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2016 marks the eightieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish Revolution. When Franco led his fascist forces against the Second Spanish Republic in July 1936, anarchist militias simultaneously fought the fascists and seized large swathes of Southern and Eastern Spain, overthrowing local authorities and collectivizing wealth. One of the most passionate and dedicated of these militias, the Iron Column, was formed largely of liberated prisoners and included women within its ranks.
While the Iron Column fought the fascists on the front lines, however, their supposed comrades were stabbing them in the back. The syndicalists of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) joined the Republican government in September 1936, with three CNT members taking positions as ministers. In March 1937, the Iron Column, previously organized along egalitarian lines, was ordered to submit to incorporation into the Republican Army and accept the leadership of Republican officers hostile to their revolutionary ambitions. One of the “uncontrollables” of the Iron Column published a denunciation of this betrayal, entitled “A Day Mournful and Overcast,” in Nosotros, the daily newspaper of the Column.
The uncontrollable introduced himself as “an escaped convict from San Miguel de los Reyes, that sinister prison, which the monarchy set up in order to bury alive those who, because they weren’t cowards, would never submit to the infamous laws dictated by the powerful against the oppressed.” He had been imprisoned at the age of twenty-three “for revolting against the humiliations to which an entire village had been subjected. In short for killing a political boss.”
In this detail of his life story, he closely resembles the Chinese warrior Guan Yu, who was later deified as Guan Di and is closely associated with loyalty and righteousness. In the Ming Dynasty novel Romance of Three Kingdoms, Guan Yu explains why he left his hometown, for “there was a man from a wealthy family who was acting like a big shot and bullying everybody, I ended up killing him. I had to become a fugitive, and have been living the life of an itinerant mercenary for the past five or six years.” Like Guan Yu, the uncontrollable rebelled and fought back against injustice in his home village, and suffered the consequences for his action: he was imprisoned for eleven years before anarchists opened the gates of the penitentiary. The word “rebel,” incidentally, comes from the Latin prefix re- (opposite, against, or again) added to bellare (to wage war): thus, it literally means “to fight back.”
The uncontrollable joined the militia that had liberated him, and, like Spartacus and his fellow rebels stripping weapons from the Roman legions they defeated (Life of Crassus 9.1), he armed himself with a rifle seized from a slain fascist. While fighting the fascists, the Iron Column also “changed the mode of life in the villages through which we passed – annihilating the brutal political bosses who had robbed and tormented the peasants and placing their wealth in the hands of the only ones who knew how to create it: the workers.” The methodology and members of Iron Column, however, were denounced by their enemies:
We have been treated like outlaws, and accused of being “uncontrollable”, because we did not subordinate the rhythm of our lives, which we desired and still desire to be free, to the stupid whims of those who, occupying a seat in some ministry or on some committee, sottishly and arrogantly regarded themselves as the masters of men.
The reference to those “occupying a seat in some ministry” clearly referred to the supposedly anarchist-syndicalist CNT, for it was not only fascists but also anti-fascists who condemned the Iron Column: “Not only the fascists considered us dangerous, because we treated them as they deserved, but in addition those who call themselves anti-fascists, shouting their anti-fascism until they are hoarse, have viewed us in the same light.” And the uncontrollable knew exactly what kind of people love to shout their anti-fascism until they are hoarse: “people who wish to be regarded as leaders.”
![Lucia Sanchez Saornil, one of the founders of Mujeres Libres. [Public Domain]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Luic_San_Saorn_1933.jpg)
Lucia Sanchez Saornil, one of the founders of Mujeres Libres, an anarchist women’s organization that maintained independence from the CNT. The process of militarization re-established the gender roles that Mujeres Libres sought to destroy. [Public Domain]
The uncontrollable is a pariah. And moreover, the uncontrollable is a mystic seeking to “penetrate the obscurity of the fields and the mystery of things” at night while fighting the fascists by day:
On some nights, on those dark nights when armed and alert I would try to penetrate the obscurity of the fields and the mystery of things, I rose from behind my parapet as if in a dream, not to awaken my numbed limbs, which having been tempered in pain are like steel, but to grip more furiously my rifle, feeling a desire to fire not merely at the enemy sheltered barely a hundred yards way, but at the other concealed at my side, the one calling me comrade, all the while selling my interests in most sordid a manner, for no sale is more cowardly than one nourished by treason.
