La Canica Again – A Game of Marbles

In the last post, Leah Pattem told about the end of La Canica in Lavapies. This occupied bank was one of a number of long-lived social centers in Madrid. The animating idea behind La Canica was utopian. It was named for an idea of community economics, la canica, the marble, that would replace fiat money as a medium of exchange in the barrio. Now I want to explore the background of that occupation, and some of the ideation behind the dream of a community currency.

Leah Pattem wrote of what La Canica meant for the community in Lavapies. It was a center for the the movements fighting to maintain reasonable rents in the face of private equity interests which are sucking up apartments all over Spain.
But that is not why it was occupied. What does it mean for activists to take a bank? To take a school? Are these vacant buildings simply targets of opportunity?

Photo by Leah Pattem

In this post I’ll pick a bit at the ideology behind La Canica, the dream they were dreaming through their ongoing collective struggles. I’ll also try an iconographic reading of the now-expunged mural on the exterior wall of the expropriated bank branch.
Some of the most useful and strongly supported occupations in Madrid have taken place in abandoned educational institutions – that was the late Ingobernable (2017-19), and the freshly evicted La Atalaya (2014-24). While taking an abandoned bank was something new, it had been prefigured.
The Las Agencias activist art group organized ludic dances in banks during the ‘90s before the time of the crisis (Leónidas Martín, 2022). The great assemblings of 15M in 2011, provoked by politicians’ response to the financial crisis of 2008, cohered the radical movements like never before. During the years after, when the evictions of long-time rental tenants started to mount up, activist collectives took a new tack.
In the spring of 2016, activists took a bank in the Gracia barrio of Barcelona. They called it Banc Expropiat, and the struggle to hold that premises went on for years. In the fall of that year La Canica was taken in Madrid, christened Banco Expropriado.

(It was not the first here. Another group of anti-fascists and feminists took a closed office of the Caja Madrid in Moratalez, well outside the center city. I visited that one, called the Bankarrota.)

What Does This Mean?

These occupations add up, like the cascading clacks in a game of marbles, to a set of actions that propose a different kind of economic arrangement – a solidarity economy. The organizers of La Canica explained that they were building “a network of exchange… in various neighborhoods” in Madrid, promoting “the formation of cooperatives and the collectivization of resources and means of production. It is, in this sense, a tool that is being very useful for the direct and common organization of our lives, allowing goods to circulate between us by reducing our dependence on the Euro and wage labour” (Daniel Martin, 2016).
The symbol of this solidarity economy was the ostensibly valueless toy marble, proposed as a community currency. Artists love to make their own money. As an antiquarian, and one-time junior philatelist, I collected this stuff. I got “boniatos” from Madrid’s own co-op economy fair years ago. I did not trade mine in for lunch, as you can see then-mayor Manuela Carmena doing in the photo.

The mayor Manuela Carmena fingering her boniatos in 2015

My favorite piece of this kind of local currency was a scrip used at the Earthaven community in North Carolina. It passed from hand to hand, with multiple signatures of its users as validations. One fellow was persuaded to cash his out to me. I always hoped to pass by La Canica and buy up some marbles, but I never did.
Maybe there’s still a chance, as the Nodo de Producción de Carabanchel, closely involved in La Canica, was active as recently as last year. Carabanchel is a quickly gentrifying barrio of mixed residences and workshops, the coming artsy-fartsy part of the city. I’ve blogged about events at the social center there, ESLA Eko. But I’ve never seen those mythical mystical marbles.

Beats for Resistance

A manifesto still on the Nodo dePdeP website references the electronic music festival in 2023 that was shut down by the police (see my O&P post, “More Police, Less Music?”). It expresses a clear political intent behind this cultural program, a program which the city recognized as dangerous.
This is the convergence of culture and politics which artists are putting up against the bullfighters managing the regression of cultural agencies in rightwing controlled parts of Spain, the culture that rejects the compromises necessary to work in institutional spaces and, like the Pichifest zine fair, organizes in okupas.

The Mural at La Canica

La Canica was decorated with a very elaborate mural which has been whitewashed. Who did this mural, and what does it mean? I can read the many hands – reaching, being severed, bleeding out – as an allegorical representation of people’s interactions with the financial system as embodied by the bank that once occupieid the storefront. The fingers are being damaged, and seem to be looking to feel out a better way. The floating marbles, "las canicas", can signify that way which the fingers just can't seem to grasp.

Photo by Leah Pattem

Even the uphill part of the painting, the super-ornamental tattoo-like letters, is hard to read and cryptic in meaning: “Quien roba un ladron” might read as "S/he who steals" or "S/he is a thief" or even "Who robs the thief".

photo at: thediscoveriesof.com/madrid-graffiti

The artist(s) surely know their intentions best. It's signed, it seems, “ART SEN ALE”, which I couldn’t search up. In a sense, most street art reads as anonymous, circulating as images and not as authorial works. They are kind of public mysteries. Leah Pattem blogged on this several years ago: "Discover the dark messages hidden in Madrid’s street art" (11 November 2018 https://madridnofrills.com/madrid-street-art/) writing, “Although street art is deeply connected with gentrification, it often gives a voice to the victims.”
In truth, a lot of this art isn’t really that hard to figure out!

The Whole Thing Is a Cruel Joke

Exchange is mysterious. Money is ridiculous. Maybe it is like democracy, the least worst system so far for allocating the means of subsistence and production. Only now power and money have pretty much collapsed into each other. Those who have it are gaming it fiercely in the form of equity derivatives and crypto-currencies. The absurdity is patent.
But what, like the mystical canica, could possibly replace money? That is the question, which the painted mural cannot envision, although it pictures clearly the harm bank finance does.
I also collected what is called “primitive money”, mostly African. I was delighted once to get a small bunch of what sellers called “Kissi pennies”. The story about how this "money" was supplanted on a website about Liberia is instructive, and involves French and British colonial governance, and the U.S. rubber company Firestone.
The French have always loved les monnaies primitive. Since early days their colonists have had to work out how to eliminate local indigenous systems of exchange in order to enslave populations to the system of the franc. Image search = “acheter des monnaies primitives” to see the incredible variety of forms devised for who-knows-what types of transactions in Africa.

Kissi "pennies"

The go-to book in Engliish on “primitive money” is still Paul Einzig, Primitive Money: In its Ethnological, Historical and Economic Aspects (1950). Einzig was a financial journalist specializing in the analysis of international money markets.
How these objects encoded value and how they were transacted should not be a question for the theorists of supercession, like Einzig, but for economic anthropologists.
When I wrote my text on the political economy of art, I looked to the best known of these, David Graeber. I found his Toward an anthropological theory of value : the false coin of our own dreams (2001), based on his fieldwork in Madagascar, rather inscrutable. (Too shy, I did not try to contact him while he was still alive.) The book by his colleague, Keith Hart Money in an unequal world (2001), was more useful.
Like everybody else, Graeber began with Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques (1925), in translation as An Essay on the Gift. (Note, he writes “archaic”, not “primitive”.) Mauss’s thought inspired the French journal La Revue du M.A.U.S.S., which Graeber attended. (His essay Graeber’s essay "Give It Away" is on their website now.]
These ideas fired artists’ thought at the turn of the century. That’s clear in Ted Purves’ edited collection of texts, What we want is free : generosity and exchange in recent art (2nd edn., 2005), in which different artists tell how they realized the gift in their practice.
So it’s possible, on a local, episodic, experimental level, to loosen the grip of money on our collective throats. How to do that is an art. It is the art of acting, as the title of a recent book of essays on Graeber’s work has it, “As if already free”.

Farewell to La Atalaya

It is something of a dark time now for idealists. Last month another okupa was evicted, La Atalaya in Vallecas. For ten years La Atalaya had been a a multi-purpose space inside a big abandoned school. It had a library, a learning program, a metal-working studio and bicycle workshop, and multiple recreational spaces, including a boxing gym, skate ramp, and urban garden. I attended a fiesta there a few years ago. The former schoolyard was packed with children enjoying circus performances, puppet shows, and each other.
It is dispiriting when important self-organized centers are closed without notice and without negotiation. Social and recreational needs which are fulfilled in those places are simply amputated. Since it is Vallecas, a traditionally resistant barrio of Madrid, we can be sure that this blood will rise again.

LINKS

#BancoExpropriado #SolidarityEconomy

Leónidas Martín, “From Las Agencias to Enmedio: Two Decades of Art and Social Activism – Part 2 of Preparing to Exit: Art, Interventionism and the 1990s”, 15 Nov 2022
https://internationaleonline.org/contributions/from-las-agencias-to-enmedio-two-decades-of-art-and-social-activism-part-2/

La Bankarrota | centro político kolectivizado
https://labankarrota.noblogs.org
22 abr 2016 — Una antigua sucursal, no de Bankia, sino de Caja Madrid. Ha llovido mucho desde la última vez que sus propietarios se preocuparon por él, pero …

Daniel Martin, "Activistas de Banco Expropiado 'okupan' y rebautizan una antigua sucursal de Bankia en Madrid", 21 October, 2016
https://www.elmundo.es/madrid/2016/10/20/58091ad5468aebaf568b45b2.html

Community Currencies
Ester Barinaga and team at Lund University, Sweden
https://www.lusem.lu.se/organisation/research-centres/sten-k-johnson-centre-entrepreneurship/research-sten-k-johnson-centre-entrepreneurship/community-currencies

Más de 30.000 boniatos se intercambiaron en La Feria
https://www.economiasolidaria.org › Noticias June, 2015
Más de 30.000 boniatos se intercambiaron en La Feria ... En la III Feria de Economía Social y Solidaria, organizada por el Mercado Social de Madrid (MES) y la Red …

Nodo de Producción de Carabanchel – Nodo de producción
https://nodocarabanchel.net/

Sync! (°͜ʖ͡°) [smiley face] festival at ESLA Eko
“Política a 126 BPMs: Manifiesto”
https://sync.encamino.es/

Occupations & Properties, "More Police, Less Music? “I See That, and Raise You a Marble”, Sunday, April 23, 2023
https://occuprop.blogspot.com/2023/04/more-police-less-music-i-see-that-and.html

Kissi Money or ‘Money with a Soul’
https://liberiapastandpresent.org/kissi.htm

La Revue du M.A.U.S.S.
https://www.revuedumauss.com.fr/

Graeber’s essay "Give It Away"
https://www.revuedumauss.com.fr/Pages/ABOUT.html

Holly High & Joshua Reno, eds., As if already free : anthropology and activism after David Graeber, 2023

Roberto Iannucci, "La Atalaya, el pulmón social de Vallecas al que Almeida ha dado la puntilla en su guerra contra los centros autogestionados", Publico, 28 November 2024
https://www.publico.es/sociedad/atalaya-pulmon-social-vallecas-cargado-almeida-guerra-centros-autogestionados.html