Shit anarchists say

are you stupid. Go read on Spain. The USSR was with the fucking liberals.

m8 do u even english

...

how many times are you going to post these same 5 pictures?

as many times as you post those same 2 pictures

tranarchist flag when?

The CNT had the power to install full worker control but decided to install a pluralistic democracy, Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, which included former petite bourgeoisie and Communists. They fucked themselves over. They didn't want to be seen as power hungry. The CNT failed because they couldn't be pragmatic and ruthless when the time came.

literally most edgy ideology possible

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

ironmarch.org/index.php?/topic/1686-scientific-study-autism-and-antifascism/

why the hell people take them seriously?
got this from ylilauta btw

Marxists are even more pathetic at military organization and strategy because their army model is hopelessly outdated as disaterous failures like the winter war and the sino-vietnamese conflicts show.

Marxists cannot win a war if they do not have superior man-power and industry backing them because their mode of organization is so shit tier.

A state doesn't guarantee either, though. Historical happenstance does.
Would the black army have fared much better with the manpower and industry backing the red army?
Considering they held back the white army, an army that had sent the red one into a full rout, with only a tenth of their numbers and no industry, I'd say yes.

...

Ho Ho Ho, ayyyyy leMao.
And this is ignoring the fallacious notion that the USSR was bad at combat because of the Winter War and Afghanistan, despite having dozens of military victories more than defeats, notably in the largest war to date which saved both Europe 'and' Asia from fascism.

Stay mad, anarkiddie. Keep desecrating the names of Bakunin and Kropotkin with your salt and anti-platformist "anarchism".

The vietcong is a bad example because they were massively centralized out of necessity, exactly what Marxists argue should make an army suck.

And to reiterate I said that Marxists could only ever win when they had the overwhelming advantage in manpower and industry and even then it wasn't always enough, primarily because of how weak and inefficient their system is at the core, also in military terms.

Indeed, the Russians won *in spite* of centralization, that made theme incapable of quick and efficient maneuvers in the early stages and got surrounded countless times exactly because of this system, exactly what the decentralised prussian army model had been invented to prevent in the first place.

kakalonia
/you

kronstadt
/you

I'm not even an anarchist but I would say that those are both true. None of the major anarchist movements ever were allowed to just do their own thing unmolested. As for the first point, the Mau Mau guerrillas literally beat the British army armed with guns made from pipes. Effective insurgency beats military might every time.

this is also where your "relevance" already ends

it's really quite pathetic and sad

Why are anarchists always effete wormy little fucks that would get their shit kicked in by any one who weighs more than 60kg?

"It's so unfair that everyone is always against us, no wonder we always lose but it's totally nothing wrong with us, it can't be!
Now let me tell you how to be successfull."

Shitposting isn't an argument

...

...

Production efficiency went down with the implementation of war communism, significantly so. It was only because they had larger pool of labor and industry beforehand that they weren't curbstomped, and without support from the black army the whites would have taken moscow anyways.

he keeps riding the glorious ML shaft of unmatched success and victories
yet still gives me his tsundere bullshit
but it's still cute

...

wont even try to argue for what those "one word responses" are hinting at

i accept your defeat

See

...

the only thing coming close to shitposting is namedropping shitty attempts at socialism

stay mad kid :^)

See

But Marxists always do the same thing once 1991 is brought up.

Was there any major Marxist movement that was allowed to "just do their own thing"? Anarchists should consider preparing for the problems to come. But that requires effective administration. Hence inevitable fail.

Besides, Makhno literally declared war on Soviets. What the fuck did you expect to happen?

Bullshit.

This is so retarded it makes my eyes bleed.

Stop lying.

I don't get why we can't just see context for different points in history.

I would argue that state socialism as it was in the 20th century has been rendered extinct via the Cold War. There's no way to recover large stretches of land to establish a state that can last decades, that's become less realistic than anarchy.

However at the same time, the internet has provided a window into an anarchist society that has never before presented itself in history.

See

The can go fuck itself. Claiming that Civil War did not affect anything and shit happened only because "war communism" was implemented is beyond retarded.

