes, different democratic mechanisms.

Stacco: Can you give us an example?

Miguel: Yes, the basic process is the citizens initiative process. Anyone can enter the platform and propose something in common language. Anyone can support the proposals. Once a proposal reaches the threshold, which is 2% of the census or 50,000 people, it goes to a referendum one month later. Then, if there are more people voting “yes” or “no”, we take it as binding and we fulfill the proposal.

Stacco: And, is this debated in parliament, is it debated online, or…

Miguel: The thing is, we have a problem in Spain because the constitution forbids us to have binding referendums.

Stacco: But you have a majority, so, if it’s binding internally for you, that means that automatically, you have the majority of votes…

Miguel: Exactly, we take it as binding but legally, we can’t force it to be, because of the constitution. It’s something absolutely crazy, I think no place in the world forbids this – it’s illegal! It’s really illegal…

Stacco: But in your jobs as representatives, when you go to assembly you will vote, and just by mathematics, you will get a majority.

Miguel: Exactly, the thing is that some of the decisions can be taken by the executive of the city council (the Ahora Madrid party), so that’s automatic. Some decisions should be taken into the local parliament where the other parties are, and where Ahora Madrid is the minority party. We have the support of the Socialist party, and together we have a majority, but they have to agree with things. They say they agree with the mechanism, that we’ll have binding agreements, of course, and that there will be no problems, but…(laughing) we’ll see! .

Stacco: There are very different economic interests at play.

Miguel: Yes, it’s a bit different because the Socialist party is a traditional party, a “real” party. Ahora Madrid is just an instrumental party, something very different. We’ll see, but in principle, it could work as if it were binding without a problem. Decide Madrid is the most important mechanism because it comes from the bottom up. Really, people can decide what they want to do. There is no limit to the kinds of proposals they can suggest, and they are not limited to the city. For example, they can propose that we want to stop the war in Iraq. Of course, the city cannot stop the war! But if one million people in Madrid were to vote against the war, that could produce a very important political effect. This makes a statement against the war that is not aesthetic. Maybe what could be voted on would be having the Mayor meet the Ambassador…

Stacco: …to amplify the effect.

Miguel: Yes. The city government could call the national government and say, “We should abandon this war”, something like this. The thing is, we don’t want to impose limits. We want to build something that anyone in the city can join, to have a debate and decide together whatever they want. If we can do it, people will join. If we can’t, we’ll do as much we can to get closer.

We’re also studying different mechanisms to open the city council for the citizens. For example, we opened the citizen budget, a participatory budget. This year a small part of the budget, 60 million euros (which, anyway, is a huge sum of money) is now decided by the people. Yes, people can always make proposals, but this is much more specific because now, they’re proposing on how to spend a certain amount of money. You cannot propose just anything, it has to be focused on how to use money. It’s part of the city’s investment budget. It’s open, but not everything is an investment, so, it’s close to specific issues. You can build a school, a social center, maybe fix some streets, but you can’t spend the money however you like. There are legal terms.

This is not so powerful, it hasn’t got as much potential as some other mechanisms, but we thought it was interesting because the budget is one of the main tools in the city council. It can really design the kind of policies that you want, so it’s important to be open to everybody. It’s been very well received: 5,000 really good proposals were submitted. Nothing stupid, all really focused on issues that haven’t been solved in recent years. We also have another process, the redevelopment of one of the main squares of the city (Plaza de España), and we started that process on the web.

Refugees are welcome in Madrid City Hall. Image by Jerome Paz.

Stacco: But you put forward that proposal, it wasn’t put forward by someone…

Miguel: Exactly, it’s another kind of process which we call the “electoral” process. Here we start from the top, rather than the bottom. Parts of the government that were traditionally executed in a closed way by the councilmen, like the redevelopment of this square, for example. That was one of the main problems in the last few years:  the big, stupid construction and waste of money. The councilmen decided with us to make it participatory, to open it up to everybody. We created a specific process where people answered 18 questions to design the kind of square they want – do they want it green, with bike lanes or not. These answers are binding for the square. The process is now open, so architects can send their projects, but they must fulfill what people requested. They present their projects, we upload them to the website. People will be able vote and, in the last phase, decide what to build.

The potential is not as huge as the main, general process because it’s so specific, but it’s also important that we start taking these small corners of power inside, to bypass them and build a new way of solving these problems. We just have to go step-by-step, taking what we can. Next month, we’ll start a human rights program that is also going to be done in a participatory way, people will vote on the measures they want us to fulfill. We’re going to start a process with a disability plan, and a citizen audit of the city council (which will be very important). We’re going to take all the information on what’s been done in the last 8 years, and ask everybody to help us understand it, and see what we need to do with the decisions. Maybe the contractors were in fact illegal, for example, maybe there were debts taken on that shouldn’t have been. We’re going to make it possible for people to check every corner, and decide what they want to do with these things.

Stacco: Speaking of the various portals, how about Datos abiertos, how does that relate to the rest of the ecosystem you have in place?

