And from this difference another emerges, a considerable one in my opinion. Anyone who thinks that things to be done are outside ourselves and are accomplished as a number of successes and failures--life is a staircase, at times you go up, at times you go down. There are times when things go well, and times when they go badly. There, whoever thinks life is made up of such things: for example, the classic figure of the democratic politician (for goodness' sake, someone you can talk to, a friendly guy, tolerant, who has a permissive side to him, believes in progress, in the future, in a better society, in freedom) well, a person like this, probably not wearing a double-breasted jacket, no tie, so casual, a person who close up looks like a comrade and who himself declares he is a comrade, this person could very well be a cop, it makes no difference. Why not? There are democratic policemen, the era of uniform repression is over, repression has friendly aspects today, they repress us with lots of brilliant ideas. How can we identify this person then, this democrat, how can we recognise him? And if he pulls the wool over our eyes to prevent us from seeing him, how can we defend ourselves from him? We can identify him through this fact: that for him life is production, his life is made up of doing things, a quantitative doing that unfolds before his eyes, and nothing else.
—Alfredo M. Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension