Direct struggle against capital: A Peter Kropotkin anthology

I visited libcom at the weekend and read David Greaber’s account of developments in Iraqi Kurdistan and was disappointed by the number of comments along the lines of “there is no communism here” – so comparing a real social movement with an idealised vision of a perfect system in order to dismiss it. Look, it is simple, no real movement will be perfect nor will it be what we hope for at its start. It is a question of tendencies – is the movement popular and be able to evolve? As Kropotkin put it:
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“But precisely because we are well aware of our purpose and know that it cannot be achieved in a single day […] Precisely because we know that an uprising may well topple and change a government in one day, whereas a revolution, if it is to achieve a tangible outcome ― a serious, lasting change in the distribution of economic forces ― takes three or four years of revolutionary upheaval ― for that very reason, we say to the workers:
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“The first uprisings of a revolution cannot be mounted with the notion of carrying out the wide-ranging and far reaching changes that only a revolution can effect, once it has had time to ripen.
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“The initial disturbances can have no purpose other than to weaken the machinery of government: to stop it, to damage it, and render it powerless, thereby creating an opening for subsequent developments in the upheaval.
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“In any case, were we to wait for the Revolution to display an openly communist or indeed collectivist character right from its initial insurrections, that would be tantamount to throwing the idea of Revolution overboard once and for all. For that to be a possibility, it would require that a large majority be already in agreement upon effecting a communist change, which is generally not the case, since it is primarily the turns taken by a revolution that can draw the masses over to communism […] were that period of “anarchy” to last, communist ideas would, of necessity, become more sharply defined and would embed themselves during the upheaval as lessons taught by actual experience.”
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(“Insurrections and Revolution”, Direct Struggle Against Capital, 553-555)