The Village Against the World (12 page)

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As soon as the 1,200-hectare farm was won in 1991, cultivation began. The new Marinaleda co-operative selected crops that would need the greatest amount of human labour, to create as much work as possible. In addition to the ubiquitous olives and the oil processing factory, they planted peppers of various kinds, artichokes, fava beans, green beans, broccoli: crops that could be processed, canned, and jarred, to justify the creation of a processing factory which provided a secondary industry back in the village, and thus more employment. ‘Our aim was not to create profit, but jobs,’ Sánchez Gordillo explained to me. This philosophy runs directly counter to the late-capitalist emphasis on ‘efficiency’ – a word which has been elevated to almost holy status in the neoliberal lexicon, but in reality has become a shameful euphemism for the sacrifice of human dignity at the altar of share prices.

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.

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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
.