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Title: The Future of Insurrection
Author: Lupus Dragonowl
Date: 2011
Language: en
Topics: insurrection, The Coming Insurrection, insurrectionism, post-left anarchy, AJODA, sustainability, asymmetrical war, SHAC, summit hopping, AJODA #70/#71, AJODA #72/#73
Source: Anarchy: Journal of Desire Armed 70/71 and 72/73

Lupus Dragonowl

The Future of Insurrection

Section 1: The composition of insurrection

What is insurrection?

The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible. It becomes

irreversible when you’ve defeated both authority and the need for

authority

— The Invisible Committee

The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated

within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we

must choose sides. To no longer wait is... to enter into the logic of

insurrection

— The Invisible Committee

It’s enough just to say what is before our eyes and not to shrink from

the conclusions

— The Invisible Committee

What strategies and orientations can develop insurrectionary

anti-politics into a movement actually able to destroy global

capitalism? This is the question taken up by The Coming Insurrection, as

well as by author such as Bonanno. I aim here to use insights from The

Coming Insurrection to open onto discussions of various aspects of the

future of insurrection. The purpose will be to think through strategic

implications of attempting to use a mainly expressive form of action for

strategic purposes, and ways to deal with the obstacles faced in the

process.

But first of all, what is insurrection?

Insurrection differs from revolution in being an attack on the existence

of state power, rather than a seizure of such power. It follows in the

tradition of Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘law-destroying violence’, which

is directed against the capability for use violence to make or preserve

laws. It is not instrumental violence to subordinate others, but rather,

exists beyond the mythology of statist violence, destroying the power of

death for the sake of the living. Bonanno’s theory of insurrection

relies on a concept of social war, which refers to an irreducible

antagonism between included and excluded. Insurrection for Bonanno

involves the rejection of alienation, especially of subordination to

production, and involves both an affirmation of life and desire and

assault on the structures of power. ‘Unfortunately civil war is an

obligatory road which must be passed in any historical moment of

profound, radical transformation’. Yet it must also be playful,

generating excitement and a sense of empowerment against the social

system as death-machine. Insurrection pits active force against reactive

force, and is the point of explosion of accumulated discontent.

It is fundamentally connected to non-renunciation, the refusal to

compromise on desire. It is thus connected to an active, affirmative

type of desire. It is also fundamentally connected to affinity-networks

and bands, as opposed to organisations. It most often arises from

standpoints of exclusion or marginality, as opposed to those which are

included but exploited. Insurrection has at least three political

components. It has an affective or expressive component: attacks which

respond to indignity and violation, which are psychologically liberating

and inspiring. It has a strategic component: it imposes costs on

repressive or oppressive forces, and serves to carve out spaces of

autonomy by altering the balance of forces. And it has a prefigurative

component, with each act of insurrection pointing towards and attempting

to produce in the present a total insurrection resulting in the

destruction of the system. Insurrectional agency is effective when the

three components are articulated. And this creates issues of their

interconnection and the passage between them: how insurrectional acts

which are affectively motivated and expressive can nevertheless serve

instrumental purposes such as carving out spaces of autonomy and

imposing costs, and how and when these spaces and costs reach the point

of bringing down the system. We can think of issues ranging from summit

protests to squat defence to the SHAC model as examples of how the first

connection comes about. The second is more tentative, but raises

questions of why for instance the Greek insurrection fizzled out after

three weeks. Is there a time-limit on insurrections in the global North,

and how can it be overcome?

Just-in-time repression

The lid on the social kettle is shut triple-tight, and the pressure

inside continues to build. From out of Argentina, the specter of Que Se

Vayan Todos is beginning to seriously haunt the ruling class.

— The Invisible Committee

There is no question that insurrection is growing. This is because the

paths of reform and revolution are failing. At present states are

becoming less attuned to social struggles, because they are seeking

comparative advantage to attract global capital. They are increasingly

reluctant to make the concessions they would once have made, to keep

social peace. They will accept immovable objects (the Peruvian Amazon

struggle for instance) – but only when they are absolutely forced to;

and one can normally expect all viable tactics of repression to be

employed first. The field of insurrection thus comes to overlap with the

fields of reform and revolution, which can succeed only by way of

insurrection (though the revolutionaries and reformists are slow to

learn this).

Things have changed. Gramsci’s old notion that the frontline of

capitalism is now buttressed by the ‘trenches and fieldworks’ of civil

society is no longer valid. It spoke of a Fordist and corporatist era

which has passed. Today, capitalism is once more engaged in a war of

movement. More than this: it is like an army which has all its troops on

the frontline. It has corroded all its deep supports, such as legal due

process and civil rights, as too costly to maintain. It has pushed its

forces of repression further forward, onto a frontline where people can

barely speak out without facing repression. But behind this frontline

there is an open field all the way into the system’s territory. The

mentality of just in time production has been expanded into the fields

of politics, security, repression. Just-in-time security means events

like 911 are always just about to happen, only just averted – in

Powell’s words, they had the information it would happen, but there was

too much information to handle, to filter.

So, too, the field of protest: the frontline forces are vicious but are

always only just in time to prevent an event. Unexpected events, like

the unrest on the first of Britain’s student protests, the Melbourne

taxi drivers’ protest which shut down the city, the ‘Anonymous’ DDoS

attacks on Wikileaks’ persecutors, the flash mobs which periodically hit

major cities, can flare up out of nowhere, taking the state completely

by surprise. Emerging like a snake from the spaces of quiet suffering,

they pose a constant threat of ‘unknown unknowns’ the system cannot

handle. The closer insurrection is to these unpredictable modalities of

protest, the less it can be pre-empted, and the more the vast space

behind the front lines is open to it.

This provides opportunities for exciting events. But there is also a

certain danger in the upturn. Anarchists are not affected by who’s in

power, but the wider field of potential resisters clearly are, and this

in turn affects things like the numbers resisting and the general level

of energy. This ultimately seems to affect anarchists too. Take the

situation in Britain. Today, there is a wave of militant resistance to

the new Tory government’s cuts programme, with impressive actions in

London. Yet it is strange that this has come only now. Things were no

better under Blair. Then, a militant opposition emerged (in events like

J18 and Mayday), precisely because the broad constituency of resistance

was decomposed by Blairism’s clever use of incorporation and

lesser-evilism. Now, because of a recession and a Tory government, the

masses are moving once again. But the future does not lie with those who

will be quieted by a change in government. The future lies with those

who do not compromise – which is to say, with the network of bands. The

danger we face today is the reabsorption of the bands into a movement of

resistance hegemonised by the mass. The opportunity is that people can

be drawn from the mass into the network of bands by the experience of

struggle.

Texts like The Coming Insurrection are charismatic. They resonate on the

basis that they make claims which appeal to the reader, subjective

truths which are otherwise hidden. Insurrections, too, are charismatic.

And it is impossible to know in advance how resonant they will be, given

their exclusion from public discourse by the dominant system. Resonance

with the hidden transcript, or with psychologically repressed material,

or with groups denied a voice, is hard to predict. Insurrection is also

expressive. ‘Instrumental action relates to only one sphere of the

lifeworld, another sphere being... [the] expressive’... [T]he pursuit of

expressive authenticity is a form of protest against disenchantment,

which is brought about by the rationalization of the lifeworld’

(Routledge and Simons 476). The replacement of instrumental with

expressive orientations should be one of an insurrection’s goals. There

is something inherently appealing in meeting state violence with a

counter-attack, something which is missing in other responses, for all

their usefulness and bravery. ‘It is high time for them to understand

that we refuse to put up with this abuse any longer’ (Black Block

Papers, p. 80).

The experience of the excluded and the right to be angry

We can no longer even see how an insurrection might begin... our sense

of the war in progress [is dulled]... We need to start by recovering

this perception.

— The Invisible Committee

No one can honestly deny... this was an assault that made no demands...

and it had nothing to do with politics.

— The Invisible Committee

The intensity of experience sustains insurrection beyond its specific

goals. Above all, insurrection is a question of intensity. In bourgeois

rhetoric, intensity and violence fuse into one another. Intensity is

frightening to the system because it does not take part in the politics

of inclusion, it does not sell itself to power. The images of the

“violence” of insurrection thus fuse real attacks with imaginary

violence, with the state’s fear of its own collapse.

There are of course dangers of insurrection slipping into roles and

reproducing the system’s violence, but these dangers are overplayed by

critics. Insurrection is not at all a masculine thing, a performance of

social roles – it is all about the right to be angry. Similarly,

activism of whatever kind if not above all a publicity stunt, not a

performance for the mass or state gaze, but something else, an

expressive action, an act against or in radical antagonism with the

state, imposing costs on it. Fighting the police as enemies stands in

the tradition of indigenous warfare, of “popular defense” in Virilio’s

sense, not the modern warfare which exterminates the enemy as

irreducibly evil or which closes space to prevent action.

Another criticism we can safely ignore is the leftist objection that

insurrection is an action of a minority, and that images of insurrection

are alienating to the majority. Insurrection is performed to bring about

a better world, it is not performed for the gaze of the Other. There is

no reason insurrectionists need to be accountable to the majority; we

are the excluded, those who are not part of the community, so the

majority is not part of the same collective as we are. Why should the

excluded always be the ones expected to dialogue, compromise, appeal to

others? The system has made clear it has no time for such things. It is

putting itself further and further from any possibility of dialogue.

