Capitalism has created a situation called scarcity. And that scarcity is not natural, it's socially induced. Along with that sense of scarcity, or feeling of scarcity, is a feeling of economic insecurity. Along with that is a feeling of deprivation... And unless we can demonstrate that that feeling is not justified technologically, we will not be able to speak intelligently to the great majority of people and reorganize our economy so that we really know what needs are rational and human and what have been created, almost fetishisticaly, by the capitalist economy.

I'm by no means convinced that capitalism and the development of technology has made anarchism easier.

I'm less influenced by any of [Karl] Marx's ideas today than I've ever been in my life, and most significantly Marx's theory of historical materialism, which I think is virtually a debris of despotism.

In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and charitable acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.

You see something very important is happening. Personality is being eaten out, and with that the idealism that always motivated an anarchist movement - the belief in something, the ideal that there is something worth fighting for.

I categorically deny that. The American left today as I know it - and believe me, I am very familiar with the American left - is going toward authoritarianism, toward totalitarianism. It's becoming the real right in the United States.

I believe that anarchists should agree to disagree but not to fight with each other.