The OP in these comments saying that didn’t even know that communism is by definition stateless and yet Cowbee is in here writing full-blown essays on the different understandings of the definition of communism per ideological position, including slippery ones that require a lot of reading such as communization theory, and you’ve got me making references to primary sources on Nestor Makhno’s record and the governmental structure of the Generalitat of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (albeit oblique references.)
But sure, it’s those darn MLs are the ones who can’t read.
Edit:
Oh god, they just said that my ~500 word comment is me writing “a book”. Please, that’s 2 minutes of reading at an average reading speed. Don’t say these sorts of things to me - it’s just baiting me into insulting you if you do 😭😭
Oh god, they just said that my ~500 word comment is me writing “a book”. Please, that’s 2 minutes of reading at an average reading speed. Don’t say these sorts of things to me - it’s just baiting me into insulting you if you do 😭😭
When you’re used to comments that are just a few lines, your multi-paragraph comment is like a book.
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Nevertheless, your comments here are fantastic, as always, especially your points on the semi-state nature of the tactics practically employed by the Spanish anarchists.
Honesty, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants in this.
That excerpt doesn’t capture the half of it imo. For example, there were attempts to nationalize the telecommunications industry in Barcelona. The Generalitat conducted a census of the industry and, although the results were incomplete, there were hundreds of companies operating. Just in Barcelona. (I can’t remember if it was over 300 or over 500, but the details don’t really matter.)
Obviously, especially in war time (and a civil war to boot), such critical infrastructure needs to be secured. This is straight up non-negotiable imo (putting aside the matter of the May Days for brevity here). I might be more sympathetic to other anarchist arguments but in these matters, you simply must seize and nationalize infrastructure and to do that you need a state, there’s just no other way around it.
Also this quote doesn’t even address the issues of military discipline, which was atrocious amongst the Republic forces although Jorjor Well, of all people (lol), happens to discuss this.
There were major issues in the Spanish Republic and I’m loath to pin its failure on one single matter however Catalonia and the surrounding regions that were held by the republic were the most economically productive in Spain, although critically they were almost always characterized by smallhold factories and production by small companies (think petit-bourgeois cobblers or tailors or very small factories that produced things like candles rather than big industrial factories like existed in Britain.) This made it virtually impossible to manage the economy and production well, especially for a revolutionary government, and it was well suited to sabotage and reactionaries doing what they do.
Due to the political ideology of the CNT/FAI they didn’t go nearly as hard on liquidating these smallhold companies and organizing a necessarily ruthless program of nationalization, much to the detriment of the war effort. On top of that you had classic trade union consciousness rearing its ugly head, given the nature of economic organization there, and so you have things like an hours-long debate in the government because the glassworkers’ union was demanding that recycling efforts were ceased so that artificial demand could be induced to keep glassworkers employed.
The government was jammed up for hours because glassworkers wanted to smash bottles and jars to create more work for themselves while the fascist forces were nipping at their heels the whole time. I’m still astounded by this, honestly, and we all know the consequences that poor organizing had on Spain and more broadly for Europe (not to mention WWII and, of course, Morocco.)
If you get me talking about this long enough I end up getting legitimately angry for how this incredibly rare opportunity got pissed up the wall.
Absolutely, 100%. I’m of the side that believes that practice informed them the necessity of discipline and organization, which is why the level of organization they did develop was a product of sheer practicality. Had they continued to develop and learn, it likely would have looked similar to the soviet system, but sheer unseriousness held them back.
What is that an excerpt from? It looks interesting!
This is from the first volume of Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War by Robert Alexander. It’s the most comprehensive assessment of the economy of Revolutionary Catalonia in Parts 3 & 4 that I’ve ever encountered.
Alexander is a really interesting one - a Trot and a Lovestonite who worked closely with the US State Department, a lifelong member of the CFR, did a lot of work for the AFL-CIA, was advisor to JFK and helped bring about the Alliance for Progress. But his historical scholarship is good, albeit very anticommunist (surprise!) and he’s naturally very sympathetic towards the anarchists in the SCW given that the Trots and the anarchists were in close alignment there.
Interesting, I’ll have to give it a look, thanks! And yea, if we limited ourselves purely to pro-communist historians then we’d unfortunately be lacking in English material.