Leftists tend to assume that capitalist power is nothing but the

alienation of our own power. This is true, if the “we” is cast broadly

enough (it is alienated life), but it is not maintained by the

insurrectionists, the people who resist; it is maintained by others,

whose positions are incommensurable with ours. They are not simply

seduced by false consciousness or forced to alienate their labour; they

actually desire the present system. Hence, we should not imagine that

all of this will dissolve in the event that individualism is replaced by

collectivity and struggle. For one thing, insurrectional struggle is on

a certain level very much individual.

But more crucially, the structural analysis underpinning this view is

flawed. Leftism makes excuses for people’s reactionary ideologies by

taking a starting point of ideological submersion as axiomatic, and

imagining community or struggle to be a messianic antidote; if

anarchists criticise people for being reactionary, they’re prone to call

us ‘moralistic’ (meaning we have our own ethical principles, instead of

a historical teleology). Of course, insurrection often transforms those

who are a part of it, and many people go through moments of revelation

in the face of police brutality. Yet insurrectional bands are most often

formed from prior individual refusals; the refusal constitutes the

community, it does not result from it. On the contrary, movements which

start out as reformist or reactionary do not miraculously become

insurrectionary simply because people come together. This is because the

real basis of revolt resides in desire, not community. People are not

simply products of ideology and subjectification until they miraculously

break its spell in revolt; the system needs hooks in desire to draw

people in. People vary in the degree to which their desires resist this

process of attraction. The facts that the social relations have to be

continually reproduced, that fetishism is incomplete and can break down

at any point, that systems left to their own devices go into entropy, do

not at all affect the fact that the system will not collapse while those

who desire it exert dominance over those who do not.

The included (including people who are exploited, but nevertheless

identify with the system) have betrayed insurrection time and again. In

doing so, they have harmed their own position as well as ours. If the

included do not care enough about the most basic rights and needs of the

excluded, or do not have the power to force the system to concede — why

on earth should the excluded hold back, out of concern for their

approval? In any case, the mass doesn’t think, it just reacts. Greek

“public opinion” supported unrest while it happened, then fell on board

with the government line. British “public opinion” was massively against

Thatcher at the height of crises, only to return to her at elections. We

need a more constant compass than this. The Coming Insurrection is

right: there is no prior community, no “we”, only the affinity of those

who are linked in aspirations and actions. The ground of resistance is

not the community or the majority, but each person’s right to be angry

and to resist, based on our difference, our refusal, and our

non-renunciation. We shouldn’t feel a need to form links with others who

have no desire to form links with us. Against alienation, yes:

alienation from ourselves, from others who resist, from the

environment... but separating ourselves from reactive force and those

who bear it is not alienation, it is autonomy. In Clastres’ account,

indigenous groups maintain autonomy by separating not only from the

state form but even from one another, to defend the autonomy of each

group. We need to get past the simplistic association of separation with

alienation. Of course we can, and should, ask how, if at all, we can

bring over some of the people who aren’t resisting to our side. But we

must not subordinate our will to theirs, nor imagine we’re doing good by

indulging their self-limiting aspirations or their reactionary beliefs,

in other words, by compromising on our own desires. We aren’t all in it

together

Short of the final collapse of state and capitalist power, the maximum

effect of insurrectionary actions occurs when it is nevertheless pushed

back, rendering the effects of such actions cumulative, and expanding

open or liberated spaces. These strategic effects are difficult to

produce, and can only come from a fusion of the brain with the heart:

using expressive actions to produce instrumental improvements, which in

turn reinforce the expressive states productive of further action.

Strategy comes easy to organised movements because they can turn

mobilisations on and off. It is harder for expressive movements and

bands, but it is still possible, because expressive affects have

triggers and varying intensities.

Insurrection rejects the state’s claimed monopoly on force, largely

because it pursues a diffusion of all forms of social power. The

mainstream attitude to violence in the global North is like the

Victorian attitude to sex. There is at once an emotionally invested

prohibition, replete with condemnations and silencings, and an attempt

to restrict its legitimate expression to a confined proper context in

which enjoyment and excess are excluded... and a proliferation in

practice, from structural violence to police brutality to organised

crime. The ridiculous outrage about insurrectional violence is not only

hypocritical – it isn’t really about violence at all. It’s about what

are known as ‘feeling rules’, in particular, a prohibition on feeling

angry against the system.

A qualification, however. There is a lot of talk in The Coming

Insurrection about events, decisions, subjective truths and so on. This

is a big theme in French philosophy today, probably lifted from the work

of the Maoist Badiou, and can be traced back to the debate between the

fascist Schmitt and critical theorist Walter Benjamin. The problem with

the use of decisionism in insurrectionism is that the act of decision,

the ‘sovereign decision’ as Agamben calls it, is constitutive of the

state. Hence why Schmitt, the founder of this concept, could still be a

fascist. We need to be clear on how our anti-politics is different from

that of the statist suspension of the ethical, the sovereign decision.

For Agamben, this distance is created by being all-inclusive and

immanent, which is to say, it rejects normativity, it diffuses ethics.

For Virno, by a kind of decision which is not sovereign, but which

simply emerges from a distributed network. For Benjamin, in the

difference between a violence which founds law and a violence which

destroys law, which is to say, which diffuses power. I think, too, that

the Invisible Committee’s version is different: we do not make the

decision, it takes hold of us. It ‘will occur to us rather than being

made by us’. What these views have in common is diffusion, the

replacement of concentrated relations with diffuse relations (ethics for

Agamben, process for Virno, violence for Benjamin). Decisionism is

associated with the concentration of power, and hence is part of statist

reason. We need instead a diffusion of the power to decide.

Insurrection and band societies

the decomposition of all social forms is a blessing. It is for us the

ideal condition for a wild, massive experimentation with new

arrangements, new fidelities

— The Invisible Committee

We’re setting out from a point of extreme isolation...FIND EACH OTHER.

Attach yourself to what you feel to be true. Begin there.

— The Invisible Committee

All affinity is affinity within a common truth

— The Invisible Committee

There is a special kind of group which is the agent of insurrection. I

have variously seen it called a band, neo-tribe, neo-sect, bund, pack,

fused-group, subject-group. Anarchist groups are, at least partially,

band societies. For some, in all or most aspects of life; for others, as

the most emotionally intense aspect of lives also lived less intensely

in other political forms. As Virilio observes (Speed and Politics, p.

4), street insurrection reproduces the raiding party of our ancestors.

Anthropologists such as Ingold have shown that bands are fundamentally

different from societies in the usual sense. The band involves a way of

constructing social relations which does without the usual hierarchical

props. It is absolutely immanent to everyday life. Militant resistance

gets its power from its articulation in everyday life, not only in the

moments of insurrection themselves, but in the full set of autonomous

practices of which they are a part. (What is sometimes attacked as

‘lifestyle activism’ is actually the embodiment of this immanence). The

band as a social form seems to reappear wherever organisation isn’t

fully implanted. Bands seem to come naturally to children. Anarchists,

and far-leftists too, usually end up in bands, even when they want

organisations (like Makhno for instance).

Anarchist bands are somewhat distinct from indigenous band societies,

being rather closer to the ‘bund’. Schmalenbach’s account of the sect or

‘bund’ suggests that it achieves a social form irreducible to community

and society, held together by a special kind of emotional bond he terms

‘communion’. Immediate emotional experiences (often produced through

ritual) hold together such groups without the mediation of abstract

identities or organisations. Existing without a basis in ascriptive ties

such as kinship, the bund cannot exist independently from the social

acts which constitute it. It must constantly be re-enacted, or

disappear. It is thus an absolutely immanent form of social life. Acts

of insurrection constitute insurrectional bands, playing the function of

ritual. Bands are counterposed to rational, linear history (since are

based in immediacy of affective fusion, not representation).

Perhaps the most commented-on discussion in The Coming Insurrection is

the critique of milieus and the argument for communes. Milieus are

constituted by the problematic aspects of many activist groups, such as

informal hierarchy. They are deemed reactionary because they betray

truths and are only concerned with their own ‘sad comfort’. In contrast,

communes arise when people find each other and forma common path. A

multitude of communes could replace all the various institutions of the

dominant system, forming an entire counter-society. ‘The commune is the

basic unit of partisan reality. An insurrectional surge may be nothing

more than a multiplication of communes, their coming into contact and

forming of ties’.

This raises the question of the transition between the two. When do

milieus turn into affinity-groups and vice-versa? The difference seems

to be defined in terms of their animating social logic and emotional

formation. Crucially, communes are defined by ‘the spirit that animates

them’, ‘the density of the ties at their core’, and not by ‘what’s

inside and what’s outside them’. This defines them in distinction both

from right-wing networks and from states and other hierarchies. It also

establishes them as very close to the categories of band, pack,

neo-sect, fused group, subject-group, and bund. A ‘truth’ is here

associated with the intense, immediate emotional connection at the heart

of these kinds of groups. The loss of this leads to a ‘milieu’ as direct

connection is replaced by some kind of normativity.

In other words, insurrectionists, communes, are always bands. But not

all bands are insurrectionist. Formally, all band societies are rather

similar. But they differ in how their identity is constructed. The

autonomous kind of band should be distinguished from those types of

‘sect’ and ‘neo-sect’ which claim to be the one true way, viewing

themselves from the start as something akin to a universal church. Band

societies can be reproduced only if they coexist with other bands in a

terrain of multiple voices and horizontal connections.

Networks and the everyday

The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a

chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present

order of things

— The Invisible Committee

We count on making that which is unconditional in relationships the

armor of a political solidarity as impenetrable to state interference as

a gypsy camp.

