Society
Anarchists and Communists in Spain
Published 09 April 2007
NS editor Kingsley Martin rejected George Orwell's account of Communist suppression of the Barcelona anarchist uprising but allowed HN Brailsford's more neutral report
The New Statesman 22 May 1937
The Spanish civil war (1936-39) aroused the idealism of the British left. Many articles in support of the republican cause appeared in the NS but its editor, Kingsley Martin, would not publish criticism of the Soviet Union's role in the conflict. He famously rejected articles from George Orwell exposing the communist role in suppressing the anarchist uprising in Barcelona, but he accepted a more neutral report on that event from the historian H N Brailsford.
Selected by Robert Taylor
Looking down from a 'plane over Barcelona a week ago I saw the tramcars moving along the Ramblas and the factory chimneys smoking. It was true, then, that the rising had been suppressed and order restored. This achievement, however, had cost the lives of 900 men who ought to have been facing Franco, while the wounded on both sides, following an authoritative but confidential estimate, numbered 2,500. This was by far the gravest of several armed encounters between the Democratic Republic and the forces of Social Revolution: one is not sure that it will be the last. So profound is the gulf between the thinking of Spanish Anarchists and the moderates of the People's Front that the marvel is rather that the struggle has been so long postponed. For this delay the Valencia Government has to thank as much the virtues of the Anarchists as their failings. Their leaders, in spite of a feud that dated from the days of Bakunin and Marx, had had the magnanimity to join both the Republican and the Catalonian Governments. Down to the day of the Barcelona rising, and even after it, all their official utterances were persuasive pleas for unity and even for fusion. When they did argue their case in print it was with courtesy and restraint. Their failing is deliberate, high-principled indiscipline. When at last they struck in Barcelona it was without the support of their formidable mass organisation, the C.N.T. Trade Union federation. Two only of the organisations on its fringes (the Friends of Durruti and the Libertarian Youth) manned the barricades, in alliance with the Marxists of P.O.U.M. Had the C.N.T. With all its armed forces attempted to seize power in the early days of the civil war it could have won Catalonia and held it – until the inevitable foreign intervention. For these feuds provoke two nightmares. They may open the weakly held Aragon front to a Fascist offensive. They may also serve as an excuse for an Italian or even an international occupation of Barcelona, on the plea that this great city with its many and wealthy foreign concerns is a prey to anarchy. The prompt action of the Valencia Government has removed both these dangers. But can it in this poisoned atmosphere advance over the corpses of hundreds of dead workers to its positive ends – the disarmament of the civilian population and the fusing of the volunteer party militias into a regular army? It might have been managed if Premier Caballero had himself gone to Barcelona and used his magnetism and his legend to win the workers. It cannot be done by force alone.
Several factors went to the making of this rising. Catalonia is intensely nationalist and with difficulty identifies her cause with that of Spain. She smashed her own local Fascism in the first week of the civil war; her mood ever since has been that of a victor. Her own territory is free, and she feels only a moderate interest in the distant Aragon Front, which her forces hold. For lack of 'planes, tanks and artillery (as she sees it) she can undertake no hopeful offensive there, and for this she blames Russia even more bitterly than the Valencia Government. They will not (she says) give arms to Anarchists, because they mean to crush them when victory is won. It was even said that the International Column was raised for this purpose. To these charges Valencia has three answers. First, arms even now are scarce, and must be reserved for the vital fronts. Secondly, the Anarchist militia is so undisciplined that to give it modern arms would be to waste them. Thirdly, in fact the Anarchists have plenty of arms, including tanks and artillery, but they keep them for use against their more moderate comrades.
Under these arguments, as I realised during a stay in Barcelona, lurked a cruder struggle for power. When civil war broke out, the anarcho-syndicalist C.N.T. was, with its reputed membership of about a million, the dominant power in Catalonia. But in nine months the United Socialist and Communist Party has by brilliant organisation raised the local membership of its rival Trade Union federation, the U.G.T., to some 450,000. The C.N.T., struggling to be loyal, felt its power slipping from it. It manoeuvred unskilfully; it claimed additional representation and even a majority in the Catalonian Ministry; its gangster fringe (for gunmen and bandits mingle in its undisciplined ranks with idealists who carry on the ethical tradition of Godwin and Proudhon) murdered in the week before the rising two U.G.T. Ministers, Roldan and Sese: finally its Left Wing lost patience and made its bid for power.
But the real issue lay deeper. This was, like the Spartacist tragedy in Berlin, a struggle between Reformism and the will to make a proletarian revolution. P.O.U.M., which rose in alliance with the Anarchist Left, had been involved with incredible bitterness in this struggle, ever since the formation of the People's Front. It represented the older and now heretical Communist position. It opposed any alliance with the middle class even for the salvation of the Republic: for the sake of political as distinct from social democracy it would make no sacrifices to unity. Against it, far more fiercely than against the Anarchists, the Communists waged a merciless feud, and charged it with all the treasons ascribed to Trotsky. Of these it was doubtless innocent, but it behaved with reckless, partisan folly. Its leader, Nin, was calling on the eve of the rising for the instant convocation of a constituent assembly of workers, peasants and soldiers. Its newspaper backed the rising. Yet the Anarchists with whom it allied itself stand farther from its unbending Marxism than do the Socialist from whom it assailed with its tanks and guns stolen from Government arsenals.
