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Title: Letter to the anarchist galaxy
Author: Anonymous
Date: 2011
Language: en
Topics: armed struggle, critique, insurrection
Source: Retrieved on November 24, 2011 from http://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=6610

Anonymous

Letter to the anarchist galaxy

Uninvited, we are forcing ourselves on a debate that is not ours. And

which never will be, as it is set on a terrain that remains sterile for

the development of insurrectional perspectives and the anarchist ideas

and activities that focus on such a development. So, you might ask, why

write a letter? Because nothing is closer to our hearts than liberatory

and destructive revolt, than the struggle for the subversion of the

existent, because we will never stop recognizing ourselves in all

comrades who decide to attack the structures and people of power out of

a desire for freedom; because there are few things we cherish more than

individual will, the striving for coherence and the courage of lighting

the fuse, above everything. Don’t think we are writing this premise in

an attempt to please; it is sincere, as is our concern about the

voluntary amputation of the domain of anarchist struggle.

Let’s be clear:

More than ever there is a need for the destructive intervention of

anarchists, more than ever it is the moment to intensify, to search for

possibilities and hypotheses enabling the extension of revolt and

insurrection and in this way speed up the overturning of this world. But

this need and urge don’t absolve us from the obligation to think about

what, where, how and why.

Let’s be straightforward:

For what reasons are anarchists (we don’t have any difficulty in

understanding why authoritarians would do so) systematically claiming

their acts and signing them with acronyms that have become famous

worldwide? What brings them to associate this road with an excessive

form of coherence between thinking and acting, between theory and

practice, while in fact it is simply the illusory abolition of a

permanent tension which should exist between them and which is beyond

doubt the moving strength behind the anarchist movement?

This spreading mania risks casting its shadow over all acts of revolt.

Not only actions by anarchists that merrily pass through the bitter and

always disappointing pill of the claim but also, and perhaps especially,

the action of the more general panorama of rebellion and social

conflictuality. Maybe that is one of the ‘reasons’ that pushed us to

write this text. Tired of experiencing and finding the anarchist field

of attack, sabotage and expropriation more and more assimilated to an

acronym and, as such, political representation; tired of seeing the

horizon narrowing into two falsely opposing choices: either

‘respectable’ anarchism, running behind assemblies, social movements and

base trade unions; or ‘bad’ anarchism, being kindly asked to stamp your

contributions to the social war with some acronym — and if you don’t,

someone else will do it for you.

Because we also choose to attack. We also sabotage the machinery of

capital and authority. We also choose to not accept a position of

begging and are not putting off the necessary expropriation until

tomorrow. But we do think that our activities are simply part of a wider

social conflictuality, a conflictuality that doesn’t need claims and

acronyms. We believe that only when actions are anonymous can they

really be appropriated by everyone. We believe that putting a stamp on

an attack is moving the attack from the social to the political field,

to the field of representation, delegation, actors and spectators. And,

as has often been said before in this kind of debate, it’s not enough to

proclaim the refusal of politics: its refusal implicates coherence

between means and aims, and the claim is a political instrument just

like the membership card, the program, the declaration of principles.

Over and above that, there is some confusion that we want to expose,

because we can’t continue to simply stand by and watch a content which

is more and more being given over to concepts such as informality. The

choice of an informal autonomous anarchist movement implies the refusal

of fixed structures, of membership organisations, of centralising and

unifying federations; and therefore also fixed recurring signatures, if

not all signatures. It is the refusal of the drawing up of programs, the

banishment of all political means; and thereby also of programmatic

claims that claim to be in the position of outlining campaigns.

