The political reinvention of the city

While enthusiasm has grown for reactionary, racist, and new fascist forces in many European countries, the recent municipal elections in Spain witnessed social-movement platforms entering city parliaments across the country. A broad current of organization, sometimes calm, sometimes raging, resulted in the reality that since 2015 the largest cities in Spain have been governed by forces to the left of social democracy – in the cases of Barcelona and Madrid, by mayors Ada Colau and Manuela Carmena. The movements in Spain took advantage of the relative accessibility of the municipal elections to develop a “new politics” that would go beyond the so-called “left-populist” mode of Podemos. Leaving the level of the mass-mediated national election campaigns to the latter, a broad array of actors, groupings, initiatives, movements and left parties came together as the municipalist confluences, plotting small social revolutions on the city territory. The development of a politics in the immediate living environments and social surrounds of neighborhoods that drew on newer organizational forms at neighborhood and city scales counteracted European politics-as-usual, with its emphasis on mediatized spectacle and national focus. Almost simultaneously, the summer of migration began – a very different current that wanted no less to wear down the strongholds of the state apparatuses. As the autonomy of migration made the Schengen borders porous, new platforms in Spain decided to circumvent national politics and take over the cities under the municipalist banner: effervescence at the Mediterranean’s edges and in the urban molecules.

The present volume attempts to introduce and theorize about the practices, processes, strategies and procedures that have collected in the manifold experience of municipalisms over these past few years – their failures and their successes, and their possible translation beyond the borders of Spain. Its primary aim is not to consider the eventful nature of individual hotspots of social movements, the sudden eruption of left parties and platforms or specific tactical successes in particular electoral periods. Rather, the singular developments in Spain are to be understood in the context of crisis beginning in 2007 and up to today: a decade of ongoing precarization for larger portions of the population, but also a decade of social movements, of spreading situated counter‑powers and microsocialities and new forms of institutionality.

Beyond any schematic opposition of movement and institution, the municipalist movement has never been about simply taking control of institutions. It is about probing a new institutionality, instituent practices[1] and constituent processes[2] - and thus it is about modes of consistency, of preservation, enabling, containing and care. Diagonal to the national structures of centralist politics, underneath the radar of transnational economic flows, a contagious and wave-like movement emerged across Spain that carries the potential to extend beyond its borders: towards a concrete assemblage of rebellious cities in Europe, but also to a confluence that overflows all given scales, from the smallest local context of the village or neighborhood to the translocal formation of the new municipalisms.[3]

2007/2017. The arc of the 15M movement

With the 2007 subprime crisis and its subsequent global spread, the effects of the crisis spread into all aspects of political and social life. The structurally weak economies of Southern Europe were subjected to the consequences of this multi‑faceted crisis to a particularly high degree. The neoliberal-governmental rulers of Spain (led by the social democratic party PSOE until 2011) developed a practice in the name of the EU-prescribed austerity policies: private indebtedness, municipal debt, national debt and the accompanying governmental discourses that attribute economic debt to moral guilt; a lack of affordable housing and the increasing loss of homes due to aggressive forms of eviction by banks and state administrations; an extreme increase in unemployment, especially for youth; drastic cuts to wages and social benefits – these are only the tips of the iceberg of this form of government, which was unfamiliar in Europe before the crisis and which became executed most starkly in Greece.[4]

But paternalistic and governmental practices were not shaping this time alone. Subjectivities and social practices were also changing. In 2009 and 2010, critical positions became more concerted and radicalized vis-à-vis the economic policies of the government. Many people perceived the economic aspects of the crisis in the context of a political crisis of representative democracy, which in Spain manifested as the exposure of hidden continuities of the Francoist state through the Spanish “transition” since the 1970s. At the same time, the corrupt clique of the two central parties, the conservative Partido Popular (PP) and the social democratic party (PSOE), ironically joined in the acronym PPSOE, began to collapse. Here, the problem of representation was about who considered themselves to be represented by these parties, but it increasingly became about a much more fundamental problematization of representative democracy as a form of government in neoliberal-machinic capitalism.

