It did work, every time Anarchists had the opportunity to exert it. For example the author Augustin Souchy addresses that in his book "With the peasants of Aragon", where he describes his experiences when he travelled to the town of Alcampel in Aragon, Spain during the Spanish Revolution.
A extract from his book describes:
The social and economic story of Aragon was the finest chapter of that period. A majority of the 500,000 people in that rural area put their personal property into the collectives voluntarily and committed their families to the free and equal life of libertarian communism. But individualists lived among them and enjoyed the respect of their neighbours.
The voluntary character of the social transformation from private ownership to collective communities is described at length in the first person account of what happened in the town of Alcampel. (See Appendix.) About half of the town goes collective. Among those who do not join are three teamsters who drive their own trucks, the only trucks in the town. The Collective cannot function without some means of transportation. Does the Collective requisition the trucks? No. They understand and respect the fear of the teamsters; they could lose their livelihood if they gave up their trucks. So, the Collective leaves the only three trucks in town in private hands and sends a delegation to Barcelona to obtain a truck.
How did it happen that the spirit of liberty had such strong roots in Spain, that 8,000,000 of 12,000,000 people lived or worked in voluntary collectives in Loyalist Spain, without benefit of government decrees requiring compliance with regulations from above?
The libertarian labour movement was born in Spain in October, 1868, following a visit by Giuseppi Fanelli, an Italian comrade and supporter of Michael Bakunin in the fight within the First International Workingmen's Association between the authoritarian Karl Marx and the anarchist Bakunin.
There was no force and people should drift away from the picture of communism as the forced collectivization in the state bureaucratic USSR, where people neither had the choice nor a will to work for such a regime. Another extract reads:
Stores are not collectivised. Small merchants continue to operate their stores as in the past. Transportation is collectivised. Housing is the property of the municipality. There is no charge for electricity or water. The town has two movie houses. They are collectivised by the UGT and the CNT. The majority of the workers, 32, belong to the CNT, 5 to the UGT.
If someone doesn't wanted to join, they didn't have to. They were free to live or stay there as they want. The Fascists, under the Falange Espanola de la JONS was a rare exception since those actively tried to subvert the harmonic doing of the voluntaries by sending them to the firing squad and murdering and raping civilians on the mass as reported during the capture of Sevilla by the army coup attempt, where around 3000 men, women and children were shot within several days.
With the Peasants of Aragon: Libertarian Communism in the Liberated Areas by Augustin Souchy Bauer
ISBN: 0-904564-51-1