Sections (TOC) :
• 1
12 Words; 98 Characters
• 2
59 Words; 359 Characters
• 3
50 Words; 309 Characters
• 4
33 Words; 219 Characters
• 5
276 Words; 1,795 Characters
• 6
163 Words; 974 Characters
• 7
101 Words; 681 Characters
• 8
149 Words; 862 Characters
• 9
100 Words; 626 Characters
• 10
37 Words; 214 Characters
• 11
44 Words; 302 Characters
• 12
62 Words; 366 Characters
• 13
85 Words; 537 Characters
• 14
91 Words; 538 Characters
• 15
51 Words; 277 Characters
• 16
19 Words; 152 Characters
• 17
59 Words; 375 Characters
• 18
77 Words; 489 Characters
• 19
98 Words; 589 Characters
• 20
21 Words; 136 Characters
• 21
57 Words; 285 Characters
• 22
41 Words; 237 Characters
• 23
48 Words; 294 Characters
• 24
19 Words; 170 Characters
• 25
74 Words; 475 Characters
• 26
101 Words; 599 Characters
• 27
48 Words; 311 Characters
• 28
59 Words; 409 Characters
• 29
23 Words; 141 Characters
• 30
63 Words; 398 Characters
• 31
122 Words; 692 Characters
• 32
50 Words; 291 Characters
• 33
41 Words; 277 Characters
• 34
59 Words; 366 Characters
• 35
22 Words; 148 Characters
Sections (Content) :
• 1
...no central authority is needed: cooperation based on reciprocity can be self-policing.
• 2
The more artificial, brutal, and authoritarian is the power of the State, the more indifferent and hostile it is to the natural developments, interests and desires of the people, the freer and more natural must be the organization of the International. It must try all the more to accommodate itself to the natural instincts and ideals of the people.
• 3
After having reconstructed society on the basis of the most complete liberty, equality, and justice -- not to mention work for all and an enlightened education inspired by respect for man -- public opinion will then reflect the new humanity and become a natural guardian of the most absolute liberty.
• 4
By direct action of the workers themselves -- in their syndicates and communities -- rather than by the dictatorship of a political party, however revolutionary, is society to be organized after the revolution.
• 5
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.
• 6
Economic changes can only come about as a result of unity at the places of work. Workers' councils, united with others, industry by industry, and locality by locality, are the basis of a revolutionary movement and also of a changeover in the system. It is possible now "to build the new society within the framework of the old," by creation of units in industry; localized associations for mutual aid and protection; cooperative endeavors and even clubs of common interest. A living commune consists of all facets of human interest. A united, local commune can bypass the State and ignore laws imposed upon it that it does not wish to observe, unless the authorities use force. And a commune active in coordinating workers' councils, tenants' associations, and many other action groups would be the fallback unit in any creation of a free society. It circumvents the need for the State and thus negates authority. It makes it possible for the State to be abolished.
• 7
The notion of a free society is so attractive as to be generally acceptable to all who are not completely warped by authority, and especially by successive younger generations, whenever imposed ideals of duty and obedience have cracked because too great sacrifices were demanded in their name. Against these notions can be seen the alternative possibilities arising from indiscipline and disobedience such as: the abolition of frontiers, fraternity between peoples, "one world, no government," the absence of war and end of violence, the breaking down of artificial class barriers, sexual liberation, education without forced discipline, and production for use not profit.
• 8
My reading of history tells me that in all great social changes the revolutionary class always fails of success until it is able to do the work of the class it seeks to destroy, and to do it more efficiently. And when it has so perfected itself that it is able to perform this work, neither gods nor men can stop its onward march to victory. In other words, a new social order cannot supplant the old until it has its own organization ready to take its place. Within the social order of capitalism I can see no possibility of building up a new economic organization fit for the work of superseding the old on socialist lines, except that new order be built upon the lines of the industries that capitalism itself has perfected. Therefore I am heart and soul an industrial unionist.
["Changes," by James Connolly, 1914, Forward, May 9, 1914.]
• 9
Sometimes I dream of this social change. I get a streak of faith in Evolution, and the good in man. I paint a gradual slipping out of the now, to that beautiful then, where there are neither kings, presidents, landlords, national bankers, stockbrokers, railroad magnates, patentright monopolists, or tax and title collectors; where there are no over-stocked markets or hungry children, idle counters and naked creatures, splendor and misery, waste and need. I am told this is farfetched idealism, to paint this happy, povertyless, crimeless, diseaseless world; I have been told I "ought to be behind the bars" for it.
• 10
The importance of Spain in history is that it was the first country in which some millions of people adopted the anarchist philosophy and when they put it into practice in the revolution they made it work.
• 11
...when workers expropriate the bourgeoisie, when they seize foreign properties, when public security is in their hands, when the unions control the militias, when a true revolution is occurring, how is it possible to give all that legal sanction without compromising the revolutionary spirit?
• 12
The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of every phase of life,--individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.
• 13
Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.
