Here and There: The Church in Spain (1937)

The Here and There column from the August 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

Editorial: Atrocities in Spain (1936)

Editorial from the December 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rebellion in Spain has taken on more and more the character of wholesale warfare, with all the ingenuities of cruelty which modern science and industry have made possible. Day and night the civilian population of Madrid has been subjected to artillery bombardment and the almost indiscriminate scattering of explosive and incendiary bombs. The deaths and casualties have run into thousands, while the number rendered homeless is estimated at far over 100,000. All of this has been done by the rebel generals on the plea—a common one with the higher ranks of the military profession, who, for some obscure reason, are still associated with notions of bravery—that it is simply their job to smash the Government and its civilian supporters. Behind the rebel generals, and running less personal risk even than they, is the Catholic Church, which lent its support to the rebellion, and the forces of monied and landed property which fear the workers and peasants, whether in Spain or outside, more than anything else.

Among those sympathetic to the rebels in this country may be included the Times and Daily Telegraph. It is for that reason worth while placing on record what they reluctantly admit about the conduct of their friends in Spain. The Times, in a review of the Report published by the rebels on the atrocities committed by Government supporters, says: —

. . . the fratricidal strife in Spain has been peculiarly envenomed by recourse to the taking of hostages and by ruthless reprisals, and there is, unhappily, reason to suppose that General Franco’s opponents could level against the forces under his command counter-charges equally valid though probably less numerous.—(Times, October 28th, 1936.)

Earlier the Times, in an editorial, said : —

. . . there can be little doubt that the insurgents arc conducting the war with a cold-blooded ruthlessness as revolting as any of the cruelties perpetrated by the supporters of the Government.—(Times. October 10th, 1936.)

The Times and Daily Telegraph have both had something to say about the wanton slaughter from the air of civilians in Madrid.

The Daily Telegraph says that

. . . the ruthless bombardment of Madrid by General Franco’s forces is shocking his friends as well as his enemies . . . .—(Daily Telegraph, November 19th, 1936.)

While the Times' own correspondent in Madrid sent the following report on November 18th: —

Although shrapnel takes a constant toll, air-raids cause most damage, and it is estimated that 50 tons of bombs have fallen on Madrid in 10 days. The damage to historical buildings is impossible to give in detail here, but the worst loss so far has been the Palacio de Liria, seat of the Duke of Alba, which was hit by an incendiary bomb yesterday evening. The palace contents are second only in artistic value to the collections of the National Palace. The fire burned all night—a terrifying torch symbolising the destructive agency of the civil war. It is believed that some of the principal treasures were removed several months ago, including a painting by Titian, armour, tapestry (the gift of Louis XIV), and part of the archives. The chief groom, Letheridge, his family, and the Duke’s dog are refugees in the British Embassy.

Not content with destruction by day, which may to some extent be directed against military objectives, the insurgents come at night, bombing round the conflagrations already existing, and throwing flares which water cannot extinguish.—(Times, November 19th, 1936)

So much for the forces of “culture,” “civilisation ” and “ religion,” which deliberately and for motives of class interest plunged Spain into this civil war.

Before leaving the subject there is the question of the employment of Moorish troops. We do not share the view that brutalities carried out by human beings with black or yellow skins are any worse than those carried out by white men, and in any event, the responsibility rests with the white-skinned high command, which gives the orders. Moreover, as has been pointed out by Franco’s friends, black troops were used by the Allied Governments in the War, and by France in the occupation of the German Rhineland.

It is, however, one of the ironies of history that the Moors, now being employed to crush the Spanish Government, are the same Moors who only a few years ago were praised to the skies by the British Labour Party when they were fighting to resist French and Spanish occupation of Morocco.

In order to bolster up its mistaken notion that national independence is something the workers should fight for, the Labour Party then idealised the Moors. Now it can find nothing good in them.

The Goal of the Class Conscious (1941)

From the June 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

The conflict now raging has now reached a more serious stage, and the working-class, compelled by circumstances to fight the enemy of their masters, are naturally somewhat anxious regarding the duration, even though they may, in Britain, at least, have no misgivings in regard to the outcome of the fighting.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when our masters were not so much concerned about Democracy as they appear to be at present. For instance, when the Social Democrats of Vienna were shot down by Dollfuss at the command of Mussolini; the deed received the blessing, tacitly, of the ruling class of both Britain and France. There was no protest except a pious, hypocritical gesture. Surely, if any group of men ever sacrificed their lives in the interests of Democracy it was those of the Karl Marx Flats. The Social Democrats were not revolutionaries, but they believed in liberty. They offered to give their support to Dollfuss on condition that he would restore the Democratic Constitution. He refused because Mussolini, whose tool he was, wanted to get control of Austria ahead of the Nazis. Hitler out-manoeuvred them both, and Dollfuss was assassinated.

The events now taking place in Crete and the Atlantic are so breath-absorbing that we are not very observant in regard to what is happening in the profit-making sphere. The war is as exciting as a circus, and it may be to our advantage if we look at the actions of some of the wire-pullers behind the scenes.

The United States is in the picture just now and has recently unearthed a few interesting things by means of certain investigations made by the U.S. Department of Justice.

These have been condensed in an article from the pen of Albert H. Jenkins, which appeared in the Federationist (Vancouver, May 1st): —

“War or no war, Big Business men of all nations do business with each other “as usual,” regardless of the results to their own countries. That was proved by shocking disclosures after the last World War. It is being revealed again by sensational grand jury probes now being conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice.

There are three of these investigations. First came the inquiry showing that the Mellon Aluminium Company of America’s tie-up with a German firm resulted in a serious shortage of aluminium and magnesium for aeroplanes and other defence needs of the country, while production of those strategic light metals went ahead by leaps and bounds in Germany.

Second is a probe of the drug industry, begun last July, and third, is an investigation of the chemical industry, begun this week by a grand jury in New York.

COMBINED AGAINST U.S.

The facts which are being brought out show how American and foreign corporations got together to limit production and fix prices of important products the world around, by means of patents and secret agreements, with results harmful to the interests of the United States. These international combines include many other foreign firms beside those in Germany, but the latter are particularly significant because of war and defence developments.

The latest action by the grand jury was to subpoena the books of five companies—General Aniline, Sterling Products, Winthrop Chemical, Sobering and the Swiss Bank Corporation. The subpoenas also require these companies to give the jury full information about their relations and dealings with 100 other big concerns in the United States, Germany, England, France, Italy, South America and other countries.

GIANTS UNDER FIRE.

Among these companies are such giants as duPont, Dow Chemical, American Cynamid, Lever Brothers, and practically all the other leading American and foreign drug and chemical corporations.

Grand juries do not disclose their findings until they make indictments, but some idea of what the Department of Justice officials are after can be obtained from their recent testimony before the Monopoly Committee and the House Appropriations and Patents Committees, where they were describing this probe and asking for more money to carry it on.

One of them, who was talking “off the record” and does not want his name mentioned, told the Appropriations Committee that “the German chemical trust has in this country eight affiliates, one of which is a $30,000,000 investment trust.”

UNCLE SAM IS “STOOGE.”

Since the war shut Germany off from South American markets, he said, the German chemical companies are having American companies fill their orders from South American customers. The American products are “packed in such a way that they look like German stuff.”

Thus the American companies are handling the South American markets for the German concerns, so the latter can take back those markets after the war, despite the Roosevelt administration’s attempt to expand the U.S. trade with South America.

Moreover, he continued, the American chemical companies pay “millions of dollars a year” in patent royalties to the German concerns. Some of this money is being sent secretly to Germany, and much of it is sent to South America, where the Germans use it for “penetration” of South American countries.

