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Head on over to Freeman Beyond the Wall dot com,
forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I
want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana Show. Carl
Dolla is back. More Spanish civil War on deck? What's
going on?
Speaker 2: Man doing well, happy Martin Loofer King Day Junior and
Inauguration Day, Spicy Day.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's been interesting so far. But nothing ever happens, nothing,
nothing ever happens. Last time we recorded. I just realized
this this morning. Is we recorded that the day after
the election. So we're on a We're on a pattern, man,
We're on some kind of schedule here. So all right,
So I think last time we talked, I mentioned what
the hell is his name for?
Speaker 2: Nellie? Nellie?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and well you were like, okay, well let's put
something together. And so you are here to talk about
the other guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So you know, one thing that people have pointed
out is that I always just when I speak about
the Spanish Civil War, to fite my knowledge on all
the various groups and subgroups, I always just call them libtards.
And I do that deliberately. And why do I do
that deliberately Because I am very well versed in these people.
I've been you know, around their ideas for a long time.
I'm tired of them and I want to dismiss them. However,
it's useful to explore what they actually believed. But I'm also,
you know, not going to enshrine them with too much legitimacy,
although in fairness, I will say that there are there
are good critiques that you will find from the left,
Like one of the things Peepe, that keeps coming up
when when you and Thomas talk, because you guys are
both actually knowledgeable about the subjects that you talk about.
You're not doing the you know, the James Lindsay of
the world. You know, you're woke because as you know,
because Mark said something ever so slightly similar, or we're
going to trick everyone because we're gonna, you know, quote
Hegel and Marx was a Hegelian and therefore you're a communist.
If you publish something it's it's really retarded. And and
we don't want to be retards. We want to be
very well educated in reality, and we don't want people
to be to be conned by the fake framing of
whether it's a leftist position or it's a you know,
to repeat ourselves, a mainstream you know, conservative or you know,
really liberal psyop operation. So we want to know what
kind of libtards the various apostles of atheistic materialism were
in Spain. When we talked about the Spanish Civil War,
So this scene here is CNTFAI. You can tell by
the red and black, the classic anarchist colors. This is
cnt FAI in Barcelona. Right after there they suppressed the
military rising and they began their their little revolution. You'll
notice the long eighteen ninety three pattern Spanish mousers and
not the later slightly shorter nineteen sixteen carbines, which are
great rifles, by the way. So I'm going to proceed
and we're going to learn a little bit about the
ideological roots and some of the standout folks in Spain.
Why did Spain? Why was Spain so heavily anarchist compared
to other parts of the world when they had these
various uprisings. What are some of the tensions between the
anarchist and marx positions, plus the kind of mainstream liberal groups.
And we're also going to address some of the kind
of foundational concepts that you need to understand when you're
looking at leftist critiques and factionalism. What do these things
actually mean. I will continue to dismiss them as libtards,
but I also want to prove here that I know
what I'm talking about, and I highly encourage everyone else
to to examine you know, what your enemies say. So
I'm really leaning into two primary sources here in this
little talk. If you want to understand like the top
level ideas that are coming from here. These are two
great books. They're both available in English. I just grabbed
the Spanish version Spanish edition title for the second book,
The Spanish Anarchist by Murray Buukchin has the bulk of
what you need here. There's other material that I sourced
for this, especially some of the more niche elements of
the conversation that we'll get into well.
Speaker 1: And one of the good things about reading bookchen is
is that he's sympathetic.
Speaker 2: He is, and he also if you're looking at his
name and you're saying, hey, I noticed something, you were
accurately identifying something. But he's sympathetic.
Speaker 1: Oh, as someone who came out of you know, libertarianism,
monarcal capitalism, and a studied agorism, I know exactly who
Murray Buckchin is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a very intelligent guy. There's a really interesting
thing too it Since you're educated on this subject as well,
you'll notice that there was a huge lull in anarchist
orient and material until really the very end of the sixties,
or really it took off in the early seventies when
there was kind of a revitalization. And there's a bunch
of arguments behind why this pattern happened, but frankly, a
lot of it was during the Cold War the left
either went anti communist leftist or Marxist slash Marxist Leninist
Maoist right. And then in the kind of post sixties,
and I suspect a lot of it has to do
with kind of nineteen sixty eight, you know, post nineteen
sixty eight, there was a big shift into people exploring anarchism,
and a bunch of it also was kind of the
evolution of what we know about the counterculture in the
sixties and seventies that where there's a fair bit of that.
But there was a real serious academic interest in anarchism
and historical anarchism at this time and re examining things
not just through the lens of the you know, communism
versus capitalism discussion. I don't know if you have anything
to add there, no, no, I'll keep going great. So
one of the neat things about the anarchist is that
they actually follow through with with what they believe. And
what you'll find is that if there's an anarchist book
that's in English or even other languages, you'll probably be
able to find it online for free because they're giving
it away, and if you're buying it, it's because you're
paying to print it. I raise my hand and acknowledge
that I was a person who used to go to
an anarchist bookstore when I was an edgy teen and
I was exploring these things. And what I would say
is anarchist library, libcom and of course archive dot org
have a lot of great material. The Commune, libertarian, communist
and anarchist websites have tons of great material on the
topic of the Spanish the Spanish Civil War, and just
the general topics of anarchism, communism, etc. And all the debates.
You can find all the stuff online for free. Don't
pay money for it, just go out there and read it.
There's a lot of great material. Marx is actually extremely
interesting and he has some very good critiques, and we're
going to talk a little bit about that. Here. I'll
be talking about other books that you guys can check out,
or just topics. To start with The Spanish Labyrinth by
Gerald Brennan is another book that is a sympathetic and
very interesting book about the environment of Spain before the war,
especially like the nineteenth century, because really all of all
of these things, when you're talking about these these movements,
you have to understand, you know, the causes and conditions,
as I always point out, and they both do a
really good good job of exploring that Bookchin really leans
into one of the main narratives of the UH. You know,
when you look at how did Spain develop this super
deep rooted anarchist anarchist core, and that legend is around
what we'll call Finelle's mission. So in October eighteen sixty eight,
a tall, heavily bearded Italian revolutionary arrived in Barcelona by train.
Giuseppe Finelli was a We'll look a little more into
who he was in just a moment, but all you
need to know is that he was financed and directed
by Mikhail Bakunin, who was I'm going to pronounce it
that way. I know I'm probably butchering it, but he
was the stand out representative of the anarchist faction in
the International Workingmen's Association, which was also known as the
First International. So Finelli made contact with Spanish radicals that
were known to this faction. Even though he did not
speak Spanish, he spoke French and Italian, and from this
contact arose the largest and most consequential anarchist movement in history.
So eighteen sixty eight is a very important year. There's
a reason that this happened in eighteen sixty eight. To date,
Spain and Portugal were seen as the most isolated and
least contacted parts of Europe in the nineteenth century. Karl
Marx himself stated there's perhaps no country except Turkey so
little known to and so falsely judged by Europe as Spain.
Now why eighteen sixty eight, So let's look at a
super quick timeline as to what happens to create this
environment where the prominent anarchists in the world are understanding
that they need to reach out to Spain. So French
Revolution happens in seventeen eighty nine. France is right next
to Spain. Right. So while this is a huge deal
in world history and American history because of our alliance
with France, as it coincides with our own warfare independence
in the early years of you know, our young nation.
This really set a lot of things off because the
Peninsular War, the war in Spain and Portugal that happened
eighteen seven to eighteen fourteen, was really critical in terms
of establishing the base for the kind of foment that
was taking place in eighteen sixty eight. There was a
fair bit of assistance by the liberalizing forces in Madrid,
like the bureaucrats and the we may say petite bourgeois
or bourgeois elements in the government who were Frenchified as
one of the terms that they would use. They followed
French you know, styles and fashions and you know, ideology, everything,
and they wanted to liberalize Spain. There was an element
of this at play when they essentially placed a new
king in the throne, creating a war that involved the
Spanish and the French and the British to retake the
country of Spain from French dominion. Because Napoleon's brother was
made king. There was a constitution that was instituted in
eighteen twelve with liberalizing elements that essentially got tossed out
when there was a restoration with Spanish victory, but it
still left an imprint that was always referred back to
for the rest of the century. The First Carlist War
took place in eighteen thirty three to eighteen forty and
this is again traditionalists fighting against the central force, the
central government's liberals. So the fueros, which is the old
rights and privileges, particularly relevant in the northern parts of
the country and home rule were abolished tactically where it
would be least disruptive and would help the central government
the most through the rest of the century. So first
in Navarre via the Compromise Act of eighteen forty one,
after the Carlists were defeated. So the idea was, you know,
this is one of those things that you and I
have talked about, Pete. There's the traditional Spanish rights to
kind of self government in their own provinces and districts,
but this allows rebellion against the central government. And so
this was abolished in Navarre, which was again that one
of the Carlist homelands, although they were also huge in
Basque country also and a fair bit in Catalonia. So
it was the second Carlist War eighteen forty six to
eighteen forty nine because they were not happy with this arrangement.
