Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War (2002)
isreview.org
isreview.org
Having said that I fully concur with your recommendation of Homage to Catalonia. Amazing book about a pretty amazing time.
POUM had its differences with Moscow controlled Communists (the third International) - Moscow was for a broad coalition government that would postpone socialist reforms (that's called the 'Popular Front' approach, similar to what was done in France); while POUM was all for pressing on with socialist reforms right during the civil war (mostly within Catalonia). So POUM was more similar to the anarchists in its politics, but the anarchists were much larger movement than the Marxist POUM.
In any event POUM was a small local party that did not matter a lot, but its suppression (that went on with the persecution of the Anarchists) in later stages opened rifts within the Spanish Republic. All that happened once the Spanish government came under increasing control of Moscow - that came as a result of international isolation while the Soviet Union remained as the only backer.
Left wing politics is all very factional, so it gets complicated. I think the Popular Front approach would have been more productive, but Orwell for example did not think so; in any event it became quite bad once the NKVD came in.
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/spain/spain03...
As opposed to what, lauding Franco?
Any communication of information will inevitably be limited, and the way that limitation manifests will be influenced by the subjectivity of the person communicating.
The documentaries may present the facts they choose to include in a more dispassionate style than other sources, but this should not be confused with objectivity.
I never said it is 100% objective, they just clearly avoid siding with any party in those documentaries.
Not more. And all the ugly things he saw, stealing, dirt, unprofessionalism, etc. he states very clearly.
Objectiveness is not treating each party equally -- it's calling a spade a spade!
Well, not much more than what western empires have been for their colonial subjects (who, in addition to slavery, forced labor, mass killings, political rule, torture and so on, they also considered inferior beings). So there's that. Of course another being wrong doesn't make one right -- but at least helps put things in perspective and reduce one-sided smugness.
The difference is that the USSR did so upon its own subjects (which is probably better for the rest of world -- if you weren't their subject).
USSR had a dictatorship of upper echelons of the party, which degenerated into full scale war against large parts of its own population (including ...the upper echelons of the party).
But there are some subtleties too: it's not like people weren't supportive of the regime, especially early on. (Of course Germans were also supportive of the Nazi regime, so there's that).
So, in a sense, they got what they wanted -- it just happened to turn to tyranny. That said, they also had many positive changes from the tsarism on its early days. And they also become a less tyrannical state after Stalin.
It shows the true possibilities for social change and the dangerous forces that can undermine idealism.
But yes, he simply saw only parts of the whole picture, but what he saw, he gave an accurate review about.
The final conclusion, that anarchists should abandon their theories in favor of Trotsky's, has a bad taste. There was another anarchist-y society, the Free Territory[0] in east Ukraine, which, with its 3 years of existence, was quite successful (for anarchist societies standards). Sadly, it is often unmentioned, though it had even better starting conditions: while the CNT had to struggle with Franco's army (and the support of the other facist leaders), the equivalent reactionary White Army was later defeated by the alliance of Soviet and anarchist troops. They didn't mingle with any local government, and their leader Makhno[1] - though not elected - did limit himself to the militancy. So there was only one part left of the problems of spanish anarchists, as analyzed in the article's conclusion: Franco’s army, the complicity of the PSOE leadership, and the treachery of the Communists–but [also] the betrayal of the revolution by the anarchist leaders. With former diplomatic aggressions from Trotsky[2], attempted assassionations by the Cheka, finally the Red Army took over the Free Territory.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestor_Makhno [2] http://nestormakhno.info/english/trotsky/ord1824.htm
Anarchism itself is so broad and varied that it resists characterisation. You have the entire spectrum, from primitivists to pacifists to futurists. People who claim that voting in elections is pointless(like many on the Occupy movement) to people who advocate for the lesser evil(Noam Chomsky 'endorsing' Hillary Clinton) to people who advocate for the worse evil(accelerationists)
The one thing that can be said about it with certainty, is that it is seen as "a tendency in human affairs, to question existing power structures". Whether that be the state, religion or interpersonal power relations between race or gender. Much of what we define as "progress" is in reality questioning deep-seated assumptions that seem so obvious that only a fool would question them. In the past, some of these assumptions were things like "It is obvious there are significant difference between races", "It is obvious that men and women are not intellectually equal", "It is obvious that we need a monarch or ruling class to maintain peace and order". Today it is things like "It is obvious that corporations are here to stay and beneficial" or "It is obvious that we need a centralised government to keep order".
