anarchist-organizations

"Direct action enables people to develop a new sense of self-confidence and an awareness of their individual and collective power. Direct action is founded on the idea that people can develop the ability for self-rule only through practice, and proposes that all persons directly decide the important issues facing them. Direct action is not just a tactic, it is individuals asserting their ability to control their own lives and to participate in social life without the need for mediation or control by bureaucrats or professional politicians. Direct action encompasses a whole range of activities, from organising coops to engaging in resistance to authority. Direct action places moral commitment above positive law. Direct action is not a last resort when other methods have failed, but the preferred way of doing things."

"Prisons we helped build. And paid (more specifically promised to pay over the next twenty years for we never have enough dough to pay for a house or a car or anything for that matter -- they have to exploit us even more by making us pay interest) for them. We build the prisons and then we live in them. We produce shit and then we eat it. Producers of shit -- consumers of shit."

"Capitalism is a vicious circle. People's sweat and blood is used and exploited. They make us produce shit... they give us next to nothing while their class pockets huge profits... the ruling class... the Bryan of this world."

"How many Rolls Royce... how many Northern Irelands... how many anti-Trade Union bills will it take to demonstrate that in a crisis of capitalism the ruling class can only react by attacking the people politically? But the system will never collapse or capitulate by itself. More and more workers now realise this and are transforming union consciousness into offensive political militancy. In one week, one million workers were on strike... Fords, Post Office, BEA, oil delivery workers... Our role is to deepen the political contradictions at every level. We will not achieve this by concentrating on `issues' or by using watered down socialist platitudes."

"FELLOW REVOLUTIONARIES... We have sat quietly and suffered the violence of the system for too long. We are being attacked daily. Violence does not only exist in the army, the police and the prisons. It exists in the shoddy alienating culture pushed out by TV films and magazines, it exists in the ugly sterility of urban life. It exists in the daily exploitation of our Labour, which gives big Bosses the power to control our lives and run the system for their own ends."

"Our attack is violent... Our violence is organised. The question is not whether the revolution will be violent. Organised militant struggle and organised terrorism go side by side. These are the tactics of the revolutionary class movement. Where two or three revolutionaries use organised violence to attack the class system... there is the Angry Brigade. Revolutionaries all over England are already using the name to publicise their attacks on the system. No revolution was ever won without violence. Just as the structures and programmes of a new revolutionary society must be incorporated into every organised base at every point in the struggle, so must organised violence accompany every point of the struggle until, armed the revolutionary working class overthrows the capitalist system."

"The Angry Brigade doesn't claim responsibility for everything. We can make ourselves heard in one way or another. We machine-gunned the Spanish Embassy last night in solidarity with our Basque brothers and sisters. We were careful not to hit the pigs guarding the building as representatives of British capital in fascist Spain. If Britain co-operates with France over this `legal' Iynching by shutting the truth away, we will take more careful aim next time. SOLIDARITY & REVOLUTION LOVE"

"We are no mercenaries. We attack property not people."

"We are realists and understand that the abolition of the state system will not occur tomorrow, but even today we can already demand a way of life with "no rulers and no ruled", "no masters and no slaves." Direct action is the democratic act when democracy stops functions. The Berlin wall was not dismantled by rulers and agreements but rather by citizens who felled it with their own hands."

":No to the ghetto that's being built by Jews! No to walls between people! Stop the occupation! Israelis, Palestinians and international activists! Bring down the apartheid wall in Mas'ha!."

"We, to whom the future of this land is important, regard the system of fences and a separation wall as not only a huge disaster for the Palestinian people but also a direct threat for us and anyone who desires a peaceful as well as secure life. This is not a security fence. This is a racist apartheid fence that will cause bloodshed for all of us for many years to come."

"We try to live in our daily lives the changes we are striving for. We work in a spirit of full cooperation, without leaders. Our decisions are arrived ay by consensus and everyone contributes according to their ability. We believe that justice and equality are arrived at by voluntary agreement between people, and that the state is only an aggressive tool of dominant ethnic an/or class groups."

"The ethnic cleansing is occurring before our eyes, and we have only one option: to use the few rights we still have from the remnants of Israeli democracy and break the racist immoral laws. Yes to break the gates and fences, block the bulldozers with our bodies, enter closed off military areas, and also transform the enemy into our friend. Palestinian and Israeli resistance will continue as long as the occupation - the infrastructure and root of terror - continues."

"We have come here to say that this war is not necessary and is certainly not just. We have come here to refuse the politics of hared and vengeance. We have come here to opposes the whitewashing of war crimes, and their portrayal as a fight against terrorists. We are here to say that those who speak out against civilian casualties in Sderot cannot avoid killing that is taking place in Gaza , courtesy of the Israeli army's bombardments."

"Here at this podium, just as in the olive groves of the West Bank, our primary moral duty is not to maintain ideological purity but rather to stand with Palestinians in their resistance to oppression. We recognize the importance of garnering international support for the ongoing struggle and the major contribution of this award. We believe that standing here, in the current state of affairs, is a direct continuation of the blocking of bulldozers, standing side by side with the stone throwers, or running away from tear has along with young and elderly protesters."

