“To the degree that anarchists regarded a free society as nonhierarchical as well as classless, they hoped that specific interests would give way to communal and regional interests, indeed, to the abolition of interest as such by placing all the problems of the community and the confederated region onto a shared agenda. This agenda was to be the concern of the people at large in a direct face-to-face democracy. Workers, food cultivators, professionals, and technicians, indeed, people in general, were to no longer think of themselves as members of specific classes, professional groups, and status groups; they were to become citizens of a community, occupied with resolving not separate particularistic conflicting interests but a shared general human body of concerns.

It is this kind of moral vision of a new society that gives to present-day anarchism a relevance that no other form of communistic or socialistic movement has advanced in recent memory. Its concept of emancipation and community speaks to the transclass problems of gender, age, ethnic, and hierarchical oppression -- problems whose scope reaches beyond the dissolution of a class-ridden economy and that are resolved by a truly ethical society in which the harmonization of human with human leads also to the harmonization of humanity with the natural world. Anything less than this vision, I submit, would fall short of the potentialities of humanity to function as a rational, creative, and liberatory agent in both social and natural history. Over many books and essays, I have articulated this broad conception of humanity's self-realization in what I consider to be a constructive vision of anarchy: a directly democratic, humanly scaled, confederal, ecologically oriented, and communistic society.”