This piece by feminist researcher and facilitator Manuela Zechner traces the entangled genealogies of recent feminist and autonomist struggles in Spain —from the social syndicalisms that emerged after 2008 thru the 15M movement of 2011 and on to the dawn of Spain’s municipalist movements of 2015. It highlights the centrality of commons and care for building collective power.
Zechner tells a story that points from digital and creative activism to an embodied politics of care and commons. Situated experiments and struggles in Spain have forged lively forms of movement infrastructure and institution, inventing self-organised modes of social reproduction and new feminist politics. Social centers and commons nurseries are examples of such powerful articulations of commoning and care. This piece is an extract of her book Commoning Care and Collective Power, forthcoming from Transversal texts in German and English.
Manuela Zechner is a feminist researcher and facilitator, working across social movement spaces, academia and the arts. Her work focuses on micropolitics, care, commons and collective power, and takes the form of texts, workshops, radio shows and videos. She is currently tracing and building connections across struggles for care and ecology.
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Collective power, commons and care: entangled genealogies from Spanish movements
In Spain, since the turn of the millenium, the notions of commons/common/commoning have been pivotal to a great number of social movements. This text provides a little genealogy of commons-related movements in the Spanish state from the viewpoint of autonomist and feminist struggles. My account here traces a development from notions of commons as relating to resources and rights, towards understandings of commons as social systems and paradigms of relation. We move from an affirmation of commons via a politics of autonomy to an commons politics that affirms interdependency, in tandem with new feminist movements. This genealogy leads us past copyleft cultures, precarity struggles, social centers of the commons, social syndicalisms of the 2008 crisis and the 15m movement of 2011 (genealogy I) on towards new feminist politics of care, childcare commoning, the ‘feminization’ of politics in municipalism and new, international articulations of care, commons and community. At stake across these threads, often kept short but with links to further reading, are ways of learning and becoming that are experimental and transversal in their attempts at building collective power.
Minor genealogy I: Commons between autonomy and institutions
The 2000s: The Procomún: against copyright, authorship and the privatization of knowledge
In the early 2000s, in the context of increased debates about the commercialization of culture and of copyright, notably the wealth of new and collaborative cultural production enabled by the internet, the ‘commons’ becomes a key concept to a growing movement of cultural producers and online activists. Starting from around 2006, the discourse of commons appears in relation to cultural production in Spain, via the notion of the ‘procomún.’ Initially, ‘procomún’ appears as a direct translation of ‘commons,’ meaning something akin to a public utility, an ‘Allmende’ in German. The term however soon takes on a life of its own and becomes the keyword of cultural producers’ revindications around free culture, public licensing, creative commons and collaborative culture in general. New cultures of collaboration question the paradigm of individual authorship, genius and the figure of the artist, with a myriad collectives and networks of cultural workers and hackers emerge.
In dialogue with and relation to the EuroMayDay movements (2006-10 roughly[1]), Spanish groups such as Atravesadas por la Cultura emerged and put forward new and collective forms of (cultural) workers’ inquiry that lead to the formulation of militant research, as a method of collective knowledge production that runs counter to the privatization of knowledge. Based in Madrid but in close dialogue with their counterparts in Málaga (Creador*s Invisibles), Barcelona (Yporductions), Italy (Chainworkers, Serpica Naro Collective), London (the Carrot Workers Collective) and elsewhere, they ran inquiries in cultural workers conditions and the increasing exploitation of digital labor (from teleworkers to artists, museum vigilantes, writers, interns, etc.) as well as reviewing cultural policy and funding in Madrid. A debate and experimentation flourished, thus, with non-proprietary, radically collective and critical forms of knowledge production, which took its spread across different areas of work and research.
After the financial crisis of 2008: from the Procomún to institutions of the commons
In 2008, a severe financial crisis hit the world, with Spain badly affected due to its mortgage bubble. Monies for culture dried up and the boom of creativity subsided as economies suffered. Movements around precarity and digital labor, going strong since the EuroMayDay 2001, were transformed and a new phase of struggle announced itself. Financial neoliberalism, austerity and gentrification came to require new concepts, bringing problems of social reproduction to the fore. The notion of the ‘Procomún’ slowly gave way to ‘comunes’ or ‘común’ and the concrete critique of creative industries in Spain soon came to be articulated as a question of cultural governance and autonomous infrastructures, for self-management, income-generation and the reclaiming of urban space. Social centers took on a new importance as spaces of autonomous cultural production, research and social reproduction[2].
Claiming the Casa Invisible as a social centre of the commons in 2011, Málaga/ES
The Casa Invisible in Málaga, occupied in 2007, played a central role as a prototype of ‘monster institution’[3] or ‘Institution of the Commons’ in Spain. The Universidad Nómada collective and Traficantes de Sueños publishing cooperative co-facilitated this shift from autonomous knowledge to autonomous infrastructure, alongside many other groups and initiatives. Promoting the right to the city and grassroots forms of creation and research, commons-based institutions set out ‘to work on the collective intelligence in projects that seek the self-organization of social creativity and the production of critical knowledge connected with experiences of struggle against precarity, for the freedom of movement and access to knowledge (my translation from Spanish).’[4] The horizon was thus opened for a new kind of institutional critique that stemmed from a critique of authorship and property, bridging the gap between the immaterial and the material by articulating cultural production with autonomous spaces. A broader debate on the city was inaugurated. The notion of ‘institution of the commons’ came to embody a double claim: a recognition of the institutional dimension of autonomous spaces of creation and organization beyond the public, as a ‘commons’ of the city; and a becoming-common of existing public cultural institutions, addressing ways of enabling cultural programming, research and education that are in touch with social struggles rather than representative of the state. A key historical reference for this vision is Italian autonomism, particularly the work of Antonio Negri: at the same time, Negri and Hardt had just published Commonwealth, generating debates concerning self-government, commons and institutions and drawing on exchange with Spanish and Italian social movements.
