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Title: Say You Want an Insurrection
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: January 7, 2010
Language: en
Topics: insurrection, insurrectionary anarchy, anarchism without adjectives
Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2010/01/07/say-you-want-an-insurrection

CrimethInc.

Say You Want an Insurrection

So do we—a total break with domination and hierarchy in all their forms,

involving an armed uprising if need be. Until that’s possible, we’ll

settle for recurring clashes in which to develop our skills, find

comrades, and emphasize the gulf between ourselves and our oppressors.

But how do we bring about these confrontations? How do we ensure that

they strengthen us more than our enemies? What pitfalls await us on this

road? And what else do we have to do to make our efforts effective?

Over the past few years, a small current has gained visibility in US

anarchist circles prioritizing the themes of insurrection and social

conflict. Like any ideological milieu, it’s a lot more diverse than it

appears from a distance. Some strains emphasize confrontation for its

own sake, rather than as a means of achieving reforms; others frame

revolt as a means of building the power of the oppressed outside static

organizations. The common thread is that all are critical of formal

institutions and focus on attack as their central theme.

How effective are these strategies at achieving their professed goals?

To answer this question, we can’t simply study insurrectionist theory in

a vacuum; we have to look at the activities associated with it in the US

context. In practice, it’s not always easy to tell where strategic

considerations leave off and matters of emotional and psychological

temperament begin; in this case, both are relevant. Much of what we will

discuss below is not so much a matter of what insurrectionists say but

of what they do.

This subject is of particular interest to us because we are

insurrectionists of a sort, whether or not we use that adjective. For

well over a decade, we’ve focused on confrontational struggle based in

individual initiative, informal networks, and ad hoc organization.

Starting with shoplifting and vandalism and working up to streetfighting

and clandestine direct action, we’ve learned the advantages and

disadvantages of this approach on our own skin. One is always most

critical of what is closest to one’s heart: most eager to see it

succeed, and most concerned about potential errors.

In some ways, this is a very old line of thinking—perhaps older than

some of its adherents realize. One genealogy traces its origins to the

dispute between Marx and Bakunin over the organizational forms of the

Paris Commune. Some insurrectionists see precedents in the propaganda of

the deed carried out by Nineteenth-century assassins and the illegalism

associated with Jules Bonnot and his fellow bank robbers. We can trace

the lineage of current insurrectionist theory from Errico Malatesta and

Luigi Galleani through the works of Alfredo Bonanno, Jean Weir, and

others who attempted to distill lessons from the social struggles of the

1960s and ’70s.

At the same time, the latest wave of insurrectionist ideas is something

of a new phenomenon in the US, where the high turnover rate in most

anarchist communities often dooms them to relearn the same lessons over

and over. One can hardly blame the new generations for this—if anything,

the older generations are to blame for dropping out or refusing to

communicate. Seasoned anarchists have to be especially cautious not to

be dismissive and hostile about the enthusiasms of their young comrades.

Ten years ago, we were the upstarts whose new energy and muddled ideas

provoked all the testy veterans; we were able to learn from some of

their criticisms, no thanks to them, but their disdain contributed to

our defensiveness and their marginalization. If we accept roles on the

opposite side of this dynamic now, we may doom those who come after us

to repeat the same pattern.

In that spirit, let’s start with the advantages of insurrection as a

point of departure.

Starting from Revolt…

Attack is the refusal of mediation, pacification, sacrifice,

accommodation, and compromise in struggle. It is through acting and

learning to act, not propaganda, that we will open the path to

insurrection, although analysis and discussion have a role in clarifying

how to act. Waiting only teaches waiting; in acting one learns to act.

—“Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organizing for Attack,” in Do or Die #10

Many organizations and movements, including some that are explicitly

anarchist, promise to challenge the powers that be as soon as the

groundwork has been prepared; but the world is always changing, and one

may lay a foundation only to discover that the terrain has shifted. Once

one gets used to waiting, even if it is only a matter of needing to

prepare a little more, it is always easier to go on waiting. Revolution,

like parenthood and everything else momentous in life, is something one

can never be adequately prepared for.

Often, this preparation is framed in terms of the need to do more

outreach and education. But until there is a clash, until the lines are

drawn, there is nothing to talk about. Most people tend to remain aloof

from theoretical discussions, but when something is happening, when the

stakes are high and they can see concrete differences between opposing

sides, they will take a stand. In forcing such ruptures, one can compel

those who hide authoritarian and capitalist allegiances to show their

true colors, while offering everyone else the opportunity to form other

allegiances.

Sometimes one has to aim beyond the target in order to strike it.

Perhaps in the pacified US, some have to decry all compromise and

deliberation to resist co-optation and paralysis. By interrupting the

apparent consensus and social peace, confrontations make injustice

visible and legitimize the rage others feel as well. When the fog of

apparently universal submission is dispelled, those who wish to fight

can finally find each other—and readiness to fight is a better basis for

allegiance than merely ideological agreement.

The form of one’s immediate actions should match one’s long-term goals.

Theoretical elaborations give rise to more of the same. Focusing on

winning reforms tends to contribute to the development of reformist

logic. If you want to destroy all forms of domination, it’s best to

confront them all from the outset.

… and Spreading to Resistance

Insurrectionary anarchism, therefore, places particular importance on

the circulation and spread of action, not managed revolt, for no army or

police force is able to control the generalised circulation of such

autonomous activity… What the system is afraid of is not just these acts

of sabotage themselves, but also them spreading socially.”

— ibid.

Almost all strains of insurrectionist thought emphasize the importance

of revolt spreading. This is one of the best standards, then, by which

to evaluate insurrectionist efforts.

If both postponement and action tend to give rise to more of the same,

then in acting oneself, one extends an invitation to others. This is an

argument for carrying out actions that others can easily emulate, in

hopes that they will catch on.

That’s the idea, anyway. Sometimes, of course, anarchists carry out an

action others could easily emulate, but no one does. What other factors

enable an action to inspire more actions?

Even if the Time Is Not Ripe

We are insurrectionalist anarchists… because rather than wait, we have

decided to proceed to action, even if the time is not ripe.

—Alfredo Bonanno, The Insurrectional Project

It is an article of faith among most insurrectionists that one should

not wait for the appropriate material conditions, but should attack

immediately. As a defense against the sort of postponement described

above, this makes perfect sense; as a moral obligation or an axiom to

govern every decision, it can be dangerously counterproductive.

Insurrectionist theory allows for this, but in practice insurrectionists

do not always make the wisest choices. This is one of the cases in which

it can be difficult to differentiate between insurrectionism as a

program with concrete goals and insurrectionism as a matter of

disposition. To react immediately against oppression without thought for

the consequences is beautiful, and perhaps a way to recover one’s

humanity in a desensitizing world—but it is not always strategic.

This does not stop some from posing it as strategic. People who grew up

in a society founded on Christian notions of moral law often argue for

their own preferences as universally valid prescriptions. It’s

surprising how judgmental people who claim to reject morality can be!

So is insurrectionism a religion, or a strategy? If it is a religion,

its precepts are timeless and unconditional: categorical imperatives.

If, on the other hand, it is a strategy, developed under specific

conditions, we should think hard about how those conditions might be

different from ours, and how we should adjust it accordingly.

When Bonanno originally formulated his analysis in the 1970s, Italy was

in the midst of an upheaval that threatened the entire social order;

authoritarian and anti-authoritarian currents intermingled and contended

in the course of struggling against the government. He was not making an

argument for precipitating clashes where there were none so much as

proposing an organizational strategy to ensure that ongoing clashes

would promote liberty and autonomy. Contemporary US anarchists reading

texts such as Armed Joy do not always understand this, interpreting them

instead as a challenge to escalate tactics on a personal basis.

Of course, in a society based on competition and exploitation, there are

always clashes, however subtle. One doesn’t have to precipitate new

ones; it is enough to fight where one stands. Unfortunately, the

insurrectionist imagination is often limited by the most well-known

models for attack. Imagine an insurrectionist who goes to work or school

during the week but smashes bank windows on the weekends—hesitating to

create a rupture in the fabric of her own daily life while willingly

risking felonies to destroy things outside it. If such a lifestyle could

make sense, it is an admission that one must still choose carefully when

and how to “proceed to action.” We’re not convinced it does make sense,

but that doesn’t mean the insurrectionist in question would be better

off immediately smashing the windows in her own workplace.

If “proceeding to action even if the time is not ripe” doesn’t mean

picking up the closest heavy object and attacking the nearest person in

a uniform, what does it mean? How do we decide what kinds of action are

most worthwhile?

On Mayday, several dozen masked hoodlums rampage through an upscale

shopping district in downtown San Francisco, smashing windows and

setting off fireworks. Afterwards an anonymous statement on Indymedia

reads, in part:

“De Beers, Prada, Coach, Tumi, Wells Fargo, Longchamp, Macy’s, Armani,

Crate and Barrel, Montblanc, Urban Outfitters and Guess were all

targeted for all kinds of boring ass political shit, but primarily

because fuck them. Exploitation is the norm of economic activity, not

the exception. We see no need to reveal our laundry list of grievances

and solidarity.”

Much has changed since the communiqué from the ACME collective following

the black bloc at the WTO protests in Seattle. In 1999, the ACME

statement was widely read and debated, influencing the politics of a new

generation that saw more sense in opposing corporate power with crowbars

than with signs or lockboxes. A decade later, black-clad anarchists are

miraculously still finding ways to smash windows, despite

ever-increasing surveillance and repression—but the communiqué, if not

the action itself, seems to be directed only to those who understand and

approve of the tactic.

Against Subculture

Particularly to be avoided are the cultural and activist circles… All

milieus are counter-revolutionary because they are only concerned with

the preservation of their sad comfort.

—The Coming Insurrection

Historically, insurrectionist anarchism has centered around a rejection

of static organizational structures. In the US, where long-standing

anarchist organizations are not particularly common or powerful, it has

recently come to be framed more as a reaction against cultural factors.

Some insurrectionists conceptualize their position as a break with what

they consider to be hopelessly passive and assimilated anarchist

subcultures—bicycling as an end in itself, potlucks that never end in

streetfighting, and so on. Some take this further, dismissing the very

idea that subculture could have any radical potential.

What does it mean to dismiss subculture? Culture is as ubiquitous among

human beings as language; you can challenge it, you can even destroy it,

but you generate new culture in the process. In general, this dismissal

does not seem to proceed from some mystical doctrine that we could

escape culture per se, the way that John Zerzan preached a primitivist

utopia without language, but rather from a reaction to the subcultural

identifications of the preceding generation of anarchists. As explored

in Rolling Thunder #8, by the time today’s young anarchists came of age,

the punk scene that sired so many of their predecessors had come to be

dominated by reactionary elements. Faced with this, rejecting one

subculture was not enough—why not reject subculture itself?

Young insurrectionists are not the first to attempt this: one can find

similar rhetoric in books like Days of War, Nights of Love. Before an

idea wins many proponents, it’s easy to declare that it transcends

subculture, as it is not incarnated in any particular social context.

Once it gains adherents, however, things get more complicated. In all

likelihood, the proponents will share subcultural reference points—how

else would they have encountered the idea?—and failing this, they are

bound to create common points of reference in the course of attempting

to put the idea into practice. Culture is simply a matter of points of

reference, and the more obscure they are, the more “subcultural”—in this

regard, ideological insurrectionism is a significantly more subcultural

current than, say, the vegan straightedge scene.

Actual insurrections can transcend subcultural boundaries in ways that

theories do not, of course; likewise, cross-cultural spaces can

sometimes create fertile ground for uprisings. There’s a lot to be said

for forging bonds between different communities in struggle,

demonstrating that resistance is not the sole province of any one

demographic. Were it not for the homogeneity of most insurrectionist

circles, it would be possible to read this criticism of subculture as an

argument for cross-cultural spaces, rather than as an underhanded way to

promote yet another new subculture. There is no such thing as a zone

free of cultural identifiers—efforts to stay free of cultural

limitations must begin by integrating multiple cultural contexts rather

than pretending to be outside all of them.

Perhaps, like the authors of the aforementioned Days of War, some people

have to espouse a grandiose opposition to culture itself just to feel

entitled to get something new off the ground. But eventually, when that

new something has gotten going and become subculturally identified, they

will need a critique that acknowledges this—otherwise, they are bound to

be quarantined and neutralized like their predecessors. Those who think

they can discount culture entirely are trying to throw out the baby with

the bathwater—an especially difficult project when you’re the baby.

This dispute about culture parallels the much older dispute between

insurrectionists and anarchists who believe in building long-term

institutions. The latter argue that insurrectionist criticism of

institutions is founded on the notion that formal structures are

inescapably hierarchical, but counter that this analysis provides

insurrectionists with no tools to challenge the subtle hierarchies that

develop in informal networks. Decrying authoritarian tendencies and

cultural complacency in competing ideological milieus is no proof

against falling prey to them oneself.

So, are all subcultures “only concerned with the preservation of their

sad comfort”? Perhaps this is simply a matter of semantics, of calling

social circles that are only concerned with preserving their comfort

“milieus.” Is there a positive role that subculture could play in

fomenting insurrections?

Let’s return to the question of how action proliferates. As pointed out

above, simply doing things that “anyone else can do” is not itself

enough to spread resistance. The premise of this approach is that others

who share similar frustrations will see the actions and understand the

strategy embodied in them, and that this alone will move them to action.

But this takes for granted that the actions will be visible and the

strategy comprehensible across cultural lines; it also disregards the

ways that desire is determined by culture as well as class.

Many of the assassins who killed presidents and tsars over a century ago

passionately believed that these actions would inspire the oppressed to

rise up. Clandestine “armed struggle” groups have sometimes used the

same logic. One common insurrectionist critique of these groups is that

their actions are too specialized; but this does not explain why more

easily reproducible tactics often fail to catch on. Another critique of

armed groups is that they separate themselves from others so energy and

ideas cease to flow; this seems more to the point. One could argue that

the circulation of insurgent desires and values—essentially a cultural

phenomenon—is as indispensable for the proliferation of revolt as

gasoline is to a Molotov cocktail.

For example, over the past few years, North American anarchists have

carried out clandestine attacks on ATMs, bank windows, and other

targets; this is currently one of the best-known templates for

insurrectionist activity. Such nighttime attacks don’t seem to have

spread widely outside the anarchist subculture in most of the cities in

which they have occurred, but they have given rise to copycat actions in

other anarchist communities. This indicates the importance of a common

cultural context—shared values, points of reference, and venues for

communication. Acting sincerely can be contagious, but our actions are

always modeled on the examples we know and driven by the values fostered

by our communities.

