Mayor Ada Colau visits FaPaC festival just like another citizen. Demotix/Alejandro Ascanio. All rights reserved. In a recent article on openDemocracy, Barcelona-based activist and theatre
director Simona Levi invited the Podemos leadership to adopt a
non-hegemonic attitude toward the civic lists that won the recent municipal
elections in Spain. Claiming that the affirmation of Barcelona en Comú, Ahora
Madrid, and other civic lists is in continuity with the “transversal” spirit of
the 15-M movement, Levi invited Secretary General Pablo Iglesias to refrain
from using these successes to promote his party’s agenda.
To back her claims,
Levi noted how, in the city of Madrid alone, Ahora Madrid won 519,000 votes,
almost double those won by Podemos (287,000) in the regional election the same
day.
Similar results in the
rest of Spain suggest that while Podemos is indeed an important player in the
renewal of the Spanish political class, it is by no means the only one. As
Jordi Vaquer has recently noted, the rise of Ciudadanos and the resilience of
the PSOE in many regions pose a veritable dilemma for Podemos vis-à-vis the general elections in
November.
Will the purple party
run alone? Or will it try to replicate the model of the civic lists at a
national level, joining forces with other political formations? By choosing the
former, Podemos’s populist aspiration to represent the vast majority of the
Spanish population may be undermined by less than impressive electoral results.
By choosing coalition politics, the party may have to make compromises that are
also in contradiction with its populist appeal and strategy.
The name of
the leader
In this respect,
Podemos’ dilemma goes to the heart of what defines the identity of a populist
party. Ernesto Laclau—a political philosopher who has influenced both Iglesias
and Podemos’s political secretary Íñigo Errejón—is very clear on this point.
For Laclau, the main feature of populism is that it tends to divide the
political field into two opposing camps: the people vs. power. In constructing
this “internal frontier” populism establishes a “chain of equivalence” among a
plurality of unfulfilled demands. This operation revolves for Laclau around the
name of a leader. It is the name of the leader—whether it be Pablo Iglesias,
Ada Colau or Manuela Carmena—that gives demands that would otherwise have
little in common a positive symbolic expression, allowing that which is
denied by power to enter the field of representation.
Because the name of the
leader is central in projecting a “retroactive unity” on an
otherwise heterogeneous set of demands and subjectivities, the populist
operation is always reductive and thus hegemonic in character. This may explain
why the current leadership of Podemos rejected the proposal—advanced by Pablo
Echenique, Teresa Rodríguez and Lola Sánchez last October—to put three leaders
at the helm of the party instead of one.
The recent refusal of
Pablo Iglesias to form a coalition with the United Left for the general
elections in November could be read along the same lines (along with the rejection of the “Left” as a political category).
Yet, if we consider
that the same leadership has also chosen to support the civic lists in the 24M
municipal elections and is likely to replicate this model at the upcoming regional elections in Catalonia, we
can see how the populist playbook is being applied with a certain degree of
flexibility.
The struggle
for hegemony within the popular camp
But is it? In a recent interview, Iglesias noted that the victory of Barcelona en Comú
should not be attributed to the coalition of parties that have supported the
candidacy of Ada Colau, but to Ada Colau herself, “who was a referent for
something new.”
Certainly, Colau’s
personal story as an activist and spokesperson of the PAH, the widely popular
anti-eviction campaign, has played a major role in projecting her to the
highest office in Barcelona. At the same time, the open assembly process that
went under the name of Guanyem Barcelona/Barcelona en Comú has allowed city
residents to develop a shared program, select a leader, and crowdfund this
process without the mediation of political parties.
To be sure, Colau’s
candidacy was supported by a coalition of parties, which included Podemos among
others. Yet the novelty of her candidacy is that it was advanced in Barcelona’s
neighborhoods through a widely participatory process that was very similar, as
Levi notes, to the 15M.
Thus, even if Iglesias
does not say it, the name of Ada Colau is an index of the autonomous capacity
of civil society to build an inclusive process—a popular (constituent) process
that has already taken over institutional power in several Spanish cities. But
if this is true, then Podemos cannot lay claim to be the exclusive
representative of the voluntad popular against the vested interests of
the 1%. As Levi puts it in the open letter cited at the beginning of this article: “Podemos alone cannot and
should not represent Everything.” So indeed, the struggle for hegemony within
the popular camp has begun.
Yet for this agonistic
challenge to be real and overt, the forces that have started the Guanyem civic
lists in Barcelona and other cities would have to scale this autonomous process
to a national level. That is, they would need to prove that the mass experiment
in participatory democracy that began with the indignados movement in
2011 can now engage with electoral politics outside and beyond the purview of
the traditional party system. Is this a realistic hypothesis?
The power of
organizing without organizations
It is and it isn’t. To
begin with, creating a national political force from the ground up implies an
exponential multiplication of the levels of mediation among the actors who engage
in such process.