To grasp this situation one must realise that the Communists now constitute the modern Centre Party in republican Spain. Their propaganda, as skilful as it is pervasive, is almost exclusively defensive. It focuses attention on resistance to Fascism and on a concentrated effort to win the war; it discourages talk about the future, and ridicules its allies' weakness for “plans and projects”. I have before me a pamphlet by its secretary, Jose Diaz, which defines its objective as the creation of “a domestic and parliamentary republic of a new type.” The novelty of this conception is not easy to grasp, for Diaz goes on to insist that the chief task is to destroy the material foundations of Spanish feudalism – the vast aristocratic estates, the political and economic power of the Church, and the old army based on caste. Something is added, in much vaguer words, about the need for breaking up the financial oligarchy and nationalising the Bank of Spain, but it is obvious that industry will be socialised, if at all, only partially and with extreme caution. The enemy, in short, is feudalism and less certainly big business, but small property, whether in town or country, need have no fear.
I just discussed this policy with several leading Communists. They justified it mainly on two grounds. Spain is a land of peasants, who own their few acres, save in the south and west, where the great estates predominate. They cannot be driven forcibly to to accept socialisation – an experiment which the Anarchists have tried in Aragon with disastrous results. Again, the support of the small middle class is essential, if the war is to be won. In fact, the country was very evenly divided by the test of votes in February, 1936; the Republic dare not throw away potential support from any quarter. Secondly, it dare not antagonise the Western democracies by unfurling the flag of proletarian revolution. This had the ring of everyday common sense, though I reflected that Lenin brushed aside very similar arguments in 1917. As one listened to Franco's guns in Madrid and read the news from Bilbao, this prudent moderation was intelligible. It certainly sprang as much from a study of the particular case of Spain, as from any consideration of Russian interests.
These, the reader may object, are opportunist arguments; but will not the Communist Party, with or withou8t its Socialist allies, revert to its revolutionary policy when victory is won? That is, one supposes, the reckoning on which the British Government bases its hostility to the Republic. I think this development must be permanent. This prediction I base on the social composition of the Communist Party both in Catalonia ( where it is fused with the Socialists) and in Spain. It retains the discipline for which it is famous; it can by its immensely skilful propaganda through posters, periodicals and broadcasting compel the average man to think its thoughts. It has rendered incomparable services in waging the war, and it shares the gratitude that Russia has justly earned. But it is no longer primarily a party of the industrial workers or even a Marxist Party. One of its leading men was describing to political schools for the army. “What do you teach?” I asked. “The fundamentals of Marxism?” “Well, no,” he answered, “the instruction is all on People's Front lines.” Again in Catalonia a leading Communist was explaining the rapid growth of the U.G.T. “Much of the new membership,” he said, “has come from the ranks of the Esquerra (Left Middle-class Republicans)> The small middle-class realises that of the two parties our is the stouter defender of small property.” The claim was true. In the next day's newspaper I read a report of a gathering of retail tradesmen in Barcelona. It was the U.G.T. Which saved them from the plans of socialisation backed by the Anarchist C.N.T.
The growth of the Party has been astonishingly rapid during the civil war. Insignificant in number when that began, the Party is now, or soon will be, the leading political organisation in republican Spain. In nine month it has quadrupled its membership, which now stands at 249,000 in governmental Spain, exclusive of Catalonia. Its social composition is unusual – 89,000 industrial workers as against 62,000 agricultural workers, 76,000 peasant owners, 15,000 “middle class” and 7,000 “intellectuals,” together with 19,000 women. Its vigorous youth organisation has in round figures 300,000 members. This intense activity in recruiting provoked protests from other parties. It struck me that these new members could not have been sifted and tested with the care customary in the early years of the Party. In fairness I will give the crushing answer of the organiser to whom I put this objection. On November 7th, at the worst hour of Madrid's peril, the Party called together its new members in that city. They numbered 2,000 men. Of these 1,700 volunteered for the militia. They had to stand under fire, unarmed in reserve, waiting till they could receive a rifle from a dead man's hand. Of these 1,700 no fewer than 900 were killed in the defence of Madrid. He went on to illustrate the Party's share in the risks and labours of the active army. In three brigades on the Cordova front respectively 80, 50 and 95 per cent. of the men were its members.
It is a tangled tale, this Spanish epic. The heroism of simple men, who have flung their lives away for the joy of battling half-armed against feudalism, blends with the vanity of leaders and the egoism of parties. Doctrinal feuds that our grandfathers waged in learned tomes arm themselves with machine-guns and wreak mass-murder in the streets. I have tried to describe without judging. But when memory goes back to the bloody defeats of 1934, and faces frankly the forces that then so nearly crushed the Spanish workers, I think they were wise to form the People's Front. Once formed, it was pledged in loyalty, as in prudence, to modernisation. When one has seen something of the palaces of the grandees and the hovel of the peasants, to make an end of feudalism seems no small achievement. With this will come much else – education for the masses, an expansion of all the social services, co-operation among the producing peasants, workers' councils in the factories, and, above all, a new sense of national unity and ambition. To this new Spain the Anarchists, if their gunmen can but be weeded out, have much to contribute. Liberty is their passion, though they have loved her in day-dreams; they too, though they scorned discipline and system, have learned to give their all to the common good. With all its failings this nation can boast that, when at last it is roused to action, it acts with a will and endures to the end.
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