Civil war

Why can't a democratic army have discipline?

*yawn* Old Stalinist propaganda re the alleged military inefficiency of the militia. Military historians (non-anarchist) who have actually analysed the role of the militia and the "regularised" army where they fought side by side in some of the biggest battles, conclude that the militias fought harder and with greater effectiveness, despite being starved of weaponry by the Stalinist scum.

I've no idea who Enaa is, but he sounds like an ignorant reactionary eejit.

edit: also I get bored with leftist bookworms who've probably never even organised or fought a sizeable anti-fascist engagement make out their like some military experts who can say "I'm sorry that is not how war is fought". How the fuck would they know? If you look at political violence in the last 20 years in the UK, who was doing the fighting? The anarchists or the leftist authority-worshippers?

Anarchists can't win a war because they're not the ones with all the guns and bombi

Anarchists don't even know how to tanks. Total dweebs.

Let's think about building unions before building armies.

I wonder if he's actually read the book he's referencing, given how massively ineffective the Popular Army was against the Nationalist forces according to what Bolloten writes. Apparently the guy you're arguing with is also either unaware of or choosing to ignore the Makhnovists, who defeated Denikin and Wrangel despite not following this armchair general's guidelines for "how wars are fought."

Then he may wish to read up on the English Civil Wars and the New Model Army, an Army that was the most democratic and disciplined (they even fined you for swearing) and was on the winning side.

Of course once Cromwell became Lord Protector the New Model Army got less Democratic and interestingly much less disciplined and brutal.

http://libcom.org/tags/english-civil-war

Go with the first hand account, I say.

Later it became the fashion to decry the militias, and therefore to pretend that the faults which were due to lack of training and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system. Actually, a newly raised draft 'of militia was an undisciplined mob not because the officers called the private 'Comrade' but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear...

When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a dangerous job. 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness--on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square. The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in the field-at all.

Ocelot, can you name some of those non-anarchist military historians who had high praise for the anarchist militias?

I don't doubt you, but I'd like to repeat this to others, but don't want to be all like: "Someone on an internet forum said..."

Even naming just one would be a big help! (And if possible the book it appears in)

Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain (Phoenix, 2006) p. 129 "The defence of Irún demonstrated that untrained workers, providing their defensive position was well sited and prepared, could fight bravely and effectively against head-on attacks backed by modern weaponry... The militia fought with remarkable skill and courage... the battle was lost partly because six ammunation trucks failed to reach the defenders after the French border was closed on 8 August."

Battle for Spain is excellent (and you can read it here: http://libcom.org/history/battle-spain-spanish-civil-war-1936-1939-anthony-beevor), however while it does acknowledge the greater dedication and bravery of the anarchists, it does criticise them for recklessness (for example in the Barcelona uprising, a last detachment of fascist military were holed up in a barracks. Instead of just wait and starve them out, large numbers of anarchist workers fearlessly tried to storm the barracks right away and lost their lives needlessly).

However, it is much tougher on the Stalinist-controlled regular army, which also lost almost every offensive, and wasted huge amounts of resources and lives on propaganda missions.

So developments in the Spanish Civil War not an argument for or against the effectiveness of anarchist military organisation as such. As the flaws of the anarchist militias would not have been fixed by greater discipline, but possibly by better tactics. And of course they were starved of arms by the Communists.

The Makhnovists are a good example of an anarchist-organised army being successful.