I don’t think it is a fair description. The manor lords were generally left behind by the industrial revolution. They had land, but that is not capital. Their wealth was too illiquid.
And in the case of the Digger situation, it was a feudal dispute over land use. The Diggers wanted to farm common land and thereby deprive the use of it by others. Enforcing property law is not remarkable, although I’m sure the feudal lords did so in an extreme manner.
That’s a false choice. The quick and easy path is always available for anyone. What makes a people - or a cause - worthwhile or worthless is the extent they compromise morals for the sake of power. And this choice comes to everyone sooner or later. Moreover, many of those selfsame groups were not your mythical “noble Leftists who were FORCED by TEH EBIL CAPITALISTS and DEH AWFUL IMPERIALISTS” to go to violence, repression, and unholy alliances with global tyranny. They were quite willing to grab onto it the second other means failed them, and often beforehand. They wanted power and perfection, and they wanted it now, and if it meant tyranny, then they applauded tyranny.
From someone who cannot miss an opportunity to act as an apologist for Franco’s fascist regime that’s kinda funny.
BG, seems to me you omitted some important qualifiers. How about:
Because, IMO once you cross the line into authoritarian “the ideology, or death” territory, communist or fascist are very similar products and you can get to debating which is worse. Get sent away for trying to make and keep a profit from your shop, or get sent away for trying to organize a union to work that shop; either way shut up and be a good little cell of the larger living being of the Party/People/Nation/whatever.
As Nava mentioned, production and service cooperatives, employee-owned industries, and land-ownership collectives ARE players in the modern economy of Spain and other lands – but part of their success lies in that they are voluntary, the people in them WANT to be there for the benefits they provide their members, not forced at gunpoint because “it’s what’s good”; and they seek to compete with private businesses, not to overthrow and destroy them.
Silly. I dislike Franco’s regime. However, it may have been better than the probably alternatives at the time. And no more. It is the Left which insists that anyone who does not agree with them simplisme. I accept that there is an order of “good”, “better”, and “best” in this world and we are very rarely able to even get as far as “good”. You cannot curse one possibility without mindlessly embracing the other: I can curse both, but still choose the least bad.
But you don’t curse them both. You take any opportunity to pronounce that Franco and his murdering scum weren’t that bad, that they were better than the alternative, that at least they didn’t interfere with the abusive power of the Church in Spain.
And to me it is simple. You defend a fascist regime over a social democratic one, you are an apologist for fascism. That Franco wasn’t as evil as Hitler doesn’t mean he wasn’t brutal, murderous scum. And those who defend him aren’t a hell of a lot better.
Okay, I’ll debate it. Marxist regimes include the Soviet Union, which murdered some ten million of its own citizens; the People’s Republic of China, which murdered at least 25 million and probably more; Cambodia, which killed about a third of its country’s population, making it in percentage terms the most murderous regime to ever exist in the history of humanity; and on and on.
How is the death toll from fascism any worse? If you want to say Hitler was worse, I’ll buy that. Nazi Germany is as bad as it’s ever gotten in many ways. But taken as a whole, it sure looks to me like the total weight of Marxism is just as bad as fascism. In the end both always end up being about killing people.
I’m honestly curious what answer you’d have to these simple facts that isn’t a No True Scotsman argument.
Since when are Stalinists “social democrats”? Stalin must be turning in his grave, dude!
And coops are privately owned, it’s just that they’re privately owned by (a majority of) the people who work in them. We have government-owned and union-owned companies too, but those are altogether different breeds.
Actually, Stalin was, once . . . The Bolshevik Party was originally a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. N.B.: There was no hypocrisy or euphemism in the name – the RSDLP never pretended to be anything other than an orthodox Marxist party aiming at a communist society, though the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions differed as to tactics. It was only later that “social democracy” came to mean something very different.
I never claimed he was. My point is that it isn’t a choice between fascism and Stalinism generally. It’s often fascism against social democracy/democratic socialism, and the support given by western ‘democratic’ nations to fascist forces has undermined the possibility of success for progressive democractic forces, leading the left to flee into the arms of the Stalinists (and later just the plain old Soviets) who were the only people offering support.
Well, the thread started as a question about Cooperativismo Anarquista; part of the problem in that case was that both the Anarquistas and the Stalinists were (and had been for a while) prone to doing things at gunpoint. Social Democrats were barely in the map for Spanish politics, having been shoved off the table by the people further left.