It is the refusal of all centralisation; and so equally of all umbrella

structures, no matter whether they declare themselves verbally

‘informal’ or formal. In a positive sense, to us informality signifies

an unlimited and undefined archipelago of autonomous groups and

individuals which are forging ties based on affinity and mutual

knowledge and who decide upon that basis to realize common projects. It

is the choice for small, affinity-based circles which make their own

autonomy, perspectives and methods of action the basis for creating ties

with others. Informal organization has nothing to do with either

federations or acronyms. And what brought some comrades to speak not

only about informality, but about ‘insurrectionalism’ as well? With the

risk of devaluing the wide panorama of ideas, analyses, hypotheses and

proposals, we could say that ‘insurrectionalism’ contains the methods

and perspectives which, out of a non-compromising anarchism, want to

contribute to ‘insurrectional situations’. The anarchist arsenal of

methods for this contribution is enormous. Moreover, the use of methods

(agitation, attack, organisational proposals etc.) in itself means

hardly anything: only in a thought-out and evolving ‘projectuality’ do

they acquire meaning in the struggle. Setting fire to a State building

is beyond doubt always a good thing, but it is not necessarily inscribed

in an insurrectional perspective ‘as such’. And this counts even less

for the choice, for example, of aiming attacks particularly against

rather central, spectacular targets, accompanied by confessions of

faith. It is no coincidence that during other moments of insurrectional

projectualities, the emphasis was put particularly on modest,

reproducible, anonymous actions of attack compared to the more

centralized structures and people of power, or on the necessity of

well-aimed sabotage of infrastructures that don’t need echoes in the

media in order to reach their goals, for example the immobilization of

transport, data, and energy supplies.

It seems that there are not all that many perspectives behind the

current mania for claims, or at least, we have difficulty in discovering

them. In fact, and this doesn’t imply that we want to underestimate the

sincere and courageous rebellion of those comrades, it seems as if there

is above all a striving for recognition. A recognition by the enemy, who

will hurry to complete its list of terrorist organisations, often

signifying the beginning of the end: the enemy starts working to isolate

a part of the conflictuality from the wider conflictuality, an isolation

which is not only the forerunner of repression (and actually it doesn’t

really matter, repression is always there — we’re not going to weep

about the fact that anarchist activities are always being followed by

the eyes of the Argus, and thus prosecuted), but especially, and that’s

the most important, it is the most effective means to combat all

possible infection.

In the current condition of the social body, which is sick and

deteriorating, the best thing for power is a clearly recognizable and

definable knife which tries to stab a piece of it, while the worst for

power is a virus that risks harming the whole body in an intangible and

therefore uncontrollable way. Or are we mistaken, and is it all more

about recognition by the exploited and excluded? But are we as

anarchists not against all forms of delegation, of shining examples

which often legitimize resignation? Most certainly, our practices can be

contagious, and our ideas even more, but only on condition that they

bring back the responsibility to act to each separate individual, when

they question resignation as being an individual choice.

To inflame hearts, most certainly, but when this lacks the oxygen of

one’s own conviction, the fire will extinguish fast and in the best case

will simply be followed up by some applause for the upcoming martyrs.

And even then, it would really be too ironic if the principal opponents

of politics, the anarchists, were to take up the torch of representation

and, in the footsteps of their authoritarian predecessors, separate

social conflictuality from the immediate subversion of all social roles,

and do this in times when political mediation (political parties,

unions, reformism) is slowly becoming obsolete and outmoded. And it

makes no difference whether they want to do this by taking the lead of

social movements, speaking great truths in popular assemblies or by

means of a specific armed group.

Or is it all about striving for ‘coherence’? Unfortunately, the

anarchists that exchange the quest for coherence for tactical

agreements, nauseating alliances and strategic separations between means

and aims have always existed. Anarchist coherence is beyond doubt also

to be found in the denial of all this. But this doesn’t mean that, for

example, a certain condition of ‘clandestinity’ would be more coherent.

When clandestinity is not seen as a necessity (either because repression

is hunting us down or because it is necessary for certain action), but

as some kind of hpinnacle of revolutionary activity, there is not so

much left over from the infamous a-legalism. In order to imagine this,

it might suffice to compare it to the social situation in Europe: it is

not because thousands of people are living in a really ‘clandestine’

situation (people without papers), that it makes them automatically and

objectively a threat to legalism and crowns them as ‘revolutionary

subjects’. Why would it be any different for anarchists living under

conditions of clandestinity?

Or might it all be about frightening the enemy? A recurring element in

claims is that apparently there are anarchists who believe they can

scare power by expressing threats, publishing pictures of weapons or

exploding little bombs (and let’s not mention the despicable practice of

sending letter bombs). In comparison to the daily slaughter organized by

power it seems kind of naïve, especially to those who have no illusions

left concerning rulers that are more sensitive, capitalism with a human

face, or more honest relations within the system. If power, despite its

arrogance, were to fear anything it would be the spread of revolt, the

sowing of disobedience, the uncontrolled igniting of hearts. And off

course, the lightning of repression will not spare anarchists that want

to contribute to this, but that doesn’t prove how ‘dangerous’ we are in

any way whatsoever, it maybe only speaks about how dangerous it would be

if our ideas and practices were to spread among among the excluded and

exploited.

We are continually surprised about how little the idea of some kind of

shadow is able to please contemporary anarchists, the ones that don’t

want to resign themselves, wait or build mass organisations.

We used to be proud of it:

we would put all on all to make the swamp of social conflictuality

extend and so make it impossible for the forces of repression and

recuperation to penetrate. We didn’t go searching for the spotlight, or

for the glory of the warrior: in the shadow, at the dark side of society

we contributed to the disturbance of normality, to the anonymous

destruction of structures of control and repression, to the ‘liberation’

of time and space through sabotage so that the social revolt could

continue. And we used to diffuse our ideas proudly, in an autonomous

way, without making use of the echoes of the media, far away from the

political spectacle including the ‘oppositional’ one. An agitation which

was not striving to be filmed, recognized, but which tried to fuel

rebellion everywhere and forge ties with other rebels in the shared

revolt.

It seems that today more than a few comrades have chosen the easy

solution of identity over the circulation of ideas and revolt, and have

in this way reduced affinity relations to a joining something. Off

course it is easier to pick up some ready-made product off the shelves

of the militant market of opinions and consume it, rather than develop a

proper struggle track that makes a rupture with it. Off course it is

easier to give oneself the illusion of strength by using a shared

acronym than to face the fact that the ‘strength’ of subversion is to be

found to the degree and in the way it can attack the social body with

liberating practices and ideas. Identity and ‘formation of a front’

might offer the sweet illusion of having meaning, especially in the

spectacle of communication technology, but doesn’t clear every obstacle

from the road. Even more, it shows all the symptoms of sickness of a

not-so-anarchist conception of struggle and revolution, which believes

in being able to pose an illusionary anarchist mastodon before the

mastodon of power in a symmetrical way. The immediate consequence is the

evermore narrowing of the horizon to a not-so-interesting introspection,

some patting on the back here and there and the construction of a

framework of exclusive self-reference.

It wouldn’t surprise us if this mania were to paralyse the anarchist

movement even regarding our contribution to more and more frequent,

spontaneous and destructive revolts. Being locked up in self-promotion

and self-reference, with communication reduced to publishing claims on

the internet, it doesn’t seem that anarchists will be able to do a lot

(apart from the obligatory explosions and arsons, often against targets

which the people in revolt are already very much destroying themselves)

when the situation is exploding in their neighbourhood. It seems that

the closer we seem to get to the possibility of insurrections, the more

tangible these possibilities are becoming, the less anarchists want to

be busy with it. And this counts equally for those who are closing up

themselves in some ideology of armed struggle. But what are we talking

about when we speak about insurrectionary perspectives? Definitely not

just about a multiplicity of attacks, even less when these seem to tend

towards the exclusive terrain of the anarchists with their fronts. Much

more than a singular armed duel with the State, insurrection is the

multiple rupture with time, space and roles of domination, a necessarily

violent rupture which can signify the beginning of thesubversion of

social relations. In that sense, insurrection is rather a social

uncleashing, which goes further than a generalizing of revolt or riots,

but which already carries in its negation the beginning of a new world,

or at least should do. It is precisely the presence of such utopian

tension that offers some grip against the return to normality and the

recovery of social roles after the great feast of destruction. So it may

be clear that insurrection is not a purely anarchist matter, although

our contribution to it, our preparation towards it, our insurrectional

perspectives, could in future times be beyond doubt important and maybe

decisive for pushing the unchaining of negation towards a liberating

direction. Abandoning in advance these difficult issues — which should

be gaining importance in a world that is becoming more and more unstable

— by locking ourselves up in some identity-based ghetto and cherishing

the illusion of developing ‘strength’ by common signatures and the

‘unification’ of anarchists that are prepared to attack, inevitably

becomes the negation of all insurrectionary perspectives.

To get back to the world of fronts and acronyms, we could for example

mention the obligatory references to imprisoned comrades as a clear sign

of the restraining ourselves within a framework of exclusive

self-reference. It seems that once locked up by the State, these

comrades are no longer comrades like we are, but are precisely

‘imprisoned’ comrades. In this way, the positions in their already

difficult and painful debates become fixed in a way that can have only

two exits: either the absolute glorification of our imprisoned comrades,

or absolute rejection, which can very quickly turn into a renouncement

of developing and embodying solidarity.

