Probably my favorite of his books. There’s an easygoing charm with his writing here that is absent with his more political writing. He’s much more in the mode of observing here than in driving a political point home---which makes sense, since he relegates the politics in two appendices instead of the main text itself. And he comes off as a winsome foreigner, charmed and bemused by the people of Spain while being caught in some ugly internecine conflicts among the forces fighting the Fascists. By Orwell’s account Spaniards are always late, disorganized, terrible soldiers, and yet very hospitable and hard to be mad at, relics of a time when there was a nobler spirit in Europe.
Some takeaways. One is the fascinating history of leftist movements in Europe, where there was much disagreement and much infighting among various factions. It is quite interesting to see just the diversity of opinions among the left, which to a modern reader (moi) seems to be the product of actual political power possessed by the left at that political moment in Europe. It is hard to see such diverse opinions re: the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolution in America, 2017, since the left in this country has been in the political wilderness for a very long time now. Hard to have disagreements about something whose possibility seems forbiddingly remote.
Especially interesting was the fact that the Communists were against revolution during the Spanish Civil War; by Orwell’s account Communist Parties followed the lead of the USSR, who wanted to preserve the stability of western democracies that were allied to it. Because of these alliances the USSR got in a strange position where it became expressly anti-revolution. In Spain (and Catalonia in particular) this played out in the struggle against the PSUC (which took the Communist anti-revolutionary line) and the POUM (which was in favor of the revolution, more in line with the Anarchists).
I must say that Orwell’s depiction of Revolutionary Catalonia, in its brief existence, is one of the first truly positive accounts of socialism I’ve encountered. He rightly points out that when most people in the west hold forth against Communism, they have in mind the bolstering of central governments. I think he’s right---I’m guilty of that myself. The Barcelona and the POUM militia he describes isn’t really about that, though; it’s more about the levelling of social hierarchies, the erasure of boundaries between classes. Where everyone was excited about being part of something larger than themselves.
To me that is the thing that is lost in the current incarnation of the political left, at least in America. What the imminent revolution was to the Catalonians the American civic religion and secular myth are to us; big ideas that everyone can rally around. Republicans know this, and exploit it to their own ends. Besides the DNC last summer, Democrats don’t exploit this at all, to their detriment. We have become too obsessed with critiquing the flaws of this country to recognize the power of mythology in gaining the support of the power---ours is not a public policy problem (we have the better policies) but rather a narrative problem. A reclamation of patriotism as the uplift of all Americans has to be part of the roadmap for the Democrats to lead themselves out of the political wilderness.