Juventud y utopía. Las comunas contraculturales en España (1968-1986)

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation studies the countercultural communes founded in Spain during the last years of Franco's regime and the transition to democracy (1968-1986). By analyzing an eclectic range of primary sources related to the underground, as well as interviews with some of its participants, it interrogates why a part of the Spanish youth conceived the communes as an alternative to the family capable of initiating the construction of a new social model more in accordance with human nature. Thus, it argues that this experience was mediated by a set of historical ontological assumptions of Western modernity. The first part of the thesis establishes a genealogy of the phenomenon. On the one hand, it contextualizes the countercultural movements that emerged in the West from the 1960s onwards and, on the other, inserts them into the utopian tradition of modernity. The second section establishes a comparison between the Spanish case and other capitalist countries in order to understand it from a transnational perspective; it details the communities that were founded in the country between 1968 and 1980 and, in addition, delves into the reasons behind the crisis of the family as a social institution. Finally, the third section focuses on the mutations to which this way of life was subjected in the 1980s to explain the immediate historical antecedents of the current neo-rural movement