People seem to be most likely to join revolts when doing so can help

them meet their needs. But needs themselves are socially produced:

nobody needed cell phones to maintain contact with their friends until a

decade ago, for example, and countless indigenous communities chose

resistance over all sorts of amenities until their lifeways were

destroyed. The existing power structure is generally at least as capable

as radicals are of offering opportunities to meet the needs it produces,

whether through individual competition or institutional reforms. A real

counterculture fosters needs that capitalism and democracy can never

accommodate, such as the desire for human dignity.

Efforts to spread resistance must take this into account. Over the past

half century, insurrectionists overseas have frequently been

subculturally identified—for example, the Italian insurrectionist milieu

of the 1980s and ’90s was based in a network of autonomous social

centers. In criticizing long-term infrastructural projects and

countercultural milieus, some US insurrectionists reveal that they are

unaware of the context behind the overseas rioting that inspires them.

In response to the extravagant notion that we should jettison culture as

a site for mobilizing resistance, we counterpose the project of building

a culture of resistance, a space in which people of multiple cultural

backgrounds can develop common reference points in order to attack

hierarchy in all its forms.

Against Anarchist Identity

A variant on the rejection of subculture is the rejection of anarchism

as an identity. This calls to mind another old question: should we

organize specifically as anarchists, or are other approaches more likely

to produce anarchy?

There is a lot to be said for resisting quarantine in closed circuits of

the converted. Picture a molecule that bonds with other molecules by

sharing electrons with them. If it has loose electrons, it is prone to

creating new connections or disruptions; on the other hand, if all of

its electrons are in stable bonds, it is unlikely to introduce new

dynamics to the molecules around it. Similarly, anarchists who seclude

themselves in the company of committed ideologues tend to become static

and predictable, while those who limit their participation in explicitly

anarchist circles to stay open to other relationships can sometimes

catalyze waves of transformation.

At the same time, organizing on the basis of a social rather than

ideological position—for example, as queer youth, as a neighborhood, or

as working class people who like to break things—can be extremely

challenging. Anyone who has worked in coalitions knows how hard it can

be to accomplish anything in the face of massive internal differences in

goals and values. This is true even without centralized

decision-making—think of the instances when presumed comrades have

pulled newspaper boxes back onto the sidewalk during street

confrontations. Perhaps the best approach is to organize at some

intersection of social position and ideology: for example, a gang who

grew up together discovers anticapitalist resistance, and sets out to

introduce the possibility to other gangs.

Often the ones at the forefront of clashes with the authorities are not

self-identifying anarchists at all, while anarchists with carefully

articulated political positions avoid conflict or even sabotage

resistance. People adopt political stances for all sorts of reasons, and

these stances frequently have nothing to do with how they actually

conduct themselves. This phenomenon corroborates insurrectionist

skepticism about the importance of ideological positions, but it also

means that those who identify as insurrectionists are no more likely to

practice what they preach than anyone else.

Despite the fact that avowed anarchism does not always correlate with

active resistance, there’s no reason to believe struggles that are not

identified as anarchist are any more likely to produce anarchic

situations or relationships. If you’re opposed to all forms of

oppression, you may as well say so from the outset, lest you leave an

opening for authoritarians to hijack your efforts.

Not Just Insurrection, but Anarchist Insurrection

‘Armed struggle’ is a strategy that could be put at the service of any

project.

—At Daggers Drawn

In the US, where militant political conflict is rare, it’s tempting to

assume that clashes with authority are inherently antiauthoritarian.

Insurrectionist websites and magazines appropriate images from a wide

variety of contexts; some hail all sorts of antisocial crime as

manifestations of social war, without knowing the motivations of the

protagonists.[1]

But rebellion and street violence are not necessarily anarchist.

Resistance to oppressors is praiseworthy in itself, but much resistance

takes place in support of other authoritarian powers. This is all too

familiar in other parts of the world, where illegal violence on the part

of fascists, paramilitaries, gangs, drug cartels, mafias, and

authoritarian revolutionary movements is an essential aspect of

domination. Aspiring authoritarians often take the lead in attacking

reigning authorities precisely in order to absorb and co-opt popular

unrest. Rioting per se is not always liberating—Kristallnacht was a riot

too. Even if some participants have the purest intentions, insurrections

can go any number of directions: remember what happened to the Russians

following the insurrection of 1917, or the Iranians following the

insurrection of 1978–79.

So anarchists must not only provoke confrontations, but also ensure that

they contribute to a more horizontal and decentralized distribution of

power. In this regard, glorifications of the superficial details of

militant confrontation—black masks, Molotov cocktails, and so on—are

largely beside the point, if not actively distracting. The flow of

initiative among the rebels, the ways decisions are made and skills are

shared, the bonds that develop between comrades: these are much more

important. Likewise, one must strategize as to how social uprisings will

contribute to long-term revolutionary momentum rather than simply

enabling reactionary forces to consolidate power.

Against Activism

A great deal has been said against activism: it is a specialized role

that frames social change as the domain of experts; it is predicated on

dialogue with the powers that be; it promotes inauthenticity and limits

the scope of change. A lot of this is mere semantics—many people who do

not deserve such accusations see themselves as activists. Some of it is

projected class resentment: those who have time to mess around in

everyone else’s business, “changing the world” rather than solving the

problems of individualized survival, must have privileged access to

resources, as the right wing has always alleged.

It’s not easy to distill the kernel of truth in this flood of vitriol,

but one thing is certain: activism that does not explicitly challenge

hierarchy fortifies it. Reformist struggles can win adjustments in the

details of oppression, but they ultimately help the state maintain its

legitimacy in the public eye—not only by giving it the chance to redress

grievances, but by reinforcing the notion that the power to effect

meaningful change lies in the hands of the authorities. It is better to

struggle in such a way that people develop an awareness of their own

capabilities outside all petitioning and bureaucracy. Reformist activism

also tends to build up internal hierarchies: as if by chance, the best

negotiators and media liaisons often turn out to be college-educated

white people with good skin and conciliatory tones. Of course, certain

insurrectionist practices may simply build up hierarchies according to

different criteria.

Sustaining Confrontations

Unless it provides for the practical needs of the participants,

insurrectionism is just an expensive hobby: activism with felony charges

and a smaller base of support.

The other lesson we can derive from a close study of activism is the

importance of not overextending. Some activities produce more energy and

resources than they consume; others cost more than they produce. Many

activist projects ultimately founder because they fail to recoup the

resources invested in them: one cannot carry on an exhausting

undertaking indefinitely without deriving the wherewithal for it from

somewhere. Of course, these resources can take a wide variety of forms:

a Books to Prisoners group may consume a great deal of labor hours, but

persist so long as the social connections it provides are rewarding;

traveling around the country to participate in riots may be expensive in

terms of gas and bail money, but if it is exciting and empowering

enough, the participants will come up with the cash somehow. On the

other hand, if a million dollars must be raised for court costs

following every demonstration, this may prove prohibitive, unless each

demonstration wins new allies with deep pockets.

Activities that cost more resources than they produce are not

necessarily bad, but you have to strategize accordingly if you wish to

participate in them. Ironically, despite insurrectionist hostility to

activism, strategies that focus on confrontation are often at least as

costly in this regard as traditional activist organizing. In dismissing

goal-oriented struggles in favor of confrontation for its own sake, some

US insurrectionists set themselves up for burnout. Symbolic clashes can

help develop the capacity to fight for more concrete objectives, but not

if they are so costly that they drain their social base out of

existence. Breaking windows is a dead end unless it helps to generate a

widespread social movement[2]—or at least provides access to enough of

the commodities behind the windows to fund the vandals’ eventual court

cases.

