Your One-Stop Shop for All Your 70th Anniversary Leftist Sectarian Polemic Blogging Needs

In anticipation of the 70th anniversary of the bloody Stalinist suppression of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista in the Barcelona May Days, we are--thanks to Jacob Levy--proud to bring you the latest in sectarian Marxist polemics blogging.

First, we have Eric Hobsbawm declaring that George Orwell was a Traitor to Humanity by telling the truth about what he saw in Spain:

Eric Hobsbawm: Writers supported [the Republican cause in] Spain... Hemingway, Malraux, Bernanos and virtually all the notable contemporary young British poets - Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice - did. Spain was the experience that was central to their lives between 1936 and 1939.... [P]olemics about the civil war [within the Left]... have never ceased since 1939. This was not so while the war was still continuing, although such incidents as the banning of the dissident Marxist Poum party and the murder of its leader Andrés Nin caused some international protest. Plainly a number of foreign volunteers... were shocked by... the behaviour of the Russians and much else....

And yet, during the war, the doubters remained silent... They did not want to give aid to the enemies of the great cause.... The exception proves the rule: George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.... Orwell himself admitted after his return from Spain that "a number of people have said to me with varying degrees of frankness that one must not tell the truth about what is happening in Spain and the part played by the Communist Party because to do so would prejudice public opinion against the Spanish government and so aid Franco."... Only in the cold-war era did Orwell cease to be an awkward, marginal figure....

[P]olemics... are legitimate... only if we separate out debate on real issues from the *parti pris* of political sectarianism, cold-war propaganda and pure ignorance.... A serious war conducted by a government requires structure, discipline and a degree of centralisation. What characterises social revolutions like that of [Spain in] 1936 is local initiative, spontaneity, independence of, or even resistance to, higher authority.... In short, what was and remains at issue in these debates is what divided Marx and Bakunin. Polemics about the dissident Marxist Poum are irrelevant.... The conflict between libertarian enthusiasm and disciplined organisation... remains real.... Wars, however flexible the chains of command, cannot be fought, or war economies run, in a libertarian fashion. The Spanish civil war could not have been waged, let alone won, along Orwellian lines....

Moral revulsion against Stalinism and the behaviour of its agents in Spain is justified.... [Y]et... not central to the problem of the civil war. Marx would have had to confront Bakunin even if all on the republican side had been angels.... [A]mong those who fought for the republic as soldiers, most found Marx more relevant than Bakunin...

Second, we have a reply by Stephen Schwartz, whose affection for Eric Hobsbawm is far smaller than mine:

Eric Hobsbawm's Stalinist Homage to Catalonia | Jewcy.com: Eric Hobsbawm... political and pseudo-intellectual legacy of Stalinism... banal but repellent rehash... long-discredited clichés... fundamental lie of Stalinist propaganda, which holds that the Republicans would have won the war if they had submitted to dictation from Moscow....

Hobsbawm... contemptible exercise in pseudo-history... CNT militants in the uprising at Casas Viejas, a rural hamlet in Andalusia, in 1933.... Jerome Mintz... exposed Hobsbawm as a mendacious tourist.... “[H]is account is based primarily on a preconceived evolutionary model of political development rather than on data gathered in field research.” Mintz correctly states, “The model scales labor movements in accord with their progress toward mass parties and central authority... [Hobsbawm] explains how anarchosyndicalists were presumed to act rather than what actually took place... his evolutionary model misled him on virtually every point.”... In Spain today Mintz’s work, based on extensive and serious research and interviews, enjoys high esteem....

Hobsbawm... the Guardian in 2007... attack[s] [George] Orwell, the [Catalonian Anarchist Movement] POUM, and the general legacy of the Spanish revolution....

[T]hree distinct trends appeared on the Republican side [of the Spanish Cvil War]:

1. the Catalan Left, Basque nationalists, and other liberal bourgeois trends who wanted to carry out a Jacobin-style modernization;
2. the proletarian upsurge of the CNT, Socialists, and POUM;
3. the Stalinist conspiracy to create a one-party dictatorship.

