What did we do wrong is Spain?

Lack of international support mostly. The Republic and other leftist forces spent much of the war in a state of severe shortages of almost everything because trade had all but collapsed and nobody was willing to send materiel for the war effort. The Nationalists could more-or-less ride it out using the foreign aid from Germany and Italy (along with the accumulated capital of the Spanish bourgeoisie) while the anti-Fascist forces at best had a small trickle of supplies coming from the USSR (and even then, only to those factions that fell in line with Soviet demands).

Stalinists: we're going to implement lukewarm Soviet-style state capitalism in a country isn't underdeveloped enough to require that step
Everyone else: that really won't be necessary
Stalinists: [seizes guns and pushes political repression]

You do realize that productivity in areas subject to direct workers control were significantly higher prior to expropriation, right?

yeah the fascists hand more planes and tanks, and trained men. you know anarchism and marxism fought each other in spain but it doesn't matter, we should take what lessons we can and move on, not argue about shit that happend 80 years, ago, we are or should be on the same side now that is the side against capital, the important thing is defeated capital in the present so… comrades?

Meant to say "significantly higher when compared to pre-expropriation"

That's actually fucking genius.

not my idea, i think it was orwells or one of the cnt hardliners, (the cnt could not have done it, it would have to be a declaration clad in the officialness of the republic and it would have to be backed up by crates of rifles)

Literally the opposite of idealism but okay.

The short answer is everything.

I mean tankie shitheads and succdems allowed the fascists every advantage and refused to attack wealthy landowners and the church who were giving the fascists everything. Instead they spent most of their time killing the real dream of a socialist society because they wanted that uncle Joe money.

Anarchists went full anarkiddy and didn't cooperate with actual socialists.

L O L

We are not cucks

The worst part about tankies is how you're just edgy socdems.

Wew. How is that prison cell Bordiga?

it lacking in the seating department

Don't post under a Lenin hat when you are just a liberal.

Just stop.

...

you do realize that you're spewing bullshit, right?

econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/spain.htm

Orwell definitely mentions something about the Republic failing to capitalize on anti-colonialist sentiment in the Spanish colonies.

Lenin would have killed himself if he could have seen what Stalin had done.

Socialism in One Country is literally the most anti-Marxist concept to come out of """Marxist""" thought next to third worldism.

really now?

brian caplan is an ancap, so…. this is like me using a victims of communism article to say stalin was shit

Ironic, but I suppose that's to be expected from a Red Capitalist.

From Robert Alexander, a non-anarchist socialist writer who studied anarchist Spain extensively alongside Communist struggles around the world:
libcom.org/files/Alexander R.J. The anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. V.1.pdf

Notice how when external factors such as resource availability and wartime conditions are taken into account, the assessment on Spanish worker's self-management becomes far more positive even by many of the former owners of the firms. You would think as a Marxist materialist you would understand that the lens by which we assess societies, both historical and modern, is dependent on the material conditions of the society in question. Wouldn't want to have that sort of logic turned around by comparing all those 20th century ML states to the US and Western Europe, would we?

WEW

...

...

The same thing we always do wrong: we can't unite.

Holy shit when is the left going to get over Spain? It's been seventy fucking years.

'Han pasado'. Deal with it.

The communists betrayed literally everybody in the middle of the war and then ran off like an autistic child into a highway to fight the fascists themselves. Read Homage to Catalonia.

...

We could have won the war, man.

The PCE did everything it could to make sure the Republic lost and lost hard.

...

...

Pretty much the exact opposite of what said. The CNT didn't push for revolution and instead compromised with the Republic, and so the anarchists joined the government. The Republic intentionally did shit like give the anarchists crappy weapons, pass laws that undermined their power structures (the dual power) etc. Would the anarchists had won if they had pressed for full revolution? Who knows, but what I do know is that a house united against a common enemy would have been more effective then one divided, and the Republic/Anarchist alliance was a house divided if there ever was one. It's also worth noting that the USSR had no intention of spreading socialist revolution is was more concerned with maintaining it's bourgeois allies in Spain, France, and elsewhere. Orwell comments frequently on how much the communists parties of these respective countries supported them almost as fervently as nationalists.

Much like how everyone laments the death of Rosa Luxemburg, Spain is primarily remembered as a point where a potential revolution in the West was thwarted by "betrayal." Unlike the botched German revolution however, the nature of the "betrayal" in Spain is not as clear-cut (no SDP to literally shoot revolutionary leaders in the back of the head), so people of every leftist color come to explain how their program at the time would have or should have been the one to unite Spain against the fascists.

They're right though, the PCE was quite possibly one of the least effective factions that could have consolidated power in the twilight months of the Republic. Disarming the militias as mentioned by was an ESPECIALLY grievous case because, regardless of ideological leanings of those militias (being primarily anarchists), they still were the individual largest anti-fascist fighting force at the time. Even if they weren't always the best trained or equipped, their numbers were among the only advantages the anti-fascist forces actually had on their side. When they lost that (along with dwindling popularity through actions spelled out in part by ), the Republic successfully shot itself in the foot; the only way it could win the war at that point was through superior firepower or tactics, neither of which was to a standard that could even compete with the nationalists.

You need to send me a source on that rather big accusation…

I agree with you, but at that point in the war I think they were desperate and trying to prop up the republican army with whatever they could find.
If only the rest of the spanish left rised up in 1934…

Everything I mentioned is well documented.

The PCE struggled to maintain the appearance of a respectable liberal democracy in the hopes that countries like France and the UK would 'come to their senses' and send materiel to help against the rebels.

Even when it was obvious this was not going to happen and these countries ruling classes by and large viewed the republic as a bunch of reds, they dogmatically stuck to their policy, alienating the massive, firmly revolutionary sections of the Spanish proletariat and peasantry (the people who'd crushed the rebel rising in over half of the country and prevented Mola, Franco, and friends from triumphing immediately).