Efficiency in catalonia was improved despite the civil war. You can't bureaucratic inefficiencies on the war

*cant blame

This has moved beyond dumb. Now it's just adorable.

...

Did you present any argument I needed to reply to? You made unconnected statements.

Or, perhaps, you were implying that having no raw materials for factories, having half of your workforce drafted, the rest half-starving and working on machines that have no spare parts to repair with, is somehow irrelevant?

Say so directly then.

You also didn't explain how Soviet efficiency dropped, nor how Catalonian increased. I don't know what you are talking about and how this "efficiency" was calculated in the first place.

There is no argument to be made. Babbling can't be argued with.

Catalonia industries produced 50% more than they used to. The were more effective. This is documented.

Internet will not save anarchy. Economies of scale, standards, cooperation and other hierarchy-based concepts still apply there. You need organization (central authority, yes) there more than anything.

Consider the fact that Internet has been around for decades and the only semi-useable anti-state thing it managed to produce was bitcoin. And even bitcoin didn't even change much, since it didn't actually get integrated in any framework.

Efficiency as in industrial and agricultural output. Output lowered in Russia while it increased in catalonia.

A black market emerged in Russia, despite the threat of martial law against profiteering. The ruble collapsed and barter increasingly replaced money as a medium of exchange[9] and, by 1921, heavy industry output had fallen to 20% of 1913 levels. 90% of wages were paid with goods rather than money. 70% of locomotives were in need of repair, and food requisitioning, combined with the effects of seven years of war and a severe drought, contributed to a famine that caused between 3 and 10 million deaths.[10] Coal production decreased from 27.5 million tons (1913) to 7 million tons (1920), while overall factory production also declined from 10,000 million roubles to 1,000 million roubles. According to the noted historian David Christian, the grain harvest was also slashed from 80.1 million tons (1913) to 46.5 million tons (1920).[11]

I'll wait until you manage to present a coherent argument.

Anarchist revolution in Catalonia was aborted by Cnt themselves, by rejecting actual class struggle and mobilizing people for Saragosa front

The section is in regard to the effects of war communism on the economy

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism

inb4
if you want to provide counter evidence to the sources used be my guess

In Italy and in Germany, fascism took over the state by legal means. Democracy capitulated to dictatorship, or, worse still, greeted dictatorship with open arms. But what about Spain? Far from being the exceptional case of a resolute action that was nonetheless, and sadly, defeated, Spain was the extreme case of armed confrontation between democracy and fascism in which the nature of the struggle still remained the same clash of two forms of capitalist development, two political forms of the capitalist state, two state structures fighting for legitimacy in the same country.

Objection!! — “So, in your opinion, Franco and a working-class militia are the same thing? The big landowners and impoverished peasants collectivising land are in the same camp?!”

First of all, the confrontation happened only because the workers rose up against fascism. All the contradictions of the movement were manifest in its first weeks: an undeniable class war was transformed into a capitalist civil war (though of course there was no assignment of roles in which the two bourgeois factions orchestrated every act: history is not a play).6

The dynamic of a class-divided society is ultimately shaped by the need to unify those classes. When, as happened in Spain, a popular explosion combines with the disarray of the ruling groups, a social crisis becomes a crisis of the state. Mussolini and Hitler triumphed in countries with weak, recently unified nation-states and powerful regionalist currents. In Spain, from the Renaissance until modern times, the state was the colonial armed might of a commercial society it ultimately ruined, choking off one of the pre-conditions of industrial expansion: an agrarian reform. In fact, Spanish industrialisation had to make its way through monopolies, the misappropriation of public funds, and parasitism.

Space is lacking here for a summary of the 19th century crazy quilt of countless reforms and liberal impasses, dynastic squabbles, the Carlist wars, the tragicomic succession of regimes and parties after World War I, and the cycle of insurrections and repressions that followed the establishment of the Republic in 1931. Beneath all these rumblings was the weakness of the rising bourgeoisie, caught as it was between its rivalry with the landed oligarchy and the absolute necessity of containing peasant and worker revolts. In 1936, the land question had not been resolved: unlike France after 1789, the mid-19th century sell-off of the Spanish clergy’s lands wound up strengthening a latifundist bourgeoisie. Even in the years after 1931, the Institute for Agrarian Reform only used one-third of the funds at its disposal to buy up large holdings. The conflagration of 1936-39 would never have reached such political extremes, including the explosion of the state into two factions fighting a three-year civil war, without the tremors which had been rising from the social depths for a century.