On those nights, the uncontrollable was possessed by the urge to run wild and destroy all that sought to grind him and his comrades down:
And I would feel a desire to laugh and to weep, and to run through the fields, shouting and tearing throats open with my iron fingers, just as I had torn open the throat of that filthy political boss, and to smash this wretched world into smithereens, a world in which it is hard to find a loving hand to wipe away one’s sweat and to stop the blood flowing from one’s wounds on returning from the battlefield, tired and wounded.
There is an ancient Greek word for this kind of hands-on dismemberment: σπαραγμός. Sparagmos is associated in literature with the Dionysiac cults, which contained many women and slaves, just as the Iron Column was comprised of ex-prisoners. Euripides wrote in Bakkhai that the mainads needed no weapons but their hands to hunt their prey:
They, with hands that bore no weapon of steel, attacked our cattle as they browsed. Then wouldst thou have seen Agave mastering some sleek lowing calf, while others rent the heifers limb from limb. Before thy eyes there would have been hurling of ribs and hoofs this way and that; and strips of flesh, all blood-bedabbled, dripped as they hung from the pine-branches. Wild bulls, that glared but now with rage along their horns, found themselves tripped up, dragged down to earth by countless maidens’ hands. The flesh upon their limbs was stripped there from quicker than thou couldst have closed thy royal eye-lids.
But it is not only destruction that characterizes the Dionysian spirit, but “the wildly irrepressible desires we carry in our hearts to be free like the eagles on the highest mountain peaks, like the lions in the jungle.”
![Dionysos mosaic [Ancient Images / Flickr]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Dionysos-Chariot.jpg)
Dionysos mosaic [Ancient Images / Flickr]
I would abandon myself joyfully to dreams of adventure, beholding with heated imagination a world that I knew not in life but in desire, a world that no man has known in life but that many of us have known in dreams. And dreaming, time would fly by, and my body would stand weariness at bay, and I would redouble my enthusiasm, and become bold, and go out on reconnaissance at dawn to find out the enemy’s position, and…. All of this in order to change life, to stamp a different rhythm onto this life of ours; all of this because men could be brothers and I among them; all of this because joy that surges forth even once from our breasts must surge out of the earth, because the Revolution, this Revolution that has been the guiding light and watchword of the Iron Column, could soon be tangible reality.
The word “enthusiasm” also comes from ancient Greek: ἐνθουσιασμός denotes the condition in which a god (θεός) is inside (ἐν) a person. Compare the previous quote with a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy:
Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the bond between man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, now matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth freely offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and the desert approach in peace. The wagon of Dionysus is covered with flowers and wreaths. Under his yoke stride panthers and tigers.
If someone were to transform Beethoven’s Ode to Joy into a painting and not restrain his imagination when millions of people sink dramatically into the dust, then we could come close to the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man, now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power or “saucy fashion” have established between men. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united with his neighbor, reconciled and fused together, but also as if the veil of Maja has been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around before the mysterious original unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher unity. He has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances. The enchantment speaks out in his gestures.
In both of these texts, we find sympathetic magic between the joy of the earth and the liberation of humans, the possibility of universal camaraderie between human and human, and a dreamlike transcendence that becomes incarnate within material reality.
Dionysian methodologies of warfare cannot be described as “non-violent,” but they supersede the linearity of rigid militarization by striking where unexpected, by changing the very time and space within which the “battle” is waged. Euripides’s mainads first and foremost caused disruption by abandoning the οἶκος (oikos), the household centered around slavery and gender roles, whence we derive the word “economy:” management of the οἶκος.
But when pursued, they fought “with the thyrsus, which they hurled, caused many a wound and put their foes to utter rout, women chasing men, by some god’s intervention. Then they returned to the place whence they had started, even to the springs the god had made to spout for them; and there washed off the blood, while serpents with their tongues were licking clean each gout from their cheeks.”
Another individual known for having snakes coil about his face, the Thracian gladiator Spartacus, whose wife was a prophetess, also won a battle by a Dionysian miracle. Spartacus and his fellow runaway slaves, who were primarily of Thracian and Gaulish origin, were besieged on top of Mount Vesuvius:
But the top of the hill was covered with a wild vine of abundant growth, from which the besieged cut off the serviceable branches, and wove these into strong ladders of such strength and length that when they were fastened at the top they reached along the face of the cliff to the plain below.