Does it still make sense to continue repeating that our imprisoned

comrades are neither positioned above or below other comrades, but are

simply among them? Isn’t it remarkable that, despite the many struggles

against prisons, the present current is again coming out with

‘political’ prisoners, abandoning a more general perspective of struggle

against prison, justice,...? In this way we risk completing what the

State was already trying to realise in the first place by locking our

comrades up: by turning them into abstract, idolized and central

reference points, we are isolating them from the social war as a whole.

Instead of looking for ways to maintain ties of solidarity, affinity and

complicity across the walls, by placing everything in the middle of

social war, solidarity is shrinking into the quoting of names at the end

of a claim. On top of that, this is generating a nasty circular motion

without much perspective, a higher level of attacks which are

‘dedicated’ to others, rather than taking strength from ourselves and

from the choice of when, how and why to intervene in given

circumstances.

But the logic of armed struggle-ism is unstoppable. Once set in motion,

it unfortunately becomes very difficult to counter. Everybody that

doesn’t join and take up its defence is compared to comrades that don’t

want to act or attack, that submit revolt to calculations and masses,

that only want to wait and are refusing the urge to light the fuse here

and now. In the deformed mirror, the refusal of the ideology of armed

struggle is equal to the refusal of armed struggle itself. Of course

this is not true, but for who wants to hear that, there is no space for

discussion left open. Everything is being reduced to a thinking in

blocks, for and against, and the path which we think is more

interesting, the development of insurrectional projectualities is

disappearing into the background. To the applause of the formal

libertarians and the pseudo-radicals as well as the repressive forces,

who desire nothing more than the drying up of this swamp.

Because who still wants to discuss projectuality today, when the only

rhythm that the struggle seems to have is the sum of the attacks claimed

on the internet? Who is still searching for a perspective that wants to

do more than strike a little? There is, by the way, no doubt about that:

striking is necessary, here and now, and with all the means that we

think appropriate and opportune. But the challenge of the development of

a projectuality, which aims at the attempt of unchaining, extending or

deepening insurrectional situations, demands a bit more than the

capacity to strike. It demands the development of proper ideas and not

the repetition of other people’s words, the strength to develop real

autonomy in terms of struggle and capacities; the slow and difficult

search for affinities and the deepening of mutual knowledge; a certain

analysis of the social circumstances in which we act; the courage to

elaborate hypotheses for the social war in order to stop running behind

facts or ourselves.

In short: it doesn’t only demand the capacity to use certain methods but

especially the ideas of how, where, when and why to use them, and then

in combination with a whole spectre of other methods. Otherwise there

will be no anarchists left, only a spectrum of fixed roles:

propagandists, squatters, armed strugglers, expropriators, writers,

window breakers, rioters, etc. There would be nothing more painful than

to find ourselves so unarmed in the face of the coming social storm than

for each one of us to have only one speciality left. There would be

nothing worse in explosive social situations than having to note that

anarchists are too much involved in their own back yard to be able to

really contribute to the explosion. It would give the most bitter taste

of missed opportunities when we, by focussing exclusively on the

identity ghetto, would abandon the discovery of our accomplices inside

the social storm, the forging of ties of shared ideas and practices with

other rebels, breaking with all forms of mediated communication and

representation and in this way opening up space for true mutuality which

is allergic to all power and domination.

But as always we refuse to despair. We are aware that many comrades are

searching for possibilities to attack the enemy and forge ties with

other rebels through the spreading of anarchist ideas and struggle

proposals, in a time and space that abandons all political spectacle. It

is probably the most difficult path, because it will never be rewarded.

Not by the enemy, not by the masses and most probably not by other

comrades and revolutionaries. But we carry a history inside of us, a

history that connects us to all anarchists and which will obstinately

continue to refuse to be enclosed, either within the ‘official’

anarchist movement, or in the armed-struggle-ist reflection of it. Those

who continue to refuse to spread ideas separately from the ways in which

we spread them, thus trying to exile all political mediation, including

the claim. Those who don’t care much about who did this or that, but

connect it to their own revolt, their own projectuality which expands in

the only conspiracy we want: the one of rebellious individualities for

the subversion of the existent.

November 20, 2011