Text of image, highlighted parts have been bolded.
Some of the lessons, which the CNT leadership had drawn from the experience of the year and a half following the spontaneous seizure by the workers and peasants of a large part of the economy of Republican Spain, are clear. It concluded obviously that some kind of general direction and planning were needed in the CNT economy. They concluded that some facility under CNT control was needed to provide for the financial needs of the several thousand collectives. It had come to feel that within the collectives, as well as among them, there was need for instruments to enforce labor discipline. There was need, they concluded, to standardize the social security aspects of the system of collectives, in so far as possible without the interference of the state.
Missing from the resolutions of the economic plenum were some of the traditional beliefs of the Spanish anarchists. Gone was the insistence on the complete autonomy of every unit of the libertarian economy. Gone was the trust in spontaneous solidarity, both among the workers within each collective and among all of the collectives, as being sufficient to assure the smooth functioning of the system as a whole. The decisions of the economic plenum, had the Civil War been won and the anarchists been in a position to carry out the decisions of January 1938, would almost certainly have resulted in a degree of bureaucracy in the anarchist economy which they had always abhorred, and before the War had always tried to avoid in practice within the CNT and its affiliated organizations. One can only speculate on whether such modifications in anarchist doctrine were the inevitable result of trying to run a large part of a more or less modern economy or were the consequence of a group of people for the first time in their lives having considerable power, liking it, and seeking to expand it.
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This is the hallmark of the chronically online western dilettante “anarchist” mentality.
You cannot achieve statelessness in a material sense if the world is an assortment of states. What do you imagine happening? A country like the USSR just declares statelessness, dissolves the government, and no longer administers its territory while at every border is a state run by capitalists who would immediately annex territory?
That’s no way to run a socialist revolution.
Even by your own definition of a state, the actually existing examples of anarchism in history met that definition - Revolutionary Catalonia literally had customs houses and strictly controlled their borders, the Makhnovshchina administered and defended its territory while imposing the will of the government over that territorial claim. (I’m not going to discuss AANES since they aren’t even socialist by their very constitution and I’m not gonna entertain idealist Orientalist nonsense by discussing it and as for MAREZ they openly reject the label of anarchism so out of respect for them I’m not going to lump them into the anarchist category but, if someone were to, they would still meet that definition.)
That leaves Freetown Christiania which enforces a drug policy over its borders (enough said) and KPAM, and we both know that you haven’t done anywhere near enough reading to even start to discuss that example.
So why is it that the anarchists who have attempted socialist revolutions recognize the necessity of state apparatuses and territorial borders (i.e. the existence of the state) and yet you do not? What do the anarchists who have actually put the hard work in to advance their political project understand about the material conditions of reality that you do not?
I am a dialectal materialist. My position is that you cannot just dissolve a state by pressing the button labeled “statelessness” and that it’s not possible to achieve a full moneyless, classless, stateless society until the contradictions that give rise to these phenomena have been resolved; capitalism didn’t displace feudalism until the contradictions of feudalism were surpassed by centuries of development of the material conditions (and feudalism itself only ended in 2008 btw) so obviously it’s naive to argue from a position that countries that only existed for lean than a century and achieved socialism (or at least made major strides in achieving socialism) while being beset at all sides by war, subversion, and gray zone warfare at the hands of reactionaries should be able to just press the communism button immediately. But if that really is the position you’re going to be arguing from then perhaps you should be asking yourself why actually existing anarchist projects never achieved socialism, let alone anarcho-communism and the statelessness that is implied therein.
I can tell you two things about this though:
Following this thread until you reach the conclusion will be where you discover that you are no longer an anarchist, as long as you step out of the axioms and into matters of history.
You and I both believe in the idea of the withering away of the state already, although I doubt you would admit that openly and it’s likely that you haven’t even admitted it to yourself yet; the only difference between you and I on this matter is that we disagree on the timeframe that this takes place within.
I can go beat for beat on this but trust me when I say that you’re talking to a person who was a committed anarchist likely longer than you’ve been an adult for and we’re gonna do the “guac is extra” routine if it gets that far in the discussion.
Man wrote a book for me, so I’m actually going to stop and read it, then edit this comment later (=
Oh yea, my idea is that people will fight for their own self-interest, obviously. So if I design an uh…“living package” that is minimally expensive, and makes you not-dependent on outside factors for your basic survival, encourage trade between communities, an ethical system that means those who seek to exploit or subvert this new movement, get shunned (as all have to agree to a set of ethical terms, and they will see how those working against this system will go against their own self-interest).
I have a lot of kinks to work out there, in free time. I need to buy and test a “living kit”, and stick to it. This needs to be a start to something bigger. As for how I plan to deal with violent outside interference, a good part of the plan is that I would be sapping those outside, malevolent forces of their power, by denying them subjects. The movement would basically by leaderless, and based on economics by the time it takes off, and trying to regulate it, would draw aggro, and drain support away from The Powers That Be.
To make things even more interesting, these communities would be able to operate independently by design, so violence against them would be quite hard (good luck cutting supply lines, electricity, destroying food). If I have plans other than hoping people organize to defend themselves, I am sure as fuck not revealing them.
I’m not baiting you into fedposting and I reject it entirely but it is possible to make references to historical examples or to talk in hypotheticals without signing your name to it, for example, after mentioning what you have then following up by saying “I’ve heard that the Venezuelan Colectivos are armed and trained to act as a community self-defense force so it will be interesting to see how effective they are and what can be learned from their model of community self-defense” - you aren’t saying “we should do this” or “I’m forming this myself where I live” but the allusion is enough to gesture at an example without getting yourself dragged before a court, that is assuming you even want to discuss something like this publicly online in at all. It’s easy enough to read between the lines but also you have boatloads of plausible deniability if you ever had to account for posting a comment like that. OpSec is always priority.
I get what you’re saying about draining away the power from capitalisms and/or statism but my question is - what has happened to every utopian commune to ever exist? Either they pose a threat and they get taken down (and it’s not like any commune could resist against the forces of a power like the US military) or they peter out.
In my opinion what you’ve described is a way of building the new world within the shell of the old, except with extra steps. This is going to come off as uncharitable but this is the exact trajectory that Revolutionary Catalonia took in terms of defending the revolution - they started largely with very classic anarchist-ish policy (including economic policy) and over time the issues with public safety, a mafia-like org holding too much power as a sort of shadow state, labor discipline and economic productivity, attempts to organize production and logistics etc. all led them to start reinventing the Bolshevik wheel. In a smaller, shorter way (that has much less in terms of documentation) this is also the trajectory that the Makhnovshchina took as well.
You’ve also never seen a world without the United States, whomst spends 60% of the world’s military budget and has financed 100000000 coups
Until all capitalists are destroyed and every single human endeavor on Earth is being democratically directed by the working class, a state will have to exist to wage class war
are you rly gonna pretend mls read less than anarchists
The OP in these comments saying that didn’t even know that communism is by definition stateless and yet Cowbee is in here writing full-blown essays on the different understandings of the definition of communism per ideological position, including slippery ones that require a lot of reading such as communization theory, and you’ve got me making references to primary sources on Nestor Makhno’s record and the governmental structure of the Generalitat of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (albeit oblique references.)
But sure, it’s those darn MLs are the ones who can’t read.
Edit:
Oh god, they just said that my ~500 word comment is me writing “a book”. Please, that’s 2 minutes of reading at an average reading speed. Don’t say these sorts of things to me - it’s just baiting me into insulting you if you do 😭😭
When you’re used to comments that are just a few lines, your multi-paragraph comment is like a book.
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I’m trying so hard to remain a polite and respectful guest here and this reply is bringing the absolute worst out in me lmao
If they were an actual lib I wouldn’t be trying to hold it in right now.
Nevertheless, your comments here are fantastic, as always, especially your points on the semi-state nature of the tactics practically employed by the Spanish anarchists.
Honesty, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants in this.
That excerpt doesn’t capture the half of it imo. For example, there were attempts to nationalize the telecommunications industry in Barcelona. The Generalitat conducted a census of the industry and, although the results were incomplete, there were hundreds of companies operating. Just in Barcelona. (I can’t remember if it was over 300 or over 500, but the details don’t really matter.)
Obviously, especially in war time (and a civil war to boot), such critical infrastructure needs to be secured. This is straight up non-negotiable imo (putting aside the matter of the May Days for brevity here). I might be more sympathetic to other anarchist arguments but in these matters, you simply must seize and nationalize infrastructure and to do that you need a state, there’s just no other way around it.