The 15M movement of 2011
In 2011, an event changed the horizon of the commons and of the political in Spain: the 15M movement. On 15th May 2011, after the conservative, austerity-bound and corrupt Partido Popular of Mariano Rajoy was reelected to parliament, thousands of precarious and declassed people took to the streets in Spanish cities. They opposed austerity and called for real democracy, first establishing encampments to occupy main squares and then moving into neighbourhoods with their newly formed organs of struggle and mutual support. A myriad commissions and new groups sprang from this moment, leading to the development of a wave of new social syndicalism around education, healthcare, immigration, water and so forth, called the ‘Mareas’[5] (tides), as well as bolstering a wave of new cooperativism, feminism, youth struggles and so forth. Difficult to sum up in a couple of paragraphs, the 15M was an extremely powerful movement that changed subjectivities and fundamentally reoriented several generations of people in relation to politics, embracing self-organization and contesting the status quo, in a spirit of solidarity and empowerment. While young people—particularly those recently educated, whose prospects of work and dignified life were crushed by the austerity regime—kicked off the protests, this was also a truly intergenerational movement, involving pensioners as well as students and unemployed people of different ages alike.
In the 15M context, debates and practices of the commons found fertile ground. ‘Commons’ never quite came to be a key term of the movement, yet ongoing debates and practices around urban politics and alternative institutions found powerful articulations with this huge movement. Spain’s urban and social fabric became receptive to new forms of experimentation and instituting, as some 62 camps stood firm in large cities (with over 100.000 inhabitants) and many, many more sprung up in smaller places[6]. A broad desire to invent another kind of politics sustained new forms of grassroots organization. From assemblies to working groups, from horizontal online collaboration to inclusive facilitation tools, to safe and accessible encampments, from a politics of care in urban conviviality to a politics of joint, radically horizontal knowledge production, the 15M brought a new political spirit to flourish, inspiring a myriad struggles in other countries (‘Occupy’) and itself inspired by the previous uprisings of the Arab Spring.
The spatiotemporal development of the 15M is significant for understanding the entanglement of commons, care and municipalism. First there was an online call for protest, echoed and shared widely across social networks (then still quite novel): toma la calle and toma la plaza led from demonstrations in the streets towards occupations of squares. After some months in encampments, the experimentations on the squares eventually became too difficult to sustain, as autumn arrived and people got tired of the intensity of outdoor life and organization. The ‘indignados’, as the 15M is often referred to in the Anglophone world,[7] slowly decided to move into the neighbourhoods, where their struggle was to be articulated with everyday life and local social networks. Thousands of neighbourhoods across the country soon had their own assemblies and local committees. This led to the movement broadening and becoming more sustainable, connecting with people’s everyday lives and spaces in the neighbourhoods. It also led to a new sensibilization to urban politics, bringing forth new demands and campaigns in relation to local policies, resource allocations and urban planning. This laboratory of learning prefigured the municipalist turn, a learning that turned from a focus on the state (as a locus of democracy, austerity and corruption) towards the city and its institutions.
Estimates say that in August 2011, around 8.5 million people in Spain supported the 15M movement[8] —probably a conservative estimate. Yet still all this left the regime and government unchanged. For some, this brought on a sense of futility. Many returned to their lives, and participation in assemblies decreased. Others debated how to take the struggle forward, and soon arguments for moving to a new level emerged. Might it be possible to subvert the system from within? Some activists strongly disagreed and found this to be a dangerous proposition, yet others preceded to experiment along these lines. Podemos and the new municipalisms were bids for trying to change democracy from within, in very different ways: where Podemos stayed focussed on the state, arguing that now a party-organization was necessary, the new municipalisms built on the local dimension and the power that had been built there. A tension between the strategy of Podemos—more classical and abstract in its quest for building power—and that of new local electoral campaigns—more rooted and embodied in concrete practices and collective processes— was unavoidable, but often also productive. Yet this narrative often forgets an experimental step.
Both Podemos and the new municipalisms were preceded by experimental party-prototypes that emerged out of the core of the 15M. The first significant anti-corruption party to come out of the 15M was the Partido X[9] (formerly Partido del Futuro), which emerged from hacker and online activist networks close to where the initial online call for the 15M protest came from (the original DemocraciaRealYa collective). The Partido X was not a membership organization but proposed, rather, forms of ‘Wiki government’ and similar protocols, meant to radically reinvent the way politics functions via online technologies, to enable radically new forms of participation and debate, in the spirit of the 15M[10]. Their running for elections was highly experimental, a test for determining some possibilities and limits within the party form. Whilst many quarrels and splits ensued across the newly forming initiatives coming out of the 15M, there was also exchange and collaboration across platforms like the hackers’ camp of the Partido X and the more Laclau- and Trotsky-inspired camps of Podemos (parts of the online strategy of the former came to be adapted for the latter by its makers).
