The Spanish establishment panicked. The raids were immediately and aggressively condemned by the PP and the PSOE as wanton, despicable criminality – perpetrated by an elected member of the Andalusian parliament, no less. Even the IU leadership distanced itself from Sánchez Gordillo. José Antonio Griñán, the leader of the PSOE–IU coalition in the Andalusian parliament, called it ‘barbarism’. And yet, the Spanish right struggled to turn the popular mood against Sánchez Gordillo: whether you agreed with the stunt or not, the crisis was so widespread, as was dismay over its uneven effects on the poor, that even cynics understood the point. Popular sympathy seemed to be on their side. Fifty-four per cent of those polled by El Mundo, not a left-leaning newspaper by any stretch, supported the action.
Sánchez Gordillo’s success in spinning the raids was in part thanks to his refusal to self-aggrandise and blow them out of proportion. He did not pretend for a minute that expropriating ten trolleys’ worth of rice and chickpeas was an act of redistribution big enough to change any lives: yes, it was a stunt – but it was a vital one. The raids were, in fact, ‘propaganda of the deed’, as he explained to the media: ‘We are obliged to grab attention in this way so that somebody stops and thinks. They have to understand that people here are desperate.’
Press and TV demand grew throughout August, and the supermarket raids were the media’s main talking point for weeks: news programmes visited Andalusian food banks and soup kitchens, discussed rising food prices, foreclosures, and the impossibility of getting work. When he had finished all of his national (and international) TV spots, Sánchez Gordillo used the brouhaha to announce a three-week march across the Spanish south, in the middle of a devastating August heat wave, to highlight the crisis. The plan was to call upon his fellow small-town mayors along the way and try to persuade them to default on their debt repayments. The rural pueblos did not cause the crisis and should not be made to pay for them, he explained; it was an attempt to link up some of the chain of separate communities, to build solidarity. Little came of the march, ostensibly, but it kept the issues – and their iconic advocate, with the grey beard and the keffiyeh – in the headlines for an extra fortnight.
As the dust settled on Marinaleda’s month of notoriety, it became easier to see the expropriations as part of a wider pattern of behaviour. They were a spectacular addition to a growing armoury of acts of everyday anti-capitalist resistance, new (and not so new) coping behaviours brought on by necessity, in the face of the crisis. Barcelona-based sociologist Carlos Delclós identified the supermarket raids as a ‘public policy correction’, whereby the crisis of legitimacy at the heart of Spanish democracy, at the heart of capitalism, demanded a pro-active intervention from its subjects. ‘We should never forget that democracy means “people power,”’ he wrote, ‘and that correcting a lack of democracy means exercising power from the bottom up, occupying the cracks in the architecture of repression, and breaking it open like rhizomic roots shattering concrete.’
Thousands of microcosmic acts of quotidian resistance were already taking place, Delclós observed: ‘citizens refusing to pay outrageous fees for public transportation and toll roads, doctors refusing to deny free health care to undocumented immigrants, and police refusing orders to assault protesters – while people all over the country are referring to taking a Robin Hood stance on shoplifting as “pulling a Gordillo” (via the hashtag #HazteUnGordillo)’. To this we can add the firefighters and locksmiths across Spain who have refused to evict families foreclosed by their banks, and even the widely recognised explosion in dinero negro, the black market; cash-in-hand work has ballooned since the crisis.
Of course, poverty in Spain was not invented by the crisis – even in the heyday of the economic miracle, there were people living on the streets and families struggling to feed their children. The crash catalysed an explosion of that misery across parts of the Spanish class system which had never before experienced it. According to a 2013 report by the FOESSA Foundation looking into social exclusion and the crisis, 380,000 Spanish households had been without a single employed member before the crisis: by the end of 2012 this number had more than quadrupled, to 1.8 million. The numbers continue to horrify, but they do so in the abstract. The great significance of Sánchez Gordillo’s latest intervention was that it highlighted what no one else in power would dare: ‘that the crisis has first and last names, faces and ID cards’.
I never encountered Schadenfreude in Marinaleda directed at the architects of the collapse, much less, of course, at its victims. The response of the villagers, like that of Sánchez Gordillo himself, was sombre and pessimistic: this is what capitalism does, this is what any kind of centralised power does. The Spanish people, who have suffered so much in the past, even the relatively recent past, are now condemned to suffer again. One 15-M activist in Seville told me that one of the main reasons there had not already been a revolution was culturaclass="underline" Spaniards were stoically resigned to the fact that their earthly life would be a ‘valley of tears’. And like the good Catholics they were, they would endure the pain.
By 2011, marinaleños were seeing the effects on their friends and relatives in neighbouring pueblos and farther afield: the girlfriend in Casariche whose business had folded; the friends in Estepa who could only get odd jobs, or a couple of months of seasonal work in the mantecados factories; the cousins in Valencia facing eviction from their home.
By 2013, they were starting to notice the effects inside the village, too. In among my scrawled notes from the Marinaleda February carnaval, the pages in my notebook swollen by beer stains and dusted with loose threads of rolling tobacco, I found one sentence that stood out, underlined three times, from a middle-aged local called Pepe: ‘It’s a bad time for Marinaleda – but it might be a good time for the revolution.’
8
The End of Utopia?
In retrospect, things got a bit out of hand in August 2012. The supermarket expropriations and ensuing media mayhem, as well as the surrounding three-week march and land occupations, catapulted Sánchez Gordillo into the public eye. He was a major problem for Rajoy’s government and their allies – even for their parliamentary enemies in the PSOE – because he made it clear the crisis was not an unavoidable act of God, but a consequence of their economic and political system. Therefore it was something that could be contested, perhaps even defeated. With the Robin Hood mayor in the spotlight, more and more people were talking about Marinaleda, and what it stood for.
While the message that propelled him there had been deadly serious, the danger is, when you reach a certain level of recognition in contemporary pop culture, that the message canbe obscured by the spectacle. His fame reached its first peak of bathos in September that year, when the global youth clothing chain H&M created a Sánchez Gordillo t-shirt. Appropriately, the design was part of their new ‘Zeitgeist’ collection, and showed a hand grasping an ear of maize, accompanied by the words ‘Food to the people! No world hunger’ – Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo’. H&M withdrew the design within four days, issuing an official apology that they hadn’t intended ‘to take sides’ and were ‘sorry if any customers have felt offended’. It was a sign of how charged the supermarket raids were, in the context of capitalism’s crisis, that a message like ‘food to the people’ might be deemed controversial, or even offensive.