As the European Elections unfolded last week, many activists and progressive forces around the world paid particular attention to the municipal elections taking place at the same time in Spain. For years, Spain has been a beacon for the possibilities of progressive change at the municipal level. This explains the shock that came with reading headlines or tweets announcing the electoral defeats of political projects built around a new form of municipalism. The defeat of these political projects, known as Fearless Cities or Cities of Change, was particularly painful in Madrid, and in Barcelona, where Barcelona en Comú had put a lot of effort in building an international movement and network of Fearless Cities.

However, this defeat is mainly a perception for now, as the tight results mean that complex negotiations will happen, where the new municipalists will have a strong voice, even with possibilities to keep the mayor’s office, albeit with less power than four years ago.

Still, in light of these developments, we need to ask: what went wrong with the municipalist project in Spain? This text aims to give some insight into these electoral results. It attempts to unpack what happened in Spain for those aiming to better understand the context, and to draw some lessons for their own similar, or comparable projects.

The three souls of the new municipalist projects

The new municipalist platforms that came to power in 2015 resulted in one of the more remarkable political successes of the “left” forces of the last decade. This was achieved right when Podemos as a political party was on the rise in Spain, Syriza was at the height of its influence in the midst of the negotiations with the Troika to end austerity in Greece, and social democratic parties were in free-fall in the EU. Their success was presented by Podemos as the first stage of a major assault on state-level power. However, that picture was not completely accurate. Podemos had a strong influence in the constitution of the municipalist projects, but the new municipalists were much more than that.

There are a few good texts about what elements define the new municipalist practices, particularly from the Barcelona en Comú perspective. However, in this text I propose an alternative angle to understand their success and their apparent defeat last week. I argue that we must focus on which forces made a victorious dynamic possible under the umbrella of the new municipalism in record time. Only then can we better understand last week’s outcomes.

The new muncipalist projects enabled the convergence of three main groups: first, traditional “left” forces – understood as mainly Izquierda Unida (IU) and the old Communist party; second, grassroots activist veterans of the anti-globalisation movements of the 2000s, hardened by the massive mobilisations and action as part of the anti-austerity 15M ; and third, the mass of unmotivated social democratic voters that were looking for a left and progressive alternative to the status quo in the aftermath of the Troika-driven policies. The first two were the core organizers of the new municipalist movement, with various degrees of influence depending on the municipality. The latter was an important mass of voters whose influence would be decisive in the elections. When these three souls were dancing together, a process of “desborde” (overflow) would unfold, meaning that the political campaign would escape the control of its protagonists, and be appropriated by the general public who would in turn re-shape it to their own image and wishes. A comparable process happened with the Mayoral Campaign of Manuela Carmena in 2015.

One of the most important theoretical and dialectical debates within Podemos the last years has been to what extent the political project had to build a discourse closer to one of these three groups. One of the main reasons behind the current crisis facing Podemos has been an inability to articulate itself around all three consistently. There were passionate and deep differences of opinion among the most politicised sectors of the party, and the tendency to make these tensions public exacerbated the internal crisis. For those looking in from the outside, the debates were confusing. This was used strategically by the party’s opponents, and likely contributed to the loss of support. The new municipalist projects, thanks to their focus on local politics and day-to-day problems instead of grandiose debates about political theory, were best suited to face these tensions. As we will see, those places that were able to hold the “three souls” together have been the most successful ones.

What happened?

The best way to sketch the current landscape is to look a bit closer at each of the most paradigmatic cases.

Barcelona and its mayor Ada Colau have deservedly garnered most of the attention globally. Barcelona en comú developed a solid campaign. Its project included all three souls. It included the traditional left and Podemos – with Pablo Iglesias joining the campaign. It incorporated grassroots activists, who brought enormous imagination, and PR successes like public support for Colau from Bernie Sanders and Naomi Klein among others.

The movement deployed a successful political message centred on how to make the city a better place for all, and a process of desborde, which attracted many social democratic voters and others, unfolded. Last week’s outcome only appears to be a defeat because out of a total of 756,000 they got 4833 less votes than, and the same number of city councilors (10 each of a total of 41) as, their main rival, the Republican Independent Left (ERC). The ERC was the only rival capable of getting more votes in the city, and for very particular reasons. The ERC based its campaign on attacking Colau, and on the need for a capital for an eventual Catalan republic. The imprisonment of their leadership in Madrid as a consequence of the push for independence only dramatized their message. Nevertheless, at the time of writing, Barcelona en Comú is calling to form a government together with the ERC and the social democrats.

Madrid is a complex story. Here the defeat is also only relative. Manuela Carmena’s party, Mas Madrid, has obtained 19 out of 57 council seats and 31% of the vote. Her party’s main rival, Partido Popular, garnered 15 council seats and 21% of the vote. Carmena’s mayorship is in trouble only in the case of a tenuous alliance between the conservative right and the liberal right who are ready to form a pact with the new far right party Vox. An alliance of this kind would be unthinkable in France or Germany, but not in Spain. However, the division of the three souls explains why Madrid is in this situation.

Carmena came to power with Ahora Madrid, the new municipalist platform that in 2015 gathered the three souls of the movement. However, an internal split with the grassroots activists and traditional left, who for instance advocated a default on the huge public debt of the city, led Carmena (a former judge and vocal against institutional disobedience) to create her own municipalist group under her direct control – Mas Madrid. IU Madrid, Anti-capitalist Madrid and a number of the grass roots municipalists created their own party outside Mas Madrid, Madrid en Pie Municipalista. To make things more complicated, regional elections in Madrid were conducted at the same time, exacerbating the internal crisis of Podemos as regional, local and national allegiances were tested to their limits. The perceived infighting and bickering undermined momentum.

In sum, a cohesive municipalist project uniting the three souls was not possible in Madrid. Some would call it the typical division characteristic of the left, but here the issue is not about a mere aggregation of the votes of the different groups, since they would be enough to form a majority. The problem here is that when there is no synergy among the “three souls” the dynamics of desborde (overflow) do not happen. This translates into passivity on the part of a significant number of people. When you feel you are part of the something big and open, you go the extra mile to make another call, another meeting, another meme, the next tweet, a drawing that captures the feeling of your neighborhood, as was the case in 2015. These small bites do make a difference, especially in left and progressive groups who vote based more on conviction and ideals, than those on the other side of the spectrum. Lack of motivation can explain how the poorest neighborhoods of Madrid had less participation this time, while the richest ones did mobilize and made a difference by voting for one of the three right wing candidates.

Cadiz is the only relevant municipality with a municipalist candidate that has kept its leading position, even winning more seats. Its representation grew from eight to 13, of a total of 27. Four years ago, the charismatic leader José Maria Santos, known by all as Kichi, was the only one from the new municipalist platforms that came directly from the Podemos rank-and-file, although from the Anti-capitalist arm and not the “central” headquarters. The leadership of Kichi has been able to keep the three souls of the municipalist project together, under the flag of Adelante, the brand of Podemos in Andalucia under the control of the Anti-capitalists. Cadiz was the “poor” southern cousin of the municipalist projects, with an inheritance of huge debt from the previous mayors, and much smaller capacity to address it. Kichi´s management reduced Cadiz´s debt with suppliers from 265 to 44 million Euros, and average payment occurs now in 30 days instead of 130. These changes might seem small from a broader revolutionary perspective, but they do change people’s lives, especially small businesses that depend on their deals with the administration. Kichi has consistently defended the need to remain humble and close to the people. He was at the center of the heated debate within Podemos after Iglesias bought a villa worth 600.000 euros. In the midst of the media scandal that unfolded, (exacerbated also by the many opponents of Podemos), Kichi wrote a letter expressing that “the ethical code (of Podemos) is a guarantee to live like the common people”.

Zaragoza. The new municipalist platform that was created in 2015, Zaragoza en Común has plummeted from nine to three out of 31 council seats. Here, the main reason is that Podemos and IU presented a different platform than Zaragoza en Común, obtaining two councilors. Social democrats grew substantially, capitalizing on the charisma of the new President of Spain, Pedro Sanchez. Unfortunately, similar to Madrid, an anticipated pact amongst the three right-wing parties would mean the end of a progressive mayor in the city.

