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There’s a really fantastic 6-part documentary that goes over the conflict in great detail, but to give the short version:
It failed for a multitude of reasons, but when I did my own deep dive on this, I didn’t find Anarchism itself as one of those reasons. I found that the specific time it took place, as well as the previous industrial capacity of Spain itself, were likely two of the biggest contributors.
The civil war occurred during a period when there were powerful states on the world stage, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, who were ready and willing to supply needed logistics and manpower to other right-wing states. It also happened when both of those states were not yet embroiled in their own world war, giving them the opportunity to send more resources and aid than they would’ve have been able to justify a handful of years later.
On the other hand, the Anarchists (and Liberals) of Spain had no allies on the world stage willing to help them besides some meager aid from Mexico (who lacked the ability to send airplanes or tanks), and a few secret shipments of aid from France.
The only other nation willing to get stuck in was the USSR, and they obviously only wanted to supply the marxist-leninist faction in Spain to ensure they would have control at the end of the war.
So if you consider the scenario from the Anarchist perspective, what could be done? They were fully aware that the Lenininsts would likely betray them due to what happened in the Russian Revolution, but they were also the only faction that could convince the USSR to ship desperately needed tanks, planes, artillery, firearms, medical supplies, etc, in the numbers needed.
So they had to decide; Do we attack the Leninists at the start of the war before they are equipped? That would cut off all future logistical aid and create a second front in all of the cities, probably ceasing production of the supplies they can build, supplies which are already needed to sustain the conflict with the fascists, and it would probably get the liberal government to denounce the Anarchists as well, resulting in them vs. literally everyone. It would be speed-running defeat.
Instead, they went the path they did, likely hoping for a future opportunity to come out on-top after the fascists had been defeated, instead of guaranteed defeat immediately.
The Anarchists knew this was an uneasy alliance, they knew they would be betrayed at some point, and they saw the liberal government shuffling its feet whenever they asked it for help. There was even discussion among the Anarchists on robbing the gold reserves of the Spanish national bank and buying supplies themselves, instead of relying on the liberal government to do so, but they ultimately decided not to to avoid more internal conflict after the liberal gov seemed to be following through on buying some weapons for the Anarchists. That unfortunately backfired when the government shortly after went back on their word, and instead gave all the gold to the USSR.
Even knowing that the Marxists would betray them, I don’t think they expected that to happen while the fascists were nowhere close to being defeated, as starting internal conflict would only ensure their collective defeat, but… The Marxists did it anyway, which was unexpected, and it did hasten their defeat.
The other issue was that Spain simply hadn’t developed enough military industrial capacity before the war to avoid being so reliant on foreign logistics. As General Pershing supposedly once said, “Infantry win battles, logistics win wars.” That’s ultimately why the allies were able to defeat the Axis in WWII as well, since the combined industrial and logistical capacity of the allies (especially with the introduction of the US’s industrial capacity), simply become overwhelming.
Any system or ideology in the same circumstances as the Anarchists in Spain is not going to have good odds of succeeding.
In comparison, the Russian Revolution happened when the neighboring countries who could’ve stepped in to take advantage of the conflict were already militarily depleted from WWI, so the right-wing White army was pretty much on their own, which made it much easier for the combined Anarchist/Marxist armies to defeat them. The Anarchists at that time were pretty blind-sided by the betrayal of the Leninists, since leftist back-stabbing was fairly unprecedented at that time.
I apologise, but I’m going to have to narrow this down a bit - I’m typing this in-between power failures. You know… third-world problems.
I didn’t find Anarchism itself as one of those reasons.
Of course you didn’t… anarchism itself is perfect and cannot have deap-seated theoretical flaws and contradictions that lead to failed praxis that their enemies can take advantage of. Right?
Right?
Are you telling me that the FAI ignoring the CNT’s attempts to create a banking system that would allow the agricultural collectives monetary independence from Spain’s liberal-controlled financial institutions didn’t come back to bite anarchist Catalonia in the ass?
According to Bolloten, Payne and Esenwein from “The Spanish Civil War - Revolution and Counterrevolution”
“Nor is it any wonder that when the workers in some of the collectivized plants asked Jose Tarradellas, the
left Republican councillor of finance in the regional government, for financial assistance, he attempted, according to his own testimony, “to use their predicament to capture control of the collectives.”
