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    Fifty Orwell Essays

    Page 7
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    working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will

      leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on

      ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the

      notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely

      contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who

      ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in

      a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just

      fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a

      man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler's Way

      of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on

      his public school and university education and found it a 'sickly,

      debilitating debauch'. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly

      and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.

      In a working-class home--I am not thinking at the moment of the

      unemployed, but of comparatively prosperous homes--you breathe a warm,

      decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere.

      I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good

      wages--an 'if which gets bigger and bigger--has a better chance of

      being happy than an 'educated' man. His home life seems to fall more

      naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the

      peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a

      working-class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after

      tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the

      steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair

      at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on

      the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of

      mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat--it is a

      good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but

      sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.

      This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes,

      though not in so many as before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon

      one question--whether Father is in work. But notice that the picture I

      have called up, of a working-class family sitting round the coal fire after

      kippers and strong tea, belongs only to our own moment of time and could

      not belong either to the future or the past. Skip forward two hundred years

      into the Utopian future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of

      the things I have imagined will still be there. In that age when there is

      no manual labour and everyone is 'educated', it is hardly likely that

      Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands who likes to sit in

      shirt-sleeves and says 'Ah wur coomin' oop street'. And there won't be a

      coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture

      will be made of rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as

      evening papers there will certainly be no racing news in them, for

      gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and

      the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will

      have been suppressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won't be so many

      children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way. But move

      backwards into the Middle Ages and you are in a world almost equally

      foreign. A windowless hut, a wood fire which smokes in your face because

      there is no chimney, mouldy bread, 'Poor John', lice, scurvy, a yearly

      child-birth and a yearly child-death, and the priest terrifying you with

      tales of Hell.

      Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modern engineering, nor the

      radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are

      published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match,

      but the memory of working-class interiors--especially as I sometimes saw

      them in my childhood before the war, when England was still

      prosperous--that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad

      one to live in.

      SPILLING THE SPANISH BEANS (1937)

      The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any

      event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of

      all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the

      eyes of DAILY MAIL reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers

      that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the NEWS

      CHRONICLE and the DAILY WORKER, with their far subtler methods of

      distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real

      nature of the struggle.

      The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the

      Spanish Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is

      far more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists. It is now almost

      certain that the war will end with some kind of compromise, and there is

      even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao fail

      without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no

      doubt whatever about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own

      revolutionaries. For some time past a reign of terror--forcible

      suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the press,

      ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial--has been in

      progress. When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging;

      indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners

      were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that

      could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who

      are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there

      not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they

      are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them

      there are those dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes

      in his galoshes--the Communists.

      Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor

      devils in the front-line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of

      it as the real war. The real struggle is between revolution and

      counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying to hold on

      to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who

      are so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so

      few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is

      now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in

      alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful

      machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of

      revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists

      assailed as wicked 'Reds' by right-wing intellectuals who are in

      essential agreement with them. Mr Wyndham Lewis, for instance, ought to

      love the Communists, at least temporarily. In Spain the Communist-Liberal

      alliance has been almost completely victorious. Of all that the Spanish

      workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a

     
    few collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants

      last year; and presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later,

      when there is no longer any need to placate them. To see how the present

      situation arose, one has got to look back to the origins of the civil

      war.

      Franco's bid for power differed from those of Hitler and Mussolini in

      that it was a military insurrection, comparable to a foreign invasion,

      and therefore had not much mass backing, though Franco has since been

      trying to acquire one. Its chief supporters, apart from certain sections

      of Big Business, were the land-owning aristocracy and the huge, parasitic

      Church. Obviously a rising of this kind will array against it various

      forces which are not in agreement on any other point. The peasant and the

      worker hate feudalism and clericalism; but so does the 'liberal'

      bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more modern version of

      Fascism, at least so long as it isn't called Fascism. The 'liberal'

      bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests

      stop. He stands for the degree of progress implied in the phrase 'la

      carri�re ouverte aux talents'. For clearly he has no chance to develop in

      a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are too poor to buy

      goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes to pay for bishops'

      vestments, and where every lucrative job is given as a matter of course

      to the friend of the catamite of the duke's illegitimate son. Hence, in

      the face of such a blatant reactionary as Franco, you get for a while a

      situation in which the worker and the bourgeois, in reality deadly

      enemies, are fighting side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the

      Popular Front (or, in the Communist press, to give it a spuriously

      democratic appeal, People's Front). It is a combination with about as

      much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads

      or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.

      In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front

      is bound to make itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois

      are both fighting against Fascism, they are not fighting for the same

      things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois democracy, i.e.

      capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for

      Socialism. And in the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers

      understood the issue very well. In the areas where Fascism was defeated

      they did not content themselves with driving the rebellious troops out of

      the towns; they also took the opportunity of seizing land and factories

      and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers' government by means of

      local committees, workers' militias, police forces, and so forth. They

      made the mistake, however (possibly because most of the active

      revolutionaries were Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments), of

      leaving the Republican Government in nominal control. And, in spite of

      various changes in personnel, every subsequent Government had been of

      approximately the same bourgeois-reformist character. At the beginning

      this seemed not to matter, because the Government, especially in

      Catalonia, was almost powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or

      even (this was still happening when I reached Spain in December) to

      disguise themselves as workers. Later, as power slipped from the hands of

      the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-wing

      Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie

      came out of hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor

      reappeared, not much modified. Henceforward every move, except a few

      dictated by military emergency, was directed towards undoing the work of

      the first few months of revolution. Out of the many illustrations I could

      choose, I will cite only one, the breaking-up of the old workers'

      militias, which were organized on a genuinely democratic system, with

      officers and men receiving the same pay and mingling on terms of complete

      equality, and the substitution of the Popular Army (once again, in

      Communist jargon, 'People's Army'), modelled as far as possible on an

      ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense

      differences of pay, etc. etc. Needless to say, this is given out as a

      military necessity, and almost certainly it does make for military

      efficiency, at least for a short period. But the undoubted purpose of the

      change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In every department the

      same policy has been followed, with the result that only a year after the

      outbreak of war and revolution you get what is in effect an ordinary

      bourgeois State, with, in addition, a reign of terror to preserve the

      status quo.