Moscow tried to unite 1) with 3) to overcome 2), but 1) and 2) had more in common with each other, and the attempt failed. Stalin, however, succeeded in effectively sabotaging the Republican defense; his discreet 1938 message to Hitler indicating Soviet willingness to withdraw support for the Republic was a crucial step....

The Stalinist view of [Georg] Orwell put forward by... [Hobsbawm] dismisses Homage to Catalonia because it was turned down by a Soviet-lining publisher.... For Hobsbawm, Orwell is not only illegitimate because his book did not sell well, but because he was “an awkward, marginal figure.”... As to the POUM... Hobsbawm.. refers with something approaching disdain to “the murder of its leader Andrés Nin [having] caused some international protest.... Polemics about the dissident Marxist Poum are irrelevant here and, given that party’s small size and marginal role in the civil war, barely significant.”...

Andreu Nin (1892-1937) was not simply... leader of an anti-Stalinist party. He was also a respected Catalan-language journalist and the translator into Catalan of several major Russian works, including Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina. His versions of these classics are still widely known in Catalonia, and it is mainly because of them that his murder by the Stalinists has never been forgotten.... Nin's assassination was the subject of a prime-time documentary, Operació Nikolai, shown on the Catalan channel TV3 in 1992.... To kill Nin was not the same as it would have been to murder, say, the American Trotskyist Max Shachtman, but would have been more like liquidating John Dos Passos....

The role of the POUM in Catalan history was never marginal... it filled the Marxist political space in the region’s labor movement... its members included most of the original founders of the Spanish Communist party, and it embraced “minority” nationalism, i.e. Catalanism, at a time when such a position was novel in Spain and... almost unknown elsewhere in the Western European left....

Hobsbawm informs us “Wars, however flexible the chains of command, cannot be fought, or war economies run, in a libertarian fashion. The Spanish civil war could not have been waged, let alone won, along Orwellian lines.” Once again, the Stalin-nostalgia betrays his ignorance of Spanish reality.... [T]he militia units generally fought better than the militarized units.... [T]he Stalinist-controlled International Brigades and the militarized Republican soldiery with whom they were coordinated were known for incompetence in battle, desertion, and, in the case of many of the foreigners, their reassignment to special groups ordered by the Russians to kill leftist dissidents, since the Spanish would not carry out such duties....

The Spanish knew so many things that Hobsbawm will never know – and above all, they know that while Orwell’s methods might not have guaranteed the victory of the Spanish Republic, those of Stalin and his admirers assured its defeat.

Comments

[andres]

I'm not going to touch this with a ten-foot pole, other than to mention that Schwartz, though his position is far more logical and truthful, doesn't succeed in getting my sympathy either, and his assessment of the relative effectiveness of the Republican units in the civil war is rather questionable, in particular because the non-communist militias, in spite of their motivation, were never as well armed as their communist counterparts.

This whole exercise in within-Marxist blame shifting, in my view, ignores the real culprits in the whole sad story of the Spanish Republic: the US and Britain, which never came to the aid of the Spanish Republic, and France, which provided too little help and too late at that. The non-intervention of the Western countries guaranteed (a) that the Spanish Republic would have to turn to Stalin for military assistance, and (b) that a regime friendly to Hitler and Mussolini would take power in Spain. That Franco was too wise to side with the Axis in WWII was a piece of good fortune that the US and Britain did not deserve.

It is too easy, too simplistic, and too obvious to blame Stalin and the Comintern for the victory of Franco in Spain. Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Churchill, and Blum deserve the lion's share of the blame, for they could have rescued Spain from both Stalinism and fascism and yet chose not to do so because none of them gave a damn about Spain in their foreign policy calculations.

And it would be nice if Brad would take a break from his Hobsbawm hate-fest to mention the important points above...

[anne]

http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/0.html

1938

Homage to Catalonia
By George Orwell

In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers' table.