Because this work of
mediation demands a high level of personal commitment and is very
time-consuming, it has historically led to the formation of a professional
class of mediators, or career politicians. For civil society to do away
with this class—which is often belittled by populists as parasitical, greedy,
incompetent, and corrupt—a different distribution of time and resources would
be necessary.
In his best-selling
book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations,
Clay Shirky argues that the social web has dramatically lowered the transaction
costs—in terms of time, money, and resources—that are necessary to coordinate
group activity. Because native features of the social web such as tagging and
sharing incorporate cooperation “into the infrastructure” Shirky claims that
activities that could once be historically undertaken only by large-scale
organizations are now increasingly coordinated by nonprofessionals outside of
an institutional framework.
The mass
amateurization that we see at work in Wikipedia, Instagram, YouTube (and in
commercial services like Uber and Airbnb) is for Shirky nothing but the outcome
of the extension of cooperation on a scale that is unprecedented in human
history.
But if the power of
organizing without organizations has significantly impacted on traditional
institutions and companies, it is not unreasonable to believe that it will soon
have its impact on traditional party politics.
Two kinds of
technoparties
Indeed, the rise of
“technoparties” like Podemos and Ciudadanos in Spain and the Five Star Movement
in Italy shows that this process is already under way.
These formations have
been steadily employing a vast array of software tools and online platforms
that allow their members to discuss and draft policy proposals, hold their
primaries online, crowdfund initiatives and campaigns, and even vote on
decisions that are to be taken by their elected representatives.
To be sure, while these
political parties openly encourage the networked participation of their own
activists they still remain parties, with a recognizable leadership and a
stable organizational structure. For these structures to be dissolved and
replaced by an ad hoc coordination of
citizens and nonprofessional activists, these software tools would need to
allow citizens not only to deliberate but also to vote on specific initiatives.
Indeed, software like Liquid Feedback, AdHocracy and DemocracyOS have been designed precisely to scale
decision-making and implement a flexible system of delegation that in theory
allows any member of a network to make a proposal and assume a leadership
position on a given topic.
It is too early to say
how effective and “revolutionary” these software procedures that promise to
scale direct democracy are. Certainly, there are European parties like the
German Pirate Party and the Citizen Network X Party (a post-indignados Spanish party that was
founded in 2013) that have been experimenting with these advanced decision-making
technologies. Commited to a radically democratic politics that eschews the
formation of a “professional” leadership, these parties have been the
closest instantiation of a “liquid” party that is nothing more than a free and
variable association of citizens.
And yet, after
promising starts, the Swedish and the German Pirate Parties and the X Party
have been unable to win a significant consensus in the most important test for
a political party: the national elections.
Even though there are
many contingent reasons for these disappointing performances, I believe that
Podemos, M5S, and Ciudadanos have a relative advantage over these smaller
technoparties—namely, that they are led by a charismatic and “telegenic”
leadership.
Why
leadership still matters
Not only are leaders
like Pablo Iglesias and Beppe Grillo able to appeal to constituents who may not
be so engaged with network-based politics, but, as Paolo Gerbaudo has recently noted,
their populist rhetoric sutures widely different demands and subjectivities in
their opposition to a common enemy.
In this respect,
whether we like it or not, these technoparties seem to have a better chance at
providing a blueprint for many technoparties to come than those formations that
identify networked participation with an impersonal, process that needs no
central anchoring point.
From this perspective,
I disagree with Levi’s claim that Barcelona en Comú cannot be exclusively
identified with Ada Colau. Even if this is materially true, it is not so
discursively. The name of Ada Colau in fact guarantees that the popular process
behind her candidacy has effectively taken control of a local network of state
power. As Manuel Castells points out, the state is the network to which all
other networks (financial, military, communicative) turn, as the state has the
power to define the rules and norms of society by retaining the monopoly of
violence.
Thus, whereas the indignados
could develop practices of mutual solidarity and advance a plurality of
demands in an open social field, running for elections entails a shift in the
nature of political participation.
Because institutional
power symbolizes the community in its entirety, running for office means to
engage in an operation that is intrinsically reductive and hegemonic. This
does not mean, of course, that state power is autocratic and party leadership
should be unaccountable and unchangeable. But the pluralist politics of
multiplying the fronts of struggle is only fruitful insofar as these fronts, or
rather the organizations behind them, do not compete for the same seats.
Of course, a civil
society that aspires to map itself onto the network of state power can
guarantee a level of inclusivity that no political party will ever be able to
guarantee. But for this to be possible, the actors involved in the process need
to recognize that their own candidates are competing to represent the totality
of the community exactly as the candidates of the other parties do. In this
sense, populist discourse is not just a political strategy among many, but as
Laclau points out, an inextricable and ontological dimension of modern
democracy.
Widening participation,
ensuring the ongoing renewal of leadership, and guaranteeing that the norms of
conversation and the decision-making protocols can always be subject to
revision is not going to change this fundamental fact.
—
The author would like
to thank Vicente Rubio for feedback on this article.
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