Financial Struggles in Post-Crisis Spain: How the Failure of ‘Popular Finance' Gave Birth to a Working-Class Movement

Many social consequences of financialization are well-known: inequalities engendered by the process of financial accumulation (Krippner 2005), workers’ precarity due to cutbacks and job loss associated with the rise of the 'shareholder value' (Lazonick and O ‘Sullivan 2000), transformation of domestic economies under the influence of new financial products (Erturk et al. 2007) such as capital-funded pension plans, home mortgages or consumer credits. These social changes have led to the constitution of 'popular finance': a way to 'incorporate popular and working classes into private financial spaces' in order to develop self-government and individual management of 'everyday capital' (Aitken 2007). But financialization of everyday life also faces setbacks and resistance.

In Spain, the anti-eviction movement Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), a grassroot organization against the massive diffusion of subprime loans among low-income workers, was born in February 2009, two years before Occupy Wall Street, and before the Indignados. It stemmed from popular barrios where borrowers couldn't repay their loans. It then spread out all over Spain - a country of 46 million, where 6,1 million home mortgages were sold from 2002 to 2007, and 497 000 foreclosures registered from 2008 to 2013 (Méndez Gutiérrez Del Valle et al. 2014). In 2015, PAH leader Ada Colau was elected mayor of Barcelona. In Madrid, one of the largest PAH section, the organization was built around a group of Ecuadorian immigrants (Gonick 2015), often linked to the construction business.

This contribution relies on a series of interviews with activists and borrowers, PAH statistics and long-term ethnographic participant observations in Madrid. It describes the birth of the PAH in Spain, showing how it developed anti-finance dissenting practices among working-class overindebted mortgage borrowers, often from immigrant background and with no college degree. One form of empowerment was based on frequent workshops developing economic and juridical literacy by means of key financial concepts. Securitization, Euro Interbank Offered Rate (Euribor), investment funds, foreclosure procedures, capital accumulation, are some of the notions investigated by borrowers, often with the help of lawyers and economists. This knowledge is a way to resist to 'popular finance' and to the political dream of universal homeownership. It challenges the moral obligation to repay the debt, it fosters empowerment, resistance to evictions, and the preference for affordable rents instead of expensive loans.

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