"Outside Catalonia, finance minister Juan Negrin, a centralist and a strong advocate of nationalization, also hoped to exploit the economic dislocation. “When the war broke out,” he told Louis Fischer, “working-men’s committees, often Anarchist, took over the factories. . . Now they have no money. They are coming to me for running expenses and for raw materials. We will take advantage of their plight to gain control of the factories.”
Seems pretty cut and dried to me how anarcho-communist orthodoxy gave the liberals an easy way to co-opt and destroy the collectives… and that’s just one glaring example I found with little trouble.
I found that the specific time it took place, as well as the previous industrial capacity of Spain itself, were likely two of the biggest contributors.
Yes. The conditions was difficult. The conditions will always be difficult and/or next-to impossible. That is not something that will ever change no matter where or when the socialist experiment takes place.
Therefore, glaring mistakes based on bad theory is something that should be avoided by dumping the bad theory, don’t you think?
The fascinating thing to me about anarcho-communists is that they fetishise the idea of a “moneyless society” to an even greater degree than even the most hardened Marxists - it’s really hard to die on a hill nobody else even wants.
Again… tankies can do this. They proved it in Mexico and northern Syria. Can anarchists? I’m not seeing it - at least not in any anarchist discourse I’ve seen or particpated in on reddit, youtube or lemmy over the last decade. In fact, doing so seems to be the furthest thing from their minds.
“Infantry win battles, logistics win wars.”
We can talk about the logistics of war and peace all day long - it’s a subject the revolution romanticisers completely ignore - but that’s an entirely different discussion.
What source mentioned that?
It’s literally there in the description - “Disillusioned by the systematic corruption of power after the Iraq War, ex-diplomat Carne Ross examines anarchism as an alternative solution to democracy. Anarchism offers a solution to the brutalities of Capitalism and the dishonesties of Democracy.”
If you are going to allow liberalism - a fundamentally anti-democratic ideology - to dictate the meaning of the term democracy to you can you truly tell me you’ve “killed the liberal inside your own head”? If you do that, why not just allow tankies - who peddle a fundamentally anti-socialist ideology - to dictate what the term socialism means to you as well?
The working class is not going to negotiate on ideas like democracy - there’s a good reason why liberalism co-opted it and turned it into an oligarchy-sustaining farce instead of simply repressing it.
Extreme suppression of Anarchists by state governments in most areas,
Face it… the CIA spent most of the (so-called) “Cold War” repressing third-world nationalism - not anarchism. And state repression cannot be blamed for the huge gulf which exists between anarchist narratives about the status quo and the wider working class.
The working class is not going to cross that gulf - anarchists are going to have to do so. And they better bring narratives that actually mean something to the working class, which anarchism has not been able to manage for a very, very long time now.
It’s a choice between going back to the drawing board, or continue going nowhere slowly.
which was only avoided by FDR’s economic reforms
So, you’re telling me the libs know how to beat the socialists? And the socialists have no way of beating their methods?
Sounds to me like that requires new modes of thinking because the old ones don’t really address the machinations of liberalism, doesn’t it?
I’m not a zealot, and Anarchism does not hold to the idea that everyone 100 years ago had everything perfectly figured out like ML’s do, it’s constantly changing and adapting as we learn what does and does not work.
Are you telling me that the FAI ignoring the CNT’s attempts to create a banking system […]
That isn’t a position I argued in favor of. The anarchists did get bit in the ass by the liberal government who still had control of the purse strings that would’ve given them more access to global trade. The 6-part documentary goes over that very situation, and even interviews the asshat who denied the Anarchists money for control.
The internal banking system doesn’t really relate to that, though, the issue was that the internationally accepted currency wasn’t under Anarchist control. So the lesson learned from that conflict is that the liberals will fuck them over just as the tankies will, but again, the specific war needs combined with the political situation of that period did not realistically allow for the Anarchists to just swiftly take those rivals out of the game.
Also, I mentioned how the CNT discussed taking control of the gold reserves by stealing it, the reasons they didn’t, and how they later regretted not doing it, which is another mistake to learn from.
That is not something that will ever change no matter where or when the socialist experiment takes place.
