MAC 4: “Subaltern Europe” Continued

A 2015 performance action against "wolfish" financial speculators in housing, performed by Warsaw group Miasto Jest Nasze

Voices from the East

In Raúl Sánchez Cedillo's trans-European segment of the MAC 4 conference Justyuna Koscinska of Miasto Jest Nasze spoke. That is the City is Ours group of Warsaw, Poland. (She distributed her card upon leaving the conference, which is quite untypical in these gatherings; it was easy then to find her group online.) They are fighting “wild reprivatizations” and evictions from social housing, and always the cutting down of trees to prepare parks for development.
(I recalled the hard story of the Warsaw woman housing activist murdered in the 1990s for her activism that we heard from activist architects at our SqEK conference in Rome in '14. Never solved. Even so, as I write this, NY Times reports: “In Poland, nearly half of the judges on the Constitutional Tribunal, one of the nation’s top courts, rebelled and declared its workings politicized and dysfunctional”, illustrated with a photo of people protesting in front of the Supreme Court in Warsaw. So not only the young left, but also the shreds of civil society are pushing back against the authoritarian government. SqEK's 2017 conference was in the east of Europe, in Prague, for the first time.)
Radomir from the Belgrade, Serbia, group Roof Overhead, a consortium of anti-eviction groups, spoke also of their struggle against the privatization of flats acquired during the socialist period. “When we made an electoral run,” he said, “we were shocked by how the media banalized and stereotyped our positions. It's a thing to be aware of, how your positions will be distorted.”
Justyuna concurred. “We are stereotyped as communists who want to terrorize society. Ownership of apartments has been valorized. We think it's better to rent. Tenants' rights is hard to discuss, because renting is associated with communism. The air pollution problem is also involved with ownership, and the property rights of the car.”
She referenced the sanctuary cities movement, and the offering of municipal ID cards to migrants. Urban citizenship is happening more in the German-speaking world right now, she said. This amounts to rethinking global justice from the municipal level.
I was reminded of the prescient artists' project, recently shown in Madrid, the “NSK State.” It was created in 1992 by people from Slovenian arts group Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). They issued passports for their “state”, which for a period were actually used successfully by some African migrants.

One-time logo of Warsaw municipalist group

Corporate Power in Cities

A madrileño, Tom of Ecologists in Action, asked: “What are the limits of municipalism in relation to corporate powers? With Ahora Madrid we can see there are big limits. How to spend public monies is the question. Here in Madrid, a huge amount goes to transnational corporations. How can we get rid of that? We don't have small and medium companies to take over from the transnationals. From the first moment, corporate power was organized to stop any systemic change.”
Now, he noted, AirBnB is lobbying in Brussels as the “European Holiday Association.” They are asking the EU to intervene in cities' lawsuits against AirBnB, relying on the capitalist market policies of the EU.
A woman from Greece observed that now, ten big cities in Greece have left governments. Women have campaigned to pass resolutions against TTIP, the trade pact that would affect cities' ability to do local democracy, and other things.
Renau from Lisbon: The political questions are obvious, even if they are not discussed under the rubric of municipalism. The anti-austerity movements of 2011-12 were the biggest movements in Portugal since the Carnation Revolution. They started to shift the political composition of the ossified left in Lisbon. Questions around gentrification and tourism weren't as present. But recently there has also been a shift in global investment. A huge influx of foreign capital has come to Lisbon. Rented social centers have emerged. Squatting is hard because of the weakness of the social movements. There is now an Assembleia de Ocupação de Lisboa – AOLX to claim housing in Lisbon. We try to squat city-owned property. The group is not openly antagonistic, she said (although their blog posts are pretty rad). “They've sort of formed an NGO.”

Passport of the NSK State

This compares directly to the NYC of the 1980s and '90s, when the movement squatted abandoned city-owned properties which the city was trying to sell to private developers. (The story is told in Christopher Mele's book, “The Selling of the Lower East Side.”) Then artists weren't so hip to being used. Now artists are coming to the aid of the movements early on – e.g., the activist art group Left Hand Rotation has produced a documentary comparing the new pressures on housing to the 18th c. earthquake that levelled Lisbon.

Raul Recapped –

Isabel spoke (and I missed her) on how the work of care is being reorganized. On the long trend of racism. Ecologies of care. Techno-ecologies. On the new social commons, and on new ways of defining social struggles. Transformation of classes.

