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Everyday Politics, Social Practices and Movement Networks:

Daily Li fe in Barcelona’s Social Centres1

Word count: 9, 585

Last checked: 22/7/14

Abstract: The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much

contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to

moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals.

Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are

framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence.

This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing

that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being

developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural

and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case

studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and

politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres.

Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to

occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and

prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The

variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow

diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of

mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non-activists. An approach which focuses on

practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how

everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.

Keywords: social movements; theories of practice; everyday life; social centres; political protest;

Barcelona

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Introduction

The relation of political participation with everyday life is currently controversial. Some political scientists

have identified declines in certain types of participation, while others have highlighted generational shifts

towards ‘post-materialist’ values, identity politics and the environment (Inglehart 1997; Norris 1999). The

debate has spurred increased analysis into ‘newer’ forms of political action, recently most obvious in

studies of consumer activism such as boycotting and buycotting (Jacobsen and Dulsrud 2007) and internet-

mediated participation and networking (Castells 2007; Juris 2008; Chadwick and Howard 2009).

Meanwhile, in arguments claiming a rise of individualization and decline in the relevance of certain social

classifications such as class, social theorists such as Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992) elaborated concepts

of emergent political forms where a moral disposition towards politics – as an instrument of social change –

is located in processes of identification and self-realization. However, these theories tend to subsume

political engagement in an account of social change which is relatively uninterested in collective action.

Activists, and scholars of social movements, meanwhile, increasingly identified the realm of

everyday life as politically significant from the 1960s onwards, particularly for feminism,

environmentalism, the peace movement and queer politics (Hanisch 1978; Habermas 1981; Offe 1985;

Melucci 1985, 1996). This trend has continued beyond the proliferation of ‘new’ social movement theories.

Compared with the labour movement or with institutionalized pressure groups, many of these social

movements have different types of goals, targets, and tactics. Goals are multi-layered and are less focused

on legislative change or a redistribution of resources, more on establishing more equal, peaceful,

ecologically benign societies. Targets and adversaries are often cultural or more diffuse than national elites,

with corporations and international governance bodies more frequently targeted. Repertoires of protest

remain diverse, but are more likely to include direct action, prefiguration, the use of temporary protest

spaces or institutions, and other forms of ‘everyday’ politics. These diffuse goals and targets, and

unconventional styles of protest, make moments of political protest or contestation, and the very definition

of social movements and their boundaries – difficult to sustain empirically. Although there have been

moves to demonstrate ‘even newer’ historical turns in the development of social movements, particularly

with the marked decline in identity politics, the abovementioned trends identified since the 1980s remain

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important in contemporary collective action (Buechler 2000; Haenfler, Johnson and Jones 2012). In

remaining a collection of theories and empirical work about collective action, however, social movement

studies has retained a perhaps inevitable bias towards adversarial social movement mobilization and highly

visible social conflict, meaning analysis of the everyday has been tentative and contingent.

This paper examines how political meaning and ideology underpin everyday practices in social

movement networks, and explores the implications for theories of protest and daily life. Social centres,

spaces where alternative living arrangements, social and educational events and political campaigns are

hosted, are used here as case studies to anchor an analysis of practices of daily life and political action in

Barcelona’s social movement and youth cultural communities. Practices are understood as composed of

several interconnected elements focused on social actions and understandings, or following Andreas

Reckwitz (2002: 250), as 'routinized way[s] in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are

treated, things are described and the world is understood'. Practices carried out in social centres demonstrate

how the testing, expression and prefiguration of political meaning takes place in the course of everyday life,

not just in periods of low movement activity or ‘abeyance’.

All practices in social centres have various explicit purposes, and the provisioning of food, the

organizing and distribution of space, and the dividing of labour are the examples used here. Yet practices

simultaneously stage enactments of values and politicized identity. They contribute towards the small-scale

achievement, or prefiguration (Graeber 2002; Maeckelbergh 2009, Yates 2014), of certain overarching

goals: attempts at decommodifying exchange; sharing resources and knowledge; and establishing

egalitarianism in domestic work and decision-making. The practices described are also politicizing, as the

organization of social events initiate collective performances of practices, and the sharing of associated

knowledge and competence among participants relating to the pursuit of social change. Diverse networks of

people are connected and politicized through the variety of activities taking place in centres, less often

united by any clear or continuous collective identity, but through common understandings and compatible

types of performances of these social practices. Thus, networks are deliberately stimulated through the

organized events and quotidian socializing that take place in and around social centres, as well as in

communicative or adversarial protest such as demonstrations and direct action.

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Examining everyday practices in this way extends understanding of how latent processes work in

social movements (Melucci 1996). According to Verta Taylor (1989) and Suzanne Staggenborg (1998),

such processes maintain networks and oppositional identities between protest cycles, as activities during

periods of abeyance. This creates opportunities for collective action that map onto those of the political

system (Staggenborg 1998). Building on these insights, I argue that everyday practices can develop and

establish relationships of cooperation, learning and a culture of experimentation with political ideas about

everyday life in their own right. These processes allow different types of social groupings to coalesce and

derive group solidarity, share skills and understandings, and they help explain recruitment and rapid

mobilization beyond activist cadres. In this way, they are also illustrative of the relationship between

subcultural groupings and social movements, requiring a conceptual vocabulary which does not reify

collectives and movements, but is sensitive to the various overlapping forms of connections on the basis of

shared ideas and practices.

