What if the Spanish Revolution had survived?

[BrainGlutton]

Spinoff from this thread, “Is it possible to be anti-capitalist and pro-market?”

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, another, related but distinct phenomenon took place: The mainly anarcho-syndicalist Spanish Revolution. In which the workers took control of the factories, etc., for real. It was as if a labor union local, instead of demanding concessions from management, demanded to be the factory’s management and its sole stockholder too, and made it stick.

The Spanish Revolution was a workers’ social revolution that began during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and resulted in the widespread implementation of anarchist and more broadly socialist organizational principles throughout various portions of the country for two to three years, primarily Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and parts of the Levante. Much of Spain’s economy was put under worker control; in anarchist strongholds like Catalonia, the figure was as high as 75%, but lower in areas with heavy Communist Party influence, as the Soviet-allied party actively resisted attempts at collectivization enactment. Factories were run through worker committees, agrarian areas became collectivised and run as libertarian communes. Even places like hotels, barber shops, and restaurants were collectivized and managed by their workers. Sam Dolgoff estimated that over 10 million people participated directly or at least indirectly in the Spanish Revolution[1], which he claimed “came closer to realizing the ideal of the free stateless society on a vast scale than any other revolution in history.”[2] Dolgoff quotes the French anarchist historian Gaston Leval (who was an active participant) to summarize the anarchist conception of the social revolution:[3]

In Spain during almost three years, despite a civil war that took a million lives, despite the opposition of the political parties (republicans, left and right Catalan separatists, socialists, Communists, Basque and Valencian regionalists, petty bourgeoisie, etc.), this idea of libertarian communism was put into effect. Very quickly more than 60% of the land was collectively cultivated by the peasants themselves, without landlords, without bosses, and without instituting capitalist competition to spur production. In almost all the industries, factories, mills, workshops, transportation services, public services, and utilities, the rank and file workers, their revolutionary committees, and their syndicates reorganized and administered production, distribution, and public services without capitalists, high salaried managers, or the authority of the state.

Even more: the various agrarian and industrial collectives immediately instituted economic equality in accordance with the essential principle of communism, ‘From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.’ They coordinated their efforts through free association in whole regions, created new wealth, increased production (especially in agriculture), built more schools, and bettered public services. They instituted not bourgeois formal democracy but genuine grass roots functional libertarian democracy, where each individual participated directly in the revolutionary reorganization of social life. They replaced the war between men, ‘survival of the fittest,’ by the universal practice of mutual aid, and replaced rivalry by the principle of solidarity…

This experience, in which about eight million people directly or indirectly participated, opened a new way of life to those who sought an alternative to anti-social capitalism on the one hand, and totalitarian state bogus socialism on the other.

<snip>

The British author George Orwell, best known for his anti-authoritarian works Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, was a soldier in the militia of the CNT-allied Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista (POUM; English: Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). Orwell meticulously documented his first-hand observations of the civil war, and expressed admiration for the social revolution in his book Homage to Catalonia.[4]

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life–snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.–had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.

<snip>

The most notable aspect of the social revolution was the establishment of a libertarian socialist economy based on coordination through decentralized and horizontal federations of participatory industrial collectives and agrarian communes. This was accomplished through widespread expropriation and collectivization of privately owned productive resources (and some smaller structures), in adherence to the anarchist belief that private property is authoritarian in nature. Spanish Civil War scholar (and anti-socialist) Burnett Bolloten writes of this process:

The economic changes that followed the military insurrection were no less dramatic than the political. In those provinces where the revolt had failed the workers of the two trade union federations, the Socialist UGT and the Anarchosyndicalist CNT, took into their hands a vast portion of the economy. Landed properties were seized; some were collectivized, others were distributed among the peasants, and notarial archives as well as registers of property were burnt in countless towns and villages. Railways, tramcars and buses, taxicabs and shipping, electric light and power companies, gasworks and waterworks, engineering and automobile assembly plants, mines and cement works, textile mills and paper factories, electrical and chemical concerns, glass bottle factories and perfumeries, food-processing plants and breweries, as well as a host of other enterprises, were confiscated or controlled by workmen’s committees, either term possessing for the owners almost equal significance in practice. Motion-picture theatres and legitimate theatres, newspapers and printing shops, department stores and bars, were likewise sequestered or controlled as were the headquarters of business and professional associations and thousands of dwellings owned by the upper class.