Poster from Euromayday

He summarized me (on the question I've written already) – speaking of constructing migrants as subjects in themselves, not only as subjects of care, and how cultural institutions could relate in that work.
Other points of his summary in telegraphic fashion –
Elections are useful mainly as ways of deblocking at the level of the state. I think this meant “deblocking” the path of the social movements, how they are constrained in terms of the invisibility of their issues, distortion, etc., and their inability to propose policy and legal solutions to their questions.
Gerald Raunig: We need our own media.
Lunch. (I failed to buy a ticket, and there was no more room.)
The second session of the Subaltern meeting was assemblyistic. Groups were defined in a kind of rolling chaos, but ended up being something like 1) on treaties, municipalists against them, and how to network for practical purposes; and 2) housing – the struggle against global funds like Blackstone, and e-platforms like Uber, Cabify, Air BnB.
I joined a 3rd group on networking. The discussion was broad:
In the electoral pursuits, you get into an NGO world. Which network can municipalists use to help them? Radomir of Belgrade – Foreign legitimation of our struggle against waterfront development was helpful.
Italian man – We need to share legal best practices. Other municipalities offer examples of what is possible to do. A knowledge exchange in the field of law. I mention the crowd source law project in Madrid, which is in its infancy.
A “how to” program of questions like social media, how to do campaigns, etc. Question of the local vs. the national: “Neighborhood politics is already transnational” because everyone comes from someplace.
Me – (broken record) Cultural institutions in relation to social movements.
Raul – There is no global-local opposition anymore. Any locality is already a small world, an isomorphism that is already academic. Democracy is not overdetermined by national interests and governments. The manteros are harrassed by local police. This is not only here in Madrid, but everywhere.
He proposes an action day on issues, like No Se Vende (Not For Sale) EU-wide.
The main idea is to reinforce each movement in its own place.
Tom of Ecologists in Action – Who represents municipalities on the EU level? EU regulations impact cities, but the cities can't influence them back? This is a question, to work to influence power on an EU level, or mainly to build local power? We can use a concrete exchange with political platforms like Corbyn's Momentum and Bernie Sanders campaign on media and social media.
Gerald – We need these classical campaign logics, but on social media we need not to be so classical. We should think of funding our own media. Using Facebook and so, we will not produce a disobedient character. For example, the Euromayday program, a networked event which started in Milan in 2001. It spread all over the EU. The question of precaricization of labor became foregrounded. They named the issue. Municipalism was long a'building. EU wide action days can help.
In Hamburg in 2009, I saw street poster traces of Euromayday all around the city, as groups there had participated and pushed the program. An amazing Lego animation announced it online. I met graduate students who planned to write theses on Euromayday. Now online there is merely a fading luminescence of this event. I put some in the links below.
Many, including Gerald Raunig and most recently Geert Lovink in an anthology by my publisher, have written on the question of dissident media, and the dystopian aspects of corporate social media platforms. These writings definitely inform my consumption and use of the corporate platforms. But “our own”? So much more easily said than done. I recall the failed efforts of Michael Alpert's zcomm.org to launch one a few years ago. I'd love to see Gerald get a big grant and launch a platform with built-in auto-translation (like Facebook and Twitter have), that would greatly extend the fine work EIPCP has done with its occasional multi-lingual e-zine.

NEXT:
MAC 4 Concluding Session; Spanish Social Centers Ponder Legalization Strategies; The Madrid Seminar of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

LINKS

Miasto jest Nasze | Warszawa: miasto mieszkańców!
http://miastojestnasze.org/

Roof Overhead, Belgrade, Serbia (in Cyrillic)
https://nedavimobeograd.rs/zdruzena-akcija-krov-nad-glavom-podrzala-ne-davimo-beograd/

Squatting in the East - Baltic Worlds
http://balticworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/BW-1-2-2016-open-access.pdf

NSK State | The NSK TIMES
times.nskstate.com/about-nsk/

The city belongs to those who occupy it: Okupying Lisbon
blog post of Sept. '17 describes the movement
http://autonomies.org/2017/09/the-city-belongs-to-those-who-occupy-it-okupying-lisbon/