Perspectives on everyday life and political protest

Latency, abeyance and moments of protest

Notions of abeyance, latency and social movement community built on new social movement theories and

other contemporaneous developments, to clarify the type of relations existing between cultural and political

processes in movements, and those between movements and wider society (Taylor 1989; Melucci 1996;

Staggenborg 1998, Staggenborg and Taylor 2005). However, this work came from analysis of movements

between protest cycles, showing that networks and activities persist when movements are not mobilizing,

but rarely generalizing beyond these moments of ‘abeyance’ (Taylor 1989). Networks of activists and

repertoires of protest are sustained over periods of relative inactivity and limited opportunity through

affective bonds, cultural activities and ‘free’ spaces (Evans and Boyte 1986, Taylor 1989, Futrell and Simi

2004). Yet the concept of abeyance, and the associated findings about what movements do when they are

not mobilizing, has been limited to explaining the persistence of social movements where political

opportunities are scarce. ‘The abeyance process functions through organizations capable of sustaining

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collective challenges under circumstances unfavourable to mass mobilization’ (Taylor 1989: 765).

Similarly, Suzanne Staggenborg’s (1998) work on movement communities conceives of movements

regularly interacting in wider cultural groupings, which helps ‘in analysing both how movements emerge

within cycles of protest and how some movements maintain themselves beyond the decline of a protest

cycle’ (1998: 181). Although Staggenborg emphasizes the diffuse boundaries between subcultural

expression and activism, her aim is principally to show how communities provide a primary context for

opportunities and constraints for mobilization which maps onto the wider political context. Theories which

acknowledge cultural practices, mutual learning and identification processes in social movements’ day-to-

day existence create alternative ways of doing things, build support for movements and their ideas, and

forge alliances between groups. In other words, these processes have implications for socio-cultural change

which do not feed directly into movements and their direct struggles in a landscape of political

opportunities and constraints.

Alberto Melucci (1985, 1996) placed greater emphasis on the role of everyday processes of

networking, learning and the construction of meaning in social movements. For Melucci, these processes

are not simply about movements in abeyance. Rather, latent movement activity (what goes on within

movements) and visible movement activity (more or less mobilization) are mutually constitutive:

The molecular change brought about by the hidden structure should not be seen as a ‘private’ and

residual fact, but a condition for possible mobilization (1996: 116).

The relation of latency and visibility in movements runs throughout Melucci’s work, but he is at his most

categorical in the 1985 article ‘The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements’.

These two poles, visibility and latency, are reciprocally correlated. Latency allows visibility in that

it feeds the former with solidarity resources and with a cultural framework for mobilization.

Visibility reinforces submerged networks. It provides energies to renew solidarity, facilitates

creation of new groups and recruitment of new militants attracted by public mobilization who then

flow into the submerged network. (1985: 801)

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Melucci also frequently refers to latency and visibility as two ‘poles’ between which movements oscillate

(1996: 130, 174), but implies elsewhere that they may take place simultaneously due to the blurring

between public and private, and between individual identity and collective action (1996: 115). He does not

explicitly discuss how there might be other forms of visibility to public mobilization, or how latent

processes might themselves become a focus of overt political attention.

These accounts offer a variety of insights towards building micro-sociological understanding of

everyday life in social movements. Complementing this, work on social movement spaces shows how

movements ‘prefigure’ movement goals in everyday practices (see Polletta 1999). Yet similarly to

arguments about abeyance, the emphasis is on the role that spaces and visions of ‘alternatives’ have in

social movement ‘persistence’, as though they were important to movements only during periods of

quiescence (Polletta 1999; Futrell and Simi 2004; Glass 2010). Work on prefiguration, particularly in

studies of the alter-globalization movement, shows that the way in which political action is planned and

undertaken, even in everyday life, is important both in producing inspiring and/or feasible alternative

societies, and in distinguishing groups from authoritarian and hierarchical forms of left-wing political

organization (Graeber 2002; Maeckelbergh 2009). Marianne Maeckelbergh’s (2009) account, for example,

shows how a variety of goals are managed simultaneously in social movements, with an overlapping range

of strategic priorities and goals. However, her analysis is typical in focusing on decision-making and the

actual planning of protest. This over-emphasizes rationality, downplays habit and identity, and continues to

treat activities outside of political protest and its planning as somewhat irrelevant.

Literature on social movements, therefore, even that ostensibly focused on ‘identity’ and ‘culture’,

still implies that everyday processes are only important when there is nothing else to look at. Rather than

showing how protest is socially contextualized, it simply negotiates for a small additional set of everyday

moments or cultural groupings to be taken account of. The occasional exceptions to this rule, however, are

encouraging. Staggenborg and Taylor’s (2005) article on the ruddy health of the women’s movement

recommends a move beyond the ‘contentious politics’ paradigm. It argues for the necessity to think of the

women’s movement not in terms of ‘waves’, but to acknowledge that visibility does not always correlate

simplistically with activity. This is evidenced by a demonstration of the ongoing vitality of feminist groups

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in North America simultaneously organizing and negotiating in social institutions, and in subcultural

groupings and spaces. Increasing awareness of, and interest in movements focusing on ‘lifestyle

movements’ and (anti-)consumption are also valuable reminders of the sub- and micro-political activities at

the peripheries of social movements (Haenfler, Johnson and Jones 2012). Until very recently, most

accounts have downplayed the dynamism and connections between different movement organizations, and

between movements and other collective identifications (Portwood-Stacer 2012).

This article seeks to address these problems, with an account of how political ideas and discourses

are associated with and performed through practices in social movement spaces. Interactions between

diverse groups in sharing practices and space allow political ideas to be articulated and tested in ‘latent’

social movement processes, with their own patterning of latency and visibility internal to the social

movement and youth cultural communities. These everyday politicized practices can be carried out by

individuals or collectives as part of their political trajectories, while further developing meanings,

recruitment and capacity-building. This perspective recommends an epistemological shift away from the

apparent boundaries of the social movement and individual activist; to the ideas, social practices and

experiences shared by participants in movements and their social surroundings.

