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Abolish the People

In recent years, populism has become so much the destructive domain of the right — so thoroughly claimed by the Trumps, Mileis and Melonis of the world — that it might be strategic to cede it for the time being and seek out other terrain. One alternative, tricky in its own way, is the commons. The term typically describes a set of resources that are shared freely among a collective. But this is not a given condition, much less a natural state. Always contingent, the commons is in fact defined by its opposite: enclosure, or the claim of private property on things and places that were once, or should be now, collectively owned and available to all. More precisely, the commons is defined in resistance to enclosure. Crucial to this resistance is a utopian dimension which, I believe, could help us to subvert the dystopian impulses of many populist projects today, perhaps opening up a path beyond them.How to locate this utopian dimension in history, as opposed to before it or beyond it, and how to harness it in the present? In his essay on Surrealism, published in 1929 on the brink of economic catastrophe, Walter Benjamin praised this school of artists as ‘the first to perceive the revolutionary energies in the outmoded’. Benjamin described a number of decaying objects the Surrealists saw in this light, as André Breton scoured the Paris flea markets for disused items that had taken on an uncanny charge, and Louis Aragon roamed through the Paris passages that had entered into a spectral afterlife. Yet at the top of his list Benjamin placed what he called ‘the first iron constructions’ — the ambitious architectural creations of the rising bourgeoisie, such as those that housed the world exhibitions of the mid- to late-nineteenth century.‘Utopian’ may be a better word than ‘revolutionary’ to describe the energies trapped in these structures and spaces. Benjamin believed that any class on its ascent to power has the confidence not only of its new dominance in the present but also of its unfettered vision for the future. This is a future that — at least initially, at least in principle — is not restricted to this class alone, but radiates outward to society at large. In time, the class sacrifices its political vision in order to protect its economic privileges. It forfeits its own utopia. But the energies of that vision are not altogether lost; they continue to exist as a resource held in common, like a nontoxic fuel buried deep in the earth which can be extracted at a later date. For Benjamin, the Surrealists were engaged in exactly this sort of probing for the buried dreams of the bourgeoisie, and there is no reason why we cannot now attempt something similar, more than a century later.This means seeking out a commons of lost pasts: pasts with utopian energies, however faint; pasts with visionary futures that we hold collectively. While such visions are often rapidly compromised — the utopian can slip into the ideological and sometimes into the dystopian — we know that a utopian glimmer can still linger even in the most reified of things.A couple of kitschy images from the long life of the bourgeoisie might serve to evoke this particular type of commons. Here is a manipulated photo of the Empire State Building: a skyscraper built in the depths of the Great Depression and originally conceived with a towering dock for a new kind of air travel, which looked beyond the downturn of the present to a dazzling techno-future. This vision was never achieved, of course, but it still conveys a desire, a utopian desire, for a transformed world, even if what came to pass was anything but.And here is a still from the famous advertisement that introduced the Macintosh personal computer during the Super Bowl of 1984: a female athlete breaks into the drab prison-world described in the Orwell novel and smashes the giant screen of Big Brother with a sledgehammer. Here, the utopian energies take the form of a society transformed by information, liberated from its overlords by the diffusion of digital media. Once again, this utopian desire was later co-opted: we now know what our surveillant overlords, federal or corporate or both, can do with this kind of technology. Yet the fact that this transformative force was eventually rechannelled does not erase it from these early images of the internet age. It remains suspended there. Another resource waiting to be tapped.Along with this commons of lost pasts we can also point to a different but related one: a commons of damaged presents. This commons is made up of the industrial ruins that still lie, in pieces, around us — the decayed infrastructure of the modern city as a centre of manufacturing that has mostly disappeared: shuttered factories, defunct power plants, disused train lines, bypassed viaducts and the like. Over the last few decades this commons became an attractive target for a new wave of enclosures, as old areas of industrial production have been retooled as new sites of postindustrial spectacle (‘the Bilbao Effect’) or real estate speculation (‘the High Line Effect’). Although such utopian energies were short-lived, that doesn’t mean they didn’t stir, even or especially in the souls of the designers who worked out the redevelopment of these abandoned areas.Finally, there is another corollary version of the commons of damaged presents to consider, one that will inevitably expand in the coming years: the commons of lands scarred by climate change — fires, floods, and other natural and unnatural catastrophes — as a result of industrial capitalism. Obviously, private property persists in this situation too, as big banks and hedge funds circle the disaster zones like dragon vultures. But even so, might a claim for the commons be made for parts of this new terra incognita?This is to stretch the concept of the commons beyond recognition. But rather than pull back, why not push the idea of enclosure further as well? ‘Capitalism began with enclosure’, Fredric Jameson reminds us. As far back as 1516, Thomas More was warning against the predations of private property in his Utopia. Today, enclosure continues both at the micro level, in the monetising of our data or the manipulating of our genes, and on a macro scale, in the exploitation of the oceans or the planned colonisation of the planets. AI is a soul-killing expropriation of our cognitive labour, of what Marx called our ‘general intellect’: not so much an enclosure as an outright theft of untold amounts of intergenerational work. This struggle of the cognitive commons against technological capture may end up being as important as the environmental fight against fossil capital — from which it cannot easily be separated, given the proliferation of resource-hungry data centres.In Latin law, which remains vestigial in current international law, many of these entities — the oceans and the planets — would fall under the rubric of res nullius, meaning ‘things belonging to no one’, and res nullius est res communis, ‘things belonging to no one are things belonging to everyone’. This holds right up to the point when they suddenly belong to someone: that is, when they are expropriated. To insist on the commons in the ruins of the 2020s is to resist enclosures of this kind.‘Capitalism began with enclosure’, Jameson writes, and then continues, ‘and with the occupation of the Aztec and Inca empires.’ Historically, enclosure involved conquest, empire, resource extraction, labour exploitation (often in the form of chattel slavery) and settler colonialism. Slave plantations are enclosures, so are Indian reservations, so are the camps of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (extermination centres in Nazi Germany, concentration camps in the US during World War II, rendition centres after 9/11, refugee camps throughout the two centuries), and so are the Gaza Strip and ICE lockups today. To resist enclosures is to insist on the commons as a form of utopia in the etymological sense, as a no-place to claim in the name of everyone.If philosophy is class struggle in thought, as Louis Althusser liked to say, then ideology is all the more so, and on that front the right has beaten the left badly in recent decades. Progressive populism appears to be overwhelmed by reactionary populism, which speaks of ‘the people’ as though it had a monopoly on the category, as though it alone can give voice to a collective beyond class. My wager is that ‘the people’ may have now become a force of the anti-commons, of enclosure, in whose name detention camps and data centres are being built. Hence my vote for a temporary moratorium on the word, and a search for its utopian antithesis.

