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Title: Another Critique of Insurrectionalism Author: Anonymous Date: January - February 2014 Language: en Topics: translation, Spain, insurrectionary Source: Retrieved on July 1st, 2015 from http://anarchistnews.org/content/another-critique-insurrectionalism Notes: Spanish original: http://www.alasbarricadas.org/noticias/node/32041
This text is less so a general critique of insurrectionalist methodology
or ideas than a critique of how a specific insurrectionalism, that which
has developed in Barcelona in the last eighteen years, has played out in
practice. It problematizes a set of practices and attitudes that it sees
in the self- proclaimed insurrectionalist milieu there, from arrogance
to bad security to an incomplete understanding of repression. At times
it broadens to critique insurrectionalisms of other places or more
general aspects of the tendency.
Unlike other critiques of insurrectionalism, this one doesn't come from
the left. It doesn't seek to pacify resistance or manage struggle, nor
do its authors believe in the preservation of productive work with a
self-managed face. It also doesn't pretend to be universal. For these
reasons I thought it was worth translating for an English- speaking
audience. There are certainly great disparities between the anarchist
milieu and practice in Barcelona and those of the Anglo world, not the
least of which is that there is far more anarchist activity and a far
greater number of anarchists in Barcelona than in any English-speaking
city.
Some of the critiques and proposals are therefore less readily
applicable to other places. However, it's important to share
experiences, lessons, and perspectives across cultures and milieus.
Whether one judges an idea or critique to be misplaced or deserved,
applicable or not, without an exchange of perspectives it is hard to be
well-informed, critical, and dynamic. Personally, I still find the term
“insurrectional” worth holding onto and identify with the tendency.
Living in North America, where there is comparatively little street
conflict or subversive activity, pacification and recuperation are
continuing full steam ahead, and many currents that call themselves
anarchist are in themselves recuperative, this qualifier seems
appropriate to use, when it refers to a coherent and well-thought-out
set of ideas and methods rather than simply a posture or subculture. I
also think the foundational ideas and critiques of the tendency have
more depth than the authors may see in the practice in Barcelona. As
they say below, there are multiple insurrectionalisms.
Additionally, while it largely fulfills its goal of comradely critique,
at times the text strays towards a derogatory tone, overgeneralization,
and perhaps misplaced blame. These instances don't further the
meaningful dialogue it seeks. However, the text points many sound
critiques at an imperfect milieu. The partial understanding of
anti-repressive practice, the problems of arrogance and callousness, the
dangerous lack of good security precautions, the ease with which many
insurrectionalists fall into theoretical vagueness, extreme rhetoric,
and posture—these things among others merit serious rethinking of
approaches and practices. Not being intimately acquainted with the state
of anarchist struggle in Barcelona, I have to base a lot on the word of
the authors rather than my own experience, but clearly much of what is
written applies beyond one city, and that to me is what makes it useful
in other places. I think one would be hard-pressed to deny the presence
of some of these problems and the obstacles they pose to social
revolution.
I hope that the dissemination of this text will be a small step towards
greater critical thinking in our anarchist trajectories and increased,
meaningful communication across borders and experiences.
November 2014
(January – February 2014, Barcelona)
In the last few years, several critiques of insurrectionalism have
appeared. In Castellano [1] , the most well known would be “Anarquismo
profesional y desarme teórico” [“Professional anarchism and theoretical
disarmament”] written by Miquel AmorĂłs, and "CrĂtica a la ideologĂa
insurreccionalista" [Critique of the insurrectionalist ideology] written
by Proletarios Internacionalistas. Both texts have good parts and
harmful points—arrogance and polemical doublespeak in the first and the
simplistic, millenarian and messianic figure of the proletariat in the
second. It is interesting to underscore that both, in critiquing
insurrectionalism, confuse it with Italian insurrectionalism. In order
to critique it they focus not on the acts accomplished but rather
exclusively on the words written. Furthermore, they focus almost only on
the words of one Alfredo Bonanno, old comrade, indefatigable supporter
of insurrectionalism, yes, but in the end, just one among many and one
whose work had not even been well spread in Castellano in the moment in
which an explicitly insurrectionalist current was launched in the
Iberian Peninsula.
Contrary to the suppositions of those authors, insurrectionalism is
multiple. One can speak of an insurrectionalism in the Spanish state
that was born with the bank robbers [2] of Cordoba and with the excision
of some the CNT's most radical sectors, principally the Libertarian
Youth.
One can also speak of a Chilean insurrectionalism that comes from the
self-critique of sectors of the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla, plus the
combatant youth that continued struggling against democracy.
An insurrectionalism exists in the North American context that has as
its major influences Fredy Perlman, Wolfi Landstreicher, At Daggers
Drawn, to a lesser extent the work of Bonanno and to a greater extent
the experiences of ecological and indigenous struggles.
Insurrectionalism in Greece, if such a current can be spoken of in such
a distinct milieu, takes much more influence from the Situationists than
from Bonanno.
One can also speak of insurrectional currents of the past even though
they don't have a direct continuity to the present, such as the Spanish
FAI (Iberian, not Informal) until '34, or at least several groups
belonging to it, sectors of Argentinian anarchism in the same epoch, or
groups like Black Banner in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.
Italian insurrectionalism would be a very important example to study,
however all the critiques of it, at least in Castellano, have been
directed at its stand-in, Bonanno. Because of this we don't have any
historical analysis of the fortune of the insurrectionalist current in
the Italian state.
We would argue that insurrectionalism in Italy was in the end a failure.
A very useful failure because of its teachings and very important in our
history of combat against the State, but a failure nonetheless. Its
utility comes from the collective lessons and experiences of defeat that
were acquired thanks to courage, and not from the collective experiences
of victory or advancement that were won thanks to lucid theory applied
well.
That is not to say that the more pacifist or leftist currents in Italy
were right, because they weren't, nor that the critiques that
insurrectionalists made of the milieu were not correct, which they were.
But against an enemy as powerful as the State it is not enough to be
correct. We can only prevail by making a constant assessment of our
efforts, lines of attack and positions of defense, and implementing the
necessary changes.
And this has not been done in Barcelona.
Although a historical analysis of insurrectionalism in the Spanish state
in the last 17 years would be of great interest, this text will not do
that. (On this note, we recommend “La Epidemia de Rabia” [“The Epidemic
of Rage”] by Los Tigres de Sutullena.) This critique will be based in
the deeds, the strategies, the actions, and the current positions that
could characterize the insurrectionalist current in Barcelona at this
moment.
It will not be based on the work of distant and sometimes unconnected
authors because insurrectionalism here has never been based in
philosophy, always in the streets. And although reading and ideas are
indispensable for anarchists—and this has been significantly lacking
from insurrectionalism here—the anarchist critique must always be in
relation to the struggle, because our experience comes from the street,
and to the street, its fruits must return.
To begin, the question can be asked: What is insurrectionalism? It would
not be so easy to give a clear answer. Between 1996 and 2003 the label
of insurrectionalist made more sense, although it was not more precise,
because in Barcelona theoretical clarity has always been lacking even
more than in Italy. We use the label because it denotes a practice that
exists, even though it does not have theoretical cohesion. It is not
possible to currently define it because it exists as a response to a
situation that no longer exists in the Spanish state. Moreover, it is
influenced by a large participation of non-Spanish people, like some of
the present authors whose insurrectionalism reflects the historical
experience of other places and who have, to a greater or lesser extent,
adapted their practice to the current situation in the Iberian Peninsula
(or some who have not adapted anything, understanding that in forms of
struggle there exist eternal and immovable truths).
Given that insurrectionalism is not a precisely defined and delimited
current and that we are not going to refer to concrete texts, it is
possible that this critique could become too broad and that people who
don't reproduce the errors that we critique here, or reproduce some
errors but not others, could be inappropriately faulted. We leave it to
each individual to decide if the critiques describe them or not. In the
end it is the responsibility of all to improve the practices of our
milieu. This is precisely the point of the text.
Although we criticize some, we send a strong salute to all the comrades
with the courage to continue attacking the State and to all those who
dedicate themselves to the struggle, in whatever form that may be.
After much consideration, we have no other option but to make a
devastating critique of what is currently insurrectionalism in
Barcelona. We believe that the greater part of the insu [3] comrades, if
they do not verbally agree with our critique, can only deny it out of
pure pride. We insist that it is not possible to arrive at a positive
assessment of all that is lived in Barcelona. In the whole city there
are not enough brushes to paint a pretty picture of the
insurrectionalist practice in the last few years.