OTHER CONSPIRACIES PROBED

In addition to the aluminium, magnesium, drug and chemical probes, the Justice Department is acting against similar “conspiracies” involving other products which are vital to national defence.

The situation on several of these other products was described at the same House Committee hearings. One case is “an agreement between the General Electric Company of the United States and Krupp, a big German trust.”

This agreement, the witness said, covers “tungsten carbide, the key to the whole German machine-tool industry. It is harder than diamond.” Because of the agreement. “Germany produces 20 times as much tungsten carbide as the United States.”

Another interesting item in the same paper indicates that Uncle Sam is not in full sympathy with Democracy everywhere. The prosecution of the Social Democrats of Germany in Spain could be stopped if the United States made an appropriate gesture. The following is worth noting: —

“The Mexican Government has protested strongly to Vichy against the violation of the agreement that Spanish refugees were to be protected by the French Government and permitted to emigrate to Mexico.

Undoubtedly there has been connivery with Franco, who is unwilling to allow Loyalist leaders to escape, because he is afraid that one day they will return and lead a revolt against him, and is hoping that ultimately France will deliver them over to his vengeance. Progressive Americans point out that Washington could help by refusing to send foodships to Vichy or to Madrid, unless those ships could carry back the refugees to Mexico.

The fate of anti-Nazi German refugees in France is not less tragic. Recently two able German intellectuals of the Social-Democratic Party who held high office in the Weimar Republic, Breitsheid and Hilferding, were handed over to the Germans by the Vichy Government; by this time they may be dead. No one will bemoan the fate of the capitalist Thyssen, through whose money Hitler came to power and who recently was handed over by Vichy and died in a concentration camp. The betrayal of the anti-Fascist refugees to their enemies is the lowest act that Vichy has committed.”

The ruling class of this and all other countries will endeavour to do their utmost to make the world safe for capitalism after the war. Their great new world is a profit world. But there is one thing they cannot do, and that is reconcile the contradictions the present system produces. These will become ever more glaring and ever more irreconcilable.

War Savings Weeks are a means of lowering the real wages of the class to which we belong: real wages are food, clothing and shelter; these are declining in quantity and quality.

We are told that our savings will help us tide over the trying period that will follow the cessation of hostilities. This means when unemployment comes you will be able to exist on what you couldn’t buy during the war.

There is one thing, however, the ruling class forget, and that is the increased knowledge that is being imbibed by those who live by selling their labour power. The wage slaves are not all asleep. The conversations one overhears in cars, in restaurants, on the job, in fact wherever workers are gathered together, induces one to conclude they will not readily go back to the bread line after the war.

This is as it should be. The material conditions have reached the stage when the present system of production is a fetter on production. A sure harbinger of a new, and, let us hope, a better form of society, in which there will be neither wage-slave nor capitalist, nor private property in the means of life. The Socialist has heretofore lacked encouragement, but he has builded better than he realised. The issue between the capitalist-class and the working-class has been kept clear, and moving circumstance has now brought into being those conditions which make Socialism practical politics. It is the only policy that unquestionably offers peace and plenty to all mankind. It is the only policy that can be advocated honestly and without equivocation. It is true. Its triumph is inevitable. Whatever its enemies attempt in another direction will be exposed as inadequate and harmful. The common ownership of the means of life and production solely for use is our goal. Those who ask for less condone exploitation and betray the class to which we belong.

Charles Lestor

The Shape of Things to Come—and The Forces That Will Shape Them (1940)

From the August 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who seek to explain by reference to “ideologies” the swift movement of events in the world, the sudden collapse of impregnable positions, the seemingly inexplicable changes which show the grand old men of yesterday to be the dodderers of to-day, must be bewildered and confused by what is going on before their eyes. In a short period of time they have seen those exponents of supposedly irreconcilable doctrines—Stalin and Hitler—joined in a pact of friendship, while Catholic Italy and Catholic Spain fall more and more under the influence of Nazi Germany, erstwhile enemy of Catholicism. They have seen democratic France turn towards Dictatorship, and Conservatives proclaiming the need to back up “revolutionary” movements. The idealist who tries to discern the pattern in history, past and present, is prevented from doing so because he believes that ideas and beliefs have an independent origin and that one set of ideas will triumph over another if only the men who hold them have leaders of goodwill and integrity. The Socialist who looks to social relations and economic forces is better placed. Not, of course, that the Socialist can predict with certainty just how and when a conflict of forces will work out in the future, but at least he knows what is the nature of the forces on which the issue depends. Knowing, as Marx puts it, that “it is not men’s consciousness which determines their life,” but “their social life which determines their consciousness,” he also allows for the fact that at any given period of history the vital forces at work have to struggle with ideas which resulted from past conditions—”the tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living.”

The Weakness of France

Some of the explanations given of the French collapse are of the most superficial kind : Petain, we are told, was a “pessimist ” even in 1917, and Laval “a defeatist and potential traitor”; there were elements in France who were “vaguely anti-Parliamentarian and anti-democratic and equally vaguely pro-Fascist”; Daladier was “a civilian mediocrity,” and Gamelin “a military mediocrity”—and so on. These “explanations” cry aloud themselves to be explained. A little nearer the mark is the Economist’s French correspondent (July 20th, 1940), who says that he interviewed many French officers and “cannot recall one who was not a pessimist, not about the outcome of the war, but about the social and economic difficulties which would open up for France after the end of hostilities.” “It was not,” he says, “the mental attitude that wins wars.”

Some of the newspaper correspondents have, however, shown a more correct and robust grasp of realities in their judgment of the forces at work in France.

A Special Correspondent in France of the Daily Telegraph (June 25th, 1940) pointed out that Petain and Weygand were scared by reports (proved to be incorrect) that Communists had seized public buildings in Paris. This incident shows that preoccupation with maintaining France’s social tranquillity and repressing subversive movements weighed heavily with the two aged soldiers, and that they did not see the situation in its true perspective.”

Mr. Ward Price (Daily Mail, July 8th) mentions the “rich and influential Frenchmen” (including an unnamed “owner of iron ore mines in Lorraine”) who were behind Laval because they thought that “their personal interests would be benefited by co-operation with Germany, or, conversely, that war between the two countries would ruin them.” As long ago as 1931, in pre-Nazi days, Laval had proposed a Franco-German Committee of Economic Co-operation.

Another Daily Mail correspondent, Mr. Francis Tuohy, classifies the people behind French Fascism as “Catholics, Royalists, Officers, aristocracy, big business, police and functionaries, intellectuals and students, the propertied classes in general” (Daily Mail, July 22nd), and according to a French ex-editor, writing in the Manchester Guardian (July 22nd), one of the members of the Petain Cabinet is a Senator named Mireaux, editor of the Temps. “That paper,” he says, “is the organ of the Comité des Forges, the head of which is M. de Wendel, a great friend of M. Laval.” (The Comité des Forges is the organisation of French heavy industry.)

One last quotation on this aspect is from an editorial in the Manchester Guardian (July 12th) :

“That France needs reform is evident enough. In the last twenty years she has had forty-two Ministries. Only five Governments have kept themselves alive for twelve months. Such rapid changes give a mischievous instability to politics. In the background there lurks the power of what M. Herriot called “the 200 best families,” obstructing all social reform and threatening the Governments that did not obey them. It was, indeed, because the revolt against the sinister rule of the banks and big business was so certain at the end of the war, however the war ended, that many rich men were anxious to compound with Hitler ; they were more afraid of victory than of defeat. When defeat came they spoke like the rich friend of Cicero who wrote to him, ” Since the Republic is lost, let us at least keep our property!””

