Speak to me of anarchy: Specifically Revolutionary Catalonia

Great Debates
1

I have several self-professed anarchist friends. They run from punk rockers who dig nihilism but don’t put much thought into it to educated folks who study philosophy and political theory and they advocate anarchism and disavow capitalism with the same ferocity and certainty that Libertarians do their similar but also diametrically opposite views.

With the Libertarian crowd, you can pretty much frame a lot of discussion by pointing out that there has never been a Libertarian country. Which isn’t to say that debating with Libertarians isn’t fun and all, but at the end of the day they have to concede that they deal only in theoretical constructs and have no hard evidence that a Libertarian society would work.

(Note to pissed-off Libertarians - which I realize is a redundancy: if you want to make the case that there have been or are Libertarian societies, please start another thread and don’t derail this one.)

I bring this up because my more scholarly anarchist advocate acquaintances counter the “if your socio-political system is so great, how come it’s never been implemented” question that Libertarians have difficulty answering with the assertion that anarchy has, in fact, been tried, specifically during the Revolutionary Catalonia, where during the Spanish Civil War a region of Spain was controlled for three years by what they claim was an anarchist regime.

I don’t know much about this or how successful it was. Looking at at the most basic way to evaluate the movement - how long it lasted - it was fleetingly brief. Of course it’s short tenure doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great idea that made for a great place to raise the kids, only that someone more powerful came along and tore it down which historically can happen to the best of them.

Proponents of anarcho-syndicalism still look to this period as an example of why that system can succeed. Should they? Or are they using confirmation bias? Was it really great to be in Catalona in the late '30s or was it horrible? Does that period really make a good case for advocating the success of an anarchistic society, or is it actually better used as en example for it’s failure to work very well or very long?

2

Personally, while I acknowledge that RevCat was an anarchist state, I don’t really look to it as a model for future anarchist polities. It was very much of its time and place.

3

In my opinion, we should look at that ‘experiment’ for what it is: something exceptional that was only made possible by the outbreak of a civil war and ensuing chaos. Given a relative vacuum of power at the time, the anarchist unions that were huge in Catalonia (CNT and FAI) pretty much took over. It’s unlikely that a similar scenario will arise in the western world today, so it can hardly be an example.

Also, bear in mind that revolutionary Catalonia showed one of the fundamental weaknesses of anarchism: an anarchist society is very vulnerable to external threats. As soon as the Communists started getting organised, they were able to crush the rather dis-organised and under-equiped anarchists. In a similar scenario today the enemies might not be Communists or fascists, but simply state security forces.

Julián Casanova recently released a fantastic history of anarchism in Spain, and its section on the Catalan revolution is particularly enlightening.

To summarise: the anarchists proved that they could manage key industries by getting the workers directly involved, without productivity dropping noticeably. They also began to support the role of women, who would arguably have been more liberated in Catalonia in 1936 than in any other time in Spanish history until the late 1970s.

At the same time, the revolution gave rise to a whole lot of violence aimed at those who had previously been in power. Whether it was religious figures, or industrial moguls or even members of established political parties, they were left in a very precarious situation. Since the anarchist revolution was going to abolish private property, political parties and religion, the former members of these groups suffered the backlash.

Yes and no. In my opinion it shows that, at a specific point in time in a specific place, it was possible for an economy to be run according to anarchist theories and not implode. It showed that, if workers took over certain industrial areas and abolished leadership positions, the result would not always be chaos.

But it also showed that this lack of a clear authority is very vulnerable to (a) internal violence; and (b) external attacks. Was it worth it? My anarchist grandfather from northern Spain would say yes; hundreds of others would disagree. Will we ever see anything like that again? No, not in the western world.

(I’m sorry about the excessively long response with no clear conclusions. This is one of my favourite topics, but even I don’t really know what to make of it)

4

I missed the edit window, but I wanted to add something:

There was also a very important sense of liberation, perhaps more psychological than physical. Interestingly, George Orwell was in Spain at the time and seemed to drift slightly towards anarchism after this experience. His own words show the ambiguity of the revolution:

5

It sounds like they were good at seizing stuff.

6

They liked to make private industries democratic.

7

But they didn’t actually start any new industries, did they?

8

It didn’t last long enough for the question to matter, did it?

9

True, but that also invalidates it as proof of anything.

10

Like the Spanish Revolution as a whole, it serves as proof that an anarcho-syndicalist economy, with the workers in control of the factories for real, can thrive for a short time. Since the Stalinists soon crushed it, we never got a chance to see whether it could be viable in the long run – and that is the run in which the question of innovation would be relevant.

11

A thriving economy means actually creating something new, not just moving the chairs around in something built under a different system. The anarcho-syndicalists proved that they could serve as acceptable short-term custodians of a capitalist-built economy, nothing more.

12

Didn’t you just repeat what BrainGlutton wrote, with slightly different wording?

13

Libertarians have never had a problem answering the question “if your system is so good why hasn’t it been implemented?”. In fact a large portion of libertarian writing explains why this is so. The reason you think it hasn’t been answered is because you never looked for a response, ignored the response, or simply did not understand the response.

14

Did I?

15

This points up a cultural divide that perhaps makes it difficult for Americans to understand radical politics in a European context. We expect waiters to look us in the face. A waiter is probably of the same social class as the customer, more or less, and might well dine in restaurants on his days off. Apparently that is not true in Europe, or at any rate was not true at the time of the Spanish Revolution.

As for “shop-walkers,” what are they?!

16

No, it doesn’t. And the anarcho-syndicalists did indeed “create something new” in the organization of the economy. And it thrived.

17

That is not true.

18

Yes, it does. For an economy to work, businesses have to adapt and evolve, new businesses have to open, and failing businesses have to close. Capitalism, with its bottom-up methods, can do these things; Communism, with its top-down approach, can as well, to varying degrees of success. But anarcho-syndicalists? I don’t see it happening.

19

It’s important to contextualize here: Anarchism is not simply a more extreme form of Libertarianism. Libertarianism is an extreme form of one branch of Anglo-American Classical Liberalism (Social Liberalism or Left Liberalism being another branch of the same tradition). Anarchism is a different tradition, a Continental European tradition closely associated with Marxism. In a nutshell, Libertarians oppose the state (in large part) because they see it as a threat to private property and Anarchists oppose the state because they see it as a defender of private property. On that point, the Anarchists are probably more nearly correct WRT any state that is not Stalinist.

20

What, you think workers’ soviets or whatever you call them are incapable of having ideas? What do you base that on?