Refusal to take power means they get crushed by elite backlash

I find Bookchin’s line on all of this interesting, even if incomplete. Resolutely opposed as he was to the state and hierarchies as unreformable instruments of oppression and denial of human freedom, he was not naïve about the necessity of taking power: Every revolution, indeed, even every attempt to achieve basic change, will always meet with resistance from elites in power. Every effort to defend a revolution will require the amassing of power – physical as well as institutional and administrative – which is to say, the creation of government. Anarchists may call for the abolition of the state, but coercion of some kind will be necessary to prevent the bourgeois state from returning in full force with unbridled terror. For a libertarian organization to eschew, out of misplaced fear of creating a “state”, taking power when it can do so with the support of the revolutionary masses is confusion at best and a total failure of nerve at worst (Bookchin, 2014: 183). Graeber’s response is to insist that anarchist strategy “is less about seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it” (2002: 73). Only within such autonomous spaces can true democratic practices become possible. From my perspective this means creating a parallel state (like the Zapatistas) within the capitalist state. Such experiments rarely work and when they do, as in the case of the paramilitary forms of organization that dominate in Colombia or the various mafia like organizations that exist around the world (e.g. in Italy), they are rarely benign (in fact they are typically hornet’s nests of extortion, violence and corruption). Even left revolutionary guerilla movements (such as the FARC in Colombia) experienced defaults of this kind and there is no guarantee that any parallel power structure devised by anarchists will not suffer from similar problems. In any case, the present penchant for ‘government by NGO’ provides a classic example of how ruling powers can co-opt and de-fang the radical idea of autonomy for their own purposes.