Opinions on Revolutionary Spain?
Howdy. I'm an anarchist who's gotten interested in left communism recently. I wanted to know what folks here think of the Spanish Revolution and if there are any left communist critiques of the revolution. Many of us consider it a success insofar as it formed a functioning socialist society, though as far as anarchism goes, I think it fell short in trying to dismantle social hierarchy and the state.
Posted Oct 24, 2016, 6:41 AM UTC
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When Insurrections Die offers some good analysis, starting from the section titled Barcelona 1936. To put it briefly, Dauvé notes how almost every single group, including the CNT and the POUM, participated in the bourgeois popular front, held back proletarian insurrections and strikes, and eventually paved the way for their own massacre at the hands of first the Stalinists and socialists, then the fascists. He also has some criticism of the collectivisation, saying it was doomed from the beginning because it excluded communisation; that is, it changed the form of capitalist production (replaced executives with cooperatives, replaced the standing army with the armed population, etc.) while maintaining its content (e.g. wage-labour, even if wages were equalised and replaced with coupons). "What money brings together cannot be free, and sooner or later money becomes its master."
I haven't read it yet, but there's also The Spanish Revolution, Past and Future: Grandeur and Poverty of Anarchism; How the Working Class Takes Over (or Doesn’t), Then and Now by Loren Goldner, which forms the third chapter of his latest book.