He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend--the kind efface you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone--any man, I mean--to whom I have taken such an immediate liking. While they were talking round the table some remark brought it out that I was a foreigner....

[radek]

his assessment of the relative effectiveness of the Republican units in the civil war is rather questionable, in particular because the non-communist militias, in spite of their motivation, were never as well armed as their communist counterparts.

Yes, but there was a reason for that, was there not?
Actually one of the biggest problems facing the Republicans was a lack of competent leaders, whichever faction you're talking about. They had plenty of charismatic ones, but few competent ones. This didn't change with the arrival of Soviet advisors who favored mass charges, lives be damned (like the Battle of the Ebro). This worked later in WW2 in the populous Soviet Union but was completly ineffective in Spain. Local militia commanders also had some romantic notions of bravery which led them to do stupid things. As a result the Republicans, military and militia, were both much better at defense (No Passeran and all that) than at offense. Given the superiority in weapons and leadership (supplied by Germany and Italy) Franco's victory was then a matter of time, with all the tragic consequences.

It is too easy, too simplistic, and too obvious to blame Stalin and the Comintern for the victory of Franco in Spain. Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Churchill, and Blum deserve the lion's share of the blame, for they could have rescued Spain from both Stalinism and fascism and yet chose not to do so because none of them gave a damn about Spain in their foreign policy calculations.

The reason it is easy and simple to blame Stalin is because he deserves a good bit of a blame. I do agree that the position of UK, US and France (which had a socialist government at the time) was pretty despicable - part of the same appeasment that raised its ugly head later in a different context. Particularly France turning away refugees or even handling them over to Franco. But seriously, who deserves more blame? One who let's something bad happen by not intervening to prevent it, or the one who actively sabotages the efforts to prevent the bad from happening based on his own political agenda? There's room for more than one bad guy here.

Brad:
the [Catalonian Anarchist Movement] POUM,

I think here you mean "CNT, POUM". POUM became closely allied with the Anarchists of the CNT in the face of Stalinist prosecution but they were never Anarchists. Just anti-Stalin commies. There was also some bad blood at different points - early on due to ideological differences and later because POUM felt, somewhat, that the CNT was sacrificing it to the Stalinists in order to save its own skin.

[TedL]

It's interesting to read the comments, and helpful. Reading only Hobsbawm and Schwartz, one *is* mired in an all-too-familiar game of intra-Marxist blame-shifting. If Hobsbawm's claims are rightly viewed with skepticism, Mr. Schwartz's blunt tone, redolent of the very worst intra-Left infighting, practically requires it. Someone coming fresh to the conflict, without much background, feels pretty clearly that he's without a trustable guide.

[JR]

Brad and Schwartz seem to be incapable of distinguishing a historian's exposition of the past with the historian's own view of the past. Hobsbawm comes nowhere near to saying that Orwell was a Traitor to Humanity.

[He does too. He says that Victor Gollancz was right to reject _Homage to Catalonia_ because publishing it would have given aid and comfort to the Nazis.]

[andres]

radek: Agreed; we just share a difference of focus. Stalin was going to undermine the Spanish Republic--that was easy to foresee because it lay in the very essence of his world outlook to be in contempt of democracy's attempts to both reform capitalism and fight fascism. Because Stalin on one side and Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini on the other were _givens_ it makes the failure of Britain, France, and the US to assist the Spanish Republic all the more inexcusable.

JR: good points. Brad seems unable to understand how or why any respectable historian or academic would still be sympathetic to communism as a failed attempt to transform the world system. As I mentioned earlier, he needs to read/reread the writings of people like Djilas, Roy Medvedev, and yes, Khruschev, in order to understand that though there was a strong tendency, there was nothing inevitable about communism being taken over by the Stalins, Maos, and Kim Il Sungs of the world.

