The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  One morning, soon after arriving for my first period living in the village, I was invited for coffee with Chris and Ali, two of the ten or so British couples who have retired there (and one of the few who seemed to have done so with an enthusiasm for its political peculiarities). We sat in their back garden in the winter sunshine, and they showed off the work they’d done in their two years there, planting and landscaping. They still needed to buy some garden furniture, they explained, but it was impossible to get across to their Spanish neighbours what garden furniture was. The marinaleños couldn’t grasp it as a concept – and you can’t buy it in the shops. Why? Because the outdoors is for socialising together, publicly: out front, not in the back.

  The streets are the social centre of the pueblo, observed Julian Pitt-Rivers in The People of the Sierra, his landmark 1954 study of the village of Grazalema, only seventy-five miles south of Marinaleda and almost exactly the same size, with a population of just over 2,000.

  And sure enough, when the sun is shining, which it almost always is, the older ladies of Marinaleda bring their (dining table) chairs out onto the pavement, together or alone, and chat to their neighbours as they pass by. Alternatively, they take a short stroll to one of the many benches that line Avenida de la Libertad and wait for someone to join them. Front doors are left open, eliding the division between the family space and the public space – even the primary school gates are open while the children play.

  To understand Andalusia, its remarkable culture and politics, it is necessary to understand the concept of the pueblo. It is a wonderful word which means village, town, or even city, and simultaneously a people – and in that dual meaning lies the key to its magic. A village is its people. You might travel far away from its boundaries, never to return, and subsume yourself into the heady multi-cultures of city life, but you are still, in your essence, a son or daughter of the pueblo, and you will never lose that.

  Each pueblo is a unique space, but its uniqueness comes from the claustrophobia of never being permitted to own, or even roam, the land outside the limits of the village: the unreformed feudal-style system concentrated land ownership in the hands of a few aristocratic families. In the south, the countryside has always been so big and sparsely populated that there is even a social imperative behind the historic congregation in these small communities. The fact Andalusia never had an industrial revolution means there was no great wave of urbanisation in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

  For centuries, Andalusian day labourers have settled in these tidily-sized pueblos, rather than in big cities or scattered in isolated cottages out in the fields, and this has forged a unique spirit, an ultra-local micro-patriotism, where a pueblo’s traditions, idioms and characters are its great strength, and a thriving collective personality develops of its own volition, independent of trends outside. Historically, the Andalusian pueblo rejected all authority that derived from outside it. The central state or regional government would often seek to override this, and would often succeed, especially with the Guardia Civil as their sentinels; but the popular desire of a pueblo was always for absolute autonomy from outsiders. In fact, Pitt-Rivers cites a third, essentially synonymous definition for the word: pueblo meaning ‘plebs’, an identification of a working-class grouping that separates them from the local rich folk, who ‘do not really belong to the pueblo but to that wider world which has already been delimited as theirs. In this sense,’ he continues, ‘the pueblo is a potentially revolutionary force.’

  It is into this environment that the anarchist philosophy of Bakunin and Kropotkin arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century and found a very congenial home. Theirs was the non-Marxist side of the First International: one that agitated for a working-class revolution and absolute equality, but believed that communism could only be achieved without a centralised bureaucracy, or any hierarchical power structures purporting to act on behalf of the workers. They believed in a federated network of equal but autonomous communities, operating without any interference from centralised power: anarchism described the Andalusian pueblos at their most radical, without even meaning to. In this respect, Marinaleda and its political lineage do not represent the communism of the hammer and sickle or Soviet-style centralism.

  ‘The power of elites,’ Sánchez Gordillo once said, ‘even when they call themselves leftists, is always a tyranny.’

