Insurrectionary violence doesn’t produce socio-political organization --- their ‘new autonomous worlds’ are left indefinitely waiting

So what, then, is the central problem in the midst of all this positive feeling about the social anarchist approach to daily life questions? The answer for me lies in what Bookchin calls “the anarchist disdain for power” (2014: 139; as represented, for example, in John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power (2010)). And behind this, of course, lies the thorny problem of how to approach the question of the state in general and the capitalist state in particular. The best I can do here is to take up the most compelling historical example I have come across of the failure of an amazingly well-developed anarchist movement to mobilize collective power and to take the state when it clearly had the opportunity to do so. I rely here on Ealham’s (2010) detailed and sympathetic account of the anarchist movement in Barcelona from 1898-1937 and in particular on its failure to consolidate the power of a mass movement in 1936-7. I propose to use this example to illustrate what seems to be a general problem with anarchist practices, including those that Springer advocates. The Barcelona movement was based on the instinctive collective organizations of working class populations in the barris (neighborhoods) of the city along the lines of integrated social networks and mutual aid, coupled with deep distrust of a state apparatus that neglected their social needs and essentially criminalized, marginalized, and merely sought to police and repress their aspirations. Given these conditions, large segments of the working class fell in line with anarcho-syndicalist forms of organization as represented by the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), which at its height had over a million adherents throughout Catalonia. There were, however, other anarchist currents – the radical anarchists in particular – that often opposed the syndicalists and organized themselves (often clandestinely) through affinity groups and neighborhood committees to pursue their aims. But the overall structure of this working class movement was neighborhood based and territorially segregated. The CNT was “very much a product of local space and the social relations within it; its unions made the barris feel powerful, and workers felt ownership over what they regarded as ‘our’ union” (Ealham, 2010: 39). But it had great difficulty in thinking the city as a whole rather than in terms of those separate territories it did control. The militant affinity groups, for example, “were incapable of converting isolated local actions into a more offensive action that could lead to a powerful transformation at regional or state level” (2010: 122). The movement’s central weakness in the run-up to the civil war, Ealham argues, “was its failure to generate an overarching institutional structure capable of coordinating the war effort and simultaneously harmonizing the activities of the myriad workers’ collectives. In political terms, the revolution was underdeveloped and inchoate…..the revolution in Barcelona failed to generate any revolutionary institution……workers’ power remained fragmented and atomised on the streets, dispersed among a multitude of comités without any coordination at regional or national level” (2010: 168; also Bookchin, 2014: Chapter 8). The reluctance of the anarchists of whatever sort to take state power for ideological reasons when it clearly had the power to do so left the state in the hands of the bourgeois republicans and their Stalinist/communist allies who bided their time until they were well-organized enough to violently crush the CNT movement in the name of republican law and order. Even worse, the movement largely betrayed its own principles by practices that ignored the will of the people. The radical affinity groups pursued insurrectionary tactics that produced a “growing disquiet” about their “elitism” and the undemocratic ways in which they would launch continuous insurrectionary actions. They depicted their actions as “catalytic” rather than “vanguardist”, but most people recognized this was anarchist vanguardism under another name. The insurrectionists expected and appealed for mass support (which rarely materialized) for actions decided upon by no more than at most a hundred but in many instances just a dozen or so members of a particular affinity group. This created problems for everyone else. The anarcho-syndicalists of Madrid and Asturias complained that the cascading insurrectionary actions of the radical anarchist “grupistas” in Barcelona were disruptive rather than constructive. “Our revolution” they wrote in their daily paper, “requires more than an attack on a Civil Guard barracks or an army post. That is not revolutionary. We will call an insurrectionary general strike when the situation is right; when we can seize the factories, mines, power plants, transportation and the means of production” (quoted in Ealham, 2010: 144). What is the point of insurrectionary action, they said, if there is no idea let alone concrete plan to re-organize the world the day after?