Dear Russell,

I hope you will listen to my brief message, which is not intended to offend or undermine you. You call yourself revolutionary. Well, welcome to the revolution, where critical thinking means we are entitled to critically examine what you mean by revolution.

My name is not your business. My identity is irrelevant. I am an anarchist. I am an environmentalist. I am Black Bloc. I am an enemy of the State, an adversary of capitalism and I am in enmity with religion. I seek to help destroy all these through collective struggle. Perhaps you feel the same, perhaps you don't.

I will start by praising you, then I will devastate your thinking in the politest way possible. To be honest, I haven't read your book, although I often read what you write and your YouTube videos. Often your interventions can be cutting and funny and very welcome as a means to opening minds.

As anarchists, we cannot compete with the media and we can’t hope to operate for our own interests using its apparatus which is designed by, and is a tool of, those we wish to overthrow. We can’t hope to become famous and influence public opinion in the way you hope to do. Our victories are small, our presence is largely misunderstood, limited or even non-existent. We are misunderstood and maligned as thugs and are the subject of reactionary and draconian legislation. That's why I appear disguised and anonymous. You can operate in daylight and using your own name. Your celebrity status and wealth liberates you to mouth off without accountability to bosses and policemen. You can buy yourself freedom to voice radical ideas. As such, you are one of the elite.

But you also cause us problems by placing yourself close to us and I feel, at this point, going off on a short tangent. You have in the past presented yourself as misogynistic, something many anarchists have a deep problem with, particularly committed feminists within our movement. I dislike your bragging over sexual exploits, which objectify and often shame your former partners. Women are not something to be conquered and they are not your sexual entertainment. As anarchists, we fight male chauvinism and patriarchy. In this aspect you are firmly on the other side of the barricades.

Putting aside your misogyny, I am still unclear what you are about. You are no Che Guevara. You are no thinker, you are not even a doer. You are a talker. You call for revolution, you call for the abolition of the exploitative structures of capitalism and you wish to replace it with ... well, I don't know, a sort of woolly notion of love and freedom.

Many consequently suggest you are an anarchist, although I don't think you have personally adopted this guise. You are a sort of left-wing version of Nigel Farage, exploiting a niche on the ideological spectrum that the political mainstream has abandoned in its drive towards bland consensus. You do not call for the abolition of the state or capital. You want a "reduction" of the profit motive, "heavily taxing" corporations and putting extra "responsibility" on them to be green. The substance of your critique of the political class is not structural but is aimed at the fact that many of them went to public school. You say nothing that suggests you are a revolutionary in anything other than a Fabian reformist viewpoint. This is just populism. No doubt, that populism sells you books.

Let me make it clear. Anarchism is a method, not just an ideological critique or simply abstaining from voting. It is more than a vague feeling of disenchantment. It is not apathy. It is not disengagement. Far from it. Anarchism is about building a culture of resistance by creating community and social structures that stand apart and in opposition to the State and to Capitalism. This takes effort. It means being embedded in a community, not simply bestowing the patronage of your wealth and fame to an pick-n-mix assortment of causes. Sometimes it means confrontation. Sometimes this confrontation means attack. As revolutionaries, we will put ourselves in danger because we will no longer live as slaves to corporate exploitation and consumer conformity.

Capitalism is not fundamentally a moral problem, a problem made by nasty people, it is a problem about the fundamental structure of a society based on value and the state. I do not think you understand that. As such, your ideas can only be corrosive to any revolutionary movement against the real existing state of things.

Your lack of grassroots involvement beyond superficial statements puts you outside this movement. It means you will never be part of the change you hope to create. We don't want better wages, we want an end to toil. We don't want corporate social responsibility, we want to get rid of the bosses. We don't want green-washing PR campaigns, we want to the reunification of humanity and nature.

You know nothing of this because you are not an oppressed worker. You are not being radicalised by fear living on zero hour contracts, or being constantly threatened by benefit sanctions in lieu of finding non-existent jobs. Until and unless you become a part of a community of strivers, strugglers and freedom-fighters, you'll always be part of the elite. Unfortunately, there are few revolutionaries around. Chances for true revolution - the overthrow of the system - are curtailed by state repression, media control and our own organisational limitations. It is fair to say that you can generate more followers in your aimless interviews than we have gained. It's a sad reflection of the state of our movement that you have eclipsed it. And perhaps we can learn something from you in terms of the way we present ourselves.