Land and Freedom
Directed by Ken Loach
Showing at Dendy Newtown and other cinemas from mid-December
Reviewed by Peter Boyle The Spanish Civil War of 1936-38 was one of the great historical events in the 20th century. It was built upon great heroism and sacrifice on the part of Spanish workers and peasants, and inspired a generation of socialists and democrats in Europe, some of whom gave their lives as volunteers in the fight against Franco's fascists. Ken Loach's Land and Freedom is based on the story of one of those volunteers, a young unemployed British worker, David, who goes to fight in Spain. Although David is a member of the British Communist Party he ends up serving in a militia unit organised by the Workers Party of Marxist Unity (POUM). He witnesses first hand the social revolution taking place in the countryside where poor peasants have seized the land from their landlords. But when he is injured he is sent back to Barcelona. While David is in Barcelona, the Stalinist Spanish Communist Party (PCE, by then a powerful partner in the Popular Front government of Republican Spain) attacks the telephone exchange which is run by workers in the anarcho-syndicalist union, the CNT. As a CP member he is conscripted into this provocation but in the process comes to realise the counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinists. David tears up his Communist Party card and returns to his POUM militia unit at the front as the Stalinists begin their systematic repression of their former allies against Franco. Before long the battle-scarred militia unit is violently dispersed by well-armed troops of the "Popular Army" led and armed by the Stalinists. When Land and Freedom was released in Spain earlier this year, veterans of the revolution and a new generation of militants flocked to see it. A fierce debate erupted between Stalinists and survivors of Stalinist repression. In Britain, Land and Freedom is proving to be Loach's most popular film. The Stalinist Morning Star, however, resurrected the slander that the brutal repression of the POUM and the anarcho-syndicalists was justified because these forces were a "fifth column" for the fascists. The POUMists were branded by the Stalinists as "Trotsky-fascists", a fantastic and bizarre term coined in the 1930s show trials in Moscow, where former leaders of the Bolshevik Party were sentenced to death on trumped up treason charges. The POUMists, like most victims of the Moscow trials, were neither Trotskyists nor fascist agents. Between 1928 and 1934 Stalin had directed Communist parties around the world to spurn any united front work with other working class parties. This policy had disastrous consequences for the working class in Germany where the CP refused to work with the social democrats against the Nazis. In 1935, after the rise to power of Hitler and the annihilation of the German CP, Stalin did an about turn and CPs were instructed to try to enter alliances with "democratic" capitalist parties. The Spanish workers became victims of this policy. When General Francisco Franco launched his fascist uprising in July 1936, the Popular Front government sought a compromise. In response, but hundreds of thousands of workers took to the streets of Madrid crying "Treason!" and demanding arms. Weapons were reluctantly distributed to workers who then began to take real power around the country. The British writer George Orwell (who, like David in Land and Freedom, served with the POUM militia on the Aragon front in 1937) captured the heroism of the Spanish workers in Homage to Catalonia: "It was the kind of effort that could probably only be made by people who were fighting with a revolutionary intention — i.e. believed they were fighting for something better than the status quo. In the various centres of revolt it is thought that 3000 people died in the streets in a single day. Men and women armed only with sticks of dynamite rushed across the open squares and stormed stone buildings held by trained soldiers with machine-guns. Machine-gun nests that the fascists had placed at strategic spots were smashed by rushing taxis at 60 miles an hour." Workers took over the factories, peasants seized the land, and trade unions and revolutionary parties built militias to fight the fascists. The Stalinists insisted that the revolution had to keep the support of Spanish capitalists. Capitalist property had to be protected, they argued, so as not to frighten off support for the Republican side from the governments of Britain, France and the US. But the Spanish capitalists were already on the side of Franco and no help came from these "democratic" capitalist governments while Hitler armed Franco. Even the Blum popular front government in France, supported by the French CP, refused to help. Stalin sent arms to Spain but these were only issued to units controlled by the PCE while poorly armed CNT and POUM militias held the front against the fascists. Meanwhile the PCE, assisted by secret police sent from Russia, slandered the other left parties and prepared their suppression. Those who wanted to get rid of the capitalist order were accused of sabotaging the war against the fascists. But in the name of preserving the capitalist order the Popular Front government refused to take two steps that could have helped defeat the fascists:
- They refused to support liberation of the Spanish colonies, especially Morocco where the fascists had their stronghold — a move that could have opened a front in Franco's rear.
- They refused to legalise the peasants' land seizures — which could have stirred up even more revolt in the territory controlled by the fascists.