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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It would have taken me longer to figure out how to use the terminal to run tesseract to OCR this image than it would have taken me to manually transcribe it so maybe it’s relative to my own abilities but it’s still legendary work. Regardless, any efforts to make things more accessible are immediately legendary in my eyes anyway so basically you’re just gonna have to take the compliment either way.
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.
Right? There would be almost nothing.
Speaking of which, the info on the glassworkers comes from the account of Dolores Ibarruri’s They Shall Not Pass.
I can also recommend International Solidarity with the Spanish Republic (1936-1939) which is quite dry but it’s good especially for a primary source for details on the military aid to the republic.
Awesome, more to read! At the same time, more to read… 🫠 lol.
Thanks, comrade! o7
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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It would have taken me longer to figure out how to use the terminal to run tesseract to OCR this image than it would have taken me to manually transcribe it so maybe it’s relative to my own abilities but it’s still legendary work. Regardless, any efforts to make things more accessible are immediately legendary in my eyes anyway so basically you’re just gonna have to take the compliment either way.