Btw, though Brad DeLong comes across as an amiable Falstaff in most of his writings, he turns into a combination of Hyde/Caliban/Iago whenever either (a) Eric Hobsbawm, or (b) Noam Chomsky, or less virulently (c) Duncan Foley (from the left side of the political spectrum) becomes the subject of debate. It is a strange and fascinating transformation to behold.

[andres]

Here, btw, is my favorite passage from Orwell's _Homage to Catalonia_, chapter 14, found at:

http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/index.html

"I record this, trivial though it may sound, because it is somehow typical of Spain--of the flashes of magnanimity that you get from Spaniards in the worst of circumstances. I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards. I only twice remember even being seriously angry with a Spaniard, and on each occasion, when I look back, I believe I was in the wrong myself. They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope that in Spain even Fascism may take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs."

Even right-wing Spaniards should be proud of such praise.

[David Graves]

Wow. Falstaff vs. Hyde/Caliban/Iago? Spending time with the Orwell of Homage to Catalonia is to have an invaluable guide to a time that must seem very very distant to many: the turmoil of the economic crisis of the 1930's, the rise of fascism and the state of the left in the period after the Russian revolution but before the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact. I read it thirty years ago...probably time to pick it up again. And to think of the Spain's place in the world in 2007.

[DRR]

As I mentioned earlier, he needs to read/reread the writings of people like Djilas, Roy Medvedev, and yes, Khruschev, in order to understand that though there was a strong tendency, there was nothing inevitable about communism being taken over by the Stalins, Maos, and Kim Il Sungs of the world.

Wow. The old "Communism was great, it just kept getting led off course by tyrants and madmen, funny coincidence" excuse. Interesting as I wasn't aware that such advanced states of denial still existed.

[I agree. When Fidel Castro is your poster child for the best you cando, you are in real trouble.]

[andres]

I do _not_ claim it was a coincidence that communism ended up controlled by people like Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il Sung. Merely that it was not inevitable, in contrast to what many others, like DRR claim.

And contrary to your unstated implication, Brad, Fidel Castro is not my posterboy, simply a slightly less pernicious variant of the above three despots.

[Stephen Schwartz]

The question of whether the POUM was anarchist or Trotskyist or just anti-Stalinist has become something of a bugaboo in recent years, caused first by Trotskyists who wanted to disavow the POUM, and second by POUMists and those imagining sympathy for them, who wanted to disavow Trotskyism.

After many years' reflection and research on this topic, I no longer accept the whole argument over typology, for the following reasons:

a) Joaquim Maurin, Andreu Nin, David Rey, and most of the other leaders of the POUM had been militants of the anarchosyndicalist CNT before the foundation of the Spanish CP, and although their emergence as a Catalan Marxist trend was viewed by the CNT with hostility until the civil war, they never truly renounced their past.

b) The group created by Nin, the Izquierda Comunista, was the official Trotskyist group in Spain until 1935, when they joined Maurin's Bloc Obrer i Camperol in founding the POUM. Trotsky polemized against them but they never actually disavowed him, either, and during the civil war, with Maurin having found himself behind enemy lines and then being captured by the Franco forces, and Nin and his group leading the party, the POUM displayed Trotsky's portrait at meetings and published some texts of his.

So the term anarcho-Trotskyist is not, from the historiographic viewpoint, incorrect.

Nevertheless, the POUM was distinguished from other leftist tendencies in Europe at the time above all by its Catalanism and its interest in the national-emancipation movements of the stateless nations, including the Catalans, Yugoslav nationalities, and the socialist wing of Zionism. One of the points of my essay was to indicate that the Catalanist legacy of the POUM proved to be its most enduring feature. Another notable aspect of the POUM heritage known to Catalans but unknown outside Spain was its interest in cultural modernism, including surrealism, which the POUM viewed as revolutionary.

I somewhat resent the suggestion that the only point of my essay was an exercise in Marxist blame-shifting, because I have come to the conclusion, which is rather unorthodox in the world of SCW experts, that the Catalan petit-bourgeois left was in fact a revolutionary force in that it sought bourgeois modernization in a context where it was driven to Jacobin, or better, Dantonian radicalism.