At the beginning of 2011 the first slogans naming the crisis of representative democracy appeared: an organization with the name ¡Democracia Real YA! spread the slogan “They call it democracy, but it’s not.” Real democracy in the here and now became the central demand of a new social movement. While a similar movement of assembly extended across a significant geopolitical area, from the North African uprisings of the “Arabellion” to the US Occupy movement and beyond, Spain became the place where these movements would have the most lasting social and political effects. Falsely labeled “indignados” from the outside, the insurrection of 15M (the abbreviation that would refer to the whole movement) was organized shortly before the parliamentary elections, in the first weeks of May 2011.[5] On May 15, 2011, the Puerta del Sol was occupied in Madrid, followed shortly thereafter by the central plazas in almost all large cities in Spain. And from the mass demonstrations, an unexpected and sustained reterritorialization emerged in most cities; demonstrators built camps with tents and other transitory dwellings, provisional gardens, info booths, improvised computer networks and people’s kitchens in public spaces. For weeks and months the occupiers developed inclusive practices of assembly in plenaries and commissions. While the Twitter feeds helped facilitate rapid changes in course in actions and demonstrations, direct communication in the assemblies was characterized by long, patient, horizontal discussions. Collective moderation, sustained care work, the development of a specific code of sign language and the methodology of radical inclusion afforded the intensive experience of self‑organization in multiplicity for hundreds of thousands of people.

Thus, the 15M movement – contrary to its name – was not simply a one‑day event event. It was not a pure uprising, but a sustained, non-linear movement with discordant connections and genealogical lines in all directions. The occupations and assemblies dissolved in various cities after a month, as it were, or in some cases after three months, but they did not simply disappear: they took a new form, a form of doubled deterritorialization. On the one hand the assemblies spread into the city neighborhoods. With the slogan #tomalaplaza thousands of neighborhood assemblies were set up, which considered singular neighborhoods in a less symbolic way and were also more manageable in size than the assemblies in the central squares. In addition to this spatial dispersion another deterritorialization occurred into various social fields. Called “mareas” (tides), these groups formed in various spaces, from education to law to health and labor[6], distinguishing themselves by color (the green tide, white tide, black tide, and so on) and developing concrete concepts and demands, counsel and actions. Especially in healthcare and primary education these social sector formations were very successful.

Lastly, already in 2009 the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) had been established in response to the rigid effects of the crisis by people affected by mortgages and evictions[7]: to negotiate with banks and government agencies, to postpone evictions or to block them with activist tactics, to attack the role of banks in the housing crisis and to change the legal situation. But the most important practice of the PAH was to begin a process of exchange, of mutual empowerment and care, in a situation where hundreds of thousands of people in Spain had been pushed into individualized suffering. Against this crisis effect of economic, social and psychopathalogical individualization, care and concern were shared in the platform’s assemblies and actions, and thus people were able to overcome radical individualization, the self-blame of indebtedness, the fear of eviction and the loss of living space and co-existence in neighborhoods.[8]

Parallel to the deterritorialization of the 15M movement in the city assemblies, the mareas and the actions of the PAH, a new kind of governmentality took shape in the Spanish government during the years of 2011 and 2012 – a form of government that Raúl Sánchez Cedillo calls “Rajoynat,” after the new head of government and PP leader Mariano Rajoy: a system of “limited political pluralism” and the complete financialization of state sources of power, which transforms the crisis into an even more extreme form of precarization and fear. This new regime, its management of the state debt crisis of July 2012 and its centralization of administrative power in the Montoro law of 2013 created a significant extension of social insecurity across large parts of the Spanish population. In addition to the sluggish and heavy violence of “Rajoynat,” at the beginning of 2015 a new right-wing party emerged alongside the Partido Popular: the neoliberal Ciudadanos (“the citizens”), a receptacle of law‑and‑order liberals, ultra-rightwingers and business interests, in sum a cloned party whose foremost ability is to sweep up the losses incurred as the PP is shaken by corruption scandals. In her contribution to this collection, Manuela Zechner characterizes Ciudadanos as the ideal subjects of the masculine spaces and halls of power.

