- Miners Against Fascism by Hywel Francis, Lawrence & Wishart: 1984.
By a strange twist of fate the publication of Miners Against Fascism coincided with the start of the 1984 miners’ strike, when Welsh miners once again found themselves in the forefront of working class struggle. This alone should generate interest in Francis’s detailed history of Welsh miner volunteers for the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War.
What makes this whole episode instructive as well as the light it sheds on the politics of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who then and now exercise some leadership in the Welsh coalfield.
Francis states that the aim of the book is ‘to explain the social and political reasons why Wales, and especially its miners, responded in the way it did to the struggle against fascism in Spain in the 1930’s.’ And, in many ways, this is a book that Francis is uniquely suited to write. He grew up in one of those South Wales valleys where Communism was thought to be hereditary. His father was the late miners leader Dai Francis, and such legendary figures as Will Paynter and Jack Jones were well known to him. Miners Against Fascism draws heavily upon this background and on a mass of oral evidence from those who participated in the Spanish Civil War and the class struggles in the South Wales coalfield which preceded it.
Fifty years ago the South Wales coalfield provided no less than 118 ‘volunteers for liberty’. These Welsh miners formed one of the biggest contingents within the British Battalions of the International Brigades. One South Wales valley alone—the Rhondda—provided more volunteers than the combined total of miners from the English coalfields.
Why did so many volunteer? Francis puts forward two main reasons. First, it was an extension of the unique ‘extra-parliamentary’ form of class struggles which re-emerged in South Wales in the inter-war period. Secondly, it was an expression of a particular form of internationalism, a ‘proletarian internationalism’.
It must be said that the first part of Francis’s case is the strongest. The miners, betrayed by the TUC leaders in 1926, were left to fight on alone. The bosses employed starvation tactics. Police were drafted into South Wales to physically crush the resistance. And although the miners were eventually defeated, as Francis says the ‘collective coalfield experience was a salutary one for many’.
While the more general experience of the defeat was demoralising, the bitter struggles of the period served to heighten the political consciousness of a significant minority of South Wales miners. The CPGB managed to capture the best of these militants.
The real value of Francis’s book lies in the detail he paints of the class struggle in the valleys in this period. But his inability or unwillingness to break with Stalinism blinds him to the treacherous role played by the CPGB during these years.
In the late 1920’s the CPGB, faithfully parroting Stalin’s ‘Third Period’ class against class line, launched a bitter attack on the Labour Party and the leadership of the South Wales Miners’ Federation (SWMF), denouncing both as social fascists. As a result, the CP succeeded in actually marginalising itself.
Francis recognises that this policy proved disastrous but believes that ‘out of the errors of this sectarianism grew a united front strategy which anticipated later national and international Communist policy changes.’ This is nothing short of disingenuous. The victory of fascism in Germany (itself partly due to Stalin’s criminal ‘social fascist’ policy) caused the Comintern to perform a sharp turn towards right opportunism. For Stalin, the fight against fascism now required not simply a united front of fighting workers’ organisations (previously dubbed ‘social fascist’) including the reformists, but the ‘democratic wing’ of the bourgeoisie itself. This was called the Popular Front. The CPGB was only required to rubber stamp this change of line.
In South Wales each and every ruling class attack was interpreted by the CPGB as further evidence of ‘creeping’ state fascism. This necessitated the defence of ‘democracy’ (of the bourgeois kind) as a lesser evil. For the party, ‘Revolution Now!’ was seen to be tactically infantile and politically indulgent’.
Moreover, for the Stalinists, any working class activity which threatened the continuation of the Popular Front was ‘tactically inevitable’. Within the rank and file of the SWMF there was strong support for the policy of ‘strikes for Spain’ and against the governments policy of non-intervention. But the Stalinists on the Executive of the SWMF believed that ‘limited and realistic demands in support of the Spanish Republic with only moral and organisational pressure being used, would be the best way of securing maximum results.’
While in Spain the Popular Front had tragic and well known consequences, in South Wales it proved no less effective in strangling working class resistance under the banner of ‘democracy’.
What of Francis’s claim that the miners who volunteered for Spain exhibited ‘proletarian internationalism’? The overwhelming majority of South Wales miners who fought in Spain were members of the CPGB who saw the Spanish Civil War as a straightforward defence of bourgeois democracy and Spain’s ‘national rights’. In the words of one of them, ‘The major thing was the defeat of the rebellion and to reject and counter Fascist Germany’s and Fascist Italy’s attempt to encircle France and Britain and go forward with their conquest of Europe’. This social chauvinism was constantly flogged by the CPGB. In so far as ‘proletarian Internationalism’ existed in South Wales it was despite the CPGB, not because of it.
Miners Against Fascism is a book of uneven merit. It draws its strengths from Francis’s closeness to those who created the history it explores; it is ‘history from below’. As an account of the development of political consciousness within the South Wales coalfield in the twenties and thirties it is a valuable study, but Francis’s blindness to the CPGB’s crimes limit its educational usefulness in training a new generation of militants.
