The Last Hour in Madrid (1939)

From the April 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

What actually caused the revolt in Madrid that took place during March is not easy to discover with certainty. One thing, however, can be said without possibility of error. Men in that beleaguered city, awaiting the final assault of General Franco, and his foreign armies, would not have tried to seize power by force of arms without having what in their eyes was a very urgent and satisfactory reason. The revolt was apparently led by Communists, and received the approval of the Communist Daily Worker, but some accounts from Madrid itself indicated that by no means all the Communists there took part in it—whether because they opposed it or were taken by surprise is again in doubt. The view held by many observers was that, after the loss of Catalonia to Franco, many elements in the Madrid political parties were favourable to seeking surrender on whatever terms could be obtained. If, in these circumstances, some of the men who in any case would be Franco’s first victims, preferred to resist to the last, rather than submit, nobody could call their courageous attitude in question.

The nature of the case put by the two sides can be seen from a few typical statements: The Communist Daily Worker (March 5th, 1939) reported from Paris that the surrender policy was “the product of direct intervention by the British and French Governments,” working in conjunction with Franco. The Daily Telegraph was quoted by the Daily Worker to the effect that it was known in London at least a week earlier that Colonel Casado and Senor Besteiro (members of the Council of National Defence, against which the revolt took place), had been in touch with Franco and proposed to surrender once they had established their authority. The Daily Worker, (March 7th) had this to say of the Council: —

“The Council is composed of ex-professional officers, anarchists and Right-wing members of the Socialist Party. Political organiser of the movement is Julian Besteiro, a member of the Right-wing of the Socialist Party. Throughout the whole war Besteiro has been a leader of the capitulationists. As long ago as the end of 1936 he was notorious on account of his close contacts with the British diplomatic agents in Spain and elsewhere . . .”

The case put forward by the Council of National Defence (on which apparently the chief workers’ organisations, except the Communists, were represented—Manchester Guardian, March 7th), was that the Negrin Government had come under foreign Communist influence; had hidden the true facts of the military situation from the people, and were “hoping for a world war” to save themselves and their Government. This last charge Negrin denounced as absurd.

So much for the explanations given by the two sides.

The struggle itself, though comparatively short, was bitter, and must have weakened still further Madrid’s capacity to withstand the attack being prepared by Franco.

What was tragic was the bitterness of feeling among groups of workers, which could countenance this slaughter under the eyes of the enemy outside the gates. The Madrid correspondent of the Daily Telegraph could report (Daily Telegraph, March 8th), that: “Lieut-Colonel Mera, the Anarchist military leader, has brought veteran Anarchist shock troops . . . into Madrid to assist in suppressing the rising.”

The diplomatic correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (March 8th, 1939) reported executions of Communists in Madrid, and stated that once the supply of arms from Russia ceased there had grown up much anti-Communist feeling. The Daily Express (March 8th) alleged that the Anarchists shared this feeling towards the Communists because of their part in putting down the Anarchist-Syndicalist revolt which took place in Barcelona, with heavy loss of life, in 1937.

One ironic feature was a statement issued from General Miaja’s headquarters, that “Troops loyal to the new Defence Council, with abundant war material, are marching on Canillejas ” (i.e., marching to suppress the revolt) (The Times, March 10th, 1939). How often have Miaja and his Communist admirers lamented their lack of war material for the war against Franco.

One thing the revolt does show again: that is the difficulty or the impossibility of achieving real unity by merging together in a Popular Front parties and individuals who differ fundamentally in aim, outlook, and method. It was obvious in 1936 that it would be an enormous task to secure unity between long standing opponents like the Spanish Labourites, Anarchist-Syndicalists, Communists, Trotskyites, Liberal Republicans, Catholic Basque Separatists, etc. The revolt in Barcelona, and now this revolt in Madrid, together with the frequent inability to secure effective and loyal co-operation, show that, even the stress of war will not make men who think differently work to a common programme.