Spain had no large centre-left bourgeois party like the “Parti Radical” which was the centre of gravity of French politics for over sixty years. Before July 1936, Spanish Social Democracy kept a much more militant outlook in a country where land was often occupied by wage-labourers, where strikes were rampant, where Madrid tram workers tried to manage the workplace, and where crowds stormed jails to free some of the 30,000 political prisoners. As a socialist leader put it: “The possibilities of stabilising a democratic republic in our country are decreasing every day. Elections are but a variant of civil war.” (One might add: a variant of how to keep it at bay.)

In the summer of 1936, it was an open secret that a military coup was coming. After giving the rebels every chance to prepare themselves, the Popular Front elected in February was willing to negotiate and perhaps even to surrender. The politicians would have made their peace with the rebels, as they had done during the dictatorship of Primo de Riveira (1932-31), which was supported by eminent socialists (Caballero had served it as a technical counsellor, before becoming Minister of Labour in 1931, and then head of the Republican government from September 1936 to May 1937). Furthermore, the general who had obeyed Republican orders two years earlier and crushed the Asturias insurrection — Franco — couldn’t be all that bad.

But the proletariat rose up, blocked the putsch in half of the country, and hung on to its weapons. In so doing, the workers were obviously fighting fascism, but they were not acting as anti-fascists, because their actions were directed against Franco and against a democratic state more unsettled by the masses’ initiative than by the military revolt. Three prime ministers came and went in 24 hours before the fait accompli of the arming of the people was accepted.

Once again, the unfolding of the insurrection showed that the problem of violence is not primarily a technical one. Victory does not go to the side with the advantage in weaponry (the military) or in numbers (the people), but rather to who dares to take the initiative. Where workers trusted the state, the state remained passive or promised the moon, as happened in Zaragoza. When their struggle was focused and sharp (as in Malaga) the workers won; if it was lacking in vigour, it was drowned in blood (20,000 killed in Seville).

Thus the Spanish Civil War began with an authentic insurrection, but such a characterisation is incomplete. It holds true only for the opening moment: an effectively proletarian uprising. After defeating the forces of reaction in a large number of cities, the workers had the power. But what were they going to do with it? Should they give it back to the republican state, or should they use it to go further in a communist direction?

Created immediately after the insurrection, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias included delegates from the CNT, the FAI, the UGT (socialist union), the POUM, the PSUC (product of the recent fusion of the CP and the socialists in Catalonia), and four representatives of the Generalitat, the Catalan regional government. As a veritable bridge between the workers’ movement and the state, and, moreover, tied if not integrated into the Generalitat’s Department of Defence by the presence in its midst of the latter’s council of defence, the commissar of public order, etc., the Central Committee of the Militias quickly began to unravel.

Created immediately after the insurrection, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias included delegates from the CNT, the FAI, the UGT (socialist union), the POUM, the PSUC (product of the recent fusion of the CP and the socialists in Catalonia), and four representatives of the Generalitat, the Catalan regional government. As a veritable bridge between the workers’ movement and the state, and, moreover, tied if not integrated into the Generalitat’s Department of Defence by the presence in its midst of the latter’s council of defence, the commissar of public order, etc., the Central Committee of the Militias quickly began to unravel.

Of course in giving up their autonomy most proletarians believed that they were, in spite of everything, hanging onto real power and giving the politicians only the facade of authority, which they mistrusted, and which they could control and orient in a favourable direction. Were they not armed?

This was a fatal error. The question is not: who has the guns? But rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000 proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they recognise will take away the guns which they failed to use against it.

