The Church in Spain
Among a series of excellent articles on Spain in the Manchester Guardian one deals with the function of the Catholic Church in Spain and its attitude towards the Civil War. The correspondent, who spent a year in Spain, says: —
The burnings were often carried out by the villagers without any instructions from outside— indeed, they were often as spontaneous and, seemingly, as natural throughout Spain as the seizure of land was in the South of Spain. . . .But, generally speaking, the war on the churches seems to have been a popular, spontaneous movement. And even when a gang arrived from outside the villagers, would, as a rule, stand round passively and look on while petrol was poured on the altar and set alight and the priest was dragged from his hiding- place.
In a country where the majority of the people have been, and still are, Catholics this indifference to the fate of the clergy needs some explaining. Read on: —
A Materialist Church.Genuinely Christian priests have been killed. Much fine art has been destroyed and some of the finest music in the world been silenced. But the problem of the Church in Spain has another aspect. It was a Church more permeated by materialism than any other in Europe. It was largely—though by no means entirely—a commercial enterprise. It was the biggest landowner in a country of big landowners. It had a vast, and sometimes even a commanding, share in various industrial and commercial interests. A Church that identifies itself too closely with a temporal order is in danger of sharing the destiny of that order. And if a Church throws its weight on the side either of revolution or of counter-revolution, it will survive with the one or perish with the other.
The Spanish clergy has used Catholic teaching to influence Spanish workers to assist in maintaining the landowning and capitalist interests of the Spanish Church. They have failed and millions of Spanish Catholics are now the bitter enemies of the Catholic Church. The Jesuit boast that Catholic teaching until the age of seven years immunises the mind for life from heretical influences is a patent myth. The dominating influence in class struggles is class interest. The class interest of the Spanish workers, or what appears to them to be their class interest, dominates the influence of religious superstition. In many thousands of cases the open struggle with the Catholic Church will be sufficient to destroy its influence entirely. The position surprises many people with exaggerated ideas about the power of religion. The attitude of the Spanish worker to the Catholic Church is no less a logical expression of material interest than the attitude of the angry Spanish peasant who hung the image of St. Anthony upside down in a well after a failure of his crops. (An instance quoted by the Guardian correspondent, which can be paralleled by many stories from countries where there is a large Catholic peasantry.)
The Catholic Church is lined up with the landowning class behind Franco in a desperate fight to retain its ownership and feudal privileges. That is its chief interest in the struggle; and its resources are at the disposal of Franco. Many churches have become arsenals and many priests have discarded the cassock for the rifle. It is a ruthless and bitter class struggle in which life and property inevitably are destroyed.
If Catholic priests were murdered by angry Spanish peasants they have the reactionary and callous attitude of the Catholic Church to thank.
Whatever the outcome of the immediate struggle in Spain the hypocrisy and charlatanry of the Catholic Church there has dealt a blow to its moral influence which will not be rebuilt so easily as the walls of its churches.
Civilising Spain
The Irish Brigade, raised by General O’ Duffy to fight on behalf of Franco in Spain, has returned to Ireland without having done much fighting. The Manchester Guardian (June 23rd, 1937) quotes from the Irish Times and the Irish Press an account by the volunteers of what they saw in Spain.
We saw General Franco’s army executing “Reds” each morning in massed groups. They machine-gunned the condemned people, beginning at their ankles and directing the fire up along their bodies. The “ Reds,” in their last moments, lifted their clenched fists in the Communist salute, snouting “Viva Madrid !” This was in Caceres. It was in this town that the brigade spent most of their time.
That “great gentleman” and Catholic, Franco, will find a place in history with those murderers of the Paris Communards, the French ruling class.
Marx—by Mr. Woodburn
Mr. Arthur Woodburn, secretary of the Scottish Labour Party, N.C.L.C. lecturer, and exponent of finance and economics, arch-squarer of the circles in Labour Party policy, says in the June Plebs: —
When individuals deny the obvious and proved fact that the Labour Party is a Socialist Party there is no point in arguing with them. . . . No one can join the Labour Party without proclaiming himself a Socialist.
It is, perhaps, too much to expect an Oracle to argue, but does he need to? Surely an "obvious and proved fact” should speak for itself? The “obvious and proved fact” that prominent members of the Labour Party have openly repudiated being Socialists and that the Labour Party is a Socialist Party does, however, appear to require explanation. Would you oblige, Mr. Woodburn? And would you also mention where evidence can be found for the statement that Marx agreed that
It was quite conceivable that the capitalists would be bought out if they were paid very well if (as an exception, and England at that time was an exception) circumstances so developed that the capitalist would be obliged to submit and proceed in a cultured and organised manner towards Socialism on terms of compensation,
and where
Elsewhere Marx said that "Under certain conditions the workers will not by any means refuse to buy out the bourgeoisie.”
