Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

ISSN: 0893-5696 (Print) 1475-8059 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20

A Plurality of Communisms
Justin Helepololei
To cite this article: Justin Helepololei (2015) A Plurality of Communisms, Rethinking Marxism,
27:3, 368-370, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2015.1042706
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042706

Published online: 16 Jul 2015.

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Date: 27 September 2015, At: 20:05

Rethinking Marxism, 2015

Vol. 27, No. 3, 368370, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1042706

A Plurality of Communisms

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Justin Helepololei
The unending crisis in southern Europe has brought a new urgency to thinking and
living in different ways. Responding to the exchange between Jodi Dean and Stephen
Healy at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference, this article draws on
recent examples in Spain of direct action at the local, regional, and national levels in
order to question the perennial call to scale up. Is expansion inherently desirable? Is
it a priority? What are the tradeoffs? Where does this urge come from? Are there
visions of mass mobilization that dont replace one universalizing tendency with
another?
Key Words: Commons, Crisis, Direct Action, Scale, Spain

Its an exciting time to be thinking about communism and the commons. Its also a
desperate time. For a growing number of people, its no longer a question of if but
how to live collectively. Racked by financial crisis since at least 2008, the economic
picture in Spain is a bleak one. But this bleakness has meant that many thousands of
people, abjected from the formal economy, have had to find other ways to live,
moved by anger as much as joy. For this reason its a context we all might benefit
from considering.
From May 2012 to April 2014, thirty-six families illegally occupied an empty
apartment building in the city of Seville, Spain.1 The bank-owned corrala, as this type
of building is called, had never been inhabited, part of the massive empty housing
stock left over from Spains precrisis real estate boom.2 Through the coordination of a
citywide housing assembly established during the 2011 Indignado or 15M protests, the
residents, all evicted from their homes since the crisis began, took over the building
and renamed it the Corrala de Vecinas la Utopa. Cut off from utilities by the city
government, residents relied on each other to get by. Young people would bring jugs
of water up flights of stairs to elder neighbors. Those with generators on their
balconies could run appliances and phone chargers. Parents took turns watching
children play together in the semidarkness of unlit hallways. And all of the residents
met to organize the collective self-management of the building, coordinating
constantly with their expansive network of supporters and with the dozen other
1. See La PAH Huelva en contra de la represin a la movilizacin, Corala de Vecinas La Utopa,
3 March 2015, http://corralautopia.blogspot.com.
2. A recent Human Rights Watch report details the impact and extent of Spains housing crisis.
See Spain: Rights at Risk in Housing Crisis, Human Rights Watch, 28 May 2014, http://www.
hrw.org/news/2014/05/27/spain-rights-risk-housing-crisis.
2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

