Perverted History. The “Socialist” Countess’s Twaddle Exposed. (1917)

From the June 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Little more than half a century has passed since in Japan the Samurai surrendered their privileges into the hands of the Mikado, and with their sacrifice the new Japan was born…. Suppose that our aristocracy, as a class, were to emulate the Samurai, that they were to place at the disposal of the State the Mother Earth that belongs to the State by right. They might reasonably accept a moderate recompense, something that would provide for them and their children on the scale of modest living that will become the rule when we begin to meet the price of war . . . How far fairer it would be for us to recognise and accept the truth and go as the Moors went from Spain, where they too had become an anachronism, though the beauty that made their sojourn remarkable lingers to this day. If we would make the supreme sacrifice of our traditions we could trust the common sense of our countrymen to see that no plutocrats stepped into the place we had vacated ; we could make our bargain with the State that it should be the supreme landlord spending the rent to make the lovely countryside at least as valuable to national life as the ugly town. We who came into the high places of Europe with the false halo of conquest would retire from them in the real halo of renunciation, and our act of supreme sacrifice would be a better memorial than the best of us could have hoped to gain.”

The above is from an article by the Countess of Warwick which appeared in the “Daily Chronicle” of April 12th, 1917. The article is entitled “We Must Go.” The “We” is the “hereditary landowners,” to whom the appeal is made to hand over their land to the State, in the interests of greater productivity, and in justice to the workers, who have bled for it.

How the latter can benefit in any way from the proposed surrender of lands is made no clearer by the Countess than by any of the Fabian or I.L.P. treatises on the same subject.

State ownership of land, or, indeed, of any of the means of wealth production, solves no problem for the working class. Only common ownership with democratic control can do that. State ownership, that is, collective ownership by the capitalist class, as with the Post Office, for instance, leaves the workers still wage-slaves. The introduction of labour-saving machinery would therefore have the same effect as it has to-day. The countess, like many another reformer, overlooks this fact, though it should be obvious. She says: “The country has great needs, and if it is to remain solvent the united work of one and all following the latest developments with the most complete equipment will be inevitable.”

This policy in the past has resulted in increased unemployment for the working class ; its extension, therefore, can only result in greater poverty, arising from still further increased unemployment. State ownership of the land excludes the working class from the soil, except in the capacity of wage-workers. They are mere subjects of exploitation to those who provide with their capital the “most complete equipment,” and the rent to be paid to the State for the use of the land.

The fallacy of State ownership, however, has been so often exposed in these columns that we can afford to leave it for the present and deal with the other fallacy contained in the first quotation—that a ruling class has ever in the past renounced, or is likely in the future to renounce, its privileges and power unless compelled to do so by superior force. There is no record in history of a ruling class abdicating in favour of a class weaker than itself. Nor is there any record of a ruling class so imbued with a moral sense of justice and consideration for the class it governed, that it would, knowingly and willingly, sacrifice the meanest of its privileges to assist that class to its emancipation. The ruling class in capitalist society is stronger in its determination to maintain its rule and possesses more powerful weapons than any previous class in history. Its barbarity, as every contest with the workers testifies, equals and its hypocrisy exceeds, that of any previous ruling class.

But, the reader will ask, does not the countess give actual examples from history where a dominant class voluntarily abdicated? Both these examples are misrepresentations of the actual facts. Take the case of Japan. In that country the system of society previous to 1868 was similar in its essential features to the Feudal system of European countries. The Samurai were the military class, composed of territorial nobles, called Daimios, and their vassals or retainers. Strictly speaking, however, the term Samurai applied to these latter only. They and their families were kept by the Daimios, or had lands assigned to them for which they drew the rent, as under the Feudal system in Europe. This applied to the Daimios as well, who numbered about 255, and whose incomes varied between 10,000 and 1,027,000 koku of rice per annum.

The revolution that abolished this system was not of the same sanguinary character as the bourgeois revolution in France in 1689, or the English revolution in the time of Charles the First. “The two parties,” says Arthur Diosy, “were too unevenly matched for the struggle to become a severe one.” Therein lies the secret of its relatively peaceful consummation. The Daimios were between the devil and the deep sea ; they submitted to the inevitable—on the best terms they could obtain. They received from the State an annual income equal to one-tenth of their former income, and were relieved of the responsibility of maintaining the Samurai, who were taken over by the Government to form the nucleus of the Army and Navy. Those who held hereditary incomes were given the opportunity to sell their rights to the Government for half cash and half Government bonds.

Unlike the revolution that broke up the Feudal system in Europe, the Japanese revolution was projected, or rather accelerated, from outside the nation. Attempts to establish trading relations by occidental powers, sometimes, as in the American expedition under Commander Perry, involving a display of naval forces, rudely awakened the ruling class from their feudal sleep. The Mikado and his nobles were forced to recognise that they must establish their rule on Western lines, or they would speedily become a vassal State to one or other of the great Powers that, with increasing impatience, knocked at her gates with wares for sale—and with heavy artillery to batter them down if their admittance was long delayed.

