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Ida Susser: Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc

June 21, 2022 Focaal Web Editor

On June 19, 2022, the united left party, NUPES (New Ecological and Social Popular Union), cobbled together by Jean-Luc Melenchon in less than two months, won enough seats to become the official opposition in the French National Assembly. How should we understand the growth of this left alliance in France which seems to have taken political pundits by surprise?

Since 2015, I have been conducting ethnographic research on progressive social transformation in Paris and, in fact, documenting the emergence of the counter-hegemonic bloc represented in this alliance. I have focused on what has been called “commoning” (Nonini 2007; Stavrides 2015; Susser 2016, 2017, 2018; Dardot and Laval 2019), the process of creating commons, to consider the ways in which this form of popular contestation is transforming political subjects, generating collective ethics, and reconfiguring democracy.

Image 1: Jean-Luc Melenchon delivering a speech at the NUPES convention on 7 May 2022, photo by Hugo Rota

Two aspects of commoning help to illuminate the current elections. The first is the creation of a new political subject and a political vision through a process of sharing and community activities. The second is the process of thresholding or crossing of transitional space that led to alliances among groups who had not previously recognized common interests. I argue that both aspects contributed to the creation of a public oriented in the direction of social justice, inclusivity and a collaborative left leaning political bloc.

To illustrate these processes, I focus on the Gilets Jaunes, a movement which emerged in November 2018. From the start there was much debate in France and internationally about whether to characterize the Gilets Jaunes as right or left in the context of Brexit, Trump, and most significantly, Marine Le Pen, head of the extreme right party in France (Rogozinski 2019, Balibar 2019 and many others). It is this dilemma that made these protests particularly important from an analytic and practical political perspective.

Historical Conjuncture and Crisis

In 2016, the Socialist government of Francois Hollande, with Emmanuel Macron as economy minister, initiated legislation to change the labor laws. Although policies to reduce public spending and increase the flexibility of employment had been gradually implemented for some time, this major effort by a Socialist government to change the labor laws set off a political crisis.

Because of this crisis, a new era of street protest emerged in Paris. The first of the protests was Nuit Debout, which began on March 31, 2016. This movement echoed the historic squares occupations of Southern Europe in 2011, although it took place five years later. As previously, in Spain, the call to action was initially to join the unions in support of the traditional labor laws that a socialist government proposed to relax.

The attempt to change the labor laws, and the protests in response, dramatically undermined the legitimacy of the Socialist Party. The political conjuncture of this event with allegations of fraud on the traditional right opened the way for a new political configuration in France. In this vacuum, the newly created party led by Macron, the left party created by Jean-Luc Melenchon in 2012, and the marginal far right, reincarnated by Marine Le Pen, re-oriented the national arena.

Taking advantage of the wide-open field, in May 2017, Macron, without a traditional party but strongly supported by corporate funding, was elected President for the first time. He rapidly began to implement far-reaching changes. In the interests of workforce flexibility, he weakened employment security and later tried to alter the calculation of union pensions as well as increase the age for pension entitlements. Student admissions to public universities were re-organized and health workers and teachers faced layoffs. The threat of worker disciplining in the interests of capital became widely feared. Each change was accompanied by massive social movements and street uprisings.

Over the years of the first Macron presidency, many different groups under different kinds of pressures opposed the new changes. Resistance took the form of both organized strikes and wildcat worker strikes, the occupation of squares, student sit ins and street rebellions. In November 2018, the Gilets Jaunes uprising began. Finally in 2019, a mass movement was organized by unions to oppose the dismantling of the national pension plans. I analyze the Gilets Jaunes within this broader historical arena as well as in contrast or comparison with the protest movements I have been observing in the United States.

The Gilets Jaunes and Commoning

The Gilets Jaunes began as a one issue protest, against the gas tax. The message was spread through Facebook, and other platforms. Still organizing around one issue, the protesters began to meet in real time, at roundabouts, crossroads and along highways in many parts of France. Next, Gilets Jaunes took to the streets of Paris in enormous and unprecedented marches on successive Saturdays for over eighteen months.

