Republished from Remix the Commons

Joan Subirats(1) (UAB) Conferencia FEPSU 2016

AA: In your recent article in La Vanguardia(2), you set out a framework for a cultural policy, you refer to putting into practice the key community values that should underpin that policy… Maybe we could start there?

JS: For me, whereas in the 20th century the defining conflict was between freedom and equality – and this marked the tension between right and left throughout the 20th century because in a way this is the frame in which capitalism and the need for social protection evolved together with the commodification of life while at the same time the market called for freedom – ie: no rules, no submission. But the need for protection demanded equality. But in the 21st century there is rejection of the notion of protection linked to statism: Nancy Fraser published an article(3) in the New Left Review, it is a re-reading of Polanyi and she claims that this double movement between commodification and protection is still valid, but that the State-based protection typical of the 20th century, where equality is guaranteed by the State, clashes since the end of the 20th century with the growing importance of heterogeneity, diversity and personal autonomy. Therefore, if in order to obtain equality, we have to be dependent on what the State does, this is going to be a contradiction…. So we could translate those values that informed the definition of policies in the 20th century, in 21st century terms they would be the idea of freedom (or personal autonomy, the idea of empowerment, not subjection, non-dependence) and at the same time equality, but no longer simply equality of opportunities but also equality of condition because we have to compensate for what is not the same (equal) in society. If you say “equal opportunities”, that everyone has access to cultural facilities, to libraries, you are disregarding the fact that the starting conditions of people are not the same, this is the great contribution of Amartya Sen, no? You have to compensate for unequal starting situations because otherwise you depoliticize inequality and consider that inequality is the result of people’s lack of effort to get out of poverty. So equality yes, but the approach is different. And we must incorporate the idea of diversity as a key element in the recognition of people and groups on the basis of their specific dignity. That seems easy to say, but in reality it is complicated, especially if you relate it to culture, because culture has to do with all these things: it has to do with the construction of your personality, it has to do with equal access to culture just as cultural rights and culture have to do with the recognition of different forms of knowledge and culture – canonical culture, high culture, popular culture, everyday culture, neighbourhood culture …
So for me, a cultural policy should be framed within the triple focus of personal autonomy, equality and diversity. And this is contradictory, in part, with the cultural policies developed in the past, where there is usually confusion between equality and homogeneity. In other words, the left has tended to consider that equality meant the same thing for everyone and that is wrong, isn’t it?, because you are confusing equality with homogeneity. The opposite of equality is inequality, the opposite of homogeneity is diversity. So you have to work with equality and diversity as values that are not antagonistic, but can be complementary. And this is a challenge for public institutions because they do not like heterogeneity, they find it complicated because it is simpler to treat everyone the same, as the administrative law manual used to prescribe `indifferent efficiency’: it is a way of understanding inequality as indifference, right?

AA: In your article you also talk about the opposition between investing in infrastructures versus creating spaces and environments that are attractive to creators and you put an emphasis on the generation of spaces. What is being done, what has been done, what could be done about this?

JS : In Barcelona we want to ensure that the city’s cultural policies do not imply producing culture itself, but rather to try to influence the values in the production processes that already exist, in the facilities, in the cultural and artistic infrastructures: the role of the city council, of the municipality, is not so much to produce culture as to contribute to the production of culture. Which is different, helping to produce culture…. Obviously, the city council will give priority to those initiatives that coincide with the values, with the normative approach that we promote. There are some exceptions, for example, the Grec festival in Barcelona(4) in July, or the Mercé(5), which is the Festa Mayor, where the city council does in fact subsidize the production of culture, so some productions are subsidised but generally what we have is a policy of aid to creators. What is being done is that 11 creative factories (fablabs) have been built, these are factories with collectives that manage them chosen through public tenders. There are now 3 factories of circus and visual arts, 2 factories of dance creation, one factory of more global creation housed at Fabra & Coats, 3 theatre factories and 2 visual arts and technology sites. So there are 11 factories of different sorts and there are plans to create others, for example in the field of feminist culture where we are in discussion with a very well consolidated group : normally all these creative factories have their management entrusted to collectives that already become highly consolidated in the process of creation and that need a space to ensure their continuity. Often the city council will cede municipal spaces to these collectives, sometimes through public competitions where the creators are asked to present their project for directing a factory. This is one aspect. Another aspect is what is called living culture, which is a programme for the promotion of cultural activities that arise from the community or from collectives in the form of cooperatives and this is a process of aid to collectives that are already functioning, or occasionally to highlight cultural activities and cultural dynamics that have existed for a long time but have not been dignified, that have not been valued, for example the Catalan rumba of the Gypsies, which is a very important movement in Barcelona that emerged from the gypsy community of El Raval, where there were some very famous artists like Peret. There we invested in creating a group to work on the historical memory of the rumba, looking for the roots of this movement, where it came from and why. Then some signposts were set up in streets where this took place, such as La Cera in El Raval, where there are two murals that symbolise the history of the Catalan rumba and the gypsy community in this area so that this type of thing is publicly visible. That is the key issue for culture: a recognition that there are many different cultures.