It is because of this that, ultimately, we find ourselves obligated to
say loudly that insurrectionalism has become homologous with civility
[4] . Although its intentions are totally opposite to those of the good
citizen, its effect is none other than the maintenance of social
control.
Before continuing, it's necessary to clarify that insurrectionalism in
its moment brought several very important contributions to the anarchist
struggle in Barcelona, but these contributions are gradually
diminishing. The rupture with the pacified and bureaucratized CNT of the
'90s, the consistent position of total opposition to the prisons and
support to prisoners, the recovery of the knowledge and determination
necessary to attack the State—all are very important elements that
radicalized the anarchist milieu in Barcelona and beyond, with marked
effects that persist to this day. It is possible that without that
insurrectionalist break of the '90s, anarchism in Spain would already
have been transmuted into another lapsed and recuperated sect. The
contributions of the insurrectionalists have influenced all the other
sectors of the struggle (there are even sections of the CNT that have
internalized some of the insurrectionalists' critiques and once again
defend a vision of conflictual struggle). In part thanks to its early
successes, now it does not exert as much radicalizing influence; in some
way it has completed its work and generalized the good things it had.
Blind to the limit against which it has been crashing for years, it
continues in a posture of frozen defiance. In general it has not
positioned itself in relation to the current configuration of social
control.
Its theoretical influence has been minor. Although its critiques of
pacification and comfort were correct, its social analysis—for example
the critiques of work or of organization—was fairly weak. But what is
most important is that its practice rapidly reached a limit and this
limit never came to be understood. After the repression—successful for
the State—of 2003, insurrectionalism in Barcelona had no excuse not to
launch a self-critique and fundamental transformation, but from then on
only found itself at a standstill in already chosen stances and changes
towards the worse.
The major contribution that insurrectionalism could still bring to
Barcelona's anarchist milieu today, being an anti-intellectual
insurrectionalism and as such without theoretical contributions, would
be the collective increase of street force, introducing new tactics and
extending them to everyone who takes the streets. But it will not bring
these due to its arrogance, communicative incapacity, self-isolation,
attachment to mistaken strategies, and lack of theoretical clarity about
the world in which we live.
We believe that insurrectionalism in Italy had an important critique of
recuperation, but fell short with its critique of repression. Without a
doubt, this is the case in Barcelona. The principal shortcomings of
insurrectionalism, for us, are not the fact that Bonanno says
contradictory things from one decade to the next (his principal sin
according to AmorĂłs) or the fact that insurrectionalists say that the
structure of class society has changed (it has changed, something that
doesn't diminish the continuity of a fundamental reality of
exploitation). Rather, its principal shortcomings have been that it has
never understood what repression is, how it functions, and how to
overcome it. On the contrary it has tended to function in a manner that
only facilitated repression, principally through self-isolation.
One cause of insurrectionalist self-isolation is the arrogance that many
insus insist on expressing towards other people. A Greek comrade, making
a defense of that arrogance, explains to us that, originally, “arrogant”
referred to the posture of the warrior who confronts a much more
powerful enemy. As such, arrogance is necessary for the daring ones who
confront the State. Up to here we're in agreement. But it has been a
historical error of insurrectionalism not to understand who its enemies
were and who were possible accomplices.
An awareness of how the whole society is structured to facilitate social
control has directed the insurrectionalists in Barcelona with a more
nihilist character to define all of society as the enemy and, in so
doing, assuring their own self-isolation. There are those nihilists who
define “society” as “institutionalized society.” It seems to us little
more than a word game to be able to utter slogans as extreme, appalling,
and cocky as “we want to destroy society.” Because of the etymology of
the word “society,” the historical non-universality of the massified
institutions and forms that are what the nihilists really want to
destroy, and the lack of another term to signify a human collectivity
bound somehow by distinct types of communication, it seems much more
sensible to reclaim the term “society” as something neutral that can be
hierarchical and institutionalized or not. To signify that which the
nihilists want to destroy just as much as we do, the terms “nation,”
“citizenry,” “the public,” “social classes,” “mass society,” or “society
of the spectacle” could be used.
Nor do we want to reject misanthropy, but the game of faulting society
as the enemy is confusing the institutions and apparatuses that
structure society with the people that compose it, that is, confusing
the prison with the prisoners. And although certainly no jail functions
without the participation of the jailed, blaming them for their
condition would be a great stupidity.
The truth is that the only immediate option that each individual has to
deny the authority of the State is suicide. Any act of resistance
conducts one to a higher degree of control, from normal citizen to
surveilled subversive, from there to common prisoner and from there to
prisoner in maximum security isolation where the possibility of
counterattacking doesn't exist, only of tying up one's shoelaces or
bedsheets and exiting the game. In the end, a prison without prisoners
doesn't function, the same as a State without subjects doesn't exist.
Approached on an individual level, the only revolutionary act is suicide
(better taking some of the bastards out with us). Because, does it
seriously seem justifiable to us to distinguish ourselves from the rest,
from the “citizen sheep,” for the simple fact that sometimes we break
things? Our possible participation in acts of sabotage—even if these are
the most radical, for example placing little camping-gas bombs—doesn't
negate the fact that in all the other moments of our lives we are
collaborating with our own domination.
Following this approach to its absurd conclusion, we would have to
explain that the only coherent anarchist is the dead anarchist. Some do
believe this, perhaps unconsciously with their martyr complexes; they
also want to be dead and coherent anarchists. But this dead-end demands
that we rethink the starting point. In this case, the fundamental
supposition is that of individual liberation.
It's an idea that has its logic. Today, each one of us begins isolated,
alone. We don't have ready-made comrades and accomplices just by
belonging to the working class, like it could have been in past eras. To
set forth on a struggle in these conditions requires great courage. “The
secret is to really begin.” Furthermore, our forebears' conception of
mass politics is clearly erroneous. The idea of masses is authoritarian
and destined to failure. A mass with a singular thought can't think and
struggle as is necessary. What good are a million “anarchists” with CNT
cards if the whole mass can be diverted towards reformism by a handful
of upstarts and petty politicians? Massification stupefies. It doesn't
create a revolutionary force in spite of all the millions that it might
unite.
It turns out that almost every erroneous idea rests on false
dichotomies. Insurrectionalism is justified by several. Not only mass
struggle and individual struggle exist. We bet on the following vision:
liberation is a collective process lived and defined in an individual
manner. We are social beings and freedom only makes sense collectively.
It must be in common, because I cannot have a full life without relating
with others and because no one is free while some are not. But freedom
doesn't come from an ideology, it arises neither from democratic
equality nor from a class interest that is supposedly sufficient for
all. No assembly concedes us freedom. Each one of us defines our own
freedom and each one lives the struggle in a distinct manner, with
distinct necessities and desires. Losing fear is an important step
towards liberation, and without fear you will never be anyone's slave,
but being a fugitive is not the same as living in freedom. This is not
about gradualism, an alienation between means and ends, nor hoping for a
utopia to come. Each moment of struggle has to base itself in this
concept of freedom: we choose our own path, but searching for an
expansive network of subversive relations, as much with people involved
in a struggle very similar to ours as with people who resist in other
ways. As individuals, we choose to be free and to fight against power,
but not merely in order to live a stagnant and impotent antagonism—we
actually want to destroy the State. One part of our struggle for the
destruction of the State is the reclamation of lost collectivity. The
dichotomy between gradualism and stagnation (so-called “total negation”)
is false. It doesn't correspond to our vision of struggle.
When we lose a bit of our arrogance, we will see that it's indispensable
to look for complicities—not just of four friends who can go out in the
night and break windows with us, but complicities for all moments of
life and resistance. Affinity groups are not enough, not even close. We
are talking about reconstituting all of society, not as a gradualist
strategy to reach a future freedom, but as a way of projecting our
desires for freedom towards tomorrow and as a way of beginning to live
and struggle right now. When we lose a bit of our arrogance, we'll see
that our small sabotages don't exempt us from the criticisms against
collaborating with domination; they don't distinguish us from others. We
will see that there are many forms of resistance, and we will never be
conscious of all of them, nor will we know all the people who partake in
them. Does it seem a coincidence that almost all the people in our
milieu come from the same economic strata, have the same skin color,
speak the same language and are more or less the same age? (Certainly,
many are immigrants but from a very short list of countries, all
culturally similar to Spain). Would we be so naĂŻve as to believe that
this is because all struggling people share these demographic
characteristics? To assume that we are the only ones struggling is to
prevent subversive contact with others and enclose ourselves in a
superficial idea of struggle.
