The Village Against the World (13 page)

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In 1982, when the community employment fund was temporarily withdrawn and several Andalusian towns went on strike, Marinaleda voted in its assembly to continue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.

The primacy of work and land within the Marinaleda mythology comes less easily to the younger generation, who did not spend their formative years denied it, nor struggled throughout their lives to get it. Moreover,
modern technology and transportation has dissolved the hard boundaries of the
pueblo –
and its tight occupational possibilities – in a way that would have been inconceivable 100 or even thirty years ago. The Andalusian
jornalero
identity – with its unique iteration in each
pueblo –
has been remarkably tenacious over the centuries, but the fact is that both culture and people now seep in and out of the borders of each town with incredible ease. Cheap cars, cheap flights and the internet have flattened the landscape.

‘A thousand euros a month is fine – 1,200 a month is pretty good,’ Cristina, a young law graduate, told me one evening as we nursed our
cañitas
of cheap lager. We were talking about the
mileuristas
, her generation, so christened because they had learned to get by on one thousand euros (
mil euros
) per month. The Spanish minimum wage works out at €600–700 a month, and unemployment benefit is generally €500–600 per month. Cristina was living with her mother in Marinaleda while also renting a room in a flat in Estepa, where she works as a teacher some of the week. She lives a dual life, she explained: she loves her life in the larger
pueblo
, shared with other people her age; it offered an escape of sorts from an unfortunately prolonged adolescence. Her peers in Estepa tell the same story – many of them are thirty or above and still live with their parents.

Cristina’s parents are
marinaleños
, and moved to Barcelona in the great exodus of the 1960s, when there was no work in the fields. Like so many, they returned in the 1980s because the situation had changed. Despite the long
absence, they were always, of course, sons and daughters of the
pueblo
. Cristina was schooled in the new post-Franco Catalan education system, and almost everyone in her class was a Spanish emigrant – there were people from Extremadura, Galicia, Andalusia, and only about four or five Catalans. ‘It gave me a big belief in cosmopolitanism,’ she told me. ‘People were sharing their cultures from across Spain. One child would say, “at home we eat this kind of food”, another would say, “ah, well, my mother cooks the stew like this …” ’

In the perfect storm of Ryanair,
la crisis
, and the internet, a new kind of wanderlust-by-necessity is detectable among Spain’s younger generations – and it has infiltrated Marinaleda, too. There is a growing sense that the current Spanish
juventud sin futuro
, youth without a future, will only find one by emigrating. Cristina had this same
zeitgeist
mixture of despair – she’s been unemployed before – and sense of adventure and excitement when she considers that leaving the country might be her only option. I’d love to see London, she said, agonising, as she often did, about the quality of her English skills – she badly needed to pass her imminent English exams, she felt, in order to get out.

In 2013, everyone knows that full employment in Marinaleda is a myth. In fact, it’s not even fair to call it a myth: ‘They don’t
really
have full employment!’ is a straw man set up by right-wing critics of the village. Sánchez Gordillo’s line in interviews in recent years has been: ‘We
have almost full employment.’ This is correct, according to the official statistics from the Junta de Andalucía: the unemployment rate in the village is 5 to 6 per cent.

The situation is certainly tougher now than it has been for a long time. One evening in the Centro de Adultos, where evening classes take place, I picked up a Youth of Marinaleda Bulletin, a monthly four-page leaflet produced by the town hall. Alongside notices of go-karting and basketball tournaments, and courses in ‘personal marketing’ for budding entrepreneurs, laid on by the Andalusian Youth Institute, was a page of jobseeker websites including
summerjobs.com
,
pickingjobs.com
,
holidayresortjobs.com
,
workingholidayguru.com
,
gapwork.com
. Almost all of them offered short-term, seasonal work orientated around harvests and holiday high seasons on the coast. On the back was another page devoted to job vacancies, advertising work in McDonald’s, Toys R Us and Disneyland – or, for anyone willing to travel not just beyond the
pueblo
, but beyond the Spanish border, there was the possibility of cleaning jobs in France.

In a sense, it was ever thus. The modish idea of ‘the precariat’ describes the group experiencing ever-worsening labour conditions under late capitalism following the slow disintegration of the job-for-life, with its relatively stable, union-backed working conditions and pensions. In Spain this is a process which Prime Minister Rajoy’s landmark, detested labour reforms of 2011 have deliberately accelerated (for the good of the
economy, naturally). But for Andalusian
jornaleros
, short-term contracts, long periods without work, permanent financial insecurity and poverty pay have been the norm for centuries. In a region which never really experienced Fordism – the standardised system of industrial mass production embodied by the Ford Motor Company in the United States – post-Fordism is a slightly meaningless concept. For young
marinaleños
who can’t, or don’t want to, work as a
cooperativista
in El Humoso, these less than tantalising job offers are just a continuation of the labour conditions of their ancestors before 1979 – neo-feudalism with a Disney smile.

In Somonte, the latest, most high-profile piece of Andalusian anarchist land expropriation, I had seen a sophisticated mural which expressed a sentiment I had expected to hear more of in the crisis. Painted in green on the side of a white farmhouse building, in large capitals, it read
Andalusians – don’t emigrate, fight!
Further down, underneath stencilled portraits of Zapata, Malcolm X, Geronimo and Blas Infante, was a quote from the latter:
The land is yours: reclaim it!

I’ve encountered almost no resentment of the people emigrating in search of work – but then the generation of
ninis
(neither work nor study) are not the first to face this dilemma: their parents had to do the same, and their parents before that. The only difference is now you emigrate on a cheap flight to Berlin or London, rather than hitching a slow ride to the fields or factories of the north.

Despite the lack of reproach, those leaving certainly felt guilt and sadness. I recall one Spanish friend speaking to me very quickly in English about his plans to leave, for the third time in five years, to go and work in Berlin (following Stockholm and London). He had to speak fast because his mother, who didn’t understand much English, was in the living room with us watching television, and he hadn’t yet mustered the courage to tell her he was leaving again.

Outside Marinaleda, the situation for other young Andalusians is devastating. Once, at a bar in Estepa, a young man called Jesús joined us. I asked him the same broad questions I asked everyone, about the economy, about the government, about the future. He clasped his face with one cradling hand – he was weary but stoical, like a cargo ship buffeted by strong winds. ‘Things are getting worse everywhere. Wages are now even lower, and contracts are shorter. If you have graduated from university, you must go to Germany or America or England to get a job.’ Spain has the highest proportion of graduates of any country in Europe – for all the good it is doing them now. There were two options, Jesús said. Either live with your parents, spend all your time looking for work, go out and protest occasionally, or join the hordes scuttling down the brain-drain to points beyond Spain.

What about Marinaleda, as an alternative? He shrugged. It’s good that you can have a free house and a job there, but it’s not all great, he said. ‘You know you have to work on Sundays?’

In Seville, a woman in her mid-twenties called Emma told me that about 90 per cent of her friends were out of work, and most of them had had to move back into their family homes after a few fleeting years of adult freedom. ‘I’m talking about all different kinds of people, people with no qualifications, people who have a masters, people who have two degrees.’ She went on:

‘It’s really,
really
bad here. Seville had so many building companies before the “brick crisis”, as we call it. You have so many unemployed young and not so young people with no other qualification than to work in construction. We have thousands of flats where construction just stopped, and the buildings are left half-finished.’ These relics of late capitalism scar the whole Spanish landscape now.