The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  Sánchez Gordillo once suggested to me that the House of Alba could invest their vast riches (from shares in banks and power companies, as well as multi-million-euro agricultural subsidies for their vast tracts of land) to create jobs, but they’ve never shown any interest in doing so. ‘We believe the land should belong to the community that works it, and not in the dead hands of the nobility.’ That’s why the latifundio owners plant wheat, he explained – wheat can be harvested with a machine, overseen by a few caretakers; in Marinaleda, crops like artichokes and tomatoes are chosen precisely because they need lots of labour. Why, the logic runs, should ‘efficiency’ be the most important value in society, to the detriment of human life?

  The town co-operative does not distribute profits: any surplus is reinvested to create more jobs. Everyone in the co-op earns the same salary, forty-seven euros a day for six and a half hours of work: it may not sound like a lot, but it’s more than double the Spanish minimum wage. Jornalero participation in decisions about what crops to farm, and when, is encouraged, and often forms the focus of the village’s general assemblies – in this respect, being a cooperativista means being an important part of the functioning of the pueblo as a whole. Where once the day labourers of Andalusia were politically and socially marginalised by their lack of an economic stake in their pueblo, they are now – at least in Marinaleda – called upon to lead the way. Non-co-operativists are by no means excluded from involvement in the town’s political, social and cultural life – it’s more that if you are a part of the co-operative, you can’t really avoid being swept up in local activities, outside the confines of the working day.

  Many visitors to Marinaleda seem to expect the rhetoric about autonomy and self-sustainability to mean that everything grown on the land is consumed in the village, with nothing imported or exported. It doesn’t quite work like that: they’d have an unusually pimento-heavy diet if they operated according to the principles of subsistence farming in Marinaleda. The produce is certainly sold in the village: you can find the El Humoso logo on jars and tins of vegetables in the few grocery shops, including the Basque-owned supermarket Eroski, the closest Marinaleda has to a ‘big name’ chain store, the size of a small 7-Eleven one might find in a major city. The other ‘supermarket’ is Coviran, also a grocery chain, and about the same size as most marinaleños’ living rooms. But the bulk of El Humoso produce is sold outside the village, all over Spain and even abroad.

  It would be churlish to reproach them for it, but inevitably, the unique context for the co-operative’s produce is made very clear in its marketing: ‘Know that when you consume any product from our co-operative, you are helping to create employment and social justice’. Why not, suggests the website, show your support for this ‘alternative solidary economy’? Sánchez Gordillo found himself making a similar case in 2012, when he spent two and a half weeks visiting Venezuela, doing numerous TV interviews and speeches: he eventually persuaded Chávez’s lieutenants to invest state money in buying olive oil from the co-operative – a big deal for the village, in every sense.

  After our breakfast in the olive oil factory, Dave and I asked if we could see the olive harvest in action, since we had come at the right time of year. Sure, Manolo said. It was another glorious sunny winter day, and I asked if we could walk it. He laughed and shook his head. ’1,200 hectares is a lot, you know?’ The harvest was happening far away, far too far; literally miles away from the farm buildings and the road, over the rolling hills, beyond the TIERRA UTOPIA mural, beyond the horizon.

  So we were passed along a series of men in green overalls, piled into a mud-splattered 4×4 with Antonio and set off along the bumpy, soggy paths through the fields. Somewhere along the way our back wheel sunk deep into a muddy hole and we ground to a halt: the wheel spun and spun, but there was nothing doing. While Antonio went off to look for help, we stood amid the endless symmetrical rows of twelve-foot olive trees. It was like being lost in a forest, but with no canopy overhead blocking out the light, just blue sky. It took him about half an hour to reappear, accompanied by a tractor to tow us out. At one point we spotted another group of pickers, about a quarter of a mile from the path, bent low over the reddish-brown pepper plants in the distance.

  When we arrived at the harvest site we found about forty people taking in the olives, sweating away in grubby t-shirts and roughed-up jeans. Spain not only cultivates more olives than any other country on earth, it cultivates more than the second, third, fourth and fifth countries in the list (Italy, Greece, Morocco and Turkey) put together. Marinaleda’s olive oil is described as hand-crafted, which it mostly is, but they do get some help from a wonderful piece of machinery: the tree shaker. This bit of kit grasps the tree trunk about a third of the way down with outstretched metal arms, like Homer Simpson grabbing Bart’s neck. The driver then presses ‘shake’, and it proceeds to throttle the tree frenetically, while the olives rain down in their hundreds – aided by two men with ten-foot aluminium poles whose job it is to whack the branches while it’s shaking. It’s basic physics, but it works.

  After about thirty seconds of this, when the downpour of fresh olives has been reduced to a trickle, the machine releases the tree, reverses away, and swings around to attack the next. Meanwhile, the workers move in for the exhausting next phase. They gather up the vast nets that now contain hundreds, perhaps thousands of olives, tie the nets at the corners, and, with the bunched end held with both hands over one shoulder, lean into the hard slog of dragging the nets through the rows of trees to where the truck is waiting to take them back for processing. The men and women are inclined at the same narrow angle to the ground as the guys who pull articulated lorries in World’s Strongest Man competitions. They looked about as determined, so we tried not to get in their way.

  As late morning turned into early afternoon, another smiling chap in green overalls offered us a lift back to the farmhouse where we had begun, and we decided to take it – we didn’t want to get stuck out there. This time, it transpired, we would be travelling in a rather more old-school way: in the back of an olive truck, clinging onto the sides, supported by the rustic cushion of thousands of freshly harvested olives. ‘Have you tried squeezing them between your fingers?’ asked Dave. I squeezed, and managed to hit myself right in the eye with the gloriously fragrant gloop of fresh olive oil. It smelt amazing on my fingertips, toasting in the December sunshine: some consolation for the temporary blindness.

  At the farmhouse we hung around some more, taking photos and idly wondering how to get home, when another white 4×4 pulled up, and a big, rectangular wardrobe of a man in his fifties leaned out and asked if we needed to get back to the village. His name escapes me now, but it’s fairly safe to assume he was called Antonio. It was getting near lunchtime – Spanish lunchtime; English lunchtime had long since passed – and so the traffic was going in the right direction. The working day in the fields is over by 3 pm.

  So we chuntered along the blessedly flat roads, back towards Marinaleda, with Estepa looming halfway up the hill in the distance to the right. Are these lands part of El Humoso too? I asked, gesturing at the olive rows around us. No, these are all fairly small holdings, private lands, he explained, mostly owned by people from the neighbouring pueblo of El Rubio, the kind of farms run by one family, perhaps with a little help from hired labourers at harvest time. We’ve visited El Rubio, I told him: in a way, it’s not really so different from Marinaleda, right? Another small Andalusian pueblo with lots of jornaleros, some tapas bars, and a carnival?

  He briefly turned his head away from the road ahead and looked at me like I was a small child. ‘It’s completely different.’ That told me.

  * * *

  The land – the dirt, the earth itself – is not only deemed to be a sovereign right, a home; in a deep sense, it is almost part of the jornalero’s DNA. La tierra is exalted throughout Sánchez Gordillo’s rhetoric, and in the language of his political fellow travellers, the SOC-SAT and men like Diego Cañamero. This is
both geographical and historical: to be surrounded by it and denied ownership of it, for so long, gives the earth a very different hue. But this unwavering focus on the land as the ultimate goal leaves no room for diversification or distraction: there is never a suggestion, or even a consideration, that utopia might be protected and furthered by the expansion of job creation into other areas. Marinaleda’s motto – one of its many mottos – is ‘Land to the tiller’. That is what they as a pueblo are destined to do.

  It’s a philosophy which positions 1991 as their ideological end-point; this is their End of History.

  Some of the British ex-pats living in the village suggested to me that, given the crisis, now was the time for the Ayuntamiento to capitalise on Marinaleda’s increasing fame and create some kind of gift shop, selling t-shirts and baseball caps and all the usual tat, emblazoned with the village name and crest. They’re certainly right that there are enough visitors to sustain such an enterprise; there always have been, but especially since the actions and expropriations of August 2012. Tourists and travellers flock from Spain and Europe just for the night to see this notorious little village for themselves, while others come in from Seville, Malaga or Valencia for concerts at Palo Palo. Just imagine, Len laughed, you could buy a combination costume of a Palestinian keffiyeh, a checked shirt and a straw hat, to look like the mayor, and a mouse mat with una utopia hacia la paz on it. León at Palo Palo sells t-shirts, after all. ‘He’s got some sense. But the mayor will never do it. He’s only interested in the land. But it’s stupid! They don’t have work – and people would buy that crap, of course they would.’

  Private enterprise as such is permitted in the village – not only legally, but perhaps more importantly, it is permitted, an accepted part of life. As with the seven privately owned bars and cafés in the village (the Sindicato bar is owned by the union), if you wanted to open a pizzeria or a little family business of any kind, no one would stand in your way. But if a hypothetical Head of Regional Development and Franchising for, say, Carrefour, or Starbucks, with a vicious sense of humour and a masochistic streak, decided this small village was the perfect spot to expand operations, well – they wouldn’t get very far. ‘We just wouldn’t allow it,’ Sánchez Gordillo told me bluntly.

  The point is that Marinaleda is not, in the full extent of its economic operations, a communist village. Or at the very least, in the Soviet analogy, it’s more NEP than War Communism, a mixed economy that permits the generation of some small-scale private profit, rather than an all-encompassing, centrally planned control economy.

  There are a number of privately owned farms, mostly small plots of land owned by a single family, enough to sustain an extended family in work and income, but not enough to provoke the ire of the cooperativistas, or Sánchez Gordillo. Even in the case of the few families with enough work to sporadically employ others, usually to help with harvests, there is an obvious – and widely recognised – distinction between that kind of land ownership and the latifundios owned by the Houses of Alba and Infantado. No one in this part of the world seems to be absolutist about property and profit, and consequently the kulaks aren’t nervously looking over their shoulders.

