Should the CNT have taken power?

[Forward Union]

I would rather this was a debate between just the Anarchist members of this forum, but obviously this is an open message board, and anyone can post. Im not entirely sure there are any anarchists here who thing teh CNT made the wrong decission, but either way, I haven't seen a thread devoted to this, so lets hear what you all have to say.

Just to get the ball rolling here is a controversial statement.


Originally posted by Balius's Thoughts from Exile (1939)
"The CNT and the FAI which were the soul of the movement in Catalonia could have afforded the July events their proper color. Who could have stopped them? Instead of which, we allowed the Communist Party (PSUC) to rally the opportunists, the bourgeois right, etc., . . . on the terrain of the counterrevolution.

In such times, it is up to one organization to take the lead. Only one could have: ours."
...
According to Balius, in May 1937, the Catalan proletariat had urged the CNT to take power.

Source (http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/spain/sp001780/chap9.html)

[spartan]

No! Why? Well because the Anarchists would have been hard pressed running one Anarchist state which would be surrounded on all sides by much much stronger Capitalist states. Also the Anarchists would not have had the ability to attack or defend themselves from these nations if these nations suddenly decided that the Anarchists were a nuisance. Add to that the fact that the Anarchists would not have got support from fellow leftists in these Capitalist countries as most leftits back then were Authoritarian Communists (as opposed to Anarchists who were Libertarian Socialists) who followed the state Socialism and Socialism in one country theory. Also the idea of an Anarchist state is silly as Anarchism is a global revolutionary struggle movement that believes that Capitalism can only be brought down via most proletariats in the world rising in a revolution which will kill off Capitalism and the Bourgeoisie and inaugurate a new anarchist society for the whole world where there will be no nations or governments/hierarchies or money etc. So an Anarchist nation is impossible as Anarchism does not recognise the concept of "nations" etc. The question you should be asking is "would the Anarchists taking power in Spain have sparked a worldwide revolution" and the answer to that is no because most leftists back then were as i said before Authoritarian Communists who believed in state Socialism and Socialism in one country and were opposed (often violently as seen in the Russian revolution) to Anarchism/Libertarian Socialism which believed in world wide revolution.

[rouchambeau]

I don't think they should have "taken power". Of course, they would have done well to destroy any efforts by counter-revolutionaries and Stalinists to undermine their movement. But I don't see anything productive coming from taking formal power or being recognized as the only legitimate revolutionary group.

[Random Precision]

No! Why? Well because the Anarchists would have been hard pressed running one Anarchist state which would be surrounded on all sides by much much stronger Capitalist states. Also the Anarchists would not have had the ability to attack or defend themselves from these nations if these nations suddenly decided that the Anarchists were a nuisance.

Which happened anyway, but the Anarchists just decided to roll over and play dead for the Stalinists instead of fighting for the revolution and its gains. Is it this you prefer?


Add to that the fact that the Anarchists would not have got support from fellow leftists in these Capitalist countries as most leftits back then were Authoritarian Communists (as opposed to Anarchists who were Libertarian Socialists) who followed the state Socialism and Socialism in one country theory. Also the idea of an Anarchist state is silly as Anarchism is a global revolutionary struggle movement that believes that Capitalism can only be brought down via most proletariats in the world rising in a revolution which will kill off Capitalism and the Bourgeoisie and inaugurate a new anarchist society for the whole world where there will be no nations or governments/hierarchies or money etc. So an Anarchist nation is impossible as Anarchism does not recognise the concept of "nations" etc. The question you should be asking is "would the Anarchists taking power in Spain have sparked a worldwide revolution" and the answer to that is no because most leftists back then were as i said before Authoritarian Communists who believed in state Socialism and Socialism in one country and were opposed (often violently as seen in the Russian revolution) to Anarchism/Libertarian Socialism which believed in world wide revolution.

You're an idiot.


My answer is yes, absolutely. Even if the revolution still had failed, they would have given it a much better chance than it had otherwise. From the minute they refused to take power, the days both they and the revolution had were numbered.

I also take issue with the OP's insinuation that only anarchists should be allowed to discuss this...

[AmbitiousHedonism]

Even if the revolution still had failed, they would have given it a much better chance than it had otherwise. From the minute they refused to take power, the days both they and the revolution had were numbered.

The second poster might have been rambling but it wasn't entirely incoherent. The anarchist idea of revolution is not isolated free spaces but the abolition of all governments. Anarchists would argue that once a group has to take power the revolution has already failed, it doesn't have a chance. Its days were numbered from the beginning.

The anarchist movement continued underground in Spain even after the fascists took power.

I don't have an opinion on the original matter.

[Random Precision]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13, 2007 08:22 pm
The second poster might have been rambling but it wasn't entirely incoherent. The anarchist idea of revolution is not isolated free spaces but the abolition of all governments. Anarchists would argue that once a group has to take power the revolution has already failed, it doesn't have a chance. Its days were numbered from the beginning.
"Taking power" in my opinion was the only way for the CNT to defend their revolutionary gains. Even if the revolution had not spread (which they missed the chance to do as well), do you not agree that the revolution should still have been defended for as long as possible?

In other words, nothing ventured nothing gained.

This is the source of my problems with the CNT and many modern anarchists. They were unwilling to take a chance on the revolution even when it smacked them upside the head!

[Rawthentic]

Maybe the question should be posed as: Should the CNT have made revolution?

[Labor Shall Rule]

Yes, they should of.

There was a concern over how the Union General de Trabajadores, under the flag of the Socialist and the Communist Party, had blocked the call for overthrowing the crumbling appendenges of the capitalist state. They however, were not the largest trade union in Spain at that time. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo was. The workers and farm laborers, under the leadership of the CNT, was responsible for the socialization of most of the economic apparatus; eighteen-thousand enterprises, along with fourteen-million acres of land were seized by the producers themselves. They enjoyed the status of a mass organization; the position of being more popular than any other trade union in all of Spain at that time.

It was possible for them to take control, to "throw out all that is outmoded and reactionary", and replace it with the democratic control of the producers themselves. But they didn't. They became bourgeois ministers.

[syndicat]

First of all, the CNT majority did endorse the CNT taking over the governance of the country but only jointly with the socialist union, the UGT. The UGT was the majority in Madrid, the center of the country and in the north of the country.

However, the question, as posed by Balius, isn't about Spain as a whole. It was about Catalonia. The CNT did not have a majority in all of Spain and some of the areas where they were the majority were conquered by the army at the beginning of the civil war (most of western Andalucia...Cadiz, Huelva, Sevilla, and Zaragoza).

As Durruti correctly recognized, the Left Socialist leader Largo Caballero would vacillate between the CNT and the Communists/Republicans. The only way to get Largo Caballero and the Left Socialists to stop wavering and go along with the unions taking over the running of the country, was for the CNT to create new structures of union power in the regions where the CNT had the power to create them. This is why Durruti helped the CNT unions set up the Regional Defense Council of Aragon. If it was correct for the CNT take over the governance of that one region, why not other regions where it was dominant? The most important such region was Catalonia.

The CNT's big failure, as Balius correctly points out, is not taking the lead and sweeping away the regional Generalitat government apparatus and replacing it with a workers congress and regional defense council (which was also called a "revolutionary junta" -- "junta" means council in Spanish).

It so happens that anarchism is an ambiguous ideology. And no more so than on the question of "government." It is not the aim of anarchism, as the CNT understood it, to abolish all governance. And a structure of governance in a territory is a government. What the CNT's program called for was in effect a working class government. The problem was that they needed to start building this from the bottom up by organizing the unions to take over in the regions where the revolutionary forces were greatest.

By not doing that, they played into the hands of the Communists, who were beating the drum for the rebuilding of the Republican state, and the construction of a hierarchical army and police, so that they could gain control of it.

When I say that the unions should have taken power, this should not be construed as "the anarchists" taking power. The CNT was a mass union organization, not a political organization. And if all the unions were invited to participate in proportion to number in the congresses and councils, the other leftwing tendencies could not say they were frozen out. The Communists would have representation because they controlled a part of the UGT.

By taking over control of the governance of the country, they also would have gained control of the gold reserves, and prevented its shipment to Russia, which was one of the things that most undermined the ability of the working class to defend itself in Spain, as it undermined the Spanish currency on world currency markets, thus reducing their ability to buy resources on the world market.

The working class cannot free itself if its movement does not take over control of regions where the revolutionary movement develops. As Garcia Oliver said at the time, "a revolution must be governed." Either the CNT would set the agenda and dominate the direction, or someone else would, to the CNT's detriment.

Finally, in reply to Red Dali, capitalist property had been largely expropriated by the time the CNT joined the Popular Front government in Nov 1936, so it wasn't really a capitalist government. I would say that it was a government that would tend to empower the coordinator class. A coordinatorist regime isn't a bourgeois regime. Nonetheless, a society dominated by the coordinator class is as much a system of exploitation and working class subordination as one dominated by capitalists.

[Intelligitimate]

The CNT-FAI could not take power because they were incapable of it as an organization. It was never equipped with the ability to capture and exercise of power. It had more than enough power and influence though. To quote Companys, head of the Generalitat himself:

"Today you are the masters of the city and of Catalonia . . . You have conquered and everything is in your power. If you do not need me or want me as President of Catalonia . . . I shall become just another soldier in the struggle against fascism. If, on the other hand, you believe in this post . . . I and the men of my party . . . can be useful in this struggle."

The CNT-FAI, unable to actually seize and wield power, just simply agreed to this, and created the Central Anti-fascist Militia Committee and shared power with the UGT, POUM, Rabassaires, PSUC, and the liberal republicans. The CNT's unions had a vertically aligned structure, and the CNT itself was highly decentralized: its national and regional committees had no power to enforce anything, and could barely maintain communications with each other. The lack of any ability to simply organize itself for the seizure of power is a direct result of the purist elements of the party, and exposes the weakness and inability of anarchists to ever mount any real challenge to bourgeois power (and this certainly had nothing to do with anti-authoritarianism, as the CNT would shoot people who opposed their rural collectivization, and very often resorted to violence against any of its opponents).

To quote Lorenzo:

"Only a party with an iron discipline could have taken power -- a party organized as if it were a military unit, with its revolutionary general staff, its centralized and hierarchised structures . . . In the CNT . . . to get something accepted, a militant had to argue at length ad do the rounds convincing people [in the various regional organizations]. How on earth -- in such conditions -- could the CNT have taken power, even if its 'leaders' had wanted to? The anarchists had no effective organizational machinery with which to fight: the rising of 1932 and 1933 had already demonstrated that."

This whole little “revolution” was doomed to fail anyway. Had the anarchists took power, they would have only hindered further the war effort against the fascist rebels, and they would have destroyed the CNT even sooner. Talking about the "best chance" for this "revolution" to succeed is just a bunch of stupid nonsense.

[black magick hustla]

intel, can you quote any evidence of spanish anarchists shooting down people who opposed the collective?

I read from other sources that it was actually the opposite. They where given a piece of land but they would be unable to hire laborers.

I do know they would shoot down fascist supporters, but frankly I don't have any problem with that.

[Fawkes]

Had the anarchists took power, they would have only hindered further the war effort against the fascist rebels, and they would have destroyed the CNT even sooner.
The only ones that "hindered the war effort" were the Communists that bred sectarianism by claiming that the P.O.U.M. were "Trotsky-fascists" and in the pay of Franco and by attacking anarchist collectives so as to reinstate capitalist control.

[Intelligitimate]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14, 2007 01:19 am
intel, can you quote any evidence of spanish anarchists shooting down people who opposed the collective?

I read from other sources that it was actually the opposite. They where given a piece of land but they would be unable to hire laborers.

I do know they would shoot down fascist supporters, but frankly I don't have any problem with that.
One of the worst incidents occurred in January 1937 in La Fatarella (Tarragona). 30 peasants resisting collectivization were killed by CNT forces.

Aragon became the place where the CNT had its most success with rural collectivization, and most of its problems. CNT militias would do things like requisitioning food from the collectives. The CNT couldn't put a stop to this, even though it knew it was seriously hurting their efforts to collectivize the countryside (which is just another expression of the organizational weakness of the CNT).

[Intelligitimate]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14, 2007 01:25 am

Had the anarchists took power, they would have only hindered further the war effort against the fascist rebels, and they would have destroyed the CNT even sooner.
The only ones that "hindered the war effort" were the Communists that bred sectarianism by claiming that the P.O.U.M. were "Trotsky-fascists" and in the pay of Franco and by attacking anarchist collectives so as to reinstate capitalist control.
Please. The POUM was a minor party that nobody gave a shit about, not even the CNT, and there was no conspiracy by the communists to oppose collectivization. Collectivization was simply not as popular as modern anarchists like to pretend (the CNT's internal documents reflect their own difficulty with this), and in an effort to gather as many forces against the fascists as possible, nearly everyone else opposed rural collectivization in certain instances. Even the CNT didn't do much in rural collectivizing in Catalonia, recognizing the property rights of small landholders. The Republic even went along just fine with CNT collectivization of pro-Fascist land and industry.

[Fawkes]

Please. The POUM was a minor party that nobody gave a shit about, not even the CNT
They had 9,000 troops on the front lines in Catalonia and they were actually one of the first to respond to Franco's attempts to take over.


and there was no conspiracy by the communists to oppose collectivization.
Then why did the Marx Division (27th) and the 30th Division of the Republican Army attack three different peasant collectives in 1937 and redistribute the land and property to the former landowners?

[Bilan]

Originally posted by Intelligitimate
One of the worst incidents occurred in January 1937 in La Fatarella (Tarragona). 30 peasants resisting collectivization were killed by CNT forces.

Sources? Evidence?

[Intelligitimate]

They had 9,000 troops on the front lines in Catalonia and they were actually one of the first to respond to Franco's attempts to take over.

The POUM didn't have 9,000 members, let alone militia troops. The POUM was a merger of Nin's tiny party and the BOC, which had a few thousand members. And everyone knows the CNT put down the (relatively minor) fascist rebellion in Catalonia. The Companys' quote above was made right after the CNT put it down.


Then why did the Marx Division (27th) and the 30th Division of the Republican Army attack three different peasant collectives in 1937 and redistribute the land and property to the former landowners?

You'll have to be more specific than that.

[Intelligitimate]

Originally posted by Tierra y Libertad+September 14, 2007 02:22 am--> (Tierra y Libertad @ September 14, 2007 02:22 am)
Intelligitimate
One of the worst incidents occurred in January 1937 in La Fatarella (Tarragona). 30 peasants resisting collectivization were killed by CNT forces.

Sources? Evidence? [/b]
I'm not sure what the nature of your request is. You can simply google what I provided to verify this event did happen. If you're looking for scholarly work that references the event in some detail, check Broué and Témime's The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, p. 228 (this is the reference Helen Graham has in her The Spanish Republic At War: 1936-1939).

[Fawkes]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13, 2007 09:41 pm

They had 9,000 troops on the front lines in Catalonia and they were actually one of the first to respond to Franco's attempts to take over.

The POUM didn't have 9,000 members, let alone militia troops. The POUM was a merger of Nin's tiny party and the BOC, which had a few thousand members. And everyone knows the CNT put down the (relatively minor) fascist rebellion in Catalan. The Companys' quote above was made right after the CNT put it down.


Then why did the Marx Division (27th) and the 30th Division of the Republican Army attack three different peasant collectives in 1937 and redistribute the land and property to the former landowners?

You'll have to be more specific than that.

[Note 6. The figures for the P.O.U.M. membership are
given as: July 1936, 10,000; December 1936, 70,000; June 1937, 40,000. But these
are from P.O.U.M. sources; a hostile estimate would probably divide them by
four. The only thing one can say with any certainty about the membership of the
Spanish political parties is that every party over-estimates its own
numbers.]
Source (http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/4.html)

One of the examples I am referring to is the city of Puigcerda. First Source. (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/coldoffthepresses/tragedy.html#prelude_may) Second Source. (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/spain/spain04.htm) Third Source (pages 71 and 92 of the 2006 AK Press edition). (http://akpress.com/2006/items/visiononfireakpress)



...and now, time for bed.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Yes, and what did the Union General de Trabajadores do? It refused to truly represent the sentiments of the working class, and tied itself to the rear of the radical bourgeoisie within the Popular Front. They were class collaborationists; the leadership sat on their asses while the reinstitution of owners in the factories and land was quickly coming. If you are facing fierce annihilation at the hands of armed fascists, as well as bourgeois conspiracies being formed against your own organization within the very government that you support, then it should be obvious that rather than exchanging your political principles and conscience in for legal and political entitlements, there should be an all-out fight for survival that would lead to the conquering of power.

The CNT should of constructed a revolutionary army that would liberate these areas from the bourgeois volunteers, mobilized peasants, and colonial mercenaries that Franco commanded. A civil war against the capitalist class always follows the conquering of the state power.

I don't understand why you are emphasizing the importance of taking control on the 'local' level. It was one of the factors that lead to their downfall.

It doesn't matter if private ownership of the means of production was collectivized - if you do not wipe out the capitalist state at it's very foundations, then you leave a sleeping giant that will awake as soon as you are too much of a thorn in it's side.

[syndicat]

intelligetimate:
"Only a party with an iron discipline could have taken power -- a party organized as if it were a military unit, with its revolutionary general staff, its centralized and hierarchised structures . . . In the CNT . . . to get something accepted, a militant had to argue at length ad do the rounds convincing people [in the various regional organizations]. How on earth -- in such conditions -- could the CNT have taken power, even if its 'leaders' had wanted to? The anarchists had no effective organizational machinery with which to fight: the rising of 1932 and 1933 had already demonstrated that."