Problematizing the collective

There are many empirical accounts of people who together share politicized practices that are not

directly part of social movement mobilization (e.g. Purdue et al 1997; Cherry 2006; Haenfler et al 2012).

Although such practitioners may lack shared goals and collective identity, scholars have tended to use the

terminology of collectives – movements, subcultures and neotribes. Squatting, veganism, the use of local

currencies and the use of co-operative business models, for example, are ways in which social practices and

cultural codes around tenancy, food consumption, economic exchange and business organization can be re-

ordered. Their performance is often understood by participants as questioning the legitimacy of orthodoxies

or dominant cultural codes, and the practices regularly share overarching goals with social movements.

Using the terminology of collectives in these cases can obscure the relationships between more and less

politicized people, and the different ways in which the same practices can be performed. Although the

notion that social groupings overlap is now taken as given (see Maffesoli 1996), most empirical studies

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retain a collective term and use it to study one supposed collective at a time. Empirically studying the

overlapping of social constellations therefore has an untapped potential in understanding the everyday

production of social collectives through processes of recruitment and capacity-building, and the constitution

of an unfolding collective identity that is fluid (McDonald 2010), but is nevertheless patterned and

distributed in specific ways. Practices which are politically inflected are particularly interesting for showing

how movements produce and maintain political meaning.

Examples of how groupings are entangled shows how the problem persists. Punk, for instance, has

traditionally been described as a subculture, with Dick Hebdige (1979) arguing that expressions of style,

argot, music and ritual provide ‘magical solutions’ to working-class social predicaments. Following this

and the unravelling of the concept of subcultures, commentators have since focused on components of punk

lifestyles that seem to demonstrate a politics of food provisioning (veganism), and the independent and

autonomous production of music and media (DiY), as itself being a milieu or ‘culture’ (Purdue et al 1997;

McKay 1998). However, others discuss veganism as a cultural movement in itself, that punks play just one

part of (Cherry 2006). Here punk is conceived merely as a cultural style that some members of the vegan

‘movement’ adhere to. Research has also explored punks’ involvement in social movements (e.g. O’Connor

2003). These works present a contradictory array of collectives or movements on the basis of various

different social, cultural and political practices, only hinting at the variety of ways in which food habits,

cultural rituals and political protest overlap (a partial exception is Purdue et al 1997). Such overlaps are

central to patterns of cultural and political solidarity, and processes of recruitment, capacity-building and

decline in and around social movements.

Continuing in this vein, recent work has argued that apparently politicized people practising green

living, voluntary simplicity and vegetarianism should be considered social movements based around

aspects of lifestyle (Haenfler, Johnson and Jones 2012). Yet although it is reasonable that such activities be

recognized in social movement literature, the notion that they compose distinct movements plays down the

meanings and activities that they share with other social movements – obscuring their emergence, support

networks and potential mobilization. Groupings and networks, explicitly political or otherwise, are never

autonomous of one another, but share practices, ideas, and space.

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Social practices

Taking practices as the principal methodological unit of analysis rather than individuals or collectives is

one potential antidote to these problems. Focusing on what people do and why allows for a better

understanding of how ideas and politics inhere in the activities – tactical or everyday – carried out by

movements. Despite an increasing use of ‘theories of practice’ across the social sciences, influenced by

Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu and Andreas Reckwitz (2002), among others, there has been little

application in the sub-field of social movements (some notable recent exceptions explore media practices,

see for example Mattoni 2012). Examining practices allows analysis to de-centre the individual or social

collective from analysis, and articulate how social forms are continually being produced, reproduced,

disrupted and realigned. The distinction between practices as entities and performances is key here.

Routinized and coordinated bundles of activity, such as (for example) food provisioning, sheltering and

recreation, are referred to as practices as entities, a main characteristic being that they are recognizable

activities even if one is not a practitioner (Reckwitz 2002). Performances, meanwhile, refer to the instances

of practices being carried out. Practices as entities are continually constituted and reproduced through their

performances, with their meanings and compositions shifting and developing accordingly.

The persisting focus on moments of mobilization as separable from ‘latent’ cultural processes, and

on movements as neatly separated from wider socio-cultural milieux such as youth cultures or other

groupings, has survived various rounds of conceptual development. This paper thus uses theories of

practice as an epistemological device and resource for analysing everyday political processes in

movements. The following two sections introduce the case studies and methodology used to carry out this

work.

The case of social centres

Social centres are a type of ‘free space’ for the organization and interaction of social and cultural

movements, and the practice of daily life. Miguel Martínez writes:

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In them the functions of residential buildings have been integrated, subordinated or eliminated in

favour of a broad range of counter-cultural, political and productive activities open to other social

movements and sectors of the population beyond the ‘alternative scene’. (2007: 383)

Three main elements thus define social centres: they act as a base and resource for social protest; they host

a set of ‘alternative’ cultural and educational practices; and they engage with localities and local

communities via the organization of political, educational and leisure activities. They may or may not be

accompanied by a residential communal living project. These elements together differentiate social centres

from other practical movement projects in cities across Europe.

Social centres have their origins in the squatting movements of Holland, Italy, Germany and the

UK, with Spain a more recent but exceptionally active national context (see Ruggiero 2000; Martínez 2002,

2007; Chatterton 2010; Mudu 2004). In the UK, Holland and Germany, squatting as a practice became

framed politically after its use in contesting housing shortages. From the early 1970s, and particularly in

Italy, Holland and Germany, squats began to use appropriated space to address the lack of social services

and cultural infrastructure in neighbourhoods, allowing a pooling and sharing of skills and knowledge in

organizing free education and resources (Martínez 2002). Although many contemporary social centres are

not squatted, they generally originate from these public and politically varied squatting experiences.