Valencia was a special case because Compromís, an older party, holds office. Compromís is a left progressive party from the Valencia region with a nationalist character although not pro-independence. Before the creation of Podemos and the new municipalism, Compromis was the main voice against corruption in the institutions run by the governing Popular Party. Compromis’ leader, Monica Oltra, was expelled from the Regional Parliament on several occasions, due to her interventions about the corruption scandals there. These interventions made her very popular. The new municipalist platform Valencia en Comú, with three councilors out of 33, together with the support of the social democrats, was key to giving Compromís the mayor´s office in 2015. Valencia en Comú decided to disappear and join Podemos and IU this time round, but they did not get enough votes for a council seat this time. However, Compromis keeps the mayor´s office due to higher support and its alliance with the social democrats. Despite its different nature, Compromís has employed strategies and tactics that municipalist projects have used elsewhere; like reducing its debt by half, reducing the number of cars in the city, welcoming refugee ships, and increasing social spending. Compromís Municipal will govern for four more years.

Have these projects been transformative?

We can define transformation as the process of a cocoon becoming a butterfly; this is a process that cannot be reversed. After learning the election results Ada Colau declared that they had “broadened the horizon of what is possible”. Indeed, the seed of the new municipalist projects will continue to grow. Amsterdam plans a Fearless Cities Conference in 2020, Belgrade will host one in a few days.

Cities are slowly gathering more power and influence. A week before the latest G20 in Buenos Aires, for instance, the first Urban20 gathered. There, the leaders of the 25 largest and most influential cities came together to put city agendas on the global map. Cities are demonstrating that they are capable of raising the minimum wage, reducing emissions or enforcing more accountable business practices on firms like AirbnB and Uber, even better than states. This dynamic can only grow. Colau’s administration in Barcelona created the biggest public energy utility of Spain, focusing on renewable energy. It is hard to imagine that a future administration would try to undo this. Carmena has reduced the debt of Madrid by almost half, a staggering 2.14 billion Euros. Similar dynamics happened in many other new municipalist governments. This puts paid to the myth that left and progressive administrations hurt the economy, or that they create debt that efficient right-wing administrations then have to solve. The inverse has been proven. If others after them create new debts, the population will take note. The last financial crisis ensured that voters know how dangerous debt is.

The results of Spain’s municipal elections were not what progressives around the world expected. We must wait and see how the political field will reconfigure itself, an open process at the time of writing, in Barcelona and Madrid. We must, however, examine the details so that we can draw the lessons needed to expand progressive political influence at the local level in a way that can tackle global issues such as unaccountable financial power and global warming. We live in a moment of crisis and opportunity, and the Spanish experience shows that it is possible to incorporate veteran left parties, grass roots activists and disfranchised social democratic and progressive voters into broader transformative processes. How to do that sustainably will depend enormously on the local context, and it is the task of the new municipalists to create the tools and narratives to accomplish it.

Do not forget that ¡Si se puede! It is possible!

Republished from OpenDemocracy.net.

Header image: Fearless cities: Ada Colau with Manuela Carmena | CC BY-NC 2.0

The post Spanish municipal elections: what happened with the new municipalist projects? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Thomas M. Hanna, Joe Guinan and Joe Bilsborough: There is no telling when the next UK general election will come, and when the Corbyn Project could accede to national political power in what R.H. Tawney once called ‘the oldest and toughest plutocracy in the world’. But there is still plenty of work to be done in the meantime. While there were some advances in last month’s local elections, the mixed results underscore the difficulty of mobilisation around a stale and sterile managerialist model of local government, as embodied in all too many Labour councils.

Austerity at the national level may have been eased, at least rhetorically, but a fiscal crisis of the local state still rages. Since 2010, government funding to local authority budgets has been slashed by 49.1 per cent, with more pain still to come; by 2020, cuts in central government funding are forecast to reach 56.3 per cent. Although plans for all councils to receive 100 per cent rates retention by 2019/2020 have been placed on ice, cuts premised on this change continue unabated. Almost half of all councils are set to lose all central government funding by 2019/2020, with a yawning £5.8bn funding gap opening up by the end of the decade. Even with the best will in the world—clearly lacking in places like Haringey, where until recently a ghoulish Blairite zombie local government politics still walked at night—this has not been a promising context in which to build political support for and project out a Corbyn-inflected ‘new economics’.

But difficulty need not be impossibility—as can be seen in the path taken by the flagship Labour council of Preston in Lancashire. In a few short years Preston has gone from being one of the most deprived parts of the country to a model of radical innovation in local government through its embrace of community wealth building as a modern reinvention of the longstanding political tradition of municipal socialism. Community wealth building is a local economic development strategy focused on building collaborative, inclusive, sustainable, and democratically controlled local economies. Instead of traditional economic development through public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives, which waste billions to subsidize the extraction of profits by footloose corporations with no loyalty to local communities, community wealth building supports democratic collective ownership of—and participation in—the economy through a range of institutional forms and initiatives. These include worker co-operatives, community land trusts, community development finance institutions, so-called ‘anchor’ procurement strategies, municipal and local public enterprise, participatory planning and budgeting, and—increasingly, it is to be hoped—public banking. Community wealth building is economic system change, but starting at the local level.

The term first emerged in the United States in 2005, and was coined by our colleagues at The Democracy Collaborative. It was used to describe the model then beginning to emerge in the severely disinvested inner-city neighbourhoods of some of America’s larger cities as a response to crisis and austerity. As federal and state fiscal transfers dried up, social pain intensified in communities that had long been suffering from high levels of unemployment and poverty. Precisely because large public expenditures for jobs and housing were seen to be no longer politically achievable, more and more people started turning to economic alternatives in which new wealth could be built collectively and from the bottom up.

There are now two flagship models of community wealth building—and a growing number of additional efforts in cities across the United States and United Kingdom.  The first model is the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio—created, in part, by our own organisation, The Democracy Collaborative. Cleveland had lost almost half of its population and most of its large publicly-traded companies due to deindustrialisation, disinvestment, and capital flight. But it still had very large non-profit and quasi-public institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, and University Hospitals—known as anchor institutions because they are rooted in place and aren’t likely to up and leave. Together, Cleveland’s anchors were spending around $3 billion per year, very little of which was previously staying in the local community. The Democracy Collaborative worked with them to localise a portion of their procurement in support of a network of purposely-created green worker co-ops, the Evergreen Co-operatives, tied together in a community corporation so that they too are rooted in place. Today these companies are profitable and are beginning to eat the lunch of the multinational corporations that had previously provided contract services to the big anchors. Last month came the announcement of an expansion of the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry to a new site serving the needs of the Cleveland Clinic, with a hundred new employees on fast track to worker ownership.

The ‘Cleveland Model’ is one of the sources of inspiration for Preston, now the pre-eminent example of community wealth building approaches in the UK. Back in 2012, Evergreen caught the attention of Labour councillor Matthew Brown, now a colleague at The Democracy Collaborative. With the help of others, such as Neil McInroy at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), Brown took the Cleveland Model and radically expanded it. The ‘Preston Model’ now encompasses a string of public sector anchors across Preston and Lancashire, to which has been added public pension fund investment, affordable housing, and—hopefully, in the near future—an energy company and a community bank.

A longstanding tradition

Both the Cleveland and Preston Models represent a reinvention of a longstanding political tradition that played a significant role in the development of mass socialist politics in Europe and North America—and could now do so again, just when such a politics is most needed. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, activists on both sides of the Atlantic began to articulate a sophisticated political-economic theory of change. They suggested that by advancing a radical yet popular economic strategy of democratised ownership, good governance, and better working conditions at the local level, they could begin to build political power from the ground up. “Little by little the conditions of the people are to be improved”, Carl Thompson, a Wisconsin State Legislator and one of the United States’ leading municipal socialists, argued in 1907. “[T]hus, in every way, society will be gradually prepared for and led into the experience of Social-Democracy” (Thompson, 1908, 28). Similarly, in Britain in 1919, the Russian émigré and radical journalist Theo Rothstein asserted that local councils should be transformed “into so many forts from which to assail the Capitalist order” (Rothstein, 1919).

Municipal socialists believed that by pursuing policies and conducting campaigns around economic issues that directly affected the community, they could build durable political coalitions, raise the aspirations and political awareness of ordinary working people, and develop the political and administrative skills for further social and economic transformation (Judd, 1989; Stave, 1975). This coupling of consciousness-raising with the marked material enrichment of everyday life could then be deployed to the furtherance of socialism more broadly—in local, state, and national elections.