In these circumstances the Mikado and his nobles, after consultation, and not without military opposition from some of them, took the only possible course to maintain their independence as a nation. They proceeded to organise the nation on the model of their capitalist neighbours, their first care being to establish a fighting force on land and sea, capable of warning off belligerent intruders and guaranteeing a share in the world’s markets to Japanese capitalists.

This action, taken in defence of their independence and based on a compromise or bargain between the nobles and their legitimate ruler, is what the countess describes as a sacrifice.

So much for the first example quoted by the Socialist (!) countess ; now for the second. The Moors entered Spain in 711 A.D., and in three years had “conquered the whole country, except the almost inaccessible regions of the North-West.” The Spaniards, according to their historians, waged almost uninterrupted warfare against them for nearly eight centuries. They gained the upper hand late in the fifteenth century, and then commenced a long period of religious persecution against the Moors, who were finally all converted to Christianity by burning, torturing and other methods approved by the Inquisition.

But their religious opinions were suspected by the clergy under Phillip III, who ordered their expulsion from Spain. “How far fairer it would be for us to recognise the truth and go as the Moors went from Spain, where they too had become an anachronism” says the countess, as though their going was a voluntary act of abdication.

They went, “about one million of the most industrious inhabitants of Spain,” says Buckle, “were hunted like wild beasts. Many were slain as they approached the coast, others were beaten and plundered, and the majority, in the most wretched plight, sailed for Africa. During the passage, the crew, in many of the ships, rose upon them, butchered the men, ravished the women, and threw the children into the sea. Those who escaped this fate landed on the coast of Barbary, where they were attacked by the Bedouins and many of them put to the sword. Others made their way into the desert, and perished from famine.”

The Moors ruled in Spain with the same arrogance that characterises every ruling class. Their rule became “an anachronism” because their power was broken and for no other reason. What childish nonsense, what a wilful perversion of history, to pretend that theirs was a voluntary act of renunciation. Yet it is on statements such as these that capitalist tools, wearing the Phrygian cap and waving the red flag of Socialism, gravely inform the workers that the shuffling, grabbing and hypocritical capitalist class will lead the working class, step by step, to its emancipation.

As in Japan, so in every European country—feudalism succumbed before the revolutionary power of the capitalist class. The fact that a compromise was afterwards effected, by means of which, feudal traditions and lineage were preserved, made no difference to the ultimate nature of society. Capital alone had voice. Was it not by means of capital that the wealth-producing class was exploited, and the national exchequer provided with the funds that maintained the fighting forces ? Lords and Barons might flaunt their heraldry, but the capitalist built his State on physical force and allotted monarchy and aristocracy their places in the capitalist State. The aristocracy were absorbed ; they became capitalists themselves and henceforth their interests were identical with those who had accomplished a revolution against them. For all practical purposes landowners and industrial capitalists form but one class—there is no serious friction between them. They control the executive power in the full determination—rarely expressed because so well understood—to maintain the existing system of society, and neither the prayers of morbid countesses nor the groans of their millions of starving victims will ever shake their resolve.

Only the organised might of the working class can break the power of capitalism and bring emancipation. If the capitalist class were imbued with the moral and sympathetic qualities they profess, the poverty and the toll of lives under their system, even in peace times, should have been sufficient incentive for them to exercise those qualities. Not so, however. Their efforts were always in the opposite direction—how to intensify exploitation.

Even the tragedy and devastation of their latest crime, with all the added misery it brings in its train for the working class, has never once caused the question to be raised—except by the Socialist—”Is not the system itself wrong ?”

And let the workers make no mistake, though every capitalist nation took sides and fought to the last man, till every vestige of civilisation were destroyed, the ruling class would never raise that question.

That question must be asked and answered by the working class. At present they are exploited, dragooned, bluffed, trained and educated to the status of wage-slavery. Thus with their intelligence warped, though the largest in numbers, they are the weakest. Let them strip themselves of the capitalist shroud which envelops their minds and they will at once become the strongest class in society. The capitalist class will then lose the opportunity, which they have never shown the slightest inclination to embrace, to win a “halo of renunciation” because working-class emancipation will be accomplished by the working class itself.

F. Foan

Steven Pinker, the modern Pangloss (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like a fearful angel, you don’t need to tread far into the recent works of Steven Pinker, particularly The Better Angels of our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018), to get the gist of his popular thesis that today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better still, so long as states maintain control and reason triumphs over savage instinct. Better Angels is Bill Gates’s favourite book, and it’s not hard to see why.

