Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell

In December of 1936, George Orwell travelled to Spain to fight against the fascists in the civil war. Orwell had just finished writing his first work of non-fiction, The Road to Wigan Pier, an investigation into working class living conditions in Northern England, in which he articulated his support for socialism and critique of capitalism:

Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation–an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream.

Orwell died young and garnered fame only toward the end of his life. He published his first major success, Animal Farm, in 1945. He wrote his next and final work, Nineteen Eighty-four mostly from his deathbed; he published it in 1949 and died six months later. He was 45 years old.

At age 32, as he travelled to Spain, Orwell was still a young writer searching for his perspective. His experience in Spain would give him that perspective, which he would describe in his next book Homage to Catalonia.

In the second half of the 1930s, Fascism was growing in Europe. Mussolini and Hitler were already in power, and Franco was fighting for control of Spain. Leftists across Western Europe were mostly democratic capitalists and Stalinist communists — united in their opposition to fascism. Orwell writes in Homage to Catalonia, "When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist – after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct."

Orwell spent some months on the front line, firing shots across no man's land towards fascist lines, but for the most part his military service in Spain was an exercise in futility. The republican soldiers lacked in everything — uniforms, weapons, food, tools, matches, latrines, strategy. In Orwell's account, the greatest fight was the constant search for firewood. Second to that was the effort to avoid getting killed by a rowdy comrade, a malfunctioning weapon, or a crude bomb.

Nonetheless, Orwell writes very fondly of his time on the front, in large part due to the political organization of his division — an anarchist militia, where all soldiers were treated as equals:

Everyone drew the same pay, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, and called everyone else 'thou' and 'comrade'; there was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no cap-touching. I was breathing the air of equality, and I was simple enough to imagine that it existed all over Spain. I did not realize that more or less by chance I was isolated among the most revolutionary section of the Spanish working class.

In July of 1936, a monarchist coup d'état had kicked off the civil war. The monarchists wanted a revolution. According to Orwell, the first wave of resistance against the coup came not from the government but from anarchist trade unions.

As soon as the rising broke out the organized town workers replied by calling a general strike and then by demanding – and, after a struggle, getting – arms from the public arsenals. If they had not acted spontaneously and more or less independently it is quite conceivable that Franco would never have been resisted... During the first two months of the war it was the Anarchists more than anyone else who had saved the situation.

The anarchists launched a counter-revolution, and then they went further, pushing a revolution of their own.

Their resistance was accompanied by – one might almost say it consisted of – a definite revolutionary outbreak. Land was seized by the peasants; many factories and most of the transport were seized by the trade unions; churches were wrecked and the priests driven out or killed.

This was the militant anarchism in which Orwell found himself embedded, more or less by happenstance.

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.

Orwell was amazed by the authentic air of solidarity and equality. His squadron was guarding a hill in the Spanish countryside, overlooking a valley filled with peasant farms, facing another hill guarded by fascist troops. The operation may have been dysfunctional, but Orwell says that it was "not far from" perfect equality, "a foretaste of Socialism... However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable."

Today, "anarchism" and "chaos" are synonymous, but the anarchism that Orwell experienced was a very specific political movement. Anarchists stood for direct control of industry by workers; government by local committees; and opposition to centralized government, the bourgeoisie, and the church.

The end-goal of anarchism is equality and socialism, which is why the anarchists formed an alliance with the communists during the civil war. But, Orwell writes, "Philosophically, Communism and Anarchism are poles apart... The Communist's emphasis is always on centralism and efficiency, the Anarchist's on liberty and equality."

The revolutionary attitude of the Spanish anarchists made them vulnerable. As the war progressed, the communist contingent emerged as the most influential wing of the republican forces. The Stalinist communists had no interest in revolution. A communist revolution on the far side of the continent would strain the Soviet Union's diplomatic and economic resources at home. So the communist party took a conservative position, pushing to win the war at any cost in order to preserve democratic capitalism in Spain, with a view to eventually realize Spanish communism. This directly contradicted the anarchist view: "the war and the revolution are inseparable." While Orwell agreed with the communist strategy in principle, he grew skeptical over time:

On paper the Communist case was a good one; the trouble was that their actual behaviour made it difficult to believe that they were advancing it in good faith... The thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone the Spanish revolution till a more suitable time, but to make sure that it never happened.