One writer (Jose Martin Blazquez—”I Helped to Build an Army.” Seeker and Warburg, 15s.), who was an army officer, and sided with the Republicans in the early part of the war, maintains that the Party rivalries made it impossible to build up an efficient army. There again, as Franz Borkenau maintains in his preface to the book, there was not one view of what kind of army to build, but three incompatible views—a revolutionary popular army like that of the French after the revolution, a “political” army like that of Russia, or a non-political army like the British. The Anarchists favoured the first, the Communists the second, and the army officers and Liberal-Republicans the third. According to Blazquez, the circumstances made the task impossible.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: The Sterility and Futility of Ex-Communist "Intellectuals" (1950)

Editorial from the August 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Manchester Guardian for the 10th July contains an article giving a report of the “Congress for Cultural Freedom" that was held in Berlin from June 26th to 30th. The article is by H. R. Trevor-Roper who attended as one of the British delegates and who appears to have summed up the nature of the congress and the delegates with a considerable amount of clear-sightedness.

   “This congress turned out to be a political demonstration. As such it was well organised and no doubt successful. My only objection is that it was not advertised as such, and I do not think it would have obtained all its sponsors or all its delegates if it had been correctly advertised.”

As the article makes clear the congress was certainly not one for cultural freedom; it was in fact dominated by renegade communists who made vicious attacks upon their late friends and upon the ideas they had formerly backed as the essence of all that was advanced in culture, and deserving of world wide support, with them, of course in the vanguard of the movement—the admired leaders! Unfortunately for themselves they were, as always, only ignorant tools. When they discovered this they turned their impotent fury upon the hands that led them up the garden.

Mr. Trevor-Roper describes some of the incidents that make plain the narrow personal outlook of these would-be leaders of the world, and how little this outlook has to do with cultural freedom. Some quotations from this article are enlightening.

   “The printed prospectus offered highly intellectual terms of reference, and Professor Ayer (one of the English delegates), in his opening speech, kept to them. To a disapproving audience he quoted Mill and examined the philosophic justification of tolerance. The Greek chairman then explained that this was irrelevant, since our enemies were too intolerant to be tolerated; and a German, declaring that ‘in our times John Stuart Mill cannot help us,’ appealed for a rival dogmatism as a more useful weapon of war. Professor Herman J. Muller, of Indiana, then spent forty five minutes denouncing Lysenko as an ignoramus.”

Mr. Trevor-Roper remarks that after this it was impossible to return to an intellectual level. The next day they discussed “The defence of peace and freedom," Mr. James Burnham opening on the subject. This is what Mr. Trevor-Roper has to say of Mr. Burnham’s contribution:

   “Mr. Burnham’s prophecies have always been oracular and infallible in form, but their content has needed frequent revision. At the moment he is prophesying the inevitable defeat of Communism. In his speech he advocated a somewhat expensive method of securing the inevitable, for he preached total war; denounced pacifism, then (by an imperceptible transition) peace; and urged his audience to judge the morality of atom bombs according to the nationality of their manufacturers.”

Then Mr. Arthur Koestler added his contribution: 

   “Mr. Koestler made, altogether, three speeches, and his theme was constant if unconstructive. It was that Right and Left are meaningless terms; that the choice before us is Communism or Anti-Communism; and he who is not with us is against us. On this occasion he developed his theme into a long attack on England as parochial and isolationist for refusing to see the problem in these clear terms.”

Mr. Koestler has always been a master at seeing problems in clear terms, only the terms get mixed up— one day on one side and the next day on the other side.

The ex-communist Franz Borkenau also made a contribution about which the writer of the article makes the following comments :

   “Pouring out his German sentences with hysterical speed and gestures, he screamed that he was a convert from Communism and proud of it; that past guilt must be atoned for; that the ex-communists alone understood Communism and the means of resisting it; that Communism could only mean perpetual war and civil war; and that it must be destroyed at once by uncompromising frontal attack, and yet, terrible though it was, this fanatical speech was less frightening than the hysterical German applause which greeted it. It was different from any other applause at that congress. It was an echo of Hitler’s Nuremburg.”

The writer of the article adds that with that speech and the applause the whole structure of the congress was revealed as an alliance between two parties—the ex-communists among the delegates and the German Nationalists in the audience. “Cultural freedom,” he says, “ was nowhere.”

The concluding paragraph of the article is .an example of the clear-headedness of the writer, at least on this particular question. He sums up as follows:

   “The congress was in no sense an intellectual congress. . . .  It was simply Wroclaw in reverse—the Wroclaw of the ex-communists. Signor Silone once suggested that the coming struggle would be between the Communists and the ex-Communists. After the sterile congresses of Wroclaw and Berlin I am confirmed in my view that a more satisfactory solution will be offered by those who have never swallowed and therefore never needed to re-vomit, that obscurantist doctrinal rubbish whose residue can never be fully discharged from the system.”

These ex-Communists (Burnham, Koestler, Borkenau, Hook, Lasky and the rest) are incapable of understanding now the mainspring of their own fatuous conduct. Blinded by a false conception of their own importance, always wrong, and violently wrong, they still hope to occupy the centre of the political stage and bolster up their empty egoism with the plaudits of equally blind followers. Yet so great is their political ignorance that they are fated always to back the wrong horse. Their actions demonstrated that it is they, more than any, who fail to understand the basis of the Russian dictatorship and its imperialist policy, and that it is also they who are the more easily rendered impotent. They fall for every wrong social theory, for every futile movement, and are used and cast aside by political climbers of every brand; their contradictory professions, fleeting loyalties and futile actions brand them as what they are—servile tools of ambitious political groups always ready, like mangy curs, to snap at the heels of those who have fed them. Blindly imagining that they arc superior to the working class they are in fact but the scum that floats on the surface of that class.

The Communist International (1939)

Front cover of the 1962 edition.

Book Review from the February 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The Communist International," by F. Borkenau. Faber & Faber. 12/6. 442 pages

A by no means insignificant reason for the lamentable condition of the international working-class movement is to be sought in the baneful influence of events in Russia. Hypnotised by its mythical Socialist character, bull-dozed by its offspring, the Communist International, thousands of militant workers have fallen victims to its spell. Fortunately, numbers of workers everywhere, under the hard blows of reality, are beginning to come to their senses. Anything that tends to hasten this process can only be welcomed, and therein lies the importance of this book. Written by a former official of the German Communist Party, it is a painstaking and scrupulous attempt to reveal the origins of Russian Bolshevism and its influence, through the Comintern, on the world Labour movement.

Dr. Borkenau is of the opinion that the Communist International has served three main purposes during its history. In its first years it was “mainly an instrument to bring about revolution"; later it was “mainly an instrument in the Russian factional struggles”; and at the moment it is "mainly an instrument of Russian foreign policy." A safe generalisation, and one not necessarily conflicting with the author’s view, would be that the Comintern at all times was subordinated to the needs, either real or imagined, of the Russian State. For even during its early and "heroic” period, when, possibly, the Soviet leaders did sincerely desire and work for revolution elsewhere, attempts at revolution were always encouraged for the advantage it was thought they would bring to the newly- launched State.

Although the Communist International did not formally come into existence until March, 1919, the Germany of the January of that year was one of the countries where Russian influence first made itself felt. Under the influence of the Russian events and its chief protagonist in Germany, Radek, a small group of militant and romantically-minded workers, known as the Spartacists, rose in armed revolt. Rosa Luxemburg, a member of this group, and those closely associated with her, strongly advised against this senseless act. Inevitably, this heroic, but unbelievedly muddle-headed, attempt to seize power was drowned in blood. One of the tragic aspects of this pitiable farce was the death of Rosa Luxemburg, whose ghastly murder was a great loss to the German working-class movement  in particular, and to the international working class in general. Dr. Borkenau pays a moving tribute, marred only by a colossal piece of masculine conceit, to this truly remarkable woman. The sharp differences between Luxemburg and Lenin, particularly on the question of leadership, where Luxemburg, the Socialist, opposed the essentially bourgeois "Jacobin" revolutionary, Lenin; Luxemburg's critical attitude towards the Russian Revolution; her whole life and work, no less than the manner of her death, make the " Lenin-Liebknecht-Luxemburg” commemoration meetings, and the Communist claim that "Luxemburg" belongs to them, an insult to the memory of one of the finest individuals who ever championed the cause of the working class.