In Spain, and Catalonia, these processes took place more rapidly following the rapid development,

fragmentation and assimilation of existing ‘new social movements’ into the political system after Franco’s

death in 1975 and the transition towards democracy (Alabart i Vila 1998; Buey 1999). In the early 1980s,

early squats in the cities of Madrid, Bilbao and Barcelona had begun to identify as multifaceted political

and counter-cultural spaces (Martínez 2007; Gonzalez 2011). Increasingly international punk bands and

‘zines’ allowed radical political perspectives around anti-fascism and autonomism to develop beyond

Germany and Italy, and take root in the Spanish context (Fernández Gómez 2010). In the Spanish context

squatting and social centres are organized by an increased variety of groups and movements (Fernández

Gómez 2010). In such a context, it has been claimed, Catalan social centres have politically socialized a

generation of activists, were organizational bases for a number of prominent counter-summits in the alter-

globalization movement, and re-popularized assembly structures, civil disobedience and direct action to a

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coalition of actors across the political left (Herreros 2004; Juris 2008; González 2011). The attempted

recent eviction of one long-standing centre, Can Vies, in 2014, led to sustained demonstrations of tens of

thousands of people despite repressive police tactics, and eventual agreement from the council to halt the

demolition and, apparently, to agree to activists’ demands to rebuild the centre (e.g. Mumbrú Escofet 2014).

This paper’s empirical work is based on participant observation and interviews focused around

three social centres in Barcelona, selected from a total of several dozen active self-described centres in the

metropolitan area. The following section briefly introduces the case studies chosen and details the methods

used for gathering data.

Fieldwork and methodology

Can Tintorer2 was a squatted former council building located on the edge of Barcelona. A relatively

unprecedented eight years in age when fieldwork began, it was a symbolically important project among

social centres, activists and participants in the alternative cultural milieu of Barcelona. It was home to

twenty-five semi-permanent residents, who organized the social centre and communal living project. Their

political interests revolved around environmental sustainability, self-sufficiency, anarchism and community

living. Residents were individually involved in various movements from local campaigns for the defence of

national park land, to international mobilizations. The social centre leased space freely in the grounds as

allotments to neighbours; ran environmental education workshops for school and university groups and

welcomed 50–150 visitors one day a week for its public events.

Localia was only several months old when fieldwork commenced, and consisted of three

collectives dating from a previous social centre, and a somewhat separated community of twenty

inhabitants. The space was located in a neighbourhood high in immigration, rapidly gentrifying through its

popularity with tourists, students and young cultural workers. A significant Latin American influence

shaped the activities and collectives that operated in the social centre’s public space, and the centre’s

overall identity. During 2009–2010, the period of data collection, Localia was among the most active

centres in Barcelona, with an average of six weekly activities organized, including theatrical, dance and

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musical workshops, performances, politics-themed talks, fund-raisers, food events and campaign meetings.

Activities attracted anything between less than ten, to over 100, participants and co-organizers.

FUGA rented its social centre space privately in the same neighbourhood as Localia, did not list its

activities in anarchist newsletters, and politically identified with Marxist autonomism (see Katsifiacas

1997). Many participants were activists who had been involved in alter-globalization mobilizations. Unlike

most centres, the group were eager to collaborate with institutions and NGOs in order to augment their

political influence. During my time in the field there were between eight and twenty-five people at the

weekly assemblies, and up to fifty at some of the cultural or educational events.

Following Burawoy et al (1991), a methodological approach of overt ethnographic observation and

interviews was used, which sought to establish dialogue between observations, interview data and

sociological theories drawn predominantly from social movement studies. Public activities in the three

centres were attended during an intensive fieldwork period spanning November 2009 until June 2010,

following a period of reconnaissance in which many more centres were visited.3 I also stayed as a visitor in

Can Tintorer for the month of April 2010, participating in the majority of house and centre activities. Most

time was spent observing the organizing and decision-making work of assemblies and the delivery of public

events and participation in workshops, seminars, campaigns, demonstrations and actions, on which

extensive field notes were taken. Twenty-four audio-recorded open-ended interviews with participants were

conducted from February 2010 onwards, in Spanish and English, focused around deriving narratives of

involvement in social centres and discussions of personal involvement and participation. This helped

contextualize observations in participants’ narratives, and to explore how they framed activities away from

the collective. In addition, content analysis of documents, websites, alternative media and other texts was

conducted on materials gathered during fieldwork, including a review of media coverage of social centres

and squatting in Barcelona. Analysis of all materials gathered from the fieldwork was transcribed fully and

analysed for themes inductively, organized using qualitative data analysis software, during a predominately

manual iterative process of analysing small sections of the data, then comparing with the whole.

Everyday political practices in social centres

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The following sections describe how political meaning was associated with, and performed and

communicated through three sets of practices: food provisioning, the distribution of space and the division

of social centre labour.

Food skipping and anti-capitalism

One mode of provisioning food and other goods that was practised across many social centres in Barcelona

– and increasingly by other parts of the population since the recession – was the gathering of reusable waste

products from bins. Skipping, as it is normally known in British English (often known as dumpster diving

elsewhere) refers simply to the procedure of sourcing food and objects from waste. It is also the core

practice of freeganism, a broader category of activities or lifestyle where the appropriation and provisioning

of goods or services takes place without payment, generally described as a politically anti-consumerist ethic

or orientation (Oakes 2000). Although the practice of skipping was carried out regularly and habitually, in

various aspects of its organization and the distribution of what was gathered, participants from social

centres made explicit reference to critical discourses around waste, consumerism and individualism.

