In December I was in Barcelona for a day by myself before my friends arrived. I get quite anxious travelling solo in a big city now; it reminds me of my early twenties moping around looking for meaning and getting confused. So I planned myself some nice things to do. I went for a swim in a municipal pool, got a haircut and visited the CNT bookshop. But by the afternoon I started to feel that familiar overwhelm, and to make it worse, I accidentally walked into the heart of the city’s shopping district. I can see it in a clear and funny way looking back now. It was like barging in on some mass cult ritual. Hordes of nervous-eyed people circle an enormous historic square, offering sacraments (dolla) to the new gods labelled H&M and Apple. Predictably bleak looking back, overwhelmingly loud and incomprehensibly sad at the time.
I had a little podcast in my ears stopping me really spin out. The Blindboy podcast. A weird, incredible set of autofictional audio essays from this Irish guy. With soothing tinkling piano sounds and his calm, earnest voice, each episode is a trip into the meaning of something that’s happened to him. And the things that happen to him, are the same things that happen to all of us: baffling, nonsensical, mad modern things: chips delivered on a miniature shopping trolley in a motorway hotel, finding yourself in an old church graveyard with two pigs engraved on a headstone, pumpkin spiced lattes and so on. The thing you get to love about Blindboy is that he’s not letting himself get stuck in that baffled state. He wants to know why we could possibly have made fish fingers. He’s not getting lost and overwhelmed in Barcelona. He’s making connections, taking the unbridled chaos of the world and for a little minute, choreographing it into something legible. It’s a calming, joyous way to feel part of a community.
The weird thing is that a few days before our trip, he released an episode called ‘I’ll Give You Barcelona…’. It’s him reading a short story that’s not even really about Barcelona. Anyway I was thrilled: another strand in the web of jokes, encounters, coincidences, phrases, ideas, silly noises etc. for us to pull together! As you might know, I think friendship is a very important part of being alive. and I guess I didn’t have so much of this when I first came to Barcelona. To be in such a city and not get overwhelmed you need a crew (virtual or otherwise) to build a shared story about that place with. Anyway, turns out Barcelona’s interesting as hell, and I wanna tell you about it.
The 2010s saw a lot of revolts but few revolutions. Many more people came out on the streets to resist an old system and insist on a new one than ever before in human history, but very few managed it. Vincent Bevins says in his study of this cycle of protests that very few were able to get organised enough to transform the energy of the streets into lasting political change. The exception is of course Rojava, but it is also Barcelona.
Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common), the city-wide political manifestation of the street movement the indignados (the outraged), aimed to turn the experiments in direct democracy that animated and organised the street protests into a lasting institutional form that could ‘govern by obeying’ Barcelona. Their strategy for doing this was to run an enormous local campaign based on getting regular people involved and winning power -ultimately to transform the very idea of power- in the Barcelona municipal government. And, in a lot of ways, they managed it.
They held hundreds of neighbourhood assemblies, co-wrote a new city-wide constitution with thousands of participants online, rallied a vast array of local organisations, and recruited thousands of volunteers to help get the vote out. Only 8 months old, in 2015 Barcelona en Comú (BeC) won enough seats to take control of the city council.
It’s astonishing. When you think of the entrenched power of capital, media and legacy political parties in big cities like this, it’s a profound relief to know that people working hard and getting organised can reclaim the institutions that are supposed to serve them.
Radical municipalism
What’s important to know about BeC, is that it wasn’t just about doing progressive politics at a city level. It was an experiment in something called radical municipalism. To understand radical municipalism you need to go back to Murray Bookchin, one of the most eloquent proponents of it. A 20th-century American theorist and activist, (and one of the key influences on the Rojava revolution), Bookchin was sick of watching our ecosystems getting destroyed and sick of the anarchism and Marxism failing to meet the challenge. He felt we needed a new synthesis of the two and another way to achieve a rational, sane and democratic society.
What he based this synthesis on was the history of free cities resisting the unfreedom of the nation-state. He points to the Athenian polis, the medieval communes, the Commuñero movement of 16th-century Spain, the Paris Commune of 1871 and, of course, the Spanish anarchist collectives of 1936. What he concludes is that the city (or municipality) is the level at which a genuinely free social life can be organised. Any higher and you get alienated, unaccountable state control. Any lower and you fail to build a powerful enough force to resist capitalist forces. The municipality is the scale that you can have genuine mass democracy which is the only thing that can produce an ecologically sensible relationship with the rest of the living world.
Since then, this idea -municipalism- has flowered into a hundred interpretations. You can stick words like ‘autonomist’, ‘platform’, ‘managed’, ‘libertarian’, ‘radical’, ‘new’ and ‘socialist’ in front of municipalism and you’ll get slightly different variants of the theme. Laura Roth, Bertie Russel and Matthew Thompson have done some good work recently in articulating what is distinct about radical municipalism. It is much more, they say, than, what you could call a progressive localism (just a city council doing ‘good things’): it’s seeing the city as the level at which to build and transform the political community, to develop new kinds of power beyond patriarchal, nation-state and colonial structures. It’s a strategic intervention to enable wider democratic change as well as a place to practice it.
The gorgeous historical rhyme of Barcelona en Comú’s wager with radical municipalism is that Murray Bookchin took his ideas from the practical experiences and organising forms of the Spanish anarchists in Barcelona when they took control of the city in 1936. The radical ideas that animated this city in the first half of the 20th century, have resonated around the world, reaching northern Syria, neighbourhood democracy in India, communes in Venezuela, and coming all the way back to Barcelona.
