Flippanarchy

Honesty, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants in this.

That excerpt doesn't capture the half of it imo. For example, there were attempts to nationalize the telecommunications industry in Barcelona. The Generalitat conducted a census of the industry and, although the results were incomplete, there were hundreds of companies operating. Just in Barcelona. (I can't remember if it was over 300 or over 500, but the details don't really matter.)

Obviously, especially in war time (and a civil war to boot), such critical infrastructure needs to be secured. This is straight up non-negotiable imo (putting aside the matter of the May Days for brevity here). I might be more sympathetic to other anarchist arguments but in these matters, you simply must seize and nationalize infrastructure and to do that you need a state, there's just no other way around it.

Also this quote doesn't even address the issues of military discipline, which was atrocious amongst the Republic forces although Jorjor Well, of all people (lol), happens to discuss this.

There were major issues in the Spanish Republic and I'm loath to pin its failure on one single matter however Catalonia and the surrounding regions that were held by the republic were the most economically productive in Spain, although critically they were almost always characterized by smallhold factories and production by small companies (think petit-bourgeois cobblers or tailors or very small factories that produced things like candles rather than big industrial factories like existed in Britain.) This made it virtually impossible to manage the economy and production well, especially for a revolutionary government, and it was well suited to sabotage and reactionaries doing what they do.

Due to the political ideology of the CNT/FAI they didn't go nearly as hard on liquidating these smallhold companies and organizing a necessarily ruthless program of nationalization, much to the detriment of the war effort. On top of that you had classic trade union consciousness rearing its ugly head, given the nature of economic organization there, and so you have things like an hours-long debate in the government because the glassworkers' union was demanding that recycling efforts were ceased so that artificial demand could be induced to keep glassworkers employed.

The government was jammed up for hours because glassworkers wanted to smash bottles and jars to create more work for themselves while the fascist forces were nipping at their heels the whole time. I'm still astounded by this, honestly, and we all know the consequences that poor organizing had on Spain and more broadly for Europe (not to mention WWII and, of course, Morocco.)

If you get me talking about this long enough I end up getting legitimately angry for how this incredibly rare opportunity got pissed up the wall.

I'm not baiting you into fedposting and I reject it entirely but it is possible to make references to historical examples or to talk in hypotheticals without signing your name to it, for example, after mentioning what you have then following up by saying "I've heard that the Venezuelan Colectivos are armed and trained to act as a community self-defense force so it will be interesting to see how effective they are and what can be learned from their model of community self-defense" - you aren't saying "we should do this" or "I'm forming this myself where I live" but the allusion is enough to gesture at an example without getting yourself dragged before a court, that is assuming you even want to discuss something like this publicly online in at all. It's easy enough to read between the lines but also you have boatloads of plausible deniability if you ever had to account for posting a comment like that. OpSec is always priority.

I get what you're saying about draining away the power from capitalisms and/or statism but my question is - what has happened to every utopian commune to ever exist? Either they pose a threat and they get taken down (and it's not like any commune could resist against the forces of a power like the US military) or they peter out.

In my opinion what you've described is a way of building the new world within the shell of the old, except with extra steps. This is going to come off as uncharitable but this is the exact trajectory that Revolutionary Catalonia took in terms of defending the revolution - they started largely with very classic anarchist-ish policy (including economic policy) and over time the issues with public safety, a mafia-like org holding too much power as a sort of shadow state, labor discipline and economic productivity, attempts to organize production and logistics etc. all led them to start reinventing the Bolshevik wheel. In a smaller, shorter way (that has much less in terms of documentation) this is also the trajectory that the Makhnovshchina took as well.