“When Engels and I first joined the secret communist society, we did so only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules.”

— Karl Marx, Letter to Wilhelm Blos, November 10, 1877

'Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism have in common that they offered the atomized individual a new refuge and security. These systems are the culmination of alienation.

The individual is made to feel powerless and insignificant, but taught to project all of his human powers into the figure of the leader, the state, the "fatherland," to whom he has to submit and whom he has to worship. He escapes from freedom and into a new idolatry.

All the achievements of individuality and reason, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century are sacrificed on the altars of the new idols. ...built on the most flagrant lies, both with regard to their programs and to their leaders.'

— Eric Fromm

"For state and society are two different things. Neither is society an accumulation of all the different organizations and connections within which people order their communal affairs and under which the state exists alongside other institutional forms, nor is the state from among a great many possibilities one of the types of organization in which society can embody itself.

It is certainly clear that wherever society exits there is no room for the state, but that wherever the state is it is like a thorn in society’s flesh, it does not permit it to form a people who can socially inhale and exhale, and instead divides them into classes and thereby prevents them from being a society.

A centralized construct cannot at the same time be a federalist construct. A system of management organized along authoritarian lines is a government, a bureaucracy, a commanding power, and this is the mark of the state; a community built upon equal rights and mutuality is, when considered within the bounds of their physical proximity, a people, when considered as a general form of human living, a society.

State and society are opposing concepts; the one excludes the other."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"To speak of the class state is to speak of wooden wood. The state is and can be nothing other than the centralized executor of a class detached from the people, for the subjugation of a people disenfranchised and reduced to a dominated class.

The process of state management thus divides human society into social classes by protecting the land along with the man-made means of production as the property of the privileged class, regulating the permission for the use of the property by the unpropertied class, which is nearly everyone, according to the principles of the sanctity of property privilege and of the preservation of the character of labor’s performance as the hiring out of labor power. The state is made exclusively for this purpose; it has never served another purpose; it could never be made useful to another purpose.

Only where the rights of masters stand opposed to the rights of slaves does the state make sense, does it find tasks to carry out. The state could and did come into being only with the inception of personal property for the exploitation of people. With the development of capitalism, which makes the principles of material exploitation by the property owners the entire focus of man’s life, the state constantly enlarges and coarsens the network of legal, supervisory and compulsory measures through which the proletariat is to be maintained in obedience to the privileged class.

But again it is the Marxist socialists who along with the materialist world view also want to adopt the centralist mode of organization, this essential characteristic of the capitalist state, as the blueprint for the construction of society freed from capitalism."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"It has been demonstrated that overall conditions condition people’s behavior, but that these conditions arise to a considerable degree from the voluntary initiatives of the people themselves, so that behavior in turn creates the conditions. It can be generally accepted that similar conditions have similar behavior as a consequence, and just as well that similar behavior creates similar conditions.

That capitalism has established a centralized state administration for the strengthening of its hegemony over people, which through steady intensification of authoritarian pressure has continually increased the power of capital and retroactively caused a constant expansion of state authority to the detriment of the workers and to the benefit of the privileged, simply means that the state directed from above is the only form of organization suitable for the maintenance and promotion of the capitalist-directed economy; however, it means at the same time that only capitalist conditions can harmonize with state centralism in its intended effect, and further that every centralized state power can develop capitalism and generate it anew wherever it is not or might never have been at all.

Therefore, if certain interpretations of Marxist doctrine wish to convince one that the essence of capitalism is determined by private exploiters’ ownership of the means of production, that their management through the state, however, can be interpreted already as a sign of socialism, then one cannot object strong enough against such a twisted falsification of the basic idea of socialism.

State capitalism, even where one prefers to call it state socialism, has not the slightest thing in common with true socialism; it is on the contrary the form of capitalist subjugation most hostile to the spirit of community, mutuality and individual responsibility, without which there can be no socialism."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"It is thereby completely irrelevant whether the state is conquered by the proletariat, in order to arrange it to socialist living conditions through gradual transformation, or whether in place of the private capitalist state, destroyed through revolution, one creates another in which from the outset state powers assume the duties of beneficiary of the workers’ own labor power, the possession and utilization of which they themselves have been deprived.

It is, as well, a worthless concession to the natural insight of socialists who recognize the irreconcilability of social equality with the state, to claim that the state governed with a striving towards socialist economic forms has the characteristic of making itself superfluous with the disappearance of capitalism, of dying off and clearing a path for the accomplishment of socialism by a society of federally allied equals. A state does not die off, but consolidates itself by developing the foundations on which it rests."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"The foundations of the state are the capitalist class relations, and it makes no difference whether the class contradictions arise from the private ownership by the few of the earth and the means of work or are brought about by the transferal of the same ownership to select state commanders.

