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Introduction
George Orwell published his memoir of the Spanish Civil War in 1938, while the conflict was still ongoing. It chronicles the roughly seven-month period he spent in Spain contributing to the Republican cause. Orwell arrived in Barcelona in December of 1936, eager to join and document the fight, and later fled to France to escape political persecution in June of 1937.
In the intervening period, Orwell experienced the extremes of war and politics. This arc - which led to a significant personal transformation - attracts romantics and history lovers on its own merits. These events take on added significance given their influence on a writer whose work left such a mark on the events and thinking of the Twentieth Century. The path to the effective warnings against Stalinism in Animal Farm and 1984 along with the testament to intellectual honesty that Orwell’s work became, runs right through Homage to Catalonia.
All the Best Matadors were Fascists
A few months before Orwell arrived in Spain, Nationalist forces – a coalition of Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and others – orchestrated an insurrection against the Republican government. While the Nationalists successfully gained control of much of western Spain, military units that rose up for the Nationalist cause in Barcelona were suppressed. A coalition of hard-left factions allied with the government participated in the suppression and took over the city. As a convinced socialist, Orwell was fascinated by the results.
“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. 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; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.”
Formal language that showed deference to hierarchy had fallen out of use. The “bourgeoisie” disguised themselves as workers, in dress and in speech. Workers assumed control of many of their workplaces, and activists attempted to reform the city’s brothels. A notable feature of Spanish life at the time was conspicuously diminished:
“Where were the handsome bulls and the handsome bullfighters now? It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.”
Given Orwell’s desire to fight and his affiliation with the International Labor Party (ILP), he was directed to join their Catalonian affiliate: the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). The POUM was a Trotskyist organization. While the organization didn’t survive long, the experience of fighting for its militia arm has been immortalized by the chance occurrence of having Orwell among its ranks. Homage to Catalonia is a work of long-form journalism. Orwell memorably describes the charms and shortcomings of the military training he received. Once his unit was shipped to the Aragon front, they experienced long stretches of enduring boredom and the elements interrupted by stretches of chaos, terror and carnage. After three and a half months of hell on the warfront, Orwell and some of his comrades were given leave from the conflict. They promptly returned to a new Barcelona that had transformed yet again.
“A deep change had come over the town. There were two facts that were the keynote of all else. One was that the people—the civil population—had lost much of their interest in the war; the other was that the normal division of society into rich and poor, upper class and lower class, was reasserting itself.”
While public sentiment in Barcelona may have been cooling, conflict amongst the various leftist political parties heated up. Stalinist parties and the Republican government, which were dependent on Soviet arms and support, expressed ever-greater hostility toward the Anarchist and Trotskyist parties. In May 1937, street fighting broke out between the two camps. Orwell, back from the front for a rest, was dragged into ugly street fighting with his POUM comrades. The immediate causes of this infighting were complicated but ultimately flowed from Moscow. Stalin was eager to eliminate the followers of his rival Trotsky, and Marxist theory dictated that Spain was not ready for open communism. As far as Moscow was concerned, a liberal democracy would have to remain the façade that communists used to govern Spain.
Orwell survived the street combat events and was quickly shipped back to the front, where a Nationalist bullet hit him in the throat. The frontline healthcare system took its time responding, but ultimately saved his life. Orwell didn’t get to recover in peace however, as the Stalinists got the POUM banned and suppressed. Many of his comrades were rounded up, jailed and occasionally killed in an extrajudicial manner. Orwell and his wife delicately snuck out of the country to avoid persecution; it was later shown that he escaped right before an impending arrest on trumped-up charges.
Reflections
Homage to Catalonia didn’t receive much attention until after Animal Farm and 1984 made Orwell an international star in the 1940’s. Since then, its fans have included alt-left romantics as well as critics of Marxism like us. Some of its lessons are more obvious than others. The tragic view of the up-close reality of war has been echoed by many others with firsthand battlefield experience.
Orwell’s exposure of the unglamorous reality of communist parties seems obvious today but wasn’t at the time. Displaying the selfish ruthlessness of Stalinist influence in the Spanish Civil War, ridiculing communists’ impractical dedication to Marxist theory when it contradicted empirical reality, and admitting the lack of widespread, durable support for Marxist governance took guts in the 1930’s. During this time period, Marxism of different flavors likely reached peak market share amongst Anglophone intellectuals – communism was the religion of the best and the brightest. Well into the 1950’s, some would still credulously consider it the wave of the future and brag about fake production numbers published by Moscow.
Fittingly, a Trotskyist true-believer in working class rule had the courage to risk his own reputation and career prospects with this critique. In 1946, in between the publication of Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell expressed how his experience in Spain changed the trajectory of his career.
“The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”
We’re not for democratic socialism either, but we are fans of intellectual integrity. No mere mortal’s entire life can stand the scrutiny that comes with personifying an ideal like this one, but Orwell comes close. This is the greatest value in his work – the impact his later works had on immunizing the world against communism and totalitarianism is intertwined with it.
Given all this impact, rereading Homage to Catalonia has also led us to reflect on the role of chance and of small details in history. Orwell may have come away with different conclusions from the Spanish Civil War had he joined up with the International Brigades instead of POUM, which came close to happening. The inter-leftist May Days conflict in Catalonia might not stand out amongst the many horrible things people did to each other in the Spanish Civil War or in the Twentieth Century had a legendary writer like Orwell not been amongst the ranks of the POUM. Also, Orwell may have never lived to write his most influential books if the bullet had pierced his throat an inch to the left or right. With gratitude and awe, we wish you all the same good fortune and a great weekend.
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
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Discussion #30: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell