Dear friends of the RLS,

I’m writing to you on behalf of the steering committee of the MAC4 meeting, that will be
held in Madrid next June the 22-24th. What is MAC? MAC stands for Municipalismo,
Autogestión, Contrapoder and it’s a grassroots municipalist meeting that has had its first
edition in Malaga in June 2016 and two further meetings last January 2017 in Pamplona/
Iruña and October 2017 in Coruña (see this latter website: http://mac3.uno/).

We would like to invite the RLS to collaborate and participate in this event, thus enabling a
much larger participation coming from different european cities. The european involvement
in the municipalist movement is key to its success and, viceversa, the european predicament
needs new political inputs like those that the municipalist movements and electoral coalitions
have contributed with in the last years.

The MAC meetings are a great chance to meet among activists and municipalist militants
from across Spain and Europe, in orden to address the many challenges that both urban
struggles and new municipal representatives and governments have to face these days. Since
2015, urban struggles have been able to weigh on the composition of city councils and
municipal governments across Spain, but the assessment we can make of this three years is
far from being all too clear or non controversial.

There is a clear link between the surge of municipalist coalitions in Spain and the aftermath
of the 15M movements in 2011. The outcry for a “real democracy” against the austeritarian
neoliberal regime that took to the streets and square in May that year has had an offspring in
the municipalist coalitions. This genealogy is pretty apparent for the actors of spanish new
municipalism (while there has been an specific municipalist development in Catalonia for
years before 2011), but it is also apparent if we take a look both at its methods (network and
grassroots democracy, direct collective action, transparent candidates primaries, held by
means of open source voting systems, ethical codes for candidates about remuneration limits
and business as usual corrupt practices) and its contents (a more direct municipal democracy,
municipal ownership of basic and key city services, the struggle for affordable housing and
against foreclosure and rent evictions). After all, we may well say that, together with the new
feminist movement, the municipalist experiences are the only political creations that still
cherish some potentialities for a new working prototype of revolutionary democracy.

Municipalism can’t be reduced to its governmental and representative spin-offs, although

these are always considered as a tactical and necessary challenge for the transformation of the
political systems in a radically democratic way. Municipalism is fundamentally about the way
popular struggles and city-based cooperation can find out and invent new democratic
institutions able to enforce social justice and defeat neoliberal regimes.

It not easy though to translate these issues into the specific european contexts, both nationally
and at the UE level. Nonetheless, there are many processes affecting most european cities that
offer a gate for a strong commoning among differents territories. Both the european
austeritarian dictatorship (Brussels, Berlin, Frankfurt) and the global financial capital are
responsible for the general deterioration of urban life throughout the continent:

a) the Fiscal Compact has turned into a vertical command chain that allows neoliberal
national governments to control municipal spending through specific measures of fiscal
enforcement over the democratic will of city councils; for most municipalities, this means the
impossibility of implementing any social policies whatsoever and in fact it means the end of
the autonomy of municipal governments;

b) at the same time, both the platform corporations, like Airbnb, Uber, etc., and global
investment funds like Blackstone, with the full support of the fiscal authorities, are colonizing
the urban space with a brutal force. The new real estate bubble seems to be focused on this
urban economies of gentrification, touristification and residential housing (mostly rental in
the spanish case), and it’s creating a huge and unfettered expropriation of wealth from the
lower popular classes to the top financial calls groups in society while they commit a fiscal
sabotage right before our eyes;

c) this fiscal sabotage, together with the suppression of every fiscal autonomy for
municipalities forces a range of privatizations of essential municipal services and facilities,
from water supply to transportation systems to garbage collection.

d) On the other hand, this general deterioration of urban life for the popular classes is a
window of opportunity for the extreme right agendas, be it neoliberal or völkisch nationalist.
The discourses and actions against non-white citizens, refugees, informal migrant workers,
prey on the conditions created by this financial-state led clamp on welfare and social minima.

It’s far from overstated to say that, contrary to the nation-State based political spaces and
institutions, increasingly dominated by toxic right-wing populism and clashes among
different (national, gender and race related) forces of labour, the city and metropolitan
landscapes in Europe convey a series of isomorphisms that allow us to grasp the possibility of
municipalism as a passkey to real, coordinated, networked european struggles against finance
capital and austeritarian dictatorship in Europe, and hence against the resistible rise of fascist
forces.

We do hope that you find the MAC4 approach and challenges worthy of your participation
and support. Shortly we will be starting the call for participation and workshop proposals. It
would be great to count on you to organise a good transeuropean municipalist workshop and
also an assembly with all the european participants.

Our best regards.

Fundación de los comunes - fundaciondeloscomunes.net

Instituto Democracia y municipalismo - http://institutodm.org/