Rey Heredia, a Decade of Experimenting with the Principles of Radical Democracy

For 15M movement’s actors, ‘radical democracy’ is both a global social aspiration and a field for local experimentations, starting spectacularly in spring 2011 with the occupation of central Spanish squares in the form of acampadas. Then, over a longer period, new acampadas were organized, this time in more peripheral neighborhoods, which also involved the occupation of public or private buildings, usually abandoned. The purpose of these occupations was to ‘liberate’ a space from capitalist injunctions and make it available for the solidarity-based organization of ‘citizenship’ or civil society. In this contribution, we highlight the efforts made over more than a decade by the Acampada Dignidad in Cordoba (southern Spain) to implement the principles of a so-called ‘real’ democracy (inclusion, deliberation, horizontality), academically described as direct or radical democracy. Since October 2013, Acampada Dignidad has occupied a former public school named Rey Heredia, which has become a self-managed and self-financed social center. Over more than a decade, this CSOA Rey Heredia has welcomed existing collectives and promoted new actions, based on the needs of the neighborhood population in which it is located (solidarity canteen, open library, radio, summer school for local children). While each collective has its own specific causes to defend, the ways in which it organizes itself and makes decisions, in the form of deliberative assemblies, are on the whole common. Through an analysis of ethnographic and filmic materials, taken from Leïla Tazir's thesis “The legacies of the 15M in Cordoba, an approach through affects and images”, we'll see how this space enables a confluence of expressions of citizen empowerment as an alternative to the processes of exclusion of many populations (impoverished working classes, unemployed or precarious workers, racialized immigrants, LGTBQ+, etc.) inherent in representative democracy subject to the diktat of hegemonic neoliberal capitalism.