The foreign Trotskyists and even Orwell somewhat confused these issues by insisting that the CP and the Catalan Esquerra were equally bent on crushing the CNT and POUM in Catalonia. This is not sustainable on the basis of primary sources. First, the CP attempted to create such a bloc and the Esquerra at times succumbed to it, because of the Russian arms blackmail, but the Esquerra was as resentful of Stalinist pressure as were the CNT and POUM. Indeed, at some moments elements of the CNT were friendlier to the Russians than either the Esquerra or the left Socialists outside Catalonia. Second, the Esquerra and its leader, Lluis Companys, who came in for vast abuse in the Trotskyist literature, acted to protect the POUM against the Stalinists. The Trotskyists ignore this because to them fighting the bourgeoisie was the main goal. In this sense, the critique of their position that emphasizes victory in the war over defeating the bourgeoisie is correct -- but the war could not be won by a Stalinist puppet-state. The Stalinists who murdered Nin came from Madrid to kidnap him, and tortured and executed him in Alcala de Henares. They were not Catalans. But Companys and the Esquerra intervened to try to stop the trial of the POUM leaders.

In a related matter, although the CNT was hostile to the POUM at various points, after the crises of December 1936 in the Generalitat and the fighting in May 1937 the CNT DID NOT turn its back on the POUM; POUM members were admitted to the CNT unions (an impossibility from 1931 to early 1936) and to the CNT militias.

On the question of Western European blame for the fall of the Republic, I think an interesting false logic is often displayed, and that the situation of Spain vis-a-vis the dominant European democratic powers has parallels with the American civil war and the later Bosnian conflict. In all three wars, the UK and France made it clear that to them peace and bogus "stability" were more significant than freedom. Therefore, the UK wanted to stop the American civil war along a truce-line, leaving both Union and Confederate armies in place and slavery untouched. This, of course, is what they did in Bosnia, and I have often argued that an order imposed in Spain by the UK, France, and the League of Nations would have probably closely resembled that in Bosnia today -- the Francoists holding one zone, the Republic others, with the Basque country and Catalonia in a semi-independent status. Bosnia, with its endemic unemployment, stagnation, and forced acquiescence to Serbian corruption as the price of peace, shows us what Spain would likely have looked like had the democratic powers and the League intervened more forcefully.

Franco (and Milosevic) could have been halted by immediate action from the Western powers at the commencement of the war, but once the conflict began in earnest, it is very doubtful they would have helped the Republic even had they wanted to. Clinton in Bosnia broke this pattern.

The ethical democratic position, then, would have been to end the arms embargo on the Republic (a harbinger of the vile boycott imposed on the Bosnian Muslims) and allow the Republic to purchase weapons from the West to defend itself. This would have greatly diminished the Russian factor. Also, of course, Mexico gave substantial military aid to the Republic, but not enough to tip the scales toward Republican victory.

Either way, my main point remains: Stalin wanted, above all, to eliminate the possibility of a Western, non-Stalinist, revolutionary alternative. This alternative was exemplified but not monopolized by the anarchists, who defined their goal as "libertarian communism," and had the Republic won, with its immense anarchist movement, the history of the global left would certainly have been affected. Had the bloc of the CNT/Esquerra/POUM/left Socialists outside Catalonia won the war, without a League of Nations truce forced on them, I do not think they would have created a totalitarian state. Rather, I believe they would have ended up with something much like today's Slovenia -- a mixture of vigorous private enterprise, voluntary collectives, and a minimal number of state enterprises or socialized enterprises. No group except the Stalinists in Spain advocated statification of the economy, and even the Stalinists did not call for forced collectivization of land.