As people who lived near one another but had not necessarily met before began to meet regularly, they began to build a shared sense of community. Starting out as a mixture of pensioners, and many poor and disabled people from the provinces, including disengaged socialists and Le Pen supporters, the Gilets Jaunes can be seen as negotiating positions over time. Negotiations took place within the space of the commoning experience during the occupations, the general assemblies, the assemblies of assemblies and the massive Saturday demonstrations.

Image 2: *Gilets Jaunes* – Acte IX at Place de l’Etoile in Paris on 12 January 2019, photo by Olivier Ortelpa

The community was built in multiple ways: by barbecues and picnics, by bringing children to play in the environment, by building cabins, sometimes making them comfortable for wintry stays. Saturday afternoons were spent grouping close together in the cold to keep warm in wind, rain and snow, and some Saturday evenings around fires and in cabins. Gilets Jaunes wrote personal statements and commentaries on the backs of their vests. They spray painted slogans and arrayed tags, posters, and banners as well as other forms of graffiti (Le Comité de soutien 31 2019) along the routes of the demonstrations. The yellow vests and the songs such as the ever-present “On est la” generated a sense of belonging and became a signal that Gilets Jaunes were present in whatever guise they happened to be. Over time, singing the song simply indicated that people emulated and echoed the Gilets Jaunes in other demonstrations. Experiences such as this can be seen as the commoning process of the Gilet Jaunes.

Through meeting several times, a week, sharing narratives, singing Gilets Jaunes songs and, dressing in the familiar yellow vests, group members built a, possibly fragile, sense of solidarity in ways that crisscrossed over divisions of family, income, color, and age, and maintained a strong belief that the disabled were part of the community. Negotiations involved a recognition that poverty and distress need not be shameful but were a product of changing circumstances and uncaring or destructive government policies. As a result, in difficult, often physically uncomfortable, conditions, principles of cooperation were established along with a belief in horizontalism and an aversion to political leaders.

Où sont les neiges d’antan? (Where are the snows of yesteryear?)

Analysts have discussed the solidarity of factory floors or assembly lines and even nostalgia with respect to that solidarity (Muehlenbach 2017). Following Lefebvre there has also been a recognition of the solidarity of the streets and public spaces (Lefebvre 1971, Harvey 2012, Susser and Tonnelat 2013). The experience of the Gilets Jaunes points to the creation of a critical public at the roundabouts which generated or echoed the affect of the lost village community.

Such nostalgia has historically generated conservatism as well as revolutionary ideas (Susser 2008, Williams 1983). The question became, in what ways would this community be invested with emotions? It could generate an exclusive nationalism (as today in Hungary, Romania, or Poland) or a wider sharing sense of the needs of the poor and disabled.

In an ever-evolving process, people came to the roundabouts and talked among one another of their economic challenges and domestic hardship. They managed to escape the individual humiliations of poverty and household desperation, of their unrelenting work for not enough pay, their exhaustion and lack of belief in their own or their children’s future. Instead, they talked collectively about the degradation of everyday life – the loss of a village center, a post office, a bakery, and a public square; the loss of local schools; the need to drive long distances for employment and childcare; and the endless drudgery of work which did not allow sufficient time or provide the means to help their children, their elderly or disabled neighbors and relatives or meet their friends (Susser 2020). Their nostalgia recalled the loss of a social existence centered around local services and a secure welfare state and became the basis of their rage against Macron’s neoliberal policies.

Thresholding

The second aspect of commoning which contributed to a progressive or left positioning on the spectrum was what has been called thresholding (Stavrides 2015). Analysts (Stavrides 2015) have talked of “thresholds” to distinguish commoning from more right wing or nationalist movements claiming territory. The idea was that open doors or thresholds connected different groups which allowed for inclusivity while at the same time recognizing ethnic and other identities upon which the different groups were based. If commoning creates groups which are built on experiences of sharing in new ways, thresholds are a basis for sharing across groups. Thresholding be understood in much the same way as rites of passage which Arnold Van Gennep (1960) saw as taking place in three stages, separation, transition, and incorporation (see also Turner 1958).

We might consider moments of liminality, such as occupations, freezing afternoons at roundabouts or possibly the common experience of violence in the streets as the moments of separation and transition. These represent challenging and bonding processes taking place in liminal or temporarily undefined space. In sharing such trying circumstances, people cross thresholds of trust and build bridges across unusual groups, in processes of incorporation. Thus, what might be understood as prefigurative politics which emerged in the practice of street protests included both commoning and the recognition of many autonomous groups working together: In other words, inclusivity, and thresholds to new populations.