This whole little “revolution” was doomed to fail anyway. Had the anarchists took power, they would have only hindered further the war effort against the fascist rebels, and they would have destroyed the CNT even sooner. Talking about the "best chance" for this "revolution" to succeed is just a bunch of stupid nonsense.

First of all, Lorenzo was the son of the Treintista national secretary of the CNT in the summer of 1936. he was recalled from that position in November due to retreating from Madrid against explicit direction by the members. So, you have to take what Lorenzo says with a grain of salt since he is writing from the point of view of one faction, the treintistas, the faction who wanted the CNT to join the Popular Front. the quote from Lorenzo is an exaggerated statement of his father's bureaucratic point of view, as national secretary.

if they were so ineffective, how come they defeated the army? in reality they organized before the military coup 200 neighborhood defense groups in the Barcelona area, and coordinated them with a regional workers committee. so much for "extreme decentralization."

the CNT was not a "party" but a mass union. the argument that you give would imply that you don't believe that the workers themselves can ever take power, only some highly centralized clique.

furthermore, Lorenzo's father was a major opponent of the proposal for the unions to take power, which was fought out in the CNT internally in August and Sept. 1936. he lost that vote initially in Sept 3, 1936, when the CNT national conference approved a proposal of the revolutionaries from the unions in Barcelona to take power jointly in Madrid with the UGT. this was the proposal for a National Defense Council, with a unified command for the militia. all of this contradicts the image you present of the CNT.

The army revolt in Catalonia was not "relatively minor" as it involved 12,000 troops and the major industrial center of the country, with 70% of Spain's manufacturing capacity.

What demoralized the people fighting the fascists was the efforts of the Communists to weasel their way into control of the officer corps of the armed forces and police, and the commisarriat, and then the setting up of the SIM, which carried out arrests and murders of revolutionary compeitors of the Communists.

What also undermined the war effort was the sending of 70% of the gold reserves to Russia, which caused a collapse of the exchange value of the Spanish currency, cutting its value in half, thus undermining the ability of the antifascist side to obtain resources of any kind on international markets. the CNT's proposal to form a national defense council with the UGT in Sept would have prevented that.

Lorenzo's remarks have to be understood as an attempt to justify after the fact the stance of his father, in opposing the attempt of the CNT and UGT to take over governance of the country, and in favor of capitulation of the CNT to the Popular Front.

[syndicat]

in regard to the fight over the land, it is necessary to be clear that the big difference in policy was between the Communists, on the one hand, and the UGT and CNT farm worker unions, on the other hand. The UGT Land Workers Federation was led by the Left Socialists and their policy on land collectivization was the same as that of the CNT. In the countryside there were big landowners who hired people to work for them, and there were also relatively affluent working farmers who also had enough land to hire others to work for them. The aim of both the CNT and UGT farm worker unions in the revolution was an end to wage-labor in the countryside. Thus if a farmer owned more land than he could farm himself, they'd take the excess. But it was against the policy of either UGT or CNT farm worker unions to forcibly take land that was being worked by a peasant proprietor himself.

Because the Communists were organizing the middle layers of Spanish society against the CNT proletarian movement, this meant they were defending the interests of the larger landowners and landowning farmers who hired others, as well as, in the urban areas, the landlords, shopkeepers, small factory owners, managers, lawyers and other professionals. they organized them into fake "unions" against the workers.

in some cases the Communists in Catalonia in 1937 held "peasant conferences" where they tried to rile up the peasants who had owned more land than others to seize back the land that had been expropriated. in one well known case this led to a clash with the police and some deaths. maybe this is the incident that intelligetimate is referring to.

reddali:
Yes, and what did the Union General de Trabajadores do? It refused to truly represent the sentiments of the working class, and tied itself to the rear of the radical bourgeoisie within the Popular Front. They were class collaborationists;

this is WAY too simplistic. the UGT was very factionalized and had all sorts of people in it. It was less unified than the CNT. in many cases local worker sections of the UGT were in revolutionary alliances with the CNT in collectivization and self-management of agricultural lands and industrial operations. i've already mentioned that the UGT farm workers union had radical leadership in many (but not all) places and were often in a direct alliance with the CNT. this was true in some industries as well, such as the railway industry, which was run by the Revolutionary Railway Federation which had been jointly formed by the CNT and UGT railway worker unions (but only after the CNT took the initiative to begin seizing control of the railways).

moreover, the UGT was a majority of the organized working class in areas like Asturias and the central region, and there were worker militias here controlled by the socialists and Communists. the CNT couldn't just waltz in and say "We're taking over".

what is required is a concept of class unity, of class power.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by syndicat+September 13, 2007 11:17 pm--> (syndicat @ September 13, 2007 11:17 pm) Finally, in reply to Red Dali, capitalist property had been largely expropriated by the time the CNT joined the Popular Front government in Nov 1936, so it wasn't really a capitalist government. I would say that it was a government that would tend to empower the coordinator class. A coordinatorist regime isn't a bourgeois regime. Nonetheless, a society dominated by the coordinator class is as much a system of exploitation and working class subordination as one dominated by capitalists. [/b]
This whole thing about a coordinator class really does nothing, but confuse the issue. Either the Popular Front government was capitalist, or it was not. I would say that it was.


First of all, the CNT majority did endorse the CNT taking over the governance of the country but only jointly with the socialist union, the UGT. The UGT was the majority in Madrid, the center of the country and in the north of the country.

The CNT majority also endorsed joining the bourgeois government. I think that the question that needs to be asked is whether the CNT was a revolutionary organisation that was capable of taking power.

'The Friends of Durruti' put it quite clearly:
Towards a Fresh Revolution
The vast majority of the working population stood by the CNT. Inside Catalonia, the CNT was the majority organisation. What happened, that the CNT did not makes its revolution, the people's revolution, the revolution of the majority of the population?

What happened was what had to happen. The CNT was utterly devoid of revolutionary theory. We did not have a concrete programme. We had no idea where we were going. We had lyricism aplenty; but when all is said and done, we did not know what to do with our masses of workers or how to give substance to the popular effusion which erupted inside our organisations. By not knowing what to do, we handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the marxists who support the farce of yesteryear. What is worse, we allowed the bourgeoisie a breathing space; to return, to re-form and to behave as would a conqueror.

As for the idea of a CNT-UGT government, the most important question to ask about it is which class it would have represented, the proletariat, or the bourgeoisie.

This obviously is a more difficult question for those who have theories like that of the coordinator class.

Devrim

[syndicat]

Devrim: You don't really say anything here, so there's nothing to respond to. The CNT unions in Spain were comparable to the factory committee movement in the Russian revolution. That movement ended up being taken over by the Communists, and their program developed a coordinator class run economy. so i guess on your assumptions nothing really happened in the Russian revolution.

[Rawthentic]

Devrim, don't you see? All Communists work for the creation of a coordinatorist class system (lol :lol: ), while anarchists are the real revolutionaries.

The fact of the matter is that if there is no political power, there is no revolution.

[Random Precision]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14, 2007 02:59 am
I'm not sure what the nature of your request is. You can simply google what I provided to verify this event did happen. If you're looking for scholarly work that references the event in some detail, check Broué and Témime's The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, p. 228 (this is the reference Helen Graham has in her The Spanish Republic At War: 1936-1939).
I happen to have that right here:


The enemies of collectivization had regained confidence, encouraged by official statements about order, legality, and property. They knew that they could rely on the new police force: in January 1937, in Fatarella, a village of 600 inhabitants in Tarragona province, the small proprietors took up arms against the Anarchists who wanted to collectivize them, and the result was several dead and wounded.

As you can see, it was the capitalist peasants who started the fight, and far less than 30 were killed. It actually seems to imply that there were casualties on both sides.

This is not to say that I don't have issues with the CNT's agricultural collectivization, but that is a quite high exaggeration of its faults.

[manic expression]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14, 2007 09:12 pm
Devrim: You don't really say anything here, so there's nothing to respond to. The CNT unions in Spain were comparable to the factory committee movement in the Russian revolution. That movement ended up being taken over by the Communists, and their program developed a coordinator class run economy. so i guess on your assumptions nothing really happened in the Russian revolution.
Hogwash. The workers (especially in Petrograd) supported the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks, in turn, made the worker councils the organs of the state, establishing worker control and a worker state. What did the anarchists propose? What did the anarchists do in Catalunya? Exactly.

By the way, don't change the subject: we're talking about the CNT (and their failure to make any significant steps toward revolution).

[Labor Shall Rule]

As for the idea of a CNT-UGT government, the most important question to ask about it is which class it would have represented, the proletariat, or the bourgeoisie.

Exactly.

The CNT could just waltz in and take control. They were the majority.

If they did "take the driver's seat of the revolution", as Balius put it, it would make it possible for a revolutionary alliance to be born out of the fiery crucible of the civil war. As your post clarifies, the railway union began to collectivize their stations as soon as the CNT started the entire process themselves. I think that is an excellent example of how they could of "lead by example", which is what they failed to do when they clearly could of taken and held the political power in their own hands.

It would heighten the class struggle; atomize the entire working class into realizing where their interests truly lie, as the miners, railway workers, and farm workers face opposition from their own leadership in the UGT. It might even motivate the radical bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie within the union into preserving their position by siding with the CNT.

You really need to stop making excuses Syndicat. Your leadership fucked everything up. Their weakness and corwardice lead to the deaths of thousands of workers and peasants.

[syndicat]

manic:
Hogwash. The workers (especially in Petrograd) supported the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks, in turn, made the worker councils the organs of the state, establishing worker control and a worker state.

Not quite. The soviets had been set up, in most places, by the party leaders of the Menshevik and other parties, and centralized so that control was in the hands of a few people, not the plenaries of worker delegates. See "Factory Committee and the Russian Revolution". http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/raclef.htm

"Worker control" as defined by Lenin meant no more than that workers could exercise surveillance over management, veto hiring decisions, examine the books. it didn't mean workers managing. Lenin was against that. Moreover, the "worker control" in Lenin's decree of Nov 1917 merely legalized what the workers had already conquered thru direct action.


What did the anarchists propose?

You're confused. The issue is the CNT, not "the anarchists." The CNT was a mass union organization, not a political organization. The CNT proposed, at its Sept 3 1936, national conference that the two unions in Spain, CNT and UGT, jointly replace the Republican state with a working class government. UGT veto'd this. Nonetheless, the CNT in the region of Aragon did take power in that region, via a workers congress and an elected labor defense council (working class government).



What did the anarchists do in Catalunya? Exactly.

The CNT expropriated 13,000 enterprises in Spain, the great majority of Spain's economy, and put it under workers' management, not "workers' control" in the sense defined by Lenin (except in some places where the CNT unions took a more cautious approach, but this was not in Catalunya). The CNT built a labor army with tens of thousands of members, and built an entire arms industry from scratch.


By the way, don't change the subject: we're talking about the CNT (and their failure to make any significant steps toward revolution).

So, expropriating most of a country's economy and putting it under direct worker management and building up a huge labor-controlled army is "failing to make any significant steps toward revolution"?

[Labor Shall Rule]

There is no god-damned cooridinator class.

If there is a labor and capital relationship; if there is a flow of propertyless individuals that sell their labor-power in order to sustain him or herself; if there is a state that was founded and is controlled by the capitalist class, then there is no cooridinator class! It's capitalism, not some mythological conception of an entirely new historical epoch of bureaucratic control.

[syndicat]

Devrim:

As for the idea of a CNT-UGT government, the most important question to ask about it is which class it would have represented, the proletariat, or the bourgeoisie.

I think it obviously would have been a working class government. The CNT's program also called for the defense council to be accountable to a national workers congress.

Red Dali:


Exactly.

The CNT could just waltz in and take control. They were the majority.

Not in Madrid or New Castile or Asturias. In those areas the CNT was a minority and the UGT and its allied parties, socialists and communists, controlled most of the arms, that is, the militia. You've never responded to this point.



If they did "take the driver's seat of the revolution", as Balius put it, it would make it possible for a revolutionary alliance to be born out of the fiery crucible of the civil war.

Balius was referring to Catalonia. In Catalonia the CNT was the majority and had initially seized all the arms and arms depots of the army. The CNT thus had defacto armed power. I totally agree with Balius that it was a mistake for the CNT not to use that as the basis for creating a working class government, based on a regional workers congress.



As your post clarifies, the railway union began to collectivize their stations as soon as the CNT started the entire process themselves. I think that is an excellent example of how they could of "lead by example", which is what they failed to do when they clearly could of taken and held the political power in their own hands.


In the case of Catalonia, i agree with you. And so did Durruti. That was his view of what the CNT should have done. That's why he supported the CNT unions taking power in Aragon which they did do. And if they had done so in Catalonia, they would have been able to bring tremendous pressure to bear on the UGT and its most leftwing section, the Left socialists, to go along with the CNT proposal for a joint national CNT-UGT government.

[manic expression]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14, 2007 10:37 pm
Not quite. The soviets had been set up, in most places, by the party leaders of the Menshevik and other parties, and centralized so that control was in the hands of a few people, not the plenaries of worker delegates. See "Factory Committee and the Russian Revolution". http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/raclef.htm

"Worker control" as defined by Lenin meant no more than that workers could exercise surveillance over management, veto hiring decisions, examine the books. it didn't mean workers managing. Lenin was against that. Moreover, the "worker control" in Lenin's decree of Nov 1917 merely legalized what the workers had already conquered thru direct action.
And yet when the Congress of the Soviets convened, who did they support? It sure wasn't the Mensheviks, it was the Bolsheviks and Left-SR's. To say that the Soviets somehow choked worker power is against what actually happened, they were the people who made up the system from top to bottom.

Worker control, as it was in practice, was the creation of a worker state which controlled the means of production. Quote Lenin if you want to quote Lenin, don't work in the abstract. Furthermore, the decrees of November 1917 made the Soviets the central part of the power structure in the Soviet Union. What are you trying to say?


You're confused. The issue is the CNT, not "the anarchists."

I was talking about Russia.


The CNT expropriated 13,000 enterprises in Spain, the great majority of Spain's economy, and put it under workers' management, not "workers' control" in the sense defined by Lenin (except in some places where the CNT unions took a more cautious approach, but this was not in Catalunya). The CNT built a labor army with tens of thousands of members, and built an entire arms industry from scratch.

Don't play that game. We all know what the CNT actually did, and we all know the complete futility of their program. They did nothing to make a revolution, they did nothing period. The expropriations and "workers' management" that you keep jabbering about were paper-thin and crashed when met with the first sign of opposition. Also, it's ironic that you mention the arms industry when the Republicans depended upon the Soviet Union for aid in that very catagory.


So, expropriating most of a country's economy and putting it under direct worker management and building up a huge labor-controlled army is "failing to make any significant steps toward revolution"?

Refusing to decisively take control from the capitalists and establish any sort of worker control IS a failure to do precisely that. The anarchists, instead of building resistance to the fascists and capitalists, inexplicably rolled over and accomplished nothing.

[syndicat]

manic one:
And yet when the Congress of the Soviets convened, who did they support? It sure wasn't the Mensheviks, it was the Bolsheviks and Left-SR's. To say that the Soviets somehow choked worker power is against what actually happened, they were the people who made up the system from top to bottom.

the Congress of Soviets represented only a minority of the population, the workers and military personnel. 80% of the population were peasants. and even then the Bolsheviks did not have a majority at that congress. They gained a temporary majority when the right SRs and right Mensheviks walked out.

but from the fact that the Bolsheviks got approval to set up Sovnarkom at that congress, how does that show that a structure was created that would allow the actual workers to actually control the decisions that affect them? in reality workers did not have power.


Worker control, as it was in practice, was the creation of a worker state which controlled the means of production. Quote Lenin if you want to quote Lenin, don't work in the abstract. Furthermore, the decrees of November 1917 made the Soviets the central part of the power structure in the Soviet Union. What are you trying to say?

The state did not, at that point, "control the means of production". Lenin's idea was to continue private ownership of industry with the workers acting as a control on them. he was forced to change course in July 1918 due to the civil war, and only then was the economy nationalized, from above, not by the workers.

moreover, "workers control" was not continued under state ownership. the power of the factory committees -- the organs of "control" -- was emasculated. first in jan 1918 the factory committees were subordinated to the union bureaucracy. and then at the party congress in March 1920 one-man management was approved, which Lenin and Trotsky had advocated since 1918, and any control by the factory committees was gone by end of 1920.

one-man management was appointment of managers from above by the party-state. what you see here is the consolidation of a new coordinator ruling class.


Refusing to decisively take control from the capitalists and establish any sort of worker control IS a failure to do precisely that. The anarchists, instead of building resistance to the fascists and capitalists, inexplicably rolled over and accomplished nothing.

what you provide here is basically a lot of babble. The CNT and UGT expropriated 14 million acres of farm land and 18,000 enterprises. the workers had taken management of most of the country's industry.

the Communists were trying to work towards state ownership and control. and once they gained the dominant position after May 1937 that is what they did, using the state to seize control of industries. the Communists had focused on organizing the middle strata -- shop keepers, landowners, lawyers, managers, etc. And this was to be the new managing class in the state-owned system they were moving towards.

i would agree that the CNT did not maximize its leverage to force the left socialists in the UGT to set up a joint UGT-CNT workers government, which would have prevented the Communists from gaining the upper hand.

the reason Spain became totally dependent on the Soviet Union for arms was because the Communists were able to weasel their way into major influence over the rightwing socialists and got them to do their bidding, including sending the country's gold reserves to Russia, and blocked the gold being used to build up a war industry in Catalonia, which was the only part of Spain with significant industrial capacity (70% of precivil war manufacturing capacity). the Communists were opposed to giving resources to develop a war industry in Catalonia because it would have been controlled by the CNT, where the arms industry initially built up there was set up and run by the CNT unions.