In Hungary, Finland, Germany in 1921 and 1923, and in China in 1927, the tale of intrigue, duplicity, treachery and disastrous incompetence of the Communist International unfolds itself. The description of the fantastic escapades fostered by the self-appointed "revolutionary general staff” would simply be unbelievable were it not for the factual evidence which Dr. Borkenau so abundantly provides. We must content ourselves with selecting as "high spots" the 1921 rising in Germany, and the catastrophe known as the Canton "Soviet" of 1927.

In 1921, Bela Kun, a leading Hungarian Communist, arrived from Russia, where he had witnessed at Kronstadt the bloody suppression by Lenin and Trotsky of the last remnants of Soviet democracy. Convinced of the desperate situation of the Soviet regime, he persuaded the Central Committee of the German Communist Party to stage a rising, the outcome of which he hoped would assist the Soviet Power to maintain itself. Completely isolated from the workers, the Communists sat down to work out the details of the "rising." As the German workers proved completely unresponsive to calls for an armed revolt, it was decided that a little "assistance" would not be misplaced. Hence we have, for example, the Communists of Breslau deciding to start the "Revolution" by blowing up their own party premises, to stage the explosion in the toilet, and, moreover, seriously debating whether to blow up the toilet when occupied or not! Fortunately, commonsense(!) prevailed. The toilet went up in the air without a victim. During this time the Communists also called for a General Strike. But the German workers didn’t want to strike! Were the Communists dismayed! Not a bit of it! They simply mobilised their unemployed members and set them to literally drag the employed workers out of the factories. Paul Levi, one of the few independent spirits connected with the German Communist movement, commenting in a pamphlet, Our Road, on the fist fights between Communist unemployed and the employed workers, stated that: "Even more pathetic reports arrived from Berlin. We learn that it was a terrible  thing to watch how the unemployed, crying loudly at the pain of the thrashings they had received, were thrown out of the factories." Levi was excluded from the party, and although the Communists were subsequently forced to admit the accuracy of his indictment—and this was upheld by Lenin—he was never reinstated.

Already before the senseless attempt to form a "Soviet" at Canton in December, 1927, the Chinese Communists had been bloodily defeated ; by Chiang-Kai-Shek. As Dr. Borkenau says:  "The root of the . . . catastrophe in China lies in this duplicity, in this child-like conviction that your adversary will not understand your intentions, though you express them quite openly, that he will continue to co-operate with you as long as you want it, and allow himself to be overthrown when it suits you." The Chinese Communists thought they could use Chiang; instead he used them, and then mercilessly destroyed them. Stalin, who was for the most part responsible for this disastrous policy of double-dealing, was faced with the criticism of the opposition in Russia. To retrieve his prestige, a German Communist, an unscrupulous, daring and irresponsible careerist by the name of Heinz Neumann, was sent to China, where, with the support of the remnants of armed Chinese Communists, he staged the Canton "Commune." Formed amidst the general indifference of the populace, this " Soviet" lasted 58 hours, important sections of the workers taking up arms against it. At the end of this adventure, a frightful massacre of Communists took place, involving the whole of the Chinese Communist leaders. Only Heinz Neumann escaped. It is perhaps one of the minor ironies of history that Neumann escaped death then, and later, at the hands of Hitler, only to be shot by his Russian "comrades" at Moscow in May, 1937.

Dr. Borkenau supplies what is to us one of the most convincing reasons for the never-ending purges, denunciations, jailings, shootings and persecutidns that have decimated the ranks of many Communist parties, in particular the Russian Party. The Communists, in spite of the lip-service they pay to "objective reality," are, in fact, incorrigible  "subjectivists." If social reality conflicts with what the latest dogma from Moscow says it ought to be—well, so much the worse for reality. Living in a world of their own, perhaps the most dangerous illusion ever held by them is that the working class is simply bursting with revolutionary ardour and only restrained by the nefarious tactics of treacherous Labour leaders. But if the workers do adopt a policy of which the Communists approve, and disaster, nevertheless, results, then the leaders have not fully understood, were not really " Bolshevised," or have misapplied, sabotaged or betrayed the infallible directives given by infallible people in Moscow. Therefore—off

with their heads! If the "workers’ State" has finally been achieved, as in Russia, and, nevertheless, paradise obstinately refuses to make an appearance, are the causes to be sought in a mistaken appraisal of social conditions? Of course not! It must lie the treachery of some of the leaders. Consequently, we have the spectacle of men who have grown old and broken in the services of the Revolution being dragged out from political obscurity and butchered to satisfy the need of a scapegoat.

