Basically what the title says. I'm fairly familiar with the major players in the Spanish Revolution (the CNT-FAI, the various libertarian Marxist militias that allied with them, etc), but I was wondering if anyone knew just how successful they actually were. Taking into account the circumstances (quite literally pioneering a completely new societal system while in the midst of a brutal civil war), how successful was it at ensuring good living standards, education, workers' rights, etc?
So most books I have read about the Spanish Civil War discuss the anarchist movement and economy pretty generally.
In Preston's Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge, he states that farming collectives increased food production compared to previous years.
Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War goes into a bit more detail. He details the difficulty for Anarchists to gather resources outside of their own zone of control. He provides data for Barcelona Cinemas ran by a committee providing a month and a half of vacation. Workers who were ill or disabled received 75% of their pay. Lines of credit and financing needed to operate many factories in anarchist hands were run by rival political parties. The textile industry because of this, operated only 3 days a week.
Hugh Thomas though, provides works that discuss the anarchist experiment in his bibliography (if you speak spanish). The most pertinent to this questions is Crisis economica y agitacion social en Cataluna by Alberto Balcells.
If you don't speak Spanish search anarchists and spanish civil war in this subreddit. Generally the other posters who know this subject recommend a book about the Catalan experiment.