They wanted, you know, a full restoration of their rights
as well as to defend against the early liberalizing influences
from the government. This coincides with Europe's revolutions of eighteen
forty eight, which really change everything in terms of propagating
all of these liberalizing ideas around the world, especially in
the West. And also another thing that happens is when
these revolutions fail all around the world, whether it's Germany,
whether it's France. And when I say Germany, you know
what I mean, it's in the German principalities and in
various areas, So all these people have to go to
different areas to hide out, and a bunch end up
in Spain and other parts in the world.
Speaker 1: And here and here, I mean they fought, they came here,
they became mercenaries in a lot of places.
Speaker 2: Yes, they fought this.
Speaker 1: They fought in our Civil war.
Speaker 2: I have. It's funny. I had a bunch of German
ancestors come here in the eighteen forties, and at one
point I was like, I got to look at these
dates again because I'm a little nervous, and I was
happy to see eighteen forty one. In eighteen forty two,
I was like a few because it's certainly it certainly
wouldn't comport what I know of them, you know, in
the businesses that they were in, and they were just
they wanted to get away from that kind of stuff obviously,
but they weren't revolutionaries themselves. Few wipe the brow. But yeah,
so it was it was a huge spread of all
these ideas that were associated with that. We'll talk about
what some of those ideas are shortly. Again, this is
a super high level survey, so really another critical foundational element,
especially coming after the revolutions of eighteen forty eight. I'm
talking in extreme shorthand here. I definitely encourage people to
read more material about this. Check out Pete and Thomas's
shows about Marx. You'll get a lot of information about that.
This is total shorthand. The First International, which is the
International Workingman's Association, is founded in eighteen sixty four. And
what this is is a group of you know, international radicals,
but but mostly from just a couple of countries in
Europe who start saying we need to not only network internationally,
but we need to start establishing ties with one another
to actually do things, and we need to kind of
determine what our ideology is going to be and immediately
different factions start forming. We'll talk about that shortly. One
of the factions here reaches out to Spain because in
eighteen sixty eight, Queen Isabelle the Second was overthrown in
what is described as the Glorious Revolution, which ushers in
the Seseno Democratico, which is a democratic or revolutionary depending
on who you talk to, six year period. So the
Saseno Democratico was a huge shift in Spain because it
was the very first time that a system was developed
which lasted for the next several decades. That was really
critical in forming kind of the political nullification of a
lot of the revolutionary energy, while also definitely moving the
needle in terms of liberalizing influences through the formal government.
It was a very open period with the least formal
repression of ideas and organizations, political organizations, radical organizations in
this initial period. Now, what happened was the conservative and
liberal parties worked out a system that the largest establishment
parties developed what they called the peaceful turn alterno pacifico.
It was informal, but it was agreed upon where they
would determine in advance the results of a general election
so when you have a when you have a kind
of constitutional monarchy, you have the monarchy, which is the
symbol of order and continuity, but then you have the quartes,
which is where the various political parties do their business
and actually run the government. And they worked out the
system where they would just alternate being in power with
one another. So this had a again, like I said,
a kind of deradicalizing effect where it pushes the extremes
to the edges. And really fundamentally, what it would look
like is if you go to let's say any site
or Wikipedia and you look at who the prime minister
of Spain was, you'll notice there were just a handful
of generals and politicians that were just switching off. And
there were several people who were prime minister five or
six times in this period, going all the way into
the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: So can I ask you a question about the cartoon
that's up there. Yes, the guy up top has interesting physiognomy.
Speaker 2: I honestly, I'm not one hundred percent sure. I can't
remember who he was, but he was essentially a he
was a little worm. I don't think he has that
physiognomy because I believe that he was a genuinely well,
now that I think of it, him being an actual
Spanish politician wouldn't necessarily do anything, but it was a
here's our solution and more and mora. You know, these
are these are representatives of liberals and conservatives switching off
between each other, but also speaking from you know, saying
the exact same thing and running the system and that
this is the big solution by mister political operator. But
I'll check that out. That's that is an interesting observation.
So into this environment comes Giuseeppe Finelli. He was a
Neapolitan Italian Republican. So remember Italy was not unified until
later in the nineteenth century, so he was from Napoli
and he was a veteran of the eighteen forty eight
Revolution in Italy. He was a veteran of Garibaldi's Sicilian
campaign of eighteen sixty. Remember Garibaldi was seen as a
great unifier of the nation of Italy. Finelli was a
member of an organization called Young Italy, which was one
of the primary Italian nationalist organizations. That Finelli was a
hancho of. Mazzini is another name that you will recognize
associated with Young Italy. If you ever dive into it,
it's really interesting because again they're unifying the country, but
there's all these various political channels. So he also participated
in a Polish uprising in eighteen sixty three, just as
a radical revolutionary. And again who was Poland fighting against.
Consider the Third Italian War of Independence against Austria in
eighteen sixty six. So remember Italy and Austria, Austria Hungarian Empire.
If you look at anything in the eighteenth and nineteenth century,
you'll see that a lot of Italy was under the
boot of the Austrians, and they had a lot of
influence through the rest of the peninsula because of that,
a lot of commercial sway and finances.
Speaker 1: I'm far from an expert. I need to stop talking
about it right now because I'll start saying dumb things
right away.
Speaker 2: But that's where a lot of the struggle was in Italy,
and Finelli was a veteran of this, and again he
had been a revolutionary for several decades at this point
in time. He was elected to Italian Parliament in November
eighteen sixty five. And this is kind of it's going
to sound quaint now, but as an Italian parliamentarian. He
could travel by train for free in multiple nations, not
just Italy, so he could travel all over Italy for free.
There were some there was some arrangement where he could
go through France essentially for free, and so he became.
This gave him a huge leg up for spreading the word.
He tied in with Bakunin at some point, meeting him
in a summit in Italy in the eighteen sixties and
possibly having corresponded with him for a while before that,
because again here's this republican, you know, political leader who's
fighting against the kind of regressive elements you know in
his thinking in Italy and especially against the Austrians to
try to free his country, and radicalizing continuously through this
process and ideas we're getting more and more and more
radical in Europe at the time. So he ties in
with Bacunan through the iw A International Workingmen's Association and
is charged with prosthalizing their libertarian vision in Spain. So
again he spoke only French and Italian. But the all this,
the records and testimonies of Spanish anarchists who met him
said that you know, they were able to figure out
through his passion like almost like an electric rod. The
the spirit of what he was saying was communicating with them.
Speaker 1: But what would you how would you definearian here, because
you know, libertarian nowadays pretty much means globalist, free market globalist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good that's a good point. So libertarian
originally meant essentially anarchists anarchism with personal freedom versus collective anarchism,
especially as it relates to people voluntarily organizing themselves as
well as having a little more there's more of an
allowance for personal property to a certain degree. And we'll
get in we'll get into where some of these arguments
were coming from. But that was the basic, the basic idea.
It's not centralized, it's not based on you know, a
temporary state as Marx advocated, and it's not there's a
lot of arguments when it comes down to it with
anarchists about which is why there's so many kind of
versions of them. And we'll talk a little bit about
where those ideas come from, but broadly, that's that's the
basic idea, is that it's it's it springs forth from
an individual person. It isn't it isn't theoretical, it isn't philosophical,
it isn't historical and scientific. It's an individual spirit longing
to be free.
Speaker 1: Gotcha.
Speaker 2: So this is a really critical, you know, point to make,
which is that the International Workingmen's Association, which again established
in eighteen sixty four and ended, depending on you know,
de facto and de jure eighteen seventy two or eighteen
seventy six, and so again this is a post eighteen
forty eight international Congress of the broad left, broad coalition
of mutualists, anarchists, socialists, secularists, republicans and various radical leftists.
So founded twenty eight September eighteen sixty four in London
by an international group which was largely British because it
was in London, but there were French, a big French faction, Irish, Polish,
Italian and German delegates, and one of those delegates from
Germany was then obscure journalist Emmigrey Karl Marx. He was
very obscure in eighteen sixty four, he volunteered to draft
documents and help put together the formal plan. And this
is really important because he became automatically extremely influential. Everyone
was like, oh, he's he's excited to put together, you know,
all the boring details that other people, other people wanted
to talk to each other about, like abstractions, and Karl
Marx says, I'll put together the formal program, which gives
him a huge leg up. So the first thing he
drafted was the address and the provisional rules of the
International working Men's Association. So they developed parameters out of
the gate initially for trade unions and defined what we
see as like progressive government policy on education and labor regulations.
