Ada Colau and Pablo Iglesias in Madrid Caja Magica, December 13, 2015. Demotix/jorge gonzalez.All rights reserved.When I first met Jorge Moruno, he had the most presentable white-dude dreadlocks I’d ever seen. We were having a coffee with our friend Raimundo Viejo after a protest organised by the indignados movement in the spring of 2011. Those thick, red tufts falling far past his waist made for a curious contrast with the labyrinthine Italian Marxist theory he delivered in a thick, radio-ready voice.
The conversation jumped from co-lamenting the micro-political miseries of lefty factional in-fighting to a spirited debate about rap and reggae. Jorge thought of these as a sort of music of the multitude. Raimundo thought this was truer of free jazz, questioning rap’s reliance on the machine-time of MPCs. I didn’t believe in a music of the multitude, preferring instead to think of it as a glorious noise. But I found the conversation fascinating, and it wouldn’t be the first time we discussed the topic over the next few years.
As the occupation of the squares gave way to Spain’s post-2011 socio-political climate, our debates continued on the social networks, thanks in large part to the community that had formed around a plucky local-access debate show filmed in a dark basement in the working class neighbourhood of Vallecas in Madrid. That show was called La Tuerka, or ‘The Screw’. Its host was a ponytailed, precariously employed college professor named Pablo Iglesias. Today, as the leader of the Podemos party, he is running for President of Spain. Moruno, minus the dreadlocks, is one of his main speechwriters.
