Today's Topics:
1. US, WSA, ideas and action: Electoral Road to Socialism? By
Tom Wetzel (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. US, black rose fed: WHAT WENT WRONG FOR THE
MUNICIPALISTS IN SPAIN? (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
Could a shift from capitalism to socialism be brought about through electoral politics?
Ever since the origins of the modern socialist left in the late 1800s, many socialists
have viewed the politics of parties and elections as a way they can insert themselves into
history - forming a core component of their strategy. ---- In the World War I era the
American Socialist Party (SPA) had gained a hundred thousand members and elected more than
a thousand government officials - mayors, members of city councils and state legislators.
By the mid-20th century "democratic socialism" had been coined as a kind of political
brand to refer to the tradition of the socialists oriented to electoral politics as a
strategy for social change. ---- The "democratic socialist" label was partly meant to show
their defense of the systems of "representative democracy" and liberal values in western
Europe, North America and elsewhere. This was combined with critiques of the repressive
and undemocratic nature of the "communist camp" countries of the mid-20th century - the
Soviet Union, Castro's Cuba, Communist China. This defense of "representative democracy"
is tied in with their basic strategy of working to gain political power through elections.
The "democratic socialist" brand gained a huge boost in visibility in the USA in 2016 when
Bernie Sanders called himself a "democratic socialist" during his presidential campaign.
His attacks on economic inequality echoed the Occupy movement of a few years before and
his reform proposals spoke to the conditions of life faced by the younger generation. This
led many young people to search out the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). This was
the beginning of the vast growth in the membership of DSA - from about five thousand to
over 60,000. The new members were overwhelmingly in their twenties and thirties.
DSA derives from the 1980s merger of Michael Harrington's Democratic Socialist Organizing
Committee with the New American Movement. DSOC was one of the fragments of the old SPA
when it blew apart in the early 1970s. Harrington advocated the rather delusional idea
that the labor movement could be the basis for converting the Democratic Party into an
American labor party. The New American Movement, on the other hand, was mainly a product
of the student-based New Left of the Sixties. NAM's founders wanted it to be a
non-Leninist "revolutionary socialist" organization. Like the present DSA, NAM was a
multi-tendencied organization based on activist chapters. After the libertarian socialist
and hard Maoist factions quit NAM in the mid-‘70s, NAM drifted more towards left-liberal
reform via electoral politics. Hence the merger with DSOC.
The charter of the merged organization allowed for caucuses and a certain democratic
flexibility. And this has helped DSA to accommodate its huge growth. The multi-tendencied
character of DSA is reflected in the proliferation of many different caucuses and working
groups - from the North Star caucus (the old guard from the Harrington-influenced DSA) to
the Libertarian Socialist caucus (a coalition of people with views from syndicalism to
building "alternative institutions" like cooperatives). There are also groups defined by
interest, such as labor, socialist-feminism, eco-socialism. Many of the local chapters
include people who focus on organizing tenants or fighting ICE roundups of immigrants.
A particularly influential tendency in DSA is the Bread and Roses caucus. This goes back
to the Momentum slate which elected about a third of the members on the National Political
Council of DSA. This effort also included people who created The Call (now the official
blog of the Bread and Roses caucus). Various members of Bread and Roses are on the
editorial masthead or staff of Jacobin. Bread and Roses proposes a strategy which they
call "the democratic road to socialism." Their strategy is based on combining the building
of unions in workplaces and "the politics of mobilization" with an electoral strategy
based on the eventual creation of a mass socialist party. Bread and Roses counter-pose
their strategy to "ultra-left tactics that substitute adventures organized by a small
cadre of activists for a mass, organized working-class movement. And we oppose politics
defined by radical posturing that appeals only to the already convinced." Building "a
mass, organized working class movement" is central to the syndicalist strategy, so we can
agree on that point.
In Our Road to Power Vivek Chibber points to the lack of a real presence in the workplaces
of people with socialist or radical politics. And this is indeed a long-standing weakness
of radical politics in the USA. But for Chibber the main focus is building a social base
for socialism - a base for a socialist party. For the transition to socialism, the Bread
and Roses strategy relies on the role of the electoral socialist party pushing through
structural change after winning state power through elections.
The aim of combining electoral politics with a socialist goal has led also to a revival of
interest in non-Leninist forms of Marxist theory. A number of the writers and activists
around Jacobin magazine and the Bread and Roses caucus have thus revived an interest in
the ideas of Karl Kautsky. Kautsky was the pre-eminent Marxist theorist of the pre-World
War 1 electoral socialist parties. Kautsky's strategy was for the "gradual accumulation of
forces" through the growing votes of the German Social-democratic party and the growing
membership of the centralized German trade union federation. "Class struggle," for
Kautsky, was conducted primarily through electoral politics. He tended to see actual
strikes and mass struggle as secondary to "the main battle."
Kautsky was a major influence on the leadership of the American Socialist Party before
World War 1. But the left wing of the party saw things differently. The main publication
of the party's left was International Socialist Review. A perusal of the pages of that
magazine shows the strong influence of syndicalism and libertarian socialist ideas. IWW
organizer Bill Haywood was part of the party's left wing. In Industrial Socialism Haywood
did see a tactical role for socialist electoral politics. He suggests that electing
socialists to head a local government could create a more favorable environment for
organizing - helping to keep the police in check for example. But Haywood did not see
socialism coming about through an electoral path. For that he looked to the development of
a labor movement capable of large-scale mass action - and an eventual "expropriating
general strike."
In explaining "why Kautsky was right", Eric Blanc points to writings of Kautsky in the
1890s to early 1900s where Kautsky believed that a fundamental "ruptural break" with the
capitalist regime would be necessary but differs from the Leninists in "how to get there."