The appeal is in the sensationally anti-intuitive optimism and the simplicity of the argument. A clear line is drawn from barbaric prehistory through the murderous Middle Ages all the way to the relatively placid present, in a bid to demonstrate the ‘civilising process’ embodied by states, which has led to universally declining levels of violence. Pinker doesn’t claim it’s a new idea, and indeed bases much of his argument on Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, published in Germany in 1939 (a not-insignificant date, as we shall see).

It’s also an idea with some good prima facie evidence supporting it, at least for Western Europe during the last few centuries, at least for average civilian homicide rates. Few historians would argue that murder rates in this part of the world have not declined substantially over that period.

But zoom out, and the price of this simple linear argument seems to be that all other lines and details have been overlooked, rather like a large-scale geographical map from which all roads and features have been erased, apart from the one single highway that Pinker wants you to follow.

Predictably, this has enraged academic historians, who liken Pinker to a visitor who enters your house in muddy boots and then sticks his feet up on your living room table. Now, frustrated by the fact that ‘Pinker’s message is reaching the masses, and ours is not’, many of these historians, some of them from Pinker’s own Harvard University, have joined forces to deliver a devastating counter-blow (The Darker Angels of our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence, edited by Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale, Bloomsbury, 2022). There are 18 chapters written by experts in pre- and medieval history, early modern Russia and Japan, the Enlightenment, the British Empire, and histories of the environment, sexual violence, race, and the myth of a universal human nature. Some contributors offer a cool and detached evaluation of Pinker’s methodology, while others write with barely concealed rage at his blithe effrontery and cavalier lack of scholarship.

Pinker’s approach to evidence is variously described as shoddy, egregious and cherry-picking. He quotes sources that suit his argument, even if they’re only coffee-table books (like The Great Big Book of Horrible Things), and ignores vast swathes of respectable research that don’t. For instance, the medievalist Sara Butler writes: ‘Pinker has never seen a medieval court record, nor does he understand how the law worked in the Middle Ages… When he measures medieval against modern statistics, he has no idea that they are measuring very different things… without valid statistics, Pinker’s entire argument falls apart’ (p136).

If you ever wondered how Pinker could possibly know the murder rates in medieval times, with its patchy records, or in prehistory, with almost no records, you’ll find academic historians asking exactly the same question. Pinker doesn’t know, he’s guessing, and relying on estimates which are themselves sometimes wildly inflated and ideologically suspect, like those of Catholic missionaries estimating the supposed violence of heathen Native Americans. If you as an archaeologist dug up two Iron Age skeletons, and one had had its head bashed in, you wouldn’t automatically conclude that the murder rate must have been 50 percent. Archaeologist Linda Fibiger certainly wouldn’t. She studied 1,000 human remains from 150 sites spanning 3,000 years and made tentative conclusions on interpersonal violence only for that period and only within that geographical range. Pinker makes continent-wide conclusions based on 21 individuals from one Jutland cemetery (p.115).

What we discover, in chapter after chapter, is that Pinker is massaging the evidence, upwards in the case of the past, to make violence and ‘savagery’ look much worse than it really was, and downwards in the present, to make the world seem more peaceful than it really is. To take one example, he cites one claim that the Spanish Inquisition executed 350,000 Jews in 350 years, which was nearly twice the total population of Jews in Spain during that period (p.128). He also name-checks an eminent researcher but without mentioning the researcher’s own estimate of executions for the same period at around 810, a figure widely considered more reliable. This figure generates its own irony, as it would mean that Pinker’s own ‘civilised’ USA, with 1,526 executions between 1973 and today (p.270), has executed almost twice as many people as the Spanish Inquisition, and in a fifth of the time.

In reality, much of the historical evidence suggests the opposite of what Pinker claims. The Middle Ages was not addicted to cruel executions, which were in fact rare, and most punishments were in the form of fines. Early modern Russia, considered ‘uncouth’ by Western standards, executed far fewer people than its neighbouring European countries, and with less Grand Guignol cruelty. The Enlightenment, rather than civilising society, served to justify unparalleled colonial and racist violence, while excluding whole categories including women from supposedly universal notions of human rights. There’s a pattern to all this, and you can easily find other examples yourself. For instance, the ‘Wild West’ was arguably less violent than the modern USA and had more robust gun laws (bit.ly/3wYwj7S).

Pinker is unashamedly a neo-Hobbesean, arguing that in ‘non-state societies’ we humans are ruled by our inner demons – predation, dominance, revenge, sadism and ideology (‘ideology’ here meaning fascism, Marxism etc, but not his own perspective, which doesn’t count), whereas the benevolence of disinterested elites (like himself) and the ‘gentle commerce’ of capitalism have ‘gifted’ us modern civil liberties and allowed the predominance of our ‘better angels’ including empathy, self-control, a moral sense and reason. At no point does he consider that these modern freedoms had to be fought bitterly for, and in fact sees any social dissent or struggle as counter-productive and ‘de-civilising’.

