“Utopia: Know that the land of Los Humosos,
found in the Genil lowlands, does not belong to anyone but to all the community
and to the people who worked for years for a utopian society and for a better
world—more just, egalitarian, peaceful, ethical, ecological, and humane. And we
now have that. Know that when you consume our products you join in a great
collective dream.” (Hill, 2014).
In
the 21st century, it is very rare to find a society surrounded by
the forces of global capitalism but refusing to adhere to the demands of the
free market. And yet Marinaleda, a town in southern Spain, is doing just that,
and has been for many years, ever since its mayor, Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo
was first elected in 1979 at the age of 30. (Edgar, 2013). Marinaleda has a well-developed
infrastructure, very low living costs, virtually full employment amongst its
citizens, and for those who are temporarily out of work, they have a strong
safety net to fall back on.
The
town of Marinaleda, steeped in socialist traditions, has managed to form its
own socialist economic system, albeit being slightly dependent on the central
and regional governments for funding. Despite this, it remains virtually self-sufficient
with high levels of employment and low levels of poverty. There is a strong
importance of interdependence and community and not relying on ‘free market’
principles. Marinaleda owes its current system partly to its history of anarchism
and also extreme levels of poverty and oppression during the Franco
dictatorship which helped created a radical opposition. The process of
enculturation ensures the system has continued from one generation to the next,
although it is only a few decades old.
A
society’s economic system is the cultural methods of allocating natural
resources, the means of exploiting the resources through technology, the
organization of work, and the production, distribution and consumption, and
exchange of goods and services. Marinaleda’s economic situation is especially
unique in Spain, considering the ongoing economic crisis, and the news about
increased evictions and suicides regularly discussed in the Spanish media. (Bueker, 2013). With a population of nearly
3,000 (Edgar, 2013) It has been described as a thriving community with no
poverty. In 2012, the town had only 5% unemployment, compared to the rest of
Spain on average- 25%, and Andalusia, 34% (Hancox, 2012). There is full
employment because if a resident loses their job, the cooperative hires them. (Burnett,
2009). In Marinaleda, there is no competition of who works the most, earns the
most, and who makes the most profit by selling products. Everyone in the
cooperative earns the same salary- $47 a day for six and a half hours’ work. (Hancox,
2013). Marinaleda tries to keep this the equivalent of public service wages. An
advisor to the mayor described their philosophy, ‘If everyone works less,
everyone can work.’ (Roth, 2013).
Marinaleda
has created a municipal housing program with no mortgages. Once someone has
lived in Marinaleda for two years, they get materials to build their own home. (Editorial,
2013). These are three bedroom houses, with a garden of 100 square meters built
on municipal land with materials from the regional government, and only $15 a
month for rent. The prospective owners donate about 450 days of their work to
the construction. To prevent people from profiting, residents are forbidden
from selling their houses, but they can give it to their children or to someone
they choose. (Hancox, 2012). The town
does depend heavily on money from the regional and central governments, despite
considering the town to be autonomous (Burnett, 2009). The material for each
home costs the regional government about $25,000 with a combination of state
housing subsidy for building materials, free labor for construction and land
given by the town. Community members come together with architectural plans
provided by council to build a block of houses, with no sense in advance of
which home will belong to which family.
There
are extensive sports facilities and a beautifully maintained botanical garden. Marinaleda’s
residents have access to a variety of social services, including free home care
for the elderly, nursery schools cost $17 a month, (Burnett, 2009) and access
to a public swimming pool is only $13 for the whole summer, all financed
through the cooperatively run farms and factories. (Edgar, 2013). The Mayor stresses the
importance of his belief of people over profit, “The whole idea of the place
being somewhere good to live is that anyone can afford to enjoy themselves. You
can’t have a utopia without some loss-making facilities.” (Bush and Wilton,
2014).
Different
subsistence modes tend to foster different attitudes about land rights and
access to natural resources. Farming peoples need to make claims to specific
parcels of land that they cultivate. Ownership may be vested in a community as
a whole or in individuals. Ownership of land tends to be most formalized among
farming peoples, who expend a great deal of labour readying their fields for
planting and need specific acreage to produce sufficient food. Societies organize
subsistence strategies to utilize their land and resources efficiently. Marinaleda
is horticultural because it has a subsistence strategy that focuses on small
scale farming using a relatively simple technology. “In horticultural societies,
families, kin groups, own or allocate land…horticultural surpluses are stored
against famines and disasters, and are redistributed to those in need.’
(Bonvillain, 2013: 148-149). Farming
provides people with a stable source of food. Rather than relying on the
fluctuating bounty of nature, people grow their own groups. Marinaleda rejects
concepts of industrial agriculture, “increased use of complex technology,
leading to increased replacement of human labor with machinery and increased
use of fossil fuels as sources of energy in production…tendency towards
production among producers.” (Bonvillain, 2013: 174-178).
The
mayor intentionally promotes low productivity farm jobs, needing industrial
processing to create more work, and grows labor-intensive crops like
artichokes, hot peppers, broccoli, broad beans and wheat (Burnett, 2009). The
number of workers depends on the season and there is a co-operatively owned
factory that produces olive oil. The
town cooperative does not distribute profits- any surplus is re-invested to
create more job. (Hancox, 2013).
Every
few weeks, the town holds a ‘Red Sunday’, where volunteers clean the streets or
do odd jobs. Also on ‘Green Sundays’ everyone works in the fields, harvesting,
packing etc. (Edgar, 2013).
There
is no police, which saves $350,000 a year. (Hancox, 2012). Marinaleda still
operates with some degree of central authority, but the local council has
devolved power into the hands of those it serves. At the general assembly, an
average of around 200-400 people discuss problems and find solutions. Minor
crimes are addressed via this assembly. Decision making is done collectively
and on a broad range of issues, from public works to management of the village
cooperative. Gordillo has been regularly re-elected competitively. (Edgar,
2013)
It
appears that Marinaleda has a good record of gender equality when it comes to political
representation, “Women are over-represented on village council and in general
assemblies.” And Gordillo notes “Everything we have won here, has been thanks
to the women.” (Hancox, 2013, page 98(. Despite this, there are still
traditional patriarchal gender roles used in the village, “Some aspects of
Spain’s old fashioned gender roles persist (especially when it comes to
housework)..” (Hancox, 2013, page 98). An
expert in anthropology at the center of Andalusian Studies in Seville, said Mr
Sanchez had brought social equity to an uneducated, economically oppressed
community. But the vision is ‘anachronistic’, he says, as the future for
Andalusia lays not in the fields, but in industry and services. (Burnett,
2009).
To
understand how this town came to be so economically radical and reject free
market capitalism, it is worth noting its history of activism and environmental
conditions. Marinaleda was once an impoverished village that has been
influenced by a rich anarchist history of the region. This would have made it
easier for the town to break free from the rest of Spain as the naturalized
concepts- ideas and behaviours that seem so natural to others would not have
been as strong in this region. The
importance of how historical socialist traditions influence a modern economic system
in an area is also reflected in a small radical town in British Columbia, “the
Utopian ideals and socialist beliefs of the original Finnish settlers have
continued to inspire the community and emerge as even more important for the
Sointulans' outlook toward economy and the natural environment.” (Saikku 2007:
7).
It
is a town whose social fabric has been woven from very different economic
threads to the rest of Spain since the fall of the Franco dictatorship in the
1970’s. In 1979, after the death of Franco, being a farming community with no
land, (Blitzer, 2012) in a position of abject poverty and suffering from more
than 60% unemployment, and after Marinaleda’s people frequently forced to go
without food for days at a time, came hunger strikes and occupying of
underutilized land. As Gordillo explains, “It
was misery. The surroundings were all huge expanses of private land. Andalusia
is like Latin America: 2% of property owners own 50% of the land."
(Hancox, 2012). A week’s long occupation of a nearby reservoir began to
convince the regional government to allocate them enough water to irrigate a
tract of land. Gordillo founded a radical labour union and supported militant
actions of landless labourer’s right after the fall of the Franco dictatorship.
Aiming to build a veritable socialist utopia placed them in opposition to
liberal capitalism. And yet over three decades they have constantly won. Marinaleda's first major action was a 1980 ‘hunger
strike against hunger’, by 700 people for nine days, which won the equivalent
of €25m from the government to keep the landless and largely unemployed
peasantry going till the December olive harvest. (Edgar, 2013). In 1988, the people from
Marinaleda waged a determined struggle against the brutal regime of
larger-scale land owners who dominate Andalusia. The first victory was in 1991-
1,200 hectares of land they gained owned previously by the absentee Duke of
Infantado. (Edgar, 2013). 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." (Hancox, 2013).
It appears that timing had a keen part to play in the
central government being more open to granting resources to Marinaleda, “Spain’s
public spending had gone from an anemic 20 percent of GDP in 1960 to
nearly twice that by 1980. This means that Marinaleda made its demands for
resources precisely when the government, for the first time, had something to
offer in response.” (Hill, 2014). I
believe that Gordillo’s leadership in bringing and keeping the people of
Marinaleda together in this collective cause is key to their success as one of
the most significant characteristics of culture is that it is integrated. There
is a tendency for peoples’ beliefs and practices to form a relatively coherent
and consistent system, (Pryor, 2007) which is how the town has managed to keep
its economic system. Through the process of enculturation, members have learnt
to accept their roles.
WORKS
CITED/REFERENCE LIST
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2012. The Don
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accessed on February 26th 2015.
Bonvillain, Nancy.
2013. Cultural
Anthropology 3rd Edition, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey Pearson
Bueker, C.A.
2013 SUICIDES SPAM
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accessed February 26th 2015
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Mutual Friends, Electronic document http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/30/co-op-bank-losses-709-million-mutual-high-street,
accessed February 26th 2015.
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accessed February 26th 2015
Hancox, Dan.
2013. The Village Against the World. Brooklyn,
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accessed on February 26th 2015.
Minder, Raphael.
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Saikku, Mikko.
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