Also this quote doesn’t even address the issues of military discipline, which was atrocious amongst the Republic forces although Jorjor Well, of all people (lol), happens to discuss this.
There were major issues in the Spanish Republic and I’m loath to pin its failure on one single matter however Catalonia and the surrounding regions that were held by the republic were the most economically productive in Spain, although critically they were almost always characterized by smallhold factories and production by small companies (think petit-bourgeois cobblers or tailors or very small factories that produced things like candles rather than big industrial factories like existed in Britain.) This made it virtually impossible to manage the economy and production well, especially for a revolutionary government, and it was well suited to sabotage and reactionaries doing what they do.
Due to the political ideology of the CNT/FAI they didn’t go nearly as hard on liquidating these smallhold companies and organizing a necessarily ruthless program of nationalization, much to the detriment of the war effort. On top of that you had classic trade union consciousness rearing its ugly head, given the nature of economic organization there, and so you have things like an hours-long debate in the government because the glassworkers’ union was demanding that recycling efforts were ceased so that artificial demand could be induced to keep glassworkers employed.
The government was jammed up for hours because glassworkers wanted to smash bottles and jars to create more work for themselves while the fascist forces were nipping at their heels the whole time. I’m still astounded by this, honestly, and we all know the consequences that poor organizing had on Spain and more broadly for Europe (not to mention WWII and, of course, Morocco.)
If you get me talking about this long enough I end up getting legitimately angry for how this incredibly rare opportunity got pissed up the wall.
Absolutely, 100%. I’m of the side that believes that practice informed them the necessity of discipline and organization, which is why the level of organization they did develop was a product of sheer practicality. Had they continued to develop and learn, it likely would have looked similar to the soviet system, but sheer unseriousness held them back.
What is that an excerpt from? It looks interesting!
I absolutely agree with this take.
This is from the first volume of Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War by Robert Alexander. It’s the most comprehensive assessment of the economy of Revolutionary Catalonia in Parts 3 & 4 that I’ve ever encountered.
Alexander is a really interesting one - a Trot and a Lovestonite who worked closely with the US State Department, a lifelong member of the CFR, did a lot of work for the AFL-CIA, was advisor to JFK and helped bring about the Alliance for Progress. But his historical scholarship is good, albeit very anticommunist (surprise!) and he’s naturally very sympathetic towards the anarchists in the SCW given that the Trots and the anarchists were in close alignment there.
Interesting, I’ll have to give it a look, thanks! And yea, if we limited ourselves purely to pro-communist historians then we’d unfortunately be lacking in English material.
Text of image, highlighted parts have been bolded.
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Legendary work comrade, tyfys o7
I didn’t type it up myself. I downloaded the image and ran it through tesseract.
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I never see communists actually achieve statelesness.
I will start my own “communism”, with blackjack, and hookers!
This is the hallmark of the chronically online western dilettante “anarchist” mentality.
You cannot achieve statelessness in a material sense if the world is an assortment of states. What do you imagine happening? A country like the USSR just declares statelessness, dissolves the government, and no longer administers its territory while at every border is a state run by capitalists who would immediately annex territory?
That’s no way to run a socialist revolution.
Even by your own definition of a state, the actually existing examples of anarchism in history met that definition - Revolutionary Catalonia literally had customs houses and strictly controlled their borders, the Makhnovshchina administered and defended its territory while imposing the will of the government over that territorial claim. (I’m not going to discuss AANES since they aren’t even socialist by their very constitution and I’m not gonna entertain idealist Orientalist nonsense by discussing it and as for MAREZ they openly reject the label of anarchism so out of respect for them I’m not going to lump them into the anarchist category but, if someone were to, they would still meet that definition.)
That leaves Freetown Christiania which enforces a drug policy over its borders (enough said) and KPAM, and we both know that you haven’t done anywhere near enough reading to even start to discuss that example.
So why is it that the anarchists who have attempted socialist revolutions recognize the necessity of state apparatuses and territorial borders (i.e. the existence of the state) and yet you do not? What do the anarchists who have actually put the hard work in to advance their political project understand about the material conditions of reality that you do not?