But before that, in the European elections of May 2014, a new left-wing party had already made itself known with effective publicity: Podemos was established at the beginning of 2014 to translate the crisis of representation that had become visible through the 15M movement into a political breaking point. All porosity around this development notwithstanding, three groups played a more significant role: Pablo Iglesias’ media projects La Tuerka and Fort Apache; the tendentially Trotzkyist Izquierda Anticapitalista (the Anticapitalist Left party), with strong successes around Teresa Rodríguez in Andalucia; and a circle of young leftist political scientists of the Complutense University of Madrid around Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón, the spokesperson of the “populist hypothesis” of Podemos. Their ambitious goal soon became to take over the government as quickly as possible, in order to push an anti-austerity discourse in Europe together with Syriza in Greece. After an electoral campaign designed around their top candidate Pablo Iglesias and influenced by his media presence and other publicity effects, Podemos was able to secure 8% of the vote in the EU elections, followed by 20% of the vote in the national elections of 2015 and then, in alliance with the ‘old’ leftist coalition party Izquierda Unida as Unidos Podemos, 21% in 2016. The problem, however, was not just that they never achieved participation in a government, but above all that when they attempted to develop grassroots groups as a “political brand”, no top-down internal democracy could be called upon.[9]

If the typical tensions between party and movement were repeated here and Podemos beat more widespread and radical confluences with the creation of the party and the entry into the EU elections by one year’s time, this entry can also be seen as the common pincer movement of two complementary actors – a leftist, not-yet institutionalized party driven by media presence on the one hand, and on the other a social movement that did not dare enter governmental institutions, attempting instead to push ahead with its own radical change.[10]

The municipalist movements in Spain

Whereas Podemos concentrated more and more on the national scene and the parliamentary elections of 2015 and 2016, from the beginning of 2015 confluences began to draw together the social movements related to 15M, the PAH, the mareas, autonomous social centers as well as Podemos at the level of the city and municipal governments. With the municipal elections of June 2015 in sight, a new reterritorialization emerged with view to the territory of the city and its institutions – a Spain-wide municipalist movement from below. With various names (Barcelona en Comú, Ahora Madrid, Cádiz Si Se Puede, Zaragoza en Común, Participa Sevilla, Málaga Ahora, etc.) and different goals these platforms shared a common reference to the principles and methods of the 15M movement and some common demands: adequate solutions to the problem of debt at all levels, the remunicipalization of certain services, public support of self-managed social centers, a city planning that would counter the gentrification and touristification of Spanish cities, the principle of social syndicalism and the guarantee of social rights, especially with respect to housing and education, diverse approaches to the development of new institutionality in city administration and an open and translocal practice of migration policy.

As the philosopher Montserrat Galcerán Huguet, city district mayor and council member in Madrid for Ahora Madrid, writes in this volume, new political options were born primarily “of a broad process of confluence that avoided becoming a jumble and which from the beginning set new criteria for action.” The flows of the confluence came from all directions, from more or less organized groups, from people who had long been uninterested in representationist party politics, from the many new groupings that had been formed in the wake of the 15M movement. Many of the various local platforms developed an “ethical codex” in which all procedural forms were made transparent, including a uniform salary for elected council members. Through the effect of commitment and care, inclusion and participation, stubbornness and relentless insisting that there are political and social alternatives, the result was neither an undifferentiated and indifferent jumble “beyond left and right,” as some Podemos actors described their electorate. Highly concentrated crystallizations arose which, without directly aiming to create a party, became more and more visible on the stage of the city election campaigns. As Galcerán Huguet underscores, the confluence constitutes itself “does not constitute itself as a new party that gobbles up everything prior, but rather is born like a common shelter in which the old party discipline cannot impose itself.” No homogenization, no party discipline, no populist leader, and instead an insisting on the radical dispersion that is inherent to municipalism. The dispersed composition of municipalism is doubly necessary – as antidote against the centripetal forces of the party and the state, against the institutionalization of movements, but also as a timely form of counter-power in machinic capitalism. Dispersion in its inner organization, multiplicity, manifoldness, and simultaneously dispersion beyond the country, as a molecular multitude of cities. To cite Sánchez Cedillo, it is about the fact that “in the biopolitical and technopolitical dimension of power, in the rebellion, in the exploitation and emancipation in which we live, only an enormous, multiple and dispersed process of collective work, evaluation, resolution and decision can make a credible charge for democracy against contemporary debt politics and commissary dictatorship.”