The insurgents did not take on the legal government, in other words the state as it then existed, and all their subsequent actions took place under its auspices. “A revolution had begun but never consolidated”, as Orwell wrote. This is the main point which determined the course of an increasingly losing armed struggle against Franco, as well as the exhaustion and destruction by both camps of the collectivisations and socialisations. After the summer of 1936, real power in Spain was exercised by the state and not by organisations, unions, collectivities, committees, etc. Even though Nin, the head of the POUM, was an adviser to the Ministry of Justice, “The POUM nowhere succeeded in having any influence over the police”, as one defender of that party admitted.8 While the workers’ militias were indeed the flower of the Republican army and paid a heavy price in combat, they carried no weight in the decisions of the high command, which steadily integrated them into regular units (a process completed by the beginning of 1937), preferring to wear them down rather than tolerating their autonomy. As for the powerful CNT, it ceded ground to a CP which had been very weak before July 1936 (having 14 MPs in the Popular Front chamber in February, as opposed to 85 socialists), but which was able to insinuate itself into part of the state apparatus and turn the state increasingly to its own advantage against the radicals, and particularly against the militants of the CNT. The question was: who mastered the situation? And the answer was: the state makes subtle and brutal use of its power when it has to.

If the Republican bourgeoisie and the Stalinists lost precious time dismantling the peasant communes, disarming the POUM militias, and hunting down Trotskyist “saboteurs” and other “Hitler agents” at the very moment when anti-fascism was supposed to be throwing everything in the struggle against Franco, they did not do so from a suicidal impulse. For the state and the CP (which was becoming the backbone of the state through the military and police) these operations were not a waste of time. The head of the PSUC supposedly said: “Before taking Zaragoza, we have to take Barcelona.” Their main objective was never crushing Franco, but retaining control of the masses, for this is what states are for, and this is how Stalinism got its power. Barcelona was taken away from the proletarians. Zaragoza remained in fascist hands.

On May 3, the police attempted to occupy the Telephone Exchange, which was under the control of anarchist (and socialist) workers. In the Catalan metropolis, heart and symbol of the revolution, legal authority stopped at nothing in disarming whatever remained alive, spontaneous and anti-bourgeois. The local police, moreover, was in the hands of the PSUC. Confronted by an openly hostile power, the workers finally understood that this power was not their own, that they had given it the gift of their insurrection ten months earlier, and that their insurrection had been turned against them. In reaction to the power grab by the state, a general strike paralysed Barcelona. It was too late. The workers still had the capacity to rise up against the state (this time in its democratic form), but they could no longer push their struggle to the point of an open break.

As always, the “social” question predominated over the military one. Legal authority could not impose itself by street battles. Within a few hours, instead of urban guerrilla warfare, a war of position, a face-off of apartment building against apartment building set in. It was a defensive stalemate in which no one could win because no one was attacking. With its own offensive bogged down, the police would not risk its forces in attacks on buildings held by the anarchists. Broadly speaking, the CP and the state held the centre of the city, while the CNT and the POUM held the working-class districts.

The status quo ultimately won out by political means. The masses placed their trust in the two organisations under attack, while the latter, afraid of alienating the state, got people to go back to work (though not without difficulty) and thereby undermined the only force capable of saving them politically and… “physically”. As soon as the strike was over, knowing that it henceforth controlled the situation, the government brought in 6,000 Assault Guards — the elite of the police. Because they accepted the mediation of “representative organisations” and counsels of moderation from the POUM and the CNT, the very same masses who had defeated the fascist military in July 1936 surrendered without a fight to the Republican police in May 1937.

At that point repression could begin. Only a few weeks were necessary to outlaw the POUM, to arrest its leaders, to kill them legally or otherwise, and to dispose of Nin. A parallel police was established, organised by the NKVD and the secret apparatus of the Comintern, and answering only to Moscow. Anyone showing the slightest opposition to the Republican state and its main ally, the USSR, could be denounced and hunted down as a “fascist”, and all around the world an army of well-meaning, gentle souls would repeat the slander, some from ignorance, others from self-interest, but every one of them convinced that no denunciation was too excessive when fascism was on the march.