Image: The Democracy Collaborative, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In the UK, interest in the economic and political possibilities of municipal socialism came and went with the rising and ebbing of the tides of economic reform and mass politics. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was led by early Fabian thinkers, with six Fabians—among them Sidney Webb—being elected to the London County Council in the 1892 elections. Of the first hundred Fabian tracts, written between 1884 and 1900, some forty-three discussed issues of local government (Chandler, 2007, 130-131). In What About The Rates?, Webb’s 1913 treatise on the financial autonomy of the municipalities, he protested vociferously against a political strategy which sought to marginalise the municipal: “Let us leave such proposals to the enemy … We, as Socialists, much cherish local government, and aim always at its expansion, not its contraction” (Webb, 1913, 9-10).

Municipal socialism was thus conceptualised as a consciously-evolving process, simultaneously shifting ownership—and with it power—whilst raising local living standards. Economic and political successes were consciously built upon to expand the strategy both horizontally (to other municipalities and industries) and vertically (to larger enterprises and services, and higher levels of governance). F. Lawson Dodd demonstrated the unfolding logic of this approach in a 1905 tract, arguing that the merits of water municipalisation warranted a further municipalisation of the milk supply on the bases of both power and public health: “The establishment of municipal milk depots supplied from municipal farms is the first step towards the social organisation of the dairy industry … The community would take over the whole of the supply”, he argued (Lawson Dodd, 1905, 17). The full extent of the impressive economic footprint achieved by municipal ownership in late-nineteenth-century Britain is nicely captured in the account given by Webb in his 1890 book Socialism in England:

“The ‘practical man,’ oblivious or contemptuous of any theory of the Social Organism or general principles of social organisation, has been forced by the necessities of the time into an ever deepening collectivist channel. Socialism, of course, he still rejects and despises. The Individualist Town Councillor will walk along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with the municipal water, and seeing by the municipal clock in the municipal market, that he is too early to meet his children coming from the municipal school hard by the county lunatic asylum and municipal hospital, will use the national telegraph system to tell them not to walk through the municipal park but to come to the municipal tramway, to meet him in the municipal reading room, by the municipal art gallery, museum and library, where he intends … to prepare his next speech in the municipal town hall, in favour of the nationalisation of the canals and the increase of government control over the railway system. ‘Socialism, sir,’ he will say, ‘don’t waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, sir, individual self-help, that’s what’s made our city what it is’” (Webb, 1890, 65)

Tensions soon arose, however, between local and national aspirations. With the rise of Labour as an electorally successful national party committed to a top-down reorganisation of the British economy, municipal socialism began to wither. This was partly the party’s own doing, with one of the deleterious consequences of the centralising tendencies of Attlee’s post-1945 nationalisation programme being the abandonment and erasure of the rich tapestry of local traditions of municipal ownership, mutualism, and co-operation. The boards of the newly nationalised (and centralised) public companies were comprised of a curious assemblage of the contemporary elite, which often meant that the extensive tacit knowledge of the workers and successful economic practices of municipal enterprises were marginalised, ignored, or lost altogether. Knights, Lords, and generals were well represented on these boards (Jenkins, 1959, 16), but—to take but one example—not a single member of the fourteen appointees to the board of the first Gas Council had been connected with any of the numerous previous municipally owned public gasworks (Kelf-Cohen, 1973, 59).

Only with the sunset of the top-down Keynesian economic management of the postwar Golden Age did municipal socialism begin to re-emerge as a political force. In the dark days of Thatcherism, radical local experiments re-appeared in the shape of the Greater London Council (GLC) and other metropolitan councils. As Stuart Hall wrote, the GLC “operated right across the spectrum, politicising sites of daily life and drawing them into the orbit of politics in ways unthinkable to most conventional Labour councils” (Hall, 1988, 237). Thatcher, perhaps more than anyone, immediately saw the political danger inherent in any significant revival of municipal socialism—especially one with a strong participatory, democratic character. “The GLC represents modern socialism”, the arch-Thatcherite Norman Tebbit stated, concluding that ‘we must kill it’ (Wainwright, 2003, 8).

Many of Thatcher’s own colleagues were made somewhat uneasy by “her deep-seated and almost obsessive objections to urban socialists” (Kösecik and Kapucu, 2003, 87), whilst the municipal socialist and Labour MP for Manchester Central, Bob Litherland, wondered aloud in Parliament as to whether it might be deemed “unfair that the metropolitan counties have to suffer because a Prime Minister takes a paranoic view of Ken Livingstone and thinks that he is immortal” (HC Deb 11 April 1984). George Tremlett, a Conservative councillor on the GLC and outspoken critic of Thatcher’s abolition agenda, was dropped from the Conservative Group altogether after arguing that “the proposals were so outrageous and so contrary to all the Conservative traditions of government that they must call into question Mrs. Thatcher’s capacity to form a balanced judgement on important issues of public policy”, and eventually encouraging Conservatives to vote Labour in the 1984 by-elections (Kösecik and Kapucu, 2003, 77).

Despite this opposition, Thatcher persisted in her determination to abolish the GLC, which was accomplished with the Local Government Act of 1985, wherby these resurgent experiments in municipal socialism were legislated out of existence. With Thatcher’s defenestration of local government, municipal socialism once again faded from the picture politically in Britain. Recent plans to devolve power to local government have been a mixture of unintelligibility and—especially since 2010—cynical exercises in political buck-passing, particularly attempts to shift the blame for implementing austerity. As a consequence, the public has quite rightly reacted negatively to such efforts, as well as other associated attempts to address the overwhelming centralisation of Britain’s political economy and governance. Referenda on regional assemblies in England advanced by Tony Blair were soundly rejected—by as much as 78 per cent in the vote on devolution to North East England in 2004—while George Osborne’s lopsided localism agenda has been plunged into legislative formaldehyde with the arrival of Theresa May in Downing Street.

Municipal socialism revisited

In the modern era of 24-7 news cycles and horserace political coverage, local politics rarely receives much attention. When local campaigns and politics are covered at all, it is usually because such elections are deemed to be a bellwether for the relative national political strength of the parties. This downgrading of local politics also extends to political analysts and activists, and often even to the political parties themselves, as can be seen in their reluctance to invest precious resources in local campaigns.

There are promising signs, however, that this is now beginning to change. With the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, municipal socialism has once again returned to the Labour Party’s agenda in a powerful way. “With amazing creativity in the toughest of times, we are seeing the first shoots of the renaissance of local government for the many, not the few—the rebirth of municipal socialism”, Corbyn proclaimed in February of this year.

As indicated above, one of the leading models of re-emerging, modern-day municipal socialism in the UK is to be found in Preston. In 2011, the city—which had been declining economically since the 1970s—was reeling from a bitter double blow. Central government funding was plummeting under the austerity regime of Cameron’s coalition government and long held revitalization plans based on a £700 million shopping centre had collapsed. The newly-elected Labour council realized that they needed to come up with a new strategy. It was then that Councillor Matthew Brown, Cabinet Member for Social Justice, Inclusion, and Policy, stepped forward with his ideas. Inspired by alternative forms of economic development around the world, including the Mondragón cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain and the Evergreen Co-operatives in Cleveland, Ohio, Brown and his fellow councillors began to develop plans to deploy Preston’s existing assets and financial clout to catalyse a new local economic model that builds wealth rather than extracts it from the community. Working with the Manchester-based CLES, Preston Council approached the large anchor institutions in the area and came up with a strategy to shift as much of their spending and procurement back into the local economy as possible. In 2013, six of the local institutions that signed up for the effort spent around £38m in Preston and £292m in Lancashire as a whole. By 2017 this had skyrocketed to £111m and £486m respectively. The new localized contracts cover everything from school lunches to large-scale construction projects. Moreover, contracts shifted locally have a multiplier effect, as pounds circulate and recirculate throughout the local economy, creating jobs which in turn lead to more spending on goods and services, which then leads to the creation of more jobs, and so on.

The Preston Model, however, is about much more than just developing the local economy through shifts in spending and procurement. It is about alternative forms of ownership that not only enrich the lives and livelihoods of residents and workers, but also give them the opportunity to actively participate in the economic decisions that affect their lives and the future of their city. Even before working with the anchor institutions, Preston Council backed plans to develop co-operatives (and link them to the procurement needs of the anchors) and a public financial institution (see Chakrabortty, 2018; Sheffield, 2017; Singer, 2016).

