An uphill battle

The goals espoused by the radical municipal governments in Spain are certainly ambitious. Their first one hundred days in office have been characterized by a promising pragmatic approach to implementing a bold policy program coupled with the occasional flamboyant gesture, like José María ‘Kichi’ González replacing a painting of the King of Spain in the mayor’s office with one of Fermín Salvochea, the nineteenth-century anarchist mayor of Cádiz.

The challenges facing Spain’s radical city governments are many.

But the challenges facing city governments are many. Again, the case of Barcelona En Comú is illustrative. Less than a week after elections, the upper ranks of the city police handed in their resignation. They were upset that one of the new city government’s main representatives is Jaume Asens, a prominent human rights lawyer who has helped prosecute Catalonia’s biggest corruption scandals, uncovered cases of torture by city police and frequently defended squatters, sex workers, anarchists, participants in the Gaza freedom flotilla and Guantanamo prisoners.

As a political move, it was remarkably similar to the New York police union’s actions against Mayor Bill De Blasio, whose relatively mild remarks regarding the murder of Eric Garner were less flattering than what police have become accustomed to hearing from elected officials.

Moreover, they are also facing an intensely hostile media landscape dominated by media groups who clearly side with the establishment. The most widely read newspaper in Barcelona is the conservative daily La Vanguardia, which belongs to Spain’s oldest media holding, the Grupo Godó. Primarily controlled by the family of the Count of Godó, the group also owns a tremendous portion of the Catalan television channels and radio stations.

The rest of the city’s media landscape is distributed among the established Spanish media groups. Meanwhile, independent media outlets have small audiences fragmented by diverging opinions on the new representatives’ decision to enter institutional politics.

Finally like most of the radical municipal platforms, Barcelona En Comú are currently governing the city from a minority position, meaning that many of their decisions must be approved by the other parties in order to be implemented. Though the radical left pro-independence Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP) is ostensibly an ally, they do not hold enough seats to make a majority. Thus, any decisions must count with the support of at least one establishment party.

All of these disadvantages were on display during a revealing dispute that took place during the summer of 2015. In the weeks following the new government’s inauguration, Barcelona’s main commercial and touristic areas saw an increasing presence of African street vendors, specifically in parts of the city where they were previously less visible. It is unclear whether this increase was simply due to a higher number of tourists (their main clientele) or if, as some street vendors have claimed, city police told them to sell in these areas.

Over the following weeks, the Grupo Godó ran daily reports portraying the situation as the result of a chaotic transfer of power. This was not the first time they had done this. The last time a left-wing coalition governed Barcelona, La Vanguardia ran a series of front-page stories depicting street vendors, prostitutes, homeless people and squatters as a problem of social hygiene and urban and moral decay.

Their narrative was a paradigmatic example of what the geographer Neil Smith refers to as “the revanchist city,” a vengeful reaction of elites against the supposed “theft” of the city, characterized by “a desperate defense of a challenged phalanx of privileges, cloaked in the populist language of civic morality, family values and neighbourhood security.”

Against the reaction of the city’s revanchist elite, socially marginalized groups have practically no collective voice.

Against the reaction of the city’s revanchist elite, socially marginalized groups have practically no collective voice.

Against this reaction, socially marginalized groups have practically no collective voice. To defend their interests, they are forced to delegate political action and rely primarily on the protests and public statements of activists and NGOs, who are often distant from the social realities of the populations targeted by social cleansing.

Further complicating the situation, the lack of contact and enormous gap between the realities experienced by African street vendors and average citizens has allowed insidious myths to take root in society and proliferate unchallenged. The most pernicious of these is the idea that street vending networks are controlled by so-called “mafias,” a notion that is frequently parroted in the media based purely on anecdotal claims. Coupled with their lack of self-representation, this makes it especially difficult for the street vendors and similarly marginalized groups to advance a counter-hegemonic narrative concerning their work, much less engage in meaningful collective bargaining.

Nonetheless, Barcelona En Comú responded to the conflict with a systematic effort to look for a “social response” to the problems faced by street vendors, as opposed to a “police response” to the problem of public order described by the media and the police. They convened a negotiating table that brought together city police, social organizations, activists, NGOs and street vendors to look for a just solution. It was the first time street vendors were recognized as legitimate interlocutors by the public administration. Their efforts, however, were mostly drowned out by the hostile rhetoric of the establishment press.

When no agreement was reached at the negotiating table, the conflict dragged on. Then on August 11, a Senegalese street vendor named Mor Sylla died under questionable circumstances during a police operation in Salou. The conflict escalated dramatically and a riot broke out in the center of the touristic town.

Instead of responding to the tense social climate this generated by relaxing pressure on street vendors, Barcelona police continued to act aggressively, resulting in several clashes. Finally, when a scuffle broke out in a central metro station and some vendors responded by throwing rocks at the police, four police were injured, as well as four vendors and one bystander. Disappointingly, Barcelona En Comú responded by deploying riot police in the city center to dissuade the vendors from gathering in the areas where they had been working.

The power of self-representation

The success of the revanchist campaign against African street vendors outlines the real distribution of power in a major city. With no majority, a hostile media landscape and a status quo in which the dominant social norms sustain an unjust social order, even a government made up of social activists with years of experience in bottom-up organizing and civil disobedience can be pushed to make decisions that reinforce the order they seek to subvert.

Perhaps most unsettling is the ability of the police to condition the political agenda. The potentially disastrous repercussions of allowing the police to impose its own ideology on governing institutions cannot be overstated.

If Barcelona is to become a “standard bearer of social justice and democracy,” this cannot be achieved by decree.

If Barcelona is to become, as Barcelona En Comú state in their program, a “standard bearer of social justice and democracy,” this cannot be achieved by decree. Autonomous counterpowers must be developed to challenge dominant cultural frameworks and force the city government to advance the interests of its most marginalized residents.

In the revanchist city, these residents are overwhelmingly those whose poverty is criminalized: sex workers, street vendors, the homeless, street artists, small drug offenders, addicts and so on. There is a pressing need for autonomous platforms that allow the aforementioned collectives to represent themselves without having to delegate their collective voice to others. A broader movement for the right to the city could also be a step forward. However, it is also possible that such a movement would end up absorbing marginalized voices in an attempt to link them with middle-class interests.

Another critical challenge is the media landscape. Independent media have been successful in periodically breaking important stories. But they have not been so successful in promoting a counter-hegemonic narrative beyond their limited audiences. Such a narrative, or series of narratives, will need a much stronger foothold in the media landscape if they are to produce and sustain a cultural shift.

Thankfully, promising initiatives are emerging in Barcelona. The first is a self-organized network that watches over the areas most favored by street vendors, filming their interactions with police to prevent abuse and challenge dubious police reports. The second is a coalition of neighborhood assemblies and local migrants’ rights collectives that is working to amplify the voices of the street vendors themselves through self-organized local events in the city center.

Independent media have been working with these platforms, dismantling the mainstream media’s toxic narratives through rigorous investigative journalism. They have also received the occasional bump from Barcelona En Comú’s substantial presence on the social networks and seen their message echoed in city hall by both Barcelona En Comú and CUP.

It is easy to be discouraged by the uphill battle of the new municipalist platforms. But it is important to keep in mind that the current situation was unimaginable in Spain four years ago. Today, expectations are high—and it is a good time to be audacious.