Wherever people defend the rights of the individual, I stand with them above all, over and beyond any wishes relating to how an economy should be managed or how people should govern themselves. This is a very strong commitment on my part.
I'm much more interested in developing human character in society. And I'm much more interested in the social conditions that foster commitment to ideals, a sense of solidarity, purposefulness, steadfastness, responsibility.
I don't feel the individualist anarchists, particularly in the American tradition, including the Transcendental tradition of New England, in any way deserve the derogatory comments that are often made about them by the left. When one gets down to it ultimately, my anarcho-communism stems from a commitment to true individuality. My attempt to recover the power and the right of the individual to control his or her life and destiny is the basis to my anarcho-communism.
I will never compromise - I can now say with assurance at the age of 57 - with my libertarian and my revolutionary commitments; they'll have to kill me first. They can't buy me out. I'm just not interested in what they have to offer. I've managed to stick it out, and the thing that has been the most rescuing, the most redeeming, feature of my life that has kept me alive, that has kept me more or less single-minded about my commitment to libertarian ideals once I escaped the trap of Marxist-Leninism - a childhood trap, to be sure - has been consciousness.
I've developed my anarchism, my critique of Marxism, which has been the most advanced bourgeois ideology I know of, into a community of ideas and ultimately a common sense of responsibilities and commitments.
In The Ecology of Freedom, my critique of what is called civilization and industrial society is massive, and my attack upon [Karl] Marx's commitment to it as a necessary stage in human progress and the domination of nature is very sharp.
