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Sections (Content) :
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[Makhnovitsi Insurgent] If the anarchist society is to be made possible, the workers themselves in their factories and firms and the peasants themselves in their districts and villages must set about constructing the anti-authoritarian society, awaiting decrees and laws from nowhere.
• 2
As early as the 1870s, more than a decade before French anarchists proclaimed anarcho-syndicalism to be the best, often the only approach for achieving a libertarian society, Spanish anarchists influenced primarily by Bakuninism had created a diffuse but largely syndicalist union movement that combined the visions of a revolutionary general strike with insurrections and a commitment to a confederally organized system of "workers' control...."
• 3
We, too, desire to arrange the world morally; but we desire this arrangement to emanate from the many below, and not from the few above, that is, we desire to arrange it ourselves.
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...only Anarchism makes non-authoritarian organization a reality, since it abolishes the existing antagonism between individuals and classes.
• 5
"Do they expect students not to be anarchists?" he said. "What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!"
• 6
Anarchism means man living free and working constructively. It means the destruction of everything that is directed against man's natural, healthy aspirations.
Anarchism is not exclusively a theoretical teaching emanating from programs artificially conceived with an eye to the regulation of life: it is a teaching derived from life across all its wholesome manifestations, skipping over all artificial criteria.
The social and political visage of anarchism is a free, anti-authoritarian society, one that enshrines freedom, equality and solidarity between all its members.
In anarchism, Right means the responsibility of the individual, the sort of responsibility that brings with it an authentic guarantee of freedom and social justice for each and for all, in all places and at all times. It is out of this that communism springs.
Anarchism is naturally innate in man: communism is the logical extrapolation from it.
• 7
To the peasants, the power of local soviets meant the conversion of those bodies into autonomous territorial units, on the basis of the revolutionary association and the construction of a new society. Placing that sort of construction upon that slogan, the peasants applied it literally, expanded upon it and defended it...
• 8
Scientific societies and congresses, international lifeboat and Red Cross associations, laborers' unions, peace societies, volunteers who hasten to the rescue at times of great public calamity, are all examples, among thousands, of that power of the spirit of association which always shows itself when a need arises or an enthusiasm takes hold, and the means do not fail. That voluntary associations do not cover the world and do not embrace every branch of material and moral activity is the fault of the obstacles placed in their way by governments, of the antagonisms create by the possession of private property, and of the impotence and degradation to which the monopolizing of wealth on the part of the few reduces the majority of mankind.
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...the task of emancipating working people must be the work of working people themselves. This emancipation consists of the reduction of the functions of government to zero, ensuring that, at all times, control over all necessary forms of social organization is from below.
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...the welfare of humanity, which the future can and will bring, lies in communism. It excludes in logical ways all authority and servitude, and therefore equals anarchy. The way to the goal is the social revolution. By energetic, relentless, international action, it will destroy class rule and establish a free society based on cooperative organization of production. Long Live the Social Revolution!
["Anarchist Communism," by Johann Most, 1889.]
• 11
When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never ‘work’, but as a matter of fact it does ‘work’ in the long run.
• 12
We cannot look to this or to any similar government to put through the necessary changes of its own accord. The initiative will have to come from below.
• 13
Within the Catholic Church there have been two well-known competing visions. The first views society and its relationship to its adherents through a hierarchical, top-down approach. The second positions itself as an ally of the disempowered, working with them to achieve social change from the bottom up. In the middle are those who are motivated by fear or self-interest, and serve as a cushion between these two poles. I have worked with total conviction to always take the side of the people from below: the simple and humble people, the indigenous people, who in the state of Oaxaca are the poorest of the poor.
• 14
[To the Politician:] You talk of justice and benevolence, but you begin at the wrong end. The defenders of your country, and the deplorable state of the poor, are objects of prior consideration to priests and bells and gaudy processions.
• 15
Fighting for freedom is not letting your leaders think for you and decide, and following obediently behind them, or from time to time scolding them. Fighting for freedom is partaking to the full of one's capacity, thinking and deciding for oneself, taking all the responsibilities as a self-relying individual amid equal comrades. It is true that to think for oneself, to think out what is true and right, with a head dulled by fatigue, is the hardest, the most difficult task; it is much harder than to pay and to obey. But it is the only way to freedom. To be liberated by others, whose leadership is the essential part of the liberation, means the getting of new masters instead of the old ones.
• 16
Revolutions from above, that is to say, carried out peacefully by the wealthy and conservative classes of a nation, may bring prosperity to business and increase profits, but they do nothing more... They do not constitute an authentic revolution but an evolution, more or less effective, more or less profound, but one that definitely does not disturb anything essential.
• 17
Once you make subsistence and not profit the motive for association and mutual aid, there is everything to he said for local control, individual initiative and absolute equality.
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If we ask questions that look from the outside in, or from the top down, then we will probably see very little positive change on the ground.
Chronology :
March 12, 2020 : Bottom-Up Organization -- Added.
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