Victoria: As I said, the transparency policy of the City of Madrid would be completed by different pieces, right? We have the transparency portal, we have the right to request information, we have the Open Data portal — a portal that was set up around 3 years ago. Nowadays, we publish roughly 200 datasets, which is not too much for a big city like Madrid. The quality of the data that we’re publishing is not yet as good as it should be. Still, it’s a good portal. We’re publishing useful information, and every day we’re publishing more.  

The transparency ordinance that we drafted this year, which hopefully will be approved at the plenary session at City Hall, includes an article making it mandatory for the government to publish all information in open formats. This will have a huge impact in increasing both the number and the quality of datasets we publish on the portal. That’s because we’re also working on internal education, telling people not to use PDFs, but to use spreadsheets or any format that can be reused by anyone. So, we have big plans for the portal.

We have a project with three other cities to have interoperable systems among them. We’ll not only be publishing more information; it will be in a better format, and using the same architectures. When you have big countries that are very decentralized like Spain, you find that information is held by different administrations, and you can’t really understand who has the competence for what. You don’t understand who has the information, and even if you can find that out, what if you need to re-use the information and everyone has different formats, or different information related to the same issue?

Here’s a silly example: you can find the list of buildings that a city has, and what they do with them, but you have different datasets and they’re differently organized. To be able to compare them, you’d have to undertake enormous manual work to do some homogenization, making it effectively impossible. The conviction that we need to work in open formats, using open software, is key to our department in participation, transparency, and open government. We believe in it, and we will do it. The transparency and open data portals are being created as open software, that’s a definite requirement we will follow.

Stacco: Which cities are you talking about?

Victoria: The cities we’re working with are Zaragoza, A Coruña, and Santiago, with whom we’re also working on the participatory processes we’re opening up. That’s the idea — we work together to create one project that can be shared and improved upon by anyone who uses it.

Infographic by Politocracia.es depicting the political parties and movements who coalesced into Ahora Madrid.

Stacco: That ties into my next question. Comparisons between Madrid and Barcelona are very artificial, even a bit odious to me, but I’d like to turn that around somehow and ask you your opinion on what’s been going on in Barcelona, and to compare it with Madrid just to see the differences. So the people outside can understand what’s going on.

Miguel: This is very interesting because when Ahora Madrid began, it happened the same way in almost every city in the country. New parties began to appear in every small village and city…

Stacco: There’s something else I should have asked about. My experience outside Spain, is that everybody confuses Podemos with what’s actually going on. I think that it’s very important for our friends in the commons movement to know that Podemos is not Guanyem, or En comú; or that Podemos is not Ahora Madrid, etc.

Miguel: I will try to clarify this. When people decided to build new parties, the first one on the scene was Podemos. This was at the time of the European elections. Podemos came along with leaders like Pablo Iglesias and others, and it was a strange mix. They had leaders, but they also had assemblies where everybody could go participate, and be part of the party. This was totally unseen, and it turned out to be a complete success. They won five seats in the European parliament and grew from there.

The next elections were the local elections. At that time, people decided they wanted local parties. Podemos didn’t want to run for the locals because it was impossible for them to build 5,000 new local structures and ensure that they weren’t full of crazy people, etc.  As Podemos weren’t running in the locals, people decided to build a new party. All of these local parties are disconnected from Podemos. They aren’t part of its common structure, the people have no relationship. Yes, they may have a working relationship, but that’s it. The idea underlying these parties is very similar: we are all taking the content from the social experiences of the last four years and putting it in practice within the institutions. The idea was to open the decisions as well as the information to everybody, making it a citizen project more than a traditional party.

I think there’s a difference in how it’s working at those two different levels. The local parties have been built by people who were in the streets and squares as part of the 15M movement, people who were obsessed with horizontality, openness and inclusivity. It worked quite well in that sense. All the leaders that were chosen in the main cities in Madrid, Barcelona, A Coruña, most of them came out of nowhere. In Madrid, our current Mayor, Manuela Carmena wasn’t even there as we were building the party. We were a party without a leader. It was totally crazy, but we just opened up the process and someone proposed this woman, saying “she’s gonna be great!” Most of us didn’t even know who she was, but as we got to know her we all thought, “oh, she’s wonderful”, and it turned out great.

But you see the exact same thing happening in other places. The leaders of the new city councils in many cities were largely unknown, but now people are in love with them, and like, “wow, how come you haven’t met this important political person” now that they’re all over the media. That was pretty great. Also, given the way we built the electoral lists, as I explained earlier, it really was a mixture of people, open to everybody. Conversely, Podemos was built in a much more traditional manner. They had some defined leaders from the start, invested in building the project. Now, they remain as the people taking the most important decisions on everything.

Of course, it’s not quite a traditional party. It’s more open: the base, the membership, and those who are really upholding the party are also unknowns who value openness, assemblies, etc. But at the end of the day, the party’s structure now, after this year, resembles a traditional party. It has an executive, the leader has a huge amount of power, and is able to make a lot of decisions. So, it’s something quite different from what we’re doing, and not as open. It was open in the sense that they started a few participatory processes, but there is a lot of control. This doesn’t lead to anything substantial, and it’s more about whether people agree with the vision espoused by the party’s leadership.

