Freedom is never a done deal, nor is it a fixed notion. - Cindy Milstein

The concept of utopia within anarchism isn't some faraway, never-neverland; nor is it a way to ignore material needs or desires. Rather, it's precisely a means of taking full account of material as well as nonmaterial needs and desires—not simply bread and butter, but bread, butter, and also roses—and imagining ways that everyone can fully satisfy them. Anarchism looks to the past, when people lived out communal and self-governed forms of organization; it sees potentialities in the present; and it sustains the clear-eyed trust that humans can always do better in the future. The utopian sensibility in anarchism is this curious faith that humanity can not only demand the impossible but also realize it. It is a leap of faith, but grounded in and indeed gleaned from actual experiences, large and small, when people gift egalitarian lifeways to each other by creating them collectively.

Anarchism is a compelling political philosophy because it is a way of asking the right questions without seeking a monopoly on the right answers. The point is to destroy monopolies, along with all other singular choke holds on people's collective ability to be free. Self-organization is the key to ensuring the nonexclusive ownership—or rather, the ownership in common—of freedom. As anarchism thoroughly grasps, freedom is only possible when people all share the ability to determine and shape social relations and social organization. The only way to create such far-reaching forms of justice is to ensure that everyone has an equal portion of power, that we not only discuss, debate, and dialogue about what kind of society and everyday life we want but also problem solve, implement, evaluate, and revisit those decisions over the whole of life.

As a practice, direct democracy will have to be learned. As a principle, it will have to undergird all decision making. As an institution, it will have to be fought for. It will not appear magically overnight.