— The Invisible Committee

If the band is the basic unit of insurrection, networks are necessary to

reproduce it across time and space. In The Coming Insurrection, it is

argued that we can no longer find each other in sites such as the

factory; instead, affinity is formed through everyday insubordination.

It has long been argued that coming-together as affinity-groups is

already an act of insurrection; Hakim Bey, for instance, views it as

defiance of the capitalist distribution of time. The Coming Insurrection

stands in this tradition of emphasising affinity.

Major insurrectional events involve bands, but also swarms. The band

coexists with the swarm; swarms emerge when bands come together for an

event. Movements over time switch between swarms and bands. When swarms

decompose, bands tend to come to the fore. A swarm may arise when a

number of bands coalesce. The transition between the two requires a

degree of critical literacy, dialogue, inclusiveness, avoidance of

silencing. Inclusive networks are the means to make bands into swarms

and swarms into bands.

If everyday life forms a site in which insurrection can be built, it

follows that insurrection is not limited to those acts the system

demonises as ‘violent’; it also encompasses an entire range of

‘nonviolent’ approaches: building links among excluded groups and bands,

reconstructing subsistence economies, ‘social weaving’, emotional

healing, forming bands and networks which create their own values, the

construction of autonomous spaces. The strategies proposed by authors

such as Colin Ward and Hakim Bey, or autonomist strategies of ‘exodus’,

of defecting from capitalism and withdrawing life-energies and

creativity from it, are not counterposed to those of insurrection, but

operate as its everyday level, its condition for reproduction. In

practice, insurrections emerge from, and extend, networks of power and

meaning already operating in everyday life, often submerged or hidden.

(This also suggests that insurrection is in continuity with, not

entirely separate from, resistance). It is easy enough to find useful

things to do, other than actually fighting the system on the frontlines.

But this cannot be a substitute for insurrection. Ultimately, the state

will respond with violence to the recomposition of forces it cannot

control, and the recomposed bands will either have to deal with

dispossession or fight – and defeat – the state. We need to radicalise

the idea of diversity of tactics as it applies to protests, embracing

interdependency and the insufficiency of each actor to the total

struggle as part of a broader radicalisation of interpersonal relations.

Not everyone can fight the police; not everyone can forego fighting the

police.

Insurrection should thus be part of a broader process of reclaiming life

from capitalism and the state. This is not to say, however, that unrest

short of a final destruction of the system is unnecessary or

unproductive. Small, apparently ineffectual insurrections, often deemed

ritual protests by researchers, become crucial means for building the

subjectivities, repertoires of action and ‘action spaces’ which prepare

for insurrections which can bring down the system. An event like the

Greek insurrection of 2008 is made possible by the more ritualised

showdowns of the November anniversaries and other events all year long.

Place

to keep the riots going for a month, while keeping the police in check –

to do that you have to know how to organize, you have to establish

complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly

— The Invisible Committee

The relation to territory also changes: instead of possessing territory

as in state projects, insurrection increases the density, circulation

and solidarities of communes, rendering the territory ‘unreadable,

opaque to all authority’. This requires a proliferation of existential

territories: ‘the more territories there are superimposed on a given

zone, the more circulation there is between them, the harder it will be

for power to get a handle on them... Local self-organization

superimposes its own geography over the state cartography, scrambling

and blurring it: it produces its own secession’. The text portrays this,

not as a return to local slowness against state speed, but a

surreptitious overtaking of the state. Territory should here be

understood in relation to the distinction in geography between places,

which are sites of meaning for participants, and space. Capitalism is

premised on spaces which are not places, ‘non-places’ such as airports,

hotels and supermarkets which resist being turned into local places.

The reconstruction of local space creates which is sometimes termed

‘homeplace’, a type of place in which people feel emotionally secure and

at ease. The imposition of non-place also imposes generalised insecurity

and anxiety. Place, or existential territory, exists in the dense

indigenous relations to particular local ecosystems, the detailed

spatial knowledge and sense of belonging to a locality of inner-city and

banlieue rebels, even (in a mediated way) in the worker’s relationship

to the factory. The current phase of capitalism (and not necessarily

earlier phases) seeks to replace the experience of place with a mixture

of ‘telepresence’ (virtual images) and non-places in which people are

controlled and equivalent. In this phase, the restoration of place can

be a means to restore autonomy which has been lost by localities. Of

course, caution is needed here to distinguish the autonomous

construction of place from exclusionary and oppressive types of local

identity (such as nationalism and racism), and from a purely defensive

orientation to place (such as rural conservatism and working-class

nostalgia). An autonomous relationship to space is a localising

relationship but also an immanent relationship counterposed to the

transcendence of any particular spatial imagining. It is, in the

Zapatista slogan, ‘a world where all worlds fit’.

Section 2: The power of insurrection

to know that a certain coexistence will end soon, that a decision is

near

— The Invisible Committee

any loss of control would be preferable to all the crisis management

scenarios they envision

— The Invisible Committee

Insurrection has power when acts are available to insurrectionists which

are not available to hierarchical power. The state tries to destroy such

advantages, both through recuperation, bringing in approaches which

begin outside, and through repressive countermeasures. Insurrections

often arise in a cyclical way. The emergence of a new tactic to which

the system cannot respond generates new forms of insurrectional power.

These new tactics create cracks in the dominant system, which attract

other people amd groups who were formerly disempowered. The tactics

reproduce virally. In contrast, downturns in militant activity occur

when existing forms of action seem to have stopped producing powerful

effects.

The motor of change is the instability of the existing order’s ability

to ‘govern’ or ‘command’. This relies not primarily on its ability to

suppress, but on the persistence of obedience. Each insurrection

disrupts or destroys the system’s ability to command. Each time, the

system will either collapse or recompose. So far, it has recomposed. Of

course, neither insurrectionists nor statists can foresee the other’s

ability to invent new tactics or weapons. So both new insurrections and

new recompositions of the system are unpredictable. A final collapse of

the dominant system will occur when the system cannot invent new

responses or weapons quickly enough to contain the ability of an

insurrection to undermine command. This also leaves the question of how

to reconstruct spaces outside command once the system has collapsed, or

while it is collapsing.

Asymmetrical conflict

The police are not invincible in the streets, they simply have the means

to organize, train, and continually test new weapons. Our weapons, on

the other hand, are always rudimentary, cobbled-together... [and] don’t

have a hope of rivaling theirs in firepower, but can be used to hold

them at a distance, redirect attention, exert psychological pressure or

force passage and gain ground by surprise

— The Invisible Committee

The tactics and techniques which form weapons of insurrection and

repression, as well as the literal weapons, are constantly innovated on

both sides. The Coming Insurrection plays up the state’s research

capacity to generate new weapons. This is, indeed, a serious problem,

though the state tends to develop new weapons modelled on old ones, new

weapons which do the same things in slightly different ways (is there

really a world of difference between microwave beams, LRADs, water

cannons, tear gas and shooting in the air?) In contrast, it suggests the

improvised weapons of insurrectionists are necessarily inferior, and

implies they do not develop. This is not necessarily true. Firstly,

activists through time have innovated a whole range of tactics which

later catch on, such as the various innovations in lock-ons, tree-sits

and tunnelling in the 1980s. Secondly, there are a great many actors –

from smaller state powers to organised crime networks and armed

opposition groups – doing research into undermining asymmetrical power.

These actors often discover things that are later used in insurrections.

Molotov cocktails were invented by the Soviets as a cheap way to fight

an invading army. The Internet was originally invented by, of all

people, the US military, as a defensive measure against massive assault,

before being taken up by hacktivists (consider the Operation Payback

actions for instance). Thirdly, age-old knowledge can be rediscovered,

as when activists borrow consensus decision-making from indigenous

groups. We should look for new vulnerabilities, and tools which exploit

such vulnerabilities. In China, the next big wave of asymmetrical

technologies are already emerging, in forms such as electromagnetic

pulse weapons which take out enemy technologies, and cheap

micro-satellites which destroy satellite surveillance. In Iraq and

elsewhere, insurgents are pioneering the use of mobile phones as

triggers, and even making moves into remote-control and robotics. How

many of these measures will eventually have insurrectional uses? Already

a remote-controlled graffiti machine has been created. We can expect to

see the constant innovation of new asymmetrical techniques for as long

as domination persists.

Raising costs

To defeat or push back states strategically, it’s helpful to understand

how they think. This is not easy: they think in a way which is so alien

to non-renunciated life that it is hard to understand. It helps to think

of the state as an instrumental machine: it functions in large part on

cost-benefit rationalities. Costs are the Achilles’ heel of repression.

They ultimately constrain states, because they can interfere with

states’ abilities to pursue other activities, or the competitiveness of

their capitalist tax-base. States want control, but on the cheap; and

they will usually choose between tolerance and repression based on which

costs more. Actually, their thinking is more complicated than this, for

several reasons. Firstly, they’ll sometimes bear a large immediate cost

(such as the expense of the Battle of Mainzerstrasse) in the hope of

future benefits (such as a smaller, more demoralised squatters’

movement). Secondly, the ‘cost’ of the destruction of the system is for

the state infinite, and justifies any cost. Thirdly, states sometimes

seem to react to incalculable costs (such as moral panics) in

unpredictable ways.

If done right, imposing costs allows statists (and capitalists) to be

pushed back a bit at a time, cornered, disempowered, and reduced to a

much less threatening position. Roughly speaking, this works as follows.

