Speak to me of anarchy: Specifically Revolutionary Catalonia

[Batistuta]

@BrainGlutton

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?!

Absolutely. In Spain back then, there was a very clear division between the working class and what we called the ‘clase pudiente’, or those with money. This division was represented, for example, by the formal pronoun (“usted”) that you had to use when talking to those who were somehow ‘above you’. Hence my mention of a “psychological liberation” during the revolution in Catalonia: for a short while, people did not feel the need to use the formal pronoun when talking to customers, they no longer felt like they had to do whatever their customers/bosses told them to do. This was a tangible, dramatic change; whether it was worth the violence that came with it is another question.

And I think the term “shop-walker” is old-timey English for “someone who works at a shop”. Do you have the term ‘floorwalker’ in the USA? I think it’s similar to that.

[BrainGlutton]

@Batistuta

And I think the term “shop-walker” is old-timey English for “someone who works at a shop”. Do you have the term ‘floorwalker’ in the USA? I think it’s similar to that.

We used to – “The Floor Walker” is the title of an old Charlie Chaplin short – based on that, it appears to refer to a sort of middle manager who walks around a department store supervising the clerks. But I’ve never seen one IRL; I don’t think they exist any more.

[OurLordPeace]

@Alessan

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.

According to Iain McKay and the sources he uses here, in part of the Anarchist FAQ, they did, in fact, innovate in Catalonia, and it is in some ways a model for the present.

[John_Stamos_Left_Ear]

@WillFarnaby

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.

Do all Libertarians not know how to fucking read or just you?

From my OP:

(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.)

[BrainGlutton]

@Batistuta

Absolutely. In Spain back then, there was a very clear division between the working class and what we called the ‘clase pudiente’, or those with money. This division was represented, for example, by the formal pronoun (“usted”) that you had to use when talking to those who were somehow ‘above you’.

It used to be like that here, but only for blacks.

[Jonathan_Chance]

@John_Stamos_Left_Ear

Do all Libertarians not know how to fucking read or just you?

From my OP:

That’s it. Warning issued.

Rein that in right now.

[OurLordPeace]

@BrainGlutton

It used to be like that here, but only for blacks.

This is why anarchists are prominent among those who militantly oppose racists. I love this one, where they smash the Nazis’ car.

Here’s one from the UK, and here’s the same sort of thing right in front of the White House, with starring roles for newly prominent American Nazis Scott Terry (with the Apartheid-era South African flag) and Matthew Heimbach (with the Confederate battle flag).

Notice all the prominent anarchist black flags and such, and notice the police always protecting the bigots (“Who(m) do you serve, who(m) do you protect?”) and arresting activists of color.

Anti-Racist Action Points of Unity:

Anti-Racist Action has four points of unity to which all chapters must agree.

We go where they go. Whenever fascists are organizing or active in public, we're there. We don't believe in ignoring them or staying away from them. Never let the Nazis have the street!
We don't rely on the cops or courts to do our work for us. This doesn't mean we never go to court, but the cops uphold white supremacy and the status quo. They attack us and everyone who resists oppression. We must rely on ourselves to protect ourselves and stop the fascists.
Non-sectarian defense of other anti-fascists. In ARA, we have a lot of different groups and individuals. We don't agree about everything and we have a right to differ openly. But in this movement an attack on one is an attack on us all. We stand behind each other.
We support abortion rights and reproductive freedom. ARA intends to do the hard work necessary to build a broad, strong movement against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, discrimination against the disabled, the oldest, the youngest, and the most oppressed people. We want a classless, free society. We intend to win![13]

[OurLordPeace]

Damn, this one is great. “The only good Nazi is one that’s dead!” Bash the Fash!

[blindboyard]

@BrainGlutton

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.

I expect people to be surly and unhappy when serving others. They’re doing something unpleasant on onerous in exchange for cash. Whores don’t kiss.

[Batistuta]

@blindboyard

I expect people to be surly and unhappy when serving others. They’re doing something unpleasant on onerous in exchange for cash. Whores don’t kiss.

It’s not about being surly and unhappy. It’s about workers and customers using the same pronoun. It’s about knowing that a worker is no less than his/her customer. It’s about a social division that, as I understand it, didn’t exist in the USA back in the 1930s. Being happy or unhappy is the least of it.

[puddleglum]

@BrainGlutton

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

Where is your cite that the economy thrived? What I have read of Catalonia during that time was that there were two type of anarchy. One in the cities where the workers were given charge of the factories and they were run as democracies but were integrated into the larger economy the same way they were before, with prices, and wages being paid. The major difference was the way the internal structure was organized. This resulting in production cratering and never getting near its pre-war highs.
The other type of anarchy was in the countryside where collective farms were organized and landowners were made to give up their farms to the collective. People were forced to work long hours for small rations and the rest was sent to the armies.
See here for a paper on Spain under the anarchists.

[OurLordPeace]

@puddleglum

Where is your cite that the economy thrived? What I have read of Catalonia during that time was that there were two type of anarchy. One in the cities where the workers were given charge of the factories and they were run as democracies but were integrated into the larger economy the same way they were before, with prices, and wages being paid. The major difference was the way the internal structure was organized. This resulting in production cratering and never getting near its pre-war highs.
The other type of anarchy was in the countryside where collective farms were organized and landowners were made to give up their farms to the collective. People were forced to work long hours for small rations and the rest was sent to the armies.
See here for a paper on Spain under the anarchists.

Yes, as I mentioned in the other thread, Bryan Caplan writes that it cratered. That’s the first I’ve seen to that effect, as everything else I’ve seen (such as this section, and others, of the Anarchist FAQ, with cites of some of the same primary sources Caplan uses) indicates that the collectivized enterprises and farms thrived, even in the face of the war against the Fascists, and the hostility of the Communists and right-Socialists towards the Revolution.

It’s worth noting that both sides of this particular argument can see the other’s sources as too ideological to be reliable, but I am suspicious of Caplan here, and not just because I am indeed on the red-and-black side. Caplan is an “anarcho-capitalist” [sic, we say] like the sort mentioned in the original post. The only case study they seem to have is Somalia’s recent history, which (I might be wrong here) seems to show an anarchic environment without the kinds of political ideas that could be put into place in Spain (and earlier in the Ukraine, and so on) or perhaps with too much tribal conflict or religious fundamentalism or ferocious patriarchy or … I’m not sure, but in any case some things (like telecom) prospered in anarcho-capitalist Somalia, but most of the other things that people fear about anarchism were on display.

So, while I may agree with Caplan on certain other topics, and I’m not disputing his qualifications in general as an economist, when I skimmed that paper I found myself doubting his credibility. It’s fittingly Orwellian to see this argument over empirical facts, facts about a conflict in which Orwell made his observations of objective reality being made up out of whole cloth by partisans and ideologues.

(Note at the end: there are some American-libertarians who have given up on “capitalism” per se, saying that they support free enterprise instead. They see capitalism as having negative connotations, and rightly so, such as corporations colluding with the state in order to gain power they would never have in a genuine free market. Such people also tend to have some understanding for anarchists like the ones discussed in this thread, and will say that they’re fine with libertarians/anarchists of any stripe, as long as there’s mutual non-aggression and such. I see them as more honest than most “libertarians” or “anarcho-capitalists”, who are often just secular Republicans, or privileged Randroids, with no successful case studies towards which they can point.)

[BrainGlutton]

@puddleglum

Where is your cite that the economy thrived?

Here.

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:[7]

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.

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:[8]

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.”[8] 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%.[9] 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.[citation needed]