Preston has been lauded by the Labour leadership and by sections of the media as an example of what could be achieved—albeit on a far greater scale—nationally under a Corbyn-led government. “This kind of radicalism”, argued John McDonnell in a 2016 speech at the Preston-based, worker-owned transport company TAS, “is exactly what we need across the whole country”.

Star Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty kicked off his excellent new series exploring real-world economic alternatives with an in-depth study of the Preston Model, following on the heels of a broadly sympathetic write-up in The Economist, which dubbed Preston ‘Corbyn’s model town’. In a speech to the Co-operative Party, Corbyn himself praised the “inspiring innovation” of developments in Preston, particularly when set against the wider backdrop of swinging cuts to local government funding.

Preston also demonstrates the renewed potential of modern municipal socialism as a political strategy. As was the case a century ago, advancing a radical and innovative program of local economic regeneration can quickly lead to tangible political benefits. In the May 2018 local council elections, the Preston Labour Party pledged (among other things) to increase investment and jobs based on the Preston Model; to create a public bank and local wealth fund; to support the creation of new worker cooperatives; and to ask the Lancashire Pension Fund to invest more in the local economy (Preston Labour, 2018). The voters responded, as Labour increased its majority on the local council by picking up two seats—College Ward and Garrison Ward—that had long been controlled by the Tories. Moreover, as new councillor for College Ward Freddie Bailey explained to local journalists, “what we found helped was the Preston Model” (Farnworth, 2018). This was reinforced in the wake of the election when Matthew Brown was elevated to become Leader of Preston City Council.

Onwards to municipal socialism!

While it is right to remain cognisant of the limitations placed on local government by colossal cuts and decades of restrictive legislation, the twin temptations of fatalism—that nothing can be done—and deferral—that nothing can be done until Labour is in power in Westminster—must be roundly rejected. As Preston today demonstrates, a new radical municipalism can indeed emerge in Britain (as it is doing all across the world in the face of neoliberal crisis and austerity) and can serve as the basis for potentially much further reaching national and international change. Exorcising the zombie councils who do little besides implement austerity is vital, but so is creatively, confidently, and collaboratively exercising the significant powers councils do still possess.

As Daniel Frost recently urged in New Socialist, and as we have argued previously, there is much that can be done already—as a movement we need not wait for Labour to gain power nationally before we begin advancing ambitious programmes around a ‘new economics’ based on radical modern reinventions of municipal socialism.

Working with and for the local community to invigorate popular participation in economic decision-making and create—rather than merely extract—community wealth represents both an electorally and an economically successful strategy that can be implemented by councils across the country. The manner in which Preston has caught the imagination as a laboratory of ‘Corbynomics’ points to the wider role such approaches can play, not just in delivering for their local communities (vitally important though that is, the foundation of all else that follows) but also in helping us all to imagine, experience, and get involved with systemic economic transformation.

In an earlier period of economic contraction and difficulty in Lancashire, none other than Karl Marx wrote, in the New York Herald Tribune, of the emerging workers’ movement in the region: “The eyes of the working classes are now fully opened, they begin to cry: Our St. Petersburg is at Preston!”

Today, anyone looking around, from Capita to Carillion to the grim shadow of Grenfell Tower and the travails of East Coast Mainline, can see the existing neoliberal economic model failing and collapsing. But what holds a system in place, often, is a failure of imagination that things can fundamentally change, and that there are real, viable alternatives for organising a next system. Part of the answer to our failing economic system lies in on-the-ground experimentation and model building that embraces the design and principles of a new systemic alternative.

There is precedent for this. In the political science literature in the United States, it is known as the ‘laboratories of democracy’. In Britain, when Nye Bevan launched the NHS in 1948, he drew as inspiration from the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, a community-based model in South Wales that began in 1890. This small Welsh experiment was then scaled up into one of the world’s truly great public health systems.

We now have an opportunity—in the unknown amount of time between now and the next UK General Election—to get people familiar with the elements of the democratic economy through a widespread embrace of community wealth building approaches by Labour councils and local authorities. This suggests the potential basis for a new institutional underpinning for socialist politics, building support for our new economics from the ground up in a way that is far less scary and more comprehensible in a local context than it can sometimes appear at the national level. Our ambition, as the Corbyn Project, should be to bring about what Tony Benn termed “a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. Community wealth building is what that looks like when you start at the local level and begin creating systemic economic change from the ground up.

***

References

Chakrabortty, A. (2018) ‘In 2011 Preston hit rock bottom. Then it took back control’, The Guardian, 31.01.2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/preston-hit-rock-bottom-took-back-control

Chandler, J. A. (2007) Explaining local government: Local government in Britain since 1800.Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Photo by drinksmachine

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The goal of the voting is not to put one experience above others; there is no prize for the one with more votes. This is an exercise of Coopetition, meaning that we seek cooperation but have introduce an element of competition to encourage public interaction and engagement that we hope will amplify transformative practices that we would like to see flourish worldwide.

Regardless of the vote results, we recognize the hard work, successes and victories of all 9 initiatives as well as the others portrayed in the Atlas of Utopias.

Transformative Cities aims to support these initiatives by giving them visibility in our website and allied organizations and partners, which includes:

• A long piece written by commissioned journalists under a media partnership between Transformative Cities and Open Democracy,
• the production of photos and graphics based on their initiative and,
• the organization of collective learning spaces, either online via webinars or physically in events like the annual New Politics conference organized by TNI and its partners.

Last but not least, the transformative Cities process is open and we aim to improve it along the way, please do contact us if have any suggestions or comments so the next edition contains even more collective intelligence.

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However, this doesn’t mean that we are powerless and in a next installment, we will propose a strategy that is also learning from the innovations of platform capitalism. The following extracts have been sourced from Open Democracy:

Frank Pasquale: As digital firms move to displace more government roles over time, from room-letting to transportation to commerce, citizens will be increasingly subject to corporate, rather than democratic, control.

Economists tend to characterize the scope of regulation as a simple matter of expanding or contracting state power. But a political economy perspective emphasizes that social relations abhor a power vacuum. When state authority contracts, private parties fill the gap. That power can feel just as oppressive, and have effects just as pervasive, as garden variety administrative agency enforcement of civil law. As Robert Lee Hale stated, “There is government whenever one person or group can tell others what they must do and when those others have to obey or suffer a penalty.”

We are familiar with that power in employer-employee relationships, or when a massive firm extracts concessions from suppliers. But what about when a firm presumes to exercise juridical power, not as a party to a conflict, but the authority deciding it? I worry that such scenarios will become all the more common as massive digital platforms exercise more power over our commercial lives.

Focusing on the identity and aspirations of major digital firms. They are no longer market participants. Rather, in their fields, they are market makers, able to exert regulatory control over the terms on which others can sell goods and services. Moreover, they aspire to displace more government roles over time, replacing the logic of territorial sovereignty with functional sovereignty. In functional arenas from room-letting to transportation to commerce, persons will be increasingly subject to corporate, rather than democratic, control.

For example: Who needs city housing regulators when AirBnB can use data-driven methods to effectively regulate room-letting, then house-letting, and eventually urban planning generally? Why not let Amazon have its own jurisdiction or charter city, or establish special judicial procedures for Foxconn? Some vanguardists of functional sovereignty believe online rating systems could replace state occupational licensure—so rather than having government boards credential workers, a platform like LinkedIn could collect star ratings on them.

This shift from territorial to functional sovereignty is creating a new digital political economy.

Forward-thinking legal thinkers are helping us grasp these dynamics. For example, Rory van Loo has described the status of the “corporation as courthouse”—that is, when platforms like Amazon run dispute resolution schemes to settle conflicts between buyers and sellers. Van Loo describes both the efficiency gains that an Amazon settlement process might have over small claims court, and the potential pitfalls for consumers (such as opaque standards for deciding cases). I believe that, on top of such economic considerations, we may want to consider the political economic origins of e-commerce feudalism. For example, as consumer rights shrivel, it’s rational for buyers to turn to Amazon (rather than overwhelmed small claims courts) to press their case. The evisceration of class actions, the rise of arbitration, boilerplate contracts—all these make the judicial system an increasingly vestigial organ in consumer disputes. Individuals rationally turn to online giants for powers to impose order that libertarian legal doctrine stripped from the state. And in so doing, they reinforce the very dynamics that led to the state’s etiolation in the first place.