If the costs are high enough, states can usually be prevented from

repression. For the costs to be high enough, they need to be higher than

the costs of toleration. The state may or may not choose to invest in

‘speculative’ repression, which aims mainly to alter the future balance

of forces. It is less likely to do this, the less disposable income it

has. Hence the reason insurrections are usually more effective during

economic downturns. The state’s reasoning will also be affected by

activist responses. The less easy activists are to demoralise, the less

beneficial the gamble of speculative repression will seem. Spaces

crucial to insurrection can be imposed on states. States will concede a

lot rather than risk collapse. Most often, these concessions feed back

into recuperation. But they can also be used to carve out autonomous

zones. Think of examples like autonomous student spaces in

pre-neoliberal Japan, squatting in 1980s Germany and Holland, the

Zapatista zone in Chiapas, de facto self-governed shanty-towns in major

Southern cities, or university asylum in Greece. These are not

recuperated spaces, but autonomous spaces the state was/is forced to

tolerate.

We can see this statist reasoning across a number of cases. In the case

of the UK animal rights movement, the state did not intervene to save

various small operations such as Hillgrove Farm, but was prepared to go

to very extreme lengths (from government financial bailouts to bogus

trials) to protect HLS itself, viewed as central to an accumulation

strategy based on biotechnology. The German squatters’ movement was

highly successful in the 1980s, mainly by imposing costs – a squat

eviction would be met with militant protests, fierce squat defence, and

the formation of new squats. This position was reversed in the early

1990s, and some cities are now squat-free. This is partly due to

recuperation (most of the old 1980s squatters were legalised), partly to

just-in-time policing (the tactic of attacking squats the moment they’re

formed, is costly, risky, often effective, but vulnerable to just one or

two failures rendering it unsustainable; it is only viable because of

the mass legalisations of squats and reduced numbers in the movement).

Hence, the state reduced costs of repression, but also took on more

costly repression – which can be made sense of in terms of rapidly

rising real-estate prices in most of the affected cities.

This allows us to upgrade our sense of our own effectiveness. It must be

remembered here that what seem like positive things for the state, such

as jailing an activist or fencing in a summit, are actually immensely

costly. States regularly spend millions on summits. The Toronto G20

summit reportedly ran to an $850 million bill. Jail costs $20,000 per

prisoner per year in running costs alone. In the case of the London

Mayday protests, the ‘successful’ repression of Mayday 2001 through mass

‘kettling’ cost £20 million in pre-emptive business closures alone,

compared to a £500,000 total cost of Mayday 2000, deemed unsuccessful

because of property damage. (The state gamble – which ultimately

succeeded – was that this cost would be worth it if demoralisation and

fear caused the annual protests to fizzle out). Protest often imposes

costs, even when it seems to be effectively repressed. It should be

added that Southern regimes often operate on a different basis, mainly

because they rely on forms of repression which are less effective, but

lower-cost.

This calculation on the state side can be used to modulate insurrection.

Reducing the costs of autonomous activity to a point where they are

small enough to be tolerated is not an option, as it increases

disempowerment. There are exceptions in terms of selectivity: indirect

targeting of smaller firms in campaigning against a major company, and

squatting lower- rather than higher-value buildings, are two examples.

Another option is to actively nibble away at a target in cumulative

ways, which never cross the threshold where repression becomes

cost-effective, but which add up to the collapse of the target. Usually,

however, insurrection implies that ordinary action imposes extensive

costs, and cutting these costs is impossible without betraying

insurrection.

Raising the costs of repression, on the other hand, is viable. For this

to be done, each movement needs, so to speak, capacity held in reserve.

This can be achieved in two ways. Firstly, it would be helped by being

less ‘hyperactive’, doing fewer things but doing them better, while

staying ready to respond to a crisis. Secondly, it would be enabled by

links between movements, such that repression of one band which was

already fully-stretched produced responses from completely different

bands which were not part of the same mobilisation. Hence, effective

networking around issues of repression can be an effective way of

preventing it. Either way, keeping in reserve a capacity to respond to

repression is crucial to preventing it. Keeping up a high level of

movement composition – strong connections, sustainable emotional forces

– contributes to preventing repression. In Manipur, the Meira Paibis

provide an example of a ‘reserve’ force constantly on watch for

repression, something like a vastly extended Copwatch scheme, patrolling

for hours each day on the lookout for state forces, ready to sound the

alarm if abuse occurs. Overcommitting to the moment, at the expense of

failing to keep forces in reserve to respond to new developments,

impedes the ability of insurrections to handle repression. Activist

bands and affinity-networks need to find ways to distribute activity

sustainably through time, avoiding overcommitment and burnout.

Another way to think about insurrection is in relation to the SHAC

model. This puts a particular inflection on permanent attack: there is

still constant action, constant attack, drawing on expressive

modalities, but it is varied in intensity and target, to increase its

instrumental power. The model is often misunderstood as operating on a

human level, as ‘intimidation’. Primarily it operates at the level of

the basic logic of capitalism, which is instrumental and inhuman: it

imposes costs. Capitalists make decisions to disinvest, because the risk

of suffering losses outweighs the profit which can be made. This has

proven very effective in pushing HLS to the point where it can no longer

function in the capitalist market. SHAC’s vulnerability is that, while

it imposes costs on animal abusers, it is open to retaliation by the

state, on which it does not, on the whole, impose costs. It can be

predicted that people will apply this kind of strategy across a range of

issues, and especially, apply it to create the conditions of permanent

attack: to prevent the state from repressing, to corrode its repressive

capability, to carve out autonomous zones, to retaliate against state

atrocities. This would in turn enhance its existing uses too, rendering

the likes of SHAC less vulnerable to state repression.

One way to sustain movements in the face of repression is to turn

repression itself into a source of anger, and hence of further action.

This is shown in certain Southern contexts where killings by police (of

activists or of ordinary people) lead almost automatically to responses:

police stations attacked, mass protests called, and so on. In Iran

during the 1979 Revolution, the tide was maintained because activists’

funerals, held after a delay, became a site of renewed resistance,

spreading into new demonstrations. In Kashmir today, when police kill,

protests always follow. Even in America, police killings and deaths in

custody sometimes spark unrest, such as the recent Oakland uprising. Is

it possible to duplicate this kind of response in contexts where the

violence used is not usually lethal? If it happened, it would probably

turn a particular event (such as conviction) or the use of a particular

tactic (such as ‘kettling’ or abuse in custody) into a trigger for

protest or for other actions.

Analysing summit protests

The response to summit protests shows the strategic situation clearly.

The police effectively lost in Seattle, Prague and Washington, partly

because they were unable to hold space, partly because the images went

against them, and partly because real disruption occurred. Police

responses have followed a standardised model, and have ranged from the

relocation of summits to fortified out-of-town encampments, through the

use of pre-emptive arrests, “kettling”, and attacks on convergence

sites, to a general increase in brutality. There are three strategic

rationales to this response. Firstly, it aims to disrupt protest in

general (not only militant protest), the apparent purpose being to

reclaim media space by showing the police on the attack (rather than

delegates besieged, or police being routed). The goal here is to

hegemonise the media space. Secondly, it aims to make activists feel

powerless, to disrupt devices such as the creation of temporary

homespaces at convergence sites and the division of protests into zones

to modulate risk, to deploy weapons designed to produce pain and

disorientation, and to produce situations of frustration and sheer

terror. These measures aim to break morale. Thirdly, the relocation of

summits changes little in spatial terms, but reframes a forced outcome

as a choice. Previously, it seemed like a defeat that summits occurred

under siege, and protesters occupied the surrounding town; now, it seems

like a deliberate strategy. This created dilemmas for activists. The

previously highly effective ‘swarming’ tactic had to be abandoned.

Morale-boosting symbolic victories became less likely.

This response occurred because the state did not wish to concede the

space it had effectively lost with the rise of summit protests; it

preferred to try to seize back this space through fascistic measures.

The state thus gives up many of the deep supports of its existence, the

ideology of legitimacy which disguises social war and keeps up an

appearance of civil rights. This is, once more, an effect of ‘just in

time’ policing: the state has all its forces on the frontline, and no

deep support behind it; it has given up the trenches and fieldworks the

maintenance of which would formerly have provided security in the event

of a frontline defeat, but which restricted what the state could do on

the frontline. This basic vulnerability is often missed in critiques of

the effectiveness of such protests today. This said, it creates certain

problems. The expected effect of such measures would be to reduce

overall numbers, make it less likely that first-time protesters will

attend, but also to increase militancy among protesters, who will become

increasingly angry with the repression. This seems to be what has

largely happened. The gap which needs to be addressed on our side is

that, if such protests no longer self-recruit so easily, there is an

increasing need for other kinds of bridges into everyday life, to bring

new people into activism. Protests can no longer be expected to

self-recruit.

Hitting the infrastructure of power

Power is no longer concentrated in one point in the world; it is the

world itself, its flows and its avenues, its people and its norms, its

codes and its technologies... Anyone who defeats it locally sends a

planetary shock wave through its networks.

— The Invisible Committee

Every network has its weak points, the nodes that must be undone in

order to interrupt circulation, to unwind the web.

— The Invisible Committee

Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any real effect involves

reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its networks

— The Invisible Committee

It’s within the malfunction and short-circuits of the system that we

find the elements of a response whose logic would be to abolish the

problems themselves

— The Invisible Committee

All the incivilities of the streets should become methodical and

systematic, converging in a diffuse, effective guerrilla war that

restores us to our ungovernability, our primordial unruliness.

— The Invisible Committee

The idea of targeting crucial nodes of power is not new to

insurrectionism. According to Bonanno, because power is exercised

through control over physical spaces, it can be attacked in its presence

in physical space. A single act of destruction is not the same as

bringing down the entire system. But multiplied enough times, it renders

parts of the system unworkable. Effective insurrections often take the

form of the sustained reproduction of the destruction or blockage of

nodes, through time and space. Everything depends on keeping the action

going, expanding it, and responding to moves to make it more difficult.

There is not a qualitative difference between the small victories,

tearing down all the surveillance cameras in an area or making squat

eviction impossible, and the eventual destruction of capitalism and the

state. The latter is an accumulation of the former, to the point where

the system’s functioning becomes impossible. Furthermore, if mechanisms

necessary for state control or capital accumulation are taken out in

this way, the state and/or capitalism would be expelled from the space

in question. Social relations themselves can’t be destroyed by sabotage,

but they are embedded in infrastructures which can be physically

targeted. The power and extent of such infrastructures affects greatly

whether autonomous spaces can appear, and the costs of sustaining them

make them a weak link.

There is, of course, also the question of building other worlds in

liberated spaces. This process is affirmative, not destructive, and may

involve quite different ‘virtues’, quite different forms of social

relations from those involved in destroying capitalism. This needs to be

done well, because the problems with the system (particularly informal

hierarchies, exclusion, and patterns such as racism and sexism) are

often reproduced in autonomous spaces. But this process by itself,

without insurrection, could not be enough. Furthermore, since social

relations recompose whenever a crisis disrupts the status quo (think of

New Orleans, the Argentinazo, etc), it seems the insurrectionary part is

the more difficult part. In addition, sabotage can help in the

reconstruction of other worlds. Sabotage is often highly emotionally

empowering. In a Black Block statement (see The Black Block Papers, p.

45–6), it is described as cracking the veneer of legitimacy, exorcising

structural violence, turning limited exchange-values into open-ended

use-values, changing how we see objects, increasing the ‘potential uses

of an entire cityscape’, and breaking spells by making the impossible

possible.

The Coming Insurrection makes various contributions to the strategy of

sabotage. In particular, it argues for surprise attacks, which it views

as central to the banlieue revolts: ambushing police patrols, attacking

police stations at night and so on. In demonstrations, the equivalent

tactic is taken to be bypassing the Red Zone and choosing one’s own

terrain. ‘The important thing is not to be better armed but to take the

initiative’. Another tactic suggested is opening up multiple fronts.

‘Harassing the police means that by forcing them to be everywhere they

can no longer be effective anywhere’.

The Coming Insurrection argues that insurrection starts with an

unconditional refusal, ‘a truth that we refuse to give up’ –

non-renunciation. This then spreads until there is victory, like the

proliferation of the German squatters’ movement and the French

anti-fascist resistance. To this should be added Bonanno’s observation

(And We Will Still be Ready, 26–7) that insurrection requires

replicability, not decipherability. The means by which an

insurrectionary act spreads is not its comprehension by viewers, but the

fact that it can be imitated and taken up by others with insurrectionary

intent.

Blocking nodes

Jam everything – this will be the first reflex of all those who rebel

against the present order. In a delocalised economy [using] just-in-time

production... to block circulation is to block production as well

— The Invisible Committee

the metropolis is one of the most vulnerable human arrangements that has

ever existed... A brutal shutting down of borders... a sudden

interruption of supply lines, organized blockades of the axes of

communication – and the whole facade crumbles... The world would not be

moving so fast if it didn’t have to constantly outrun its own collapse.

— The Invisible Committee

On the longshoremen’s strike: ‘With ten thousand people, the largest

economic power in the world can be brought to its knees.’

— The Invisible Committee

through the systematic occupation of institutions and obstinate

blockading, the high-school students’ movement of 2005 and the struggle

against the CPE-law reminded us of the ability of large movements to

cause trouble and carry out diffuse offensives.

— The Invisible Committee

Today, systemic vulnerabilities are concentrated in strategic nodes:

transport and communications infrastructures (key roads, airports,

high-speed rail links, ports, cellphone towers, electricity

infrastructure), symbolic sites linked to capital accumulation (e.g.

tourist sites), and distribution depots (e.g. petrol stations,

warehouses). Targeting such sites is a growing trend among movements the

world over. It is effective because just-in-time production and reduced

state spending have left the infrastructure increasingly vulnerable, the

system increasingly close to the wire: a small shutdown can shut down a

massive network dependent on it, and have immense effects, since the

system requires constant flows in the absence of stockpiles.

Just-in-time production leaves the system increasingly vulnerable to

blockades. The Coming Insurrection refers to the Argentine piqueteros

and the Oaxaca uprising, deemed by statists a disaster on the scale of a

hurricane, and an incident in Rennes where only 300 people were needed

to shut down the main access road to the town for hours. Examples could

be multiplied: the struggles in Bolivia and Ecuador, the Manipur

uprising, the costs imposed by blockades of timber sales, the airport

and road intersection occupations in Thailand. In the successful

Baliapal land grab resistance movement, checkpoints were set up on the

four entrance roads to the area, and staffed around the clock. When

state forces appeared, conch shells were blown and metal plates beaten

to summon protesters to create human roadblocks (Routledge and Simons

488). It might be predicted that blockades will be multiplied, sustained

through rolling series of blockades, used as a way to impose costs

whenever the system attacks, used to defend and carve out autonomous

zones. Indian social movements have pioneered a tactic known as the

bandh, in which an entire local area is shut down in response to a

(usually localised) abuse or grievance, complete with roadblocks, and

sometimes stone-throwing. More than the workplace strike, the bandh is a

strike in the full space of capital, creating autonomy in an area by

shutting down ‘normal life’. Something like the bandh might be used in

areas where local populations are resistant to neoliberalism, to link

insurrection to the wider opposition and eat away at state power. There

might be a future period, for instance, in which every time American

police killed a black person, the nearest city was shut down for a day.

One might predict that the number of murders by police would decrease,

and that autonomous spaces and feelings of empowerment would increase.

Invisibility

turning the anonymity to which we’ve been relegated to our advantage,

and through conspiracy, nocturnal or faceless actions, creating an

invulnerable position of attack... To be socially nothing is not a

humiliating position... but is on the contrary the condition for maximum

freedom of action

— The Invisible Committee

And once we become visible our days will be numbered.

— The Invisible Committee

The theme of invisibility has a long history. James Scott’s work focuses

on invisible tactics of everyday resistance, some of which not only

disguise the actor, but also disguise the fact that resistance has even

happened. David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

speculates that there are a huge number of liberated zones around the

world, but most of them have stayed liberated by being invisible, and

will only be stumbled across by other anarchists. Resistances usually

stay invisible because this makes it harder for the state to crack down.

It makes it harder to induce moral panics, or to distinguish resistances

from passive effects. There are many forms of invisibility. There’s the

most familiar forms, such as masking-up, late-night sabotage, security

culture. There’s others which create an appearance of being recuperated,

without actually being recuperated. There’s still others which make

people invisible as part of a large movement, whose members are too

numerous to track down in detail.

The more militant an action is, the greater the risk that the state will

turn its gaze towards it. This can often be warded off to a degree by

forms of invisibility which make it difficult for the state to catch

activists. Yet once visibility is established, the state may lash out in

other directions, looking for a target – an innocent activist to stitch

up, a community to collectively punish, a social movement infrastructure

to close down as a scapegoat. When doing things which bring about

partial visibility, planning should not be limited to avoiding

individual detection. Preparation should also be made to impose costs on

the state should it engage in repression.

Fraternising and decomposing the state

A massive crowd would be needed to challenge the army, invading its

ranks and fraternizing with the soldiers... It is not impossible to

defeat an army politically.

— The Invisible Committee

Can an insurrection win by decomposing the state? Historically, there

are cases where statists have gone over to the insurrection, as in

Albania and Serbia. Yet this usually occurs when the state machine is

already collapsing, and is a prelude to their hijacking of the revolt.

We need to realise that statists, as long as they remain statists, are

inculcated into a mentality which precludes the emotional responses

necessary to identify with revolt. It is hard for compassionate people

to understand the brutality of the state, and realise it is not going to

decompose through statists’ basic humanity. It happens sometimes with

soldiers who are conscripts, or recruits from poor backgrounds (the

‘poverty draft’), but it happens rarely with properly induced state

agents. In the colonies, the risk of the military identifying with

insurgents is managed in a simple way: they don’t speak the language. In

the case of the police, the same effect is achieved through ‘cop

culture’, and often the very real blocking of communication through

helmets and visors. Not to mention that, as for Crisso and Odoteo, this

absense of a common language is now true for all of us when faced with

the police. David Graeber argues that activists find police impossible

to understand, mainly because the police’s authoritarianism and the

situation of conflict provide a barrier to emotional exchange. Berardi

argues that the scarcity of attention available today has turned many

people into ruthless executors of decisions taken without attention.

Virilio argues that today’s warriors are so supplemented with artificial

vision that they can no longer relate on a human level. And then there’s

the risk that they’ll simply replace human police with robots. If the

state ever resorts to sending conscripts or poverty-draftees against

insurrectionists, it’s asking for trouble. As long as it can rely on

police, robots, or tonton macoutes, it can get away with repression.

Rules of engagement

We live under an occupation, under police occupation.

— The Invisible Committee

Rather than fraternisation, it is more helpful to think in terms of the

transformation of the ‘rules of engagement’, expanding the scope for

insurrectional action while restricting that of the state. In his paper

on the phenomenology of giant puppets, David Graeber observes that, in

conflicts between police and protesters, each side acts as if playing a

game whose rules it had invented entirely by itself. In fact, the field

is conflictual, and rules of engagement between opponents sometimes

emerge. Aside from normally prohibiting certain kinds of deliberately

lethal force, police in many Northern countries seem to recognise no

limits in their rules of engagement. The reason for this is that police

seek a monopoly on defining situations – they do not wish to admit the

existence of an adversary.