One of major problems with society today is that people are essentially told there are 2 positions:
1)You think on balance Government is worse and bloated, and therefore steps should be taken to reduce government influence and increasing private control of resources.
2)You think on balance corporations are worse, and therefore steps should be taken to reduce corporate influence by increasing government control of resources.
Most Anarchists contend that Government and Corporations are undesirable, and that we must work towards some kind of decentralized, federated, non-hierarchical system with free association.
I think in general people need to think more about Libertarian Socialism(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism) as a viable alternative to the US/Soviet model, which are more alike than different, as they are both in essence state-capitalist systems. They aren't identical, but fall in a pretty narrow spectrum and incentivise power-seeking. An approach that questions everything on the other hand is the essence of anarchism: a first-principles based method of determining the structure of society.
Also, a nameclash of "decentralized, federated, non-hierarchical" political systems with decentralized/federated digital systems. I don't see any good reasons why an anarchist ought to choose a decentralized/federated design for an arbitrary piece of software. But I get the sense that anarchists think choosing such a design is an ethical imperative, very often to the chagrin of their potential userbase.
If you think that’s laughable, consider your relationship with Facebook or Google.
What would an anarchist think of Len Sassaman's idea for doing a scalable remailer that had a centralized component (if I remember correctly)?
What would an anarchist say about the design of the directory servers in Tor?
What would an anarchist say about using DNS to host a git repo on a website?
If the answer is that an anarchist would reflexively focus mindshare on the centralization because it is a priori unethical, then anarchism as an institution is a hindrance to software development.
A lot of things hinder software development: laws and regulations; skepticism of the community; lack of resources; technical constraints of existing hardware; trade secrets and patents to maintain an edge against competitors; ethics and morals incidental to the organization of society...
hell we're already in a place where people reflexively look at centralized services (and even decentralized services) and see future hierarchy.
not all hindrances are equal but
a) do you imagine anarchism to be a uniquely strong hindrance
b) do you consider that hindering of software development to be a sufficient issue to object to anarchy.
As you say plenty of ink has been spilled on them. Is it then questions from a position of never having had/seen/read this conversation or from what they've seen not being satisfactory or from not actually being what they want but they're running off the script they have seen.
The hindrance is a developer reflexively prioritizing criticism of some centralized part of a design without fully understanding the design, because "centralized" necessarily equates to "bad" or "wrong."
Some of the back-and-forth with Moxie over federating Signal looked suspiciously like a case of that. I see a lot of similar discussions wrt FLOSS privacy/security software. To the extent that anarchy is responsible for the ideological bent that "centralized" is "bad,", I'd say yes, it's a problem that wastes a substantial amount of time and effort.
> b) do you consider that hindering of software development to be a sufficient issue to object to anarchy.
Maybe you can help me come to a conclusion. Where does the ideological bent come from that "centralization" equates to "bad" in FLOSS privacy software?
For all I know, it could be that most anarchists are opportunistic and savvy in how they use computers, and it's only the anarchist software developers who have the ideological bent I described.
Although again none of the concerns below are necessarily anarchy specific nor do they necessarily (this is a statement of hypothetical, not a statement of fact: as far as I know we have no data in any direction about anything) have an significant effect on software development when compared to almost any other concern, source of friction or limitation
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I'm at best anarchist adjacent in as much as the circles I run in are concerned so I am not the one to diagnose them all (and there's an enormous variety of them)
But I would suspect that they see history as pointing to centralized architectures as significantly more vulnerable to being corrupted/controlled. And in many cases unauditable or unaccountable until it is too late (lavabit seems relevant here).
