Barcelona Metropolis

Does the burning of rubbish bins as a form of protest on the streets of Barcelona correspond to flames of social revolt that evoke the spirit of the Rose of Fire? Or, on the contrary, do they spark nihilism against numerous crises and are they a showcase for a narcissism ignited on social networks but unlike the collective tradition of some peaceful social and barricade movements? The answer cannot ignore the examples of a contemporary history built by people’s coups in a city that is both bourgeois and revolutionary.

One of the photographs discovered in the “red box” of the photojournalist Antoni Campañà – with a recent exhibition at the MNAC [Catalan National Art Museum] and a wonderful book of images on the Spanish Civil War – portrays a group of children with their fists raised behind a toy barricade, on the street Carrer de la Diputació, in August 1936.[1] For the Barcelona that has featured in the news lately on account of the burning of bins and the clashes of young people with the police in protest at the imprisonment of rapper Pablo Hasél or, in autumn 2019, against the sentence of the trial surrounding the Catalan independence movement, Campañà’s photograph is helpful. It gives cause for reflection on the roots and causes of urban violence, with a certain revolutionary infantilism included, in a city that is also an exponent of demonstrations and social movements of great political maturity or of childish naivety but not necessarily violent in nature.

In fact, some of these demonstrations, social movements or urban revolts waved the flag of pacifism or antimilitarism. That does not certify anything, as evidenced by the violence of the Revolt of the Quintas [Conscripts] in the Gràcia neighbourhood, in 1870, or the Tragic Week of 1909. But in more recent history – and without going back to 1980, 1990 and 2000, decades of movements against NATO, of conscientious objection and insubordination, and of No to the war –, it can be concluded that both the movement of the “indignant”, which filled the squares on 15-M [15 May 2011], and the sweeping sovereignty movement of the last decade have been examples of civility. It is a true cliché that hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated without throwing a single piece of paper on the ground. It is also true that during this intense period of movements – from the evacuation of Plaça de Catalunya, on 27 May 2011, to the quashing of the vote on independence, on 1 October 2017, and in neighbourhood actions against evictions –, when there has been violence, it has not usually been instigated by the protesters, but by the police. And that without delving into structural violence.

That does not mean that the city is, by definition and everywhere, synonymous with social and political conflict, riots and barricades. Just like Barcelona, in particular, is a benchmark as a city of peace, without fear. It was obvious in the citizen response to the jihadist attacks of August 2017, as had already been made evident in the major demonstrations of 1987 against the ETA attack on Hipercor and in 2000 against the murder of Ernest Lluch. These two sides of Barcelona, the city of peace and the city of barricades, like its qualifiers bourgeois and revolutionary at the same time, are not recent.[2] Built by people’s coups, contemporary history is full of examples that help to contextualise and afford complexity and solidity of analysis to a reality that can be hidden or distorted by short memory, limited knowledge in social sciences and the servitudes of liquid society and communicative immediacy.

Barcelona is a city that, when lately it experienced porn riot incidents broadcast on television and social networks, spilled over with the notion of the society of the spectacle, a term coined in the sixties by Guy Debord. Since history lends character to any society, social and collective memory reasons or community psychology cannot be underestimated against the backdrop of the burning of bins in Barcelona. Admittedly, the specific formula of urban protest is not new. However, although in the anthropology of urban space the ritual component of protests that often repeat scenarios and typology is studied, new elements emerge from the comparative historical and political analysis of recent episodes. There is a nihilism unlike the Barcelona tradition that cannot be dismissed by appealing to the manipulated cliché of the Italian anarchist conspiracy (incidentally, a constant with a historical substrate in the 19^th century Orsini bombs and the Liceu bombing of 1893). And there is also a glimpse of new elements of individualistic narcissism, magnified by social networks, which do not fit into the collective tradition of sociopolitical activism in Barcelona, whatever ideological sign it may be. That is why the mystification of the barricade can be well discerned.