Environment, convergence, and thresholding

Thresholding among the Gilets Jaunes occurred with respect to the environmental movement. Emmanuel Macron had announced the gas tax as an effort to curb the use of this gas for environmental reasons. Consequently, the Gilets Jaunes protest against the gas tax was interpreted by the government and the media as a protest against ecology. Over the next two years, much time and effort were put into convergence. Environmentalists who were also Gilets Jaunes and others who organized joint marches, teach ins and conferences worked to counteract stereotypes and to build thresholds between the two movements.

In February 2019, the environmental movement staged a demonstration on a Saturday afternoon in Paris which the Gilets Jaunes joined. They started together. However, after the first few blocks the Gilets Jaunes parted ways from the permitted route of the ecological demonstration and made their way on a “wild” protest (undeclared) towards the Champs Élysées. Later all the groups met again listening to passionate speeches at La Place de la République. Some youthful Gilets Jaunes were sitting in the square wearing flowers in their hair reminiscent of green protests over many decades. After about 6pm, as dusk settled, violence suddenly erupted, traffic was stopped, and the square was closed off by police. From the point of view of the Gilets Jaunes, the violence was in response to police arrests in the square.

In spite, or possibly because, of the evening clashes, this demonstration clearly opened portals between the Gilets Jaunes and the environmentalists. From early 2019, “The end of the month and the end of the world” became a characteristic slogan of the Gilets Jaunes. Climate activists continued their efforts towards convergence. The Gilets Jaunes never became a climate movement, but the polarization claimed by the government was not supported by later events. Rites of passage in shared marches and other experiences had opened thresholds for collaboration.

Police brutality and thresholds of race

As I described in a previous post in FocaalBlog (Susser 2020), the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the US were followed by massive demonstrations against police brutality in France. Although police brutality was a long-time theme of the Gilets Jaunes, this time the Paris protests, while including the Gilets Jaunes, focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. This recognition of common problems represented newly possible thresholding between the Gilets Jaunes and people of color from the banlieues.

Here, thresholds were opened between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship, and other forms of historical subordinations.

Joint marches between Gilets Jaunes and people of color most subject to police brutality were not an ongoing phenomenon but again this demonstrated the opening of a portal for common understandings.

Image 3: “Who protects us from the police?” *Gilets Jaunes* protest in Tours on 12 January 2019, photo by Guillame70

Unions and strikes: thresholding on the left

Many Gilets Jaunes were suspicious of unions and many unions refused to officially march with Gilets Jaunes. However, despite this contentious relationship, there were collaborative efforts on May Day marches and elsewhere. Gilets Jaunes picketed many early mornings with bus drivers when they were out on strike. After the strike, the bus drivers organized a barbecue in front of a bus headquarters for Gilets Jaunes who had come out on those cold winter mornings: one of many thresholding events among strikers and Gilets Jaunes.

The silence of others: a more controversial example of thresholding

While there was openness among the Gilets Jaunes about not having enough to live on and many domestic challenges, Gilets Jaunes avoided talking about the politics of left and right. Their reticence over political persuasions was not surprising in the polarized political situation of France. In 2017, Macron had successfully used the fear of fascism and the history of the Vichy government to mobilize voters in opposition to Marine Le Pen in the second-round elections.

In 2018, as hundreds of thousands of Gilets Jaunes poured into Paris from the provinces, both Le Pen, on the extreme right, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, on the left, pledged support. Reporters and participants claimed that in ACTE 3, Le Pen nationalists led the assault on the Arc de Triomphe. The international leftist Black Bloc may have led the attack on the elite restaurant Le Fouquet a few months later. The participation of many on the left in the protests, and the roundabouts over time led to a movement that called for a diverse democratic voice and the extreme right became marginalized.

While the Gilets Jaunes expressed their rage in breaking windows and other property and participated in attacks on the Arc de Triomphe and Le Fouquet, they did not accept political leadership from either the far right or the left. Silence with respect to political affiliation and the rejection of an official leadership remained a determined response.

