On Tuesday, some 200 members of the Andalusian fieldworkers’ union (the Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores, or SAT) went to two supermarkets (the WalMart-esque Carrefour and Mercadona), filled up ten shopping carts with milk, sugar, chickpeas, pasta, rice and other basic necessities, and walked out without paying.
They proceeded to donate that food to 26 families in La Corrala Utopía (Sevilla) and three civic centers in three towns in the province of Cádiz.
Described by the SAT as an expropriation, the action is a spectacular example of the type of civil disobedience people all over Spain are engaging in to resist the government’s simultaneous imposition of neoliberal austerity and their pardoning of financial criminals and kleptocratic elites.
Citizens refusing to pay outrageous fees for public transportation and toll roads, doctors refusing to deny free health care to undocumented immigrants, and police refusing orders to assault protesters are just some examples of how, like the budget cuts, the Spanish regime’s crisis of legitimacy extends to all sectors of Spanish society.
Until now, most of the widespread civil disobedience against austerity in Spain has been carried out by average citizens active in or inspired by movements like the indignados.
What makes the SAT’s reaction so remarkable, however, is that it was spearheaded by a labor union and led by… a politician? Andalusian Rep. Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo is a member of the Izquierda Unida party (IU) and mayor of the mythical farming village of Marinaleda.
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