[Intelligitimate]

if they were so ineffective, how come they defeated the army?

It might have had something to do with the fact the Catalan security forces (the Assault and Civil Guards, the Mozos de Escuarda, and army officers who didn't rebel, such as Colonel Frederic Escofet and Major Perez Farras) remained loyal to the Republic and helped arm the CNT militias, against explicit orders from Companys. There were 3,000 Civil Guards, 3,200 Assault Guards, and 300 Mozos de Escuarda. The military commander of the region, General Llano de la Encomienda, relied crucially on their support against the 2,000 (not 12,000) rebels in Catalonia.


the CNT was not a "party" but a mass union. the argument that you give would imply that you don't believe that the workers themselves can ever take power, only some highly centralized clique.

It wasn't “the workers themselves” that decided to share power with Companys and backed down from taking power. That is firmly in the hands of the CNT-FAI leadership, because they simply couldn't do it and didn't ever intend to anyway. They had no real blueprint for seizing power. When it was handed to them on a silver platter, they (read: the CNT-FAI leadership) didn't know what to do with it. They could barely control their own organization, as their inability to stop their militias from requisitioning grain shows, or their inability to get collectivization going where there was any other form of political organization to stop them. They only succeeded so well in Aragon because they were the only real mass organization in the region.


The army revolt in Catalonia was not "relatively minor" as it involved 12,000 troops

There were not 12,000 rebel troops.


What demoralized the people fighting the fascists was the efforts of the Communists to weasel their way into control of the officer corps of the armed forces and police, and the commisarriat, and then the setting up of the SIM, which carried out arrests and murders of revolutionary compeitors of the Communists.

What demoralized people fighting the fascists was the constant losses of the Republic due to critical lack of supplies and later food, due to the defacto embargo imposed by the Western power's policy of Non-Intervention that applied only to the Republic. The SIM was created by the Republic to fight the very real Fifth Column activities that were going on, not by communists. The whole problem with the anarchist/Trot/fascist line on Spain is that it assumes some vast Stalinist conspiracy to control the Republic that never in fact existed. It is mainly the product of the delusion of the exile authors to explain their groups own failures, with a Cold War twist.


What also undermined the war effort was the sending of 70% of the gold reserves to Russia, which caused a collapse of the exchange value of the Spanish currency, cutting its value in half, thus undermining the ability of the antifascist side to obtain resources of any kind on international markets. the CNT's proposal to form a national defense council with the UGT in Sept would have prevented that.

The Gold transfer was done to even allow international purchases to begin with. Western banks were delaying transfers of funds, and some assists were even frozen by France and Britain. The Bank of Spain made the decision under the Giral cabinet (which had no socialists or communists in it) to transfer the funds out of the country to allow for instant convertibility. The Soviet Union was the only logical place. Not transferring the funds would have meant nothing could have ever been purchased safely.


As you can see, it was the capitalist peasants who started the fight, and far less than 30 were killed. It actually seems to imply that there were casualties on both sides.

The bit you quoted doesn't give a specific number, and other sources put the total number at 30 for the anti-collectivization side.

[syndicat]

illegit:
It might have had something to do with the fact the Catalan security forces (the Assault and Civil Guards, the Mozos de Escuarda, and army officers who didn't rebel, such as Colonel Frederic Escofet and Major Perez Farras) remained loyal to the Republic and helped arm the CNT militias, against explicit orders from Companys. There were 3,000 Civil Guards, 3,200 Assault Guards, and 300 Mozos de Escuarda. The military commander of the region, General Llano de la Encomienda, relied crucially on their support against the 2,000 (not 12,000) rebels in Catalonia.

The Civil Guards did NOT help the worker militia. they remained in their barracks and did nothing to see what the outcome would be. on the last day of the fighting, when it was clear the army was defeated, they marched to the presidential palace and then offered their loyalty, not before.

only 600 of the Assault Guards fought with the CNT militia in the streets. if the police were such a big factor, how come the chief of police failed in his effort to keep the main arms depot out of the hands of the CNT? on July 20th he told Companys that the CNT now held de facto armed power and the police could not guarantee state order. the First Army Corps, the section of the army in Barcelona, had 12,000 men. NONE of them went over to the side of the people until they were besieged by CNT armed defense groups and assualt guards.


It wasn't “the workers themselves” that decided to share power with Companys and backed down from taking power. That is firmly in the hands of the CNT-FAI leadership, because they simply couldn't do it and didn't ever intend to anyway. They had no real blueprint for seizing power.

more bullshit. on July 23rd there was a regional plenary of the CNT of Catalonia, at which all of the local labor council delegates were present -- over 500 people. It was this body who decided whether to overthrow the government, not some "leadership" clique as you allege. There was an open debate that went on for hours. The unions from the industrial area of Baix Llobregat put forward the motion to overthrow the Generalitat and have the unions take over. THEY thought they knew what they were doing. They were for the carrying out of the libertarian communist vision the CNT had just approved at its national congress in May 1936.

The CNT did lack a concrete plan in July of how to develop a "revolutionary workers alliance" with the CNT (that was approved at the May congress), and it took them six weeks of internal debate to finally work that out at the national conference of Sept 3, where they decided on a National Defense Council and national workers congress and unified people's militia with unified command, to replace the dysfunctional Republican state.


The SIM was created by the Republic to fight the very real Fifth Column activities that were going on, not by communists.

Complete bullshit. The Communists had already been caught with their pants down in March 1937 when Rodriguez, the anarchist director of prisons, made public the discovery that the Communists, under cover of the Madrid Defense Junta, which they controlled, had a secret political prison where the nephew of a leader of the Socialist party and other Socialist party members were being held prisoner and tortured.

This led Largo Caballero to dissolve the Madrid Defense Junta. The Communists at that point had it in for Caballero. The Communists used their control of the police officer corps to mount a huge provocation, a coordinated assuault on the worker managed telephone system, managed by the CNT telephone workers union. This led to a general strike in Barcelona. The Communists then used this as a pretext to demand in the national cabinet that the POUM and CNT be banned. Caballero refused, but the petty bourgeois allies of the Communists backed them up: Basque Nationalists, right wing social democrats, bourgeois Republicans.

Caballero was thus removed from power and Negrin, who was a close supporter of the Communists was put in power, and Negrin was quite willing to accept the Communists proposal for creating SIM, which the Communists controlled, and which they used to arrest and assassinate revolutionaries. The SIM was simply an appendage of the Communists and it was crawling with Soviet police agents.


The Gold transfer was done to even allow international purchases to begin with. Western banks were delaying transfers of funds, and some assists were even frozen by France and Britain. The Bank of Spain made the decision under the Giral cabinet (which had no socialists or communists in it) to transfer the funds out of the country to allow for instant convertibility. The Soviet Union was the only logical place. Not transferring the funds would have meant nothing could have ever been purchased safely.

Nonsensical bullshit. The Spanish government throughout the civil war was able to approve all sorts of purchases abroad of equipment, food, and sale of exports. The 30% of the gold reserves that remained in Spain was used to buy things from various countries. For one thing, the embargo only affected weapons and war materiel, not everything. Given the embargo against arms, a more effective policy would have been to buy equipment and raw materials, materials and equipment that could be used for a variety of purposes and thus not embargoed, and use this equipment and material to develop their own arms industry. This is in fact what the CNT proposed.

By sending 70% of the gold reserves abroad, as soon as this became public knowledge, the value of the Spanish peseta fell by half on currency exchanges, thus cutting the Republic's purchasing power in half on the world market of everything.


As you can see, it was the capitalist peasants who started the fight, and far less than 30 were killed. It actually seems to imply that there were casualties on both sides.

hey, you're not quoting me but someone else.



The bit you quoted doesn't give a specific number, and other sources put the total number at 30 for the anti-collectivization side.

It is a misdescription to call it "the anti-collectivization" side, it was affluent landowning farmers who had been incited by the Communists to try to take their land back. And they weren't killed by "CNT forces" as you said, but by the police.
And don't try to fob off quotes from someone else as if it is from me.

[syndicat]

me:
The CNT did lack a concrete plan in July of how to develop a "revolutionary workers alliance" with the CNT (that was approved at the May congress),

This should have read "revolutionary workers alliance with the UGT"

[Devrim]

Originally posted by syndicat+September 14, 2007 09:12 pm--> (syndicat @ September 14, 2007 09:12 pm) Devrim: You don't really say anything here, so there's nothing to respond to. [/b]
Yes, maybe I don't really say anything except to state that this whole idea of a coordinator class is worse than useless, and confuses things.

I can't be bothered to argue against it as you obviously think that it is important, and will spend pages arguing for it, and I think that it is a very strange idea that even within the little groups that we are today virtually nobody holds.

I presume it comes from (or if it has an earlier route was at least used by) the group around Cardan/Castoriadis. With them you can see it as part of a brave attempt to break with Trotskyism, and its analysis of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for them, and their analysis, the reality stepped back in in the 1970s, and disproved it. I think ideas like yours were thrown out along with the other nonsense such as the idea that the crisis has been overcome.


The CNT unions in Spain were comparable to the factory committee movement in the Russian revolution. That movement ended up being taken over by the Communists, and their program developed a coordinator class run economy. so i guess on your assumptions nothing really happened in the Russian revolution.

I don't think that the CNT unions were in any way comparable to the Russian factory committee movement, I don't think the phrase 'coordinator class run economy' has any meaning, and I don't understand on what basis you draw those assumptions about my opinions on the Russian revolution.


syndicat
Devrim:



As for the idea of a CNT-UGT government, the most important question to ask about it is which class it would have represented, the proletariat, or the bourgeoisie.

I think it obviously would have been a working class government. The CNT's program also called for the defense council to be accountable to a national workers congress.

Yes, this is a difference. I don't think it would have.

Devrim

[Intelligitimate]

The Civil Guards did NOT help the worker militia. they remained in their barracks and did nothing to see what the outcome would be . . . only 600 of the Assault Guards fought with the CNT militia in the streets.

Cite a source.


more bullshit. on July 23rd there was a regional plenary of the CNT of Catalonia, at which all of the local labor council delegates were present -- over 500 people. It was this body who decided whether to overthrow the government, not some "leadership" clique as you allege. There was an open debate that went on for hours. . . The CNT did lack a concrete plan in July of how to develop a "revolutionary workers alliance" with the CNT (that was approved at the May congress), and it took them six weeks of internal debate to finally work that out at the national conference of Sept 3, where they decided on a National Defense Council and national workers congress and unified people's militia with unified command, to replace the dysfunctional Republican state.

I never said anything about a “clique,” (though perhaps you think 500 people counts as “the workers themselves”) but thanks for providing evidence of exactly what Lorenzo said about the nature of the CNT's organization inefficiency.


Complete bullshit. The Communists had already been caught with their pants down in March 1937 when Rodriguez, the anarchist director of prisons, made public the discovery that the Communists, under cover of the Madrid Defense Junta, which they controlled, had a secret political prison where the nephew of a leader of the Socialist party and other Socialist party members were being held prisoner and tortured.

The SIM was created at the behest of the defense minister Prieto on August 9th 1937.


This led Largo Caballero to dissolve the Madrid Defense Junta. The Communists at that point had it in for Caballero. The Communists used their control of the police officer corps to mount a huge provocation, a coordinated assuault on the worker managed telephone system, managed by the CNT telephone workers union.

Conspiracy nonsense of which there is no evidence of.


The Communists then used this as a pretext to demand in the national cabinet that the POUM and CNT be banned. Caballero refused, but the petty bourgeois allies of the Communists backed them up: Basque Nationalists, right wing social democrats, bourgeois Republicans.

Everyone wanted Caballero gone, even the PSOE withdrew its own appointees from the cabinet, Caballero was incompetent, and the only real non-negotiable demand of the PCE was the removal of Caballero as head of the war ministry.


Caballero was thus removed from power and Negrin, who was a close supporter of the Communists was put in power

At the behest of Azana, nor was Negrin a “close supporter” of the communists, anymore than say, Prieto.


Negrin was quite willing to accept the Communists proposal for creating SIM, which the Communists controlled

Neither did the communists propose the creation of the SIM nor did they control it, nor was it crawling with Soviet agents. The personnel that were there served an advisory role.


Nonsensical bullshit.

The shit you write would fit this description, as it is basically just one stupid conspiracy after another. It is a fact Republican assets were frozen by Western banks. The decision was made by by the Giral cabinet on the advice of the Bank of Spain for very practical reasons. The Republic would have been dead much faster if they had followed your moronic advice.


hey, you're not quoting me but someone else.

No shit.


It is a misdescription to call it "the anti-collectivization" side, it was affluent landowning farmers who had been incited by the Communists to try to take their land back. And they weren't killed by "CNT forces" as you said, but by the police.

The quote does not say they were killed by police, it says the they relied on the new police force. The first sentence makes this clear, and in any case, whatever they were (Broué and the others I could find who discuss the incident are basically pro-anarchist, not disinterested academics), it doesn't change the fact the CNT would shoot those who opposed collectivization.

[Leo]

Originally posted by Dev
I can't be bothered to argue against it as you obviously think that it is important, and will spend pages arguing for it, and I think that it is a very strange idea that even within the little groups that we are today virtually nobody holds.

I presume it comes from (or if it has an earlier route was at least used by) the group around Cardan/Castoriadis. With them you can see it as part of a brave attempt to break with Trotskyism, and its analysis of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for them, and their analysis, the reality stepped back in in the 1970s, and disproved it. I think ideas like yours were thrown out along with the other nonsense such as the idea that the crisis has been overcome.

All this talk about a coordinator class reminds me of a part in John Reed's Ten Days Which Shook the World in which Reed quotes the conversation between two soldiers and a mob of business men, government officials and students which he had witnessed:

"Just at the door of the station stood two soldiers with rifles and bayonets fixed. They were surrounded by about a hundred business men, Government officials and students, who attacked them with passionate argument and epithet. The soldiers were uncomfortable and hurt, like children unjustly scolded.

A tall young man with a supercilious expression, dressed in the uniform of a student, was leading the attack.

“You realise, I presume,” he said insolently, “that by taking up arms against your brothers you are making your-selves the tools of murderers and traitors?”

“Now brother,”answered the soldier earnestly, “you don’t understand. There are two classes, don’t you see, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. We——”

“Oh, I know that silly talk!” broke in the student rudely. “A bunch of ignorant peasants like you hear somebody bawling a few catch-words. You don’t understand what they mean. You just echo them like a lot of parrots.” The crowd laughed. “I’m a Marxian student. And I tell you that this isn’t Socialism you are fighting for. It’s just plain pro-German anarchy!”

“Oh, yes, I know,” answered the soldier, with sweat dripping from his brow. “You are an educated man, that is easy to see, and I am only a simple man. But it seems to me——”

“I suppose,” interrupted the other contemptuously, “that you believe Lenin is a real friend of the proletariat?”

“Yes, I do,” answered the soldier, suffering.

“Well, my friend, do you know that Lenin was sent through Germany in a closed car? Do you know that Lenin took money from the Germans?”

“Well, I don’t know much about that,” answered the soldier stubbornly, “but it seems to me that what he says is what I want to hear, and all the simple men like me. Now there are two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat——”

“You are a fool! Why, my friend, I spent two years in Schlüsselburg for revolutionary activity, when you were still shooting down revolutionists and singing ‘God Save the Tsar!’ My name is Vasili Georgevitch Panyin. Didn’t you ever hear of me?”

“I’m sorry to say I never did,” answered the soldier with humility. “But then, I am not an educated man. You are probably a great hero.”

“I am,” said the student with conviction. “And I am opposed to the Bolsheviki, who are destroying our Russia, our free Revolution. Now how do you account for that?”

The soldier scratched his head. “I can’t account for it at all,” he said, grimacing with the pain of his intellectual processes. “To me it seems perfectly simple—but then, I’m not well educated. It seems like there are only two classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie——”

“There you go again with your silly formula!” cried the student.

“——only two classes,” went on the soldier, doggedly, “and whoever isn’t on one side is on the other…”"

[Random Precision]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15, 2007 03:52 am
The bit you quoted doesn't give a specific number, and other sources put the total number at 30 for the anti-collectivization side.
What might those be?


The quote does not say they were killed by police, it says the they relied on the new police force. The first sentence makes this clear, and in any case, whatever they were (Broué and the others I could find who discuss the incident are basically pro-anarchist, not disinterested academics), it doesn't change the fact the CNT would shoot those who opposed collectivization.

No, you can't assume that. All we can see from that episode is that the CNT fired on a group of people who threatened them with violence. Something that happened a lot in the period.

[Labor Shall Rule]

The Bolsheviks did gain a majority.

In June of the year that they seized power, the elections to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets produced 283 Socialist Revolutionary delegates, 248 Menshevik delegates and only 105 Bolshevik delegates. The next election, however, at the following Second All-Russian Congress showed that the Bolsheviks rose to 390, the Socialist Revolutionaries fell to 160 and the Mensheviks, to 72. Their periodical sold more than any other party newspaper in the entire country. Not only that, but over 50,000 trade unions, worker associations, and local councils passed resolutions demanding the transfer of power into the hands of the Soviets. At the Duma elections, they gained control over key urban centers, while the Mensheviks only gained 3.3% of the vote.

