Why was socialism/communism in Catalonia such a disaster?

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Read this: libcom.org/library/anarchism-spanish-revolution, but be warned: this document may permanently show you the poverty of not just anarchism, but also opportunism and antifascism.

TL;DR: instead of tailing the already-prevalent insurrection against workers' capital, the CNT substituted itself instead of the proletariat and, in an attempt to be "pragmatic", slowly started the inevitable burial of the real movement's activity by dooming itself to more and more having a need to create various organs of capital's management and the adoption or even creation of state power, all while fancying itself not just socialist, but anarchist.

It wasn't, they increased agricultural yields by as much as 50% according to some sources

where has the ever been anything close to leftcom socialism ever? Leftcoms literally just hipsters at this point

I have some sympathy for left communism, but Jesus Christ why do you guys talk in this ridiculously stereotyped manner? I swear every single sentence you write has to include this phrase. Get some more vocabulary ffs

stfu you OPPORTUNIST, my armchair is waiting

It may and likely does come across as autistic, but the phrase is incredibly important to emphasize because it embodies the fact that the emancipation of the working class can only come through its own devices, and that communism is to be understood as this permanent struggle against capital in all its forms, not an ideal "state of affairs" to be speculated. We have nothing to build and everything to abolish. Communism, or whatever we may call it, is the real movement that was born on the same day capitalism was born.

is not an argument. Where has left communism ever created an emancipatory movement?

Fuck off liberal.

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funny how George Orwell the nightmare state man did not describe it as such

Like in China?

so who is right? everyone is contradicting each other

if there is some tipping point where the populous suddenly realise communism is a good idea, how come communist revolutions have only started in places where there has been a strong revolutionary party?

read Marx, jesus christ

Leftcoms hold the Russian revolution as a legitimate proletarian revolution, so start there.

There cannot and will not be such a thing as a "[insert ideology] revolution", including a "left communist revolution".

Yes, much more violently so than others, in fact. If anything, the forceful insertion of deviating ideological impetuses is what utterly crushed the insurrectionary character of the Chinese workers in a time of capital's crises: insurgentnotes.com/2012/10/notes-towards-a-critique-of-maoism/.

The chinese revolution has nothing to do with communism, there's no point even talking about it

By '25 there was already a highly developed Chinese proletariat in coastal cities, which waged their own separate insurrections against capital. Again this was attempted in '67 where Shanghai workers established their own commune within the city limits and were crushed by the Chinese "Communist" Party's PLA. So absolutely, what we refer to as and associate with the term "Chinese revolution" was merely Mao's "discovery" of the peasantry's revolutionary subjectivity, but only after the massacre of the few proletarians during the Guo Gong Guanxi period, that actually existed prior to that and indeed were incredibly active against capital during the civil war and the early second Sino-Japanese war.

The Anarchist labor movement in Catalonia was one of the most genuinely socialist movements in history, but the fact is that they failed to carry out the revolution in order to fight against the threat of fascism. This mistake ultimately lead not only to the destruction of said movement but also the fascist take over of Spain. The republic supported by Russia intentionally undermined the efforts of the anarchists in both their civil and war efforts, something which the anarchists allowed by cooperating and joining the republic's government and war effort. Bookchin speaks a lot about this in his book The Spanish Anarchists.

I don't think you're getting it, take Russia in 1905 for example, Bolsheviks played a minor role there and workers formed councils(like Saint Petersburg Soviet) without SRs or RSDLPs telling them to do so, they didn't need to read the entire Capital to know that they're treated like shit and their boss is shit.

how come you are always telling people to read but never quoting?

So the Russian Revolution was a legitimate revolution but Catalonia was not… why?

There has been on many occasions in many places.

I meant, like in China now, there are conditions for revolution, they have suicide nets on the factories, why is there no revolution?

it seems your friend does not agree with you nonetheless

nobody said anything about needing to read capital. It was a bolshevik revolution controlled by the bolshevik party in 1917

There is all the time. Communism is a part of the proletarian character innately under capitalism.

Brutal repression. On the China question I suggest everyone here read the left communist Chinese from the Chuang collective: chuangcn.org/2017/03/yangon-factory-uprising/, chuangcn.org/2016/06/guiyangs-casualized-conductors-fight-back/, chuangcn.org/2016/09/uniqlo-strike-talk/, etc. and especially read their first journal, Dead Generations: chuangcn.org/journal/one/.

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The socioeconomic situation was shit due to the war and people in general were already at the state of militancy, as July days show, my point is that peoples' desire to get rid of the Provisional Government was not born because they subscribed to Lenin's concepts, but because they desired "Peace, Bread and Land". And Kerensky's head.

Right so how do plan to overcome brutal repression without forming a revolutionary Union of some kind or another?

And why was the Catalonian model not legitimately proletarian but the Russian revolution was?

Yes but it took the revolutionary planning of the party and councils to organise everybody do the actual seizing of the palace etc

Not "I", but the proletariat, won't. The proletariat will have to organize, not just regionally and nationally, but internationally in order to abolish capitalism, for there can be no such thing as socialism and capitalism side by side. If you ask me, if the proletariat is to succeed, it will only be through party and council lines.

