Writing during the Spanish civil war, Sylvia Townsend Warner said of Anarchism that “the world was not yet worthy of it, but that it ought to be the politics of heaven.” The sense that we are not worthy, strikes me as a deeply distopian notion, related to the age old belief that sees humanity as an immutable mass of miserable beings. This vision of fallen humanity remains one of the greatest obstructions to the envisioning of a transformed world, time for a little textual detour.
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When eighteenth-century radicals such as William Godwin’s ideas of human benevolence and unlimited progress began to be popularised in the late 18th century Britain, the philosophers of doom responded. Reverend Thomas Malthus’ quasi-scientific account of the struggle for existence in a world where the earth’s resources would always be fought over by ever expanding populations, was written as a direct repost to Goodwin. For Malthus, Godwin’s belief that benevolence was the moving principle in society was “little better than a dream, a beautiful phantom of the imagination, ” poverty and misery were not social ills but part of natural law, humans would always compete in a world of limited resources.
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The Spanish Civil war was one of the worlds most remarkable social revolutions, millions of people lived and worked collectively without hierarchy, whole towns and cities were run with popular assemblies and yet whilst it was happening the mainstream press showed a blind eye to the success story and reported on what they understood better, war and conflict. In 1937, when George Orwell , returned from the front impressed by the achievements of the anarchists, and published his Homage to Catalonia, it only sold 300 copies, the rest were remaindered to an anarchist bookshop.
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We are driving across Andalusia, its hard to imagine that during the civil war there were entire communities in this region that abolished money, collectivised land and developed barter systems. All we seem to experience are endless identical grids of olive plantations, grey green dots on a backdrop of dry white earth, a monotonous industrial monoculture that continues for hours on end.
Spain was the only country in the modern era where Anarchism developed into a large enough social movement that had the power to threaten the state and successfully manage huge areas of a country, during the 1936-39 civil war. Spanish Anarchism was rooted in popular peasant culture, a precapitalist collective village tradition. To many in the close knit rural communities and newer urban neighbourhoods Anarchist values were as much a way of life as a theoretical position. This long history of Self governing communes with their own laws and charters, created a fertile soil for the anarchist politics of the late 19th century. Pretty much every revolutionary Spanish political movement in the the sixty years previous to civil war was ostensibly anarchist in spirit if not in name.
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Marinaleda is clearly not anarchist, on paper it is more of a mini libertarian communist state with aspects of ecological thinking. On the surface it feels very similar to Murray Bookchin’s theories of Municipal Libertarianism, the practice of building revolutionary direct democratic institutions in ones own neighbourhoods. It will be interesting to see if Bookchin’s theory has become reality here. What ever the case is, Marinaleda’s history, which began just after the death of Franco and the transition to democracy, reads like a fairy tale.
Andalusia was suffering chronic unemployment , in Marinaleda’s case it was over 75%. The majority of the land was owned by a tiny elite of aristocratic landlords who farmed olives and cotton using huge agro industrial machines. The villagers eacked out a living as precarious agricultural day labourers, not knowing whether they would have work from one day to the other. Jobs like olive picking only lasted three months in the year. People lived in squalid cramped conditions, sometimes three separate families sharing the same house. Life was hard and many emigrated to the cities or abroad, villages across the region died.
In Marinaleda though they decided to do something about it. The party in power in the local council together with a radical agricultural union, the SOC decided to fight for their own land. In 1979 they started the struggled and took direct action to reclaim the local Count’s land. This included 700 people going on hunger strike for 13 days, trapping the Spanish president in a local village, 25 days of government building occupation in Seville, sabotaging the Counts farm machinery and most importantly occupying his land. After twelve long years a final push involved a non stop occupation of his fields for 90 days and nights. The Count gave up and sold the land to the Andulucian government. Not wanting to accept that it had been won through struggle, they invented a kind of legal song and dance which ended with 1200 hectares being given to Marinaleda. Many of the local land owners followed suit, frightened that their land was going to be subject to the same treatment, they sold it cheaply to Marinaleda council.
The mayor later described to us how one of the most beautiful moments of his life was the day when they were given the keys to the Counts Finca and let themselves in to the majestic farmhouse, which now boasts a huge mural on its façade saying LAND and UTOPIA. With their own land they were autonomous from the count, could create jobs and start to run their own lives. ... "
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