Thus Kautsky believed that the bureaucratic state of the pre-World War 1 German monarchy
was far too undemocratic to be used as a vehicle for building socialism. For Kautsky, the
power of the autocratic executive authority and the military officer corps were the basic
roadblock. He believed that a "revolution" could be brought about by achieving a
parliamentary majority. This majority would "occupy government power" and use this as a
platform for transforming the state, eliminating the old military corps and the autocratic
executive power. Kautsky's ideal was the supremacy of the House of Commons in the British
state. Although Kautsky kept Marx's language of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" to
refer to the rule of the working class, he believed that this could be achieved through
the statist "representative democracy" of a British-style parliament.
This makes the statism of Kautsky's approach clear enough. But the liberal state is not
"neutral ground" for the working class. Class oppression is inherent to the structure of
the state. This is shown by the subordination of public sector workers to the
managerialist bureaucracies of the state - a power base for elements of the bureaucratic
control class, such as state managers, prosecutors, judges, military brass.
In its more radical form "democratic socialists" propose that a party committed to
socialism could use the state to enact reforms that would break the old capitalist scheme.
This would mean, according to Neal Meyer "nationalizing the financial sector so that major
investment decisions are made by democratically elected governments and removing hostile
elements from the military and police. It will mean introducing democratic planning and
social ownership over corporations (though the correct mix of state-led planning and
"market socialism," a mix of publily-owned firms, small privately-owned businesses, and
worker cooperatives is a matter of some debate in our movement)."
Here we see one of the traditional problems with electoral socialism: A tendency to think
of socialism in terms of nationalization - state takeover and management of banks and
other industries and "state-led planning." This problem seems to fall directly out of the
electoralist strategy. After all, politicians are seeking government office. For that
reason their program focuses on what they propose to do through the state once elected.
Reformist versus Non-Reformist Methods
For libertarian socialists with a syndicalist orientation, our strategy is fundamentally
different than the electoral socialists. The syndicalist strategy is based on the
development of movements built on non-reformist forms of action and organization. But what
is the difference between "reformist" and "non-reformist" methods?
A "reform" is any partial change in society that is within the power of movements to fight
for. There are different ways to fight for "reforms," different ways to organize and
different forms of action. And this will have effects on the development of working class
power to make change.
A reformist approach relies upon paid "professionals of representation" to win gains "for
us" - the layer of paid officers and staff in bureaucratic "service agency" unions, the
paid staff and executives of non-profits that "advocate" for us, the politicians who we
vote into office. The method of action is indirect because it doesn't rely on the direct
participation and action of working class people themselves. The activists may do
door-to-door canvassing to get working class people to vote for candidates, but this does
not bring these people into organizations they can control and use as vehicles of direct
activity of struggle by working people themselves.
The electoral socialist parties tend to be controlled by the paid layers at top, such as
the politicians who are focused on retaining government office and not losing votes. This
means they have a lifestyle that will lead them to oppose the development of direct action
such as strikes and occupations when these reach a level of social conflict that may
threaten their institutional position.
When the focus is on electoral campaigns, this will tend to lead electoral socialists to
look to the paid apparatus who control unions, and have financing and staff to support
candidates. This has often led electoral socialists to support the positions of the paid
officials of unions even when these conflict with the rank and file. In other words, they
will tend to accept bureaucratic trade union methods and structures.
But the existing trade unions tend to be controlled by a layer of full time officials and
staff. As with the professional politicians, their way of life is based on their
institutional role. They tend to favor negotiations staying in their own hands so that
they can negotiate deals that the employers can be persuaded to sign onto without risky
levels of mass struggle. Like the professional politicians, they will tend to oppose
direct action getting to the point of threatening severe risks to the union that is the
basis of their prestige and way of life. The present trade unions in the USA tend to be
obsessive about not breaking the law. They accept no-strike contracts and stepped
grievance systems that take struggles and disputes off the shopfloor and place them in the
hands of lawyers and paid officials - thus discouraging direct action by workers
themselves. But it's very unlikely for unionism to be revived in the private sector in the
USA without a revival of militant methods of direct action that are likely to violate the
restrictive labor law regime in the USA.
When people propose a strategy of seeking changes or improvements to our situation by
voting for politicians to enact a reform, or through "mobilizations" crafted and
controlled by staff-driven non-profits, or relying on the paid officials of trade unions
to negotiate with employers, or building alliances by schmoozing up politicians and other
bureaucrats in unions and non-profits, this approach does not encourage participation in
decision-making or control of organizations by working people. These methods do not build
self-reliance and confidence in our own capacity. The rank and file are not learning about
democratic organizing or public speaking or other skills learned through direct
participation in building a membership organization and direct collective struggle.
The upshot is this: A reformist strategy tends to build up these layers of political and
union bureaucracy apart from the working class. And these layers tend to become a
roadblock to the development of wider mass action and direct solidarity that can lead to
major class confrontations - conflicts that challenge the power of the dominating classes
and threaten the capitalist regime. Thus a reformist strategy will tend to keep the
working class captive to the capitalist regime. In Germany Kautsky's reformist approach
necessarily built up layers of trade union careerists, professional politicians and the
party apparatus. Already by World War 1 this layer had become a roadblock to a mass
struggle for socialism.
We can say that an approach to action and organization for change is non-reformist to the
extent that it encourages a reliance on direct struggle (such as strikes and occupations),
and builds rank-and-file controlled mass organizations, and builds self-confidence,
self-reliance, organizing skills, more active participation, and wider solidarity within
the working class.