Spoiler alert: The following paragraphs discuss the final chapters of the book.

Late in the spring, Orwell took a bullet to the neck, which failed to kill him but succeeded to remove him from active duty. Upon his return to Barcelona, where he intended to convalesce, Orwell discovered that the republican government had cracked down on the anarchists. The government had propagated conspiracy theories that the anarchists were fascist spies working to undermine the republican movement from the inside, finally the police swept anarchist strongholds imprisoning anyone they found and executing their leaders.

This all happened while anarchist militants continued to fight on the front lines as members of the republican army, not knowing that their comrades and commanders were being jailed and murdered back home.

Orwell was in danger. As a member of the anarchist division, he was liable to be imprisoned indefinitely without trial. He spent the following days on the lam. At night, he slept in empty lots. During the day, he cleaned himself up in the public bathhouses and then played tourist in the city's expensive shops and restaurants,

For the first time in my life I took to writing things on walls. The passage-ways of several smart restaurants had 'Visca P.O.U.M.!'' scrawled on them as large as I could write it.

("Visca P.O.U.M." means "Long live the workers' party.")

Orwell was injured, outlawed, and outraged. He wanted to keep fighting for the cause, but he could never enlist in a communist unit:

"Sooner or later it might mean being used against the Spanish working class... and if I had to use my rifle at all in such an affair I would use it on the side of the working class and not against them."

When Orwell had arrived in Barcelona, it had been an egalitarian society. The wealthy dressed down in simple clothes and workers had seized control. By the time he left six months later, Barcelona had again appeared its bourgeois-capitalist self. On the train out of the country, Orwell was sitting in a first-class dining car when two detectives came in:

When they saw us in the dining car they seemed satisfied that we were respectable. It was queer how everything had changed. Only six months ago, when the Anarchists still reigned, it was looking like a proletarian that made you respectable.

In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell makes his political views clear. He despises capitalism and Stalinism. He sees the police as the "natural enemy" of the working class. While he never joined the anarchist party, he expresses the most sympathy toward the anarchists. Orwell is a socialist, but a socialist with a particular contempt for power and inequality.

Homage to Catalonia is considered a classic work of memoir, but when it was released in 1938 it was a critical and commercial flop. The book sold some hundreds of copies in the UK and received no reprints, translations, or international distribution until after Orwell's death. The problem was that Orwell's political views were too radical for the communist thinkers of his day.

I think Orwell disdained communism in the way we can only criticize the thing we know best. Orwell hated capitalism, monarchism, and fascism — but that was easy, because he was so removed from them. Orwell's publishers and editors were communist. They refused to publish his writing because it was too critical of the Party. Orwell could have been a communist himself, but he had seen its ugly face. He wrote Animal Farm as a satire of Stalin's Russia. And then he wrote Nineteen Eight-four as a critique of political power with a strong esthetic of communism.

After Orwell's death, his work found a new life as anti-communist propaganda, which missed the point. Orwell hated authoritarianism, which he saw in all of the world's major powers. The three superpowers in Nineteen Eighty-four — Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia — were based on the "Big Three" Allied leaders in WWII: the USSR, the UK, and the USA. In 1945, Orwell coined the term the "cold war" to describe the stalemate between these three powers:

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications – that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.

Orwell foresaw the rise of a self-stabilizing, technocratic bureaucracy that could not really be called "democracy." He saw this coming because he had seen its opposite — an organic form of self-organizing collectivism — and he watched that form get crushed, not by an obvious evil like Hitler, Franco, or Mussolini, but by a supposed friend — the so-called leftists and progressives who said they wanted to create a better world. In the end, it is the people who have power — in whatever form — who will do anything to keep it.