And finally, regarding the myth of the efficient traditional military units vs. the allegedly inefficient militias -- a point that makes no sense whatever in the Spanish context, considering the heritage of the war against Napoleon and the Carlist wars -- there is simply no doubt, for one who reads the Spanish sources, that the militias fought better than the regular "Popular Army" and especially the so-called International Brigades. The latter should go down in history, if we base ourselves on Soviet and other original sources, except for the Franco-Belgian, Italian, and some Slav volunteers, as a mob of police assassins, deserters, and general riffraff leavened with untrained CP "suicide pilots". The wholesale losses in the American battalions were largely caused by the lack of experience and training, and the similar massacres in the Hungarian and South Slav battalions were a result of Soviet-ordered executions after collapse, flight, and mass desertion from the front. The Franco-Belgians were withdrawn because they would not accept Stalinist orders. The Italians fought well but were never under complete Stalinist control. The IB never won or even influenced the outcome of a single battle, and their role in the defense of Madrid, although emotionally stirring, has been vastly exaggerated. It is no accident, as we would say, that Catalonia, defended by the militias, held out the longest against the Francoists, or that the CNT units maintained their militia character, notwithstanding assignment of brigade numbers and uniforms, until the end of the war and their successful evacuation into France.

The claim of military incompetence on the Republican side is absurd and false, because the majority of the regular military officers, especially in the middle ranks, actually sided with the Republic. This was why the Franco forces became known for battlefield promotions to the post of "alferez provisional" or temporary lieutenant. Germany provided only a detachment from its air force, and no battlefield military advisers comparable to those from Russia; nor did the Italians who fought for Franco assume command over Nationalist troops. (Some Spanish Nationalists fought alongside or in Italian-dominated units, and one can buy lots of old Italian medals in Spanish pawnshops or junk shops.) Indeed, I think the Nationalists would have been much more resistant to advice from Germans and Italians than the Republicans were about the Russians. The Republic had the memory of Spanish resistance to Napoleon as a factor for morale in mobilizing the people, but the Nationalists had the history of the Reconquista to inspire them, even as they used Moroccan mercenaries as advance-terror units. The competent officers in the Republican army were sabotaged by the Stalinists.

It is also seldom noted that on the Franco side, the Carlists participated in the war in militias, which, regardless of their distasteful ideology, did not fight poorly. Military elan of the usual kind, however, clearly served the Francoists better than the Republic. But that involves Iberian psychology visible even in the works of the Roman historian Livy.

Franco himself acknowledged that the anarchists and other indigenous Spanish leftists were worthy enemies compared with the devious Stalinists. Franco proved much more vengeful against the Basque nationalists (who were right-wing and Catholic and sided with the Republic almost by accident, causing great ire on the part of the Francoist Catholics) and the Catalan "separatists" who wanted to dilute the cultural patrimony of Spain, than against the proletarian movements. Workers were needed to keep the economy going and were offered a kind of amnesty, but the Basque and Catalan bourgeoisie were relentlessly persecuted after the civil war. There is no truth, however, to claims that CNT militants adopted Francoist positions. When the Spanish CP called for infiltration of the Falangist union structure and later created the "comisiones obreras" as a legal leftist trade union movement within the Franco state, they were condemned by the rest of the Spanish left.

I do not see my argument as a Marxist argument, but a mere attempt to introduce a context unknown to foreigners. Today, my personal sympathies are far more with the Catalan Esquerra than with any of the proletarian movements, though the CNT deserves considerable honor for producing a useful body of trustworthy historical literature.

Stephen Schwartz

[andres]

Stephen: I owe a partial apology in that I read only fragment of the article that Brad posted here, not the original source, so I got the impression that the article was directed entirely at Hobsbawm. But your point is well made--given Spain's centralized and authoritarian heritage, it's quite possible to imagine the Basque and Catalan bourgeoise as revolutionaries. A strange situation for the 20th century, but there it is.

btw, intervention in Spain in the form of brokering a ceasefire and then occupation zones is not what I had in mind when I accused the Western European countries. Ending the arms embargo against the Republic was much more important, and might have made all the difference.

[radek]

Stephen, this is very very excellent (as is the article linked to by Brad).