Food skipping was timed to coincide with the closing hours of bakeries, markets and supermarkets.

Participants performed a short localized tour of establishments, either alone or in small groups, fishing from

street bins or bags pertaining to targeted shops. Residents of social centres rarely skipped only for

themselves, and this was particularly true with food skipping. Usually one or two residents skipped daily

for the rest of the squat or with a particular public food event, and sometimes even a rough menu, in mind,

while many squatters skipped food or material goods spontaneously as they moved around the city. Localia

and Can Tintorer, fully-fledged communal living projects, usually ritualized collective meals, meaning the

majority of skipped food was effectively divided among the collective. Yet even where no communal living

arrangement was in place, skipped goods were often shared, and the responsibility rotated among members,

largely due to the substantial quantities sourced through a single outing. Norms and ideals about

communality and equality were thus reinforced and re-determined through the practice of skipping, as well

as through group decisions over conduct and attempts to deliberately live communally.

Skipping was first and foremost described as a way of provisioning goods. When asked why

participants did it, often the first answer was simply that the food was edible and the findings still had

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obvious use-value. ‘Great, isn’t it’, marvelled Roger, an electrician and environmental activist from Can

Tintorer, in a discussion about the substantial collection of clothing for public distribution his friends had

accumulated in their social centre, ‘You can get whatever you want!’. Discourses of practical advantage

were often the most visible during participant observation, but this was not due to an absence of political

meanings. Participants, particularly in interviews, talked at length about the decadence, inequality and the

wasting of unused or discarded private property ‘wasted by capitalism’. This was an interpretive movement

frame (Gillan 2008) which was applied to various practices, but mainly developed through important

arguments defending squatting, in which many participants were well-versed, seasoned by legal battles,

demonstrations and rhetorical conflicts in the media. The food’s value was reiterated in the activities of

preparing it, eating it and living well off it, and the goods skipped were used to furnish squats or social

centres where participants often lived, emphasizing and embodying the waste and inefficiency of the

political system that participants opposed. In this way the practice of skipping, while on the one hand a

cheap and practical way to make ends meet for young underemployed people, was simultaneously

understood and presented as an ongoing discursive and literal demonstration of how capitalism unfairly and

inefficiently concentrated wealth – particularly stark given the bank bailouts, mass unemployment and vast

numbers of house evictions due to foreclosure taking place during the recession.

Announcements or notices explicitly signposted and publicized the anti-consumerist logic at public

food events or ‘free shops’ organized for centre visitors. ‘Free shops’ offered unwanted goods, often

skipped, without cost to the public. People donated clothes and objects that they did not need, taking or

exchanging them for preferred clothing or other material goods, and stocks were supplemented by newly

skipped goods. These free shops, coupled with communal living arrangements, meant that many goods

circulated freely among social centre users and squatters, purchasing becoming the exception to how goods

were provisioned. Social centres generally tried to encourage wider access and interest from their

constituencies in order to extend their support networks and spread political ideas and practices. Thus,

access to Localia’s free shop, located visibly within the centre’s public spaces, was encouraged during or

after workshops and other events. This meant that people who were ostensibly in the centre for other

practices, drawing workshops, musical performances or to learn about a particular social movement, for

example, were also encouraged to think about waste and property differently, or at least keep stock rotating

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and spread the word. Localia organizers also tried to pique wider interest in the ‘shop’ and centre by

erecting a small stall on the street front with a selection of sample clothing, and hailing passers-by with

sartorial suggestions.

Public food events were another common activity organized in centres for encouraging interaction

among participants. Organizers sometimes used food events as fundraisers for other groups, allowing

regular participants from one centre to visit and interact with those from other centres, extending and

thickening existing networks. Localia and many other social centres ‘skipped’ much of the food served in

their weekly cafe event, again helping to publicly demonstrate radical political orientations towards

consumption. It was less frequently announced or explicitly advertised than in free shops, but most

customers understood that the low price of the food was a function of this ‘anti-capitalist’ mode of food

provisioning. Opposition to consumerism was also often expressed through symbolically displacing or

avoiding moments of monetary transaction in social centres through devices such as ‘donations boxes’.

In summary, political ideas around anti-consumption and anti-capitalism was demonstrated,

communicated and shared in performances of skipping, and even more directly in participation in a free

shop or attendance at a food event, where people often started their initiation into the practice and its

rationale. These political ideas were often adjacent or tangential to social movement goals pursued by the

same individuals, although during occupations and other localized moments of confrontation and protest,

skipped goods were often circulated to sustain participants. The sharing of space between free shops, food

events as well as meetings, workshops and actions also led to cross-cutting relations between social

movements and other kinds of networks. The following section explores the significance of this sharing of

space and resources in centres.

Distributing resources and communality

Squatted social centres represented themselves as constructing a form of community among the live-in

residents that presented an alternative to dominant ways of living. Communal living did not occur

automatically upon co-habitation, but was self-consciously enacted through on-going performances of

communal social practices such the sharing of possessions and space, and material adjustments or

arrangements reinforcing them. This communality connected in various practices with critiques of private

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property and consumerism, but was also seen as an alternative to what was perceived as Western society’s

overarching culture of individualism and egoism. The distribution of space was a particularly clear example

of how political frames around communality were materialized, taking place through communal living in

social centres, and in the opening of social centre space to publics beyond centre residents.

Localia residents saw private space as individualistic, and thus incompatible with communal living.