Forces for Change in Europe

The safeguarding of property interests is the dead hand of the past, but what of the more active forces pushing towards change and reorganisation in Europe? Can the men who appear as leaders hold developments in check, or failing that can they guide them into the channels they desire? Are they the creatures or the masters of the forces behind and below them ? We need to be cautious in forecasting events, but it seems a safe conclusion that the regime of Petain and that of his friend Franco are both doomed to fail. Petain’s Foreign Minister, Baudouin, can say (News Chronicle, July 18th) that “the world existing before May 10th is definitely buried,” and think that he is free to determine the destiny of France so that “new relations will be instituted between Capital and Labour and there will be new conceptions of life based on authority, order and obedience.” So also Franco’s brother-in-law and Foreign Minister, Serano Suner, can say (Daily Express, July 19th) that “freedom has been buried for ever in Spain,” but events will determine otherwise. Franco, only a brief while ago, was talking of a new stable order in Spain based on the peasants and national self-sufficiency just as Petain’s Government at the present time “apparently sees France’s role in the new Europe as primarily a peasant and handicraft country” (Daily Telegraph, July 23rd). But the clock of industrial and capitalist development cannot be turned back to medievalism. Franco and Petain both ignored or forgot that they live in a world which is subject to the intense and inescapable pressure of trade and competition ; on the one hand, and working-class resistance on the other. It is not to be forgotten that “a million Republicans are held in prison camps” in Franco’s Spain (W. Forrest, News Chronicle, July 18th). And it is from a Spanish newspaper correspondent in Vichy that the report came that Petain’s Government had to shift from Clermont-Ferrand to Vichy because of the violent and threatening attitude of the workers at the Michelin tyre factory in the former town (Daily Telegraph, July 19th).

Franco used to talk of being free from the pressure of capitalist forces, determined to build up Spain within her own border and on her own resources, but already he has been forced to change his tune to the more familiar one of Spain’s “duty and mission” to command Gibraltar and go in for a policy of Empire building : “We have shed the blood of our dead, not in order to return to the decadent past but in order to build a nation and create an empire” (The Times, July 19th). “Expansion in Africa” is now the order of the day.

When considering the prospects of such dictatorships as those of Petain and Franco, it is worth noticing that the four dictatorships that succeeded in establishing themselves (Russia, Germany, Italy and Turkey), along with some differences had two things in common. In each case power was obtained by a new group, not a mere reshuffling of representatives of existing parties and interests, and in each case those who seized power contrived to do so by using (or exploiting) the more or less constitutional machinery without waging open civil war against the workers or other large representative section of the population. On one or the other of these counts both Franco and Petain fail to possess the qualities that make for comparative permanence (not, of course, that other dictatorships have real permanence either).

It is relevant at this point to consider the position of Russia, and the urge that drove the Stalin regime to enter into the pact with Hitler. The military consideration of not wanting to be isolated in face of Germany and Japan was one aspect, but observers have recently confirmed that behind that fear was the factor of internal economic difficulties. The Moscow correspondent of the American New Republic (quoted in Forward, July 20th) gives it as his judgment that slackening industrial development compelled the Russian Government to take the view that “in both technical organisation and labour, efficiency was advancing so slowly that it would be generations before these departments would compare with those of the modern industrial States.

“Stalin’s way out was an alliance with some big industrial country, in order (1) to ensure Russia’s position of strength in the coming European war; (2) to supplement consumer’s goods industries until they would be able to stand on their own; (3) to supply the machine tools, optical apparatus, etc., which Russia is still forced to import.”

Mr. Louis Fischer, who was for 14 years a newspaper correspondent in Russia, says much the same in his “Stalin and Hitler” (Penguin Special, 6d., May, 1940). He attributes Russia’s industrial slowing down to several factors: “In part (it is) due to military preparations. But it is more adequately explained by the purges and several inherent Soviet economic weaknesses.” (P. 62.)

Here again, as in every other instance of international trends, it is idle to look wholly or mainly to abstract ideas and motives whether of rulers or ruled.

Before leaving the question of the forces making for change in Europe, it is interesting to view the spectacle of Conservatives being forced against every inclination to support movements that may help to undermine the German-Italian dictatorship systems. It is put most strikingly in the columns of the Daily Express. Below are two quotations from recent issues. The first is from an article by Mr. Geoffrey Cox, showing how Franco should be attacked at home if Spain goes to war on Germany’s side: —

“Seize the Canary Islands and other Spanish island possessions and set up there at once a Republican Government which we recognise.

But we can only do this if our appeal is a genuine Republican revolutionary appeal for straight-out revolution.

We must be prepared to co-operate with all the parties of the last Spanish Popular Front Government—Socialists and Communists and Anarchists, as well as Liberals and Radicals. We must get out of our minds all questions of whether these people are Red, or pink or white.

For no other appeal will rouse Spain now except the cry of the Republic.”—(Daily Express July 19th.)

The second quotation is from an editorial: —

“Our allies are ordinary people, not Fascist dictators. And since the ordinary people of Europe are now ruled by Fascists we must organise revolutions.

If (by some terrible folly) Britain were ever at war with Soviet Russia, we would work for a Right Wing revolution there. Since we are fighting Fascists, we must work for Left Wing revolutions in Europe. That is only common sense.

And so our Foreign Office and Ministry of Information should change their whole mentality.

Respectable ex-public school-boys and English gentlemen were admirably suited for conducting our relations with Right Wing politicians abroad. But they are the wrong people for carrying on underground intrigues, organising strikes, arranging sabotage and fomenting general discontent in Europe.”

— (Daily Express, July 23rd.)

In that quarter, at least, the dead hand of the past has been thrown off in so far as the winning of the war is concerned.

Edgar Hardcastle

Lessons of the Spanish Civil War (1979)

From the March 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Forty years ago. after three years of bloody civil war, the victorious Franco supporters came to power in Spain and imposed their long rule of savage repression. The war cost 600,000 lives, including about 100,000 “who may be supposed to have died by murder or summary execution” (The Spanish Civil War, by Hugh Thomas).

Propagandists for both sides presented the issues in simple terms—the Francoists’ “defence of religion against Communism and Russian influence”, opposed to the Republicans’ “Defence of Parliamentary democracy against reaction and German and Italian invasion”. However, the outstanding feature of the civil war was that hardly anything was what it seemed to be, and in the confusion, misjudgement was general.

There were Catholics on both sides. Many of the poorer priests in Spain sided with the Republicans, and in this country a number of Catholics like Dr. Morgan, Labour MP and medical adviser to the TUC, gave active support.

Although the Franco revolt included part of the Spanish armed forces, most continued to support the government and in spite of his monarchist backing Franco did not restore the monarchy. Neither did he join his German and Italian allies in the second world war which quickly followed the end of the civil war, at which time the Stalin government which had been providing arms to Spain to fight the German troops, entered into its pact of friendship with Hitler.

While the Conservative Party in Britain mostly supported Franco, an influential group actively campaigned to get the British Government to intervene on the side of the Republicans, on the ground that British capitalist interests would be imperiled if Germany got control of Spain and, through it, of the Mediterranean. Other sections of the Conservative Party, while aware of the force of the argument, took the view that British intervention might provoke the war with Germany for which they were not yet ready.

The Civil War from the start was overshadowed by the rivalry of capitalist interests between the Powers, Germany seeking to get a base in the Mediterranean and Britain, France and Russia wishing to prevent it. In addition German capitalism aimed to get control of mineral wealth in Spain. Hugh Thomas says that Germany’s condition for arming the Franco forces “was German participation in all the important iron ore projects in Spain. In return for this rich prize Germany committed enough war material to Spain to tip the balance finally towards the Nationalists.”

This was also the view of the Anarchists and Anarcho-Syndicalists:

The rebellion could not have taken place if the Spanish fascists had not already come to an arrangement with Hitler and Mussolini, who agreed to a mutual aid arrangement against Spain, in furtherance of their imperialist ambition. (Three Years of Straggle in Spain. Freedom Press).

