File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/current, message 53


Date: Sat, 17 May 1997 20:55:22 +0100
From: Lew <Lew-AT-dialogues.demon.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: George Orwell, Spain and War



Sixty years ago this month the events began which inspired George Orwell
to write *Homage to Catalonia*. Left-wing militias in the Catalan
capital, Barcelona, opposed to the government's policy of restoring
capitalist normality in the territories which had not fallen to Franco,
were attacked by Republican para-military forces under Communist
command.
 
Orwell witnessed these events while on leave from the front where he 
was fighting as a member of one of these left-wing militias, that of the 
POUM (Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista, or Workers Party of
Marxist Unification). The POUM was basically a dissident Communist Party
which didn't believe in taking orders from Moscow. It has been called a
Trotskyist party (not least by supporters of Stalin) but, although it
did contain some Trotskyists, this is inaccurate. Trotsky did try to
tell it what to do, but the POUM no more followed orders from 
Trotsky than it did from Stalin. 

Orwell had joined the POUM militia because he wanted to fight Franco not 
because he agreed with their political views. He knew some people in the 
Independent Labour Party (ILP) and they put him in touch with the POUM 
with which the ILP had some links. He was not a dissident Communist
himself and never had any sympathy with Leninism or Trotskyism. As he
pointed out in a book review in January l939:
 
"It is probably a good thing for Lenin's 
reputation that he died so early. Trotsky, in 
exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, 
but he is probably as much responsible for 
it as any man now living, and there is no 
certainty that as a dictator he would be 
preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he 
has a much more interesting mind. The 
essential act is the rejection of democracy - 
that is, of the underlying values of democracy;
once you have decided upon that, Stalin - or at 
any rate someone like Stalin - is already on 
the way"
(*The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters*, Vol I).
 
After May l937 things in Barcelona got worse. In June the POUM was 
banned. Its leader, Andres Nin, was arrested and later murdered by
agents of the GPU, the Russian secret police. Other POUM members were
detained and tortured, including non-Spanish members of their militia.
Orwell and his wife had to go into hiding and eventually got over the
border into France. 

*Homage to Catalonia* describes Orwell's own experiences in Spain but 
it also defends the POUM and the anarchists against the lies the 
Communist Party and their stooges put out about them to the effect that
they were in contact with and acting on behalf of Franco's fascists. 
Orwell knew this to be completely untrue and, out of honesty as well as 
loyalty to his former companions-in-arms, he denounced this. Needless to 
say, the Communists suggested that he too was a fascist sympathiser and 
"Trotsky-Fascist". It left him with an abiding disgust with the
Communist Party, its ideology and its methods, which was to inspire his
later novels *Animal Farm* and *Nineteen Eighty-Four* which, rightly,
show them no mercy. 
         
Orwell had gone to Spain as someone who had vague pro-working class
feelings. His experiences there politicised him and he left holding
radical left-wing views. What he learned in Spain was, first, a respect
for the capacity of ordinary workers to run things on their own and,
secondly, that the Communists were committed, not to furthering the
interests of the working class, but to furthering the foreign policy
objectives of the Russian state and that, to this end, they were 
prepared to lie, cheat and kill. Hence his damning, but wholly accurate, 
description of them: "the more vocal kind of Communist is in effect a
Russian publicity agent posing as an international Socialist" (*Inside
the Whale*).
 
In I935 the Comintern under Stalin had carried out one of its U-turns. 
When the I930s began, Social Democratic and Labour parties were 
still being denounced as "social fascists" and seen as being as bad, if
not worse, than the real fascists. With the coming to power of Hitler,
however, Germany came to be seen by the Russian rulers as a threat to
their interests. Russian foreign policy then changed, from a more or
less equal hostility to all the openly capitalist powers to seeking an
alliance with capitalist France and Britain against capitalist Germany. 
The Communist Parties had their role to play in this strategy: to work
for the broadest possible anti-fascist alliance to include openly pro-
capitalist elements as long as they were anti-fascist, i.e. in effect
anti-German. Everything was to be subordinated to the creation of such a
broad anti-fascist front. All talk of "revolution", "soviets" and the
like was dropped; the red flag was replaced by the Union Jack, and
patriotism became de rigueur. 

Orwell, having experienced first hand the application of this policy in 
Spain, saw through this, writing in a private letter in September 1937: 

"After what I have seen in Spain I have come to the conclusion that 
it is futile to be anti-Fascist while attempting to preserve capitalism.
Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest
democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism when the pinch
comes. We like to think of England as a democratic country, but our rule
in India, for instance, is just as bad as German Fascism, though
outwardly it may be less irritating. I do not see how one can oppose
Fascism except by working for the overthrow of capitalism, starting, of
course, in one's one country. If one collaborates with a capitalist-
imperialist government in a struggle against Fascism, i.e. against a
rival imperialism, one is simply letting Fascism in by the back door". 

