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If anarchists wants to be taken seriously by the working class, theyāre going to have to do more doing and a lot less talking
That suggests that Anarchists are not working class, and are somehow talking ādownā to working class, but they very much are the working class figuring out how to solve their own problems.
Itās not about moneyā¦ itās about what it is that youāre offering.
What are you talking about? What do you think makes someone working class or not? If they work for someone else for a wage to live, they are working class.
and are somehow talking ādownā to working class,
Did you literally just forget how this conversation started in the first place?
but they very much are the working class figuring out how to solve their own problems.
So all the anarchists I see distancing themselves from the working class by referring to the working class as ānormiesā is merely a figment of my imagination? If you are, that would be niceā¦ but then youād have to explain to me why the only anarchists you find in my country are edgy white liberal kids at elite universities.
What are you talking about?
What did you think the working class really cares about? Explain to me how we keep the electricity on, the water flowing through the pipes, the food shelves stocked (community gardens doesnāt even qualify as a start) and the pharmacies in a working condition. Show me the nuts and bolts from which a plan can be built.
Itās a fantastic historical event we can learn from and build upon, and that book should hopefully answer how weāll keep the pipes flowing and the pharmacies running.
As for things average people can do to contribute toward building that sort of future, itās obviously not something that can be done overnight. Itāll involve building alternative, decentralized power structures that can, over time, slowly make us less reliant on the state and its powers. Basically, building something new within the shell of the old.
Many people can only contribute a little of their time and energy in-between commitments from their job to keep them and their families alive, but with enough joining in, alternatives can be built. Starting small (short guide toward the bottom of that post) is what most of us can do, and I think Anarkās Cooperation Tulsa project is a good example of that in action. After being the seed to get it started, he has seen steady growth and more involvement, even grants/funding from his local county/town government after seeing the work he has done.
Building up radical unions (like the IWW), teaching others how to start tenet unions, starting worker owned cooperatives, converting or building cooperatively owned housing, etc, are all a bit harder to start, and often more risky, but they are very impactful building blocks that serve to give us working class folk breathing room financially, giving us more time into building these alternative systems.
the food shelves stocked (community gardens doesnāt even qualify as a start)
I wouldnāt dismiss them. According to studies, smaller scale urban gardening and community gardens are actually capable of up to ten times higher yields compared to industrial farming. You can read more on that in the comments of this post here.
And I agree, ultimately weāll need to have independent food production. That may take ques from how Cuba does urban gardening, and could be combined with quite promising Edenicity apartment complexes with rooftop growing areas combined with converted parking lots (some solid number crunching on the real-world viability of that in the video), which should allow for cities to be mostly food independent, as well as making it viable to produce their own textiles locally.
If you want to see a potential end-point for all this, The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin offers a very grounded and in depth look into how an Anarchist society could function as a target we can aim toward and be hopeful about, which itself is very important.
A for effort - and Iām not being sarcastic. I need you to understand that before I start pointing out all the problems with this approach of yours.
1936 Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
Sounds absolutely grand. But how did it fail?
When I ask anarchists this, the answer I inevitably get boils down to something along the lines of, āthe anarchists were stabbed in the back by tankies and liberals.ā
Thatās not an answer - thatās a cop-out.
Firstly, the tankie/lib alliance did not stab the anarchists in the back. They stabbed the anarchists in the chest - in fact, the anarchists saw the knife coming from a mile away and was still incapable of preventing it. Itās very easy to blame the liberals and the tankiesā¦ itās much harder to analyse why anarchism seems so uniquely incapable of resisting (never mind taking the fight to) the political machinations of liberalism. Iād go even further and argue that anarchismās apparent inadequacy in the face of liberal realpolitik is even more evident today than it was in 1936.
This is not a praxis problem - itās a theory problem. Or rather, a lack of theory problem.
Secondly, studying the successes of anarchist Catalonia (or Makhnovist Ukraine, or the Paris Commune, or whatever failed libertarian socialist project you might want to mention) is a dead-end as far as theory goes. Political theory that is built on past successes are next to uselessā¦ theory that is built on a sober (and granular) appreciation of failure is not.
