The Academy Goes International
A key project of the Working Families Academy is to facilitate exchange with like minded social movement and political forces in other parts of the world. This past June, a delegation of leaders and members of the Center for Popular Democracy, the PICO organizing network, and Working Families attended the Fearless Cities conference in Barcelona, Spain.
The conference brought together over 700 people to learn and share about the growing global “municipalist movement.” Muncipalismo has gained worldwide recognition in the wake of the stunning 2015 victory of Ada Colau as Mayor of Barcelona. With the support of a new political formation, Barcelona en Comú, Mayor Colau went from a housing rights activist who had never held elected office to the mayor of the second largest city in Spain — all in less than a year! Like Podemos, Barcelona en Comú traces its roots back to the Indignados movement, a pre-cursor to the Occupy movement in the United States.
This piece is an in-depth dialogue between two WFPers who were at the Fearless Cities conference, Nelini Stamp and Steve Hughes. In it, they share impressions of the event and lessons learned. They also surface some of the unresolved and/or contested questions and look for what — if anything — can be applied from the Spanish experience to the work of Working Families in the United States.
Steve Hughes: I had a professor in college who used to say that the “problem with America is that the weather stops at the border.” She was referring to the fact that the television weather reports used to show the movement of cloud formations in a very peculiar way. Their satellite maps showed North America and had superimposed on the general landmass little white lines that showed the borders of states and the US national borders as well. However, in those days it used to be that when the clouds crossed the US-Mexico border, they would just disappear. It was as if the weather ceased to exist in Mexico! It’s of course a metaphor for the way in which America — as the center of global empire — tends to look only inward on itself. We look at our own problems and triumphs through the lens of “American exceptionalism” and our “weather” — be it storm clouds or sunny — just seems to stop at the border.
Nelini Stamp: Yeah, that seems about right! You know the reason I am an internationalist starts with the fact that my dad is an immigrant from Latin America, so from the start I had some sensitivity to what you are describing. However, it was when the Occupy movement went global that my eyes were opened to globalization and the fact that it is literally the same corporations screwing over masses of people all across the world. Since that time I have been on several international delegations which I count as a great privilege in terms of allowing me to build relationships and work together with a much wider global community facing many of the same challenges we are facing in the US.
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“…in the movement circles I found myself in we were quickly starting to realize that the people we were up against were a global movement. They were nationalist, and white supremacists, and they were presenting themselves as economic populists. It was the same formula in so many places — it was clearly a pattern.”
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SH: Maybe it just has to do with where I am sitting, living and working in Europe, but I do detect that maybe there is an increased sense of the interconnectedness between someone like Trump and the emergence of, say, UKIP, or of Marine le Pen in France. Of course, it does not hurt that Trump personally staked his own political brand on those things and that he is surrounded by white nationalists that openly coordinate with these folks! But still, it seems there is maybe a rising consciousness of the interconnectedness of these political phenomena, which feels different from the prevalent mood when I came of age. I grew up with Bill Clinton as President. The Cold War had ended. America seemed to be all McMansions, SUV’s, and soccer moms if you listened to the political discourse of the day. America had “won” the Cold War and as a result there was even less motivation for us to look beyond our borders than usual.
NS: I think of 9–11 and the Bush years as my formative years. Obama supposedly brought back the international perspective. As our first black president he was a global signifier of the US being global (in a good way) again. He was seen as a progressive world- wide leader, and he even won the Nobel Peace Prize which was quite a different way for me to understand our president coming out of the Bush years. At the same time, in the movement circles I found myself in we were quickly starting to realize that the people we were up against were a global movement. They were nationalist, and white supremacists, and they were presenting themselves as economic populists. It was the same formula in so many places — it was clearly a pattern. I don’t think there was any way to hide it anymore, you had to connect the dots.
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“Municipalism — or municipalismo — is a concept that has gained quite a bit of purchase in recent years thanks to the stunning victory of Ada Colau, a housing rights activist who had never held elected office before, as mayor of Barcelona…”
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SH: So let’s talk about Barcelona. We just attended a quite impressive convergence of the “global municipalist movement” that brought together 700+ people from every continent on the planet. Municipalism — or municipalismo — is a concept that has gained quite a bit of purchase in recent years thanks to the stunning victory of Ada Colau, a housing rights activist who had never held elected office before, as mayor of Barcelona. The political movement that brought her to power came to be known as Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) and, along with the emergence of Podemos in the national political firmament of Spain, BCN en Comú is seen as a direct outgrowth of the Indignados movement, Spain’s version of Occupy Wall Street (which actually pre-dates Occupy).
NS: Yes, it was folks from Spain that actually came to New York in the very early days of Occupy and taught us how to set up our occupation. They were super clear every time we asked them for advice on our occupation. When we had a question during the first weeks we turned to the Spaniards to say “what did you do?” or “How did you handle this or that problem?” And it is crazy to know that Podemos came out of the same political movement and that moment in 2011, the year of global uprisings. Since then they have been able to contest for real power in Spain.
SH: So what was your impression of the conference?
