Christopher Day > Quotes

“The Makhnovist movement rose up as a result of the Brest-Litovsk agreement in which the Bolsheviks ceded Ukraine to Austrian and German Imperialism. But like the rest of the old Russian empire Ukraine was in the throes of a social revolution as the peasantry was seizing the land. The Ukrainian Confederation of Anarchist Organizations (Nabat) saw in this situation an opportunity to build under anarchist leadership a military force that might carry forward the revolution and expel the foreign imperialists. And that is precisely what they did before they were crushed by the Bolshevik Red Army.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“There is a reason that the world is dominated by regular armies with unified command structures. It is not because the states of the world simply find their authoritarian form more agreeable in spite of its comparative military inefficiencies. If that were so states would be constantly striving to obtain the benefits of decentralism in military matters (as they sometimes do in other matters in which decentralism is in fact more efficient). But the military remains the most centralized institution in any society, its authoritarianism the model by which less authoritarian institutions are judged.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“a regular army can only be defeated by another army. Militias or other irregular forms of military organization alone, while capable of heroic resistance, will ultimately collapse before a regular army. The collapse of a national army (almost always precipitated by a military defeat) can create an opening for a revolutionary movement. But if that movement does not create its own army the old order will reconstitute its army or a foreign power will do it for them.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Irregular forces like Makhno’s can sustain themselves perhaps indefinitely in geographically remote hinterlands. But Ukraine was not such a region. The Brest-Litovsk agreement and the general social collapse of Russia created a momentary opening into which Makhno’s forces stepped. But the consolidation of Bolshevik rule in the rest of Russia and the decision of the imperialists to abandon Ukraine meant the closing of that window.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“We know that we will never confront the exact same circumstances as previous revolutions. But we should also know that certain problems are persistent ones and that if we can’t say what we would have done in the past we should not expect people to think much of our ability to face the future.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Architectural gestures affect us in similar ways to human gestures.”
― Christopher Day, Places of the Soul: Architecture and environmental design as a healing art

“Every revolution arises from the failure of a particular state in a particular moment. In Spain the Republican government crumbled in the wake of Franco’s military revolt. Power was lying in the street, and the anarchist movement, the most powerful force among the workers and peasants, took it.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Revolutionary situations do not present themselves to us only after we have made perfect preparations for them. They arise suddenly when the old order is unable to maintain its rule.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“The simple fact of the matter is that wars can not be won in this way. Militias can play an important role in defending the gains of a revolution, in organizing irregular warfare within a circumscribed region, and in suppressing counter-revolutionary activity within the zone of a revolution. But without a regular army of its own the revolution can not hold back the advances of an invading army.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“A revolution is a struggle for power and is inevitably a messy affair. If we are not prepared for the fact that future revolutionary situations are going to present us with unpleasant choices then we are not really interested in making revolution.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“If we don’t have a plausible plan for making revolution we can be sure that there will be somebody else there who will.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Anarchism in Spain raised the hopes of millions that a classless stateless society could be achieved in the here and now, lead them to the barricades to make it real, and failed abysmally. The Spanish people were condemned to forty years of fascist rule because of the failure. And yet while the anarchist movement of the past half century has produced an extensive literature extolling the momentary successes of the Spanish Revolution in the creation of peasant and workers collectives, there has been almost no serious effort to analyze how the anarchist movement contributed to its own defeat. Blaming one's political enemies (fascists, Communists, or social-democrats) for behaving exactly as one would expect them to behave only further confuses matters. Betrayal, after all, is only possible on the part of someone trusted.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“There is a crying need for the development of a new body of revolutionary theory that breaks decisively with the dogmatism and political shallowness of anarchism as well as with the authoritarian essence of marxism.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Making war, even a war of resistance, has a certain authoritarian logic to it. War is about killing people and sending some people off to die so that others might live. It is, unfortunately, not mainly about killing the class enemy, but rather about killing the other oppressed people, often conscripts, who make up the enemies army.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Thoroughgoing social revolutions, even if contained in a single country, are a profound threat to the international capitalist order. Every such revolution that has not been crushed internally has had to face some degree of foreign military intervention.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“In so far as a military force has as its aim the defeat of other military forces within a given territory it is acting to create a monopoly on organized violence — a defining feature of the state. Is it possible to create a truly anti-authoritarian military structure that corresponds with the relative decentralism of a libertarian society and that is able to defend that society from external (or internal) military threats?”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Once we are willing to accept that good anti-authoritarian intentions do not get us off the hook for the authoritarian consequences of anarchist incompetence it becomes possible to approach the whole historical experience of the revolutionary movement in a considerably less self-righteous frame of mind.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“How many anarchists once they have read an anti-authoritarian account of some historical episode actually go and read accounts from other perspectives?”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“The question that confronts revolutionaries is never simply whether the workers (or peasants) are capable of taking control of the means of production, and reorganizing production on democratic and libertarian lines (like the workers and peasants collectives in Spain). Nor is it even whether they are capable of establishing within cities and villages organs of self-government (as in the many cases of workers councils). From the Paris Commune to the Zapatista rebellion we know that these things can be done.

The question is almost always whether they can do these things over a prolonged period of time under conditions of war and general social breakdown. These are the conditions under which revolutionary opportunities are most likely to occur. It is precisely under these conditions that the limits of the revolutionary movement as a whole have revealed themselves.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“The strength of anarchism is its moral insistence on the primacy of human freedom over political expediency. But human freedom exists in a political context. It is not sufficient, however, to simply take the most uncompromising position in defense of freedom. It is necessary to actually win freedom.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“It is important to note that in spite of all the anarchist slogans the program of the Makhnovists in practice was not much different from that of later peasant revolutions (like the Chinese), namely: redistribution of the land, more or less voluntary collectivization, and expulsion of the imperialists (national independence).”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“The anarchist movement is filled with people who are less interested in overthrowing the existing oppressive social order than with washing their hands of it.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Bakunin’s brilliant predictions of the consequences of Marx’s statism have not become the foundation for a developing anti-statist praxis, but rather a hollow chorus of “we told you so.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“The proletariat should not be viewed as a monolithic entity represented by a single party (a la the various currents of Marxism) but rather as a contested body whose unity is contingent on the freedom of its different parts to fight for their interests within it. The fight for women’s liberation or the recognition of the rights of various ethnic groups then are not battles to be put off until after the proletariat seizes power globally, but are necessary precursors to that seizure of power that clarify the revolutionary orientation of the proletariat.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Anarchism has quite simply refused to learn from its historic failures, preferring to rewrite them as successes.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Anarchists sometimes claim that decentralized, non-authoritarian structures are inherently so much more efficient than centralized authoritarian ones that these principles should be applied to military operations. This is the express route to anarchist martyrdom.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project