Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

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