[6]

The economic policies of the anarchist collectives were primarily operated according to the basic communist principle of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. In some places, money was entirely eliminated, to be replaced with vouchers and coupons distributed on the basis of needs rather than individual labor contributions. Bolloten writes of this process also:[7]

In many communities money for internal use was abolished, because, in the opinion of Anarchists, ‘money and power are diabolical philtres, which turn a man into a wolf, into a rabid enemy, instead of into a brother.’ ‘Here in Fraga [a small town in Aragon], you can throw banknotes into the street,’ ran an article in a Libertarian paper, ‘and no one will take any notice. Rockefeller, if you were to come to Fraga with your entire bank account you would not be able to buy a cup of coffee. Money, your God and your servant, has been abolished here, and the people are happy.’ In those Libertarian communities where money was suppressed, wages were paid in coupons, the scale being determined by the size of the family. Locally produced goods, if abundant, such as bread, wine, and olive oil, were distributed freely, while other articles could be obtained by means of coupons at the communal depot. Surplus goods were exchanged with other Anarchist towns and villages, money being used only for transactions with those communities that had not adopted the new system.

Bolloten supplements this analysis through quotation of anarchist journalist Augustin Souchy’s remark that “The characteristic of the majority of CNT collectives is the family wage. Wages are paid according to the needs of the members and not according to the labor performed by each worker.”[7] This focus on provision for the needs of members rather than individual remuneration effectively rendered these conditions anarcho-communist in nature.

Despite the critics clamoring for “maximum efficiency” rather than revolutionary methods, anarchist collectives often produced more than before the collectivization. In Aragon, for instance, the productivity increased by 20%.[8] The newly liberated zones worked on entirely libertarian principles; decisions were made through councils of ordinary citizens without any sort of bureaucracy (it should be noted that the CNT-FAI leadership was at this time not nearly as radical as the rank and file members responsible for these sweeping changes). In addition to the economic revolution, there was a spirit of cultural revolution. Traditions some viewed as oppressive were done away with. For instance, women were legally permitted to have abortions, and the idea of “free love” became widely prevalent. In many ways, this spirit of cultural liberation prefigured that of the “New Left” movements of the 1960s.

Ultimately the Spanish Revolution was crushed – not by Franco; by the Republican government, which was increasingly dominated by Communists following the line of Stalin, who did not like any of the above one little bit. To Stalin, and to all orthodox Communists worldwide following the Soviet lead, the proper revolutionary model was the Soviet model: The Communist Party in control of the state, the state in control of a centralized planned economy.

At this time Stalin was what amounted to the Pope of the International Communist Church, and true believers generally hate heretics even worse than they hate infidels. This was a period of schism within the international Marxist-Leninist socialist movement, between the followers of Stalin and those of Trotsky, still alive in exile at this time, still accusing Stalin of “betraying the Revolution.” Stalinists returned the favor and called Trotsky the traitor, and Stalin’s agents in the USSR and abroad were hunting and persecuting Trotskyists and suspected Trotskyists with the zeal and ferocity of 16th-Century Roman Catholic inquisitors hunting Protestants. Trotsky was accused of conspiring with the Fascists and Nazis and was blamed for all the USSR’s troubles. Anyone Stalin saw as a potential rival for power, anyone he wanted to eliminate or scapegoat or demonize, was accused of being a Trotskyist agent. (All this inspired the scenarios in Orwell’s later political novels: Animal Farm, where Napoleon blames everything on the absent Snowball; and Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the bugbear is the mysterious Immanuel Goldstein, purported leader of the Brotherhood.) And then there were the Anarchists, who were even further out there from a Stalinist POV.