Also, Germany and Italy as well as the French Popular Front government, seized the opportunity to try out new weapons of war in battle conditions.

Inside Spain the line-up on the Franco side rested largely on the big landowners and the Church, both of which saw their privileges threatened by the Popular Front government. It was estimated in 1931 that more than half the total land was owned by less than one per cent of the population and it was the declared intention of the Government to break the landowners’ stranglehold. It was not the capitalists who in the main supported the Franco rebellion—they also saw the big landowners as their enemy.

Capitalist parties belonged to the Popular Front, and the government which held office at the time of the rebellion was entirely composed of "radicals” and “progressives”. Although the Spanish “Socialist Party” (similar to the British Labour Party in outlook) was the largest party in Parliament, they were not in the government until some six months after the start of the war.

The declared aim of the Popular Front government was to establish in Spain a “Parliamentary democracy on the English model”, but to what extent did this represent the views of the voters and parties in the Popular Front? It was certainly the aim of the “Socialists” and the trade unions with whom they were allied, as well as of the capitalist parties in the government, but most of the other Popular Front supporters were completely opposed to it.

The Spanish Communists said that that was their aim too, and for saying so they were condemned by the Trotskyists and Anarchists. It would have been very odd if the Spanish Communists, who supported the Stalin dictatorship in Russia, had really favoured democracy. In fact it was for them merely a temporary political manoeuvre, as the Communist Jose Diaz put it:

To have attempted to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat would have meant skipping a necessary stage of development. . . . (Lessons of the Spanish War, 1936-1939).

He argued that premature disclosure of the real aim would have hampered the government in getting aid from abroad.

The largest body of supporters of the Popular Front, the Anarchist and trade union bodies which jointly published Three Years of Struggle in Spain made no secret of their total opposition to “parliamentary democracy” and determined to prevent its operation. They ridiculed the idea that “the revolution for which we were fighting” was “a new kind of democratic republic: that our politics should circulate in the orbit of the western democratic tradition of England and France.”

Their aim in the war had been, they said, “that the proletariat should repulse the State, no matter what political and economic parties stood in the way.” They complained that republican governments since 1931 had been hardly less repressive than had been the monarchy. Writing when the war was over, they had to admit that, in taking part in the government, helping to form a regular army and allowing Russian control, they had had to compromise—“no one knows it better or regrets it more keenly than we do.”

It is obvious that the Popular Front was a facade, and there never was working class unity for “parliamentary democracy”. The course of the war brought the bitter antagonism of the rival factions to the surface with mutual charges of murder and betrayal and the declaration: “neither in war nor revolution has anti-fascist Spain had a worse enemy than Stalinism.” They charged the Communists with holding the view "Better lose the war than allow the revolution”.

The fact is that democratic political methods require a degree of development, including working class maturity, which did not exist in Spain in 1936. Oliverra, himself a supporter of democracy, writing in the Labour Party journal Labour (September 1936) noted that the industrial capitalists were either neutral or pro-republican and described the Franco rebellion as “the last fling of feudalism". But he believed that at that time "Liberal institutions" could not take root in Spain.

Spain is very different today. Great advances have been made in industrial development and Anarcho-Syndicalist ideas have lost much of their appeal. Spanish capitalism, with its limited monarchy and parliamentary system, is now in course of coming into line with those of the European powers in the Common Market.

Edgar Hardcastle

Some Lessons from Spain (1937)

From the February 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

While the war clouds are fast gathering in Europe, the Spanish Civil War continues its devastating course, taking heavy toll of working-class lives and spreading ruin and misery over Spain.

Although six months have passed since it commenced the murderous attack of Franco and his international cohorts has not yet accomplished its object. While the avowed aim of Franco and his supporters is to keep the old order in Spain as it was the indiscriminate bombing and artillery barrage of towns is fast wiping out the objective evidence of old Spain.

We are accustomed to the sanctimonious reverence of the ruling class for the art treasures of the past but the savage methods of the Franco group shed a dear light on the object that inspires the real reverence of the property owner. Pictures, statuary, fine buildings, cathedrals and all the other irreplaceable relics of the artistic passion of the past weigh as nothing in the balance against the possible loss of revenue to the erstwhile rulers of Spain. And so it has always been and always will be while one set of people see an opportunity of living on the backs of the rest of the population. .

Again and again we are given evidence of the emptiness of the protestations of the property owners and their mouthpieces when an opportunity comes to give effect to their views. When war is called for, or resistance of any kind, by the rulers of society then priest and politician will find reasons why the war should be prosecuted or workers should be prepared to lay down their lives for a State that is not theirs.

Last October Dr. Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking at a Diocesan Conference at Canterbury, urged that complete pacificism was harmful as it left the State at the mercy of violent men. The object of his remarks was to impress upon his audience and the world at large that a defensive war was a just war. As all combatants in war claim that they are on the defensive (witness the last European War, and the statements of all leading European spokesmen now that they all want peace) this is equivalent to supporting any war on behalf of capitalism.

In the course of his remarks the Archbishop is reported as having put forward the following points: —

  The use of force of the sword by the State was the ministry of God for the protection of the people. If that were true of the State in its domestic relations, it was equally true for the State in its international relations. It all depended upon the motive or intention with which it was used.
 If the force of an army were used for national aggression or acquisition or self-assertion it was wrong. If it were used for the defence of the people it was right.

(News Chronicle, 13/10/36.)

In Spain a democratically-elected government has been subject to the onslaught of a rebellious military and land-owning clique who have carried out the attack with extreme brutality and have enlisted in their support native tribesmen as well as thousands of alleged volunteers from aggressive dictatorships. As far as we are aware neither Dr. Lang nor his friends have taken any practical step to see that aid was given to a government that was employed in just that defensive action for which he pleaded. Are we to assume that in reality Dr. Lang was simply giving his blessing to the rearmament projects of the British Government and thus fulfilling his function as a pillar of capitalism? It certainly looks as if this were the case.

The agony of Spain is only a matter of concern for the capitalists of other nations if any of them have interests involved or if there is any prospect of gain by fishing in troubled waters. For the rest it is a matter of minor importance to them that thousands of Spanish workers are losing their lives just because landowners and the Catholic Church want to keep intact their privilege to rob the wealth-producer of the product of his toil.

One of the spokesmen of the Spanish Government recently said that over a million lives had already been lost in the present civil war. It is a sad thought that in spite of the many and bitter lessons during the last hundred years, in which millions of workers’ lives have been sacrificed, the mass of the workers of the world still fail to grasp the fact that capitalism offers nothing to them but toil and misery, and they still turn away from the Socialist message. Yet, in the advanced countries at any rate, the workers produce and distribute the wealth upon which all live. While the capitalists control this wealth they use their position to live in idleness and luxury. The workers can, and some day will, obtain control of the means of production. When they do so they can banish want and economic misery and the bestialities of the struggle between classes. The lesson is a simple one and so easy to learn if only workers will look facts in the face.

Gilmac.

The Passing Show: Democracy (1961)

The Passing Show Column from the July 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Democracy

We make no apology for returning to the subject of Sir Thomas Moore, the Conservative M.P. for Ayr Burghs. Sir Thomas is the man who advocates a return to flogging and more frequent hanging as the answer to our troubles. But he only supports these punishments in cases of petty violence. Where a dictator is able to carry out a long and widespread campaign of violence, then Sir Thomas (provided he agrees with the tyrant’s brand of politics) is all for it. In the early days of Hitler's regime he was an outspoken supporter of German Nazism; and he is still a loyal champion of Spanish Fascism. On June 7th he wrote to The Times defending General Franco's regime, on the grounds that he imposed "law and order" on the country when, in the thirties, Spain was threatened with "communism on the march to impose its usual stranglehold on freedom”.