24-year-old market research interviewer and queer activist Cecilia explained:

So this is what we’re trying […] to carry forward the communal life, try and find time to share, to

eat together. For example in all the flats all the doors are open, there is no… we try not to let this

kind of private property of each flat exist, you know? Because this is a big block of flats. It could

happen that each person says ‘this is my house, full stop’. But the idea is… no! (Cecilia, Localia)

Localia’s open-door policy was abided by as much as possible. Participants expressed their frustrations

with the challenges of sharing property and space they were accustomed to privately owning, but

considered these to be personal and temporary failures, and part of a process of becoming competent and

skilled in community living.

In effect, the political logic of communality also underpinned the patterning of more or less social

or communal time (to eat, clean and do leisure activities together) and an informal inventory of pooled

resources such as tools and furniture. It was negotiated alongside other motivations and imperatives, such

as – paradoxically – privacy. In Can Tintorer, as with most centres, residents pooled some goods but not

others, a result of on-going compromises between the realism of convenience and functionality for the

resident on the one hand, and the idealism evoked by communal living on the other. Most food was either

bought organic and wholesale, cultivated or skipped by and for the collective, each contributing the same

small sum of money per month. Medicines – a mixture of natural remedies and standard medications – were

pooled after their first individual use. Tools and practical building materials were collectively sourced and

shared. Comparing with Localia, more compromises were made in Can Tintorer: after arguments about

gloves, a set of work gloves was bought for every member from the monthly budget. Similarly, members

had and maintained their own bikes, relinquishing potential economies of scale in order for responsibility

17

for upkeep and costs to be divided according to individual usage and care. Particular objects and practices

became stages on which struggles over ideology, feasibility and power were waged. Negotiation about

communality also had to balance individual participants’ needs and convenience with public

demonstrations of unselfishness over space and resources that justified squatted social centre projects and

the illegal appropriation of space in order to build support among visitors, neighbours and the media.

In these ways, social centres’ practices self-consciously showcased a politics of communality and

sharing; from workshops in which skills were shared freely, to debates which often also acted as publicity

for campaign groups, to musical or theatrical performances and parties, as well as food events and free

shops. These events combined the ethic of anti-capitalism with one of freely sharing knowledge, culture

and other resources. This made social centre events, it was argued, an alternative to the standard urban

‘consumer culture’ focused on privatization of resources and individualism:

I: To just go back to something you said about politics, that it was always something you do in a

social centre, or involved with a social centre – why do you say that?

R: OK, why a social centre is fundamental from my point of view. Well in a city like Barcelona, the

options that the people have for obtaining pleasure and cultural stimulus, all that is enormous – so

why open a social centre? The response is this, that for us liberty has nothing to do with

consumption. It has nothing to do with that particular development of ‘me’ in the social […] We

don’t believe it anymore, that the questions… that the market has opportunities for all, and it’s

simply about taking advantage of them. For us, for a start, we don’t want to be alone – it’s not

something that appeals to us particularly, we want to assume a collective identity that’s part-

university, part-space-of-leisure, part-public-square-social-relations, part-union, space of

organization. (Jaume, FUGA, emphasis in original)

The freedom to ‘not consume’ within an autonomous space such as a social centre, irrespective of the

activity, operated against the individualistic form of identity-construction that FUGA members saw other

18

cultural experiences as engendering. Instead, space, culture and knowledge were freely shared, and

identities and freedom were collective rather than individualized.

Discussions over what parts of the house should be open to the public were common among

members in squatted centres such as Can Tintorer and Localia. Members in favour of wider access would

cite the need to not ‘privatize space’ ‘as capitalism does’, but to share the space they had ‘liberated’.

Members arguing against wider access would argue that this needed to be balanced alongside individuals’

need for privacy, and, Can Tintorer’s Noé pointing out sharply during one such discussion, ‘We’re not

obliged to provide people with absolutely everything’.

Performances of alternatives to private property and space were therefore difficult to pitch – not

everything, it was normally concluded, could be shared – just as it was necessary to charge for some

activities, and for food and for drinks in order to pay, for example, lawyers’ (often greatly reduced) fees. It

was often the tension between the political ideas or ideals, and the performances which evoked them, which

kept discussion open, kept practices changing, and allowed for debate and political meaning to be engaged

and revisited on a regular basis.

Dividing labour – egalitarianism and equality

Another essential priority in social centres was institutionalizing forms of greater apparent equality and

egalitarianism in everyday life. This could be seen in the rotation of responsibility for skipping among a

social centre collective, or in the emphasis on consensus decision-making and direct democracy. Yet the

division of work involved in social centre operations was perhaps the most interesting example of how

everyday practices were developed and performed in accordance with these political ideas. This had a

demonstrative component, but was also simply an important practical condition for people to be able to live

communally.

Participants usually attempted to divide responsibility for social centre maintenance in ways that

were fairer than work environments outside of centres. They believed society generally lacked recognition

of unpaid domestic or ‘invisible’ labour, over-valued specialized knowledge and certain skills, and

reproduced gender and socio-economic inequalities through unfairly stratified wage structures and

19

contracts. Various organizational devices used in social centres helped to ‘visibilize’ domestic labour and

systematize the carrying out of tasks in a more equal way.