Those Anarquistas and Stalinists may be related to the definition of Democratic in Democratic Republic of Germany, but the issue this thread was originally about was NOT between Fascism and Social Democracy.
Say, where’s RedFury?
Perhaps any discussion about the Spanish Anarchists and/or Republicans needs to be prefaced by a mandatory “by the way I know Franco was a Nazi-supported scum!” disclaimer?
I’m left wondering as to the extent to which in this particular case the abuses of the anarchists and Stalinists can really be cast as a case of the moderate progressives being undermined by the Establishment powers, and the people driven into the arms of the extremists. During the period from the 1890s to 1930s the European nations experienced an ebb and flow of scares about violent anarchist and, later, Bolshevist movements that made no bones about wanting right off the bat overthrow and revolution, NOT reform from within. OTOH, in reality these movements largely failed in doing much beyond providing excuses for the ascent of reactionary regimes who had no qualms in sweeping away the moderates as well, so that becomes something of a chicken-or-egg question.
And IM outsider’s O, if “Memoria Histórica” means that whoever was in opposition to Franco is presumed right no matter what they were doing, and any attempt to debate what they got wrong or that they were not universally supported is to be dismissed, then that’s not much an improvement over the lies and propaganda of the dictatorship.
It’s the huge tragedy of the European left in the late interwar period, IMHO. Social democrats and democratic socialists could coexist, work together, and make important advances. But even in parties where they did (such as the British Labour party) they were still prone to internal warfare.
Then the revolutionaries screwed the pooch badly. The refusals to enter popular fronts left the Democratic Left attacked from two sides, and with the Church and organized capitalism so scared of the left they cooperated totally with the fascists, the Democratic Left became emasculated and only the revolutionary left was seen as fighting.
Throughout Europe the Democratic left maintained large levels of support. But they also needed support from the middle and the far left to stand a chance of opposing fascism adequately. They got neither, and Europe ended up with the twin tyrannies of Fascism then Stalinism.
To be fair, Franco was not, strictly speaking, a fascist. He had fascist, or Falangist, supporters and included them in his goverment, but he was himself more of an authoritarian-traditionalist – rather in the mode of the Carlists (though, in the event, the Carlists also found themselves rather disappointed by their co-optation into Franco’s coalition). Fascism, although it loudly harks to the past, is an essentially modern creed, with its own mass-based and social-revolutionary and anti-aristocratic elements. Franco . . . seems to have lacked the imagination to be a fascist. Or, as John J. Reilly says in his review of Fascism: A History, by Roger Eatwell, “Franco’s Spain was not fascist because Franco was not an artist, but a cop (or, as they used to say in my old high school, a “Prefect of Discipline”).” And, though he accepted without hesitation Hitler’s and Mussolini’s support in the Civil War, he did not, after victory, return the favor by supporting the Axis war effort. Nor was he interested in war-glory or fresh empires for Spain. All he really wanted was to turn back the clock, ideally to before 1789 or even to much earlier, to the days when the Church and nobles were on top and the peasants knew their place.
Actually, the Carlistas are a lot less authoritarian than they are portrayed as being. They believe in such things as “the King is subject to the Laws” and “the King can’t change the legal system in any significative manner (can perform maintenance, though) without Parliament’s approval” and “everybody has the right and duty to address and question the Authorities” and “discipline comes from within”. In many points, they’re closer to the idealist Anarchists (you know, the ones who believe in “let’s talk it over”) than to National Socialism. The “way back when” they wanted to go back to was “way back before the Kings thought they owned the country”.
Why are you speaking of them in the present tense? Why would they still exist, since the monarchy was restored in 1975, and there are no serious Carlist claimants any more other than King Juan Carlos himself?
Franco, in any case, did not govern as if he were subject to laws. But he was not the king, was he?
There’s still a Carlist Party, the Pardito carlista. They’re not particularly important anymore, though.
The CTC is still around too, but I think they’re even smaller than the PC.
There are still Carlistas (there’s at least three Carlista Parties I know of); there is a claimant, but even without a claimant, “la cuestión sucesoria es lo de menos”, “the succesion is nowhere near as important as the principles.” As has been said these parties are tiny, but many parties which are important at the regional level are “children of Carlismo”, understanding “where they come from” requires understanding Carlismo.
Franco wasn’t King, but Carlista ideology calls for any ruler to be subject to the Law; Carlismo is Monarchic but if we were a Republic they would want the President to be subject to the rule of Law and during the Dictatorship they still expected Franco to follow the procedures which had been set (which were far from ideal).