The resistance movement was global. Riots broke out, crops were burned, Happicuppa cafés were looted, Happicuppa personnel were car-bombed or kidnapped or shot by snipers or beaten to death by mobs; and, on the other side, peasants were massacred by the army. Or by the armies, various armies; number of countries were involved. But the soldiers and dead peasants all looked much the same whenever they were. They looked dusty. It was amazing how much dust got stirred up in the course of such events. (From: Chapter 8, Section 2: Happicuppa, Page 179..)
I believe that discipline, coordination, and planning are indispensable, but we shouldn't define them in terms taken from the world that we're destroying. (From: Third Part: The Revolutionary (July 19 to November....)
Without exception, upheavals even as limited (in terms of political and social practice) as that of the 1930s come about as a consequence of and also result in severe dislocations in the social structure: in the structures of authority and repression and in the structure of culture and everyday life. Like a miracle, a germ of humanity, of species being, nourished in the warmth of the freedom suddenly attained, strikes root in the lives of ordinary people, gives them hope and encourages their aspirations, fires their imaginations and broadens their conception of self until it embraces mankind as a vivid, sensual reality to be lived in the empirical world. (From: Chapter 6: Consolidation, Page 92..)
...we should see revolution as a long process of disequilibrium, in which society passes through various experimental stages before reaching an equilibrium. (From: Third Part: The Revolutionary (July 19 to November....)
What do we understand by revolution? It is not a simple change of governors. It is the taking possession by the people of all social wealth. It is the abolition of all forces which have so long hampered the development of humanity.
[Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty) group pamphlet] Society must understand that it must not get down on its knees and whine for liberty, but conquer it. It must understand this and organize itself for the fight against the government. (From: Chapter 16: The New Politics and the Peasant, Page....)
Once man is free from earthly and "heavenly" gods, free from "good manners" and from his morality, which depends on these Gods, he lifts up his voice and struggles against the enslavement of mankind and the distortion of his nature.
["The Anarchist Revolution," by Nestor Makhno, published by Sabotage Press.]
The revolution is the creation of new living institutions, new groupings, new social relationships; it is the destruction of privileges and monopolies; it is the new spirit of justice, of brotherhood, of freedom which must renew the whole of social life, raise the moral level and the material conditions of the masses by calling on them to provide, through their direct and conscientious action, for their own futures. Revolution is the organization of all public services by those who work in them in their own interest as well as the public’s; Revolution is the destruction of all coercive ties; it is the autonomy of groups, of communes, of regions; Revolution is the free federation brought about by desire for brotherhood, by individual a...
Justice on the streets is nothing more than exposure of and attacks upon all of the existing society's mystifications (parties, trade unions, reformism, leftism, laws, justice, guardians, judges, courts, prisons, offenses, which is to say, its norms). (From: Section 6: Self-Dissolution of the Politico-Milita....)
We had no use for anything connected to the past, a past which had in some ways sunk already, but which would still make inexhaustible attempts to reassert itself. All revolutions carry with them a counter revolution. A Revolution is a forward march from a certain point, whereas counter revolution is a return to that point, or in some cases to a point that is further back. (From: Section 3: Machiavelli in Sal Dals, Page 5..)
...for its depth and breadth of lasting influence, there is nothing in so short a time period to equal the tremendous progressive humanization of society as social revolution. (From: Chapter 9: Overall Assessments of the Spanish Revo....)
...there are the ideas of the future, of which some are already approaching realization and are obliging people to change their way of life and to struggle against the former ways: such ideas in our world as those of freeing the laborers, of giving equality to women, of disusing flesh food, etc.; while others, though already recognized, have not yet come into practical conflict with the old forms of life: such in our times are the ideas (which we call ideals) of the extermination of violence, the arrangement of a communal system of property, of a universal religion, and of a general brotherhood of men. (From: Part 2..)
...no popular explosion of the magnitude and intensity of the Tragic Week is the work of one man. (From: Chapter 13: Francisco Ferrer: "Author and Chief of....)
....in ordinary times, it [the Communist Party] was like a widow, aloof and distant; during political campaigns its face was that of a slaughterer out for blood. (From: Part 3: Adapting the New Order, Chapter 5: Moderat....)
We bear the same chains as you, your burdens are our own evils, we share your fate. Therefore we suffer with you, and we hope with you and we take arms with you “against the sea of troubles.”