NS: From a US-based movement perspective, it was really quite shocking the degree to which a race analysis and discourse was so completely missing from this European movement space. They admirably talk about, and take steps toward, the “feminization of politics,” as they call it, but there is absolutely no similar attempt at centering a race-based analysis even though, as many people in our delegation pointed out, Europe is the place where the ideology of white supremacy comes from! What was also surprising to me about this is that Europe is confronting new white supremacist movements right now, as well as nationalism. Europe is dealing with a massive refugee crisis that is rooted in their years as colonizers of the global south and the Americas and it’s really interesting to see how this just did not make it into the room.
What I also noticed is the way in which discussions of class feel much more normalized in a European movement space than in many places in the US, which is also a good thing. So in the end, I would say the conference did a lot with feminism and class. Race, not so much.
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“…it was telling that when a member of our delegation organized a side event digging in on the issue of white supremacy, the only people who showed up — with a few exceptions — were people from the United States.”
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SH: Yes, it was telling that when a member of our delegation organized a side event digging in on the issue of white supremacy, the only people who showed up — with a few exceptions — were people from the United States.
NS: Yes, that is true. And it is also true that, as a result, we hardly did much bridging of the US experience and understanding of white supremacy and a European (or anywhere else for that matter) understanding of the term. As Americans, we kind of ended up talking to ourselves — which is not too hard to do when you are essentially the only people in the room!
But I also noticed something going on in our delegation, and it mirrors what I have also been noticing in many of the movement circles I have been working in within the United States. There does seem to be an organic merging of race and class discourses going on right now. The Bernie Sanders campaign’s failure to really do this well was definitely a fatal flaw for them. Not to mention, the Clinton campaign was very cynical in how they exploited this failure. All of it, I think, revealed the state of play for us as US movement people in terms of the interplay between these ways of viewing our work. But since that primary fight, it seems there have been a lot of deep conversations going on in both white-dominant movement spaces and POC (person of color)-led movement spaces.
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“There does seem to be an organic merging of race and class discourses going on right now.”
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SH: What is that looking like from your perspective?
NS: Even in our Barcelona delegation I noticed the ways in which these discourses were blending. There were several people who pointed out the ways in which being a candidate of color is not enough. One person spoke about an forthcoming report from one of our affiliates documenting the way in which much of the incarceration agenda is being driven at the municipal level. The funding that is going to disproportionately lock-up black and brown people is largely coming from the local level, and it is being authorized by city councils that are often controlled by Democratic-machine politics, and often being voted on by POC elected officials. Back in the States I am hearing this same discourse happening in younger, of-color movement spaces — to me it feels like the “next big thing” for our movement.
SH: Several people in our delegation talked about the need for us to use our time on this delegation to “expand our political imagination.” One person even referenced the history of how Pablo Iglesias, one of the founders of Podemos in Spain, had his own political break-through when he spent time observing up-close the political movements in Bolivia. To hear how Pablo told it, this is where he began to imagine actually doing politics at scale, and where he started to believe in winning as a movement. It is striking that given the historic ambition of leftist movements in Spain — and the subsequent way the Franco regime tried to systematically erase that history — that it took this “looking outside yourself” moment for the most visible leader of Podemos to have his own “aha” moment!
NS: Yes, again it is why I am an internationalist. Looking outside ourselves is actually part of our movement history in the United States. Whether you are talking about Malcolm X going to Mecca, or James Lawson going to India, or Haitian Revolutionaries fighting in the American Revolution it is in the very fabric of system change in the United States. Engaging with these partners abroad is what helps us expand our understanding of the possible.
SH: A number of people in our delegation talked about their feeling that we need to find ways to be doing political education at scale in the United States right now. This is something you are obviously thinking about a lot with your membership work for WFP. Do you feel like you gained any insights on this question when you were in Barcelona?
NS: One thing I was struck by was the way in which another member of our delegation talked about the need to create a “new American identity,” which to me has echoes of the calls to create “beloved community” from the days of the earlier civil rights movement. Thinking about how to do this from a temporary vantage point outside the United States does seem to give one a useful perspective on the matter though. And if we want to move toward a new American identity, or beloved community, or whatever we want to call it, there is certainly going to be a need for a quite massive program of political education in my opinion.
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“Several people . . . talked about the need for us to use our time . . . to ‘expand our political imagination.’ . . . Pablo Iglesias, one of the founders of Podemos in Spain, had his own political break-through when he spent time observing up-close the political movements in Bolivia…[it] is where he began to imagine actually doing politics at scale, and where he started to believe in winning as a movement.”
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SH: Yes, I was struck actually at even how that development of a sense of community played out within our delegation. One member of the delegation remarked to me one evening as we were walking to dinner just how valuable the experience of getting to know the other people in our group was, and how much she appreciated that in this foreign environment everyone sort of took off their organizational hats for a while, and started thinking more as a collective. There is something that can be learned here about the process of creating beloved community, even amongst ourselves! The question is, how do we scale that up to include a much, much bigger group of movement people, as well as people who don’t even think of themselves as part of this or any “movement” at the moment?