In June 2015, four years after 15M, almost simultaneous to the intensification of the political and economic situation in Greece and some weeks before the influx of the great currents of the Summer of Migration, the municipalist movements witnessed a decided electoral success. In A Coruña, Barcelona, Madrid, Zaragoza, Cádiz and other cities the confluences were able to take over government, and in many others they became the strongest opposition. In Barcelona Ada Colau, a key activist of the PAH, became mayor. Barcelona en Comú received 11 of 40 mandates in the city parliament and became the largest fraction.

The name “Ganemos” (We win) of some of the municipalist lists rang true. And at the same time as this success, or perhaps already before[11], we must ask together with Galcerán and Carmona in this volume how power can be distributed instead of concentrated, how leader figures can recede a bit, how the knowledge and sensibilities gained through years of experience in social movements and self‑organized, neighborhood-level and extra-parliamentary (non-electoral) resistance can be translated when people participate in government. And how can it be prevented that this knowledge and these intuitions don’t get overwritten by the professional politics in the everyday? The tools of the municipalist cycle include the participation of independent actors, their territorial anchoring, a strong attempt for diversity, proportional election systems, participative programming, the introduction of an obligatory ethical code, a low maximum income as well as strict accountability for the representatives of the electoral lists.

Galcerán and Carmona bring into focus a politics that is not limited to electoral spectacle but includes developed procedures for participation that lead to sustainable decisions in the long process before the election. The creation of electoral lists is thus a good way to proceed inclusively. In the case of the municipalist movement, the Dowdall System was used – a procedure that extended the diversity of actors beyond classical political candidates but also beyond the protagonists of social movements, while simultaneously ensuring a local anchoring of the lists. This kind of situated politics, aimed at neighborly relations of care, has strong genealogies in feminism and in the Spanish left has been somewhat misleadingly labeled the “feminization of politics” in recent years. Our authors emphasize that the “feminization of politics” is not simply born, it is made. It cannot happen without a fundamental questioning of representation, without a concept of the political that puts care, diversity, and common responsibility at its core. Municipalism and feminist politics share the “attempt to break free of the dichotomies of winners and losers, majorities and minorities, and to place the politics of relations of care at the center of practice.”

The scale of the city is very important, especially because the city level offers greater chances to not simply take over the institutional apparatus, but to change it, to set instituent practices and constituent processes in motion that question and experiment with the form of the institution itself. The municipalist projects reach into the city apparatuses and attempt to transform them, they try to work with and change the modes of subjectivation of those working in and with the institutions as their work is underway. But performing these difficult tasks requires translocal connections that pull along such municipalist projects. Here we can point to the networks that developed with the municipalisms: the inter‑urban bundling of energies in encounters such as macuno 2016[12] in Malaga, makdos 2017[13] in Pamplona, where hundreds of the protagonists of the municipalist movements came together to discuss current problems and challenges; the emerging translocal networks such as the network of sanctuary cities; the constituent processes that, as Kelly Mulvaney describes in this volume, are far more than constitutional processes whose telos lies solely in a new constitution.