So there was a pragmatic element of what they were doing,
and then there was like a more philosophical considerations taking place,
plus an awful lot of politics taking place internally, like
how would they relate to the rest of the world.
So there was a split almost immediately. The fractures started showing,
but it wasn't a formal split between the statists, which
was essentially the Marxists who believed in a working with
the state as well as you know, post revolution, there
being an element of a state before they achieve you know,
a utopian anarchist scheme, and the anarchists who are like,
we have to be principled and we're only going to
fight for what we want, which is the annihilation of
the state and no replacement of the state with another state.
So that formal split really happened in eighteen seventy and
then there was a foal schism by eighteen seventy two.
The symbol at right is the Spanish anarchist leaning chapter
of the International Workingmen's Association, which they called the Spanish
Regional Federation of the IWA. Its initials were fre ai T.
The very first congress in Spain was in Barcelona, again
with that nucleus of people who had engaged with Finelle,
and so going into this IWA, the Spanish representatives of
with the IWA, their formal people were almost entirely anarchists
at this point when Finelle went around the country and
some others went around the country as well, but their
anarchist message really resonated with real radical and again remember
this is a period where the more state oriented and progressive,
you know, slow evolution type liberals and socialists are seeing
working in that system as being the way that they're
going to get what they want, whereas the IWA is
outside the system, and the anarchists are the biggest faction
by far in Spain, So how quickly did they grow again?
Eighteen sixty nine, eighteen seventy there's this formal organization and
then by eighteen seventy three there were twenty nine thousand
formal dues paying members in Spain. There were never more
than two hundred members of this organization in Madrid, which
is the seat of government of Spain. So h there
were anarchist factions in Madrid, but Madrid was primarily non
anarchist in in terms of what the program was for
how people were seeing the future. This is also considered
this Spanish group that's associated with i w A is
considered the predecessor to the to the CNT, which is
the largest anarchist organization and uh political party and labor
union in Spanish history. So you've got AIDS AKA, the
International Alliance of Social Socialist Democracy. So we were talking
about Finelle right and how influential he was and how
much his message resonated with the Spanish Finelli was just
a member of an eighteen man nucleus of anarchists that
were a faction within the IWA headed by Bakunin, and
they sent many, many representatives to Spain. Because of the
revolutionary Foemen taking place there, and because they wanted to
head off the Marxist tendency within the IWA at the past.
So it was not only to get buy in in Spain,
but it was also to recruit formally people in Spain
who would want to engage with the IWA as well
as they knew with contacts that they had, you know,
through these established networks that have been developing, especially since
eighteen forty eight between Spain and France in particular, but
just the general international socialist and leftist bent as it
was maturing, and so this was their opportunity. So they
actually sent quite a few people into Spain. And this
is a photograph here probably taken in Madrid with Giuseppe
Finelle right here Fernando Garrido, Aristide rey Eleri Recluse and
Giuseppe Finelli, like I said, and then Jose Maria Oorense.
So these are a couple of Spanish representatives who become
very important to this organization and the Spanish the Spanish
group associated with the iw A. So there were among
the travelers there were several oops, sorry, there were several
Italians and a Russian Leon Meshnikov, and Elias. Elias Recluse
was a Frenchman, so it's a very interesting group of people.
But they Recluse understood some Spanish. He'd been in contact
with some Iberian dissidents for some time, and this is
really interesting when you look at some of the the records.
Recluse wrote a history of their trip at the time,
which I believe is not available in English. I wasn't
able to find a copy of it. I've seen translations
of it. I think it's only in French in Spanish,
although I could be conflating it with something else. But
it's very interesting because they talk about these other folks,
whereas most of what you hear when you read about
this trip is just about Finelle's mission. So as Finelle
was working with this core group of people in Barcelona
and Madrid and a few other places, these other guys
were spreading all over Spain and they were even participating
in some of the actual uprisings that were taking place,
particularly in the south of the country around Andaluthia. So
Recluse had been a member of the International Revolutionary Brotherhood,
which was a you know, this kind of foundational group
that Baqunan was associated with since eighteen sixty five. So
his book is called Recluse Impression of a Trip through Spain,
and so he was the one who identified these other
foreign radicals and revolutionaries that were part of this conversation.
And it's interesting because apparently hardcore Spanish anarchists get annoyed
by the focus on Finelle. It could be just you know,
you know what these spurks are, like, I know more
than you do, so they like to get passionate about it.
So I thought i'd share that. So now let's talk
a little bit about the history of the internationals, because
when when we talk about the internationals, they're really really
important in Marxism and anarchism, and this will kind of
help with the continuity of you know, we're talking about
the nineteenth century, but a lot of it is because
of the results that end up later on in history
in the twentieth century. So the first Internation National was
kind of the label given to the International Workingmen's Association,
as I pointed out, created eighteen sixty four. In eighteen
seventy two, it really split formally into competing anarchists and
like state socialist internationals, and then it was essentially dissolved
because of that faction factional split eighteen eighty nine was
an attempt to get it back together again. The Second
International saw the anarchists rematerialize, as some people were trying
to reconcile these groups with one another for various reasons,
but the infighting was such that the anarchists were officially
excluded in the eighteen ninety three Zurich Congress. That eighteen
ninety six London Congress saw anarchists such as Erico Mala Testa,
who's a name that if you're familiar with anarchs history,
will sound familiar. He challenged their expulsion at the London Congress,
which was a failure, and so essentially at this point
the Marxists were essentially running the show, although though there
were still non Marxist state socialist groups still participating in
the Second or International, nationalist sentiments which arose during World
War One essentially saw the end of the Second International,
and then nineteen nineteen the Communist International was spun up again.
This one was expressly Marxist, and not only that, but
was an organ of the Soviet Union proper. So it
was more like Marxist Leninist, which is a something that
I won't spend a ton of time on. But I
know that you and you and Thomas have talked about it.
So that's another Again, listen to those shows, folks, So
you know it sounds petty, but it's worth talking about
the kinds of things that were going on in the
IWA Congresses before the Spanish mission in eighteen sixty eight,
eighteen sixty nine. So the Geneva Congress of eighteen sixty
six saw something that we will all be familiar with,
which was the formal announcement that one of their primary
goals would be to establish a universal eight hour workday,
which they were very successful at. This idea really came
through the IWA, so when you see it around the world,
you know that's a thing that they accomplished. I'm not
gonna do the James Lindsay thing here. I think that
that's a perfectly reasonable expectation. As a fan of the
bundle of sticks approach with the AXD sticking out of
the top, I think it's perfectly reasonable to take, you know,
these kinds of ideas and you know, adopt them in
a pro social fashion. Take that. Vivek So then in
eighteen sixty seven and Lassan which is in Switzerland, very
pretty area. In French speaking Switzerland, there was the goal
of a free, compulsory secular education, which again was largely
based on the Prussian model, but we saw this spread
around the world. Consider at the time, like in Spain,
the free education that was available was from the church.
It was not compulsory either, so people could just bail whenever,
and was again instituted specifically explicitly as a secular compulsory
state run thing, because that would put the libtards in charge,
right like, obviously you educate the people, you you know,
you control their ideas total totally in line with a
Marxist position and effort. But there were plenty of other
people that agreed with it, including the United States government.
And then another one that's kind of interesting. The very
first time that they made a state stated a goal
that was for collective ownership of anything, was a state
slash collective ownership of transportation companies. That was the first
formal support for the principle of collective ownership. So in
eighteen sixty eight in Brussels cerial excuse me, serious conflicts
arose regarding methods and goals, and so when you look
at all the different versions of socialism and anarchism and communism.
