It was at a moment in Barcelona, of this same time, late in December
1936, that George Orwell chose to open his exceptional book “Homage
to Catalonia.”
In the first page of chapter one, he describes how the
city seemed to him then…
“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.”
So, Orwell thought that not only could Socialism work but it that it was
already working in Barcelona during that time, however brief.
In Orwell's earlier life he had argued that wealthy Britain was only able to exist thanks to
coal miners working themselves to early deaths in underground infernos. They
were the true creators of that nation’s wealth.
As William Blake outlined, the entire modern world is "underwritten
by constant, speechless suffering and that "culture" begins in the
callused hands of exhausted children," [to quote historian, RobertHughes.]
It all reminds me of a line in a song by another Australian expat, NickCave:
"Out of sorrow, entire worlds have been built."
