Marinaleda, a small village outside of Seville, has tried
for the last thirty-five years to construct what has failed numerous times
before — a communist utopia. In "The
Village Against The World," author
Dan Hancox traveled to the countryside of Andalusia, Spain to find the story of
the incredible village. Here are a few excerpts that Hancox shared with Business
Insider:
In 2004, I was leafing through a travel guide to Andalusia
while on holiday in Seville, and read a fleeting reference to a small, remote
village called Marinaleda – a unique place,‘a communist utopia’ of
revolutionary farm labourers, it said. I was immediately fascinated, but I
could find almost no details to feed my fascination. There was so little
information about the village available beyond that short summary, either in
the guidebook, on the internet, or on the lips of strangers I met in Seville.
‘Ah yes, the strange little communist village, the utopia’, a few of them said.
But none of them had visited, or knew anyone who had –and no one could tell me
whether it really was a utopia. The best anyone could do was to add the
information that it had a charismatic, eccentric mayor, with a prophet’s beard
and an almost demagogic presence, called Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo.
Eventually I found out more. The first part of Marinaleda’s
miracle is that when their struggle to create utopia began, in the late 1970s,
it was from a position of abject poverty. The village was suffering over 60
percent unemployment; it was a farming community with no land, its people
frequently forced to go without food for days at a time, in a period of Spanish
history mired in uncertainty after the death of the fascist dictator General
Franco. The second part of Marinaleda’s miracle is that over three
extraordinary decades, they won. Some distance along that remarkable journey of
struggle and sacrifice, in 1985, Sánchez Gordillo told the newspaper El País:
We have learned that it is not enough to define utopia, nor
is it enough to fight against the reactionary forces. One must build it here
and now, brick by brick, patiently but steadily, until we can make the old
dreams a reality: that there will be bread for all, freedom among citizens, and
culture; and to be able to read with respect the word ‘peace’. We sincerely
believe that there is no future that is not built in the present.
It may be a household name in Spain today, but it was not
until the late twentieth century that Marinaleda gained any notoriety. The
village ’s first victories came during a different systemic crisis, one which
exists in the living memory of many: the aftermath of a fascist dictatorship.
In 1975, thirty-six years after his brutal victory in the
Spanish Civil War, General Francisco Franco finally passed away. He left
Andalusia in a wretched state: aside from the embryonic construction and
tourism industries on the Costa del Sol – the profits from which rarely
enriched the locals – the region was bereft of industrial development, and of
investment generally. As a region historically home to rebellious peasant
farmers, scourges of the kind of central authority Franco embodied, and his
enemies in the 1936–39 Civil War, he had been happy to let it rot.
In the ensuing chaos of the dictator’s death, while his
friends and enemies manoeuvred to address the power vacuum in Madrid, the small
community of poor, mostly landless farm labourers in Marinaleda began to pursue
their own unique version of la Transición. At the time, 90 percent of
landless day labourers, known in Spain as jornaleros, had to feed
themselves and their families on only two months of work a year.
As Spain began its slow, careful transition from fascism to
liberal democracy, the people of Marinaleda formed a political party and a
trade union, and began fighting for land and freedom. There followed over a
decade of unceasing struggle, in which they occupied airports, train stations, government
buildings, farms and palaces; went on hunger strike, blocked roads, marched,
picketed, went on hunger strike again; were beaten, arrested and tried
countless times for their pains. Astonishingly, in 1991 they prevailed. The
government, exhausted by their defiance, gave them 1,200 hectares of land
belonging to the Duke of Infantado, head of one of Spain’s oldest and
wealthiest aristocratic families.
From the very beginning, one man was at the forefront of
this struggle. In 1979, at the age of thirty, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo
became the first elected mayor of Marinaleda, a position he has held ever since
–re-elected time after time with an overwhelming majority. However, holding
official state-sanctioned positions of power was only a distraction from the
serious business of la lucha – the struggle. In the intense heat of
the summer of 1980, the village launched ‘a hunger strike against hunger’ which
brought them national and even global recognition. Everything they have done
since that summer has increased the notoriety of Sánchez Gordillo and his
village, and added to their admirers and enemies across Spain.
Sánchez Gordillo’s philosophy, outlined in his 1980 book Andaluces,
levantaos, and in countless speeches and interviews since, is one which is
unique to him, though grounded firmly in the historic struggles and uprisings
of the peasant pueblos of Andalusia, and their remarkably deep-seated
tendency towards anarchism. These communities are striking for being not just
anti-authoritarian, but against all authority. "I have never belonged to
the Communist Party of the hammer and sickle, but I am a communist or
communitarian," Sánchez Gordillo clarified in an interview in 2011, adding
that his political beliefs were drawn from a mixture of Christ, Gandhi,
Marx, Lenin and Che.
In August 2012 he achieved a new level of notoriety for a
string of actions that began, in forty-degree heat, with the occupation of
military land, the seizure of an aristocrat’s palace, and a three-week march
across the south in which he called on his fellow mayors not to repay their
debts. Its peak saw Sánchez Gordillo lead a series of supermarket
expropriations along with fellow members of the left-communist trade union
SOC-SAT. They marched into supermarkets and took bread, rice, olive oil and
other basic supplies, and donated them to food banks for Andalusians who could
not feed themselves. For this he became a superstar, appearing not only on the
cover of the Spanish newspapers, but across the world’s media, as ‘the Robin Hood
Mayor’, ‘The Don Quixote of the Spanish Crisis’, or ‘Spain’s William Wallace’,
depending on which newspaper you read.
Somewhat later in the book, Hancox finally meets “the
Robin Hood Mayor,” Sánchez Gordillo, in the wake of the recent Spanish
financial crisis. The communist mayor is, as many might guess, fascinating:
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.’
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