Towards the end of the Civil War, all Anarchist, Trotskyist, any non-Stalinist leftist parties in Spain were suppressed. As George Orwell recounts in Homage to Catalonia, he happened to have volunteered with the militia of the POUM and got out of Spain just in time to avoid being arrested (by the Republican government, not by Franco). Yes, the infighting sapped the Republic’s ability to resist Franco; OTOH, putting down the non-Stalinists was a condition for continued Soviet military aid, on which the Republic was utterly dependent.

Question for debate: What if the Republicans had won the Civil War, and won it without crushing the Spanish Revolution? Suppose, also, that in the coming, wider war, Hitler found himself too busy to mess with it, and so Spain remained independent and more or less neutral in WWII (as it did in our timeline when Franco ruled it), and had the same political and economic system after the war was over.

So: How would an economy largely based on self-organized collectives, independent of non-worker owners, independent of the state, independent of any political party, have developed over the following decades?

1. Would it have been economically viable in the long run?

2. Would it have inspired imitation in other countries?

3. Would it, despite its radically egalitarian intentions, inevitably have produced some sort of managerial or leadership elite functionally indistinguishable from the capitalists in the West or the party bosses in the USSR?

[puddleglum]

Click this to read an alternative version of what was really like in Anarchist Spain this
In short, the Anarchists burned churches and murdered clergy, stole in order to support its army, conscripted recruits, stole land from its owners, and forced peasants into collectivation. Spain was in the middle of the Great Depression but both industrial output and agricultural production fell dramatically in the parts of Spain the Anarchists controlled.

1. It would not have been economically viable, if people are paid the same no matter what they produce, they will shortly produce as little as possible.
2. The only way it would have been copied would have been if it sent out agents to foment revolution in other countries the way the USSR did and Spain is a much smaller country.
3. Of course, managers and leaders are necessary for coordinated effort. Every succesful revolution ends with the revolutionaries in charge and living like royalty.

[Little_Nemo]

I think it would be possible. You could organize businesses like micronations. Each business would have its “citizenship” - the employees. And it would have a democratic government where the citizen/workers could vote on the government/management.

I don’t see any inherent reason why this couldn’t function. Businesses organized by collective managment might not be as flexible as more traditionally managed companies. But a diminished flexibility is, at worse, a survivable liability and might even be an asset in some situations.

The biggest problem I would foresee would be the one I mentioned in the other thread. It’s relatively easy to start up a traditionally managed company. All you need is an individual or a small group with the necessary capital and a plan of how they want to use it. But starting up a collectively managed business would be a lot harder. You’d need to have a plan and then find a large group of people who are interested in joining the collective, are available to join, and have the skills and assets the proposed company needs. It would make each start-up work like a jigsaw puzzle. Except that instead of having all the pieces in a box, most of the pieces you need are already fit into other puzzles. And all the puzzles want to keep their own best pieces and the pieces themselves get to pick which puzzle they’re in. And you’re not exactly sure what the picture looks like.

[BrainGlutton]

@puddleglum

Click this to read an alternative version of what was really like in Anarchist Spain this
In short, the Anarchists burned churches and murdered clergy

So? In the context of Spain in the 1930s, that was a good thing. Should’ve been done sooner. Centuries sooner.

@puddleglum

, stole in order to support its army, conscripted recruits,

Revolutionary army. Duh! And the Nationalists did exactly the same things, you know.

@puddleglum

stole land from its owners

Double-duh! That was by way of being the point!

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

So? In the context of Spain in the 1930s, that was a good thing. Should’ve been done sooner. Centuries sooner.

I don’t know that the deliberate and targeted murder of unarmed religious figures can really be seen as a “good” thing, in most systems of morality.

[BrainGlutton]

@Captain_Amazing

I don’t know that the deliberate and targeted murder of unarmed religious figures can really be seen as a “good” thing, in most systems of morality.

