Chan Island wrote:And yet still they were there, no matter how much they got rubbished. Can anarchism say the same?
Except we can link it. Let's start with the CNT. They took over Barcelona... also known as Spain's most industrialised city, a title it had had for literal centuries. It was a beating heart of manufacturing, and should have been well able to fuel a war effort in the 1930s, as it had done in both the first world war and other previous conflicts. But that didn't happen. As others have pointed out in this thread, the restarting of the factories was sloppy, the workers lacked direction, and the supplies never sufficiently organised. Some of that can be blamed on the war, sure, and some can be blamed on the fact that other factions controlled some sectors of the city's infrastructure- yet we can't pretend the CNT made no mistakes.
I mean, they did fuel a war effort against the fascists. I don't know how much more 'efficiency' that could have been squeezed out of production could have changed the cold hard math of the Civil War, particularly when it comes to Nazi Germany and Italy's open support (ie the critical airlifting of the Army of Africa and bypassing the large Republican naval superiority) and the future Allied powers' unwillingness to lift a finger to support the internationally recognized and legitimate government of Spain against the coup-slash-civil war. All those macro-level factors that probably tipped the scales of the war were entirely outside of the CNT's control.
This is what I mean about anarchism receiving criticism for its context, not for anything that they actually did - it would be one thing if the CNT had been in charge of the whole Republic and its military on day one, but they never were.
Chan Island wrote:Mistakes that seem to repeat themselves in other serious anarchist attempts, like Ukraine, Manchuria or the Zapatistas. Failure to organise under a strategic vision. Failure to delegate. Failure to guard itself from being undermined by internal enemies. Failure to maintain it's own existence under the stress of war time. Failure to craft functional alliances with other powers or factions. And I don't see any reason why this wouldn't repeat itself again.
'Thrice-scorched Ukraine'- which is why famously the army of next-door Poland failed in its bid for independence. Which is why Serbia, devastated by 3 consecutive wars, famously failed to repel the first Austrian invasion in WW1 and tragically no longer exists as a nation. Which is why poor Lithuania, squashed between the German and the Russia armies, stood no chance against the bolshevik menace in 1919. Except, that's not what happened. All 3 of those projects succeeded despite the hardship and brutality of war- against the exact same enemies that the Ukrainian anarchists faced to boot. Because they did things like organise under a common strategic vision, organise supply chains and guarded against internal enemies. 'Thrice-scorched Ukraine' is an excuse, not a reason, for Makhno's failures.
I mean, to pick Poland as an example, there are important contexts to why those movements succeeded that the Makhnovists didn't have. The Polish Army was able to more or less materialize fully formed in 1918 out of veteran Polish Legion forces released from Austro-Hungarian service, augmented when the German forces evacuated Polish territories and left all of their weapons, ammunition and supplies behind. That well-supplied army went on to a good showing against the Soviets, including intervening in that Lithuanian-Soviet war as a third combatant and probably pretty decisive factor in the outcome of the war.
Compare that to the inception of the Free Territory, which was only ever able to arm itself with whatever they could steal or with whatever equipment deserters had with them. There's a famous example very early in the revolution when self-described 'terrorist' Maria Nikiforova lead 200 people, armed with just ten rifles and a couple of revolvers, to surround a military base in Orikhiv, induced the local Russian Army regiment to surrender, shot their officers and appropriated the base's armaments.
The glaring contrast between that very neat transfer of power and material to the Poles and the Makhnovists struggle to arm themselves by tooth and claw really just illustrates the material realities that very badly undermine this hand-wavy narrative about anarchism's defeat.