Non-reformist forms of organization are self-managed by the members - rooted in direct
participation (as in the direct democracy of a union meeting) and forms of accountable
representation (such as elected shop delegates who still work the job or an elected
rank-and-file negotiating committee). Non-reformist forms of action are disruptive forms
of collective action based on direct participation - such as strikes, occupations,
militant mass marches.
Syndicalism can be defined as a strategy that is based on non-reformist forms of action
and organization. The idea is to work to build self-managed forms of mass organization,
such as unions controlled by workers themselves and other grassroots mass organizations.
By "organizing the unorganized," we help to build a movement that working people can use
to fight the employers, landlords and powers-that-be. By building up the capacity of
working people to organize and run their own movement, and build a form of social power
they control themselves, we encourage the self-reliance, confidence and links of
solidarity needed for advancing the struggle against the system.
To the degree that working class people do not see themselves as having the power to
directly change the society, they are likely to see the ambitious agenda for radical
change offered by socialists as "pie in the key" or "nice ideas but unrealistic." On the
other hand, growing levels of direct struggle and a stronger development of solidarity in
practice builds more of a sense of potential power. When working people participate
directly in building unions, or in carrying out a rent strike with other people in their
building, or in reaching out to others in the community to build solidarity, this directly
engages people in the action - and helps people to learn how to organize, builds more of a
sense that "We can make change." To the extent that the working class builds power through
its mass participation and disruptive challenge to the system, this encourages people to
develop aspirations for deeper changes in society. In this situation mass organizations of
struggle form a setting that allows those active workers who have a radical agenda for
social change to connect with the grievances and concerns of other working people.
As this process develops in the course of a growing crisis in the system, the possibility
for a fundamental break to the system becomes possible as the working class develops the
organizational strength, confidence, participation and aspirations needed for a
fundamental challenge to the dominating classes. This consciousness can develop rapidly in
periods when large numbers are brought into mass struggle and solidarity is built through
widening connections that working people create among the various groups in resistance to
the system. The working class needs to develop its own class-wide agenda and "gather its
forces" from the various areas and sectors of struggle to form a united bloc with both the
power and agenda for change.
What I'm describing here is the process of class formation. This is the more or less
protracted process through which the working class overcomes fatalism and internal
divisions (as on lines of race or gender) and builds the confidence, organizational
capacity and the aspiration for social change. This is the process through which the
working class "forms" itself into a force that can effectively challenge the dominating
classes for control of society.
The potential for this process of mass struggle to develop into a fundamental challenge to
the system depends on the way this dynamic of mass struggle interacts with the political
and economic crises of the capitalist regime. We can't predict exactly how a basic
"rupture" with the capitalist regime will develop.
For syndicalists, a key part of a revolutionary process is the takeover of the collective
control of the industries by workers, and a process of breaking down the old top-down
bureaucratic state and building new self-managed institutions, such as neighborhood and
workplace assemblies, and councils or congresses of delegates. From a syndicalist point of
view, the democratic promise of the revolution is rooted in the self-managed character of
the mass organizations that are driving the process.
Even when this kind of fundamental challenge to the system is "off the agenda," we need to
encourage forms of organization and struggle that leave open the potential for mass
extension that can break the framework of the capitalist regime. To do this we need to
avoid building up institutional barriers to this movement from below.
Of course many activists are likely to continue to look to electoral politics as part of
their strategy. Although much of the working class doesn't vote, many people do think
about candidates for office. Not only because of the media frenzy around elecctions but
also because it can make a difference who is elected in some cases. Even if "democratic
socialists," Marxists and other radicals continue to look to electoral politics as part of
their strategy for change, many of them also favor a focus on building grassroots
organizations and direct struggle - building more democratic unions, pushing strikes to
gain working class power, and building other forms of grassroots social movement protest.
For many activists in DSA, this may be their main personal focus. To the extent the focus
is on building democratic mass organizations, building participation and support for
militant struggles, syndicalists and other socialists may be able to work together in a
kind of "united front from below" in the organizing situation.
A Revolutionary Path?
In "Our Road to Power," Chibber concedes there was an era when mass movements did pose a
revolutionary challenge to the system:
"Now there's no doubt that the decades from the early twentieth century all the way to the
Spanish Civil War could be described as a revolutionary period. It was an era in which the
possibility of rupture could be seriously contemplated and a strategy built around it.
There were...socialists who advocated for a more gradualist approach, but the
revolutionaries who criticized them weren't living in a dream world."
But, as Chibber sees it, a revolutionary strategy is permanently off the agenda:
"Today, the state has infinitely greater legitimacy with the population than European
states did a century ago. Further, its coercive power, its power of surveillance and the
ruling class's internal cohesiveness give the social order a stability that is orders of
magnitude greater than it had in 1917. What that means is, while we can allow for and
perhaps hope for the emergence of revolutionary conditions where state breakdow is really
on the cards, we can't build a political strategy around it...Today, the political
stability of the state is a reality that the left has to acknowledge. What is in crisis
right now is the neoliberal model of capitalism, not capitalism itself."
For Chibber, this means that "left strategy has to revolve around building a movement to
pressure the state, gain power within[the state]...and erode the structural power of
capital." To do this "democratic socialists" propose to use the labor movement (and
"mobilizational politics") as a social base for participation in electoral politics.
The history of the electoral socialist parties in the 20th century does not provide much
reason to hope this strategy will work. By the mid-1980s the various electoral socialist
parties in Europe had abandoned any idea of a transition to socialism. They had become
parties focused on "managing" capitalism - and quite willing to adapt to the elite demands
for a politics of austerity, privatizations and cuts.
In its radical form "democratic socialism" proposes a series of gradual structural reforms
to achieve socialism through electoral politics. In fact the capitalist elites will wage a
fierce fight against radical reforms that attack capitalist control over the work process,
or attack the basis of capitalist profits or capitalist ownership of the industries.