Not that, but in general the attack on the Church in Spain – which, like most acts of revolution against established authority, in practice could hardly be done nonviolently. Maybe it could have been done less violently, but in any case it was overdue to be done. The Catholic Church in pre-Civil-War Spain, you must understand, was not just a church; it was an oppressive proprietary and political institution, and had been so for centuries. No revolution worthy of the name could have left it alone.

[Lemur866]

Well, to fight the hypothetical, why is it that such schemes never seem to work out in the real world? We can play “what if they did?”, but that ignores the fact that they never do. I guess the bosses and their running dog lackeys always crush such things. Well, why is it that the bosses are so powerful that the socialists never ever win in real life, and when they do it’s Animal Farm?

Thing is, there’s nothing stopping anyone in the United States or Canada or Europe or wherever from setting up cooperatives and living in this way. There aren’t any fascists waiting to come in and shoot everyone. It’s a free country. And it turns out there really are cases of such cooperatives and communes and collectives, but very few people want to participate in them, and they certainly don’t noticeably outperform conventional organizations. If collectives were that much better, why can’t they compete with other methods of social and economic organization? And if they require the forcible suppression of other methods of social and economic organization to function, then it might be socialism but it ain’t exactly democratic socialism, is it?

A collective barbershop that can’t compete with a for-profit barbershop is pretty much a prima facie refutation of the notion that the for-profit barbershop skims off excess value for the owners.

So to answer your question, if the Stalinists hadn’t crushed the anarchists, pretty soon the guys who were violently overthrowing the church and the landowners would find themselves in charge of the territory, and pretty soon they’d be indistinguishable from any of the other warlords that have squabbled over territory over the centuries. When you have a group that’s used to smashing the bourgeoisie violently, violence becomes a familiar tool, and then you have to smash the counter-revolutionairies, and then the anti-social elements and boy are there a lot of anti-social elements.

[Sam_Stone]

Anyone who has ever organized or participated in any kind of non-paid organization soon finds that there are one or two people out of every ten that actually do the work. The rest sit around and complain or do a lot of meetings and talking and planning and never accomplish a damned thing.

The pastoral view of a collective where everyone willingly shares in the work for the greater good of all is generally a fantasy. The only time it works even remotely well is when there is some overarching incentive that binds them together - usually religion (or a religious belief in a political system). And even then, collectives often have to resort to threats and intimidation of their members to get them to work (such as threatening expulsion from a community).

I’ve been a member of many clubs. I’ve been a director of several non-profit organizations. I’ve been involved with parent associations and fund-raising and all that. None of them ever work particularly well until a small percentage of the people basically take over and start running the show.

There were lots of experiments with communes and collectives in America in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It was the hippy thing to do. A lot of these were very sincere, and had the advantage of having self-selected members who were all with the program, ideologically aligned, and at first all believed in the concept and tried their best to make it work.

What usually happens is that some members start to slack off. Others are power freaks. Some want to endlessly debate every little decision. Eventually, internal turmoil and disparity of labor causes the things to collapse and everyone goes their own separate ways. Or, the people doing all the work will start demanding additional compensation, and a typical hierarchy starts to develop, and then the slackers and the true believers leave to find a ‘better’ commune.

And when these communes would try to compete with businesses that have more capital, a selected work force paid for their ability and a proper management team, they’d get their hemp hats handed to them in the marketplace.

The notion of collective activity that continues working without incentives for individual work denies the reality of human behavior. Our interactions with each other in society are generally controlled through incentives. The expectation of personal reward for labor given, fear of being fired, social pressures, pressures by other members of a family or community, whatever. Change the incentives, and the behavior changes.

The problem with any communistic system, whether it be worker collectives within a capitalist society or forced collectivization, is that once in the collective the incentives are all twisted. If you can’t encourage someone to work with the promise of higher pay, you have to do it by appealing to their morality, or ideology, or through fear.

A religious commune might stay functional for a long time because the people are motivated by their religion. Voluntary collectives set up by political ‘true believers’ might work for some time because everyone is unified in trying to prove out the model.

But when you group people randomly into collectives where there is no shared vision or goal, disaster ensues. No one is willing to take risks, people slack off and refuse to work, etc. In these cases, the only way to incentivize them is through fear. Which is why all these noble attempts to organize the people into collectives rapidly turn into tyranny.