One way Can Tintorer and Localia tried to de-hierarchize work was in assigning specific times for

all members to perform domestic labour simultaneously. Simultaneous working guaranteed that members

participated for the same amount of time regardless of the task, which helped compress or level the ‘value’,

in time, of different tasks. Can Tintorer had also established commissions to handle some of the more

specialized tasks, and all residents were members of one or two different commissions. On the communal

work days, commission leaders assigned tasks but usually took part in some of the same tasks as normal

members. This was designed to limit the temporary advantage to those at the top of these working

hierarchies. Also detracting from these temporary hierarchies was a system of rotation. Decision-making

assemblies were facilitated by different members each fortnight, and people changed commissions every

few months or years, also helping to prevent the development of ‘expert’ and ‘novice’ roles. This rotation

meant that job inequality as well as its value could be tackled (see Baccaro and Locke 1998). Although

such systems helped prevent hierarchies where somebody was clearly at the ‘bottom’ of a working

structure, the necessity to retain even temporary (yet rotating) expert roles and to continually ‘skill-share’

caused frustrations when efficiency seemed compromised. Like with communality, working ‘alternatives’

were under pressure not just to comply with ideological injunctions of centre participants, but also to

present practical improvements to standard centre procedures.

Systems such as rotas, commissions and work days established minimum levels of contribution and

divided responsibility in generally fairer ways than when work was carried out ad hoc. One-off tasks in all

social centres, however, required members to volunteer in order to resolve or achieve them. Maria, a busker

from Guatemala and resident of Localia, explained, ‘all of these [tasks] are voluntary and whoever fancies

them most signs themselves up. Sometimes it’s harder to get somebody to sign up… but the work always

gets done’. These examples, more common for Localia, as a younger centre than Can Tintorer, put pressure

on certain members, undermining their morale, and visibly created demand for a fairer or more egalitarian

practice.

As with other politicized practices, there were various ways in which alternative ways of doing

things and their political rationales were communicated. Can Tintorer’s weekly work day invited

20

volunteers, through a local anarchist newsletter and word of mouth, to participate in the centre’s gardens.

This was a way for interested outsiders to learn about how Can Tintorer organized themselves in daily life.

In their co-performance of gardening practices, as well as the small-scale conversations and pedagogy

taking place between the more and less experienced labourers, volunteers were taught not only the routines

and procedures of how Can Tintorer self-sustained, but also their practical and/or political basis.

Alicia [ CT resident] and I worked sowing two rows of seeds simultaneously. David [another

volunteer] was given the job of spreading straw down around the onions, which we later undid

much of with Andreu, who thinks Xavi [both CT residents] has an ‘obsession’ with putting straw

down. So why did we put down straw? I asked Alicia. It was to keep moisture in the soil when it

was hot, and also to prevent to some extent the growth of weeds, she said. And no, it is bought from

a local farmer, she told an enquiring David, they don’t have fields for growing it themselves. (Field

diary March 2010)

Such questions superimposed volunteers’ or visitors’ expectations of the project’s ideological goals over

what actually did take place, and were at least implicitly coupled with suggestions of alternatives. Members

became practiced at justifying the organization of their practices according to certain frames – that it was a

more equal way of doing things, it was non-individualistic, or it was anti-consumerist. This visibility kept

practices reflexive to new ideas, political positions and possible innovations. It also meant that visitors to

Can Tintorer simultaneously discussed and learned political norms and ideas, and the practices associated

and expressed through them.

21

Discussion

Everyday forms of political action are mainly ignored by social movement studies focusing on visible and

adversarial mobilization moments, and clearly demarcated social movements (Staggenborg and Taylor

2005). Concepts of latency and visibility acknowledge the importance of collective identity processes

outside of abeyance, but suggest that movements still fluctuate between these latent processes and the

‘visibility’ of mobilization (Melucci 1996).

Everyday practices in social centres involved – but were not only a matter of – cultural expression,

solidarity and collective identity. They were politicized and were politicizing forces themselves, and took

place in parallel with adversarial actions and campaigns, apparently irrespective of the point in the protest

cycle that the movements in question found themselves in. Although many of these practices were not

collective action, and thus not ‘visible’ to most social movement analysis, political meanings were clearly

visible, and communicated to outsiders, in their performances. It was maintained that such everyday

political practices established a closer relation between political values and lifestyles for individuals and

collectives, tackling inequality, individualism and relationships of exchange on a small scale. While their

success in doing so cannot be easily assessed, they certainly provoked discussion and helped forge

networks based around shared practices and political stances. They also allowed connections to be

established across different types of social groupings, and between insiders and outsiders to social centres.

These activities took place at various nested levels of latency and visibility, with negotiation over

politicized practices in small friendship groups, in communal living projects and social centres as a whole,

and in public performances of some such practices – few or none of which would qualify as ‘visible’ in the

sense meant by Melucci (1996).

The most obvious justifications for everyday politicized practices included their sheer practicality –

skipped food was shared in part because skipping frequently yielded a glut of one or several items – it is

difficult for one or two people to get through a crate of aubergines in the few days it will take before they

have entirely disintegrated. Yet practical considerations did not take precedence over the ‘political’ or vice

versa, although interviews tended to treat political rationales with the greatest gravitas. There was a

negotiation of priorities in any social centre in which personal needs, practicality, and political imperatives

22

were balanced or traded off against one another, particularly obvious with the distribution of space. The

political ideas of everyday practices, meanwhile, connected with but were rarely identical to those

communicated in campaigns. They tended to be driven by general social critiques which underpinned or

united more concrete social movement goals. FUGA’s campaigning for immigration rights, Localia’s

demonstrations about private space and Can Tintorer’s environmentalist actions each centred on discrete

movement outcomes but were premised on the overarching political goals evoked in their daily practices,

such as greater equality, anti-capitalism and redistribution or sharing of wealth and power. Everyday

politicized practices – like the activism that many participants engaged in – thus conformed to descriptions

of ‘new social movement’ actions, but they also went some way beyond these descriptions. Their political

underpinnings evoked the wish for wider socio-cultural change in society at large rather than the pursuit of

specific goals. Although these distinct goals and targets are recognized by many studies of cultural politics

and new social movements, the addressing and framing of these goals and targets through ‘latent’ everyday

practices, as well as through open contestation and adversarial protest, has rarely been acknowledged.

