Homage to Catalonia

This book is Orwell's account of his time fighting on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was in Spain from late December 1936 until June 1937, fighting as an international volunteer with the POUM militia. His account covers three main subjects: his time fighting on the frontline; his experience of the street fighting in Barcelona between different republican factions in May 1937 and the events that followed; and his analysis of the different republicans parties and the struggles between them leading up to the suppression of POUM.

Orwell spent the first four months of 1937 fighting with POUM militia around Huesca near Saragossa, initially with a mainly Spanish unit, then with one of English volunteers. "Fighting" is perhaps not the best word, for as Orwell himself says, very little actual fighting occurred, and most of the effort on his section of the front was concentrated on trying to keep warm and fed, although he did take part in one sharp but inconclusive assault.

In late April, Orwell returned to Barcelona on leave. While there, at the start of May, the government police attempted to seize control of the Telephone Exchange from the Anarchist unionists who were occupying it. POUM came out on the side of the Anarchists, and street fighting followed by several tense days of barricaded stand-off followed, during which Orwell took part in guarding the POUM headquarters. Government police were brought in from Valencia, and order restored. Soon after the fighting ended, Orwell returned to the frontline; however, the events in Barcelona were to have serious consequences for POUM.

Orwell had been back at the frontline for only ten days when he was hit by a Fascist sniper. The bullet passed through his neck, and came very close to killing him. He was evacuated from the frontline and sent first to a hospital in Tarragona, then to a POUM-run sanatorium on the outskirts of Barcelona. He had lost his voice, it was believed permanently, and his other wounds would take months to fully heal, so he decided to leave Spain, and travelled back to the front to get his medical discharge papers.

By the time he arrived back in Barcelona around the 20th of June, POUM has been suppressed by the republican government, and its members were being rounded up and imprisoned. POUM was blamed for the troubles of early May; but more seriously than that, they were accused by the now-dominant Communists of being Trotskyists and Fascist traitors. After dodging the police for a few days, Orwell managed to slip out of the country.

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The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 with an army revolt led by Franco against the left-leaning Republican government. This provoked the trade unions and other left-wing organisations not only to organise themselves in defense of republican democracy, but to instigate revolutionary steps in the areas under their control. Land was seized from large landowners and either collectivised or distributed amongst the peasantry; factories were collectivised; churches were destroyed; and workers militias and organs of direct democracy were established. At the same time, Franco received active support from the Fascist governments of Italy and Germany, and Spain's own fascist movement, the Falangists. Thus the civil war, which had started as a conservative, monarchical, and clerical revolt against a democratic republican government, took on the character of a struggle between Fascism, rising in power throughout Europe, and socialist revolution. Both the anti-Fascist and the revolutionary aspects of the republican cause attracted many international volunteers, of whom Orwell was one.

There were three important factions amongst the revolutionary parties on the republican side. The first were the Anarchists, whose party was the CNT. They were particularly strong in Catalonia, and had played a major role in the initial organisation of resistance to the Army revolt and revolutionary activities. The second were the socialists and communists, sometimes organised in distinct parties, but in Catalonia joined in the PSUC. Their position in the central government was greatly strengthened by the USSR being the only significant foreign country supporting the republican side. By the time of the May troubles, the communists were very influential in the government, and had through infiltration gained virtual control over the police forces--at least according to Orwell.

The third group was POUM. Much smaller in numbers and without a significant union power base, its members however were highly politically conscious and active. POUM were a revolutionary socialist party, but one standing consciously outside the central control of the Soviet communist party and its mouthpiece, the Communist International. In Britain, Orwell was a member of the similarly-oriented Independent Labour Party; therefore, upon arriving in Spain, although by his own account unclear of and impatient with the different party distinctions, he joined the POUM militia, though never the party itself.

POUM also differed from the Communists on the issue of the place of revolution in the struggle against Franco. The Communists, under direction from Moscow, were committed to maintaining an alliance with the centrist elements in the republican camp, what they termed the liberal bourgeoisie. In this view, the war came first; the revolution could come later, if it was to come at all. Therefore, they cooperated with the centrist elements in not just preventing further revolutionary developments in republican-held areas, but in rolling back many of those that had occurred; for instance, replacing the party militias with a regular army, and returning control over public institutions from the workers to the government.

