What military victory could not measure: Libertarian Barcelona and the ethnography of revolution in 1936

This paper approaches the libertarian experiment in Barcelona in 1936 as a lived alternative modernity. Using memoirs and archives, I apply a historical ethnography method to scope the experience of radical reorganisation of the economy, education, healthcare, and gender. In doing so, this paper shows how, despite overwhelming odds, anarcho-syndicalists built a different world the size of their city. An ethnographic take on Barcelona, in that space and temporality, challenges sweeping and fatalistic conclusions on radical libertarian revolutions. If what was lived and re-organised there and then is historically relevant, then its military defeat against fascism does not necessarily make it an unworkable alternative to capitalist modernity.