To Storm the Heavens

At his final campaign rally before winning the 2015 Greek general election, Alexis Tsipras gave a warm welcome to the new leader of the Spanish left, Pablo Iglesias, who strode onstage to rapturous applause as Leonard Cohen’s ‘First We Take Manhattan’ blared in the background. Iglesias embraced his Greek counterpart and the two stood with their arms raised in defiance: the image of a confident, insurgent left, poised to take power from a discredited political class at the height of the eurozone crisis.

Iglesias’s party, Podemos, had topped opinion polls in Spain early that year and seemed on course to replicate Syriza’s rise. Combining his personal charisma with an innovative communications style and populist vituperation against Spanish elites, the party had channelled mass discontent at austerity into a new transformative project — all within twelve months of its founding. ‘First we take Athens’, Tsipras tweeted after the rally, ‘then we take Madrid’.

Now, a decade later, both parties are exhausted and increasingly marginal in their respective nations, lacking the strong leadership and political orientation that were once their defining features. What explains this reversal, and what comes in its aftermath?

While Syriza’s trajectory was defined by its failed confrontation with the Troika, Podemos’s story is more complex: not a single moment of truth, but a gradual process of retreat and fragmentation, as its hopes of surpassing the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) receded and its poll numbers slid into irreversible decline. At the same time as its electoral ambitions came apart, though, another arc bent in the opposite direction, with Podemos continuing to exert a powerful ideological influence on Spanish politics, turning it into Europe’s progressive outlier.

We can only draw the right lessons from this experiment if we grasp these two distinct dimensions: the failure of Podemos’s radical mission, which flowed from its inability to resolve fundamental strategic and organisational problems, and its strange, lingering afterlife. Governing some of the country’s largest cities and eventually ascending to national office as the junior coalition partner to PSOE, Podemos and its allies made clearer policy gains than left-populist forces elsewhere on the continent. Spain’s recent positions on migration and the welfare state are a reflection of this legacy, which anchored PSOE to the left. Yet the regeneration of the old social-democratic establishment was a bitter pill for a party that had hoped to bury it.

The Podemos Hypothesis

The cracks within Podemos were apparent early on. Sergio Pascual, the party’s first Secretary of Organisation, remembers having ‘mixed feelings’ on the night of the 2015 elections. On the surface the results were impressive, with Podemos securing almost 21 percent of the vote to PSOE’s 22 percent. Yet Pascual knew that this one-point gap made all the difference. ‘We bet everything on the sorpasso of the Socialist Party’, he tells me, ‘sacrificing internal democracy and part of our programmatic identity to achieve it in an immediate electoral blitzkrieg. But once it failed to materialise, we faced a difficult institutional balance of power.’

Many of Podemos’s initial leading cadre, Pascual included, had previously worked as political advisors to leftist governments in Latin America. They saw a parallel between the Pink Tide backlash against neoliberalism and the crisis of representation in austerity-era Spain, arguing that the same conditions which had undermined traditional party systems in countries like Ecuador and Bolivia — allowing left-populist leaders to rapidly assemble new electoral majorities — had now arrived in Europe. The Indignados movement of 2011 was an unmistakable sign, bringing millions to the streets with the chant of ‘They Don’t Represent Us’.

By late 2013, Iglesias’s incendiary appearances on TV panel shows had turned the 35-year-old political scientist into a tribune for the disaffected. The pony-tailed professor eschewed the traditional language of the left and instead presented a series of populist binaries: el pueblo versus la casta, democracy versus oligarchy. After Spain’s existing left-wing party, Izquierda Unida, refused to join a united slate for the 2014 European elections, Podemos ran its own independent campaign with Iglesias’s face on the ballot papers instead of a party logo. It won 8 percent of the national vote. The leadership was convinced that a historic window of opportunity had opened. The task was to capture government within a single electoral cycle.

Blitzkrieg to Attrition

Podemos adopted a top-down organisational structure with a focus on media spectacle and message discipline, built for rapid advance at the ballot box. To ‘storm the heavens’, Iglesias declared, an ‘electoral war machine’ was needed for a twelve-month institutional assault.

One of the Podemos parliamentarians elected in 2015, Txema Guijarro, recalls the ‘epic character’ of that campaign: ‘Our Latin American experiences intoxicated us with the idea that winning was all-or-nothing. But maybe that was part of our miscalculation. In reality, the Spanish parliamentary system was never going to be as conducive to that kind of breakthrough, nor was the political system as fragile as it was in, say, Ecuador.’

The problem of translating the rapid insurgency into a more durable project became visible after the vote, which produced a deadlocked parliament and raised the prospect of a deal between Podemos and PSOE. There was no consensus among the leadership about how to move forward. For Iglesias the plan was simple: try to negotiate a coalition government of near equals, or, if that failed, force fresh elections. This threatened to deepen Spain’s crisis of governability and keep the right-wing government of the Partido Popular in power, but he reckoned it was worth the risk. ‘He knew our outsider appeal had a limited shelf-life’, says Pascual, ‘so he calculated that if PSOE would not share power with us, we should combine our vote with Izquierda Unida’s in a new electoral alliance that would allow us to beat PSOE in a second election’.

The party’s chief strategist, Iñigo Errejón, favoured a more conciliatory approach. He pushed for Podemos to allow PSOE to form a minority government so as to thwart the narrative that they were plunging the country into chaos. And he rejected the idea of forming a pact with Izquierda Unida, which, as he saw it, would mark a retreat from populism — with its below/above binary supplanting left/right — to a conventional strategy of ‘left unity’. Errejón began to organise within the party to challenge Iglesias’s dominance. As factional fighting spilled out into the open, amplified by a hostile media, Podemos lost momentum.

In the end Iglesias’s position won out; IU agreed to join a Unidas Podemos slate ahead of the June 2016 election, which was called to break the impasse in parliament. But much of the damage was already done. With more than a million left-wing voters deciding to stay home, the new alliance was unable to match the tally that Podemos had gotten just six months earlier. There now seemed to be no real possibility of eclipsing PSOE in the short term. The Iglesias and Errejón factions continued to clash: one calling for a line of open confrontation with PSOE, the other wanting to reduce antagonism and win support from wavering Socialists. The internal war accelerated the party’s downward spiral.

The Reset

Iglesias again emerged victorious from this dispute. He built his strategy on the assumption that Spain was headed for a grand coalition of the centre. PSOE had recently launched an internal coup against its progressive leader, Pedro Sánchez, which seemed to suggest that the irreformable establishment was closing ranks. Podemos thus tried to stick to its intransigent position and consolidate its outsider status. But soon enough the political landscape shifted. In a surprise turn, Sánchez took on the old guard of his party, faced down his right-wing challenger and triumphed in the 2017 leadership contest, styling himself as the saviour of the Spanish left.