Assembleia de Ocupação de Lisboa - AOLX
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/assembleiadeocupacaodelisboa/

"Terramotourism" documentary by the activist art group Left Hand Rotation
http://autonomies.org/2016/11/the-plunder-of-tourism-lisbon/
42 minutes

I saw the Madrid city website last year, but now cannot find it. There is this article, which looks to be an exhaustive rundown, as of 3 years ago. (This stuff changes fast.)
Robert Ambrogi, “The Failure of Crowdsourcing in Law (So Far, At Least)”, August 10, 2015, at lawsitesblog.com

Tomas Herreros and Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, “Euro Mayday: El otro 1 de mayo,” 01/05/2008
http://blogs.publico.es/dominiopublico/488/euro-mayday-el-otro-1-de-mayo/

Publication in PDF (SP): "Milano-Barcelona. Euro MayDay 004. 1º www.euromayday.org. Primer de maig de 2004. MayDay! MayDay! Contra la precarització de la vida..."
https://marceloexposito.net/pdf/mayday_periodico.pdf

EuroMayDay - Tactical Media Files (ENG)
http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/campaigns/6410/EuroMayDay;jsessionid=1C8A4F64F806E9DED6EF792AD9C52ED5

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, eds., Organization after Social Media (Minor Compositions, UK/USA, 2018); online via Scribd at:
http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=857#more-857

Tomas Herreros and Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, “Euro Mayday: El otro 1 de mayo,” 01/05/2008
http://blogs.publico.es/dominiopublico/488/euro-mayday-el-otro-1-de-mayo/

Publication in PDF (SP): "Milano-Barcelona. Euro MayDay 004. 1º www.euromayday.org. Primer de maig de 2004. MayDay! MayDay! Contra la precarització de la vida..." https://marceloexposito.net/pdf/mayday_periodico.pdf EuroMayDay - Tactical Media Files (ENG) http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/campaigns/6410/EuroMayDay;jsessionid=1C8A4F64F806E9DED6EF792AD9C52ED5

A CODA to the first post, “Acto Inaugural” – “Disenchantment”

Meeting of members of Instituto DM at madridxmunicipalismo.info

I'm afraid this post is out of order, but as the first post was far from clear, it seems necessary to explain further what this MAC 4 meeting in Madrid on municipalism, self-government and counterpower was intended to be about.
In the first post on MAC 4, I referenced the disappointment many in Spain are feeling with the city governments they helped to put into power. In a pre-conference article posted to El Salto, Alberto Azcarate spelled it out, and I condense points from that below.
Note that these MACs are not meetings about municipalism per se, like academic conferences or meetings of elected officials and their governments' functionaries. The MAC meetings are intended to function as “an observatory and a critical monitoring platform” for the “change councils” to ensure that they comply with the mandates they received from the social movements that stood behind them from the beginning and voted them into power.
The new electeds were to serve as “promoters of counter-power organizations” in order to neutralize institutional inertia. In Madrid especially, after decades of right-wing government, the “administrative apparatus [is] strongly impregnated by the normative philosophy of that political current.”
Instead the city councils seem to have forgotten that they did not arrive to power as leaders, but as messengers to fulfill the mandates of the movements. They have succumbed to “institutional possibilism.”
The booklet – La crisis sigue. Elementos para un nuevo ciclo político/“The Crisis Continues” – published for the MAC 4 analyzes what the authors see as the close of a cycle of politics. “It is no longer about assessing the municipal experiences that were born in 2015,” they write, “but about starting to bet on those movements and struggles that can push beyond what has already been achieved.”
The next wave will again be driven by the movements, to “reconstruct the mobilizing base.” They look to the milestone of the the feminist strike of 8M, the national mobilization of pensioners, the “everlasting PAH – a collective star of movementism,” and the new movements for housing vs. gentri- and touristi-fication, the unions of precarious and domestic workers, and of sin papeles., among others.
The main areas of discussion at MAC 4 then were to be the emergence of a new militant feminism and its leadership “in the struggles against the general crisis of the reproduction of life”, the urban movements against the new real estate bubble – rising rents, gentrification and turistification of urban centers; the “new anti-fascism to confront the war against the poor”, and institutional racism. Also of course “the issue of political organization, in complex and fluid movement contexts, ranging from cooperativism to social centers.”
The movement groups which made such efforts to take Ahora Madrid and Manuela Carmena to the municipal government today feel cheated. Their issues have been forgotten. Now, as Ahora Madrid and Carmena look to “the middle strata of social democratic” voters in Madrid, “the sinuous drifts of institutional politics begin to promote a silent dispute over the integration of future candidates and candidates in electoral lists.” MxM: Madrid por el municipalismo convened the final assembly of the MAC 4 (which I did not attend), where these issues were addressed.