The closest ties were however arguably those between Partido X and the new municipalisms, as these emerged from broadly the same activist ecosystem in Barcelona—where the original DemocraciaRealYa had also in large part sprung from. The common denominator of these practices is experimentation, rather than strategy or party line. Speaking of micropolitics, this common local grounding and its shared biographies and collective struggles are significant, as they enabled trust and agility built on a shared political-activist culture, and a situated politics. This background to the new municipalisms is often ignored or underrepresented in research, which tends to focus on Podemos and the grand narratives of the state (particularly in anglophone literature and political theory). It is however key to understand the experimental, transversal and situated politics that leads from the 15M into municipalism—a matter of micropolitics. Micropolitics means not just the socio-affective politics of relations between individuals or groups, but also the tactics and strategies derived from embodied and situated experience, in their connections with local and translocal histories and struggles.
This conception of changing the source code, the proper ‘DNA’ of politics and institutions, was fundamental to the spread of a desire to take on capital-P politics. This led to a myriad of initiatives that prepared the ground for grassroots candidatures. The model for those was never the political organization, the party, but rather the social network, the neighbourhood assembly and the social centre. There was a belief that there was enough social force and intelligence present not just to take power, but to invent new forms of political and institutional organization. Across the 15M’s local and thematic commissions, the various protosyndicalist Mareas, the powerful PAH housing movement, the Citizen Bailout Plan (‘Plan de Rescate Ciudadano,’[11] a name later ironically adopted by Podemos as part of an electoral campaign), the DemocraciaRealYa/DRY networks, the Juventud sin Futuro networks of precarious and emmigrant youth, the Yayoflautas pensioner’s movement, and many other key 15M actors, there was a world of new practices and approaches to learn from. This logic of learning and experimenting is what enabled the innovative and processual capacities of municipalism, wherein government was always imagined as self-government.
After the 15M movement: from institutions of the commons to candidatures of the commons
Let us now look more closely at the debates and conceptual productions that made a municipalism of the commons possible. Around 2013/14, the self-education platform Nociones Comunes ran many courses prefiguring questions of urban governance in relation to commons, municipalism and the relation between social movements and institutions:[12]
When we speak of commons, we speak of resources that are managed by communities and that generate collective benefits; of processes that are not exempt from elements of management, control or regulation, but that rest on principles of social justice. […] In order to build an alternative narrative to that of Barcelona as space of elites and as strategic scenario for taking over social wealth, in order to recuperate a history that has been deleted because it was considered unproductive and annoying, a way of living the city that today re-emerges in different processes and social movements, we thus started a reading group[...](my translation from Spanish).[13]
These spaces of debate were crucial for the development of autonomous knowledges and practices of the commons in Spain, also providing the ground for some important feminist and anti-racist discussions. They carry the legacies of militant research[14] towards alliances of self-education projects, in autonomous bookshops and social centers where Nociones Comunes courses have their home. Nociones Comunes is organised, since 2011, via the Fundación de los Comunes, a transterritorial network of activist projects that sets out towards ‘thinking the commons as a space that does not grow and stop at the local, but that has the capacity to be lived in a distributed way in other territories. For this we need federated institutions of the commons, processes that can walk side by side, sharing their codes and transferring robust experiences (my translation from Spanish).[15]‘ In 2014, the Observatorio Metropolitano Madrid –one of several groups of the Fundación de los Comunes– published a book entitled La apuesta municipalista, launching the idea of running popular municipalist candidacies. While so far the electoral debate had revolved around the state level and centered on Podemos, now a new horizon for taking over institutions had opened, one that seemed much more compatible with the logic of proximity of the 15M than the party-models of Podemos.
Early neighbourhood assembly of 'Guanyem Barcelona/Barcelona en Comú' in Poble Nou neighbourhood, Barcelona, july 2014
Out of circuits linked to the 15M, notably the PAH and the Fundación de los Comunes, municipal candidacies were proposed, and received massive popular support—first in Barcelona, soon in other cities. Their initial names and mottos were ‘Guanyem/Ganemos’ (let’s win), echoing the upbeat mottos of the PAH (‘Si se puede’—yes we can/yes it’s possible in English) and of Podemos (which itself means ‘we can’ in English). Following the launch of these experimental candidatures, a period of vivid social creativity and composition ensued, building singular grassroots campaigns that set up powerful debates and imaginaries of change in many cities. Soon, the platforms renamed themselves to ‘En Comú/En Común’ meaning ‘in common’—a new name had to be found because a cheeky conservative mayor had registered the party name ‘Guanyem’ to his name before any municipalist activists thought about party registry formalities.
The renaming soon showed to made a lot of sense however, as the logic of the political work being done in the neighbourhoods and across thematic areas came to open a processual horizon about reinventing institutional politics from below, building structures and horizons that were no longer just about winning. A collective force had been set loose through common, open processes of elaborating electoral programmes, through joint researching and discussion, as well as joint campaigning and reaching out.[16] Appropriately, ‘En Comú’ pointed to a how, a way of doing things, rather than to a what. More on this process in the section on municipalist micropolitics—for now I will conclude this genealogy of commons by pointing to similar genealogies beyond Spain.