Then there is the area of civic centres: approximately 15% of the civic centres in the city are managed by civic entities as citizen heritage, and those civic centres also have cultural activities that they decide on, and the city council, the municipality helps them develop the ideas put forward by the entities that manage those centres.

So, if we put all those things together, we could talk about a culture of the urban commons. It is still early stages, this is still more of a concept than a reality, but the underlying idea is that in the end the density and the autonomous cultural-social fabric will be strong enough to be resilient to political changes. In other words, that you have helped to build cultural practices and communities that are strong and autonomous enough that they are not dependent on the political conjuncture. This would be ideal. A bit like the example I often cite about the housing cooperatives in Copenhagen, that there was 50% public housing in Copenhagen, and a right-wing government privatised 17% of that public housing, but it couldn’t touch the 33% of housing that was in the hands of co-operatives. Collective social capital has been more resilient than state assets: the latter is more vulnerable to changes in political majorities.

AA: You also speak of situated culture which I think is very important: setting it in time and space. Now Facebook has announced it is coming to Barcelona so the Barcelona brand is going to be a brand that includes Facebook and its allies. But your conception of a situated culture is more about a culture where social innovation, participation, popular creativity in the community are very important…

JS : Yes, it seems contradictory. In fact what you’re asking is the extent to which it makes sense to talk about situated culture in an increasingly globalized environment which is more and more dependent on global platforms. I believe that tension exists and conflict exists, this is undeniable, the city is a zone of conflict, therefore, the first thing we have to accept is that the city is a battleground between political alternatives with different cultural models. It is very difficult for a city council to set out univocal views of a cultural reality that is intrinsically plural. Talking about situated culture is an attempt to highlight the significance of the distinguishing factors that Barcelona possesses in its cultural production. This does not mean that this situated culture should be a strictly localist culture – a situated culture does not mean a culture that cuts off global links – it is a culture that relates to the global on the basis of its own specificity. What is most reprehensible from my point of view are cultural dynamics that have a global logic but that can just as well be here or anywhere else. And it’s true that the platforms generate this. An example: the other day the former minister of culture of Brazil, Lluca Ferreira, was here and talked about a program of living culture they developed, and they posted a photograph of some indigenous people where the man wore something that covered his pubic parts but the woman’s breasts were naked. So Facebook took the photograph off the site, and when the Minister called Facebook Brazil to say ‘what is going on?’, they told him that they didn’t have any duty towards the Brazilian government, that the only control over them was from a judge in San Francisco and that, therefore, if the judge in San Francisco forced them to put the photograph back, they would put it back, otherwise they wouldn’t have to listen to any minister from Brazil or anywhere else. In the end, there was a public movement of protest, and they put the photo back. The same thing happened here a few days ago, a group from a municipal theatre creation factory put up a poster with a man’s ass advertising a play by Virginia Wolff and Facebook took their entire account off the net – not just the photograph, they totally removed them from Facebook. And here too Facebook said that they are independent and that only the judge from San Francisco and so on. I believe that this is the opposite of situated culture because it is a global cultural logic, but at the same time it allows itself to be censored in Saudi Arabia, in China, that is to say it has different codes in each place. So to speak of situated culture means to speak of social transformation, of the relationship between culture and social transformation situated in the context in which you are working. But at the same time to have the will to dialogue with similar processes that exist in any other part of the world and that is the strength of a situated culture. And those processes of mutuality, of hybridization, that can happen when you have a Pakistani community here, you have a Filipino community, you have a Chinese community, you have a Gypsy community, you have an Italian community, you have an Argentinean community: they can be treated as typical folkloric elements in a theme park, or you can try to generate hybridization processes. Now at the Festival Grec this year there will be poetry in Urdu from the Pakistanis, there will be a Filipino theatre coming and a Filipino film fest at the Filmoteca – and this means mixing, situating, the cultural debate in the space where it is happening and trying to steep it in issues of cultural diversity. What I understand is that we need to strive for a local that is increasingly global, that this dialogue between the local and the global is very important.