Yes, there are certain things that we do better than anyone, but there's
a lot of knowledge that we lack and that other people resisting
authority do much better than us—people we don't even know, or
otherwise, whom we would have known but wrote off as reformists or
hippies. Recognizing that there are forms of struggle that don't take
place through demonstrations or claimed acts of sabotage is a first step
towards understanding that the insurrectionalist vision of struggle is
partial, that we need to evaluate other forms of participation in
struggle, open ourselves up to other types of people, and weave wide
networks of complicity and solidarity, not through affinity (these we
already have, although we could work on them more) but through
difference.
This would be a real step outside of self-isolation and towards a strong
and anarchic struggle, with neither masses nor centralization. But we
would also have to transform the view of repression and anti-repressive
practice.
Insurrectionalism in Barcelona has not been capable of understanding
what repression is, how it functions, and how to respond to it. In
general, the insurrectionalist analysis of repression has been that of a
blow or a series of blows that seek to punish the most combative sector
and discourage future attacks. To this vision corresponds the following
practice of response: knowing the list of court cases, defending the
freedom of those charged, and counterattacking in order to demonstrate
that the repression has managed to sow neither fear nor paralysis. Or to
summarize: in the face of repression, continue attacking. And why not?
To water down combativeness because there have been consequences is a
disgraceful error, and one committed by the Organization [5] and its
Libertarian Movement several times during the 20th century.
But repression is much more than a blow. It forms part of a whole
process of social engineering that seeks to transform the social terrain
to facilitate total surveillance and restrict the possibilities of
struggle. The repressive part of the process tries above all to isolate
a subversive sector from society. Insurrectionalists, in general, have
facilitated their own isolation, and moreover with an air of superiority
and scorn at being the only ones to express solidarity, within a
situation produced as much by them as by the State, designed precisely
to ensure they are alone in their response. Making posters with a
certain aesthetic and language, inviting some and not others, veils of
secrecy, downplaying or omitting the repression suffered by others, not
respecting the limits of others: all these elements function to ensure
that when the insurrectionalists request solidarity, only their closest
friends come. Later, they grumble about this as evidence that no one
else cares about solidarity: it is a pathetic case of self-fulfilling
prophecy.
Repression functions like this: before any arrests, there exists a
continual campaign by the State to convert everyone into civil snitches,
individualistic [6] , unsolidaristic people [7] , and superficial
morons. This is achieved through advertising, TV shows, movies (being
that we are social and symbolic beings, narratives are extremely
influential on human beings), consumerism, laws, economic competition,
narcotic apparatuses like Twitter and cellphones, etc. Berlusconi, in
Italy, directed the perfect example of such social restructuring: before
entering politics, he consolidated a media power that pursued this
transformation of values in Italian society in order to “take the water
away from the fish.” From a solidaristic and combative society that
supported the forceful struggles of the 60s and 70s—struggles subdued
only thanks to the ensemble formed by the compromising nature of the
reformist communists, the vanguardism of the radical communists and a
good application of state terrorism—a superficial, consumerist society
emerged in the 2000s that didn't care about the totalitarian practices
that the State used to repress anarchists; anarchists that remained
alone and as such were extremely easy to repress.
If the people with the most radical critiques don't intervene to
sabotage this process of social engineering, spreading
counter-narratives and constructing material bases capable of supporting
another way of existing, everyone will have just two options: either
become superficial idiots in order not to remain isolated, or become
rarities that belong to one or another urban tribe (one of which could
be the anarchists). Now without the obstacle of an opaque and
solidaristic society, the State can ratify and apply new laws that
facilitate repression. And if to the radicals it seems reformist to
struggle against new laws or if they simply don't inform themselves of
the State's maneuvers, the State will have it even easier.
Now the moment of repression has arrived, after two steps that the
insurrectionalists ignore (who consider standing alone in confronting
repression a mere show of their bravery and the cowardice of others—a
bit myopic). The State deals out the repressive blow and observes the
results. Far from being the only ones repressed in the last few years,
anarchists share this honor with independistas [8] , Muslims,
immigrants, Roma people, and many more sectors of society. Each blow
plays a distinct note as if one were dealing with a musical instrument.
After a blow, they see who is agitated, who's moving, like a vibrating
guitar string. In doing so, the State can trace affinities, measure the
strength of support of each bastion of resistance and fill in their map
of governed society with more detail, taking away even more of its
opacity in the interest of facilitating future incursions on a territory
previously hostile and today docile. The effect of this continuous state
cartography operation is that of increasingly controlling society
through the isolation of any subversion.
This isolation operation should be of great difficulty for the State,
given that the capitalist economy needs society to be increasingly more
integrated and connected (only in a certain way, clearly), and given
that governance always provokes resistance and historically societies
have been hostile to states. How sad, then, that insurrectionalism has
chosen to understand society as a hostile terrain when it is exactly
this behavior that helps the State isolate it. The moment that society
is opaque to the anarchists and transparent to the State, it is needless
to talk of struggle—we will have already lost definitively.
With each repressive blow, the State can intensify the isolation of
subversive people, quarantining the arrested, tiring out their immediate
circle, signaling to others that they are dangerous (or at least strange
and undesirable) and preparing the terrain for the next wave of social
restructuring.
The principal response of anarchists in the face of repression should be
subverting isolation and overcoming the enclosure constituted by the
police and media operation. Counter-attacking is important, and attacks
in these situations can only be realized with close comrades, but the
counter-attack doesn't debilitate the repressive operation and sometimes
makes more repression fall on comrades than they can take. Getting
caught in the necessity of counter-attacking as the only response to
repression leads to a militarization of the conflict in which all is
reduced to tactical questions and anarchist ideas cannot flourish.
More important is to look for complicities and support outside of the
nucleus that's been hit. The support that comes from people with whom we
share neither a tight affinity nor the same form of struggle will not be
equal to the support that comes from other combative anarchists, but we
have to learn to appreciate it. When subversive networks are wider is
when we will have more possibilities of resistance and the State will be
more restricted in its attempt to repress.
Let's speak in concrete terms. Let's say that the insu response to a
blow can bring together a combative anti-repression demo of 200 people.
For the moment, with so much support, the immediate necessities of the
arrested can be covered: legal fees, letters and visits, etc. Later,
other people probably will not join these 200. Why? For many reasons.
Because of the arrogance and secrecy predominant among these 200.
Because of the danger of going into a group that has been reduced in
size and is dedicated to the counter-attack. And it's not that others
are cowards, but rather that people don't put themselves in dangerous
situations—and furthermore, with people who are not very known or close
to them—if they don't understand what it has to do with them. And it's
true, they should know that repression against some is a blow against
the freedom of all. They should know that you have to support those who
attack. They should know that you have to stand by those that the State
marks as the worst. But one can understand why they're not there. To
begin with, one is not born radical. The media are always sowing
passivity and civility and it is essential to disseminate our own ideas.
Furthermore, it's not that the insurrectionalists are in general the
best example of solidarity without limits. Often they act as if these
were only their prisoners; there are competitions to show who is closest
to the heroic prisoners and that creates dynamics of secrecy and
information control, and neither is it that many insurrectionalists are
seen in the support demos for arrestees from other circles.
One can note that many more people went out to the street to support the
anarchists who participated in spaces of broad struggle that were of
obvious importance to many other people, like the three thousand that
spontaneously went out to take the Ramblas after the arrests in the
Parliament case. [9]
So, the situation won't expand beyond these 200 people. The State soon
knows who almost everyone is. They have separated and revealed
themselves, and now they are controlled. In the best of cases, they
continue taking the streets, caught in the only form of solidarity they
know and recognize. The 200 are reduced to 100 because of the increase
in risk. They will burn a large number of banks, in their demos or in
nocturnal attacks, but the State knows more or less who they are. There
are new arrests. Now there isn't sufficient energy to write letters or
visit everyone frequently. The arrested remain isolated and upon getting
out of jail, many are burned out and give up their involvement with the
struggle and with other comrades. We all lose their experience.
Meanwhile, few people beyond the anarchist milieu find out about all
this because the attacks are clandestine and the demos are surrounded by
police. If they notice, they see something external to them and they
wouldn't even know how to involve themselves: ways of participating for
people who find themselves on the outside are not apparent. The
psychological distance between the anarchists and other people increases
and depression generalizes in the milieu (more ignored evidence of the
collective nature of freedom: the more separated we are from other human
beings, the more dejected and hopeless we become).
It must be said that there are other factors. The critiques are true
that say that there's a fear of repression in the libertarian milieu and
this fear takes hold of many comrades, that many people take advantage
of cheap excuses to disassociate themselves from the exhausting tasks of
solidarity, that many people stop participating in the anti-repression
assemblies because quitting is easier than continuing. To blame
insurrectionalist practices for the failure of solidarity would be
taking advantage of an insincere self-victimization. On the other hand,
to blame the others without recognizing the self-isolation of
insurrectionalist practice would be an act of sanctimoniousness that
exaggerates the purity of solidarity among the insus and, even more
serious, encloses insurrectionalism in the dead-end where it has spent a
decade rotting, refusing the possibility of getting out.