Public events, activities and the distribution of social centre resources to wider constituencies

demonstrated visions of socio-cultural ‘alternatives’, often and most effectively through visitors’ own co-

participation in and performance of shared practices. These were spaces and moments where the political

messages associated with practices were shared. ‘Free shops’, volunteer work days and food events thus

encapsulated, and communicated, perspectives about anti-capitalism, communality and egalitarianism.

Political ideas and ideals were enacted, as with the use of waste food or the distributing of space or

resources differently, or the dividing of domestic labour in more egalitarian fashion, but they were also

performed in the course of practices. This allowed political action to be carried out and its meaning

communicated simultaneously. A recent study of similar practices of sharing, self-sufficiency and

cooperation described as ‘alternative economic practices’ used survey data to show broad levels of

participation across Catalonia (Conill et al 2012). The authors argue that the recession has led to the

popularization of many such practices, as well as broader support for the anti-capitalist and ‘autonomist’

justifications used commonly by participants in social centres.

Despite such findings, some of the multiple social groupings and networks in social centres, or all

of them taken together, could nevertheless be described using some collective terminology (Ruggiero 2000,

23

for example, conceives of a self-contained social centre movement). There were loose boundaries and

identities among the networks of people who participated in food events, cultural events and movement

campaigns happening around social centres, but what patterns existed were produced, augmented and

fragmented precisely through the interactions taking place through collective performances of social

practices. In this case, referring only to a social centre movement or subculture might have hidden how

public events and activities in social centres acted as points of interaction connecting participants, for

instance, in drawing classes with those interested in movement campaigns, keen gardeners with anarchists,

and yoga enthusiasts with squatters, and those suffering economic hardship with those espousing alternative

ways of life (Conill et al 2012). Coincidences in time and space initiated through a variety of practices and

groupings taking place in social centres meant that more ‘cultural’ or more ‘political’ networks of people

were frequently meeting, eating together and learning skills, ideas and politics from one another in a

circular process. Collective terminology has therefore been used sparingly, and a language of social

practices and their performances preferred, for the analysis of these dynamics.

In sum, events, spaces and practices were nodes of contact between a variety of groupings

surrounding social movement and alternative lifestyle milieux. At the same time they were sites where

political ideas were experimented with and negotiated through performances of practices and centre

policies. This created conversations and exchanges in expectations which often kept the oscillation between

radical political ideas and convenience dynamic, developing a range of ‘alternative’ ways of doing

everyday practices.

Conclusion

Literature on theories of protest and social movements increasingly considers everyday life and daily

practices as consequential for recruitment, the construction of meaning, and for understanding political

adherences and preferences. Prior literature has discussed distinct collective entities – subcultures,

‘lifestyle’ movements (Haenfler, Johnson and Jones 2012) or movement communities (Staggenborg 1998),

and the relation between moments of movement visibility and latency. These concepts have helped expand

24

traditional understandings of movement organizations and their contexts. It has been argued here that a

focus on practices and the events where they are performed shows how diverse groupings are linked, and

the means through which politicization, and the political solidarity of collective identity, occurs. The use of

social practices as a unit of analysis helps explain the kinds of meanings and forms of association that

constitute social movement networks, and why they matter all the time.

These findings pertain to the networks, events and practices surrounding the ‘free spaces’ known as

social centres. There is still considerable work to be done in exploring the social relations coordinating

protest and everyday life in protest spaces and social movement infrastructure such as eco-villages and

squats to temporary autonomous zones and protest camps. Future avenues of research might examine

politics and the everyday in other spaces, or with delocalized groupings, potentially using practice theories

to explore how political protest is shaped by political meanings developed in the everyday, and vice versa.

It is not just the spatial aspect of these infrastructures which is important, but the degree to which they

contextualize protest practices in the routines and temporalities of daily life – already recognized by most

movements and activists as part of the same business of seeking social change (see also Yates 2014).

This paper has shown how participants connect through performances of particular practices in

social centres, often with a similar political framing justifying these practices. Obviously, a huge variety of

everyday practices that are inflected with some kind of political injunction are conducted outside of social

centres. Critical consumption, DIY culture, dietary regimes such as veganism or vegetarianism, and forms

of online engagement and piracy have been academically explored as such, yet the connections between the

meanings mobilized and social spaces inhabited by the full range of practitioners, and social movements,

remain under-researched. This undermines both studies of social movements and theories of cultural

networks and groupings. Further study is needed to continue exploring the dynamic ways in which protest

politics and the social and cultural practices of daily life relate.

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Notes

1 Acknowledgements: This work was made possible through support from the ESRC (ES/I903445/1). Thanks to Alan Warde, Dale Southerton, Kevin Gillan, Nick Crossley and Kevin Hetherington and members of the Manchester Social Movements Research Group for feedback on early drafts and much valuable discussion, and the anonymous referees for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. Thanks most of all to the participants in the study. All errors are my own.

2 Names of all participants and social centres have been anonymized, and their details and locations perturbed in order to protect confidentiality.

3 This fieldwork took place at a time when Catalonia and Spain were in recession and youth unemployment was nearly 40% (European Commission 2012), but before the majority of public sector cuts implemented by the Catalan centre-right government, voted into parliament in November 2010. It pre-dated general elections and the indignados or 15-M movement of public square occupations of May 15th 2011 onwards by roughly a year. Many of those involved in social centres participated, and tactics popular in centres such as civil disobedience, assembly structures and a prefigurative political orientation were among the distinctive features of this dramatic and sustained surge in mobilization.