They’re still light years away from the traditional parties we’ve had in Spain, but it’s important to understand that the effects are a bit different. The fact that we built a totally open platform that people could trust was one of the big draws for Ahora Madrid. We were able to win the elections because of this. A month before the election, we thought that there was no way we could win the elections, it was totally impossible! No one knew about our party. Sure, everybody knew about Podemos, but the local parties? No one knew about us, and at that time, Manuela Carmena was hardly known.

But we were really open, and our attitude was like, “ok, you take control of it! You can control the campaign, control everything. It’s your party, you can do whatever you want!” And that’s how we built trust, people really trusted this. They trusted the process and supported us massively. In one or two months, we had a very good shot at winning — and with no money. The money we had was raised through crowdfunding, and it wasn’t all that much either. We did it without the support of the media, without any of the kind of power that everybody assumes is necessary to win elections: money, the media, etc. But we proved otherwise. Common citizens who self-organized…and won!

And this is something that, until now, hasn’t happened with Podemos. Podemos entered the regional elections, then they went to the nationals and they weren’t able to win any of these. I think it’s because of what I’ve explained earlier. If you don’t open up and share your control with everyone, you lose that potential. People will not support you because they understand it’s more your game, and not theirs. They don’t feel the need to engage.

Stacco: Can you explain to people, because I think this is quite telling. In Spain, when we have local elections, we have elections for the city and the province simultaneously.

Miguel: Exactly.

Stacco: And in the last local elections one year ago, we had Ahora Madrid running for the city of Madrid, and Podemos running for the province. But these, in the case of Madrid, are voted on by exactly the same people, the same census. If you live in the city of Madrid, you vote at the city and at the provincial level simultaneously. It’s two ballots. Can you tell us about the results of that election?

Miguel: This is the interesting thing, and the same thing happened in every region and every province of Spain. Podemos didn’t win in any of them. At the same time, the “local versions” of these parties won in all the major cities. We won in Madrid, Barcelona, Cádiz, A Coruña, Zaragoza. So, this was very clear: this is the way you do it. You have to share this control with everybody else. If you make it look as if you’re opening up, but you’re not really doing it in the end, people see through that straight away.

Stacco: You can’t fake it.

Miguel: You can’t! This may be very subtle, but you should be true to your principles.  It doesn’t matter how participative it “looks”, it really has to be. And this was clearly proven. The results spoke for themselves. It’s interesting because all these local parties, Madrid, Barcelona, A Coruña, are different. We don’t have a common structure. The people in each city are totally different, even if some of us have a prior relation from the squares.

Representatives and Mayors from Spain’s new municipalist coalitions. Image by Terrassa enComu.

Stacco: So, with this focus on openness, do you mutualize information and best practices?

Miguel: All of us are working on the same things. We’re just taking the common ideas developed in the last four years and putting them into practice. At the end of the day, all the programs are quite similar but it’s not like we wrote them together, it’s just that we’re coming from the same place. Common traits include being open to everybody, participatory decision-making, putting social justice at the core of everything we do. This is a very comfortable feeling, it’s really great when working together. And we really are working together, in everything. In all the plans.

This is significant. Normally, you find a sense of competition among the major cities. Madrid, Barcelona, big cities…“mine is better!”, etc. But here it’s is the opposite. We really love each other, we really want to work together and to help. Whenever something bad happens to the people in Barcelona, we’re totally outraged and screaming our lungs out: “No, the same thing can’t be happening to them!” And it’s the same with the other cities, it’s amazing. We meet in lots of forums, conferences, working groups. We really are working together, which makes life much easier. Normally, most city councils work and develop their projects in isolation, and they want to come out on top of the other cities. So, if they want to build software for participation, you go to a big technology company and pay a million euros…

Stacco: …and you make it proprietary…

Miguel: …and you get your proprietary software. At the same time, the next city is doing exactly the same. They have exactly the same software but they also paid a million, and it’s the same for other cities. You end up with 50 cities using the same software while announcing it as this great new thing. It’s totally stupid (laughs). And we’re doing absolutely the opposite. We started the software from scratch – this is Consul, from Decide Madrid. Some months later, Barcelona started using the same software. Now the developers from Barcelona have come to Madrid and they’re working together. And now it will be adopted by the people in A Coruña, working together – Victoria mentioned that.  

Even from the point of view of saving money, even if you forget about politics, ideology, everything, it’s like, “we’re saving money, we’re saving lots of money!” (laughs). And of those millions of euros the others were spending…nothing! We’re just paying the people developing the software, who actually work for the city council. It’s available for every city in the world. If we start solving all our problems by applying collective intelligence and debating how to scale everything, we will have something available for everybody in the world. This is the way it should be done. We agree that working together is the way to go and we’re seeing the benefits. It’s not something we do to look good (laughs).

Stacco: Besides your own personal work here, what other things are happening here in Madrid that you’d like people to know about.

Victoria: Well, somehow I prefer not to give my insights on how other people are doing because I think they’re doing great, but that’s an insight.