Only a week earlier, on May 31st, there had been the news of the sentencing of thirty-two agricultural workers to terms of up to 15 years' imprisonment by a Madrid military court, on the charge of "spreading communist propaganda" (a blanket term which, in Spain, covers any criticism of the regime). This is only the latest of a long series of trials of political opponents which Franco's courts have held since he—having shown himself more successful at violence and killing than his opponents—came to power in the Civil War. These thirty-two farm workers, and the thousands of others in Franco's political jails, would no doubt be interested to learn of Sir Thomas’s contention that Franco seized power in order to forestall an attempt to put a "stranglehold on freedom" in Spain. To defend Franco on these grounds is like giving a medal to a man who saves a child from drowning, only to stab it to death immediately afterwards.

Democracy

But, of course, political freedom need not be Sir Thomas's concern. If the Communists were in power in Spain, they would probably (not necessarily, of of course, as Yugoslavia shows) ally themselves with Russia—which is now the main overseas enemy of the British ruling class. Franco and his Fascists, on the other hand, would come in with the British ruling class in any war against Russia. So Sir Thomas supports Franco, and Mr. Butler goes to Spain as Franco's guest, saying it is a shame that Franco Spain has been left out of things for so long. What do they care for the fact that the Spanish people are deprived of democratic freedoms? Democracy is a useful catchword in time of war: but if the interests of the ruling class demand it, democracy is shrugged off without a second thought.

Borgwards

Just as state control was applied here to rescue the coal and rail shareholders from the complete loss of their investments, so nationalisation—or municipalisation—is used for the same purpose in other countries. A news item from Germany in The Times (7-6-61) ran:

  Dr. Johannes Sender, who took over the direction of the Borgward car manufacturing company in February, said today that the firm would have to cut its staff by another 2,500 people. In March the board empowered the management to dismiss up to 2,500 workers. Borgwards was taken over by the Bremen municipal authorities earlier this year after it ran into financial difficulties.

The local Social Democrats would find the sacked five thousand workers a troublesome audience, if like the Labour Party here, they tried to persuade them that municipatisation was really for their benefit.

Raw material

An advert aimed at capitalists has recently been appearing in the more expensive newspapers. It tries to persuade industrial concerns to move to Durham, or at least to open new works there. Headed “All the workers you need in County Durham," it goes on “good hard workers, ready and willing to learn new skills".  It gives a picture of a crowd of them.

This offering of human beings as promising raw material to employers bent on the extraction of surplus value is surely degrading both to the men themselves and to those who planned and those who read the advertisement. One might advertise cart-horses in much the same way. One of the many advantages of Socialism is that human beings will be considered as human beings, not simply as so much factory-fodder.

Expense accounts

The next time you read figures showing the gross inequality of incomes— after tax—in this country, the next time you hear of the handful who get £120 and £140 per week after tax, compared with the millions who get less than £20 and the millions more who even get less than £10, remember that this is by no means the whole story. The directors' fees, the share dividends are only part of the real income of the owning class Besides the actual money, which is taxed, there are the large allowances on the expense accounts, which are untaxed. So excessive have some of these junketings on expense accounts become in America that the American Treasury investigated the position, and has now released some evidence showing what has been happening. “Safaris in Kenya, lavish living in Las Vegas and in the Caribbean and the maintenance of yachts have all been tax deductible " (The Times 8-5-61). An insurance man was allowed 97,500 dollars for “personal expenses ”. The president of a dairy went on a six-month safari, and took his wife with him: he was allowed $16,443. A corporation which owned luxurious facilities on a sub-tropical island, including its own fishing cruiser, and aircraft to take its executives and their guests down there, was allowed $375,000. A supply firm had its own yacht, ranch and hunting lodges, and was given a tax-allowance of £473,140 to cover its expenditure on them and on night club entertainment. If we can be sure of anything, it is that the ordinary workers in these firms never saw these sub-tropical islands, or the hunting lodges. These devices are simply ways in which owners of firms obtain the means of luxurious living without having to reveal too enormous personal incomes. For to confess their real incomes (apart from the extra tax) would show too clearly to the workers the vast gap which separates the upper from the lower class.

Alwyn Edgar

Twenty Five Years After (1961)

Book Review from the December 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas, Eyre & Spottiswood. 42s.

The Spanish Civil War began 25 years ago and Mr. Hugh Thomas thinks that the time has come when a study could usefully be made of a tragedy which though dwarfed by subsequent world events, nevertheless cost 600,000 lives, including about 100,000 “who may be supposed to have died by murder or summary execution”

He has made a very good job of collecting and presenting information on the complex and fast-moving events of the three-year Civil War. In his 720 pages he carries the reader forward from the election of the Popular Front Government in 1936 to the revolt that faced it soon afterwards; through the military campaigns with their alternating advantage first to one side then the other, to the final collapse of the Republican forces in March, 1939. Six months later the principal governments that had helped or hindered the Republican forces in Spain were involved in the World War—all except Spain itself, under the-victor of the civil war, General Franco.

The League of Nations which had been impotent to do anything about the “local” war was brushed aside by World War II. Yet when that war ended and the United Nations inherited the shabby mantle of the League, Spanish Republican Exiles had still learned so little that they were hoping that the new organisation would dispose of Franco.

It might have been expected that the world war and all that has happened since would have destroyed interest in the Spanish Civil War, but the steady stream of books proves otherwise. It is not the size and destructiveness of the war, but the passions aroused in participants and onlookers alike that make it still memorable. There is also the inevitable speculation about what would have happened if only some politician or party had turned in a different direction at the crucial moment.

It is memorable, too, for the flood of outside volunteers who wanted to help.

Some adventurers were bound to be attracted to Spain in the Civil War, but the majority of the 40,000 volunteers from France, Germany, Britain and U.S.A. and many other countries who joined the International Brigades were men anxious to fight and, if necessary, willing to die, “for democracy and against Fascism.” (Doubtless the same idealistic motives sent Irish and other Catholic volunteers to fight for Franco “in defence of religion").

Many soon became disenchanted when they found that war is not just dying, but living in mud and blood and hardship, and enduring the indignities of army discipline—they were learning again what their fathers who volunteered for war in 1914 could have told them. Mr. Thomas writes of early 1937:

  The volunteers had discovered in battle that “a War of ideas” is much the same as any other conflict. In Spain, or elsewhere, there was confusion of orders, jamming of rifles at the critical moment, uncertainty about the whereabouts of the enemy and of headquarters, desire for cigarettes (or sweet-tasting, things), fatigue, occasional hysteria. . . . From the start, the wilder volunteers had got into trouble with the authorities, if only for drunkenness. But now trouble was incessant. Those who wished to return home were not permitted to do so when they wished. Some complained that they had volunteered on the assumption that they could go home in three months time. Here the principles of a volunteer army conflicted with military needs. (P. 390.)

Some deserted and landed up in military detention camps (“re-education camps") and some were shot as deserters.

But, of course, the war was not won and lost by the volunteers, but by the intervention of foreign governments Germany, Italy and Russia. And the fighting men were to discover then, or alter the war, that governments have reasons of State and of profit that have little to do with the slogans and speeches about democracy and religion. 

The Anarcho-Syndicalists and others on the Republican side, who quarrelled bitterly with the Communists, were particularly incensed because Russian military aid had to be paid for; partly with the £63 million of Spanish gold that was early sent to Russia for safe keeping.

Mr. Thomas dismisses as unreal the charge that the Russians "cheated” the Republicans of the money, but concedes (p. 310) “that Russia drove a hard bargain for her goods. In addition to the gold, Spanish raw materials were despatched to Russia in bulk.”

