Most people mean ‘worked’ as in ‘functioned on a basic level’ rather than ‘survived outside military pressure’, though. When they say “Anarchism doesn’t work”, they generally mean “Anarchism, as a socio-economic system, is inherently non-functional” rather than “Anarchism can be destroyed, or has never lasted against outside forces.”
To be fair, almost none of Europe survived those same outside forces a few years later. With the prior warning of what happened in Spain.
1930s Spain is where the Nazis practiced their Blitzkrieg technique, before using it to control almost the entirety of Europe.
The political systems of Czechoslovakia, Austria, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, etc aren’t called into question in the same manner because they couldn’t resist the German military machine so why should anarchist Spain?
Most people mean ‘worked’ as in ‘functioned on a basic level’ rather than ‘survived outside military pressure’, though. When they say “Anarchism doesn’t work”, they generally mean “Anarchism, as a socio-economic system, is inherently non-functional” rather than “Anarchism can be destroyed, or has never lasted against outside forces.”
In such a cutthroat (and often outright evil) world, though, it needs to be able to last against outside forces in order to work.
The outside forces will never stop, so unless we find a way to overcome them, lasting anarchism will never be achieved.
To be fair, almost none of Europe survived those same outside forces a few years later. With the prior warning of what happened in Spain.
1930s Spain is where the Nazis practiced their Blitzkrieg technique, before using it to control almost the entirety of Europe.
The political systems of Czechoslovakia, Austria, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, etc aren’t called into question in the same manner because they couldn’t resist the German military machine so why should anarchist Spain?