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 al-
ternative 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.