There may be “not much point in arguing,” but, really, Mr. Woodburn, we would like to know.
The "New Leader” and “ The Socialist Standard"
In an article, “A Communist Leader and the Right to Strike,” which appeared in the July The Socialist Standard, it was stated that: “No reference has appeared, or—to be pedantically correct—has been noticed,” in Labour and Communist newspapers to the Bedwas Agreement signed by Mr. Arthur Horner. We learn now that such reference had been made. John Alpin, industrial editor of the New Leader, writes to say that it carried a critical analysis of the agreement and that a reply to that analysis by a member of the South Wales Miners’ Federation was dealt with point by point. Rather disagreeably, he says that he “would have assumed that the S.P.G.B. . . . would have read the columns of the New Leader each week.” We make the correction suggested by Mr. Alpin, if such it can be called, gladly. The number of weekly and monthly journals published by working-class organisations is numerous, and when writing is a voluntary task and journals unobtainable through the usual channels it is quite easy to miss an issue of any particular journal. The New Leader could help to avoid the recurrence of such “errors.” We suggest it put us on its exchange list. We put this suggestion to several journals, including the New Leader, a few years ago. Many agreed, even where the price is much higher than The Socialist Standard and publication more frequent: the New Leader declined. Perhaps, Mr. Alpin, you would do something to adjust the matter?
The Indian Workers and their Exploiters
Congress, India’s Nationalist Party, has climbed down from its earlier attitude of refusing to form governments in the six Provinces where it obtained majorities in the recent elections. In the resolution embodying the decision to form Governments, the draft of which, according to the Daily Herald, is attributed to Gandhi, it is said: —
The proper description of the existing relationship between the British Government and the people of India is that of exploiter and exploited, and hence they have a different outlook upon almost everything of vital importance.
Having admitted that exploiters and exploited must have a different outlook, Mr. Gandhi ignores the obvious, that exploited Indians can have no harmony of outlook with the Nationalist exploiters of their own race. To say, as he has said, that the Indian princes, landowners and capitalists can be persuaded to be “trustees” for the Indian masses, dodges the issue. The British capitalists would claim “trusteeship” for millions of Colonial masses throughout the world with nothing more to support it than the pious hypocrisy which cloaks their real interests. The practice of capitalism does not reveal the capitalist class to be any less the robbers because the class they exploit happen to speak the same language. The Indian workers have yet a painful road to travel before they acquire the understanding necessary for their emancipation.
More Russian Puzzles
The Russian Government’s purge of "Trotskyites,” “diversionists,” ”wreckers” and “spies” continues, apparently, unabated. As must obviously happen, no amount of bias or coloured phraseology can obscure the contradictions which obtrude through the evidence against the “traitors."
The Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald (June 29th, T 937) gives the number executed for spying in the Far Eastern Province of Khabarovsk as 133 to the end of April, and quotes the Russian newspaper Izvestia, that “the spies were able to persuade railway workers’ to sell them uniforms." The reason why workers, who, according to Russian and Communist claims, are well paid, should want to sell their uniforms, is left to the imagination of the reader who is keen enough to notice the contradiction.
Another report from the same correspondent (July 3rd, 1937) states that a notorious spy, who had been run to earth, succeeded in organising "a gang of ex-priests, monks, kulaks and discontented young people'' (Our italics.) Perhaps a Communist friend could explain that “discontent" of young people.
Many of the “honourable Communists" who helped to draft the Constitution have since become victims of the purge, including Tukhachensky, Gamarnik, Uborevich, Yakir and Chervyakoff, who are dead, and Goloded and Postysheff, who are disgraced.
The Moscow correspondent of the Daily Telegraph (June 29th, 1937) refers to the purge among industrial leaders whose production figures have fallen, and quotes from Pravda an attack on the woman Communist President of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society, who. it is alleged, spent £600 on clothes suitable for her to wear to meet foreigners, when sent on an official trip abroad. The reward of Socialist competition?
Yet another report comments on the arrest of a “Trotskyist bandit,” Doletski, head of the Tass News Agency, which supplies the bulk of all news to Soviet papers. He is ”accused of having suppressed news about wreckers in industry and having over-emphasised news of successes." (Daily Herald, July 8th, 1937.)
Suppression of news inimical to its interests is inevitable where there is political dictatorship and a host of minor dictators in their own particular spheres. No regime claiming to represent working-class interests, which has a sound basis, need repress news or criticism. Socialist principles have nothing to lose and everything to gain from free and open discussion. Under dictatorship even the mildest criticism of the regime, or opposition on questions of policy, must result in intrigue against the Government and take insurrectionary forms.
Where there is dictatorship by a person or a clique, who decide what is right for the majority, it is inevitable that discontent and inequality arise. When discontent becomes widespread a scramble takes place to place culpability on the shoulders of others. Socialist interests can only thrive under the free and open conditions of democracy.
Harry Waite
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