"Temporary Autonomous Zone" by Hakim Bey was not necessarily a life-changing book, but it did help me conclude that all authentic anarchists are fucking crazy. 
No beef, though; their insanity helps them think out of the box. Their disgust for civilization and their affection for chaos allows for those of us living inside of the box to obtain valuable perception from the outside. Mankind was not made to sit behind a cubicle or to program hundreds of pages worth of computer code, and anarchists might be the last strain of primitivism that we have left. Just as my pal Dave says, "there's something good in everything."
Many anarchists of the past took part in "all sorts of uprisings and revolutions." Even those which led to authoritarian and highly statist regimes. In these rebellions, "they found in the moment of insurrection itself the kind of freedom they wanted." Once reading Bey's brief mentioning of such a "permanent revolution," I could not help but to dwell on the subject. It's a fascinating concept, I must admit: that liberation is only achievable in the moment of struggle.
Hitler made mention of these permanent revolutionaries in a July 13, 1934 speech in Reichstag. "They became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its own sake and desired to see revolution for its own sake and desired to see revolution established as a permanent condition... But there can be no such thing as a state of permanent revolution: neither can any beneficent development be secured by means of periodically recurrent revolts." These revolutionaries ditch the movement once a new state begins to materialize. "as "the Revolution" triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed," states Hakim.
Fascinating.
A google search for "permanent revolution" brings up a few writings and concepts by Trotsky but none of them relate.
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