AA: Returning to social innovation and popular creativity, social innovation is also a concept taken up pretty much everywhere: how is it understood here? Taking into account that in the world of the commons, Catalonia, and especially Barcelona, is very well known for its fablabs, which are also situated in this new era. How then do you understand social innovation and how do you see the relationship between education and social innovation?

JS : What I am trying to convey is that the traditional education system is doing little to prepare people and to enhance inclusive logics in our changing and transforming society, so in very broad lines I would say that if health and education were the basic redistributive policies of the 20th century, in the 21st century we must incorporate culture as a basic redistributive policy. Because before, the job market had very specific demands for the education sector: it knew very well what types of job profiles it needed because there was a very Taylorist logic to the world of work – what is the profile of a baker, of a plumber, of a miller? How many years you have to study for this kind of work. There is now a great deal of uncertainty about the future of the labour market, about how people will be able to work in the future and the key words that appear are innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, flexibility, ability to understand a diverse world, teamwork , being open to new ideas: this has little to do with traditional educational profiles, but it has much to do with culture, with things that allow you to acquire that backpack of basic tools that will help you navigate in a much more uncertain environment. And for me, to find the right connection between culture and education is very important because it allows the educational system to constantly transform itself by taking advantage of the creative potential of an environment that is much more accessible now than before because of new technologies, and therefore to make the transition from a deductive system where there is a teacher who knows and tells people what they need to know – to an inductive system: how do we explore what we need to know in order to be able to act. And that more inductive, more experimental logic has to do with creativity whereas the traditional education system didn’t postulate creativity, it postulated your ability to learn what someone else had decided you needed to study. It’s art, it is culture that allows you to play in that field much more easily …

Translated from Spanish by Nancy Thede.

1 Joan Subirats is Commissioner for culture in the city government of Barcelona led by the group Barcelona en comu. He is also professor of political science at the Universitat
autonoma de Barcelona and founder of the Institute on Governance and Public Policy.

2 “Salvara la cultura a las ciudades?”, La Vanguardia (Barcelona), Culturals supplement, 12
May 2018, pp. 20-21. https://www.lavanguardia.com/cultura/20180511/443518454074/cultura-ciudadesbarcelona-crisis.html

3 Nancy Fraser, “A Triple Movement”, New Left Review 81, May-June 2013. Published in Spanish in Jean-Louis Laville and José Luis Coraggio (Eds.), La izquierda del
siglo XXI. Ideas y diálogo Norte-Sur para un proyecto necesario Icaria, Madrid 2018.

4 Festival Grec, an annual multidisciplinary festival in Barcelona, now in its 42nd year. It is
named for the Greek Theatre built for the 1929 Universal Exhibition in Barcelona:
http://lameva.barcelona.cat/grec/en/.

5 Barcelona’s annual ‘Festival of Festivals’ begins on Sept 24, day of Our Lady of Mercy, a city holiday in Barcelona. It especially highlights catalan and barcelonian cultural traditions and in recent years has especially featured neighbourhood cultural activities like street theatre. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mercè.

Photo by PJ Nelson

The post Interview with Joan Subirats: The challenges of a cultural policy for the city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

Many would still argue to the state.

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

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

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

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

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

And how is it going?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The City as the New Political Centre appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Update on the political context in Catalunya (November2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AA: What about Cadiz?

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

NT: You mentioned 2 points regarding internationalism…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 An earlier version of this interview was published in June.

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

Photo by christopher.berry

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Try: feminised politics, proximity, ecology and community. As we turn off ‘post-truth’ politics, face-to-face meeting, listening and community-building supported by safe technologies are some of the salves for human-scale democracy. While New Zealand is facing a national election, it’s worth considering other forms of democracy, namely engaged local politics, currently being called municipalism in Europe.

Jump to Barcelona in June — where 700 people from 180 countries converged in inaugural Fearless Cities summit on municipalism — organised by the current political movement, Barcelona En Comu.

If you’re not one for party politics, municipalism is attractive — it’s about designing a process of involving all citizens in the self-organising of their communities, towns or cities, not so much about creating new policies and group think from the top down. My interests: developing self-empowered societies, commons-building and in art processes that develop communities. After registering and paying 20 Euros online, I found myself connected to and hosted by the Corbella family who — mother, sister, son, father are all involved in the movement of people-driven democracy.

The summit was hugely powerful — not only connecting us to a major international network but giving visibility to residents, activists and councillors who have been elected from the ground up — from Europe and North America, Middle East and Africa, all encouraging us to continue work with people to eliminate fear that divides citizens. All the summit sessions can be found at You Tube here.