But it does seem that the rules of engagement can be pushed in either

direction. Protesters are more daring in some countries than others.

Police violence is more indiscriminate from Genoa onwards than before.

In practice, rules of engagement are set in two ways: in indirect

effects after the event, and in impact on morale. The police have found

ways to dominate certain indirect effects, notably ‘bad press’, through

psychological operations. But this does not leave them immune to other

kinds of indirect effects which impose costs on repressive actions. The

ups and downs of each side’s emotions are more fluid and dynamic.

Insurrectional acts exist on a continuum between hope and anxiety: there

is always enormous gain, in emotional self-empowerment, but this system

tries to balance this with enormous risk. The level of risk varies with

the countermeasures taken by the system and its ability to handle the

broader context. The state tries to terrorise us because it is afraid.

Though it is hard to tell when it is truly afraid, and when it simply

simulates fear (to cause moral panics, for example). On the

insurrectionist side, in principle rules of engagement are rejected as

concessions to power, but in practice activists do hold back in all

kinds of ways. The question of altering the de facto rules of engagement

to our advantage – by losing our own fears, and by imposing limits on

the state – may be crucial during prolonged struggles.

Sustaining Insurrection

a blockade is only as effective as the insurgents’ capacity to supply

themselves and to communicate... Acquiring the skills to provide, over

time, for one’s own basic subsistence implies appropriating the

necessary means of production.

— The Invisible Committee

the state... instinctively grinds down any solidarities that escape it

until nothing remains except citizenship... [The citizen] can’t help

envying these so-called “problem” neighbourhoods where there still

persists a bit of communal life, a few links between beings, some

solidarities not controlled by the state, an informal economy, an

organization that is not yet detached from those who organize.

— The Invisible Committee

Inhabiting a nowhere makes us vulnerable to the slightest jolt in the

system.

— The Invisible Committee

The destruction of the peasant’s world... meant the disappearance of the

means for dealing with scarcity.

— The Invisible Committee

The longest uprisings in the global North in recent memory have been the

Greek insurrection of 2008 and the French banlieue revolt of 2005. Both

of these lasted around three weeks. This has, of course, inspired

activists used to four-day summit protests or even shorter upheavals,

but ultimately, a month is not long enough to bring down the system. In

both cases, the state largely sat out the revolt, waiting for it to

fizzle out. If the state was genuinely afraid that the revolt could last

forever, it could not have responded in this way. Bolivia has

experienced a number of peasant shutdowns which have lasted for months.

Thailand has seen protest camps which have taken over key intersections

in the capital for months on end, eventually repressed by police, only

to reappear a month later with similar staying-power. The Manipur

uprising of 2004 was six months long at its peak. Parts of Palestine,

such as the village of Bil’in, manage to continue recurring waves of

protest. Argentina, Albania, Oaxaca, Ecuador, Kabylie, Kashmir... the

list goes on. In other words, Northern insurrections face a pressing

problem of endurance.

One possible reason movements in the South have such temporal resilience

is that they are operating out of local economies which are only

marginally subsumed in capitalism, and networks of everyday practices

which produce a social fabric irreducible to the system: they could

persist because they were really autonomous across the board, and could

shut down the capitalist economy without destroying themselves. To be

able to endure, an insurrection needs an autonomous economy or

subsistence-system. This intersects with issues of defeating the

commodity system by re-localising ‘production’, and expands onto broader

issues in green anarchism around gift economies and ludic alternatives

to work. ‘Subsistence perspective’ writers such as Maria Mies argue that

subsistence provides a global alternative to commodity production,

recognising the importance of nurturing the forces which actually

produce life. The Coming Insurrection also refers to the Kabylia

uprising of 2001, which effectively pushed the state out of the region.

‘The movement’s strength was in the diffuse complementarity of its

components’, irreducible to its most formal manifestation the village

assemblies. The ‘communes’ ranged in this case from the young people

fighting police to the producers of resistance symbolism and people

sustaining subsistence production, without which the blockades of the

commodity economy could not have been so constant and systematic.

Subsistence is also a question of producing types of bands which can be

sustained over time. In a paper on precarity, Silvia Federici has argued

that ‘no movement can survive unless it is concerned with the

reproduction of its members’. Whereas the peak of struggle today tends

to be associated with events such as demonstrations, we need to be alert

to questions of how to reproduce the movement through time. When

communities in struggle are able to reproduce themselves – as in the

indigenous movements of Bolivia and Ecuador – she argues that their

anti-system struggles can become more radical. She also argues for a

reexamination of the tradition of working-class mutual aid, prior to the

Fordist period. These arguments echo with Hakim Bey’s discussions of

recreating sociality, autonomist discussions of recomposition, and

primitivist discussions of rewilding. What links these fields is the

creation of conditions in which insurrection can be sustained through

time, which in turn, is necessary in rendering the state superfluous,

and hence in destroying it. Would a successful insurrection lead beyond

the current status of activism as ‘bund’, as entirely non-ascriptive

band? This question comes down to the issue of the place of childhood in

sustainability through time. Ultimately, it can be hoped that loose

bands and overlapping networks can provide a context in which ascription

remains redundant.

The issue of subsistence also speaks to broader issues of vulnerability.

Subsistence economies operate on an orientation which favours systemic

redundancy, and hence resilience, over efficiency./ Efficient systems

usually produce one thing as cheaply as possible, leaving people

vulnerable to shocks if what they produce is no longer in demand or if

production is disrupted by social or natural crises. Subsistence

economies spread their activity across a wide range of sectors, so that

problems in any one sector aren’t as likely to destroy the entire band.

Resilience is an alternative to ‘security’ (the control of space to

pre-empt the unexpected) in dealing with human vulnerability.

The limit in subsistence capabilities is what is holding back the

temporal scope of insurrection in the North. Today’s activist bands in

the North do not have the degree of autonomy that some Southern

movements achieve. Most often, such bands are sustained by marginal

employment or state support. This is supplemented by what might be

called a ‘raiding’ economy, taking items from the system by means such

as squatting, skipping, urban foraging and autoreduction. This should

not be viewed as simply an extension of the system. Indigenous groups

besieged by state forces similarly rely on a mixture of raiding,

marginal production and benefits. Raiding, marginality and bottom-up

tribute extraction are strategies whereby systemic capture can be

prevented or minimised. Yet there is a limit to how far it can sustain a

movement which actually poses a threat to the system. A commune, The

Coming Insurrection rightly observes, can’t bank on a raiding economy

forever, it needs to increase its self-organisation to meet needs.

Ultimately, what prevents recomposition is dispossession: it is easy

enough to live without forces work, provided one can seize back enough

of what one needs.

Local knowledge

The circulation of knowledge cancels hierarchy; it equalizes by raising

up.

— The Invisible Committee

Freedom isn’t the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical

capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or

dissolve them.

— The Invisible Committee

The recomposition of subsistence goes hand-in-hand with the

recomposition of local knowledge. The Coming Insurrection recognises the

need to recreate and draw on local knowledges in order to sustain

insurrection. ‘There’s a whole set of skills and techniques just waiting

to be plundered and ripped from their humanistic, street-culture, or

eco-friendly trappings’, not to mention ‘the intuitions, the know-how,

and the ingenuity found in slums’. Such techniques will have to be

deployed both to ‘repopulate the metropolitan desert’ and to sustain

insurrection beyond the early stages, in fields such as food, transport

and communications. At present, our ability to attack the metropolis is

compromised by our dependence on its services. Escaping this situation

requires a long ‘apprenticeship’ in a wide range of practical skills.

Communes should seek self-sufficiency, and should seek to limit their

own size to prevent hierarchies emerging. In effect, what is proposed

here is a recomposition of local knowledges, corresponding to a

recomposition of bands.

This is excellent, as far as it goes. But it needs to go a few steps

further. Band societies and subsistence economies do not begin and end

with practical knowledge, though they have plenty of it. They also have

very different epistemologies and cosmologies from those familiar in

metropolitan societies. In practice, this always includes a spiritual

element, which if examined closely, turns out to be a way of managing

and reproducing emotional states. The question is not only practical but

cosmological, because cosmology is necessary to sustain indefinitely the

emotional states which produce insurrection. Indigenous cosmology

interconnects with local knowledge, providing the frame within which it

has meaning, and creating narrative structures which render local

knowledge memorable and emotionally resonant. This is a situation where

the truth which the band society refuses to renounce is not empty. It

is, rather, the truth of a local context in its entirety. Similarly, it

is not entirely the case that ‘[e]verywhere it’s the same chilling void,

reaching into even the most remote and rustic corners’ (CI). There are

still places where stones can speak.

Walking through the Witches Market in La Paz — a day after the road

barricades were cleared on January of this year — I realized how deep

the Western view has been innoculated in my mind... I realized that my

perception of reality has been modified and trained according to one

model of interpretation, which standardizes the notion of the world in

order to impose on us a set for socialization... In this world, life is

about something else. If you cannot hear the murmur of stones there is

no way you can communicate with this secret world.

— Jesus Sepulveda, ‘Stones Can Speak,’ Green Anarchy 21

This re-localisation also changes the nature of knowledge. Local

knowledge does not function like global science. Instead of recording a

set of facts, it diffuses the power to create knowledge. There is much

in the process of insurrection which must necessarily be a matter of

situated, local knowledge and which thus, cannot be expressed in

articles or books. Local knowledge has characteristics very different

from those in dominant forms of knowledge in the global North. Studies

of local and indigenous knowledge reveal that it usually involves a very

reflexive sense of locality, situatedness, and relationality, i.e. the

fact that knowledges are produced by particular people in particular

places, and are relative to their process of construction and the place

where they’re produced. Indigenous languages tend to encourage all

claims to be situated in the speaker’s social position, and use words

which refer to relations instead of things. (And it is quite possible

that we will need to create a new language, or at least, inflect our

existing language-use in ways which restore these characteristics). The

Andean conception of wealth emphasises wealth in connections, not in

things. An emphasis is placed on the practice of ‘doing’

knowledge-production, rather than the outcome. Hence, local knowledge is

not a set of facts, but rather, a process of learning and sharing

knowledge located in particular ways of life. It is often expressed in

practices rather than communicated through books. It usually takes a

holistic perspective on knowledge, rejecting the division of the world

into spheres or categories, the separation of humanity from nature, and

the separation of both of these from the supernatural (whether through

the disenchantment of reality or the abstraction of transcendental

religion). Local knowledge tends to be expressive rather than

instrumental. And it tends to prefer inconclusiveness and difference to

rapid decision, involving for instance long consultative processes when

reaching decisions. It can be argued that local knowledge is largely a

product of a subsistence economy, corresponding to a way of life which

is itself situated and relational.

How can local knowledges be recreated? It is not a matter of simply

importing content from other local knowledge systems – borrowing DIY

skills, indigenous medicinal knowledge and so on – because this misses

the importance of process in local knowledge. Nor is it about copying

the rituals of other groups, or playing at being like them, which turns

the immanence of local knowledge into a transcendentalism of social

roles. Of course, the importation of particular knowledge-content and of

techniques such as rituals can play a crucial role. Yet is it more

important to recreate the generative level of local knowledge, its

construction as process in an intensely situated locality. The concepts

of local knowledge should not belong to the massified world, but to an

intense connection to a local ecology and to those with whom one relates

to this local ecology. Other aspects of local knowledge need to be

recovered: an intense awareness of relationality (and corresponding

rejection of ‘unmarked terms’ of privilege), and a replacement of

instrumental orientations with a cosmology oriented to expression. Both

the reifying tendencies of existing language (to focus on things instead

of relations), and its pressures towards universalism and generality

(towards taking one’s own subjectivity as “obvious” and meanings as

shared), need to be resisted.

Section 3: Dangers to insurrection

Strategies of tension

As an attempted solution, the pressure to ensure that nothing happens,

together with police surveillance of the territory, will only intensify.

— The Invisible Committee

The most visible danger to insurrection is the danger of repression. Its

contemporary manifestation as “war on terror” follows a model of

counterinsurgency shown clearly in Italy in the 1980s: creating a civil

war of a type the state could use to destroy the movement under the

ideological shadow of a struggle with an invisible enemy. What went

wrong in Italy was not that the movement was drawn into conflict, but

that sufficient costs were not levied on repression (in contrast, for

example, to the pariah status which strategies of tension often bring on

regimes in the South). This lack of costs has two dimensions. The first

dimension is ideological: the state was able to rely on ideological

gestures such as moral panics and media imagery to maintain legitimacy

even while cracking down. The second dimension is the failure in the

Italian case to find sufficiently effective asymmetrical means for

imposing costs on repression. In other circumstances – in Chiapas, the

Niger Delta, Bougainville – the strategy of tension has backfired.

Research on armed opposition groups shows that repressive

counterinsurgency only works with a specific kind of group, whose basis

is in any case rather weak. In any other case, repression simply

emboldens resistance. What’s more, refraining from insurrection is no

guarantee that the state will not resort to terror. And there are cases

where the existence of more ‘extreme’ forms of opposition creates the

conditions in which states are forced to tolerate less ‘extreme’ forms.

Above all, we need to avoid aiding the state’s order not to think. The

point of terror is to make resistance unthinkable. Any move which aids

this, aids the power of the state.

It can be argued that the global ‘war on terror’ is actually an indirect

response to the failure of existing mechanisms of domination in the

aftermath of Seattle. A strategy of tension has been unleashed which

uses moral panics around terrorism and other issues to create a sense of

fear which is used as a pretext to close space. This strategy plays to

the psychological vulnerabilities, not only of the mass, but of

activists too. A part of this dynamic is the state’s attempt to

‘contaminate’ activism by ignoring the diversity of tactics and the

division of protests into zones, adding in random attacks on

less-militant protesters, bystanders, associates of protesters, people

with similar ideas... In a more alert context, this could easily be met

by vigorous responses. It seems, in fact, that the strategy of tension

is revived to deal with each protest wave. It will fail when the fear is

insufficient to curb a wave.

Moral panics

The new economy cannot be established without a similar screening of

subjects and zones singled out for transformation. The chaos that we

constantly hear about will either provide the opportunity for this

screening, or for our victory over this odious project.

— The Invisible Committee

”Terrorist threats”, “natural disasters”, “virus warnings”, “social

movements” and “urban violence” are, for society’s managers, so many

moments of instability where they reinforce their power, by the

selection of those who please them and the elimination of those who make

things difficult.

— The Invisible Committee

It’s useless to react to the news of the day; instead we should

understand each report as a maneuver in a hostile field of strategies to

be decoded, operations designed to provoke a specific reaction.

— The Invisible Committee

Moral panics serve as perhaps the most important state weapon today,

turning what are otherwise empowering events into sources of anxiety,

fear and isolation, eliminating the ‘bad press’ which repression would

otherwise cause, and providing an enabling context for escalating

repression. News coverage often functions as counterinsurgency. Police

and other state agencies consciously deploy psyops to hegemonise the

media field. The media complies, running police reports as fact. But

there are also cases where the media targets a movement, particularly a

sphere of everyday resistance, and draws the state in. Moral panics

function through the dynamics of what Virilio terms ‘telepresence’: they

focus on a single image, taken as iconic, and make the image stand for

the event, at the same time turning the glare of attention on it, on

condemning it, on catching the perpetrator and so on. Usually, the image

is unrepresentative. Sometimes, it is created or set up deliberately by

the state. Always, it is taken out of context, and used to slander

entire movements. It is a major reason insurrections sometimes fail to

resonate, to be replicated: they are received by potential supporters

through a distorting frame.

The function of moral panics within anarchist and related movements is

weaker than in the wider society, partly because people reduce exposure

to, or selectively interpret, mainstream news. But there are still

effects. Particularly worrying in this regard was the response to the

Greek movement to the Marfin Bank incident which, while tragic, was at

worst an accident and quite possibly a state set-up. The effect was to

paralyse the movement, destroy the day of action and create a context

where the police could storm Exarcheia with little opposition. It also

led to recriminations among anarchists, and in particular, other

currents turning on insurrectionists, internalising the wider

demonisation inside the movement. This is not the only instance. For

example, a strike wave in Korea has been defeated because support

evaporated after a media scare over a video with a parodic execution of

a boss. Tree-spiking went into sharp decline after an accidental death.

And I suspect 911 had a similar effect on activism in America: the less

composed layers were drawn into the paralysing effects of mourning, at

the expense of the broader context.

Moral panic is not a tactic we can afford to recognise as legitimate. Of

course we have our own ethical positions, but these can have nothing in

common with systemic moralities. An incident like Marfin can only be

viewed in the context of far greater slaughter and suffering resulting

from the system’s actions, in normal conditions of everyday life. The

biggest danger here is in holding back from actions for fear of

moral-panic responses. The state will not stop with one wave of panic;

if the tools are allowed to work, they will be used against every form

of resistance until none is left. It is always possible to deduce some

risk, however unlikely, which could rule out an action. Derrick Jensen’s

As the World Burns contains a powerful parody of this strategy: an

eco-sabotage action which might, indeed, would have killed children, if

only they’d walked two miles from the nearest school and thrown

themselves into the burning building. In Germany and in Britain we’ve

seen moral panics about how police ‘could have been’ killed by people

throwing stones, or dropping objects off buildings (despite the fact

that such acts have been done a million times, without killing police).

Then there’s the roadblocks which ‘could have’ stopped ambulances, the

tree-sits which ‘could have’ caused an agent of repression to fall while

removing someone, etc. Giving in to moral panics lets the state close

all autonomous space, issue by issue, band by band. Instead we need to

build emotional and social barriers among our bands, which prevent moral

panics from being internalised either in our psyches or our social

groups. We should not be trying to distance ourselves from others deemed

to be truly excluded, whereas we are the ‘good’ protesters. We are the

excluded, and we reject the boundary between included and excluded, the

state’s right to select, the division into good and bad subjects.

So, what to do when a moral panic is turned on activists? The current

responses fall into two categories: either to persist, to ignore the

newfound visibility and carry on as before (which happens with animal

rights), or to back off, holding back from action until the hostility

dies down (which seems to have happened with tree-spiking). Neither is

very effective. Persistence lets the state get away with persecution,

which becomes more likely as activism continues as before. Backing off

actually rewards the state for persecution. Yet alternatives seem

limited. The third option is to meet escalation with escalation, but

opponents may not have the forces in reserve to do this. A frontal

confrontation on an issue is difficult, because the state can and will

concentrate forces in the aftermath of a moral panic. The possibility

remains, however, of sideways forms of retaliation for moral panics,

disempowering or costing the state in broader ways. In particular, while

it may prove difficult to get around the blockage at the site of

repression, the fact of repression can be used as a trigger for actions

elsewhere. This requires among other things that the affective impact of

state terror be offset or transformed.

There are precedents for responses to moral panics, which involve a

certain intensity of action being ‘normalised’, so that the response of

moral panic becomes increasingly unavailable or is denied an effect. The

German autonomes provide, at their peak, the main example: in the early

period, moral panic was in full flow, and activists were often given

long jail sentences; as the movement grew, it became impossible to

suppress, and moral panic was actually reeled back, with sentences

reduced and previously suppressed activities tolerated. A crucial aspect

of this movement was that any act of repression, from evicting a squat

to jailing activists, was met with militant protests or direct action. A

similar effect might be achieved if, for instance, convictions of

activists, deaths on protests, or incidents of ‘kettling’ led to

sabotage sometime in the following weeks. If the link was clear, a cost

of repression would be established.

The danger of massacre

When things get serious, the army occupies the terrain. Whether... it

engages in combat is less certain... a bloodbath... for now is no more

than a threat, a bit like the threat of using nuclear weapons.

— The Invisible Committee

The one remaining rule of engagement, that the state normally refrain

from lethal force, is rather anomalous. It does not seem to prohibit

occasional statist murders which can be passed off as situationally

justified or as aberrations by individual bad cops (from Carlo Giuliani

to Ian Tomlinson to Alexis Grigoropoulos, to the Kent and Jackson State

shootings). But it is very noticeable that the state has not so far

adopted a policy of large-scale shooting into crowds. This is a

historical and geographical exception. Massacre was a normal

accompaniment of state repression of insurrection in the nineteenth

century and perhaps up to the Second World War – think of the massacres

at the Paris Commune, the 1848 insurrection, the 1918–19 German council

rising, the Haymarket Martyrs, and various labour disputes in the US.

And while massacre is not exactly normal in most of the global South, it

certainly happens with disturbing regularity. 60 people were killed

during the El Alto ‘gas war’, to take just one example; think too of

Acteal, of Bougainville, of retaliations in West Papua, of the

Argentinazo of 2001, the Peruvian Amazon protests, events in Kashmir and

Palestine, not to mention that twenty years ago, some regimes (such as

Indonesia) used massacre as a matter of course at every minor protest or

dispute.

Why is the state holding back? It is impossible to imagine for a moment

that it cares about the lives of insurrectionists or about human rights.

Most probably, the state has realised that massacre has unwanted

effects. Even with the current psyops dominance, a massacre generates

‘bad press’. It produces further waves of protest, as people mark the

funerals of the dead or turn against the police. It risks the emergence

of armed opposition (the long IRA campaign, for instance, was caused by

the Bloody Sunday massacre). It shows the world that social war is going

on. The allergy to ‘violence’, the Victorian attitude to it, is notably

absent in much of the global South. The current system is premised on

the denial of social war, the denial that an adversary exists. It is

also sometimes argued that recourse to massacre defeats the point of

power, which is to rule, not to destroy: in showing that the state can

crush resistance only by failing to govern, by recognising that the

spirit of resistance cannot be defeated, the state effectively admits

its own illegitimacy, its basis in violence. On this view, a spirit of

resistance can always render a state powerless (Routledge and Simons,

493–5). Understanding this is crucial, because a successful

insurrection, in which ‘less-lethal’ weapons had failed, would push the

state to the point where massacre would be considered as an option. The

state will only use the option if it believes it will work. The way to

make it certain it will not work, is to make the state certain that it

will not stop the insurrection this way, that it will only inflame it

further. The Argentinazo and the ‘gas war’ were largely successful, in

spite of the state turning to such measures. During the Gujjar protests

in India, the police were given orders to stop killing protesters,

apparently when protesters started responding in kind against police.

The state’s ‘zero option’ is not undefeatable. A situation needs to be

created in which its activation would be suicide for the state.

The danger of state conspiracy

The basis of insurrection is affective and immediate. It is thus

dependent on how people feel. People either get angry about something or

they don’t. People either feel empowered by an act or they don’t.

Insurrectionists can’t conspire to produce effects the way the state

can. The state can do things in sneaky, instrumental ways which minimise

the risk it faces. For instance, it can realise cumulatively, or under

the veil of recuperation, things that would spark revolt as one-off

measures.

As a result of its instrumental basis, the state can also conspire to

change the ‘rules of engagement’ almost overnight. There is a frequent

problem that, just as some issue is about to be won, just as Huntington

Life Sciences is about to close or summit protests are successfully

holding cities, the state makes a move which can only seem unfair,

altering the entire situation in which the conflict occurs. Bush

famously boasted that his opponents analysed reality, but, being driven

by belief, he could simply change it at will. While his opponents are

busy catching up, he’ll change it again. It is necessary to be prepared

for such moves. At present, they have a highly decomposing effect on

activist movements, particularly when repression is ratcheted up (think

of the impact of Genoa and its aftermath in Italy, or the effect of the

post-911 period in America). Being aware of such problems can help avert

them, but it is also necessary to keep active on the current terrain,

and not hold back out of fear that the state will make such moves. It is

hard to come up with answers as to how to respond to this risk, but

three possibilities come to mind. Firstly, that a capacity to respond

overwhelmingly to escalation, held in reserve, could serve to ward it

off. Secondly, that enabling the state to make other moves of partial

retreat can make such options of escalation less attractive. The risk in

any such preparations is that they could also enable recuperation.

Thirdly, enacting similar alterations of the ‘rules of engagement’ on

one’s own side can disempower the state’s own ability to change the

rules. Insurrection needs to stay unpredictable, and innovate

constantly.

Recuperation

no guaranteed income... will be able to lay the foundation of a New

Deal, a new pact, a new peace. The social feeling has already evaporated

too much for that.

— The Invisible Committee

Where repression fails, there is always recuperation as an alternative.

It is a quieter, less obvious way of defeating insurrections.

Recuperation is an ambiguous response. It often involves real problems

being addressed, sometimes even with the same responses which might

occur in a liberated context, and with the recognition or tolerance of

autonomous spaces. Yet it addresses such problems one by one, in such a

way as to keep the system in place and hence to keep generating

problems.

Recuperation follows a common pattern. The state will decide, in the

event of defeat, to tolerate the costs of autonomy, because they are

less than the costs of repression. But it will also try, simultaneously,

to alter the future strategic balance by decomposing the basis for

resistance, usually by drawing people inside on the margins. There is

thus a common pattern of the state conceding something (squatters’

rights in Germany, Aboriginal autonomy in Australia, a halt to

road-building in Britain...), waiting for the struggle to abate, and

then attacking again 20 or 30 years later.

The main threat posed by periods of recuperation is that the networks

sustained by resistance fall apart, and the emotional states arising

from struggle become harder to sustain. It can be difficult to retain

social composition at times when recuperation is at work. There is a

tendency for the number of activists to decrease, and for people to be

less angry. Previous partial victories, such as the creation of

autonomous spaces, then become vulnerable to a backlash after a period

of time. Ways need to be found to ‘lock in’ such victories during

periods of downturn in struggle. This could be achieved by deepening

resistance in everyday life, or by radicalising the break with dominant

ways of seeing.

In place of a conclusion: crisis

What makes the crisis desirable is that in the crisis the environment

ceases to be the environment. We are forced to reestablish contact,

albeit a potentially fatal one, with what’s there, to rediscover the

rhythms of reality... [of] something to inhabit

— The Invisible Committee

Reconnecting with such gestures [of defying the state and making do with

what’s available], buried under years of normalized life, is the only

practicable means of not sinking down with the world

— The Invisible Committee

There is a clinically dead civilization... only decision will rid us of

the corpse

— The Invisible Committee

Capitalism is in crisis. Maybe this is one of capitalism’s periodic

cyclical downturns. Or maybe it is something deeper, a crisis of the

dominant system, connected to the ecological crisis, to the end of

abundant energy supplies, to ecological exhaustion. The world-systems

analyst Sing Chew suggests that civilisations eventually collapse from

ecological exhaustion, when they run out of resources to exploit. After

the collapse, there follow ‘dark ages’, which Chew, as a progressivist,

tends to fear – but which for us, could be periods of hope. In ‘dark

ages’, diffuse power proliferates, populations disperse from centralised

spaces, local knowledge predominates over global knowledge.

Crisis creates opportunities for rebuilding. The Coming Insurrection

refers to the experience of New Orleans: crisis created a space in which

accumulated practical knowledges were deployed. This suggests something

important: recomposition is only ever a crisis away. It has to be

actively prevented by keeping the lid on the pressure-kettle, by

actively decomposing. It reappears the moment a crisis makes the lid

come off. They argue that movements are strongest when they take

advantage for the opportunities for self-organisation created by moments

of suspension of normality – from Islamic parties providing para-state

services in marginal zones to left parties exploiting crises. The

implication is that gaps created by crises can also be filled by

activist bands, recomposing other ways of living.

Hence, we have a range of paths forward for insurrection, a range of

possible futures. Certain strategies seem likely to proliferate. In

particular, the warding-off of repression is likely to produce new

strategies, and subsistence orientations could well re-emerge.

Insurrections should be thought of in terms of counterposing a social

network based on bands, swarms and affinity to a social system based on

hierarchies. It is also a struggle of expressive against instrumental

conceptions. The success of insurrection depends on the prevalence and

intensity of diffuse power, counterposed to concentrated power. The

current crisis provides a potential opportunity to expand spaces of

autonomy, but certain fundamental problems would have to be addressed

before Northern movements can sustain an insurrection indefinitely.

Whether these problems will be addressed, remains to be seen.