LINKS

Alberto Azcárate, “Desencanto de los ayuntamientos del cambio en el MAC4,” pub'd 6/23/18 Disenchantment of the municipalities of the change in the MAC4
https://www.elsaltodiario.com/municipalismo/desencanto-de-los-ayuntamientos-del-cambio-en-el-mac4

La crisis sigue. Elementos para un nuevo ciclo político
PDF download
http://encuentromac.net/ponencia-la-crisis-sigue-elementos-para-un-nuevo-ciclo-politico/

MxM | Madrid por el municipalismo
http://madridxmunicipalismo.info/

MAC 4: Anti-Racism and Subaltern Europe

The first day proper of the MAC 4 conference of municipalists in Madrid dawned plenty hot. I decided to attend the panel on anti-racism, freedom of movement: organizing alliances and politics for a city without borders. A tall order, to be sure... This meeting was held in a tent, poorly indicated on the conference map. How I long for those hand-drawn maps of complex locales one sees in antiquarian tourist papers! I know the Matadero pretty well, but an entire building was left off the abstracted map, so I had to wander back to the central reception in the blistering heat to ask “Where the fuck are the tents?”, which, needless to say, were not privileged locations on that day.
I arrived late, como siempre. The discussion in Spanish with various accents was mostly over my head, although I could recognize familiar themes repeated from the inaugural session. Fortunately for me much of the content of this meeting would be repeated later at the Reina Sofia museum on the occasion of the visit of Black Lives Matter activist and historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, which I will blog later.
There was talk about demonstrations and which groups participated. An African man spoke of capitalist resource extraction in Africa. This is a frequent line in talks by migrant spokespeople, which seems rather like a familiar song. What is less known today is the new varieties of “assistance” by the Chinese, and the US military expeditionary forces operating in relative obscurity.
From what I've seen of movement activism here, there hasn't been much done on foreign policy. Unlike the USA, the EU is not so directly fucking with other countries. But there also doesn't seem to be much attention given to what Spanish corporations are doing overseas, which can be rough.
Madrid has seen a recent growth in visibility of groups advocating for migrants and for an end to institutional racism. Groups like Afroconciencia, a group of “afro-descendant” people supported by the Matadero cultural ce nter, and the ally group SOS Racismo among others have emerged strongly, and are networking internationally. The neo-fascist reaction to the high flow of refugees and migrants has brought this struggle to the forefront.
This is exciting for me, since for my lifetime anti-racist struggle has been at the forefront of US left action. I have many ideas about it, and there is a lower bar to white participation in the movements in Europe than in the USA. (As Professor Taylor told us later, Black Lives Matter is black-organized, period.)
A woman from Barcelona (I think with BCN en comu itself) spoke of institutional racism in the Mossos (Catalonian state police), and other functionaries of the state. This is effective racism, she said, not just an attitude among the public. To confront this requires public education. Also migrants and diverse peoples must be put into public service.
Another person noted that in the state of Madrid (not the city, but “Comunidad de Madrid”, run by the right wing) there are 14,000 unresponded requests for asylum. There needs to be a concrete program of education, “talleres de sensibilizacion” for city workers. A wonan said she is trying now to organize exactly that, talleres de sensibilizacion in schools which have high percentages of migrants of certain groups.
A trans person of color spoke about the problems facing the community. Migrants without papers – sin papeles, sans papiers in France – cannot participate in most official centers, because “first they ask for your DNI [national identity card], which they don't have.” In Spain everywhere for everything you have to show and give your ID card number. With the recent change in the federal government after the no confidence motion unseated the right wing, sin papeles have been given access to public health services.
A guy from Cameroon spoke very well, since he had studied Spanish in his country. “People here in Spain couldn't imagine that.” He had only been in Spain six weeks, he said. “People can't imagine that Africans come to Europe for tourism.” He suggested forming mixed football teams to encourage anti-racist attitudes. “That's easy to do.”
With a low comprehension, my mind began to wander. Amidst this mixed crowd of people both white and of color, I ruminated on a recent favorite theme – a living museum of the cultures of African and American peoples. I realized the thought came probably from the FITUR - Feria Internacional de Turismo we attended last year, where countries mounted pavilions to display themselves and their attractions to entice curious Spanish tourists. We browsed the fascinating pavilion of Mali, and chatted with the people there.
Madrid, alone it seems among the capitols of major colonial powers, has no major museums of the colonized peoples of Africa, and only a remote and anemic one to represent the Americas. What this means in affective terms is that immigrants, migrants and refugees and their descendants in Spain are visible only as subjects of care, victims of racism, people in the end to feel sorry for and to try and help.
That's ridiculous. In NYC, and most major US cities, large general museums with ethnographic displays are crucial instruments – and were so conceived of by their founders – to educate the people about each other and their pasts. They confront with their “riches” racist attitudes that are reflexive, automatic, unconscious, institutional.
Even so, these collections were founded by imperialist white explorers and scientists who regarded the places and peoples they studied as exotic objects. Some of these museums have been the staging ground for teach-ins and demonstrations demanding that they focus more on the legacy of colonialism and the damage it has done. “Decolonize This Place” – it is not a new campaign. There is a depth of experience among these cultural activists which I hope to be able to connect with Spanish movements in the future.

