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
So, this amiable gentleman wreaks criticism upon us and says, ‘Yes, anarchists are good people but they are ineffectual. What have they ever done in history? What State has ever been anarchist? Have they ever realised government without a government? Isn’t a free society, an anarchist society, a society without power, a contradiction?’ And this critical rock that crashes down on us is certainly consistent, because in fact if you look closely at anywhere that anarchists got near to realising their utopia of a free society such as in Spain or Russia, if you look at them closely, you find these constructions are somewhat open to criticism. They are certainly revolutions, but they are not libertarian revolutions, they are not anarchy.
So, when these gentlemen say, ‘You are utopians, you anarchists are dreamers, your utopia would never work’, we must reply, ‘Yes, it’s true, anarchism is a tension, not a realisation, not a concrete attempt to bring about anarchy tomorrow morning’. But we must also be able to say but you, distinguished democratic gentlemen in government that regulate our lives, that think you can get into our heads, our brains, that govern us through the opinions that you form daily in your newspapers, in the universities, schools, etc., what have you gentlemen accomplished? A world worth living in? Or a world of death, a world in which life is a flat affair, devoid of any quality, without any meaning to it? A world where one reaches a certain age, is about to get one’s pension, and asks oneself, ‘But what have I done with my life? What has been the sense of living all these years?’
—Alfredo M. Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension