It is now thirty-five years, two statutes and several constitutional ‘upgrades’ later, and essentially, we are where we were. Andalusia remains in the rear compared to the other peninsular and island peoples. We continue to be the last in all indices of economic and social welfare. We are first only in unemployment and precariousness, poverty and deprivation.
They blamed this predicament on ‘speculative financial capital’ and the distant, undemocratic powers in Madrid and Brussels. Those gathered on the windy Malaga intersection spoke of the need to oppose la dictadura de los mercados, the dictatorship of the markets: it’s a familiar twenty-first-century conjunction – one in which, even so long after the death of Franco, dictatorship was still the preferred word for the situation they endured.
I found it momentarily odd to see this flag-waving coming from people so far to the political left. But then Andalusian nationalism is of an unusual kind – seemingly devoid of chauvinism or parochialism – and its roots lie in the insurgent anarchism of the nineteenth century.
It seems like an astonishing quirk of history, but in 1873, albeit for only two months, Francisco Pi y Margall became leader of the Spanish Federal Republic, a regime of radical decentralisation that sought to replace traditional top-down power hierarchies with horizontal pacts of understanding between free groups and people. As Madrid had promised freedom, in the Spanish countryside, villagers took advantage of the situation to divide up the latifundios among themselves and proclaim their pueblos independent sovereign micro-states. Spain briefly became the world’s first and only anarchist nation state.
Though a liberal republican and federalist in his politics, Pi y Margall was a friend of the French anarchist thinker Proudhon; among the Spanish poor, support for federalism dovetailed neatly and directly into anarchism. The German writer Helmut Rüdiger, who spent much of the 1930s in Spain, expressed it well when he wrote that
Spanish anarchism is nothing more than an expression of the federal and individualist traditions of the country … It is not an outcome of abstract discussions, or theories cultivated by a few intellectuals, but an outcome of a social dynamic force that is often volcanic, and the tendency towards freedom in it can always count on the sympathy of millions of people.
That social dynamic force lies at the heart of Andalusian history, a history littered with poverty and spontaneous, violent uprisings – so when anarchist theory evolved and spread, it found a ready-made support base in southern Spain. In 1871, when the Communist International split between the Marxists, who believed in a strong state, and the Bakuninists, who didn’t, Spain was the only country that inclined heavily towards the latter. In Jerome Mintz’s anthropological study The Anarchists of Casas Viejas, about a tragic failed Andalusian uprising in which many died, we read that ‘Bakunin’s views matched the Spanish temper – belief in local control and maximum individual freedom – and reflected the Spanish situation – that of an oppressed but potentially explosive rural population.’ The forging of a collectivist utopia through protest and land occupation in Marinaleda is not simply a late capitalist story, the exception which ridicules the rule. It’s a well-rehearsed rural Andalusian performance of rebellion against a very physical, tangible inequality.
If the dance of popular peasant uprising is innate, the steps practised by the other side are just as entrenched in the Spanish muscle-memory; from the Inquisition, through the brutal repressions of the nineteenth century, into the Civil War, Francoism and beyond, encompassing the ‘preventative arrest’ and torture of some 20,000 leftists for political crimes in the 1890s, or the dispatching of government troops into factories in Seville to crush worker rebellions. Anticipating the polarity of the Spanish Civil War, revolutionary left-wing groups sought to agitate with ever-greater intensity as the nineteenth century drew to a close; the right-wing authorities were always equal to the task.
Spain is the only country in the world where anarchism ever became a mass movement. The anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the CNT, had over a million members in the pre-Civil War period, a situation which is entirely explicable given the country’s economic situation and desperate need for land redistribution. Beyond political context, there is even something anarchist-leaning about the Andalusian personality: individual freedom and mutual aid are both traits held in high esteem – your neighbour is born free to choose his or her own path, but equally, they should not be left to starve if the fates conspire against them.
While for Marx the urban proletariat was the vanguard of revolution, Bakunin’s philosophy focused more on a federated network of smaller communities and groups, a conception of communism that already chimed with the lived experience of Andalusian life: the village unit is a self-sustaining ecosystem which regulates itself, and does so without the need for state enforcement, power hierarchies (elected or otherwise) or the desire for profit. For Bakunin, freedom could only come from absolute devolution of power until there was none left at the centre. The ‘right of secession’ he wrote of was already held to be integral to liberty in the Andalusian pueblos. Bakunin called for:
The internal reorganisation of each country on the basis of the absolute freedom of individuals, of the productive associations, and of the communes. Necessity of recognising the right of secession: every individual, every association, every commune, every region, every nation has the absolute right to self-determination, to associate or not to associate, to ally themselves with whomever they wish and repudiate their alliances without regard to so-called historic rights [rights consecrated by legal precedent] or the convenience of their neighbours.
Of course, the isolated ecosystem of any nineteenth-century peasant village, with its unique customs, assumptions and culture, could make for a challenging environment into which to evangelise. Bakunin warned that their resistance to politicisation would need working around – via a network, connecting the most ready, able, and revolutionary members of each peasant community to talk to one another: ‘We must at all costs breach these hitherto impregnable communities and weld them together by the active current of thought, by the will, and by the revolutionary cause.’
Bakunin was writing about rural Russia, but ‘hitherto impregnable communities’ is the perfect description of the Andalusian pueblos of the nineteenth century. While they may have been somewhat culturally hermetic, some of their inhabitants did at least leave home, usually the men; thousands of workers were regularly compelled to travel great distances to find work, in order to survive. Most itinerant Andalusian day labourers migrated to the cities and emerging industries of the north, especially Catalunya and the Basque Country; others went elsewhere in rural Spain, or to France – wherever seasonal farm work was most plentiful. There, sleeping on barn floors for months at a time with scores of other poor labourers, revolutionary ideas were easily shared.
Among Spain’s many regions, anarchism thrived most of all in rural Andalusia (with a strong uptake in urban Catalunya, for different reasons). And yet, Andalusia is not the only poor part of Spain, far from it – parts of Extremadura and Castile, for example, have long been desperately poor. As Temma Kaplan writes in Anarchists of Andalusia 1868–1903, it is actually the contrasting wealth, not poverty in itself, which explains the region’s innate radicalism: ‘Where almost everyone is poor, the idea of revolutionary social changes might seem utopian, for if everything were equally divided, everyone would be equally poor.’ It is the visible wealth inequalities in the south which have made it so susceptible to radical ideas.