Descending on these ladders of wild vines, the rebels caught the Roman legion by surprise and defeated them in battle. Like the Iron Column, they were supported by the locals: “they were also joined by many of the herdsmen and shepherds of the region, sturdy men and swift of foot, some of whom they armed fully, and employed others as scouts and light infantry.” The escaped slaves and shepherds of Vesuvius were literally anti-fascists: Roman officials were preceded by lictors carrying fasces as symbols of their political authority.
Death of Spartacus, Hermann Vogel. [Public Domain]
Michael Kimble, a black gay anarchist incarcerated at Holman, writes that prisoners’ struggle will not always be non-violent, echoing the Iron Column in his uncontrollability: “If your solidarity and support is predicated on prisoners being ‘non-violent,’ we don’t want or need it, because you are trying to control us.”
The Iron Column’s revolutionary war against fascism and prisons and the society that produces both is alive and well. And it is once again being fought by partisans, by people who desire first and foremost to change their own lives, “to stamp a different rhythm onto this life of ours.” Ill Will Editions writes that the concept of the “partisan” is “best understood not as a splitting of a totality into competing parts or factions each defined via mutually contested claims over the management of the whole, but rather as the intensification of asymmetrical differences that were already there within the way we live.”
The Polytheist and Heathen milieus are plagued by “people who wish to be regarded as leaders” of movements, who wish to claim “management of the whole.” Some of them wish to maintain the supposedly apolitical nature of the whole, others to defend the whole against the very real threat of fascist infiltration. Both positions accept and reify the continued existence of the πόλις (polis), which exists only in contrast to actual communities and traditions. My position is not apolitical, but anti-political.
Mujeres Libres wrote, “To be an anti-fascist is too little; one is an anti-fascist because one is already something else.” Like their syndicalist predecessors who became Ministers, those who claim to be anti-fascist because they are aspiring managers do not seek the “different rhythm” of life that I seek. The uncontrollables of the Iron Column speak from their mass graves, warning us never to trust these would-be politicians:
History, which records the good and evil that men do, will one day speak. And History will say that the Iron Column was perhaps the only column in Spain that had a clear vision of what our Revolution ought to be. It will also say that of all columns, ours offered the greatest resistance to militarization, and that there were times when because of that resistance, it was completely abandoned to its fate, at the front awaiting battle, as if six thousand men, hardened by war and ready for victory or death, should be abandoned to the enemy to be devoured.
History will say so many, many things, and so many, many figures who think themselves glorious will find themselves execrated and damned!
* * *
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Once again, Wild Hunt shows it’s obvious political bias. This is a pagan news source, give us pagan news. Not communist drivel
All news is biased. Go elsewhere if you don’t like it.
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I’ll ask you what I ask all anti-statists. If we dissolve the State, how will we take care of the most vulnerable among us? How will I get my meds, which I rely on to live and function, and which are currently paid for by the government? Without government controls, the prices on those, already exorbitant, will shoot up. Will “my community” pay for them? How, without becoming another government and imposing taxes? What if I am isolated from my community because of my disabilities? Who will pay for my meds then?
Word!
Anarchism does not stand for the dissolution of all social structures. A communal, anarchist society would still have rules, though they would be decided amongst the commune through direct democracy. Your drugs would not go up in cost because capitalism would be ended with the dissolution of the state. All these questions can be answered reading a basic anarchy 101 plenty of places on the internet.
No Anarchy 101 FAQ has ever adequately answered my questions. How does the dissolution of the state end capitalism, without a State that specifically ends it? And if the corporations close down, who will make my meds?
How is direct democracy NOT a State? It’s quite literally the polis that HC was talking about, at least in Athens. Athens was a direct democracy (for the few male citizens), and was still a State.
And communalism has never worked on a large scale. It barely works on a small scale. That’s why all those hippie communes fell apart. Only a few survived in the long term.
Your “plan” would only work in a post-scarcity society… one that continues to be post-scarcity after the dissolution of corporations. Which we don’t have and may never have. And it might well not work even then, because people don’t actually do direct democracy well in large groups.
“How does the dissolution of the state end capitalism, without a State that specifically ends it? And if the corporations close down, who will make my meds?”
Capitalism requires the State for its maintenance. Property rights, including patents and other intellectual property, are only enforceable through the State. Without that protection for capitalists, anyone who acquires the means could create your meds.
That only states that there’s no bar to such action. It doesn’t guarantee a replacement of what’s available now.
MadGastronomer brings up important questions that need to be reckoned with as we transition out of capitalism. I merely meant to point out that capitalism as it exists now is constituted by the State, it’s not something we need the State to end.
