Outlawing all but a single “vanguard” party ruled by “democratic” centralism has nothing to do with democracy except its subversion. These political institutions systematically impede participatory impulses, promote popular passivity, and breed authoritarianism, bureaucratism, and corruption.... More than anything else, and in particular more than any economic failures, it is the failure of “political Marxism-Leninism” that is the essence of the revolutions of 1989.

From: Revolutions in the East
by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel

Our institutions, other things equal, should help us express feelings of sympathy and empathy for one another. We should not praise or settle for economic institutions that force us to view other people as obstacles to be avoided, removed, or trampled over. We should not be compelled by our means of allocation to see other's gains as our losses.... Does this preclude excellence? Does it preclude originality and diversity? No, what it precludes is turning people into predatory, greedy, hyenas.

From: Marketeers?!
by Michael Albert

Embarrassment on hearing the R-word conveys that liberated human history is impossible. Equating the R-word with "blood-lust" accepts that struggle for change can yield only minimal gains or, if we get too ambitious, worse than what we already have. To debate the propriety of "revolution" reflects timidity about truth. We must no longer debate the R-word as if humanity may after all be able to flourish within the dictates of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism.

From: Resurrect the 'R' Word
by Michael Albert

But beyond this general Left understanding that capitalism is inherently unjust, and beyond this general hope and insistence that the alternative must be some kind of socialism, some kind of worker-run society, some kind of real (rather than bourgeois) democracy... beyond a quite passionate belief in these compelling (but somewhat vague) principles, the Left, frankly, doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Worse still, when it talks, it’s usually talking to itself.... And worse STILL, it often just talks…and talks…and talks—as if the incessant turning of the “forces of capitalist production” in and of itself, relieves us of the burden of action.

From: Is There an Alternative to Capitalism?
by Paul Burrows

In 1917 the Russian workers created organs (Factory Committees and Soviets) that might have ensured the management of society by the workers themselves. But the soviets passed into the hands of Bolshevik functionaries. A state apparatus, separate from the masses, was rapidly reconstituted. The Russian workers did not succeed in creating new institutions through which they would have managed both industry and social life. This task was therefore taken over by someone else, by a group whose specific task it became. The bureaucracy organised the work process in a country of whose political institutions it was also master.

From: The Bolsheviks and Workers Control
by Maurice Brinton

A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life.

From: Anarchism: What it Really Stands For
by Emma Goldman

Lastly, all of you who possess knowledge, talent, capacity, industry, if you have a spark of sympathy in your nature, come, you and your companions, come and place your services at the disposal of those who most need them. And remember, if you do come, that you come not as masters, but as comrades in the struggle; that you come not to govern but to gain strength for yourselves in a new life which sweeps upward to the conquest of the future; that you come less to teach than to grasp the aspirations of the many; to divine them, to give them shape, and then to work, without rest and without haste, with all the fire of youth and all the judgment of age, to realize them in actual life. Then and then only will you lead a complete, a noble, a rational existence. Then you will see that your every effort on this path bears with it fruit in abundance, and this sublime harmony once established between your actions and the dictates of your conscience will give you powers you never dreamt lay dormant in yourselves.

From: An Appeal to the Young
by Peter Kropotkin