Previous and parallel developments in Latin American institutions
The experiences of the new Latin American Left, from the beginning of the 2000s to their decline a decade or two later, have been eagerly observed in election-bound circles in Spain. Here, thought on the commons and their relation to governance and electoral politics was more ripe already, having generated not just new horizons and processes but also a series of failures and critiques. Particularly those countries where new, non-party movements swept a new political class to power (as in Bolivia and Ecuador) have yielded some lessons on the potentials and pitfalls of running for government. But Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela too have produced rich debates about the new left ‘gobernismo’ (‘governism’) and its relation to social autonomy. Key Latin American thinkers for these debates on commons and governance include Raquel Gutiérrez, Bolívar Echevarria, Alberto García Linera, Rita Laura Segato, Colectivo Situaciones and Maria Gallindo. Raquel Gutiérrez, who has been to Spain for conversations about and with new electoral movements[17], from Podemos[18] to municipalisms, bases her analysis in social struggles rooted in commons –water movements in Bolivia, for example, with strong indigenous protagonism. From the viewpoint of these struggles, she interrogates and documents social movements and political processes in several countries in Latin America[19] and insists that building power through commons hinges on a collective capacity:
When we speak of the production of the common, we don’t just speak about a way of managing or a kind of access or some such thing, we are talking about unfolding the collective capacity to generate material wealth –autonomous in some form– that can allow us to conquest fields of political autonomy (my translation from Spanish)[20].
Contrary to more technocratic and formulaic notions of commons management, which have found a place in some Latin American popular governments, Gutiérrez thinks about building power as a collective, embodied and material process. Building power involves transversalities and strategies that reach across different social fields[21] as well as the production of subjectivities. Commons entail a form of material and subjective production that must be autonomous, argues Gutiérrez. This does not mean they do not ‘talk to’ state agencies or negotiate with institutional actors, but that they determine their own meanings, uses and framings.
The Colectivo Situaciones in Argentina, too, are interested in micropolitical and collective subjective processes that come with crisis, rebellion and left institutional politics. In 2009, they made a book to reflect on the political ‘impasse’ engendered by Kirchnerism in Argentina and its implications for social movements[22]. One key aspect of this concerns a crisis of language:
In the impasse the word ‘politics’ enters into crisis in a precise way: the ‘factory of meaning(fulness)’ is displaced towards the mediatic-managerial sphere, in detriment of collective thinking. …We thus confront a paradox, where whilst all kinds of political discourses circulate, a progressive depoliticization of the social and of language occurs. (my translation from Spanish)[23]
This process of becoming void, or becoming catchphrase, of political language can be observed in a myriad of contexts where institutional or commercial actors appropriate the language of social movement. The ‘common/s’ has been used in an enormous amount of political and institutional initiatives in Spain, from party and candidature names that vary from ‘Barcelona en Comú’ to ‘Catalunya en Comú’ to ‘En Comú Podem’ to the denomination of ‘Los Comúnes’ as a general term of this political camp, and so forth. Largely speaking, the municipal candidatures did not banalize the term to the extent that it becomes void or depoliticized, but as the name gets replicated, it does become a brand name of sorts. Yet it’s not broad use that makes for banalization, it’s the careless appropriation of political terms by those who no longer have any stakes in them. In those municipalist circles with an open ear to local as well as remote genealogies of electoral politics and social movements, there is a struggle to keep ‘the commons’ politically charged. They do not always succeed. Still, my hypothesis here is that it is useful to look at intentions, processes, relations, outcomes and effects in relation to one another, through a micropolitical lens, in order to understand where things go right or wrong.
Minor genealogies II: Feminist subversions of the commons and community
We will now follow a second line of genealogies of the commons in Spain, as rooted in feminisms of social reproduction and care. These take us past the 15M movement and towards the municipalist present of 2020 in yet other ways. I focus this genealogy on childcare, as an aspect of feminist politics often taken to be unrelated to social movements or indeed institutional politics. As a key condition, an embodied challenge and an enabling constraint, childcare is all but anecdotal for politics—not just for policy but indeed also for politics itself. Here we will begin to see how and why childcare shapes politics, as part of a new wave of feminist movements focusing on social reproduction and care.
The 15M, new feminisms and struggles for reproductive rights
The 15M was a powerful catalyst for feminist movements, leading to the development of practices and debates that left a legacy from the streets to the neighbourhoods to the new municipal governments. The powerful work of the feminism commissions of the 15M and the work of a large number of feminist collectives that fought against precarity, racist and sexist labour regimes, restrictive abortion laws, the invisibility of care, and political machism set the scene for a broad social debate on care, care work, interdependency, vulnerability and social reproduction. Feminist groups such as the Feministas Indignadas and Feminisms commissions of the 15M, the Territorio Doméstico migrant domestic worker’s collective, the Precarias a la Deriva and Agencia Precaria collectives of precarious female labourers, the Escalera Caracola social Center in Madrid, and books such as Nuevos Feminismos (Silvia López Gil, 2011), Economía Feminista (Amaia Perez Orozco, 2014), Caliban y la Bruja (Silvia Federici, reprinted 2010) and Cojos y Precarias Haciendo Vidas que Importan (Foro de Vida Independiente and Agencia de Asuntos Precarios Todas a Zien, 2011) facilitated a broad and very lively debate on new feminist horizons, practices and struggles in common. Those that preexisted 2011 found new force and inspiration in the 15M, while new generations of feminists were politicized via the groups that sprang from the 15M.
In 2013, the feminist forces of the 15M were propelled by the attempt of the conservative minister Gallardón to illegalize abortion in Spain. The Partido Popular government approved a law that would undo 30 years of feminist institutional struggles and achievements, bringing back memories of the Franco era and sparking large-scale outrage across society and its movements. The new conservative affront was part of an anti-feminist neoliberal political package that included drastic cuts to healthcare and education, seeking to enforce a model of society where people would again rely solely on their families for their reproduction. The link between precarity, women’s rights and reproductive labor came to be blatantly clear and massive counter-mobilizations ensued. As is often the case, reactionary attack summoned forces that were to outlast it. Gallardón stepped down as a minister in 2014, and his law went into the dustbin of history: at the same time, the streets, squares and neighbourhoods were still vibrant with feminist debates and organization. The renewed anti-abortion movement was questioning reproductive rights in broad terms, drawing on second-wave feminist demands of reproductive autonomy, as well as developing new viewpoints in relation to care and interdependence. A new feminist cycle had begun.
The 15M engaged not just younger feminists, but also a generation of activists that had been struggling against precarity and patriarchal political cultures in years prior (as well as many older generations). Many of them were women now in their 30s, questioning models of activism and confronting challenges about sustainable setups of home, care networks and families as well as work[24]. With this came questions about parenthood, for many. Thus there started to be murmurs about the need to claim reproductive justice not just in relation to abortion, but to also fight towards new horizons of social reproduction and care, against the precarity and isolation of women and feminized subjects (those deemed vulnerable, essentially). Multiple jobs, temporary and underpaid contracts, informal work arrangements, lack of labour- and social rights, rising rents and instable housing arrangements, all played their part in a crisis of social reproduction that was affecting people’s lives. Too much for capital, too little for lives.
How to even imagine building a family? Whether it was singles, couples or larger nuclei of people that were asking this question. Whether they were heterosexual (the majority), queer (many), lesbian, gay, intersex, trans (many) and so forth, the sustainability of lives in common, and the possibility of building cross-generational alliances and homes came to be a key concern. Family should be a matter of choice too, to the extent that people can embrace one another and set limits as well as spaces for themselves: many young and not-so-young people were forced to move back to their parents homes due to the financial crisis and its unemployment, in southern Europe in particular. Conservative politics was to set people back to having no choice but to stick with their families, no matter how abusive that might have been, for children and mothers in particular. The rate of machist gender-based murders and violence was and is high in Spain (as in many other countries), increasing in times of crisis when people are confined to the home. New feminist and LGBTQI+ movements picked up on this since the financial crisis, bringing new demands to the fore: against gender-based violence but also for autonomous networks of care and reproduction (including demands to do with assisted reproduction, same-sex marriage, safe spaces, combatting transphobia, and more). In this way, care and reproduction came to take on new significance in feminist and allied movements.
As the 15M grew and matured, alliances were increasingly forged across feminist groups and domestic workers’ struggles (with the Territorio Doméstico collective at the forefront), disabled people’s groups (with the Foro de Vida Independiente, for instance) and pensioners (the Yayoflautas movement), all of whom were vulnerable and acutely threatened by the PP’s policies. The question of vulnerability and sustaining life –always as a matter of dignity and solidarity, not pity and charity– had become common in the face of the brutal cuts that impacted millions of people’s lives. These debates and struggles emerged in the same manner as those around childcare: slowly, at times timidly, gaining confidence and visibility as they drew strength from one another. The politics of care was collectively developed in bouts, by mothers with young children who had their hands full, by migrants and disabled people who had yet to strengthen and connect their platforms, by LGBTQI+ people making experiments and new claims. Still, the politics of care was new territory for feminism, and even more so for social movements in general.
A new politics of interdependence: the case of childrearing
In this often invisible but powerful way, the 15M movement was a key catalyst for the emergence of a series of projects and practices that seek to politicize care and address the increasing need for alternative infrastructures of reproduction, in the face of drastic cuts to public services and soaring unemployment. Those articulations brought a wealth of new notions, practices and alliances to the fore. Let’s take the neighbourhood of Poble Sec in Barcelona, on which I will dwell in my account of childcare here. Poble Sec is one of those more organized, radical neighbourhoods in Barcelona, with lively grassroots movements and neighbourhood politics. It is worth the attention in this account of childcare commoning because it brought forth not just one of the first radical projects in town, but also a singular alliance of self-organised childcare projects, as we shall see in the following section of this book. Sticking with 2011 for now, we return to the vibrant energies of the 15M and the feats, feasts and festivals of collective intelligence and experimentation they brought forth. Like any neighbourhood that wasn’t totally desolate in 2011, Poble Sec had its local 15M assembly. Meeting regularly on squares, this is where neighbourhood problems and projects were discussed. Feminists of different inspirations were part of this too.