The feminisation of politics
As with the Spanish anarchists and these other movements, the question of undoing patriarchy and transforming the old culture of domination is at the heart of radical municipalism. The phrase ‘the feminisation of politics’ has become the popular (if imperfect) way of referring to this. It doesn’t mean making politics more feminine (although sometimes there is a connection to that), but weaving in feminist practices to change the way power works.
To break that down a bit. Right now politics is a game of competition, coercion, manipulation, and betrayal which brings out the worst of human possibilities. Cooperation (unless it’s a short-term deceptive ruse) is a naive thing to bring to this game; power exists as a tool to beat opponents with. The feminisation of politics insists on a complete overhaul of that. Instead of focusing on individuals it focuses on collectives; it involves as many people as possible in decision-making; it seeks radical solutions to issues that meet everyone’s needs; it is a caring approach that understands care as a fundamentally productive social force; it advocates leadership that is consensual and mutually empowering; and, because of the way gender roles have been divided in patriarchal society, it involves achieving a balance of representation in decision-making spaces.
(Three activists from across various radical municipalist movements in Europe, including Laura Roth, have pooled together practices for organisers trying to ‘feminise’ politics. You can download it for free here.)
Struggling with power
While in power BeC has achieved some great things. They’ve shut down 5,000 illegal Airbnbs, meted out €600,000 in fines; legislated that all new development must be at least 30% social housing; set up a new wing of the council, SIPHO, to help residents resist evictions; pedestrianised vast parts of Barcelona, creating more space for nature and public gatherings; and allowed community groups to legally reclaim buildings and infrastructure if it will be used for a social good, Can Battló, a once squatted industrial centre now a mosaic of community projects (we watched some kids lose a police van in) being the flagship example.
We haven’t reached a happy ending yet though… Last year, BeC came third behind the two major parties and lost the mayoral seat. Some reasons for this were out of its control. (The issue of Catalonian independence split the vote, and BeC had to hold a middle ground between its Catalonian and its Spanish working-class base.) But before these results, BeC were discovering challenges that they hadn’t anticipated and were struggling to overcome. It’s a bit heartbreaking to see so much work and dedication get twisted and distorted by the system of power it is trying to change. But this is our work. And as Roth and co put it, BeC’s challenges are better seen, not as a verification or refutation of the premise of municipalism, but as part of “a process of ‘collaborative theory building’; something akin to a giant collective action-research cycle”.
To start with, the municipal government of Barcelona is an institution with 12,000 employees, a bureaucracy with an enormous amount of inertia. To politicise, educate and build the confidence of all of these people is tough. Hierarchy is baked in. And the activists who got elected found themselves outside of the radical milieu that could support them to make bold interventions. As one of them said:
“We no longer comment on Naomi Klein's latest article, but on the procedure for modifying the budget; we are no longer talking about the latest super interesting initiative in the world of the social economy, but about how to introduce, while respecting current laws, a social clause in the next town hall cleaning contract. We don't plan to attend the usual "in defense of" protest, but to get home at a decent time, even if it's only two days a week.”
What the BeC delegates needed was concrete, confident proposals for reorganising such a behemoth institution, things they could present to civil servants. There is a lot at stake once you're in charge of education, sanitation, roads, hospitals etc. It’s not a great time to take untested risks, especially when the establishment’s main critique of the left in Barcelona is that it’s utopian and unrealistic.
This struggle against the inertia of Barcelona’s municipal politics feeds a popular story about BeC that gets told again and again about similar efforts at transformative politics. In its least generous form it goes, ‘look at those sellouts who’ve made a career out of our life and death struggle, who used this movement to get into power only to betray us’. The more generous version goes, ‘dang even the best activists we had couldn’t overcome the way power concentrates and corrupts’. In both, the idea is that a small section of the movement gained power and betrayed the masses.
The other way of seeing this classic dilemma is to flip responsibility. What if the politicians didn’t betray the movement, but the movement betrayed the politicians? After winning the election the street movement significantly demobilised. The demands for radical transformation softened, and the experiments in alternative forms of organising waned. Whereas what BeC needed was an unignorable population, one that was deeply engaged in the wider transformation, offering concrete and demonstrably effective forms of democratic decision-making.
Now, I’m not sure that Blindboy has ever heard of radical municipalism. I partly just wanted to let you all know about him. But also there’s a connection. One of the few things I have experienced about municipalism in practice (involved with democratic community organising projects like Trust The People and Cooperation Hull) is the force of direct democracy. A well-facilitated assembly is a lot like a good holiday; it’s a total break from the normal way of doing things. It’s worlds apart from that soul-withering PMQ style of political discussion where the aim of the game is to humiliate your adversary and claim victory. It’s about making sense of a confusing situation together and coming up with a new set of coordinates to navigate the world by.
Blindboy’s story is not about Barcelona, but it is a critique of the meaninglessness of patriarchal masculinity, and his podcast is the same gesture towards collective worldbuilding implied by radical municipalism and the feminisation of politics. Listening to Blindboy is like a good holiday and a good assembly, it’s fucking fun because you learn about the world and other people. You feel a sort of trust in a bigger group being rekindled. It’s creating a community based on curiosity. And that’s a powerful tool for seeing a city as a place that belongs to its inhabitants.
More on Barcelona and municipalism:
Nice stuff.