Gross, this guy likes neocons.

How is 1 a half truth? It seems we agree, the western bourgeoisie democracies failed to provide aid to the Republicans while the fascists did. I guess I didn’t mention that the soviets gave aid, but not as much as the fascists so they had the advantage on that front.

Why would you say the civil war was lost then? I agree the fascist aid wasn’t decisive, and the Republicans could win in spite of it, but they didn’t. It wasn’t because the communist turned on the anarchists, the republicans were losing the war prior to that. The anarchists had ample time and supplies to martial an army and relieve Madrid but they never did, they were content to hold there lines in aragon and wait for Franco to mop up the basque country before turning on them because the fundamental military issue of anarchism, no one is going to vote to go on the offensive.

I’m not a tankie, I just recognize the military weakness of the anarchist cause, just as I recognize the communist weakness of devolving power. I recognize anarchists can’t win wars and communists can’t give up power once the war is won. History has shown both to be true in every scenario its come up. Understanding the weaknesses of both causes is necessary if we want to achieve liberation from oppression and exploitation.

Authoritarians tend to hate when people don’t fall in line.

Yeah, the meme is accurate. After the right has been defeated the anarchists and authoritarians will turn on each other, both sides understand this. The blacks didn’t defeat the reds because of lack of will or a naive commitment to left unity, they lost because they lacked the discipline and organizational capacity to win a civil war.

“I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

This quote goes hard, I love it. Onto the reading list it goes

I wouldn’t recommend reading anything from orwell personally. Dude was a cop and a hitler apologist. I prefer isaac asimov’s review of 1984.

In this chapter, I will discuss the book, but first: Who was Blair/Orwell and why was the book written?

Blair was born in 1903 into the status of a British gentleman. His father was in the Indian civil service and Blair himself lived the life of a British Imperial official. He went to Eton, served in Burma, and so on. However, he lacked the money to be an English gentleman to the full. Then, too, he didn’t want to spend his time at dull desk jobs; he wanted to be a writer. Thirdly, he felt guilty about his status in the upper class. So he did in the late 1920s what so many well-to-do American young people in the 1960s did. In short, he became what we would have called a ‘hippie’ at a later time. He lived under slum conditions in London and Paris, consorted with and identified with slum dwellers and vagrants, managed to ease his conscience and, at the same time, to gather material for his earliest books.

He also turned left wing and became a socialist, fighting with the loyalists in Spain in the 1930s. There he found himself caught up in the sectarian struggles between the various left-wing factions, and since he believed in a gentlemanly English form of socialism, he was inevitably on the losing side. Opposed to him were passionate Spanish anarchists, syndicalists, and communists, who bitterly resented the fact that the necessities of fighting the Franco fascists got in the way of their fighting each other. The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed

From then on, to the end of his life, he carried on a private literary war with the communists, determined to win in words the battle he had lost in action.*

*And he would be heavily propped up as an author by the CIA for doing so:

George Orwell’s novella remains a set book on school curriculums … the movie was funded by America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

The truth about the CIA’s involvement was kept hidden for 20 years until, in 1974, Everette Howard Hunt revealed the story in his book Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent. ]

• Martin Chilton. (2016). How the CIA brought Animal Farm to the screen

During World War II, in which he was rejected for military service, he was associated with the left wing of the British Labour party, but didn’t much sympathise with their views, for even their reckless version of socialism seemed too well organised for him.

He wasn’t much affected, apparently, by the Nazi brand of totalitarianism, for there was no room within him except for his private war with Stalinist communism. Consequently, when Great Britain was fighting for its life against Nazism, and the Soviet Union fought as an ally in the struggle and contributed rather more than its share in lives lost and in resolute courage, Orwell wrote Animal Farm which was a satire of the Russian Revolution and what followed, picturing it in terms of a revolt of barnyard animals against human masters.

This would make him a bit of a hypocrite in that regard, no? Perhaps a bit of projection happening?

Went through the Wikipedia for it and read appendix 6. I still stand by my opinion that the anarchists were doomed by either fascist or communist hands due to there lack of discipline. Yeah everyone was aligned against the anarchists, but everyone was aligned against the bolsheviks in 1917 and they were still able to win a civil war and establish a government.

Most of the appendix I read was litigating the conflicts in Barcelona in May and how the communist press distorted and lied about what happened. I’m willing to accept the communists did a coup and tried to cover it up and blame it on the POUM. The question is whether that was the right strategic move given the circumstances, and Orwell recognizes this:

Of course it is arguable that the C.N.T. workers ought to have handed over the Telephone Exchange without protest. One’s opinion here will be governed by one’s attitude on the question of centralized government and working-class control.

And elsewhere he emphasizes the difference between communists and anarchists:

So, roughly speaking, the alignment of forces was this. On the one side the C.N.T.-F.A.I., the P.O.U.M., and a section of the Socialists, standing for workers’ control: on the other side the Right-wing Socialists, Liberals, and Communists, standing for centralized government and a militarized army.

In a war you need centralized military control to win, and war has never been won without a commander and a hierarchy below them controlling the troops. Orwell seems to be of the mind that a revolutionary discipline can be achieved through a sincere belief for a cause. This makes sense for a foreign volunteer who signed up for there belief in socialism, but your average person isn’t motivated enough by ideology to voluntarily risk there life.

This is shown by the anarchists unwillingness to relieve Madrid. By the time of the POUM purge the Republicans were losing the war. What needed to be done was a mass conscription drive and then a push to relieve Madrid. The anarchists couldn’t do that because conscription was authoritarian and a democratic militia is never going to vote to leave there defensive lines and go on the offensive as that would mean more danger and casualties. So they were content to man the front in aragon and not much else. Orwells account shows this.

I share Orwells love for the worker control and true democracy of Barcelona during the civil war, but I don’t think that system can survive the realities of a civil war. I’d love to be proven wrong but I haven’t found any evidence to the contrary. If you have one please let me know, it’d restore my faith in the ability of man to overcome oppression.

Most people who call themselves Marxists haven’t read more than quotes of his work.

I do, on my rifle. Now do us both a favor and fuck off, tankie scum.

Oh, look… a tankie with a self-portrait!

It’s all larping until it isn’t. The tavern discussions were much like this when our great great grandfathers were talking.

Granted there is no path forward right now, to improvement. But when there is, many will think of what was said here, or elsewhere, and it will influence some. Just like yesteryear.

Thanks! I wanted to add this but didn’t find it in my collection

There’s a reason our anarchist instance has so many folks with adhd and autism. We even have a unique flair for either for people like me who aren’t afraid of being labeled.

Haven’t broken enough expensive-looking stuff yet, clearly!

anarchism is a bit different than breaking things…

If you go back to the Spanish Civil War or the French Revolution, or you look to modern anarchist movements in capitalist states in the Americas and the Pacific Rim?

Anarchist resistance efforts are most successful at spontaneous work stoppages and radical efforts at sabotage. But they’re awful at coordinating across wide areas, resisting infiltration, or leveraging economies of scale to expand industrial operations.

Anarchists aren’t allows just breaking things. I regularly work with a mix of groups in my local Food Not Bombs chapter. But raising funds, organizing a reliable workforce, and expanding the enterprise is extraordinarily difficult when its just spontaneous organization.

authoritarianism

I see the term kicked around. But it tends to be interpreted as “authority I disagree with” which can mean just about anything depending on the listener.

Conservatives have gleefully used the term in their crusade to dissolve consumer protections, to wage war on civil groups, and to persecute minorities under the banner of “anti-DEI”.

if we only cared about what succeeds we’d all be deliriously happy with capitalism

Capitalist growth drive contains the seeds of its own destruction. We’re seeing that play out with Trump’s tariffs, Boeing’s bankruptcies, and the failure of a slew of liberal institutions throughout the NATO block.

But its naive to conclude the failure of capitalism - or “authoritarianism” generally speaking - is just bureaucracy writ large. At some point, you need a new orthodoxy to organize around. It can’t just be vibes based individualism that we’re all gambling on spontaneously congeling around a better system of interaction.

Depends on your metric of success. By my metrics they are abysmal failures.