Anarchist Infrastructure and Military Organization

Let's talk about how anarchist movements handled infrastructure and organization in the Spanish Civil War.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh yeah, that's a beautiful sound. This is It Could
Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes
putting them back together. I'm Robert Evans. I'm here again
with Dr James Stout. James say, hello, hi people, we
are in an undisclosed location. Is that going to get

(00:27):
you in trouble with your immigration stuff? Yes? Yeah, okay,
well let's just bleep out the rest of that, but
keep the thing with me asking if it's gonna get
him in trouble with this immigration officer, that'll be fine.
This is a podcast that all too often, as Garrison
and I say, winds up us being like here's a problem, goodbye.
UM and telling people about problems is important, but it's
also important to talk about solutions. Now. There's been a

(00:48):
discourse not just on the Twitter but on the subreddit
for um it could Happen Here repeatedly over the last
few months of people talking about like how it anarchists
handle things like large scale distribution of food, an industrial base?
You know, how would anarchists? How would an anarchist society
handle infrastructure in any meaningful capacity? Um And I think
there's kind of a wide spread idea among some people

(01:10):
that like, you have to have intense centralization um to
do that. Um, now, James, you are I wasn't joking
about the doctor thing. You do have a PhD. In
Your specific area of specialty is the Spanish Civil War,
that's right. Yeah, even more specific than that, actually, my
h My very specific area of a specialty is the

(01:32):
Second Republics in a period before the Civil War and
really like the first week of the Spanish Civil War.
But yes, Catalonia specifically like revolutionary Catalonia. And I guess
my thing is the anti fascist Popular Olympics in six
but more broadly Catalonia and Catalonia before and in the
Civil War. Yeah. And one of the things that's interesting

(01:53):
about this period is you did have one of the
fairly rare times in history where a significant number of
people were living in an industrialized Ish nation um with
with anarchists under anarchist principles. Um. And a number of
things were done in an anarchist fashion, including the production
of armored vehicles, the maintenance of large amounts of agriculture,

(02:14):
you know, power and whatnot. Um. So yeah, how how
how do how do James? Yeah, how do anarchism? Let
me tell you. Um, I should start by saying, like,
I'm not like a big, big theory guy. I'm more
of a sort of doing things guy, um person. But yeah,
so if we look at what we had in Catalonia
right in nineteen thirty six, the Spanish Civil War, if

(02:36):
you're not familiar, starts on the nineteenth d n six
with a coup. Right, Um, some of this will sound familiar.
Maybe you could listen to our podcast about Me and Ma.
But we have a military uprising against a leftist democratic
government that has just been elected in nineteen thirty six, Um,
after two years of a right wing It's called the

(02:56):
Biennio Negro, like the black by any and the You know,
you've lived through the Trump Ship, you understand. So we
have this coup that happens, and in cities across Spain,
the coup is largely stopped. The differentiating factors we talked
about this in our podcast is where the people are armed,

(03:17):
the coup is stopped. Where the people are not armed,
where the government says, then we weren't released weapons to
you the coup. The coup succeeds. Right now in Barcelona,
the coup is stopped almost entirely by the anarchists with
a little bit of help from the police. Actually, oddly right, um,
the one classic allies and the police fighting it together.

(03:37):
I mean it is also a very different kind of
situation with the I mean yeah, culturally, like, how does
that happen? How does that happen? Well, in Spain, you
have various police forces, right, and some of them are
created by the Second Republic, So they are police that
exist really to protect the republic from things that would

(03:58):
attack it. That does not mean that they do not
attack for workers, right, the Republic was often called the
Republic of order because they violently put down strikes and
the anarchists killed them. But in this instance they remained
loyal gil the cops. Yeah, that's that's a pretty steady thing.
But in this instance, the Republic was under attack from

(04:20):
the right, right, from the military, and in some towns
the police split for the military, but in Barcelona they
largely did not. Write we have various police guards, police
groups in Spain, federal and local, but the assault guards
and the civil guards in Barcelona largely remained with the republic, right,

