The Spanish Civil War - pg. 126

In their own countries some young middle-class idealists
were ill at ease with workers, and perhaps wary of the
way their earnest social pot-holing could risk derision. Like
Marx before them, they had often despaired of England's
'bourgeois' proletariat. The Spanish proletariat, on the other
hand, had never respected or aped their social superiors.
Even in the eighteenth century, foreign travelers were
amazed at the cavalier way Spanish servants and labourers
treated their aristocracy. Also, the fact that the Andalucian
peasant had never been crushed by the seizure of the common
land or contained by religion, meant that the Spanish working
class could be romanticized in a way which their own working-class
seemed tot thwart. Consequently, the Spanish conflict offered
Anglo-Saxon intellectuals a breath of pure and unclosed emotion
in comparison to the suffocating a privileged identity in the mass
struggle made many of these intellectuals ideal recruits for communist
authority.