And here is where Elias, a German Jew writing in 1939, becomes relevant again. His theory of states as a civilising influence presupposed that the state itself was benevolent. Elias ended up doubting his own assumption (p.101) precisely because of what subsequently happened in Europe. Yet Pinker skates over all this, dismissing the Holocaust as a statistical outlier that doesn’t affect his main argument. Awkward details don’t trouble him, as he ‘only travels on the sunny side of the street’ (p.66), trading in ‘comfort history’ and ‘Pinkering’ the evidence (p.305). Though Better Angels, at 800 pages, seems to follow the principle that ‘if you say it enough, it becomes true’ (p.176), Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil – Sparta to Darfur (2007) concludes, in 700 pages, that genocidal violence is as bad today as it’s ever been (p.332). With Pinker, one is irresistibly reminded of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, for whom everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Finally, modern historians are suspicious of linear historical narratives, because linearity always involves leaving stuff out. Nowadays they prefer more ‘webby’ approaches which reflect the diverse and often contradictory nature of the evidence. Marx the dialectician would have approved of this approach, so it’s a shame that one or two contributors in this book see him as part of the problem, a linear teleological thinker plotting a deterministic path to the future. This is to take the same one-sided view of Marx that Pinker takes of history. In all probability, judging from the withering scorn that Marx levelled at the half-baked and self-serving bourgeois thinkers of his own day, he would have given Pinker a roasting that even the sharpest condemnations in this collection would struggle to match.

Paddy Shannon

The Mirage in Spain (1934)

From the April 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard 

From recent reports Spain appears to be well on the road already trodden by other European countries. Somewhat similar circumstances have thrown up similar groups and catchwords and the leaders of labour are making the same mistakes and marching to their doom with a blindness that would almost drive one to despair.

The economic development of Spain has been such that, until recent years, it has not favoured the rise of a strong capitalist class or a considerable body of proletarians in the modern sense of the term, although the mass of the people have been poverty stricken. The helm of state has been controlled by a small group of nobility in alliance with the Catholic Church.

During the 19th century the industrial and commercial development of Spain was unimportant. In fact, so backward was it that the mass of the people were illiterate, and even to-day half of them can neither read nor write. An economically privileged nobility and clergy had control of political power and reduced the majority of the population to a low level of existence by grinding taxes and tributes of various kinds.

There was a professional element that drew their ideas from the more advanced countries and strove to fit on to the country a political system out of harmony with the economic framework. Periodically there were revolts, sometimes instigated by dissatisfied sections of the ruling group, sometimes led by the professional element who wished to see Spain take its place with the more advanced countries.

One result of these struggles was the constitutionalist movement of 1868-76, during which a republic was proclaimed so weakly founded that, after an existence of three years, it ended with the Constitution of 1876 and the return of the Monarchy. In spite of the collapse of the republic, however, the constitution represented a real advance and was based on liberal views. But the old repressive measures and the control by the Church of education continued. However, the economic development of the country was beginning to gather energy and Bilbao in the Basque Provinces, Barcelona in Catalonia and Valencia were becoming the centres of considerable industrial activity.

The isolated industrial development in departments such as Catalonia, Valencia and the Basque provinces, combined with differences in language and the hopelessness of breaking the wall round the central government developed a movement towards local autonomy. Nationalist movements within the country aiming at separate and autonomous departments have arisen and anarchist and syndicalist movements have flourished. The nationalist sentiment was the mainspring of the federal constitution of 1931 and the anarchists and syndicalists who joined the unions were the despair of the leaders of the growing labour movement, who modelled their attitude upon that of the leaders of the other European Social-Democratic movements.

During the present century industrial development has made considerable progress and industrial and commercial capitalists have joined in the struggle to obtain political influence. The capitalists objected to the commercial competition of the Catholic Church (which took part in ordinary industrial ventures) and to its freedom from taxation. They also objected to the heavy cost of an overgrown and inefficient bureaucracy and mismanaged military expeditions. In short, they had reached the time when they wanted a political apparatus cleared of antiquated rubbish and fitted to meet the needs of modern conditions.

While the Monarchy existed it represented the tyranny of the past and people of all shades of opinion could unite against it under the slogan of Republicanism and settle their differences afterwards. The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, in 1923, was a belated attempt to save the old order by keeping down some of the disruptive dements. But the dictatorship was expensive and it failed to keep down internal turmoil. It thereby lost what support it originally commanded outside the Church and the aristocracy. The franchise was sufficiently wide for the local elections to show that the aristocratic group were going to be swept away in the elections to the central Parliament, so they took time by the forelock and went before the storm broke.