Miguel: Right now we’re in a bit of a bubble. As I’ve said, working here is quite crazy. We’re living our whole lives inside this building and we’re really focused on this phase. I think that once we entered institutions, a lot of the stuff that was going on outside became more quiet. This is partly because a lot of people who were outside are now within the institution. Because of this, they’re totally focused on their day-to-day while assuming that other people can be outside doing a lot of things. But a lot of the really active organizers are not out of there any longer.

I also think that in this specific phase of the movement, people are mostly focused on the institutions instead of on protest, direct action or building new projects on the outside. This is because, given the potential of institutions, everybody is thinking of how to exploit and use this potential. This is just a phase. I am totally sure that it will pass and we will go back to the streets to build something new, or whatever comes later. Regardless, I think that it’s really important to focus and understand how to change this. This is a huge monster, a huge machine, and it’s really difficult to change things. We really need to put a lot of focus on ideas for this.

Stacco: OK, let’s turn the question around. We talk about politics and counter politics, we talk about power and counterpower. Now that you find yourself within power, how do you enable and make sure that there is a counterpower, and respect that? I guess that, through your work, you’re enabling the great majority of people outside institutions to still have a voice, to still matter.

Miguel: Yeah, for us specifically this is our objective: to give people the control of institutions, and then…disappear! (laughing) I mean, our department could last a very short time.

Stacco: So you can finally go on holiday! (laughing)

Miguel: For sure! Our specific role here could be quite short. This what we need to do: enable people to take decisions, to take control. Once that’s done with, we don’t need to do anything else. Ok, we have to take care and do the maintenance so it keeps working, and nothing more. We’ve started all these processes and think that they have the potential to change everything, but up until now, the bulk of the decisions taken by the city council are elected in the traditional way. We can’t forget that 99% of the system still works that way. People are doing their best to open everything to everybody, but power remains focused on a small group of people.

Stacco: OK, so this is my final, long-winded question. To me, in 15M I could identify the Commons as part of the discourse, both explicitly and implicitly. My observation was, I see a commons being made over here. There was a lot of popular resonance with 15M, huge indexes of approval from the general populace who may have been sympathetic to 15M, even if they weren’t participating in the squares actively. So now that you’ve come into power, do you think that the Commons is still part of the dialogue? Not just with the activists and the people working here but with the citizens that you interact with? Or, do you think it’s a hard political concept to understand?

Victoria: I think it’s a hard political concept to understand. I think that in cities like Barcelona, they use it more naturally than we do here in Madrid, probably because of the people who are working in the city right now. But the fact that you don’t use it as a concept doesn’t mean that we’re not actually putting it into place. The feeling that brought everyone in, which nowadays exists in the Madrid government is very similar to the one that struck the people of Barcelona, Zaragoza, and other cities That’s something they had in common. I think it’s being used, or verbalized, more by people in Barcelona. They’ve even done a congress about it, talking about it — but I think in Madrid, it’s also happening. It’s probably something we don’t say, but I would say, yes, it’s definitely happening.

Stacco: I definitely think it’s part of the matrix, and I would like to see it become more part of the conversation because, it’s impossible to define. Because of that, it’s actually an interesting conversation to have with people, to engage their creativity. It’s not something you just explain with a little pamphlet and no further dialogue: “here’s all you need to know about the commons, read it, goodbye.”

Victoria: Exactly. I think it’s the philosophy behind the commons that’s moving every single department here in the city of Madrid, because the idea is to give the city back to the citizens. That’s essentially what we’re talking about. That’s what we’re doing, actually doing, no? I would say there are a lot of concepts that are difficult for people to understand because they don’t normally use them, but it doesn’t mean they don’t really understand them – they know what’s going on. Even if they don’t call it “the Commons”, they can feel what’s really happening. In that sense, I think it’s just a different approach in terms of communication, but I don’t think it’s different in terms of what’s actually happening.

Miguel: I think that the Commons, as a concept, is absolutely important because it offers us a new path to follow. It’s quite a complex concept which points to an absolute paradigm change, but we’re still ensconced in the old paradigms and it may be difficult to understand the concept and its full potential. Still, it’s a beacon to follow and one of the few new possibilities allowing us to change things because it really questions the matrix of the whole system. It’s huge and complex as it has to do with economy, with knowledge, with power and its distribution. However, at this moment I can’t say that it’s playing a very visible or specific role.

Stacco: Would you say that the commons is part of the matrix which informs what you’re working on over here, but not communicated so much to the outside due to its complexity?

Miguel: Absolutely. It’s not communicated, and it’s also something that we have to develop. We need new ways to see how the commons could work everyday in our economy, our information systems, everything. But this is something that we have to invent, to build. This has to be clear. We more or less know where we want to go and the direction we want to follow, but we don’t know what we’ll find there. This something we have to work on. It’s going to take a lot of time but, otherwise I cannot imagine another tangible direction capable of changing the whole system.

Stacco: Ok, now that we’re talking about large scale change, and we’ve left Madrid far behind…

Miguel: Yeah!

Stacco: How do you see this crystallising and scaling up, both nationally and transnationally? These experiences you’re building here, do you think they are feasible at other levels? Or do you think that we need to go through a process of maturation of the urban commons before we can tackle national and transnational Commons?