In the 1970s the Swedish social-democrats proposed a fund for the unions to buy out shares
of Swedish companies (the 1970s-era Meidner Plan). This plan was opposed at the time by
the syndicalist SAC union in Sweden because it would leave the corporate managerialist
bureaucracy intact. It was not actually a proposal for worker control of industry.
Nonetheless, it was enough of a threat to the owning class in Sweden that the major
capitalists mobilized effectively against it. The social-democrats were forced to retreat.
They soon moved towards neo-liberal politics - including extensive privatizations of the
public sector. The French Socialist Party under Mitterand in the early 1980s had to
retreat from an ambitious plan of nationalizations when it was faced with vast capital
flight (a "capital strike"). For Chibber, "mass mobilizations" and actions, especially in
the workplaces, will be necessary to force the state to grant concessions. But he wants to
combine this with "democratic socialists" gaining power within the existing state -
pursuing reforms for a series of "breaks" with the inherited capitalist regime.
In fact, this strategy is highly unrealistic because (as I've argued above) there is an
inherent contradiction between an electoralist strategy and a strategy of mass working
class struggle from below. The reformist approach of relying on elections and conventional
bureaucratic trade unions builds bureaucratic layers that form a roadblock to the
emergence of a mass working class movement with the organizational capacity and aspiration
to make a fundamental challenge for power from below. The reformist strategy discourages
the development of an independent working class movement with the capacity for an
effective challenge to the system.
Success for a working class movement from below works to a different logic than electoral
politics and bureaucratic trade unionism. Here the movement builds power by building
disruption collective action, such as strikes, and building wider solidarity, overcoming
internal divisions (for example, along lines of race or gender). Self-managed, democratic
organizations are essential if people are to control the struggle - crafting demands and
working out the tactics. The working class develops the capacity and aspiration for
challenging the system from below by relying on non-reformist methods of action and
organization.
Moreover, the course of world events since the Sixties does not suggest the capitalist
regime has either the popular legitimacy or stability that Vivek Chibber seems to think.
From the 1960s to 1980s there were a whole series of crises where mass-scale working
class movements posed a nearly revolutionary challenge to the system: the general strike
in France in 1968, the revolutionary collapse of the state in Portugal in the 1970s, the
mass strikes of Solidarity in Poland in 1980. In these cases the movements weren't
defeated by the stability and power of existing states. Rather, they were defeated by the
role of Socialist and Communist parties which saw the mass movement from below as a threat
to their bureaucratic ambition of sharing in state power.
Given the vast ecological crisis that capitalism faces, the steep financial crash in 2008,
the overthrow of various rulers in the Arab Spring or the emergence of radical right-wing
populist movements, it's not clear that the state has the kind of stability or popular
legitimacy that Chibber claims. In the USA, elections rarely attract much more than half
the eligible population to vote - 55 percent in the 2016 presidential election. And
studies show that the non-voters are poorer than the voting population. Much of the
working class doesn't vote. This makes elections a poor venue for working class struggle
because our numbers cannot be marshaled there. Left candidates will depend on votes of
middle class elements who may not favor a radical working class agenda.
A plausible path to self-managed socialism is going to lead through a revolutionary
crisis. If the working class does develop high levels of direct struggle and solidarity
through the growth of non-reformist methods of action and organization, this builds
organizational strength, wider solidarity among sectors of the oppressed, and greater
aspiration for change as people develop a growing sense of their own power. In such a
period, the working class needs to develop its own class-wide agenda and "gather its
forces" from the various areas and sectors of struggle to form a united bloc or front with
both the power and agenda for change. In this way the working class becomes a
revolutionary factor in its own right.
The working class front or alliance (made up of grassroots unions and other social
movement organizations) that acts as a force of social transformation may have
ideologically specific organizations (such as various socialist groups) participating in
it. As syndicalists, however, we are opposed to the idea of a party "taking state power"
and then implementing its program through the managerialist bureaucracies of a state. The
history of the mid-20th century "communist camp" countries suggests where that will lead.
As syndicalists, we believe that a process of social transformation should aim at worker
self-management of all the industries but also democratic accountability of social
production to the people in the ways they are affected by it - through effects on ecology,
through quality of services and products, and by producing for social benefit. This means
rooting the governance of society and industry in the democracy of neighborhood and
workplace assemblies and councils or congresses of elected delegates.
A revolutionary working class strategy is not about building a small armed group to
assault the heavily armed state from outside. In the syndicalist concept of an
"expropriating general strike," the idea is that workers throughout the economy "defect"
from management control, taking over control of the places where they work. This includes
the public sector. In the Russian, Portuguese and Spanish revolutions there was also very
substantial "defection" of the personnel of the military forces to the side of the working
class. There was very little initial violence in the October, 1917 transfer of power to
the Soviet Congress in Russia because the rank and file of the army and navy were already
loyal to the soviets.
An argument against a revolutionary strategy is often based on the kind of dismal,
authoritarian regimes that discredited the Communist movement in the 20th century. The
problem here is the idea of party hegemony and seizure of state power by a "centralized
cadre party." When a revolution is propelled and controlled by a guerrilla force in the
hands of a top-down political group (as in China and Cuba) or a single political party
works to gain a top-down party monopoly of state power (as the Bolsheviks did in the
Russian revolution), this prefigures the power of a bureaucratic class that rules over the
working class.
But guerrillaism or the seizure of state power by a "centralized cadre party" are not the
only forms of ruptural strategy. The syndicalist strategy is designed to avoid the
bureaucratic class power that emerged in the Communist states. This is accomplished by a
strategy centered on democratic mass organizations.