Some of the feminist activists of the 15M were pregnant at the time, looking to build sustainable arrangements of care across their mono- and duoparental units, to build a mutliparental constellations of queer, hetero and activist spirits to raise their children within. They had met in the post-partum classes of the local health center and in the local 15M assembly, key spaces of intersection for conversations and complicities. Sharing precarious living conditions, a desire for change and the need to collectivize childrearing somehow, alongside many questions about motherhood, parenthood and families, these full-bellied beings got talking and thinking. The Poble Sec 15M assembly was criss-crossed by a loose mothers’ network that stemmed from post-partum classes, allowing for a new political-vital thing to be dreamt up: childcare commoning, as I call it here. This took many forms, as we shall see later on, from different mother’s networks to self-organised childcare projects in Poble Sec, the first properly collective of which emerged already in 2011: Babàlia. What started as a mothers’ network providing mutual aid and care, sharing a spaces and taking turns in looking after children, grew into a more solid structure as the children moved from being babies to toddlers. Babàlia soon came to include a pedagogue and fixed schedule, and a space where pedagogues and parents work together to raise children. A grupo de crianza compartida—shared childrearing group—with a distinctively activist, feminist ethos. Rethinking care was on the agenda.
Babàlia is not the first parent and educator-run childcare project in the history of Poble Sec, but it is special because it’s fully collectively run and comes out of social movements. Babàlia inaugurates a new phase of experimentation that runs parallel to feminist and commons movements, spurred by a moment of intense questioning of capitalist and patriarchal modes of social reproduction. Babàlia’s proposal was to question patriarchy and capitalism not just in word but in practice, by developing an affordable, collectively run, feminist space for rethinking childrearing. This meant coming up with a model of childcare that wasn’t centered around wage labour: one where children weren’t immediately[25] handed over to public or private institutions so that mothers could rejoin the labour market, nor left to the home alongside their stay-at-home mothers so that daddy could work. One where children could be subjects, and indeed mothers and fathers too. Though Babàlia did not literally self-describe as a commons, it brought the very question of alternative models of care, and of grupos de crianza compartida as childcare commons, onto the horizon in Poble Sec. An anticapitalist reproductive commons, much in line with the analyses of Silvia Federici who came to Poble Sec too in 2014, having been widely read by local activists, to share thoughts and discussion with feminists struggling around social reproduction.
Due to cuts, public access to early childcare institutions was very limited, and so the emergence of alternative infrastructures of reproduction was born of need as much as conviction. The mix of unemployment and public cuts meant that parents had time for organizing on their hands, but also children: a situation that invites for rethinking the relations between care and politics. As feminists of the 15M took up questions of reproduction, maternity and childrearing, different experiments of collective thinking as well as of organization emerged. The grupos de crianza are part and parcel of this history, as are feminist social centers as loci of experimentation, and feminist self-education spaces. The course ‘El ADN de la Vida. Cuidados, crianza y comunidad’ of the Nociones Comunes platform took place in 2013 in Madrid, connecting and continuing debates and practices on collective childrearing and social movements. Facilitated by feminists and other activists, the course set out to map and debate models of childcare and subjective, collective and social dynamics that occur with care and childrearing. How can we rethink and re-value reproduction and childcare, beyond the binary trap between conservativism and the nuclear family? This meant starting from experience in relatively unchartered territory:
Course on community-based childcare of Nociones Comunes grassroots education platform, Madrid, 2013
We will stop to reflect on the question of care and interdependency on the one hand, and on the other hand we will get into the debates about different childcare models. Two questions that, once explored, will bring us to look deeper into the dichotomies, solidarities and possibilities that childrearing [crianza] opens up in debates on public and private space, also between the strong contradictions and the challenge that proposing childcare between the familiar and the communitarian means. Our questions will be ‘how to articulate models of childrearing that don’t relegate childcare back into private space? How to crisscross and affect [atravesar] the common and communities with childrearing? How can we approach community-related debates in this field?’ And the key question ‘What is the political and social meaning of a construction of collective, community childrearing? (my translation from Spanish).[26]
A string of books and articles shedding light on the matter appeared from 2013 onwards, penned by recent mothers. The bestselling book Where is my tribe?[27] reflects on raising children in individualist societies and facing a lack of support networks, as well as on the tensions and contradictions between feminist demands of various generations in relation to the experience of raising children today. Similarly, from the viewpoint of sex-positive, post-porn feminism, activist Maria Llopis published an edition on Subversive Maternities[28]. The bibliography continues, with books such as Trincheras Permanentes[29] reflecting on the intersections between politics and care (via social movements and parenting), Maternidad, igualdad, fraternidad: las madres como sujetos políticos en sociedades poslaborales[30] looking at mothers as political subjects, and so forth. All these books are authored by women who were active in the 15M movement. Like Babàlia, they share a desire to rearticulate babel with babble, to find new ways of speaking, thinking and relating that abolish the centrality of white, independent males as political subjects.
Care autonomism and the ‘feminization’ of politics
Let me briefly outline two main tendencies in the years after the 15M and municipalist entries into town halls. These are institutional feminism and care ethics on the one hand, and autonomous and community-based care politics on the other. This is not the story of a simple split however, as we shall see below: it’s more like a tale of differentiation and new affinities.