Miguel: All these ideas, including the commons but also focusing on things like collective intelligence, or mechanisms for direct democracy – they’re not really concerned with scale, or the way power and society were previously organized. A true paradigm change will not be fixed to the old structures. For example, take this decision-making platform we’re building: once you’ve built a viable platform that incites tens of thousands of people to work, think and take decisions together, the number of people or the scale doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter what type of decision you make, it doesn’t matter if it’s a local or national decision, none of that matters.  The same thing happens with the Commons.  

Since one of the characteristics of these ideas is how fluid and open they are, I don’t think they’re fixed to preexisting structures. Anything that we can make in Madrid and other cities will work at any scale, anywhere in the world. Actually, inside the department we have built a service, a kind of working group called “The Institutional Extension Service”. And that’s precisely what they do: they’re calling every city council in the world, every country, everybody to tell them: “Okay we’re building this platform, it’s free and we’re going to give you the platform, we’re going to give you all the rules and laws we had to write to make it work, and we’ll give you all the knowledge that we have built around this platform, for free. It’s working for Madrid, so it can also work for you – so, why aren’t you using it?”

Stacco: Please, fork it and surprise us!

Miguel: Yes! Fork it and also help us with it. But, please, use it! We’re not navel-gazing. It so happens that we’re in Madrid, but we could be in any city government and institution, and we’d be doing exactly the same things. If it works here, it works everywhere. Furthermore, we have to tell every institution that we should be working this way. Institutions are designed to work for the citizens, so the Madrid city council should work for the people in Madrid — and this may be one of the main problems.

Every government at the local or national level is not thinking about the common good, about everybody. They’re just thinking about their common good and that brings the competition, the arguments, the fights and all that stuff. If you start to build new institutions with a shift in logic, and build them to always take into account what’s going on on the outside…perhaps some of the largest problems can be stopped.

Stacco: Anything else you want to say?

Miguel: No! I’ve said enough already! (laughs)

Victoria: We talked about the transparency policies, but I haven’t gone into much detail about what we’ve already done and what we can share. For example, in this transparency ordinance which will include what the government must do, we will include, for example, the publication of diaries, or agendas. That means that every single public official needs to publish their meetings. We need to say who we’re meeting, and what we’re talking about. This is essential to decision-making transparency and is one of the goals we want to achieve within the three years we have left. We’ve built the software for that, and it’s being used very well. In terms of people filling in their agendas, it’s working quite well. So, anyone who is interested in reusing that can also find it.

Then, the second thing I haven’t talked about is the transparency of the lobbies. This ordinance includes the obligation to create a lobby register, which is something that is not very common in Spain. The locations that have put a transparency register into place, like Catalonia, haven’t had it implemented in a very good way. There are many lobbies that aren’t registering, because no one is taking care of it. So, we will create a mandatory lobby registry, we’re working on it. I think this will be a very good tool to share. I’m talking about the software, because we will mix it with the agenda so it will be easy to register a new one, and then access the agendas and request meetings. It will flow – it will be very easy to use.

In terms of losing the fear that many people have about the transparency of decision making, we’re doing it and nothing is happening — in the good sense. I mean, we’re publishing the agendas, we’ve published the CVs of everyone that is not a public official who works in City Hall.  We thought it was going to be the end of the world — and nothing happened. We’ve had positive feedback. People are happy to know who they’re working with because actually, we have really good professionals joining us in City Hall. That’s great. I think that’s something where Madrid can work as an example of how we should lose that fear of transparency, because it can be done. There’s no apocalypse after publishing any data!

Stacco: I like the fact that you’ve done it pre-figuratively. I mean, you’re already doing those practices even though you’re not bound by law to do them, while you’re working and making those practices actually codified.

Victoria: Yeah, it’s something that we also want to achieve for participation, because we do believe that. Of course, we want to do things. Of course, we want to publish information and open participatory process, but we believe that those two sides, those two elements are essential for democracy to exist! So we want that to last, and to be established as something which the next government following us will also have to implement. Because it shouldn’t be optional.

Stacco: Perfect closing.

Victoria: Great!

Lead image by Enrique Flores. See his Ahora Madrid images here. Ahora Madrid office images by Stacco Troncoso. Other images are credited in the captions.

[1] The following is extracted from Government of the Republic of Nauru’s website. Nauru were the first to implement this system named for its creator, Desmond Dowdall: “The electoral system that was adopted in 1971, the Borda count, known locally as the ‘Dowdall system’, involves an unusual form of preferential voting. There are 6 two-member constituencies, 1 three-member constituency and 1 four-member constituency. Voting is compulsory and voters must indicate a preference for all candidates on their ballot paper. Rather than a process of successive elimination of candidates with the lowest number of votes, each preference is allocated a value corresponding to its fraction of a vote. For example, a first preference is 1, a 6th preference is one sixth of a whole vote, 0.16 (so preferences are valued respectively as 1, 0.5, 0.33, 0.25, 0.2, 0.16 etc). All values are tallied and the two candidates (or in Meneng, the three candidates, or in Ubenide, the four candidates) with the highest scores are elected. As the Constitution does not prescribe an electoral system, the current system can be changed by Parliament without the need to amend the Constitution.”

The post This is how people power wins an election: the story of Ahora Madrid appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Click on the image to see full size. Source: autoconsulta.org.

X-net‘s Simona Levi reflects on the recent results of the Spanish Municipal Elections and seeks to correct some popular misconceptions resulting from international press coverage on the role of Podemos.

The propaganda has spread far and wide, and we are concerned to note how many analysts, particularly foreign media outlets without local correspondents, are giving Podemos undue centrality.

This text seeks to clarify the current state of the unfolding Spanish r-evolution, so that its major contribution to global change will not be lost among obsolete, simplistic models.

On May 24, civil society won a magnificent victory in Spain.

It was an intelligent, thoughtful, constructive victory in the true style of the indignados.

The definitions of what the indignados movement is are as numerous as the people who participated in it; and there have also been some deliberate misinterpretations of what it is.

For us, the spirit that allowed the indignados movement to be born and grow can be summed up in its own words: “Some of us see ourselves as more progressive, others more conservative…” leaving no doubt that 15M would be a pragmatic rather than an ideological movement. This is the key to its success. The left had been calling for rebellion for years, with few results. So whether we like it or not, the indignados achieved what the left couldn’t, precisely because it was not foundationally ideological.

The great political innovation of the indignados was forged on the basis of this transversality and pragmatism, in the first month and a half in the squares (stage one of the indignados). The movement was politicised but not ideological, constructive, not limited to protest. It was a movement that identified some minimum criteria on which to build a ‘real democracy’ (the famous ‘minimum criteria’ documents were drawn up in the first month).

During that first month we learnt to organise as citizens, to trust in our shared capacities and competencies rather than dogma, to accept responsibility and to assess results based on facts rather than rhetoric.

And the indignados movement has continued on this basis, in the second stage, in everything we have done and are doing, splitting into dozens of citizen devices and chalking up successes such as the PAH (platform to support victims of mortgage scams and of evictions), 15MpaRato (a citizen initiative that led to the arrest and trial of the former director of the IMF Rodrigo Rato and 100 other politicians and bankers for the banking swindle), the Citizen Debt Audit Network, the ‘White Tide’ (movement for universal healthcare and against privatisation) and all the other ‘tides’, Legal Sol (legal defense of basic rights, freedom of expression, and demonstrators)…

@PabloMP2P

The indignados movement is what we have kept doing ever since.

Back then, on 15 May 2011 – and not now or in 2014 with the rise of Podemos – we declared that part of our plan was to bring down the two-party system.

And since then, we’ve made progress in this regard: Aritmetica20N (2011);Partido X (2013); Podemos (2014); Barcelona en Comú (2015); AhoraMadrid(2015); Marea Atlántica (2015); Compostela Aberta (2015); Terrassa en Comú(2015); Capgirem (2015); … it isn’t the names that matter, but the patience and tenacity to keep going, adapting methods in order to achieve our collective goals on this and other regards.

This is why we are concerned by recent declarations in which Pablo Iglesias takes credit for a collective victory on behalf of Podemos.

Some examples:

Manuela Carmena and most of the citizens behind the electoral platform Ahora Madrid are not members of Podemos; Manuela barely held any rallies with Podemos, and many of the members of Ahora Madrid are indignados or activists in general and don’t have anything to do with Podemos. They are there to participate in designing a new city.

Likewise, Barcelona En Comú is not Podemos, nor is Ada Colau. Ada has fought side by side with activists in innumerable struggles in Barcelona over the past 15 years. The first thing she said to the people who had gathered to celebrate the victory of Barcelona En Comú is that it would not have been possible without the struggles that came before; she emphasised that a new kind of politics will not be possible without a strong, organised civil society, independent of any electoral platform, that will hold city councils and other public institutions to account. She called for us to be autonomous and vigilant, rather than merging with her.

The attitude of these new electoral platforms is worlds away from the attitude of Podemos so far towards civil society groups, which it has repeatedly called to join its ranks and dissolve into it.

The Podemos leadership style seems to repeatedly turn to a tactic destined to confuse involving a reinterpretation and claiming authorship of collective struggles. Some other thoroughly collective and distributed struggles of the past, such as the response to the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and the struggle against evictions under the slogan ‘Yes we can’, which Podemos also used as its slogan for its founding assembly, are examples of this among many.

Podemos website featuring Ada Colau and Manuela Carmena without their consent. They have repeatedly said they are not members.

We don’t believe that these are simply superficial details.

We are convinced that it will be impossible to make progress and continue on our common path if we limit options rather than harnessing this great opportunity to expand them.

Our history has seen fratricidal situations; in 1936-37 for example. They were much more tragic, but resonate in terms of political praxis. It would be criminal to repeat the same mistakes. To homogenise the diversity on this side of the trenches won’t improve our chances of success: it will destroy them.

We want a world in which, at last, organised and diverse civil society is as relevant as political parties, if not even more so.

In this context, it is important that Podemos resists the temptation to impose itself as hegemonic in a much broader r-evolution.

