"By definition an anarchist is he who does not wish to be oppressed nor wishes to be himself an oppressor; who wants the greatest well-being, freedom and development for all human beings. His ideas, his wishes have their origin in a feeling of sympathy, love and respect for humanity"

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"I’m not here to convince the reader to become an anarchist, however. I’m here to say that fundamentally, most discussions between anarchists and non-anarchists involve both parties talking about two different and unrelated ideas. Most, but not all, people critical of anarchism are not arguing against the political ideology that I or millions before me have espoused. They aren’t arguing against a free association of cooperative, autonomous groups who federate with one another in order to build an antiracist, antipatriarchal society based on mutual aid and mutual respect. They’re arguing against “no rules.”
Some of those arguments are in good faith. Others are not.
Anarchism is an umbrella term for an assortment of specific and identifiable ideological positions. That is to say, anarchism is not a vague thing. It’s a complex thing, it’s an organic thing, and it’s an ideology against ideology, but it is still a specific and identifiable thing. When I say, for example, “anarchist capitalists are not anarchists” I mean to say that capitalism is entirely outside the bounds of what has been identified historically as anarchism as a coherent movement. Anarchism, as part of the larger umbrella of socialism (another misunderstood word), was specifically developed to oppose capitalism. Anticapitalism is at least as central to anarchist theory and practice as anti-statism is."

"I bristle at the sorts of questions like “how would medication be manufactured and distributed in anarchism?” These questions can be asked in good faith, and if they are, they deserve an answer. But usually the undertone of the question is “it would not be, and therefore by advocating for anarchism you’re advocating against life-saving medicine.”
Most of the askers wouldn’t be able to describe to you how medication is manufactured and distributed in our current system, or how it was in Soviet Russia. It’s not the kind of specialized knowledge that the average person has. The cheeky answer that occurs to me first is of course “well it doesn’t work very well now either, now does it?”
But the original question itself shows a misunderstanding of anarchism (which is, again, an understandable misunderstanding). Anarchism does not generally argue against the manufacture and distribution of medicine. It is not “corporations” that make medicine, not “governments” that develop international standards for safety. It is people who do both of those things. People embedded within organizational structures."

"Anarchism is capable of presenting answers to questions about supply chains and manufacturing, but those answers are also not, quite, what anarchism is. Anarchism is not a set of answers. It’s a set of tools with which to find answers. The answer to “how would anarchist society handle the following,” is “we will organize in such a way that those who are most capable of answering that question will be able to get together and answer it.” I don’t mean this as a vague platitude, I mean it concretely. When workers control a factory, for example, rather than the stockholders, efficiency is increased, pay is increased, working conditions improve, and hours are shorter. In an anarchist society, the people who know how to make and distribute medicine will be able to meet and discuss how to produce better medicine more efficiently, and there would not be the monetary barrier between a patient and her meds, nor the national barrier between a researcher and her peers.
When we say “we don’t know what an anarchist society would be like because we are not yet in one,” we are not being vague or evasive. We are saying that societies ought to be constructed by the people in them. Anarchism is a set of tools and principles with which to construct societies that value freedom and cooperation. We actually do have examples of what those societies can look like, but where we are at now, and where we will be in the future, is not revolutionary Catalonia, Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, or Korean Manchuria. We should not expect to reach the same answers as they did, even if we apply similar problem-solving methods to our problems."

"The revolutionary Left was heavily anarchist or heavily anarchist influenced until the turn of the century, or in many countries, until the Russian Civil War that the Bolsheviks emerged victorious from. (I don’t have it in me to call it the Bolshevik revolution. It was a pluralistic revolution waged by multiple socialist tendencies that the Bolsheviks took over through the large-scale murder of their fellow revolutionaries. Yes I’m a salty old anarchist ♥♥♥♥♥. Yes, that still feels like the most accurate way to describe what happened.)"

"Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this—letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom."

“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”

"The hard truth of it is that I’m anti-Communist. I’m also, when push comes to shove, a communist.
In this case, the capital-C matters quite a lot.
Words have multiple meanings, depending on the context in which they’re used, and one of the most mishandled words in history is the word “communist.” I don’t even want to say it’s one of the most “misunderstood,” because that implies there’s a single correct meaning of the word, and there isn’t.
If a communist is someone who seeks a stateless, classless, moneyless society in which decisions are made at the local level by various councils and then larger federations organize that decentralized social structure, then I’m a communist. This is the original sense of the word. About once a year I ponder getting the words “according to ability / according to need” tattooed on my body before I decide that I already have too many words tattooed on me.
If a Communist is someone who supports one-party rule and totalitarian governments that promise to do what’s right by “the workers,” then I am absolutely opposed to it. If a Communist is someone who believes that only the United States and its allies are capable of evil, and that any government that opposes the US is therefore inherently good, then I am absolutely opposed to it. If a Communist is someone who takes orders from their Party and not from their conscience, then I am absolutely opposed to it.
The conflation of these two concepts, communism (little-c) and Communism (big-C) frankly ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up a lot of the Left in the 20th century and still does damage today. That conflation started, as best as I can tell, in March 1918, when the Bolshevik Party in Russia changed its name to the Russian Communist Party. From this point forward, to say you were a communist implied you were a Communist. That is to say, you were a party member or in allegiance with that party.
One of the greatest swindles perpetrated against humanity was authored by both sides of the cold war–when they convinced people that capitalism and Communism were the only options available to humanity. The west convinced people that capitalism was synonymous with freedom and democracy. The Soviet bloc convinced people that the Communist Party was synonymous with worker’s power and equality.
Both sides worked together, though, to convince people that authoritarianism was synonymous with communism. If you hate authoritarianism, accept capitalism. If you hate capitalism, accept authoritarianism."