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New Statesman 'books that changed my life'
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Penguin)
Peter Hain
Aged eighteen going on nineteen, politics was already in my blood after a childhood in South Africa where my parents had been jailed and banned from political activity. Finally we were forced into exile in Britain in 1966, when I was sixteen.
But my belief in socialism really crystallised several years later - around 1968-69 - the years of the Paris uprising, of student agitation throughout Europe and the US, of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and of anti-Vietnam War protests.
A 'new left' had emerged, iconoclastic and just as opposed to capitalism as to Stalinism: 'neither Washington or Moscow', as the slogan went. A 'bottom up' socialism rather than a 'top down' one, popular participation not state bureaucracy, workers control not nationalisation - these were the watchwords.
Activists like me in their late teens could immerse ourselves in an exciting ferment of new and radical ideas shaped by the passionate debate in teach-ins, conferences, demonstrations and sit-ins.
I was soon to adapt non-violent direct action - from student sit-ins like at Hornsey College of Art, worker occupations, and squats in empty houses - to the anti-apartheid struggle, leading the Stop The Tour protests of 1969-70 which disrupted all-white South African sports tours and isolated the country from international sport.
I also listened to arguments between marxists and anarchists, socialists and liberals, and I read the burgeoning literature of the contemporary new left voraciously : Noam Chomsky, E P Thompson, Raymond Williams, Ralph Miliband, and many more writers and pamphleteers.
But it was George Orwell, a writer of the left from a different era that seemed to set all this in a more grounded, more mature, and historic perspective in Homage to Catalonia.
I recall it less as the classic it was on the Spanish Civil war, and more as a personal discovery by Orwell of how his democratic socialist instincts were sharpened and shaped by the buffeting and swirl of the ideological clashes and bitter struggles within the inspirational resistance to Franco's fascism in Spain.
Orwell describes how the left which led this resistance was typically divided between anarchists, syndicalists, communists, trotskyists and socialists. As he picked his way through the heroism and the horror, the passion and the ulterior purposes of the these competing groups, he experienced both all that is best, and all worst, about the left.
The best was the extraordinary commitment and dedication to beat Franco. The volunteers who joined the international brigades made sacrifices for the cause, poorly trained yet fighting and often dying in a foreign land, for their ant-fascist beliefs. The Spanish left lit a fervent flame for community socialism with their agricultural co-operatives and worker collectives, showing incredible bravery in battle.
The worst was the bitter sectarianism between communists, trotskyists and anarchists, and how this crippled the overall resistance, their own ideological objectives and party interests thwarting the left unity desperately necessary to defeat the enemy. In the case of the communists, their continuing allegiance to Moscow when Stalin and Hitler were manoeuvring towards a pact, led to betrayals of fellow members of the resistance.
Trotskyists in some ways came out better in Orwell's eyes, though they too were on the receiving end of his penetrating criticism that relied not so much on invective as a bluntness of style which I found refreshing. Orwell was never one for bullshit - and the left would be a lot healthier if his writ even today ran right across its politics.
He was contemptuous of posturing, of striking up positions so as to be seen to follow whatever was deemed the acceptable 'line'. Equally he had no time for adventurism or the tendency of the Trots both in Spain at the time and contemporarily to pose ' transitional demands' incapable of being satisfied but which, from their point of view, would 'expose' left wing opponents as betraying the faith.
However I remember Homage to Catalonia, not as some dry textbook, but instead a gripping narrative, climaxing in the internecine fire fight in Barcelona where the left helped defeat itself, and thereby opened the door to Franco's murderous victory and equally murderous rule.
Like Orwell's, my socialism was, and remains, 'libertarian' rather than 'statist'. I continue to believe that extra parliamentary action is a vital force for change, which can prod and thereby complement progressive government.
So, Orwell's book not so much changed my life, as helped define an enduring set of beliefs that have guided more than forty years of political life, both outside and inside government.
New Statesman, 19 January 2009
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