Vivir la Utopia (1997, English subs, about Pre-Spanish-civil-war communes)

English version for those who were put off by the German version posted earlier.

Rather than concentrating on the horrors of the civil war itself, who tortured whom and how, this documentary concentrates on pre-war activities of one of the two groups that constituted the divided left, the 'anarchists', the other group usually being referred to as the 'communists'.

The 'anarchists' interviewed in the doc, oldtimers talking about what they experienced 60+ years ago, refer to themselves as 'liberal communists', following Bakunin and Kropotkin, not to be confused with the other bunch being 'authoritarian communists', who follow Marx. So the anarchists are anti-hierarchical, as opposed to the communists being pro-hierarchy.

The interesting thing about the documentary is that it describes how the Spanish anarchist movement grew out of a labor union with strong educational and social community building activities, sort of like Hamas when you think about it. It describes how tensions built up first with the capitalist bosses and the church, next with the army, and as the movement starts organizing villages and towns for itself, throwing out the bosses, the clerics, redistributing assets, abolishing money(!), and organizing trade agreements with foreign countries, it finally manages to antagonize the elected government who then backs the 'autoritarian' communists. They ended up living utopia, until external forces destroyed them. (Rather than internal chaos, as modern prejudice would want us to associate with anarchy). The anarchists' point is that absence of hierarchy is not absence of organization. Can this really be true?

A must see, a doc that reactivates those unused parts of your animal brain.