Perhaps one of tlie most interesting and revealing chapters in this book is the one entitled "The Structure of the Communist Parties." The instability of the membership of the Communist parties is well known, and in Germany it reached such proportions as to justify the use of a technical term, "fluctuation," a term which was subsequently applied to all the non-Russian parties to describe the staggering influx and exit of members. Basing himself on a careful analysis of the available statistical material, Dr. Borkenau concludes that in the German party a nucleus of only five per cent. remained faithful, whatever happened. And since, as he says, "the Germans have a well-justified reputation for the stubbornness with which they stick to allegiances once established,” there is no reason to suppose that any other Communist Party is any better in this respect. The social composition of the parties varies as to the policy pursued, whether "right" or “left." It is a noticeable fact that, in Great Britain, the Communist Party has, at the moment, attracted many who formerly they would have dubbed "middle- class elements." In Spain the process has gone so far that the party there has almost lost its proletarian character.

Summing up, Dr. Borkenau reaches the scathing conclusion that "an iron guard, unshakable, integrating the experience of a generation of revolutionary fighters, is the official ideal of a Communist Party. Shifting masses, imbued with a deep hatred of the old mass organisations and their humdrum activities, but without any stability or fixed conviction of their own, are the reality."

Apart from the fact that the author talks of the specious economic arguments of Karl Marx without in any way attempting to justify such strictures, the book also contains one or two minor inaccuracies. That these latter have been seized on so avidly by Communist apologists, in an attempt to discredit the book as a whole, merely serves to demonstrate the weakness of the Communist case. Dr. Borkenau also asserts that the workers in the majority have hitherto shown no desire for Socialism: a statement with which every Socialist will readily agree. But when he goes on to conclude that they never will do, he assumes the role of a prophet, and we, as Socialists, will do our best to see that, in due course, experience will confound him.

Nevertheless, this remains an extremely valuable book, which all workers ought to read. Propagandists for Socialism will find it invaluable when faced with Communist opposition. As far as members of the Communist Party are concerned, if blind devotion to a myth has not entirely impaired what critical faculties they ever possessed, we can only implore them to get hold of it at all costs. We freely concede that in the ranks of the Communist Party are to be found many workers abounding in enthusiasm, energy, capacity for self-sacrifice, and devotion to a cause which they quite sincerely identify with the cause of the working class. But these very qualities, which could be of inestimable advantage to the working class, are transformed into a veritable curse because of the blind, uncritical, unquestioning devotion to an illusion. This book should go a long way towards dispelling that illusion.

Arthur Mertons

George Orwell, Spain and anti-fascism (1997)

From the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sixty years ago this month the events began which inspired George Orwell to write Homage to Catalonia. Left-wing militias in the Catalan capital, Barcelona, opposed to the government's policy of restoring capitalist normality in the territories which had not fallen to Franco, were attacked by Republican paramilitary forces under Communist command.

Orwell witnessed these events while on leave from the front where he was fighting as a member of one of these leftwing militias, that of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista, or Workers Party of Marxist Unification). The POUM was basically a dissident Communist Party which didn't believe in taking orders from Moscow. It has been called a Trotskyist party (not least by supporters of Stalin) but, although it did contain some Trotskyists, this is inaccurate. Trotsky did try to tell it what to do, but the POUM no more followed orders from Trotsky than it did from Stalin.

Orwell had joined the POUM militia because he wanted to fight Franco not because he agreed with their political views. He knew some people in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and they put him in touch with the POUM with which the ILP had some links. He was not a dissident Communist himself and never had any sympathy with Leninism or Trotskyism. As he pointed out in a book review in January 1939:

"It is probably a good thing for Lenin's reputation that he died so early. Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind. The essential act is the rejection of democracy - that is, of the underlying values of democracy; once you have decided upon that, Stalin - or at any rate someone like Stalin - is already on the way." (from George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters , Vol 1, as are all the quotes in this article).

