An explanation of the impossibility of freedom within a state of any kind and a prescription for a system free of hierarchy (anarchy).

• The state
  • entire essence of the state: god is always on the side of the strong battalions
    • everything else is just a harmless grace-note, it’s purpose being to beguile the tender feelings of people who cannot bear to face the harsh truth
  • ultimate realization of the modern state: organize the most intensive expoloition of the people’s labor for the benefit of capital concentrated in a very small number of hands
  • since every state power stands outside the people and above them, they mys invariably try to subject them to rules and objectives which are alien to them. we declare ourselves the enemies of every government and every state power, the enemies of state organization of any kind. we belief that the people can be happy nd free only when they crate their won life, organizing themselves from below upward by means of independedn and completely free associations, subject to no official tutelage but open to the free and divers influences of individuals and parties.
  • states: force always precedes right
  • representative democracy
    • representative democracy: this later form of the state, based on the pseudo-sovereignty of a sham popular will, supposedly expressed by ssueudo-representives of the people in sham popular assembles, combines the two main conditions necessary for their success: state centralization , and the actually subordinate not the sovereign people to hthe intellectual minority that governs them, supposedly representing them but invariably exploiting them.
    • between a monarchy and the most democratic republic there is only one essential difference: in the former the world of officialdom oppresses and robs the poepld for the greater profit of the pribledged and properied classes, as well as to line its own pockets, in the name of the monarch; in the later., it oppresses and robs the peoppl in dactyl the same way, for the benefit of the same classes and the same pockets, but the the name of the peoples’s will. in a republic a fictions people, the “legal nation” is supposedly represented bt the state, smothers the real, live people. but it will scarcely be any easier on the people if the cudgel with which they are beaten is called the people’s cudgel.
    • constitutional forms of the state, or forms of popular representations, do not impede state, military, political, and financial depotism. instead, they have the effect of legitimizing it and giving it a false appearance of popular government, and they can significantly enhance its internal strength and vigor.
    • the only difference between revolutionary dictatorship and the state is in external appearances. essentially, they both represent the same government of the majority by a minotirt in the name of the presumed stupidity of the one and the presumed intelligence of the other. 
      • equally reaciontary, both haven the direct and inevitable result of consolidating the political and economic privileges of the governing minority and the political and economic slaver of the masses
  • capitalism
    • capitalist production: must constantly broaden this scope at the expense of the small-scale production and speculation which they swallowed up: they must strive to become unique, universal, world-wide. just as the state carries the ambition to become a world-wide state.
    • it is the inevitable result of capitalist monopoly, which always and everywhere accompanies the strengthening and expansion of state centralization. it can be said that privileged capital, concentrated in a few hands, has today become the soul of every state. the set is financed by iy, and by it alone, and in return guarantees it the unlimited right to exploit the people’s labor.
  • a state without slavery, open or camfloused, is inconceivable – that is why we are enemies of the state
• Social revolution
  • “the passion for destruction is a creative passion too”
  • to expect to use political methods to abolish political domination was a dangerous delusion
  • bakunin believed that social solidarity, a deep-rooted social and communal instinct, was an innate feature of human nature. if it failed to manifest itself consistently in comtemporaty society, that was only because it had been suppressed, or distorted by the artificial structure of the stea. to create a new and better society, theretfore , did not require the reeducation of it’s inhabitants or the transformation of human nature, but only the release of the masses’ pent-up natural instincts and social energies by destroying the institutions thwarting them.
  • who carries out the revolution
    • the primary purosose of revolution was to destroy the state and all its appurtenaccesl consequently, the popular forces most suitable for carrying it out where those segments of the population most alienated from the established order and whet the least to lose from its demise
    • the intellectual proletariat — educated individuals who had turned their backs on their class of origin. they alone could provide organization, propaganda, and encouragement to the scattered and downtrodden masses. they must not attemptt to direct the masses or to empose their down ideas or values on them however, but must limit themselves to litterery and organizational tasks. exactly how such dedicated and strong-willed individuals were to be prevented from dominating or even dictation to the masses was unclear.
    • the proletariat: they have very littler property or none at all and are therefore not corrupted by it.
    • anyone who is invested with power by an invariable social law will inevitably come the oppressor and exploiter of society
    • the youth must become participants who have doomed themselves to destruction. acting in accordance with a rigorously conceived and fixed plan, and subjecting all their activity tothte strictest discipline on order  to creat that unanimity without which there scan be no victory, they must ready both themselsve and the people not just for desperate resistance but also for bold attack.
  • not even poverty and desperation, however, are enough to provoke a social revolution. they are capable of production personal or, at most, local rebellions, but thy are insufficient for arousing the people en mass. that requires a popular ideal, which always develops historically, from the depths of popular instinct, an instinct nurtured, broadened, and illuminated by a series of significant events, painful and bitter experience – it requires a general conception of one’s rights and a profound. passionate, one might say religious, belief in those rights. When such an ideal and such a belief are found in a people together with a poverty that drives them to desperation, then social revolution is inevitable, it is imminent, and there is no force that can prevent it.
  • we have neither intention lthe least desire to impose on our own people or on any other an ideal social organization that we have drawn from books or thought up on our own. in the belief that the masses bear all the elements of their future organizational norms in there own more or less historically evolved instincts, in their everyday needs and their conscious and unconscious desires, we seek that ideal within the people themselves
    
  • those are the convictions of social revolutionaries, and for them we are called anarchist. we do not object to this term because we are in fact the enemies of all power, knowing that power corrupts those invested with it just as much as those compelled to submit to it. under its pernicious influence the former because ambitious and avaricious depots, exploiters of society for the iown personal or class advantage, and the later become slaves.
    
  • the only way to render political power harmless, to pacify it, to subdue it, is to destroy it.
  • in all previous revolution, when the army, in its struggle against the people, found itself opposed not only by the masses but by the respectable citizens who were leading them, by university students, and by the national guard, the majority of which consitated of bourgeois, it rapidly became demoralize, and before actually being defeated it yielded and retreat,d or fraternized with the people. even in the heat of battle, a compat of sorts had existed and been observed between the contending sides which did not allow even the most fourious passions to transgress certain boundaries, as though both sides by mutual agreement were fighting with blunted weapons. it never occurred either to the people or to the army that houses the streets could be destroyed or tens of thousands of unarmed people cut down with impunity.
  • to contend with such a wild beast one needs another beast, no less wild but more just: an organized uprising of all the people, a social revolution which, like military reaction, spares nothing and stops at nothing
  • communism / marxism
    • revolutionalry dictatorship: based on the this fiction of pseudo-popular representation – which in actual fact means the government of the masses by an insignificant handful of privileged individuals, elected (or not elected) by mobs of people rounded up for voting and never knowing why or whom they are voting for – on this imaginary and abstract expression of the imaginary thought and will of all the people of which the real, living people do not have the faintest idea.
    • on communism: there is a flagrant contradiction here. if their state is to be trull a people’s set, then why abolish it? but if it’s abolition is essential for the real liberation of the people, then how do they dare call it a people’s state?
      • freedon, or anarchy – that is, the voluntary organization of the workers from blow upward – is the ultimate goal of social development, and that any state, in including their people’s state, is a yolk that gives rise to despotism on the one hand and slavery on the other
      • they say that this state yolk, this dictatorship, is a necessary tractional device for achieving the total liberation of the people: anarchy, or freedom, is the goal, and the state, or dictatorship, the means. thus, for the masses to be liberated they must first be enslaved
      • liberty can be created only by liberty
  • Reactionary forces
    • the bourseoise fears social revolution more than anything else and knows that the stet is its only refuge from this threat. therefore it always wants and demands as strong a state as possible, or, to put it simply, a military dictatorship. … it wants that dictatorship to be arrayed in forms of popular representation, which will enable it to exploit the people in the people’s own name. 
    • conservative party: the philosophy of the justification and legitimization of everything that exists. “all that is real is rational”
    • an inate habit of obedience and the desire for domination
    • people who fight the church but not the state: they are so sure of God’s nonexistence that they do not fear his wrath. the authorities are another matter..
  • social-revolutinary banner, in letters of fire ann blood: abolish all states, destroy bourgeois civilization, organize freely from blow upward, by means of free associations – organize the unshackled laboring hordes, the whole of liberated humanity, create a new world for all mankind.
  • co-operatives cannot liberate the worded masses. nevertheless, it does offer the benefits, even now,  of accustoming the workers to unite, organize, and independently manage their own affairs.
  • difference between political revolution and social revolution
  • p. 136
• What is anarchism
  • to expect to use political methods to abolish political domination was a dangerous delusion
  • the ideal: an end to want, an end to poverty the full satisfaction of all material needs through collective labor equal and obligatory for all; then, an end to all masters and to domination of every kind, and the free construction of popular life in accordance with popular needs, not from above downward, as in the state, but from below upward, but the people themselves, dispensing with all governments and parliaments – a voluntary alliance of agricultural and factory workers associations, communes, provinces, and nations; and finally, in the more distant future, universal human brotherhood triumphing on the ruins of all the states
  • even the most rational and profound science cannot divine the form social life will take in the future. it can determine only the negative conditions, which follow logically from a rigorous critique, social and economic science rejected hereditary individual property and, consequently, took the abstract and, so to speak, negative position of collective property as a necessary condition of the future social order. in the same way it rejected the very idea of the state or of statism, meaning the government of society from above downward in the same of some imaginary right – theological or metaphysical, divine or intellectual and scientific. therefore it took the opposite, or negative, position : anarcht, meaning the free and independent organization of all the units and parts of the community and their voluntary federation from below upward, not by the orders of any authority, evan an elected one, and not by the dictates of any scientific theory, but as a result of the natural development of all the varied demands put forth by life itself.
    
  • life does not follow from thought. thought follows from life, and that in order to alter thought one must first of all change life. give the people a broad human existence, and they will amaze you with the profound rationality of their ideas
  • a person is strong only when he stand upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts in accordance with his deepenst convictions.
  • anarchist program which reflects all the conditions for the real and total liberation of the masses:
    • convinced that the state in any form whatsoever is incompatible with the liberty of the proletariat, that does not permit the fraternal international alliance of people, we want to abolish all states
    • along with the steate, everything that bears the name of juridical law must inescapably perish, every structure creed from above downward means of legislation and government and never having in any objective but the establishment and systaiazaion of explosions of the people’s labor for the benfifi of the ruling class
    • abolution of the stea and juridical slaw will be necessary have as it’s consequence the bolition of individual hereditary properly and the juridical family which si based on tialskdfas
    • abolution fo the state, the right of property, and the juridical family alone will a make possible the organization of popular life from below upward, on the bias of collective labor and property, which by the force of events will ahee become possible and obligator for all. this will be achieved by means of the completely free fedeariotn of separate individuals into associations or autonomous communes – or, disregarding communes or any provincial or national divisions, into great homogeneous associations linked by the identity of their interests and social aspirations- and the federation of communes into nations and of nations into humanity.