It's all about like methods and goals. And so there
was a statement for global solidarity and a formal anti
war stance. Again and this arose in the context of
depending conflict between France and Germany. It's eighteen sixty eight, right,
So what kind of debates took place. So the formal
statement about this anti war stances explicitly, and I quote
the Congress of the International Workingmen's Association assembled at Brussels,
records its most emphatic protest against war. It invites all
the sections of the Association in their respective countries, and
also all working class societies and all workers groups of
whatever kind, to take the most vigorous action to prevent
a war between the peoples, which today could not be
considered anything else than a civil war, no more brother wars. Right,
Seeing that since it would be waged between the producers,
it would only be a struggle between brothers and citizens,
the Congress urges the workers to cease work should war
break out in their respective countries. So big challenge, right,
And this is the first time we see this sentiment
publicly stated in the world. We hear a lot more
of it in World War One as really as part
of the Second International as well. So what are some
of these other debates that start taking place here. It's
really factionalism and the kind of ideological disputes. So Pierre
Joseph Prudona was kind of a founding father of anna
archism and uh and just kind of socialism in leftism
in the in the nineteenth century. He had had this
goal of mutual exchange banks, which are you know, it's
a it's a liberalizing concept to free people from the
you know, the ownership of banks by capitalists. But the
Marxists disdained it as they stated that it possessed a
commercial spirit and it wasn't sufficiently anti capitalist. Right. The
idea was like, by moving away from the current banking
system and having a mutual exchange bank there you could
leverage with labor, you can negotiate with labor and not
just capital. And the Marxists were like, well, that that's
negotiating with capitalists instead of just defeating them. So we
oppose it. However, rather than this you know, this argument
being something that they would stay formally as a goal
or say it wasn't a goal as they essentially said,
we'll talk about it in the next congress because we
we want to resolve this with ourselves. The next one,
which is gonna sound really quaint, is about machinery. Right. So,
the the laborers, you know, a lot of them saw
machinery and mechanization is bad because it takes work away
from workers. However, it was also seen as necessary to
create the desired material conditions, you know, from the Marxist perspective,
particularly that would allow you know, basically, you know, super cheap, easy,
you know, post scarcity life, right, because a lot of
people were thinking, you know, let's not think about how
things are exactly right now, let's think into the future
where we going. Machinery isn't a bad thing if it
leads to this world without want. And so there was
a whole argument about, well, machinery is good theoretically because
of this, but it should be in a collective ownership,
et cetera. Again, these none of these were settled, but
we're starting to see these arguments that you will recognize
if you if you really know anything about the history
of labor relations and the ideological arguments there. And then finally,
the other argument that really broke out at Brussels was
around ownership of land and agricultural production, because again getting
back to Prudone, they had seen a lot of failures
in France of you know, collectivization and the fact that generally,
you know, tragedy the commons is a real thing. But
then it comes down to it can't be compulsory, so
it's volunteer. Is it done individually, is it done collectively?
Et cetera? Who owns the land, who's responsible for it,
et cetera. So again maturing these ideas and all these
different socialistisms are starting to refine and define themselves at
this point in time. Again right when these guys go
to go to Spain. So I mentioned Pierre Joseph Prudone.
He lived from eighteen oh nine to eighteen sixty five.
He's seen as the father of anarchism by a great
many people. He was already heavily networked in Spain at
this point during the eighteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Is he just because he was a member of Is
that because he was a member of French parliament?
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, member of French Parliament. And again remember the
liberal bent in Spain was very very frenchified. They were
very tied into the French government, so in the Spanish government,
among the liberals, this level of thinking was very deeply rooted,
essentially essentially anarchist. Again, these people are in government, but
they're seeing this as a goal, right, which we a
lot of times see as like a Marxian type thinking.
But it was, it was all over the place. It's
this a progressive you know, goal that they would get,
you know, however they could get it, whether it was
you know, procedurally and slowly or arrived at via revolution,
if the conditions are right for it.
Speaker 1: And I always thought it was. I always thought it
was funny that he you get left right from the
French parliament. Yeah, the liberals, the more liberals were on
the left, and Friedrich Bostiat the the current you know,
the current crop of people who call themselves libertarians. They
would trace their lineage back to Bastiat and he sat
next to Prudon on the same uh, on the same side.
Speaker 2: Exactly, which is uh. That's why sometimes every once in
a while I use intemperate words to talk about libertarians
because but but I will say this, I will say this,
I think I think thinking evolves over time, and it
really comes down to who you think your enemies are.
But uh, when I when I look at people and
I determine whether they're my enemy or not, I look
at whether they're a friend or an enemy, right, not
not based on what they believe or what you know, whatever,
as much as do they see me as an enemy?
And pro Don was he was a product of his time,
you know, post French Revolution of France. He described the
liberty he pursued as the synthesis of community and individualism,
which sounds pretty good, right, Like, I think that's the
balance that everyone really has to consider when you look
at these things. But he also stated that property is theft.
So what his key works there's what is property? Or
an inquiry into the principle of right and government? Very
quaint phrasing for a title. And he also wrote another
very influential work called the System of Economic Contradictions or
the Philosophy of Poverty. Now his he dealt a lot
with feelings and philosophy and looking at the way things were.
Karl Marx wrote a response he he had been kind
of Prudon was very influential in the left, especially you know,
eighteen forty eight, all these times when Marx is coming up,
and Marx is a product of his time. Another thing
that was taking place in the nineteenth century, eighteenth and
nineteenth century is there's kind of a split between science
and philosophy, and making your arguments scientific became really important
and Marx. One of the key things to understand about
Marx is he always felt that his approach was scientific
and not philosophical. And he wrote a response to the
Philosophy of Poverty titled the Poverty of Philosophy, and in
that he basically says, there will be all these problems
with anarchism and the Prudonian element, you know, and not
so many words, but I'm just going to put it
that way because it's non scientific, and the problem with
philosophy is that it doesn't it isn't as logical, and
it doesn't have this, you know, this method being applied
to it to prove the accuracy of its statements. There
are these there are these ideas that are felt, but
does that make it something that can actually exist in
the real world, which I think is a fair affair critique.
Remember that Marx was trained in like a Hegelian model,
which again I'm not an expert on Hegel. There's way
better people to think of than Hegel. I have to
sit down and read Hegel. I've I've determined that this
is going to be one of the things that I'm
working on this year, because there's a there's a basic
concept that Hegel outline, which is thesis antithesis, and then
you establish a synthesis, and that's kind of how ideas
and things progress over time. And that's it's it's see,
it's a major, a major understatement to say that that's
the way thinking progresses. But at the same time, like
it's it's a fair point, like you have these two
things that are in opposition with one another, and to
make progress you have to come up with a synthesis
of them, kind of like the ideologies that we're talking
about here. And so Marx felt that you have to
come at these arguments in a very logical, systematic way
to prove them and do proofs of statement, which is
what you see in Marx's work, whereas Prudone tends to
be more like this is a fact, and therefore rather
than arguing through, you know, the nitpicky elements of it
and worrying about super detailed argumentation, so One of the
really interesting things is that there's a really good chance
that Marx's early contention with Prudon was rooted in the
fact that Marx was very domineering and totalitarian like personally.
It started out in a softer version of that because
he was less established, but if he didn't like someone,
he would just he would dismiss them ideologically. And there's
a fellow named Carl Grun who had been in circles
that Marx was a part of in Germany. Marx bitterly
disliked him, and Carl Grun had been translating Prudin's work
into German, and so Groon was kind of an early
He was influential in these in these circles that Marx
traveled in in Germany. And there's a lot of the
kind of philosophical arguments that Marx came out of it
landed upon, I should say, came out of in disliking
these people and arguing with them about it. So like,
for example, Groun argued in a very Prudonian way that
humans are material beings, again not spiritual, not of physical,
but material beings, which is something that Marx would agree with,
who are by nature social They need the community of
others to survive, and so he called for a philosophy
of action. He felt that spiritual alienation of humanity took
place in religion. So and that's a pretty typical strange
spin that that atheists would make, which is that religion
spiritually alienates humanity. You know, Okay, so you do away
with it. What are you going to replace that spiritual
element with? Oh, with you know, society coming together? He says. There.
Speaker 1: You know, I always love the argument that, oh, you know,
humans are material, but they're also social. Okay, square that circle?
Speaker 2: Exactly why is that? And and you know, they make
their arguments about it, but it all it does, is it.
It always just proves that they that they chose the side.
And remember also in the nineteenth century that atheism was
the side that you would take if you were the
scientific cool guy, if you were a cool liberal, right,
and so they just automatically say, oh, well, the church
is false. I'll talk a little bit more about some
other arguments there in a second, but that that was
where this this position came from. They would just say, oh,
well it was false and it was man made. Because
you know, atheism is obviously correct, and so they just
frame it based on that and just are dismissive of
all spiritual elements whatsoever. And the fact that people have
these experiences, they just dismiss it. So this Groon Fellow
saw parallel in complementary development of socialist theory in France
and the revolution of critical philosophy in Germany. Whereas Marx
who's using what is essentially critical philosophy but claims that
it's science, right, and so a lot of it is
just like really nitpicky and silly, and it's and it
really comes down to people arguing with each other for
whatever their whatever their reasons are. So this is Marx
is coming into this world of these other ideas through
the IWA, these really influential French people who are very
powerful in terms of like their standing at the time.
And he's a young guy coming into this, you know,
seeing what's happened in France. And so how does he
argue against philosophy because you know, the philosophers are the
ones who are most influential in this group, And he
says philosophy gives undue priority to ideology over material substructure.