After May things in Barcelona got worse. In June the POUM was banned. Its leader, Andres Nin, was arrested and later murdered by agents of the GPU, the Russian secret police. Other POUM members were detained and tortured, including non-Spanish members of their militia. Orwell and his wife had to go into hiding and eventually got over the border into France.

Homage to Catalonia describes Orwell's own experiences in Spain but it also defends the POUM and the anarchists against the lies the Communist Party and their stooges put out about them to the effect that they were in contact with and acting on behalf of Franco's fascists.

Orwell knew this to be completely untrue and, out of honesty as well as loyalty to his former companions-in-arms, he denounced this. Needless to say, the Communists suggested that he too was a fascist sympathiser and "Trotsky-Fascist". It left him with an abiding disgust with the Communist Party, its ideology and its methods, which was to inspire his later novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eight-Four which, rightly, show them no mercy.

Russian Foreign Policy

Orwell had gone to Spain as someone who had vague pro-working class feelings. His experiences there politicised him and he left holding radical leftwing views. What he learned in Spain was, first, a respect for the capacity of ordinary workers to run things on their own and, secondly, that the Communists were bastards: that they were committed, not to furthering the interests of the working class, but to furthering the foreign policy objectives of the Russian state and that, to this end, they were prepared to lie, cheat and kill. Hence his damning, but wholly accurate, description of them: "the more vocal kind of Communist is in effect a Russian publicity agent posing as an international Socialist." (Inside the Whale)

In 1935 the Comintern under Stalin carried out one of its U-turns. When the 1930s began, Social Democratic and Labour parties were still being denounced as "social fascists" and seen as being as bad, if not worse, than the real fascists. With the coming to power of Hitler, however, Germany came to be seen by the Russian rulers as a threat to their interests. Russian foreign policy then changed, from a more or less equal hostility to all the openly capitalist powers to seeking an alliance with capitalist France and Britain against capitalist Germany.

The Communist Parties had their role to play in this strategy: to work for the broadest possible anti-fascist alliance to include openly pro-capitalist elements as long as they were anti-fascist, i.e. in effect anti-German. Everything was to be subordinated to the creation of such a broad anti-fascist front. All talk of "revolution", "soviets" and the like was dropped; the red flag was replaced by the Union Jack, and patriotism became de rigueur.

Orwell, having experienced first hand the application of this policy in Spain, saw through this, writing in a private letter n September 1937:

"Of course all the Popular Front stuff that is now being pushed by the Communist press and party, Gollancz and his paid hack set etc, etc only boils down to saying that they are in favour of British Fascism (prospective) as against German Fascism. What they are aiming to do is to get British capitalism-imperialism into alliance with the USSR and thence into a war with Germany. Of course they piously pretend that they donât want the war to come and that a French-British-    Russian alliance can prevent it on the old balance of power system. But we know what the balance of power business led to last time, and in any case it is manifest that the nations are arming with the intention of fighting. The Popular Front baloney boils down to this: that when the war comes the Communists, labourites, etc instead of working to stop the war and overthrow the Government, will be on the side of the Government provided that the Government is on the 'right' side, i.e. against Germany. But everyone with any imagination can foresee that Fascism, not of course called Fascism, will be imposed on us as soon as the war starts. So you will have Fascism with Communists participating in it and, if we are in alliance with the USSR, taking a leading part in it. This is what has happened in Spain. After what I have seen in Spain I have come to the conclusion that it is futile to be 'anti-Fascist' while attempting to preserve capitalism. Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism when the pinch comes. We like to think of England as a democratic country, but our rule in India, for instance, is just as bad as German Fascism, though outwardly it may be less irritating. I do not see how one can oppose Fascism except by working for the overthrow of capitalism, starting, of course, in one's own country. If one collaborates with a capitalist-imperialist government in a struggle 'against' Fascism, i.e. against a rival imperialism, one is simply letting fascism in by the back door".