  The isolated nature of the Andalusian pueblos was even more pronounced in Gerald Brenan’s time. In the 1920s and 30s, Brenan spent many years living in the small peasant village of Yegen, in Andalusia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, recorded in his classic memoir South From Granada. His life there was one of contented detachment. In Yegen’s bubble-like totality and de facto self-governance (albeit under the undemocratic leadership of the bourgeois local politicians, the caciques), he found both vitality and order:

  This small self-sufficing world had something of the zest for life, and also the sense of measure and balance of the ancient Greeks. When I read in Plato how they had regarded their cities and political constitutions as works of art and had attributed to them not so much moral qualities as aesthetic ones, I thought I understood why this village, which was no smaller than many of the self-governing republics of the Aegean, proved so satisfying.

  The result, he records, is that members of the pueblo almost never ‘left the peasant orbit and became merged in the life of the modern nation’. Politically, the local was everything: the newspapers might report dramatic events in Barcelona or Madrid, but no one in Yegen took the slightest bit of notice – the only news, personalities or politics that counted were those of the village; matters of national life were of no interest. For the Andalusian pueblos, Madrid represented a distant, inauthentic power, capable only of misunderstanding, and repressing, their way of life.

  This level of isolation and autonomy is of course somewhat diminished in 2013, and in Marinaleda’s case, the availability of free wireless internet for all the village is one of Sánchez Gordillo’s proudest achievements. Such techno-positivity is commendable for what remains a small, old-fashioned community, but it might also be its undoing. Modern communications tell of the failures of the capitalist world outside, but they bring the tantalising offer of new possibilities, too. The big regional centres of Seville, Malaga and Granada are enticing some of the young marinaleños away from the fields. A few aspire to join the rest of Spain’s over-qualified juventud sin futuro (youth without a future) and leave the country altogether.

  As capitalist Spain sinks (with two general strikes in 2012), it has raised Marinaleda higher than ever above the parapet. Five or ten years ago, when visiting the big cities of the south, I’d expect maybe half of the people I met to have heard of Marinaleda, and maybe half of those to care about it. It was, to many, an amusing Andalusian curiosity, a village of strange rural eccentrics and a testament to the unique political peculiarities of the region. They weren’t wrong.

  These days, though, everyone in Spain has an opinion on the mayor and his project: it’s hard not to, when his face was in the newspapers and on TV every week. Sánchez Gordillo has become akin to what José Bové was in France around the turn of the millennium. Bové is the French farmer and trade unionist who was imprisoned for dismantling a newly-built McDonald’s in 1999, in protest at the way the American chain – and capitalism in general – was hurting rural France. He became an icon of the anti-globalisation movement around the time of Seattle, No Logo and the WTO protests, and similarly, Sánchez Gordillo has been catapulted from an entire lifetime of dedicated activism to the dubious status of a celebrity anti-establishmentarian. It is a wonder that the crisis – and the media that must keep the narrative of crisis interesting – has not created more icons of resistance, but one could certainly do worse than the mayor of Marinaleda.

  Inevitably, his fame has prompted more press attacks than ever. Marinaleda has long had enemies; as its iconic figurehead, Sánchez Gordillo has survived two assassination attempts, many more atte
mpts at character assassination, and been on trial, and in jail, more times than he cares to count. In the last year the sharks of the Spanish right have circled, growing ever more outraged at the expropriations and occupations. One of the most abstract, but most needling criticisms, is that the village is just ‘a communist theme park’, where the reality of life is little different from neighbouring villages. In this view the money is leeched from the regional government in Seville, and the self-conscious self-description of the village as ‘utopia’ really just means rural poverty plus a big painting of Che Guevara’s face on a wall.

  As the crisis deepens, Sánchez Gordillo worries the elite that Alain Badiou called the ‘camarilla of inheritors and parvenus’. He worries them because in a western neoliberal world dependent on resigned submission to TINA – There Is No Alternative – he has one, and it seems to work. We may be in a new age of global revolt and assembly, but capitalist realist rhetoric keeps asking the same thing of its dissenters: what’s your alternative? It’s a rather terse rhetorical question: capitalist language is all about competition, but it doesn’t like competitors. From Puerta del Sol to Wall Street to St Paul’s, the damning questions rang out: ‘What are you for? What are your demands? What’s your programme? How would it work in practice?’

