Lets talk about Revolutionary Catalonia

Apparently they fought pretty well against the other factions until the massive offensive against Catalonia.
Didn't they sell out to the USSR?

At the onset of independence, you had mass murder of priests and other clergy, business owners, and anyone who was suspected of being a nationalist. After that initial period though, things calmed down on that front.

Society was organized by worker unions. You might be a member of the lumber union, or the steel union, or any number of other occupational unions, and for practical purposes, these unions filled the void of both economic and political leadership. They issued currency in "work hours," which were scrips that essentially said you did one hour of work and could be exchanged for goods or services worth one hour of work. This worked somewhat ok for local towns, but made actually managing the authenticity of the currency difficult, and made trade with foreigners nearly impossible, which meant your union leads had a semi-monopoly on foreign goods. Rationing also became a thing, because some goods like food weren't gated by hours worked producing it, but the time it took to raise cows and grow crops. I think towards the end of things, the scrip system was looked at for being reworked to address some of these issues.

Unions would organize workers for militias, but they had difficulty getting enough volunteers -- one of the chief aims of the anarchists is that the individual had to agree to do something and couldn't be forced, so you had union leads attempting to convince their fellow workers why they should go and fight and die for Catalonia. Also, there was a large lack of leadership in their military structure, since it was just union leads attempting to coordinate a battle plan without any central authority. This extended to getting the political side of things running since anarchists by nature didn't want to establish themselves as any sort of leadership over the region.

The quality of life for workers improved quite a bit though, since they could dictate their working conditions and hours because they had control of their facilities after the takeover. You generally had improvements in lighting, safety, and didn't have to work 10-12 hours a day anymore. Previously prohibitively expensive things like meat and other goods became easily affordable by anyone, but as before, were subject to rationing to prevent over consumption. You didn't really pay any taxes, because there was no one to pay taxes to, and public services such as construction were funded by work hour scrips like everywhere else.

Ultimately, the anarchists had trouble when dealing with foreign threats, such as the impeding Nationalist Army knocking on their door. This sort of pressure caused a few changes to take place as the war wore on: The Catalonian Anarchists actually had a leadership form, which stole legitimacy from the anarchist cause, and the rise of support from the USSR caused additional attraction to the Communist parties, which eventually subsumed the remaining anarchists entirely. The Communists had the ability to organized a coordinated military and political response, something the anarchists greatly lacked. The republicans had a similar capability, but less popularity.

Assuming a vacuum or the republican army somehow managed to crush the nationalists before things got too dire, it's possible Catalonia and Aragon would've been their own separate regions from Spain as a whole and would've remained anarchist for a few more decades before the world left them behind. Internally, despite problems, the anarchist cause had a lot of popular support, and its most crippling problems were dealing with external issues rather than internal ones.

I would argue this encompasses probably 80% of the population of any given nation. People tend to be somewhat pragmatic, and realize they need to put food on the table for their wife and kids somehow. That doesn't happen if you burn every bridge with each boss you have as time goes on (Believe me, I've been there).

I'd say the remaining 20% are the more ruthless types who are willing to kiss ass and backstab their way up the chain of command to grab as much power as they can. Most of these guys will become the ones the peons despise, while a few others will actually reach the top echelons of the workforce and rule over these people.

Generally, communist and socialist groups start to gain more support when working conditions for peons become unbearable, the threat of which keeps leadership as a whole in line. The anarchists in Catalonia attempted to skirt this issue by doing away with traditional leadership and placing elected overlords in their place, which are somewhat beholden to their underlings.

If I had to organize Catalonia into something more effective, despite the damage it would do to the ideal of anarchy, I would've created a military structure and a diplomatic corps.

Soldiers were universally seen as a tool of oppression by the anarchists, so a professional military is out. It's also very difficult to get enough volunteers in a society where the individual has to come to the conclusion that something is worth giving their life for. So I would probably structure a military to be semi-conscriptive, something like all civilians are expected to serve for 2 years after their 20th birthday or something similar. This means everyone will have been a soldier at some point in their life, better removing the idea of soldiers as oppressors from others. Past that, every prior conscript would be expected to remain as an active member of the militia belonging to their union.

From this pool of conscripts, I think it would be important to draft an officer corps that would remain as a permanent fixture as its own worker union unto itself. Again, this is creating hierarchy among the anarchists, something they're completely opposed to, but at the end of the day, military officers are a professional vocation just as much as factory workers -- it's best to give them as much training as you can. The soldiers under their command would nominally be the conscripts that are rotated in and out every year as they serve their time, but would also include militiamen during defensive wars.

Diplomatic corps allow for a unified response to external governments, and could be formed by assembling union leaders from all sizable occupations and having them choose from among themselves a group to deal with outsiders. Being able to manage imports and exports and concoct a unified response when dealing with others is pretty much paramount to remaining a free and independent nation, otherwise it's likely parts of the nation are likely to sell out others during arguments.

Do you really think that they would've stayed Anarchist for a few more decades? I feel they would've ultimately had to have a sort of pseudo-leadership in place to keep working.

>because of its own stupid mentality about compromising and the lesser of two evils
Dropped. Learn to realpolitik

Catalanist here. They were traitorous sociopaths who damaged us more than they help.

>once the mass murder of clergy et al was over, everything went well
Yet Hitler killing the Jews is the worst thing ever

Fuck I hate leftist shits

Why is southern Europe traditionally so inclined to be seduced by collectivistic / universalistic doctrines (christianism, anarchism, communism...)?

Fuck no, I don't mean that as an excuse at all, just a qualification of how the violence was. When law breaks down and mob rule becomes a thing, minorities become a target. In this case, it was the clergy and the upper class.

The corollary like you said would be Nazi Germany after the elimination of Jews by banishment or execution. Once you get past that initial period, what happens next? It's unlikely you're going to continue purging when you're out of enemies, unless your name is Stalin.