Was Revolutionary Catalonia really anarchist?

Didn't Catalonia have a worker's council as a state? Not a bad thing, seems fairly LibMarx, but hardly "stateless".

Become a hardcore ML and devote your life to revolution

but why tho user, what's the point?

There is no point, life is pointless, but you may find meaning in fighting for something.

nigga, just do it. cast yourself into the absurd reality in a defiant act of rebellion to define the meaning of your existence.

seems a bit like "jus b urself bro"

Nah, it's more along the lines of be whatever and that'll be 'yourself'. There is no essence of you for you to be.

there's the ebin "tankies = MLs" meme again. it's just as boring as the "anarchists = anarkiddies" meme which uses the existence of post-leftists playing platformist to legitimize anti-platformist anarchism. just let it go already.

because even though stalin was no angel, there are non-insane parts of his rule we can rationalize or explain while not excusing his insanities and failures.

besides, once again, the point was not to look at what stalin (or mao, castro, che, etc.) did or didn't do, but to look at marxism-leninism and innately see conviction and rigor in the desire to utilize authority and the state to further goals. this is something inherent to marxism-leninism, and even anarcho-communism. the problem here is that the ancoms, when looking back at catalonia will deny the urgency and legitimacy of using authority in the struggle to obtain their goal there, and marxist-leninists will abuse this urgency and legitimacy for the USSR, PRC, etc. respectively.

revolutionary self-theory. read from many different positions and think for yourself.

but i don't really feel like being anything

thanks user this is probably good advice

You're right. Different points of view just make you dissatisfied in different ways. Even if your life is comfy and uneventful, nothing will end that gnawing sense that the world is an unfair place and so many good people get fucked over by the system by no fault of their own.

If you're not doing anything else with your life, you might as well do something about it.

Being is not an act. Becoming on the other hand…

I think that Catalonia would have been much better if the Spanish Republic and things went differently. I while think that Catalonia was heading in the right direction and that 1936 Catalonia was definitely better than pre 1936 Catalonia I do think that while Anarchist shouldn't completely throw Catalonia out of the window I do think that Anarchist should stop religiously idealizing it and stop acting like it was a perfect utopia.

And on the question was Catalonia Anarchist I would say sort of. I think that in some ways yes, but do the fact that the Spanish Republic was still a state and that technically the Anarchist didn't abolish that it doesn't make Catalonia Anarchist, but I think in the way society operated I think it was close to Anarchism in some ways.

Like what

but is there a way to make it not all seem pointless while still believing that it's pointless?

A point is a spook, like a landmark on a landscape, its not actually special or designated, rather you designate it. As long as you set the point of reference it should be fine.

""""socialism" in one country""", for one. a "socialism" that still occupied itself with planned commodity production and wage labor.

for the record, "war communism" ceases to be an excuse when stalin formally redefines his entirely centralized planned economy to be "socialism" as to legitimize his own power hunger and ineptitude.

…where the means of production and all profits from labor were in the hands of the workers.

If you really are depressed and everything seems pointless, trying to become a fanatic for a political ideology won't help. If you can't see the point/happiness in simple things, you can't really care about complex political ideology. Try to connect to others while reading up on theory, but don't think that becoming one ideology over another will help. In the long time you will just resent your politics and associate it with your depression if you mix up the two. If isolation isn't your problem, then see a doctor. Depression is a real problem that can be cured with medicine, and if you really have clinical depression, messing around in your own head won't help.

War Communism lasted until 1921 and was replaced with Lenin's New Economic Policy.
Stalin didn't come into power until after Lenin's death, obviously.

this does not constitute "socialism" as there is still wage labor and commodity production, and there are grounds to categorize the bureaucracy in stalin's ML state as its own class with very specific muh privileges that materialize themselves by virtue of their exclusivity over the use of power and authority. this is only secondary to what i previously states and is ultimately irreducible: russia's economy ran on wage labor and commodity production, albeit a planned, non-market distributed variety.

if you excuse my ahistoricism and misuse of terms there, this still does not change the fact that what followed the NEP after it followed war communism was, in fact, a state centralized planned economy which, while no longer capitalism (as the bourgeoisie had been abolished via collectivization), was not socialism either.

What muh privileges? You don't see billion-dollar mansions being built for party leaders or Wolf of Wall Street-style parties on Yachts every night.

Yes, Central Committee members had higher salaries than the average (2-4 times higher than the lowest payed worker iirc, which is very equal distribution compared to most other countries even today), but the bureaucrats didn't function as a class. They're exactly that: employees of the state. Even Richard Wolff admitted that all the profit from state industry went back to the population, not concentrating into the hands of a few party leaders.