The most sustainable forms of confrontation seize resources which can

then be employed in further struggle. The classic example of this is the

European squatting movement of thirty years ago, in which the occupied

buildings were used as staging areas for further social struggles. This

approach supersedes both self-defeating reformist activism and

self-destructive insurrectionist dogma. Unless it provides for the

practical needs of the participants, insurrectionism is just an

expensive hobby: activism with felony charges and a smaller base of

support. Insurrectionists of other eras have recognized this and robbed

banks rather than simply smashing their windows.

Revenge is itself a need, but it is hardly the only need. People who

face enough challenges just getting by will not be much more attracted

to gratuitous vandalism than they are to activism that has nothing to do

with their daily lives; on the other hand, tactics that enable them to

sustain themselves may be more appealing. Insurrectionists who are

frustrated with the lifestyle-oriented anarchism of those they perceive

as “subcultural” actually stand to learn a lot from them. The latter

remain involved in their version of anarchist community not because of

moral or ideological imperatives, but because it sustains them. For

insurrection to spread, it must do the same.

Making a Virtue of Repression

In the US, militant struggle means taking on the most powerful state in

the history of the world. It demands a strategy that takes into account

the repression, legal support, and prison sentences that will inevitably

result, and somehow turns them to our advantage. The absence of such a

strategy is perhaps the most significant structural flaw in

insurrectionist projects today. We have to engage with the issue of

repression beyond the usual security culture, limited prisoner support,

occasional solidarity actions, and wishful thinking. “Don’t get caught”

isn’t a plan, it’s a prayer.

It’s embarrassing to acknowledge, but the activists who practiced

non-violent civil disobedience in the US during the 1980s and ’90s were

miles ahead in this regard, integrating their arrests, court cases, and

prison sentences into their campaigns as strategic moves. Their approach

was predicated on privilege and glorified victimhood in the most noxious

ways, but perhaps we can still learn something from them in order to

make the most of repression and ongoing prisoner support in our own

struggle.

The current case of the RNC 8, in which anarchists have been targeted

with conspiracy charges for organizing actions against the 2008

Republican National Convention, may offer one starting point. The

defendants have used their case to delegitimize the government and win

allies in other communities; as of this writing, they seem to have the

prosecutors on the defensive, as the terrorism charges against them have

just been dropped and the case is widely acknowledged to be an

embarrassment. If they had simply been anonymous vandals, rather than

highly visible organizers, this might not have been possible.

Is It Safer in the Shadows, or in the Spotlight?

No leaders to round up, no hierarchical organisation to wield power over

us in our name, no membership lists to investigate, no manifestos to

denounce, no mediators to meet (and then join) the power-holding elite.

No public claims are made, no symbolic lines are drawn, no press

statements to be deliberately misconstrued and trivialised by

journalists. No platforms or programmes which the intellectuals can

hijack as their exclusive property, no flag or banner to which to pledge

a crass and sectarian allegiance.

— “Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organizing for Attack”

No membership, no statements, no public face. This might make it harder

for the state to single out enemies, but it also sounds a little like

the invisibility and isolation that make it so hard for comrades to find

each other and get started.

In the current atmosphere of repression, the insurrectionist approach is

often framed as a question of security: with infiltrators everywhere and

the legal repercussions of resistance intensifying, it is simply too

dangerous to engage in visible organizing. However, it’s far from

certain that less visibility is any more likely to make anarchists safer

or more effective.

It often happens that in attempting to correct old errors, people commit

new ones; forsaking problematic strategies, they learn the hard way what

advantages led their predecessors to adopt them in the first place. So

it is that anarchists, who only came into the public eye a decade ago,

are now fantasizing about returning to the shadows.

The government would like nothing better than for anarchists to retreat

to private scenes and cliques, leaving few opportunities for unconnected

individuals to get involved. It is to the authorities’ advantage for

small numbers of radicals to escalate to more militant tactics while

losing connection to a broader social base; this makes direct action

less likely to spread, while rendering it easier to justify repression.

It might be harder to track down clandestine groups at first, but recent

FBI investigations, such as Operation Backfire,[3] show that closed,

high-security structures are not impenetrable. One can also look at the

case of the Tarnac Nine, French radicals who are currently being charged

with terrorist conspiracy; they are also alleged to be involved in

authoring the book The Coming Insurrection, which champions “zones of

opacity” impenetrable to the authorities. In fact, such zones do not

result only from proper control of information, but also from the

appearance of so many insurgent groups that the authorities cannot keep

up with all of them at once.

If this is true, the most pressing task for anarchists is not to carry

out secretive military strikes but to spread skills and practices. There

is no substitute for participatory activities that offer points of entry

for new people and opportunities for existing groups to connect.

Likewise, refusing to interact with the public effectively means leaving

it to the corporate media to tell one’s story—or else suppress it. Just

as insurrectionists must tie the escalation of conflict to the pace at

which it spreads so as not to overextend themselves, they must also

balance the practical advantages of secrecy against the necessity of

circulating new formats and rebellious energy.

This also has a bearing on whether it is safer and more strategic for

anarchists to act alone with the element of surprise, outside any

conventional “political” framework, or to participate in broader

campaigns and mobilizations. In the latter context, the state is often

more prepared and vigilant, rendering successful attacks more difficult

from a purely military point of view; on the other hand, arrestees are

more likely to receive support from outside the immediate anarchist

community, and their actions may be more visible and comprehensible to

others.

All this is not to say that anarchist organizing should be visible in

the same way conventional political campaigns are. The point is to

ensure that anarchist models of resistance are accessible to everyone,

not to promote the popularity of a platform or spokesperson or party.

The chief dangers of visibility are not posed by the police, after all,

but by the possibility of being absorbed into the spectacle, performing

for the cameras until one comes to mistake representations for reality.

---

The economy has just crashed, and the anarchists who have spent the

preceding half decade building up various anticapitalist infrastructures

are eager to assert themselves and their alternative in the public eye.

Some friends have been tossing around the idea of a street party, and

two dozen people meet to discuss it. The street party becomes A Funeral

for Capitalism, intended to initiate a public dialogue on how to

mobilize a grass-roots response to the crisis. Handbills and stickers

appear everywhere; in planning meetings, the organizers picture

themselves at the helm of a crowd of hundreds, tying together public

merriment and resource distribution in a two-pronged assault.

But the night of the street party is unseasonably cold, and only fifty

diehards show up, finding themselves nearly the only pedestrians on the

street. They barely make it one block before a lone police officer pulls

over and charges into the crowd, seizing someone at random in hopes of

setting an example to scare the others onto the sidewalk. To his

surprise, he meets a rain of blows. These are not the hesitant activists

of the previous generation, but a fiercer new breed.

His intended victim escapes; he snatches another, but the same struggle

ensues. Backup has arrived by now, and eventually the police manage to

capture a single partygoer.

The rest regroup at a nearby café. Almost everyone who was in the street

is present; there is a new sense of common cause. Within a couple hours,

they have raised enough money to bond the arrestee out of jail; a couple

weeks later, a benefit show featuring a puppet show and a bake sale

draws more participants than the street party did and raises all the

funds necessary for legal fees.