That’s just… Not how war works, though. You don’t think if the US had a successful Anarchist revolution in the 30’s, that it wouldn’t be in a far better position in every possible way compared to a successful revolution in say, Belgium right before WWII? The North America is geographically isolated by an ocean that makes it very difficult to invade, had access to plentiful resources, and had large industry that would make arming themselves quick and easy in comparison to Spain.
Where and when an revolution takes place, and the logistical and military ability of nearby rivals at that time, are huge impacts on its chances of success. A large part of why the 1775 US revolution had any chance of succeeding is due to Britain already being very much occupied with fighting the French, meaning they couldn’t bring the entire weight of their military and logistical might against the colonies. The US also had military aid from a friendly power will vast resources at its disposal (France). How on earth can you say things like that don’t matter? If those fortunate events and allies weren’t there, the US revolution probably would’ve failed, regardless of its ideology.
it’s really hard to die on a hill nobody else even wants.
I mentioned it as something some of them tried. There is no tenant that Anarchism must abolish money, but it’s at least on the table if the people agree to try it via consensus. If a community wants markets and money, they can stick with it if they want. It is not a hive-mind.
It’s literally there in the description
Are you dismissing that entire documentary because the person who wrote the description did a poor job of specifying what they meant by democracy? If anything, anarchism is the natural evolution of democracy; it’s basically just going an one extra step beyond democracy where communities can decide for themselves what is best for their own situational, instead of voting for someone else to decide for them.
Here’s that same documentary with a description below that simply reads “This is the BBC documentary about Carne’s life and ideas”, if that helps, I guess? I only linked to the peertube upload as I try to avoid linking to Youtube when possible.
Face it… the CIA spent most of the (so-called) “Cold War”
The first red scare happened pre-WWII, before the Cold War, before the CIA or even the OSS existed. That was when they cracked down on Anarchism hard.
This would go a whole lot easier if you were. Liberals aren’t zealots either… have you ever tried arguing with one, though? I wouldn’t recommend it - they cling to their privilege (whether real or perceived) harder than most fascists.
That isn’t a position I argued in favor of.
That doesn’t matter - it happened whether we think it was dumb or not.
You don’t think if the US had a successful Anarchist revolution in the 30’s, that it wouldn’t be in a far better position in every possible way
Absolutely not. An anarchist insurgency in 30s US of A would have ended up very much like the Spartacist uprising in Germany did - and that would happen even if it had somebody like ole’ Smedley Butler to lead it. It would have started off in a logistically worse position than the Spanish anarchists were… even if it managed to take over an entire state it would still be child’s play for the US government to isolate it economically. And even if they managed to seize a sizable gold reserve (which the Spanish anarchists failed to do) there’d be absolutely no chance of even buying anything with it from any foreign military-industrial complex thanks to the US Navy. And there’d be no question of which side the liberals would be on here, giving the anarchists absolutely no chance of playing allies off against enemies and vice versa. The fact that the liberals of Spain did not immediately take hands with Franco makes the Spanish situation somewhat unique - a situation which would absolutely not have happened in the US at any point in it’s history, including today.
How on earth can you say things like that don’t matter?
That’s not what I said. When an insurgency becomes allied to a military-industrial complex it’s only because said insurgency is a useful catspaw to said military-industrial complex. Iran does not support the resistance in Gaza and Lebanon because it actually gives a damn about the people in those two places. The French supported the US colonists because they were a useful weapon against the British, not because they gave a damn about those colonists.
Think about your scenario - an anarchist insurgency in 30s US, or even today, for that matter. Would anybody need this insurgency as a tool of disruption against the US? If the answer is yes… then there’s potential. If not…
Do not be fooled by the events of 1917 Russia - an insurgent element managing to seize a large industrial complex under those conditions in those times in that manner is probably a once-in-a-millenium event.
but it’s at least on the table if the people agree to try it via consensus.
When there’s a war going on, no… they can’t. War is not the time for pie-in-the-sky economic experiments run by people whose ideology dictates that they refuse to understand how economies work. I’d say that it’s a pretty bad idea in peacetime as well - just ask the Ukrainians about that - but that might just be me.