This closed off much of the political space Podemos had previously occupied. ‘We underestimated Sánchez,’ Guijarro concedes, ‘not least in his ability to push through a certain renovation in his own party. In making his comeback, he incorporated elements of our discourse and programme while minimising any openings available to us institutionally.’

The wider coordinates were also in flux thanks to a partial economic recovery and a reactionary tide of Spanish nationalism unleashed by the failed push for Catalan independence. The supposed threat to Spanish unity was now top of the agenda, and Podemos was struggling to respond. Miguel Urbán, a leading figure in the party’s radical Anticapitalista wing, and a member of the European Parliament until 2024, highlights its misreading of the conjuncture: ‘The electoral war machine model, with its hyperleadership structure, had marginalised early on any role for activists in the party, just when there had been a wave of popular enthusiasm around the project . . . By the time Podemos’s core leadership realised it had gone too far and attempted to reverse course, it had already undermined the conditions that would have made such a change of focus possible.’

The power struggle within Podemos’s leadership meanwhile led to a major split in 2019. Sidelined by Iglesias, Errejón struck a deal with Madrid’s left-wing mayor, Manuela Carmena, to set up a new regional platform called Más Madrid. He took most of his allies from the party with him, launching an unsuccessful bid for the capital’s regional presidency. Guijarro sees this as the result of a broader ‘failure of method’, in which Podemos’s inability to ‘create effective mechanisms for institutional dialogue and bargaining’ made it impossible to mediate internal disagreements.

At this point Iglesias changed tack. The same leader who had previously called for maximal antagonism with PSOE was now increasingly convinced that entering a Sánchez-led coalition was the sole means to stabilise the left, while renewing his own public image and that of the party leadership. By going all-in on this alliance, he argued, Unidas Podemos could block Sánchez’s preferred option: a more piecemeal coalition in which the centre and the right would wield real power, while the radical left would get only minor concessions.

Faustian Pact

The path to this agreement was long, running through two more general elections in 2019, during which Unidas Podemos’s vote share fell even further, to 14.3 percent in April and 12.9 percent in November. Finally, after four elections in four years, Sánchez found himself with no alternatives: he was forced to form Spain’s first left-wing coalition since the 1930s, including five Unidas Podemos ministers, with Iglesias as deputy PM.

When I interviewed Iglesias in his ministerial office in October 2020 he acknowledged it was hard to get an electoral payoff as a junior partner — that PSOE stood to reap the rewards from any progressive measures they pushed through — but he insisted the arrangement had nonetheless opened up new possibilities for his party. ‘This allows us to make up part of the leadership of the state, it allows us to form government cadres which we did not have, it allows us an understanding of and a praxis in the state that you don’t get from local or regional governments. And’, he reminded me, ‘we are young — a political force that reached government after existing for only six years.’

Seven months later, Iglesias had resigned. Governing turned out to be a gruelling process for him and his ministers. Their social agenda came up against fierce PSOE resistance and they swallowed some unpalatable policies in areas like defence and law and order. In the febrile atmosphere of the pandemic, Unidas Podemos engaged in a series of highly charged controversies around lawfare, media bias and free speech, but lacked the heft to force PSOE’s hand on any of these issues. The bitterness of the struggle diminished Iglesias’s public profile. ‘It’s clear’, he conceded on the night he stepped down, ‘that at this point I’m not contributing to the cause’.

Still, Unidas Podemos’s impact on government was real. Even with its limited leverage, it passed measures that were among the standout achievements of the coalition’s first term: a 46 percent rise in the minimum wage, a major new social welfare programme, a Guaranteed Minimum Income scheme, and a successful energy price cap during the Ukraine war which effectively contained inflation. With the far right on the rise, Unidas Podemos also played a key role in resisting its bigotry, calling for migrants to have their status regularised en masse.

As Iglesias exited the stage, much of Podemos’s political capital dissipated along with its dominance on the left. The most popular left leader to emerge during this period was Yolanda Díaz. A labour lawyer and member of the Communist Party, she took up the post of labour minister and was praised for her Covid furlough scheme as well as her major progressive reform of the country’s employment laws, which strengthened collective bargaining rights and massively reduced the use of temporary fixed-term contracts. Her political approach was distinct to the left populism of Podemos: rather than stoking binary antagonisms, she pursued a more cautious tripartism, striking deals between workers, business and the state. When Iglesias anointed her as his successor in the role of deputy PM and figurehead of Unidas Podemos, he passed the baton to someone outside his own party, in what appeared to be a tacit acknowledgement of its exhaustion.