It's also well documented that they fiercely defended private property and reversed efforts at collectivization/socialization in Aragon, Catalonia, and elsewhere. Lister drove his tanks into Aragon, requisitioned tools and livestock and land and returned them to their 'rightful' owners. He even scrawled 'collectivization is theft' on walls. This didn't exactly endear them to the people who'd carried out this collectivization and saw themselves as having finally been liberated from the control of the landlords and bosses.

And they gained nothing from this stabbing the laboring classes in the back. The mystical 'moderate, anti-fascist' capitalists and middle class folks they were trying to court with these shows of respect for bourgeois legality were a fiction. The vast majority of the country's wealthy and powerful backed Franco. The Communists were appealing to a phantom instead of the workers and peasants that were the republic's base of support and the most fervent anti-fascists around.

The Communists also preferred to carry out military operations designed to impress foreign observers and persuade Britain and France to allow shipments of arms to those designed to inflict heavy losses on the rebels. They torpedoed a proposal by the Prime Minister of the Republic, Largo Caballero, to launch an offensive into Extremadura which would have cut rebel Spain in two, because they didn't want him (a known opponent of Soviet policies) to boost his popularity at the expense of theirs. They instead pushed for offensives like Belchite and Teruel, which looked nice, but squandered countless lives, weaponry, and supplies to win only a few miles of ground (which was almost always regained by the rebels within a few weeks or months). The most disastrous of course, was the Battle of the Ebro, which completely destroyed the Popular Army for the sake of a strategically worthless strip of riverbank and effectively sealed the republic's fate.

Communists were also favored for promotions in the armed forces over those of Anarchist, Socialist, or Republican affiliation. Disproportionately. The Negrin government, backed all the way by the PCE, decided to spend time, money, and manpower rebuilding the Republican state's machinery in the rearguard instead of devoting it to the fight against Franco. A massive internal police force was built up with able-bodied men that could have been sent to the front instead, and it was used to repress internal dissidents.

If you want sources, try The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas, or The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism by Stanley Payne, or The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor, or The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge by Paul Preston, or The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War by Robert J Alexander or literally any book on the SCW, because every authority on the subject accepts these facts.

his personal ideology is irrelevant to the question of CNT economic performance
he used official statistics indexed at 100 in 36

he literally accounted for wartime conditions in the quote I gave for fuck's sake

he comments on this in the paper and justly critiques this practice of shutting down factories when you have soaring unemployment

kek, you don't even know what makes one a capitalist

I don't see this normal functioning reflected in statistics
is declining industrial production index was normal?

no it is not at all clear because they experienced a severe shortage of military equipment
they halted their offensive because of the shortage of weapons for fuck's sake

wew, opinions of some pigs are now enough evidence of CNT economic performance
especially when official statistics speak otherwise

I smell bullshit
but anyway, even if it all was as they claim, it just only three firms

no, declining and then stagnating production in a wartime doesn't make assessment of Spanish worker's self-management far more positive

wtf are you talking about
SU had faster growth than both US and WE they were second only to japs in 50s and first half of the 60s
and productivity growth fucking doubled in 52 from the 40 level
and I don't even speak about rapid industrialization and building of the whole industries from scratch

It actually is relevant, because what stats he uses and brings attention to is meant to drive a narrative, not just state data.
He acknowledges it for the first half a year (when the worst damages of the Civil War had not yet occurred) but then neglects to determine what degree of the subsequent loss in productivity was a result of the war, whose detrimental effects would likewise worsen over the duration of the war.
Again, if the factories in many cases are in a non-functional state and production needs to be brought back online as soon as possible, it makes sense to consolidate until conditions are such that those factories can once again be made operational. That's not something you can necessarily do when severely lacking capital and fighting a domestic war to boot.
I see a lot of apology for societies who had no intention of abolishing the law of value; whatever you're peddling sure isn't socialism.
Which again is mostly a result of wartime conditions. Again, Caplan did not factor out the effects of the war from the index, only implies that they may have had some effect. Most accounts seem to indicate that, in areas that were not under siege and had the resources, production had not significantly diminished. The index only counts the total value produced compared to the base year, which of course is going to be lower; it does not however speak to the efficiency of individual production facilities that the material means to operate normally.
The point is that wartime manufacturing was not centered in Loyalist-controlled regions: the industry had to be built from the ground up and, like all industries as the war progressed, faced material shortages that slowed production for facilities that lacked access.
The point is that the factories were not neglected or in dire-mismanagement; they were in good hands, but their means to produce were hindered. Again, even the author recognizes the material shortages that bottlenecked loyalist productive abilities.
Yes, I bet you do when it doesn't prove your point.
Overall industrial production in Russia during the course of its Civil War declined to 1/7th of what it was prior to the war, with specific key industries declining to less than 1/10th their original output. Agricultural output was worse than Spain too, with harvests yielding only 37% of pre-war levels. Who'd have thunk it: Civil Wars cause economic upheaval. Revolutionary Spain STILL managed to overall outperform the comparative alternative models if you're implying worker self-management was the problem.
Why do you think growth was so rapid in the USSR? Starting at a point of lesser development means that the rate by which you can subsequently develop and industrialize can be significantly higher than other nations which are, for all intents and purposes, fully industrialized.
And I didn't just mean Russia either: I meant all the ML states, Third World experiments and all. Aside from better healthcare and some social safety nets, are you going to claim that the economy of Cuba is comparable to the US? Of course not: the standards by which they are compared is completely different based on the material conditions of their respective societies.

Too small and not enough military orginisation.

maybe we needed to shoot more preists?