The former current, embodied in the most solid way by Barcelona en Comú, was led by a number of women of the municipalist movement, who came to take on political roles—from mayor to councillors and sectorial leaders, researchers and campaigners. The list of prominent feminist figures in Barcelona en Comú is very long: it’s not just mayor Ada Colau but a host of councillors at different levels, party organizers and leaders, advisors and so forth. Coming from many different struggles and feminist currents, these people set out to change politics from within—in a feminist way. To question the rhythms and modalities of institutional politics, its hierarchies and roles, institutional and spatial architectures, and relational codes. The role that care plays (or doesn’t play) in politics is a central point in this endeavour.
Those struggles of municipalist feminists across the Spanish state are often referred to as a ‘feminization’ of politics’[31]. The term points to identity politics and quotas as well as to broader demands about becoming-vulnerable and caring. These two layers are often mingled in the complex manoeuvres and alliances feminist municipalists build, with differing outcomes. Many, me included, put less faith in quotas and prefer to focus on the feminist rather than ‘feminizing’ aspects of such politics: this implies examining the politics of care and solidarity in municipalist politics, and critically questioning the subsumption and neutralization that ‘feminization’ can imply (just as it did with the feminization of labour). In any case, municipalism certainly has kick-started a new cycle of institutional feminism: this is reflected in the solid and visionary feminist policy-making of Barcelona en Comú as much as in the state-level feminism of the party Podemos, which often takes abolitionist stances on sex work for instance. Whatever we may make of the struggles of the women, queers and trans persons at the forefront of this new institutional feminism, their quest to change institutional-political culture undoubtedly takes a lot of courage and reveals a great deal about how political institutions work and may (or may not) be changed. In my writing on this subject, I grapple with its contradictions from embodied and situated viewpoints, to learn from the experiences of those at the forefront of this struggle to subvert institutions. This implies eschewing narratives of total failure and total success alike.
Before, beneath and beyond such institutional feminisms there is however the feminisms of the street, embolded by the strikes of the 8th of march, global feminist networks and local feminist mutual support, the fight against patriarchal violence and for reproductive rights, and a feminist politics of comons and community. Strong and steady in Latin America, and partially reflected in Spanish movements, this approach is based in community and self-organization[32]. The politics of care here relates more to subversion of community, as described in MariaRosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’ influential 1975 pamphlet ‘Women and the subversion of community.’ Rooted in feminist self-government rather than government, and learning from women’s struggles and self-organisations of social reproduction notably, this feminism is sometimes in dialogue with different attempts at forging feminist policy in Spain, but stays out of the institutions. It draws force from decolonial, anarchist and anti-capitalist feminisms that fight for resources, land, infrastructures and new organizational forms. Steeped in a politics of social reproduction, the new feminisms that bridge commons and care want more than decent public services, they engage new feminist pedagogies and epistemologies, starting from the (global) south.
In Spain, many movements are now engaged in translating the lessons, concepts and sentipensares (feeling-thinking) of the Latin American feminist wave[33] into southern European urban and rural contexts. Where institution-based feminists pick up on the radical new meanings of this politics, the mix can be powerful. The tensions between autonomy and institution remain interesting and lively. Beyond a rigid binarism between movement and institution, there needs to be more micropolitical understanding and a culture of precendents that allows us to learn from different political experiences. As Raquel Gutiérrez says:
This is a question that was often asked in Latin America in terms of an excluding binarism, which moreover is a binarism that sterilizes the real possibility of making actions of sustained and profound force. It was movement or institution, and never could one think movement ‘and’ institution, and set the terms movement and institution in tendentially less hierarchizing conditions, where tasks are given to those who enter the institutions, because what they have to work on are these hierarchies. The problem is that the state is an entity where a great part of the capacity of public speech is monopolized. So, if those entering the institution preserve this monopoly, or whats more, if they reaffirm it… how is it then going to be possible to enable a dialogue? (My translation from Spanish)[34]
Much can be said about how words are often monopolized, how radical demands and horizons are neutralized, by institutions. Volumes could and should be written on it, not from a viewpoint of theory merely, but from experience. My attempt, in my forthcoming book, consists of weaving together stories about the relation between social movements and institutions, from different positions and perceptions. To not leave feeling, affect, subjectivation, alienation, relationships and modes of care out of the narrative, but center on it for a moment, in order to learn from the conjuncture that feminism and municipalism have brought. The lesson to be learned, I believe, is one about how we collectively articulate autonomy and interdependency. A problem that resonates across many of the conditions we face today.
Feminist strike in Valencia, 8th march 2019
References
[1] For a more detailed genealogy of this, see Zechner, M. (2013a) The world we desire is one we can create and care for together, Phd Thesis. London: Queen Mary University London.
[2] See the Transversal webjournals on ‘Instituent practices’ (2007) https://transversal.at/transversal/0707 and ‘Monster Institutions’ (2008) https://transversal.at/transversal/0508
[3] Ibid, see particularly Universidad Nómada (2008) ‘Mental Prototypes and Monster Institutions,’ Transversal Webjournal,http://transversal.at/transversal/0508
[4] Museo Reina Sofia & Fundación de los Comunes (2009) ‘Governance cultural vs. Instituciones de lo Común,’ https://www.museoreinasofia.es/actividades/governance-cultural-vs-instituciones-comun
[5] See the Wikipedia Entry on ‘Movimiento 15M y Mareas,’ https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movimiento_15-M#Mareas
[6] Monterde, A. (2016) ‘Map of Acampadas and Municipalist Candidacies,’ Arnau Monterde Blog, 11/08/2016, https://arnaumonty.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/mapa-de-las-acampadas-del-15m-candidaturas-municipalistas-y-gobiernos-emergentes-en-las-ciudades-de-mas-de-100-000-habitantes/
[7] The term is a bit of a misnomer, reducing the affective range of the 15M to the notion of indignation, when this initial rage was soon complemented and overtaken by collective joy, creativity, experimentation, trust and solidarity.