However much more morally satisfying it may be to know that the right of exploitation does not lie in the hands of personal greed, — what matters is that all exploitation is exterminated, not that it is depersonalized. It is meaningless to the creative person whether his performance benefits a joint-stock company, which passes on in the form of dividends the derived profit to people who have absolutely no contact with the labor itself, often not even aware of what is being produced in the factory of which they are co-owners, — or whether the state confiscates the fruit of his labor. The effect is for him totally the same: the product of his labor does not belong to him, he is deprived of its possession and he finds absolutely no profit in the product itself, but rather in receiving a wage for its production. The wage system is not altered in the slightest by the transferal of private capitalism to state capitalism, yet the wage system is the mark of exploitation."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"Marxism represents in the state and in its own organizations the standpoint of the most rigid centralism. It battles the authority of the current state, not because it deprives the people of their right to self-determination, but because it does not extend the oppression to the ruling class."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"The centralist socialists, however, place themselves on the side of the state in its efforts to allow nothing of its total power to be taken from it, yet they attack it since — and here, because it has to do with a classic example of capitalist phenomena, economic being really determines consciousness — it nonetheless withdraws step by step before the demands of the propertied class, and they believe that authority’s ruthless display of power toward poverty finds its explanation in the weakness of the state toward wealth, not however in the essence of state authority itself.

They oppose authority not because it is authority but because they want a different authority, made of people of their persuasion, of people who as leaders of their parties or unions have accustomed themselves to centralist governing, imposing regulations, demanding discipline and obedience, subordinating people and making them at the same time believe that they are being governed for their own good and not for that of their governor.

Accustomed to authority and drilling, central direction and surrender of the will to superiors, raised for belief in the state and trust in a leader, the state socialists will be desirable citizens for state capitalism. Only, this state capitalism will lack all the qualities of socialism: equality and justice, individual responsibility and mutual support, solidarity of people with one another and self-management in social cooperation. An all powerful bureaucracy will suppress from on high every independent stirring of the people and be the expression of a state which has as little similarity to a real society as all earlier forms of state and which contains all the seeds of a class-divided exploitation economy."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"We anarchists disdain a leadership with the power of command and ensured of extended operation, that is, every state government, bureaucracy and central party, every dictatorship and every croneyist regime.

But we deny neither the usefulness of the director in the theater or chairperson at a meeting nor of the captain on a ship. Here personal qualities assign certain tasks to the appropriate persons in certain cases. The same holds true in political struggle and just as well in an uprising or in fending off armed aggression.

Just as a wandering herd follows the lead animal, which is not chosen but rather takes the lead because it is confident of the best trail, but when tired can immediately be replaced by any other animal, so it is with people, too.

There are spokesmen, there are ringleaders, that is, people who are followed because they bring the will of all most clearly to expression or set themselves into action with the most determination. A leader is one who shows the way, not whoever gives laws or leads followers around behind him on a leash."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"The liberation of society from the state is thus to be achieved primarily by that class for whose oppression the capitalist system requires the state, whose submissiveness is perpetuated through the authority of church and state, through the power structures of patriarchy and monogamy, through the habituation to centralistic forms of organization for the attainment of hostile divisions within all areas of life, through the fostering of patriotic and racist arrogance, through laws, punishments, taxes, through joblessness, hunger, misery, bad air, paternalism and humiliation.

Liberation from the state is liberation from class enslavement; the enslaved class must be the carrier of the struggle for liberation. The struggle for communist anarchy is therefore to be conducted during the period of revolutionary preparation as a class struggle."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"The liberation of the laboring class must be the work of the laborers themselves! In this assertion is contained the profession of faith in individual responsibility, in equality, in mutual aid and in free will, just as international unity likewise proclaims the negation of the state, and thereby of centralization, supremacy and authoritarian power.

Only the infiltration of Marxist doctrine into the class struggle concept brought the dissolution of class unity as well as of the internationalism of the workers.

Under the influence of Marxism the workers created for themselves centralistic party and union organizations, mandated officers for the discernment of the workers’ interests, whereby they placed their struggle for liberation into the hands of superior representatives, took part in the state’s parliamentary elections, so that the state with its national borders again attained for them an objective significance, and let themselves be caught up by state-administered socialism.

Thus has the worker become citizen, and his struggle against exploitation is wrecked on the contradiction that he supports and strengthens the public apparatus determining the exploitation."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"The conduct of the class struggle from the anarchist point of view, however, requires only the application of the anarchist ethos in order to assure its prospects for liberating the proletariat.

For communist anarchists there neither exists an obligation to organizational unity nor is the idea of anarchism irreconcilable with the creation of an organization.

Only the formation of centralistic organizations and bureaucratically directed incorporations would be in contradiction to the central doctrine of anarchism, that social living only exists where every individual is free to exercise a conscious influence on all decisions and undertakings."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

"The Marxists understand by dictatorship of the proletariat the dictatorship of a Marxist party executive on which they bestow the power of government even over the councils, the right to make law, to levy taxes, and to every form of representation of the revolution, up to declarations of war and treaties with foreign state governments. Supposedly this party clique is to be allowed to ensconce itself as the ruling power only until the complete implementation of socialism.

Since, however, every centralist state power means state, consequently forced advancement of authority, special status for the privileged, assault on equality, thus is such dictatorship nothing other than the clearing of a new path for an oppressing class, for new exploitation and for all the damages removed by revolution.

The implementation of socialism can thus under such an allegedly proletarian dictatorship never be achieved, and the new power will never abdicate until chased off by a new revolution in favor of the councils."

— Eric Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism?

“Beijing cannot tolerate those who expose the fraudulence and hypocrisy of its sham rule of law because it threatens to energize mass democratic activity that exceeds the boundaries of legality.”

https://lausancollective.com/2024/mass-jailing-of-hong-kongs-pro-democracy-candidates-shows-beijings-fear-of-mass-militancy/