Orwell was sure that not only could Socialism work but that it was already working in Barcelona during that autumn and winter, however briefly.
In his earlier life Orwell had argued that wealthy Britain was only able to exist thanks to
coal miners working themselves to early deaths in underground infernos. They
were then the true creators of that nation’s wealth.
As William Blake wrote, the entire modern world is "underwritten
by constant, speechless suffering and that 'culture' begins in the
callused hands of exhausted children," [to quote historian, Robert Hughes.]
(This reminds me of a line in a song by another Australian expat, NickCave:
"Out of sorrow, entire worlds have been built.")
"Out of sorrow, entire worlds have been built.")
In the first page of chapter one, Orwell describes how Barcelona seemed to him only eight decades ago…
“The
Anarchists were still in virtual control of
Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had
been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or
January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came
straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling
and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever
been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically
every building
of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags
or
with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled
with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary
parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.
Churches here and there were
being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe
had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the
bootblacks had been
collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and
shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile
and even ceremonial
forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Senior' or
'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and
'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'.
Tipping
was forbidden by law; almost my
first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying
to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been
commandeered, and
all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red
and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the
walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements
look like daubs
of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where
crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were
bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was
the aspect of
the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it
was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.
Except for a
small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people
at all.
Practically
everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or
some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving.
There was much
in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it,
but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting
for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was
really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled,
been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not
realize that great
numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising
themselves as proletarians for the time being.”[This post comes with a link to Expat.com, a site about expatriation in Spain (and other countries.)]
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