I attended sessions on non-state institutions, on sanctuary cities and on municipalism in towns and rural areas, thinking always, how might New Zealand might relate to this new movement?

Try these recurring themes from the summit:

1. Feminised politics. The new municipalisism is radicalising the process of representation and it is female-led. It will grow from those experienced in listening to their communities. Barcelona City Councillor, Laura Perez Castaño suggested that no matter how we look at it, women’s needs are different to men’s. Issues such as mobility and working hours are different for women and our political positions different. New Zealand knows about historic suffrage; and we should start to recognise the new community-driven leaders who are women.

2. Proximity is a key asset when it comes to municipalism. Having access to all the members of our small communities allows for genuine engagement. We talk about New Zealand’s ‘2 degrees’ social geography and this is powerful. The traditional elite have used proximity in recent times and it can be just as easily employed. Recommended reading: Joan Subirats on Proximity (included here the book Cities in the 21st Century).

3. Ecology and people are connected. Legendary Indian activist Vandana Shiva spoke about forests self-organising and that the natural state for people too is also to self-organise within their urban ecosystems. To quote US activist Debbie Bookchin, “We can’t address ecological problems without resolving our addiction to domination and hierarchy.” We know this in New Zealand: the mauri of the land is connected to the mauri of the people. That means the people and land stay well together.

4. As community organisers, don’t rely on the mainstream media to reach your people or reflect your community. Organising at community level is the way to connect where you are dealing with people at a personal level. It’s time consuming -get used to it. Barcelona En Comu was largely ignored by the TV and newspapers until the election. Trust your community networks and not the media.

Leading European examples

Barcelona En Comu started out as movement of self-organising groups and Barcelona’s Mayor Ada Colau is one of the more public faces of it. Back in 2014 she was part of organisation, Platform for Mortgage Victims, working to stop people being evicted from their homes by banks.

Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau at #FearlessCities

Connecting with other groups, the Platform members became more politically active when they realised that it wasn’t just about tackling banks — that public institutions had to change too. Running for Barcelona Council, initially under the banner Guanyem Barcelona (We will win Barcelona) they didn’t meet in secret or in members’ sitting rooms. They held meetings in the squares, in the streets, and in all neighborhoods. For more history see this Guardian piece How to win back the city.

Although Barcelona en Comu evolved to become a political party, their connection between the people and political process continues fluidly. Oriol Corbella, one of my young hosts, sent me a message as he was attending a recent meeting in his neighborhood with the elected members of Barcelona En Comu, reporting back after two years in Council. He described how the room was separated into five circles (each circle a subject), with the respective politicians explaining “the goals we had accomplished, the difficulties and the future. There are many difficulties for the ones in government to communicate what they do to the people from the party.” But intention is there.

Participatory democracy is fast-shaping the operations of other local governments over Europe, and it may be that smaller towns are easier to manage than cities. At the session Municipalism in towns and rural areas I learned that in the UK, in Buckfastleigh, Devon, Pamela Barrett, Mayor of Buckfastleigh, was elected once her community collectively developed 8 new initiatives and Council raised rates by 1 pound a week (equating to an 100% rise) without backlash. Buckfastleigh runs its meetings in football clubs, in parks and the streets, and allows members of the public to contribute in a Roman-style ‘polis’.

In Torrelodones, Spain, Marina Vicen, Councilor for Youth and Education, spoke of how the Council has established a drop in centre to deal with issues immediately — same day if possible.

In Celrá, we heard from Mercè Amich Vidal, Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), Councilor for Youth and Equality at Celrà City Council where their constituency asked them to ring the elderly residents every morning to wish them good morning and will check-in on them personally if they don’t respond. They call this the Bon Dia service.

In Celrá, 10o% of local budget (outside of Council staffing) is allocated participatorily. The town has since been trialing an online app — Celrà participa — which will assist.

Municipalist Councillors from Spain and UK: Marina Vincen, Mercè Amich Vidal, Pamela Barrett

In London, the Right to the City campaign started before the UK general election and has similar principles to municipalism, with a certain pick up especially since the tragedy of Grenfell Tower. Yet it feels as if class and power issues could take a while to be fully shaken from the English psyche — see Caroline Molloy’s damning piece on UK local politics.

Surely it’s possible for those of us in NZ to leave behind the colonial psyche of ‘us’ and ‘them’?

New Zealand community-driven politics?

Our New Zealand local governments are generally approachable. I’ve found Councils responsive and Councillors increasingly open minded. In Wellington I often see our Councillors in community events, football games, coming readily to invited meetings through my varied involvement in several community-driven planning programmes. The organisation I co-direct, Letting Space, for example, has worked with Wellington City, as well as Dunedin City, Masterton District, and Porirua City on a platform for community voice — the Urban Dream Brokerage*, a place for all-comers to suggest good ideas for vacant city spaces.

