This series of comments comes from this link and is how various authors answered the question:
Is the Anarchist Ideal Achievable?
I am embarrassed, attempting to respond as I should to the survey of La Revue Anarchiste. Is there an anarchist ideal? Is anarchism an ideal? If there is an anarchist ideal, which is it, since there are several tendencies or currents in anarchism?
It is true that the continuation of the question posed by La Revue Anarchiste seems to delimit or define the anarchist ideal: “without authority” — “elimination of all constraint.”
It is doubtless necessary to read: “of all political authority” — of “all constraint of the statist, governmental order and everything related to it,” for we know that man “is not free,” biologically speaking: he is subject to the direction of his determinism.
To be anarchist is to deny, to reject the arché, political and legal domination, the machinery of power.
And it is more; it is to deny, to reject the utility of the State for ordering the relations between men.
Better yet, it is to get along with one another without the intervention and protection of archist institutions.
How can I know if, in the future, “man” could do without political authority, without any imposed authority?
How can I know if the “elimination of all constraint” will ever be anything but the prerogative of tiny minorities?
Judging by appearances, I do not see any man doing without authority — I do not catch sight of any minority shielded from “all” constraint.
In the end, I am unconcerned.
I feel that I am anarchist and that is enough for me.
I feel hemmed in, fettered, enveloped, limited and restrained by the multiple bonds forged by the institutions of the State.
I rise up against these constraints; I slip free as soon as I can find the occasion.
Each time I wish to deal with an ordinary (?) human being, I find them imbued with conventions, prejudices, beliefs, biases and points of view inculcated by the agents of archism.
I try to liberate those that I meet from these foreign suggestions.
Alas!
I do not live “without authority.”
On each corner of the road, at each crossroads, I must submit to its visible representation.
And if it was only that!
However, in my daily relations with the anti-statists on my side, I do my best to get along with others by taking no account of the play of governmental institutions.
I succeed to a greater or less extent, but I persevere.
And I am hardly concerned whether the relations that I maintain with “my own” tally or not with the education, the economic or sexual morality, the education of the State or the Church (spiritual aspect, stand-in for the State).
If we turn to anarchist individualism?
Anarchist individualism is not an ideal, but an activity, a state of struggle—open or masked, but continual—against every conception of life that subordinates the individual to governmental authority, which considers the individual as a function of the State, which subjects it to social constraint and legal sanctions whose grounds, good or bad, individuals have been able and are still unable to weigh or examine it relation to their individual development.
I do not know if those who constitute it make up an “elite,” but I maintain that there exists all across the world an anarchist individualist milieu, milieu de camarades, which, by all the means in its power, strives to ignore the social, moral and intellectual conditions on which the archist society rests.
Using stratagems, if open escape is not possible.
We do not live by hypotheses, nor by conjectures.
If there is an anarchist ideal, I intend to achieve all of it that I can immediately, without waiting, without asking myself whether or not I make up part of an elite, by associating myself with the atheist, materialist, presentist, pleasure-seeking comrades like myself, eager to redouble their efforts, as I am.
All the rest is distraction or metaphysics.
Let is thank La Revue Anarchiste for having furnished us with the occasion to distract ourselves, as comrades.
E. Armand
This series of posts will insure that these anarchists' works live on in living memory.
If only a few.
Don't lose hope now, dear reader.
We've made it this far.
At some point the ride gets easier.
Rule by force has had it's day.
When everybody sees the iron fist in the velvet glove we win.
We just have to survive its death throes.
There is a reason these facts are not in the modern curriculums.
Setting rewards to burn only burns the author portion of the payout.
The crowd isn't silenced.
Please cheer loudly, if that is your thing.