Productivity in the Soviet Union declined after Stalin died. You know why? Because while the Soviets continued to execute people or throw them in the Gulag for political crimes, Stalin used to do it for people who simply slacked off. Don’t show up for work, or get too many black marks from your boss, and you might get a visit from the secret police, and those never ended well.

After Stalin died, the new leaders didn’t have quite the stomach for mass murder and imprisonment of the population, and productivity levels plummeted.

Eventually, alternate methods of incentivization were developed in the Soviet Union. The better workers were moved up in queues for apartments and cars. Factory managers who met quotas were rewarded with state-provided homes and nicer vehicles. The heads of organizations were given the ability to travel the world, limousines, country homes, and all the trappings the wealthy have everywhere. If you were a good citizen, a member of the party, and had proven to be productive, you’d be given access to stores that sold goods not available to others. And of course, there was still an element of fear. When the state runs everything, it can ruin your life. So you pretty much had to do what the state told you to do.

Even with all that, the levels of individual worker productivity were very low in the Soviet Union, and corruption levels were high as people sought out other ways to be rewarded. Black markets were everywhere, and alcoholism was sky-high. Even after Stalin’s reign of terror ended and the leadership was largely replaced with technocrats who sincerely tried to make Communism work, the Soviet Union was a crappy place to live and had a lousy economy.

[smiling_bandit]

@Sam_Stone

There were lots of experiments with communes and collectives in America in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It was the hippy thing to do. A lot of these were very sincere, and had the advantage of having self-selected members who were all with the program, ideologically aligned, and at first all believed in the concept and tried their best to make it work.

You can go back much farther, too. Communes, and communal businesses, were tried in variopus utopian schemes in the post-Revolutionary America era, and they all failed. Actually, one didn’t - it became a for-profit business and made oodles of cash!

Communal businesses can work, though. All you need is for everyone to have a direct economic interest in each other’s success, a clear line of authority, and deep knowledge of your coworkers. In other words… a perfectly prosaic family business.

[Aji_de_Gallina]

Unspeakable poverty, plummeting GDP, mass murder even when the “obvious targets” (rich people, church) were dead (you can always fing new guilty people, takeover by better organised communists and then even more murder and suffering…at that point Franco would be like Gandhi.

[Little_Nemo]

Another issue would be voting weight. Let’s use the hypothetical shoe factory I mentioned in the other thread. Let’s say it was started ten years ago by a hundred workers, all of who had an equal share in the company, and the company has become a success. Enough so, that the workers have decided to expand the business to triple its current size.

Now the problems would arise. How many of the hundred current workers would accpet the idea of two hundred additional workers coming in and being given equal shares in ownership and voting power.

They’d be telling each other, “We spent ten years building this company up from nothing and now these new guys get to walk in and grab a share of our business? Why should they get an equal share of all the profits we worked for? And why should we let them have a say in running things? We spent years learning this business - what do these guys know about making and selling shoes? What if the 200 of them start outvoting the 100 of us and ruin the business? Hell, what if the 200 of them just vote the 100 of us out altogether?”

And these are not unreasonable concerns. So what would end up happening is the one hundred current members would vote in a policy giving them some protection - like maybe they get a vote for every year they worked so they all have ten votes and the new guys only have one. Not unreasonable but the result is you’ve now got a heirarchy where one hundred senior workers control a thousand votes and run the business while the two hundred other workers are second class employees.

[RickJay]

BrainGlutton left out all the negatives about the “anarchist” societies in Spain, such as the fact that a hell of a lot of coercion was involved in convincing people to play along.

What would have happened, of course, is that it would not have survived anyway. Some form or social order would have had to arise. Perhaps it would have been a good one, perhaps a bad one, but the Spanish Revolution’s brief existence, which was really not very anarchist at all, wouldn’t have lasted.