And in terms of political advocacy the work of New Zealand organisation Action Station has begun to reveal the possibility of crowd-sourcing support for specific causes. It’s work is driven by what people want to see happen and has had huge effect in selected areas.

There are many groups who see themselves as legitimate voices of the land, and thousands of Friends’ groups who inadvertently become the main caretakers for the rivers, streams and wilder habitats of our country. Many of recent our environmental victories have been thanks to our nation of volunteers. Yet these groups are at arms length from politics. We’re just playing in the shallows with what is possible. We need to connect voice and ideas with real politics.

Perhaps we don’t perceive the need for radical transformation in New Zealand like those in bigger cities and countries. Perhaps we don’t perceive we have an issue with corruption or access to power.

And yet we still have major problems — hugely disempowered communities and those whose needs are not being met. We’ve seen the rate of homelessness at world-beating levels, of cities too expensive for average wage earners to live in, increased mental illness, youth suicide at record levels and huge disenfranchisement in society. Many of these problems lie in Central government policies. But some issues can be met in our local towns and cities.

With the majority of the New Zealand population saying they think that traditional parties and politicians don’t care about them, we need to find new ways for people to have a voice.

Political commentator Bryce Edwards suggests:

“The idea of participatory and decentralized ways of doing politics are particularly apt for contemporary New Zealand, because the political system has become the opposite of that — it’s currently very centralized and elite. Few people are involved in the political process, and power is highly concentrated. So, we desperately need to be talking about and trialing ideas like municipalism.

“Municipalism might well be a philosophy and practice tailor-made for contemporary politics in New Zealand…People are increasingly either disenchanted with how politics currently works, or at least highly suspicious about democracy and authorities in general. There is a backlash forming against the status quo of how decision-making occurs, and about who has the power. That means that people are particularly open to new ideas about running society — and so concepts like municipalism have a very good chance of resonating with a wide variety of people. It could indeed resonate with many of those on both left and right, with young and old, and with many different types of communities (rural, provincial, urban, etc).”

The movement toward municipalism in Europe tells us that it is at the local level that we can really address peoples’ needs. Cities and towns have more connection with our daily lives. It is not the direction that New Zealand has been heading with recent attempts at reforms.

What would full municipalism look like in New Zealand? Listening and working collectively requires open-mindedness. It would require people to put aside their cynicism and their egos. Would it be more Āotearoa hui-style politics that we adapt? It needs people who are disempowered being given the platform to speak openly and for those with more resource to listen and finding solutions together, from the ground up.

Could we imagine ourselves like Celrá, where our local Councils fund services that we ourselves have prioritised? Imagine — if it were not just our elderly but also the unwell and fearful being phoned every morning to see how they were. Could we imagine participatory budgeting at a large scale, to decide what we spent our money on?

Imagine regular, official Council meetings in our parks and squares (or vacant sites if the weather is bad) where our communities come to talk about their local needs for, say good local food, or cheaper activities or safer traffic and these were addressed directly by the neighborhood representative? Engaging Maori tikanga would be vital and important- hui are the ideal reference point for the practice of listening hearing each other.

Barcelona en Comu have a step by step guide about how to organise a municipalist driven culture. Is New Zealand is ripe for a truly people-led approach to politics?

For more writing on the Fearless Cities summit, I recommend fellow Wellingtonian Richard Bartlett’s snapshot How a Global Network of #FearlessCities is Making Racist Colonial Nation States Obsolete.

Author Sophie Jerram in Barcelona

*My experience has been in the transformation of space from private to public. We need more spaces to debate and meet in. We’ve witnessed first-hand the submission of hundreds of new ideas for public life. Often all is needed is space and encouragement.  has helped people launch ideas, taught new skills, redistributed resources, connected property owners with creative makers, and moreover given people the chance to practise their ideas in public space free of commercial pressure. I’ve been in Europe talking with the local city of Helsingør about how this ‘radical’ programme handing over spaces to people with ideas could be adapted to Danish life.

*

Photo by BarcelonaEnComu

The post What Municipalism and #FearlessCities could mean for New Zealand appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

The Genesis of a New Political Subject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Political Subject for a New Political Era

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Commons Economy, Participation and Co-production of Policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AA — What about Cadiz?

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

NT — You mentioned 2 points regarding internationalism…

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

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

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

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

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

The Challenges of Scale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by christopher.berry

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