The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  Over the last few years la crisis in Spain – that distant land, beyond the borders of the village – has become a permanent state of affairs; it is a phrase you hear so often in news reports and everyday conversations, it almost loses meaning. La crisis is not a moment, not even an unpleasantly long-lasting event, but the state of things.

  In May and June 2011, as the PSOE government stuttered towards its inevitable collapse, and unemployment, foreclosures and debt soared to astounding new highs, the Spanish people mounted their first serious response to the crisis. The now famous indignados movement began in Madrid with the occupation of the capital’s iconic central square, the Puerta del Sol, on 15 May 2011, and over the following weeks spread out into all of Spain’s major towns and cities, until it was a truly national phenomenon, identified by the name 15-M or ‘the Spanish revolution’. The broadest phrasing of the many demands emanating from the 15-M encampments was for ‘real democracy now’. Its pluralistic anti-capitalism, horizontalism, pacifism, general assemblies and working groups became both the template and the immediate inspiration for the global Occupy movement, in America and beyond. A study for Ipsos Public Affairs that summer found between 6 and 8.5 million people, in a country of only 48 million, said they had taken part: 76 per cent of those polled said their demands were reasonable, and only 7 per cent were opposed to the protests.

  ‘We are’, announced one especially totemic 15-M slogan, ‘neither right nor left: we are coming from the bottom and we’re going for the top.’

  Seville may be a city of historic renown, a major international tourist destination, and the capital of Andalusia, but it’s not actually very big: it’s less than a quarter of the size of Madrid. Nonetheless, the day protests exploded into life there, 29 May 2011, over 30,000 people spilled out of the Metro and into the Plaza de España. The Plaza was the central exhibit in the 1929 Sevilla Expo, a massive monument from a world fair built on the brink of global collapse, a space so wide and open it makes you catch your breath – with only the central fountain to draw your eye away from the sumptuous tiles of the perimeter; it hosts the best kind of emptiness, a vacancy that demands to be filled with people. And then, drums playing, in the glorious heat of early summer, they marched past the world’s largest cathedral, past the Moorish Giralda tower, past Plaza Nueva, where the city hall is, and eventually halted on the newly finished public-private architectural monstrosity widely known as The Mushroom. The camp lasted a month there, with thousands sleeping over for some or all of the period, yearning for the full experience, the corporeal solidarity.

  Amid Seville’s wizened stone and garlanded history, the demand was for something new. If they were to start creating ‘real democracy now’, as their slogan demanded, it would be focused on horizontal organisation, mass assemblies, and consensus-based decision making. A resurgent sincerity seemed to emerge from the swamp of postmodernist irony, just as it did in New York. In both cases, they meant business. ‘They wanted to take it seriously,’ Emma the indignada told me, when I met her later that year. ‘Drinking was forbidden, because it was not supposed to just become a party, so at one or two in the morning people were just chatting quietly about politics, or sleeping. A lot of different topics came up, with people who wanted to help Palestine or the Sahara. You had a schedule, day by day, a lot of events and discussions. People were bringing food from home to The Mushroom – there were people from nearby villages and towns outside Seville, including Marinaleda.’

  Emma was not an experienced activist, and she seemed particularly eager that I understand her consternation at just how broad and unprecedented a movement it was: 15-M was something unique and special, the source of an empowering head-rush of new possibilities. This, she explained, was a new level of participation, involving more than just the usual suspects such as the leftist parties, anarchists, perroflautas (hippies) and socialist trade unions.

  ‘Of course,’ Emma continued, ‘there was a big representation from Marinaleda at 15-M, they hired a big bus so everybody could come to Seville. Marinaleda is really, really important for us.’ Why is that, I asked? ‘Because here we are really too quiet, and they are not. I’m so excited you’re going there,’ she said, kindly, like I was in for a treat.

  ‘Before I went to Marinaleda, I had this idea of it being a very revolutionary place, and it is, but … it’s really the old people who are like that. The young people you see there don’t seem to be conscious of how lucky they are, of all the things they have. It’s really weird. They live in a kind of bubble, they don’t realise what the world is like elsewhere.’

