[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.

The best way to think about anarchism is as a combination of three levels. On the one hand, the sort of instinctual revulsion against forms of inequality in power; on the other hand, a reappraisal of what one is already doing in egalitarian relations; and then the projection of these principles on all sorts of relations.

If you imagine that everything is an exchange, then we're supposed to just transact and walk away. If we haven't walked away and we still have a relationship, it's because there's a debt.

Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.

We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens - like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It's never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?

It is assumed in many parts of the world that democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem, who come together to solve it in a way where everyone has an equal say.