Peter Gelderloos’ critical appraisal of spain’s “municipalities of change” is timely. (Roarmag 02/07/2019)
In the general municipal elections of 2015, various, large spanish cities (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, etc.) fell to coalitions that promising greater social and political justice, echoing an agenda of older “social democracy” or of the more recent social movements in the country (most notably, 15M) that sought an institutional expression for their indignation and desire for change. That desire came to an end in the municipal elections of June, 2019, with cities falling to Right-wing coalitions and Barcelona’s Ada Colau hanging on as mayor with the support of Barcelona pel Canvi–Ciutadans (the party of france’s former interior minister, Manuel Valls).
Spain’s “rebel cities”, as they came to be called, are no more.
The end of a political cycle, some may say. Or as we would hope, the end of the illusions of “social democracy”, that is, the belief that an anti-capitalist can be carried through the political institutions of capitalism.
However, if history can be said to teach anything, social democracy is stubborn and as long as capitalist social relations persist, the illusion of the possibility of the institutional reform of those same relations will continue, zombie like.
And again, Gelderloos’ analysis is important, for if the “municipalities of change” failed, so too did anarchist and autonomist movements, in the wake of the enormous social upheaval that was 15M.
South America’s “socialism for the 21th century” is in tatters, mired or lost to corruption and dictatorship. And in Europe, Podemos, Syriza and the like, were only the poor inheritors of an unreformable reformist tradition.
One would like to say that the stage is open for those who would create ways of life beyond Capital and the State. But for that to be possible, both our thought and action must be radical.
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Amador Fernández-Savater: Reaching for a politics of pure potentiality, or trying to keep power at bay
One never takes power, it is power which takes us.
Tomás Ibáñez
We follow Peter Gelderloos’ critical evaluation of spain’s “radical” municipalism with a more theoretical reflection, by Amador Fernández-Savater, on the political cycle in the country that began with the eruption of the 15M movement of 2011.
Inspired and borrowing from the work of Giorgio Agamben, Fernández-Savater endeavours to articulate a politics of destituent potentiality, a politics that aspires not to power, but to ways of life that keep creative potentialities open.
And though we share concerns and sensibilities with Fernández-Savater, it is unclear whether his notion of politics as a “potentiality at a distance from power” is robust enough to outline or sustain a radical anti-capitalist and anti-statist politics.
We share the essay below, in translation, as an invitation to through a radical politics that does not reduce itself to creating a counter-power to capitalist hegemony, or to seizing that power for a “socialist” politics.
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