Genealogies of municipalism and the transformative force of migration

This is not only about Spain. In cities not limited to Naples, Zagreb and the communities of Rojava, experiences not unlike to municipalism are accumulating – as is the interest in them and their neighborly discourses: rebellious cities, fearless cities, sanctuary cities, city for all, anti-gentrification initiatives and projects that are critical of tourism, urban commons, the right to the city, and so on.

On the one hand, these movements and discourses are new and can only be understood in their contemporary forms and in the context of current geopolitics. But they also refer back to various genealogies that underscore the city as the key locus of social and political concentration, which reach back hundreds of years to situations even prior to the formation of the European nation-states. The postoperaist political scientist and former vice mayor of Venice, Beppe Caccia, writes: “Italian and other cities of the middle ages were considered spaces of freedom from feudal bondage – the expression ‘city air brings freedom’ stands for this – and the small ‘republics at the time of the kingdoms’ had a very different model of sovereignty.” Later, resistance against processes of centralization became interesting, as with the emergence of modern nation states. In part this came about from remains of the ancient régime, but foremost it was linked to the emergent workers’ movement. This was the object of a dispute between Proudhon and Marx, where the latter would later, in the context of the Paris Commune of 1871, admit that the spread of communes among other French cities could have had a strategic advantage in the revolutionary process.[14] The Paris Commune is yet and again a touchstone for radical discourses on the city, and for the new municipalisms, too, much can be learned from it.[15] It was also relevant for the genealogical line of municipalism in Spain, as this gets traced in the book on the Apuesta Municipalista (or, Betting on Municipalism) published by the Madrid Collective Observatorio Metropolitano in 2014, a year before the first municipalist movements: after the question of the autonomy of communities became a matter of struggle and legal changes in the first half of the nineteenth century, the in the middle of the nineteenth century the writings of the Catalonian philosopher and politician Francesc Pi y Margalls and the writer and painter Fernando Garrido called for a consideration of federalist concepts of decentralization. But the strongest proposals in the struggle for the city emerged in the libertarian movement directly following the Paris Commune. The short but intensive experience of the Commune spread beyond Europe and beyond its century and became a point of reference and numerous interpretations for revolutionary city politics up to the present. The concept developed by the Spanish revolutionaries of the late 19th century for the commune, municipio libre, would become one of the most influential concepts of libertarian movements in Spain around the turn of the twentieth century. They emphasized social cooperation that determined the development of municipio libre and on the basis of which broad and complex assemblages could be built. The city was, from this perspective, “the ecosystem of community cooperation”[16] and as municipio libre it became a basis for the Spanish revolution of 1936.[17]

While the Commune hails from a linguistic surround that has affinities to commonality and community, but also to communism and today to the commons, municipalism has a more problematic inheritance. Munus capere in Latin means, “to assume an obligation,” and precisely this is what the municipes – the citizens of a city – do in ancient Rome. The obligation to pay city duties is closely tied to the aspects of this citizenship that touch on basic forms of exclusion from and inclusion in the community of citizens, the ciudadanía.[18] In this volume Manuela Zechner follows the inherent tensions of this concept from its etymological context to the various uses and connotations in Spain today. One of the problems surely lies in the threatening limitations and closures of local practices, not only with respect to classical nationalisms, especially in Catalonia and the Basque Country, but as a danger of communitarian enclosure vis-à-vis contemporary movements of asylum and migration. As important as the status of citizenship and the corresponding rights are for those who live with the status of illegalization and radical precarization, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for decades, so little can citizenship be more than a clumsy tool in the struggle for a good common life here for all.

As Zechner shows, this becomes evident, for example, in the struggle of migrant street vendors in Barcelona (without papers or licenses for copied brand products that they sell). Or in the endless hierarchies and asymmetries that emerge through the layers of migration: refugees who have already lived in the city for a longer time but without papers, various communities that came to the city at different points in time and attained citizenship status at some point. The Catalonian project Ciutat Refugi might be an example of how the municipal‑migratory double can be used to offset the citizenship-granting state: as the city uses its competences in immigration and border control it can pressure the central state to allow more refugees into the city. At the same time, as Zechner claims, the affirmation of municipal sovereignty – similar to Catalonian independence – make little sense as long as the subject of politics remains the same: more or less autochthonous, white, more or less bourgeois. Thus, ways of dealing with the involved subjects, subjectivations and ways of instituting in this sense is by no means something that comes after the institution but rather requires constant attention.

Against this backdrop Manuela Zechner asks about the form of an embodied, subjective hacking, beyond the city as a citizens’ fortress, and about forms of undoing the codes that write “the normal citizen.” Taking this up, it would be worthwhile to pay more attention to the transformative force of migration to change, influence, and re-form the city. Migration wears away at the state apparatus by constantly inventing other forms of living together, thinking together and feeling together. Without migration there would be no city. Maybe this acknowledgement and a return to the old antiracist demand “whoever is here is from here” could open the way for an actualization capable of inventing new politics: forms of condividuality, of sharing tasks and wealth, which could also link to the concept of co-citizen that is based in relation and reciprocity, as our eipcp colleague Stefan Nowotny wrote in a text on the translatability of citizenship in 2008: the citizen is he who is the co-citizen of someone here.[19] Departing from this and rejecting the authoritarian assignations, allocations and interpellations of state apparatuses, municipal modes of subjectivation and sociality could be enabled that poke holes into the banks of the fortress, the fences of the state, the paper of the passports, the lines of the capitalist algorithms.

The present volume is an attempt to give accounts in German of the practices of care, sociality and institutional transformation that have developed in this decade of counter-power in Spain. It should also trace the rich discourses, theories and political strategies that have emerged in and with the sustained molecular transformation in Spain. A process of fermentation, which should make us less dependent on the lure of the state apparatus and leave no space for fantasies of the state as a vessel to take over, and which opens and invents different institutings and institutionalities. A process that emerges both outside of and within the state, whose two sides, municipalism and migration, do not stand against one another but rather actively contribute to constituent processes in Spain, Europe, and beyond.

From: Die neuen Munizipalismen (The New Municipalisms) Soziale Bewegung und die Regierung der Städte (Social Movement and the Government of Cities), Christoph Brunner, Niki Kubaczek, Kelly Mulvaney and Gerald Raunig (Eds.) https://transversal.at/books/munizipalismen

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[1] Stefan Nowotny and Gerald Raunig, “Preface to the New Edition,” in: Instituierende Praxen. Bruchlinien der Institutionskritik, Vienna et al: transversal texts 2016, pp. 9-17, online: http://transversal.at/books/instituierendepraxen.

[2] See Antonio Negri and Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, Für einen konstituierenden Prozess in Europa, Vienna et al: transversal texts 2015, online http://transversal.at/books/negrisanchez-de. (Selected texts in English on the transversal texts blog, online: http://transversal.at/blog/Democracy-today-is-wild-and-constituent; http://transversal.at/blog/The-hope-of-the-democratic-monster; http://transversal.at/blog/A-call-to-Podemos; http://transversal.at/blog/For-a-constituent-initiative-in-Europe).

[3] See, for example, publications such as Observatorio Metropolitano, La apuesta municipalista. La democracia empieza por lo cercano, Madrid: Traficantes de sueños 2014; Angel Calle Collado, Ricard Vilaregut Sáez, Territorios en democracia. El municipalismo a debate, Barcelona: Icaria 2015; Fundación de los Comunes, Hacia nuevas instituciones democráticas, Madrid: Traficantes de sueños 2016; Emmanuel Rodríguez López, La política en el ocaso de la clase madia. El ciclo 15M-Podemos, Madrid: Traficantes de sueños 2016.

[4] See Isabell Lorey and Gerald Raunig, “Das gespenstische Potenzial des potere costituente. Vorbemerkungen zu einem europäischen konstituerenden Prozess,” in: Antonio Negri and Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, Für einen konstituerenden Prozess in Europa, Vienna et al: transversal texts 2015, 9-36, online: http://transversal.at/books/negrisanchez-de, as well as the Sánchez Cedillo’s contribution to this volume.

