Orwell and Barcelona

https://redflag.org.au/article/george-orwell%E2%80%99s-socialism

Spain beckons

On 17 July, the fascist general Francisco Franco launched a military coup to put an end to a seven-year worker and peasant revolt that had challenged the running of Spanish capitalism. The Spanish workers, aware of the fate of their comrades in Germany and Italy, were not prepared to go quietly. Their rallying cry became: “Better Vienna than Berlin!” (In Berlin Nazism had triumphed without a fight, while in Vienna workers armed themselves and resisted fascism to the last.)

Immediately, Franco was halted. His army was defeated in two-thirds of Spain. With the old Republican government crippled and the army in revolt, workers were in power across sections of Spain. Orwell travelled to the country to assist in the fight against fascism. He arrived in Barcelona just after Christmas. The scenes did away with his uncertainties about the capacity of workers to transform the world.

“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle”, he later wrote. “Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags … Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal … I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

Barcelona completely transformed Orwell’s understanding of socialism. At first hand he experienced the political maturity, courage and profound ability of workers to create a new society. Orwell had seen workers’ power and was not about to turn his back on it. He resolved to stay in Spain and join a working class militia.

Orwell’s sojourn in revolutionary militancy in Spain, his commitment to socialism, is an awkward fact for many of his conservative biographers. Robert Colls, for instance, decries Orwell’s role in the revolution as a flight of fancy, condescendingly stating that he “might have spent a little less time responding to his own experiences, and a little more time thinking about the art of the politically possible”.

Initially, Orwell had little understanding of or interest in the political differences between the groups fighting in Spain. But he would soon learn that the fate of the struggle hung on the debates between the working class organisations central to the resistance.

Orwell joined the POUM in early 1937. The organisation identified as Trotskyist and argued that the way to win the war against Franco was to complete the social revolution that was already under way. It would be possible to defeat fascism only if workers were aware that they were fighting for their complete liberation from all forms of exploitation.

The counter-argument came from the Stalinist Communist Party, which argued that the war needed to be won first, and that workers could make a revolution only after fascism had been defeated. Workers needed to keep Spanish capitalists on side, and this meant avoiding anything that would scare them off – such as taking control of production or arming themselves in the streets. The number one imperative for the Stalinists was therefore to put this revolutionary situation to an end as quickly as possible.

When Orwell arrived back in Barcelona from the front in May, the Communist Party was attempting to do just this. As troops tried to take back the worker-controlled Barcelona Telephone Exchange, workers rose up to defend themselves. Tragically, the other workers’ organisations, particularly the anarchist CNT and the POUM, refused to give a lead to the uprising. After days of fighting, workers began to take down the barricades, opening the way for a wave of repression. Orwell escaped across the border to France just as other members of the POUM were being rounded up by Stalinist secret police.

Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky had said that at the beginning of the revolution: “In its specific gravity in the country’s economic life, in its political and cultural level, the Spanish working class stood on the first day of the revolution not below but above the Russian workers at the beginning of 1917.” Now, a great workers’ revolution was crushed under the heel of fascism and Stalinism. A great hope vanished.