Spanish Labyrinth, by Gerald Brenan

[p024] The Spanish Labyrinth, by Gerald Brenan. C.U.P., 13s. 6d. This book, now republished as a paperback, is a valuable contribution to the study of that very complicated conflict of classes in Spain which came to a head in the ’thirties. It is valuable because it goes right back to the historical roots of this crisis and also because it deals in detail with the agrarian problems. A liberal revolution has never been carried through successfully in Spain, the bourgeoisie lost both the battle against the Church and over the land; and the situation at the beginning of the Republic was of a declining feudalism. Mutual obligations had degenerated into absentee landlordism. This backwardness produced two important political groups — the Carlists or feudal socialists, similar to our own Young England group created by Disraeli, and the Anarcho- syndicalists depending on the landless agricultural proletariat of Andalusia. The Republic described by Brenan is not the utopia worshipped by British Liberals (including Frank Byers, director of the Rio Tinto mines, which financed Franco’s rebellion). No, he shows how both the ‘Left’? and Right governments

[p025] BOOK REVIEWS enforced their rule by brutality, legislation against trade unions (i.e., compulsory arbitration in all indus- tries) and a _ severe censorship. Against this repression was thrown the working class, mainly expressed, with all its backwardness and all its heroic tenacity, in anarcho-syndi- calism. Eventually, after the victory of the Popular Front, this struggle became polarised around two parties, the Falangists (fascists) and the Com- munist Party. The Falange posed convincingly as a socialist organiza- tion, demanding the reform of the church, colonial independence, the nationalization of the banks and stronger measures against the land- lords. But this early ‘ progressive toryism’ had little appeal for the workers, who were swinging rapidly to a_ revolutionary except those in whom syndicalism had instilled an idealism which was attracted by ‘socialism without class war’ extolled by the founder of the Falange, Jose Antonio. Later these policies aided in the demoralization of the working class who felt they were more Left wing than those of their own party—the Communist Party. Yet in 1936 it was under pressure from confident trade unions .that Caballero himself (he was formerly a member of Azana’s vicious government) demanded a_ workers’ government and the arming of the trade unions. This fervour led mili- tants in their thousands to the Communist Party, where they were diverted from their goal into the Popular Front, the role of which, Stalin wrote to Caballero, was to attract the lower and middle bour- geoisie. The confidence of these classes was to be won only by Stalinism showing its willingness to smash the forces of the working class. The reason Brenan gives for the victory of Fascism in Left wing centres such as Seville is the criminal way the CP split the working class; and in Barcelona it became the party of businessmen, shopkeepers gendarmes standing clearly in oppo- sition to the trade unions. As the war dragged on the Party demanded the suppression not only of the ‘ Trotskyists ’, but of the trade unions and the Workers’ Militia. Despite the invocations of ‘the Spanish temperament ’, the syllogisms consciousness, , and - and the clumsy attacks on Marxism, this book shows the problems met by socialism in an _ under-developed country, and the allied crisis of Stalinism. Congress Debunked