In addition to that vulnerability centralization puts broad power in concentrated hands which is kind of a necessary precondition for hierarchy and it easier to head things off at the pass then start down the slope and hope people don't succumb to momentum.
And worrying about architecture need have no effect on non-network oriented software, which outside of communication software is basically all of it if you haven't drank the SaaS koolaid.
But unless there is a workable decentralized alternative the point is moot.
I don't see any good reason to avoid using Wikipedia just because it is centralized. I don't see any good reason for Snowden to have avoided using Lavabit (nor its other 400,000 users). Again, I'd speculate that anarchists who aren't technically-minded would probably agree by their actions.
Moreover, well-designed, stable decentralized alternatives like git seem to have no problem overtaking their centralized counterparts. So what is the use of equating "centralized" with "bad?"
so, uh
https://www.wired.com/2016/07/meet-moxie-marlinspike-anarchi...
'Largely based on' is far too strong a term for the relationship between their ideas, after which the connection of the other figures to anarchism becomes even more tenuous.
This phrasing implies that supporting a democratic regime (over fascism) was somehow their actual goal, which is hardly the case.
It's worth looking at the political compass https://www.politicalcompass.org/images/axeswithnames.gif to realize that all dictatorships and most of the current "democracies" are very authoritarian.
It is truly a brilliant political ideology, and really hasn't been properly tested as one. It came close in the Spanish Civil War, but this conflict had too many competing ideologies on one side against the fascists, that it was undermined by the communists when it was just starting to show its worth.
This is true but its also true that violence (and being maligned for being violent) isn't a new occurrence for anarchism. There were plenty of strands of anarchism that felt violence and other illegal action was justified in order to achieve the aims you set out.
Some people who call themselves Anarchists are, indeed, aiming for "collective ownership of [property]". Others are aiming for individualized, self-sufficient control of property (e.g. homesteading).
Everyone sees what they're thinking of when they say "Anarchist", and as long as nobody tries it or fleshes out what they mean by that, everyone gets along because Anarchism is definitely not what we have now.
This is basically the most recent serious anarchist experiment in recent history, and it is not very well know, yet extremely interesting from a governance theory/practice point of view. And, sadly, under attack by a huge power.
But what I wanted to talk about is something the article omits. Basically because it wasn't really known until barely half a year ago, when Sònia Garangou published Les Joventuts Llibertàries de Catalunya (1932-1939), about the libertarian youth in catalonia (JLC from here on), not to be confused with the FIJL, the iberian federation of libertarian youth. Even within the libertarian and anarchist movements, Catalonia had many differences with other spanish groups, and it really went on its own path.
> As late as 1936, the CNT devoted an entire discussion at its national congress to the place of vegetarians, nudists, naturists, and "opponents of industrial technology" in a libertarian communist society.
CNT, FAI, POUM, etc. have always been the highlighted organizations in the spanish anarchist, communist and libertarian movements, but the recent research tells us that in Catalonia, the JLC might have been equally or even more relevant (in those years, CNT had around 550.000 affiliates in all Spain, FAI between 5.000 and 30.000, POUM even less, and JLC around 32.000 only in Catalonia). They were highly organized and decentralized, and besides vegetarianism and naturism, and maybe even more importantly, they were one of the first organizations in Spain to promote gender equality, have many women leading the local and regional groups, and also promoting culture through the creation of local libraries.
I think we will be able to read more about all this in a few years, after more studies and research are done, but for the moment, I thought it was interesting to mention this forgotten fragment of history, that might be so relevant to put the historical events and differences in context.