"Vegananarchism doesn't just mean not feeding off the suffering of animals; like orthodox Judaism, it also means not eating with the gen pop of the barracks of Isra-hell. With the infoshop, and the vegan-queer-punk-cult bar, and a couple of semicommunes, we almost have what it takes to keep apart at times."

"We shall laugh to scorn your power that now holds the South in awe; We shall trample on your customs, we shall spit upon your law; We shall outrage all your temples, we shall blaspheme all your gods.- We shall turn your slavepen over the plowman turns the clods!."

"You scoff at the rebel and lynch him till' dead But I was an outcast and they called me a "Red." You call me Christ Jesus with intelligence dim But I was a Rebel called Jerusalem slim And my brothers: the outcast, the rebel and the tramp."

"Deliver us from a country where man is damned for the dollar and the dollar is deemed the man"

"The Industrial Workers of the World, an organization launched in Chicago last June, is making wonderful progress in all parts of the country, and in practically every industry. This is as it should be, because the IWW is organized along the lines of the evolution of capitalism, which is so organized, that under one head or one management, whole lines of industry are conducted, reaching from ocean to ocean or from Maine to Mexico. So that the freight-handler working in the freight yards in San Francisco is affected when the longshoreman in New York City asks for better conditions from the employer, and he must be prepared to back his brother up in his just demand…It is the mission of the IWW to teach the laboring classes their solidarity of interest as a mass and, how they in future must act as a class, in order to win in their contests with capital. The line of action of the IWW is in direct contrast to that of the AFL, whose members are compelled to “scab” on each other when a strike of any dimension is declared"

"In the brief span of its life, the IWW produced men who became internationally known and whose names were torches of inspiration in many lands. Most of them paid a high price for their fame, some with their lives. Frank Little and Wesley Everest were lynched. Joe Hill, the poet and song-writer, was executed. Bill Haywood, out of prison on bail while his war-time conviction was being appealed, was persuaded by New York Communists that world revolution was just around the corner and that he was needed in it. He skipped bail and fled to Russia, only to be relegated to the sidelines, and to die there a broken man...The IWW was much more of a revolutionary organization than a labor union-and frankly so...It was characteristic of IWW meetings that after the last speech had ended and the applause had died down, the audience would break up into circles, to continue discussing the subject, and later each circle would sing its favorite song. Gradually the circles would merge, and finally each man present, his arms over another's shoulders, would join in Joe Hill's best-known ballad, The Preacher and the Slave."

"The term "Wobbly", said to have been fastened on the I. W. W. members in derision by a Los Angeles editor, had been adopted by them with enthusiasm."

"In 1905, when she was invited to appear at the founding convention of a new radical industrial union christened the Industrial Workers of the World, Lucy Parsons thought she'd found her niche once again. Unfortunately, she realized that the other founders saw her as more of a mascot than a comrade."

"The Industrial Workers of the World never brought about their revolution. Despite the IWW's internal problems, the state's intolerance for even moderate challenges to employer authority, not to mention those fighting to overthrow capitalism, meant that these radicals never had a chance to create the idealized would they sought. But the IWW provided hope and organizing expertise to workers who had none. It organized across the nation's racial divisions like no union had done before. It took on the most oppressive employers and sometimes won. The IWW advanced a radical critique of American capitalism that influenced another generation of radicals to come. It played a critical role in teaching American workers how to use radical ideas to advance an agenda that effectively challenged capitalism, laying the groundwork for the working class of the next generation to finally win dignity and respect."

"Deliver us from the greed and graft that exist in this nation and from the parasites who neither toil nor spin, but bedeck their persons with finery until they glitter in the gloming like a rotten dog salmon afloat in the moonlight."

"Through our house there came the dissidents, the brave exploded root, the radicle. I think the IWWs had the greatest influence on me: They believed that only from the working class could come the poets and the singers, the prophets, the heroes, and the martyrs. They rode the trains with their red membership cards and gathered wherever there was an attack upon their fellow workers. When they came to our house to recuperate, eat, and take a bath, they told hair-raising tales about riding the freights, the wheat fields, the docks of San Diego, the timber workers, the free speech fights in Seattle. They knew which were the best prisons to stay in all winter to learn, read, and eat till spring."

"The IWW's founding convention in 1905 featured a marquee lineup of the twentieth century's most famed-and in some cases, notorious-leftist labor luminaries. People whose words and faces were known far and wide (and in one case, seen on the covers of magazines) during their respective eras, from the Western Federation of Miners' Big Bill Haywood and Vincent Saint John, to American Railway Union president Eugene V. Debs and United Mine Workers organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones."

"CrimethInc. is significant in what it is not: It is not a membership organization It is not an elitist vanguard that purports to lead the masses out of darkness to salvation - experience has shown a thousand times that such parties are the social forces that create masses. And it is not a Movement, either: for such things only exist as part of history, and as such are subject to its laws - gestation, ascendance, decline. As crimethink is a force that exists beneath te currents of history, outside the chain of events, CrimethInc. is the first stirring of a revolt that will take us all out of history."