Now let's imagine the results of another response to repression. When
the blow comes down, the comrades choose to communicate, to the most
people possible, why this case of repression and the struggle that it
has hit are important. They widely invite people to participate and they
respect other forms of participation. 1000 or so people come. The number
isn't important but rather the fact that support is being gained among
people who wouldn't have found out about it (only on TV) and that these
people are bringing themselves closer to, in some manner, an illegal and
anarchic form of struggle that was hit by the State. In other moments,
high visibility counter-attacks are carried out, thought out to win
empathy for those who attack and against the repressors. Within the
anti-repression demos, a segment ups the level of sabotage and
combativeness, but always with respect to others, for example always
carrying out their actions from the back of the demo, just past the
demo, or simply doing all of it calmly and sensibly.
In this case, in the short-term there might not be as many attacks, but
in the middle-term there could be more. Even more important is the fact
that the comrades have overcome the repressive enclosure that the State
has erected. The police have a much harder time figuring out who is
doing the illegal actions and it's even more difficult to isolate and
repress them. Many more people are finding out about the repression and
supporting a combative and anarchic struggle: ways of participating are
being created that don't require being on the front line. This isn't
about a big, empty, and inert mass, but rather a multifaceted milieu
that supports combativeness in a way that's difficult for the State to
monitor and understand.
We're not falling into mental masturbation: there will also be many who
refuse to participate because the illegal actions of which the arrested
comrades are accused seem bad to them. You can exhaust yourself working
to inform and bring out a hundred thousand people and only 400 or 40
come. But it's ok. We will know who is really in solidarity and who's
not if we work at it instead of assuming the reason people aren't there.
And of the hundred thousand, we will know with more precision up to what
point they are apathetic if we look for their complicity and support, at
least symbolic. Moreover, we will not have wasted our time in informing
them of the repression simply because they don't show up at the
solidarity actions. We don't do it principally to convince them but
rather so that a revolutionary perspective reaches them, not just that
of the TV. That other people position themselves in relation to our
struggle, although in an apathetic and antagonistic way, and not in
relation to social peace and the social categories emitted by the TV, is
already an achievement. And with these 400 or 40 more who come, there
will be more conflicts because they will not have the same ideas or
experiences of struggle. As liberal as they may be, the conflict that
arises is good. It's this conflict that erodes liberalism.
As a brief example, imperfect but historical, we can look at the
solidarity campaign for Amadeu Casellas. Much more strength was
generated, with a high level of attack, by creating an environment of
struggle with a multiplicity of forms of participation and support.
Clearly, there were conflicts with more leftist elements but this has to
be assumed – we're not saying to accept it but rather to criticize it
while we promote another vision of struggle.
Countering the criminalizing narratives of the press. Intervening
against the State's social engineering campaign and against the new
repressive laws. Widening our connections and looking for the widest
support possible when repression touches us. Justifying—not in the eyes
of the State but rather in the eyes of our neighbors—that there are
people struggling in this or that manner, and winning support for the
struggle. (It can be said that neighbors are often civic-minded and
unsolidaristic. This is true. The neighborhood is one more institution
of social control. So are lawyers, but facing repression, insus are
accustomed to maintaining contact with lawyers who are only partial
comrades. In a revolutionary project wouldn't it be more useful to look
for a solidaristic neighborhood than a solidaristic judicial system?)
These are necessary responses to repression. And the same way that the
insurrectionalists say, with reason, that in the face of repression one
must continue attacking, we say that in every moment it is necessary to
develop a mode of struggle that analyzes and overcomes isolation,
understanding this as one of the most potent forces of capitalism. For
anarchists, overcoming enclosure isn't a mere response to repression but
has to be second nature. Counter-attacking is also important, but the
attacks have to respond to their own logic, not a blind necessity to do
for the sake of doing.
As anarchists we insist that the attack has multiple logics. It is not
merely about a military intention of destroying the enemy. If that were
its aim, the ends would justify whatever means; strategy would demand of
us a gradualist vision of struggle—of accumulation of forces—and an idea
of postponed liberty—that of first winning the war and afterwards, the
revolution. There's no place for anarchist ideas in such an approach. If
the only purpose of the attack is to destroy the enemy, either a
traditional strategy—that is to say, Machiavellian and gradualist—is
posed, or an immediatist strategy—that of striking with all of the
forces available in the moment independently of whether it will serve
for something. As much as insurrectionalists promote a non-gradualist
approach, but rather one of here and now, it will be nothing more than
an inferior military strategy, destined to failure. The next logical
step for the comrades attached to this conception of struggle is
renouncing the hope of winning and the idea of revolution itself (a step
that many nihilists and egoists take). In the name of a badly conceived
anarchism, they deny the possibility of realizing anarchy.
For us, the attack is important precisely because it gives a
transformative sense to all the other actions we carry out—actions that
the majority of insus overlook and actions that dissidents who give sole
focus to the creative part of the struggle also betray. There is no
creative act that capitalism is not capable of recuperating if it isn't
linked to actions of negation and destruction. In order to critique
insurrecctionalism, we turn to the great insurrecto Bakunin who said
that “the passion for destruction is a creative passion.” In thinking
about destruction only as destruction, insurrectionalists waste all its
power. Attacks shine with beauty because they constitute the destruction
of something ugly, something that oppresses us, and because they open a
crack for the creation of something new, something ours. We also have to
look to the creation of new social relations, anarchic relations.
And unlike mass-movement anarchists, we insist that the attack is
important because it heals us; it allows us to become people again. Its
benefit at the individual level is indispensable, because weak and sick
people can't constitute a strong struggle. But this cannot be the final
motive for the attack because healing ourselves, becoming people again,
also happens through the collective, the recovery of relationships of
community. Attacking to satisfy our anxieties is good, but cannot in
itself be considered as struggle, much less if it goes masked in
vainglorious and unrealistic rhetoric speaking of war against the State.
Attacks also cause economic damage to our enemies or damage the
infrastructure essential to the economy and social control. Destruction
alone cannot end capitalism. On the one hand, a social relationship
can't be destroyed, only transformed. On the other, we will probably
never be strong enough to exert the adequate level of destruction. In
the Second World War, the capitalist powers unleashed a level of
destruction that surpasses us completely, reducing the cities of Europe
and Asia to ashes, and in the end the whole game was profitable for
capitalism.
As such, the attack as a measure of material destruction always requires
a strategic approach. Can the target of the attack concede something to
us, like a business that's accusing comrades of damages and could
rescind its accusation? Is it a moment of more generalized revolt, and
infrastructural sabotage could break with normality and impede social
control?
Another meaning of attack is symbolic. Human beings are social and
symbolic creatures. Symbols are very important for us. Neither the State
nor the struggle can be thought about without turning to symbols that
communicate norms and their subversion. That an attack is symbolic
doesn't take away from its importance. But we should think hard about
the symbolism. An attack becomes a symbol of our strength or of the
fragility of the social peace. It can mark an enemy or visibilize our
rage. In this sense, the most important thing is not the level of damage
that is caused, but its visibility—that the effects are visible the day
after or that other people see the attack in the moment it is carried
out. An attack with a letter bomb, which only the police and the handful
of comrades that read the anarchist web page where the communique is
published find out about, has much less symbolic strength (and economic
as well, probably) than an attack at midday with sledgehammers.
An attack with a bomb or with fire—more-so the first but always
depending on how the action is carried out—can communicate to others
that the authors of the attack don't care if a third party ends up hurt
as collateral damage. We underscore: it totally depends on the level of
precaution, sense, and calm with which the attack is prepared and
carried out. An attack with explosives also communicates to society a
material distance between the authors of the attack and others. Anyone
can break a window with a hammer or set fire to a dumpster but someone
who makes and places bombs has necessarily gone through a process of
specialization. It must be asked: Is this the message that they want to
send? But all too often, at least according to the postures in the
communiques published afterwards, the authors are only thinking of
sending a message to Father State, a gesture that is fairly useless, not
very strategic according to anarchist criteria, and topped off with
aromas of frustrated adolescence.