Nowadays, it's true that the anarchist movements have lost a lot of strength, but even if they seem residual, they are still organized enough and have the capacity to initiate direct action and mobilize people when needed, and the last events in catalonia are good proof of it. We have been seeing a resurgence of small groups of people organized at a local level, and even when it might seem they are organized for a very different reason, anarchist groups and individuals have been highly participative in these processes, as they have historically been with any social movement.
And it's really characteristic that the differences between the anarchist groups from Catalonia and the rest of Spain that we talk about from 85 years ago still happen nowadays. 85 years later, and in Madrid they still don't quite understand what catalans are doing.
P.S. I'm not an expert, so don't take my words too seriously, I'm just giving my opinion on a few points I think can be interesting to better understand anarchist movements in Spain and the influence they still have today.
Do you have first hand information on this claim, or do you asume it was the anarchists organizing it? Because as far as I know, they are not really important there. They do exists and they certainly push things, but I doubt in a crucial way. Most anarchistic groups I met, were rather anachronistic and lived and thought in terminology of the 19. century ... and had as much vitality.
This said, I'm not talking about the rallies from september 11's and those organized by ANC and Òmnium Cultural, which have been the most massive ones. Neither they are the sole organizers of every local action, but they have been actively participating in most.
Most anarchists doing real work do not really talk about themselves as anarchists so much. There's a lot of people that pretend and talk a lot but in contrast do and know very little. That's common and it's easy to be confused by it. Most anarchists doing real work I have met are very wary of letting themselves be identified or put themselves in front of the cameras, both figuratively and literally.
It's mostly a list of things that happened before concluding that the anarchists were completely unprepared for partial success which caused them to fracture and ally them selves with various lesser-of-two-evil factions which further fractured them leading to their eventual irrelevance.
Not just in Spain, in USSR and elsewhere too.
In fact the ideological enmity between communists and anarchists starts even back at the time of Bakhunin and Marx (and they were many critiques from one to another).
The Russians managed to acquire millions of dollars of gold reserves from the Republic in exchange for a disappointing array of weaponry, distributed only to their cronies, and accompanied by incompetent military advisors who were more interested in looking good back home than in winning the war. The anarchist unions seem to get more respect, but there's a strong argument that they were militarily ineffective, that their resistance to the Russia-aligned PSUC was destabilising at a critical period, and that the middle of a war against ascendant fascism was not the greatest time in the world to start redistributing land and making enormous social reforms. That's not even getting into Catalan/Basque independence, all the little minor parties, the different police factions, the wave of assassinations that led up the war (though fewer in number and in response to similar assassinations), the immense difficulty of forming a stable government, etc.
Reading into the war gave me a greater awareness of exactly how badly the "good guys" can behave, while in no way mitigating the horrors the Nationalist faction committed.
My grandfather's father and a substantial part of my grandmothers family (her father, brother, ...) were killed by anarchist because they were Catholics and because they were bourgeois (on one side they were a declining industrial family and on the other side they were doctors and pharmacists). They came one night, they put them into trucks and they never came back.
That was their crime, to go to church every Sunday, to be richer than the average, and have studied at the university. So the part of the family that survived had to support Franco, it was a question of survival.
Franco's side did the same with communists and anarchists, so many people had to join radical left-wing militias, more radical than themselves, just to survive.
There is nothing to romanticize about the Spanish Civil war. There were no good guys, it was all chaos, injustice and death all over the place, and today we still pay the consequences of so much stupidity.
I don't want to get too personal, as I lack the historic details in your case, but as far as I know the republic and the anarchists were not at all the same. And anarchists that killed rich people for being rich and catholic alone ... might have existed, but not as the norm and rather a very extreme subgroup. There is no common anarchistic ideology that justify this. So maybe there was a bit more to it, like beeing member of the falangists as well? (Even then it would be against common anarchistic ideology in general, but more likely)
So I doubt the choice of your family was binary. Understandable, given that they were catholic and franco was on the catholic side ... Maybe. But not the only choice.