Although disagreeing in fundamental ways, Gilets Jaunes were more or less uniform in their hatred of Macron. They believed that he was “stealing the state” with his privatization policies and cutbacks in funding for services and public employment. They blamed the government for the destruction of a middle-class lifestyle either for themselves or for their children.

Collaboration for a political bloc was not based on a romantic image of common identity. Rather it was built on a restrained acceptance of political difference in a common rage about the loss of accustomed living conditions. This contrasts sharply with the US where polarization between left and right has become more extreme.

Trump, class, and thresholds in the United States

Although the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders certainly raised the possibility (Susser 2018), no political bloc has yet emerged to work across the vicious polarization in the United States. Trump demonstrators also come from the shrinking middle class and displaced affluent working class partially represented in the Gilets Jaunes. However, they have moved to the right and responded to the Trumpian rhetoric of anti-immigrants, whispered racism, antisemitism and now even the adoption of theories of the Great Replacement. What can explain these different reactions to some similar circumstances?

Analysts have been concerned that Gilets Jaunes, like Trump supporters, were opening an avenue for the antisemitism, racism, and anti-immigrant rhetoric expressed by the growing far right. Indeed, in recognition of the popularity of Le Pen, Macron adopted some rightwing exclusive rhetoric. A popular surge to the right was a frightening possibility. However, the Gilets Jaunes did not evolve into a movement fundamentally based on hatred of the other. Instead, as a movement they focused their desperation and rage against Macron’s shredding of the welfare state and reduction in investment in areas outside gentrified Paris (Hazard 2020). They demanded a more receptive democracy and not an authoritarian state.

Conclusions

As political pundits have finally noticed, a new political bloc or a working class with consciousness or agency is emerging. Commoning and the generation of shared values as well as thresholding across autonomous groups were particularly significant in the long-term building of this oppositional left bloc. An important part of this thresholding was the ability to by-pass the polarization of the extreme right and the extreme left. This unusual collaboration, rarely the product of any explicit negotiations, allowed the extraordinary and inspirational mass movement of the Gilets Jaunes to avoid the exclusive and racist nationalism evident in the US.

In the presidential elections of 2022, Le Pen, as in 2017, made it through to the second round. However, Melenchon came in a close third. Macron, lacking the broad support evident in 2017, relied on the anti-fascism of the left to pull him through the second round. The power of the left to support Macron against Le Pen was finally negotiated into NUPES, a united left front for the deputy elections for the National Assembly in June 2022.

In the June elections, NUPES won enough seats to become an official opposition and deny Macron his majority in the National Assembly. Some of Macron’s nominated ministers did not even make it into the Assembly. Macron was no longer able to pass the much-hated changes in pensions or his other policies. Marine Le Pen also won more seats than previously. Nevertheless, the success of NUPES clearly represents an unheard-of situation in the fifth French Republic where the President is generally rubber stamped by a weak National Assembly. This new powerful counter-hegemonic political bloc should come as no surprise. It has been formed over five years of extraordinary protest including the collaborative politics of commoning, thresholding and silence in the Gilets Jaunes collective efforts. The forthcoming regime will have to take these progressive voices into account.

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.

References

Balibar, Etienne. 2019. Le sens du face-à-face. In Joseph Confavreux (ed.). Le Fond de l’Air Est Jaune. Editions Seuil

Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. 2019. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hazard, Benoit. 2020. Lorsque les ‘sans-parts’ se rallient au ‘pouvoir vivre’. Ethnographie des associations des gilets jaunes sur les ronds-points de l’Oise. Condition Humaine/ Condition Politique 1 https://revues.mshparisnord.fr/chcp/index.php?id=237#text

Lefebvre, Henri 2003. The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2017. The Body of Solidarity. Heritage, Memory, and Materiality in Post-Industrial Italy. Comparative Studies of Society and History 59(1), 96-126.

Comité de soutien 31. 2019. La rue etait noire de jaunes – 500 slogans, tags, affiches, pancartes, dessins, photos, banderoles…. Éditions du croquant.

Nonini, Donald M. (ed.) 2007. The Global Idea of ‘The Commons’. Berghahn

Books.

Rogozinski, Jacob. 2019. Démocratie Sauvage. Lignes 59, 23-36.