It then fell to Díaz’s new electoral vehicle, Sumar, to reactivate the country’s radical forces, with Errejón brought back into the fold as her de facto second in command. She set about integrating various national and regional formations into an alliance which, like its predecessor, was top-heavy and leader-centred, promising to extend the progress made under the coalition. But unlike Podemos, Sumar’s origins did not lie in a movement wave beyond the established institutions; the fact that it was built exclusively from high office ended up reinforcing its subordination to Sánchez. Díaz’s main task became balancing the competing demands of Sumar’s internal actors and continuing to negotiate from a position of weakness with PSOE. Without a transformative offer, she failed to build out from her pandemic-era popularity and construct a sustainable electoral brand. Sexual misconduct allegations against Errejón further undermined Sumar’s credibility, and it unravelled at striking speed.

Sánchez Hegemonic

This implosion was yet another blow for an already demoralised Spanish left. In retrospect it seems obvious that many of the strategic decisions of left populism — not just in Spain, but elsewhere in the West — were based on a fundamental overconfidence about the pace and extent of the establishment’s decline. When it became clear that the existing order could stave off collapse, the left found itself disoriented, and struggled to develop a more durable approach to institutional politics. It was one thing to channel outrage at elites during a moment of crisis, but another to create mass identification with a political project while putting down the territorial roots and extra-parliamentary structures needed for sustained electoral engagement.

The result was that Unidas Podemos was already in retreat as it entered cabinet. Though it exercised significant influence in certain areas of government policy, the main political beneficiary was Sánchez — who made a show of standing above the tense negotiations between his ministers and acting as the final arbiter. This allowed him to tack left in response to public pressure without giving elites much cause to worry. He struck a delicate compromise between the different elements of the wider governing bloc, carving out greater autonomy from the right of his own party, while advancing or frustrating the left’s priorities as circumstances required. Sánchez broke with the continent-wide assault on migrants and implemented the Podemos policy to secure their status, welcoming 1.5 million new arrivals within three years. He courted major investments in renewables, greening the Spanish energy sector more rapidly than its European peers and lowering utility bills. And he vowed to ‘defend the welfare state tooth and nail’ against cuts and privatisation. On his watch, tax revenues and public spending have soared, while the economy has grown faster than any other major eurozone country.

Yet Sánchez has also thwarted every part of the Podemos programme that relied on confrontation with the Spanish power structure. Even as he and his family became the targets of a concerted lawfare campaign, the PM refused to rein in the reactionary judiciary or democratise the state, for instance by removing the Francoist Official Secrets Act or restrictions on public protest. He has repeatedly shied away from challenging the rentier interests who dominate the property market, allowing the country’s affordability crisis to deepen as young people continue to be priced out of decent housing. His government has been mired in corruption scandals, with senior figures accused of influence peddling and skimming money off state contracts. The limits of his reform agenda are, predictably, being exploited by the right bloc — which has won a series of regional victories, and is determined to dislodge PSOE in next year’s general elections.

Yet perhaps the most consequential change to have taken place under Sánchez is the direction of Spanish foreign policy. With much of Europe’s political class lying supine before Trump II, Sánchez is one of the few Western leaders to have openly challenged Washington: rejecting its calls to raise defence spending to 5 percent, pushing the EU to end its association agreement with Israel, refusing the use of Spanish bases for the war on Iran, and forging closer ties with China and nations of the Global South — with investment in electric vehicles, batteries and other green technologies aimed at unleashing a new phase of industrial development.

This is not an index of Sánchez’s radicalism so much as his wager that Spain has more to gain from adapting to the new geography of global economic power than it does from clinging to the old Atlantic order. There is a certain irony here. Although the left populism of the 2010s drew inspiration from Latin America, its main focus was the gulf between masses and elites within the Spanish nation-state. Sánchez’s social democracy, by contrast, has no Third Worldist influences — it is a simple outgrowth of the PSOE tradition that emerged after the dictatorship — yet it has been effective in grappling with the changing international balance of power. Its willingness to reimagine Spain’s role in the global order and reject the logic of the New Cold War is its most consequential feature, which may have major implications further down the line.

More than a decade after Tsipras and Iglesias electrified the crowds in Athens, we now see Sánchez embracing Lula da Silva at the first ever Spain–Brazil summit in Barcelona — the two leaders promising to build an anti-war, anti-Trump bloc that will unite progressive governments across the planet. This is not an image of rebels primed to storm the heavens, but of statesmen offering protection from the excesses of a dying empire. Instead of a war on the establishment, the new centre left offers a refuge from the brutalities of neofascism. Their ambition for the existing order is not destruction but revivification. In a world sliding towards chaos, it’s easy to see the appeal.