Without resorting to either the cliché of the Rose of Fire or the mythologised resistant Barcelona of 1714 or revolutionary Barcelona of 1936, many examples are testament to the unrest in the streets of the Catalan capital. In an 1873 memoir on the social upheaval in Spain, Friedrich Engels wrote that in Barcelona there were “more barricade fights than in any other city in the world”. A long century later, on 25 March 2003, a former president of the United States, George Bush Sr., referring to the major demonstration of No to the war held three days earlier on Passeig de Gràcia, declared: “No one can allow their politics to be decided by the number of people who demonstrate in Barcelona”.^[3]

Speeches at that event (the philosopher Marina Garcés and the General Secretary of the CGT [General Confederation of Labour], Ermengol Gassiot, among others) and the iconography of the poster design and communication through social networks of this new urban revolt, like in some media, sought to connect today’s Barcelona with the mystical Rose of Fire. “Recognising that the conflict exists makes us be alive, makes us a tool for struggle and enables us to change it. And we see that in opposition to fascism, in the flames, in the barricades and in the broken ATMs, which are also our collective action”, said Gassiot, amidst applause, after referring to the Canadenca strike of 1919 and the Paris Commune of 1871.

But the Barcelona where rubbish bins are burned today has nothing to do with the city that Engels placed in 1873 at the top of the ranking of barricade fights (and which was also the city of the hearts of Clavé, where music was another socialisation factor for the working class). Despite ruling the Communes, Barcelona is not the Paris Commune either (by the way, it is surprising that it was relegated by Barcelona in Engels’ ranking; even more so when Karl Marx reviewed the intense barricade story written by Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray).[1] In the 150 years of the Paris Commune, the historian Roberto Ceamanos, who has studied it in depth, states that “the barricade, a symbol of popular resistance, reached its golden age in the episode of the Commune.”^[2] This academically reaffirms a conclusion already reached, based on her own experience, by the Russian journalist and communist Larisa Reisner, in 1923, in Hamburgo en las barricadas [Hamburg at the Barricades]: “The old and romantic barricade is long a thing of the past. Today the fight is different”.[3] Even so, the mystique of the barricades survives in Barcelona because of July 1936 and thanks to foreign authors such as the historian Chris Ealham[4] or the testimonies of George Orwell, Mary Low, Hans Erich Kaminski and Axel Österberg, who indeed wrote Tras las barricadas de Barcelona [Behind Barcelona’s Barricades].^[5]

Historiography long ago resolved the categorisation of uprisings and protest movements contemporary to capitalism. In the traditional revolts of the quintas [conscripts], against shortages or urban speculation, which broke out when what Edward P. Thompson called the “moral economy of the crowd” was violated, new models of protest were added, ranging from Luddism, which destroyed the machines that left workers unemployed, even to English Chartism, which called for political and social democracy. And from here, a wide sample: from propaganda of the deed and revolutionary gymnastics (very important in our anarchism) to classic strikes (such as those of the Workers’ Commissions during the sixties and seventies or the Canadenca strike of 1919, which Salvador Seguí was able to call off in time to give value to the triumph of the eight-hour day); and from the boycotts of means of transport (such as the tram strike that in 1951 marked a turning point in urban, working-class and social protest in Barcelona) to the performances of the 21^st century.

The typology is varied, but no matter how much ideology or anthropology of urban conflict we subject to analysis, in the political history of social movements, a spontaneous or nihilistic protest is not the same as one with defined direction, organisation and objectives, regardless of its success or legitimacy. One cannot forget the dual soul of a city of peace and a city of barricade that, in different formulations, is repeated throughout the history of Barcelona. But there must be rigour in contextualisation and precision in analogies. A riot is not the same as a revolution, nor a revolt the same as a few altercations. July 1909 did not mean the same thing as July 1936. The Canadenca type of strike is not the same as the tram or the Nissan strike. And the context in which 15-M emerged or the one that led to massive pro-independence demonstrations on 11 September is not the same a decade later.

You can always play barricades, as the children in the Campañà photo did. But it is also useful to take other images for comparative analysis. Given the suggestion of some, the photos that Manel Armengol took and the footage that Pere Portabella filmed, in February 1976, of the unitary demonstrations of the Assembly of Catalonia demanding freedom, amnesty and the statute of autonomy are well known. There are no barricades or burning rubbish bins, but there are people mobilising in the streets of Barcelona with a clear political direction for historical change.