As with all proletarian revolutions, what started in Catalonia was absolutely proletarian in character, but lost it all in but a few years, just like the Russian proletariat did: endnotes.org.uk/issues/1/en/gilles-dauve-when-insurrections-die.

So storming the palace was successful because people organizing it had developed certain theoretical beliefs(later identified as, let's say ML) which ensured the success during the coup?

right and why does that make the Russian revolution legitimate and the Spanish not?

Not necessarily no but they had to be organised and they were organised around an ideology whether they were aware of it or not.

I don't think that at the moment of coup the organizers were preoccupied with establishing their flavour of revolutionary ideas as the dominant theory, but rather with getting rid of the Provisional Government first and foremost. Same applies to any spontaneous uprising against the current state of affairs really.

I'm inclined to think they were. You really think those that stormed the winter palace did so without any idea of what it would accomplish?

But it wasn't sponatneous, it was carefully co-ordinated and organised.

I am an anarcho-syndicalist and I agree with this criticism.

I already wrote a refutation of this in another thread. It's the fault of tankies for having autism and forcing anarchists to have to collaborate with the state (as the organs described in it are those of forced-by-necessity collaboration rather than dominance of the syndicate structure itself; it is critical to make the distinction between the syndicates here as centers of power, which they were not, and frameworks for the exercise of power, which they were) or otherwise immediately descend into infighting which would swiftly end with the victory of the Republic, backed as it was by arms and supplies shipments from the USSR.

Perhaps it would have been better to make anarchism and left communism absolutely indistinguishable in praxis and have the CNT entirely refuse collaboration with the tankie-infested Republican government, as the end which came about was inevitable in those circumstances - perhaps it wouldn't have been so. I don't know that any of us can pass a final judgement with certainty. Most anarchists have been critical of the collaboration of the CNT since then, and there were even criticisms of its unorthodoxy from the hardline movements within the CNT itself, which were the platformist Friends Of Durruti (who correctly learned from Makhno's experience with the Bolsheviks and were ignored) and egoist-communist FAI.

Furthermore, his critique of the economics of anarchism and the painting of all anarchism as advocating markets is entirely a straw man and shows either immense disingenuity or an understanding of anarchism entirely derived from second-hand sources.
Yes, Proudhon, the man who first formulated the term "scientific socialism" (pg 264 of "What Is Property?") and contrasted it to the utopianism of previous socialists, is himself a utopian. Bravo, illiterate leftcom! You sure showed those theoryless utopian anarchists!
Pure anarcho-communism as advocated by Kropotkin in "The Conquest Of Bread" and advocated here by Wagner in all but name was, in fact, realized in the agrarian communes of Aragon, as the task of distribution and allocation between and within communes did not require a complex system of accounting, unlike heavily industrialized Catalonia. Here, anarcho-syndicalism was more appropriate. Now, anarcho-syndicalism is, in fact, different from mutualism. Whereas in mutualism, communes produce as entire firms which exchange reciprocally according to need on a market with free credit (based on occupancy and usage instead of property and usufruct rights) and industry is decentralized to them, with markets serving the purpose of coordinating production where this is absolutely needed, anarcho-syndicalism abolishes markets for capital and instead relies on collective bargaining between firms (via delegates sent to the syndicates, which are built to be centers of organization rather than centers of power) when organizing the allocation of MoPs according to broad, democratically-determined needs. What credit there is remains as a non-circulating one meant to organize production and consumption in a manner not too different from the labor vouchers which Marx proposed in "Critique Of The Gotha Program" and which were proposed before that by Bakunin - it is a way to gauge demands for a firm's service and from there make the democratic final judgement via the syndicate on whether it's still need or ready to be liquidated.
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The immediate elimination of all barriers on consumption and production and resultant free exchange according to need and free production according to ability, that is, communization (a term which actually appears in "The Conquest Of Bread" and might even have been coined in it) was physically impossible in an early-20th-century industrial society without its destruction as such and brutal reversion to agrarianism - Makhno found this out the hard way when he applied Kropotkin's theories and succeeded in the rural communes of Huliaipole but failed horribly with management of the industries of Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk, as he lacked the insight into industrial organization offered by Bakunin and Proudhon. Notably, his later platformist theory learns from this and advocates syndicalism (see: "Organizational Platform Of The Libertarian Communists") precisely because he followed through in southern Ukraine with what Wagner advocates and in doing so revealed it to be unworkable for contemporary industrial production.

Once the (simultaneous and inseparable) insurrection and collectivization took off on their own in Catalonia (it wasn't so much led by anarchists as defended and given organization by them), they were already backed into a corner with no choices. The entire article smacked of sectarianism for sectarianism's own sake. Furthermore, with advances in computational technology and the development of cybernetics as the trans-disciplinary study of control systems of closed-feedback loops, it has become possible to dispense with the remnant elements of markets inherent in classical syndicalsm as a means of coordinating production and instead rely on modern information technology to truly realize immediate communism as proposed by the author. There's a reason why I won't stop talking about the possibility of a modern cybersyndicalism - the experience in the Spanish Civil War and its relation to anarchist theory then and now reveals that we need it.

If you don't think it was socialist at all, then you don't know what socialism is. kys

What else could they have done, though?
Just roll over for Franco? It's not like they had a choice.