Revolutionaries (17 page)

The student movements of the past few years have been like anarchist movements, at least in their early stages, in so far as they have consisted not of mass organizations but of small groups of militants mobilizing the masses of their fellow students from time to time. They have been obliged to make themselves sensitive to the mood of these masses, to the times and issues which will permit mass mobilization.

In the United States, for instance they belong to a primitive kind of movement, and its weaknesses are evident – a lack of theory, of agreed strategic perspectives, of quick tactical reaction on a national scale. At the same time it is doubtful whether any other form of mobilization could have created, maintained and developed so powerful a national student movement in the United States in the 1960s. Quite certainly this could not have been done by the disciplined small groups of revolutionaries in the old tradition – communist, Trotskyist or Maoist – who constantly seek to impose their specific ideas and perspectives on the masses and in doing so isolate themselves more often than they mobilize them.

These are lessons to be learned not so much from the actual anarchists of today whose practice is rarely impressive, as from a study of the historic experience of anarchist movements. They are particularly valuable in the present situation, in which new revolutionary movements have often had to be built on and out of the ruins of the older ones. For let us not be under any illusions. The impressive ‘new left' of recent years is admirable, but in many respects it is not only new, but also a regression to an earlier weaker, less developed form of the socialist movement, unwilling or unable to benefit from the major achievements of
the international working-class and revolutionary movements in the century between the Communist Manifesto and the Cold War.

Tactics derived from anarchist experience are a reflection of this relative primitiveness and weakness, but in such circumstances they may be the best ones to pursue for a time. The important thing is to know when the limits of such tactics have been reached. What happened in France in May 1968 was less like 1917 than like 1830 or 1848. It is inspiring to discover that, in the developed countries of western Europe, any kind of revolutionary situation, however momentary, is possible once again. But it would be equally unwise to forget that 1848 is at the same time the great example of a successful spontaneous European revolution, and of its rapid and unmitigated failure.

¹
An illustration of this complexity may be given from the history of anarchism. I take it from J. Martinez Alier's valuable study of landless labourers in Andalusia in 1964–5. From the author's careful questioning it is clear that the landless labourers of Cordova, traditionally the mass basis of Spanish rural anarchism, have not changed their ideas since 1936 – except in one respect. The social and economic activities of even the Franco regime have convinced them that the state cannot simply be rejected, but has some positive functions. This may help to explain why they no longer seem to be anarchists.

Let me begin with the Hollywood film that has become a permanent icon of a certain kind of educated culture, at least among older generations:
Casablanca
. The cast will still be familiar, I hope: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre, Sydney Green-street, Marcel Dalio, Conrad Veit, Claude Rains. Its phrases have become part of our discourse: ‘Play it again Sam', ‘Round up the usual suspects'. It is essentially about the subject of this essay. For, if we leave aside the basic love affair, this is a film about the relations of the Spanish Civil War and the wider politics of that strange but decisive period in twentieth-century history, the era of Adolf Hitler. Rick, the hero, you will remember, has fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He emerges from it defeated and cynical in his Moroccan café, and he ends by returning to the struggle in World War II. In short,
Casablanca
is about the mobilization of anti-fascism in the nineteen-thirties. And those mobilized against fascism before most others, and most passionately, were the Western intellectuals.

In my history of the ‘short twentieth century'
¹
, I discussed the
peculiarities and complexities of this mobilization. As we know, the Axis – Germany, Italy and Japan – was in the end defeated by a military, and tacitly by something like an ideological, alliance, both short-lived, between capitalist
USA
, communist
USSR
and the old liberal-bourgeois imperialism of Great Britain. But this alliance did not come into being effectively until 1941, almost nine years after Hitler's accession to power. In fact, it was forced on all the allies by the relentless expansionism of the Axis powers, headed by Germany. Hitler forced a war successively on Britain and France, the
USSR
and the United States, who all wanted to avoid it.

That ‘Fascism Means War', as the slogan of the times had it, was evident from the moment that Hitler came to power. So, at least for everyone to the left of the political centre, was the nature of the Nazi project. Hitler made no secret of it. The logical response was obvious: to unite all the forces opposed to fascism, for whatever reason. I regard this proposition as self-evident, and indeed in the end this unity was forged and defeated fascism. For reasons that I fail to understand this has been contested in France, notably by the late François Furet in his
Le passé d'une illusion
. What infuriated Furet was that the Communists, and especially the French Communist Party, benefited from this policy of anti-fascist union, and indeed established themselves as the chief proponents of this union. He therefore denied the reality of anti-fascism, which he regarded merely as a Communist tactical trick to capture the support of liberal and democratic
ingénus
. Following similar lines, Kristof Pomian, who criticized my
Age of Extremes
in the journal
Le Débat
, sought to present the politics of the 1930s as triangular rather than binary. Democracy, he argued, confronted both fascism and communism with equal hostility, or at least it should have done.

But that was not the case. The choice was between two sides. It was recognized as being between two sides. Those in London, Paris and Washington who feared a new world war did not for a
moment believe that it would be against anyone except the aggressor powers, i.e. Germany, whether or not allied to Italy and Japan. No doubt Poland, Romania and the small Baltic States feared Russia, and with good reason, but speaking globally, Russia was seen as a counterweight to the main danger, which was Germany. Liberals did not even have the option of neutrality. The most immediate lesson of the Spanish Civil War was that ‘non-intervention' helped one side. This was evident to the British government, which certainly wanted the Nationalists to win, though it also wanted at that time to avoid formally taking sides with Hitler and Mussolini against bolshevism. As Maurice Hankey, Cabinet Secretary, put it to the British Cabinet on July 20, 1936:

‘In the present stage of Europe, with France and Spain menaced by Bolshevism, it is not inconceivable that we may soon find it advisable to unite with Germany and Italy. The more we keep out of European complications the better.'
²

It was equally clear to Léon Blum that in accepting non-intervention reluctantly, for reasons of both domestic and international policy, he was betraying the Spanish Republic. He justified this in public by claiming that this was the only way to avoid a war, Europe being – he said – on the brink of war in August 1936
³
, but this was plainly not so. In short, genuine neutrality between the two sides in the Civil War, or equal hostility to both, was impossible. That, after all, is what Stalin himself was to discover in 1939–41.

