<http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/the_village_against_the_world_20131108>
The Village Against the World
Posted on Nov 8, 2013
By Nomi Prins
"The Village Against the World"
A book by Dan Hancox
The most expensive government on the planet-ours-was shut down over
budget concerns, health insurance and passive-aggressiveness. The
inane partisan squabbling most acutely affected those with the most
to
lose-the people at the bottom of the economic pile. Meanwhile,
grossly
unequal division of wealth and power is a growing blight on the face
of humanity. Dangerous mechanisms of financial ruin are nurtured by
governments while they spew rhetoric about helping citizens. A future
in which reckless economic exploitation will diminish seems highly
unlikely.
But what if another world were possible? One in which the spoils of
predatory capitalism, subsidized by central banks and federal policy,
aren't rapaciously consumed by a tiny minority at the expense of the
vast majority of global citizens?
In his captivating new book, "The Village Against the World," Dan
Hancox shows, in lyrical and penetrating prose, that not only is it
possible, but "an observable fact." And so begins his tale of the
alternative.
Nestled in farmland about 60 miles from Seville, Spain, in the region
of Andalucía, exists Marinaleda, a village of 2,700 people. The cry
OTRO MUNDO ES POSSIBLE-another world is possible-adorns a metal arch
over its main avenue. For 30 years, the citizens of this tiny pueblo
have fought and won a struggle to create a utopia in which everyone
has a job and a home. Communism seems too dismissive and combative a
term for Marinaleda's ability to exist in defiance of a system that
has shattered surrounding towns, and entire countries around the
world.
"The year 2016," Hancox writes, "will mark the 500th anniversary of
Thomas More's Utopia Š But Š how do you go from a fevered dream, an
aspirational blueprint, to concrete reality?"
The answer unfolds as Hancox takes us on a trip that inspires one's
visual senses as he depicts the white-washed beauty of the village,
one's taste buds as he describes simple meals capped with thick bread
doused in fresh local olive oil, and invites us to envision a
collective life freed-as much as possible-from global crises,
acquisition and power plays.
In Marinaleda, the Che Guevara stadium houses sporting events,
oversized placards of doves decorate streets named for left-wing
idols
like Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda, and "profits" from the local
vegetable canning factory or olive oil co-op are used to enhance the
village. Marinaleda's main housing "development" consists of 350
casitas-modest homes self-built by their inhabitants, with materials
furnished by the village. Mortgages are 15 euro per month. The
village
has, and needs, no police force.
For eight years, Hancox was fascinated with Marinaleda's "miracle
struggle," transforming from "abject poverty" in the late '70s (60
percent unemployment, and people going without food for days at a
time) to the functioning "utopia" that it became.
Beyond Marinaleda, the economic suffering of Spain at the hands of a
speculative overdrive unleashed by big U.S. banks and adopted by
European ones, remains acute. It is made worse by austerity measures
that punish citizens, while providing banks and bondholders with EU
subsidies.
Youth unemployment sits at a sickening record high of 56.1 percent,
second only to Greece's 62.9 percent. Spain's adult male unemployment
at 25.3 percent tops all other EU countries.
The Spanish housing market remains in tatters, after catastrophic
levels of overbuilding and leverage, complementing America's housing
bubble before it burst in 2007-2008. Just as in the U.S., Spanish
banks foreclosed on slews of properties for which the population had
been forced to overpay during the bubble, increasing homelessness.
The current economic crisis has left Spain with 4 million empty
homes, and ghost towns on the outskirts of Madrid. In contrast,
"Marinaleda brims with excitement and festivity during its famous
annual ferias and carnivals," though most of the time, "it is
incredibly peaceful." No one there has experienced a foreclosure.
"Even before the crisis descended on Spain, the wealth gap in
Andalusia was a chasm," Hancox informs us. "It has been so forever.
It
is a region where mass rural pauperism exists alongside vast
aristocratic estates-the latifundios. It's an oft-repeated bit of
southern rural mythology that you can walk all the way from Seville,
the Andalusian capital, to the northern coast of Spain without ever
leaving the land of the notorious Duchess of Alba, a woman thought to
have more titles than anyone else in the world. While 22.5 percent of
her fellow Spaniards survive on only ¤500 a month, the duquesa is
estimated to be worth ¤3.2 billion-and still receives ¤3 million a
year in EU farm subsidies."
It's important to note, as Hancox does throughout the book, that the
rich get more government subsidies than the poor do. This is, of
course, not unique to Spain, which is one of the things that makes
this book so important, and so timely.
Central to Marinaleda's history, and Hancox's book, is its mayor,
Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo. He is a modern-day revolutionary,
reminiscent, in appearance and inner fire, of Che Guevara. Sánchez
Gordillo has been employing resistance techniques, including hunger
strikes and occupations, for years. In 2012, he was dubbed the "Robin
Hood of Spain" after he and a group of laborers refused to pay a
supermarket for shopping trolleys filled with food, which they then
distributed to local food banks. The action made headlines worldwide.
Sánchez Gordillo, with "his trademark half-open shirt and prophet's
beard" and "almost messianic gestures," is no stranger to polarized
media attention. Charismatic and-until recently in his older
age-tireless, he spent more than 30 years fighting alongside
Marinaleda's villagers for wealth redistribution, attracting and
utilizing the press along the way.
Sánchez Gordillo became so well known that H&M, the clothing store
chain, used his image as part of its "Zeitgeist" collection,
plastering it on shirts with the words, "Food to the people! No world
hunger!" But, as Hancox tells us, the company withdrew its design
within four days, apologizing that it hadn't intended "to take sides"
and was "sorry if any customers have felt offended." Even with
capitalism ripping itself apart at the seams, "it was a sign," Hancox
writes, "of how charged the supermarket raids were ... that a message
like 'food to the people' might be deemed ... offensive."
In 1979, when Sánchez Gordillo was elected mayor of Marinaleda, the
Franco era was over. Under Sánchez Gordillo's leadership, farmers
occupied part of a large estate, El Humoso, demanding possession of
its land for farming that would provide locals with jobs. Surrounding
land had been planted with labor-light crops like corn and
sunflowers.
The citizens of Marinaleda wanted to sow labor-intensive crops that
would create more jobs, and establish a secondary processing
industry.
Their struggle was accompanied by a hunger strike in 1980 that drew
the attention of the national press and TV, as well as the BBC,
German
TV, English, German, Catalan and French newspapers, and other media
support. The event solidified Sánchez Gordillo's nascent leadership.
He became "la voz de los sin voz"-the voice of those without a voice.
In April 1981, there was another hunger strike that secured a
guarantee of four-days-per-week community employment for those
without
work. More strikes, protests and clashes with police continued for
years.
Hancox recalls that Sánchez Gordillo once suggested to him that the
House of Alba could invest their riches-from shares in banks and
power
companies as well as multimillion euro agriculture subsidies-to
create
jobs, but "they've never shown any interest in doing so." It is not
just the callousness of this inaction, but the bad economic sense
that
accompanies it, that so angered activists. If more people were
employed, a more stable overall economic environment would arise-for
everyone.
Finally in 1991, the slogan "the land belongs to the ones that work
on it" was realized, as 1,200 hectares of land were expropriated from
the Duke of Infantado and transformed into an agricultural
cooperative, tending to labor-intensive root crops and olive groves,
that provided every villager with work.
If this book was simply a one-sided leftist yarn, it would be harder
to believe, but Hancox is careful to depict the positives and
negatives of the village, its philosophy and its leadership.
External skeptics point out that nearly 70 percent of Marinaleda's
population lives off some form of subsidies from the EU, Spanish or
Andalusian government. Others argue that Sánchez Gordillo tolerates
no dissent, and that locals disagreeing with him or his philosophies
have had to move to nearby towns. As one villager told Hancox of
Sánchez Gordillo, "If you are not on his side, that puts you on the
right, that makes you a fascist-and you are attacked, insulted and
intimidated." Hancox acknowledges that "unpicking the gossip from the
facts is impossible," but he concludes that whatever the concerns,
elections are free and Sánchez Gordillo keeps winning them: "Again,
and again, and again. He does so neither by slender, contestable
margins, nor by margins so implausible that you'd be minded to send
in
UN election observers."
Recently, the village has begun feeling, perhaps inevitably, effects
of the broader economic crisis, as external subsidies are harder to
come by, and demand for produce has waned. The question Hancox bids
us
to consider is whether the village can continue as it is. Its youth
are increasingly unaware and uncaring of Marinaleda's former struggle
and history-and perhaps there's more to life than farming. Without
Sánchez Gordillo, will it possess the collective strength to
continue
fighting for its particular way of life?
This is part of a larger question: Is a collective ever truly a
collective, or must it revolve around some critical center? Hancox
points out several times, "Sánchez Gordillo is not everything." But
he is a lot. One villager tells Hancox, "Quite simply, everything
that
Marinaleda has won is thanks to Sánchez Gordillo. "
"But one day," Hancox replies, "well, the day will have to come when
he. Š" At this, the villager cuts him off: "When he's no longer
leader, in the future, the project will continue. The project is
still the same, to create a Utopia, and that will continue."
In the end, perhaps that utopian dream and its achievement, is itself
the center. Marinaleda may not be perfect, or fully independent from
its surroundings, but compared with the rampant economic decline of
the rest of Spain and the rest of the world, it is a shining example
of an alternative, with the ability to deflect many of the dangers of
destructive speculative financial-political policy. That's something
to think about.
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