I think there's something fair there, but at the same time,
this is just a route between the two because he's
talking about like you have to be really scientific, even
if what he's really doing is just advocating his own
philosophy and claiming its scientific and not philosophical. So I
apologize for that long digression, but it's really important to
understand because it's really the core argument between the anarchists,
and in this case, I'm just embodying them in Karl
mar on the left and Mikhail Bakunin on the right,
Mikhail Bakunin being really the inheritor of Prudon's standing because
Prudon died in eighteen sixty five, and so Mikhail Bakunin,
who was a Russian anarchist, became the leading international voice
for that orientation. And what it comes down to is
Karl Marx believed that materialism and process like these historical
processes were scientific and they could be proven scientifically, and
then therefore he could make his predictions because he's a
man of science and logic and he's looking at the
material conditions that everything are rooted in and how they develop.
So he was a historical materialist, that's, you know, the
basic way of describing him. He saw societies as developing
through material development and class conflict, with specific preconditions required
to make that progress. He had the same goal, supposedly
of a stateless system. However, but Kewnan argued that Marx
was a statist and an authoritarian, both in his theory,
you know, which is rooted in the concept of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, where there has to be some
sort of state, you know, as an interim where the
proletariat makes its assertions and develops the system of you know, socialism,
state socialism and then communism over time, where they will
eventually arrive at the same desired goal as the anarchists,
whereas the anarchists saw that as something that would deteriorate intotlitarianism.
And who's that Jewish linguist. I can't think of his name,
all of a sudden, the anarchist that everyone knows about,
the libtard Oh, Chompsky, Chompsky, thank you, gnom Chomsky stated
that Bakunin's prediction that Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat would
deteriorate into totalitarianism is totalitarianism is the only or one
of the few accurate predictions in the social sciences that
ever took place. So he calls Mikail Bakunin a social
scientist even though he was just a really a passionate,
idealistic revolutionary. And Karl Marx would turn over in his grave,
which I hope he does constantly to see someone make
this statement that that Chomsky made, thank you. So I
want to also point out a couple of things about Bakunin.
One of the things is when you when you look
for material to read about Pacunan, there's there's not tons
of it. He has lots of incomplete little writing.
Speaker 1: Well, I think there some people may assume he is
part of a certain tribe, but he certainly wasn't. He
was actually Russian, like his dad was a Russian diplomat. Yeah,
they lived nowhere near near the Pale. I mean they
were they right near Moscow, and they had servants, and yeah,
I mean this is a guy who he's a Russian
who actually came from from some considerable means.
Speaker 2: Yeah he was. He was Russian nobility, and he was
one of the things I remember constantly reading about but
not seeing a lot of proof of it when I
was a young man and I wasn't quite as wise
to the wink winks in this area. I'd be reading
material about anarchism and about Bakunin, and Jewish writers would
describe him as an anti Semite. And really what he
was talking about a lot of the time is Karl Marx,
who who will also sometimes see described as an anti Semite,
even though he was the grandson of a of a
long line of rabbis, and then his father wasn't a rabbi.
His father supposedly was baptized but raised Karl Marx primarily
you know, non non religiously, but cunan. You know, when
when you look at your your series that you're doing
with doctor Johnson right now, about two hundred years together,
Bikunin was coming out of Russia, you know, in the
nineteenth century, seeing the way that Jews behaved commercially and
so on, and was commenting on it, and that makes
him an anti semi right. That's really where that that
criticism of Pecunin is is that his anti Semitism was
based on real things that he saw taking place. And
if your concern is the peasantry and righteousness, you're not
going to defend the Jews of the pale. It's just
it's there's no scenari that would happen.
Speaker 1: Oh, you're allowed to celebrate certain behavior. If you criticize it,
that's when it becomes a problem.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly. Whereas Karl Marx, you know, I don't have
prepared statements on this topic, but his his critiques of
of of Jews that are described as anti Semitic are
more about the the religious practices and organizations and as
well as a lot of the kind of the the
commercial behaviors. Again fair, fair critiques as a Jewish person himself,
but you know it's I think they make too much
of the Cunan's supposed anti Semitism. Uh, it's just people
that Jews don't like are anti Semites, is where that
comes from. But I don't like Michael, but Cunan he
was one of his most famous statements from his posthumously
published God in the State, which is basically a fragment
of a of a book that was kind of put
together from a bunch of his writings. He was a
really disheveled man, as you can see on the right.
He would sit down and scribble things out on whatever
he could whatever he could find to write on, and
other people would put them together for him. He was
very passionate and reactive like that. He he stated, if
God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
And then, you know, here's another one that'll sound familiar,
you know, sla Lynsky said essentially the same thing, saying
that this was the belief of the Jews. But this
is Bakunan, the supposed anti Semite, saying this. But here
steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free thinker,
in the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of
his beastial ignorance and obedience. He emancipates him. He stamps
upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity in
urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge. However,
so this is a classic Libtard, you know position, right,
anti anti clerical, anti religious position. However, he also was
very critical of the the revolutionaries themselves and really the
concept of power. And I think this will resonate You'll
understand what he's saying about marx and Marxists is true.
But it's also a something that we should examine within ourselves.
Have we internalized this thinking too much? Like with you
know libertarian priors quote, if you took the most ardent
revolutionary vested him in absolute power, within a year, he
would be worse than the czar himself. So he had
this extremely revelutionary framing. But he was constantly critiquing the
danger of the revolutionary state in particular particular. So this
is the push pull between these two men in particular,
not just the ideologies, but a lot of it came
down to the men disliking each other. Marx was pushing
for the International, the IWA to develop a single platform,
and he wanted to require the establishment of workers' parties
in each country that would follow the same program, the
really communist International. That's what he wanted all along, whereas
this organization was originally supposed to be just everyone spreading
their ideas and the best idea would win, right, So
that is what's driving but Cunan and his people to
make contact in Spain. It was to spread the ideas
in Spain, but also to get strength in this international
organization for the anarchist idiom. So that's a lot of
that's a lot of background, And what I want to
do is I want to point out where you get
a lot of these, the factionalism and all the different
subisms and the modifiers, the adjectives that are applied to
various ideologies from the from the left, and this is
just real basics. So obviously you have the three key
strategies that are big differentiators between these different groups, and
you'll see that in these arguments that are taking place
and where people kind of bucket themselves or they apply
these modifiers to themselves. So obviously you have the revolutionary
and I have this on the far left side for
good reasons. You have the revolutionary leftist strategy, which is
that you don't legitimize the regime regime by participating in
the formal political process, so you organize solely to develop
alternative and ideological institutions that are under your control outside
of the existing system. You advocate violence against both the
state and your political enemies, which also includes like you know,
clergy and so on, and they use inflammatory rhetoric. The
pragmatic strategy is that you engage in collaboration with the
government if it achieves your goals, but you're generally revolutionary.
You organize to both develop alternative institutions as well as
to mobilize politically, like legally in the system you seek
the appearance of legitimacy, and internally these people are conflicted
about the use of state power against other radicals, Like
they want to suppress the other radicals that oppose them,
but they also understand that that could be used against them.
They have inconsistent rhetoric. And then there's the reformist tendency
or strategy in leftism. They primarily work toward their goals
through the legal political processes, whether they do everything legally.
When I say legal political processes, I just mean the
formal state. It's like the Democrats. Now, they violate the
law all the time, but it's done through this state.
They organized to engage age primarily with the legal political process.
They condemn violence, right, but accept the use of force
against radicals. So they talk all the time about you know, peaceful, legitimate,
you know, authority and or legitimate processes and democracy and
all that bullshit, But they accept the use of force
against their enemies and they use careful rhetoric. So I
point that out because when you look at all these
different parties, you'll notice a lot of the argument is
about not about what their goals are, but about how
they get there. And so after this mission to Spain
and the the IWA starts grouping together these Spaniards and
figure out where they're going to have a congress, where
their headquarters is going to be, kind of what their
program is going to be. They end up focusing on Barcelona,
and it's because Barcelona embraced this program, you know fully,
and so they their first Workers Congress was eighteen seventy
in Barcelona, and it was seen as a victory of
collectivist anarchism and a politicism over state socialism as it
relates to Spanish participation in the international. So essentially the
IWA Congress in Spain is not working with the Spanish government.
It's excluding all together the the Marxian and the collaborationist
groups in Madrid, and they're just not interested in it.
And because this message has come through to them, so
why anarchism and not Marxism? Right, So the way that
these ideas spread was through and and engagement with the
i w A was spread through these anarchist oriented groups.