But in general I very much agree. Not much to romanticize about a civil war. Heroic deaths here and there, yes. But mostly blood and hate.
It is a small town, quite remote. Soldiers (no officers are present, as the officers supported Franco's military coup and were sentenced to death for that just at the beginning of the war) and militia men are in control. They burn the churches, kill the priests and kill your father and your older brother, together with other men in town that are guilty of being "bourgeois" and Catholic. None of these assassinated men had weapons. They were right wing civilians, which doesn't make them fascists, because they weren't. After a few months of suffering and going to sleep every night wondering if tonight is the night they will com for you, the Republic finally sends some officers. This improves the situation and puts some order, but, still you feel pressured every time you leave home. At then end of the war, Franco's troops enter town. You feel relieved, as you know you are now safe. However, at the same time, you suffer because it is now the families of the other side, people that you know, that will suffer as you suffered until now. Franco's secret police comes to visit you to ask you to testify against those who killed your family members. You say no, because you are Catholic and, thus, against revenge. Franco's police, surprised, investigates you, but at the end absolves you.
That's how happened, more or less, in one side of my family. Every day during the war they hoped Franco would win, but they were no fascists, they didn't really believe in the guy, they valued Catholicism and just wanted to survive.
I just want to point out that once inside a war, there are no good guys and you end up choosing the side that is not going to kill you. This doesn't mean you support what this side is doing to the other side.
I think in Syria something similar is happening. Many people that know that Assad is a butcher, are supporting him because they fear more the alternative than the butcher. This happens to many Syrian Christians who fear that salafists will kill or expel them if they win the war. So, even though they despise Assad, they want him to win the war.
Addition: So, sometimes you don't choose sides, the sides choose you, mainly, negatively, they consider you an enemy and thus you end hoping the others win, even if you despise them.
Currently, in Spain, a lot of left wing people have an idealistic view of the war that I find dangerous.
Also, there is still too many people downplaying Franco's brutality.
I fear that this condemns us to make the same errors again.
Well, each to his own likings I guess.
But you know "missguided" socialists killed people for being born rich and fascists killed people for being born jewish. Sounds pretty similar to me.
They were exploited and betrayed, but the same could be said for the majority that stayed home and later were sent off to be slaughtered by the power that the USA worked with "against communism". And at the least the CPUSA volunteers had some agency.
Eby's book is good though.
Of course we could say that at the time it was too hard to see, but Purges had already been going on for long, with millions dead in murders and famines, and people knew. Many just chose not to believe.
Hitler was as involved in the Spanish civil war as Stalin. During the following great war, the allies decided that Stalin was the lessor of the two evils, and I think that history has largely judged that to not have been the wrong decision.
There was also the fact that they didn't had many legs to stand on.
What Stalin did to its own people, the western powers did the same and worse in their colonial territories. Mass executions, dictatorships, torture, forced labour, police brutality, concentration camps, state-caused famines, and the like.
Just one example: "On the pretext of a slight to their consul, the French invaded Algeria in 1830. Directed by Marshall Bugeaud, who became the first Governor-General of Algeria, the conquest was violent, marked by a "scorched earth" policy designed to reduce the power of the native rulers Dey; this included massacres, mass rapes, and other atrocities. Between 500,000 and 1,000,000, from approximately 3 million Algerians, were killed within the first three decades of the conquest."
It didn't continue any better than that. In fact, until the very 60s, decades after WWII ended, the police beat to death 100 demonstrators, not in some remote backwater, but in Paris itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961
And that's just one example from France. There are many other examples from France, Britain, Belgium, and so on.
Besides, they could not care less for the Jews. What they wanted, and fought Germany for, was not to let it rule the world (trade lines, developing nations, crucial territories and so on) -- the same thing WWI, WWII, and the Cold War happened for.
Good thing that they were betrayed and a very good thing would have been all of them being killed in the war. He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.
Those guys that wanted revolution should have started it in their own house first.