POUM, on the contrary, argued that revolution was integral to the fight against the Fascists (although Orwell does caution that there was a diversity of opinions with the POUM membership, unlike the Communists). The argument was twofold. First, holding to a revolutionary line would provoke the working classes behind the Fascist lines to revolt, and those already on the republican side to make greater sacrifices, whereas a policy of maintaining capitalism offered them (so POUM thought) little to aspire to. And second, in POUM's eyes, capitalist democracy was akin to Fascism anyway, and the capitalist bourgeoisie were the natural consituency for Fascism. This last point is rather startling; and although, when putting forward this argument, Orwell is careful to identify it as POUM's, he nevertheless seems to agree with it.

The dispute over the place of revolution in the resistance to fascism had an important international dimension. At the time, Stalin's USSR was seeking to build a defensive alliance with France and Britain against Nazi Germany. A socialist revolution in Spain, especially one which the Communists had been involved in, would be seen by both these countries as a threat, and undermine Stalin's diplomatic efforts. For this reason, Stalin and the Communist International directed the Spanish Communists to ally themselves with the moderate republicans and oppose the development of a revolution in Spain. Thus, paradoxically, the Communists defended capitalist democracy against its socialist enemies. It was this experience which was to lead Orwell later to classify Western European Communism as to amount practically to the support of Soviet foreign policy.

This pragmatic diplomatic concern had a darker dimension to it. In the USSR, this was the time of the show trials, the purges, and the reign of terror. These oppressive and paranoid measures were applied by Stalin's regime in its dealing with foreign Communist and revolutionary movements, too. Stalin was also obsessed with the perceived threat posed by Trotskyism, and both the POUM's independence from Soviet control and its insistence on fomenting international revolution were reminiscent of Trotskyism.

Thus, the troubles in Barcelona in early May provided a pretext for the suppression of POUM and the persecution of its members. That the suppression of such a revolutionary group was desired by the moderate, democratic elements in the Republican government was understandable enough. But it was pursued with the greatest vigour not by these anti-revolutionaries, but by the Communists. Orwell himself remarks at the embarassment which moderate members of the Spanish government regarded the treatment of POUM, and their explanation that such things were necessary to placate the USSR, the government's vital foreign backer. At the time of the suppression, the republican police had been thoroughly infiltrated by Communists, and there were repeated instances in which the release of POUM members from jail was ordered by the Government but refused by the police.

At the same time, the Communist press in Spain and internationally was filled with stories of POUM's deliberate sabotage of the Spanish republican cause. They were accused of being Trotskyists and conscious agents of the Fascists ("fifth-columnists", as the term was). So concerted were the propaganda efforts against them, that Orwell was concerned that this interpretation of the events of May and June, ludicrous thought it was, would become accepted as history. It was partly to fight against the effects of this policy of lies that he wrote Homage to Catalonia.

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The place of this experience of the persecution of POUM by a disciplined party prepared to use bald lies to achieve its ends in the development of Orwell's forebodings about a totalitarian future, and his linking of this threat not just with Fascism but with Communism too, is evident enough. Interesting, too, though, is what the book reveals about the nature of Orwell's political thinking as it was at the time.

First, one must recall that, despite his later lionising by the anti-communist right, at this stage of his life, Orwell was quite definitely a revolutionary socialist. We have already seen him accepting the notion that the middle class were the natural audience for Fascism, and that capitalism was essentially Fascistic in tendency. Seemingly in his view the only real alternatives were Socialism and Fascism; capitalist democracy was at best a broken reed, at worst a prelude to Fascist tyranny. This was a view that he was to continue to hold for many years more, writing in 1941 for instance that the only (albeit slim) hope for Britain to defeat Nazi Germany was on the back of its own, imminent, socialist revolution. So too Orwell is blase about the destruction of churches, the liquidation of the bourgeoisie, and the other violence accompanying the workers' seizing of control; blase, too, about the force that he realises will be necessary in the future to coerce the peasantry into collectivism.

The notion that the violence of the revolution itself tends strongly to the establishment of tyranny, a notion so obvious to the modern reader and one which Orwell seems to have glimpsed in the writing of Animal Farm, does not appear to have suggested itself to him at this stage, despite its playing out in the events he himself lived through in Catalonia.

More than this, it seems to me that his embracing of extremism, his either/or reductionism, his own willingness to harden himself to violence and force in achieving political ends, itself contributes to the mental environment in Europe in which the democracies lost their nerve and wilted in the face of the rising Fascist challenge. At the end of the book, he mocks England for its isolation from the harshness of the times. But in the end it is the even more isolated United States, working with the hated Soviets, that defeats the Fascist challenge, and the system of capitalist democracy that preserves the liberties that Orwell's dark fantasies decried as nearing extinction.