Quotes from Roy San Filippo

Generally speaking, the historical experience has been that movements away from democracy taken in the name of emergency conditions is not reversed when those conditions change (when internal and external threats to revolution subside).

The State is inherently authoritarian. It represents the interests of the rich against the poor. It is run by representatives—self-selected and sharing a similar ideology—ratified by the increasingly diminishing percentage of the population that bothers to vote.

The State is not democratic, in the best sense of the word, but elitist. It is a specialized institution standing above the rest of society, alienated from and oppressing most of the population.

There is a spectrum of resistance possible within a political context. From our commitment to defending each other against arrest at demonstrations, to providing both legal and political defences for people brought to trial, to supporting imprisoned revolutionaries, we believe that our commitment to each other is our strongest defence against the power of the State. We demand the release of all political prisoners and prisoners of war, but we also work for the abolition of the prison system.

One demonstration of the power of the State is the fact that it has so colonized our imaginations as to make itself seem natural, leaving us unable to think of a different way. Yet for the majority of human existence we have lived without the State.

As anarchists, we see State reforms as positive, opening up new space for action. We do not sit back complacently when reforms are won.

We will not get real freedom as a concession from rulers. We will have to win real freedom for ourselves.

The State is not an instrument of liberation. For this reason we oppose strategies for social change that rely on the power of the State. Whether it is participating in elections, petitioning those in power, or trying to seize State power, we see such strategies as self-defeating.

In fact, every major State reform has come in response to the strength and power of grassroots movements.

The State is born of the conquest of other people. The self-governing community is a creation of the people themselves in the process of overthrowing the State.

The free society is characterized by the radical decentralization of all kinds of power. Confederal structures do not rule over communities; they are the means by which communities cooperate.

An anarchist society is not one free of conflict. It is a society in which the resolution of such conflicts is not monopolized by an elite.

The autonomous municipalities established by the Zapatistas represent in many respects only the latest chapter in a long history of revolutionary dual power. In this respect they offer a contemporary example from which certain general lessons can be extracted, much as lessons might be taken from the experiences of the workers councils that sprung up across Europe in the wake of the First World War, or during the Spanish Revolution, or the Shanghai Commune during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Often dual power is discussed in a way that it disconnects it from the long years of thankless mass organizing work that precedes it. It is treated as if it springs spontaneously from the people in the revolutionary moment, without respect for the patient nurturance of the forces that make it possible.

All politics, even revolutionary politics, is the art of the possible. What distinguishes revolutionary politics is the commitment to expanding the realm of the possible to include genuine power to the people.

Revolutionary consciousness is collective. Individuals can come to revolutionary conclusions, but it is only when they start to talk to each other about those conclusions and attempt to draw out larger more general truths by looking at all of their experiences and drawing on all of their knowledge that we can talk meaningfully of revolutionary consciousness.