  So they don’t ever leave the bubble?

  ‘Well, I’ve never met anyone from Marinaleda who is not actually living there. You’re not going to find a really intellectual place there – don’t misunderstand me, it’s people who’ve been working all their lives, but before, they were working for big landowners.’

  For centuries, there has been anger across the south of Spain about the latifundios. ‘But in Marinaleda,’ she said emphatically, ‘– in Marinaleda they didn’t get angry, they just went! They broke down the gate, got inside, knocked on the door and said “We need land”.’ Her admiration for the marinaleños as people who act out their class war, rather than merely talking about it, as pseudo-intellectual city folk are wont to do, was not in the least patronising – there was genuine longing in her voice, for that level of political integrity. The dedication to direct action certainly tallies with the history of the Andalusian pueblos. Sánchez Gordillo would later cite to me the notion of ‘propaganda of the deed’ as anarchism’s greatest influence on his politics.

  The 15-M participants not only protested against the dire state the crisis had left them in, they also announced their complete lack of faith in the established parliamentary parties – in parliamentary politics at all – to solve any of these problems. It was thus inevitable when, in November 2011’s general election, plagued by incompetence and incumbency, the nominally centre-left PSOE were ousted in favour of the rightist PP. The left-wing coalition IU, which Sánchez Gordillo’s CUT party belongs to, doubled their previous vote share to 7 per cent nationally, but to expect the indignados’ energy and numbers to be transformed into any kind of game-changing protest vote is to misunderstand the nature of their indignation.

  Most of the indignados had abstained, the PSOE vote tumbled from 44 to 29 per cent, and the remaining rump of voters elected Mariano Rajoy as the first PP prime minister since 2004. There are, a 15-M member called Juanjo told me at the time, 10 million Spaniards who will always vote PP, whatever happens – so if everyone else opts out, they’re going to win.

  The 15-M movement had informed not just Spain, but the world, that millions of Spaniards were unwilling to brook the crisis. They were desperately looking for an alternative to the current system – and yet, in their midst, there was already one in operation. They may have ignored it before, or dismissed it with a chuckle as a rural curiosity run by a bearded eccentric; but they could do so no longer. ‘What are your demands? What is your alternative?’ barked the dogs of capitalist realism. And, especially in the south, the indignados were able to respond: ‘Well, how about Marinaleda?’

  It seems almost too obvious to say, but Marinaleda is a village of fewer than 3,000 people. It is not a political party, it is not a revolutionary national movement, and it is not an ideology in itself. Its ability to provide an answer to all of Spain’s problems was, and is, clearly limited.

  And yet the marinaleños used the small bully pulpit that 15-M afforded them with gusto. Throughout 2011, Sánchez Gordillo took every opportunity to get the message across on TV, in the press, and in the Andalusian parliament that the Spanish people were being unduly punished for capitalism’s crisis, and it was time to resist, as the village had done.

  Then, at the end of 2011, came Marinaleda’s latest highly public contretemps with the Spanish nobility. This time it extended beyond the Duchess of Alba, to her son – and on this occasion it was defi
nitely the noble who started it. Cayetano Luis Martínez de Irujo y Fitz-James Stuart, also known as the Olympic horse-riding Duke of Salvatierra, made some blithely provocative public remarks which enraged the marinaleños. First, Cayetano said he agreed with a right-wing Catalan nationalist politician that Andalusian workers were using government subsidies to get drunk, sponging off the richer Catalans. Shortly afterwards, he was challenged about this in a TV interview. Surely, the interviewer said, the sharp rise in poverty in the south was due to the crisis, not to the fecklessness of the workers? Cayetano responded that Andalusia was ‘a fraud’, where no one wanted to work and backwardness was ingrained: ‘When you see these young people, who have absolutely no desire whatsoever to progress, that’s serious. That only happens in Andalusia.’

  In a sense, this kind of casual upper-class prejudice is so predictable it might just have been ignored; you suspect a similar outrage in the UK might have provoked a few muttered swearwords and some rolled eyes. In Marinaleda they opted for a slightly more robust, direct response: they occupied Cayetano’s land.