[BrainGlutton]

@smiling_bandit

You can go back much farther, too. Communes, and communal businesses, were tried in variopus utopian schemes in the post-Revolutionary America era, and they all failed. Actually, one didn’t - it became a for-profit business and made oodles of cash!

Do you mean Oneida Limited, or ZCMI?

[BrainGlutton]

@RickJay

BrainGlutton left out all the negatives about the “anarchist” societies in Spain, such as the fact that a hell of a lot of coercion was involved in convincing people to play along.

Cite?

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

Cite?

Did you read the link in the second post? It goes into detail about the large scale theft and seizure of property, of conscription into anarchist militias, of forced collectivization of farms, of the abolition of markets and forced sales and purchases at fixed prices, and of large scale terror and murder of opponents. As it puts it:

The theoretical problem that the Spanish Anarchists did not confront is straightforward. Once you declare unpleasant but non-violent acts to be “domination,” you implicitly justify using violence to stop them. If Catholicism is “domination,” then surely killing priests is a form of self-defense. If prostitution is “domination,” then closing the brothels and making prostitutes take up another line of work is actually a form of liberation. If wage-labor is “domination,” then forbidding a person to hire an eager worker (even a worker with the option of working for a large collective farm) actually saves the worker from victimization. What is the pattern here? By expanding the meaning of “domination” to include almost everything, you actually leave people with no freedom at all. All that remains is the Orwellian freedom to live precisely as the Anarchist council thinks right.

If “freedom” means anything at all, it must leave open the freedom to perform many immoral actions without punishment. Words can hurt other people’s feelings, or humiliate them, or convince them to devote their lives to follies. But if anything is not “domination” or “coercion,” it is speaking your mind to the world.

Likewise, if a person must devote their life to a cause, or else face punishment, they are not free. If a person must join the war against Franco, or care for the needy, or make the collective successful - or face prison or execution - they are not free. They are not free even if the cause to which they must dedicate their life is noble, just, and right.

The Spanish Anarchists loved the words “liberty” and “freedom,” but they did not love them enough to think deeply about them. They assumed that their application was obvious; there was no need to make a list of what people should and should not be free to do. Instead, the Spanish Anarchists focused upon what they thought free people ought to do. They did not spend a great deal of time thinking about how to treat people who planned on using their freedom differently. Either they assumed that a bizarre degree of unanimity would prevail once the state was abolished; or they planned to kill all dissenters until unanimity was achieved; or, most likely of all, they were too emotional to think about the issue.

[smiling_bandit]

@BrainGlutton

Do you mean Oneida Limited, or ZCMI?

Oneida. The Mormons were an unusual case and not exactly a commune or Utopian experiment (though with several similarities).

[RickJay]

@BrainGlutton

Cite?

You can start by going back to THE VERY WIKIPEDIA PAGE YOU USED IN YOUR OP and reading the entire last half of it, which you snipped out. Follow the references from there.

[transprog]

What would it look like?

Probably like this .

Or at least something similar.

[JoseB]

Ummm… I guess I have some “second-hand” knowledge of the matter. My father fought in the Spanish Civil War, in the Republican side. He had first-hand experience with the anarchists at the time.

He said that there was coercion, and also that, without that coercion, the anarchists wouldn’t have had an iota of a chance of implementing their program --many, MANY people did not agree with them, and the reaction of the anarchists was not to try to convince them of the goodness of their ideals, but to force them to go along, or else.

He said that “a few among them were idealists, but the majority were in there for motives such as revenge (against those who were better off), or thinking that with time they could ‘climb’ somewhere, or thinking that the anarchists were ‘winners’ and wanted to get in the ‘right’ side”.

He also thought that the anarchist uprisings and the infighting between anarchists and others in the Republican side crippled the Republican war effort, fatally.

He didn’t think highly of the Spanish anarchists.

[BrainGlutton]

@JoseB

He also thought that the anarchist uprisings and the infighting between anarchists and others in the Republican side crippled the Republican war effort, fatally.

That is certainly true. And maybe all those who said, “Fight Franco now, social revolution later,” were in the right of it, at least in strategic terms.