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Message: 2
As Spain's municipalist parties suffered a major setback in May's elections, Barcelona
based author Peter Gelderloos writes on how their own actions and inactions are largely to
blame for the loss of support. For those not familiar, municipalism is a political current
which emphasizes the building of participatory democracy at the local level through the
use of municipal government and often associated with thinker Murray Bookchin. ---- A
leading example of these politics in action can be found in the Barcelona en Comú
political party which emerged out of M15 squares movement and housing struggles to win
Barcelona's council and mayoral offices in 2015. Anarchist author Mark Bray describes the
party as an example of, the tendency of horizontalist mass movements to be siphoned into
non-horizontal, electoral politics. ... In Spain, the most significant party that grew out
of the 15M was Podemos (We can) which has formed electoral coalitions with other similar
parties and platforms like Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) and Ganemos Madrid
(Let's win Madrid) which calls for the promotion of "democratic municipalism" and the
creation of political structures that are "democratic, horizontal, inclusive, and
participatory ..." (Ganemos Madrid 2016). Their rhetoric is rife with horizontalist
references to "autonomy" and "autogestión" (self-management). They essentially claim to be
merging the spirit and ideals of horizontalist assembly with the lamentable "necessity" of
taking office. Moreover, they fully embrace horizontalism's antagonism toward formal
ideology by rejecting the left/right binary and eschewing the usual trappings of leftism.
Mark Bray, "Horizontalism: Anarchism, Power and the State" originally published as
"Horizontalism" in Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach, Routledge, 2018.
By Peter Gelderloos
On May 26, citizens across Spain went to the polls to vote in municipal and European
elections. The results were widely seen as a setback to the municipalist wave that swept
Spain's major cities four years prior. Carlos Delclós published one explanation, focusing
on the gap between their hype and their policies and how the Catalan independence movement
has upset the landscape. To put it simply, parliamentary majorities are now all but
impossible, given that the divide between Left and Right has been further divided by a
perpendicular axis, the one between Spanish nationalism and Catalan nationalism.
There are, however, a whole series of failings that stem from the actual programs and
interventions of the municipalist parties. Weeks of wrangling to turn the divided vote
into feasible coalitions has given us even more examples of politics as usual in the last
month, and I think we are obliged to take an honest look at the four years the governments
of change have been in power. Delclós has mentioned some accomplishments; I will focus on
failings.
Admittedly, this is not the whole picture, but the problems I bring up are grave enough to
warrant a serious reconsideration of the parties I discuss, and electoral strategies in
general. I will focus on the experiences in Barcelona and to a lesser extent València,
being the two cities I know best, as well as two primary examples in which the
municipalist platforms that seized City Hall four years ago were the creations of
grassroots activists more than career politicians.
Interpreting the Elections
First, a word on the context. The Catalan independence movement has certainly shaken up
politics in the Spanish state, but I do not think "nationalism" explains the waning
fortunes of the municipalist wave. Rather, the actions and inactions of the municipalist
parties themselves explain their loss of support.
In the increasingly polarized environment that accompanied the explosion of Spanish
nationalism and the brutal government assault on voters in the October 2017 independence
referendum, Podemos and Barcelona en Comú (or BComú) came off as crass opportunists.
Supporters of independence were livid with the ways the BComú mayor, Ada Colau, sabotaged
the 2017 referendum. How could a municipalist be anything but enthusiastic in response to
a popular referendum? It seemed a calculated political move, given that Podemos was hoping
to get into power in part by positioning themselves as middle-of-the-road mediators with
regards to Catalonia, something they could not do if independence were achieved before the
next elections. Meanwhile, Spanish nationalists from the Socialists all the way to Vox
despise Podemos and BComú for not taking an iron-fisted approach to the independence movement.
The other municipalist party, the CUP, lost all their seats in Barcelona, showing that
unwavering support for independence was also not a sure strategy. The CUP is the only
party I know about that functions in an internally democratic, assembly-driven manner and
the only one with a nominally anticapitalist politics. As such, their fate is even more
relevant to those interested in municipalist strategies. At the mercy of parliamentary
politics - designed over centuries with the express aim of neutralizing any radical threat
from below - they had to make compromises to enter a governing coalition. They staked
everything on the independence process, joining with centrist, Catalan nationalist parties
in the hopes that in a pie-in-the-sky future of an independent Catalonia, they could
achieve a progressive, anti-austerity government. To get there, they had to support the
pro-austerity budgets of their larger allies.
In the end, they alienated Spanish-speaking progressives, and they lost the interest of
Catalan-speaking progressives who figured they might as well vote for the center-left ERC,
which was actually sticking to its program. Ironically, the passive, media-driven tactics
favored by the CUP's larger allies condemned the independence movement to failure. The CUP
hedged their bets and lost on both fronts.
But independence was not the major issue in the municipal elections - at least, not for
everybody. Many voters favored independence parties in the European elections and
non-independence parties in the municipals. So what went wrong for the municipalists?
Consider this statistic: 60 percent of Barcelona residents feel that the city has gotten
worse in the last four years. That figure is far worse than it was with the previous
incumbent who lost the mayoral elections, and by necessity it does not count the growing
number of people who have had to leave Barcelona due to rising rents.
In a seeming reversal of fortunes, Ada Colau recently managed to secure another term as
mayor after weeks of wrangling, even though her party narrowly lost the vote. Instead of
seeing this as a new lease on life for the municipalist movement, we need to interpret it
as a deeper, more ominous kind of failure. She got the support necessary to stay in power
by teaming up with the Socialists. The price she had to pay for that alliance was to
refuse any coalition with pro-independence parties, such as the leftwing ERC that actually
came in first in the mayoral elections.
