A-Infos (en) Mexico, FAM, Regeneracion #19 - On Anarchist Ideology. The Conception of Ángel J. Cappelletti by Alfredo Velarde (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

"Anarchism" does not in any way mean the absence of order or 
organization. Anarchist thinkers contrasted order, which immediately 
emerged from the very life of society, from human activity and work, 
with the transcendent, external order imposed from outside by physical, 
economic, or intellectual force. The former, which is not only the only 
authentic order but also the only solid and lasting one, presupposes the 
suppression of the latter, which is fallacious and essentially unstable. 
The apparent Proudhonian paradox is based on this opposition: "Freedom 
is not the daughter of order but its mother." - Ángel J. Cappelletti

One of the main merits of Ángel J. Cappelletti's short and concise book, 
Anarchist Ideology, has directly to do with the fact that, from the very 
beginning, he embraces the notion of "anarchist ideology" without 
hesitation. And he doesn't do so as a "second-order" or clearly 
"inferior" conceptual category-for some-when compared to the Marxist 
category or concept, for example, of "science." In this regard, 
Cappelletti doesn't believe-as we don't-that the notion of ideology, 
from the moment it is employed in any of its uses, must assume that, 
precisely because it is ideological, libertarian ideology is a "weak" 
and-to be strict-even "soft" category, due to that alleged "Marxist 
certainty" that, in every ideology, elements of "true consciousness" 
coexist (the minority) with others that are more preponderantly false 
and therefore (most of them) simply erroneous. Thus, he seems to forget 
that there are sound ideologies and fallible ideologies.

In any case, this is certainly not the position that surreptitiously 
slips beneath the refined and even sophisticated use that Cappelletti 
confers on that peculiar form of solid ideology, which is the consequent 
and consistent ethical way of thinking and acting of anarchists. And 
this is fundamentally explained because, both in consistent ideological 
thought and in militant revolutionary action, anarchists have always 
sustained their emancipatory activity with the support conferred upon 
them by that special mode of thought, which libertarians have drawn 
inspiration from, thanks to the powerful social philosophy of which 
militant and revolutionary anarchism is its most finished product, since 
it first saw the light of day, with the initial skirmishes of the 
antagonistic and irreconcilable class struggle between capital and 
labor, during the first half of the 19th century.

In a certain sense, and despite their notable differences, the original 
history of anarchism is contemporaneously similar to that of Marxism, 
with which it shares some of its deepest roots-such as the thinking of 
the great utopians-or as in the case of both anti-capitalist currents 
being influenced by the French Revolution and, above all, the Paris 
Commune, in addition to having emerged to combat the nascent bourgeois 
class, which the capitalist and industrial mode of production made 
essential, at the specific decisive moment in the history of modernity 
that the transition from feudalism to capitalism demanded for its 
consolidation. However, if anarchism and Marxism arose from the same 
prehistoric roots, the evolutionary course of their respective 
programmatic positions increasingly distanced them-to the point of 
becoming antagonistic and making anarchists the radical nemesis of 
pseudo-authoritarian statist communism. And it was because Marxism was 
content with the deplorable slogan of its struggle to demolish the 
state-capitalist political machine, replacing it with another state 
machine that deviant statist communism believed to be an "alternative." 
This ultimately turned out to be not only clearly false, but even 
counterproductive to the libertarian and perennial emancipatory task, 
having replaced the genuine proletariat with expert-occupied 
nomenclatures of collective state capitalists of a clearly 
anti-socialist techno-bureaucratic makeover.

Hence the importance for the younger generations of genuinely 
libertarian activists to never overlook the incontrovertible fact that, 
at the heart of anarchist ideology, there is, as its axial support, the 
indispensable social philosophy of anarchism and some of its most 
cherished emancipatory demands, such as widespread social 
self-management, federalism, mutual aid and proletarian internationalism 
in favor of universally liberated workers.

Unlike the so-called "state communism" of infatuated Marxists, who 
always identified it with the problematic vision - supposedly 
"scientific" - of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," anarchist 
ideology (under the pertinent meaning exemplarily given to it by 
Cappelletti), far from revolutionarily replacing the capitalist state 
with the "proletarian state," proposed the definitive abolition of all 
state and governmental forms, including those always misnamed "workers' 
states," which in the fatal course of their resounding terminal 
collapse, generated a complex repertoire of "dictatorships over and 
against the proletariat." This is in a specifically different sense from 
the anti-proletarian dictatorship that all capitalism presupposes, in 
fact, even that which claims to be "liberal" and "democratic," but which 
has only been able to maintain itself as a despotic political hegemony, 
exploiting and oppressing the human being and the class producing useful 
goods and services, but ignominiously stealing the economic surplus that 
it has historically and savagely stripped from all producers by blood 
and fire. Let this introductory summary of the first part of 
Cappelletti's brief, yet powerful, text serve as an invitation to its 
instructive and combative, militant, anti-systemic, and anti-state 
alternative reading.

Notes:
1 In the text Anarchist Ideology. Published by the Black Flags 
Collection, Ediciones de Contacto, Mexico 2023, p. 15 (italics mine).

https://www.federacionanarquistademexico.org/
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