The CNT didn't even battle it out. They didn't set up a conventional army to capture Madrid, New Aragon, and Austrias. They didn't prevent their extermination through extroadinary acts. They should of seized power in Catalonia, which they did not. Stalin, and the Spanish Communist Party, could only go as far as the weakness of the anarchist leadership. Syndicat, you make it sound like they were condemened; like they were in a position of not being able to do anything to prevent the wholesale slaughter of fascist reprisals.

[syndicat]

illegit:
I never said anything about a “clique,” (though perhaps you think 500 people counts as “the workers themselves”) but thanks for providing evidence of exactly what Lorenzo said about the nature of the CNT's organization inefficiency.

For you command is "efficiency" apparently. But actually it isn't.

How can a mass organization of 350,000 make a sudden decision? It does so by consulting the rank and file elected delegates. There continued to be discussion at the rank and file level later, and in Sept 3, 1936, the national CNT, at the insistence of the delegation from Catalonia, adopted the program for getting rid of the Republican state.

Indalecio Prieto and Juan Negrin were the leading right-wing figures in the badly split socialist party, and both were close to the Communists. Negrin, however, was the prime minister put in power by the alliance of Communist/Republican/Basque Nationalist/social democrat leaders.

You're wrong when you say that the PSOE didn't back up Caballero in May 1937. The Left Socialists did back him up. Caballero wasn't very competent, tho, on that point i will agree. The fact he let the Communists organize circles around him and trusted them is a sign of this.

In regard to the SIM, there is a good description of a personal experience with it in Bill Herrick's memoir, "Jumping the line." Herrick was a member of the Communist Party from New York City serving in the Abraham Lincoln battalion. His party boss insisted that he go with him to a SIM prison. There Herrick personally witnessed the murder of several young revolutionaries. A girl shouted "Viva la revolucion" just before a SIM thug shot a bullet thru her brain. Eliminating the revolutionary competition of the Communists was one of the SIM's functions.

For the rest, you provide no evidence or cogent arguments, so i see nothing to respond to.

[syndicat]

reddali:
The CNT didn't even battle it out. They didn't set up a conventional army to capture Madrid, New Aragon, and Austrias.

That's New Castille and Asturias. The CNT did take power in Aragon. In New Castille and Asturias the majority of arms were in the hands of the organizations controlled by the socialists and communists, and the CNT was in a working alliance with these groups, as they represented the majority of the working class in those areas. There had been a long history of an alliance between the UGT and CNT in Asturias, including a twoweek revolutionary seizure of the region in Oct 1934 that was put down by the army with bloodshed. The CNT and UGT had set up a Council in Asturias in 1936. But you're saying that the CNT should have declared war on the UGT -- the majority union -- in Asturias. That makes no sense at all.

What was needed was to find a way to put pressure on them. Taking over in the regions where they were the majority was the way to do that.



They didn't prevent their extermination through extroadinary acts. They should of seized power in Catalonia, which they did not.

I've already agreed with that several times.


Stalin, and the Spanish Communist Party, could only go as far as the weakness of the anarchist leadership. Syndicat, you make it sound like they were condemened; like they were in a position of not being able to do anything to prevent the wholesale slaughter of fascist reprisals.

You're mischaracterizing what I've said. I've already criticized their failure to take over in Catalonia. I keep making this point in response to you and you continue to come back with this sort of comment, as if I'd said nothing.

[Intelligitimate]

How can a mass organization of 350,000 make a sudden decision?

By having an effective organization and/or a strong leadership, neither of which the CNT had.


Indalecio Prieto and Juan Negrin were the leading right-wing figures in the badly split socialist party, and both were close to the Communists. Negrin, however, was the prime minister put in power by the alliance of Communist/Republican/Basque Nationalist/social democrat leaders.

Basically everyone except the Caballeroists, CNT, and the POUM.


You're wrong when you say that the PSOE didn't back up Caballero in May 1937.

They withdrew their cabinet appointees when Caballero tried to form a new cabinet that excluded the PCE. Even the UGT leadership was split on backing him. The general secretary of the PSOE, Ramon Lamoneda, once remarked: “Caballero always claimed to have been “kicked out by the Communists”, which was in part true, since everyone kicked him out, from Azana to Martinez Barrio.”


In regard to the SIM, there is a good description of a personal experience with it in Bill Herrick's memoir, "Jumping the line."

It doesn't surprise me you would approvingly reference the work of an extreme anti-Communist, as essentially the anarchist/Trot line is virtually indistinguishable from the Right.

In any case, I see no reason to believe, assuming he isn't lying, what he saw didn't have something to do with SIM activities regarding deserters, draft-dodgers, or Fifth Columnists, which the SIM was in charge of. There were many cases of harsh treatment of these individuals, but the idea of the SIM as some kind of Sovietized cheka is baseless crap.

[syndicat]

me: "How can a mass organization of 350,000 make a sudden decision?

ill:


By having an effective organization and/or a strong leadership, neither of which the CNT had.

in other words, centralizing power into the hands of a few at the top is your idea of "effective organization" and "strong leadership." As Ella Baker said, "A strong people don't need strong leaders." When i asked the question above, I was asking how the members could make the decision, that is, how an organization based on rank and file democracy can work. This is apparently what you don't favor.

But it is only thru a mass movement controlled by the rank and file that that the proletarian class can liberate itself.

me:
"Indalecio Prieto and Juan Negrin were the leading right-wing figures in the badly split socialist party, and both were close to the Communists. Negrin, however, was the prime minister put in power by the alliance of Communist/Republican/Basque Nationalist/social democrat leaders."

int:

Basically everyone except the Caballeroists, CNT, and the POUM.

In other words, the only tendencies with a signficant working class base. The other political tendencies were dominated by the petty bourgeois and coordinator classes. that's who the Communists were organizing, only 40% of the PCE's membership came from the working class. and that's who the Communists were allied with. It fits in with their aim of creating a coordinatorist regime, such as in the Soviet Union. They didn't say that that was their aim but in reality that's what their politics were driving towards.


The general secretary of the PSOE, Ramon Lamoneda, once remarked: “Caballero always claimed to have been “kicked out by the Communists”, which was in part true, since everyone kicked him out, from Azana to Martinez Barrio.”

Azana and Barrio were leaders of the pro-capitalist Republican parties.


It doesn't surprise me you would approvingly reference the work of an extreme anti-Communist, as essentially the anarchist/Trot line is virtually indistinguishable from Right.

His book is a first-hand account. He was a committed member of the Communist Party. It was those SIM murders of revolutionaries that bothered him and led to his break with the CP. Then the CP got him fired from his staff job at the Fur Workers Union, and the Abraham Lincoln vets association denied him the veteran benefits to which he was entitled. So he had reason to be pissed off at the Communists. And my viewpoint on the Spanish revolution is quite distinguishable from the right since the right didn't support working class power in Spain, and on that point it is the CP that was in line with the right.

[Intelligitimate]

in other words, centralizing power into the hands of a few at the top is your idea of "effective organization" and "strong leadership." . . . When i asked the question above, I was asking how the members could make the decision, that is, how an organization based on rank and file democracy can work. This is apparently what you don't favor.

I sure as hell don't favor a decision making process that relies on prolonged debate on decisions that are of the utmost importance and immediacy, like a revolution, no. Again, Lorenzo's remarks are incredibly spot on here. Even if the CNT insisted on this process, they still didn't have any real effective communication channels to even let this type of decision making process be expedited, or they should have already agreed on the need to capture power previously and had some kind of blueprint ready to follow in the case of their capture of power. They didn't have the will, means, and ability to capture power as an organization, or they would have been easily able to do so.


In other words, the only tendencies with a signficant working class base. The other political tendencies were dominated by the petty bourgeois and coordinator classes. that's who the Communists were organizing, only 40% of the PCE's membership came from the working class. and that's who the Communists were allied with. It fits in with their aim of creating a coordinatorist regime, such as in the Soviet Union. They didn't say that that was their aim but in reality that's what their politics were driving towards.

The whole idea of a “coordinator class” is retarded nonsense. The PCE didn't have an “aim of creating a coordinatorist regime,” that is your deluded conspiratorial fantasy. The PCE's line was quite clear: get as many people on board as possible to defend the Republic against the fascists. The reason why so many army officers and such joined the PCE was because the PCE recognized early the necessity of a regular, disciplined army to defend the Republic, and didn't try to persecute these individuals who didn't join the fascist rebellion. To quote Helen Graham:

“[A] psychological divide placed tremendous pressure on the hundreds of professional army offices serving the Republican war effort. For them the rising had produced an enormous culture shock. They had been betrayed by the conspiratorial actions of their own comrades, which had ripped away their social and professional terms of reference. On top of this came the Republic's own post-coup purge of officers, which further increased their sense of alienation. At any time, problems caused by shortage and dislocation could be turned into accusations of treason and crypto-fascism. The feeling of being continually under suspicion and required to prove oneself daily (at the same time as risking one's life at the front) caused extremely high levels of stress and illness. Even for those whose Republican politically identity was clear, the world they knew had gone. The new one was either hostile or offered few known points of reference in terms of organisation or values. The sate was still in chaos, its sustaining political forces (republicans and socialists) either consumed or badly fragmented by the crisis. Yet there was one party – albeit still on the sidelines – with a clear line on military and rearguard organisation which spoke directly to their sense of order and discipline. It is in this very particular and desperate context that we have to understand the appeal of the Spanish Communist Party to regular army officers on the centre front – whether or not they actually joined the party. What the PCE offered them was an alternative family / a refuge of structure in culturally dysphoric, structureless and traumatic post-coup times, and a source of collective protection; and, not least, the party reaffirmed their patriotism and sense of civic value, both severally damaged by the rebellion . . . Antonio Cordon, who would become more closely identified with the PCE than many others, also shared these reasons for joining the PCE at the start of the war.”

A sort of clientelism also existed during the Spanish Civil War, where many people thought they needed to belong to some party, and this phenomenon affected more than just the PCE. Lumpen prole elements particularly flocked to the CNT for this reason.


Azana and Barrio were leaders of the pro-capitalist Republican parties.

And your point being? Even the other socialists didn't want him. Even the CNT basically didn't give a crap about backing him after him offered them only two portfolios in the PCE-excluded cabinet. Nobody wanted Cabarello! Prieto wasn't picked to replace him also because he had bad relations with the CNT.


His book is a first-hand account.

So what. It doesn't mean what he saw, as far as you have reported, is any indication of some bizarre conspiracy of the SIM to eliminate people the communists allegedly didn't like.


Then the CP got him fired from his staff job at the Fur Workers Union, and the Abraham Lincoln vets association denied him the veteran benefits to which he was entitled.

Which might be why he testified against them at the HUAC...


And my viewpoint on the Spanish revolution is quite distinguishable from the right since the right didn't support working class power in Spain, and on that point it is the CP that was in line with the right.

What you share with the fascist/right-wing version of history is a raw hatred of the Republic and a belief in communist conspiracies around every corner. As Grover Furr's review of Radosh makes clear, the narratives are so closely aligned they freely are cited in service of one another, as Radosh does. It is the same reason why right-wingers like Hitchens love Orwell and his Homage to Catalonia.

[manic expression]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15, 2007 01:27 am
the Congress of Soviets represented only a minority of the population, the workers and military personnel. 80% of the population were peasants. and even then the Bolsheviks did not have a majority at that congress. They gained a temporary majority when the right SRs and right Mensheviks walked out.

but from the fact that the Bolsheviks got approval to set up Sovnarkom at that congress, how does that show that a structure was created that would allow the actual workers to actually control the decisions that affect them? in reality workers did not have power.
Uh, yeah, representation is what counts. In case you weren't paying attention, Soviets were set up in rural areas as well as in the cities. However, the important fact here is that the revolution began IN THE CITIES, so obviously the Soviets would be primarily operating IN THE CITIES. It doesn't take a genius to figure this out.

The SR's and Mensheviks started abandoning the Soviets due to their own faults. The Bolsheviks put power into the hands of the working class, the Right SR's and Mensheviks turned their backs on that very demographic. And yet here you are, criticizing the former.

The Sovnarkom was elected BY the Congress of the Soviets. Your delusional bias is becoming more and more apparent.


The state did not, at that point, "control the means of production". Lenin's idea was to continue private ownership of industry with the workers acting as a control on them. he was forced to change course in July 1918 due to the civil war, and only then was the economy nationalized, from above, not by the workers.

As I said before, if you want to quote Lenin, go ahead and quote Lenin, don't make petty presumptions and expect me to play by them. By the way, Lenin was in favor of abolishing private property in a decisive and effecient manner, unlike the weak-minded anarchists.


moreover, "workers control" was not continued under state ownership. the power of the factory committees -- the organs of "control" -- was emasculated. first in jan 1918 the factory committees were subordinated to the union bureaucracy. and then at the party congress in March 1920 one-man management was approved, which Lenin and Trotsky had advocated since 1918, and any control by the factory committees was gone by end of 1920.

Worker control was excercised through the worker state, the Soviet system. Workers did directly control the state through the Soviets, and because the workers realized that a new management style was needed for the civil war, they instituted it. They, unlike the anarchists, responded to material conditions appropriately.


one-man management was appointment of managers from above by the party-state. what you see here is the consolidation of a new coordinator ruling class.

Ah, yes, the phantom "coordinator class". Why don't you just admit that your analysis is comically unscientific?


what you provide here is basically a lot of babble. The CNT and UGT expropriated 14 million acres of farm land and 18,000 enterprises. the workers had taken management of most of the country's industry.

As I said, these measures were proven to be beyond paper-thin and even counterproductive. The anarchists failed to take power, and in so doing paved the roads of the capitalists.


the Communists were trying to work towards state ownership and control. and once they gained the dominant position after May 1937 that is what they did, using the state to seize control of industries. the Communists had focused on organizing the middle strata -- shop keepers, landowners, lawyers, managers, etc. And this was to be the new managing class in the state-owned system they were moving towards.

The communists were trying to create lasting worker control, which means taking power and using it in the interests of the working classes. The anarchists did not do this, owing largely to their inadequate analysis of society, and actually made no significant moves against capitalist modes of production. Face it: the anarchist experience in Spain was an unmitigated failure. The communists were trying to mop up the mess the anarchists created.


i would agree that the CNT did not maximize its leverage to force the left socialists in the UGT to set up a joint UGT-CNT workers government, which would have prevented the Communists from gaining the upper hand.

Understate much?


the reason Spain became totally dependent on the Soviet Union for arms was because the Communists were able to weasel their way into major influence over the rightwing socialists and got them to do their bidding, including sending the country's gold reserves to Russia, and blocked the gold being used to build up a war industry in Catalonia, which was the only part of Spain with significant industrial capacity (70% of precivil war manufacturing capacity). the Communists were opposed to giving resources to develop a war industry in Catalonia because it would have been controlled by the CNT, where the arms industry initially built up there was set up and run by the CNT unions.

The reason Spain was dependent on the Soviet Union was because the Soviet Union was its only real ally. Is sending soldiers and munitions to Spain, at great sacrifice, "weaseling"? That is just insulting. Also, the communists were the only ones adequately disciplined and trained to USE many of the weapons in Spain (anarchist militias routinely scrapped valuable artillery pieces because they didn't know how to use them).

[syndicat]

manic:
Uh, yeah, representation is what counts. In case you weren't paying attention, Soviets were set up in rural areas as well as in the cities. However, the important fact here is that the revolution began IN THE CITIES, so obviously the Soviets would be primarily operating IN THE CITIES. It doesn't take a genius to figure this out.

There was a separate peasants congress.


The SR's and Mensheviks started abandoning the Soviets due to their own faults. The Bolsheviks put power into the hands of the working class, the Right SR's and Mensheviks turned their backs on that very demographic. And yet here you are, criticizing the former.

if the Mensheviks and SRs "abandoned" the soviets, how did they win the elections in 19 cities in European Russia in the spring of 1918 (the first local soviet elections after Oct 1917). The Bolsheviks did not change the structure of the local soviets. If anything they became even more centralized under the Bolsheviks, with the creation of a 7-member Presidium for the Moscow soviet for example.


The Sovnarkom was elected BY the Congress of the Soviets. Your delusional bias is becoming more and more apparent.

Congress approved the Bolshevik proposal for Sovnarkom. At that point the Bolsheviks had a majority and the Sovnarkom that was created was all Bolsheviks and it was who the Bolsheviks said should be a part of it. Later, after the Left SRs gained a majority in the peasant congress in Nov 1917, the Bolsheviks were forced to go along with a coalition government with the Left SRs, for awhile.

By the way, Lenin was in favor of abolishing private property in a decisive and effecient manner, unlike the weak-minded anarchists.

Meaningless rhetoric. in Jan 1918 the soviet of Kronstadt voted to expropriate all private land, houses and businesses in Kronstadt and on Kotlin Island. The Bolsheviks voted with the Mensheviks against this because at that point in time Bolshevik policy was not to expropriate the private capitalists. Of course Lenin was for the state taking over ownership of property from the capitalists eventually.

in the first Russian trade union congress in Jan 1918 the syndicalists and maximalists pushed for worker expropriation and self-management, and for grassroots congresses of workers to develop regional and national planning. The Bolsheviks voted with the Mensheviks and SRs against this, and for subordination of the factory organizations of the workers to the trade union bureaucracy.

