Actually, the degrowth revolution will probably start in Barcelona

The guys I study with have joined me on the novel experiment in human relationships that’s emerged recently- the virtual relationship preceding the ‘real’ one. The same 40 odd people studied together every weekday, exploring degrowth. I could paint their Zoom rectangle, describe their pets’ movement patterns, most of them are characters in my dreams.

The weekend just gone, those from Europe met for the first time in Barcelona, the city where the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the university that runs our course, is based. It was a trip, one of the most beautiful and radicalizing experiences of my life, totally worth the fact I’m still here locked in a room with a mysterious illness getting my delicate ears shagged by the fireworks of San Juan. None of you reading know my classmates, so an ode to them would be silly, and I’ve already ode’d them to their faces. An ode to our backdrop is better.

Barcelona’s strong history of radical leftist politics goes well beyond that of most European cities. David Graeber once said Rojava is the “most exciting political experiment since the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War”, and he’s right, not since the streets of Barcelona and the hills of Andalucia in the 30s has the world witnessed a society as free from hierarchy and inequality and so rich in human cooperation and organization. By “the anarchists” Graeber is referring to one of the most important factions of the republicans (which included more moderate social democrats and more crazy Stalinists) who fought and lost against Franco in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. Anarchism, by the way, is a political and social framework that seeks to dismantle, as much as possible, hierarchies that cannot be justified, advocating for a voluntary association of people based on participation in the decisions that affect them, and local, self-managed economies of solidarity.

Anarchism spread across Spain in the early 20th century, but its most complete expression was in the streets of Barcelona following the outbreak of the civil war. Orwell described the scenes thus in Homage to Catalonia;

“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists;

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