Anarchists have long been accused of advocating chaos. Most people in fact believe that anarchism is a synonym for disorder, confusion, violence. This is a total misrepresentation of what anarchism stands for. Anarchists don't deny the necessity of organization; they only claim that it must come from below, not above, from within rather than from without. Externally imposed structure or rigid rules which foster manipulation and passivity are the most dangerous forms a socialist “revolution” can take. No one can dictate the exact shape of the future. Spontaneous action within the context of a specific situation is necessary if we are going to create a society which responds to the changing needs of individuals and groups. Anarchists believe in fluid forms: small-scale participatory democracy in conjunction with large-scale collective cooperation and coordination (without loss of individual initiative).
Peggy Kornegger, 1975
Even the sensibility that individualist anarchists regard as a desideratum for personal renewal requires a great deal of time ("gradualism") to cultivate in people, so why should it be any different for social anarchists, whose effort to educate the public and even a libertarian movement also requires a great deal of time? As I shall point out later, I am not very sanguine about a spontaneity so uninformed that it is unlikely to produce a successful movement, much less a new social order.
But then, I do believe in "order", indeed in the need for an organized, coherent, and purposive libertarian movement, free of Bolshevik centralization but not formless. My days in Paris in 1968, in SDS in 1969, and later in Zurich in the early eighties, where an uninformed "spontaneous" mass upsurge of Swiss youth with black flags and spray-paint cans dissolved as quickly as it arose (tragically, ending in the city's horrifying "Needle Park"), have reinforced my conviction that without a purposive libertarian movement, such popular phenomena will quickly evaporate. Sadly, I may add, once the Parisian students went off on vacation during the summer of 1968, they never quite returned to the streets in numbers comparable to the previous spring, despite all the fervent predictions made by my French comrades about the prospects of a revolution after vacation!
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I explored in considerable detail spontaneity, class, the People, organization, and the need for a "New Enlightenment" in my November 1971 essay "Spontaneity and Organization"
Murray Bookchin, 1995
Libertarian municipalism draws on historical communalism, both in its anarchist and Marxist theoretical forms, as well as its concrete tradition in revolutionary history, going back to the French Revolution of 1789. At the same time it takes historical communalism further. Where early communalism saw the communes as mainly administrative in function, merely providing "public services", and gave actual decision-making power over to workers' associations (whose federation would parallel that of the federated communes), libertarian municipalism envisions the commune as a direct democracy that controls the economy. And where anarchist communalists thought people would form communes spontaneously after the state collapsed by other means, libertarian municipalism provides for a revolutionary transition, in which the federation of communes would become a dual power against the nation-state.
Janet Biehl, 1998
People often resist building institutions with theoretical foundations and long-term programs, favoring episodic, spontaneous, moments of glory on the front lines, and in their personal lives. We want institutions with solid anti-authoritarian theoretical foundations that are committed to putting these ideas into practice: engendering spontaneity as part of a larger project of liberation. Creating good institutions does not mean compromising anti-authoritarian politics; it means committing to them. It means creating community-based revolutionary infrastructure that makes this movement relevant to our neighbors in between mass mobilizations. It means creating lasting systems of self-governance and community decision-making that mirror the free society we want to build.
Ben Grosscup and Doyle, 2002
Instead of top-down social organization, anarchists championed various types of horizontal models that could prefigure the good society in the present. That is, anarchists maintained that people could attempt to build the new world in the shell of the old through self-organization rather than passively waiting until some post-revolutionary period. Hence anarchism's emphasis on praxis. Anarchist alternatives were grounded in such key concepts as voluntary association, personal and social freedom, confederated yet decentralized communities, equality of conditions, human solidarity, and spontaneity. As the European invention known as anarchism traveled via intellectual and agitator circuits to everywhere from the United States and China to Latin America and Africa, anarchists experimented with everything from communal living, federations, and free schools to workers' councils, local currencies, and mutual aid societies.
Cindy Milstein, 2003