Stavrides, Stavros. 2015. Common Space as Threshold Space: Urban Commoning in Struggles to Re-Appropriate Public Space. Footprint 9(1), 9–19.

Susser, Ida. 2016. Considering the urban commons: Anthropological approaches to social movements. Dialectical Anthropology 40(3), 183–198.

Susser, Ida. 2017. Commoning in New York City, Barcelona, and Paris: Notes and Observations from the Field. Focaal 79, 6-22.

Susser, Ida. 2018 Re-envisioning Social Movements in the Global City: from Fordism to the neoliberal era. In Don Kalb and Mao Mollona (eds.). Worldwide Urban Mobilizations. Class struggles and Urban Commoning. Berghahn Books.

Susser, Ida. 2020. Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries? FocaalBlog, December 3, https://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser-covid-police-brutality-and-race-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries/

Susser, Ida. 2021. “They are Stealing the State”. Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser (eds.). Urban Ethics. Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities. Routledge.

Susser Ida, and Stéphane Tonnelat. 2013. Transformative cities: The three urbans

commons. Focaal 66,105-121.

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Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2022. “Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc.” Focaalblog, 21 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/21/ida-susser-melenchon-the-creation-of-a-left-political-bloc/

Blog, Debt, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Maka Suarez: Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH

December 21, 2021 focaal_admin

Let me begin by saying “this is a thought experiment”; a phrase David often used, and I find useful.

In this talk I’d like to propose an approach to Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber 2011) that connects the book to David’s earlier work on Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Graeber 2004) and his latest work—with David Wengrow—on The Dawn of Everything (Graeber & Wengrow 2021). I think there are many different readings of the book on debt. My own reading of David’s work is in light of ten years of ethnographic research with Latin-American migrants in Spain, who became involved in the country’s largest movement for the right to housing—the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages—or La PAH for its short Spanish acronym (Suarez 2017, 2020). My research focuses on the relationship between political mobilization, mortgage debt, and transnational migration.

My interlocutors were being foreclosed and evicted from their homes, which were bought during the housing bubble. On average they owed over 250,000 euros. They joined La PAH in despair and out of guilt for not paying their debts. The movement helped them transform their guilt into outrage by shifting the grand narrative from individual failure into a counter-narrative on massive financial fraud.

In what follows I engage with David’s concepts of debt and freedom, as I try to illuminate some of the challenges I ran into while theorizing what debt meant to my interlocutors and fellow activists.

It was January 11th, 2012. I had just returned to London from a preliminary field visit to Barcelona. David was on leave that year and in New York but was on a short visit to London. His mind, however, was still in New York, where he had inspired and was collaborating with the Occupy movement. As we ate delicious Thai food, one of his favorite activities, David detailed his time with Occupy. Meanwhile, I was trying to get a word in to figure out my own research.

In between dishes of prawn panang, charcoal duck, lots of white rice, and Thai iced tea, David turned around and said: “What’s interesting here is not only why has debt become the focus of this movement, but why it has been so effective. It’s notorious that debt is very hard to organize around. We keep talking about debt strikes, debt this, debtors that… and everybody keeps trying to come up with a formula but it’s incredibly difficult. Part of the reason why is because this sort of old morality is very hard to, like, convince people it’s not their fault … What’s interesting here is you have a really effective broad grassroots movement focusing on [debt]. You could ask: why debt becomes a focus and why it’s worked in a certain way?” (In discussion with the author, January 2012). The question is: in what way?

So, let me begin with Fragments and its relation to Debt. In Fragments, David describes several “invisible spaces” where direct forms of democracy are already taking place. To him, it is in these spaces that “the potential for insurrection, and the extraordinary social creativity that seems to emerge out of nowhere in revolutionary moments actually comes” (Graeber 2004, 34). In Debt, on the other hand, David defines the principle of communism as “the foundation of all human sociability” (2011, 96). Communism implies spaces free of debt in which all people can contribute to a common project given the abilities they already have. Unlike hierarchy, communism is not based on relationships of precedent or status, but of cooperation. And, unlike exchange, communism does not intend to end relationships by paying back what is owed, but rather builds a sociality in which one aspires to live in. Communism would then be the moral principle of economic life operating at the heart of the “invisible spaces” suggested by David in his anarchist anthropology.