And there's this really interesting concept from Aselmo Lorenzo and
some other folks on some Lorenzo is the man pictured
here he's seen as a godfather and really like a
historian of Spanish anarchism. He and a collaborator name Tomas
Gonzalez Morogo, who owned an engraving shop and publishing house
which was interestingly in Madrid, but they were sending material
all over the country of Spain in Spanish, whether it's
their works, whether it's works coming from Bacunan and other people,
a lot of it was actually Spanish anarchist material. They
arrived at this idea where they would say, let's explain
our own history and our own beliefs. And Gonzalez Morago
and Somelmo Lorenzo stated that anarchism and cauralism were expressions
of the same Spanish feeling. Again, it's not this scientific process,
it's this feeling in the Spanish that they felt incommon.
And while they were enemies because they were split on
the really around the church is the biggest split between them.
They felt in their way of trying to argue and
get people to come over to their side, is that
they're saying, we hate political farces like the Carlists. We
have a longing for a richer and deeper social life
that you still see in some parts of you know, Spain,
especially Carlists Spain. You still see this in the towns,
you still see this all over the place. But we
want to see social moral reform, just like them, except
for the anarchists who are focused in the cities and
and Lucia, where they feel like that the people on
the bottom of the totem pole get the raw deal.
Theirs is a totally different miss and they feel that
there the Church is suppressing these people, while the Carlists
embrace the Church as supporting them. I've talked about this
a lot. You have no bless obliege of Christian feudalism
in the north and in the southern areas and in
the cities, you don't have that. They felt that liberalism
and state socialism were strengthening the bourgeoisie and the central
government to the detriment of the working classes. So Gonzales Morago,
who was again the publisher, who was spreading a lot
of this information, he was a delegate from the Spanish
IWA group. He was expelled from the International in eighteen
seventy three, executed by the organization's General counsel. And because
it was he was an anarchist and so this absolutely
cemented the Spanish orientation with the international anarchist groups and
not associated with the Marxist groups. The Marxist groups did
really well with these state socialist and liberal groups that
were in Madrid, but not as a part of their organization,
and the real revolutionary foment ended up with these these anarchists.
Speaker 1: All right, that makes that makes a ton of sense.
I mean, yeah, it actually really does. Yeah, And that's
why I wanted to walk through this.
Speaker 2: It's it's a little it's there's a lot of stuff,
and there's a lot of details, but this stuff really
has to be understood. And like I said that, the
two books that I recommended at the beginning, the Spanish Anarchists,
The Heroic Years By book a great book. And he's
a really good writer too. He makes he makes a
really sympathetic case, and he's really sympathetic with the Spanish,
even framing his presentation on the Carlists in a really
sympathetic way like this resonates with him, or at least
he states that it resonates with him, which is really
interesting to think about. He became he became part of
that that that kind of wing of American anarchists that
essentially became less political and more like focusing on localism
and environmentalism as as he got older, And it's agorithm yes, agorism, yeah,
and and so it's an interesting it's an interesting position.
And I think that the overlap with uh that I
think a lot of people who describe themselves as libertarians,
you know about this overlap a lot A lot of
them don't. So it's it's interesting, it's interesting, and people
people should, people should read, People should not watch TV
nearly as much as they do, probably shit post less,
which is why you don't see me posting a whole
lot because I'm reading so much right now. But it's like,
this stuff is all very interesting, and it helps you
to have an informed position on these things, and then
also step back and compare it to your own situation,
especially as it relates to when you're organizing. You know,
what are the kinds of things in factionalism that you see?
So what was the influence of the mission to Spain
beyond what I've talked about in Spain when we step
back and we come and look at the impact to
the actual IWA congresses after the Spanish mission, So The
first one after the Spanish mission was the Basle Congress
eighteen sixty which had its first delegates from Spain and
they were both caught Alan anarchists, Rafael farga Ipelthier and
Gospar Sentignon. And then also the very first delegate from
America came to the Basl Congress of eighteen sixty nine,
Andrew Cameron from the National Labor Union that the National
Labor Union evolved into the Knights of Labor, and then
also the American Federation of Labor AFL from AFLCIO the
Hague Congress of eighteen seventy two. So this is after
the Paris Commune, which is really important. The Paris Commune
is a whole thing that we should probably dive into
sometime and I'd be happy to put something together for that.
But in the German French War eighteen seventy, the socialists
and anarchists of Paris barricade the city and defend it
against the French while also fighting against the excuse me
to defend it against the Germans, and then also end
up fighting with the state. And this is a huge
thing because the kind of slow evolution socialists and marks
and everyone has to respond to this, and they have
to have their own hot take on what took place,
and you have your argument for this is how things
should evolve. But also here's this really important thing that
worked for a short period of time and then failed,
and so you have to react to it. You have
to have your own take. And so this is where
everyone had their hot takes on the Paris Commune, including Marx,
and his take is really interesting because you can see
that kind of balancing of his own framing. But what
happens at the Hague Congress Cunan and Guillome. You know
that the two most notable anarchists who are big supporters
of the Paris Commune are expelled from the IWA, and
the anarchist wing of the IWA is reconvened at son Emier,
Switzerland and declares itself to be the true heir to
the International. The Spanish, the Spanish Friai t their own delegate.
They formed the largest national chapter of the anarchists at
the IWA. There were dozens upon dozens of them, and
they were on fire. They were ready, they were ready
for revolution. So what's taking place in Spain during this
critical time? The split of the iwa so eighteen seventy three,
eighteen seventy six, I call it a swing and a miss.
So despite the Bourbon Restoration, El tourno pacifico, the peaceful
term that I was talking about before, where there's the
two major establishment parties, Conservative and Liberal, had this system
where they said, we're going to determine, we're going to
easily manage these general elections. We're going to switch back
and forth with one another. It had a powerful moderating
effect upon the legitimist Spanish political life for the remainder
of the nineteenth century. In eighteen seventy three, the First
Spanish Republic was proclaimed and it fell that same year.
The president was caught Alan Federalist, Republican and anarchist front
sec P E Margall and we're going to look a
little more about who he was. Again, basically an anarchist
was put in charge as president of the First Spanish
Republic because that's where the energy was at the time.
It sounds wild, but it's very important to understand this stuff.
The Bourbon Restoration took place in eighteen seventy four. Again
constitutional monarchy is implemented. This tempers the restoration, but it
also moderates the extremists by giving them an outlet in
this constitutional monarchy, and that whole deal that Torno pacifico
the peaceful turn, peacefully switching back and forth between establishment
conservative and established meant liberal parties where they have alternating
periods of power, you know as facemen as face fags.
The radical parties are implicitly suppressed through this process, if
not explicitly done. So the fueros and home rule are
abolished in Basque Country now, so again, remember two decades before,
it was maybe three decades before it was abolished in Navarre,
and now it's abolished in Basque Country. This is a
liberal victory. The liberals always saw home rule as being
a like a tool of the carlists, the traditionalists, the
monarchists and Catholics against the central liberal government. So this
is a big deal. It's not a republic, but it's
probably even more moderating than the republic would have been.
And then Mikhail Bakunan dies in eighteen seventy six, so
let's talk a little bit about fransect P E Margall,
the first president of a Spanish republic, which only lasted
for less than a year. So he was Catalan. He
was a Republican politician for a good fifty years forty
seven years. He was a theorist and a publisher. He
was constantly writing, majorly influential despite his politicism, as they
would describe it, he was participating in the political process,
but he was fundamentally an anarchist ideologically. He owned several
newspapers and journals. Here's an interesting one, La Raison. The
Reason was published in Basque Country and distributed in the
rest of the country. Part of the reason the Fuera
were cracked down on at the time was because it
allowed some level of home rule where people could publish
in Basque Country until that was shut down by the
liberals in the central government in the eighteen seventies. And
then he published the Discussion Ladiscussion. He was the principal
translator of Prudon's works, and he published his own book
called Reaction and Revolution, which is seminal Spanish leftist material
and anarchist material in eighteen fifty four. I described it
as Hegelian Prudonian. It's Reaction and Revolution. It's this whole
thesis antithesis, synthesis approach. So it's really influential it's very interesting.
Highly recommend it. It's not super long. You can find
it in English online, and it's worth reading to understand
this mindset because you're like, but wait, I thought the
anarchists didn't want to be part of the state. He
was a face man in the establishment political process. Sharing
these ideas another concept that's really important to understand. In
Spain and France. Another element of Prudonism. Prudonian thought is
fundamentally Spanish pete. You will totally get this. Federalism was
the form of the First Spanish Republic, which lasted only
eleven months. It consists of largely autonomous territories, a multi
state nation, so which existed to facto exactly for centuries centuries.
