Freedom has its forms. However personalized, individuated or dadaesque may be the attack upon prevailing instituions, a liberatory revolution always poses the question of what social forms will replace existing ones. At one point or another, a revolutionary people must deal with how it will manage the land and the factories from which it acquires the means of life. It must deal with the manner in which it will arrive at decisions that will affect the community as a whole. Thus if revolutionary thought is to be taken seriously it must speak directly to the problems and forms of social management.
What social forms will replace existing ones depends on what relations free people decide to establish between themselves. Every personal relationship has a social dimension; every social relationship has a deeply personal side to it. Ordinarily, these two aspects and their relationship to each other are mystified and difficult to see clearly. The institutions created by hierarchical society, especially the state institutions, produce the illusion that social relations exist in a universe of their own, in specialized political or bureaucratic compartments. In reality, there exists no strictly "impersonal" political or social dimension; all the social institutions of the past and present depend on the relations between people in daily life, especially in those aspects of daily life that are necessary for survival--the production and distribution of the means of life, the rearing of the young, the maintenance and reproduction of life. The liberation of man--not in some vague "historical," moral, or philosophical sense, but in the intimate details of day-to-day life--is a profoundly social act and raises the problem of social forms as modes of relations between individuals.
-- Murray Bookchin