[JR]

"He does too."
Well, no, Professor, he does not. He says that the British left in the late 1930's - including Gollancz - was unified in its belief that criticizing the Spanish Communists was a mistake because it undercut a unified anti-Nazi front. He does not say that he agrees with this position.

[But he does say he agrees with that position: "The major question at issue in the Spanish civil war was, and remains... what divided Marx and Bakunin. Polemics about the dissident Marxist Poum are irrelevant.... The conflict between libertarian enthusiasm and disciplined organisation, between social revolution and winning a war, remains real.... The Spanish civil war could not have been waged, let alone won, along Orwellian lines.... [A]mong those who fought for the republic as soldiers, most found Marx more relevant than Bakunin...]

And even if he had said that he agrees with Gollancz's decision not to publish Homage to Catalonia - something he does not say - that is a far cry from calling Orwell a Traitor to Humanity.

Read the article again with your own eyes, not with Schwartz's.

[Stephen Schwartz]

To Andres, thank you. My interpretation of the possible bad consequences of League of Nations or Anglo-French intervention in Spain is novel and based on my own observation of the Bosnian experience, which led me back to the example of the American civil war.

I agree with you -- the issue was the arms embargo. The same problem was present in Bosnia; although the U.S. and Iran together provided clandestine arms to the Bosnians, the UK and France forced the U.S. to refrain from direct action against the Serbs until 1995, and in the end Bosnia gained peace but remains divided. In general, I fear that the British and French consider peace of greater value than freedom. The Iberian peoples, like Americans, believe the opposite. Peace at the price of freedom is worthless; freedom at the price of peace is difficult but preferable. So it was when the Romans attacked Saguntum.

It was a mistake of the "left anarchists" associated with the Amigos de Durruti to follow the POUM and Trotskyist line that the Catalan bourgeoisie were bigger enemies than the Stalinists or the Francoists. The socialist left of that epoch had forgotten a great deal of Marx, but mainly that, as Marx wrote, the bourgeoisie is a revolutionary class; specifically, it "ceaselessly revolutionizes production." The Catalan Esquerra (ERC) of Companys was the only serious bourgeois-democratic party in Spain; the Izquierda Republicana in the rest of Spain was moribund. Compare Companys and his group with Azana or Giral.

The Trotskyists did not understand that while the centralist Spanish bourgeoisie was moribund and politically paralyzed or anti-revolutionary, not unlike that in Russia in 1917, the Catalan bourgeoisie was neither weak nor anti-revolutionary. One could paraphrase Marx on the anti-French Spanish uprising of the Napoleonic era: while the rest of the world saw Spain as a decrepit society, under the surface vast reserves of social energy and tumult were waiting to erupt.

The Basque nationalist party was not a left party at all, just as Basque nationalism today, following in the line of Sabino Arana, is finally not a left movement in the old sense. Basque workers voted for the PSOE in the 1930s and still do today; the bourgeoisie then supported the PNV, and the peasants backed the PNV in Euzkadi but the Carlists in Navarra.

Andreu Nin was extraordinarily far-sighted when it came to minority nationalism. He saw much more clearly than almost anybody else (except Trotsky and some of the East European Communists) that the model of the national state dating from the French Revolution was beginning to disintegrate. Nobody, but nobody else then could have imagined the growth of regional and nationalist movements in later times. Right now, Scotland is preparing for a referendum on independence, something inconceivable a generation ago.

The POUM was rather vague when it came to attacking the Esquerra, which was part of the Front d'Esquerres or Left Front, as the electoral Popular Front of 1936 was known in Catalonia.

As to JR, it is spurious argument of the lowest kind to claim that Hobsbawm's entire body of work on Spain would support any other argument than that stated in his article -- that the position of the POUM and anarchists, rather than of the Stalinists, threatened unity in the anti-Franco war.