The communists were trying to create lasting worker control, which means taking power and using it in the interests of the working classes. The anarchists did not do this, owing largely to their inadequate analysis of society, and actually made no significant moves against capitalist modes of production. Face it: the anarchist experience in Spain was an unmitigated failure. The communists were trying to mop up the mess the anarchists created.

empty rhetoric that is falisified by the facts. The CNT, often with the UGT's support, created actual organizations of workers management of production in industry and on the land. The Communists worked consistently against this, defending the prerogatives of the middle strata, and worked towards state managemen of the economy. Eliminating capitalist ownership of the means of production and setting up workers management of production is obviously making "significant moves against capitalist modes of production."

The reason Spain was dependent on the Soviet Union was because the Soviet Union was its only real ally. Is sending soldiers and munitions to Spain, at great sacrifice, "weaseling"?

an "ally" that treated its arms deals as a way to chisel the Spanish Republic out of funds, like any capitalist charlatan. What was the Soviet Union's "sacrifice"? In fact, as Gerald Howson shows in "Arms for Spain," the Soviet Union sent a lot of junk because it was interested in moderizing its army and the Spanish gold reserves served this purpose nicely.

[syndicat]

int:
The whole idea of a “coordinator class” is retarded nonsense. The PCE didn't have an “aim of creating a coordinatorist regime,” that is your deluded conspiratorial fantasy.

You don't really have anything coherent to add here. Your typical response seems to be to describe any criticism of the Communists as a "conspiracy theory." But actually i don't have to suppose a conspiracy to explain why shopkeepers, managers, lawyers, landowners flocked to the Communist party. It was a tougher defender of their class interests than the Republicans, which were just loose electoral machines.

Given the expropriation of the capitalists -- which even the CPE pointed out had already happened -- it was a question of whether the working class or a new class, not based on private wealth accumulation, but control over a hierarchical managerial apparatus, would end up in control. That was the fundamental conflict between the Communists and the anarcho-syndicalists (and their respective allies).

The Communists pursued a strategy known as "permeationism." This strategy had first been advocated back around 1900 by the Fabians. The idea is that you organize the people in the bureaucracies, in the positions of power and influence in hierarchical organizations. This fit in with the two-stage concept of a socialist revolution which the Communist International had articulated when the revolution began. This strategy makes sense if your aim is power for your party.

The PCE thus beat the drum from the very beginning for construction of a conventional top down army and police, and to gain the backing of the middle classes, they did this under the rubric of "defending the democratic republic." They in fact were quite successful in gaining control of officer positions. They used their influence over the Socialists to gain control of the new academy for training officers, and over the new system of political commissars in the new army.

Unless you think that any political party working out a strategy and then working to implement it is a "conspiracy", it makes no sense to call this a "conspiracy theory." Everything then becomes a "conspiracy" and your "theory" becomes useless.

Either the Communists were organized and had a plan and strategy and worked assiduously to that plan, or not. You seem to think that they did have such a plan and were successful at working at it. Does that make you an advocate of a "conspiracy theory"? Apparently so by your logic.

The Communist party also used constant pressure on officers in the new army to join the party. When Casado refused to join, for example, they denied him knowlege of the whereabouts of his supporting artillery when he was put in charge of an infantry unit. According to a Left Socialist member of the JSU named Gomez, quoted in "Blood of Spain," the Communists "acted with the wildest sectarianism" within the army.

The system that existed in the USSR was one where the capitalists had been expropriated and a new class had become dominant. This class monopolized the positions in a hierarchy, as managers and engineers, political leaders, and ordinary workers were entirely subordinate to them. This class is the coordinator class.

And the aims of the Communists in the Spanish revolution were a "socialist revolution" that would generate this same type of nationalized, hierarchical mode of production, in which the hierarchy of managers and political apparatchiks would be the dominating, exploiting class.

This is why it made sense for the Communists to recruit within the middle strata of Spanish society because their class interests would lead them to favor that type of solution in a revolutionary situation where the means of production had already been expropriated from the capitalists. Thus the trajectory of the Communists towards coordinatorism requires no "conspiracy theory" but an understanding of class interests.

all your blabber about how criticizing Stalinists somehow puts me on the side of the right assumes there are only two sides. but that is what i deny. there are three sides.

[Intelligitimate]

You don't really have anything coherent to add here. Your typical response seems to be to describe any criticism of the Communists as a "conspiracy theory."

Because that's what you advocate. That the PCE/Comintern/Stalin had a conspiracy to take over the Republic. You can't actually show any evidence of this, so you resort to meaningless bullshit “coordinator class” ideas instead of actual evidence.


Given the expropriation of the capitalists -- which even the CPE pointed out had already happened -- it was a question of whether the working class or a new class, not based on private wealth accumulation, but control over a hierarchical managerial apparatus, would end up in control. That was the fundamental conflict between the Communists and the anarcho-syndicalists (and their respective allies).

This is your fantasy and not based in any way whatsoever on any evidence. It's even bizarre by anarchist/Trot standards.


The Communists pursued a strategy known as "permeationism."

No they didn't. This is just bullshit from Hal Draper's little pamphlet Two Souls of Socialism. The communists never advocated any such policy or pursued one. This is just more anti-communist nonsense, this time coming from Shachtmanism, the same tradition that supported US imperialism against Vietnam because of their hatred of the USSR.


Unless you think that any political party working out a strategy and then working to implement it is a "conspiracy"

It is when there is no evidence at all of that 'strategy' actually exists, yet you continue to interpret everything that happened in light of this non-existent 'strategy'.


Either the Communists were organized and had a plan and strategy and worked assiduously to that plan, or not.

They most certainly did have one, one which they continually articulated their reasons for openly, which has nothing to do with the bullshit you spew in this thread


Unless you think that any political party working out a strategy and then working to implement it is a "conspiracy", it makes no sense to call this a "conspiracy theory." Everything then becomes a "conspiracy" and your "theory" becomes useless . . . You seem to think that they did have such a plan and were successful at working at it. Does that make you an advocate of a "conspiracy theory"? Apparently so by your logic.

When you attribute words and ideas to someone that they never in fact said, it's called a strawman. It's also a subtle form of lying, because it is quite clear I never said any such bizarre shit.


The system that existed in the USSR was one where the capitalists had been expropriated and a new class had become dominant. This class monopolized the positions in a hierarchy, as managers and engineers, political leaders, and ordinary workers were entirely subordinate to them. This class is the coordinator class.

And this idea is bullshit.


And the aims of the Communists in the Spanish revolution were a "socialist revolution" that would generate this same type of nationalized, hierarchical mode of production, in which the hierarchy of managers and political apparatchiks would be the dominating, exploiting class.

Except it wasn't, cause this is just your particular brand of anarcho-idiocy.


Thus the trajectory of the Communists towards coordinatorism requires no "conspiracy theory" but an understanding of class interests.

Of which you have no understanding, as your acceptance of the idiotic idea of a “coordinator class” more than shows.

[syndicat]

Well, good to see you have no coherent reply to my actual arguments and hypotheses.

The idea that what the Communists "openly advocated for" -- "a democratic republic with profound social content" -- is what their full aim was is not plausible. If you read the report of the meeting of the Communist International held in July 1936, reprinted in "Spain Betrayed", Dimitrov says quite clearly that "at this stage" they cannot openly advocate for a socialist revolution. This obviously implies a second stage.

As various people interviewed in "Blood of Spain" point out, lots of activists assumed that the CPE's slogan, which made no sense on its face, was just designed to recruit the middle strata, by portraying themselves as the toughest defender of their class interests.

There are also letters from Soviet agents in Spain to the mother ship in that volume -- which is made up of translations from the Soviet archives -- that talk about the various impediments to the Communists gaining state power -- this assumes that this is their aim. Do you deny that their aim was for the party to gain control of the state?

As the Communist control in the UGT expanded after May 1937, and the CNT's dependency on state credits for its socialized industries weakened its ability to resist, in 1938 the UGT pushed for the CNT to accept a plan of complete nationalization of all industry. Now here we see more of the movement towards a state-administered mode of production. A hierarchical state managed economy is the form for the coordinator class domination of the political economy.

As I pointed out before, the Communist orientation to the middle strata -- an orientation emphasized by numerous people of various political tendencies interviewed in "Blood of Spain" -- fits perfectly with this hypothesis.

Meanwhile, all you can do is rant and rave.

[Intelligitimate]

It is interesting that syndicat again proves exactly what I said that he just previously denied. syndicat here cites Radosh openly in favor of his “coordinator class” nonsense in an attempt to prove a Soviet conspiracy to control the Republic. It is exactly as I said before: the anarcho/Trot line is so close to the Fascist/Right-wing line, that they cite each other in their service.

Grover Furr in his review of this fraudulent piece of scholarship destroys this nonsense. Here are his statements about that particular document in question:


Originally posted by Furr
Document 5
16. Document 5, a report by Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, to the Secretariat of the ECCI (Executive Committee, Communist International) of July 23, 1936, contains the following lines:
We should not, at the present stage, assign the task of creating soviets and try to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in Spain. That would be a fatal mistake.
Radosh claims that this statement (a statement repeated in the press release)
. . . supports the contention of some scholars that the Communists purposely disguised their true objective, social revolution. (5-6)
But it does not. It clearly states that there are "stages," the present one being the stage of "maintaining unity with the petty bourgeoisie and the peasants and the radical intelligentsia . . ." (11). Radosh's claim could only be true if he gave evidence that the Communists were denying what everyone would have expected of them -- to wish to move to another "stage," once the fascists were defeated. Radosh gives no evidence that the Communists were making any such claims to have abandoned the ultimate goal of a Soviet-style revolution in Spain. So there can be no question of "disguising their true objective."
17. It ought also to be noted that Radosh also wants it "both ways." Sometimes he criticizes the Communists for opposing social revolution, which the Anarchists supposedly stood for. This is Ken Loach's main contention in Land and Freedom. But other times, as here, Radosh criticizes the Communists for wanting social revolution but supposedly "disguising" their intentions.
18. Document 5 also offers an obvious mistranslation from the Russian. Immediately after the lines quoted above, Radosh et al. allege that Dimitrov wrote the following:
Therefore we must say: act in the guise of defending the Republic. . . . (p.11; emphasis added)
In his commentary Radosh states:
The very careful use of these terms, as well as the injunction to "act under the semblance of defending the republic," supports the contention of some scholars that the Communists purposely disguised their true objective, social revolution. (pp. 5-6; emphasis added)
19. Evidently Radosh is referring to a different translation of the document than that which finally ended up in the volume, although arguably "in the guise of" and "under the semblance of" convey much the same thing: duplicity, dishonesty. However, there is an interesting footnote in the text of Document 5 attached to the phrase "in the guise." That note, number 11 on page 515, reads thus: "Literally, 'under the banner.'" In other words, what Dimitrov actually said is this:
Therefore we must say: act under the banner of defense of the Republic. . . .
20. The question is: What does "under the banner" -- in Russian, "pod znamenem" -- mean in Russian? The answer is: it means the opposite of what Radosh says it means. Rather than "under the semblance" or "in the guise," it means "in service to" or "in defense of." At exactly this time, one of the foremost Soviet philosophical journals was titled "Pod Znamenem Marksisma": literally, "Under the Banner of Marxism," often translated as "In Defense of Marxism." No one would even think of translating that title as "In the Guise of," or "Under the Semblance of," Marxism! "Under the banner of" is a military metaphor, meaning "In the ranks of."
21. In other words, what Dimitrov actually said was:
. . . act in defense of the Republic. . . .
There must be an interesting story behind that footnote. Whoever translated Document 5 -- Radosh tells us (p. xxxi) that there were two translators for the Russian documents -- that person evidently knew that "in the guise" was not the correct translation, and wanted to tell the world, even if by a footnote, that he or she was not responsible for this particular mistranslation.
22. This is the only mistranslation from the Russian that can be discerned in this collection, because Radosh et al. don't give us the documents in the original languages (mostly Russian, but a few in Spanish, German and French). This would have been easy to do -- on a book-related web page, for example. But the way this mistranslation is treated makes one wonder whether there may be more.



There are also letters from Soviet agents in Spain to the mother ship in that volume -- which is made up of translations from the Soviet archives -- that talk about the various impediments to the Communists gaining state power -- this assumes that this is their aim. Do you deny that their aim was for the party to gain control of the state?

Indeed I do, because it was quite clearly never their aim. Their aim was exactly what they said it was, getting as many people behind the war effort as possible. Radosh is an incompetent liar, and his commentary rarely even has anything to do with the contents of the documents he is commenting on.


As the Communist control in the UGT expanded after May 1937, and the CNT's dependency on state credits for its socialized industries weakened its ability to resist, in 1938 the UGT pushed for the CNT to accept a plan of complete nationalization of all industry. Now here we see more of the movement towards a state-administered mode of production. A hierarchical state managed economy is the form for the coordinator class domination of the political economy.

The strange thing about talking to anarchists/Trots about Spain is that it is if they don't even acknowledge a war was going on, a war the Republic was losing no less. Of course they wanted to nationalize all industry in a effort to survive. Hell, the state management of the economy during war is a completely standard thing.


As I pointed out before, the Communist orientation to the middle strata -- an orientation emphasized by numerous people of various political tendencies interviewed in "Blood of Spain" -- fits perfectly with this hypothesis.

Your hypothesis is non-sense. There is no “coordinator class.” It is a stupid idea that makes complete and utter nonsense of Marxian class analysis.

[syndicat]

int:
It is interesting that syndicat again proves exactly what I said that he just previously denied. syndicat here cites Radosh openly in favor of his “coordinator class” nonsense

now you're lying. I didn't cite Radosh. I cited translations in a volume that he was an editor of. The translations are of documents from the Soviet archives. I don't agree with Radosh's cold war social-democrat viewpoint and that is why I didn't cite him. And i read the review you cited. His objections were overwhelmingly directed at Radosh, which is irrelevant since I've not relied on Radosh. Other than that he had only a few quibbles about translation of a word here or there.

The workers militia defeated the army and gained territory against the army in 1936. after the formation of the "disciplined, hierarchical" army, which the Communists had touted and which they had a big hand in developing and controlling, the Republic only went from one defeat to another. They could never gain any territory. And the Ebro campaign that the Communists pushed only smashed the Republican army, making continued resistance impossible. It was the workers taking over and managing industries that created the first war industry and greatly increased productivity.

The counter-revolutionary moves towards disempowering the working class, and the Communists' sectarian policy and practice in regard to the army, were two of the main things that sowed demoralization and undermined the antifascist side.

[Intelligitimate]

now you're lying. I didn't cite Radosh. I cited translations in a volume that he was an editor of. The translations are of documents from the Soviet archives. I don't agree with Radosh's cold war social-democrat viewpoint and that is why I didn't cite him.

You're the liar if you are trying to pretend your view differs from Radosh. He cites these same documents dishonestly and incompetently, just as you do, to try and prove the communists wanted to control the Republic.


The workers militia defeated the army and gained territory against the army in 1936.

Again, with the help of 6,500 security forces that helped arm them, against 2,000 rebels in the most proletarian area of Spain, their victory wasn't a hard one.


after the formation of the "disciplined, hierarchical" army, which the Communists had touted and which they had a big hand in developing and controlling, the Republic only went from one defeat to another.

