Power Struggles

Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier in Spain

Jaume Franquesa Bartolome

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253033765
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Wind energy is often portrayed as a panacea for the environmental and political ills brought on by an overreliance on fossil fuels, but this characterization may ignore the impact wind farms have on the regions that host them. Power Struggles investigates the uneven allocation of risks and benefits in the relationship between the regions that produce this energy and those that consume it.

Jaume Franquesa considers Spain, a country where wind now constitutes the main source of energy production. In particular, he looks at the Southern Catalonia region, which has traditionally been a source of energy production through nuclear reactors, dams, oil refineries, and gas and electrical lines. Despite providing energy that runs the country, the region is still forced to the political and economic periphery as the power they produce is controlled by centralized, international Spanish corporations. Local resistance to wind farm installation in Southern Catalonia relies on the notion of dignity: the ability to live within one's means and according to one's own decisions. Power Struggles shows how, without careful attention, renewable energy production can reinforce patterns of exploitation even as it promises a fair and hopeful future.

1Dependence and Autonomy

The peasant utopia is the free village, untrammeled by tax collectors, labor recruiters, large landowners, officials.

—Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century

The peasant-utopia has . . . never existed. There has never been a peasant-community completely free of taxes, rents, fees, tithes or labor-services, a “free village” in which smallholders have had absolute security of tenure and freedom from subjection. . . . The aspirations of peasants for this kind of independence have, however, made themselves felt in various ways—in peasant-rebellions, in political and religious movements, and in cultural traditions.

—Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave

DURING MY FIRST visit to Southern Catalonia, on a sunny spring morning in 2010, I was struck by the impression of a farmland without farmers. The stone walls and terraces filled with vineyards, olive groves, and hazelnuts bore unmistakable signs of human action and appeared to be in full production, yet this landscape was remarkably empty of people. Indeed, the most visible active presence was that of the groups of workers involved in two infrastructural projects: the construction of wind farms and a government-funded, countywide irrigation project.

Within a few weeks, I discovered that in the evenings and on weekends, those empty fields acquired new life: men and often entire families tending their fields and gardens with small tractors, or socializing, mostly during the weekend, in their masos.

“In the city they go to the gym after working, here our workout is going to the fields,” people often told me. During those first weeks, in my conversations with local residents about the wind farms, I often interjected questions about the irrigation project, conceived in the official jargon as a “system of support”—not to promote crop replacement but to alleviate the effects of extremely dry summers on hazelnuts, almonds, grapes, and olives, the traditional commodity crops of the region. The answer was invariable: “I don’t think I’ll pay for the connection; it comes too late, anyway, twenty or thirty years too late. Then, it could have made a difference, now there are no peasants anymore.”

This sense of despair infused Southern Catalans’ views of agricultural activities, a feeling ossified in a common series of complaints: “It is impossible to make a living from agriculture,” “What can you do with these prices?”, “This is not the right way to farm, it is just suffering,” “We will all end up living cramped into cities,” “Sometimes I think they should just finish us off.”

This last statement always intrigued me, not so much for the elliptical character of the subject “they”—sometimes replaced with “those in charge” (los que manen)—as for the ambivalence of the object “us,” which seemed to invoke a nebulous collective identity, simultaneously the peasantry, the rural world, and Southern Catalans. Yet in all its fuzziness and simplicity, the statement captured not only a local experience of rural exodus and anxiety about the future, but also an awareness, however abstract, of the structural dynamics fueling that experience, which Marx condensed in a famous sentence: “the bourgeoisie . . . has made the country dependent on the towns.”¹

As months went by, I also observed how this overwhelming sense of despair coexisted with more subdued yet no less unconcealed feelings of pride and joy in farming activities and the condition of pagès—a cousin term to the French paysan that translates as “peasant” or, in some circumstances, “farmer.”

“Here, we’re all pagesos,” local men and women of all ages would say, suggesting the existence of reproductive logics that escape official statistics. This became clear on my visit to the field in the early fall of 2012, around harvest time, when, in addition to the usual gifts of hazelnuts, wild mushrooms, and grapes that my family and I used to receive from neighbors and friends, we were inundated by a daily bounty of garden produce—tomatoes, melons, zucchini, watermelons, eggplants, peppers of all sizes and colors—that the villagers foisted on us as we passed in the street. Carrying baskets and boxes of vegetables, they excitedly compared the treasures nourished by newly arrived water, despite the skepticism that I had previously recorded. “I don’t know about the hazelnuts, because with these prices . . . but in the winter, the pantry will be a joy!”

These feelings and responses, contradictory and oblique, are the structurally contingent product of a long history of material relations—institutionalized in local culture, imprinted in historical consciousness, and inscribed in the landscape—that permeate daily practice. At the center of this historical process we find the “crisis of traditional agriculture,”² a term that identifies the obverse of the modernization process initiated by the Spanish economy in the 1960s, often known as the “Spanish Miracle.” Depeasantization, massive rural exodus, and a structural crisis in family farming became the negative image of industrialization, urbanization, and extension of wage relations. Rural areas and small farming were sacrificed on the altar of growth and economic development.