This weakness has become something of a joke with Amazon’s recent decision to incite a bidding war for its second headquarters. Mayors have abjectly begged Amazon to locate jobs in their jurisdictions. As readers of Richard Thaler’s “The Winner’s Curse” might have predicted, the competitive dynamics have tempted far too many to offer far too much in the way of incentives. As journalist Danny Westneat recently confirmed,

• Chicago has offered to let Amazon pocket $1.32 billion in income taxes paid by its own workers.
• Fresno has a novel plan to give Amazon special authority over how the company’s taxes are spent.
• Boston has offered to set up an “Amazon Task Force” of city employees working on the company’s behalf.

Stonecrest, Georgia even offered to cannibalize itself, to give Bezos the chance to become mayor of a 345 acre annex that would be known as “Amazon, Georgia.

The example of Amazon

Amazon’s rise is instructive. As Lina Khan explains, “the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it.” The “everything store” may seem like just another service in the economy—a virtual mall. But when a firm combines tens of millions of customers with a “marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house…a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space,” as Khan observes, it’s not just another shopping option.

Digital political economy helps us understand how platforms accumulate power. With online platforms, it’s not a simple narrative of “best service wins.” Network effects have been on the cyberlaw (and digital economics) agenda for over twenty years. Amazon’s dominance has exhibited how network effects can be self-reinforcing. The more merchants there are selling on (or to) Amazon, the better shoppers can be assured that they are searching all possible vendors. The more shoppers there are, the more vendors consider Amazon a “must-have” venue. As crowds build on either side of the platform, the middleman becomes ever more indispensable. Oh, sure, a new platform can enter the market—but until it gets access to the 480 million items Amazon sells (often at deep discounts), why should the median consumer defect to it? If I want garbage bags, do I really want to go over to Target.com to re-enter all my credit card details, create a new log-in, read the small print about shipping, and hope that this retailer can negotiate a better deal with Glad? Or do I, ala Sunstein, want a predictive shopping purveyor that intimately knows my past purchase habits, with satisfaction just a click away?

As artificial intelligence improves, the tracking of shopping into the Amazon groove will tend to become ever more rational for both buyers and sellers. Like a path through a forest trod ever clearer of debris, it becomes the natural default. To examine just one of many centripetal forces sucking money, data, and commerce into online behemoths, play out game theoretically how the possibility of online conflict redounds in Amazon’s favor. If you have a problem with a merchant online, do you want to pursue it as a one-off buyer? Or as someone whose reputation has been established over dozens or hundreds of transactions—and someone who can credibly threaten to deny Amazon hundreds or thousands of dollars of revenue each year? The same goes for merchants: The more tribute they can pay to Amazon, the more likely they are to achieve visibility in search results and attention (and perhaps even favor) when disputes come up. What Bruce Schneier said about security is increasingly true of commerce online: You want to be in the good graces of one of the neo-feudal giants who bring order to a lawless realm. Yet few hesitate to think about exactly how the digital lords might use their data advantages against those they ostensibly protect.

Photo by thisisbossi

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The Charter of the Forest was sealed 800 years ago. Its defence of the property-less and of ‘the commons’, means the Right would prefer to ignore it – and progressives need to celebrate and renew it.

Dr. Guy Standing talks about the Charter of the Forest and its relevance 800 years on. Originally published in Open Democracy.

Guy Standing: Eight hundred years ago this month, after the death of a detested king and the defeat of a French invasion in the Battle of Lincoln, one of the foundation stones of the British constitution was laid down. It was the Charter of the Forest, sealed in St Paul’s on November 6, 1217, alongside a shortened Charter of Liberties from 2 years earlier (which became the Magna Carta).

The Charter of the Forest was the first environmental charter forced on any government. It was the first to assert the rights of the property-less, of the commoners, and of the commons. It also made a modest advance for feminism, as it coincided with recognition of the rights of widows to have access to means of subsistence and to refuse to be remarried.

The Charter has the distinction of having been on the statute books for longer than any other piece of legislation. It was repealed 754 years later, in 1971, by a Tory government.

In 2015, while spending lavishly on celebrating the Magna Carta anniversary, the government was asked in a written question in the House of Lords whether it would be celebrating the Charter this year. A Minister of Justice, Lord Faulks, airily dismissed the idea, stating that it was unimportant, without international significance.

Yet earlier this year the American Bar Association suggested the Charter of the Forest had been a foundation of the American Constitution and that it was more important now than ever before. They were right.

It is scarcely surprising that the political Right want to ignore the Charter. It is about the economic rights of the property-less, limiting private property rights and rolling back the enclosure of land, returning vast expanses to the commons. It was remarkably subversive. Sadly, whereas every school child is taught about the Magna Carta, few hear of the Charter.

Yet for hundreds of years the Charter led the Magna Carta. It had to be read out in every church in England four times a year. It inspired struggles against enclosure and the plunder of the commons by the monarchy, aristocracy and emerging capitalist class, famously influencing the Diggers and Levellers in the 17th century, and protests against enclosure in the 18th and 19th.

At the heart of the Charter, which is hard to understand unless words that have faded from use are interpreted, is the concept of the commons and the need to protect them and to compensate commoners for their loss. It is scarcely surprising that a government that is privatising and commercialising the remaining commons should wish to ignore it.

In 1066, William the Conqueror not only distributed parts of the commons to his bandits but also turned large tracts of them into ‘royal forests’ – ie, his own hunting grounds. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, there were 25 such forests. William’s successors expanded and turned them into revenue-raising zones to help pay for their wars. By 1217, there were 143 royal forests.

The Charter achieved a reversal, and forced the monarchy to recognise the right of free men and women to pursue their livelihoods in forests. The notion of forest was much broader than it is today, and included villages and areas with few trees, such as Dartmoor and Exmoor. The forest was where commoners lived and worked collaboratively.

The Charter has 17 articles, which assert the eternal right of free men and women to work on their own volition in ways that would yield all elements of subsistence on the commons, including such basics as the right to pick fruit, the right to gather wood for buildings and other purposes, the right to dig and use clay for utensils and housing, the right to pasture animals, the right to fish, the right to take peat for fuel, the right to water, and even the right to take honey.

The Charter should be regarded as one of the most radical in our history, since it asserted the right of commoners to obtain raw materials and the means of production, and gave specific meaning to the right to work.

It also set in train the development of local councils and judiciary, notably through the system of Verderers, which paved the way for magistrate courts. In modern parlance, it extended agency freedom, giving commoners voice in managing the commons, as well as system freedom, by opposing enclosure.

The Charter set the foundation for what is now called the communal stewardship of pooled assets and resources. Its ethos is the antithesis of the Government’s pretentious Natural Capital Committee, which is trying to capitalise the natural commons, to make them ‘profitable’. The commons exist for a way of living, not profits.

Over the centuries, the ethos of the Charter has been under constant attack. The Tudors were the most egregious, with Henry VIII confiscating ten million acres and disbursing them to favourites, the descendants of whom still possess hundreds of thousands of acres. The enclosure act of 1845 was another mass landgrab, mocking the pretensions of private property rights. Between 1760 and 1870, over 4,000 acts of Parliament, instituted by a landowning elite, confiscated seven million acres of commons. It is no exaggeration to say that the land ownership structure of Britain today is the result of organised theft.

Despite having endured centuries of abuse, the ethos of the Charter is still alive. But one feature of the neo-liberal economic paradigm that has shaped recent governments is a disregard for the commons, which the current British government has turned into a plunder under cover of the ‘austerity’ terminology. In the USA, the Trump administration has quietly prepared for the giveaway of millions of acres of federal commons.

For neo-liberals, the commons have no price, and therefore no value. So, they can be sold for windfall gains, or given away to their backers. By asserting the right to subsistence on the commons, the Charter recognised an alternative principle, something our ancestors defended with courage. We must do so now. We must resist the plunder of the commons and revive them.

A group is organising a series of events to do so. Everybody is free to join. Developing national and localised Charters of the Commons should go alongside the worthy Charter of Trees, Woods and People that will be issued on the anniversary day. Our modest efforts will not only emphasise environmental principles enshrined in the Charter, but also its subversive commitment to the right to subsistence that underpins the basic income movement of today.

The campaign began with an event laden with symbolism, a barge trip on the Thames from Windsor to Runnymede on September 17, where a public event highlighting the need for a Charter of the Commons was held under the awesome 2,500 year old Ankerwycke yew. The Runnymede meadow symbolises the commons. An earlier Tory government tried to privatise it, but an occupy movement organised by Britain’s first woman barrister succeeded in blocking the auction.

The barge trip’s symbolism does not stop there. Margaret Thatcher privatised our water in 1989. She gave nine corporations regional monopolies and gave them over 400,000 acres from the commons. Today, those corporations, mostly foreign owned, are among the country’s largest 50 landowners. They mock the principles of the Charter of the Forest. Thames Water, while paying its foreign shareholders £1.6 billion, has been convicted and had its hands slapped for pouring 1.4 billion tonnes of untreated sewage into the Thames, and is also doing too little to fix leaks. The Charter asserted that the commoners had the right to water. It should be a public good, and be renationalised as a matter of high priority.

As well as an event in Sherwood Forest emphasising fracking, there is an event in Durham, where one of the two originals of the Charter is preserved.

And on November 7, a meeting in the House of Commons will discuss a draft Charter of the Commons. In Lincoln, where the other original Charter is held, the Labour Party is organising an event on November 11.

Further information can be obtained from www.charteroftheforest800.org . If any organisation feels their agenda is relevant and that has not been contacted, let us know. We want all voices to be heard, all commoners to stand up and all of us to remember that reviving the commons is about recovering the future.

Image: Ampthill Forest, Bedfordshire. Flickr/UK Garden Photos, Some rights reserved.

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Four years ago, Thomas Piketty published his best-seller that tried to provide a working model for capital in the twenty-first century. The reasons why Piketty failed to accomplish some of his goals have been well explained by David Harvey.

I’d like to shed light on a new process that has been neglected by both Piketty and Harvey. For those who wish to understand “capital in the twenty-first century”, studying a rising form of production is of paramount importance. Following the format of ‘capital’, I call this emerging phenomenon ‘phygital’.

What is capital?

Capital is a process, not a thing, which results in social relations. Put simply, it is a process in which money is used to make more money. This process is situated in a specific context where the capital owners develop multifaceted relations with the rest of the people and their habitat.

The owners of a company profit by developing relations with their employees, partners, suppliers, customers, natural environment etc. How value is created and wealth is accumulated in the hands of the very few is a complex process. However, to quote the Encyclopedia of Marxism, “the issue is to understand what kind of social relation is capital and where it leads”.

I shall argue the same for another process, named ‘phygital’.

What is phygital?

‘Phygital’ is a process whereby ‘physical’ (material production) meets the ‘digital’ (production of knowledge, software, design, culture). It encapsulates digitally enhanced physical reality and production, to show how the influx of shared knowledge changes and improves production.

First it was Wikipedia and the myriads of free and open-source software projects. They demonstrated how people, driven by diverse motives, can produce complex ‘digital artefacts’ if they are given access to the means of production. Now we are also observing a rich tapestry of initiatives in the field of manufacturing.

For example, see the Wikihouse project that produces open source designs for houses; the OpenBionics project that produces open source designs for robotic and bionic devices; or the FarmHack and L’Atelier Paysan communities that produce open source designs for agricultural machines. Digital technologies enable people to cooperate in a remote and asynchronous way, and produce designs that are shared as digital commons (open source). Then the actual manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures (from 3d printing and CNC machines to low-tech tools and crafts) and with local biophysical conditions in mind.

Similar to capital, phygital is a process that results in social relations. However, it is a process in which shared resources (commons) are used to produce more shared resources (commons). The kind of social relations can thus be very different to capitalism. And it may lead to a post-capitalist economy and society.

Do we really need another new term?

No, not necessarily. But we need a new paradigm, informed by the past, which can address most of the problems that capitalism has been creating, for the benefit of the many and of the environment. Towards that end, discussions around and experimentation with post-capitalist alternatives are necessary.

I believe that new ideas should ideally be described by using already widely understood terms so that the message is effectively communicated. However, I cannot come up with a better term that would describe this conjunction of the digital with the physical. If someone can, may this brief essay serve as inspiration.

Originally published in Open Democracy.

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“We’re living in extraordinary times that demand brave and creative solutions. If we’re able to imagine a different city, we’ll have the power to transform it.”  – Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona.

Excellent assessment of Barcelona en Comú’s first 20 months in power. It was written by Bertie Russel and Oscar Reyes and originally published in Open Democracy.

On 24 May 2015, the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú was elected as the minority government of the city of Barcelona. Along with a number of other cities across Spain, this election was the result of a wave of progressive municipal politics across the country, offering an alternative to neoliberalism and corruption.

With Ada Colau – a housing rights activist – catapulted into the position of Mayor, and with a wave of citizens with no previous experience of formal politics finding themselves in charge of their city, BComú is an experiment in progressive change that we can’t afford to ignore.

After 20 months in charge of the city, we try to draw some of the main lessons that can help inspire and inform a radical new municipal politics that moves us beyond borders and nations, and towards a post-capitalist world based on dignity, respect and justice.

1. The best way to oppose nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment is to confront the real reasons that life is shit

There is no question that life is getting harder, more precarious, more stressful, and less certain for the majority of people. In the US and across Europe, reactionaries, racist and nationalist politicians are blaming this on two things – immigrants, and ‘outside forces’ that challenge national sovereignty. Whilst Trump and Brexit are the most obvious cases, we can see the same phenomenon across Europe, ranging from the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany through to Front National in France.

In Barcelona, there is a relative absence of public discourse that blames the social crisis on immigrants, and most attempts to do so have fallen flat. On the contrary, on 18 February over 160,000 people flooded the streets of Barcelona to demand that Spain takes in more refugees. Whilst this demonstration was also caught up with complexities of Catalan nationalism and controversy over police repression of migrant street vendors, it highlighted the support for a politics that cares for migrants and refugees.

The main reason for this is simple – there is a widespread and successful politics that provides real explanations of why people are suffering, and that fights for real solutions. The reason you can’t afford your rent is because of predatory tourism, unscrupulous landlords, a lack of social housing, and property being purchased as overseas investments. The reason social services are being cut are because the central government transferred huge amounts of public funds into the private banks, propping up a financial elite, and because of a political system riddled with corruption.

Whilst Barcelona played a leading role in initiating a network of “cities of refuge”, simply condemning anti-immigrant nationalism is not enough. In a climate where popular municipal movements are providing a strong narrative as to what they see as the problem – and identifying what they’re going to do about it – it’s incredibly difficult for racist and nationalist narratives based on lies and hatred to take root.

2. Politics does not have to be the preserve of rich old white men

Ada Colau is the first female mayor of Barcelona. She is a co-founder of BComú, and was formerly the spokesperson of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Mortgage Victims Platform), a grassroots campaign challenging evictions and Spain’s unjust property laws. Colau leads a group of eleven district councillors, seven of whom are women, whose average age is 40.

BComú’s vision of a “feminized politics” represents a significant break with the existing political order. “You can be in politics without being a strong, arrogant male, who’s ultra-confident, who knows the answer to everything”, Colau explains. Instead, she offers a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions. This is backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and the common good – as well as policies designed to build on that vision.

The City Council’s new Department of Life Cycles, Feminisms and LGBTI is the institutional expression of these values. It has significantly increased the budget for campaigns against sexist violence, as well as leading a council working group that looks to identify and tackle the feminization of poverty.

The changing face of the city council is reinforced by BComú’s strict ethics policy, Governing by Obeying, which includes a €2,200 (£1850) monthly limit on payments to its elected officials. Colau takes home less than a quarter of the amount claimed by her predecessor Xavier Trias. By February 2017, €216,000 in unclaimed salaries had been paid into a new fund that will support social projects in the city.

Ada Colau at a public engagement event that took place in Sants-Montjuïc on 18 February 2017. Photo by Bertie Russell. CC BY-NC-SA.

3. A politics that works begins by listening

BComú started life with an extensive process of listening, responding to ordinary peoples’ concerns, and crowd-sourcing ideas – as summarized in its guide to building a citizen municipal platform.

Drawing on proposals gathered at meetings in public squares across the city, BComú created a programme reflecting immediate issues in local neighbourhoods, city-wide problems and broader discontent with the political system. Local meetings were complemented by technical and policy committees, and an extensive process of online consultation.

This process resulted in a political platform that stressed the need to tackle the “social emergency” – problems such as home evictions on a huge scale, or the effect of uncontrolled mass tourism. These priorities came from listening to citizens across the city rather than an echo-chamber of business and political elites. BComú’s election results reflected this broader appeal: it won its highest share of the vote in Barcelona’s poorest neighbourhoods, in part through increasing turnout in those areas.