  ‘He owns fourteen cortijos between Cordoba and Seville, and the Duchess of Alba has 35,000 hectares,’ Sánchez Gordillo told me the following month. For Cayetano to have the gall to complain about Andalusian labourers living off farm subsidies was, like the House of Alba itself, pretty ridiculously rich. ‘They receive so much help!’ laughed Sánchez Gordillo. ‘Together with the Queen of England, the duquesa is the one who receives the most money from the PAC [Common Agricultural Policy]: she receives €3 million a year. So we occupied the cortijos and said he had to retract his comments.’

  Camped out on his lands, they had ample opportunity to explain the huge disparity in Andalusian land ownership, and EU subsidies, to visiting members of the press eager for a quirky angle on la crisis. Sánchez Gordillo and his fellow occupiers made another demand: that Cayetano cease hiring illegal workers through private contractors who operate ‘like the mafia’, brutalising the illegal workers and native jornaleros alike.

  Not for the first time, the village won. In the subsequent PR climbdown, Cayetano accepted all their demands, apologised, and travelled to the south to meet Sánchez Gordillo and see Marinaleda for himself. It was a humbling experience for the young nobleman, who publicly professed his gratitude for an ‘enriching’ day visiting El Humoso and seeing all the work going on there. ‘Sometimes we think things are one way, and then realise they are very different,’ he admitted to El Público.

  Spain’s film crews and journalists were once again zeroing in on Marinaleda, waiting patiently for Sánchez Gordillo’s next outburst, or the next piece of direct action from the Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores (SAT). When the crisis started sinking Spain, it raised up the one existing alternative in its midst, throwing the village’s exceptional past and unique present into sharper relief than ever. The indignados were more than a protest movement, they had declared their desire for a different way of living; and so, despite its awkward size and location, Marinaleda was the obvious choice for an Andalusian-wide 15-M reunion rally in November 2011.

  Sánchez Gordillo described this event as a kind of Andalusian awakening: it was video-streamed from their town hall to tens of thousands, and hundreds of visitors came for the occasion. When he addressed the meeting, he spoke, at breakneck speed as usual, about dreams and injustices, and the urgent need to mend the gap between the utopian ideal and the grim reality. He finished his speech by quoting Che’s words: ‘Only those who dream will someday see their dreams converted to reality.’ He added that it was not enough to believe in a different world – it was time to have the courage to live as if it had already arrived.

  Other speakers at the rally included spokespeople from a new anti-capitalist co-operative in Valencia, and Enric Duran, an infamous young Catalan who borrowed €492,000 from thirty-nine different financial institutions, with no intention of paying it back, and distributed it among a variety of different co-operatives and revolutionary projects. If Marinaleda is Asterix’s village, pluckily holding out against the Romans despite the enormous odds stacked against them, then 15-M was like a simultaneous discovery, across the vast reaches of the empire, that maybe everyone else had access to the magic potion, too.

  When I interviewed Sánchez Gordillo that winter, he was, as usual, entirely confident in his world-view and the stark contrast between what they were creating and the world outside. To his credit, there was not a sliver of triumphalism in his analysis; it was stern, and sober.

  ‘The myth of capitalism has crumbled,’ he announced, ‘that the market is an omnipotent God that fixes everything with his invisible hand. We’ve seen this is a great lie, a stupid fundamentalism: we’ve seen that in times of crisis, markets have had to resort to the state, and that states are putting money into the banks.’

  And so they were – hundreds of billions of euros’ worth. In Spain, 75 per cent of debt is private. There was no extravagant public spending that created the crisis there; in 2008 Spain’s finances were well within the Eurozone’s fiscal rules, and its government debt as a share of GDP was much lower than Germany’s, a situation they maintained, to begin with. In Spain, essentially, it is the crash which created the debt, not the other way around.

  ‘If there were any justice in the world the big bankers, and the governments that allowed them to perpetrate their economic terrorism, would be in jail. And those same people who caused the crisis are the ones who now want to fix it. The pyromaniac wants to play the fireman! Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy want to speak for the banks and fix what they caused.

  ‘Everywhere there’s crisis: an agricultural crisis, an industrial crisis, a financial crisis, a food crisis, a system crisis. Before, people had work, so they didn’t think twice about it. Here in Andalusia there was a boom in construction, and things were getting built everywhere. A construction worker would earn three, four or five thousand euros per month – a lot of money! Then when we lost those jobs, people began losing their homes, because they couldn’t pay the mortgage, so the banks have been repossessing them. And so now people are seeking refuge in agriculture instead, and in other formulas that aren’t those of capitalism.’ And how serious are those formulas? Sánchez Gordillo rejected the idea that 15-M was ‘merely reformist’, as some of its leftist critics have contended: it was developing, he said, ‘an increasingly anti-capitalist vision’.

  In London, I told him, big-state social democracy on the post-war model was increasingly seen as finished. The centre-left approach, of a compromise with capitalism, was kaput: apart from anything else, if someone won’t meet you halfway, it’s not a compromise anymore. Just like 15-M, the people at Occupy London and Occupy Wall Street were looking for alternative models wherever they could find them, however obscure the location. In fact, I explained, that’s kind of what brought me here. He nodded sympathetically.

  ‘People no longer care if it’s this party or another party, PP or PSOE; they want to change the system to one that isn’t capitalistic, with unions, parties and organisations that promote a different system, with human beings at the core. People are considered merchandise: while they’re profitable, they’re used, and when they’re no longer profitable, they’re discarded. We have to change these cruel and inhuman values. I have dedicated my entire life to this.’

  He wrote ‘PP’ and ‘PSOE’ on the scrap paper in front of him, drew a circle around each, then one bigger circle around the outside. Stabbing the edge of this impromptu Venn diagram with the point of the pencil, he said simply: ‘It’s all capitalism.’

  A few months later, Sánchez Gordillo had his contempt for ‘the capitalist parties’ and his sense of realpolitik tested, when he was unexpectedly given the chance to take some small parliamentary advantage of the crisis. Following the general election at the end of 2011, March 2012 saw elections to the regional parliament in Seville: the PP were the largest party by a sliver but did not win a majority, and the prospect of a PSOE–IU coalition emerged. During the wee
ks of coalition talks, Sánchez Gordillo was being widely mentioned as a possible minister in a hypothetical PSOE–IU government – something which would have required him to abandon the mayoralty, and abandon Marinaleda both politically and geographically. He had been a deputy while still living in the village, but he couldn’t be a minister and not move to Seville.

  A compromise with the PSOE would have brought Sánchez Gordillo a great deal more power and influence, a bigger bully pulpit, and a voice in policy-making across Andalusia. Instead, he launched a revolt.

  The PSOE, he announced, were a party without principle – and if they went into coalition with this ‘capitalist’ party, IU would be, too. ‘We cannot bring ourselves closer to the sinking ship’, Sánchez Gordillo told El Mundo, and warned in the strongest possible language that such a coalition would mean legitimising the PSOE and ushering in austerity-lite, while sending the left ‘to hell’ as a stooge of the capitalist parties. As it happened, IU split in two, the party leadership made a pact with the PSOE, and Sánchez Gordillo’s warnings about more austerity and cuts were almost immediately vindicated. It was an articulation of another of his maxims: if you can’t win the fight, at least keep faith with your principles.

  The first time we met, I’d noticed how his gesticulations grew increasingly theatrical and effusive, and his trilled rrrr’s ever faster, ever raspier, the bigger the issues and ideas became. He was quite capable of working himself up into a revolutionary tumult, never mind anyone else. At the time I wondered if he was being wasted on such a small stage, as the mayor of a village of 2,700 people. What with his long-proven penchant for headline-grabbing actions, not to mention the three-hour declamations on Marinaleda TV, I wondered whether he, too, hankered for a bigger platform. Whether he wanted it or not, by August 2012, he would have it.