It was the Spanish way of doing things. So this
was baked into their thinking. It was baked into this
counter that it's this push pull of Madrid with these
other groups. And again the First Spanish Republic was quashed
and replaced with a system that the Madridians preferred, which
was less autonomy. So there's a contemporary historian whose work
is interesting. I'm going to buy his book on Largo Caballero.
It's called the Spanish Lenin. It's only available in Spanish.
It's not available online. I couldn't even find an e
version of it, which facilitates my retarded Spanish reading, because
I can paste it into a translator and then look
up the Spanish worlds, you know, and do that hole
back and forth. I'm gonna have to grind it out.
But anyway, he's interesting, and he notes that related to federalism,
the federalists reasoned in reverse that the Afranados, which is
the frenchified Madrid liberals and moderates, who made the state
the cornerstone of their moderate modernizing project, did so to
the detriment of the sovereign nation because they considered the
nation would only reach the fullness of its existence if
the unitaryan centralist state. And again, when you say the
unitarian centralist state, I'm going to preface the dash which
he fills in. This is the existing like creaking, groaning,
cobweb covered superstate in Spain that had grown up during
the Spanish Empire and become decrepit and corrupt. So it's
the existing tax structure. The quinto stel rey quintos del
rey is an old rule which is that twenty percent
of all the loot, the treasure finds or the mining
going to the king, that twenty percent twenty to the king,
the forces of order, the government, ministries, and the monarchy,
if all of that was conveniently scrapped, thus proposing a
kind of nation without a state. So again, the idea
for this first Spanish Republic was a very weak central
state that would essentially be unable to deal with the
problems of the whole nation. Baked into the cake, as
you say, de facto what they had for centuries, a millennia,
and it was seen as kind of the natural way
of doing things in Spain, which was its greatest weakness, right,
So absolutely, so what happens. What happens with Spanish anarchism
during this period the eighteen seventies to the nineties, it's
kind of a radical bomb throwing period for anarchists all
over the world, including in America, although in America the
anarchists were a problem well into the twentieth century for
an anarchist, not American anarchists. I'm looking at you Italians.
I'm just kidding, not really, So what happens because there's
the moderating influence of that Torno Pacifico with the central government,
with the official institutions, etc. Well, what are they doing.
They are living their beliefs. They are developing parallel institutions.
So here's some examples. Francisco Ferrera is a hugely influential
Spanish anarchist and Spanish educator and organizer, very influential in
Spanish history. He develops the modern schools, which are schools
not run by the church, so they're secular schools. And
he has money because people love this system and they're
donating money to him. Very wealthy liberals are supporting him,
so he develops a network of schools and a publishing
house that spreads their ideas all over Spain, and people
start implementing these things because they have resources to do it,
and kind of the fragmented like exploration of these liberal
ideas is taking place all over the country. And then addition,
only they're developing these federations of workers associations and labor councils,
which is essentially a form of syndicalism, which I'll explain
here shortly on its own slide. They're forming their own
leadership class. So through these processes, developing their own schools,
developing their own libraries, developing their own kind of parallel institutions,
their labor parties and councils. They're becoming very influential in
their communities, and they are developing their own leadership class
people coming from the working class and peasant backgrounds. It's
less these sympathizers that are coming from the nobility and
the bourgeois classes. It's their own class of leaders and
thinkers that are very revolutionary fund ndamentally and possessed, imbued
with massive amounts of class consciousness and frankly seething resentment.
But they're building this instead of being like, let's rush
to revolution, it's let's establish our own thing. And it's
not to step out and live free of the existing
institutions so much as it's to have their own institutions
with which they can actually challenge those existing institutions when
the time is right. So the Federation of Workers Associations
and Labor Councils called itself variably the Federation of Workers'
Societies of the Spanish Region. They adopt the strictures of
predecessors and these ideas they're flowing from the IWA and
the International and all these anarchist thinkers and really become
really strong through the seventies and into the eighteen eighties,
and they begin to ride a wave of general strikes
all around the country. Valencia, Sevilla, Saragoza and other anarchist
strongholds in Andaluthia, Town after town would be going on
strike and demanding communist liberty communismo libertario, so like a collective,
a communal libertarianism. There were minor insurrections all over the place,
and the movement in the countryside continued for several years,
did not come into an end until nineteen oh five
when famine in the south because of the weather literally
starved them into submission. So the agitation has spread all
over the place going into the twentieth century. These ideas
are deeply rooted and it's multi generational at this point. Syndicalism,
remember when I was talking about how strategies and tactics
of how you get things as one of the key
differentiators of like leftist thinking and all these little dashisms.
Anarchist syndicalism moragmatism, yes, exactly. Anarchist syndicalism was a revolutionary
movement that was also fairly pragmatic, that had a goal
of transferring the ownership and control of the means of
production and distribution to workers' unions, and so that was
always their goal. This was a hugely Prudonian concept. And
then laiden life. Here I have Jacques Sorel or Georges
excuse me, who was a French social philosopher who vacillated
all over the place. He's a really interesting guy. Thomas
has talked about him on your show a bit. I
think it was on your show. Maybe it was, well,
we did a couple we did a couple episodes on him.
He very inspira inspired.
Speaker 1: The radical right or the radical right, but the socialist
right in the early twentieth ventury.
Speaker 2: The socialist right. And this is the reason I'm showing
Sorel and talking about this way is because if you
think about it, it's it's a very interesting idea. The
fallen Gay where you know the Spanish Phalanx that the
quote unquote fascist group in Spain. What they were really
doing is they were saying, let's take the ideas for
organization and what motivates people, you know, among the poor,
in the working class in particular, and let's let's use
that for our own purposes because we do acknowledge that
we have social problems. And Sorell it's really interesting because
there there were people who described just in some describe
his his position as really not changing but like redirecting
his his thinking and his orientation as like a revision
of Marxism that like breaks the link between revolution and
the working class and replacing it with like the national community,
which was which again Sorell passed away I think in
the in the twenties, but twenties, yeah, yeah, But this
idea and the way he described it really really made
a lot of the radical right groups sit up and
take notice because they said, oh, my gosh, look at
how powerful these things are, this this form of organization,
as well as the fact that it really does mobilize
this this group that has been radicalized, and we can
use to our own ends, you know, to support our nation,
rather than it being this international an anti national effort
that would be directed towards destroying the nation itself. So
the strategy was one you unionize workers, and you advance
your demands through strikes and other forms of direct action.
But then there's an inherent dilemma to that, which is
that work has become deradicalized as they get reforms over time, right,
like you get better pay and and the the This
is something that's huge in the within the the CNT
and that CNT fai kind of sub faction. And even
in the Spanish Civil War, the CNT is a less
radical but anarchist, but also used to working with the
central government and used to working with business owners and
negotiating and getting things for their people. But that can
deradicalize them. And in fact, when when you have that
whole argument around putting the revolution on hold for the
purposes of focusing on the war war UH and getting
along collaborating with the Second Spanish Republic and the and
the Marxists and the and the Soviets so that you
can get arms, that's deep, you know, that's counter revolutionary
to the anarchists, and so it's this whole push pull
that becomes a big thing. But the point is that
this method allowed them to build massive organizations that were
incredibly powerful in getting there and getting their way, as
well as mobilizing them for for the war that was
to come. So to wrap things up here, I just
want to show this model and I think it's useful
to consider this, and Surrell, IWW is trash. The International
Workers of the World, we're trash. There's a monument not
too far from where I grew up to them now,
which disgusts me because the people that are honored there
were rightfully dealt with by American patriots after World War
One in some some group violence that they were trying
to instill because they love their they love International Bolshevism.
But the the organizational method is very interesting and it's
this is very similar to the model utilized by the CNT,
the Spanish CNT, to mobilize and and organize. It's a
little more centralized form of cynicalism, but is still considered
under the blanket of a voluntariist type of organization in
the in the kind of anarchist and socialist miliu. So
the idea is that you have this structure of these councils,
these work councils and representatives engaging with one another, and
the cities have their own councils that are broken up
by these shop unions, and they have delegates that go
to other cities and to other unions, and they go
out to the individual they're organized at the office level,
and you know, the specific industry that are people in,
people are in and everything like that, and this whole
structure allows them to organize and be able to communicate
with vast sweeps of the culture. And that is really
an incredible model. And again I'm not saying we should
become syndicalists or anything like that, but I'd say it's
an incredible, incredible model for organizing people in like a
pragmatic way that Surrel saw and the more radical rights
saw after the left had been using it as something
to consider. And when you are in the position we're in,
which is that you know, we've been essentially denationalized and
you know, deracialized, we need to reconsider the ways of
organizing and you at least have to be open to
exploring things that have been successful in the past and
taking what's useful Bruce Lee style and discarding what isn't.