The indignados movement calls for relationships of mutual support. Theindignados hasn’t started from scratch, it works jointly with what civil society has already achieved. We don’t have enough spare energy or resources to allow us the luxury of starting over again as if nothing ever came before.

We have to increase our competencies and the fronts we’re fighting on, not implode into a single brand.

Podemos alone cannot and should not represent Everything. To continue to try to do so could be the end of them, as Isaac Rosa explains in this article “Sí se puede, pero solos no Podemos” (“For example: in Madrid, 285,000 people voted for Podemos in the autonomous community elections, while 519,000 voted for Ahora Madrid. In other words, almost half of Ahora Madrid voters did not vote for Podemos at the other level of governments (note: the elections were on the same day and in the same place).”

Podemos was not in the indignados movement.

We need Podemos. It is another comrade in our struggle.

Podemos, whose founders have hardly been involved in the 15M, and which doesn’t share its founding ideas, has intelligently harnessed the energy generated by the indignados to give rise to an electoral platform that had been brewing for years in the media.

http://www.manuelalucas.com/sre/

We believe that if Podemos truly wants to be an instrument of popular will, of the spirit of the indignados, it should also celebrate the success of others. A hegemonic discourse that claims that organised civil society is only useful if it is inside the party brand, and that everything outside of it could threaten its leadership, can no longer stand up, luckily, amongst an empowered citizenry that is conscious of its responsibilities, the citizenry we have built with theIndignados.

Nor is it desirable for such a discourse to work. We do not want a passive civil society, like the society that the PSOE tamed in the eighties, absorbing the most highly profiled (not always the best) citizen activists into the party, as has been repeated by Izquierda Unida more recently.

Podemos is an important device for the change we want, and we hope that it will thrive among equals. The millions of organised citizens who are writing the future of 15M are ready to give and receive support based on mutual trust, because our goals can only be achieved if all of us who got down to work on 15 May 2011, and in subsequent years, keep on working.

For the r-evolution that began that day, the squares were important in 2011; diverse citizen devices in 2012-13; Podemos in 2014; and in 2015, municipal electoral platforms. In 2016, we’ll adopt whatever means are necessary to continue our work. With pragmatism and generosity.

Many opportunists climbed aboard Podemos after its success in 2014. It seems like treacherous terrain now. But there are also many valued, generous comrades who are using the opportunity that Podemos has provided to work towards the shared commitments of the indignados, just as Podemos has used the opportunity that the indignados movement opened up for them.

It is a luxury to work with these valuable people, and we know that organised citizens can rely on their support, just as they can rely on ours.

It is vital that this give and take of activism and cooperation should proliferate inside and beyond electoral platforms. The victory on 24 May has shown that we are on the right track, and that the last 4 years have only been the first stage in this era that is full of hope.

Thanks to Kate Shea Baird and Nuria Rodríguez for the translation.

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Carlos Delclós, a sociologist and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and an activist in the 15M Movement, writes about new generation of activist-politicians advancing the municipal agenda in Spain.

What the Spanish media ignore about this new generation of activist-politicians is why they became famous enough to put on a ballot in the first place: their roots in prominent local struggles and their willingness to spearhead radical democratic participation.

On Sunday, May 24th, the two parties that have ruled Spain since the country’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s were dealt yet another substantial blow, this time in regional and municipal elections. Nationwide, the ruling Popular Party saw support fall from the nearly 11 million votes they received in 2011 to just under 6 million this year. But while much has been written about the impact emerging parties like the anti-austerity Podemos or the right-wing Ciudadanos have had on the established parties, what makes Sunday’s results so remarkable is not what those parties did on their own, but what happened between several political actors at the municipal level.

In Barcelona, the prominent anti-evictions activist Ada Colau won the city’s mayoral race. In Madrid, once a stronghold of the Popular Party, the former judge Manuela Carmena also has a chance to govern, depending on whether her platform and the deteriorating Socialist party are willing to strike a deal. In the four largest cities, it is quite possible that the mayor will belong to neither of the two major parties. The same is true in Galicia’s major cities, Santiago and A Corunha. In Cádiz, Spain’s unemployment capital, another new, anti-austerity platform finished a close second.

Much of the right-wing Spanish press is already attributing these spectacular results to a cult of personality around the people leading these platforms, accompanied by the typical references to populism and Venezuela, with an occasional shout-out to North Korea for extra flavour (as if the resort to these arguments weren’t the epitome of populist rhetoric). What they ignore is why those faces became famous enough to put on a ballot in the first place: their roots in prominent local struggles, their independence with respect to the established parties and their willingness to spearhead bottom-up processes seeking a confluence between new or smaller parties, community organisations and political independents around a set of common objectives determined through radical democratic participation.

The Spanish hub of the Doc Next Network’s Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons project has been documenting this process since it began, through video and other media. Below, you can see a helpful infographic that shows just some of the ingredients with which the new municipalist candidacies Ahora Madrid (Now Madrid) and Barcelona En Comù (Barcelona in Common) cooked up their municipal recipes. They include more obvious reference points like the indignados movement, but also feminist struggles, the copyleft movement or the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, among many others.