Now I want to give you an ethnographic vignette to analyze how this moral principle organized the everyday realities lived by Latin American migrants to complicate David’s theorizing.

Hector was forty-eight at the time of our interview and his family was able to get what many families desired at La PAH: cancelling their mortgage debt after being foreclosed. In Spain, mortgage law dictates that a mortgaged home is not the sole collateral to a debt. A bank can collect on any remaining debt after the house is auctioned. The predatory nature of this law translated into debts in the hundreds of thousands for my interlocutors after having lost the property. So, full cancelation of a mortgage debt felt, indeed, like a “victory”—as Hector put it. Oddly then, most Latin-American migrants end up celebrating losing their house to the bank in exchange for a full debt cancellation. However, Hector came to another realization right at the same time: he and his family had no place to live. His wife’s monthly income of 600 euros could not pay for a place to rent, not if they wanted to pay the bills and have enough to live. They were left with one option: La PAH’s Obra Social, a project based on the re-occupation of buildings belonging to banks rescued with public funds and which sat empty for years. The idea was to relocate families like Hector’s. The name of La PAH’s project is a play on words. Every large bank in Spain has an ‘Obra Social’, a philanthropic entity supporting cultural events or alleviating social problems. In Catalonia for instance, they often funded Catalan language promotion or similar social events. La PAH thought it would establish its own strategy for solving real social problems by occupying empty buildings and using them for what they saw as its intended purpose: to house people.

**Image 1:** La PAH’s Obra Social, © Maka Suarez

La PAH’s Housing Reoccupation project for evicted families was criticized by both the left and the right. For leftist and long-term squatters, it was not radical enough because the strategy was not a permanent reappropriation. For conservatives, occupation was a crime and a threat to private property. For my interlocutors, it was a respite but not an optimal solution. Hector’s family is just one example. There were a significant number of single-mothers and their children, unemployed or in low-paid jobs, which constituted the greater portion of subprime mortgages in Spain (and other places like the US). When I interviewed Hector and his family, they had been living in the occupied building for four months. The experience had been very difficult for them, and they hoped to buy an apartment again in the future. Hector was just one case among many people for whom homeownership was still the preferred housing option and a marker of success.

Why did my interlocutors want to own a house or an apartment rather than occupying one or even renting it? To answer this question, I’d like to connect Debt with The Dawn of Everything. One of David’s most important invitations in Debt is to move away from an omnipresent language of debt. Thinking with David means questioning why people narrate their lives in the idiom of debt and examining whether and how an alternative approach is even possible. David goes to extraordinary lengths to illuminate the very mechanisms that prevent us from living without debt. The biggest endeavor of this book—to my mind—is showing us a path to freedom, real freedom we can already access if we choose to recognize that many “big theories” are in fact forms of reproducing a ruling class or the legitimacy of the state. David knew wholeheartedly that anthropology is uniquely well placed to document these sites of moral and monetary indebtedness.

In The Dawn of Everything, David along with David Wengrow, characterize freedom as the potential for doing things otherwise (something they see taking three primary forms). First, freedom to move or relocate, the idea of being free to leave a place in the face of danger or otherwise. Then, freedom to refuse orders or how not to be bound by hierarchy. Finally, freedom to shape new social realities by choosing what is at the center of our existence. I’m interested in following here the first freedom, freedom of movement, as it is key in understanding why Latin-American migrants became indebted in the first place and why they would consider doing it again today. There are two key moments in Latin Americans’ migratory journey in which debt is essential for moving. First, when they decide to travel (irregularly) to Spain. The trip required anything between 4,000 and 5,000 US dollars which were almost invariably a debt acquired in their countries of origin to move to Spain. The second moment is buying a mortgaged property. To bring their families from Latin America to Spain, migrants needed to show adequate proof of housing, buying a home was the fastest route to reunifying with their loved ones, mainly moving children from Latin America to Spain. Let me illustrate this with another ethnographic vignette.

“The thing is I didn’t even want to buy a flat, I was trying to rent one,” said Juan. He had been trying to rent a flat in order to bring his wife, Paulina, and their three children from Ecuador to Spain under a family reunification scheme. They had been apart for nearly two years. It was his reunification application that pushed him to look for a new place to live since he needed to demonstrate to immigration services proof of suitable accommodations for his family in Spain. Like many other migrants, Juan was aware that it was not possible to accommodate family life in small bedrooms that were often no more than lined, adjacent mattresses on the floor, or a few bunked beds in a room. Migrants’ usual shared rentals were legally (and physically) inadequate for bringing families to Spain.