The socialist experiments in Rojava and Chiappas proves this - both owe their existence to tankies who went back to the drawing board, critically reviewed the very Marxist-Leninist fuckups they had committed, and dumped Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy overboard (the fact that tankies dislike talking about these two projects proves as much). Should anarchists, perhaps, do the same? The ālame-duckā status of anarchism since the end of WW2 suggestsā¦ yes.
There is, by now, slightly more than an eighty-year gap between anarchist Catalonia and the present time - thatās an eighty-year period where anarchists have failed to make any real headway against the post-war liberal consensus. This is not something that is going to be fixed by wishfully hoping that enough people will be ājoining in.ā What stopped people from ājoining inā during the sixties? The seventies? The eighties?
My answer to that would beā¦ the same thing thatās stopping them from ājoining inā now - and that is, the lack of a proper theoretical framework that allows not just anarchists but also the working class to easily problematise the liberal consensus. The lack of this framework is on display literally in the very first source you posted - any self-described ālibertarian socialistā that frames the concept of democracy as some kind of āproblemā that requires solving will (justifiably) raise a lot of red flags with the working class. It seems that ākilling the liberal inside your own headā is something that a lot of anarchists preachā¦ but do not necessarily practice.
Thereās 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 didnāt 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 wouldāve 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 donāt 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, butā¦ The Marxists did it anyway, which was unexpected, and it did hasten their defeat.
The other issue was that Spain simply hadnāt developed enough military industrial capacity before the war to avoid being so reliant on foreign logistics. As General Pershing supposedly once said, āInfantry win battles, logistics win wars.ā Thatās 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 USās 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 couldāve 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 Iām going to have to narrow this down a bit - Iām typing this in-between power failures. You knowā¦ third-world problems.
I didnāt find Anarchism itself as one of those reasons.
Of course you didnātā¦ 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 CNTās attempts to create a banking system that would allow the agricultural collectives monetary independence from Spainās liberal-controlled financial institutions didnāt come back to bite anarchist Catalonia in the ass?
According to Bolloten, Payne and Esenwein from āThe Spanish Civil War - Revolution and Counterrevolutionā
āNor 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, āto use their predicament to capture control of the collectives.ā
"Outside Catalonia, finance minister Juan Negrin, a centralist and a strong advocate of nationalization, also hoped to exploit the economic dislocation. āWhen the war broke out,ā he told Louis Fischer, āworking-menās 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.ā
Seems pretty cut and dried to me how anarcho-communist orthodoxy gave the liberals an easy way to co-opt and destroy the collectivesā¦ and thatās 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, donāt you think?
The fascinating thing to me about anarcho-communists is that they fetishise the idea of a āmoneyless societyā to an even greater degree than even the most hardened Marxists - itās really hard to die on a hill nobody else even wants.
Againā¦ tankies can do this. They proved it in Mexico and northern Syria. Can anarchists? Iām not seeing it - at least not in any anarchist discourse Iāve 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.
āInfantry win battles, logistics win wars.ā
We can talk about the logistics of war and peace all day long - itās a subject the revolution romanticisers completely ignore - but thatās an entirely different discussion.
What source mentioned that?
Itās literally there in the description - āDisillusioned 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.ā
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 youāve ākilled the liberal inside your own headā? 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 - thereās 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 itā¦ the CIA spent most of the (so-called) āCold Warā 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.
Itās a choice between going back to the drawing board, or continue going nowhere slowly.
which was only avoided by FDRās economic reforms
So, youāre 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 donāt really address the machinations of liberalism, doesnāt it?
Iām not a zealot, and Anarchism does not hold to the idea that everyone 100 years ago had everything perfectly figured out like MLās do, itās constantly changing and adapting as we learn what does and does not work.
Are you telling me that the FAI ignoring the CNTās attempts to create a banking system [ā¦]
That isnāt 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 wouldāve 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 doesnāt really relate to that, though, the issue was that the internationally accepted currency wasnāt 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 didnāt, 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.
Thatās justā¦ Not how war works, though. You donāt think if the US had a successful Anarchist revolution in the 30ās, that it wouldnāt 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 couldnāt 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 donāt matter? If those fortunate events and allies werenāt there, the US revolution probably wouldāve failed, regardless of its ideology.
itās 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 itās 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.
Itās 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; itās 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.