[5] See Montserrat Galcerán Huguet, “Demokratie, Gouvernementalität und das ‘Gemeinsame’ in der spanischen 15M-Bewegung,” in: Isabell Lorey, Roberto Nigro, Gerald Raunig, Inventionen 2, Zürich: Diaphanes 2012, pp. 62-75, as well as Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, “15M als Aufstand der Körper-Maschine,” in Ibid., pp. 48-61, and Sánchez Cedillo, “15M: Something Constituent This Way Comes,” in: SAQ (2012) 111(3): pp. 573-584.

[6] See the listed colors and working areas at https://15mpedia.org/wiki/Mareas.

[7] See http://afectadosporlahipoteca.com/ as well as Ada Colau, Adrià Alemany, ¡Sí se puede!: Crónica de una pequeña gran victoria, Barcelona: Destino 2013.

[8] On the Spanish tradition of ecologies of care, see Precarias a la Deriva, a la deriva. por los circuitos de la precaridad femenina, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños 2004, as well as Isabell Lorey’s elaboration of the neologism invented by the precarias a la deriva authors, “cuidadanía” as the multiplicity of care relations instead of “ciudadanía,” or citizenship (“Care Crisis and Care Strike: Isabell Lorey,” Verso Blog 2017, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3170-care-crisis-and-care-strike-isabell-lorey).

[9] On these questions and on the history of Podemos see Raul Zelik, Mit Podemos zur Demokratischen Revolution? Krise und Aufbruch in Spanien, Berlin: Bertz & Fischer 2015; Emmanuel Rodríguez López, La política en el ocaso de la clase meda. El ciclo 15M-Podemos, Madrid: Traficantes de sueños 2016, especially the second part “La fase Podemos.”

[10] On these attempts at radical institutional transformation see Fundación de los Comunes, Hacia nuevas instituciones democráticas, as well as older cooperative works such as the transversal issue 05/08, monster institutions, online: http://transversal.at/0508. Fundación de los comunes is a driving factor of a large scene of non-academic knowledge production, developing radical concepts of political theory as part of social movements, but also organizing events and assemblies such as macuno and makdos: http://fundaciondeloscomues.net/.  

[11] On the at once temporal and spatial “before” – “pre-location” and “future perfect” – of the new institutionalities see Gerald Raunig, “Confluences. The molecular-revolutionary force of the new municipalismos in Spain,” in: transversal 09/16, monster municipalisms, online: http://transversal.at/transversal/0916/raunig/en (A German-language version of this text is included in the present volume.)

[12] “Primeras jornadas de municipalismo, autogobierno y contrapoder,” http://mac1.uno/, see also the printed Municipalist Manifesto in this volume, which was written in light of this meeting.

[13] http://mac2.uno

[14] Beppe Caccia, “Europa der Kommunen,” in: Luxemburg 2 (2016), online: http://www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/europa-der-kommunen/.

[15] Consider the parallels of many aspects of social, condividual, molecular revolutions in the Paris Commune and the current municipalist movements in: Gerald Raunig, “Preface to the New Edition of Art and Revolution,” online: http://transversal.at/blog/art-and-revolution-preface-2017?highlight=art%20and%20revolution.

[16] See Observatorio Metropolitano, La apuesta municipalista, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños 2014, online: https://www.traficantes.net/sites/default/pdfs/TS-LEM6_municipalismo.pdf, here p. 42.  

[17] Ibid., p. 44.

[18] See Gerald Raunig, “Confluences. The molecular-revolutionary force of the new municipalismos in Spain,” in: transversal 09/16, monster municipalisms,, online: http://transversal.at/transversal/0916/raunig/en (A German-language version of this text is included in the present volume.)

[19] Stefan Nowotny, “The Multiple Faces of the Civis. Is citizenship translatable?”, in: transversal 04/08, borders, nations, translations, online: http://transversal.at/transversal/0608/nowotny/en.