Joe Woolfall, Liverpool South Socialist Party
George Orwell is one of the best-known socialist writers, famous particularly for Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm: critiques of Stalinism, fascism and totalitarianism. The era in which Orwell wrote was different from our own.
Yet capitalism’s global crisis is producing intense instability, polarisation and mass resistance. The rise of the far right today does not mechanically recreate the conditions in which fascism came to power in Italy, Germany and Spain at the time Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia. Fascism arose historically as capitalism’s response to a strong, organised and class-conscious workers’ movement which threatened to take power, but whose leaders failed to lead it to victory. The rise of Mussolini and Hitler was a direct consequence of the failure of workers’ leaders to take power in the revolutionary upheavals following World War One.
In Spain, Franco’s dictatorship was the culmination of a similar process. The heroic Spanish workers could have made not one but ten revolutions, as Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky said, were it not for the treacherous leadership displayed by the various workers’ organisations. Today, mass workers’ parties do not exist in the same way as they did through much of the twentieth century; most have been hollowed out and transformed into open capitalist parties. But the Spanish Revolution remains full of lessons for today.
It is therefore an excellent time to return to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, around the ninetieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Orwell’s book is one of the finest eyewitness accounts of the revolution and counter-revolution which shook Spain from 1931 to 1939. It is also a moving account of how a socialist writer, initially drawn to Spain by a simple hatred of fascism, came face to face with the decisive question of revolutionary leadership.
A biography of Orwell records how, just before Christmas 1936, he stomped into the office of The New English Weekly, a magazine he wrote for, dressed for an expedition and carrying a heavy suitcase. “I’m going to Spain,” he declared. “This fascism. Somebody’s got to stop it.”
Such was the heroic attitude of the roughly 40,000 people from 53 countries who went to Spain to fight Franco and fascism. Orwell travelled via Paris in December 1936 and joined the militia of the POUM (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification); Orwell did not seek out the POUM for ideological reasons, rather his criticisms of Stalinism in earlier books (such as Down and Out in Paris and London) closed the ‘International Brigades’ for him. Instead, his contacts with the Independent Labour Party (connected with the POUM) facilitated his, joining the POUM’s ‘Lenin Division’.
Orwell’s first experience of Barcelona made a lasting impression on him. “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle,” Orwell wrote. “Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists.”
The old servile and ceremonial forms of speech had disappeared. Nobody said “Señor”; everyone said “Comrade”. Waiters treated customers as equals and tipping had been eliminated. “In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist,” Orwell wrote.
Revolutionary Barcelona
Barcelona had been transformed. Following the Popular Front’s election victory in February 1936, political prisoners were released and workers’ confidence surged. But it was after Franco’s military uprising in July that the revolution truly erupted. Workers defeated the fascist coup in key cities, armed themselves, seized factories and land, drove out fascist-linked managers and began reorganising society from below. In Barcelona, the old social hierarchy had visibly been overturned. As Felix Morrow put it in his ‘Revolution and Counter Revolution in Spain’, “they were the masters of Barcelona.”
The workers were far ahead of the government. At one point, Spain had three premiers in a single day, the first two falling because they refused to arm the working class. As in all revolutions, there existed dual power. Workers’ militias, factory committees, trade unions and peasants’ organisations were often the real power on the ground. A society cannot remain polarised from the perspective of class governance. At some point or another, one class and its organisations must win.
Considering the spontaneous reorganisation of society carried out by the workers, one would not be blamed for wondering whether the masses in Spain even needed leaders at all. Orwell himself initially dismissed many of the disputes between revolutionary organisations. He wanted to fight fascism in the name of “common decency”, his characteristically aristocratic, plain-English expression of socialist feeling.
But the events of the Spanish Civil War show precisely why leadership matters: what type of leadership is needed, and what occurs when the revolutionary energy of the masses is not developed and consolidated but channelled towards its own defeat.
The Popular Front government, heavily influenced by the Stalinist Communist Party, held back the workers’ revolution under the guise of “winning the war first”. This was a stageist policy: first defeat Franco, then deal with socialism later. In reality, it meant subordinating the working class and its aims to capitalist ministers and private property.
Orwell correctly explained that this flowed from the official policy of the Communist International, which had become subordinated to the diplomatic interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR. Stalin sought military alliances with capitalist powers, particularly France, and did not want a victorious socialist revolution in Spain to frighten them off. As Orwell wrote, the Communist Party’s line “was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that France… would strongly object to a revolutionary neighbour”.