Hereās that same documentary with a description below that simply reads āThis is the BBC documentary about Carneās life and ideasā, if that helps, I guess? I only linked to the peertube upload as I try to avoid linking to Youtube when possible.
Face itā¦ the CIA spent most of the (so-called) āCold Warā
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 arenāt zealots eitherā¦ have you ever tried arguing with one, though? I wouldnāt recommend it - they cling to their privilege (whether real or perceived) harder than most fascists.
That isnāt a position I argued in favor of.
That doesnāt matter - it happened whether we think it was dumb or not.
You donāt think if the US had a successful Anarchist revolution in the 30ās, that it wouldnāt 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 oleā Smedley Butler to lead it. It would have started off in a logistically worse position than the Spanish anarchists wereā¦ even if it managed to take over an entire state it would still be childās 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) thereād be absolutely no chance of even buying anything with it from any foreign military-industrial complex thanks to the US Navy. And thereād 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 itās history, including today.
How on earth can you say things like that donāt matter?
Thatās not what I said. When an insurgency becomes allied to a military-industrial complex itās 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 yesā¦ then thereās potential. If notā¦
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 itās at least on the table if the people agree to try it via consensus.
When thereās a war going on, noā¦ they canāt. 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. Iād say that itās 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, Iām 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) āCold War,ā the CIA werenāt fighting anarchism in Latin America. It wasnāt 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 didnāt have to.
Something is seriously wrong with this pictureā¦ and it canāt all be explained away by state-led crackdowns during the 10s, 20s and 30s.
Secondly, studying the successes of anarchist Catalonia (or Makhnovist Ukraine, or the Paris Commune, or whatever failed libertarian socialist project you might want to mention) is a dead-end as far as theory goes. Political theory that is built on past successes are next to uselessā¦ theory that is built on a sober (and granular) appreciation of failure is not.
Modern Anarchist thought does take those failures into account, and does not aim to replicate them 1-to-1. But those same failures also brought with it some great successes, such as showing us that our theories on how an Anarchist society is actually run, like giving the working class ownership and control of their workplaces to self manage really does work. Some areas even abolished money, and that also seemed to work.
Proving that those things do work is a massive step in convincing others that this isnāt just a bunch of pie in the sky ideas, and itās why I still point to that event.
The socialist experiments in Rojava and Chiappas proves this - both owe their existence to tankies who went back to the drawing board, critically reviewed the very Marxist-Leninist fuckups they had committed, and dumped Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy overboard (the fact that tankies dislike talking about these two projects proves as much). Should anarchists, perhaps, do the same?
Rojava is the main focus at the end of the āAccidental Anarchistā documentary I linked to in my first source, which it praises and points out as a success of Anarchist ideas in practice. The PKKās leader did toss out marxist-leninism, but only after reading Murray Bookchinās books while in prison. Murray Bookchin is an Anarchist, and virtually all of the changes Abdullah Ćcalan made to their political theory was to adopt many Anarchist positions.
However, Rojava is unfortunately now suffering from the same issues that the Spanish Anarchists did.
With the US no longer offering it logistical support, it has struggled to defend itself against the multi-pronged assaults from the new, more unified Syrian government, as well as larger assaults from Turkey. It has lost a significant amount of territory, and is slowly being forced to integrate into the new Syrian government, giving up much of their autonomy.
The main issue that Libertarian socialism/Anarchism has faced historically, is Anarchist revolutions have not occurred in areas that could support themselves logistically without outside help (Except Russia, where had Makhno been able to defeat the Marxists, they may have been able to survive long term).
Left Libertarian states are seen as enemies by all other ideologies and economic systems, as they threaten the established hierarchies in both Authoritarian Marxist-Leninist countries, as well as Capitalist power in liberal democracies.
What stopped people from ājoining inā during the sixties? The seventies? The eighties?
Extreme suppression of Anarchists by state governments in most areas, as well as economic reforms making people complacent. As an example, the Red Scare in the US resulted in the Anarchist movement being set back decades as anarchist union members (the IWW), and regular anarchist were rounded up and imprisoned or deported to Russia.
The US in particular was on the verge of a socialist revolution during the great depression, which was only avoided by FDRās economic reforms and worker protections, which allowed non-radical unions to gain significant bargaining power and better economic conditions, resulting in the āgolden ageā of the US, and thus most became content with the status quo.
