REMAKING IBIECA

Remaking Ibieca: Rural Life in Aragon under Franco



Remaking Ibieca

Introduction

In this paper, we will be discussing the life people lived in Ibieca which was a small town in north-eastern Spain. Over twenty five years, Spain's economy shifted from an agrarian economy to a market economy, which led people to adopt improved social and environmental practices. Susan Friend Harding professor conducted a study of this people which showed that between 1950 and 1975, "the inhabitants of the town of Ibieca remodelled their world involuntarily. It led to what experienced as life as usual. People of that town participated voluntarily in the social processes that take away their pre-industrial cultures, simply because they are unaware of what is at stake (Trumbull, 2007).

Relation with peasants and Landlords

In Ibieca, smallholder farmer is a manual worker and has, in general, rather lower level of life. His social figure has its parallel in the artisan, despite its legal form is different, theoretically placing the same plane as the large landowner. In fact, capitalism, to free primitive obstacles did not have the need to break the laws that will govern the property, on the contrary, he adopted, almost verbatim, the construction of Roman law according to which, in theory, the same article of the discipline code concerning property in a few square meters, in vast domains. Indeed, from the aftermath of independence, land distribution and the severe repression that prevailed against small farmers responded almost entirely to the wishes of the new ruling classes. They laid the foundations of an economic system characterized on one side by the archaism of its largely agrarian relations of production system ("two-halves" - sharecropping) and the other by the distortions inherent in capitalism dependent (import-export). While the years from 1870 to 1910 would indicate a growth of domestic industry and the birth of an industrialization, the resistance of structures pre-capitalist and anti hate between the ruling classes never allowed the bourgeoisie to overcome the pre-capitalist sector without social project already articulated but always deeply rooted in widespread practice (Susan, 2011).

Agricultural workers of these companies, while taking social and political disadvantage of not gathered in large urban modern, go along with the industrial proletariat in the way of the formation of the revolutionary potential of class. The semi-proletarians, it is, apaceros and sharecroppers, although they may not have the same class consciousness, can expect from the industrial proletarian revolution a social advantage. It was encouraging, the prevailing associative forms of work and the concentration of small businesses in large companies, will be the only one that can radically abolish and for the first time in history the system of private land occupation at the same time as the abolition of exploitation employers.

This does not mean that the small farmer or sharecropper will became the owner of the land, but they will be released to pay the tribute of its work force, consisting of the payment in cash or kind, the owner of the land previously ...