[8] See this 2011 survey in El País newspaper https://elpais.com/politica/2011/08/03/actualidad/1312388649_737959.html
[9] Wikipedia Article on ‘Partido X,’ https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partido_X, accessed 5/9/2018.
[10] See also Zechner, M. (2013c) An der Zukunft rütteln und schütteln. In: Kulturrisse/IG Kultur. https://www.igkultur.at/artikel/der-zukunft-ruetteln-und-schuetteln
[11] Zechner, M. (2012) Für einen zivilgesellschaftlichen Rettungsschirm. Kulturrisse, IG Kultur. https://www.igkultur.at/artikel/fuer-einen-zivilgesellschaftlichen-rettungsschirm
[12] To see some of the titles and access the recordings, see the archive of Nociones Comunes courses (which span Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Málaga etc.) https://traficantes.net/nociones-comunes/cursos-realizados
[13] Observatorio Metropolitano Barcelona (2013) ‘Lecturas para pensar las Instituciones de lo Común,’ Diagonal Periodico, 30/04/2013, https://www.diagonalperiodico.net/culturas/quitar-puertas-al-campo.html
[14] As in this 2006 Transversal Webjournal https://transversal.at/transversal/0406
[15] Observatorio Metropolitano Barcelona, as cited above.
[16] For more details see Zechner, M. (2015) ‘Barcelona en Comú: the city as horizon for radical democracy,’ ROAR Magazine, 2015. https://roarmag.org/essays/barcelona-en-comu-guanyem/
[17] Gutiérrez-Aguilar, R. & Reguero, P. (2017) No queremos gestionar el infierno. Pikara Magazine. https://www.pikaramagazine.com/2017/05/raquel-gutierrez-aguilar/
[18] During her visit to Spain in 2017, Gutiérrez also debated with Pablo Iglesias in his TV show ‘La Tuerka’ (Tuerka 2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtAETkGTOfI
[19] See for instance Gutiérrez Aguilar, R. (2014) Rhythms of the Pakachuti, Durham: Duke University Press, as well as Gutiérrez Aguilar, R. (2017a) Horizontes comunitario-populares, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
[20] Gutiérrez Aguilar, R. (2017b) ‘Raquel Gutiérrez en Barcelona,’ Audio recording of 11/03/2017, https://soundcloud.com/fundaciondeloscomunes/raquel-gutierrez-en-barcelona.
[21] Social fields as we outlined in: Rübner-Hansen, B. & Zechner, M. (2015) ‘Building power in a crisis of social reproduction,’ ROAR Magazine, 0, https://roarmag.org/magazine/building-power-crisis-social-reproduction/
[22] Colectivo Situaciones (2009) Inquietudes en el Impasse, Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón.
[23] Ibid, p.35.
[24] My Phd thesis, cited above, tells of care networks and imaginaries of family in feminist precarity collectives in Spain and the UK.
[25] In Spain, maternity leave lasts 4 months only.
[26] From the course description of the 2014 Nociones Comunes course ‘El ADN de la vida: crianza, cuidados y comunidad’ on childcare and social movements. https://nocionescomunes.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/el-adn-de-la-vida-crianza-cuidados-y-comunidad/
[27] In Spanish, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ is mostly rendered as ‘Hace falta una tribú para criar’ - this notion of tribú(tribe) as extended family and territorial unit (linked to the neighbourhood) is key in collective childrearing politics in Spain. Del Olmo, C. (2013) Dónde está mi Tribú? Maternidad y Crianza en una Sociedad Individualista. Madrid: Clave Intelectual.
[28] Llopis, M. (2015) Maternidades Subversivas. Tafalla: Editorial Txalaparta.
[29] León, C. (2017) Trincheras Permanentes: intersecciones entre política y cuidados. Logroño: Editorial Pepitas.
[30] Merino, P. (2017) Materindad, igualidad, fraternidad: las madres cómo sujetos políticos en sociedades poslaborales. Madrid: Clave Intelectual.
[31] See for instance Roth, L. & Shea Baird, K. (2017a) ‘Municipalism and the feminization of politics,’ ROAR Magazine, Issue 6, summer 2017, https://roarmag.org/magazine/municipalism-feminization-urban-politics
[32] This book gives account of such struggles and practices: Vega Solis, Martínez Buján and Paredes Chauca (2018) Cuidado, comunidad y común. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
[33] See for instance Gago, V. (2021) ‘The Feminist Interantional’. London: Verso.
[34] Gutiérrez Aguilar, R. & Gil, S. (2017) ‘Reproducir la vida en común, una mirada desde Latinoamerica,’ Diagonal Periódico, 10/01/2017, https://www.diagonalperiodico.net/blogs/vidasprecarias/reproducir-la-vida-comun-mirada-desde-latinoamerica-entrevista-raquel-gutierrez