Unfortunately, as our current situation shows, those liberal reforms are always temporary, since it appears inevitable that capitalism auto-corrupts liberal democracies until they are once again brought back to a point where people are desperate enough to try an alternative. Weāre seeing fascism rear its ugly head once again as one of those alternatives which promises a better life, just as Hitler and Mussolini once did.
The lack of this framework is on display literally in the very first source you posted - any self-described ālibertarian socialistā that frames the concept of democracy as some kind of āproblemā that requires solving will (justifiably) raise a lot of red flags with the working class.
What source mentioned that? I didnāt see that in the Accidental Anarchist documentary (the first source, unless you mean Anark?)
It seems that ākilling the liberal inside your own headā is something that a lot of anarchists preachā¦ but do not necessarily practice.
I responded to this:
That suggests that Anarchists are not working class, and are somehow talking ādownā to working class, but they very much are the working class figuring out how to solve their own problems.
What are you talking about? What do you think makes someone working class or not? If they work for someone else for a wage to live, they are working class.
Did you literally just forget how this conversation started in the first place?
So all the anarchists I see distancing themselves from the working class by referring to the working class as ānormiesā is merely a figment of my imagination? If you are, that would be niceā¦ but then youād have to explain to me why the only anarchists you find in my country are edgy white liberal kids at elite universities.
What did you think the working class really cares about? Explain to me how we keep the electricity on, the water flowing through the pipes, the food shelves stocked (community gardens doesnāt even qualify as a start) and the pharmacies in a working condition. Show me the nuts and bolts from which a plan can be built.
Iāll give it my best shot.
1936 Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War organized an Anarchist society with over 3 million participants, and they documented much of how exactly they ran it, right down to how they kept the electric trams for public transport going (there is a fantastic book embedded at the bottom of that article, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution by Gaston Leval, which offers more details on other aspects of how they operated that society).
Itās a fantastic historical event we can learn from and build upon, and that book should hopefully answer how weāll keep the pipes flowing and the pharmacies running.
As for things average people can do to contribute toward building that sort of future, itās obviously not something that can be done overnight. Itāll involve building alternative, decentralized power structures that can, over time, slowly make us less reliant on the state and its powers. Basically, building something new within the shell of the old.
Many people can only contribute a little of their time and energy in-between commitments from their job to keep them and their families alive, but with enough joining in, alternatives can be built. Starting small (short guide toward the bottom of that post) is what most of us can do, and I think Anarkās Cooperation Tulsa project is a good example of that in action. After being the seed to get it started, he has seen steady growth and more involvement, even grants/funding from his local county/town government after seeing the work he has done.
Building up radical unions (like the IWW), teaching others how to start tenet unions, starting worker owned cooperatives, converting or building cooperatively owned housing, etc, are all a bit harder to start, and often more risky, but they are very impactful building blocks that serve to give us working class folk breathing room financially, giving us more time into building these alternative systems.
I wouldnāt dismiss them. According to studies, smaller scale urban gardening and community gardens are actually capable of up to ten times higher yields compared to industrial farming. You can read more on that in the comments of this post here.
And I agree, ultimately weāll need to have independent food production. That may take ques from how Cuba does urban gardening, and could be combined with quite promising Edenicity apartment complexes with rooftop growing areas combined with converted parking lots (some solid number crunching on the real-world viability of that in the video), which should allow for cities to be mostly food independent, as well as making it viable to produce their own textiles locally.
If you want to see a potential end-point for all this, The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin offers a very grounded and in depth look into how an Anarchist society could function as a target we can aim toward and be hopeful about, which itself is very important.
A for effort - and Iām not being sarcastic. I need you to understand that before I start pointing out all the problems with this approach of yours.
Sounds absolutely grand. But how did it fail?
When I ask anarchists this, the answer I inevitably get boils down to something along the lines of, āthe anarchists were stabbed in the back by tankies and liberals.ā
Thatās not an answer - thatās a cop-out.