This position put Orwell far, far to the left of the Communist Party and
in June l938 he joined the ILP. The ILP, which had been one of the
original founding elements of the Labour Party, had broken away from
Labour in 1932 and was a home for all sorts of leftwing critics of
Labour's short-sighted reformism. At different times, both the
Communists and the Trotskyists tried to take it over, but without
success. While some of its members had notions of socialism, generally
speaking it was a confused organisation which was unclear both as to
what socialism was and as to how to get it, and was itself reformist in
that it campaigned for reforms of capitalism. 

Orwell was not out of place in the ILP since he, too, only had a vague 
notion of socialism. For him it was the general idea of a decent society
without private ownership of the means of production or a privileged
class and where ordinary people would run things democratically in their
own interest. Orwell, however, was clear on one thing: Russia was not
socialist or anything like it. In a book review in June l938 he 
asked of Russia: "is it Socialism, or is it a peculiarly vicious form of
state capitalism?" His answer was that, whatever it was, it wasn't
socialism. Later he embraced the theory that Russia was a new
exploiting, class society best described as "oligarchical 
collectivism" where a self-appointed and self-perpetuating oligarchy
ruled through a one-party dictatorship on the basis of the state
(collective class) ownership of the means of production. For although
Orwell was primarily interested in literary matters he also followed
very closely the arguments that went on in Trotskyist, ex-Trotskyist and
ex-Communist circles on the nature of Russian society, a knowledge he
was able to put to later use when writing *Nineteen Eighty-Four*.
 
In one of his letters Orwell mentions that he had written an anti-war
pamphlet. This has not been found, but it is not difficult to work out
from his other letters and articles what it would have said. Its basic
premise would have been what Orwell set out in book review he did in
August 1937:
 
"I.That war against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed
classes think they are going to profit from it.
2. That every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not
as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac
(militarist Germany in l914, Fascist Germany next year or the year
after). 
The essential job is to get people to recognize war propaganda when they
see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda". 

Orwell, as we have seen, regarded the campaign for an anti-fascist 
"peoples front" as just such war propaganda disguised as a peace 
campaign. It merely opposed one type of capitalism by another type of 
capitalism, in the interest of one particular alliance of capitalist- 
imperialist powers. So his anti-war pamphlet can be expected to have 
denounced mere anti-fascism as a means of preparing workers
ideologically to support Britain, France and Russia in the coming war
against Germany and Italy. 

But if mere anti-fascism was not a genuine alternative to fascism, what,
in Orwell's eyes, was? Orwell looked to the emergence of a mass
democratic revolutionary movement that would be anti-capitalist as well
as anti-fascist. Reviewing Franz Borkenau's *The Communist
International* (which should be read by anyone wanting to learn about
the various turns the Comintern effected in the l920s and l930s) in 
September l938, he wrote:
 
"Where I part company from him is where 
he says that for the western democracies 
the choice lies between Fascism and an 
orderly reconstruction through the 
cooperation of all classes. I do not believe 
in the second possibility, because l do not 
believe that a man with GBP50,000 a year 
and a man with fifteen shillings a week 
either can, or will, co-operate. The nature of 
their relationship is quite simply, that the 
one is robbing the other, and there is no 
reason to think that the robber will 
suddenly turn over a new leaf. It would 
seem, therefore, that if the problems of 
western capitalism are to be solved, it will 
have to be through a third alternative, a 
movement which is genuinely revolutionary, 
i.e. willing to make drastic changes and to 
use violence if necessary, but which does 
not lose touch, as Communism and Fascism have 
done, with the essential values of democracy. 
Such a thing is by no means unthinkable. The 
germs of such a movement exist in numerous 
countries, and they are capable of growing. 
At any rate, if they don't, there is no real 
exit from the pigsty we are in".
 
Unfortunately, no such movement did emerge and in September 1939 the
widely predicted war broke out. Although previously he had envisaged 
going underground to oppose the war (in January l 939 Orwell had written
to Herbert Read, the anarchist art-world figure, "I believe it is
vitally necessary for those of us who intend to oppose the coming war to
start organising for illegal anti-war activities" ), when the war did
break out he not only didn't go underground but he actively supported it
- and not just on anti-fascist but on old-fashioned patriotic grounds. 
He tried to enlist to go and kill German workers himself but was turned
down because he had signs of TB. Instead, he spent the war churning 
out patriotic propaganda (some of it nasty stuff: he referred to
pacifists as "fascifists" and denounced conscientious objectors as "pro-
Nazis") aimed at getting British workers to go and kill German workers
and Indian workers to kill Japanese workers. It was a betrayal, an
unpardonable one from a socialist point of view, of the working-class
internationalism he had initially adopted as a result of his 
experiences in Spain. 
-- 
Lew


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