There will doubtlessly be a heftier price to pay down the road, given that the Socialists
were the first party of austerity in Spain, and that position hasn't changed. Even more
frightening, though: Colau could only hold onto power by accepting the outside support of
the rightwing Ciudadanos (Citizens), headed in Barcelona by the rabidly racist Manuel Valls.
Barcelona en Comú Mayor Ada Colau speaking next to Podemos figure, Pablo Iglesias
A Machine That Cannot Be Tamed
One of the principal anarchist arguments against the strategy of seizing political power -
a strategy that comes back again and again, ever in new disguises, always to disastrous
results - is that the mechanisms of political power are designed to exploit, control, and
oppress, and they cannot be used for other purposes, no matter how good our intentions
might be. A convincing reading can be made of Ada Colau's good intentions thwarted by
political and economic institutions too powerful for any election to overturn.
However, in every case, it is extremely difficult to find any evidence of a real attempt
to create some kind of revolutionary transformation.
Take the case of the high voter discontent in Barcelona. The capitalist media and the
police unions - powerful forces in any democracy - conspired to channel this discontent
towards largely illusory fears of rising crime. Colau did not challenge this discourse
frontally, uncovering its racist subtext nor emphasizing the kinds of capitalist violence
that do far more harm. On the contrary, she joined the tough-on-crime chorus, promising to
add more than a thousand new cops to the streets, but promising a focus on "community
policing," a scam that any neighborhood activist knows is intimately linked to the
intensification of police violence. The CUP were the only party not to promise more cops,
and they tanked in the elections.
This is par for the course. In the last elections, Colau promised to abolish the riot
division of the city police, and in the end all she did was change their name. In effect,
she pissed the cops off and mobilized them against her administration without weakening
them institutionally.
One of the first campaigns the police and the media waged against the Colau administration
was to manufacture a crisis with the manters, undocumented immigrants primarily from
sub-Saharan Africa who make their living selling goods like clothing or sunglasses in
public areas without permission. The cops fanned the flames through increased harassment
and the media created racist fears and annoyances around these vendors, but Colau's
solution was insubstantial dialogue ending in a further crackdown on the immigrants.
This is especially significant given that the manters, politically organized in a union,
are at the forefront in the battle against racism and the border regime. Their conclusion
to the experience with the municipalist government was to label Colau as "racist".
An August 2016 demonstration by Barcelona's street vendor union protesting the detention
of a fellow vendor. Read more
The Loss of Autonomy
From the beginning, feminism has been one of Ada Colau's major campaign issues. Without a
doubt, this has given basic feminist discourses more mainstream attention, a change that
shouldn't be belittled. But it is necessary to point out that there is currently something
of a war going on in the heart of the feminist movement, and the LGBT movement as well,
concerning core beliefs and strategies.
One wing seeks integration and equality within the existing institutions, the other
identifies those institutions as patriarchal to their core and seeks a deeper
transformation of society on every level. The former, which Colau faithfully represents,
tends to control the resources and access to public discourse.
Take the example of the March 8 Vaga de totes or "Women's Strike." Advancing an economic,
anticapitalist critique of patriarchy that is relevant to poor and working class women and
anathema to wealthy women or those with positions of institutional power, and reclaiming
March 8 as a combative day of struggle akin to May Day was the project of a small group of
feminists.
In Barcelona, they were overwhelmingly anarchists or members of the pro-independence Left.
These were comrades who faced frequent fines and police harassment for blocking
ultra-Catholic anti-abortion activists or for carrying out unpermitted marches against
gender violence. In earlier iterations of March 8, when the Women's Strike was exclusively
the initiative of a relatively small assembly, they would block major roads, sometimes
numbering only fifty, while furious drivers wondered what the hell they were doing,
unaware of the significance of March 8.
This past March 8, a number of feminist comrades spoke of how confused they felt after the
protests. Now that several major political parties, including BComú, backed the event, the
streets were filled with tens of thousands of protesters, and my friends were happy with
the amount of power in the streets, with the fact that finally, all of society was
listening. But at the same time, they felt like the movement had been stolen away from
them and was being used by those who had a much more limited, reformist agenda. In effect,
March 8 had been defanged and turned into a parade, in a way similar to what has already
happened to Pride.
In Manresa, a small city outside Barcelona where the feminist movement is particularly
strong, an early morning women's march maintained a large crowd in the streets while they
smashed the windows of misogynist fashion stores and blockaded a factory known for the
exploitation of its overwhelmingly female workers. They were able to do this not thanks to
all the mainstream support now given to the March 8 protest, but in spite of it. The
morning march was organized as an autonomous event, separate from the institutional
protest, where movement police prevented the very kind of direct action and direct
propaganda - like spraypainting - that gave the earlier movement its strength.
Another example comes from the housing movement, Colau's key constituency from her
activist days. With the bursting of the real estate bubble and the financial crisis, the
Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotecas - Platform of those Affected by Mortgages or PAH
- exploded on the scene and began to undergo a major transformation.
While in its beginnings, the organization refused to help renters who were also being
kicked out of their housing, as the crisis deepened so too did the practices and
perspectives of the PAH. The immigrant families that increasingly made up the organization
brought to bear a consciousness of racism and border regimes. They also ended their
exclusive focus on mortgages, embracing everyone with housing problems, and as they begin
squatting entire buildings to provide collective housing, often working hand in hand with
squatter and anarchist groups who had been promoting this tactic for decades, they began
to address more of the problems facing the poor, such as patriarchy and educational exclusion.