Firstly, the tankie/lib alliance did not stab the anarchists in the back. They stabbed the anarchists in the chest - in fact, the anarchists saw the knife coming from a mile away and was still incapable of preventing it. Itās very easy to blame the liberals and the tankiesā¦ itās much harder to analyse why anarchism seems so uniquely incapable of resisting (never mind taking the fight to) the political machinations of liberalism. Iād go even further and argue that anarchismās apparent inadequacy in the face of liberal realpolitik is even more evident today than it was in 1936.
This is not a praxis problem - itās a theory problem. Or rather, a lack of theory problem.
Secondly, studying the successes of anarchist Catalonia (or Makhnovist Ukraine, or the Paris Commune, or whatever failed libertarian socialist project you might want to mention) is a dead-end as far as theory goes. Political theory that is built on past successes are next to uselessā¦ theory that is built on a sober (and granular) appreciation of failure is not.
The socialist experiments in Rojava and Chiappas proves this - both owe their existence to tankies who went back to the drawing board, critically reviewed the very Marxist-Leninist fuckups they had committed, and dumped Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy overboard (the fact that tankies dislike talking about these two projects proves as much). Should anarchists, perhaps, do the same? The ālame-duckā status of anarchism since the end of WW2 suggestsā¦ yes.
There is, by now, slightly more than an eighty-year gap between anarchist Catalonia and the present time - thatās an eighty-year period where anarchists have failed to make any real headway against the post-war liberal consensus. This is not something that is going to be fixed by wishfully hoping that enough people will be ājoining in.ā What stopped people from ājoining inā during the sixties? The seventies? The eighties?
My answer to that would beā¦ the same thing thatās stopping them from ājoining inā now - and that is, the lack of a proper theoretical framework that allows not just anarchists but also the working class to easily problematise the liberal consensus. The lack of this framework is on display literally in the very first source you posted - any self-described ālibertarian socialistā that frames the concept of democracy as some kind of āproblemā that requires solving will (justifiably) raise a lot of red flags with the working class. It seems that ākilling the liberal inside your own headā is something that a lot of anarchists preachā¦ but do not necessarily practice.
Thereās 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 didnāt 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 wouldāve 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 donāt 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, butā¦ The Marxists did it anyway, which was unexpected, and it did hasten their defeat.
The other issue was that Spain simply hadnāt developed enough military industrial capacity before the war to avoid being so reliant on foreign logistics. As General Pershing supposedly once said, āInfantry win battles, logistics win wars.ā Thatās 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 USās 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 couldāve 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 Iām going to have to narrow this down a bit - Iām typing this in-between power failures. You knowā¦ third-world problems.
Of course you didnātā¦ 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 CNTās attempts to create a banking system that would allow the agricultural collectives monetary independence from Spainās liberal-controlled financial institutions didnāt come back to bite anarchist Catalonia in the ass?
According to Bolloten, Payne and Esenwein from āThe Spanish Civil War - Revolution and Counterrevolutionā
Seems pretty cut and dried to me how anarcho-communist orthodoxy gave the liberals an easy way to co-opt and destroy the collectivesā¦ and thatās 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, donāt you think?
The fascinating thing to me about anarcho-communists is that they fetishise the idea of a āmoneyless societyā to an even greater degree than even the most hardened Marxists - itās really hard to die on a hill nobody else even wants.
Againā¦ tankies can do this. They proved it in Mexico and northern Syria. Can anarchists? Iām not seeing it - at least not in any anarchist discourse Iāve 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 - itās a subject the revolution romanticisers completely ignore - but thatās an entirely different discussion.
Itās literally there in the description - āDisillusioned 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.ā
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 youāve ākilled the liberal inside your own headā? 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 - thereās a good reason why liberalism co-opted it and turned it into an oligarchy-sustaining farce instead of simply repressing it.
Face itā¦ the CIA spent most of the (so-called) āCold Warā 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.
Itās a choice between going back to the drawing board, or continue going nowhere slowly.
So, youāre 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 donāt really address the machinations of liberalism, doesnāt it?
Iām not a zealot, and Anarchism does not hold to the idea that everyone 100 years ago had everything perfectly figured out like MLās do, itās constantly changing and adapting as we learn what does and does not work.
That isnāt 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 wouldāve 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 doesnāt really relate to that, though, the issue was that the internationally accepted currency wasnāt 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 didnāt, and how they later regretted not doing it, which is another mistake to learn from.