In fact, of course, liberal and democratic opinion was not neutral between the two sides. In
Age of Extremes
, I quote the
public opinion poll of early 1939 that asked the people of the United States who they wanted to win if war were to break out between Russia and Germany. Eighty-three per cent wanted a Russian victory, seventeen per cent a German one. A similar enquiry exists for the Spanish Civil War: eighty-seven per cent of Americans favoured the Republic, thirteen per cent the Nationalists.

The Spanish Civil War was both at the centre and on the margin of the era of anti-fascism. It was central, since it was immediately seen as a European war between fascism and anti-fascism, almost as the first battle in the coming world war, some of the characteristic aspects of which – air raids against civilian populations – it anticipated. But Spain took no part in World War II. Franco's victory was to have no bearing on the collapse of France in 1940. The experience of the Republican armed forces was not relevant to the subsequent wartime resistance movements, even though in France these resistance movements were largely composed of refugee Spanish Republicans, and former International Brigaders played a major role in those of other countries. For it is a curious fact that guerrilla or partisan warfare was not much used by the Republicans during the Civil War, and, where it did occur, it was not very successful; all the more curious since this strategy was pursued with local success by Spanish Communists between 1945 and 1949.

The British and American armed forces were to make scarcely any use of the experience of the ‘premature anti-fascist' volunteers who had fought in the International Brigade, whereas the German, Italian and Russian forces were to make prominent use of the professionals they had sent to Spain between 1936 and 1939.

Strangely enough the Civil War made its greatest impact on
subsequent history through its political rather than its military activities. As I try to show in
Age of Extremes
(
chapter 5
, section IV), it provided the model both for the political strategy of the European resistance movements and hence for the form taken after liberation by liberated governments, particularly in the Soviet zone of influence. However, this phase of European politics was short-lived. The Cold War put an end to it after 1947.

In short, after its brief moment at the centre of world history, Spain returned to its traditional position on the margin. Outside Spain the Civil War lived on, as it still does among the rapidly diminishing number of its non-Spanish contemporaries. It became and has remained something remembered by those who were young at the time like the heart-rending and indestructible memory of a first great and lost love. This is not the case in Spain itself, where all experienced the tragic, murderous and complex impact of civil war (obscured as it was by the mythology and manipulation of the regime of the victors), which has been excellently studied in Paloma Aguilar Fernández's
Memoria y olvido de la Guerra civil española
(Madrid 1996) [
Remembering and Forgetting the Spanish Civil War
].

If we want to situate the Spanish Civil War within this general framework of the anti-fascist era, we have to bear in mind two things: the failure actually to resist fascism and the disproportionate success of anti-fascist mobilization among Europe's intellectuals.

I am speaking not only of the success of fascist expansionism and the failure of the forces favouring peace to halt the apparently inevitable approach of another world war. I am also remembering the failure to change public opinion. The only regions that saw a genuine political shift to the left after the Great Depression were Scandinavia and Northern America. Much of central and southern Europe was already under authoritarian governments or was to fall into their hands, but
insofar as we can judge from the scattered electoral data, the drift in Hungary and Russia, not to mention among the German diaspora, was sharply to the right. On the other hand the victory of the Popular Front in France was a shift
within
the French Left, not a shift of opinion to the left. The 1936 electoral victory gave the combined Radicals, Socialists and Communists barely one per cent more votes than in 1932. And yet, if I can reconstruct the feelings of that generation from personal memory, my generation of the Left, whether we were intellectuals or not, did not see ourselves as a retreating minority. We did not think that fascism would inevitably continue to advance. We were sure that a new world would come. Given the logic of anti-fascist unity, only the failure of governments and progressive parties to unite against fascism accounted for our series of defeats.

This helps to explain the disproportionate shift towards the Communists among those already on the left. But it also helps to explain our confidence as young intellectuals, for this social group was most easily, and disproportionately, mobilized against fascism. The reason is obvious. Fascism – even Italian fascism – was opposed in principle to the causes which defined and mobilized intellectuals as such, namely the values of the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. Except in Germany, with its powerful schools of theory critical of liberalism, there was no significant body of secular intellectuals who did not belong to this tradition. The Roman Catholic Church had very few eminent intellectuals known and respected as such outside its own ranks. I am not denying that in some fields, notably literature, some of the most distinguished figures were clearly on the right: Eliot, Hamsun, Pound, Yeats, Paul Claudel, Céline, Evelyn Waugh – but even in the armies of literature the politically conscious Right formed a modest regiment in the 1930s, except perhaps in France. Once again this became evident in 1936. United States writers, whether or not they accepted
US
neutrality, were overwhelmingly opposed
to Franco, and Hollywood even more so.
⁴
Of the British writers asked, five favoured the Nationalists, 16 were neutral and 106 were for the Republic, often passionately.
⁵
As for Spain itself, there is no doubt where the poets of the Spanish language stood, who are now remembered: García Lorca, the brothers Machado, Alberti, Miguel Hernández, Neruda, Vallejo, Guillén.