Clearly it's necessary to learn new techniques and recover practices of
sabotage and weapons of struggle, but the insurrectionalists who place
bombs at the peak of a tactical scale, in spite of the fact that it's
often an inferior form of attacking, avoid strategic assessments. If
from the start, bombings are the coolest—or “most radical,” using
disguised language without any revolutionary criteria (maybe the Muslim
capitalists of Al Qaeda are the most radical current of anti-colonial
struggle today?)—actions, and anyone who critiques them is written off
as a coward or reformist, an environment is created in which it is
impossible to assess whether a concrete action contributes something to
the struggle. An even sadder reality considering that this tactic in
particular entails the greatest possibilities of tragedy if it's poorly
thought-out.
Lastly, attacks can generalize. Reproduced by outside people, attacks
constitute a way of growing in force without creating an authoritarian
party, nor adopting a quantitative logic of struggle, nor waiting for a
strength that is always still-to-come before starting to attack. As such
it's important to conceive attacks in a way that they are easy to
reproduce. The Greek comrades have had probably the most success in this
matter, and the strategic lessons extracted from there have been applied
in other much more pacified countries with similar results—although on a
smaller scale, clearly—demonstrating their efficacy. In Greece it was a
process of many years and of constant participation in social struggles.
Sometimes the comrades formed blocs in demonstrations, with their own
banners and their own propaganda to gain an anarchist visibility, and
other times they attacked from the mass, beat riot cops with sticks, or
threw trash, rocks, or molotovs, according to the strength of the
moment. There is an important consideration: a social intuition or a
sensitivity towards the receptivity or mood of the other people. The
confrontations were carried out without fear of creating conflict or
being the bad guys, but calculated not to exceed the tolerance of other
people by creating a situation so out-of-step that everyone ends up
fleeing. In other words, to remain in conflict and not end up alone: a
very important tension that the insurrectionalists of Barcelona haven't
identified. An important element of this tension is knowing and
accepting that there are moments in which it's best simply to be there
and not to attack.
Parallel to the line of conflictive participation in the social
movements is the line of autonomous attack: that of choosing one's own
moments to come together, carry out an attack and disappear. Often, such
attacks in Greece took place in the full light of day, with fifty masked
people destroying banks and luxury stores in five minutes and dispersing
right after. The act of doing it in the day makes these into
high-visibility attacks that easily enter into the consciousness of
others. And many had a social character, for example the looting of
supermarkets and subsequent redistribution of the stolen food. Being the
bad guys for many years created a situation in which there were common
conflictual events in society and in a certain moment, hundreds of
thousands of people appropriated them as their own weapons to express
their rage against the system. They generalized.
A few points remain to underscore. This insurrectional experience has
little to do with the trajectory of clandestine groups that subsequently
became the symbol of the anarchist struggle in Greece. Clandestinity
offers other possibilities but it did not play an important role in the
generalization of attacks. In fact, a large portion of insurrectionalist
comrades in Greece strongly critiqued Revolutionary Struggle when they
shot several police in Athens at the end of December 2008 and the
beginning of January 2009. Their critique was not against violence but
rather emphasized that during the previous month the whole society was
exercising a high level of violence against the police and the attack
with submachine guns—weapons that very few people had within reach—could
only professionalize and limit the struggle.
Clandestinity can permit the realization of more complex and dangerous
attacks, or simple survival in cases of extreme repression, but in
Greece and in wider revolutionary history it has always been a failure
in terms of generalization of struggle. It can't be any other way, given
that clandestinity is a type of self-isolation. Far from being glorified
it should be reserved for cases of necessity.
Another important point is that although insurrection, and as such the
aforementioned actions, were transformative, neither anarchist ideas nor
new social relations took root. And although the insurrection created a
strength necessary for winning against the police in the streets and
calling into question the capacity of the army to suppress it,
anarchists didn't have plans for going further, so that the insurrection
stagnated with the destruction of banks and police stations—the usual
anarchist targets, showing a lack of capacity for adaptation to take
advantage of the situation and go for it all.
If we speak of the generalization of attacks, we should put an identical
emphasis on the generalization of anarchist ideas and the projects that
allow us to put anarchic relations into practice. The insurrections of
the last decade have made it clear that attacks alone are not enough.
But as the situation is, it's unlikely that insurrectionalism in
Barcelona will manage to generalize combativity. Attacks will not extend
if they are poorly executed. We'll have to have more sense, admit that
there are moments to attack and moments to just be, recognize and
develop the social aspect of attacks and overall to care well for
comrades instead of talking shit or harming our own through shoddy
practice.
In spite of it all, it's likely that attacks will extend in the years to
come. But it will be thanks to the crisis, without a good depth of
ideas, based in anxiety over the current precarity and not in the
rejection of the system in its totality. There will be
insurrectionalists who claim this as a triumph of their practices, but
this will be nothing more than an irresponsible opportunism. Without
transforming anarchist practices well, the forms of rebellion that are
sown today will disappear with the crisis.
This would be an appropriate time to say a couple things about security.
This does not apply to the insurrectionalists who have well worked-out
security practices because—clearly—they do it well and don't talk about
it. But there are some who have disgracefully careless practices. And if
the champions of attack don't know good techniques for organizing their
attacks well and discreetly, who will?
We're talking about bringing cellphones to meetings (showing the State
who has gotten together with whom), bringing cellphones and turning them
all off at the moment of the meeting (showing who was there and that
illegal things were being talked about), carrying cellphones with the
battery out during actions (if it's an action that the State is going to
find out about, it gives them a list of suspects—all the people with
their cellphone turned off during a certain period of time). It seems
like we're dealing with people who can't leave it in the house because
they don't know how to walk through the streets without it.
To continue: meeting to plan actions in social centers, atheniums [10] ,
or known squats (handing over the details of the meeting directly to the
police), saying things in a quiet voice or turning up the radio during a
meeting (making it more difficult for one's own comrades to hear, but
not the police, whose mics are better than human hearing), expressing in
words what another comrade is trying to express with gestures or written
on paper, as if they were children who are just learning to read and
have to say every written line that passes before their eyes out loud
(handing over the most dangerous details directly to the police), not
criticizing comrades when they do these things (creating a culture of
superficial pleasantry that's above all pleasant to the police), and
assuming the fact that they haven't been arrested means that the police
weren't listening (believing in a vision of repressive practices that
stopped applying in the nineteenth century).
We can talk about security in street situations as well: in the age of
mass recording, masking without changing the outside layer of clothing,
or masking and unmasking all the time according to the level of danger
that you feel in the moment, doesn't do much. Aim should be practiced
before the demonstration and if someone's aim is so bad that they're
more likely to hit a pedestrian or another demonstrator, they shouldn't
throw dangerous things (instead they can carry a backpack; not everyone
can be Rambo). If someone gets so nervous in chaotic situations that
they get tunnel vision, don't see their surroundings, don't know how to
breathe deep and calm down, and are capable of breaking windows one
meter away from four-year-old kids or, who knows, knocking over an old
person in a wheelchair, surely they should carry the banner or a spray
can instead of a hammer and their closest friends and comrades should be
the first ones to tell them so. Having to repeat such basic things at
this stage in the game is disgraceful.
And these shortcomings aren't the fault of insus. They're generalized in
the milieu. But we must ask ourselves, if the insus haven't improved
these practices, what is it they've been doing? We should go further:
developing tactics against surveillance, that include practicing ways of
avoiding tails going to certain meetings or employing methods for
detecting or neutralizing more discreet and invasive microphones, like
those planted by the Italian police in the backpacks and shoes of
comrades, ten years ago now.
The Iberian insurrectionalism of the '90s arose with astute critiques of
the stagnation, bureaucratization, pacification, lack of solidarity, and
workerism of the libertarian sphere dominated by the CNT of that time.
Among certain groups that rejection evolved towards other more developed
currents, including an anti-civilization environmentalism, several
radical feminisms, a pessimist nihilism (distinct from the revolutionary
nihilism of, for example, the CCF), several sects of diluted and
libertarian Marxism, a current that shows signs of the beginnings of a
deep critique of colonialism, a hybrid activism between progressivism
and insurrectionalism (part of which has the diluted Marxism of the
Tiqqunists) and even some groups of the CNT updated with insurrectional
critiques. It hasn't always been a fruitful path just because it's been
an evolution. The important thing is that these currents turned the page
after taking the necessary posture of rejection towards the hegemony of
a long-outdated vision of anarchism (although some turned the page back,
see “a hybrid activism...”) to advance their own logics of struggle.
But some remained in this posture of rejection, advancing a more pure
insurrectionalism, editing another book of the notes from one of Alfredo
Bonanno's conferences, putting on more anti-prison days, publishing
another periodical remarkable more for its aesthetic and tone than for
its content—in fact the words fade shortly after being read, leaving
behind only a vapor of condemnation...