The movement that ended the dictatorship was the result of an agreement reached at San Sebastian between the Regionalists (the advocates of local autonomy) the Liberals and the “Socialists" which united these groups in a common movement for a Republic.

The Spanish Socialist Party originated in the ’80’s before there was any large body of wage workers in existence, although there were plenty of poverty-stricken peasants. As the Democratic-Socialist Working Men's Party it was formed at Barcelona in August, 1882, at the National Working Mens' Congress. It was influenced by the movement in France and Germany and issued a Manifesto almost identical with that of the German Social-Democrats. This Manifesto proclaimed the necessity for the Spanish proletariat to seize political power “in order to transform individual and corporate property into common property belonging to the whole community."

At the Annual Conference, in 1884, of the Spanish Working Men there were 120 delegates present, many of whom were representatives of agricultural labourers.

The growth of the movement was slow, but, in 1904, the party had 10,000 members and obtained 29,999 votes at the Parliamentary elections. The Anarchist and Syndicalist movement considerably hampered its development and there was a struggle for influence in the labour unions.

The industrial crisis following the Phillipine and Cuban wars gave the movement a bad setback. The membership of the party and of the labour unions declined.

The war and post-war economic development, during which rapid industrial progress was made in many directions, particularly in transport, coal, electricity and agriculture, gave the party a considerable push and, in the elections after the establishment of the Republic, they became the second largest party in Parliament, with a representation of 117 members out of 475 elected.

The quality of the support given to the party, however, has not taken long to show itself. In the recent elections it was only able to secure the return of 60 members ! The reason for its decline is quite simple. It was one of the supporters of the Government since 1931 and has had to carry the blame for the conduct of the Government—an inevitable result of alliance with avowedly capitalist groups.

The facts are that the original professions of the Manifesto remained pious ones, and the party occupied itself with the much lauded practical policy of reforms, losing sight of the object originally conceived—on paper, at any rate.

At the moment of writing it is threatened with the same fate that has fallen upon its Austrian counterpart and it is debating the fatal policy of armed resistance.

A situation closely resembling that which occurred in Italy in 1920 now exists in Spain. A minority of the population supporting the “Socialist,” Syndicalist and Anarchist groups are considering united action against the Government. The strike fever is spreading and an attempt is being made to bring about a general strike of all workers, with the object of overthrowing the existing system. The ground has been prepared, as it was fourteen years ago in Italy, for the rise of a Fascist movement, and two such groups have been organised and have made rapid progress during the last few months.

The view taken by the Government is illustrated by the following significant quotation taken from the Observer (March 18th, 1934): —

  A curious commentary on the trend of Spain’s Republic is the official announcement of the establishment of permanent concentration camps to hold 3,000 men. The gem of this announcement lies in the statement by the Director of Prisons that “a special camp to hold 160 persons is being erected on the Island of Hierro (Canary Islands), and which will be devoted to writers, authors, journalists, and suchlike persons.” About sixty social prisoners were removed from Madrid Prison this week, and it is understood, although no official statement has been made, that they are en route for the main concentration camp for 1,600 persons which is being hastily prepared on the Island of Lanzarote (Canary Islands), and which will be ready for occupation within fifteen days, according to the Director of Prisons.

The Labour movement in Spain has manoeuvred itself into a hopeless position, and is simply asking for the fate that befell the Italian movement.

Gilmac.

Spanish miners (2014)

Book Review from the July 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Resistencia Minera, photographs by Javier Bauluz and Marcos Martinez. The Durham Miners’ Association, 2012, 56 pages, £20.

This exquisite photographic volume by Javier Bauluz and Marcos Martinez is supported by the Spanish Miners’ Solidarity Committee UK, the NUM, the Durham Miners’ Association, the National Justice for Mineworkers Campaign and the anti-fascist organisation Hope not Hate. These organisations, working closely together during the 2012 strike in Spain, collected and sent €33,400 to the Spanish miners’ unions in solidarity with the striking miners and their families.

On 30 May 2012, Spanish miners’ unions called an indefinite strike to force the country’s government to negotiate over an immediate 63 percent cut in aid to the coal industry. The photographic booklet documents the 65 days of the strike by the 9,000 miners in Asturias, Leon and Aragon. The Spanish state deployed the Guardia Civil to the coal mining valleys of Asturias where on a daily basis they used tear gas, baton charges, and rubber bullets against striking coalminers, who resorted to using stones, nuts, bolts, slingshots and fireworks issued from home-made rocket launchers. The photographs portray the roadblocks, pitched battles in pit villages, rallies, demonstrations, the march on Madrid which is all reminiscent of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike in Britain. John Cunningham of the Spanish Miners Solidarity Committee wrote that the ‘NUM owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Spanish trade unions and particularly the miners for their solidarity and financial support in 1984-85.’ In 2012 a Spanish coal miner said ‘this is not the first time miners have fought for all workers.’