I am a dialectal materialist. My position is that you cannot just dissolve a state by pressing the button labeled “statelessness” and that it’s not possible to achieve a full moneyless, classless, stateless society until the contradictions that give rise to these phenomena have been resolved; capitalism didn’t displace feudalism until the contradictions of feudalism were surpassed by centuries of development of the material conditions (and feudalism itself only ended in 2008 btw) so obviously it’s naive to argue from a position that countries that only existed for lean than a century and achieved socialism (or at least made major strides in achieving socialism) while being beset at all sides by war, subversion, and gray zone warfare at the hands of reactionaries should be able to just press the communism button immediately. But if that really is the position you’re going to be arguing from then perhaps you should be asking yourself why actually existing anarchist projects never achieved socialism, let alone anarcho-communism and the statelessness that is implied therein.
I can tell you two things about this though:
Following this thread until you reach the conclusion will be where you discover that you are no longer an anarchist, as long as you step out of the axioms and into matters of history.
You and I both believe in the idea of the withering away of the state already, although I doubt you would admit that openly and it’s likely that you haven’t even admitted it to yourself yet; the only difference between you and I on this matter is that we disagree on the timeframe that this takes place within.
I can go beat for beat on this but trust me when I say that you’re talking to a person who was a committed anarchist likely longer than you’ve been an adult for and we’re gonna do the “guac is extra” routine if it gets that far in the discussion.
Man wrote a book for me, so I’m actually going to stop and read it, then edit this comment later (=
Oh yea, my idea is that people will fight for their own self-interest, obviously. So if I design an uh…“living package” that is minimally expensive, and makes you not-dependent on outside factors for your basic survival, encourage trade between communities, an ethical system that means those who seek to exploit or subvert this new movement, get shunned (as all have to agree to a set of ethical terms, and they will see how those working against this system will go against their own self-interest).
I have a lot of kinks to work out there, in free time. I need to buy and test a “living kit”, and stick to it. This needs to be a start to something bigger. As for how I plan to deal with violent outside interference, a good part of the plan is that I would be sapping those outside, malevolent forces of their power, by denying them subjects. The movement would basically by leaderless, and based on economics by the time it takes off, and trying to regulate it, would draw aggro, and drain support away from The Powers That Be.
To make things even more interesting, these communities would be able to operate independently by design, so violence against them would be quite hard (good luck cutting supply lines, electricity, destroying food). If I have plans other than hoping people organize to defend themselves, I am sure as fuck not revealing them.
I’m not baiting you into fedposting and I reject it entirely but it is possible to make references to historical examples or to talk in hypotheticals without signing your name to it, for example, after mentioning what you have then following up by saying “I’ve heard that the Venezuelan Colectivos are armed and trained to act as a community self-defense force so it will be interesting to see how effective they are and what can be learned from their model of community self-defense” - you aren’t saying “we should do this” or “I’m forming this myself where I live” but the allusion is enough to gesture at an example without getting yourself dragged before a court, that is assuming you even want to discuss something like this publicly online in at all. It’s easy enough to read between the lines but also you have boatloads of plausible deniability if you ever had to account for posting a comment like that. OpSec is always priority.
I get what you’re saying about draining away the power from capitalisms and/or statism but my question is - what has happened to every utopian commune to ever exist? Either they pose a threat and they get taken down (and it’s not like any commune could resist against the forces of a power like the US military) or they peter out.
In my opinion what you’ve described is a way of building the new world within the shell of the old, except with extra steps. This is going to come off as uncharitable but this is the exact trajectory that Revolutionary Catalonia took in terms of defending the revolution - they started largely with very classic anarchist-ish policy (including economic policy) and over time the issues with public safety, a mafia-like org holding too much power as a sort of shadow state, labor discipline and economic productivity, attempts to organize production and logistics etc. all led them to start reinventing the Bolshevik wheel. In a smaller, shorter way (that has much less in terms of documentation) this is also the trajectory that the Makhnovshchina took as well.
Interesting. Sigh tons to crunch over when I have actual time
You’ve also never seen a world without the United States, whomst spends 60% of the world’s military budget and has financed 100000000 coups
Until all capitalists are destroyed and every single human endeavor on Earth is being democratically directed by the working class, a state will have to exist to wage class war