A New World In Our Hearts Quotes

“Generally speaking, the historical experience has been that movements away from democracy taken in the name of emergency conditions is not reversed when those conditions change (when internal and external threats to revolution subside).”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“Everybody dreams of punching out their boss, their landlord or a cop. And every so often people actually do it. These largely spontaneous acts of individual resistance are self-limiting because they can never succeed in really striking effectively at the roots of the frustration that gives rise to them. But as soon as a group of people begins to come together on the basis of revolutionary consciousness, the question of collective direct action immediately comes to the fore: how do we strike our enemies?”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“Revolutionary consciousness is collective. Individuals can come to revolutionary conclusions, but it is only when they start to talk to each other about those conclusions and attempt to draw out larger more general truths by looking at all of their experiences and drawing on all of their knowledge that we can talk meaningfully of revolutionary consciousness.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“Within the consciousness of oppressed people there is a constant battle between two kinds of consciousness. On the one hand, we have all been socialized by the very institutions that maintain our oppression: family, school, religion, the media, and the economic structures that exploit our labor. These institutions fill us up with their ideology, with the ideas that justify their power over us. At the same time, there is the actual fact of our oppression, our basic human desire to be free and to exercise control over our own lives, and our periodic experiences of individual and collective resistance that give rise to counter-consciousness. This is a constant battle that one can never escape so long as there are oppressive social relationships.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“All politics, even revolutionary politics, is the art of the possible. What distinguishes revolutionary politics is the commitment to expanding the realm of the possible to include genuine power to the people.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“Often dual power is discussed in a way that it disconnects it from the long years of thankless mass organizing work that precedes it. It is treated as if it springs spontaneously from the people in the revolutionary moment, without respect for the patient nurturance of the forces that make it possible.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“The autonomous municipalities established by the Zapatistas represent in many respects only the latest chapter in a long history of revolutionary dual power. In this respect they offer a contemporary example from which certain general lessons can be extracted, much as lessons might be taken from the experiences of the workers councils that sprung up across Europe in the wake of the First World War, or during the Spanish Revolution, or the Shanghai Commune during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“It must be said that none of the historical experiences of revolutionary dual power have resulted in the establishment of long-term democratic or socialist societies in which the historically oppressed classes genuinely wield power. All have either been crushed by a resurgent old order or ultimately drained of any democratic content by a new revolutionary elite. At the same time, these fleeting experiences still represent the closest humanity has come to realizing the revolutionary vision of a truly free society.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“A situation of dual power can be said to characterize all genuine revolutionary situations. The classic definition of dual power is found in Lenin’s brief article on the subject written in the wake of the February Revolution in Russia, but the phenomena itself has appeared repeatedly in different guises at least as far back as medieval European peasant revolts. In the broadest sense of the term, dual power refers to situations in which a) parallel structures of governance have been created that exist side-by-side with old official state structures and that b) these alternative structures compete with the state structures for power and for the allegiance of the people and that c) the old state is unable to crush these alternative structures, at least for a period of time.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“An anarchist society is not one free of conflict. It is a society in which the resolution of such conflicts is not monopolized by an elite.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“The free society is characterized by the radical decentralization of all kinds of power. Confederal structures do not rule over communities; they are the means by which communities cooperate.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“The State is born of the conquest of other people. The self-governing community is a creation of the people themselves in the process of overthrowing the State.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“A libertarian armed force will need to be created to fight the revolution and preserve its victories. Yet to be successful this force will require a certain degree of coordination and even levels of centralization and command. The danger here is that this force too could become an institution above society. In these conditions we advocate only as much centralization and discipline as is temporarily necessary to win the revolution and beat back any counter-revolution with as much internal democracy as is possible. How to strike this balance may not be obvious; it will be a matter of political debate and decision by the people.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“In fact, every major State reform has come in response to the strength and power of grassroots movements.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“The State is not an instrument of liberation. For this reason we oppose strategies for social change that rely on the power of the State. Whether it is participating in elections, petitioning those in power, or trying to seize State power, we see such strategies as self-defeating.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“We will not get real freedom as a concession from rulers. We will have to win real freedom for ourselves.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“As anarchists, we see State reforms as positive, opening up new space for action. We do not sit back complacently when reforms are won.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“The nation-state furnished an ideology of national identity that made it easier to rally people for military adventures that their rulers considered profitable. The “common language and culture” of each of these new entities was in no way a natural human community like early tribes and bands. Rather, they were created by brutal conquest such as that of the British over the Irish, Scots, and the Welsh, or the Castilian Spaniards’ conquest of the Basques and the Catalans.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“One demonstration of the power of the State is the fact that it has so colonized our imaginations as to make itself seem natural, leaving us unable to think of a different way. Yet for the majority of human existence we have lived without the State.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“There is a spectrum of resistance possible within a political context. From our commitment to defending each other against arrest at demonstrations, to providing both legal and political defences for people brought to trial, to supporting imprisoned revolutionaries, we believe that our commitment to each other is our strongest defence against the power of the State. We demand the release of all political prisoners and prisoners of war, but we also work for the abolition of the prison system.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“In place of the State, we propose the self-organized community. We advocate that local people affected by decisions should be the ones making them. For larger geographic coordination, say at the regional or continental level, local assemblies can confederate, sending accountable and immediately recallable delegates to present the positions of local communities. All policy would be made by the people in a directly democratic fashion, with the administration of that policy carried out by accountable and recallable bodies to serve various functions. Various experts, those who know how to build bridges, for example, or design alternative energy technologies, would inform the decisions of the assemblies. But ultimately it is the people who decide, not the experts. This way of organizing society would be one part of an overall redistribution of wealth and power, which would fundamentally change our relations to each other. Of course this direct, democratic form of self-governance runs the risk of evolving into a new State, alienated from and above the majority of people; thus constant vigilance and flexibility will be required to prevent the emergence of new elites and an alienated administrative apparatus.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“The State is not democratic, in the best sense of the word, but elitist. It is a specialized institution standing above the rest of society, alienated from and oppressing most of the population.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“The State is inherently authoritarian. It represents the interests of the rich against the poor. It is run by representatives—self-selected and sharing a similar ideology—ratified by the increasingly diminishing percentage of the population that bothers to vote.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation