In his article commemorating the 60th anniversary of the victory of the Popular Front govenment Paul Preston dismissed Ken Loach's Land and Freedom as a 'marginal if not perverse' explanation of the causes of the Republic's defeat. A few comments on Paul's point of view need to be made.
The civil war was, as Preston insists, a war against fascism and not an 'internecine leftist civil war in which the central enemy was the Communist Party'; and it is against fascism that we see the POUM militia fighting in Land and Freedom. The problem is that when the likes of David Carr, George Orwell and other foreign volunteers who were not part of the International Brigades arrived in Spain to fight fascism they found themselves the victims of sabotage and betrayal.
The Popular Front strategy adopted by both the Communist Party and the more moderate sectors of the left is often presented as the only one that could have defeated Franco. But it is worth recalling where this strategy came from. For the Communists it had nothing to do with any analysis of the realities of 1930s Spain and everything to do, as in fact Preston points out, with the needs of Soviet foreign policy. The support for the Popular Front by the leader of the Left Republicans, Manuel Azaña, and the moderate socialist leader Indalecio Prieto, was totally consistent with their politics, as was their opposition to social revolution, war or no war.
The point is, however, whether this was the best, or only, strategy open to the left. It was claimed at the time, and continues to be, that it was necessary to finish with the revolution in order to win the support of the Western democracies. But, as Preston himself admits, this 'quest for respectability did nothing to alter the contempt felt in Whitehall for the Spanish Republic'.
Former Communist Party leader, Fernando Claudin, would point out years later that 'even Soviet historians acknowledge that from the end of 1937'that is, when the revolution had been clearly smashed'connivance against the Spanish Republic between the fascist states and the US, France and Britain was increasingly obvious'.
The revolution that emerged as a response to the fascist military uprising in July 1936 can hardly be dismissed as a 'marginal' event. Instead, it deserves attention as one of the major examples of working class and popular revolution of the 20th century. Vast social experiments such as the collectivisation of land and industry went further in the first months of the war than any similar development at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, for example. There is abundant evidence that the workers and peasants who resisted the military did so not in order just to defend bourgeois democracy. The very social war that Preston accuses Loach of ignoring and that led to the war in the first place, guaranteed that, as he recognises, 'the revolutionary élan of the Spanish people' was 'the Republic's greatest asset'. Given the impossibility of obtaining aid from the democracies, the fact that this revolutionary élan was 'squandered' meant that the counter-revolution was more than a 'minor episode' on the road to defeat.
It was not simply the case that the revolution's Republican opponents put winning the war before all other considerations, as has often been claimed. Political rather than military considerations often determined their choice of military strategy and this is why, for example, the Aragon front played only, as Preston says, a 'minor' role in the war. An offensive on this front, especially in the early months of the war when it was poorly defended by the fascists, could have taken pressure off Madrid and even have opened up the possibility of a breakthrough to the beleaguered Republican zone in the north. The reason this offensive did not take place had little to do with strategic considerations and a lot to do with the fact that the majority of the militia on this front was controlled by the CNT and POUM. Such political considerations explain why these units were deliberately starved of arms and equipment and as a consequence this front remained static until the belated offensive of June 1937, when well armed Communist led troops were brought from the central front for this purpose.
The POUM's role in this offensive, portrayed in the battle scene at the end of Land and Freedom, was singularly tragic. Having spent months idling their time away in the trenches round Huesca, the former POUM militia was now sent into battle, without the promised artillery cover, on the very day, 16 June, when its party was being suppressed in the rearguard.
The shortcomings of the militia system in the absence of a unified revolutionary power cannot be denied and the weaknesses of anarcho-syndicalism were brutally exposed in the Spanish war. But this does not detract from the relevance, especially in the absence of a viable alternative, of revolutionary methods. The defence of Madrid, probably the Communists' greatest moment in the war, had much more to do with using this 'revolutionary élan' than military orthodoxy. As Claudin states, 'The spirit that made possible the defence of Madrid was that of the proletarian revolution, and if there was any possibility of victory it could only be found in the spreading and deepening of this spirit.'
The international implications of a revolutionary victory can only be speculated about. What seems reasonable to assume is that, as was the case in 1917, it would have sent shock waves through the European labour movement, weakening the grip of Stalinism and social democracy. A revolutionary war in Spain could have provided the European working class with an alternative to the Communists' disastrous tactics in the forthcoming war against fascismthe same Communists who, having crushed the Spanish Revolution in the name of anti-fascist unity, then found themselves defending the infamous Soviet-German non-aggression pact.
Paul Preston bemoans the bloody suppression of the revolutionary left, but 'playing down the revolutionary activities of Trotskyists and anarchists', as he puts it, meant the crushing of the POUM and the more radical elements of the CNT. It meant the dismantling of the collectives and of democratic control of industry. It meant undermining the revolutionary enthusiasm of the militias. In short, the imposition of the Popular Front strategy inevitably meant full blooded counter-revolution.
Criticism from the left of the Communist movement is often conveniently dismissed as playing into the hands of the right. The strength of Loach's film is that it shows there was a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism, that genuine socialism has nothing to do with bureaucratic dictatorship and prison camps. The tragedy is that hundreds of thousands of working class activists gave their lives, and not just during the Spanish Civil War, in the fight against fascism believing that the USSR represented the greatest hope for the future of humanity.
Prior to Land and Freedom no other film director, Spanish or otherwise, had dealt with this aspect of the civil war. The stunning success of the film in Spain was, to a large extent, testimony to the fact that for many people, especially the young, this was the first time that they realised that in 1936 there began not only a war against fascism but also a social revolution.
Ken Loach's 'perversity' lies in his desire to remind us of a time when thousands of ordinary men and women fought against both fascism and the very system that had engendered this cancer in the first place; a timely reminder that there is a socialist alternative from below, not only to fascism and to the gulag but also to the politics of the likes of Tony Blair and Felipe González.