  Marinaleda presents an anti-capitalist answer to those questions, questions that Europe’s political and financial elites do not want answered. This community founded on mutual aid and collectivism, not the profit motive, has withstood the global financial crisis far better than its peers: 5 per cent of the town’s working population are unemployed, compared to 40 or 50 per cent in many nearby towns – and most of that 5 per cent are recent arrivals who have travelled to ‘utopia’ in search of work. When all around is misery, Marinaleda offers a glimpse of how things might be otherwise.

  Just off Avenida de la Libertad is a metal arch painted in the village’s trademark red, white and green, declaiming in capital letters OTRO MUNDO ES POSIBLE – another world is possible. I have heard and read this slogan so many times in English, and it usually makes me feel slightly nauseous – it is too often an attempt to fire the imagination that serves only to remind you of the myriad failings of the world you live in. In most parts of the capitalist world, ‘another world is possible’ is just an idealistic rallying cry. In Marinaleda, it’s an observable fact.

  Back in January 2012, sitting among the manic clutter of the mayor’s office, I asked Sánchez Gordillo about the motto which appears on the town crest, alongside a painting of white houses and a dove against a blue sky. Una utopia hacia la paz, it says: a utopia towards peace. He answered:

  ‘We’re trying to put in place now what we want for the future. But we don’t want to wait till tomorrow, we want to do it today. If we start to do it today, then it becomes possible, and it becomes an example to show others, that there are other ways to do politics, other ways to do economics, another way to live together – a different society.’

  He paused, then said the words that drained the capitalist-realist defeatism out of me and carried me halfway back to adolescence.

  ‘Utopias aren’t chimeras, they are the most noble dreams that people have. Dreams that through struggle can and must be turned into reality.

  ‘The dream of peace: not the peace of cemeteries, but the peace of equality. As Gandhi said, “peace is not just the absence of violence but the practice of justice”: the dream that natural resources and the riches the worker produces will come back to him, instead of being usurped by a minority. At this moment, a few rich people hold the riches that would feed sub-Saharan Africa, that is, 800 million human beings. The dream of equality; the dream that housing should belong to everyone, because you are a person, and not a piece of merchandise to be speculated with. The dream that banks should disappear, that natural resources like energy shouldn’t be in the service of multinationals but in the service of the people.

  ‘All those dreams are the dreams we’d like to turn into realities. First, in the place where we live, with the knowledge that we’re surrounded by capitalism everywhere; later, in Andalusia and around the world.’

  * The old field-workers’ union, the Sindicato de Obreros del Campo (SOC), extended its scope to include urban sectors in 2007, giving rise to the Andalusian Workers’ Union, Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores (SAT), within which the SOC maintains a degree of autonomy.

  2

  The Story in the Soil

  En cada barrio, en cada ciudad, en cada pueblo, en cada comarca, ahora más que nunca, seguimos en pie.

  [In every district, in every city, in every village, in every region, now more than ever, we keep standing.]

  Poster for 4 December 2012 memorial

  to Manuel José García Caparros

  Early evening on my first night in Marinaleda, we pulled up and parked opposite Antonio’s house – the only house in the village where rooms can be rented, for the princely sum of fifteen euros a night. The front door was locked and the shutters were down, so we stood outside on Avenida de la Libertad, wondering what to do. Slowly a white van crawled towards us, with two megaphones attached to its bonnet, one facing right and one left, announcing the same recorded message over and over again: there would be a general assembly at 6.30 that evening – half an hour hence, in fact. In the old days they did the same thing, but instead of a car, the message was transported around the village on a bicycle.

  So we walked the five minutes along the main road to the trade union bar, known as the Sindicato, where middle-aged men were pouring themselves whisky from the bottle and chewing sesame seeds. Eventually they drifted through the back door in the bar to the big hall, where the general assemblies take place. It was full, and busy, and bustling with small children to-ing and fro-ing and chirruping, but the meeting was characterised by a sombre tone – the only topic being the serious threat to the farming subsidy the village had come to rely on. Sánchez Gordillo was nowhere to be seen. In any case no resolutions were being proposed or passed; it was just a grim update on how little money was coming in from the regional government in Seville.

  The Sindicato hall has a large stage for concerts and other performances, but no one was up there. The assembly consisted of some 400 people sitting on fold-out chairs, taking it in turns to grab the microphone at the front, or just shouting out their comments or objections. Above their heads, the permanent backdrop to the stage is a grand painting covering almost the entire wall, depicting three farm labourers boldly striding out from the fields, backed by a whole village of comrades. The contrast between the image and the reality of the situation was the first hint I got that la crisis was posing problems for utopia, too. The disjunction between the disquiet in the room and the proud, confident figures in the painting was striking. At the end of the assembly, Councillor Gloria Prieto Buendía, standing in for Sánchez Gordillo, announced in a slightly brighter tone that there were still some seats on the bus leaving in the morning for Malaga, to attend the annual rally for Andalusian workers’ liberty and to lay flowers at the shrine to Manuel José García Caparros.

  Thirty-five years previously, on 4 December 1977, only two years after Franco died, during the uneasy transition to parliamentary democracy, there were mass demonstrations across Andalusia for regional autonomy. Millions had filled the streets of Spain’s largest region, in the cities of Seville, Malaga and Granada, in the towns and in the villages. Caparros, an eighteen-year-old factory worker, attempted to raise the still-banned green-white-green tricolour of Andalusia on Malaga’s city council building and was shot dead by the police. Ever since, 4 December has been commemorated in Andalusia, and poor young Caparros has been one of its principal martyrs.

  The following morning, twenty or so people climbed onto the bus outside Marinaleda town hall, almost all middle-aged women, chattering away excitably as friends do when on an excursion. It felt a bit like a school outing. Three young men in their late twenties were sitting at the back of the bus, rather more coolly, and there was
space at the back, so I joined them there. They were Mosa, one of the village’s handful of Senegalese immigrant workers, a tall man with a cheeky smile and a mop of braids; Raúl, a sinewy, stubbly guy who would normally be working in the fields, but had come along to help film the rally, and finally Paco, a dedicated Sánchez Gordillo loyalist who worked for Marinaleda TV and, as I should have guessed from his black hoodie and ponytail, played in the village’s premier anarcho-communist ska-punk band (there is only one). In a rather un-marinaleño move, the band are called Molestando a los Vecinos, which translates as Bothering the Neighbours.

  Temperatures had reached the unbearable heights of forty-nine degrees Celsius earlier that year. As we wound south through the Andalusian countryside towards the coast, we passed fields packed with solar panels, huge blue rectangles tilted on stilts, standing in rows like Easter Island statues, folkloric gods saluting the new religion. The Andalusian government has been slow in acknowledging the new reality of unpredictable rainfalls and ever-hotter summers, but the farmers have certainly noticed it – it’s already messing with the harvests, and doing so in an economic period when they can ill afford to absorb more disruptive outside influences.

  As we passed by the myriad small pueblos that populate the south, I showed the young men an obscure old pamphlet I’d found about the village from 1980, entitled Marinaleda: Huelga de hambre contra el hambre, the ‘hunger strike against hunger’ that had taken place before they were born. They flicked through it, amused to see a few familiar faces and names. ‘That was the last crisis,’ said Raúl. So what comes out of this crisis, I asked – are more Marinaledas possible now? Mosa smiled a sceptic’s smile and apologetically demurred – this strange town that he’d come to know and love was a one-off. ‘Why should it be?’ protested Paco. ‘In a town of this size, it is entirely possible. I don’t know if it’s possible in a big city …’ The others nodded. ‘But if other pueblos start their struggle now, imagine what they can be in thirty years’ time. It’s taken more than thirty years in Marinaleda – that’s older than any of us.’