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CRAFTING COMMUNISM

369

corrala occupations active in the region at the time. One of the more outspoken
occupiers, a woman in her midsixties, explained to me during an interview that, like
her, most of the neighbors had never before been activists, but when they were
thrown out on the street, they were given no choice.
From apartment buildings to unfinished libraries3 and former bank offices,
occupations have proliferated across Spain, where squatting has a long and
contentious history.4 Rarely do occupations last more than a few months, but when
they do, they create vital spaces for new initiatives to grow. The windows of the
expropriated bank in the neighborhood of Grcia, in Barcelona, are plastered with
fliers for events: free language classes, yoga sessions, film screenings, and debates.
These social activities supplement the weekly assemblies that convene to organize a
cooperative consumption network, a housing network, and the day-to-day management of the space itself. Such projects have persisted and continued to draw regular
participation by a broad base of people, years after the encampments of 2011 ended.
Unlike the Occupy movement, neighborhood assemblies of the 15M continue to meet
in cities throughout Spain, addressing some of the concrete needs of their
communities through projects like the corralas and the expropriated bank.5
On a larger scale, the Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC), or Integrated Catalan
Cooperative, is a growing, regional effort to connect cooperative economic projects.
The CIC facilitates the sharing of resources among new and already existing projects
through direct exchange as well as an internal currency. One factor that distinguishes
the CICs efforts from similar initiatives elsewhere is that many of the CICs events
and publications are partially funded by the expropriation of 492,000 Euros in
unpaid loans from some thirty-nine different financial institutions by one of the
networks founding members, Enric Duran Giralt. The CIC actively promotes this and
other examples of fiscal disobedience as part of a strategy of recuperating wealth
from the global financial market in order to reinvest in alternative economic
practices.
On the national and international scene, new, commons-oriented anticapitalist
parties have also emerged. Spains Podemos is one example.6 In the 2014 European
parliamentary elections, Podemos (or We Can)led by former political science
professor Pablo Iglesias Turrinwon five out of Spains fifty-four seats, taking 8
percent of the overall vote only months after the party had formed. Podemos has
shown dedication to popular grassroots politics and to building its program, candidate
list, and budget via crowdsourcing. Citing the formation of hundreds of local crculos
and also the use of digital, collective decision-making platforms like AgoraVoting.com
and Appgree, participants and critics alike have described Podemos as the
institutionalization of some of the organizing logics of the 15M or Indignados
movement. While both the long-term viability of the party and the material impact
3. See Luis Dez, Jvenes ocupan la biblioteca de Rivas, cerrada sin estrenar hace 6 aos,
Cuartopoder, 19 February 2013, http://www.cuartopoder.es/laespumadeldia/2013/02/19/
jovenes-ocupan-la-biblioteca-de-rivas-cerrada-sin-estrenar-hace-6-anos.
4. See Squatting Europe Kollective, accessed 4 April 2015, http://sqek.squat.net.
5. Examples are Efecto Gamonal in Burgos and Som Can Vies and Barceloneta in Barcelona.
6. See also the website of Partido X, accessed 4 April 2015, http://partidox.org/en.

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370

HELEPOLOLEI

of Podemoss representatives in the EU remain to be seen, the crossover between

these different spaces has been apparent as leaders like Pablo Iglesias, Enric Duran,
and many others move back and forth, working in different collectives and at
multiple scales simultaneously.
While a number of these current projects are quite small, the militancy of their
praxis hardly suggests that theyve been depoliticized into lifestyle choices, as
critics might suggest (Dean 2015, 333). The CIC, the corralas, and the occupied banks
are deeply antagonistic to the logics of the market, to private property, and to the
commodification of lifes necessities in ways that larger initiatives like Podemos
posture toward but are less able to substantiate in material practice. In this regard,
Id argue that the persistence of organizing by the Indignados at the regional and
neighborhood levels in Spain does not reflect a fetishization of the local but an
acknowledgment that truly collective action requires a great deal of time, shared
knowledge, and deliberation and that the conditions of daily life cant wait for grand
interventions but must be theorized as they are lived by the people who live them.
I thus remain apprehensive about any totalizing visions for social change. What is
framed as the logical next stepto expand, to scale upfeels dangerously close to
those civilizing missions of which monks, capitalists, and communists alike have all
been guilty. Though the impulse to universalism is less explicit in Healys diverseeconomies framework than it is in Deans call for a singular party to assert
commonality, the teleological imperative to global domination/liberation still
remains. Must we go from the plural of diverse economies to the singulartoward
a society in which cooperation is the norm, a world, a new reality (Healy 2015,
353; emphasis added)or can we value a range of different collectivities as ends in
themselves?
This moment, of building new worlds and finding new ways of being, seems an ideal
opportunity to revisit, and possibly leave behind, old impulses. It gives us a chance to
pause and to ask: Do these projects need to grow? Is having a national or an
international political program a priority? Do such programs change our lives in ways
that justify the amount of time, energy, and resources they demand? And finally, if
social scientists across the political spectrum have demonstrated that diversity and
autonomy generate innovation, can we afford to keep listening to that call for
homogenization, for monoculture, and for the cancerous imperative of perpetual
growth? Or can we work together without demanding a singular solution?

References
Dean, J. 2015. The party and communist solidarity. Rethinking Marxism 27 (3):
33242.
Healy, S. 2015. Communism as a mode of life. Rethinking Marxism 27 (3): 34356.