Which is not the defining feature of any production system and at any rate was not present in the USSR. Workers were compensated with salaries but there was no commodity exchange involved in the allocation of labor, these were direct inputs executed by the planning authorities.

Once again, not the defining feature of any mode of production. It's just a means to an end. The end is the most important part of any society's relations of production. The way labor is posited in the economy and the general goal of production is what defines separate modes of production. In the USSR this was, instead of the expansion of capital, the satisfaction of society's needs. The effect was muddied a bit through commodification of consumer goods but it couldn't fully revert into capitalism unless the industrial ministries engaged in M-C-M, which they couldn't.

Read this, it's not too long. Calling a political party a class at any point in time is an absurd slander that only former socialist countries are subject to, not even the nazis receive it.

marxists.org/archive/mandel/1979/xx/sovbur.htm

the muh privilege to decide the fate of 99.99% of working russia without legal means for them to effectively object the fact.

this is not relevant. while the power was not abused for such material ends, it was definitely non-objectable power.

it most definitely is. a wage is the value of a worker's labor substracted of its surplus, which defacto goes to be spent not by him but another party. following the substraction of the wage's surplus value, goes into guaranteeing the perpetuation of

>Read [Ernest Mandel's Why The Soviet Bureaucracy is not a New Ruling Class]
i already have, and i am fully aware that the soviet bureaucracy can not be considered its own class by virtue of it not standing at the exploiting (for profit) side of the material relation and the workers on the other. this is also not what i am alluding to when i say that soviet bureaucracy had muh privilege in power. i am simply saying just that: the soviet bureaucracy had muh privilege in power, and by virtue of effecting commodity production through wage labor was also not at the vanguard of a socialist mode of production, rather its own wholly unique centrally planned mode of production.

Even if it were true that the average person had absolutely no say in the state's decision-making process I fail to see how this would make party leaders not workers.

Cool, ill choose to fight for anarchism. thanks for the advice

They allegedly abridged freedom of speech.

Yet you have not made even the slightest effort to prove any surplus-value extraction actually took place.

You and I both know that if the USSR had freer elections or a more decentralized power structure you would call it socialist. The only reason you don't is because you totally ignore the economic base of the Soviet Union, covering this up with some pseudo-Marxist rhetoric. As I pointed out in my last post, here we have a classless and post-capitalist society where production cannot be geared towards the expansion of capital, therefore implying use. Yet you claim none of these features I listed are a defining feature of a socialist society. Wishful thinking on your part.

Nah that one hoxha postet is just unsurprisingly a dumbass

If not they were in the ball park.

yes

They had a government, but it's power was entirely nominal. Trade unions ran everything. I think you are refering to the "Economic Council of Catalonia" as the "worker's council", it was a decentralized planning organization, the unions elected reps to go to it. It was not a state, anarchism isn't ugly skinny guys with stupid hair eating out of dumpsters, we're allowed to organize =).

Free"er" elections don't change the fact that elections of people into offices that have bureaucratic power (the decisions and authority to which are enforced by violence) that the voters do not have inherently means there's a disconnect of control so it would not be socialist.

Power can't be totally decentralized. It's obviously unfeasible and at any rate unnecessary for every decision made to be put to popular vote. That is unless you want to call for referendums on exactly how resources are allocated to each of the thousands of enterprises present in the region. The most major decisions can be directly controlled by everyone, but representation is necessary for the minor details. So if we go by your definition of a socialist society, which is nothing more than "worker control," then it seems socialism is a defunct doctrine.

None of that matters though because you're lying through your teeth anyway and we both know it. If a society like Catalonia were to spring up today, which certainly did not correspond to the way you have defined socialist here, then you would change your definition immediately for sure.

Nigga wtf are you talking about, anarchists don't want everything to be put to a popular vote. There are various ways to have totally decentralized power, selecting representatives by sortition is one, or you can do what the CNT did and have each union select a representative that goes to an overall council.

Centralized power is what we have now, where a small handful of the population selects what we allocate resources to, decentralized power is spreading that power to everyone.

That is the only solution to the perceived problem put forth by the ancom poster; that officials make decisions on behalf of others.

If there are any representatives at all then power is obviously not totally decentralized, numb nuts,

You are a dumbass, representatives selected at random or by small grassroots groups is decentralized.

yet if they speak for anyone who does not voluntarily give them that right then they are coercive