Relationships of solidarity formed within the PAH led to some of the first major
interracial, intergenerational, and lower class feminist assemblies ever created in
several areas, to "popular schools" that would give after school assistance to the
children of families that suffered the violent exclusions of poverty, housing precarity,
and racism, and more. Some PAH chapters even changed their name to PAHC, to reflect that
they were also affected by the big C, Capitalism.
But as the PAH grew and radicalized, it became ever more distanced from its most famous
activist turned politician. Most chapters are now staunchly critical of Podemos and the
municipalist governments of change it allies with. In Barcelona, the PAH is largely
recognized as a fief of BComú, a fact that led the "Obra Social," the part of the
organization that occupies buildings and puts them to social use, to break away.
Meanwhile, BComú and the other governments of change get the credit for "expanding the
public housing stock" when in reality, this is an achievement of the PAH and similar
grassroots groups, who occupy unused buildings and fight banks tooth and nail to force
them to make their repossessed properties available for housing.
Focusing on the achievements of government tends to obscure the kind of qualitative
changes people actually seek. While people in the streets are fighting for their quality
of life, politicians tout their credentials with statistics and media campaigns. They
might boast of thousands of new units of public housing, but the reality is far too
complex to be expressed in statistics.
I live in a neighborhood where the two major apartment blocks are slated for demolition, a
plan approved by the CUP (Podemos-affiliated parties are not a significant part of the
picture in my district). Recently we held an event that was well attended by members of
the local PAH. One, a single mother of five, told me about how, after a years-long wait,
the housing authority offered her public housing that was completely uninhabitable, with
no water, no electricity, and even missing portions of the roof. If she were to turn down
the housing they offered, she would exclude herself from the possibility of future
assistance. Needless to say, that housing unit was one of the choice examples that banks
were handing over to the government to comply with the new laws.
What not many people know is that, as an activist, Ada Colau would often undermine the
autonomy of social movements. In the previous decade, she was part of an organization that
arose within the Barcelona squatting movement and began to push a strategy of negotiating
with City Hall, occupying spaces and then legalizing them, getting the government to
expropriate in exchange for ceding use of the space.
After Colau's group effectively pushed out the members of their shared social center,
Magdalenes, who were opposed to the strategy of legalization, the Barcelona Squatters'
Assembly expelled the Magdalenes collective, not out of vindictiveness, but to protect the
autonomy of the movement. They had a clear memory of how legalization was key to
destroying the squatters' movements of Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands,
and I think history has validated this decision.
The Barcelona squatters' movement still enjoys its autonomy, still generates powerful
struggles, and has also engaged in a fruitful cross-pollination with the PAH and similar
groups.
A more sordid example comes in the form of Jaume Assens, "third lieutenant" to the mayor
and deputy for En Comú Podem, the Podemos-BComú alliance. Before his election on Ada
Colau's ticket, he was well known as one of the principal lawyers for the Barcelona
squatters' movement. In his very first week upon assuming office, he was already signing
eviction orders against families that needed to squat in order to get housing. The new
administration, at that time, was careful not to evict social centers or squats connected
to a political movement, which meant that unconnected immigrant or gitano families were
the most vulnerable.
Housing occupied by PAH activists in Barcelona.
Capitalism By Other Means
My strongest criticism of the governments of change focuses on the way they have actually
been at the forefront of intelligent capitalist expansion. This is exceedingly clear in
València, governed since 2015 by the party Compromís, which formed as a coalition of
leftwing parties and activist platforms to run in the municipal elections shortly after
the start of the 15M (or indignados) movement.
For the previous decades, València had been the fief of the traditional rightwing Popular
Party, under the leadership of the notoriously corrupt and authoritarian Rita Barberà. One
of her pet projects was the wholesale demolition of el Cabanyal, a fishing village turned
seafront neighborhood populated by gitanos, Rroma, and poor to lower-middle class white
folks. As the neighborhood was progressively abandoned, it also become a focal point for
the anarchist squatting movement in València, now armed with historical perspective after
witnessing the total gentrification of other neighborhoods closer to the center.
Rita's planned demolition united the entire neighborhood, breaking racial and class
divides and uniting anarchists, relatively conservative or apolitical neighbors, and
gitanos active in the collective self-defense of their communities. People defended
squatted housing, occupied vacant lots to create community gardens and sporting fields
open to local youth (in contrast to the private and exclusively white tennis courts
nearby), founded new social centers, organized huge public events like paellas and
calçotades, and built solidarity.
Rita, the mafiosa mayor who ruled with an iron grip, was defeated.
Then Joan Ribó of Compromís came into power. He canceled the demolition project and
immediately embarked on a smart campaign of gentrification that paired beautification and
investment with evictions, police harassment, and a racist and anti-squatter media smear
campaign. The press built up the non-gitano squatters as a separate identity and heaped
all manner of calumnies on them as a group, portraying them as privileged parasites and
professional troublemakers (Alex Jones, anyone?), while demonizing racialized neighbors as
devious criminals.
When the lower-middle class residents - those who owned their houses, however modest and
run-down these were - realized they could be catapulted into the upper-middle class if
property values rose, they broke with the coalition that had defeated the previous government.
Meanwhile, burn-out, an increase in differentiated forms of repression, and the kind of
complacency that often besets autonomous subcultures eroded active solidarity and joint
struggle between radical squatters and gitanos. The neighborhood was punctured by
Airbnb's, tattoo and bicycle shops, and vegan restaurants, and plans were developed for an
"international" private university catering to North American students.
In four years, a progressive government accomplished what a rightwing one had been
incapable of over two decades. So when I hear people laud Joan Ribó for the bicycle lanes
and widened sidewalks, I can tell that they've never been to the frontlines of a struggle
against gentrification, or they've never seen with the eyes of those who are excluded
from, rather than those who are welcomed to, the newly beautified neighborhood, because
the last few years in el Cabanyal made it clear that the bike lanes go hand in hand with
the evictions, the racist police raids, and the wholesale expropriation of the
neighborhood by investment capital and whiter, more Nordic residents.
