I can never find that quotation of Bakunin, can you give me the source on that?
The Relevance of Anarchism
I think we should hand out copies of the ABC of Anarchism like people hand out bibles! Well maybe not, but AB does such a great job boiling things down to their basic elements.
Anarchism can be a hard sell because it is so different from the current order, but it is vital to explain to people that the journey towards anarchism will involve communities rising up, learning how to make it work together. And of course it will take a lot of struggle on a lot of levels. Nationalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia need to be understood and fought as we attempt to truly create community and labor movements not just more armchair activists. We must resist the lure of premature violence or vanguardism but be ready to fight when the time comes. By the same token we must learn to find ways to support opressed cultures and nations in the here and now without giving into nationalism. It's not as if a state of anarchism will fall from the sky.
However I agree that Anarchism is the most noble idea to ever come from humankind. And I think that is why it will endure.
Anarchists all around the world are subjected to scorn, criticism, and condescension. The most commonly leveled charge is that anarchists are too idealistic. That they lack pragmatism and sensibility. This criticism has long dogged anarchists for centuries. The Marxists and Statists of the 1800's denounced the idea that change can come without a centralized authority; their efforts during the Spanish Revolution in the 1930's were ridiculed; and today they face the charge that they are no longer relevant.
How can this be?
The Anarchists have long seen the impending troubles of centralized government. Mikhail Bakunin, a noted 19th century anarchist, predicted that state-instituted socialism would become a "red bureaucracy" that would institute "the worst of all despotic governments." He made this prediction long before any state-socialism came in place. Rudolf Rocker challenged the capitalist economic system: "The morbid desire to make millions of men submissive to a definite will and to force whole empires into courses which are useful to the secret purposes of small minorities, is frequently more evident in the typical representatives of modern capitalism than are purely economic considerations or the prospect of greater material profit."
The world today sees the centralization of political and economic power. In the US, a nation that holds great economic stake in the world, the top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 90% of Americans. The wealth has gone to fewer and fewer people in the world, just as the anarchists have long predicted. Governments have only gotten bigger, more interventionist, and show no signs of shrinking.
The notion that we anarchists are idealistic is laughable. It is not we who hold faith that the system will work out for the better; it is not we who cling to the notions of nationalism, militarism, interventionism; it is not we who believe that capitalism can be reformed. THAT is idealism. We anarchists see through the empty, malignant fictions of the capitalist scum who have condemned mankind to an existence-turned-commodity. We anarchists do not believe in the myth of the "benevolent government" that serves the needs of the people .We anarchists know that we, the people, have it within our capabilities and our responsibilities to live uncoerced, unexploited, and free. We do not relegate our hopes and aspirations into empty hierarchical structures that exist with illegitimate authority.
And people call us irrelevant…
Long Live Anarchy!