ollie wrote:
how about the (start of at least) Spanish Civil War for an active Anarchy based state? i can't think of any other that has actually (more or less) called itself that anyway.
The Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalists briefly gained control of central Spain (Catalonia) during the Spanish Civil War. Unfortunately, with the threat of Franco's fascists forces looming over the horizon, they decided to ally with the Communists for support. Because of this the Communists took control of Catalonia and systematically destroyed the social experiment which had been undertaken there.
George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, wrote:
The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution
was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it
probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was
ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was
something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever
been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every
building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red
flags ow with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled
with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties;
almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and
there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and
cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the
bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black.
Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.
Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody
said 'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else
'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping
had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first
experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a
lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered,
and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and
black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in
clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like
daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where
crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were
bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was
the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward
appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased
to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were
no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class
clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was
queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some
ways I did not not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of
affairs worth fighting for. Also, I believed that things were as they appeared,
that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either
fled, been killed or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not
realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and
disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.