Eventually the defendant negotiates a favorable plea bargain. Just as

the bond money comes back, a comrade in another community is arrested on

conspiracy charges, and the idea arises to donate the money to his

support fund: so in coming into conflict with the authorities, the

community has actually become more capable of extending solidarity to

other communities.

Yet amidst all the hubbub, everyone has forgotten about engaging with

the public at large, as the issue shifted imperceptibly from the

economic crisis to the injustice of police repression. Bonds are tighter

among the radicals, thanks to puppetry and baking no less than street

bravado, but no tighter with the rest of the city.

The Force of Insurrection

The force of an insurrection is social, not military. Generalised

rebellion is not measured by the armed clash but by the extent to which

the economy is paralysed, the places of production and distribution

taken over, the free giving that burns all calculation…

— At Daggers Drawn

The force of an insurrection is social, not military. The power of

anarchist insurrection is determined not by military confrontations, but

by how pervasive resistance is, how widely distributed tactics and

resources are, how durable and extensive and genuinely liberating the

relationships are that underpin the whole endeavor. If our goal is not

simply to persuade others—or, let’s be honest, ourselves—of our

defiance, then we have to prioritize forms of resistance that are either

highly contagious or at least sustainable. Who is the social body that

is to rise up? Whence is it to come?

The force of insurrection is social, not military. This has long been an

established tenet of insurrectionists, but in practice it is one of the

most frequently forgotten. In focusing on attack, it is difficult not to

end up unconsciously adopting the military logic of one’s enemies,

gauging effectiveness by the numbers of targets struck or the number of

dollars’ worth of damage. Perhaps this is an inevitable risk of

conceptualizing attack not as a means but an end—if attack is valuable

in itself, then isn’t a “bigger” attack better? This tendency is

particularly dangerous for those who didn’t grow up with an example in

their communities of what it looks like to wage “social war,” who must

invent their models for it from scratch.

The force of insurrection is social, not military. That means it depends

on the strength, solidarity, and relationships of an entire social

body—not just an affinity group or crew. Those who bake cupcakes for

fundraisers are at least as important as the arrested rioters; the

effectiveness of the fundraisers determines how much force insurgents

can continue to wield in the streets. One can break a window with a

single brick and the muscles of one’s arm, but one can only participate

in a long-running social conflict as part of a community. Social force

is absolutely a matter of culture, values, allegiances, priorities;

social war takes place on this terrain, which is influenced by but

distinct from the physical terrain of actual confrontations. How many

people will support you in a conflict? How many will join in themselves?

If you go to prison, will your grandmother support you? Will her

community?

The state often isolates rebels by means of a classic martial arts move:

it pushes them in the direction they were already headed, provoking them

into a showdown before they have built up the social force they need to

survive it. It is essential to set the pace of escalation oneself,

avoiding unfavorable engagements and resisting the temptation to focus

on revenge. The ultimate target of insurrectionist attack is not just

the state, but also the passivity of one’s peers.

To return to our starting point, none of this is a reason not to act, or

to wait for the proper moment to assume hostilities. Social war, like

class war, is always taking place: like it or not, we are born into it,

and decide at every moment how we fight. The point is to act

strategically, so as not to fight alone.

This is especially complicated in today’s context of surveillance and

repression. One must engage in a certain degree of clandestinity to be

capable of meaningful resistance at all. But if the most important

aspect of resistance is the relationships that result, it is a mistake

to choose forms of struggle that tend to produce smaller and smaller

social bodies. Historically, except when resistance is spreading like

wildfire, resistance movements tend to break down into smaller and

smaller elements once they come into open conflict with the state: think

of the transition from Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s to

the Weather Underground in the 1970s, or the trajectory of the Dutch

squatting movement over the course of the 1980s. If our social forms may

become smaller as conflict intensifies, it might be more sensible to

maintain low-intensity warfare that does not provoke the full wrath of

the state, or else to start with the crowd as the unit of resistance

rather than the crew or affinity group. This is not to say that we

should not be organized in affinity groups, but that affinity group

action should be a means of catalyzing crowd activity rather than an end

in itself.

The authorities understand themselves to be engaged in social war,

perhaps more clearly than most insurrectionists do. They do not simply

attack our bodies with batons, pepper spray, and imprisonment; they also

set out to attack our relationships and social connections. It is

significantly more cost-effective for them to intimidate, isolate, or

discredit radicals than to imprison or kill them. In confrontations, we

should recognize this intimidation and isolation as their top priority,

and defend our relationships and our connections to others accordingly.

They can beat or jail us as individuals without winning the social

conflict—the question is whether our values and tactics take hold.

The authorities understand themselves to be engaged in social war,

perhaps more clearly than most insurrectionists do. They do not simply

attack our bodies with batons, pepper spray, and imprisonment; they also

set out to attack our relationships and social connections.

Social War Requires Social Skills

Property destruction is not merely macho rabble-rousing or

testosterone-laden angst release. Nor is it displaced and reactionary

anger. It is strategically and specifically targeted direct action.

— ACME Collective, N30 Black Bloc Communiqué

Considering that insurrection depends on relationships, one would think

that insurrectionists would be the most personable anarchists, the most

eager to make friends and resolve conflicts. Ideally, insurrectionists

would offer a welcome contrast to strident pacifists and domineering

reformists. It should always be clear that militant action is not a

macho performance but a well-reasoned strategic decision, or at least an

honest emotional expression.

It requires tremendous patience and social skills to lay the

preconditions for insurrection. Unfortunately, some who gravitate to

insurrectionist ideas have a predisposition for impatience and

hostility. “Starting from attack” can be attractive to those who don’t

want to have to talk through disagreements or be accountable. In

glorifying their preferred tactics over those of their potential allies,

such hotheads spread false dichotomies that cut them off from the

resources and support they need to make their attacks effective,

sustainable, and contagious.

One could view this tendency as an overreaction to the ponderous

coalitions of the antiwar movement. There is nothing good about enforced

unity that paralyzes the participants and discourages autonomous action.

But a knee-jerk rejection of everything that has made resistance

movements possible in the past has little to recommend it, either.

Social Skills for Social War:

decision-making structures and cultural conventions that encourage

horizontal power dynamics

accountability processes to address internal domination

conflict resolution, both internally and with potential allies

the ability to provide for material, social, and emotional needs

the capability to reproduce the social forms of resistance faster than

they are destroyed

the means to communicate beyond a single subculture

the flexibility to adjust according to context, rather than remaining

caught in ritual

---

It is April 21, 2001, and a black bloc is methodically knocking out all

the windows of a multinational bank in downtown Quebec City during the

Free Trade Area of the Americas summit. Street confrontations have been

going on for 24 hours straight; much of the city is awash in tear gas,

and increasing numbers of protesters are responding with Molotov

cocktails and other projectiles.

A crowd of local toughs watches the black bloc from a distance. They

have looked on sympathetically as the foreigners scuffled with riot

police; the locals have no great love for the police, and as Québécois

they resent that much of the occupying army has been brought in from

English-speaking provinces halfway across the continent. On the other

hand, the activists are invaders too, and now they’re smashing up the

city.