      This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle could have

      taken place without foreign interference. But the military weakness of

      the Government made this impossible. In the face of France's foreign

      mercenaries they were obliged to turn to Russia for help, and though the

      quantity of arms sup--plied by Russia has been greatly exaggerated (in my

      first three months in Spain I saw only one Russian weapon, a solitary

      machine-gun), the mere fact of their arrival brought the Communists into

      power. To begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good

      military qualities of the international Brigades (not necessarily

      Communist but under Communist control), immensely raised the Communist

      prestige. But, more important, since Russia and Mexico were the only

      countries openly supplying arms, the Russians were able not only to get

      money for their weapons, but to extort terms as well. Put in their

      crudest form, the terms were: 'Crush the revolution or you get no more

      arms.' The reason usually given for the Russian attitude is that if

      Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution, the Franco-Soviet pact

      (and the hoped-for alliance with Great Britain) would be imperilled; it

      may be, also, that the spectacle of a genuine revolution in Spain would

      rouse unwanted echoes in Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any

      direct pressure has been exerted by the Russian Government. But this,

      even if true, is hardly relevant, for the Communist Parties of all

      countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain

      that the Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom

      they control, plus the Communist press of the whole world, have used all

      their immense and ever-increasing influence upon the side of

      counter-revolution.

      In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in

      Spain, on the Government side, has been between revolution and

      counter-revolution; that the Government, though anxious enough to avoid

      being beaten by Franco, has been even more anxious to undo the

      revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was accompanied.

      Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully

      dishonest. He would tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish

      Government crushing the revolution, because the revolution never

      happened; and
    that our job at present is to defeat Fascism and defend

      democracy. And in this connexion it is most important to see just how the

      Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works. It is a mistake to think

      that this has no relevance in England, where the Communist Party is small

      and comparatively weak. We shall see its relevance quickly enough if

      England enters into an alliance with the U.S.S.R.; or perhaps even

      earlier, for the influence of the Communist Party is bound to

      increase--visibly is increasing--as more and more of the capitalist

      class realize that latter-day Communism is playing their game.

      Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people

      with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves

      pretending--not in so many words, but by implication--that Fascism has

      nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless

      wickedness, an aberration, 'mass sadism', the sort of thing that would

      happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs.

      Present Fascism in this form, and you can mobilize public opinion

      against it, at any rate for a while, without provoking any revolutionary

      movement. You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois 'democracy, meaning

      capitalism. But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome

      person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois 'democracy' are

      Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You do it at the beginning by calling him an

      impracticable visionary. You tell him that he is confusing the issue,

      that he is splitting the anti-Fascist forces, that this is not the

      moment for revolutionary phrase-mongering, that for the moment we have

      got to fight against Fascism without inquiring too closely what we are

      fighting for. Later, if he still refuses to shut up, you change your

      tune and call him a traitor. More exactly, you call him a Trotskyist.

      And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word--in Spain at this moment

      you can be thrown into jail and kept there indefinitely, without trial,

      on the mere rumour that you are a Trotskyist--is only beginning to be

      bandied to and fro in England. We shall be hearing more of it later. The

      word 'Trotskyist' (or 'Trotsky-Fascist') is generally used to mean a

      disguised Fascist who poses as an ultra-revolutionary in order to split

      the left-wing forces. But it derives its peculiar power from the fact

      that it means three separate things. It can mean one who, like Trotsky,

      wished for world revolution; or a member of the actual organization of

      which Trotsky is head (the only legitimate use of the word); or the

      disguised Fascist already mentioned. The three meanings can be telescoped

      one into the other at will. Meaning No. 1 may or may not carry with it

      meaning No. 2, and meaning No. 2 almost invariably carries with it

      meaning No. 3. Thus: 'XY has been heard to speak favourably of world

      revolution; therefore he is a Trotskyist; therefore he is a Fascist.' In

      Spain, to some extent even in England, ANYONE professing revolutionary

      Socialism (i.e. professing the things the Communist Party professed until

      a few years ago) is under suspicion of being a Trotskyist in the pay of

      Franco or Hitler.

      The accusation is a very subtle one, because in any given case, unless

      one happened to know the contrary, it might be true. A Fascist spy

      probably WOULD disguise himself as a revolutionary. In Spain, everyone

      whose opinions are to the Left of those of the Communist Party is sooner

      or later discovered to be a Trotskyist or, at least, a traitor. At the

      beginning of the war the POUM, an opposition Communist party roughly

      corresponding to the English ILP., was an accepted party and supplied a

      minister to the Catalan Government, later it was expelled from the

      Government; then it was denounced as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed,

      every member that the police could lay their hands on being flung into

      jail.

      Until a few months ago the Anarcho-Syndicalists were described as

     


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