The result was a counter-revolutionary policy. Stalin wrote to Prime Minister Largo Caballero in December 1936, insisting upon the protection of private property. Caballero’s successor, Juan Negrín, later publicly declared, “We respect private property.” The revolutionary gains which workers had won through struggle were not extended; instead, they were gradually dismantled.
“In order to check every revolutionary tendency and make the war as much like an ordinary war as possible, it became necessary to throw away the strategic opportunities that actually existed,” Orwell wrote. He saw this sabotage firsthand. The democratic militias were broken up and placed under the control of the capitalist state. The Popular Army increasingly resembled a traditional capitalist army rather than the egalitarian workers’ militias which had formed spontaneously at the start of the civil war.
1937 May Days
The culmination came in the May Days of 1937. When the government moved to seize the anarchist-controlled Telephone Exchange in Barcelona and disarm the workers, barricades appeared across the city. Orwell found himself fighting on the POUM side, defending buildings against forces loyal to the Republican government and the Stalinists. The opportunity existed for the Barcelona workers to take control of the city and revive the revolution. But the anarchist leadership called for workers to leave the barricades and go back to work, while the POUM vacillated and submitted to the anarchists’ lead.
The POUM’s explosive growth during the revolution – from around 200 members to 40,000 in the first half of 1936 – showed the sheer hunger for a revolutionary alternative. Yet its leader, Andrés Nin (once Trotsky’s secretary), had broken from Trotskyism and drifted into a centrist bloc. That meant criticising Stalinism without offering a clear, independent class programme; a fatal compromise when clarity was needed most.
Lessons
Orwell’s writings on Spain are important because they illuminate the lessons for the working class and the revolutionary socialist movement today. Orwell did not draw every conclusion that Trotsky and Trotskyists drew from Spain. He was no Marxist, and his politics remained those of an anti-Stalinist democratic socialist. Yet his book provides powerful evidence for the idea that the power of the working class cannot be defended by subordinating the revolution to capitalist politicians and their state.
A mass revolutionary party, rooted in the working class and armed with a socialist programme, could have patiently explained the faults of all those involved: the obvious Stalinist treachery, the anarchists’ hostility to taking state power, and the POUM’s tendency to follow the anarchist leadership rather than offer an independent alternative. Spain did not lack workers’ organisation. What it lacked was a revolutionary leadership, with a Marxist leadership and programme, capable of drawing the correct lessons and policies, such as developing democratic workers’ councils and fighting for the socialist transformation of society. Along with a clear programme to rally the sizeable peasant population around, just like the Bolsheviks in 1917, particularly the necessity for a party to offer land to the peasantry.
Just nineteen years after the Russian Revolution had abolished capitalism and put workers “in the saddle”, the essential lessons seemed absent from the heads of Spain’s ‘communist’ and ‘socialist’ leaders. This was no accident. Stalinism represented a counter-revolutionary political retreat from the internationalist and democratic traditions of October 1917.
Spain also transformed Orwell as both a writer and a socialist. He later said to a friend that “history stopped in 1936”, conveying his sense that the defeat in Spain opened the way to a new era of reaction, war and totalitarianism – the world which would later haunt Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.
Throughout his life, Orwell was critical of socialists and certain forms of socialism. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he famously, and rather unfairly and snobbishly, attacked the “vegetarians, nudists, sandal-wearers, sex-maniacs, Quakers, ‘Nature Cure’ quacks, pacifists and feminists” whom he believed made socialism unattractive. But Orwell’s critique of some types of ‘socialists’ remains valuable – on Stalinism for example. His experiences in Spain gave him a lifelong hatred of bureaucracy and the falsification of truth. They also strengthened his belief in a socialism which is democratic, not ruled by a privileged elite. Orwell believed that nothing less than socialism could save humanity “from the misery of the present or the nightmare of the future”.
That was the lesson of Spain. It remains the lesson today. Homage to Catalonia is not simply a brilliant account of one man’s experience in a civil war. It is a record of workers beginning to transform society, and of how that possibility was strangled by failed and treacherous leadership. “If there is hope, it lies in the proles,” says Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed. But for that hope to become reality, mass parties of the working class, led by Marxists and armed with the lessons of past victories and defeats, must be built internationally.
- Read more on Spain 1936 at www.socialismtoday.org/spain-1936-a-crisis-of-leadership