"Today there are as many people behind bars in the United States as there were in the Soviet gulags at the height of Stalin's power."

"I always secretly looked forward to nothing going as planned. That way, I wasn't limited by my imagination. That way, anything can, and always did, happen."

"No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to."

"Life's most beautiful and inspiring moments occur at 3am, just prowling, looking for nothing but always finding something."

"Anarchism is the revolutionary idea that no one is more qualified than you are to decide what your life will be."

"Can we imagine a togetherness that isn't founded on gross generalizations, conceptualizing ourselves as unique individuals who still stand to gain from looking out for one another? Can we identify with each other rather than with categories or masters?"

"We left behind the other kids; their path-working, drinking, and being grown up- and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were meant to be lived. Life serves the risk taker"

"Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn't that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn't freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission?"

"Nothing can replace the feel of the paper against your fingers, the ink soaked up by paper, the sensation of turning a page with the wind rustling your hair, or the deliberate and intricate presentation of images and text that you can only get in the real world, on real pages. And few things can be as torturous as sitting in front of a computer screen for hours on end."

"Those who cannot forget the past, are doomed to repeat it."

"We move in spiral paths, imploding or expanding, relinquishing everything to become what we hate or finding the faith to discover new possibilities and new loves."

""Abundance and scarcity are above all the manifestations of opposing approaches to life: ingenuity or inertia, faith or fear. If we restructure our values and assumptions about what the cosmos has to offer us, we can enter a new world of possibilities.:"

"Everyone can have a full life-but not everyone can have a full wallet."

"Here's a story: once upon a time, human beings lived in a relationship of trust with the earth, seeing it as a wellspring of abundance.We ate fruit, which grew freely around us, naturally wrapped in a biodegradable peel and containing seeds from which more fruit trees would grow after the fruit was eaten. Today we eat candy bars, for which we must exchange our labor, of which supplies are strictly limited-and when we throw away the wrappers, which are manufactures from plastics and chemicals foreign to nature, we can be sure that we are adding to the slow accumulation of garbage that makes fruit trees less and less abundant."

"At this moment, an employee in a grocery store is setting out genetically engineered produce rather than tending her garden; A dishwasher is sweating over a steaming sink while unwashed dishes stack up in his kitchen; A line cook is taking orders from strangers instead of cooking at a neighborhood barbecue; An advertising agent is composing jingles for laundry detergent rather than playing music with his friends. A woman is watching wealthier people's children at a daycare program rather than spending time with her own; A child is being dropped off there instead of growing up with those who know and love him; A student is writing a thesis about an activity that interests her instead of participating in it. A man is masturbating with internet pornography instead of exploring his sexuality with a partner; An activist, weary after a hard day's work, is putting on a Hollywood movie for entertainment; And a demonstrator who has her own unique reasons to protest is carrying a sign mass-produced by a bureaucratic organization."

"There is a rebel army out in the bush plotting the abolition of wage slavery, as sure as there are employees in every workplace waging guerilla war with loafing, pilfering, and disobedience-and you can join up, too, if youhaven't already. But before we start laying plans and sharpening spears, let's look more closely at what we're up against."

"What exactly is work? We could define it as activity for the sake of making money. But aren't slave labor and unpaid internships work, too? We could say it's activity that accumulates profit for someone , whether or not it benefits the one who carries it out. But does that mean that as soon as you start making money from an activity, it becomes work even if it was play before? Perhaps we could define work as labor that takes more from us that it gives back, or that is governed by external forces."

"What else can you do? If you refuse, the economy will go on without you; it doesn't need you any more than it needs any of the hundreds of millions already unemployed, and there's no point going hungry for nothing."

"What if nobody worked? Sweatshops would empty out and assembly lines would grind to a halt, at least the ones producing things no one would make voluntarily. Telemarketing would cease. Despicable individuals who only hold sway over others because of wealth and title would have to learn better social skills. Traffic Jams would come to an end; so would oil spills. Paper money and job applications would be used as fire starter as people reverted to barter and sharing. Grass and flowers would grow from the cracks in the sidewalk, eventually making the way for fruit trees."

"Capitalism exists because we invest everything in it: all our energy and ingenuity in the marketplace, all our resources at the supermarket and in the stock market, all our attention in the media. To be more precise, capitalism exists because our daily activities are it. But would we continue to reproduce it if we felt we and another choice?"

"Obeying teachers, bosses, the demands of the market-not to mention laws, parents' expectations, religious scriptures social norms- we're conditioned from infancy to put our desire on hold. Following orders becomes an unconscious reflex, whether or not they are in our best interest; deferring to experts becomes second nature."

"Because human beings are social animals, attention creates meaning and thus value: when everyone else runs to see what's going on, each of us can't help but do the same. Thus the collective creativity and potential of a whole society is channeled into a few figureheads. Of course we love them, or at least love to hate them-they represent the only way accesses our own displaced potential."