Are you dismissing that entire documentary because the person who wrote the description
No, I’m dismissing the documentary because I saw it years ago and it contains absolutely nothing I do not already know.
did a poor job of specifying what they meant by democracy?
The fact that they did not feel the need to specify what they meant with the term is telling in itself - ie, they used the term in the exact same way any liberal does.
instead of voting for someone else to decide for them.
So you, also, only view democracy through a liberal lens, I take it?
The first red scare happened pre-WWII, before the Cold War,
I know. During the (so-called) “Cold War,” the CIA weren’t fighting anarchism in Latin America. It wasn’t fighting anarchism in Oceania, in Africa, the middle-east or even the place they deported Emma Goldman to. They barely spent any resources repressing it in Europe.
The reason? They didn’t have to.
Something is seriously wrong with this picture… and it can’t all be explained away by state-led crackdowns during the 10s, 20s and 30s.
There’s a really fantastic 6-part documentary that goes over the conflict in great detail, but to give the short version:
It failed for a multitude of reasons, but when I did my own deep dive on this, I didn’t find Anarchism itself as one of those reasons. I found that the specific time it took place, as well as the previous industrial capacity of Spain itself, were likely two of the biggest contributors.
The civil war occurred during a period when there were powerful states on the world stage, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, who were ready and willing to supply needed logistics and manpower to other right-wing states. It also happened when both of those states were not yet embroiled in their own world war, giving them the opportunity to send more resources and aid than they would’ve have been able to justify a handful of years later.
On the other hand, the Anarchists (and Liberals) of Spain had no allies on the world stage willing to help them besides some meager aid from Mexico (who lacked the ability to send airplanes or tanks), and a few secret shipments of aid from France.
The only other nation willing to get stuck in was the USSR, and they obviously only wanted to supply the marxist-leninist faction in Spain to ensure they would have control at the end of the war.
So if you consider the scenario from the Anarchist perspective, what could be done? They were fully aware that the Lenininsts would likely betray them due to what happened in the Russian Revolution, but they were also the only faction that could convince the USSR to ship desperately needed tanks, planes, artillery, firearms, medical supplies, etc, in the numbers needed.
So they had to decide; Do we attack the Leninists at the start of the war before they are equipped? That would cut off all future logistical aid and create a second front in all of the cities, probably ceasing production of the supplies they can build, supplies which are already needed to sustain the conflict with the fascists, and it would probably get the liberal government to denounce the Anarchists as well, resulting in them vs. literally everyone. It would be speed-running defeat.
Instead, they went the path they did, likely hoping for a future opportunity to come out on-top after the fascists had been defeated, instead of guaranteed defeat immediately.
The Anarchists knew this was an uneasy alliance, they knew they would be betrayed at some point, and they saw the liberal government shuffling its feet whenever they asked it for help. There was even discussion among the Anarchists on robbing the gold reserves of the Spanish national bank and buying supplies themselves, instead of relying on the liberal government to do so, but they ultimately decided not to to avoid more internal conflict after the liberal gov seemed to be following through on buying some weapons for the Anarchists. That unfortunately backfired when the government shortly after went back on their word, and instead gave all the gold to the USSR.
Even knowing that the Marxists would betray them, I don’t think they expected that to happen while the fascists were nowhere close to being defeated, as starting internal conflict would only ensure their collective defeat, but… The Marxists did it anyway, which was unexpected, and it did hasten their defeat.
The other issue was that Spain simply hadn’t developed enough military industrial capacity before the war to avoid being so reliant on foreign logistics. As General Pershing supposedly once said, “Infantry win battles, logistics win wars.” That’s ultimately why the allies were able to defeat the Axis in WWII as well, since the combined industrial and logistical capacity of the allies (especially with the introduction of the US’s industrial capacity), simply become overwhelming.
Any system or ideology in the same circumstances as the Anarchists in Spain is not going to have good odds of succeeding.
In comparison, the Russian Revolution happened when the neighboring countries who could’ve stepped in to take advantage of the conflict were already militarily depleted from WWI, so the right-wing White army was pretty much on their own, which made it much easier for the combined Anarchist/Marxist armies to defeat them. The Anarchists at that time were pretty blind-sided by the betrayal of the Leninists, since leftist back-stabbing was fairly unprecedented at that time.