LOL. This is absolutely retarded. You think a bunch of anarchist organized militias would have stood a better chance against Franco's army? You're the delusional to the point of insanity if you actually are suggesting something like that. The PLP article on Spain does a particularly good job of exposing what a sham this idea is:


Originally posted by PLP
The Trotskyite POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) was formed in October, 1935 by the fusion of two sects led by renegades from the PCE. Their activities were largely confined to Catalonia. Until their suppression in May, 1937, the POUM acted as an adjunct to the Anarchist Federation of Iberia (FAI) and the labor federation (CNT) which the FAI led. Vitriolic in their attacks on "Stalinists,"(47) the POUM merely offered friendly advice to the Anarchists, who held "similar ideas concerning hopes and perspectives on the revolution."(48)
After the Fascist rising, the FAI-CNT was the strongest political force in Catalonia, dominating the Anti-Fascist Militias committee. This Committee held the real power in Barcelona for the first year of the war, although the Generalitat continued to have some influence in the countryside.(49)
Under Anarchist leadership, workers' committees took over the factories in Barcelona and established agricultural collectives in rural areas, in some cases by force.(50) A number of foreign-owned plants were not confiscated; 87 British enterprises were protected by agreement with the British Consulate.(51)
Sources sympathetic to the Anarchists claim that their industrial experiments were successful, particularly in the arms industries,(52) and were sabotaged by the lack of credit from the central government. Conflicts with the central government did exist, but a more accurate explanation of the causes of industrial failures in Catalonia is given by Abad de Santillan, Anarchist member of the Militias Committee:
"We have not organized the economic apparatus which we had planned. We have been satisfied with throwing out the proprietors from the factories and putting ourselves in them, as committees of control. There has been no attempt at connections, there has been no coordination of the economy in due form. We have worked without plans and without real knowledge of what we were doing."(53)
Abad de Santillan thought that this situation was improving at the end of 1936, but noted that 15,000-20,000 workers were still collecting wages without working.(54) The fact is that the individualistic and muddle-headed FAIists were incapable of giving the leadership that would have enabled the working class to organize industry effectively.
After the defeat of the Fascist rising in Barcelona, Anarchists and POUMists organized militias which "fought" on the Aragon front. Their military accomplishments were truly amazing: they made a demonstration in the direction of Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon, and settled in to trade occasional shots with the Fascists. New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews was told by a POUM militiaman from the "Lenin" Division at Huesca that
"We used to play football with the Fascists down there on the plain. They were good fellows. They invited us to spend the weekend in Saragossa and Jaca, and promised they'd let us come back."(55)
Huesca had been virtually surrounded by the inactive Catalan militias for 11 months when a major attempt was made to capture the city by newly-organized People's Army forces.(56) The lull had been put to better use than football games by the Fascists, who had built substantial fortifications. The attack failed.(57)
Internationals relieving Anarchist troops on the Ebro Riber a year after the beginning of the war found no fortifications, and positions a full two kilometers from Fascist lines.(58) Exactly two casualties had been admitted to the nearby military hospital in the previous three months.(59) Anarchist militias had elevated chaos into a political principle. A leaflet distributed in Aragon stated that:
"We do not recognize military formations because this is the negation of Anarchism. Winning the war does not mean winning the revolution. Technology and strategy are important in the present war, not discipline which presupposes a negation of the personality."(60)
If in nothing else, Durruti was certainly right when he lamented that "War is made by soldiers, not by Anarchists."(61)
The Internationals also found a peasant population embittered against Republican forces by the Anarchist seizures. The commissar of the Lincoln Brigade found one farmer incredulous that he was offered money for food instead of worthless script.(62) The sullen attitudes of the Aragon farmers contrasted markedly with the enthusiastic support that had met the People's Army forces outside Anarchist-controlled areas.(63)
On the Fascist side, the Aragon front was very weakly held: a Franco historian says that the Fascists were able to remove forces from that front to attack Madrid.(64) POUMists and their defenders have excused their criminal footdragging by the lack of arms for POUM and FAI-CNT forces, claiming that communists withheld Soviet material from Aragon.(65) Orwell, for example, explains their failure to attack, despite the desires of the rank-and-file militiamen, by the lack of artillery and maps, the difficult terrain, and the fact that there was only one machine gun for every fifty men.(66) With the same material difficulties--including one machine gun per fifty men--the communist-led 35th Division forced the Ebro River in July, 1938, advanced 25 kilometers, captured 4 towns and 2500 prisoners.(67) The POUM leaders' attitude is amply summed up by a remark Orwell quotes from his POUM commander Georges Kopp: "This is not war, it is comic opera with an occasional death."(68) As we have seen, things weren't so comic on the Madrid front.
Still, it must be said that the material shortages on the Aragon front do have a sinister explanation--but not the one the red-baiters offer. After the war, FAIist Abad de Santillan obliged us with a frank confession:
"If all the leaders of the Libertarian (anarchist) organizations had ever seriously resolved to send all their armament, their war material and their best men to the front--the war would easily have been over in a few months…We can no longer conceal the fact that while, at the front itself, we had by 30,000 rifles (and perhaps as many as 24 batteries, 200 heavy guns), in the rear, in the power of the organizations, we had an additional 60,000 rifles with more ammunition than was ever in the proximity of the enemy."(69)
The intended purpose of these arms the anarchists kept from the front was combat with the other parties after the victory over Franco,(70) although the occasion never arose.
In fact, the opportunity for the supreme act of treachery did not come to the POUM or the Catalan Anarchists, but to Corp Commander Cipriano Mera, the highest ranking Anarchist officer in Spain. Mera's contribution to Fascism came in 1939, when General Casado ran a coup against the Republican government to prevent further resistance to the Fascists. Communist commanders led their troops against Casado to put down the coup, but Mera brought his troops to Casado's support and the PCE troops were defeated.(71)

[syndicat]

You're the liar if you are trying to pretend your view differs from Radosh. He cites these same documents dishonestly and incompetently, just as you do, to try and prove the communists wanted to control the Republic.

You've already conceded that the Communists aimed to take state power and carry forward, eventually, their conception of a socialist revolution. that would mean "controlling the Republic", obviously. you can't have it both ways.

me: "The workers militia defeated the army and gained territory against the army in 1936."



Again, with the help of 6,500 security forces that helped arm them, against 2,000 rebels in the most proletarian area of Spain, their victory wasn't a hard one.

Now you're confused. There were 600 members of the Assault Guard in Barcelona who...against the orders of the top officers and politicians...came to the defense of the worker defense gruops. Antony Beevor makes the point that NOWHERE in Spain did the police or army forces, ON THEIR OWN INITIATIVE, act against the fascist military coup. They only went into action on the anti-fascist side, where they did, AFTER the armed worker groups of the CNT and UGT, and masses of ordinary people, took the initiative.

The chief of police ordered the police to secure the main army arms depot at Sant Andreu, with 30,000 rifles, against the anarchists. But they were unable to do so. The CNT expropriated the arms, and took over all the army bases in Barcelona.

The POUM, Esquerra, and PSUC were only able to gain military bases to use to build their own militia groups because the CNT gave them bases. A generous gesture but a big mistake in my opinion. Having separate party and union militias only caused lack of coordination...the main weakness of the militia. This is why the CNT at the end of August started pushing for a single unified people's militia with unified command.

As I've pointed out, the army in Barcelona had 12,000 soldiers, and none went over to the people til they were put under siege, and then only a handful. A new army -- a militia -- had to be built from scratch for Catalonia to mount a military offensive against the army.

By early 1937 two-thirds of the troops on the Aragon front were in several CNT militia divisions, while the PSUC's column had only 2,000 and the POUM only 2,000. Where were these official "security forces" you blab about? They're a figment of your imagination.

New army and police forces had to be created entirely from scratch, beginning with the new national police created at the end of September.

[Intelligitimate]

You've already conceded that the Communists aimed to take state power and carry forward, eventually, their conception of a socialist revolution. that would mean "controlling the Republic", obviously. you can't have it both ways.

No, what you mean is a conspiracy to control everything the Republic was doing during the war, which is why you try explain the May Days crisis as a Soviet plot to get rid of Caballero. Now you're purposefully conflating starting a socialist revolution after the war with trying to control the Republic, which is just more of your bullshit.


Now you're confused. There were 600 members of the Assault Guard in Barcelona who...against the orders of the top officers and politicians...came to the defense of the worker defense gruops. Antony Beevor . . .

syndicat again cites extreme right-wing anti-communists in his service. Again, it can't be stressed enough that the anarchist/Trot line is nearly indistinguishable from the fascist/Right, so they cite each other in their service. Their common band is an extreme hatred of the Republic and extreme anti-communism.

In any case, cite whatever sources Beevor uses to substantiate this, or I don't give a crap what you say. When it comes to people like Beevor and Radosh, they can't be trusted at all, and their sources have to be continually checked.

My source on the numbers is Helen Graham's The Spanish Republic at War: 1936-19, and the footnote on page 94 reads thus:

“In Barcelona the (loyal) military commander of the Catalan region (General Llano de la Encomienda) did not have the military forces to defeat the rebels. The fact that he could count on the police was absolutely crucial: Barcelona had 3,000 Civil Guards, 3,200 Assault Guards and 300 Mozos de Escuarda, a total of 6,500 men against 2,000 military rebels. For the police role in Barcelona, see Esocfet, Al servei de Catalunya i la Republica and V. Guarner, L'aixecament militar i la guerra civil a Catalunya (Barcelona, 1980) – Escofet was councillor for public order in the Catalan government and Guarner his jefe de servicios.”

[Devrim]

Originally posted by [email protected] 16, 2007 01:29 pm

You've already conceded that the Communists aimed to take state power and carry forward, eventually, their conception of a socialist revolution. that would mean "controlling the Republic", obviously. you can't have it both ways.

No, what you mean is a conspiracy to control everything the Republic was doing during the war, which is why you try explain the May Days crisis as a Soviet plot to get rid of Caballero. Now you're purposefully conflating starting a socialist revolution after the war with trying to control the Republic, which is just more of your bullshit.


I think the real point here is that you are both wrong. The PCE had no intention of starting a revolution either during, or after the war.

Devrim

[syndicat]

devrim:
I think the real point here is that you are both wrong. The PCE had no intention of starting a revolution either during, or after the war.

a revolution was in process. the fight between the anarchosyndicalist movement and the Communists was over what sort of revolution it was to be, that is, who was going to end up in power when the dust settled. the Communists' strategy was to gain control over the army and police and use these as a means to state power. their aim was to nationalize the economy. the capitalists were in fact expropriated during the revolution. a revolution is a change from one kind of mode of production to another, and the question was whether it was to be a worker-managed political economy, or one in which a new coordinator ruling class was consolidated. either way it would be a revolution.

a hierarchical state and state management are necessary pieces for building a coordinatorist mode of production, as is the Communists' organizing of the middle strata who would provide the needed cadre to run such a system. from the fact that the Communists didn't expect to consolidate their coordinatorist revolution til after the end of the war it doesn't follow they weren't in fact using the war to build their power within the state to be in a position to consolidate party power after the war ended, when they could go on to the next "stage" in the revolution as they conceived it.

in reply to the qoute from Helen Graham about numbers of "loyal police forces", these forces may have existed but there is no evidence the Civil Guard played any role in defeating the army. and if she can count the numbers of the police simply by how many were employed in those services without looking at what actual role they played, then we can also count the army forces in the same way, and in fact the First Army Corps, stationed in Barcelona, had 12,000 men.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by syndicat+September 16, 2007 03:23 pm--> (syndicat @ September 16, 2007 03:23 pm) Communists didn't expect to consolidate their coordinatorist revolution til after the end of the war it doesn't follow they weren't in fact using the war to build their power within the state to be in a position to consolidate party power after the war ended, when they could go on to the next "stage" in the revolution as they conceived it.
[/b]
Which war, the Spanish one, or the coming war in Europe?

There was no way that Stalin wanted to frighten his potential allies in the West. To put it quite simply the PCE had no plans for making a revolution in the immediate, or foreseeable future.


Originally posted by [email protected]
a revolution was in process. the fight between the anarchosyndicalist movement and the Communists was over what sort of revolution it was to be, that is, who was going to end up in power when the dust settled.

I think it is more than debatable whether a revolution was in progress at all, but even if you accept that there was, the PCE were not trying to make any sort of revolution. They were if anything trying to stop it dead in its tracks.


syndicat
the Communists' strategy was to gain control over the army and police and use these as a means to state power. their aim was to nationalize the economy. the capitalists were in fact expropriated during the revolution. a revolution is a change from one kind of mode of production to another, and the question was whether it was to be a worker-managed political economy, or one in which a new coordinator ruling class was consolidated. either way it would be a revolution.

You seem quite confused as to what a revolution is here. First you say 'a revolution is a change from one kind of mode of production to another', then you seem to suggest that it is purely about who manages the economy.

The aim of the PCE was to defend the bourgeois state, not to make a revolution. Sure there would have some been state capitalist policies, but it was the thirties. There were State capitalist tendencies in all states, Stalin's USSR, Hitler's Germany, and the New Deal in the US.

In no way did the PCE even want a revolution.

Devrim

[syndicat]

a change in who controls the means of production, in the class structure, is a revolution. a change from the capitalist class to the coordinator class at the top of society is a change in the mode of production, just as a change from the feudal land controlling class to the capitalist class was a revolution, a change in the mode of production.

the big capitalists, landowners and industrialists, were expropriated in Spain by the working class. that means there was a revolution in process. had Franco been defeated, there were only two classes that could have ended up in control, either the working class or a coordinator class. the Communists were pushing throughout the war for a nationalized economy. the Communist International at the outset conceived of the revolution in terms of "stages." The PCE did in fact maintain that a revolution was underway in Spain. They had to since this was obvious to the mass of the people.

I don't buy your "state capitalism" concept. It's obfuscatory. there's a distinction between the role of the state within a capitalist political economy and its role in a coordinatorist mode of production.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by syndicat+September 16, 2007 08:57 pm--> (syndicat @ September 16, 2007 08:57 pm) I don't buy your "state capitalism" concept. It's obfuscatory. there's a distinction between the role of the state within a capitalist political economy and its role in a coordinatorist mode of production.

[/b]
That's ok. I don't buy your 'coordinatorist mode of production' concept either. I don't see how it is in anyway 'obsfuscatory'. I think it is very clear.


syndicat
The PCE did in fact maintain that a revolution was underway in Spain. They had to since this was obvious to the mass of the people.

Yes, they could hardly have said otherwise. That doesn't mean that it was true though. The Labour Party says it is socialist.

Devrim

[syndicat]

in Spain, unlike in the UK, the capitalists were expropriated. the state socialists were moving to nationalize the economy. this was enshrined in the UGT's economic plan of 1938. the expropriation of the capitalists makes the situation more comparable to that in the Russian revolution.

[syndicat]

one other point: it's often said that the Communists didn't have any revolutionary aims in Spain, that they were just defending the "bourgeois Republic." This was the line that was taken by parties of the Communist International in other major capitalist countries, such as the USA, France and UK. They downplayed the revolutionary aspects of the events in Spain.

That's because the Communists' strategy was to win over the "progressive middle classes" or "democratic opnion" or whatever in these countries, to gain support for the "Spanish Republic." In fact this strategy was a miserable failure. They won nothing. The Catholic Church had sufficient clout in the USA to force the New Deal to get on board the embargo. Also, American corporations who had their facilities expropriated in Spain were well aware a revolution was underway. The Spanish National Telephone Co in 1936 was ITT's largest subsidiary and it had been expropriated by the CNT telephone workers union.

But in Spain Communists couldn't ignore that a revolution was taking place because it was. They therefore put forward their politics as the best way to win, not only the war, but a revolution, which would be consolidated after the war, in their view. The quote i gave from Georgi Dimitrov, secretary of the Communist International, makes clear the "stagist" conception of the process in Spain that the Communists were operating with.

You should not be so surprised with the idea that the Communists would think of controlling the dominant armed power as the way to consolidate the revolution, on their terms. After World War II, that is how the coordinatorist revolution was extended to eastern Europe.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by syndicat+September 16, 2007 10:02 pm--> (syndicat @ September 16, 2007 10:02 pm) in Spain, unlike in the UK, the capitalists were expropriated. the state socialists were moving to nationalize the economy. this was enshrined in the UGT's economic plan of 1938. the expropriation of the capitalists makes the situation more comparable to that in the Russian revolution. [/b]
The comparison with the Labour party was not connected to Spain at all. It was just to show that you can't believe everything that bourgeois parties say.


Originally posted by syndicat+--> (syndicat)You should not be so surprised with the idea that the Communists would think of controlling the dominant armed power as the way to consolidate the revolution, on their terms. After World War II, that is how the coordinatorist revolution was extended to eastern Europe.[/b]

Do you really think there was revolution in Eastern Europe? It gets weirder, and weirder.


[email protected]
But in Spain Communists couldn't ignore that a revolution was taking place because it was.

So you keep saying. I would say that there wasn't a revolution as the working class didn't take power; a revolutionary situation, yes, but a revolution, no.


syndicat
Also, American corporations who had their facilities expropriated in Spain were well aware a revolution was underway. The Spanish National Telephone Co in 1936 was ITT's largest subsidiary and it had been expropriated by the CNT telephone workers union.

They should have cut a deal like the Brits then.

Devrim

[syndicat]

devrim:
Do you really think there was revolution in Eastern Europe? It gets weirder, and weirder.

QUOTE (syndicat)
But in Spain Communists couldn't ignore that a revolution was taking place because it was.

So you keep saying. I would say that there wasn't a revolution as the working class didn't take power; a revolutionary situation, yes, but a revolution, no.

this sort of nonsense is why i don't take "left communism" seriously.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by [email protected] 17, 2007 07:05 am
devrim:
Do you really think there was revolution in Eastern Europe? It gets weirder, and weirder.

QUOTE (syndicat)
But in Spain Communists couldn't ignore that a revolution was taking place because it was.

So you keep saying. I would say that there wasn't a revolution as the working class didn't take power; a revolutionary situation, yes, but a revolution, no.

this sort of nonsense is why i don't take "left communism" seriously.
Really? Do you guenuinly believe that there were revolutions in Eastern Europe after WWII. To me that seems truly bizarre.

On the 'revolution' in Spain, maybe this is down to how we define revolution, certainly there was a great struggle, maybe an attempted revolution, but if there was a revolution the working class must have seized power.

So if the working class seized power, which organs was this exercised through?

Actually I take anarchosyndicalism seriously even if you don't take left communism the same way.

I can't say the same about talk of a coordinator class, and Parcon though.

Devrim

[syndicat]

in regard to revolution, we can distinguish the process from the consolidation of power of a class.

when there is a change from one class, with its characteristic mode of production, being dominant, to a different class, with its other mode of production, becoming dominant, then you have had a revolution. a revolution doesn't have to be a revolution where the class at the bottom rebels and attempts to gain control. that's a type of revolution. not all revolutions in history have been of that type. in many countries of Europe the transition from feudalism to capitalism did not involve an uprising of the immediate producers. in Eastern Europe after WWII the coordinator class-dominated mode of production was extended from the Soviet Union via the Red Army, so to speak.

in Spain the capitalist class had been expropriated. had Franco been defeated, capitalism would not have survived (assuming the revolution would not be destroyed by a German invasion later, say). it was unclear whether capitalism would be replaced by a worker-managed mode of production or a coordinator class-dominated mode of production. of course the consolidation of a worker-managed mode of production is different than any other type of revolution in that it presupposes the elimination of the class system altogether.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by [email protected] 17, 2007 07:14 pm
when there is a change from one class, with its characteristic mode of production, being dominant, to a different class, with its other mode of production, becoming dominant, then you have had a revolution. a revolution doesn't have to be a revolution where the class at the bottom rebels and attempts to gain control. that's a type of revolution. not all revolutions in history have been of that type. in many countries of Europe the transition from feudalism to capitalism did not involve an uprising of the immediate producers. in Eastern Europe after WWII the coordinator class-dominated mode of production was extended from the Soviet Union via the Red Army, so to speak.