The fury unleashed against the POUM was no aberration. By opposing the Moscow Trials, the POUM condemned itself to be destroyed by a Stalinism locked in a merciless world struggle against its rivals for the control of the masses. At the time, not just CP fellow-travellers, but many political parties, lawyers, reporters and even the French League for the Rights of Man came out in endorsement of the guilt of the accused. Sixty years later, mainstream ideology sees these trials as a sign of the Kremlin’s mad will to power. As if Stalinist crimes had nothing to do with anti-fascism! Anti-fascist logic will always align itself with the most moderate forces and always turn against the most radical ones.

On the purely political level, May 1937 gave rise to what, a few months before, would have been unthinkable: a Socialist even farther to the right than Caballero: Negrin, heading a government which came down hard on the side of law and order, including open repression against the workers. Orwell — who almost lost his life in the events — realised that the war “for democracy” was obviously over: “that meant that the general movement would be in the direction of some kind of fascism.” What remained was a competition between two fascisms, Orwell wrote, with the difference that one was less inhuman than its rival: he therefore clung to the necessity of avoiding the “more naked and developed fascism of Hitler and Franco”.9 From then on, the only issue was fighting for a fascism less bad than the opposing one…

Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its “military” dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”. The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.

To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems — in short for everything that plays down the role of the common man. In Spain, from the fall of 1936 onward, the revolution dissolved into the war effort and into a kind of combat typical of states: a war of fronts. Soon the working-class “militia man” evolved into a “soldier”.

From the battle for Madrid (March ’37) to the final fall of Catalonia (February ’39), the cadaver of the aborted revolution decomposed on the battlefield. One can speak of war in Spain, not of revolution. This war wound up having as its first function the resolution of a capitalist problem: the constitution in Spain of a legitimate state which succeeded in developing its national capital while keeping the popular masses in check.

The working class… having lost sight of its own goals, no longer sees any urgent reason to be killed defending the bourgeois democratic clan against the fascist clan, i.e. in the last analysis, for the defence of Anglo-French capital against Italo-German imperialism. The civil war increasingly became an imperialist war

The two camps undeniably had quite different sociological compositions. If the bourgeoisie was present on both sides, the immense majority of workers and poor peasants supported the Republic, whereas the archaic and reactionary strata (landed property, small holders, clergy) lined up behind Franco. This class polarisation gave a progressive aura to the Republican state, but it did not disclose the historical meaning of the conflict, any more than the large working-class membership of socialist or Stalinist parties told us all about their nature. Such facts were real, but secondary to the social function of these parties: in fact, because they were grass-roots bodies, they were able to control or oppose any proletarian upsurge. Likewise the Republican army had a large number of workers, but for what, with whom and under whose orders were they fighting? To ask the question is to answer it, unless one it considers possible to fight the bourgeoisie in an alliance with the bourgeoisie.

“Civil war is the supreme expression of the class struggle”, Trotsky wrote in Their Morals and Ours (1938). Quite… as long as one adds that, from the “Wars of Religion” to the Irish or Lebanese convulsions of our own time, civil war is also, and indeed most often, the form of an impossible or failed social struggle: when class contradictions cannot assert themselves as such, they erupt as ideological or ethnic blocs, still further delaying any human emancipation.

You still made no argument.

libcom.org/library/when-insurrections-die

I'm reporting this as spam now.

See

See

Stop being such a fucking pansy

You could have just provided the link comrade

...

...

I'm a radical leftist who looks like a brown Gerry Adams. Is that good enough?

You should head back to r/FULLCOMMUNISM

Neither radical, nor leftism.

You have Kurd girls for this. Though, I'm mildly apprehensive of how it will all work out.

Is this where faggots come to REEEEEE about the normie leftists that actually leave the house?

...

...

also
ayy lmao

Yeah, keep on bashing on anarchists, your fellow socialists when you have filth like this to go against:

they didn't actually do it for moral reasons, they did it so they didn't have to fight a war on two fucking fronts against factions backed by several powerful countries while they only have the weapons they've stashed, improvised armoured cars and like a million people at best
this was the same reason that they needed to militarise the columns and collaborate with the government

You guys really need to read the appemdix of Homage to Catalonia.