If the government beautifies a neighborhood, it is precisely because they do not intend
for the poorer residents to be able to stick around and enjoy it. And this holds true
whether the government is rightwing or leftwing.
Ada Colau's tenure in Barcelona provides a more complex example of the same dynamic. When
she assumed the reins of government, some of the major struggles regarding quality of life
and a "right to the city" focused on runaway tourism and the hyper-precarious labor model
based on services and temp-work designed to satisfy both tourism and the trade fairs that
had become a major source of investment for the city.
Neighborhood assemblies, the PAH, and the CGT - an anarcho-syndicalist union, and the
third largest labor organization in the country - all denounced the effect mass tourism
was having on housing availability and quality of life in the neighborhoods. Transport
workers organized by the CGT, bearing the brunt of the huge influx of visitors to the
city, were fighting for more resources and better labor conditions. And a number of
assemblies were popping up to denounce political blacklists and labor precarity at the
Mobile World Congress, the crown jewel of Barcelona's trade fairs.
From the beginning, BComú has positioned themselves as the guardians of Barcelona's
economic future. As I predicted in the article I wrote at the beginning of Ada Colau's
term, her party would take limited measures against mass tourism, which conflicts with the
new model of tech-sector work-tourism; and that she would fight to continuously update the
dominant model of tourism and gentrification being deployed by the city's elite.
In practice, her measures against mass tourism have been disappointing even to the
reformist organizations that once constituted her base, consisting mainly of slowing down
a rampant hotel construction that was threatening to destroy the integrity of the city as
a well functioning capitalist whole; basically, playing the urban planning role that
capitalists require governments to execute. From the very beginning she enthusiastically
promoted a renewed contract for the Mobile World Congress and shielded that entity from
criticism. She has engaged in strike-breaking and slander against transportation workers,
as denounced by the CGT.
Perhaps most worrisome, her party has become the vanguard of the "Smart City" model, which
is the future of the capitalist city. On a world scale, Barcelona has become a leading
Smart City, advancing rational and AI integration of urban management, total surveillance,
and completely illusory "green" measures that have completely hoodwinked reformist sectors
of the environmental movement, while also attracting additional high tech investment that
is helping push out poorer city residents.
The Failings of Self-Organization
If I have avoided discussion of the municipalist parties' accomplishments with the
justification that for now I would only focus on critique, it would be wholly unfair of me
to avoid self-critique.
Without a doubt, this latest attempt to engage in a "long march through the institutions"
has been fueled by the failings of anti-institutional movements that focus on
self-organization. After all, Podemos and many of the affiliated municipal parties were
not born as a co-optation of the 15M movement. Many would-be politicians tried, but the
people were sick of political parties and they were armed with the historical memory of
how consistently political parties had failed us in the past, so they were able to defend
their rejection of parties throughout the duration of the movement.
No, these parties were born in the vacuum left behind after the 15M movement died. And it
died because we were unable to elaborate our spaces of self-organization to the point
where they could take on the self-organization of daily life.
They remained political spaces rather than social spaces, concerned exclusively with the
organization of protests, blockades, strikes, and events. Without a doubt, protests,
blockades, and strikes are important, but they are not enough to make a revolution. Even
in Barcelona, where the 15M movement matured the most, leaving behind the massive, central
plaza occupation - that clunky, disillusioning experiment in direct democracy - and
morphed into a versatile, rhizomatic complex of dozens of neighborhood assemblies, we
failed to go further.
In those neighborhood assemblies, we began to construct truly social relations, but we did
not use those relations to launch practices of mutual aid and expropriation of the social
wealth. In only a few cases did the assemblies link up with the housing struggle,
generally leaving that to specific, single-issue groups, only occasionally did they open
up the metro for free public transport, and as far as I know, never did they break merrily
into supermarkets to fill up carts and share the abundance with neighbors struggling to
make it to the end of the month. Rather, they focused on protests, opposition to austerity
measures, and getting people in the streets, a task made difficult by our pre-existing
political identities.
In the realm of symbolic protest, those identities become more entrenched, as each little
group perfects its own discourse and recruitment drives. Only by focusing on the single
thing we all truly share - the need to survive in spite of the brutality of capitalism -
could we have broken with those artificial barriers.
This was a general failing, but it is of specific concern to anarchists, autonomous
marxists and other anticapitalists, since we are the ones who spend all our time thinking
about concepts like mutual aid and communalization. I am not at all surprised by the many
failings of the municipalist parties in power, since political parties have given us no
other example in all their history.
What is surprising is our failure to spread deeper practices of self-organization, or even
to imagine such practices for ourselves, in a moment when tens thousands of people were
rejecting representational politics and open to other ways of doing things.
Though I am critical of municipalism as a strategy, I think it is possible to find common
ground within those structures that allow people to fight for housing, to defend their
neighborhoods, and to protect their livelihood, as long as such structures preserve their
autonomy from the institutions of power and the electoral vagaries of a politics that is
by definition bourgeois.
Ours cannot be a political struggle, it must be deeper, it must be social, fusing our
economic struggles for a life free of precarity and exploitation with the collective
re-expropriation of the power to organize our lives for ourselves, without representatives
or rulers.
Peter Gelderloos is an anarchist and author living in Catalonia since 2007. He is active
in the housing struggle and other social movementsand author of Worshipping Power: An
Anarchist View of Early State Formation. This article was originally by ROAR Magazine.
http://blackrosefed.org/what-went-wrong-municipalists-in-spain/
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