You can read Spilling the Spanish Beans online here.

No doubt fired up by his experiences in northern England, witnessing the poverty and working routines of miners, which led to the publication of The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell now turned his attention to an international stage; the events and lives of those caught up in the Spanish Civil War. He had travelled to Barcelona in December 1936 to collect material for newspaper articles, and maybe stay and fight in the war. He only took a day to conclude that he wanted to enlist, and he was sent to Alcubierre on the Aragon Front.

Spilling the Spanish Beans was his first written work concerning the war; a mixture of news reporting, political opinion and eye-witness account. An essay in two parts, it was published on 29^th July and 2^nd September 1937. Having left Spain in June 1937, he had travelled (with his wife Eileen) to Banyuls-sur-Mer, in the far south of France, less than ten miles from the Spanish border. He started writing the essay there. It was to be called Eye Witness in Barcelona, and it was agreed that it would be published in the New Statesman. However, its editor, Kingsley Martin, rejected it on the grounds that it could “cause trouble”. Fortunately Philip Mairet, editor of the New English Weekly, and always a strong supporter of Orwell’s work, accepted the essay for publication.

As a historical document written about the war, Part One of the essay is not so much a simple account of its causes or the manner in which the war was waged, but much more about how its reporting was – in his opinion – a distortion of the truth so that newspaper readers in Britain would have a poor understanding of what was really happening. And, despite what Orwell considers to be clearly made-up stories published in the likes of the Daily Mail, in fact he attributes the misinformation to the leftwing papers: “It is the left-wing papers, the News Chronicle and the Daily Worker, with their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real mature of the struggle.”

The basis of Orwell’s argument is “that the Spanish Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists.” Orwell himself witnessed the fact that, when he left Barcelona in June 1937, “the jails were bulging […] but the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are not there because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left.”

This may be the moment in Orwell’s life when any sympathy he felt for, or connection he felt with Communism was lost. We know of his criticism, veiled and not-so-veiled, of Communism in the likes of his later works Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. And in his previous book The Road to Wigan Pier, he spoke warmly of socialism being the answer to the nation’s problems – even if he had problems with socialists themselves. In that book, for example, he was very complimentary about the good work of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, which had been founded by the Communist Party of Great Britain. But it’s in Spilling the Spanish Beans that he first recognises that “so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies.”

Orwell goes on to illustrate how, in his opinion, many months after the war has started, nearly all progress that had been made by the Republicans had been reversed: “As power slipped from the hands of the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-wing Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie came out of hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor reappeared, not much modified.” Orwell cites “the breaking-up of the old workers’ militias, which were organized on a genuinely democratic system, with officers and men receiving the same pay and mingling on terms of complete equality” as being just one instance of regrettable regression; “the undoubted purpose of the change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism.”

Foreign interference had, in his view, added to the process; arms provided by Mexico and especially Russia meant that they could “extort terms as well. Put in their crudest form, the terms were: “Crush the revolution or you get no more arms.”” Russian influence always raises what Orwell calls “the Communist prestige”, and although the Communists denied that there had been any pressure from the Russian government, he notes that “the Communist Parties of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain that the Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom they control, plus the Communist Press of the whole world, have used all their immense and ever-increasing influence upon the side of counter-revolution.”

Part Two of the essay looks at the wider political implications of the war. Orwell warns of the dangers of Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda, which would deny that the Spanish Government is crushing the revolution, “because the revolution never happened.” He considers the relevance it might have in England, “if England enters into an alliance with the USSR […] for the influence of the Communist Party is bound to increase.”

“Broadly speaking,” Orwell proposes, “Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending […] that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism […] Present Fascism in this form, and you can mobilise public opinion against it.” He goes on to provide some rhetorical instances about how one might contradict someone “who points out that Fascism and bourgeois democracy are Tweedledum and Tweedledee”, including labelling them a Trotskyist; and there is a whole paragraph explaining the ins and outs and nuances of what Orwell describes as “this terrible word.”

Orwell describes how various categories of politicians, or indeed, anyone expressing a political opinion, would, one by one, be presented as traitors. “The logical end is a regime in which every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient of any importance is in jail.” He believes that the Anarchists and then the Communists “have succeeded in killing enthusiasm (inside Spain, not outside)” and made conscription necessary as a result. “A revolutionary army can sometimes win by enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons.”

What is Orwell’s prognosis for the future? “All prophecies are wrong, therefore this one will be wrong, but I will take a chance and say that though the war may end quite soon or may drag on for years, it will end with Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economic zones.” In the event, Spain certainly remained a whole nation; even today calls for a separate Catalonia are heavily cracked down on by the Spanish government. He goes on to predict: “and thus we are one step nearer to the great war “against Fascism” […] which will allow Fascism, British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.” Orwell was partly right; the start of the Second World War was only two years away. However, the “British Fascism” didn’t take hold as he thought it would or as quickly as he envisaged. He predicted this oncoming British Fascism in The Road to Wigan Pier too. But that’s not to say it might not still happen.

This is a very dense and intricate piece of writing, heavily factual and insightful from the point of view of one who had been there and fought the war. It’s not an easy read, nor to be honest, is it a particularly interesting one. You get the sense that Orwell needed to get his acute experiences and memories out of his system and apply constructive reason to his material. His experiences would, of course, be worked up into Homage to Catalonia, his next book, which he would set about writing instantly and would be published the following year.