It’s also worth noting that the government has to subsidize certain medications because the government enables the pharmaceutical company to maintain a monopoly on the script. When the patent expires, then other companies are able to make cheaper versions of the same medication and it overall lowers the cost. While the government protects the exclusivity of the patent, the corporation can keep its prices and profits high. Even better, the government is paying the corporation the prices it sets because otherwise few people who need it would be able to afford it.
I could dream of, in contrast, a socialist economy in which scientists and doctors receive funding to develop medications based on need instead of profit value, and then those medications become communal property, able to be produced and distributed by smaller pharmaceutical producers.
I mean, look at what’s happening with Epi Pens. Those prices shot way up, and it was a few anarchists who figured out how to make your own on the cheap.
Socialism requires a state.
You can’t make the meds I need, and a lot of people need, without a huge amount of infrastructure. The means are the problem, not the rights. And who’s going to make the investment in time and resources to find new meds without funding, either from corporations or from government? Do your wrists ever get tired from all that handwaving?
I’m more of a socialist than anti-Statist, so I still see a role for government. I am glad you have the meds you need now.
In retrospect I can see my comments were derailing rather than addressing your questions. I apologize.
Thank you.
And you never answered the question of who will pay for my meds? Or are you planning on abolishing money? If so, what medium will you use for exchange of goods? Barter is totally impossible on a large scale.
“Society would have rules” does not answer the question of how, practically, disabled people, elderly people, etc, would be cared for. It doesn’t answer the question of how you enforce your rules, either.
‘A communal, anarchist society would still have rules, though they would be decided amongst the commune through direct democracy.”
This is fine for a small population, but with seven (7) billion people on the planet, this is not feasible. For an example of the kind of society you envision, look to the original Christian communities that existed right after Yeshua Ben Yusef’s death. Why did it change? Simple… the population exploded. This is also true in many Native American communities until the Europeans came. However, even the Aztec’s and Incas had a non-anarchist society. Again, the reason is the population got too big.
A free market, even the mutated partial mix we have now, is the single best tool for human advancement yet discovered. Mutual exchange between consenting adults. You profit by delivering something that your competition can’t or won’t. Progress comes because someone looks at what’s available and says “I can do better than that!” and then can market it.
That depends on property rights and not necessarily the common good.
In the example of drug prices, at least in the United States, government is a large part of the problem, not the solution. There are no price controls at all, and in fact our government serves to hold our hands behind our backs while the drug industry cuts our purses. One of the main reasons Obamacare and our health care system in general is running off the rails is the government is specifically barred by law from even trying to bargain for better prices. If a drug company was getting $100 a month for Pill X last month and decides it would rather get $1,000 a month now, they’re going to get it, because you have no other options. That’s not an argument for anarchy or even pure libertarianism, just an observation.
There is a valuable concept in this piece, which is the fact that idealists in any movement ultimately lose out to the pragmatists and even the cynical. That has been true in every revolution in history, including our own. That’s unfortunate at some level, but also necessary. The “uncontrollables” are great at sweeping away the old order, but once you’ve killed off the corrupt bosses, pretty soon you have to get down to the business of governance. You can’t get the streets repaired and the water running and the schools open by staying in the hills with rifles or by executing people in the public square. Governance requires a set of technical skills which almost no revolutionaries possess and it requires ugly compromises. First among those compromises is giving up much of the unlimited personal autonomy which was won through the rifle in the first place. We’ve seen instances where the Iron Column/Uncontrollables did carry the day, Khmer Rouge Cambodia being a prime example. Like all anti-fascists, they swept away the old order and killed some corrupt bosses who probably needed that treatment. The problem was, they went on to decide that virtually the entire population were corrupt fascists who needed the same treatment…
As a final note, I have to say that prison riots don’t strike me as a great model for humanity’s aspiration for freedom. I can think of much better ways to celebrate Dionysis than brawling with neo-Nazis or stabbing correctional officers.
Most amusing quote of 2016 to date:
“If your solidarity and support is predicated on prisoners being
‘non-violent,’ we don’t want or need it, because you are trying to
control us.”
Uh, yeah, control is sort of implicit in incarceration. That’s why they call it “prison” and not “day camp.”
How is Obamacare “off the rails”, other than being sabotaged by Republicans? And the government IS starting to crack down on price gouging, in some ways — look at the Epipin case. The government can’t set prices, but it can take certain kinds of action. Most drug companies have, until recently, been unwilling to push it too far. The pushback against Shkreli and his like may yet change the laws, too.
But I still couldn’t get my pills without Obamacare to pay for them.
I was a believer in Obamacare, and I still appreciate what he was trying to do, but it is utterly unsustainable. It is not a real national healthcare system.
What they did was to strike one core bargain with the insurers: stop doing pre-existing condition exclusions and we will force every American to buy your products. The affordability aspect was entirely an illusion which was created by bribing the insurance companies silly in the initial years of the system to offer low prices.
That honeymoon phase is over. Premiums are going up 45-50% a year, many insurance companies are bailing from the system or offering fewer stripped down plans and virtually no doctors will accept the semi-affordable plans still on the exchanges because of miserable reimbursement and endless paperwork.
If you’re at an income level where you still get much of the premiums subsidized, but too “rich” for Medicaid, it’s still a better deal than anything else out there. If you’re paying full fare, it’s hideous. I’ve been in both ends of that equation over different years. It was great at first. Over the year plus after that and before I got employer coverage, it was terrible. I was paying premiums which were essentially a very nice car payment and THEN paying virtually all of my medical expenses out of pocket, amounting to many many thousands of dollars I didn’t have. And I’m not a sick man.
Obamacare is predatory capitalism in the guise of universal health care. It’s going to get worse and worse because the government inducements that made the deal semi-attractive to insurers are going away bit by bit, and the costs are increasing exponentially.
I have some insight into the drug price gouging because it is how I make my living. Not by gouging people, but in a vast and rapidly growing business of pre-approvals, which is the mechanism insurers and underwriters use to say no to as much prescription drug coverage as is remotely clinically defensible.
New pharmaceuticals cost at the very low end, about $12,000 a year. Many cost $100,000 and more, and not anymore just for the weird orphan diseases that 20 kids in the country have. It cost about $120,000 to cure Hepatitis C, which is typically one pill a day for 12 weeks. Thousand bucks a pill folks. Why? Because they can. If you can envision the Hoover Damn developing catastrophic cracks in it, I’m in a business which is patching them over with cement colored duct tape to give the illusion of sustainability. It cannot hold up forever of course.
Generics offer no refuge anymore either. Very many old drugs now have one manufacturer, and they can and do charge whatever they want. Shkreli was an exceptional case, but the trend he represents is in no way an outlier. The Epi-Pen business was a classic example of the rape of American patients. This drug is 100 years old and cost almost nothing to make, even with the fancy injector. Government did very little to fix the gouging. The public pressure pushed it from $700 to about half that. Were it not for the government enforced monopoly system, it would cost perhaps $50, if even that, and it would still generate decent profits. Again, not an argument to end statism as a whole.
The Epipen case is an example of collusion between government and a private company. The FDA refused to allow competition. Without competition, there is nothing except a government edict to keep prices low. With competition, prices get lower and distribution gets better over time without government interference.
I hear what you’re asking, and I don’t pretend that either I or any anarchy 101 FAQ actually has answers to them (and as I think you may have noticed, I certainly don’t think direct democracy is the answer).
But the hypothetical (and highly unlikely) complete dissolution of the State by anti-statist activity is far from the only situation in which these questions are relevant. What if the government stops paying for the medicines, without being overthrown? The immediate practical problem for individuals, families and communities is similar.
There are many large-scale problems that even the strongest of local communities will be unable to solve, but particularly because isolation (especially for the disabled) is a huge barrier to having any semblance of community at all, building stronger communities still seems like a good idea to me. Having those networks can at least somewhat help us deal with crises and disasters (even if it cannot mitigate their effects entirely) and it makes life more enjoyable in the present moment. And the relationships I want to put time into are with the Gods and spirits, and with the people that I actually *practice* religion with.
Feel free to email me if you want to speak further.
The government might stop paying for my meds, although I think it’s unlikely at this point that it will stop paying for those of everybody it pays for now without some kind of revolution. And that would be unethical. But I find anti-statism that doesn’t have a solution for it to be equally unethical.
But thank you for being honest. So many anti-statist aren’t, as is obvious in this discussion.
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There is a good reason the Facists in Spain won.
Great essay. Imagine a new reality through meditation, trancework, dancing, etc. and create it in your heart, then encourage others. Violence is not essential.
Anarchism: The political philosophy preferred by edgy high-schoolers everywhere.