On entering government, BComú then began to implement an Emergency Plan that included measures to halt evictions, hand out fines to banks leaving multiple properties empty, and subsidise energy and transport costs for the unemployed and those earning under the minimum wage.

4. A politics that works never stops listening

Politics doesn’t happen every four years – it is the everyday process of shaping the conditions in which we live our lives. This means that one of the central tasks of a politics that works is to forge a new relationship between citizens and the institutions that we use to govern our societies.

For BComú, the everyday basis of politics means citizens and civil society organisations directly shaping the strategic plan of their city. It means not just consultation, but active empowerment in helping move citizens from being ‘recipients’ of a politics that is done to them, to active political agents that shape the every-day life of their city.

In the first months of occupying the institutions, BComú introduced an open-source platform, Decidim Barcelona, for citizens to co-create the municipal action plan for the city. Over 10,000 proposals were registered by the site’s 25,000 registered users. While that’s a small share of the city’s population, the online process was complemented by over 400 in-person meetings.

The Decidim platform is now being adapted to run participatory budgetary pilot-schemes in two districts, as well as being used in the ongoing development of new infrastructure, pedestrianisation and transport schemes. Meanwhile, the municipal Department of Participation is undertaking a systematic rethinking of the ‘meaning’ of participation, looking to move away from meaningless ‘consultations’ and towards methods for active empowerment.

This is an imperfect process – and BComú have got things wrong at times, such as the failure to properly engage when introducing a SuperBlock in the Poblenou district – but the principle is simple. To govern well, you must create new processes for obeying citizens’ demands.

At the same time, the structures that built BComú remain in place, with 15 neighbourhood groups and 15 thematic working groups providing an ongoing link between activists and institutions. No structure is perfect, and it remains unclear if these working groups can help BComú avoid “institutionalization” and remain connected to social movements, but the hope is that this model provides a basis for remaining in touch with grassroots concerns.

5. Politics does not begin with the Party

BComú is not a ‘local’ arm of a bigger political party, and does not exist merely as a branch of a broader strategy to control the central political institutions of the nation-state. Rather, BComú is one in a series of independent citizen platforms that have looked to occupy municipal institutions in an effort to bring about progressive social change.

From A Coruña to Valencia, Madrid and Zaragoza, these municipal movements are the direct effort of citizens rejecting the old mode of doing politics, and starting to effect change where they live. Instead of a national party structure, they coordinate through a “network of rebel cities” across Spain. Most immediately, this means coordinating press releases and actively learning from how one another engage with urban problems.

That doesn’t mean that BComú can reject political parties entirely. While the initiative arose from social movements, it ended up incorporating several existing political parties in its platform. These include Podemos – another child of the 15-M movement  – and the Catalan Greens-United Left party (ICV-EUIA), which had consistently been a junior coalition partner in city councils headed by the centre-left Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) from 1979 until 2011.

These parties continue alongside BComú, with their own completely separate organizational and funding structures. But entering BComú has forced existing parties to significantly change how they operate. Coalition negotiations encouraged the selection of new councillors (only two of the elected candidates have previously held office), and they are subject to a tough Ethics Code that considerably increases their accountability.

The fluid relationship between the new coalitions and political parties allows for multiple levels of coordination, without having to pass through a rigid central leadership. It may also be replicated in regional government, where the recently formed Un Pais En Comú seeks to replicate the city government coalition across Catalunya. On a terrain that contains a different set of politics – not least a strong national-separatist sentiment – it remains to be seen whether this latest initiative will be successful.

Upwards of 180,000 people demonstrate in favour of accepting migrants and asylum seekers in Catalonia, organised by the group Casa Nostra, Casa Vostra – 18 February 2017. Photo by Bertie Russell. CC BY-NC-SA.

6. Power is the capacity to act

BComú does not subscribe to traditional notions of power, whereby if you hold public office, you somehow ‘have’ power. On the contrary, power is the capacity to bring about change, and the ‘occupation of the institutions’ is only one part of what makes change possible.

BComú emerged after almost a decade of major street-protests, anti-eviction campaigns, squatting movements, anti-corruption campaigns, and youth movements – the most visible form being the ’15-M’ or ‘indignados’ protests that began in 2011. After years of being at a high-level of mobilization, many within these movements made a strategic wager – we’ve learned how to occupy the squares, but what happens if we try to occupy the institutions?

Frustrated by the limits of what could be achieved by being mobilized only outside of institutions, the decision to form BComú was to try to occupy the institutions as part of the same movement that occupied the squares. In practice, this is not so simple.

Politics is a messy game, full of compromises forced by working in a world of contradictions. In the most practical sense, BComú may be leading the council, but it holds only 11 of the 41 available seats. Six other political parties are also represented on the council, mostly seeking to block, slow-down or weaken its initiatives. Frustrated by these moves – and overwhelmed by the demands of the institutions – BComú formed a governing coalition with the PSC, a move supported by around 2/3 of its registered supporters. But it remains a minority government, and two left parties that refused a similar pact responded by stepping up their block on almost all legislative initiatives. The resulting political crisis delayed the passing of the city’s 2017 budget, which was eventually forced through on a confidence motion when BComú challenged the opposition to unite around another plan – which it failed to do.

While this experience has shown the resilience of BComú in the confrontational confines of the council chamber, the key lesson here is that occupying the institutions is not enough. An electoral strategy is not sufficient alone to create change. The power to act comes from a combination of occupying both the institutions and the squares, of social movements organizing and exercising leverage, providing social force that can be coupled with the potential of the occupied institutions – the power to change comes when these work in tandem. It’s been a bumpy ride, but BComú has been able to justify its budget on the grounds that it prioritizes social measures (such as building new nurseries, combatting energy poverty and focusing resources on the poorest neighbourhoods) with reference to the extensive and ongoing process of participation that it has encouraged.

One of the biggest dangers in looking to build radical municipalist movements in other cities is to mistake electoral victory with victory, to sit back and think that now we’ve got ‘our guys’ in the institutions, we can sit back and let change occur.

7. Transnational politics begins in your city

In a time where reactionary political movements are building walls and retreating to national boundaries, BComú is illustrating that a new transnational political movement begins in our cities.

To this end, BComú has established an international committee tasked with promoting and sharing its experiences abroad, whilst learning from other ‘rebel’ cities such as Naples and Messina. Barcelona has been active in international forums, promoting the “right to the city” at the recent UN Habitat III conference, and taking a leadership role in the Global Network of Cities, Local and Regional Governments.

These moves look to bypass the national scale where possible, prefiguring post-national networks of urban solidarity and cooperation. Recent visits of the First Deputy Mayor to the Colombian cities of Medellín and Bogotá also suggest that links are being made on a supranational scale.

One of the most tangible outcomes of this level of supranational urban organizing was the strong role played by cities in the rejection of the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP). As hosts of a meeting entitled ‘Local Authorities and the New Generation of Free Trade Agreements’ in April 2016, BComú led on the agreement of the ‘Barcelona Declaration’, with more than 40 cities committing to the rejection of TTIP. As of the time of writing, TTIP now looks dead in the water.

At this early stage, it remains unclear how this supranational network of radical municipalism may develop. Perhaps the most important step for BComú is to share their experience and support those in other cities that are looking to reclaim politics, helping to build citizens platforms across Europe and beyond. But the idea of a post-national network of citizens also allows us to dare to dream – of shared resources, shared politics and shared infrastructure – where it’s not where you were born, but where you live, that determines your right to live.

8. Essential services can be run in our common interest

The clue to BComú’s strategy for essential services is hidden in its name – the plan is to run them in common.

At the end of 2016, and faced with a crisis in the funeral sector in which only two companies controlled the sector and charged prices almost twice the national average, the Barcelona council intervened to establish a municipal funeral company that is forecasted to reduce costs by 30 per cent. Around the same time, the council voted in favour of the remunicipalisation of water, paving the way for water to be taken out of the private sector at some point this year.

In February 2017, Barcelona amended the terms and conditions for electricity supply, preventing energy firms from cutting off supply to vulnerable people. The two major energy firms – Endesa and Gas Natural – protested this by not bidding for the €65m municipal energy contracts, hoping this would force the council to overturn the policy. Instead, a raft of small and medium size energy companies were happy to comply with the new directive to tackle energy poverty, and stand to be awarded the contracts if a court challenge from the large firms proves unsuccessful. BComú is also actively planning to introduce a municipal energy company within the next two years.

