“Discipline, mutual trust as well as unity are all excellent qualities when properly understood and practised, but disastrous when abused … [one use of the word] discipline almost always signifies despotism on the one hand and blind automatic submission to authority on the other . ..

“Hostile as I am to [this,] the authoritarian conception of discipline, I nevertheless recognise that a certain kind of discipline, not automatic but voluntary and intelligently understood is, and will ever be, necessary whenever a greater number of individuals undertake any kind of collective work or action. Under these circumstances, discipline is simply the voluntary and considered co-ordination of all individual efforts for a common purpose. At the moment of revolution, in the midst of the struggle, there is a natural division of functions according to the aptitude of each, assessed and judged by the collective whole: Some direct and others carry out orders. But no function remains fixed and it will not remain permanently and irrevocably attached to any one person. Hierarchical order and promotion do not exist, so that the executive of yesterday can become the subordinate of tomorrow. No one rises above the others, and if he does rise, it is only to fall back again a moment later, like the waves of the sea forever returning to the salutary level of equality.

“In such a system, power, properly speaking, no longer exists. Power is diffused to the collectivity and becomes the true expression of the liberty of everyone, the faithful and sincere realisation of the will of all … this is the only true discipline, the discipline necessary for the organisation of freedom. This is not the kind of discipline preached by the State … which wants the old, routine-like, automatic blind discipline. Passive discipline is the foundation of every despotism."

- Bakunin on Anarchism, pp. 414–5