Thatās justā¦ Not how war works, though. You donāt think if the US had a successful Anarchist revolution in the 30ās, that it wouldnāt 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 couldnāt 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 donāt matter? If those fortunate events and allies werenāt there, the US revolution probably wouldāve failed, regardless of its ideology.
I mentioned it as something some of them tried. There is no tenant that Anarchism must abolish money, but itās 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; itās 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.
Hereās that same documentary with a description below that simply reads āThis is the BBC documentary about Carneās life and ideasā, 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 arenāt zealots eitherā¦ have you ever tried arguing with one, though? I wouldnāt recommend it - they cling to their privilege (whether real or perceived) harder than most fascists.
That doesnāt 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 oleā Smedley Butler to lead it. It would have started off in a logistically worse position than the Spanish anarchists wereā¦ even if it managed to take over an entire state it would still be childās 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) thereād be absolutely no chance of even buying anything with it from any foreign military-industrial complex thanks to the US Navy. And thereād 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 itās history, including today.
Thatās not what I said. When an insurgency becomes allied to a military-industrial complex itās 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 yesā¦ then thereās potential. If notā¦
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 thereās a war going on, noā¦ they canāt. 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. Iād say that itās a pretty bad idea in peacetime as well - just ask the Ukrainians about that - but that might just be me.
No, Iām 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) āCold War,ā the CIA werenāt fighting anarchism in Latin America. It wasnāt 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 didnāt have to.
Something is seriously wrong with this pictureā¦ and it canāt all be explained away by state-led crackdowns during the 10s, 20s and 30s.
Part 2:
Modern Anarchist thought does take those failures into account, and does not aim to replicate them 1-to-1. But those same failures also brought with it some great successes, such as showing us that our theories on how an Anarchist society is actually run, like giving the working class ownership and control of their workplaces to self manage really does work. Some areas even abolished money, and that also seemed to work.
Proving that those things do work is a massive step in convincing others that this isnāt just a bunch of pie in the sky ideas, and itās why I still point to that event.
Rojava is the main focus at the end of the āAccidental Anarchistā documentary I linked to in my first source, which it praises and points out as a success of Anarchist ideas in practice. The PKKās leader did toss out marxist-leninism, but only after reading Murray Bookchinās books while in prison. Murray Bookchin is an Anarchist, and virtually all of the changes Abdullah Ćcalan made to their political theory was to adopt many Anarchist positions.
However, Rojava is unfortunately now suffering from the same issues that the Spanish Anarchists did.
With the US no longer offering it logistical support, it has struggled to defend itself against the multi-pronged assaults from the new, more unified Syrian government, as well as larger assaults from Turkey. It has lost a significant amount of territory, and is slowly being forced to integrate into the new Syrian government, giving up much of their autonomy.
The main issue that Libertarian socialism/Anarchism has faced historically, is Anarchist revolutions have not occurred in areas that could support themselves logistically without outside help (Except Russia, where had Makhno been able to defeat the Marxists, they may have been able to survive long term).
Left Libertarian states are seen as enemies by all other ideologies and economic systems, as they threaten the established hierarchies in both Authoritarian Marxist-Leninist countries, as well as Capitalist power in liberal democracies.
Extreme suppression of Anarchists by state governments in most areas, as well as economic reforms making people complacent. As an example, the Red Scare in the US resulted in the Anarchist movement being set back decades as anarchist union members (the IWW), and regular anarchist were rounded up and imprisoned or deported to Russia.
The US in particular was on the verge of a socialist revolution during the great depression, which was only avoided by FDRās economic reforms and worker protections, which allowed non-radical unions to gain significant bargaining power and better economic conditions, resulting in the āgolden ageā of the US, and thus most became content with the status quo.
Unfortunately, as our current situation shows, those liberal reforms are always temporary, since it appears inevitable that capitalism auto-corrupts liberal democracies until they are once again brought back to a point where people are desperate enough to try an alternative. Weāre seeing fascism rear its ugly head once again as one of those alternatives which promises a better life, just as Hitler and Mussolini once did.
What source mentioned that? I didnāt see that in the Accidental Anarchist documentary (the first source, unless you mean Anark?)
Could you elaborate what you mean by that?