Homage to Catalonia: Appendix I Summary & Analysis

In this Appendix, separate from the rest of the narrative, Orwell dissects the dynamics of Spanish party politics. He argues that, beyond military considerations, the Spanish Civil War is at its heart a political war, characterized by inter-party infighting.

When he first arrived in Spain, Orwell was unaware of the complexity of Spanish politics. He had joined the war to fight against Fascism in the name of what he calls “common decency.” While he was fascinated by the revolutionary atmosphere in Barcelona, he did not try to understand its historical ramifications. Rather, the myriad parties and trade unions gave him the feeling that Spain was unnecessarily divided in its fight against Franco. He joined the POUM without realizing that there were serious differences between the different leftwing parties that formed the Republican coalition.

Later, Orwell realized that his perspective had largely been shaped by what he had read in English newspapers, which promulgated a simple, anti-Fascist attitude. The press ignored the fact that the underlying struggle was not necessarily a fight against the Fascists, but a fight for power within the Spanish left. Orwell argues that the series of events he lived through in Spain, from his boredom at the front to his escape from the country, were the direct result of his belonging to the POUM. Had he been part of a Communist unit, he would have had an entirely different experience of the Spanish Civil War.

Orwell argues that while many people saw the beginning of the Spanish Civil War as a brave attempt to stop the wave of Fascism sweeping through Europe, Fascism in Spain cannot in fact be compared to Fascism in other parts of Europe. First of all, while in other countries Fascist leaders were generally backed by the bourgeoisie, in Spain Franco alienated both the working class and members of the bourgeoisie. Secondly, the working class did not resist Franco in the name of democracy. Rather, their fight was part of a true revolutionary movement, aimed at establishing political and economic power for the working class. The energy liberated by revolutionary hopes, aimed at upturning the capitalist system, was the true driver of anti-Fascist rebellion. It was only through the power of trade unions and the arming of workers, Orwell argues, that Franco’s military force was initially resisted.

Once workers were armed, they refused to give up their weapons. Peasants seized big estates, industries were collectivized, and workers attempted to create autonomous militias separate from the capitalist police. These revolutionary events, however, were mostly hidden in the foreign press. In so doing, international news effectively concealed the issue of revolution that lay at the heart of the conflict.

Orwell argues that the main reason for this press concealment was that the entire world opposed revolution in Spain. The USSR, following Communist principles, believed that at this stage revolution would fail and, therefore, decided that the Spanish revolution had to be crushed. Other capitalist countries, convinced that their economic investments in Spain would lose all value if revolutionaries gained political power, adopted the same approach. As a result, in order to discredit the Spanish revolution, foreign powers actively denied that any revolution was taking place at all. In Spain, by contrast, everyone knew that the revolution was a central issue in the war.

The revolution never became fully developed. While at the beginning the Spanish Government defended working-class interests, over time it began to shift to the right. When the USSR began to supply weapons to the Spanish Communist Party, political power shifted away from the Anarchists to the Communists. As a result, the anti-revolution Communists were able to prevent working-class control from advancing any further.

At that point, the Government was moved by two separate goals: the need to fight Franco and the need to regain control of the trade unions so that the revolution would end. The Government took various steps to weaken the power of the Anarchists and the working class. Collectivization was halted, the police re-armed, and key working-class-controlled industries taken over. Most importantly, the revolutionary militias were incorporated into the non-political Popular Army, which did not follow the militias’ revolutionary principles of social equality. Unlike in other countries, therefore, where Communist Parties belong to the extreme Left, the Spanish Communist Party was the most conservative, anti-revolutionary force within the leftwing Government.

Orwell proceeds to summarize the ideologies of the parties within the Spanish Left. On one side, the Spanish Communist Party believed that the revolution would alienate both the peasants and the middle class, and that revolutionary goals should be discarded in favor military efficiency. On the other side, both the POUM and the Anarchists believed that maintaining the status quo of parliamentary democracy was as harmful to the workers as capitalism and Fascism. They trusted that the only real alternative to Fascism was working-class control and that pressing the revolution forward was the only way to win the fight against Fascism.

Initially, Orwell agreed with the Communists that fighting for the revolution was less important than winning the war. He was exasperated by the constant inter-party fighting that he read in leftwing Spanish newspapers on both sides. Over time, though his ideas changed, as he realized that the Communists were actively weakening the Government coalition. When the Communists accused the POUM not only of weakening the war effort by pushing the revolution forward but of deliberate collaboration with the enemy, they discredited the POUM and, in so doing, divided the anti-Fascist coalition.

Orwell was disgusted by this pro-Communist narrative. He realized that much of that propaganda was disseminated by journalists and politicians who were not actually fighting in the war and who, therefore, were ignorant of what actually went on in the conflict. In general, Orwell was disillusioned to realize that the leftwing press was just as full of lies and bitter accusations as rightwing newspapers. The result of the interparty journalistic disputes was that leftwing newspapers ended up writing more bitterly against their leftist political rivals than against Fascism. When the Communists began to take power away from workers and to throw revolutionaries in jail, Orwell also realized that the Communists were not actually in favor of supporting the working class.

Orwell also argued that, from a practical perspective, revolutionary goals could have drawn more supporters to the Republican side. Had more people abroad known about the revolution in Spain, they might have been willing to leave their country to fight in defense of the working class, as Orwell and his companions did. The same might be true within Spain itself. Had the Government emphasized its support of working-class control, workers fighting on Franco’s side might have been more willing to desert and fight on the Republican side. The national and international effort to weaken public knowledge of the Spanish revolution was therefore detrimental to the anti-Fascist cause. The POUM and the Anarchists’ idea that the revolution and the war were inseparable was, for these practical reasons, less absurd than it initially appeared.

At the beginning of his time in Spain, however, Orwell was not aware of these facts, and would gladly have exchanged his boredom as a POUM militiaman for greater action in a Communist unit. Unlike the Communists, who tended to attack anyone who did not follow party guidelines, the POUM were tolerant of Orwell’s desire to join Communist troops and allowed him to express this idea freely without ostracizing him for this decision or pressuring him to join the party.