Wholesale There’s No Such Thing As Revolutionary Government (A6)

Paperback, 12 Pages: Emma Goldman knew it. Mikhail Bakunin warned of it long before the Russian Revolution. Black liberation veterans Ashanti Alston and Kuwasi Balagoon came to the same conclusion: there’s no such thing as revolutionary government. You can’t use the tools of oppression to achieve liberation. Since the mid-19th century, anarchists have insisted that freedom comes not from seizing the state, but from abolishing it. From Paris to St. Petersburg, Barcelona to Beijing, one generation after another has had to learn this the hard way. Swapping politicians does little; what matters are the institutions of rule—police, courts, prisons, armies, bureaucracies. That’s why the Egyptian Revolution of 2011–2013 mirrored the Russian Revolution of 1917–1921 and the French Revolution of 1848–1851: when revolutionaries traded direct action for representatives, power reconsolidated into new autocracies. The uniforms changed, but oppression remained.