This chapter situates this epochal transformation within a broader historical analysis of the development of material relations in Southern Catalonia since the late nineteenth century. Adopting such a long temporal perspective makes it possible to examine historical dynamics governing the transformation and continuity of the Southern Catalan rural world. This examination will focus on the articulation between two problems: on the one hand, reproduction, or the drive of people to reproduce their livelihoods and how they understand their actions; on the other hand, production, or the drive of capitalists for accumulation and how they try to manage other people’s lives to that end.³ The history of the Southern Catalan countryside may be described as a permanent struggle to reproduce autonomous livelihoods in the face of manifold political and economic structures producing dependence and marginalization.⁴ On some occasions, this struggle emerges as open conflict. More often it manifests in daily practices of carving out autonomy, in the stubborn unwillingness to be finished off, and in identity claims that escape capital’s law of value. Only through this historical lens, attentive to the precarious, shifting balance between autonomy and dependency generated in the dialectic of production and reproduction, can we understand the rejection of energy facilities in Southern Catalonia.

Dependence, Struggle, and Violence in Southern Catalonia (1874–1939)

Southern Catalonia is an area of dryland farming of Mediterranean commodity crops, predominantly grapes, olives, hazelnuts, and almonds. Specialized agriculture has been a characteristic feature since the eighteenth century, when the region tripled its population and agrarian production soared.⁵ Throughout the nineteenth century, as Catalonia became the first Spanish region to industrialize (especially along the coast), the livelihoods of the Southern Catalan peasantry progressively deteriorated, principally as a result of the worsening of the terms of trade, rising taxation, and the state-led privatization of common lands.⁶ These factors combined with increased demographic pressure to produce heightened class differences. My description of the system of dependencies structuring the Southern Catalan “traditional agrarian society” focuses on this period, which politically corresponds with a regime known as Restauración (1874–1931). During this period, successive governments dismantled the democratic reforms introduced between 1868 and 1874 and implemented an infamously fraudulent electoral process that effectively reinstated the power of the landowning elites at the national and local levels.

Nested Dependency Ties

The settlement pattern in Southern Catalonia was—and remains to this day—quite uniform, creating a structure that may be described as an archipelago of villages. Southern Catalans lived in small- and medium-sized villages, generally between five hundred and two thousand inhabitants, separated by regular distances (five to ten kilometers). Villagers rarely owned land outside of their terme municipal (“municipal territory,” the area administratively controlled by the municipality), creating a strong correspondence between landownership borders and administrative units. Dispersed habitation was uncommon, and distance to the agricultural fields—with each household typically cultivating several plots—was often considerable, a circumstance that helps explain why “farming” is locally referred to with the expression anar al defora (“going outside”). With the exception of the Ebro riverbanks, the terrain is rugged, dry, and full of stones, and has historically been made arable through the construction of a complex system of terraces and stone walls. The area was isolated, with the main communication lines being the river Ebro—linking the area with Tortosa, the region’s historical capital and its only sizable town—and a railroad to Reus—the trading market for the region’s agrarian production—built in the 1850s.

Each village in Southern Catalonia may be described as a constellation of cases (literally “houses,” yet roughly translatable as “households” and “farmsteads”) operating as units of both production and consumption.⁷ The region thus offered a fairly typical picture of petty commodity producers combining the sale of agricultural commodities with a noncapitalist organization of the labor process. Every household complemented the production of commodity crops with self-provision—raising small animals and pigs, growing fodder for mules, tending vegetable gardens and fruit trees at the edges of the fields—and exploitation of forested areas for wood, herbs, mushrooms, and, probably most important of all, hunting.⁸ The casa operated as a central cultural category evoking cooperation, affection, and unity of purpose, playing a central role in the definition of a person’s place in society. Thus, to this day Southern Catalans tend to hypostatize the casa as a subject of social relations, saying, for instance, “casa X married casa Y,” or “Joana is a sister of casa Z.”

The notion of casa thus possessed a strong ideological component stressing its organic unity, thereby obscuring the fact that the relation to the means of production within the household (fundamentally, landed property) was not collective or homogeneous. Indeed, the ideal of undivided inheritance through primogeniture structured a double axis of inter- and intragenerational contradictions. The former tended to be expressed in conflicts over decision making within the casa between the parents of the heir (amos), who tended to retain ownership of the estate until their death, and the heir and his wife (or the heiress and her husband). Within the same generation, lines of power and economic prevalence set cleavages between the prospective heir and his or her siblings, who could only remain in the casa as unmarried dependent laborers. Marriage decisions were crucial for the reproduction of the casa, and they tended to be monopolized by the amos and the married heir.⁹

Moving from the social relationships within the casa to those between cases, we observe that differential access to landed property was key to the hierarchy of cases and the relations of dependence between them. At the top of the pyramid we typically encounter a small number of relatively large landowners (cacique or senyor) whose land was not cultivated directly, but by poor peasants in sharecropping arrangements. Senyors not only possessed more, but also better land, situated on the plains closer to the village. They also enjoyed a position of semimonopolistic control over the transformation and commercialization of the agrarian produce. Their control over the life of the community was reinforced by their tight grip over the electoral processes and through the support of the church, the administrative apparatus, and the repressive forces. These landowners were the nodal points in a complex structure of power, known as caciquismo, that blossomed during the Restauración. Joaquín Costa described it in 1901:

Each region . . . was dominated by a cacique. . . . To know how a legal matter would be resolved, it did not matter whether you were right or whether the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Where the World Ends
• 1 Dependence and Autonomy
• 2 Nuclear Transaction
• 3 Nuclear Peasants
• 4 Southern Revolt
• 5 Wind Bubble
• 6 Accessing Wind
• 7 Waste and Dignity
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations follow page 100.
• Back Cover