Typical of the beliefs of Spanish critics of Russia was a statement published in London in 1941 by their Anarchist friends, in a pamphlet The Russian Myth:

  No arms or food were sent to Spain before the end of October—three months after Franco had rebelled. Immediate payment in gold was insisted upon by Stalin for such arms as were sent.

The writer of the pamphlet went on to contrast Stalin's insistence on cash down, with “Hitler and Mussolini, who gave Franco long-term credits—still in part unredeemed." He was quite wrong; German Capitalism might bait the hook with long-term credits, but not out of charity; only because a really big fish was to be caught, Spanish mineral wealth. It was German aid that was finally decisive in the autumn of 1938, but the price exacted for the arms “was German participation in all the important iron ore projects in Spain. In return for this rich prize Germany committed enough war material to Spain to tip the balance finally towards the Nationalists” (p. 612).

Mr. Thomas notes that in August, 1936, after German military help had already reached the Republican Government’s enemies in Spain, the Government was trying to buy war planes in Germany (p. 235). There is no evidence to show that Germany considered supplying the planes. If they had been in doubt they would have been duly influenced by the fact that the mineral wealth they were after in Spain was in Franco-controlled provinces.

Apart from foreign intervention with war material, troops, planes and pilots, and naval action, Mr. Thomas contrasts Franco's success in getting a high degree of unity among his supporters with the way the Republican Government was "terribly hampered by the disputes between the parties who supported it" (p. 611). He goes on:

  One excuse might be that all the parties felt so strongly about their own policies that defeat itself seemed preferable to a surrender of the purity of their individual views. It would perhaps be more truthful to say that no one was able to forge a real unity out of the Republican warring tribes as Franco and Serrano Suner were able to do among the Nationalists. (P.611.)

Failing to get aid from the West the Spanish Government had to rely more and more on Russia and the Communists —which only increased the division in its own ranks.

In April, 1939, the National Committee representing the Spanish Confederation of Labour (Anarcho-Syndicalist), the Anarchists and some other bodies published a statement, Three Years of Struggle in Spain, giving their version of events and the reason for failure. The virulence of their charges against Russia and the Russian-directed Spanish Communists shows that Mr. Thomas has understated the impossibility of Republican Unity. The National Committee bluntly declared, on the strength of their experiences in the just-ended civil war:

  Neither in war nor revolution has anti-fascist Spain had a worse enemy than Stalinism. . . . What unity did the Communist Party expect or attempt to establish? None whatever—Agents of the U.S.S.R. murdered thousands of non-Stalinist Comrades who had come to Spain and joined the International Brigades. . . .

They accused the Communists of almost every crime that they had charged against Franco, plus desertion and cowardice. They still half-believed that, but for the Communists, they would have won against Franco and his allies.

Along with evidence on which the reader can base an opinion, Mr. Thomas sums up his own by saying that most of the governments were using the opportunity of the Spanish conflict to test out weapons and study tactics for future use in larger wars. This included Republican France, and it was Léon Blum who at his trial in 1942 spoke of the Spanish war as a “test for French aviation material” (p. 615). Of course, Germany, Russia and Italy were exploiting the same opportunity, though it is one of the ironies of the situation that most of the observers appear to have drawn the wrong lessons or failed to profit by the right ones. The exceptions were the Italians and Yugoslavs who learned a lot about the kind of war the Partisans were to carry on later in both countries.

Other than that, the intervening and non-intervening governments were thinking about alignments and manoeuvring for position for the threatening world war. Each government, however, seems to have been hesitant about pushing intervention so far as to provoke that war immediately.

When the Spanish democrats complained about the governments of Britain, France, Russia and U.S.A. not being prepared to take all measures to save Republican Spain “for the sake of democracy," they were forgetting that all Capitalist groups (Russia included) are motivated by the same kind of economic and strategic interests: deciding policy on the basis of ideologies is not to be expected of any of them. If any Republicans still held this illusion in the Spring of 1939 when the Republican armies collapsed they had only to wait six months to see Germans and Russians who had been warring in Spain for three years, hobnobbing together to celebrate the Stalin-Hitler pact of friendship.

But though all the other Powers were sooner or later caught up in World War II, Franco reversed the roles—he was willing to give aid to Germany, at a price, but he was not drawn into the war as a combatant Power. This did not save the Spanish Blue Division from sharing the horrors of the war in Russia, fighting alongside the German armies. On the Republican side, Mr. Thomas relates that Russian officers who fought in Spain were among those liquidated by Stalin in the purges (p. 621), and “nearly all veterans of the Spanish Civil War in Eastern European countries were arrested and many were shot.” Later on, after the death of Stalin in 1953, they were ” rehabilitated.”

In the Epilogue in which Mr. Thomas briefly notes the subsequent fate of those who came to prominence in Spain, he tells of the Republican general El Campesino who as an exile was welcomed to Russia, but fell foul of the authorities. He escaped and in appalling difficulties made his way to Persia; only to be handed back by the British. He escaped again and is still hoping to unseat Franco. In El Campesino's own memoirs he says that what queered him with the Russian authorities was that, on being asked at a military academy which was the world's most effective fighting machine, he named the German army!

Mr. Thomas's material shows how heavily the scales were weighted against the Republicans in the international field. He expresses the opinion that “the financiers of Europe and America not only expected the Nationalists to win but desired them to” (p. 273). A vital help for Franco was that of the Texas Oil Co. was at once willing to supply oil on long-term credit, without guarantee.

Nevertheless, Mr. Thomas’s implied criticisms of the American and British Governments seem designed to invite speculation as to what might have happened if, say, American Capitalism had had big and immediate interests endangered by a Republican defeat, or if those British Conservatives who supported the Republicans had been able to persuade the Government that long-term British Capitalist interests were involved and that they should support the Republicans and risk major war with Germany and Italy. In which event the world war may have come a little sooner.

Those who, for whatever reasons, hold the view that the workers should support war can say that in 1936 that risk was worth taking. But those who reject it had and have another aspect of the Spanish conflict to consider.

It is not merely being wise after the event to say that the Republicans’ position was impossible and that civil war could not solve their problems. Many observers saw this at the time. The Popular Front which, by a bare majority of votes, won the 1936 election, was composed of such divergent elements that the aim of some of them, a sort of Labour-Liberal Parliamentary democracy, was at that time as much out of the question as the establishment of Socialism. There were the Communists, aiming to establish dictatorship on the Russian model; the Basque and Catalonian separatists inspired by hatred of central government; and the very large body of Anarcho-Syndicalists who repudiated politics and parliamentary methods, which they called "empty phrasemongering,” and who believed in direct action, violence, and armed revolt, as much against a Republican Government as any other. Their support for the Popular Front and the Popular Front Government was a denial of all their principles, regretted almost as soon as it was given.

If we concede that by some different balance of international Capitalist interests the Popular Front could have emerged victorious at the end of the civil war, what could they have done with victory that would have borne any resemblance to the democratic Spain they, or some of them, had hoped for?

Edgar Hardcastle

Franco, Fascism and Modern Spain (2018)

From the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

I regularly drive along the A348 – a meandering secondary road that cuts through a long valley – the Alpujarras – sandwiched between the Sierra Nevada and Contraviesa mountain ranges in Southern Spain. Just off that road, between the towns of Orgiva and Lanjaron, there lies what some historians reckon is possibly the largest mass grave in Spain dating from the Civil War (1936-39). El Carrizal is a barren ravine, desiccated by a recent bushfire, which may contain the remains of up to 4000 individuals, including children, brutally executed by the fascists in that horrendous war.

Burying the Past

The story of El Carrizal is recounted in Juan Gonzalez Blasco’s Orgiva: Hitos de su Historia (2002). Night after night truckloads of prisoners were brought to the spot and summarily executed. They came from all over Granada province and beyond. El Carrizal was not the only site of execution – there are reputedly 25 mass graves locally – though it was the largest. Throughout the Alpujarras Franco’s forces rounded up suspected Republican sympathisers and had them shot. Little ‘pueblos’ like Torviscon, not far from me, lost a sizable chunk of its population to the Terror.