Simultaneous Translation

Because of the anti-racism panel, I arrived 40 minutes late to Raúl Sánchez Cedillo's mesa on subaltern Europe. A woman was speaking as I entered, on a “general European problem,” that is the need for a process of “redemocratization,” a need to enlarge the practices invented here in Spain as an alternative to liberal democracy. That is a third way. It is not about winning the next election, it's about augmenting social movements.
Surprisingly she was speaking in English, as was nearly everyone else in this meeting, which offered simultaneous translation as well.
Her point was the same as the US DSA analyst I've been following, Ethan Young, made in a post on the the conflict between building movements – “organizing” they say in USA – and winning election campaigns. There are signs that the shock of Orcasio Cortez's win may reinvigorate DNC efforts to perform the former more assiduously. Labor unions as well have been jolted hard by the recent high court decision in favor of open shops. This cuts unions off at the knees. So they look to be at last waking up to the necessity or organizing.
We need to be aware of the ever-increasing racism which is more and more openly outspoken in everyday life, the speaker continued. Also fight against sexism. These are always already transnational practices. Our work has to be feminist.

Demonstration in Madrid against the release of the gang rape defendants in Pamplona

Raúl Sánchez Cedillo is a longtime member of the Fundación de los Comunes, co-organizer of the conference. He published a text framing the panel issues as part of a series posted by El Salto magazine online.
“The municipalist issue,” he wrote, “is fundamentally about the ways in which popular struggles and liberated social cooperation can invent new democratic institutions of counterpower, capable of imposing measures of social justice and lastingly defeating neoliberal 'extreme center' regimes, as well as the racist and fascist nationalisms” (auto-translation). “Extreme center” is a recent formulation that includes both traditional center right and left parties losing ground in recent EU elections because of their mutual support of EU austerity policies.
Gerald Raunig was also present. He is behind the transversal.at multi-lingual online 'zine, which for years, as the EIPCP (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), has published many invaluable analytic texts. We are confronting dictatorships, he said, and “machinic capitalism”, i.e. the platform capitalism of Uber and AirBnB.
Isabel (?) continued: It is reductive to see municipalism only as winning elections. We need to transform the state apparatus and its institutions, not just take them over and be the nicer face of the state apparatus. There are instances, like Naples and Zagreb, but there is no strong national municipalist movement in the EU, only in Spain. But if we include movements like those against gentrification and against touristification – those are not the same – and right to the city – these movements are translocal.
The idea of “ecologies of care” has a feminist legacy. Preserve those which are existing in barrios. We also have to concentrate on checking the development of an obedient character, which has also developed in the last few years. The “fake news” incantations of the right – for the classical Nazis it was Lügenpresse, “lying press” used as a Schlagwort, a slogan or literally “striking word”) – has eroded trust in all media.

