Imma tread delicately here but using the CNT/FAI as an example of a classless, moneyless, stateless, anti-authoritarian society doesn’t fit with a historically-grounded view of Revolutionary Catalonia and the larger Spanish Republic. At all.
You might take issue with this and say that it’s unfair to expect a revolutionary movement under the conditions of open civil war against the forces of fascism to achieve their vision of statelessness and an anti-authoritarian society and I’d agree but… that’s why I see seizing the state as an absolute necessity and not as optional.
I don’t believe that any revolution is above criticism and I also hold the position that there are going to be excesses. I don’t want to see them, I don’t like to see them, but they are going to happen and if we don’t have a ruthless criticism of all that exists then we will inevitably end up liable to repeat these excesses the next time around but we are also inclined to atrocity denialism etc. etc.
I’m going to avoid discussing the broader implications for the Spanish Republic and my ideological position on this stuff because I don’t want to instigate any slapfights.
In the Spanish Republic, it’s an undeniable fact that the Catholic church was targeted and subjected to a campaign of persecution. At certain points clergy were burnt alive inside their churches. Clergy were also simply executed. Skirting around the editorial commentary, this constitutes genocide in the formal definition.
A sorely overlooked facet of the history of the Republic is when a Moroccan delegation from the Spanish colonial holdings in Morocco sued the Republican government for independence, on favourable terms for the Republic. This was rejected. Even if the terms for independence were accepted with the exact terms given the Moroccan delegation, there would still have existed a very clear colonial hierarchy.
I will largely skip over military and government structures because that’s all pretty obvious and most of it can be inferred.
The Republic operated forced labour camps.
The government took measures to nationalise infrastructure and struggled to do so especially with their electricity grid. To be clear, I think that a modern state especially under conditions of war must have national control over critical infrastructure like electricity. But doing so is an inherently authoritarian measure.
Likewise there were efforts at forced collectivisation of farms.
The CNT/FAI operated “Control Patrols”'; a sort of de facto police force which had a repressive character and was infamous for arbitrary arrests and summary executions by firing squad, as well as for refusing to be accountable to the government structures of the Republic.
In CNT controlled Puigcerdá, there was significant corruption and its mayor enforced collectivisation but continued to farm his own livestock privately. Puigcerdá was a hotbed of espionage and falsified passports due to its location and issues within its government.
The CNT-UGT collectivised telephone infrastructure and controlled the Catalonian telephone exchange. When military command sought to coordinate with the government via telephone, one particular call was interrupted by an exchange worker saying that there is no government but only a Defence Committee. When the President of the Government of Catalonia was speaking to the President of the Spanish Republic via phonecall, the call was interrupted midway by a phone operator who said that the phone lines should be used for more important purposes than talk between presidents. It was a widely-held view that this telephone exchange closely surveilled calls made through it and it’s pretty obvious why that is.
On the ground level, the government took a very dim view of what they considered to be vice and took steps to discourage and curb it.
In factories, the Spanish Republic struggled desperately to balance the needs of war production against the demands of workers and their ideological positions. Ultimately this led to establishing far better terms for labour which often saw a precipitous drop in productivity and in response a course-correction of stripping workers’ rights and a program of enforcing labour discipline as an attempt to meet production requirements. The most obvious example of enforcement of labour discipline was the establishment of the role of Distributor of Tasks. This was a government official who answered only to the highest levels of government and who had vast discretionary powers over workers. Workers who were not sufficiently productive, who were deemed absent without just cause, who were late to work too often, and who showed a defeatist attitude or a lack of revolutionary zeal could be sanctioned by the Distributor of Tasks and even imprisoned.
All workers were required to maintain a sort of journal of their employment history where their employers would record critical information about the worker’s work and their general character. This record was necessary for finding work. It can be inferred that being fired by a Distributor of Tasks or being sanctioned would make finding future employment extremely difficult.
In CNT/FAI administered regions, workers were paid in labour vouchers redeemable in their local village. To travel outside of your village required exchanging your labour vouchers for currency, which could only occur with the express permission of the council. You were required to provide an explanation for what you were going to spend your money on. This effectively meant that free movement of people was strictly controlled and monitored.
Ultimately it was the anti-communist coup would spell the end of the Spanish Republic.
To sum up with the purpose of this comment, there’s a major problem in taking a team-sports mentality and projecting it onto history because you end up in what amounts to campism.
It irks me that the kind of person who posts this kind of image is the same kind of person who will level unprincipled criticisms of communists as being campists and of having a political orientation that amounts to being on the side that is anti-USA, that communists support the same repressive structures as long as it comes with different aesthetics, that they worship the state uncritically, and that they are apologists for atrocities, and that their only defence when faced with the excesses of the movements they uphold in history is whataboutism. (I believe that these people do exist btw, it’s just not as common as it’s made out to be.) The reason why this irks me is that all of these criticisms apply equally to unprincipled anarchists who engage in this sort of sectarian bickering.
I could create similar lists of criticisms of the actions of governments like the USSR, Cuba, and the communist faction of the Spanish Republic, for example, and I would be able to make these criticisms principled through a political analysis which I’ve largely avoided above because I wanted to illustrate a point about how some people engage with history through a primarily ideological lens and what implications that has for the consistency of how they apply their politics.
I wonder if the people who post these kinds of memes would be able to provide any principled criticism of the CNT/FAI, the YPG, or the EZLN?
