Marinaleda: Myth or Reality?

Marinaleda is a village for our times. It is not universally well known as I write but I have a feeling that it soon will be. In common with many areas of modern day Andalucia, it has suffered more than most at the hands of the global credit crisis and the Spanish construction debacle.

The most bold and innovative human decisions are frequently executed when the chips are down. Marinaleda is a case in point. It claims, with some justification, to be a Utopian Communist village. Here, the people led by their mayor, joined forces to buy the local land. As with every story of radical change, it has to start somewhere and the starting point here was a local unemployment rate of 60%. Put simply, it was a farming community with no land.

The big irony in this story is that a self proclaimed Communist Utopia sprung up on the back of the facist years of General Franco. The story of Marinelda has evolved over thirty years in the most gradual of fashions. The mayor Sanchez Gordillo who led the mini revolution is unsurprisingly fond of quoting that great Communist hero, Che Guevera. To get a perspective of what unemployment is like for the under 25s in the UK it is instructive to consider their cousins in the Andalucian region of Southern Spain. In Andalucia, over 55% of the under 25s are unemployed. What hope for a future? This is fertile ground for a radical change of direction. Fortunately for the population of Marinaleda, they have already assumed their self sufficiency in which the whole is greater than the individual.

Spain had a construction bubble for a dozen years which burst in spectacular fashion in the immediate aftermath of the global credit crisis. Nationally, Spain remains in dire straits financially and lurches precariously from one bail out to the next. While Marinaleda was originally the subject of derision within its locality, many must now look upon their progressive society with more than a little envy.

In the end, we can build as many houses as we like, but we still need to grow produce and work the land. More pertinently, we need to get back to basics with our fellow man. The current system is laughably unsustainable and it looks as though a tiny village in Andalucia is now having the last laugh. Maybe the secret to their success is that they have kept their project small and local. Small and local are the by words for the progress of our society. History shows this time and again but will we listen?