The physical reminders of those years still remain – the monuments to the dead, the occasional lookout post and the trenches hewn into the craggy mountainside from which anarchist snipers sought to resist Franco’s advancing army. Then there are the psychological scars. The valley retains the memory of those years as a sponge does water; squeeze it and the bitterness soon oozes back. Even today some people are reluctant to talk about the subject. In a merciless war that pitted neighbour against neighbour and relative against relative, with atrocities being committed by both sides (though far more died at the hands of the ‘White Terror’ than the ‘Red Terror’), that is perhaps not all that surprising.

Spain, post Franco, never really had something akin to South Africa’s’ post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a model of its kind. As David Smith writing in the Guardian, noted:

‘Spanish judges’ hands are doubly tied when it comes to investigating the thugs who served General Francisco Franco’s right wing dictatorship. Abuses not covered by the statute of limitation are protected by an amnesty law passed two years after Franco’s death. Politicians anxious not to place Spain’s fragile new democracy under stress, tacitly agreed to sweep the past under the carpet in what became known as the ‘pact of forgetting’ (24 June, 2014).

A belated attempt to change this situation came in 2007, when the PSOE government of Zapatero passed its Law of Historical Memory, which effectively condemned the Franco regime and cleared the way for the victims’ relatives to seek some redress. However, resistance to investigating the crimes of the Franco era is deeply embedded within the Spanish judiciary and when one leading magistrate, Baltasar Garson, sought to do just that, he was stymied in his efforts and eventually expelled from the judiciary in 2012, albeit on another matter.

It’s not just the judiciary that put up resistance, it came also from the official opposition to the Zapatero government at the time, the Partido Popular. The PP under Mariona Rajoy, now the governing party of Spain, had its origins in the Alianza Popular (AP), founded by one of Franco’s former ministers, Manuel Fraga. Fraga was on the reformist wing of fascism and sought to steer his party more towards the centre ground. This he succeeded in doing by joining forces with moderate conservatives. An organisational metamorphosis then followed, going through a succession of coalitions, culminating in the formation of the PP in 1989.

Spanish nationalism

We tend to associate fascism with extreme nationalism. However, the odd thing about Spain before Franco was the comparative weakness of nationalist sentiment there. True, the war of independence against Napoleon in the early 19th century had fostered some nationalist fervour. But this was the nationalism of a liberal elite. It chafed against, and was effectively blunted by, the institutional hegemony of the Catholic Church which constituted itself almost as a rival to the state in the enormous influence it wielded over Spanish society. 

Nationalism and the nation-state are essentially the products of capitalist development but in Spain, this occurred comparatively late in the day. Significantly, it was focused initially on just a few pockets – like Catalonia, the Basque country and around Madrid. Though agriculture began to be organised on a more capitalistic footing from the mid-19th century onwards, the largely backward rural hinterland provided poor soil in which nationalist sentiments could take root. Indeed, according to Jared Spears: ‘In the rugged isolation of Spain’s poor mountain villages, early anarchist adherents pioneered the organisational forms that later shaped the Civil War-era trade unions and peasant assemblies.’ (Jacobin magazine, May 2017). In a sense, geography aided the remarkable spread of anarchism in Spain and its emphasis on decentralisation and local autonomy. However, anarchist influence declined sharply in the course of the Civil War, ground down on the one hand by the rising power of the Stalinists on the Republican side and, on the other, by military defeat at the hands of Franco’s nationalist forces.

Thus, to the extent that nationalism existed in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century it was relatively muted and, furthermore, tended to take an ‘inverted’ form – a nationalism of the regions rather than an all-embracing Spanish nationalism. In fact, this is what marks Spain off as somewhat different from other European countries. For it was precisely in some of these regions that industrial development was most advanced. Sharp inequalities in the spatial economy of the country, reinforced by a pattern of cultural and linguistic differentiation, meant that the project of 'nation-building' in Spain could not be fully completed.

The Rise of Fascism

It was against this somewhat inauspicious background that fascist ideas began to circulate within Spain – essentially as a foreign import, to begin with. Mussolini’s Italy was the primary source of inspiration  (Stanley Payne in his 1996 book, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 charts in detail the growth of Spanish fascism).

The first openly fascist group operating in Spain was the short-lived (1931-33) Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista (JONS) led by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos. However, JONS proved spectacularly unsuccessful in making any kind of impression. It was succeeded by another grouping, the Falange Española ('Spanish Phalanx'), led by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the dictator who ruled Spain from 1923 to 1930. José Antonio, Payne points out, ‘had become interested in something rather like fascism (Italian-style) as the vehicle for giving form and ideological content to the national authoritarian regime attempted so uncertainly and unsuccessfully by his father’. Falangism was anti-monarchist and populist in orientation, attacking what it called ‘capitalism’, as many radical rightists are prone to do, in a language that sometimes sounded distinctly leftist.  Up until the Civil War the Falangists, like JONS, made little headway in attracting support, though.

The ascent of Hitler’s Nazis to power in Germany in 1933 engendered more interest in fascism – and funding too. Although Spanish fascism exhibited many of the core attributes of generic fascism – its hyper-nationalism and rigid authoritarianism - it also differed from other fascisms in ideological content - most notably in its accommodation of Catholic traditionalism. There was even a certain reluctance to clearly identify itself as fascist or to employ the usual street tactics of fascists elsewhere.  Unlike with the Nazis, little emphasis was placed on notions of racial purity (not surprising, perhaps, given Spain’s Moorish past, particularly in Andalucía)

It was the army rebellion led by Franco against the Republic in 1936 that changed the fortunes of the Falangists whose numbers swelled to several hundred thousand in the course of the Civil War. While Falangism was deployed as an ideological battering ram to infuse nationalist sentiments into the populace, the movement itself was effectively contained and subordinated to the military. In 1937, Franco unilaterally imposed a unification plan, bringing together the Falangists, pro-monarchists (Carlists) and a number of small right wing parties within a new organisation called the ‘Falange Española Tradicionalista’ with the Generalissimo himself at the helm.

Though Franco’s forces had received decisive military support from Germany and Italy during the Civil War, Spain was unable to reciprocate upon the outbreak of World War Two, with so much of the economy in ruin. This, plus the failure to secure a deal with Hitler on a post-war carve up of the world that would grant Spain its territorial claims in North Africa, meant that Franco had little option but to declare Spanish neutrality. That was just as well for neutrality ensured the survival of a fascist regime long after the Allied Powers had triumphed in their 'war against fascism'. The differences between Spanish fascism (or ‘semi-fascism’) and other, no-longer-extant, fascisms subsequently become more accentuated. An opportunist at heart, Franco increasingly began to lean towards monarchism and the traditional authoritarianism of the conservative Right in a bid to distance himself from Falangism. He also set about liberalising the economy which would have been anathema to a die-hard Falangist. His rabid anti-communism led to a rapprochement of sorts with the West as the Cold War got underway. America extended its Marshall Aid plan of economic assistance to Spain and in 1953 entered into military pact with it. The economic boom of the 1960s cemented Franco’s reputation as a popular leader among some sections of the population but, for many other Spaniards, he remained a reviled figure and his death in 1975 was regarded as a cause for great rejoicing.