• 14
When once free from the restrictions of extraneous authority, men will enter into free relations; spontaneous organizations will spring up in all parts of the world, and every one will contribute to his and the common welfare as much labor as he or she is capable of, and consume according to their needs. All modern technical inventions and discoveries will be employed to make work easy and pleasant, and science, culture, and art will be freely used to perfect and elevate the human race, while woman will be coequal with man.
• 15
From this point of view, we say first that in this mixed economy the main purpose of the Revolution has been achieved: the land is now the property of those who cultivate it, and the peasants no longer work for the profit of an idle exploiter who lives by their sweat.
• 16
...anarchy and organization, far from being incompatible as has sometimes been claimed, are mutually complimentary and illuminate each other...
• 17
Here comes my answer: Anarchy. That is the real freedom. And communism is the real equality. Only a social revolution can allow us to build a really free and really egalitarian society.
["How Are We To Establish A Truly Free And Egalitarian Society?" by Ba Jin, Banyue (Fortnight), Chengdu, China, No 17, 1 April 1921, over Ba Jin's real name Li Feigan.]
• 18
Anarchism, the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.
• 19
And yet, if we admit that a central government to regulate the relations of communes between themselves is quite needless, why should we admit its necessity to regulate the mutual relations of the groups which make up each commune? And if we leave the business of coming to a common understanding with regard to enterprises which concern several cities at once to the free initiative of the communes concerned, why refuse this same free initiative to the groups composing a single commune? There is no more reason for a government inside the commune than for a government outside.
• 20
With Anarchy as an aim and as a means, Communism becomes possible. Without it, it necessarily becomes slavery and cannot exist.
• 21
He [the native-born Anarchist] had never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asylum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a man who wanted to work and could not find work to do, or a dead baby in a ditch.
• 22
We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners.
• 23
I give thee to the future! Thine secure
When each at least unto himself shall waken.
Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?
I cannot tell--but it the earth shall see!
I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!
• 24
...organization is the foundation of the revolution.
[First Part: The Rebel (1896-1931), Section 19: Emilienne, Berthe, and Nestor Makhno, Page 126.]
• 25
What we want, therefore, is the complete destruction of the domination and exploitation of man by man -- we want men united as brothers by a conscious and desired solidarity, all cooperating voluntarily for the well-being of all; we want society to be constituted for the purpose of supplying everybody with the means for achieving the maximum well-being, the maximum possible moral and spiritual development; we want bread, freedom, love, and science for everybody.
• 26
In order to abolish the police and all the harmful social institutions we must know what to put in their place, not in a more or less distant future but immediately, the very day we start demolishing. One only destroys, effectively and permanently, that which one replaces by something else; and to put off to a later date the solution of problems which present themselves with the urgency of necessity, would be to give time to the institutions one is intending to abolish to recover from the shock and reassert themselves, perhaps under other names, but certainly with the same structure.
• 27
Peter Kropotkin is without doubt one of those who have contributed perhaps more—perhaps more even than Bakunin and Elisee Reclus—to the elaboration and propagandation of anarchist ideas. And he has therefore well deserved the recognition and the admiration that all anarchists feel for him.
• 28
Anarchism is a world view, a philosophy of society; indeed the philosophy of society, for whoever considers the world and human life in their profoundest senses and their complete development, and then decides on the societal form of greatest desirability, cannot but decide for anarchism. Every other form is a half-measure and a patchwork.
["Anarchist Communism," by Johann Most, 1889.]
• 29
Anarchists insist on creating the desired now society in the very process of confronting the old. Means must be similar to the ends.
• 30
Common to all Anarchists is the desire to free society of all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of the development of a free humanity. In this sense Mutualism, Collectivism and Communism are not to be regarded as closed economic systems, permitting no further development, but merely as economic assumptions as to the means of safeguarding a free community.
• 31
When, among the happiest people in the world, bands of peasants are seen regulating affairs of State under an oak, and always acting wisely, can we help scorning the ingenious methods of other nations, which make themselves illustrious and wretched with so much art and mystery?
A State so governed needs very few laws; and, as it becomes necessary to issue new ones, the necessity is universally seen. The first man to propose them merely says what all have already felt, and there is no question of factions or intrigues or eloquence in order to secure the passage into law of what every one has already decided to do, as soon as he is sure that the rest will act with him.
• 32
...a union is only your instrument, or the sword with which you sharpen and increase your natural force; the union exists for you and through you, the society conversely lays claim to you for itself and exists even without you, in short, the society is sacred, the union your own...
• 33
"But," it is usually asked, "What will there be instead of Governments?"
There will be nothing. Something that has long been useless, and therefore superfluous and bad, will be abolished. An organ that, being unnecessary, has become harmful, will be abolished.
• 34
... the day when the disappearance of authority shall permit all men to organize freely according to their choice, when everyone shall be able to enjoy the product of his labor, and when those moral maladies called prejudices shall vanish, permitting human beings to live in harmony, having no other desire than to study the sciences and love their fellows.
• 35
...decisions must be made by those most affected by them. That is, in effect, the standard of autonomy, meaning self-guidance or self-rule.
Chronology :
March 12, 2020 : Social Organization -- Added.
HTML file generated from :
http://RevoltSource.com/