Juan wanted to rent a flat because he thought he would not qualify for a mortgage loan. To him, private property was a superior form of housing. But in addition, he was aware of the ease private property meant when faced with Spanish immigration services. Each autonomous community has its own process of showing proof of adequate housing. In Catalonia, the regional government, through its Department of Family and Social Wellbeing, was responsible for providing a report asserting the quality of housing. According to Juan, if one had a rental agreement, the Department sent someone to check your home to know that it was indeed as you described, that no other people lived with you, and that you were able to house others—particularly children. However, as Juan explained, if one had proof of property, they never sent anybody to check anything at all.

Reading David’s three books together allows me to reflect upon this double-bind of debt as the absence of freedom and its condition of possibility. I want to circle back to David’s initial question: why was this movement so effective in organizing around debt? As an activist of La PAH but also as an anthropologist, I believe the movement was effective because it stuck with the problem of debt. It never tried to solve it but showed when it became excessive and violent. The basic requirements that the movement has long advocated for include stopping home evictions without proper rehousing, making mortgaged properties the sole collateral to a loan, implementing rental caps, and increasing social housing availability.

Although the Spanish movement for the right to housing does not seek a debt jubilee, which David advocated for in his book, it offers us a space to politicize debt relations. David never dismissed the PAH as a bunch of reformists, which several leftist activists and scholars did and continue to do. David was more interested in how people organized around debt collectively than what people did with debt individually. It’s important to highlight that in over a decade, La PAH has gone from a small group of activists meeting weekly in 2009 to becoming the largest movement for the right to housing with over 220 nodes around Spain, and weekly assemblies that gather—to this day—thousands of individuals to discuss mortgage debt and political mobilization. La PAH is an effective intervention into a growing reality of financial predation, a movement that has learned to respond to injustice collectively, and a socially diverse space where ideological conceptualizations (of debt or occupation and others) can change.

La PAH is not an example of how David thought we should deal with debt, and yet David was always ready to learn from other people’s experiences and strategies. This was very much David. A self-absorbed but incredibly generous activist, mentor, scholar, and friend. While at Goldsmiths and the LSE, I often thought I had gone in for a supervision but came out knowing about Occupy, Rojava, or his friendship with Anton Newcombe—the lead singer from the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Yet, upon listening back to each one of our conversations – I recorded many – I found detailed guides for thinking differently about what I was working on. They didn’t seem terribly evident at the time because he was never telling me how to think. Rather, David was thinking with me based on his own ethnographic examples and political aspirations. This, I believe, is a perfect reflection of how he thought and wrote. He was never trying to tell people how to think but was inviting us into his own way of connecting seemingly disconnected phenomena, often going back several thousand years to do that.

**Image 2:** Alpa Shah, Maka Suarez and David Graeber, © Maka Suarez

I’d like to thank Jorge Núñez for thinking with me about many of the ideas advanced here, and Alpa Shah for the opportunity to engage with David’s legacy at a time when his ideas are greatly needed, and he is so dearly missed. To everyone here today thank you for choosing to do exactly what David said occurs in mourning and other acts of memorialization, these are an essential part of the labor of people-making. Let’s continue making our relationships to each other matter in ways that shape the futures we want to build. Thank you!

Maka Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos, Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Debt’.

References

Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press: Distributed by University of Chicago Press.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books.

Suarez, Maka. 2017. “Debt Revolts: Ecuadorian Foreclosed Families at the PAH in Barcelona.” Dialectical Anthropology 41 (3): 263–77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9455-8.

Suarez, Maka. 2020. “‘The Best Investment of Your Life’: Mortgage Lending and Transnational Care among Ecuadorian Migrant Women in Barcelona.” Ethnos, February 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1687539

Cite as: Suarez, Maka. “Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH.” FocaalBlog, 21 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/21/maka-suarez-thinking-about-debt-with-david-graeber-and-la-pah/

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Features, The Latin American Pink Tide

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Trader Joe’s
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