Continuing in another comment.
I apologise, but I’m going to have to narrow this down a bit - I’m typing this in-between power failures. You know… third-world problems.
Of course you didn’t… anarchism itself is perfect and cannot have deap-seated theoretical flaws and contradictions that lead to failed praxis that their enemies can take advantage of. Right?
Right?
Are you telling me that the FAI ignoring the CNT’s attempts to create a banking system that would allow the agricultural collectives monetary independence from Spain’s liberal-controlled financial institutions didn’t come back to bite anarchist Catalonia in the ass?
According to Bolloten, Payne and Esenwein from “The Spanish Civil War - Revolution and Counterrevolution”
Seems pretty cut and dried to me how anarcho-communist orthodoxy gave the liberals an easy way to co-opt and destroy the collectives… and that’s just one glaring example I found with little trouble.
Yes. The conditions was difficult. The conditions will always be difficult and/or next-to impossible. That is not something that will ever change no matter where or when the socialist experiment takes place.
Therefore, glaring mistakes based on bad theory is something that should be avoided by dumping the bad theory, don’t you think?
The fascinating thing to me about anarcho-communists is that they fetishise the idea of a “moneyless society” to an even greater degree than even the most hardened Marxists - it’s really hard to die on a hill nobody else even wants.
Again… tankies can do this. They proved it in Mexico and northern Syria. Can anarchists? I’m not seeing it - at least not in any anarchist discourse I’ve seen or particpated in on reddit, youtube or lemmy over the last decade. In fact, doing so seems to be the furthest thing from their minds.
We can talk about the logistics of war and peace all day long - it’s a subject the revolution romanticisers completely ignore - but that’s an entirely different discussion.
It’s literally there in the description - “Disillusioned by the systematic corruption of power after the Iraq War, ex-diplomat Carne Ross examines anarchism as an alternative solution to democracy. Anarchism offers a solution to the brutalities of Capitalism and the dishonesties of Democracy.”
If you are going to allow liberalism - a fundamentally anti-democratic ideology - to dictate the meaning of the term democracy to you can you truly tell me you’ve “killed the liberal inside your own head”? If you do that, why not just allow tankies - who peddle a fundamentally anti-socialist ideology - to dictate what the term socialism means to you as well?
The working class is not going to negotiate on ideas like democracy - there’s a good reason why liberalism co-opted it and turned it into an oligarchy-sustaining farce instead of simply repressing it.
Face it… the CIA spent most of the (so-called) “Cold War” repressing third-world nationalism - not anarchism. And state repression cannot be blamed for the huge gulf which exists between anarchist narratives about the status quo and the wider working class.
The working class is not going to cross that gulf - anarchists are going to have to do so. And they better bring narratives that actually mean something to the working class, which anarchism has not been able to manage for a very, very long time now.
It’s a choice between going back to the drawing board, or continue going nowhere slowly.
So, you’re telling me the libs know how to beat the socialists? And the socialists have no way of beating their methods?
Sounds to me like that requires new modes of thinking because the old ones don’t really address the machinations of liberalism, doesn’t it?
I’m not a zealot, and Anarchism does not hold to the idea that everyone 100 years ago had everything perfectly figured out like ML’s do, it’s constantly changing and adapting as we learn what does and does not work.
That isn’t a position I argued in favor of. The anarchists did get bit in the ass by the liberal government who still had control of the purse strings that would’ve given them more access to global trade. The 6-part documentary goes over that very situation, and even interviews the asshat who denied the Anarchists money for control.
The internal banking system doesn’t really relate to that, though, the issue was that the internationally accepted currency wasn’t under Anarchist control. So the lesson learned from that conflict is that the liberals will fuck them over just as the tankies will, but again, the specific war needs combined with the political situation of that period did not realistically allow for the Anarchists to just swiftly take those rivals out of the game.
Also, I mentioned how the CNT discussed taking control of the gold reserves by stealing it, the reasons they didn’t, and how they later regretted not doing it, which is another mistake to learn from.
That’s just… Not how war works, though. You don’t think if the US had a successful Anarchist revolution in the 30’s, that it wouldn’t be in a far better position in every possible way compared to a successful revolution in say, Belgium right before WWII? The North America is geographically isolated by an ocean that makes it very difficult to invade, had access to plentiful resources, and had large industry that would make arming themselves quick and easy in comparison to Spain.
