Does Utopia Exist?

        Does Utopia exist? Well, there is a small town in Andalusia in Spain called Marinaleda, with a population of just over 2,700 and they have no municipal police, another feature of this small town is that every week or so they declare a “Red Sunday” when the citizens go out and clean the streets and do odd jobs about the town that need doing. Marinaleda runs a 3,000 acre farming co-operative, employing 2,650 people, the farm is about 7 miles outside of town, as well as olive groves, they grow artichokes, broad beans, broccoli and peppers and has a section growing wheat. This didn't come about with a grand plan in some central office, but was born from the struggle of the people of the town, and their belief that planning the future is not enough, the future has to be built here and now, in the present, brick by brick.

     The mayor of this remarkable town is one, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo and is quoted as saying,

     ‘The myth of capitalism has crumbled,’ he announced, ‘that the market is an omnipotent God that fixes everything with his invisible hand. We’ve seen this is a great lie, a stupid fundamentalism: we’ve seen that in times of crisis, markets have had to resort to the state, and that states are putting money into the banks.-----If there were any justice in the world the big bankers, and the governments that allowed them to perpetrate their economic terrorism, would be in jail. And those same people who caused the crisis are the ones who now want to fix it. The pyromaniac wants to play the fireman! Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy want to speak for the banks and fix what they caused.

    You can read more on this human endeavour for justice in the book The Village Against The World.

      An interesting fact about Spain is that in 2008, Spain's financial situation was well withing the Eurozone's fiscal rules. In fact, Spains government debt as percentage of its GDP, was lower than Germany's. The debt was created out of the crash, it was not the debt that caused the crash. Hundreds of billions of Euros were poured into Spains banks after the crash. It was the financial market's collapse that caused the debt and the resultant “austerity” (read poverty) across the whole of Europe.

      We the people are still paying for the greed of that parasite army, the financial Mafia. Perhaps we should be taking a leaf out of Marinaleda's book, and building our future here and now brick by brick, outside this festering mess of capitalism. 

 Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk