Tribute to Javier Navascués

Why I loved him and Paula – his political compañera and a dynamo of public and personal energy – was that we could have honest, critical and searching political discussions in which we had to be alert because we were constantly negotiating points of convergence, pondering over nuances and exploring areas of contention, rather than growing complacent in agreement. I always came away having learnt a huge amount about issues on which I thought I knew almost everything!

What enriched the discussions is that the theoretical, the practical and the personal were always stirred together and spiced by Javier's deep gravelly laugh, whenever the discussion came across a humorous human foible or arrived at a favourite theoretical punchline. And there would always be a dimension of physical pleasure, whether the constant supply of food and drink that Javier could conjure from a near empty fridge or a walk to one of the many local bars surrounding their beautiful house – a journey that would always involve a mini guided tour of the political geography of the neighbourhood. Javier and Paula were brimming with civic pride for Seville and political pride in the struggles they had won together as well as the achievements of the municipality under the leadership of Paula as Deputy Mayor and her comrades.

Take participatory budgeting, for example. A new idea spreading to Europe from famous experiments in the South of Brazil. The career politicians of the left, whether social democratic or communist were not attracted to this, indeed they were highly suspicious. It would after all, require sharing of their hard won political power with ordinary citizens, outside the party, and not necessarily part of the organised labour movement – housewives, grandmothers, wayward youth. Not in their eyes, ‘elements’ who could be trusted. For Paula and Javier, by contrast, whose political commitment was so patently driven by their belief in the capacities and dignity of their fellow citizens, this was a brilliant idea, to be grasped and experimented with in Seville. Though - and this was typical of their dialectical thinking - they clearly saw that the idea could be misused as a means of legitimating the powerful rather than empowering the powerless; in the process, becoming what our common friend and comrade Daniel Chavez describes as “participation lite”.

Anxious to avoid such a fate – the fate of so many cities and towns implementing participatory budgets across Europe – Javier and Paula invited the main architect of the original structures of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and in the state of Rio Grande del Sul, Ubiratan de Souza, to spend some time helping them set up the structures in Seville. They were determined that there should be a real sharing of power and a real exercise of citizens collective and autonomous power as a means of stronger democratic control than the institutions of representative democracy could exert. Javier's thinking on popular control drew heavily on his reading of Nicos Poulantzas and the theory of the state as a site of class struggle, permeated by the balance of class power in society more generally. As Director of Fundación de Investigaciones Marxistas (Marxist Research Foundation) Javier was a learned Marxist scholar as well as a passionate activist. His learning, however, was always a tool, not a fetish, and he was constantly developing the tools through practice .

For Javier, as for Poulantzas, this idea of popular power as a means of democratic control over the state including it's representative institutions, pointed to the importance of combining representative and direct democracy, internal transformation of the social relations of the state at the same time as building the popular power to change the wider relations of production. Oh! how I wish I'd taped Javier's rich responses in the discussions we'd have all day when I visited. But he was too informal, and self-depreciating for that. Moreover our discussions would be broken by a visit to a local site where citizens had used the participatory budget to have a new park or playground built, their street improved, or a loved old building restored. Thoughts of taping for posterity didn’t seem necessary. Here was a modest process of history in the local making, with one of it's actors as my guide.

Javier's intelligence was deep and it could be sharp, but it was widened and opened by a generous, democratic spirit. He positively welcomed new ideas and political innovations without losing his critical faculties. Javier and Paula were almost always to be seen absorbing and discussing the new ideas exchanged at European and Wold Social Forums. He was one of those in the United Left who supported working electorally with Podemos to gain office in the Spanish state. But that did not silence his criticisms of what he saw as the problems of Podemos' populism. I last saw him the day after the 2017 Spanish elections and we spent the day analysing the balance sheet of the electoral alliance, which he considered should be continued in spite of the failure of the alliance to achieve the electoral successes for which many had hoped and worked. In the evening, he and Paula took me to the city centre and to a beautiful piazza which they and local campaigners had successfully protected from commercial property development, and which the municipality had developed under the leadership of the United Left (including Paula) in coalition with the Socialist Party. Again, their pride in their city and their fellow citizens and their party (however at times dysfunctional, as Javier freely discussed) was obvious, as people greeted them and lingered for a discussion, as we walked and enjoyed the cafes and the music.

Javier lived a good life, shared it limitlessly with his friends and worked hard until his untimely death, to achieve a good life for all. I answered Javier's e-mail saying I would indeed help José Manual Mariscal, the new editor of Mundo Obrero as if José was him. Now, much sooner and faster than we hoped, Jose and I and Javier's other TNI friend and comrade, Daniel Chavez, are already in conversation, about how to keep his spirit alive, through Mundo Obrero, through our work in TNI and in Britain too in our own Poulantzian struggle. Javier would have been fascinated by this and we could have had hours of discussion during which he would have smiled wisely and given an occasional deep supportive laugh.