Most of the indignados had abstained, the PSOE vote tumbled from 44 to 29 per cent, and the remaining rump of voters elected Mariano Rajoy as the first PP prime minister since 2004. There are, a 15-M member called Juanjo told me at the time, 10 million Spaniards who will always vote PP, whatever happens – so if everyone else opts out, they’re going to win.
The 15-M movement had informed not just Spain, but the world, that millions of Spaniards were unwilling to brook the crisis. They were desperately looking for an alternative to the current system – and yet, in their midst, there was already one in operation. They may have ignored it before, or dismissed it with a chuckle as a rural curiosity run by a bearded eccentric; but they could do so no longer. ‘What are your demands? What is your alternative?’ barked the dogs of capitalist realism. And, especially in the south, the indignados were able to respond: ‘Well, how about Marinaleda?’
It seems almost too obvious to say, but Marinaleda is a village of fewer than 3,000 people. It is not a political party, it is not a revolutionary national movement, and it is not an ideology in itself. Its ability to provide an answer to all of Spain’s problems was, and is, clearly limited.
And yet the marinaleños used the small bully pulpit that 15-M afforded them with gusto. Throughout 2011, Sánchez Gordillo took every opportunity to get the message across on TV, in the press, and in the Andalusian parliament that the Spanish people were being unduly punished for capitalism’s crisis, and it was time to resist, as the village had done.
Then, at the end of 2011, came Marinaleda’s latest highly public contretemps with the Spanish nobility. This time it extended beyond the Duchess of Alba, to her son – and on this occasion it was definitely the noble who started it. Cayetano Luis Martínez de Irujo y Fitz-James Stuart, also known as the Olympic horse-riding Duke of Salvatierra, made some blithely provocative public remarks which enraged the marinaleños. First, Cayetano said he agreed with a right-wing Catalan nationalist politician that Andalusian workers were using government subsidies to get drunk, sponging off the richer Catalans. Shortly afterwards, he was challenged about this in a TV interview. Surely, the interviewer said, the sharp rise in poverty in the south was due to the crisis, not to the fecklessness of the workers? Cayetano responded that Andalusia was ‘a fraud’, where no one wanted to work and backwardness was ingrained: ‘When you see these young people, who have absolutely no desire whatsoever to progress, that’s serious. That only happens in Andalusia.’
In a sense, this kind of casual upper-class prejudice is so predictable it might just have been ignored; you suspect a similar outrage in the UK might have provoked a few muttered swearwords and some rolled eyes. In Marinaleda they opted for a slightly more robust, direct response: they occupied Cayetano’s land.
‘He owns fourteen cortijos between Cordoba and Seville, and the Duchess of Alba has 35,000 hectares,’ Sánchez Gordillo told me the following month. For Cayetano to have the gall to complain about Andalusian labourers living off farm subsidies was, like the House of Alba itself, pretty ridiculously rich. ‘They receive so much help!’ laughed Sánchez Gordillo. ‘Together with the Queen of England, the duquesa is the one who receives the most money from the PAC [Common Agricultural Policy]: she receives €3 million a year. So we occupied the cortijos and said he had to retract his comments.’
Camped out on his lands, they had ample opportunity to explain the huge disparity in Andalusian land ownership, and EU subsidies, to visiting members of the press eager for a quirky angle on la crisis. Sánchez Gordillo and his fellow occupiers made another demand: that Cayetano cease hiring illegal workers through private contractors who operate ‘like the mafia’, brutalising the illegal workers and native jornaleros alike.
Not for the first time, the village won. In the subsequent PR climbdown, Cayetano accepted all their demands, apologised, and travelled to the south to meet Sánchez Gordillo and see Marinaleda for himself. It was a humbling experience for the young nobleman, who publicly professed his gratitude for an ‘enriching’ day visiting El Humoso and seeing all the work going on there. ‘Sometimes we think things are one way, and then realise they are very different,’ he admitted to El Público.
Spain’s film crews and journalists were once again zeroing in on Marinaleda, waiting patiently for Sánchez Gordillo’s next outburst, or the next piece of direct action from the Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores (SAT). When the crisis started sinking Spain, it raised up the one existing alternative in its midst, throwing the village’s exceptional past and unique present into sharper relief than ever. The indignados were more than a protest movement, they had declared their desire for a different way of living; and so, despite its awkward size and location, Marinaleda was the obvious choice for an Andalusian-wide 15-M reunion rally in November 2011.
Sánchez Gordillo described this event as a kind of Andalusian awakening: it was video-streamed from their town hall to tens of thousands, and hundreds of visitors came for the occasion. When he addressed the meeting, he spoke, at breakneck speed as usual, about dreams and injustices, and the urgent need to mend the gap between the utopian ideal and the grim reality. He finished his speech by quoting Che’s words: ‘Only those who dream will someday see their dreams converted to reality.’ He added that it was not enough to believe in a different world – it was time to have the courage to live as if it had already arrived.
Other speakers at the rally included spokespeople from a new anti-capitalist co-operative in Valencia, and Enric Duran, an infamous young Catalan who borrowed €492,000 from thirty-nine different financial institutions, with no intention of paying it back, and distributed it among a variety of different co-operatives and revolutionary projects. If Marinaleda is Asterix’s village, pluckily holding out against the Romans despite the enormous odds stacked against them, then 15-M was like a simultaneous discovery, across the vast reaches of the empire, that maybe everyone else had access to the magic potion, too.
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’.