We look forward to the day when the Spanish coalminers inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword ‘Abolicion del sistema de salarios’ .

Steve Clayton

Almeria’s Greenhouses: The Dark Side of Agri-Capitalism (2019)

From the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part One: Mar de Plastico

In Almeria province in Southern Spain there is to be found the largest greenhouse complex in the world, an area roughly the size of the Isle of Wight. Nothing quite prepares you for the sheer scale of it all – or the brutal ugliness. Driving through it can be a disorientating experience. As far as the eye can see, covering the coastal plain and lapping the mountain range behind, is a shimmering sea of plastic.

The first greenhouses were erected in the early 1960s. Prior to that Almeria province was considered the poorest region in Spain, a barren desolate place, Europe’s only desert and the backdrop of many Spaghetti Westerns and films like Lawrence of Arabia. However, it wasn’t always like that.

Historical Background

At one time, according to Robert Wolosin, the area had extensive pine and oak forests as well as abundant fauna (including bear, lynx and roe deer), despite its meagre rainfall (2006, El Milagro de Almeria, Espana: A Political Ecology of landscape change and Greenhouse Agriculture). Successive waves of human occupation incrementally transformed this landscape to what it has become today. Key to this was the overexploitation and export of local resources linked to the extraction of economic surpluses.

Anthropogenic influences on the environment can be traced back to Roman times and even earlier. After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, the habitat largely reverted to its earlier state, only to undergo a further transformation under the Nasrid Moorish dynasty (711-1492). The Moors introduced elaborate irrigation technology and new crops like citrus and almonds. Under them, the city of Almeria itself grew to briefly become the second richest city in Europe after Constantinople, linking the hinterland to the wider world of Mediterranean trade.

The Christian ‘Reconquista’ (re-conquest) of Spain completed in 1492, signalled a new chapter in the region’s environmental history. Feudal lords leased out land for sheep farming to provide wool for the Italian textile industry. The decline of that market in the 1600s and the availability of abundant land, subsequently encouraged a shift towards low-yield, extensive ‘dry’ farming (mainly cereals) necessitating the removal of yet more vegetation cover. Pastures and woodland were recklessly put under the plough, rendering the soil vulnerable to erosion, in a manner reminiscent of Dustbowl years of the 1930s when ecologically inappropriate, commercially-driven, farming techniques were introduced on the vast prairies of North America.

The final, and most devastating, blow to Almeria’s once forested, if fragile, environment was delivered in the early 19th century when, as Wolosin notes, tens of thousands of acres of vegetation cover was lost and half a million evergreen oaks were felled to, among other things, serve the needs of the local mining industry, then experiencing a boom. The growth of the mining sector – Almeria province at that time accounted for 80 percent of Spain’s lead production – also encouraged inward migration and the resultant increase in population exerted additional pressure on the local environment. However, by the late 19th century the mining industry went into a sharp decline because of falling prices but also, ironically, because of a self-inflicted shortage of wood needed to fuel the foundries. With mining in decline and farming adversely affected by centuries of environmental abuse, the province succumbed to significant depopulation.

Such was the parlous state that Almeria found itself in the early 20th century before the advent of the greenhouses:

 ‘An area once known for forests, streams, and a wide array of plant and animal life is now parched, cracked, and shadeless’ (ibid).

The ‘Ecological transition’

Putting this in a wider context Wolosin, citing the environmentalist Heinrich Walter, remarks that the Mediterranean region, and Almeria in particular, are ‘the best and most tragic example of how mankind has removed the foundations for his existence through the overexploitation of natural resources’. How this came about can be usefully understood in terms of the concept of the ‘ecological transition’ pioneered by John Bennett in his book The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthropology and Human Adaptation (1976).

According to Bennett, there is a spectrum of human adaptations – from a local community completely reliant upon, and adapted to, its own immediate resource base right through to the kind of globalised system of production that characterises modern capitalism. In this latter case, the local community no longer depends entirely on its own resources to meet all its needs but, increasingly, on the ability of other communities to supply some, or even most, of those needs. In other words, environmental adaptation to the immediate constraints of nature gives way to the cultural adaptation of communities to each other.

The classical economist, David Ricardo, advanced his theory of ‘comparative advantage’ in support of this development. It benefits a nation, he argued, to specialise in what it is best at producing while relying on other nations to supply it with goods it is not particularly adept at producing. This reduces the opportunity costs of producing goods across all nations, leaving everyone better off from the resultant increase in global trade.

