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@ ReadFanon @hexbear.net

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If I don't reply I'm probably struggling with basic communication or my health. Don't take it personally.

Multiple award-winning Hexbear effortposter

Webfishing yapper

  • czechmate

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  • It's really nice to be back

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  • 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.)

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  • 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.

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  • Legendary work comrade, tyfys o7

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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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.

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  • 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.

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  • Bruh the trough is bone dry. You can lead a horse to water but just saying "there's water in the trough" doesn't mean that you've actually managed to led a horse to water.

    How many layers of idealism are you on?

    (Also this is the first time we have had an exchange between you and I in well over 5 years. How time flies! I'm glad to see that you have managed to get away from that shithole they call Reddit.

    Oh by the way, I've been meaning to ask and I've never known for certain - ATPL/FEE were the accounts of Sean Kealiher, right?RIP big dog. You would have hated seeing the way the world has turned out.)

  • czechmate

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  • Curious!

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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:

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

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  • 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 😭😭

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  • So we're talking about the platonic ideal of anarchism and not the examples of anarchism in the real world then?

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  • Do you think adding a figurehead or singular leader would have stopped the establishment government from using their already existing material wealth to crush dissent?

    You mean Lluis Companys right?

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  • Revolutionary Catalonia was not in any way a collection of independent anarchist cells. If you actually read the work of historians on Catalonia you'd realize that they had basically everything in terms of state apparatuses that someone like you would be ideologically opposed to, if you were consistent in your politics.

    Workers couldn't even leave their villages without the permission of the village council in Revolutionary Catalonia my guy. I don't know how to tell you this but that sounds awfully like a repressive state doing what a repressive state does, even if it flies a black (and red) flag.

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  • So either anarchism has no power structures, thus implicitly admitting that it is fundamentally incapable of bringing about the political change that it advocates for, or it has a power structure and thus it is liable to be commandeered by power hungry psychopaths and used for their own gain like the rest of the power structures around the globe.

    Which way, western anarchist?

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