As the bloc sets out in search of another bank, the locals follow them,

picking up blunt objects and threatening them in limited English:

“Fookers!” A bearded older liberal sees this unfolding and falls in

stride with the toughs for a moment, pedantically explaining, “No,

they’re not fuckers, it’s just a bad tactic.” Appropriating what they

understand to be a term of biting abuse, the locals continue following

the bloc, shouting “Bad tak-teek! Bad tak-teek!”

One idealistic young anarchist falls back to reason with the pursuers.

“We’re not against you—we’re here to fight the same institutions that

dominate you, the multinational corporations and the neoliberal

governments that—” He is answered with a punch in the face that drops

him to the ground.

This is the critical moment, in which the meaning of the whole

mobilization is at stake. If the locals and the black bloc come to

blows, the narrative of the weekend will shift from a showdown between

People and Authority to pointless fighting between Marginalized Radicals

and Everybody Else. The black bloc has a reputation for machismo; many

other activists doubt their maturity, if not their sincerity. Having

grown up bullied and baited, having become a militant anarchist in hopes

of getting revenge, the young man must feel the temptation to fight

back. If he does, his comrades will leap to his assistance. But he

simply stands up and walks back to them, unsteady but deliberate.

Two blocks further, the police loom into view: row after row of armored

storm troopers firing concussion grenades and rubber bullets at the

narrow lines of human beings before them. Both groups hesitate. The

context has shifted.

The locals eye the anarchists warily. “You are here to thrash our

citéy?” one calls out.

“No!” shouts back a man in a ski mask. “To FIGHT THE POLICE!”

“To fight the police?”

“To fight them, not you!”

“Fook the police!” shouts back another local, auspiciously.

Representatives of the two groups approach each other with guarded

gaits. Flash-bang grenades explode in the background as they hammer out

a hasty truce and shake hands. As the sun sets over Quebec City, locals

with shirts across their faces crouch alongside slingshot-wielding

radicals in goggles and bandannas, peppering the police with chunks of

broken concrete.

Confronting All Forms of Oppression

Resistance movements have collapsed again and again amidst conflict over

accountability, privilege, and internal oppression—for example, in the

US at the beginning of the 1970s, and in Italy at the end of that

decade. This occurred on a smaller scale during the disintegration of

the US anti-globalization movement after the turn of the century; the

consequences of this in Eugene, Oregon are explored in “Green Scared”

elsewhere on this website.

In some circles, insurrectionists have a reputation for failing to focus

on these issues. This is extremely problematic—the point of anarchist

activity is to attack all forms of hierarchy, not just the targets that

make for exciting riot porn. Accountability and awareness of privilege

strengthen the relationships that make meaningful struggle possible;

without these, an affinity group can fall apart in the same way a

movement can. Nurturing healthy relationships is not an additional task

anarchists must take on alongside the project of resisting domination—it

is the basis of that project, and a way to safeguard it.

Even if the aforementioned bad reputation were only slander based on

circumstantial evidence, it would still pose challenges to

insurrectionists, for it enables their adversaries to paint them as

irresponsible hypocrites.[4] Whenever anarchists fail to take the

initiative to address patriarchy, white supremacy, and other

manifestations of hierarchy, they leave themselves vulnerable to the

machinations of liberals and others eager to discredit militant

resistance. Insurrectionists should take the lead to develop tools for

understanding and undermining privilege, so it is clear to everyone that

there is no dichotomy between confronting the powers that be and

addressing more subtle forms of hierarchical power.

Confrontational approaches are bound to encounter opposition at some

point, but if the opposition is coming from potential comrades, it’s a

warning sign that one is on the wrong path. Unfortunately, defensive

insurrectionists sometimes react to this by isolating themselves further

from constructive criticism, wrongheadedly telling themselves that they

don’t need allies on the path they have chosen.

Languages of Exclusion

By all means, explode with rage. Refuse to reduce your raw anger to

demands or suspend your emotional responses to the tragedies around you.

Turn your years of pent-up anguish into a fearsome instrument of

revenge. Don’t translate your grievances into the language of your

oppressors—let them remain burning embers to be hurled from catapults.

Attack, negate, destroy.

But if it’s rage you’re feeling, why quote philosophy professors?

If some strands of contemporary US insurrectionism seem to have given up

in advance on the possibility of connecting with comrades outside their

immediate cliques, this is especially apparent in their esoteric

language and points of reference. Talk about “zones of opacity”—and the

dangers of becoming trapped in a milieu!

Perhaps this is because so much insurrectionist theory has arrived from

overseas in poor translation. Domestic insurrectionists emulate the

obtuse style of their favorite texts, and the resulting gibberish

highlights the absurdity of attempting to transpose an approach from its

original context without reconsidering it. We’re not qualified to

critique insurrectionist writing from France or Italy, where presumably

every dishwasher enjoys Foucault and Negri—but in the US, words like

“projectuality” make a lot of people stop listening.

Another source of this tendency can be found in the influence of

academia. In the ivory tower, which is predicated on exclusion,

academics are rewarded for developing abstruse language and theory. For

some insurrectionists, appropriating such language must seem the same as

appropriating other status symbols, such as the hip American Apparel®

outfits ubiquitous in certain scenes. But “every tool has a world

connected to it at the handle,” and the exclusivity of academia comes

with the terminology.

Of course, some people are attracted to exclusive language—especially

people who desire to see themselves as part of an elect in-group. A

milieu that attracts a lot of this kind of energy is not likely to make

a welcoming space for a broad range of participants; it also might not

have a lot of staying power. Capitalist consumerism depends on new

trends every season, and that goes for ideas as well as fashion: what is

hip one year is guaranteed to be passé the next.

The alternative to this, amply demonstrated by other US

insurrectionists, is not to communicate in dumbed-down prose like some

communist splinter group, nor to affect the slang of imagined class

allies, but simply to express oneself in a straightforward manner and

not take common context for granted. Recovering obscurantists could try

writing in the language they use when they talk with their neighbors or

relatives. You can’t expect others to step outside their comfort zones

unless you are willing to do the same yourself.

Striking Poses vs. Decolonizing Violence

We can become our own riot porn production machine, but this is less

important than ‘creating the conditions where an offensive can sustain

itself without fading, of establishing the material solidarities that

allow us to hold on.’

— Total Destroy #3

By and large, people in the US—particularly white people[5]—have an

especially mediated relationship to violence. This is not to say that we

are never exposed to violence, but that proportionately, we witness

representations of it more often than we experience it directly. The

land beneath our feet was bought with the extermination of its former

inhabitants, the commodities that sustain our lifestyles flow in on a

sea of blood, but when we think of violence we generally picture

stylized images on television and movie screens. Small wonder if

radicals who attempt to integrate violence into their resistance find

themselves acting out programmed roles.

“Riot porn,” the depictions of anti-authoritarian violence that abound

in insurrectionist media, is only a subset of the representations of sex

and violence surrounding us in this society. Pornography doesn’t just

cater to desire—it also shapes and directs it; in the case of riot porn,

it glorifies the moment of physical conflict, while removing the social

context that gives it meaning. Pornography can promote roles that have

little to do with the actual needs of the participants; those who have

been influenced by corporate pornography sometimes make disappointing

sexual partners. Likewise, a cynical observer might caricature some

current manifestations of insurrectionism as a misguided attempt to

distill a strategy from the aesthetic of riot porn: no difficult

negotiations with allies, no intermediate or long-term goals, only the

moment of attack, isolated in a vacuum.