The post-Franco years and Catalonia

Franco’s legacy was, thus, one of a bitterly polarised society. The strong association between nationalism and fascism provided a powerful subtext, shaping the contours of a post-Franco settlement.  Compromise was considered essential. One example was the Amnesty Law of 1977 already referred to.  Another was the decision to divide Spain into 17 ‘autonomous regions’ each exerting decisive control of such key services as social welfare, education and health. However, and crucially, the central government retained control over finance. It was empowered to levy and collect taxes from the autonomous regions – apart from the Basque country and Navarre which exercised tax autonomy – and to redistribute the proceeds back to the regions in a manner that ensured ‘fiscal equalisation’. In effect, poorer regions paid less taxes and got more revenue while conversely, richer regions paid more and got less.

However, this has become a major bone of contention between Madrid and, above all, Catalonia – one of the richest regions of Spain – fuelling the ‘independista’ movement there in its bid to secede from Spain. While Catalonia accounts for 20 percent of Spain’s taxes it receives back only 14 percent of the revenue. The 2008 economic crisis made matters worse with the highest level of budget cuts falling on Catalonia.

For its part, the central government is in no mood to accede to the separatists’ wishes. Catalonia has 16 percent of the Spanish population but accounts for 19 percent of the GDP and 25 percent of Spain’s exports, quite apart from paying a disproportionately large share into the state’s coffers. The loss of Catalonia would be a serious blow to the Spanish economy and the Rajoy government has moved decisively to prevent this happening, obstructing the independence referendum held in October 2017, organised by the Catalonian parliament, with a bungled police crackdown and then declaring the vote that delivered a thumping 92 percent in favour of independence (on a turnout of 43 percent) as legally null and void. It also invoked article 155 of the constitution, suspending Catalonia’s autonomous status and imprisoning some of the leading independistas.

Though independence would adversely affect Spain the likely impact on Catalonia would probably be even more severe. Two thirds of Catalonia’s exports go the EU but the EU has pointedly declined to recognise Catalonia’s right to secede, fearful that it might spark off secessionist movements in some other European countries. Since the October referendum more than 3000 business, including some major banks, have moved their headquarters out of Catalonia.

How do socialists view these developments? The unedifying choice between Catalan nationalism and Spanish nationalism is one that we point-blank refuse to make.  The political theorist, Tom Nairn, once declared that the ‘theory of nationalism represents Marxism 's great historical failure’ (‘The Modern Janus’, New Left Review, Nov/Dec 1975). If so, it is failure of influence, not of analysis.

Nationalism is predicated on the myth of a common interest uniting the citizens of a given country.  This has been cynically and opportunistically promoted by the Catalan nationalists particularly in relation to the tax issue. However, taxes are ultimately a burden on the capitalist class, not the working class, though the accounting ploy of routing some taxes via the workers’ payslips might very well prompt some to embrace the concept of a “stakeholder society” so central to nationalist mythology. At the end of the day, the real wages workers receive boils down to a question of economic circumstances – whether, for instance, the capitalist trade cycle is in its boom or recessionary phase – as well as what Marx described as the ‘respective powers of the combatants’ in the class struggle (Value Price and Profit, 1865). You don’t enhance the power of workers in their economic struggles against the capitalists by taking the same side as those sitting opposite you at the negotiating table and fraternally regarding them as your 'fellow citizens'.

Nevertheless, in a manner that has become depressingly predictable, large swathes of the Left have opted for a course of action that effectively submerges and obliterates working class identity in favour of national identity in the current constitutional crisis in Catalonia. It is the perceived threat of an emergent fascism that drives such class collaborationism. As the philosopher Anna Hennessey put it in an article in Counterpunch (29 September): ‘Franco was victorious and did not lose his war, as Hitler and Mussolini lost theirs, but this must not mean that we should let the dictator’s toxic ideological infrastructure persist any further into the twenty-first century. Supporting Catalonia is a necessary step in putting an end to fascism in Europe’.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything was calculated to encourage the growth of fascism it is Hennessey’s recklessly naive endorsement of Catalan nationalism. We should not be beguiled by the anti-monarchist and superficially ‘progressive’ character of this nationalism. Boris Kagarlitsky characterises it as a self-indulgent and greedy ‘revolt of the rich against the poor’ in sharp contrast to the Civil War years, when ‘Red Barcelona’ was the throbbing heart of a Spain-wide republicanism: ‘More developed regions with a high standard of living do not want to give up their resources to support less prosperous and backward provinces. “We don’t want to feed Andalusia anymore”, they say in Barcelona’ (Counterpunch, 11 September). He talks of the Catalan-language press being ‘full of racist delirium about dirty and lazy Spaniards trying to live at the expense of hard-working Catalonia’. That is surely a grotesque exaggeration but there is unquestionably some tension between incomers and natives. While Franco banned all languages except Castilian Spanish, the Catalan authorities have recently pursued a policy displacing the Spanish language with Catalan – for instance, making it a requirement for government jobs – to the detriment of many non-Catalan speakers.

There is a Fascist presence in Spain but the movement is small, fragmented and backward-looking in its nostalgia for the Franco era . Whatever populist appeal it might have has been effectively contained by the rise of the Leftist anti-corruption party, Podemos. Fascists may brawl and sieg-heil on the streets of Catalonia but their high visibility in the media is nowhere near matched by electoral success. Furthermore, for all their fanatical opposition to any kind of break-up of Spain as a centralised unitary state, they have also been comprehensively outflanked and side-lined on that issue as well by mainstream parties like the Centre Right and vehemently anti-independence, Ciudadanos (‘Citizens’) Party, which after the December 2017 elections, emerged as the single largest Party in the Catalan Parliament.

As for Rajoy, he clearly misjudged the situation, hoping to benefit politically by calling for these elections. Not only did the PP lose seats but Rajoy himself has been hoisted by his own petard. Having denounced the October referendum as illegal he sought to decisively stop the juggernaut of Catalan nationalism in its tracks by legal means. As it happens, the pro-independence parties emerged victorious as a result, having between them, won a majority of the seats– something that is likely now to prolong and aggravate the Catalonian crisis.

However, while the Far Right might currently be marginalised it would be rash to rule out a renaissance. There are suggestions that it might adopt the approach so successfully used by Le Pen in France in tapping anti-immigrant sentiment. What has been most striking about the Catalan crisis is the surge in Spanish nationalism it has provoked. In other words, Catalan nationalism has awakened Spanish nationalism, not just in Catalonia but throughout Spain. This nationalist groundswell may, indeed, bode well for the Far Right – a point those left-wing supporters of Catalonian independence would do well to heed.

Democracy

The relationship between nationalism and democracy is more complicated and vexed than liberals like Hennessey would have us believe.  While Catalan nationalists invoke ‘democracy’ in defence of their cause, an independent Catalan state, like any other, would be operating within the framework of a capitalist society that, by its very nature, can never really be democratic. How could it be when the means of wealth production are monopolised by a tiny minority to the exclusion of the great majority who produce that wealth? That aside, and disturbingly, this escalation of nationalist hostility we are witnessing on all sides is likely to further erode what limited bourgeois democratic rights there are. In 2015, for instance, the government introduced its Orwellian-sounding ‘Citizens Security Act’, popularly known as the ‘gag law’, among other things banning unauthorised gatherings and making acts such as desecrating the Spanish flag punishable with a fine of up to 30,000 euros – possibly with Catalan and other separatists in mind.

Back in the Alpujarras, a young man of my acquaintance, normally quite left wing in his opinions, was holding forth in a bar.  Venting his anger towards Catalan nationalists, he intermittently blurted out ‘Viva Espana!’ in a loud voice, whilst jokingly (or perhaps only half-jokingly) making fascist salutes. I remonstrated with him for his tactlessness, pointing out that, conceivably, there were individuals in that very bar whose relatives had perished at the hands of the fascists back in the 1930s. To me such behaviour was symptomatic of the times we are living through, an ominous portent of what might come.

Truly it might be said that nationalism is fascism’s Trojan horse.

Robin Cox