To emphasize what I wrote in my article, the really repellent quality displayed by Hobsbawm when he discusses Orwell is his Stalinist snobbery. He criticizes HOMAGE TO CATALONIA because a rather cretinous leftist publisher turned it down and it did not sell out its first printing. As I noted, this would disqualify quite a few literary classics from consideration -- MOBY-DICK, which did not sell out its original press run, is but one example. The idea of an idolized academic Marxist expressing contempt for a working journalist and author on the basis of sales is really quite despicable. It becomes even more objectionable when one considers the fate of other authors whose works were declined or did not sell out their first press runs, such as the legion of dissenting writers under Stalinism. Presumably Hobsbawm would also express contempt for Pilnyak, Babel, Mandelshtam, and Akhmatova, if he deigned to take notice of them. Ordinary Russians and quite a few ex-Communists know better.

Stephen Schwartz

[bloix]

"But he does say he agrees with that position."

No, he doesn't. He says that a Republican army organized - so to speak - along anarchist lines could not have won the war. He doesn't say that Homage to Catalonia should not have been published. How do you get from one to the other? And where on earth did you dig up Traitor to Humanity?

[c.l. ball]

DeLong and Schwartz seriously miss Hobsbawn's point.

Hobsbawn is _not_ saying Orwell was a traitor to the cause. If he wanted to, he would not bother quoting others; he could say it outright. Hobsbawn says the 1930s Left, even those who agreed with Orwell about the republican side in Spain, did not want to undermine support and sympathy for anti-fascist forces by pointing out their incompetence and brutality. That's why Orwell's publisher refuses the book and other Leftists criticize it. Orwell put truth before propaganda; most Leftists did not.

Hobsbawn uses Orwell's dissidence to underscore the tension between genuine social revolution and victory in civil war. War-fighting requires discipline; social revolution requires emancipation. For Hobsbawn, this is why the SCW has such salience; it manifests that tension. As Hobsbawn notes: "What characterises social revolutions like that of 1936 is local initiative, spontaneity, independence of, or even resistance to, higher authority - this was especially so given the unique strength of anarchism in Spain....The conflict between libertarian enthusiasm and disciplined organisation, between social revolution and winning a war, remains real in the Spanish civil war... However, in a more general sense, the conflict between revolution as the aspiration to freedom and winning war is not purely Spanish. It has emerged fully after the victory of revolutions in wars of liberation: in Algeria, probably in Vietnam, certainly in Yugoslavia." So, where the Left achieved military victory through centralization of authority it crushed the emancipatory promise of emerging social revolutions.

The problem with Hobsbawn's review is that he gets Orwell's criticism of the republican side in _Homage_ wrong when Hobsbawn writes "The Spanish civil war could not have been waged, let alone won, along Orwellian lines." Orwell didn't advocate a de-centralized, spontaneous approach to fighting; he criticized the lack of coordination and training on his side.

[Stephen Schwartz]

The latest comment by C.I. Ball is a primitive attempt at dialectic. The 30s left was not limited to the Stalinists, but also included anarchists, social democrats, Trotskyists, and others. The incompetence and brutality that the 30s left, according to Ball, was so anxious to cover up was mainly visible in the USSR in the form of forced collectivization, artificial famine, and mass purges. While the period of revolutionary chaos at the beginning of the Spanish war saw undeniable atrocities committed by leftists, they were not hidden from the world or turned into "achievements" as was the case with Soviet atrocities. Orwell's book was overwhelmingly concerned with the Soviet purge campaign that included an attempt to personally arrest and kill him. He did not speak Spanish or Catalan and was not a military expert, and was not in a position to offer an articulate criticism of Spanish Republican tactics.

The bogus contradiction between social revolution and victory in war deserves to be put to rest. The Trotskyists were at least correct in looking back at the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war, which was won by advancing social revolutionary methods equally with military art. Trotsky himself criticized the ultraradical claim that politics alone would win wars, but he also pointed out the crucial role of politics in the Cromwellian civil war, the Napoleonic wars, and the American civil war.

These are, finally, not simple issues that can be settled in the style of blog comments, which is why I wrote a long article about Hobsbawm.

Stephen Schwartz