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.
This is inside baseball kinda stuff but tbh if you want a real deep dive then, in my opinion, Morocco is kinda the key to understanding the SCW; it’s where the forces that Franco would go on to lead were blooded, it’s where Franco himself cut his teeth and rose to prominence, the Rif War was where the Spanish military would deploy tactics that would then go on to be deployed against the Republican forces (and later across Europe in WWII), and it was also pivotal in the sense that Moroccan troops would enlist in the war (regulares) and served as shock troops and relief forces that made Franco’s forces much more numerous and effective.
It was also pivot point for this chapter of history - a Moroccan delegation sought independence under terms that were very favorable to the republic early in the SCW but the republic turned the offer down to maintain their colonial aspirations. If there was Moroccan independence from Spain at this point, it could have led to:
An earlier wave of decolonization
A second front in the SCW that Franco would have fought in order to try and maintain the Spanish colony
Cutting off the supply of regulares to Franco’s forces (both of which would have significantly weakened Franco’s position)
Potentially even having Moroccan troops supporting the Republican forces, which could have proved deadly since they actually knew what they were doing with war
Any or all of these could have turned the tide of the civil war. But the European radicals opted to cling to colonialism to their own detriment (a tale as old as time). The fate of the colonized and the fate of the colonizer are inextricably linked and it’s such a shame that this wasn’t recognized.
I understand that the Moroccans were vilified in Spain, both for the Umayyad Caliphate and for the more recent history where Moroccan troops were sent in to break miners’ strikes in the region that would later be incorporated into the republic (Alcora or the Asturias, I forget - geography isn’t my strong point) and the Moroccan troops were really brutal in this, but not on account of their skin color or their religion but instead on account of the demands of the then-Spanish government. I wish there was more solidarity amongst the Spanish people to recognize that their enemy wasn’t the Moroccan people.
You can connect this to Stalin’s attempts to appease Britain and France and his advice to the Republic to not accept the overtures for Moroccan independence, since those were the big players and both had a vested interest in maintaining their colonial empires. Then the through line connects Britain and France’s lack of enforcement of the SCW non-intervention pact to Stalin figuring out which side these two would be on with regard to the nascent fascist forces and him recognizing that the USSR was basically going it alone against Hitler soon. This then leads directly to decisions like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the earlier economic ties between the USSR and Nazi Germany because, imo, it was a strategic and temporary appeasement to buy time as well as a sort of canary in the coalmine to signal when war was coming down the pipeline to the USSR. Michael Jabara Carley is really good for this stuff. He’s written a few books on it including Stalin’s Gambit.
If you want to understand what was influencing the USSR’s perspective and actions in the lead up to WWII then understanding the SCW is foundational. (Personally, I don’t take anyone seriously if they have an opinion about the M-R Pact or similar stuff but they can’t connect it directly to the SCW.)
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.
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
So real.
This is inside baseball kinda stuff but tbh if you want a real deep dive then, in my opinion, Morocco is kinda the key to understanding the SCW; it’s where the forces that Franco would go on to lead were blooded, it’s where Franco himself cut his teeth and rose to prominence, the Rif War was where the Spanish military would deploy tactics that would then go on to be deployed against the Republican forces (and later across Europe in WWII), and it was also pivotal in the sense that Moroccan troops would enlist in the war (regulares) and served as shock troops and relief forces that made Franco’s forces much more numerous and effective.
It was also pivot point for this chapter of history - a Moroccan delegation sought independence under terms that were very favorable to the republic early in the SCW but the republic turned the offer down to maintain their colonial aspirations. If there was Moroccan independence from Spain at this point, it could have led to:
An earlier wave of decolonization
A second front in the SCW that Franco would have fought in order to try and maintain the Spanish colony
Cutting off the supply of regulares to Franco’s forces (both of which would have significantly weakened Franco’s position)
Potentially even having Moroccan troops supporting the Republican forces, which could have proved deadly since they actually knew what they were doing with war
Any or all of these could have turned the tide of the civil war. But the European radicals opted to cling to colonialism to their own detriment (a tale as old as time). The fate of the colonized and the fate of the colonizer are inextricably linked and it’s such a shame that this wasn’t recognized.
I understand that the Moroccans were vilified in Spain, both for the Umayyad Caliphate and for the more recent history where Moroccan troops were sent in to break miners’ strikes in the region that would later be incorporated into the republic (Alcora or the Asturias, I forget - geography isn’t my strong point) and the Moroccan troops were really brutal in this, but not on account of their skin color or their religion but instead on account of the demands of the then-Spanish government. I wish there was more solidarity amongst the Spanish people to recognize that their enemy wasn’t the Moroccan people.
Anyway, I’m yapping. Here’s a fascinating scholarly article on the role of Morocco in the SCW. If the SCW was the prelude to WWII then the Rif War was the prelude to the prelude.
You can connect this to Stalin’s attempts to appease Britain and France and his advice to the Republic to not accept the overtures for Moroccan independence, since those were the big players and both had a vested interest in maintaining their colonial empires. Then the through line connects Britain and France’s lack of enforcement of the SCW non-intervention pact to Stalin figuring out which side these two would be on with regard to the nascent fascist forces and him recognizing that the USSR was basically going it alone against Hitler soon. This then leads directly to decisions like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the earlier economic ties between the USSR and Nazi Germany because, imo, it was a strategic and temporary appeasement to buy time as well as a sort of canary in the coalmine to signal when war was coming down the pipeline to the USSR. Michael Jabara Carley is really good for this stuff. He’s written a few books on it including Stalin’s Gambit.
If you want to understand what was influencing the USSR’s perspective and actions in the lead up to WWII then understanding the SCW is foundational. (Personally, I don’t take anyone seriously if they have an opinion about the M-R Pact or similar stuff but they can’t connect it directly to the SCW.)
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.