NS: Well, I do think that the idea of municipalism has some seeds that could grow into what you are talking about. Part of the basis of municipalism as I saw it at the conference, was the idea that a city-based movement has the capacity better than most to create a sense of shared community. The folks in Barcelona refer to it sometimes as a sense of “urban citizenship” that does not actually respect one’s national citizenship status, but rather our shared proximity in the same city or town. Can this be a basis for developing a new political identity in the US? I am not sure, but the folks we met in Barcelona are certainly taking bold steps to advance this premise in their own work in towns and cities all over the world.
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“Is municipalism a path to achieving power at higher levels of government, or is it something we do for its own sake and/or because we don’t believe we have a realistic path to power at higher levels of government?”
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One member of our delegation raised an interesting question in our final debrief session in Barcelona. Is municipalism a path to achieving power at higher levels of government, or is it something we do for its own sake and/or because we don’t believe we have a realistic path to power at higher levels of government? This feels like a resonant question for the WFP because we have a couple different tendencies going on within us as we are expanding. On the one hand, we have traditionally always seen individual states as the basic building block of our work. We tried to form state-based organizations in the mold of NYWFP, or CTWFP, as we grew. Ultimately, of course, if we had enough states we would also be positioned to contest for power at the nation-state level and to move an agenda in the US Congress. I remember we often talked about our “big hairy audacious goal” of one day having the election of the US President run through us and our movement allies, for example. On the other hand, we have recently begun affiliating chapters and moving at the city level. We have a great group of folks in Columbus, Ohio for example. And we just affiliated MLK County, where Seattle is located, with the explicit plan to focus on elevating candidates of color in the Seattle suburbs of Sea-Tac and Kent. Plus, it is hard to deny that some of our most high-profile victories have happened at the municipal level, whether we are talking Bill de Blasio, or the Bridgeport School Board, or Larry Krasner, the new District Attorney of Philadelphia. So what are we, a state-based party? A city-based party? Both? How do we knit these things together?
SH: And once we knit them together, what is our goal for it? Is it still to have the election for President one day run through us and to have some capacity to significantly control what moves and what does not move in the US Congress? Or are we imagining a more decentralized swarming of “little” victories that may or may not end up with a centralized national manifestation?
NS: I think it is pretty much impossible to say right now. I do believe that with the idea of municipalism, they are positioning the city to be at least one place of convergence — whether it is a convergence of a race and class discourse, or whatever. It does not mean this convergence won’t happen in other places as well, but focusing on a city and town strategy might be a way to push this convergence along faster and farther than if we wait for the stars to align in a state, or at the national level.
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“…everyone is talking about an inside-outside strategy, but we almost always end up doing it by accident. Are we actually doing any work to theorize what that would look like so we have a plan that people in the movement and our friends in elected office share and understand?”
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While we were there another member of our delegation said that everyone is talking about an inside-outside strategy, but we almost always end up doing it by accident. Are we actually doing any work to theorize what that would look like so we have a plan that people in the movement and our friends in elected office share and understand?
SH: What are your thoughts on how we do that?
NS: Well, before I get to that, I was struck by the fact that in many ways the election system in Spain is much more conducive to this municipalist strategy that in the States. I mean, Barcelona en Comú had literally existed for less than a year before they were taking over city hall (granted, as a minority government). Because of their representational election system, they were able to organize a core group, develop a collective program using both town halls and digital formats, have a public launch, and run a campaign in the public squares all over the city in a relatively short amount of time. Their candidate recruitment consisted of developing a list of well-known people from within their ranks and running it city-wide. They got their 10 seats plus the mayorship (out of 41 available) based on the overall percentage of the vote that their platform received in a city-wide election. In our US system of district elections with winner-take-all results, it is hard to imagine having such a huge breakthrough in just one year.
That said, we have been moving more and more toward a strategy of building electoral slates and presenting our candidates as a collective whole. While this is not the same as putting forward a candidate list like they did in Barcelona (after all, we still have to recruit our candidates from the correct district in many cases) it is a pretty decent work-around, and it allows us to approach a municipal election, for example, with a bit of a unified brand and a shared platform. It obviously is a pretty “upstream” approach to our election campaigning, but it seems to have some clear advantages over doing a candidate-by-candidate approach. I definitely sensed there was some emerging consensus on this approach, not just among people from within our delegation, but within a broader group of US-based activists we met in Barcelona.
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“…we have been moving more and more toward a strategy of building electoral slates and presenting our candidates as a collective whole… [T]here was some emerging consensus on this approach, not just among people from within our delegation, but within a broader group of US-based activists we met in Barcelona.”
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As far as the inside-outside strategy goes, I completely agree; we need a better and shared plan with our friendly elected officials. I was really glad that Local Progress had a delegation of elected officials in Barcelona, and I think continuing to work with them to develop this shared vision of an inside-outside strategy makes a lot of sense. In the end, I envision a time when we are running coordinated slates of candidates in multiple local jurisdictions, and that all of those candidates have a clear understanding going in what the shared agenda is, and are prepared for — and open to — the pressure and support that we will continue to bring as an outside movement.
SH: Nelini, I want to thank you for taking some time to process the delegation to Barcelona with me. I appreciate your insights and look forward to continuing this work together!