However, it’s important to recognize the major difference between the public and the common. As Michael Hardt argues, our choices are not limited to businesses controlled privately (private property) or by the state (public property). The third option is to hold things in common – where resources and services are controlled, produced and distributed democratically and equitably according to peoples need. A simple example of what this could look like was the proposal – that narrowly failed only due to voter turnout – for Berlin to establish an energy company that would put citizens on the board of the company.

This difference underpins the Barcelona experience. This is not a traditional socialist government that thinks it can run things better on behalf of the people. This is a movement that believes the people can run things better on their own behalf, combining citizen wisdom with expert knowledge to solve the everyday problems that people face.

Photo by BarcelonaEnComu

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Ursula Huws continues the conversation on Universal Basic Income in this article, originally published on Open Democracy’s New Economics section:

More than one in five UK workers, over seven million people, are now in precarious employment according to this analysis of official figures by John Philpott. Since 2006, the numbers on zero-hours contracts has grown by three-quarters of a million are and over 200,000 more are working on temporary contracts. My own recent research has found that some two and a half million adults in the UK may be working for online platforms like Uber, Taskrabbit or Upwork at least once a month, with about 1.2 million people earning more than half their income from this kind of work. A growing proportion of the population is piecing together an income from multiple sources, in many cases making even the concept of a fixed occupation anomalous.

Large numbers of worker do not know, from one day – or even hour – to the next if and when they will next be working. Yet we still have an anachronistic benefit system based on the principle that any fit adult (and, under the current regime, many who are less than fit) must either be ‘in work’ or ‘seeking work’. The old Beveridgean welfare state model is, in short, bust. What is left of the old welfare safety net is fundamentally incompatible with a globalised just-in-time labour market in which workers are increasingly paid by the task.

The victims of these incompatibilities are among the most vulnerable in our society – forced to take any work that is going but often unable to claim benefit when none is available. They are caught between the rock of harsh sanctions regimes and the hard place of capricious and unreliable employers, often with no dependable source of income whatsoever. And the numbers of these people missed by the safety net keep growing. The use of food banks has increased more than forty-fold since 2008, the estimated  number of rough sleepers has risen by 55% since 2010 and the number of children in poverty rose from 3.7 million in 2014-2015 to 3.9 million a year later – an increase of 200,000 in just one year. Something is clearly terribly wrong and the increasingly urgent question is how to fix it.

This is part of the problem to which the concept of a universal basic income (UBI) now presents itself as a solution to an expanding range of analysts. UBI is not only promoted as a way to update the benefit system to bring it into line with new labour market realities. It is also seen as a way to reward carers and others who carry out unpaid reproduction work in the home, to support artists, enable lifelong learning or give more autonomy to disabled people. This once-marginal idea is now seriously espoused in the UK by the Green Party, the Scottish Nationalist Party, some trade unions and sections of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties and Plaid Cymru. Further afield is also actively promoted (including setting up experimental schemes) in Finland, the Netherlands, India, South Africa and, at the neoliberal end of the spectrum, by high-tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

At the headline level, indeed, UBI can seem to represent some sort of magic bullet that will solve all these problems simultaneously, and is often promoted as such. But a closer examination of the various models proposed reveals considerable differences between them. If these are not recognised, attempts to operationalise it could lead at best to risks of unintended consequences and at worst deep political fissures that could even exacerbate some of the problems UBI is intended to address. Most attempts to model how UBI could be implemented in practice in the UK (for example by Howard Reed and Stewart Lansley, Malcolm Torry and Gareth Morgan) have looked at it in what might be called a policy-neutral context, in which all other features of the economy and the tax system remain unaltered. But of course the reality is that any change in government policy that could lead to the introduction of UBI would be part of a much broader political upheaval that would transform many of these other features. Abstracting UBI from its broader setter in this way makes it harder to see such potential hazards.

For people who believe that the world’s sixth largest economy should be able to protect its citizens from penury, and are committed to (re)developing a welfare state that reduces social inequality and enhances choice and opportunity for its citizens, perhaps the time has now come for a serious debate, not just about the pros and cons of UBI in the abstract, but about which other policies it should be linked with to ensure that these objectives are met. This involves grappling with some difficult questions. Here I look at four of the risks that could arise if a UBI is introduced without such policy safeguards.

The risk of driving down wages

In the abstract, the relationship between a UBI and wage levels can be argued to be either positive or negative. Some argue, quite plausibly, that a guaranteed minimum income would enable people to be much choosier about which jobs they accept, giving them options to turn down really exploitative wage rates and perhaps even providing them with the equivalent of strike pay to enable them to negotiate more effectively with employers without their dependents suffering.

An alternative view draws on the experience of tax credits (and now, universal credit) to point out that providing an income top-up is, in effect, a subsidy to employers who pay below-subsistence wages. In 2015-2016, this subsidy was estimated at about £30 billion. Had this been paid out by employers as part of their wage bill then this would also have led to an increase in national insurance and tax revenues. These credits therefore represent a factor which, whether inadvertently or not, increase inequalities between those who rely on their wages for their livelihood and those who derive their incomes, directly or indirectly, from corporate profits.

If a UBI is not to exacerbate this state of affairs, it is imperative that it is linked to a high minimum wage and one, moreover, that can be linked to systems where workers are paid by the task, not just to hourly rates.

The risk of undermining collective bargaining for employer-provided benefits

An important argument against UBI comes from social democratic parties and trade unions, especially in parts of continental Europe with a strong tradition of sector-level bargaining, who argue that its introduction would undermine their efforts to make employers pay into schemes that provide negotiated benefits, such as pensions, health insurance or childcare. A UBI provided by the state would, they contend, shift the burden of paying for it from employers to the general taxpayer. As Richard Murphy has shown, ‘the poorest 20% of households in the UK have both the highest overall tax burden of any quintile and the highest VAT burden’. This shift would therefore exacerbate inequalities, rather than reducing them, at a societal level.

To avoid this risk, it is therefore important that the introduction of UBI should be accompanied by measures that support trade unions’ abilities to bargain with employers at company and sector levels for benefits for their members, by protection for existing company pensions schemes and by other measures that ensure that employers continue to contribute their share of the cost, for instance through employers’ contributions to National Insurance.

The risk of undermining collectively-provided public services

By giving everyone cash, neoliberal models of UBI play along with the grain of an increasingly marketised economy in which services are individually purchased from private providers. There is therefore a risk that UBI could become a sort of glorified voucher system, undermining collectively provided public services that are designed by bodies democratically answerable to the communities they serve, under the guise of offering individual choice. Quite apart from the considerable risks that this poses to democracy, social cohesion and the quality of services, this could disadvantage individuals with special needs who require more expensive and/or specialised services than the average, exacerbating inequalities even while purporting to offer everybody the same.

It is therefore imperative that the introduction of a UBI should be embedded with policies that protect the scope and quality of public services and their collective and universal character.

The risk of creating racist definitions of citizenship

If a UBI is defined as a right of citizenship, then this raises the question of entitlement: who is, or is not, a citizen? And on what basis is their right to UBI established? A final serious risk associated with the introduction of UBI is that it could become linked to a narrow definition of citizenship from which some people (for example refugees, asylum-seekers or residents who do not hold UK passports) are excluded. In addition to the support this could give to racism and xenophobia this could also lead to a two-tier labour market in which people who are not entitled to UBI become an exploited underclass.

The introduction of UBI must therefore be integrated with humane and well-thought-out policies on immigration and citizenship, perhaps by linking entitlement to the place of residence, rather than nationality.

Conclusion

I have highlighted here what I see as four major challenges that need to be confronted if UBI is to be introduced as a genuinely progressive initiative that can restore some dignity and security to the most vulnerable members of our society, enable a flexible labour market to function in ways that avoid exploitation while encouraging entrepreneurship and creativity and reduce social inequality. In doing so, I do not wish to pour cold water on the very idea. On the contrary, I think that, at this moment in history, it is crucially important – so important that what is needed now is a debate, not about the abstract idea of a UBI, but about how it could be introduced in the real world in a way that is genuinely compatible with social-democratic and feminist ideals and starts to rebuild the train-wreck that is currently all we have left of the 20^th century welfare state that so many people worked so hard to create.

Photo by Mister Higgs

The post The key criticisms of basic income, and how to overcome them appeared first on P2P Foundation.