Issues All Over: But Housing Rules

An Italian man spoke on the subject of the commons. The protocols of Naples (which I will discuss in the blog post on the social center session), offers an opportunity to rethink this question. Democracy is based on ownership. You own a piece, you vote. To own without being present is in Roman law. The question is to reconceive ownership so that citizens have a voice and a role to play, and so that citizenship is only a proof that you are living in a place.

TO BE CONTINUED
Once they start talking in English, the report gets a lot longer!

LINKS

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor visit to Spain
http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/activities/six-contradictions-and-end-present/yamahtta-herrero

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor «Un destello de libertad»
Her book talk posted by Katakrak publishers; her book was published in translation by Traficantes De Sueños
She speaks first in English, then there is a translation into Spanish -- 1:30 hours
https://soundcloud.com/katakrak54/keeanga

Afroconciencia: The Festival
http://www.mataderomadrid.org/ficha/5525/afroconciencia.html

Sos Racismo Madrid
https://www.sosracismomadrid.es/web/

“Anti-Columbus Day Tour Attended by Hundreds at the American Museum of Natural History”, by Elena Goukassian, posted October 10, 2017
https://hyperallergic.com/404749/2nd-annual-anti-columbus-day-tour-american-museum-of-natural-history/

Ethan Young is the author of the recent pamphlet, "Mapping the Resistance: Insurgence and Polarization Between 2016 and 2020”, May 2018; ENG and GER at:
http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/mapping-the-resistance/

Raúl Sánchez Cedillo posted on 6/20/18, “Por un municipalismo autónomo de las subalternas transeuropeas”
https://www.elsaltodiario.com/palabras-en-movimiento/por-un-municipalismo-autonomo-de-las-subalternas-transeuropeas
It's part of the series of texts published by El Salto online in connection with the MAC 4 meetings
https://www.elsaltodiario.com/municipalismo

MAC 4 in Madrid – Acto Inaugural

I attended the annual meeting of the MAC group in Madrid last weekend. It's been almost a year since the last MAC, in A Coruna, and the focus has shifted from what the elected governments can do with power to support the social movements animating the country.
In this first post I'll be impressionistic. In posts to follow I'll get to the meat of the conference as I saw it.
The meeting began in an atmosphere of disappointment with some current city administrations. The municipalist admin in A Coruna, En Marea, recently evicted a social center, La Insumisa. No one from En Marea showed up in Madrid to explain this, which was weird since they sponsored the MAC 3. A visiting friend of ours explained that a public use is planned for the building, so the squat had to go. So it amounted to a conflict between the “public” and the “commons” – a disagreement over a sanctioned legal conception of use of public resources, and an emergent practical use. This was a subject taken up at the MAC.
The big idea is that “commoners” (that's a verb) should be respected, not treated as criminals because they are going against the legally constituted representatives of the “public.” The eviction of La Insumia, however, was done with violence toward a crowd of largely older people, so feelings (as well as heads) were hurt.
The disappointment in the work of municipalist governance is more general than that incident. Some early missteps and betrayals of cultural figures, and failure to act on key issues of the movements – all of this has fed into a strong critique, forwarded by the key organizers of the MAC, the Fundacion de los Comunes and the Instituto por Democracia y Municipalismo.
So finally, whatever the reason, it appeared that no one was here from any governing platform in any official capacity. I think that was a missed opportunity to share ways and means which some muni platforms have used to achieve successes in their cities. They have undoubtedly improved daily life as well as created resource tools which other cities can use.
Some of those in attendance from the East of Europe (trips paid for by the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation) did not have the same issues as the Spanish, and seemed a little confused. That part of the MAC – a table on “El municipalismo como clave de la Europa de las clases subalternas” – was conducted in English, which took me by surprise. Happily there was some translation of other parts as well, since nearly always serious Spanish discussion moves too fast for me to comprehend well.
What I had hoped for at this MAC, and argued for (too late) in a preparatory meeting, was some direct consideration of the role of culture. Cities usually have direct control over most of their cultural agencies. Too often movement activists take culture for granted, and are really only interested in propaganda. That neglects the positive and hopeful role cultural work can play, a fact every artist and cultural manager knows well. My question was/is: What would a radical municipalist cultural policy look like? Can we forge a document, a policy paper? I have some ideas... and I hope it can be a topic for the next MAC 5.

