Free The Village Against the World by Dan Hancox Page A

essence, are anarchists at heart’. Suddenly, without the sanctions of Franco’s dictatorship to protect landed interests, the labourers’ union embodied a cathartic release of long-suppressed tension. Its philosophy was both radical and apparently disinterested in Soviet or Leninist dogma.
    From the outset the marinaleños ‘declared the sovereignty of food’, as Sánchez Gordillo explained it to me, asserting that ‘food was a right and not a business; that agriculture should be out of the World Trade Organisation; that natural resources should be at the service of the communities that work them, and who use them’. While he has long expressed global solidarity for any marginalised community, and a corollary hatred of Western imperialism and militarism, it is the local needs of the pueblo that matter most. From the outset, sovereignty of the crops, and sovereignty of the terrain to grow them in, was the central tenet of the Marinaleda philosophy. Land, went the slogan, is a gift of nature, like air or water.
    Then as now, Sánchez Gordillo had a gift for making the revolutionary sound like basic common sense. ‘Property’, he wrote in Andaluces, levantaos , ‘has no reason to exist when not serving a social purpose. To abolish property is not radicalism when that property produces hunger and scarcity for so many.’
    As a partner organisation to SOC, this burgeoning jornaleros movement established a political party, in 1979 forming the Colectivo de Unidad de los Trabajadores (CUT): an explicitly anti-capitalist political party, positioned to the left of the Communist Party of Spain. That year, the first free local elections since the Second Republic and the Civil War were held. The CUT won 76 per cent of the vote in Marinaleda (the centre-right coalition UCD the remaining 22 per cent), and thus nine of the eleven councillors for thevillage’s municipal council. They have maintained an absolute majority on the council ever since.
    The CUT is not a traditional communist party, according to any tradition understood outside the region. It is neither a regular Marxist-Leninist party, nor a Trotskyite or Maoist one. ‘Our union gathers people of many political stripes,’ Sánchez Gordillo explained to me, ‘but we carry the torch of anarchism’s direct action. Even the assembly is direct action.’ He went on to cite 5,000 years of Andalusian struggle for land as the psychic engine of his movement. This lineage is more important to the CUT and SOC philosophy than 1789, 1848 or 1917.
    Even while participating in the standard Spanish electoral processes, Marinaleda’s relationship with representative democracy is unique. ‘When we got to the city council we realised we had to transform power – that the power that had previously worked to oppress could not also work to liberate.’ He calls this ‘counter-power’, an inversion of the existing pyramid: ‘the power of poor people against the power of the rich. For this counter-power to be effective, we realised that participation was fundamental. This is why we organised everything around an assembly – an assembly that was open to all workers, regardless of political affinity.’
    For him, traditional power structures are incapable of helping the poor, as well as unwilling. One pueblo participating and reaching decisions together will make fewer mistakes than a single leader or group, Sánchez Gordillotold me – and even when they do, which they do, they are at least accountable to themselves. Their realisation in those early days, he wrote in 1985, had been that ‘laws, customs, officials, habits, budgets, regulations and standards of the Ayuntamiento’ were all instruments of power, ‘helpful to fascism, but useless as a tool of struggle and freedom for the people. That old machinery had to be destroyed.’
    The assemblies became the heart of village life in the 1980s, and as a consequence, the heart of the struggle. These days they are normally attended