Post Civil War Catalonia?

[Debaser]

So, assuming that the Spanish Civil War was a Republican victory and that the Anarchists stayed in power in Catalonia (surviving the Barcelona May Days), what would have happened to Catalonia?

Could the Anarchist control survive for long? Would they seek to expand Anarchist control to other parts of Spain?

On another note, if the Republicans won the Civil War, what would be the chances of a Socialist Revolution to depose the government?

Apologies if they are silly questions.

[Ismail]

On another note, if the Republicans won the Civil War, what would be the chances of a Socialist Revolution to depose the government?It would depend on how the civil war proceeded. By the end of the war pretty much the only forces who still wanted to fight the Francoists were the PCE and the "defenists" under Negrín. They saw the prospects of a new world war coming up to save the Republic. The right-wing members of the PSOE denounced the idea of a new world war as a "delusion" and Segismundo Casado couped Negrín under the false pretext that the Communists were planning to take power.

At the same time the PCE sacrificed a lot of its ideology during the war in order to make sure that the Republican ranks didn't break up over the fears of Communist influence. Of course said ranks broke up anyway since they feared the rapidly growing PCE. I think that in the end Spain would have wound up as a left-wing bourgeois democracy. Much better than Franco, but not a People's Republic à la Eastern Europe. Stalin actually suggested a few months or so before the fall of the Republic that Negrín and the PCE hold new elections under a unified electoral Front (Negrín also called for this bit), but neither the PSOE nor PCE liked this idea.

[syndicat]

By the end of the war pretty much the only forces who still wanted to fight the Francoists were the PCE and the "defenists" under Negrín.

this is not true. the anarcho-syndicalists also hoped to be able to sustain the war...in some form...til the onset of the coming world war. the collapse of the Republican army came too fast for them to effectively underground their organization...

the anarchists were not "in power" in Catalonia. the workers had seized the means of production and built militias. but they didn't replace the Generalitat with the worker congress & worker defense council called for in their program. Eventually the PCE was able to secure the dominant position in the government, and around 1938 pushed for complete nationalization of the economy. they and their allies used dependence of the worker collectives on state subsidies & credits to have the state seize the industries from the workers. the PCE's aim was a bureaucratic class regimie like that which existed in USSR.

the anarchosyndicalist movement needed to push aside the old Republican state and achieve power for the unions in the anti-fascist zone and have the organized working class directly control the armed forces. if they had gained this power in Sept 1936 they could have prevented the disastrous sending of 70 percent of the gold reserves to Moscow and used some of those funds to build up a native arms industry in Catalonia.

had they survived til World War 2, it's likely the embargo would have ended. the US provided material support during WW2 even to Stalin.

but they would have needed to push to expand the revolution. if the people's army had been victorious in Spain I think it unlikely they would have stopped at the Portugese border. Portugal was an ally of Franco and there were underground CGT cells (the old syndicalist union in Portogal).

as proposed by the anarchists in Sept 1936, they also needed to work out a productive relationship with the anti-imperialist oppositions in Morroco, declaring Morocco independent. they could have provided arms to unions in Morocco so the working class there would have its own militia, and could prevent a capitalist dictatorship of the local elite once the Spanish & French were pushed out.

extensions in the Mahgreb and in Portugal & France were the most likely scenario.