Here lies the basis of the disagreement. I don't think that the mode of production changed in Eastern Europe. at all.

Also this is not a superficial uniformed analysis. I spent time working in a car factory in the ex-Soviet block, and talked to many workers about their experiences of the Soviet period, in the country where I worked, and neighboring countries.

To them it seemed very similar in lots of ways to my own experience of 'state capitalism' in Turkey, and in the UK.

You may think that I am wrong, but I have done the research.

Devrim

[syndicat]

there won't be that much difference in terms of direct experience of workers in workplaces because the coordinator class is the class immediately above workers in either case, and the taylorist logic, which empowers the coordinator class relative to the working class, works its way under either a coordinatorist and mature capitalist mode of production. you could have a coordinatorist mode of production that isn't based on state ownership, e.g. one based on cooperatives.

but i don't want to get into a discussion of why i think "state capitalism" doesn't make any sense as a concept of a mode of production because that would derail this thread.

[IronColumn]

I would note that the embarassing position of accepting USSR propaganda in Spain (War, then the revolution!) despite all the evidence to the contrary (i.e. the actual curtailing of both worker control and even nationalized property by the PCE) reveals a superficiality and empiricism that, as I've noted elsewhere, is reflected quite clearly in the ludicrous positions of Pareconists. In this vein, it is also worthwhile to mention that many of the predecessors of Parecon analysis of the "new class" originated among the bourgeoisie (of the Soviet or 'free world' varieties) and this explains the aforementioned shallowness of parecon doctrine. Add to this the fact that Michael Albert, its co-founder, is little other than a social-democrat (as evidenced by the articles presented on his Znet) and one can see this idea lends itself to all sorts of silliness, as on display here.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by syndicat+September 17, 2007 08:47 pm--> (syndicat @ September 17, 2007 08:47 pm) but i don't want to get into a discussion of why i think "state capitalism" doesn't make any sense as a concept of a mode of production because that would derail this thread. [/b]
The thread is derailed already:


Originally posted by Urban [email protected]
I would rather this was a debate between just the Anarchist members of this forum, but obviously this is an open message board, and anyone can post.

Not your fault, or mine (though I am not an anarchist), I would put it down to the Stalinist justifying the PCE at length.


syndicat
there won't be that much difference in terms of direct experience of workers in workplaces because the coordinator class is the class immediately above workers in either case, and the taylorist logic, which empowers the coordinator class relative to the working class, works its way under either a coordinatorist and mature capitalist mode of production. you could have a coordinatorist mode of production that isn't based on state ownership, e.g. one based on cooperatives.

There won't be much difference because the two modes of production you describe are both capitalist.

Devrim

[catch]

Originally posted by [email protected] 16, 2007 04:35 am
LOL. This is absolutely retarded. You think a bunch of anarchist organized militias would have stood a better chance against Franco's army? You're the delusional to the point of insanity if you actually are suggesting something like that.
Have you read Beevor's book on the Spanish Civil War? He shows quite clearly, that even on a purely military level, the International Brigades were used as cannon fodder by the Communists - thousands of volunteers sent to die in meaningless campaigns simply to reinforce their political position. The anarchist militias didn't have much of a chance of course, but better than suicide missions.

[manic expression]

Originally posted by catch+September 17, 2007 11:39 pm--> (catch @ September 17, 2007 11:39 pm)
[email protected] 16, 2007 04:35 am
LOL. This is absolutely retarded. You think a bunch of anarchist organized militias would have stood a better chance against Franco's army? You're the delusional to the point of insanity if you actually are suggesting something like that.
Have you read Beevor's book on the Spanish Civil War? He shows quite clearly, that even on a purely military level, the International Brigades were used as cannon fodder by the Communists - thousands of volunteers sent to die in meaningless campaigns simply to reinforce their political position. The anarchist militias didn't have much of a chance of course, but better than suicide missions. [/b]
The International Brigades were not sent on "suicide missions", that's a ridiculous and baseless claim. The IBs were famously used during the defense of Madrid (for example) - a battle that is still known for its brutality and fierce fighting. EVERY UNIT had a good chance of getting it really bad; it can happen when things go wrong, it can happen when you get surrounded (like the British brigade did), but it CERTAINLY doesn't mean they were on "suicide missions".

[IronColumn]

No we're talking about idiotic campaigns that had no military value like taking Belchite, or the Battle of the Ebro among many others. For the first, we're talking about an unimportant town being taken at great cost for a propaganda victory for the "People's Army". For the 2nd, we're talking about how most agree the Republic would have been better in holing up and waiting for WW2 to start instead of attacking superior forces in defensive positions.

The IBs just got thrown away and this was why there were quite a few mutinies in the IBs from people refusing to do some painfully stupid Stalinist task.

[PRC-UTE]

Originally posted by [email protected] 17, 2007 07:05 am
devrim:
Do you really think there was revolution in Eastern Europe? It gets weirder, and weirder.

QUOTE (syndicat)
But in Spain Communists couldn't ignore that a revolution was taking place because it was.

So you keep saying. I would say that there wasn't a revolution as the working class didn't take power; a revolutionary situation, yes, but a revolution, no.

this sort of nonsense is why i don't take "left communism" seriously.
He's right, though. This wasn't a revolution, just the opening stages of one. The workers' never abolished the bourgeois state. As the Friends of Durruti said, a workers revolution is more than just forming collectives.

[вор в законе]

And I thought the main difference between communists and anarchists is that the latter one's want to smash the State instead of seizing it.

[syndicat]

iron column:
I would note that the embarassing position of accepting USSR propaganda in Spain (War, then the revolution!) despite all the evidence to the contrary (i.e. the actual curtailing of both worker control and even nationalized property by the PCE) reveals a superficiality and empiricism that, as I've noted elsewhere, is reflected quite clearly in the ludicrous positions of Pareconists.

You're confused as usual. The Communists were for a revolution all right, a revolution that would consolidate the power of the coordinator class. Curtailing workers control and nationalizing property is evidence of exactly that.

And if you want to discuss my viewpoint, then you'll have to address what I say, not what someone else says. But rational argument obviously isn't your strong suit.

[IronColumn]

In your haste to reply, you misinterpreted what I wrote. The PCE was even moving to DE-NATIONALIZE property, giving it back to its original private owners. The counter-revolutionary movement in Spain was to go by baby steps from workers control, to nationalization, to de-nationalization. Stalin wanted to convince foreign owners that the republic would not take their property (seeing as these were mainly Anglo-french-American owners) to get a popular front WW2 pact going. Of course, this movement had to progress slowly and cautiously, but this doesn't mask its fundamental trait. Again, what sort of revolution could you be talking about?

And finally I would note that by asking me to treat you and your arguments as an individual phenomenon abstracted from social surroundings, instead of part of class society where ideologies come from specific groups and exhibit specific traits and methods of thinking, you again reveal your inability to comprehend the historical materialist method. Of course, to a hopeless empiricist this would indeed look like irrational arguing on my part. But in truth, the fact that Parecon's analysis has its predecessors in many liberal theories and the related fact that one of its foremost exponents is undeniably a social democrat is directly related to your ahistorical, superficial and incorrect view on this particular issue.

[syndicat]

IC:
And finally I would note that by asking me to treat you and your arguments as an individual phenomenon abstracted from social surroundings, instead of part of class society where ideologies come from specific groups and exhibit specific traits and methods of thinking, you again reveal your inability to comprehend the historical materialist method.

Vulgar materialism, in fact.

To try to "refute" arguments by reference to alleged causal influences on the people who make them is what in logic is known as the "genetic fallacy." It presupposes that the argument or position you are responding to is false. It therefore begs the question, and thus completely worthless. You first need to show that the view in question is false, only then does it become relevant to try to find an explanation for how someone could be led astray.

How does this "materialist method" you claim to practice get its justification? Navel gazing?

Either this "materialist method" can be justified in terms of the practice of providing reasons or not. If not, no one should pay it any heed.



Of course, to a hopeless empiricist this would indeed look like irrational arguing on my part.

I'm not an empiricist, but, hey, putting tags on people and ideas is your method. You think that shows something. It only shows you're a peabrain.



But in truth, the fact that Parecon's analysis has its predecessors in many liberal theories and the related fact that one of its foremost exponents is undeniably a social democrat is directly related to your ahistorical, superficial and incorrect view on this particular issue.

Bullshit. You don't even know what participatory economics is. It is merely a model of a classless, post-capitalist political economy. It is quite possible for someone to agree with the model and disagree with them on their own political tactics or strategies.

Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert came out of the council communist tradition. You'd know this if you'd read "Unorthodox Marxism." Your assertion that participatory economics derives from "liberal" ideas is just calling it names, nothing more.

But what their particular political views are on strategy at the moment are not something that someone who agrees with their model of a classless socialized economy has to agree with to be consistent.

Your method of smears, guilt by association, and distortions is essentially Stalinist. People who disagree with you are to be bullied, denounced.

[Enragé]

yes the CNT should have taken power, and then dismantled the bourgeois state, because failure to do so always leads to the bourgeoisie recuperating and consolidating state power, smashing the revolution

and guess what happened?

[syndicat]

IC:
In your haste to reply, you misinterpreted what I wrote. The PCE was even moving to DE-NATIONALIZE property, giving it back to its original private owners. The counter-revolutionary movement in Spain was to go by baby steps from workers control, to nationalization, to de-nationalization. Stalin wanted to convince foreign owners that the republic would not take their property (seeing as these were mainly Anglo-french-American owners) to get a popular front WW2 pact going.

That's mythologizing. where is the evidence?

the CNT telephone workers union had expropriated the country's telephone system, which was owned by ITT. according to your logic, the PCE should have pushed to give it back to ITT. they didn't. they pushed to have it taken over by the state. that's what provoked the May Days events.

in 1938 the UGT, in which the Communists had gained a dominant position by that time, put forward a program for complete nationalization of the economy.

the Communists, after May 1937, when they gained increasing control, pushed for the state to take over collectives that were in debt to the government. they didn't push to have them given back to private owners.

the Communists got the worker managed war industries nationalized, not privatized.

you claim that the PCE was aiming at then privatizing the economy later, after nationalizing it, but this is something for which you have provided no evidence. Moreover, why would the Spanish coordinator class that would be empowered by nationalization give up that power voluntarily?

Stalin was apparently not so attached to the idea of an alliance with the western capitalist powers after all -- how do you explain the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939?

you're led astray by your notion that the USSR was somehow capitalist.

[IronColumn]

The method of argument that I am employing simply disdains to treat theories and ideas as abstract and to be considered in some ahistorical realm of disputation. Thus finding their origin and tracing their genealogy, as related to real social forces, is important. There is little that is Leninist about that. In fact so little that it was one these grounds exactly that Pannekoek attacked Lenin in his "Lenin as Philospher" for Lenin's bourgeois style of polemic, which simply attacks instead of explaining where the ideas in question came from.

As for Parecon's ideas, I am well aware they come from councilism. However I said "Parecon analysis" and by this I meant the analysis of the USSR as "coordinatorist", not the particular idea of parecon society. This "third class" analysis in fact does not come from the councilist tradition, but a bourgeois liberal one, and I think it shows why this is a weak aspect of Parecon thought compared to others.

As for private property, most of the peasant collectives went through their initial freedom phase, then were nationalized under the Catalan or Madrid government, and finally were broken up under the orders of the PCE to reassure the rich peasant who got his lands back. In terms of Popular Front, Stalin only allied with Hitler as a last resort after the democracies had signaled to him (through their essential collaboration with fascism in Spain) that they did not care for an alliance.

[syndicat]

i think you confuse what a theory is with what a theory is about. any theory is as such abstract. a theory is a set of hypotheses that we adopt to explain the course of events, to explain what we observe in the world.


As for private property, most of the peasant collectives went through their initial freedom phase, then were nationalized under the Catalan or Madrid government, and finally were broken up under the orders of the PCE to reassure the rich peasant who got his lands back.

the Communists were not against the rural collectives per se. In fact there were rural collectives that were formed on the initiative of Communists. I'd read the interviews with Communists in "Blood of Spain" for this.

the one area where a Communist-led military force attacked collectives to give land back to land owners was in Aragon. however, their real target was not the collectives per se but CNT power. Aragon was the only part of Spain where the CNTheld government power, in the form of the Defense Council of Aragon, which was set up by the CNT village unions, and later brought on board the UGT as well. when the Communist army forces headed by Lister invaded Aragon in Aug 1937, they arrested 600 CNT members, dissolved the Regional Defense Council and killed some CNT activists. In the course of taking back land to give to landowners they did attack some collectives. However, after that action, 70% of the collectives there survived, despite the fact that the region was controlled by hostile Communist-controlled armed forces.

but these collectives were not forms of nationalization. They were socialized in that they were directly controlled by the villages and united into a regional federation that did social planning for the region. it was a non-state socialization.

and you've given no evidence in regard to Spanish industry. most of Spain's industry had been expropriated by the unions in the summer of 1936. 18,000 enterprises were taken. beginning in 1937 there was a tendency towards nationalization, pushed by the Communists. they did not push for privatization of any industrial enterprise as far as i know.

and you are wrong about the origins of the coordinator class theory. it doesn't derive from the "bureaucratic collectivist" theory -- itself of socialist origin (Schachtman was a Trotskyist when he developed that theory, and today the main group in the USA that still advocates this are a tendency in Solidarity, which describes itself as a revolutionary Marxist group.)

rather, the coordinator class theory derives from the discussion in the radical left in the '70s/'80s period about taylorism and the nature of the professional/managerial class. Harry Braverman, David Noble, and Steve Marglin all wrote important pieces in that period that were influential in understanding the tendency in capitalism to split doing of work from the conceptualization and decision-making, with the latter increasingly monopolized by a professional/managerial hierarchy. the Ehrenreichs' "Professional/Managerial Class", written when they were members of New American Movement, was another important contribution, as was some of the research on class structure by Erik Olin Wright. the first exposition of the coordinator class theory by Hahnel and Albert is "Ticket To Ride: More Locations on the Class Map", written in response to the Ehrenreichs' article. A number of these articles were collected in the anthology "Between Labor and Capital."

So "liberalism" has nothing to do with it.

[IronColumn]

So you are admitting that the collectives (not only in Aragon, but also there were those in Valencia and elsewhere) were broken up and that private property relations were put in place there? Regardless of the distinctions between 'nationalization', the Council of Aragon was technically a part of the government and I agree this was "real socialism" but I wanted to point out that the revolution even having to answer to a national bourgeois government merely set it up for counter revolution. This, along with the quite clear proclamations of the PCE to for respect of and preservation of private property, I think supports my case that the PCE was in no way pushing for a "revolution" but rather a "return to normalcy".

As for Parecon itself, I was simply claiming that the kernel idea of a "new class" was common to many liberal bourgeois analyses before the 70's; and following the councilists I disdain to place bolsheviks or social democrats as "socialists" because it is quite clear they are theoretically and practically liberals. Also bureaucratic collectivism is I believe still a 2 class model, and thus I did not purposely mean to reference it but rather the supposed "new class" of coordinators/managers over whom so much ink has been spilled.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by [email protected] 18, 2007 06:45 pm
Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert came out of the council communist tradition. You'd know this if you'd read "Unorthodox Marxism." Your assertion that participatory economics derives from "liberal" ideas is just calling it names, nothing more.

I am pretty sure that they didn't. I think they came out of academia. If they came out of the council communist tradition, which organisation(s) were they members of?

I suspect that this is 'council communism' stretched to the point that it is absolutly meaningless.

Devrim

[syndicat]

IC:
So you are admitting that the collectives (not only in Aragon, but also there were those in Valencia and elsewhere) were broken up and that private property relations were put in place there?

Some of them. But this is a product of the CPE's line in regard to the land in the countryside. The UGT Land Workers Federation (mostly controlled by the Left Soclialists) and the CNT farmworkers union basically agreed that the aim in the revolution in the coutryside should be doing away with wage labor, and thus they were against any farmer owning more land than they could farm themselves, because then they'd be hiring other people to work for them. The Communists' strategy was based on recruiting the middle strata, landowning farmers, small business owners, managers, lawyers, etc. Recruiting these layers fit in with my claim that their politics were coordinatorist, that is, that M-Lism is a coordinatorist politics, tending to empower a coordinator class, because these people were potential cadre for a coordinator class regime. if Franco had been defeated, capitalism would be dead in Spain so the only way recruits from the petit bourgeoisie could look forward to a privileged class position would be mainly as part of a coordinator class.

In some parts of the country, where they were in a weaker position, the CNT farm workers union pursued the same policy as the Communists, e.g. in Andalucia they took no land from larger farmers and only collectivized big latifundia of fascists who had fled, or lands voluntarily donated by campesinos. Of course, in Andalucia there were fewer smallholding campesinos. 90% of the land had been owned by the oligarchy.

But this doesn't show that the Communists' policy in *industry* was to privatize it rather than nationalize it, and i've pointed to evidence that their policy was tending towards complete nationalization of industry.



Regardless of the distinctions between 'nationalization', the Council of Aragon was technically a part of the government and I agree this was "real socialism" but I wanted to point out that the revolution even having to answer to a national bourgeois government merely set it up for counter revolution. This, along with the quite clear proclamations of the PCE to for respect of and preservation of private property, I think supports my case that the PCE was in no way pushing for a "revolution" but rather a "return to normalcy".

the business about protecting private property -- of small owners -- was merely a tactic of the Communists during the first "stage" of the revolutionary process, where their aim was to rebuild a conventional hierarchical army and police, and recruit from the middle strata. That doesn't prove anything about their long term aims and ignores the tendency towards nationalization of industry as the civil war progressed.


As for Parecon itself, I was simply claiming that the kernel idea of a "new class" was common to many liberal bourgeois analyses before the 70's;

Who? and what was their analysis? my understanding of liberalism is that it usually doesn't work in terms of classes, at least not classes as understood traditionally in radical poitical economy, based on power relations in social production. you're just making unsubstantiated allegations. really all you're doing is calling the theory names, the favored methodology of sectarians.



and following the councilists I disdain to place bolsheviks or social democrats as "socialists" because it is quite clear they are theoretically and practically liberals. Also bureaucratic collectivism is I believe still a 2 class model, and thus I did not purposely mean to reference it but rather the supposed "new class" of coordinators/managers over whom so much ink has been spilled.

You're right that the bureaucratic collectivists did not have a 3 class model of capitalism. however calling Solidarity "liberals" is merely sectarian name-calling. I don't see any reason to take that sort of thing seriously.

Devrim re Hahnel and Albert:
If they came out of the council communist tradition, which organisation(s) were they members of?

They were members of the Rosa Luxemburg chapter of SDS in the late '60s. But if you read "Unorthodox Marxism", you'll see they refer to their point of view at that time as "revolutionary councilism." This is why Albert and Hahnel insist on defining the participatory economics model in terms of "workers councils", but adding community councils as well. And if you object that they came out of the radical student left of the '60s, so did councilist groups like Root & Branch (and some of the members of that group also became academics).

[Devrim]

Originally posted by [email protected] 19, 2007 08:28 pm
Devrim re Hahnel and Albert:
If they came out of the council communist tradition, which organisation(s) were they members of?

They were members of the Rosa Luxemburg chapter of SDS in the late '60s. But if you read "Unorthodox Marxism", you'll see they refer to their point of view at that time as "revolutionary councilism." This is why Albert and Hahnel insist on defining the participatory economics model in terms of "workers councils", but adding community councils as well. And if you object that they came out of the radical student left of the '60s, so did councilist groups like Root & Branch (and some of the members of that group also became academics).
So they weren't members of a council communist organisation, but claimed that their point of view was 'revolutionary councilism'. I don't think that makes them council communists at all. Ken Livingstone once claimed he was an anarchosyndicalist. I didn't take him seriously.

Devrim

[syndicat]

So they weren't members of a council communist organisation, but claimed that their point of view was 'revolutionary councilism'. I don't think that makes them council communists at all.

so until someone joins an organization that has X politics, they don't have X politics? that makes no sense. I think this is more left communist sectarianism.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by [email protected] 19, 2007 09:12 pm

So they weren't members of a council communist organisation, but claimed that their point of view was 'revolutionary councilism'. I don't think that makes them council communists at all.

so until someone joins an organization that has X politics, they don't have X politics? that makes no sense. I think this is more left communist sectarianism.
No, it is just saying that they weren't militants of a council communist organisation. Also, I think that council communism does have a real historical meaning, and tends to get mixed up with other currents, like the Castoriadis one, which weren't council communist at all. If everyone who talked about workers councils was a council communist the Trotskyists would be too.

Devrim

[syndicat]

but your position is illogical for the following reason. if an idea is council communist when advocated by an organization, it remains council communist if that same idea is advocated by someone not in an organization. ideas are characterized by their content. when I say that the viewpoint espoused in "Unorthodox Marxism" was council communist, i'm pointing out that they identified with the anti-Leninist revolutionary tradition in Marxism. Why do you think their book was called "Unorthodox Marxism"? They have always been anti-Leninist so your references to Trotskyism are irrelevant.

i can take the example of redstar2000, an activist who posted thousands of messages on this message board. he identified his politics as "council communist" in a political profile. when i knew him in the '80s he advocated a strategy based on the development of workers assemblies in the class struggle.

but he's not belonged to a "council communist organization." The reason he can make that statement is because of what his ideas are. When you put the organization first you have it backwards. A "council communist organization" is council communist or not only in virtue of the content of its ideas, its analyses and strategy.

[IronColumn]

I think Devrim's point about belonging to a councilist organization is salient when we consider that Znet, run by an alleged councilist, is thoroughly social democrat in the orientation of the articles that it publishes.

As for nationalization, the PCE supported nationalization in key industries. This was little more than sneakily endorsing a fait accompli, only to claim credit for it and then seek to subvert it, just like their land policy. I would note that I do not think this nationalization came as a result of PCE policies, but rather as a result of attempted revolution diverted into statist channels. And I do believe they were quite explicit in protecting remaining private property both in land and probably for industry as well.

You claim that the PCE were using legalism and counter revolutionary slogans for appealing to the "rural petty bourgeoisie" as a tactic to begin their "revolution", yet if coordinators still ruled in Russia why would they not simply replicate their earlier methods which were specifically the opposite of this? Also the idea that these small owners are the recruits for coordinatorism would imply that they should be attracted by the ideology of their class (which presumably is nationalization/ coordinatorism) and yet they were in fact wanting directly the opposite of that, private property (that is, they were completely against their supposed material interests).

As for the analysis of the "new" middle class, I feel like the entire Weberian inspired tradition is a pretty telling intellectual influence on many thinkers, and thus did not need to be explicitly pointed out. In any event, it's clear you're devoted to coordinatorism and this ongoing disputation does not strike me as terribly productive anymore.

[syndicat]

IC:
You claim that the PCE were using legalism and counter revolutionary slogans for appealing to the "rural petty bourgeoisie" as a tactic to begin their "revolution", yet if coordinators still ruled in Russia why would they not simply replicate their earlier methods which were specifically the opposite of this? Also the idea that these small owners are the recruits for coordinatorism would imply that they should be attracted by the ideology of their class (which presumably is nationalization/ coordinatorism) and yet they were in fact wanting directly the opposite of that, private property (that is, they were completely against their supposed material interests).

Lenin was initially opposed to the idea of expropriation of private property. when the Kronstadt soviet voted in Jan 1918 to expropriate all land, businesses, houses in Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks voted with the Mensheviks against because Bolshevik policy at that point was only for Lenin's tepic "control." Lenin's idea was to use the workers to counter the capitalists, not expropriate them. During the period of war communism, it was large numbers of engineers, managers and former owners who they recruited to run things, and the coordinator class also gained from the NEP as well since it created greater autonomy for the managers of enterprises in relation to the state.

The petit bourgeoisie have skills and experience that is useful to them being recruited to a coordinator solution, especially in a situation where the private property capitalist solution is not available to them.


As for the analysis of the "new" middle class, I feel like the entire Weberian inspired tradition is a pretty telling intellectual influence on many thinkers, and thus did not need to be explicitly pointed out. In any event, it's clear you're devoted to coordinatorism and this ongoing disputation does not strike me as terribly productive anymore.

I.e. this says is that you can't back up your earlier claims about alleged "liberal" sources for the theory of the coordinator class.

You mean I'm committed to the theory of the coordinator class. It's the state socialists who are committed to coordinatorism. And the theory of the coordinator class does not derive from Weber or that tradition in sociology. It derives from the tradition in radical political economy that looks at class in terms of the power relations in production.


I think Devrim's point about belonging to a councilist organization is salient when we consider that Znet, run by an alleged councilist, is thoroughly social democrat in the orientation of the articles that it publishes.

i.e. Z isn't sufficiently sectarian to suit you.

[Rawthentic]

You really need to grow up and admit that the coordinatorist shit you got going on is...shit.

That "theory" does not exist, and neither do you types.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by Live for the [email protected] 20, 2007 02:22 am
You really need to grow up and admit that the coordinatorist shit you got going on is...shit.

That "theory" does not exist, and neither do you types.
This is just plain rude. Of course the theory exists; How could he defend it otherwise.

The idea that he 'need[s] to grow up' is quite laughable as I get the impression that he is at least fifty, and that you are under twenty.

syndicat, I will come back to your points later.

Devrim

[Rawthentic]

You are right Devrim.

My apologies towards syndicat.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by [email protected] 19, 2007 09:48 pm
but your position is illogical for the following reason. if an idea is council communist when advocated by an organization, it remains council communist if that same idea is advocated by someone not in an organization.
Militant political activity is part of being a communist. This isn't about whether a political position is that of the council communists, but about whether individuals are. In my opinion if they don't have the militant activity then they are not, end of story.


when I say that the viewpoint espoused in "Unorthodox Marxism" was council communist, i'm pointing out that they identified with the anti-Leninist revolutionary tradition in Marxism.

Which is quite a catch all phrase theoretically. Council communism is a more specific current.


Why do you think their book was called "Unorthodox Marxism"? They have always been anti-Leninist so your references to Trotskyism are irrelevant.

My reference to Trotskyism wasn't concerning them. It was merely pointing out that if you defined council communism as all of those who talk about councils it would be a very broad church indeed.


i can take the example of redstar2000, an activist who posted thousands of messages on this message board. he identified his politics as "council communist" in a political profile. when i knew him in the '80s he advocated a strategy based on the development of workers assemblies in the class struggle.

I don't know him. I have only posted here for just over a year. However, before thinking that this guy was an actual council communist, I would look at his positions. Did he have council communist positions on the unions? Did he have council communist positions on national liberation? I suspect he may have failed this test.

I am almost sure that the Parcon people would have.

Devrim

[syndicat]

i use the term "councilist" rather differently. there are revolutionaries who are active within unions, and active within some non-Leninist revolutionary group, and this could be an anarchist group for example, and they believe it is important to be active within the existing unions and existing worker struggles, but they hold that unions can't be revolutionary, that as a revolutionary period approaches, then it becomes possible to form workers councils which replace the unions as the collective means of struggle and also as the means of workers taking over the running of things.

now a person who holds such a view i call a "councilist." I don't really care whether you agree or not.

[Devrim]

Originally posted by [email protected] 21, 2007 04:58 pm
i use the term "councilist" rather differently...

now a person who holds such a view i call a "councilist." I don't really care whether you agree or not.
Of course you don't have to. The fact that it is not what 'council communist' has meant historically is neither here, or there. Use political terms to mean anything you like.

Devrim

[A Suvorov]

Not "should the CNT have taken power" but "COULD the CNT have taken power".

Did they have a national-class organizational structure? Did they have a plan for nationwide representation? Did they have the resources to pull it all together in a near-post-war economy and its inevitable social upheaval? Would they have had international support?

No, I think it all boils down to the academic question of COULD the CNT have pulled it off. And, secondary to that, if not the CNT- who?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

The Communists were for a revolution all right, a revolution that would consolidate the power of the coordinator class.

So the coordinator class existed before the revolution? That's new, usually people who argue there was a coordinator class say it rose up as a bureaucracy as the revolution was consolidated..

And if they existed before the revolution, they must have already had positions of power right (otherwise they wouldn't be a class above the workers).. so what interest did they have in a revolution to begin with? They wanted to take themselves out of power so they could put themselves into power?

[syndicat]

Not "should the CNT have taken power" but "COULD the CNT have taken power".

Did they have a national-class organizational structure? Did they have a plan for nationwide representation? Did they have the resources to pull it all together in a near-post-war economy and its inevitable social upheaval? Would they have had international support?

First, what we should want is for the *working class* to hold all social power. And in fact the CNT said, in all its press during the '30s, that it wanted the proletariat to have all social power. To answer your questions:

1. "Did they have a national-class organizational structure?"
They were a union federation that existed throughout Spain and had a highly democratic structure based on worker assemblies and elected delegates in shop committees. They were the majority union in Spain. It was a thoroughly proletarian organization.

2. "Did they have a plan for nationwide representation?"
Yes, this was laid out in the libertarian communist program they adopted at their national congress in Zaragoza in May 1936. This program called for a dual governance structure for the Iberian peninsula:

a. workers assemblies would be grouped into industrial federations to self-manage industries. industries in a region and nationally would be grouped together into regional and national federations that would make decisions through worker congresses. important issues would have proposals referred back by the congresses to the base assemblies.

b. neighborhood and village assemblies, called "free municipalities", would be grouped through city-wide councils in larger cities. the city councils would not be made up of professional politicians but delegates who still work regular jobs. important issues could be referred back to the base assemblies for decision. free municipalities would be grouped regionally into "people's congresses", and nationally as a national people's congress. the free municipalities were to have responsibility for the input to the social planning process about consumer demand, especially collective goods/services the people want, such as education, health care, housing. the national economic plan and regional plans would be worked out between the worker self-management organizations in the industries and the free municipalities.

3. "Did they have the resources to pull it all together in a near-post-war economy and its inevitable social upheaval?"

This had been discussed thoroughly, for example, in Abad Diego de Santillan's book "After the Revolution" which was published in 1935.

4. "Would they have had international support?"

What was important was spreading the revolution to nearby areas. The Spanish revolutionaries did have contacts in the labor movement in France and in Morocco and other nearby areas of North Africa and especially Portugal. These would be the areas to which the revolution would need to be spread as soon as possible.

I think the working class clearly COULD have taken power. The CNT could have taken power in Catalonia where it held a de facto armed dominance, and it did take power in the nearby region of Aragon, and in Valencia the CNT was also the majority. In those three contiguous regions the CNT was the majority of the organized workers, those regions together had the vast majority of Spain's manufacturing capacity (more than threefourths).

Had the CNT taken power in those three regions, they could have pressured the UGT -- the other large national union, aligned with the Socialists and Communists -- to go in with them on creating a workers governing structure for the whole country. The CNT did in fact propose this to the UGT, in early Sept. 1936. This would have created, in addition to the worker congresses i mentioned above, a National Defense Council, regional defense councils, accountable to the worker congresses, and a unified people's militia with a unified command -- a revolutionary people's army.

[rebelworker]

Originally posted by Leo [email protected] 15, 2007 07:35 am

All this talk about a coordinator class reminds me of a part in John Reed's Ten Days Which Shook the World in which Reed quotes the conversation between two soldiers and a mob of business men, government officials and students which he had witnessed:

"Just at the door of the station stood two soldiers with rifles and bayonets fixed. They were surrounded by about a hundred business men, Government officials and students, who attacked them with passionate argument and epithet. The soldiers were uncomfortable and hurt, like children unjustly scolded.

A tall young man with a supercilious expression, dressed in the uniform of a student, was leading the attack.

“You realise, I presume,” he said insolently, “that by taking up arms against your brothers you are making your-selves the tools of murderers and traitors?”

“Now brother,”answered the soldier earnestly, “you don’t understand. There are two classes, don’t you see, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. We——”

“Oh, I know that silly talk!” broke in the student rudely. “A bunch of ignorant peasants like you hear somebody bawling a few catch-words. You don’t understand what they mean. You just echo them like a lot of parrots.” The crowd laughed. “I’m a Marxian student. And I tell you that this isn’t Socialism you are fighting for. It’s just plain pro-German anarchy!”

“Oh, yes, I know,” answered the soldier, with sweat dripping from his brow. “You are an educated man, that is easy to see, and I am only a simple man. But it seems to me——”

“I suppose,” interrupted the other contemptuously, “that you believe Lenin is a real friend of the proletariat?”

“Yes, I do,” answered the soldier, suffering.

“Well, my friend, do you know that Lenin was sent through Germany in a closed car? Do you know that Lenin took money from the Germans?”

“Well, I don’t know much about that,” answered the soldier stubbornly, “but it seems to me that what he says is what I want to hear, and all the simple men like me. Now there are two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat——”

“You are a fool! Why, my friend, I spent two years in Schlüsselburg for revolutionary activity, when you were still shooting down revolutionists and singing ‘God Save the Tsar!’ My name is Vasili Georgevitch Panyin. Didn’t you ever hear of me?”

“I’m sorry to say I never did,” answered the soldier with humility. “But then, I am not an educated man. You are probably a great hero.”

“I am,” said the student with conviction. “And I am opposed to the Bolsheviki, who are destroying our Russia, our free Revolution. Now how do you account for that?”

The soldier scratched his head. “I can’t account for it at all,” he said, grimacing with the pain of his intellectual processes. “To me it seems perfectly simple—but then, I’m not well educated. It seems like there are only two classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie——”

“There you go again with your silly formula!” cried the student.

“——only two classes,” went on the soldier, doggedly, “and whoever isn’t on one side is on the other…”"
I bet a few years later that student held a govt post coordinating the economy, and the soldier got shot at Kronsdat (either with the Bolsheviks or the People, same tragedy)

[rebelworker]

I think the CNT could and should have done more to push forward revolutionary gains in areas where they were the majority, particularly Catalona.

Setting up a governing body based on federated workers councils and peasants communes. As well as a revolutionary Junta for military coordination, independant of but accountable to the "council govt".

The problem is, as Durutti stated, that the CNT was not the vehicle to push all of these changes through. An ideologica revolutionary organisation (not hampered by factions of liberal leadership as was the case with the CNT) built of working class militants to "lead by example and push for the dismanteling of republican structures of govt in anarchist workers controlled areas. Hopefully the left of the UGT would have come along for the ride... The friends of Durutti were unforunately too little too late.

On another note I think there is some importance in using the "coordinator class" lense when analysing things. Im not sure to what extent its useful(or if I fully understand the theory as Syndicat uses it) but I have developed my own similar ideas, both from personal experience, and from looking at history. Clearly burocrats and the "political class" as Chomsky has refered to them have some different interests and relations to power, capitalism and production than average workers, soldiers or peasants ( just as soldiers, workers and peasants have some different interests in relation to each other).

The Bolshevik Party was clearly bogged down by a political, intelectual and manigerial layer, as was the leadership of the CNT.