Inagural Act of the MAC in the Ateneo de Madrid

The first registration and an initial presentation were held in the sumptuous old precincts of the private scientific and literary foundation established by Spanish liberals in the 19th century. On the stage, ringed by portraits of wise old white men, representatives of the domestic workers' organizing group Territorio Domestico, the African street vendors' group Sindicato de los Materos y Lateros, and reps from the PAH and the threatened Malaga social center Casa Invisible spoke of their positions.
A rep from the Fundación de los Comunes also spoke. They have released a new pamphlet, "The crisis continues" -- “La crisis sigue. Elementos para un nuevo ciclo político” – to frame the debates of the weekend.
As I trudged through the heated streets on my way to the Ateneo I saw a guy carrying a sack of potatoes into a restauran wearing a bold white-on-black t-shirt: “Toledo Antifa Crew.” Pretty bold for our conservative neighborhood, I thought, but okay with the vecinos, I guess as long as the potatoes keep coming....

This is indeed a new cycle of politics, as the PP government has fallen and the top guy of PSOE and the ministers are now competent well-spoken professionals, not the old merry-go-round of right-wing politicians. The removal of dictator Franco's remains from the grim monument called Valley of the Fallen has been approved. The former pharoah will no longer sleep surrounded by the bones of his victims. So things are changing.
The familiar discourse of the introduction was enlivened by the bizarre appearance of an actor representing Mariano José de Larra, a journalist, satirist, and a key figure of "democratic romanticism" in Spain. Larra croaked himself in 1837, so the actor brandished a toy pistol.
Rafaela spoke of her group as part of the feminist wave of 8M against the violence of machismo and the borders, and precarious labor. The spokes for the manteros said, “At every step we encounter institutional racism” in the form of the foreigners' law. They want an end to this law that keeps them from working and subjects them to fines and jail. The PAH rep decried the rise of evictions in the barrio of Vallekas and other peripheries from apartments controlled by the semi-public Bankia, which will not negotiate with the tenants. The social center Casa Invisible, its spokes explained, is again under threat by a right-shifted city government. Social centers are basic to progressive political change in Spain. We need to change the juridical situation so that the social center is recognized. As we'll see in subsequent blog posts, this was a key issue in the MAC 4.
After this intro the assembly planned to join the ongoing mass protests against the release of La Manada (the pack), the convicted gang rapists in Pamplona. I rushed off to La Ingobernable to meet Adolfo who was going to give me a bunch of pamphlets about their MaM-II “city manuals” exhibition. That was a brilliant mapping of the movements in Madrid and their many antecedents. I felt the folks from out of town should know about this.
Adolfo couldn't come, but I met a companero from the Letralab, also cancelled because of the demonstration. His friend from the madness network said hello. I finished up the evening chatting with a Bulgarian looking for a job in Madrid, and handed her the Chto Delat newspaper on social centers (referenced in the previous blog post) – because she could read Cyrillic.

NEXT: The Conference Starts

LINKS

La Insumisa Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/ainsumisa/

Territorio Doméstico | Sin Nosotras No Se Mueve el Mundo.
http://territoriodomestico.net/?page_id=11

Sindicato de manteros y lateros de Madrid - Inicio | Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/sindicatomanteroslaterosmadrid/

“La crisis sigue. Elementos para un nuevo ciclo político”
http://encuentromac.net/ponencia-la-crisis-sigue-elementos-para-un-nuevo-ciclo-politico/

MaM-II. Las ciudades manuales - Madrid, a medias
http://a-medias.org/capitulos-de-mam/mam-ii-las-ciudades-manuales/

LINKS

La Insumisa Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/ainsumisa/

Territorio Doméstico | Sin Nosotras No Se Mueve el Mundo.
http://territoriodomestico.net/?page_id=11

Sindicato de manteros y lateros de Madrid - Inicio | Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/sindicatomanteroslaterosmadrid/

“La crisis sigue. Elementos para un nuevo ciclo político”
http://encuentromac.net/ponencia-la-crisis-sigue-elementos-para-un-nuevo-ciclo-politico/

MaM-II. Las ciudades manuales - Madrid, a medias
http://a-medias.org/capitulos-de-mam/mam-ii-las-ciudades-manuales/