And the anarchists, despite the poverty of their of their philosophy,
were very good at doing this, and this is some
of the methods that they used. So that concludes my
my ted talk. Thanks for your time, and I have
some articles about this topic out of my substack. I
don't have articles about this specific piece, but I think
I'll do some threads and probably a support article with
some with some links to the to the various works
that I cited, because they're all available out there for
free online, and so I'll get that up with a
link to this recording when it's when it's in the
clear for non subscribers to to Pete's podcast. But thanks
a lot, Pete. Appreciate it, and I'm glad we were
able to do this.
Speaker 1: Oh, not a problem at all.
Speaker 2: This was great.
Speaker 1: It's always you always want to know what the conditions
are that allows something like this to arise. Yeah, and yeah,
the conditions were ripe and it was just one of
those things, you know. I have a tendency to look
at what happened in the nineteenth century and how so
many things were happening in so many different countries. Some
might say, oh, well all of this was planned internationally. No,
a lot of this stuff was happening organically at the
same time, totally, And I think that that has a
lot to do with the spirit of the age, and
I think you have to look at that. You have
to drop your materialism and start looking at that from
a metaphysical standpoint.
Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And that's
why I dove into the IWA, because it wasn't just
about the ideas, right. The ideas were there that the
natural inclination of the Spanish corresponded, I should say of
the revolutionary Spanish specifically correlated to to the anarchists. But
part of it was this struggle for the the argument,
the international argument against the Marxists, and frankly, the anarchists
lost the argument or again because of the nature the
nature of their of their beliefs, they they kind of
had to remove themselves from the way that the that
the Marxists were playing, and the Marxists took over the
international socialist movement, even though it was wide open at
the time. So yeah, it's the it was the spirit
of the age, absolutely, and and it can be hard
to talk about too, because I was talking to someone
who's a mutual of ours on Twitter recently, and he's
in the UK, and he was saying that he he
isn't as radically anti international brigades as I was, or
he has some sympathies to them, and and I stated
essentially that I understand that given that, again, the conditions
on the ground were different for for them than they
were than they are for in America, but they're also
different than they are in Spain. And you really have
to be you have to be open to reading these
things and reading things that offend you. Uh to to
understand where where people are coming from so that you
can understand your enemy. And if we listen to the
I mean, none of us are listening to James Lindsay,
No one who's going to be listening to this things?
That guy's worth a shit. But those voices these retarded,
Like let's let's ignore the reality of what we're actually
talking about and let's make claims that are totally a
historical and not based on fact whatsoever to to control
the argument and control the debate, like we need to.
We need to not only call those people out and
ignore them. We need to share real information and we
need to like engage with the material and ours is
the winning argument, Like you were saying before, you pretty
much have to become our guys to survive. And I
think you know, we're in a very interesting time right now.
No one knows what's going to happen with the Trump administration. Uh,
you know, he was sworn in today. He made some
very very strong statements about what you know, his priorities
are going to be. And I just don't think that
you're going to be able to reconcile this James Lindsey
and you know RUFO kind of moderate nineties leftism with
what's being what has to be done, and the mission
ahead and the threats and who the enemies are. They're
not going to be able to reconcile it. But you
can reconcile it with like our beliefs and our positions. Yeah,
you can't.
Speaker 1: The the atmosphere and the the ideology, the strict ideology
that allows subversion as such as we've seen, is not
going to It's an ideology. It can't change, yep. So
it's not going to be able to initiate any change.
And it's not only I remember one time he said,
classical liberalism hasn't even begun to know, begun to fight
kind of thing. And it's like all I see is
like real classical liberalism has never been tried exactly. Yeah,
And it just doesn't. It's not it's not understanding the
spirit of the age.
Speaker 2: Classical liberalism is the enemy.
Speaker 1: Sorry, yeah, I experienced this on on Twitter five six
days ago. I posted up from nineteen thirty eight was
a speech Hitler gave and he described what he what
socialism meant to him. And I just asked a couple
of people, I said, you know, what do you disagree
with in the statement? Nobody would answer the question.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They would go into like I mean, it was like
someone wrote like a paper or or copied and pasted
a paper talking about how Hitler was socialists. He did this, this, this,
this is I'm like, answer the question, what do you
disagree with in the statement? Well, there's this this? I'm like,
are you so locked into your worldview of socialism? This
is my meaning of socialism? This is my dad. This
is how I define it. Yeah, there's no other possible
way of defining it. So when you when I see
something that goes up against the grain, I have to
answer with my no, what do you disagree with in
this statement?
Speaker 2: Oh? You can't answer.
Speaker 1: Fuck you you're not my You're not on my.
Speaker 2: Team exactly exactly. I think the most important thing for
us to think about is when you you have to
look at what you actually want, what outcome? Do you want,
like outside step outside of ideology, I feel like I've
become post ideological, though I'll I could also there's also
ideologies that people could say that I have, and they
are the ones that are essentially third positionist, although I
also understand the argument that there's no such thing given
America twenty twenty five right, a totally fair argument, which
is why I ultimately say I'm post ideological and that
I step back and I look at it like this,
what outcomes do I want and who do I want
them for? It's like it's like things that happen to
people and what people do I care about. What people
do I don't care about, Like I don't have any
hostility towards people in foreign countries, but I it's not
my job to lift them up, and in our country
I care more about, you know, good people in the
people in my family, for example, or people that are
like me and want the same outcomes that I want
than other people who are I'm not interested in sucking
up to. And so it's like, if you look at
it from that perspective outside of ideology, who gives a shit?
I mean, if it's so easy to see, like you
were saying, that socialism in contexts means different things, and
he specifically used that word because it one meant something
in German. And it also stole that argument away from
his enemies. It stole the this is socialism, this is
this is caring about society and like social you know,
the social good. It became his. He owned it at
that point because he said, no, that's nonsense. I can
reconcile these things and neutralize my opponents because it isn't
what you say it is, it's what I say it is.
And that resonated with people. He didn't say it that way.
He just said, this is what socialism is to us,
and that's incredibly powerful. Yeah. Yeah, people.
Speaker 1: People have a tendency to look at ideology and think
that that's exactly how it's going to be. It's going
to be right down the you know, we get it implemented.
This is exactly how it's going to work. Nope, that's
that's not how it works at all.
Speaker 2: It's not how it works.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you created it, You created it in a lab,
and you haven't introduced it to human beings yet. I
would introduced it to human beings. You're going to find
you're going to find out that it's if it works,
it's not going to be it's not going to be
exactly how you want it, and you're going to have
to start with the trade offs as much as it's
going to be painful.
Speaker 2: I was reading I've been reading something over the past
couple of days. I've been about Deruti, who was the
basically the the anarchist militant like military leader during the
Inner Civil War, and all these arguments about the collaboration
of the CNT like councils with these other groups, and
de Rudy's position and whether or not we have you know,
real real transcripts of this really important speech that was
broadcast on radio in you know, in Barcelona, and all
this and all these things, and and it's so funny
because they they veer between the practical and the ideological
so much in the way people talk about these things
that it's it's just another form of obfuscation that takes
place or people or or it's really rooted in an
argument that people are having now, like there there's anarchist groups,
there's a CNT political party in Spain right now, and
all these other groups that like call them like traders
and betrayers of the of the anarchist you know, ideology
and the people. It's it's all this classic, this classic
argumentation that you know is totally familiar to people who
study this stuff, and and it just comes down as
so petty and pointless that the last thing we should
be doing is engaging in that stuff. You know, call out,
call out your enemies when they claim to be on
your side and aren't. But other than that, just like,
move forward, stop worrying about ideology, start thinking about results.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and if your if your enemy takes out
another you know, it does something that neutralizes doesn't have
to be death, but neutralizes another one of your other enemies. Okay,
that's something to be celebrated.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: I had someone on I had someone on Twitter this
morning who was like mad because it's like, well, we
can't celebrate that person because it's not on our side.
We can't celebrate what happened because that's not well fuck you,
oh it's ridiculous. Yeah, but you don't want to know.
You don't want to win, you just want to be right.
There are people who want to win, and there are
people who want to be right. I'm not really interested
in the people who want to be right.
Speaker 2: I am, yeah, I am. I'm very tired of engaging
with those people because it's it's just a waste of time,
all right.
Speaker 1: I will link up to everything here, Carl Doll dot
substack dot com, your Twitter, and I also I have
a link for your merchan. You will be in the
show notes, yes sir, and until we until we find
another subject on this to uh to podcast on, because.
Speaker 2: It's endless with it's endless.
Speaker 1: It's endless, all right, Carl, thank you.
Speaker 2: Pete s