Image by Maria Castelló Solbés

Radical municipal politics is not an altogether new concept, especially not in Spain. In Catalonia, the Popular Unity Candidacies of the left-wing independence movement have had a notable presence in smaller towns for several years (they also quadrupled their 2011 results on Sunday, for what it’s worth). At the southern end of the country, the Andalusian village of Marinaleda is a well-documented experiment in utopian communism that has been going on for over three decades now.

In fact, the so-called father of libertarian municipalism, social ecologist Murray Bookchin, was strongly inspired by the Spanish municipal politics of the 19th and early twentieth century, as well as the Swiss Grey Leagues and the New England townships, when he wrote his influential “New Municipal Agenda”. While he hardly intended to prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution—especially not in large urban belts and port cities—in the text, Bookchin outlined four main coordinates: a revival of the citizens’ assembly, the need for confederation with other municipalities, grassroots politics as a school of genuine citizenship and the municipalisation of the economy. Underlying all of these coordinates is “a recovery of a new participatory politics structured around free, self-empowered and active citizens”.

All of these coordinates chime with the program and praxis of the new municipalist candidacies. In the newspaper they handed out as part of their campaign, Barcelona En Comù used almost as much space describing their process (30,000 signatures asking them to run for election, 1,000 campaign volunteers, 200 events organised by self-organised neighbourhood assemblies, 100 meetings with various community organisations in just 10 months of existence) and their vision (“a standard-bearer of social justice and democracy”) as they do outlining their program. The program itself includes 600 measures, ranging from modest but much-needed reforms (e.g., opening up more bike lanes, more social housing), to more radical ones (a guaranteed municipal income, coining a municipal currency).

Several questions remain about the conflict between the ambitions of the new municipalist candidacies and the daunting, path-dependent inertia of an institutional reality that threatens to swallow them whole. Many of those questions are addressed by some of the candidates themselves in the film Municipal Recipes, which you can watch below.

In it, they discuss the thought process that led them to make the jump into the electoral arena, how they hope to care for the city, how to make it liveable, the relationship between citizens, social movements and institutions, and the pitfalls of representative democracy, among other key issues. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a remarkable process. Tellingly, one of the most frequently used words in the film is “tension”. As Pablo Carmona of Ahora Madrid puts it, regardless of whether they achieve something like Bookchin’s New Municipal Agenda, they have opened up “a new model of social conflict” in Spain.

Recetas municipales. Una conversacio?n sobre el cuidado de las ciudades from ZEMOS98 on Vimeo.

(Click CC for English subtitles)

Municipalrecipes.cc is a campaign carried out by Lucas Tello, Nuria Campabadal, Mario Munera and Guillermo Zapata, coordinated by Sofía Coca.

If you enjoyed this article then please consider liking Can Europe Make it? on Facebook and following us on Twitter @oD_Europe

Carlos Delclós is a sociologist and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and an activist in the 15M Movement.

Lead Image by Jordi Boixareu

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A man gestures with his mouth gagged as dozens of protesters shout slogans before local elections [AP]

Bauwens told Al Jazeera given historical problems with monolithic political parties on the one hand, and problems with direct democratic assemblies on the other, “the most realistic option is to combine electoral democracy with new forms of deliberative and participative democracy”.

With numerous figures from both traditional major parties in Spain embroiled in corruption scandals, there has been a collapse of public trust for conventional politicians. This crisis of political legitimacy is exacerbated by the second highest unemployment rate in Europe, low wages, and anger against cuts to social welfare. As a result the country’s bipartisan system is being eroded, in many different directions.

This is the context in which Barcelona en Comú and sister coalitions are contesting Sunday’s municipal elections in towns and cities across the country, from Galicia to the Canary Islands. They are polling best in Spain’s two largest cities, Madrid and Barcelona. In many cases allied with anti-austerity party Podemos, and using crowdsourced electoral platforms, social activists are running for office under names such as Ahora Madrid (Madrid Now) and Zaragoza en Comun (Zaragoza in Common).

Javier Toret, the developer of Barcelona en Comú’s online participation platforms, said he is influenced by theorists such as Michel Bauwens, who is working in the field of peer-to-peer technology to create new forms of democracy.

Bauwens told Al Jazeera given historical problems with monolithic political parties on the one hand, and problems with direct democratic assemblies on the other, “the most realistic option is to combine electoral democracy with new forms of deliberative and participative democracy”.

With new technology it is now easier and cheaper than ever before for citizens to vote on almost any issue in the running of their cities. Toret was particularly inspired by web tools from Reykjavik in Iceland, where users proposed and debated policies online, took budgetary decisions, and voted on neighbourhood issues.

Using a similar model, 1,000 people took part online in the creation of Barcelona en Comú’s ethical code. Aimed at increasing transparency and avoiding corruption, the code limits wages to 26,400 euros ($29,000) a year for all party officials – thereby slashing the mayor’s salary by more than 100,000 euros ($110,100) – and commits them to full transparency, including publishing all meetings and income sources, and to “promote and support all citizen initiatives”.

Click here to read the full article

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