The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  After an hour and a half of idle chit-chat about la crisis and football, we were dropped off in Malaga city centre and trooped along in the dazzling winter sunshine to the site of the rally. On a fiendishly windy street corner, the protesters had gathered outside a branch of the BBVA bank, where a large estuary meets a dual carriageway. It was exposed, cold, and very noisy. The green and white flags of Andalusia were already in flight, and individual groups posed with their flowers under a slightly dented metal plaque to the martyr Caparros. Some had wrapped themselves in the flag of SOC-SAT, the left-communist Andalusian trade union representing field labourers since the late 1970s, the union that was the vessel for all of Marinaleda’s many struggles and victories.

  Raúl and Paco set up the camera on a tripod alongside one local news crew, and the rest of the Marinaleda contingent huddled at the back by a railing. ‘We are here in the street to reclaim it for Caparros and the people of Andalusia!’ declaimed one in a succession of speakers, drawn from across the region. They seemed unlikely to do so – it was a small event, barely more than 100 people altogether, gathered on the pavement on a chilly Tuesday lunchtime. Wreaths of flowers, tied up with green and white bows, were laid at the foot of the small plaque on behalf of the workers of Malaga, Granada, Marinaleda, Guadalajara and Seville. Despite their heft, the wreaths kept tumbling over in the wind. Marinaleda was by far the smallest conurbation represented, but their wreath was still the biggest and most extravagant. Pieces of paper commemorating Caparros’s martyrdom were handed out. He looked so horribly young in the photo, so sadly ignorant of what was to follow that fractious, unstable post-Franco period, and his own senseless death. ‘Memory, dignity and struggle’, read the injunction at the end.

  ‘Today is not just a day of remembering,’ announced Diego Cañamero, the general secretary of SAT, who has so often been Sánchez Gordillo’s rabble-rousing partner at big protests and rallies in Andalusia. ‘It is also a day for celebrating and looking to the future of our nation.’ As he proceeded, Malaga locals pushed through the small throng, trying to go about their business: grumpy-looking old men clinging onto their flat caps, mothers with prams, awkwardly weaving through the crowd.

  Because of its size, in a city of 570,000 people, the rally felt terribly niche, but it was no less passionate for that. ‘The left must struggle for the future of Andalusia, for the control of its economy in the face of the crisis,’ said Cañamero. The traffic continued to roar past behind us, and his voice rose gradually until it was almost a shout, cracking with studied passion and emotion. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the country are fighting for democracy, land and freedom,’ he said, and called for a frente común, a common front, against the miseries of the crisis. The last time there was an anti-capitalist popular front in Spain was the 1930s, and it was usurped by Franco’s coup and the civil war.

  The whole event lasted no more than forty-five minutes, and as Cañamero gave an interview to the camera, the crowd melted away into small groups again.

  I mentioned to Paco the 1.5 million Catalans who had marched for independence earlier that year. ‘Andalusia is different,’ he agreed, as we walked back down the dual carriageway in search of our bus. ‘It’s not like Catalunya, we don’t have our own language, or any desire to be independent. But you know we had a Roman civilisation here, and a Moorish civilisation?’ He cited the Caliphate of Cordoba with pride. ‘Well, I think we have a unique history, and a unique spirit.’ He paused. ‘How do you say lucha in English?’ he asked. Struggle, I said, or fight – it depends on the context. ‘Well, because that is unique here, too.’ He hummed the song that had played at the end of the rally, the crowd standing to attention with fists raised in the air – it was the regional anthem, ‘Andaluces, levantaos’ (Andalusians, arise). Also known as ‘The Hymn of Andalusia’, the tune was based on a popular religious song sung in the fields during harvest time. The lyrics, a stirring testament to the Andalusian people, the ‘men of light’, and their quest for land and freedom, were written by Blas Infante, the father of Andalusian nationalism. It was premiered in July 1936, only a week before the outbreak of civil war, and Infante was executed by the fascists one month and one day after the premiere. It was not revived until after Franco died, and like the flag, the Andalusian anthem became a vital symbol of popular revanchism in the late 1970s: honouring a vociferous liberation movement that had been held back, humbled and brutalised by forty years of fascism. The song paid tribute to a people forever at odds with power, whether it was located in the hands of aristocratic landowners, the Church, the military or Franco’s regime. More than anything, the song has become a commemorative tonic for the horrors inflicted on those who had dared to strive to be both Andalusian and free.

  For the protesters in Malaga that day, the visible wealth inequalities remain as entrenched now as they ever were. ‘Look at the royal family, they’re not in crisis,’ said Raúl, as we waited beside a cold, sun-bleached roundabout for the bus to take us back to Marinaleda. ‘Then look at the rest of Andalusia!’ On the pavement next to us, a young couple were huddled with their knees tucked under their chins, begging, with a sign saying they had a three-year-old they could not afford to feed. We talked about the time earlier that year when King Juan Carlos prompted a huge public outcry after going elephant hunting in Botswana – fairly normal behaviour for the Spanish royalty, but that little bit more offensive when 25 per cent of his subjects are out of work, and others are committing suicide rather than be evicted. Spain has always borne witness to these extreme inequalities – and out of that has come some of the most robust popular radicalism seen in European history.

  In Andalusia, as in Spain in general, things got better after 1977 – but they did so painfully slowly, and wildly inconsistently. However, once the financial crisis hit in 2008 and sent the construction-driven boom tumbling to its shoddy foundations, most Andalusians were returned to the same struggles for existence they had been fighting for centuries. SOC-SAT’s pitch for the rally in Malaga that day was to build ‘a popular protest movement as large, determined and united’ as that of the post-Franco period, as they outlined in their flyers:

  It is now thirty-five years, two statutes and several constitutional ‘upgrades’ later, and essentially, we are where we were. Andalusia remains in the rear compared to the other peninsular and island peoples. We continue to be the last in all indices of economic and social welfare. We are first only in unemployment and precariousness, poverty and deprivation.

  They blamed this predicament on ‘speculative financial capital’ and the distant, undemocratic powers in Madrid and Brussels. Those gathered on the windy Malaga intersection spoke of the need to oppose la dictadura de los mercados, the dictatorship of the markets: it’s a familiar twenty-first-century conjunction – one in which, even so long after the death of Franco, dictatorship was still the preferred word for the situation they endured.

  I found it momentarily odd to see this flag-waving coming from people so far to the political left. But then Andalusian nationalism is of an unusual kind – seemingly devoid of chauvinism or parochialism – and its roots lie in the insurgent anarchism of the nineteenth century.

  It seems like an astonishing quirk of history, but in 1873, albeit for only two months, Francisco Pi y Margall became leader of the Spanish Federal Republic, a regime of radical decentralisation that sought to replace traditional top-down power hierarchies with horizontal pacts of understanding between free groups and people. As Madrid had promised freedom, in the Spanish countryside, villagers took advantage of the situation to divide up the latifundios among themselves and proclaim their pueblos independent sovereign micro-states. Spain briefly became the world’s first and only anarchist nation state.

  Though a liberal republican and federalist in his politics, Pi y Margall was a friend of the French anarchist thinker Proudhon; among the Spanish poor, support for federalism dovetailed neatly and directly into anarchism. The German writer Helmut Rüdiger, who spent much of the 1930s
in Spain, expressed it well when he wrote that

  Spanish anarchism is nothing more than an expression of the federal and individualist traditions of the country … It is not an outcome of abstract discussions, or theories cultivated by a few intellectuals, but an outcome of a social dynamic force that is often volcanic, and the tendency towards freedom in it can always count on the sympathy of millions of people.

  That social dynamic force lies at the heart of Andalusian history, a history littered with poverty and spontaneous, violent uprisings – so when anarchist theory evolved and spread, it found a ready-made support base in southern Spain. In 1871, when the Communist International split between the Marxists, who believed in a strong state, and the Bakuninists, who didn’t, Spain was the only country that inclined heavily towards the latter. In Jerome Mintz’s anthropological study The Anarchists of Casas Viejas, about a tragic failed Andalusian uprising in which many died, we read that ‘Bakunin’s views matched the Spanish temper – belief in local control and maximum individual freedom – and reflected the Spanish situation – that of an oppressed but potentially explosive rural population.’ The forging of a collectivist utopia through protest and land occupation in Marinaleda is not simply a late capitalist story, the exception which ridicules the rule. It’s a well-rehearsed rural Andalusian performance of rebellion against a very physical, tangible inequality.

  If the dance of popular peasant uprising is innate, the steps practised by the other side are just as entrenched in the Spanish muscle-memory; from the Inquisition, through the brutal repressions of the nineteenth century, into the Civil War, Francoism and beyond, encompassing the ‘preventative arrest’ and torture of some 20,000 leftists for political crimes in the 1890s, or the dispatching of government troops into factories in Seville to crush worker rebellions. Anticipating the polarity of the Spanish Civil War, revolutionary left-wing groups sought to agitate with ever-greater intensity as the nineteenth century drew to a close; the right-wing authorities were always equal to the task.

  Spain is the only country in the world where anarchism ever became a mass movement. The anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the CNT, had over a million members in the pre-Civil War period, a situation which is entirely explicable given the country’s economic situation and desperate need for land redistribution. Beyond political context, there is even something anarchist-leaning about the Andalusian personality: individual freedom and mutual aid are both traits held in high esteem – your neighbour is born free to choose his or her own path, but equally, they should not be left to starve if the fates conspire against them.

  While for Marx the urban proletariat was the vanguard of revolution, Bakunin’s philosophy focused more on a federated network of smaller communities and groups, a conception of communism that already chimed with the lived experience of Andalusian life: the village unit is a self-sustaining ecosystem which regulates itself, and does so without the need for state enforcement, power hierarchies (elected or otherwise) or the desire for profit. For Bakunin, freedom could only come from absolute devolution of power until there was none left at the centre. The ‘right of secession’ he wrote of was already held to be integral to liberty in the Andalusian pueblos. Bakunin called for:

  The internal reorganisation of each country on the basis of the absolute freedom of individuals, of the productive associations, and of the communes. Necessity of recognising the right of secession: every individual, every association, every commune, every region, every nation has the absolute right to self-determination, to associate or not to associate, to ally themselves with whomever they wish and repudiate their alliances without regard to so-called historic rights [rights consecrated by legal precedent] or the convenience of their neighbours.

  Of course, the isolated ecosystem of any nineteenth-century peasant village, with its unique customs, assumptions and culture, could make for a challenging environment into which to evangelise. Bakunin warned that their resistance to politicisation would need working around – via a network, connecting the most ready, able, and revolutionary members of each peasant community to talk to one another: ‘We must at all costs breach these hitherto impregnable communities and weld them together by the active current of thought, by the will, and by the revolutionary cause.’

  Bakunin was writing about rural Russia, but ‘hitherto impregnable communities’ is the perfect description of the Andalusian pueblos of the nineteenth century. While they may have been somewhat culturally hermetic, some of their inhabitants did at least leave home, usually the men; thousands of workers were regularly compelled to travel great distances to find work, in order to survive. Most itinerant Andalusian day labourers migrated to the cities and emerging industries of the north, especially Catalunya and the Basque Country; others went elsewhere in rural Spain, or to France – wherever seasonal farm work was most plentiful. There, sleeping on barn floors for months at a time with scores of other poor labourers, revolutionary ideas were easily shared.

  Among Spain’s many regions, anarchism thrived most of all in rural Andalusia (with a strong uptake in urban Catalunya, for different reasons). And yet, Andalusia is not the only poor part of Spain, far from it – parts of Extremadura and Castile, for example, have long been desperately poor. As Temma Kaplan writes in Anarchists of Andalusia 1868–1903, it is actually the contrasting wealth, not poverty in itself, which explains the region’s innate radicalism: ‘Where almost everyone is poor, the idea of revolutionary social changes might seem utopian, for if everything were equally divided, everyone would be equally poor.’ It is the visible wealth inequalities in the south which have made it so susceptible to radical ideas.

  ‘Andalusia is not a poor country,’ wrote the authors of the Marinaleda hunger strike pamphlet in 1980, ‘it was made poor.’ Likewise, they argue, it was made revolutionary by the behaviour of outsiders. By seeking to impose a uniform Spanish culture on the regions, to create ‘one Spain’ under God and under the King, remote bourgeois centralism fomented the revolutionary atmosphere of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking back over Andalusian history, they write, ‘there are constants of oppression, and there are constants of struggle’. Positioned against the ordinary people of the pueblos were gran propietaria, big property, identified as the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy and the Catholic Church – with the Guardia Civil as their hired thugs and the corrupt caciques as their political representatives. Gran propietaria has a contemporary equivalent, as the nature of capitalist exploitation has changed: on demonstrations in 2013, the oppressors, when identified in one phrase, are gran capital, big business.

  Electoral politics has rarely offered the poor labourers of Andalusia much hope of a solution. There was a pretence of democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, via the election of local caciques – normally a choice between two bourgeois men of means: a conservative or a nominal liberal; the latter distinguishable only by the mildest of anti-clericalism. Even when anarchism began to flourish in the south, the sheer desperation of the landless labourers impelled them to keep voting for these men. The caciques looked after the interests of the landowners, and coercion, buying votes and electoral fraud were commonplace, as was intimidation from the local members of the Guardia Civil. The caciques’ men chose the shift workers from those assembled in the town square, and, quite simply, if you wanted the miserly amount of work on offer you had to vote the way they commanded.

  The tension in Spain between the big central state and the miniature world of the pueblo preceded Franco, and even Primo de Rivera, the country’s proto-fascist dictator from 1923–30. There has long been a sense of a distant, imposing political class who do not understand the local ways and needs of each pueblo, in their many and varied forms. It’s the same rhetoric you might hear in American election races about Washington, D.C., the remoteness of power, both geographically and in terms of its comprehension of local realities. Centralism, wrote the marinaleños behind the hunger strike pamphlet, is ‘the origin of all our old
problems, since the end of the nineteenth and across the twentieth century, and the cause of all our riots, our demands, and our revolutionary movements.’ Struggle, they continue, is the heritage of the Andalusian people – un pueblo combativo, a pugnacious people, and the methods (crop burnings, strikes, land occupations) have long been the same, as has the enemy on the ground, the Guardia Civil, with their ‘centuries in the service of the landowners’.

  In the towns of Andalusia, wrote Gerald Brenan in his classic 1943 text The Spanish Labyrinth, ‘the atmosphere of hatred between classes has to be seen to be believed. Since the Republic came in, many landlords have been afraid to visit their estates. And the labourers are all Anarchists. What else can one expect under such conditions – miserable pay, idleness for half the year and semi-starvation for all of it?’ The jornaleros, the day labourers of villages like Marinaleda, lived without smallholdings or allotments to grow food for basic family subsistence during the six months they were without work. Without credit from the shops of the pueblo during the lean times, or the gift of a loaf of bread from one’s neighbours now and then, even more would have died of malnutrition.

  While the jornaleros’ poverty was often fatal, hundreds of thousands of acres of the aristocratic-owned arable lands around them were left uncultivated, adding greater insult to the labourers’ injurious poverty. These lands were sometimes used for breeding bulls or horses, or in the case of a 56,000-acre tract of land west of Marinaleda, simply as a shooting estate. The class hatred flowing in one direction was matched only by the disinterest flowing in the other. Brenan records a visit in the 1930s by the Duke of Alba, father of Marinaleda’s nemesis, the current duquesa, to some of the vast lands he owned in Andalusia. He arrived, wrote Brenan, ‘with an equipment of lorries and tents, as though he were travelling in the centre of Africa’. Meanwhile, starving labourers who attempted to plough the fallow land were beaten by the police.