This position put Orwell far, far to the left of the Communist Party and in June 1938 he joined the ILP. The ILP, which had been one of the original founding elements of the Labour Party, had broken away from Labour in 1932 and was a home for all sorts of leftwing critics of Labour's short-sighted reformism. At different times, both the Communists and the Trotskyists tried to take it over, but without success. While some of its members had notions of socialism, generally speaking it was a confused organisation which was unclear both as to what socialism was and as to how to get it, and was itself reformist in the sense that it campaigned for reforms of capitalism.

Orwell was not out of place in the ILP since he, too, only had a vague notion of socialism. For him it was the general idea of a decent society without private ownership of the means of production or a privileged class and where ordinary people would run things democratically in their own interest. Orwell, however, was clear on one thing: Russia was not socialist or anything like it.

In a book review in June 1938 he asked of Russia: "is it Socialism, or is it a peculiarly vicious form of state capitalism?" His answer was that, whatever it was, it wasn't socialism. Later he embraced the theory that Russia was a new exploiting, class society best described as "oligarchical collectivism" where a self-appointed and self-perpetuating oligarchy ruled through a one-party dictatorship on the basis of the state (collective class) ownership of the means of production. For although Orwell was primarily interested in literary matters he also followed very closely the arguments that went on in Trotskyist, ex-Trotskyist and ex-Communist circles on the nature of Russian society, a knowledge he was able to put to later use when writing Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Capitalism and War

In one of his letters Orwell mentions that he had written an anti-war pamphlet. This has not been found, but it is not difficult to work out from his other letters and articles what it would have said. Its basic premise would have been what Orwell set out in book review he did in August 1937:

"1. That war against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
2. That every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac ('militarist' Germany in 1914, 'Fascist' Germany next year or the year after).
The essential job is to get people to recognize war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda".

Orwell, as we have seen, regarded the campaign for an anti-fascist "people's front" as just such war propaganda disguised as a peace campaign. It merely opposed one type of capitalism by another type of capitalism, in the interest of one particular alliance of capitalist-imperialist powers. So his anti-war pamphlet can be expected to have denounced mere anti-fascism as a means of preparing workers ideologically to support Britain, France and Russia in the coming war against Germany and Italy

But if mere anti-fascism was not a genuine alternative to fascism, what, in Orwell's eyes, was? Orwell looked to the emergence of a mass democratic revolutionary movement that would be anti-capitalist as well as anti-fascist. Reviewing Franz Borkenau's The Communist International (which should be read by anyone wanting to learn about the various turns the Comintern effected in the 1920s and 1930s) in September 1938, he wrote:

"Where I part company from him is where he says that for the western democracies the choice lies between Fascism and an orderly reconstruction through the cooperation of all classes. I do not believe in the second possibility, because I do not believe that a man with 50,000 pounds a year and a man with fifteen shillings a week either can, or will, co-operate. The nature of their relationship is quite simply, that the one is robbing the other, and there is no reason to think that the robber will suddenly turn over a new leaf. It would seem, therefore, that if the problems of western capitalism are to be solved, it will have to be through a third alternative, a movement which is genuinely revolutionary, i.e. willing to make drastic changes and to use violence if necessary, but which does not lose touch, as Communism and Fascism have done, with the essential values of democracy. Such a thing is by no means unthinkable. The germs of such a movement exist in numerous countries, and they are capable of growing. At any rate, if they don't, there is no real exit from the pigsty we are in".

Unfortunately, no such movement did emerge and in September 1939 the widely predicted war broke out. Although previously he had envisaged going underground to oppose the war (in January 1939 Orwell had written to Herbert Read, the anarchist art-world figure, "I believe it is vitally necessary for those of us who intend to oppose the coming war to start organising for illegal anti-war activities"), when the war did break out he not only didn't go underground but he actively supported it - and not just on anti-fascist but on old-fashioned patriotic grounds.

He tried to enlist to go and kill German workers himself but was turned down because he had signs of TB. Instead, he spent the war churning out patriotic propaganda (some of it nasty stuff: he referred to pacifists as "fascifists" and denounced conscientious objectors as "pro-Nazis") aimed at getting British workers to go and kill German workers and Indian workers to kill Japanese workers.

It was a betrayal, an unpardonable one from a socialist point of view, of the working-class internationalism he had initially adopted as a result of his experiences in Spain.

Adam Buick