Actual sex and violence can be reclaimed from patriarchal society, but

in some ways it is more challenging to reclaim representations of sex

and violence.[6] Anybody can shoot a motherfucker, but in this society

the image of the gun is almost inextricably associated with notions of

male power and domination. Anti-authoritarians who think spectacular

representations of violence can be turned against their masters are

playing with fire in more ways than they think.

On the other hand, in a society in which so much privilege rests on

violence that occurs outside our immediate experience, it is commendable

that insurrectionists set out to establish a firsthand relationship to

it. Perhaps insurrectionist activity should be evaluated according to

how effectively it serves this project of deprogramming, no less than

how much it costs the enemy or inspires potential comrades. To what

extent does a given action enable the participants to achieve an

unmediated and intentional relationship to violence? To what extent is

it simply a reprise of all-too-familiar scripts? Just as we might judge

erotic play or material by the extent to which it “queers” sex rather

than reinforcing conventional roles and power dynamics, we might assess

insurrectionist practice according to the extent to which it queers

violence. This could mean anything from empowering demographics who do

not normally have the opportunity to wield violence against their

oppressors, to dispelling the influence of media representations of

violence by replacing them with a familiarity based in lived experience,

to making violence serve forbidden roles no one has yet imagined.

---

The afternoon of the action, one older anarchist who hasn’t participated

in the organizing expresses his usual irritation: “So the idea is to get

the fucking cops called, wait till they show up, and then try to march

around? These idiots have finally come up with a way to lose the element

of surprise, which is practically the only advantage of the tactic!”

But surprisingly or not, everything goes exactly according to plan.

People gather in the park for food and games, then at the appointed time

depart in small groups for the secret location. It turns out to be a

spacious abandoned building in the heart of downtown, with a great

banner hanging from the roof: “Reclaiming space to reclaim our lives:

OCCUPY EVERYTHING.” Party favors are distributed at the door—condoms,

masks, a precious little manifesto: “You see, here’s the deal. We’ve

recently started to realize that we exist…” Inside, a dance party is in

progress; the derelict post-industrial decor has been beautified with

streamers and another banner, this one reading “PARTY LIKE IT’S 1886.” A

couple gender dissidents have taken off all their clothes. Others are

exploring the margins of the reclaimed building in ones and twos. Unlike

the Reclaim the Streets actions that swept the state a decade earlier,

this is a private party, but it has the same atmosphere of wonder.

After longer than expected, the news spreads from ear to ear: the police

are inside! The sound system cuts out and someone pulls it out the back

door just as an officer comes into sight, probing the crowd with his

flashlight. Everyone trickles out the front door in a single-file line;

this feels somewhat demoralizing, and the older anarchist grumbles that

if they really want to have a march they should be exiting in one

determined block. Instead, a hesitant crowd congeals on the sidewalk,

dawdling as the outnumbered police struggle to figure out what’s going

on.

The sound system reappears and people rally around it. Just as the crowd

begins to move down the street, a policeman rushes over and seizes it.

Everyone else continues; turning the corner, they miraculously find

themselves occupying the street in a world seemingly empty of

authorities. There is no precise cause or rallying cry for the evening,

so the participants—unable to dispense with activist traditions, despite

some rhetoric to the contrary—find themselves chanting the first

catchphrases that come to mind: “Swine flu!” “Wu Tang Clan ain’t nothin’

ta fuck with!” Two young men out on the town join in, clearly not

interpreting this as an anarchist street party.

A block later hoods go up, masks come down, and the sound of grating

metal rings out as newspaper boxes are dragged into the street. Everyone

else around the country is abandoning corporate print media, but

anarchists are still passionately invested in their conviction that the

boxes prevent pursuit by police vehicles. The café district is around

the next turn, and chairs are sent flying against plate glass windows,

only to bounce off and fall to earth. There is an element of playacting

in the demeanor of even the wildest participants: they are striking

poses, acting out their favorite scenes without the grim determination

to do damage that characterized the famous black blocs of the

anti-globalization era.

The legal risks, of course, are still very real—but the police are

mercifully far behind, and the crowd disperses before they can catch up.

Some participants are pleased with themselves; others are nonplussed. A

young hippy tries to initiate a conversation with a stern-faced fellow

tucking a sweatshirt under his arm: “Did you see those people throwing

chairs at windows? That’s fucked, huh?” The one with the sweatshirt

picks up his pace and does not answer.

Afterwards, all the discussions from five years earlier begin again. Was

it irresponsible for some people to escalate to property destruction

when others didn’t know it was coming? On the other hand, how are people

supposed to initiate participatory vandalism? You can’t exactly put up

fliers announcing it. Did anyone aside from the participants understand

the point—and does that even matter? Is it pathetic that the would-be

rioters couldn’t break the café windows? Or is it fortunate, as that

might have provoked a more serious follow-up inquiry without achieving

any meaningful objective? Few recognize these old questions—five years

earlier, most people were living elsewhere or involved in totally

different things.

The grumpy older anarchist reminisces about the days when surprise

marches like this used to take place in his own community. The first one

involved hundreds of people, the majority of whom had never imagined

themselves parading without a permit; to his mortification, they chanted

“What do we want? PEACE!” when he would have preferred to raze the whole

city to the ground. Over the following years, each march became a little

more aggressive than the last; a small nucleus of committed clandestine

organizers emerged, while conflicts deepened within the broader social

base that made the format possible. The final action ended up on the

national news, with tens of thousands of dollars of damage done to a

high-profile target and several people standing trial for felonies.

After that, everything dissolved in a mix of angry recriminations,

exhausting legal support, and prohibitive security culture.

His friend asks if it was worth it. “Maybe,” he allows. “Like, everyone

blames the Spanish anarchists for losing the Spanish Civil War, as if a

few kids in their twenties today could know the context better than they

did—but perhaps they knew they were doomed from the start, and were

holding it together as best they could in hopes of going out with a bang

so they could inspire people like us. If the movement we were part of

wasn’t going to last forever, maybe it’s for the best it ended the way

it did, too. But should you cut right to smashing shit when you’re

trying to get something started? I don’t know.”

Pretensions of Destroying Everything

Some contemporary insurrectionism affects a nihilist posture, proposing

in an offhand manner that everything that exists must be destroyed. To

indigenous or environmentalist ears, this project of universal

destruction can sound suspiciously like the program industrial

capitalism is already carrying out.

As with the disavowal of subculture, it may make pretty rhetoric to say

one is against “everything,” but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Even

opposing everything is still a position adopted in this world, shaped by

and proceeding from the existing context. If we are against everything,

how do we navigate? Where do we start, and how can we be sure that the

results of our efforts won’t be even worse? Can we make any stipulations

about which direction to set out in at all?

It makes more sense, and is more honest, to say that we side with some

existing beings and currents against others, and hope by doing so to

effect a total transformation of the world. Not only does this approach

offer concrete starting points, it also lends itself better to studying

the intricate ways hierarchical and horizontal dynamics intermingle in

both the enemy’s camp and our own.[7] If you can’t see any good in your

adversary, you probably won’t be able to recognize anything bad in

yourself. By the same token, the idea that everything has to be

destroyed anyway can make it easy to excuse oneself from criticism.

Dynamiting the Fault Lines

Let’s return once more to the context surrounding large-scale

insurrections such as the one that took place in Greece in December

2008. Militant resistance is sustainable in such situations not only

because of the initiative of the immediate participants, but also

because of the efforts of non-anarchists who oppose military

intervention, organize against legal repression, and otherwise limit the

options of the state. Many of these people may also oppose the

insurrection, even while playing essential roles in making it possible.

If social war were simply a matter of force meeting force, the Greek

government could have bombed all the squats and occupied universities

from which the revolt was organized; it could not do so because its

hands were tied by liberals, and for fear of turning liberals into

radicals.

This is not to diminish the courage of those who meet the state in open

conflict, but to emphasize that clashes do not occur between groups so

much as within societies. Every society is made up of conflicting

currents, which compete not only within society as a whole but also

within the individuals who constitute it; the moments of rupture that

take place within individuals are no less important than those that take

place between classes. The most effective insurrectionist actions not

only open up the fault lines that run through society, they also compel

the undecided to take sides—and to do so according to their own

interests, rather than those of their masters.

The outcome of revolutionary struggle is not decided by revolutionaries

or autocrats so much as by those who sit on the fence between them. The

balance of power is determined according to which side of the fence they

come down on when they are forced to choose. Revolutionaries ignore this

at their peril.

Infrastructure versus Equals Confrontation

It is neither persuasion to abstract ideas nor class position alone that

makes people invest themselves in the struggle against hierarchy. It is

the experience of anarchist solutions to the problems of life, the

development and fulfillment of anarchic desires. The need to revolt, to

destroy, to get revenge is only one of many such desires.

Liberals and others who oppose revolutionary struggle often pose a false

dichotomy between connecting with the community and engaging in militant

confrontation. Some insurrectionists have accepted this dichotomy at

face value, arguing for the latter in place of—perhaps in despair of—the

former. Ten years ago, militant anarchists argued against the conceptual

framework of violence “versus” non-violence; now the pendulum has swung

to the opposite extreme, and it is insurrectionists who insist that

attack is distinct from community organizing.

On the contrary, “community organizing” and taking the offensive are at

their most effective when they are identical. Permanent conflict,

decentralized organization, and all the other insurrectionist precepts

can serve quite well in local, community-based struggles.[8] Combining

infrastructural and confrontational approaches does not mean

volunteering at an infoshop during the day and smashing bank windows at

night, but rather synthesizing the two into a single project. This is

not complicated—as the whole world has been taken from us, we need only

seize back any one of the things that should be ours and we enter into

conflict with the state. If anarchists do not undertake this more often,

perhaps it is because it is always most frightening to attempt what one

wants most, what one knows one should have been doing all along.

Is there an empty lot that should be a community garden? Turn it into

one, and mobilize enough social force that the owner finds it most

convenient to leave you be. Is a coworker being harassed or laid off?

Bring the full power of your community to bear against her employer. Are

there resources at the grocery store or the university that would be

better off in your neighborhood? Figure out whom you can trust and how

to distribute them, and take them. To win these engagements, you’ll have

to spend a lot more time building up relationships and credibility than

running around with masks on—but there are no shortcuts in social war.

This is nothing less than the project of beginning our lives, eternally

deferred with all manner of half-hearted excuses and tortuous

theoretical justifications. In our real lives, we are warriors who fight

for ourselves and each other, who seize back the territory of our

day-to-day existence or else die trying. Nothing less is worthy of us.

It is neither persuasion to abstract ideas nor class position alone that

makes people invest themselves in the struggle against hierarchy. It is

the experience of anarchist solutions to the problems of life, the

development and fulfillment of anarchic desires. The need to revolt, to

destroy, to get revenge is one such need; if insurrectionist approaches

can fulfill it, so much the better. But we deserve a resistance that

fulfills all our needs, and all our dreams besides.

---

Returning from the riots in Gothenburg during the 2001 summit of the

European Union, activists in Stockholm begin casting around for ways to

initiate struggles closer to home. At first, the prospect is

overwhelming: when you’re trying to confront the system in its entirety,

where do you start?

Meanwhile, the rates in the Stockholm subway increase from 450 kronor to

500. One day, perhaps en route to a meeting, a young activist narrowly

escapes being ticketed for fare evasion. Like most of her friends, she

simply can’t afford the new rates, and has to risk her luck leaping the

turnstile every time she goes out. Most of the time she gets away with

it—but if they catch her next time, it will cost 1200 kronor.

She reflects on how many others must share her plight, each waging an

individual guerrilla war against the transportation authorities. There’s

a union for everything in Sweden, it seems—but when it comes to the

day-to-day tactics by which people actually survive, they still have to

go it alone.

There’s an idea. A fare-dodgers union.

Hundreds of people join up. The dues are 100 kronor a month, a savings

of 80% on the government rate for transportation, and if you get busted

the union pays your fine. More importantly, fare dodging is no longer an

isolated activity, but a collective revolt. Fare-dodgers see themselves

as a social force, taking pride in their actions and inviting others to

join in; the union also warns commuters of the movements of ticket

enforcers, giving them added incentives to skip the fares even if they

don’t become dues-paying members. Rather than trying to persuade others

to join in their activism, the founders of the union have found a way to

bring people together on the basis of the resistance they were already

engaged in: now every fare-dodger is a potential revolutionary, and sees

herself as one.

After a few months have passed and a few members have been busted for

evasion, it turns out that the union is operating at a profit. With the

extra funds, the organizers produce glossy propaganda urging the public

to join them in an all-out war on public transportation fees, and begin

brainstorming about their next step. What other fault lines run through

Swedish society? How can other individual revolts be transformed into

collective power—not in order to bargain with the authorities, but to

defy them?

Anarchism without Adjectives

There are no such things as superior forms of struggle. Revolt needs

everything: papers and books, arms and explosives… The only interesting

question is how to combine them.

— At Daggers Drawn

If we have never called ourselves insurrectionists, it is not because we

do not wish for insurrection, but because our own temperament

predisposes us to an anarchism without adjectives. The important thing

is to fight for freedom and against hierarchy; we imagine that this will

demand different approaches in different situations, and that these

approaches may need one another to succeed. We are anarcho-syndicalists

on the shop floor, green anarchists in the woods, social anarchists in

our communities, individualists when you catch us alone,

anarcho-communists when there’s something to share, insurrectionists

when we strike a blow.

Anarchism without adjectives not only refuses to prioritize one approach

over the others, but emphasizes the importance of each aspect of

anarchism to its supposed opposites. The riot needs the bake sale to be

repeatable; the arson needs the public campaign to be intelligible; the

supermarket heist needs the neighborhood grocery distribution to pass on

the goods.

All dichotomies are false dichotomies to some extent, masking not only

the common threads between the terms but also the other dichotomies one

might experiment with instead. On close inspection, successful

insurrectionism seems to depend so much on “community building” and even

“lifestyle anarchism” as to be virtually indistinguishable in practice.

If we retired this particular distinction, what other distinctions might

arise in its place? What other questions might we ask?

All this is not to say that individual anarchists can’t focus on their

particular skills and preferred strategies—simply that it is an error to

frame anyone’s personal preferences as universals. In the end, as

always, it comes down to a question of which problems you want to

wrestle with, which shortcomings you feel most equipped to overcome. Do

you prefer to struggle against invisible hierarchies in informal

networks, or brave the stultifying inertia of formal organizations?

Would you rather risk acting rashly, or not acting at all? Which is more

important to you, security or visibility—and which do you think will

keep you safer in the long run?

We can’t tell anyone which problems to choose. We can only do our best

to outline them. Best of luck in your insurrections—may they intersect

with ours.