Ricardo’s theory is based on a number of unrealistic assumptions but, here, we are concerned only with the particular counter argument bound up with the aforementioned concept of the ‘ecological transition’ – namely, that by reducing the local community’s reliance on its own natural resources, this tends to ‘desensitise’ it to the need to prudently operate within the limits of these resources. This does not mean those limits are necessarily fixed and unchangeable – human intervention can, for instance, sometimes significantly enhance the fertility and hence, ‘carrying capacity’, of the soil. Nor does it mean a community will inevitably set about despoiling its own environment if it can rely on others to supply what it needs – there are other factors involved besides this – but this does nevertheless create the conditions which can greatly amplify the environmental impact of those other factors.

The collapse of the Roman Empire is a classic example. In part, the expansion of that empire was driven by the need to secure an adequate food supply to meet the needs of Rome itself – at its height, a city of one million people – and its vast armies. Grain tributes were exacted from conquered territories all around the Mediterranean basin which profoundly altered the region’s ecology. Widespread deforestation occurred to permit intensive cereal farming leading to soil exhaustion and desertification. The resultant decline in output, in turn, prompted the empire to further expand its territory, eventually reaching the point at which its supply lines were so over-stretched that it became increasingly vulnerable to external threats.

In modern capitalism, it is not so much tribute as the quest for profit that drives economic activity. But with capitalism, we see also the same preoccupation with short term interests over long term sustainability. According to Friedrich Engels:

 ‘As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account . . . What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees – what cared they that heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, most tangible result, and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite opposite in character’ (1876, The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man).

These words have a particularly modern ring to them in the light of the multiple and escalating environmental crises facing humanity today. The underlying mechanism driving this development is plain to see. Business enterprises strive to ‘externalise’ their production costs as far as possible in order to maximise their commercial gains under a system of market competition – or face commercial ruin. However, just because those costs are made to disappear from the accountant’s ledger book, this does not mean they cease to exist. The burden of those costs is born not just by the wider community but the very physical environment itself upon which we ultimately depend.

In response, capitalism has tended to promote technological ‘solutions’ to these very problems it has itself engendered. But can such an approach ever truly succeed in ensuring we keep our heads above the water or will the rising tide of ‘externalities’ eventually engulf us all?

A Spanish ‘El Dorado’

This is a question we might well ask in turning to consider that particularly remarkable example of capitalist enterprise and innovation: the greenhouses of Almeria.

In the 1950s, under Franco, a model irrigation project was launched in that sparsely populated zone, now under plastic, with the aim of resettling landless peasants there. It was the peasants themselves who initially developed the basic technology of greenhouse production – including the use of polythene rather than glass, attached to a simple framework of wood or metal – capitalising on the region’s natural advantages such as its abundant sunshine and the virtual absence of frost, to give them a competitive edge in the market for early vegetables. At first, it was the local, then the wider national market they supplied but, with Spain joining the EU in 1986, production became truly transnational. Europe, as a whole, now relies for most of the year on Spain to provide almost a third of its demand for fresh fruit and salad crops – a figure rising to half during the cold winter months – much of this coming from Almeria’s greenhouses which generate an annual revenue of about €2 billion.

As the industry expanded so did the role of intermediaries in financing, marketing and basic R&D. Indeed, the institutional architecture that has been built up around the greenhouse industry itself is, today, extraordinarily complex and closely coordinated. Downward and Taylor quote Almeria’s Director of Agriculture as saying: ‘This is the most social level of agriculture in the world, not even the best communist system would have achieved what has been achieved in Almeria… and by people who maybe 50 years ago would have only had a herd of goats’ (Journal of Environmental Management, January 2007).

Remarkably, given the highly ‘socialised’ nature of the industry, the ownership of the greenhouses themselves remains firmly family-based with about 13,500 small scale producers operating in the greenhouse belt typically on plots of somewhat over 2 hectares. This helps to explain the popularity of the greenhouses among the locals who widely regard this development as an ‘economic miracle’ and have prospered as a result. However, it is a miracle bought at a considerable cost which calls into question the sustainability of this model of development – not least, as we shall see, in an era of growing concern about climate change.

(Part 2 follows next month)

Robin Cox

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

A Co-op in Spain (2014)

Book Review from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dan Hancox: ‘The Village Against the World’. Verso £9.99.

Marinaleda is a village of 2,700 people in the Andalusia region of southern Spain, about sixty miles east of Seville. Under the Franco dictatorship it was poor and underdeveloped, like most places in the area, where massive landed estates owned by aristocrats prevailed. When Franco died in 1975, Spain began a transition to capitalist democracy. The people of Marinaleda organised in unions and demanded land; eventually, in 1991, the government gave them 1200 hectares of land belonging to a duke.

So began the development of what Hancox terms ‘an anti-capitalist answer … [a] community founded on mutual aid and collectivism, not the profit motive’. The village co-operative owns El Humoso, a farm several miles away. This is planted with labour-intensive crops such as cotton and sugar beet, thus providing more employment than the previous practice of growing crops such as corn that need little labour power. All co-op members earn the same wage, and any surplus is re-invested to create more jobs. There are no local police, the village is run by assemblies on the basis of direct democracy, and many villagers live in self-built homes for which they pay just fifteen euros a month. Each month the villagers work together voluntarily doing improvement work, such as gardening in the park.

Yet all is not quite what it seems. The regional government provides building materials and architectural assistance for the self-built homes, and also some kind of farming subsidy (unfortunately Hancox does not say much about this). The unemployment rate is much lower than the national average, but is still five to six percent. The present economic crisis in Spain has not left the village untouched, with regionally-based funding drying up, and there is insufficient money to pay the workers at El Humoso. The charismatic mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, is taking a back seat and is powerless to solve the current problems.

Further, some rather unpleasant aspects of local life are mentioned. Two of the village’s elected councillors are from the PSOE (roughly the Spanish equivalent of the Labour Party). One of them tells Hancox that those who do not agree with the mayor (those who are not Gordillistas) do not bother to attend the assemblies, and many of those who attend do so as a way of getting work. Some opponents have felt uncomfortable staying in Marinaleda and so have moved to live elsewhere. Hancox comments that in this and other cases it is impossible to distinguish facts and gossip, leaving the reader with no idea of where the truth lies.

Marinaleda carries on some Andalusian traditions of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, and shows that people can live without large landowners and capitalists. But it is not a socialist village, just one way of organising production to survive under capitalism. 

Paul Bennett

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

Spain Thirty Years Ago (1967)

From the January 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spain once had a great empire but was left behind when the industrialisation of Europe began. The question thus arises: Why was Spain retarded? The answer given by Kautsky and others—which seems plausible enough—was that it was precisely because Spain once had a great empire. For with the constant flow of gold and silver into Spain from Mexico and Peru there was little incentive to develop industry and commerce. When, with the independence of the Latin American colonies in the first part of the 19th century, this source of wealth dried up Spain was left without much standing in a rapidly industrialising world. This retarded position showed itself in dynastic struggles and in the struggle of the bourgeoisie, in the form of Republicanism, to sweep away the relics of the past. But the Spanish bourgeoisie never had the zest or unity to make the necessary thorough structural changes.

At the turn of this century there was a wave of economic development in Spain and Spain was not involved in the first World War—which helped. However Spain was still left with the relics of an empire in North Africa. National servicemen were sent to Spanish Morocco to quell the Arab uprisings. There was not much of economic value in Spanish Morocco but the military establishment wished to have an empire to strut about in. Largely as a result of the unrest about conscription for this war the Monarchy fell in 1931. But because a Republic was set up is no reason to think that there was a widespread belief in political democracy. Not only were there the open opponents of democracy in Spain but there was also a strong anarchist movement which we can say was of disastrous significance for democracy. For the anarchists helped to spread among the working class the idea that democracy was a mere “facade” and they encouraged abstention from politics.

The Republic, set up to pave the way for modern capitalism, made mistakes from its own point of view. First and foremost it antagonised Catholic opinion. They should have known that you don’t get rid of religion by banning or ignoring it. By alienating almost the entire Church the Republic unnecessarily weakened itself for, as Gerald Brenan points out in his The Spanish Labyrinth, there was, for specific reasons in Spanish history, considerable scope for Catholics to have looked favourably upon the land-reform and agricultural development that were essential to capitalist development in the peninsular. The Republic also weakened itself by neglecting education, a necessary factor for further economic and social development. It seemed more concerned to close Catholic schools than to open new lay ones.

The deep divisions on the Republican side when war came are well known through the writings of people like George Orwell. But the other side was an odd alliance too. The Carlists, backward-looking believers in theocracy associated with a branch of the Bourbons, were unlikely associates of the Army, the orthodox Monarchists or the Falangists (or Fascists). This is one of the splits in the régime coming to the surface today.

The old forces, backed by Germany and Italy, won. They defeated in war those who wished to clear the way for capitalism. Ironically, however, this task fell to them. Since the war, economic development primed by American aid helped immensely by tourism, has gone on apace. This has led to considerable growth in the working class (including the so-called middle class) at the expense of the peasantry. The working class is making its presence felt through strikes though at one time illegal. As a result some types of strike have now been made legal by the proposed new Constitution.

The Spanish industrial élite has also been pressing for reforms. It has felt the need for a greater degree of discussion of policy and procedures. These capitalists, working to a large extent through the organisation known as Opus Dei, have been a “liberalising” element in the Franco regime.

The changes that have taken place are very limited but are still real. Granted under pressure mainly from the working class, they are hopeful as they provide increasing scope for dissent and discussion.

Eddie Grant