I'm working through Revolution and Counter-revolution in Spain with my reading group. Almost every time I heard the "vote for Biden to stop fascism" argument this past year I thought back to when I first read about the disastrous popular front policy in 1930s Spain. Because supporting Biden or any neoliberal Dem on an anti-fascist pretext is ultimately just a sort of popular frontism with American characteristics, an especially perverse and obscene variation of the usual harm-reduction argument for critically supporting even the very worst Democrats. All Dems have to do now is credibly convince people that their Republican opponent is a potential fascist and the popular-frontists will fall in line to encourage the usual lesser-evilism.
On another note, I'm thinking back to that one young person who went viral passionately making the argument for voting Biden and for waiting to deal with the neoliberals until LATER (unfortunately I can't find the original video but full audio is at the start of the TrueAnon episode linked), possibly young enough not to remember that the Dems pulled a similar trick 8 years ago to get Obama re-elected. I know for a fact there are young zoomer progressives like that who honestly don't know better because they haven't seen this movie before, who listened to and repeated similar condescending arguments from liberals and even so-called socialists who should be old enough to know better.
I know this because I was one of those people around a decade ago, even after the short-lived Occupy movement brought the "99% vs. 1%" concept into the popular lexicon and helped to revive US class consciousness. Every zoomer who's radicalized and started drawing revolutionary conclusions so quickly with less life experience deserves a pat on the back because it took me until I was in my mid-20s, about 2 election cycles since I was old enough to vote, to learn this lesson.
Chomsky claims in On Anarchism that the communists (backed by the USSR) gained control of the Republican government and forced the syndicalists to disarm and dismantle workers' committees, under the pretext (whether or not they believed it - Chomsky doesn't go into much detail about the pro-communist perspective) that it was necessary to placate England, France, and the US, who were vehemently against the revolution, in order to construct an anti-fascist alliance. Is this accurate?
The Communist Party, POUM, CNT and other parties joined the liberal-led coalition that forced the workers to disarm themselves and dissolve their committees. The 3rd International's justification was the same geopolitical one you mention from the Chomsky source, and it's difficult not to consider that a complete betrayal of the fledgling Spanish revolution on the part of Stalin and his co-thinkers. They might have beaten fascism in Germany and eastern Europe later, but they failed in Spain.
POUM, meanwhile, was the result a weird merger between the left-opposition to Stalin's camp (including former proto-Trots) and right-opposition, including elements responsible for the disastrous opportunist Kuomintang entryist approach in China in the 1920s, but POUM's left-opposition elements were the ones closest to having a correct position, one where they could say "this is bullshit, under no pretext", then immediately leave the popular front coalition in August/September 1936 and continue building and supporting dual power while it was in danger of being destroyed the same way the Bolsheviks did in 1917 between February and October. Instead POUM, CNT, and the succdems followed the same path the capital-C Communists did and stayed in the popular front, allowing the libs to abort the embryonic workers' state and restore the bourgeois state only to later lose the war to Franco.
Correct. Some of the the syndies, including official CNT leadership, joined the popular front and were ironically seduced by liberal anti-fascist arguments, partly because they chose not to distinguish between a workers' state and the capitalist state. (Hence my earlier comparison to the even greater farce of "anarcho-Bidenism".) Like POUM, the capital-C Communists, and the succdems, the CNT fell in line behind the decrees to disarm the workers and dismantle the workers' committees without any pushback.
I'm working through Revolution and Counter-revolution in Spain with my reading group. Almost every time I heard the "vote for Biden to stop fascism" argument this past year I thought back to when I first read about the disastrous popular front policy in 1930s Spain. Because supporting Biden or any neoliberal Dem on an anti-fascist pretext is ultimately just a sort of popular frontism with American characteristics, an especially perverse and obscene variation of the usual harm-reduction argument for critically supporting even the very worst Democrats. All Dems have to do now is credibly convince people that their Republican opponent is a potential fascist and the popular-frontists will fall in line to encourage the usual lesser-evilism.
The absurdity of "anarcho-Bidenism", at least for any naive zoomer anarchist or baby leftist who failed to recognize he who shall not be named to avoid getting bonked with the clown mallet as an opportunist grifter, seems like an even more farcical version of the absurdity of CNT syndicalists falling in line behind the liberal bourgie Republican governments in Madrid and Catalonia, the latter of which labeled workers fascists if they refused to disarm themselves and dissolve their militias an workers' committees mere weeks after these foundations of dual power had been laid.
On another note, I'm thinking back to that one young person who went viral passionately making the argument for voting Biden and for waiting to deal with the neoliberals until LATER (unfortunately I can't find the original video but full audio is at the start of the TrueAnon episode linked), possibly young enough not to remember that the Dems pulled a similar trick 8 years ago to get Obama re-elected. I know for a fact there are young zoomer progressives like that who honestly don't know better because they haven't seen this movie before, who listened to and repeated similar condescending arguments from liberals and even so-called socialists who should be old enough to know better.
I know this because I was one of those people around a decade ago, even after the short-lived Occupy movement brought the "99% vs. 1%" concept into the popular lexicon and helped to revive US class consciousness. Every zoomer who's radicalized and started drawing revolutionary conclusions so quickly with less life experience deserves a pat on the back because it took me until I was in my mid-20s, about 2 election cycles since I was old enough to vote, to learn this lesson.
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Chomsky claims in On Anarchism that the communists (backed by the USSR) gained control of the Republican government and forced the syndicalists to disarm and dismantle workers' committees, under the pretext (whether or not they believed it - Chomsky doesn't go into much detail about the pro-communist perspective) that it was necessary to placate England, France, and the US, who were vehemently against the revolution, in order to construct an anti-fascist alliance. Is this accurate?
The Communist Party, POUM, CNT and other parties joined the liberal-led coalition that forced the workers to disarm themselves and dissolve their committees. The 3rd International's justification was the same geopolitical one you mention from the Chomsky source, and it's difficult not to consider that a complete betrayal of the fledgling Spanish revolution on the part of Stalin and his co-thinkers. They might have beaten fascism in Germany and eastern Europe later, but they failed in Spain.
POUM, meanwhile, was the result a weird merger between the left-opposition to Stalin's camp (including former proto-Trots) and right-opposition, including elements responsible for the disastrous opportunist Kuomintang entryist approach in China in the 1920s, but POUM's left-opposition elements were the ones closest to having a correct position, one where they could say "this is bullshit, under no pretext", then immediately leave the popular front coalition in August/September 1936 and continue building and supporting dual power while it was in danger of being destroyed the same way the Bolsheviks did in 1917 between February and October. Instead POUM, CNT, and the succdems followed the same path the capital-C Communists did and stayed in the popular front, allowing the libs to abort the embryonic workers' state and restore the bourgeois state only to later lose the war to Franco.
So some anarchists - specifically the CNT - were also (at least partly) responsible for disarming and dismantling committees?
Correct. Some of the the syndies, including official CNT leadership, joined the popular front and were ironically seduced by liberal anti-fascist arguments, partly because they chose not to distinguish between a workers' state and the capitalist state. (Hence my earlier comparison to the even greater farce of "anarcho-Bidenism".) Like POUM, the capital-C Communists, and the succdems, the CNT fell in line behind the decrees to disarm the workers and dismantle the workers' committees without any pushback.