Where and when an revolution takes place, and the logistical and military ability of nearby rivals at that time, are huge impacts on its chances of success. A large part of why the 1775 US revolution had any chance of succeeding is due to Britain already being very much occupied with fighting the French, meaning they couldn’t bring the entire weight of their military and logistical might against the colonies. The US also had military aid from a friendly power will vast resources at its disposal (France). How on earth can you say things like that don’t matter? If those fortunate events and allies weren’t there, the US revolution probably would’ve failed, regardless of its ideology.
I mentioned it as something some of them tried. There is no tenant that Anarchism must abolish money, but it’s at least on the table if the people agree to try it via consensus. If a community wants markets and money, they can stick with it if they want. It is not a hive-mind.
Are you dismissing that entire documentary because the person who wrote the description did a poor job of specifying what they meant by democracy? If anything, anarchism is the natural evolution of democracy; it’s basically just going an one extra step beyond democracy where communities can decide for themselves what is best for their own situational, instead of voting for someone else to decide for them.
Here’s that same documentary with a description below that simply reads “This is the BBC documentary about Carne’s life and ideas”, if that helps, I guess? I only linked to the peertube upload as I try to avoid linking to Youtube when possible.
The first red scare happened pre-WWII, before the Cold War, before the CIA or even the OSS existed. That was when they cracked down on Anarchism hard.
This would go a whole lot easier if you were. Liberals aren’t zealots either… have you ever tried arguing with one, though? I wouldn’t recommend it - they cling to their privilege (whether real or perceived) harder than most fascists.
That doesn’t matter - it happened whether we think it was dumb or not.
Absolutely not. An anarchist insurgency in 30s US of A would have ended up very much like the Spartacist uprising in Germany did - and that would happen even if it had somebody like ole’ Smedley Butler to lead it. It would have started off in a logistically worse position than the Spanish anarchists were… even if it managed to take over an entire state it would still be child’s play for the US government to isolate it economically. And even if they managed to seize a sizable gold reserve (which the Spanish anarchists failed to do) there’d be absolutely no chance of even buying anything with it from any foreign military-industrial complex thanks to the US Navy. And there’d be no question of which side the liberals would be on here, giving the anarchists absolutely no chance of playing allies off against enemies and vice versa. The fact that the liberals of Spain did not immediately take hands with Franco makes the Spanish situation somewhat unique - a situation which would absolutely not have happened in the US at any point in it’s history, including today.
That’s not what I said. When an insurgency becomes allied to a military-industrial complex it’s only because said insurgency is a useful catspaw to said military-industrial complex. Iran does not support the resistance in Gaza and Lebanon because it actually gives a damn about the people in those two places. The French supported the US colonists because they were a useful weapon against the British, not because they gave a damn about those colonists.
Think about your scenario - an anarchist insurgency in 30s US, or even today, for that matter. Would anybody need this insurgency as a tool of disruption against the US? If the answer is yes… then there’s potential. If not…
Do not be fooled by the events of 1917 Russia - an insurgent element managing to seize a large industrial complex under those conditions in those times in that manner is probably a once-in-a-millenium event.
When there’s a war going on, no… they can’t. War is not the time for pie-in-the-sky economic experiments run by people whose ideology dictates that they refuse to understand how economies work. I’d say that it’s a pretty bad idea in peacetime as well - just ask the Ukrainians about that - but that might just be me.
No, I’m dismissing the documentary because I saw it years ago and it contains absolutely nothing I do not already know.
The fact that they did not feel the need to specify what they meant with the term is telling in itself - ie, they used the term in the exact same way any liberal does.
So you, also, only view democracy through a liberal lens, I take it?
I know. During the (so-called) “Cold War,” the CIA weren’t fighting anarchism in Latin America. It wasn’t fighting anarchism in Oceania, in Africa, the middle-east or even the place they deported Emma Goldman to. They barely spent any resources repressing it in Europe.
The reason? They didn’t have to.
Something is seriously wrong with this picture… and it can’t all be explained away by state-led crackdowns during the 10s, 20s and 30s.