The struggle of unemployed Spanish farm labourers continues to grab global headlines. First with the enterprising supermarket sweeps led by the maverick "Robin Hood mayor", Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, and this week with the mass occupation of the Palacio de Moratalla, owned by the Duke of Segorbe. "We're here to denounce a social class that leaves such places to waste," proclaimed Diego Cañamero, leader of the Andalusian Union of Workers – the duke was not there to hear him say it, being in one of his other homes, 60 miles away.

The duke, like many of the region's titled landowners, receives farm subsidies from the EU for his vast expanses of land, irrespective of whether anything is grown on it – meanwhile, rural poverty and unemployment soar ever higher. While the eurozone crisis, Rajoy's austerity measures, and the collapse of the construction industry on the Andalusian coast have brought it into sharp focus, the struggle for land goes back centuries in Spain. Some of the most notorious examples include the ill-fated Asturias Rising in 1934, in which 1,335 people were killed, and the election of a Spanish Federal Republic in 1873, a regime of radical decentralisation, which saw villages proclaim independence from the state and begin to carve up the large estates of the nobles for farming.

In Sánchez Gordillo's utopian town of Marinaleda, the farmland they spent 12 years attempting to requisition from the Duke of Infantal had always lain idle – but since their historic victory in 1991 those 1,200 hectares (2,964 acres) have employed the majority of the town's population of 2,600. It helps that the Marinaleños specifically chose labour-intensive crops, and ones that would need canning and packaging afterwards, to create more work. When I interviewed Sánchez Gordillo for my book earlier this year he explained the rationale: "Our aim was not to create profit, but jobs, so we created a complementary industry to transform our agrarian products: peppers, artichokes, favas, broccoli, olive oil and olives." The idea, he went on, is that "la tierra es de quien la trabaja" – the land is for those who work it.

The current struggle for land terrifies the Spanish right, and the paucity of their response has been telling. "They're just uneducated farmers" someone told me haughtily on Twitter (bigoted and irrelevant at the same time), while another chipped in "Sánchez Gordillo is a monster" (difficult to prove without a DNA test). There has been no critique of their argument – simply, that the crisis of capitalism is being visited squarely on the poorest in Spanish society – because there can be no critique. Marinaleda terrifies them even more; first because it proves that protest works, and second because it works. The town has only 5% unemployment – and most of these people are recent arrivals, economic migrants from outside – compared with 34% in Andalusia as a whole.

As Rajoy's £65bn austerity measures start to take effect, and the crisis deepens, expect arrests, slander and agents provocateurs – this has as long a history in Spain as the struggle for land. During the late 19th century, the rightwing Carlists published provocateur newspapers that they would then use as evidence of the dangerous anticlericalism of the country's burgeoning anarchist movement. One of these newspapers contains better rhetoric than I've seen in most sincere insurrectionary tracts: "Let us tear down the vault of heaven as though it were a paper roof!" ran the lead story in a provocateur newspaper called Los Descamisados. "We, the disinherited, the pariahs, the helots, the plebs, the dregs, the scum, the filth of society declare that we have reached the depths of our misery and the hour of triumph is at hand!"

Fair enough.