Name: The Village Against the World
ISBN: 9781781681305

Dan Hancox

Explores the realities behind the three-decade effort to establish the communist utopia village of Marinaleda, explaining how its residents work together to maintain the neighborhood, and traces the story of mayor Sâanchez Gordillo.

The Village Against the World

Jorge Cimentada

If you are mildly aware of Spanish culture and politics, I can summarize the book for you: there's a small town in Andalucía which has a somewhat cooperative-communist philosophy where everyone earns the same, work on two or three types of jobs (mostly agriculture) and does a bunch of things as a community (open air cinemas, festivals, parties). The book clearly agrees with the philosophy of the town Marinaleda, so don't expect an unbiased evaluation of the merits of cooperative communities. The book spends a lot of time introducing Spanish culture, so it was a bit boring to me. I guess the book could be interesting for someone with no knowledge on Spanish culture. Rather than a political book, its more like a travel diary of Spanish culture and Marinaleda town. 

Two things caught my attention from Marinaleda. First, it is truly interesting how a single town can change the entire productive structure of a few thousand people, establishing a communist-like system where the politicians are volunteers and everybody earns the same. The shocking thing is not that this happens. The shocking thing is that this happens a few kilometers from other towns and cities which have full-fledged market-based economies. For some reason, I thought you couldn't (legally) forbid businesses from opening a store in your town yet they manage to keep all private business from outside the city. Just a nice contrast on the diversity of what local politics can achieve when done with a lot of effort. It would cool to find an opposite example: an extreme capitalist town in a heavily regulated country (but I guess a small town can't lower taxes).

Second, Marinaleda is not particularly profitable. I mean, they earn money for them to eat and have a house yet their public owned fields are not very profitable. In fact, after reading a bit on their budget, most of their budget comes from the Andalusian community, which they then redistribute among the workers. So all in all, the book fails to recognize more deeply that this 'utopia' is mainly possible because other people are paying taxes. Marinaleda is indeed not self-sustainable: if there's less money in Andalusia, there's less money for Marinaleda. When that happens, they strike or occupy some land or protest. Doesn't sound like a self-sustainable utopia for me.

Having said this, I do understand as well the desperate measures are needed when poverty strikes so hard, so some of the strategies by Sanchez Gordillo are interesting to raise awareness and grab attention.

On other thing: Gordillo should not confound capitalism as the source of any 'bad' in the country as opposed to the neglect, corrupt, lack of long-term planning and just plain incompetent politicians that a country has. To make the example even more interesting, the UK (where Dan Hancox is from) is much more capitalist the Spain yet their experience of the 2008 crisis was not nearly as bad in Spain. 

Take any of the top 10 richest countries in the world (WITH worldwide acceptable levels of inequality, mostly Scandinavians, Australia, Canada, Germany) and all of these countries have strong market-based economies together with strong welfare-states. My problem with the left-wing utopia rhetoric is that it's based more on emotions rather than careful thought, negotiation and openness to accept things that you don't want for the benefit of long-term solutions.

Spain needs long-term solutions with competent politicians which are not afraid to make coalitions with everyone, as long as everyone is concerned with fixing problems, coming up with solutions and less with fighting and screaming louder than the others. Less taking sides w/ right/left groups and more thinking about finding solutions to problems in the long term.

The Village Against the World

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