We're not talking here about particular people, or even a particular
current, but rather the fact that in this way a type of ideological
hammer was created and it has been this hammer, the desire to manage it
or the fear of being hit by it, that has kept all the distinct currents
in the segmented and dispersed libertarian milieu minimally united. And
it's this hammer, this pure insurrectionalism, that has always suffered
from a vague critique, in so constituting more an obstacle to the
struggle than an impulse towards always better practices and ideas.
We can start with its critique of work, seen in writings like “Down with
work” and in the proposals and shortcomings of periodicals like
Antisistema. Critiques of the workerism of official anarchism and the
extolling of the working class and its mass organizations, of the goal
of productive but self- managed work and of an industrial organization
supposedly for our own good, were needed. So was the exploration of
egoist, feminist, situationist, ecological, and anti-colonial ideas on
the concepts of work, production, discipline, indolence, pleasure, duty,
desire, and necessity. But insurrectionalism simply threw itself to the
other end of the same pool where the workerists were swimming, in so
avoiding the complex questions on how to survive inside capitalism, how
to struggle in the workplace while introducing a critique of work, how
to relate to union organizations and how to replace commodified
relationships. In all this theoretical evasion, insurrectionalism in
Barcelona was strongly subsidized by the squatter movement and the
relative autonomy the State allowed it out of a strategy of pacification
and exhaustion to avoid more conflicts like the one provoked by the
eviction of the Cine Princesa in '96. Enmeshed in squatting,
insurrectionalism didn't have to concern itself with the problematics of
work. It could have done more to replace commodified relationships,
deepening and defending the ceded autonomy and in so doing, opening a
new line of attack against the State, but no more than the minimum was
done, Iberian insurrectionalism being a frozen posture of rejection and
not a dynamic practice of liberation.
Its critique of organization has also been vague. We don't believe that
it's a simple question of formality or informality, but rather of a
worldview, of the social relations at the crux of it, of the singularity
or redundancy of organizations and the unification or fragmentation of
the anarchist milieu (singularity and unification being on the road to
authoritarianism, redundancy and fragmentation constituting a creative,
libertarian, and intelligent chaos that can include formal organizations
without the danger that these take control of the milieu). Nevertheless,
Iberian insurrectionalism has wagered on informality and we can critique
it within its own logic. Immobilized by the posture of clandestinity and
secrecy and finished off by laziness, insurrectionalism in Barcelona
hasn't left any legacy of effective informal coordination. Neither has
it made any advance in the practice of deepening affinity, instead
allowing it to become a facile social club. In other words, it hasn't
even managed to achieve its very unambitious organizational proposal.
The fact that many ex-insus have come to experiment with and even get
involved in projects of formal organization demonstrates a failure—not
the defeat of informality and the triumph of formal organization, but
the failure to realize any worked-out proposal of informality that can
compete with the formal organizations on a historical rather than
abstract level, advancing anarchist theory with new experiences.
Therefore, insurrectionalists have really contributed little to
dismantling all the myths of the formal organization and its supposed
advantages. It's ironic that this work of historical argumentation has
been realized above all by people like Miquel AmorĂłs and AgustĂ
Guillamon [11], who, as much as we disagree with their critique of
insurrectionalism, have done much to reveal the reformist role of the
CNT in past eras. As to defining the enemy, insurrectionalism has done
nothing more than entrench itself in vagueness. Is it that they don't
understand that “we don't want to change the world, we want to destroy
it” doesn't mean anything? That it's only a pose?
There are distinct ways of defining the world. All the common
definitions understand it as something like the planet, the Earth, the
universe, “all that can be seen,” or as a minimum the ensemble of human
life. In all these cases, if that is what insurrectionalism wants to
destroy, it's wasting its time in the anarchist milieu. It should
immediately join up with the right wing of the capitalists and fight the
war against green capitalism. That is the only possibility it would have
to realize the destruction of the world.
Or maybe with “we want to destroy the world” they refer to a certain
construction of “the world” or “humanity” according to a Foucauldian
critique? Ok, well between all of the insurrectionalist literature and
action that we've seen along the length and width of the Spanish state
we've never noticed an analysis of the structural immanence of power nor
how it supports itself in discourse and in an institutionality with a
concrete historical origin.
Or maybe it doesn't want to destroy the world, but rather gain power
from a pseudo-radical appearance and be able to condemn everything from
a Mt. Olympus of purity? It's notable that here it's about an extreme
attitude, a pose of constant rage and not a radical critique. To leave
this superficiality and advance ideas that merit such a name, they would
have to identify what of all the existent they want to save and what
exactly it is that they want to destroy.
But that wouldn't be in the interest of insurrectionalism. To admit that
there are some existing things that they don't want to destroy isn't as
cool. At least in Barcelona it refuses to become a deep practice. It
would rather be the hammer in a paralyzed milieu, a mere posture.
Ironically, this has attached it to a well-disguised pacifism. Refusing
to define well what is its enemy and what it really wants, freezing
itself in impotent tantrums against an abstract and untouchable
“everything,” it is capable of destroying little beyond windows.
To conclude this portrait of its theoretical vagueness, we mention the
search for a revolutionary subject. It's curious how the
insurrectionalists hit the mark in rejecting the dogmatic
oversimplification of Marxism-Leninism and its revolutionary subject,
that essentialized demographic category that the vanguard has to
identify and direct towards revolution, but later, they suffer from a
lack of allies and start the search for a new revolutionary subject. In
the beginning it was prisoners, whom they glorified and tried to
organize, radicalize, and follow all at the same time. The great
disappointment from the failure of what is now stigmatized as
“prisonerism” demonstrates the fact that it was not about a sincere
solidarity with prisoners, understood as complex and imperfect people
like us, who sometimes struggled and sometimes gave in, and could be
radicals or reactionaries, comrades or fakes. On the contrary, it was an
ideological operation of lionizing a social sector sufficiently
demonized to be able to distinguish themselves from the populists who
only praised workers, the middle class or ordinary people, and then
saddling this romanticized sector with the duty of destroying the State.
Even the new currents in Barcelona that call themselves nihilists or
individualists—the latter without knowing or caring that individualism
has always rejected the concept of a revolutionary subject—have joined
the game, betting on the “criminal youth.” (To clarify, we're not
referring here to the nihilist current that's been preaching in the insu
milieu for quite a few years, but to the new expressions of it). If they
believe that among the criminal youth there aren't also norms of
conformity, oppression by the collective towards the individual, new and
creative forms of stupefaction, possible comrades and enemies like in
any social sector (minus a few constituted purely of enemies), it's
because they don't actually know any. Any abstraction of a multitude or
collectivity is an act of violence. While some types of violence are
useful, violence towards a collectivity that in theory is composed of
allies or affines [12] is a way of constituting authoritarianism.
Categories are crude imprecisions that trample over the chaotic nature
of things. If we use them knowing that they are convenient lies, it's
ok. That's language. But if we require our categories to bear the weight
of dogma, it's an affront against the liberty of the categorized beings
and the beginning of a war against nature. In searching for a
revolutionary subject, the new nihilisms and individualisms within
insurrectionalism lose the best theoretical contribution that nihilism
and egoism brought.
Franco regime that society was well under control as it approached the
transition to democracy. The Spanish is "Atado y bien atado."
As a way of preserving their evident shortcomings, many insu comrades
exercise a type of bullying towards others, always waving the flag of
the brave and the martyrs, insinuating that they are the only ones who
truly struggle or at least those who struggle in a more “radical” manner
(confusing this with “risky”) and writing off everyone who differs from
them as cowardly, sold-out, and incoherent, or at a minimum, less
important. The function of this bullying is to make all comrades of a
more uncontrollable character toe their line or at least not make an
open critique of them out of fear of being called into question. And the
comrades dedicated to the struggle but of a less combative character are
silenced beforehand, because the only criterion that insurrectionalism
recognizes is the zeal to attack here and now and in the most
symbolically hard-hitting way possible (in place of hard-hitting on an
economic, strategic, tactical, or social level, etc.).
Taking this not-so-discreet stance, they're left with the fame of the
ensemble of anarchist attacks carried out against the State, although
many of these actions are carried out by comrades who share little with
the insurrectionalist line. But this monopoly on attacks can't be
disputed without risking acknowledging participation in illegal acts.
This is how the people with the least discreet stance seize the
privilege of speaking in the name of the whole anarchist offensive.
In Barcelona, at least in the last few years, this problem has been
smoothed out a bit. Certain sectors have learned to relate a little
better with other people (perhaps, ironically, thanks to the experiences
of 15M [13] ) while others have isolated themselves. But this change
hasn't been enough to erase a dynamic that was created over years. In
part because many comrades of other tendencies opt for superficial
pleasantry, gossip, and back-stabbing and in so doing construct specters
of the bad insurrectionalist wherever they imagine that someone could
have a criticism of them. And in part because we don't stop bombarding
ourselves with the sanctimoniousness of insurrectionalist comrades in
other countries, through the reading of communiques on the internet or
the editing of texts. The arrogance that comes to us from other contexts
continues reinforcing the figure of the ruthless insurrectionalist with
his hammer. On the one hand, it's not fair to the insurrectionalists who
have improved their practice in this regard. On the other hand, neither
have they rectified nor do they critique the sad arrogance of their
counterparts in other countries, if not often glorifying it.
In doing so they can also benefit from their ideological hammer without
doing the dirty work of mistreating other comrades. Far beyond
Barcelona, the easiness of bullying in the anarchist milieu indicates an
internalized patriarchal dynamic. Proletarian violence—understood as
self-defense, sabotage, and attack against all that oppresses us—belongs
to everyone, and as such we completely reject the essentialist argument
that violent struggle is patriarchal in itself. Even so, at least a part
of the insurrectionalist current has indeed fallen into making a fetish
of violence, an act that goes hand in hand with the reproduction of
patriarchal culture. Furthermore, many of these comrades undervalue or
invisibilize other ways of participating in struggle, which could be
cleaning social centers, cooking for popular meals, writing prisoners,
supporting burned out or traumatized comrades, transmitting collective
experience and historical memory, connecting distinct generations in
struggle, developing a healthy, critical and careful communication
between comrades, spreading a libertarian culture, recovering useful
knowledge for the self-organization of life, and many more things.
But all that isn't breaking or burning is almost not talked about and
never praised. Acts of destruction are indispensable, it's clear, but in
themselves they don't form a revolutionary struggle. The comrades in
Greece burned almost all the banks and police stations in the country
and it wasn't enough. The comrades in Egypt exercised an equal or
greater level of violence against the State, but a few years later it's
been shown that a large part of the supposed comrades of struggle (not
the anarchists but the others that went out into the streets) are
reproducing insurrectionalist tactics in one moment and the next they
can demonstrate in favor of a military government or gang rape comrades
in the supposedly liberated plaza. Why should we have to repeat the same
errors when others have already shown us, through their bravery and the
advanced state of their struggle, that the path we follow becomes a
dead-end?
It's not enough to speak of attacks. It has been more than confirmed
that capitalism can't be destroyed with violence alone. But whoever
makes this assertion exposes themselves to the insurrectionalist
critique that one is weak or is trying to pacify the struggle. It's like
a game played by macho adolescents who face off with an imminent danger
they can't turn away from for fear of being called cowards or faggots.
And insurrectionalism in Barcelona doesn't even talk about patriarchy,
as though it had no importance in a struggle against all authority. It
seems that a large part of insu comrades ignore the indispensability of
patriarchy to the advancement and maintenance of the State and
capitalism (as if its own forms of oppression weren't enough of a reason
to fight against it).
Their struggle suffers from this lack of critique of patriarchy.
Dynamics of communication are produced that obstruct self-critique and
solidaristic support and care towards others; competition, sectarianism,
and shit-talking towards other sides in order to always be the best are
facilitated; it stays trapped in dead-ends out of pure pride, and it
tends towards a partial struggle that doesn't identify an important
source of oppression in our society. Lacking this critique, they are
more capable of reproducing patriarchal hierarchies and the
corresponding abuses, a reality that harms comrades in struggle and that
weakens the whole milieu.
The lack of analysis on the importance of patriarchy and its historical
relation with the State and capitalism isn't surprising either, given
that insurrectionalism in Barcelona, with important exceptions, has
tended towards cheap ideas and an anti-intellectualism that not only
rejects academic interventions in the terrain of struggle (an important
position) but also theory, deepening of ideas, and reading beyond the
histories of heroic battles fought by past martyrs. In the last few
years a certain periodical has indeed published more thorough articles
than the usual ones, but in general insurrectionalism in Barcelona
hasn't promoted theoretical and analytical development.
Perhaps the worst of all of this is that insurrectionalism in Barcelona
expresses itself in an arrogant tone that obstructs communication,
self-critique, debate, the extension of solidarity, the search for new
complicities, propaganda—in the end, struggle itself. At times it gives
the impression of being some kind of hybrid between Napoleon and Christ,
carrying out its crusade so alone, a few people, them against the world
because everyone else is so wretched, and they, poor them, have humbly
decided not to retreat.
Even worse when as anarchists we have very little to be proud of. It's
one thing to be arrogant when one is winning (and even so it can be
inopportune). Arrogance within misery is something else.
We see that insurrectionalism, such as it has been put into practice,
now has little to offer. Its most important contribution, the combative
attitude, is out of its hands. In the demonstrations and the strikes, if
the climate favors it, it's not just a revolutionary minority throwing
rocks and burning banks, but many more.
And the attacks in moments of peace, the nighttime and daytime
sabotages, for some time now have not belonged to any concrete “sector,”
as much as some insus would like to believe that they are the only ones
on the front line.
Sadly, the only way out for insurrectionalism within its own logic is to
gain a symbolic superiority through more daring actions—but not
necessarily more destructive, neither on an economic level nor on the
level of a social rupture that an action could potentially provoke.
Given their rejection of the social, their conviction to leave
relationships of obedience and spectacularity intact, they don't look
for complicities or conflictivity in the street, turning instead to
their preferred terrain of clandestinity and, as such,
professionalization of actions.
We've already seen where this path leads. With a professionalism that is
sloppy—the norm in Spain still to this day—it leads to quick repression
without a strengthening of the struggle but rather its exhaustion. And
with a well worked-out professionalism, it goes through a process of
several years of spectacle and self-isolation of the struggle before
repression puts an end to the trajectory.
It's not a question of the tactics chosen but the approach that gives
them life. There are cases in which actions were indeed based on a
strategic and well thought-out approach, truly radical in terms of how
to sharpen the struggle, but we get the feeling that more often the plan
responded to the spectacular and vanguardist trajectory that we just
outlined.
We predict that there will be those who respond to this critique saying
that we're advancing a pacifying position; that we're attacking the only
sector that's really struggling. These will be the caws of those whom
reasoning has abandoned. They will confuse the words written here with
surrender and the authors with cowards, when we have always struggled by
their side, we have lost comrades, we have lived through repression and
we continued forwards, but we insist on searching for the radical path
not in frozen postures but in self-critique and experience, so as not to
repeat the same failures year after year.
Finally, we ask forgiveness from the comrades who identify with
insurrectionalism who don't see themselves reflected in the critiques
that we present here and who have found in insurrectionalism something
that has nourished them in their struggle, something that we were
incapable of seeing.
In solidarity,
some anarchists from Barcelona
We now realize with curiosity that in the first edition, in speaking of
the multiplicity of insurrectionalisms, we neglected the French
comrades. Although we are somewhat unaware of the situation of our
Gallic neighbors—apart from the chronicle of cases of repression that
certainly makes it over the border—through the lens of us oafs who don't
speak very good French, it seems that the most lucid voice of French
insurrectionalism would be the magazine A Corps Perdu, an infrequent
collection of texts with a notable theoretical and historical base,
deftly translated into Castellano.
The last number, no. 3, is by far the best, easily surpassing any
natively-produced insurrectionalist text in Castellano (of which perhaps
only “Afilando nuestras vidas” [“Sharpening our lives”] and “Abajo el
trabajo” [Down with work] deserve to be preserved by history, and not so
much for their quality in itself as for their relation to the struggles
of the time). In quality we could compare it with At Daggers Drawn (a
text so lucid that even Proletarios Internacionalistas admitted their
respect for it). If this is a poetic sketch of the guidelines and spirit
of insurrection (in one chapter making an inexplicit yet very direct
critique of the informalism of Bonanno), no. 3 is a well-grounded,
detailed analysis of several concrete revolts of the past decade, from
Argentina to Greece. If sometimes insurrectionalism can be accused of
being a mere posture, in the pages of A Corps Perdu it is clearly a
conflictual projectuality.
Basing ourselves clearly in a very respectful assessment towards the
work of these comrades, we want to enter into two points of discrepancy
that—although of lesser importance within the work itself—for us are key
errors of insurrectionalism, as much here as in other parts. The first
deals with that matter so central to insurrectionalism: affinity. In the
magazine, on page 26, they argue the oft-repeated dogma: “Affinity tends
towards a quality of relations between comrades.”
We insist that this argument is false and that the history of our
struggles as much as the daily practice confirm that it's false.
