Who do anarchists struggle against

– Against the State seen as the centralised organisation of power in all spheres (administrative, financial, political, military, etc.)
– Against government which is the political executive organ of the State and makes all decisions concerning repression, exploitation, control, etc.
-Against Capitalism which can be considered both as the flux of productive relations in course and individual capitalists, their activity, their projects and their complicity in this form
– Against the individual parts that the State and capital are divided into. In other words the police, judiciary, the army, school, newspapers, television, trade unions, the large multinational firms, etc.
– Against the family, which forms the essential nucleus upon which the State structure is based
– Against the world of politics, therefore against political parties (all of them), Parliament which is the expression of bourgeois democracy, and the political ideology which serves to mask real social problems
– Against fascists and all the other instruments of repression used by the State and Capital
– Against religion and the Church which constitute a potent ally to repression
– Against the army which is an armed force that is used against the people
– Against prisons which institutionalise the repression of the poorest of the exploited classes
– Against asylums which repress the different

What false ideas do anarchists struggle against

– Against reformism which wants to set social problems right by using laws, political parties, parliaments, referendums, votes, etc.
– Against efficientism which wants to reduce man to an automat always capable of working and obeying
– Against humanitarianism which calls for peace and safety of an abstract idea of man but does not act concretely to attack class enemies
– Against nonviolence which blocks the just violence of the exploited which is their only arm of liberation
– Against patriotism which feeds the absurd idea of the homeland in preference to other nations, whereas the exploited have no homeland but are brothers of the exploited of the whole world
– Against militarism which justifies the function of armies with the swindle that their role is the defence of the homeland
– Against racism which defines a part of the human race as inferior
– Against male chauvinism which reduces women to sex objects
– Against feminism which closes itself within an asphyxiating inverted male chauvinism
– Against the delegate which separates the exploited from direct action
– Against hierarchy which educates towards social stratification
– Against obedience which represses all individuality
– Against authority which prevents the autonomous development of the individual
– Against progressivism, a modern version of evolutionism which is the ideological covering of reformism
– Against economism which puts the economics at the centre of the history of class exploitation
-Against trade unionism which is the direct product of economism and which means to limit the class struggle to claiming at the level of the workplace. Anarcho-syndicalism, with all its revolutionary declarations does not escape this reformist limitation

What anarchists want
– Abolition of the State, Government, Capitalism, the family, religion, the army, prisons, asylums and every form of power which uses the law to force others to do something. Therefore refusal also of any kind of workers’ or socialist State and of any form of dictatorship of the proletariat
– Elimination of the private property of land, the tools of labour, materials, machines, factories, the land and anything else required for the production of what is necessary in order to live
-Abolition of salaried work and reduction of work to a minimum organised by individual groups federated on the basis of their own aptitudes and sympathies as well as on the basis of their own needs
– Substitution of the traditional family with life in common based on love and reciprocal affinity and on the basis of real sexual equality
– Organisation of life, such as that of production, based on free associations differing according to the problems to be faced, interests to be defended and affinities to be developed. The whole of these organisations federated on a local basis, by groups of communes, then widening the relations to a larger federation until it reaches the maximum possible of the liberated areas of the revolution
– Education free and aimed at an awakening of individual aptitude which in a liberated society will be meaningful only in the limits in which this liberation is realised
– The spreading of atheism and anti-religious propaganda, always necessary because on these problems even the liberation that has come about cannot exercise more than a limited clarification
– Completion of the social revolution until all domination of man over man be abolished.

The means anarchists want to use

– The specific anarchist organisation which is an active minority of conscious individuals who share personal and political affinity and give themselves the aim of calling on the exploited to organise themselves with a view to revolution.
– A federation of different anarchist groups who while changing nothing of their particular specific structure, link with each other with informal, federative pacts in order to better coordinate their own action
– Propaganda to explain through books, pamphlets, newspapers, leaflets, graffiti, etc. what the intentions of the ruling structure are and the dangers facing the exploited. Also to supply indications of the anarchist struggle and show who anarchists are, or to urge the exploited to rebel, denouncing the consequences of obedience and resignation
– The struggle to claim better conditions – Although we are not reformists, the struggle to obtain improvements in one’s immediate situation (wages, habitation, health, education, occupational, etc.) sees anarchists present although they do not see these moments as ends in themselves. They push the exploited towards this form of struggle so that they can develop the elements of self-organisation and refusal of the delegate which are indispensable in order to develop direct action at all other levels
– Violent struggle to realise the social revolution along with the exploited. The attack against the class enemy (State, government, capital, church, etc.) must necessarily be violent, in the case of the contrary it would only be a sterile protest and would determine a reinforcement of class dominion. This attack could be:
a) isolated attacks against individual structures or people who are responsible for repression
b) an insurrectional attack by a specific minority
c) a mass insurrectional attack
d) a mass revolutionary attack
Each of these levels, starting from the first, may or may not create the conditions leading to the successive one to develop. Political and economic analyses can foresee this possibility within certain limits, but cannot give an absolute response: action itself is the only test for action. The moral foundation of violent struggle already exists in the fact of repression as it has been exercised by power for centuries.

from ‘Revolution, Violence, anti-authoritarianism’, Elephant Editions

 Elephant Editions