  In 2013, the subjectivity of the marinaleño worker is self-consciously different to that in the world outside. Left or right, no one is ignorant of this exceptionalism, based on the fact that El Humoso works towards a common goal, for the benefit of a collective, not an individual, and that it is part of something bigger than the farm itself. And yet, in a day-to-day sense, the attitude to work itself is much the same as anywhere else. ‘It’s really tiring, it’s hard work,’ is the first response of most young – and not so young – marinaleños to questions about work in the fields. ‘It’s boring and repetitive’ is the most common description of work on the factory production line. Neither of these assessments is exactly surprising. A change in socio-political context or labour organisation, however dramatic, does little to change the nature of work itself.

  But not a single marinaleño I met neglected to mention the socio-political context of that work, the history of the struggle to create it, or the parlous situation in the rest of crisis-hit Spain. The lament about work being boring, tiring or unstimulating was always followed by a ‘but’: but at least we have it here. But at least we have it now. But at least we have it together. But at least we fought and won it for ourselves.

  With an average of 36 per cent unemployment across Andalusia in 2013, soaring above 50 per cent in some towns, and a history of 65 per cent unemployment in Marinaleda in the 1980s, no one is ignorant of how bad it was, and how bad it could be. The marinaleño attitude to work is best explained not as ‘striving for the sake of striving’, as if there was something innately noble about work, but as striving for autonomy – for the dignity that comes from people’s sovereignty over their own survival.

  Autonomy is at the core of the local philosophy: the elevation of individual freedom intrinsic to the nineteenth-century anarchism which blew like wildfire through this region. ‘In this community’, wrote a visiting journalist during the 1980 hunger strike, ‘the concepts of work and autonomy are unified.’ Jornaleros, as farm-workers without land, could never be said to be truly free without a sovereignty over their work, and the basic stability of not having to migrate hundreds of miles from home in order to get it.

  Without this context in mind, the Marinaleda attitude can appear to outsiders as a kind of miniature Stakhanovism: there are constant demands for the right to work, accentuating the sense that you can only prove your political fidelity (to the struggle, to the collective, above all to the pueblo) through work.

  When Spanish social security took the form of ‘community employment’ in the early 1980s, the people of Marinaleda responded by campaigning for land, and for work, rather than the humiliation of doing ‘government jobs’ not dissimilar to those prescribed as sentences by the judiciary. The only visible difference between community employment and a chain gang, in fact, was the lack of physical chains. Throughout the 1980s, the unemployed jornaleros of the south were accused, as poor communities so often are, of fecklessness and even fraud – normally by politicians from the north. In the first of many media-savvy stunts, Marinaleda responded by working harder for free, as this El País report from March 1981 records:

  Unemployed agricultural workers of the Seville town of Marinaleda unanimously decided to expand their work day in community employment to seven hours a day, instead of the six hours officially stipulated, as a show of real will to work, and to protest allegations of fraud and picaresca [rogueish behaviour].

  In 1982, when the community employment fund was temporarily withdrawn and several Andalusian towns went on strike, Marinaleda voted in its assembly to continue working, even without pay. In August that year, Sánchez Gordillo addressed a rally of 8,000 farm labourers in Seville, saying that what was needed was real work, not charity: ‘If they still do not understand, from this event, that we want to work the land, well: we will have to act differently.’

  One of the most well-known symbolic and practical activities of Marinaleda is the ritual of Domingos Rojos, Red Sundays. Once a month – so the theory goes – the people of the village gather on a Sunday morning outside the Sindicato, usually as early as 8 am, and, depending on individual capabilities, and a popular vote on what needs doing most urgently, the participants proceed to spend the day working voluntarily to improve the village. This could mean gardening in the public park, painting murals, sweeping the streets, or helping bring in the harvest in El Humoso.

  Red Sundays were born out of an argument between the pueblo and Prime Minister Felipe González. In a 1983 speech González (an Andalusian himself) dusted off the old canard that Andalusian farm labourers were lazy and accused them of spending their community employment pay on luxuries like cars. Marinaleda held a Saturday night assembly and decided to devote the next day to improving the pueblo. Sánchez Gordillo called up the press and informed them as follows:

 
‘We want to demonstrate that in order to find laziness and corruption, the prime minister should look not at the Andalusian jornaleros, but somewhere closer to home. We want to show him that when the government rests, the jornaleros are working.’

  And so the next day, they set about several hours of street repair, painting and landscaping in the public squares. It was a defiant performance to the outside world, and a humiliation for the prime minister.

  Beyond their propaganda role, Talego’s observation on Red Sundays was that they also played a big part in solidifying community sensibility and tightening the bonds of the pueblo – thus boosting participation and faith in the project. This was, Talego suggested, a two-way street: when dishing out paid work at El Humoso, it would be relevant whether you had participated in Red Sundays – just like individuals’ participation in demonstrations, general assemblies and even village festivities would be informally, unofficially noticed.

  More than that, though, voluntary work arguably changes the labour relation. Marinaleda exists in a capitalist world, but proving that ‘we can work for reasons other than money’ is, for Sánchez Gordillo, an act of subversion of capitalism in itself. It is one situated in the history of some of the mayor’s idols – heroes of the Cuban revolution like Che, and even some Soviet figures.