Affinity only brings one to a stalemate. It's precisely the attempts to
carry solidarity beyond affinity that give relationships of affinity the
possibility to grow and mature. The same as it's impossible to create an
alternative freedom inside of capitalism, affinity currently isn't
capable of sustaining us. Sooner or later, we will also rot inside of
our informal groups. We'll arrive at superficial or banal rifts or
estrangements (not as absurd as the rifts of the formal federations, but
equally tragic). Inside of capitalism, even friendship will let us down.
It's a great disappointment that after so many years, Mediterranean
insurrectionalisms haven't gone further than affinity. We know that
affinity has failed many more comrades. It could be that the mere word
in itself is the last true friend of the dispersed and isolated
insurrectionalists.
The other point has to do with imagination. It seems that finally, the
comrades of A Corps Perdu are rectifying the great error of
insurrectionalism, that of omitting, ignoring, or undervaluing the
importance of imagination and visions of other worlds, a
counter-revolutionary tendency that the nihilists have perfected,
converting their eternal present into dogma. With a good base in
classical anarchism (complete with quotes from Bakunin and Volin), those
of A Corps Perdu write: “What has changed in the paradises of
merchandise of Western democracy is not just the degree of alienation
[...], but rather above all the difficulty of imagining a different
world.” (p. 45).
But later they abandon this theme to ambiguity, underrating “the dream
of another world” (p. 47). “The only 'positive' projects now seem to be
more on the side of reaction,” they say. They don't bother to name or
analyze these projects, nor do they go beyond indicating the necessity
of “working in the bosom of the negative with a view towards maintaining
and sharing our dreams” (p. 48). They don't go into depth about these
dreams, as Malatesta, Bakunin, Volin and others they quote often did.
They discuss the lack of visions of other worlds and the relationship of
this lack as much with capitalism as with our incapacity to direct
insurrections towards revolution. And then they stop talking about this
theme. They don't do anything to correct what we insist—and they seem to
recognize—is one of the most key weaknesses of our struggle, but instead
close off the matter with a certain irony that leaves the door open for
a quick escape to insurrectionalism's typical scorn and they stay there
in the hallway with their arms crossed. They show a path that, if they
and we are correct, will have to be taken decisively, but then they
don't take another step; moreover they don't make it clear to the reader
whether they value or look down on such a path.
I suspect that the reason is that their ideology makes it difficult for
them to talk about something that isn't destruction, something that
furthermore would have such childish or mystified names as “imagination”
or “vision.” If this is so, then this is indeed an insurrectionalism
that's a mere posture and not a conflictual project. A sad matter, given
that the capitalist war against the imagination is already reaching its
finale and most comrades haven't even raised their arms to defend
themselves.
It seems appropriate to us to add a vision of possible organization that
we could take as anarchists motivated to do so in the current context in
Catalonia. These are some reflections for a debate that's now already in
motion. We understand that this text will be spread beyond
Catalonia—because of this we have written it in Castellano—but we think
that the present organizational proposal could give more content to our
critiques and extend the same reflection to other places.
Unfortunately, it turns out that many comrades in Catalonia haven't
taken a sufficient lesson from the failures of the CNT and organized
anarchism in the era of '34-'36 and during the Transition and the
following decade. They persist in an illusory vision of the strength and
social influence of a big formal organization.
We fear that we who believe that '36 was the saddest year in the history
of anarchism are a minority. The year in which the existence was
revealed of anarchist leaders who would collaborate with the State and
its whole repressive apparatus, who would support the communists and the
bourgeoisie against any revolutionary steps and even would be complicit
in the expansion of a prison apparatus (that later would be used against
themselves), all the way up to the execution by firing squad of
anarchist expropriators. Also during the Transition and the '80s the CNT
gifted history with the same lesson as Leninism: that a bureaucracy is
always authoritarian and as such never anti-capitalist.
Facing the dangerous zeal of having a federation for its own sake, and
the continuous failure of insurrectionalist informality, we propose the
following:
—A Catalan anarchist encounter every three or six months, in which
information is shared about projects and campaigns, ties and friendships
are established between collectives and individuals, a consciousness of
collective strength is generated and as such the sensation of daily
isolation is neutralized, and discussions are organized, not to arrive
at agreements but to foment a heterogeneous deepening of ideas.
—Coordinating spaces [14] for concrete matters, never abstract or
ideological. We don't coordinate anarchism or being anarchists, but
specific tasks. We propose three:
1) one for anti-repressive collectives and prisoner support, to share
resources, ensure that no charged or incarcerated comrade is forgotten
and occasionally to call mobilizations against the ensemble of
repression;
2) another for sharing propaganda and facilitating big printing runs of
posters and pamphlets in order not to duplicate tasks and to reduce
expenses;
3) a third for infrastructure projects, to establish ties between them
and facilitate the direct distribution of goods and resources, to
economize on tasks instead of duplicating them, to facilitate the
creation of new infrastructure projects sharing experiences, to maintain
a collective and combative force capable of resisting the capitalist
dynamic that isolates, recuperates, and pacifies constructive projects,
and to weave material networks that foment a practice of mutual aid
beyond the abstract. With coordinating groups based in such concrete
tasks, the eternal problem of the organization of fictitious
collectives, the federation that exists on paper and not in reality,
could be avoided.
—For the comrades who yearn for a federation, the CNT still exists. They
can join it and put their hands to work to prove if it's still possible
today to carry out a formal struggle in the sphere of work that isn't
rapidly recuperated. If it goes well for them, they will quickly be
shocked by the bureaucratic or reformist sectors within the Organization
and they can reconstitute their sacred Federation to combat them.
—That no one founds an organization believing that in doing so more
revolutionary activity will appear. There's nothing more pathetic that
an organization composed of comrades that have neither their own
projects nor their own projectuality and are looking for a collective
force that they lack.
[1] (Trans) Castellano means Spanish. The word is used in Spain because
there are several other widely spoken regional languages, such as
Catalan, which is the primary language of Barcelona and the rest of
Catalonia. I’ve kept the original because in Barcelona it’s a relevant
distinction.
[2] (Trans) This was a milestone in the recent history of anarchism in
Spain. In December 1996, four comrades—three Italians and one
Argentinian—were arrested after a bank robbery in Cordoba, Spain, in
which two cops ended up killed. For a while their anarchist affiliations
were unknown, but when it became apparent, the majority of the CNT
distanced itself from them, going so far as to say that they were not
real anarchists and did not deserve anarchist support. La Epidemia de
Rabia en España goes into this in detail; I'm not aware of a text in
English but one probably exists.
[3] (Trans) The Spanish word “insu” is roughly translatable to
“insurrecto” in the English-speaking context, however both are used and
it's easily understandable to English speakers so I've kept it. It's
simply a shortening, not a pejorative, and is used by insurrectionary
anarchists to refer to themselves, as well as by other people.
[4] (Trans) The Spanish word is “civismo,” of which “civic-ism” is a
more awkward but maybe truer translation.
[5] (Trans) “The Organization” is a common way of referring to the CNT
in Spain.
[6] We don't want to confuse this capitalist individualism, which is not
an ideology but rather an attitude of atomized people, with the
individualism that comes from Stirner and constitutes a very valid
critique of capitalist society. For the second, “egoism” seems more
precise to us.
[7] (Trans) An awkward attempt to work around the Spanish
“insolidarios:” “people who are unsolidaristic”
[8] (Trans) People struggling for Catalan independence
[9] (Trans) The Ramblas is a wide, very touristy avenue in central
Barcelona. The Parliament case refers to roughly a dozen comrades who
were arrested at a big demonstration outside Parliament for allegedly
spitting on politicians
[10] (Trans) Atheniums (ateneos in the original, for ateneo libertario,
“libertarian athenium”) are a type of social center in Barcelona. They
can be distinguished from some other social centers, many of which are
more DIY focused, in being more focused around
educational/discussion-type events, and often more
consciously/conflictually anarchist spaces.
[11] (Trans) Two older Spanish anarchist authors who have actively
criticized the counter-revolutionary role of the CNT in '36. They are
very much not insurrectionalists and favor a more leftist—even almost
Trotskyite—vision of struggle.33
[12] (Trans) This is indeed an English word. It means someone with whom
one has affinity.
[13] (Trans) The plaza occupation movement that spread across Spain
beginning May 15, 2011 and leading to an intense cycle of protests,
occupations, and self-organization via assemblies. Inspirational to
Occupy in the US.
[14] (Trans) The Spanish word is coordinadora, literally “coordinator,”
but in this case not in the sense of a person who coordinates – rather,
a semi-formal gathering space for diverse groups to share information
and aiding in the making of coordinated or common, but not necessarily
unified, decisions.