(04:44):
And it's important to maybe if we if we step
back a second to explain the concept of a popular front,
then we can understand them more easily, right, And we
do for more detail on this. We talk about a
decent amount of this in our Behind the Insurrections episodes
on the Spanish Civil War and the popular fronts, which
aren't just a Spanish thing. The exist in France, they
exist in a number of other countries. It's the thing
that gets tried on several occasions, often successfully, at least

(05:06):
from an electoral standpoint. Yeah, yeah, it's very successful at
this time, right. And it's important to understand that the
e C, which trying to stake his Catlan Republican left,
had more or less been on popular front since nineteen
thirty one, and a popular front is basically this thing
we keep talking about, where what if everybody on the
left could get on the same page about stopping fascism.
That's the basic idea is like, you've got your Libs,

(05:28):
you've got your commies, you've got your anarchists, you've got
other weird junks of the left, and everybody agrees, let's
all work together to deal with this specific right wing
threat right now? Yes, yeah, exactly, Like we can put
our differences aside and move forward. Um, so that's what
you have in the Second Republic is explicitly called the
popular Front right, and so that is why the police

(05:49):
in Barcelona split with the anarchist Now, what happens in
Barcelona is that the military march into town from outside
of town and just pretty much get get the the
ship pushed back in by the anarchist right. All around town,
gunfights breakout. In one instance, um the anarchists are able
to persuade the soldiers manning a machine gun that their

(06:10):
class solidarity is more important than their obedience to their officers,
and then they turn the machine gun on their offices
and kill their officers instead. Unbelievably, this exceptionally fucking cool. Right.
The Spanish Civil War has all these amazing stories like that,
but that that's one of my favorites. Right, doesn't happen often,
it's great when it does. So what we have by

(06:32):
the end of the first week of the Spanish Civil
War is a situation where in Catalonia the city is
in the hands of the anarchists. Says this meeting that
happens between the President of Catalonia and the anarchists. It
may or may not be apocryphal or the exact words
may not be Apocypal doesn't really matter. What happens is
that the anarchists go to the president of Catalonia and

(06:54):
they he says to them, you're in control of the city.
The city's in your hands. I've been he actually the president.
He was liberal, but he'd been a lawyer for the
anarchist when they kept getting fired. Um, he said, if
you want me to be another foot soldier in the fire,
will'll quit my job. I'll just be another fight. But
if I can be useful to you as a politician,
I will as well. Right, So it's a submission, admission

(07:16):
from elected bogeour politician that like, the city belongs to you, now,
to the people, and it's up to you what we
do next. Right. What they did was they founded this.
They didn't actually sort of go right, it's all anarchists
right to salient anarchist groups of the CNT and the
f AI, the Anarchists Federation of Iberia and the National

(07:37):
Confederation of Labor. He didn't they didn't sort of be like, okay,
you were an anarchist control. They found out the People's
Committee of Anti Fascist Militias and they said this is
an anti fascist Catalonia, right. And then they began to
control the industries according to the principles of anarcho syndicalism, right,

(07:57):
which is the idea that the way to move towards
a more libertarian society under moving from industrial capitalism is
through industrial unions, right. And they were extremely effective. I
see this discourse a lot on Twitter or on Reddit
or in places where where um, I don't want to
just like dismiss people as tankies, but where we're because

(08:20):
like you know, maybe there's people can can listen and
we can talk and we can understand each other. But
where people go on the Internet to talk about politics
and say that like it's impossible for anarchists to do
supply chain, it's impossible for anarchists to do logistics, right,
And sometimes I think they think of anarchism as like
like only able to work in groups of five people

(08:41):
or something. There's this broad spread attitude in part because
of like some social attitudes among a lot of American anarchists,
certainly American anarchists who are very online that like anarchism
is when you live on a farm with four of
your friends, right, like that that it's very pastoral it's
anti industrial, and a decent amount of American anarchists are.
It's not uncommon to find people who are like an

(09:01):
archo primitivist or whatever. Um. But it is important to
note that there's a very long anarchist tradition as we're
talking about now that's deeply industrial. Yes, and like the
anarchist a right, the anarchist symbol that we all see
that comes from America. Right. The industrial workers of the
world come from the United States. The raised fist popular
salute comes from the IWW goes to Spain. Right, we

(09:22):
have this long tradition. But yeah, I think a lot
of American anarchists because it's easier to live and work
cooperatively in a small group somewhat detached. But what we
have in Catalonia that we don't have here is the
majority of the working class committed to an archo syndicolism. Right.
So people return to work and work very effectively when
they're not also volunteering also fighting in something like a
Druti column. Right. Um. These anarchist malicious with which we

(09:45):
can also talk about because I think they're very interesting. Um.
So for instance, one example, the elect the site is
the Hispania Sweet factory, right, Spain, Swiss. It's just an
automobile manufacturer. It's like the GM factory. Within three days
after the revolution. And bear in mind that most of
them have been out shooting at soldiers for most of
that time. Right. Big thing that they had to deal

(10:06):
with was the soldiers often us the churches. They would
burn the churches, so like it was an extremely vicious
urban battle. They were They had converted their facility to
go from producing automobiles for rich people at the time
right now everyone had a car, to producing technicals armored cars, right.

(10:28):
And you can see them if you google ce anti technicals,
the anti Arca because he's amazing, like Hodgepodge technicals that
they had well did these things on and they were
able to turn those around and produce weapons for the front.
Another good example to see as Castle pistols, right. So
as Castle is a famous anarchist leader, um and as

(10:48):
Casso was killed in the first day of the revolution
when they were fighting the Coupe. There weren't there wasn't
much weapons manufacturing in Catalonia, right, And we're very familiar
with that from our work on the Emma and what
they did was they set up a factory in Tarrassa
to make weapons. They made copies of ruby pistols actually,
but then they named them after as Cassa, so you

(11:10):
can still buy them. I sure you can google them,
you can find them. But these they set up a
weapons factory, right, and then under anarcho syndicates principles and
the principles of sort of unions controlling this production system,
unions controlling the supply chain system, which let's be honest,
they do largely anywhere, right, Like it's not Tim Apple
who buys a circuit board for your phone, it's someone else.

(11:33):
This is a slightly more globalized system with Apple phones.
But um, the the unions were able to set up
and change their production right, not just keep doing what
they were doing, but also pivot without the need for
people exercising authority over each other. Important understanding because you asked,

(12:02):
like how how would anarchists contendue industrial production? And it's like, well,
have you ever had a job that it had you
work in a factory or an assembly line or in
some sort of other industrial way. Have you ever been
a contractor and had a boss who sucked? Would it
have worked better if that boss hadn't been there. That's
the basic that's like the like it's entirely possible for
large groups of people to coordinate in a way that

(12:23):
is not a capitalist system where you're all accountable to
a shareholder, right, Like, there's there's a number of different
ways to do that. But there's a long tradition and
in fact, some corporations that are still around to day
and quite large. You can look up the mon Dragon
Corporation in Spain that have a lot of anarchist principles
in their organizing. Um, not that like it's an anarchist
company or whatever, but like there's significant, like significant amounts

(12:45):
of anarchist theory and why that operates the way it
does and has been significantly successful. Um. There's some other
examples in I think it's Brazil. Um there's a large
like steel corporation and whatnot. Um, But yeah, like there's
there's it's not there's nothing about anarchism that means you
can't have a factory producing armored cars. It just means

(13:08):
you're not producing armored cars for the profit of the
Blockheed Martin Corporation or whatever. Yeah, you're producing armor cars
because you are fighting in a conflict that you hope
will liberate other people, right, and that is arguably a
more important motivation. And then wage labor, and certainly they
in some cases increased productivity, but they were able to
sustain all the functions of an industrial society. And Catalonia

(13:30):
was very industrialized, much more so than the rest of Spain, right,
and that's perhaps why anarchism was so so important there.
And and yeah, very it doesn't require the arbitrary exercise
of authority for that to happen. And like you said,
there's plenty of examples of that. I think both of
us really enjoyed David Graeber's book. But this idea that
we move from one phase of society to another and

(13:52):
that necessitates a different form of political organization just isn't
borne out by the historical record. And I think Catalonia
is a really good exam put of that. Yeah, And
a further example of that is, in a pretty similar
time frame you're talking earlier, but not but maybe like
less than twenty years earlier, you have Nest mack No
and mock Nova in Ukraine, this kind of independent, autonomous

(14:14):
anarchist society that is extremely successful in war that the
Soviet Union does not exist without mock No fighting the
whites um as as successfully as he didn't stopping in
advance on on Moscow. And that's a rural that were
not industrialized, and in fact their anarchism was very much
based in kind of the traditional methods of organizing rural

(14:37):
societies in Ukraine. Um, And you have that a lot
in other like you have a lot there are a
lot of areas in which anarchism is common in rural
areas and it's more of like a state socialism in
industrialized areas. But you can have you also have this
deep history of industrialized anarchism and there's Uh, it shows
that there's a capability for anarchist principles to function with infrastructure. Yeah.

(15:01):
And if you want to look for rural anarchism, you
can look in southern Spain, right, there's if you want
to look at a small case study of the anarchists
of Cassas just is a great example of that, right
people can find I'm sure it's free online, it's a
pdf now. Um. But yes, it doesn't have to just
exist in urban or a rural society or between the two. Right,
Like whether Druti column went south Okay, the Drury column

(15:24):
is an anarchist column. There are a number of other
anarchist columns, but this one is the sort of the
pre eminent one, the one that was most successful because
they tended not to get bogged down as much in
fighting in rural environments where they were not skilled, but
they were extremely skilled, much more so than the military,
and fighting in urban environments, right, So they were very successful.

(15:44):
They went to Zaragotha and then fought there. While they
were there, they were collectivizing the farms, right, And I'm
sure some of that collectivization was forced. I don't want
to be like everything was rainbows and unicorns, but it's
a war. There's no side in a war whose handstake lane, right,
Like that's not minimizing or ignoring it. It's just stating that,
like you, you have to sometimes talk about the broad

(16:05):
strokes of what's going on with without pretending to whitewash
the fact that I'm certain ugly things happen there as well.
Yeah yeah, and like yeah, as you say, ugly things
happen in war. And I think if you if you
want that not to happen, maybe, I don't know, you
live on the Internet. But like um, the dirt Econum
then goes to Madrid, right in the seat of Madrid,

(16:26):
which was the also the first conflict with International brigades,
the first battle International Brigades fourteen. It was a very
successful battle for the republic. It was a bottle that
allowed the republic. If we look at the two battles
that allow the republic to exist, right, it's conflict in Barcelona,
the battle for Barcelona, the first days of the Civil War,
and it's a battle in Madrid right now. Madrid is

(16:47):
not as much of an anarchist city, is a city
with anarchism, but it's also more salient other socialism. Um.
So when the Drooty column arrives right and takes part
in the combat there, because they have been success because
they're very good urban warfare. And a lot of the
people in the Druty column didn't want Dorouty to go,
but he decided it was important to go as part

(17:08):
of this popular front right to fight this this huge
push of Spain's most professional soldiers. Right and that's where
Doruty you can read, I know somebody's working on an
unlike a graphic novel about him. Yeah yeah, yeah, and
you should give them your money if you have some
but able path. His book about Druty is very good.

(17:29):
It's an amazing book because you turn over the line
of notes and he's like, oh, yeah, this book has
taken me a long time to write because I was
involved in a resistance against Franco and spent twenty five
years in jail, solitary confinement. But what a chad. But
so you can read about Druty there, and Druty dies
in the Battle for Madrid. But it's also kind of
important to look at Spain is effective anaka Spain is

(17:54):
effective in fighting fascism. Um. What stops it being effective?
To my mind, it is not anarchist principles military organization.
The other thing that was that was impressive about the
Ruty column was that they had embedded army loyal army
officers and they listened to them and they learned from them,
and they said, Okay, we don't good at some stuff,

(18:14):
not good other stuff we would learn other anarchists didn't.
It didn't tend to do as well. Yeah, this is
a common misconception because anarchists are very much against hierarchy, um,
which doesn't mean being against professionalism or competence, right, Like,
it's the idea that like the hierarchy, for example, that
led several million young boys to get machine gun in

(18:34):
World War One because the people who were in charge
of them had not learned how machine guns function. Um,
was a problem. But if you've got someone who has
been training their entire life as a soldier and understands
very effectively how artillery functions and how machine guns function,
and because they have professionalized in that, it's not against
anarchist principles to listen to that person in a gunfight. Yeah, yeah, yeah, expertise,

(18:57):
it's not it's not. Yeah, there's not in battle with liberty,
right and so yeah, they were very willing to listen
to that. And in the same way they would be
in a like. Again, these people have worked in factories, right.
They understand that if you don't know how to use
a lathe, and you exert your liberty to use a lathe,
and your hand's gonna end up in a lathe. When
I when I go to a doctor and say, i'm am,
I have gotten this horrible infected wound, what do I

(19:19):
do about it? I am not yielding to a hierarchy,
I am I am accepting their expertise. You know. Yeah, yeah,
I think sometimes people I think your listeners are much
better informed than this generally, But people confuse anarchism with
a predilegtion for chaos and violence, and it isn't that right,
It's just it's a desire to to be more free
and to not be controlled and I have a boot
on your neck. And but to to wind up that thought,

(19:42):
like the reason that Spain that the Republican Spain starts
to lose is not because there are anarchists. And you
will definitely see this discourse on the internet. Many people
will tell me that I'm mistaken about this. It's my
fucking degree, but um yeah, I would argue that it's
because the Western world that did quote unquote democracy to

(20:02):
the end of them, right, Yeah, this is like there's
there's this. We talked about this a bit in the
episodes we did on it. But like there's this whole
argument that I'm sure you'll get into more between like
the socialists, the communists, you know, in the anarchists, but
a huge part of it, probably most of it is
that like the fascists are getting guns from other fascists
and tanks and aircraft often flown by professional fascist pilots

(20:27):
who are training for what's going to become World War two,
whereas Republican Spain has some old bulk action rifles that
got smuggled in through France. Yeah, and some mosens. It
was sold by America to Russia, from Russia to Mexico
and then from Mexico back to Spain. Right like um
and and yeah, these old males as all Well talks
about that are rusted and they can't open the boat
after they fire them and they reload their ammunition and

(20:49):
its ship. But yeah, and on the other side, right,
like the coup doesn't work if how does the Army
of Africa get from Africa to Spain. It doesn't swim, right,
How do these generals get from Africa to Spain air
lifted by other fascist nations? Right, we don't see that, right. Actually,
France wanted to sell planes to the Republic and the

(21:09):
early days of the war that Britain pretty much put
the Kai bosh on it. And there's an interesting parallel
with what you're seeing in Ukraine right now, because in
Ukraine you have a republican government um in a military
that has a fairly wide selection. Jake Camerhand just posted
like a vegan extremist who's fighting on the front lines
of the because it's like, yeah, there's a whole bunch
of different ideological tendencies fighting on behalf of the broadly

(21:32):
Ukrainian side there, including some very nasty ones. Um, but
you're kind of seeing what happens when a fascist power
invades a country like that to stop a republic, and
democratic powers send them the most advanced weapons on the planet, right,
which is all it would have taken to roll back
fascism in Spain, and then pressed. You know, there were
a lot of German Italian exiles fighting in Spain, right

(21:55):
because the Second Republic had relatively liberal, silent policies and
they knew the only way to stop fashion in Italy
in Germany with the rule at bank in Spain and
keep going right. I often have this, and I've had
this as we've reported on men or this weird thought
of like I'll be reading about the Spanish Civil War
in my office and I'll look at my gun collection.
Although if I took every if I had, if I
could go back in time with everything I have in

(22:16):
my house, all of the m O and guns. There
are a couple of battles that might have been turned
around by just that because while for one thing, because
modern semi automatic arms are much more effective than bolt
action rifles. But just like the level of armament that
those people had was um not there were eighteenth century
armies better equipped for combat. Yeah, I mean you see

(22:38):
people with muzzle loaders and stuff in the Spanish Civil War, right.
And then the only place taken term for arms is
the Soviet Union, right. And they don't just get arms,
they also get these generals, right, who are quote unquote
advising that they're not they commanding units. Uh. There's a
lot of Soviet politicking at play, right, and as much
as anything. And you can read like um, Peter Carroll's

(23:01):
book on the Abraham Lincoln Brigades or a brigade uh
Battalian sorry they want to st brigade. That will give
you a better idea of like exactly how this strict
authoritarian communist control really sacked the spirit out of the republic.
And you can see this in May of seven, right,

(23:22):
which is what jor Well writes about in his book,
right the May day when we see a conflict between
the non Stylinist communist, they weren't Trotskyist. To pume right,
very often portrayed Trotsky Trusky himself, like you can see
the letters that he wrote to them where he had
thrown disagreements with them if you care to look. Um.
But we see this conflict, the shooting war right between

(23:44):
the anarchist and the non Styalinist communists Unerstanis communists. And
what comes out of that is this idea among people
on the libertarian left, for its broad spectrum of libertarian
leftism that we saw in Spain, that it's not really
worth fighting for the republic or for the facts, because
either way we're just going to have the boot on
our neck. Right the secret police, I say, well, like

(24:04):
the secret police spent far, far, far more time going
after anarchists in the Republican Army than they did after spies.
Oh no, really, the authoritarian left spent more of their
time fighting anarchists than the fat wild crazy is it?
And it's never happened again. We learned from it, We
moved on, we've become better people. Yeah, yeah, it's great.
We were find now we've fixed it. For a lot

(24:35):
of the people fighting for the republic right, what are
you fighting for? And I think that's important that like
we remember that even in times when things are bad, right,
you have to think about what things should be like
you have to try and model that in what you're
doing now on an economic level, when you're talking about
like they come in they collectivize these farms. There's like anarchists,

(24:56):
like the anarchists in large chunks and like in Catalonian particular,
are kind of running what at the time as a
fairly modern industrial economy. How does that? How does that work? Like?
Do do you have any kind of like overall state,
like during the period of time where you know they
had reasonable control and also weren't completely overwhelmed with the fighting,
How did it function? Yeah, you kind of have a state, right,
you have this sort of people's committee, anti factious, militious,

(25:19):
but uh not really because things things are somewhat chaotic
rights on the state as we would maybe understand it now.
So what we have instead is is anarcho syndicalism. Right,
these unions going to other unions and organizing among themselves. Right,
Like you know the steel workers need X from the miners, right,
the miners and then the the tube makers need extra.

(25:40):
The steel workers and the gun company need X from
the from the tubemakers, right, and so organizing along industrial
union levels allows things to continue, right, allows the trains
and trams to continue, allows them to continue manufacturing unitions. Right.
So it's it's an eco syndicalism, it is. It's a

(26:01):
type of libertarian leftism. And then we see these collective
or sort of cooperative I should say, farming arrangements, right,
where again people people are farming, people are sort of
joining together their industrial small holdings and then delivering those,
contributing those to the city, to the war effort. And
there's something, as you see in Ukraine, right, relatively special

(26:25):
that happens in these times of conflict where people are
i think more willing to just step aside from the
am and I think that's always been that was a
thing for the Spanish working class for a long time.
But to step aside from the accumulation of stuff, right,
from the accumulation of individual goods and wealth, and to
say like, yeah, well let's all get stuck in together.
And I think that helped to allow that to happen,

(26:47):
helped to allow it to continue. But yeah, these organizations
between unions and collectives worked right, they functioned. You can't
argue that they didn't work at the Republican Army didn't
starve in a week or run out of fuel and things. Right,
These these anarchist columns were able to travel from Barcelona
to the Agostina and from the Agossa back to Madrid
like that. That doesn't happen if you're incapable of organizing. Right.

(27:09):
So in the factories, these people had already been organizing together, right.
They were on strike often right there. They knew how
to They had an existing system for organizing things because
they already organized to pay strike funds. They already organized
to look after other unique other parts of the C
and T when they were out right, they organized to
have policy statements on various things. So they had these

(27:31):
existing means to organize. They just didn't have authorities that
told people what to do. They knew how to work
together to decide what to do. Yeah. I had this
beautiful moment during the uprisings where I was in a
city um and I was hanging out with members of
a medical collective and the building that they were in

(27:54):
there was a couple of thousand square feet of they
were producing by assembly line Kim White's for clearing mace
out of your eyes. Um. They were producing like I
fax medical kits. They had racks of body armor that
had been donated or purchased with donated funds UM. And
it was all it was a substantial amount of equipment

(28:15):
that was being and and respirators and stuff that was
being organized as symbol put together, UM distributed, putting people's hands,
put in the hands of people who are going out
and utilizing it on a regular basis. UM. And it
was being done like with within the principles of kind
of like like a number of things can be organized
that way. It's it is it is handling the collection,

(28:36):
the distribution um of of of equipment and the collection
disbursement of funds like for potentially like thousands and thousands
of people. Um, that's perfectly doable under anarchist principles. And
anarchists have done that kind of thing a number of
times in the world. Yeah, Like if you look at
the example of the soup kitchens right at pro tearing

(28:58):
dine as a restaurants they called them right in in Barcelona,
a Madrid, they took over the writs right and sourced
food from rural anarchists to to feed people, right, rather
than saying like, oh, you know you have to buy feared,
you have to buy feod, you have to buy food.
You come here and anyone can eat if you're hungry, right,
and yeah, you see people doing that. Look at the
unit that we we spoke about Miama, right, the Crenny

(29:21):
generation c Army. They those guys they didn't have like
you know, no one was wearing rank, right, No one
was a general or a captain or or a sergeant. Right.
They talked and to our point before about expertise. Some
people we found out are the person we were talking to, Zara,
who was who was killed. Um was seen as a

(29:41):
commander by people because of what they wrote about him
after he died. But he never talked about himself that one. No.
In fact, he told us right that if some people
knew more, they've been in the fight for longer, they
knew the terrain, and then we'd listen to them and
they have a bit more weight in that conversation. But
we all just decide together what we what we want
to do um and that that works, right, because those

(30:01):
guys were very well respected right among the the anti
coup forces in Mihama because of their willingness to fight,
their effectiveness, and those guys have a good battlefield record
against the government troops. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, And like
it wasn't just again like it's not just five guys fighting, right,
it's also they were able and and in Miama we

(30:22):
still see this with like the underground and they called
the Development Committeels and the people who are they were
the people who did the shield walls and that kind
of thing. And people will be familiar with the George
Floyd uprising for them, they went underground and they're developing
ways to make weapons now, right, So they're the people
you'll see making three D printed guns. So the people
you'll see making improvised explosive devices, fertilized bombs, working out

(30:45):
how to make handmade to two rifles we've seen right,
Like and again they don't they don't need someone in
charge for that, right And in times of difficulty, we
revert to taking care of one another and getting things done.
We we don't contrary to I think what what we
led to believe, sort of revert to we don't need
like a strong leader, dear leader. We we we are

(31:07):
capable of looking after one another outside of authority in
the state. Yeah. And it also stands the point that
like accepting the authority of someone with expertise in certain situations,
like the fundamental way in which effective military is organized
tends to involve the existence of an n c O corps.
Right you, Every military that is good at fighting has
an in c O corp. Part of why Russia has

(31:29):
acquitted itself so unbelievably poorly in the fighting in Ukraine
is that that that does not functionally exist in the
Russian military. Um. It is absolutely the basic idea of
an n c O corp is that with among fighting units,
there should be dudes whose job and I say dudes
in the non gendered sense, there should be people whose
job is to make the functioning of that fighting unit

(31:51):
be their whole life, and they stay at that job
for a long time. They don't just like move up
and ship. They're just they're there to keep that unit
function n UM. And from the perspective of like someone
who is an anarchist, I mean as an anarchist who's
been shot at a number of times. When I'm hanging
out and there's like some grizzled ass fucking veteran in
the unit I'm embedded with. I'm gonna do whatever that

(32:12):
fucker says, right, absolutely, because you're crazy, not too, because
that's just good sense. It's the same thing as like
if you're in deep bush or whatever with somebody who
knows wilderness survival and they tell you don't eat that plant,
or they tell you, you know, this is a bad
place to camp for this reason or whatever. You listen
to them, like that's again, and you know, factories function

(32:32):
the same way. Having been on building sites, they function
the same way. Somebody tells you don't do that, it's
a bad idea, and they clearly have been doing it
more than you. You listen to them. That's not accepting
that you have a boss. That's accepting that you have
people who are more experienced and competent in certain things. Yeah,
and if you took but ineffective armies sometimes have it.
It's it's it's it's in the office of coal, right,

(32:54):
it's people who are in charge but maybe ought not
to be. But it's because of the status with that
wealth or something else. Right it And you see like
very effective fighting in the anarchist units right with men
and women and actually people who would were non binary
as well, like people who would call non binary didn't
call themselves out then. Um, but um, we see that

(33:15):
because they were willing to elect officers, right, but then
listen to them. And it wasn't it was listened to
not obey, right. But but that was an extremely effective
way of doing things. Yeah. I was having a conversation
with a buddy of mine who was a marine and
saw some very heavy combat in Iraq years ago about
like the way in which certain anarchist units had worked
over time, and talked about the fact that they elected

(33:35):
their leaders, and he was like, well, we didn't do
that obviously, but there were people you knew you shouldn't
listen to and people you did, and you understood who
you wanted calling the shots when bullets were flying, right, Like,
regardless of what the actual hierarchy was. It's just like
you know in the U. S. Military of a platoon
leader who was an officer who's been to college, and
you have a platoon sergeant, and they do somewhat different things.

(33:57):
But every reasonable person and who has interfaced with those
units will agree that like it, a good platoon leader
even though they're an officer and a higher rank. It's
going to listen to whatever the fucking platoon sergeant says
because they've been doing their job a lot long. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah,
you're a fool and you're arrogant if you don't write,
and that arrogance will find you out in a difficult
situation pretty quickly. So yeah, I think it's important to

(34:19):
look to look at those anarchists militaries, right, and then
there are lots and lots of accounts of the of
the anarchists and the Spanish Civil War. Julian Casanova's book
is It is one of my favorites that people want
to read one and married book Jinn of course has
written the Spanish Anarchists as well. So there are a
lot of books you can read about and some of
them micro case studies are really fun, right if you
want to look at like what is it like to

(34:40):
live on an anarchist farm in nineteen thirty six in
rural Catalonian Yale or something like that, like, and I
would encourage people to read them with an open mind,
and I understand that like the world was different than
than it is today, But to look at those historical
examples and realize that like what people were doing them

(35:01):
was fundamentally the same. Right. They were trying to take
care of each other and make the world better for
their children, and they didn't want the boot on their neck,
and they were all prepared to work together to do that,
and that that was an extremely functional way. And what
didn't work for them was being controlled by people from
the Soviet Union who maybe didn't understand their struggle because
they often volt it wasn't worth fighting anymore. And that's

(35:23):
true for communists to actually right, Like if you look
at the American communists who went and fought, and they
were overwhelmingly Communists who went and fought for the for
the International Brigades. The International Brigades were not the Republic's
army per se, they were the comm Interns army. And
if there is one group of people who was hated
more than anyone else, it was Commissars right, these people

(35:44):
who were sort of there to enforce his very strict
interpretation of what they saw as Marxist Leninism. So even
those people right who were communists might have had a
more slightly more libertarian understanding, didn't really take their well
to being bossed around and lost a lot of theirs
what they were fighting for because of that. Right, Cecil

(36:04):
LB's book is another really good book about that. If
you want to read that, well, I think that's going
to bring us to an end. Here, James, you have
a book about the Spanish Civil War that you should
probably plug here. Yeah. Yeah. It's called The Popular Front
and the Learner Olympics. It's about the anti for Olympics
that were held as an alternative to the Barcelona Olympic.

(36:24):
Tics explains how the Popular Front used sport to build
an anti fascist identity in Catalonia, and it used sport
to bring together anti fascists from around the world. The
Popular Olympics actually happened on the nineteenth of July, which
is the same day to civil war startists, and it
never they never occurred, but many of the people who
went to take part in the Olympics decided to stay
and fight. And so that's what my books about. It's

(36:48):
quite expensive, and you can I understand the people can't
afford it. That's fine. I keep saying I'm working on
another book, but I'm not working very hard or very fast. Yeah, yeah,
look it up, and someone's probably bootlegged it. Actually, the
book is often free at universities and other libraries, so
you have to go to your library and I'll see
I'm to get it. And uh where else can people

(37:08):
find you? On the internet at James Stout on Twitter,
same thing on Patreon. Those are my two main things.
You can find my writing a muck rack to google
my name. Yeah, and again help us, Daniel, please bleep
that out for the sake of James immigration cases. And
uh yeah, that's good. That's that's an episode. It Could

(37:34):
Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
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