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Title: Insurrection vs. Organization
Author: Peter Gelderloos
Date: 2007
Language: en
Topics: critique, insurrectionist, organization
Source: Retrieved on June 17, 2009 from http://mostlywater.org/insurrection_vs_organization_reflections_on_a_pointless_schism

Peter Gelderloos

Insurrection vs. Organization

Reflections from Greece on a Pointless Schism

“I consider it terrible that our movement, everywhere, is degenerating

into a swamp of petty personal quarrels, accusations, and

recriminations. There is too much of this rotten thing going on,

particularly in the last couple of years.”

— out of a letter from Alexander Berkman to Senya Fleshin and Mollie

Steimer, in 1928. Emma Goldman adds the postscript: “Dear children. I

agree entirely with Sasha. I am sick at heart over the poison of

insinuations, charges, accusations in our ranks. If that will not stop

there is no hope for a revival of our movement.”

Fortunately, most anarchists in the US avoid any ideological orthodoxy

and shun sectarian divides. Unfortunately, most of us also seem to avoid

serious strategizing. Those who do take this on tend more towards one or

another orthodoxy, and reading the pages of the country’s anarchist

journals an outsider would get the impression that the movement here is

indeed sectarian. In fact there are many controversies, and no clear

tectonic splits, but one divide that is growing more sharp is the same

one that runs through much of Europe, the debate between insurrection

and organization. The former overlap with post-Leftist anarchists, the

latter are often anarchist-communists. Here in Greece, where I’ve spent

the past couple weeks, the divide is very strong between insurrectionary

anarchists associated with the Black Bloc, and the heavily organized

Antiauthoritarian Movement (AK, in Greek).

In this and most other controversies I see anarchists becoming embroiled

in, there seems to be a lingering affinity for certain Western values

that are at the heart of the state and capitalism: a worldview based on

dichotomies, and a logical structure that is startlingly monotheistic.

For example, when there are two different strategies for revolution,

many of us do not see this as two paths for different groups of people

to walk, taking their own while also trying to understand the path of

the Other, but as evidence that somebody must be Wrong (and it is almost

certainly the Other).

Those of us who were raised with white privilege were trained to be very

bad listeners, and it’s a damn shame that we still haven’t absorbed the

emphasis on pluralism taught by the Magonistas and indigenous

anarchists. I would love to blame our current disputes on the internet,

because clearly it’s so easy to be an asshole to somebody and sabotage

any healthy, two-way conversation of differences if you’ve already

abstracted them to words on a glowing screen, but schisms are much older

than telecommunications (though no doubt our heavy reliance on the

internet makes it more likely that disagreements will turn into

counterproductive squabbles).

Call me naive but I think that a large part of the infighting can be

chalked up to bad communication and a fundamentally monotheistic

worldview more than to the actual substance of the differing strategies.

No doubt, the substance is important. There are for example some

necessary critiques of how the Left manages rebellion that have been

circulated by (I hesitate to use easy labels but for convenience sake

I’ll call them:) insurrectionary anarchists, but even if certain people

have figured out all the right answers nothing will stop them from going

the way of the first anarchist movement if we don’t all learn better

ways of communicating, and understanding, our differences.

In Greece, the schism between insurrectionists and the Antiauthoritarian

Movement has even led to physical fighting. There are people on both

sides who have done fucked up things. The Black Bloc threw some molotovs

at police in the middle of a melee, burning some of the protestors.

People with AK bullied and beat up anarchists whom they suspected of

stealing some computers from the university during an event AK

organized, getting them in trouble. In response, some insurrectionists

burned down the Antiauthoritarian Movement’s offices in Thessaloniki. If

we generalize, the stereotypes quickly step in to assure us that the

other side is the enemy: “those disorganized insurrectionists are even

throwing molotovs at other protestors!” or “those organizationalists are

acting like the police of the movement.” In each case, we can quickly

see a preconstructed image of the lazy, chaotic insurrectionist, or the

practically Marxist authoritarian so-called anarchist, and what we’re

doing is abstracting the actual people involved.

I don’t want to suggest that certain or all of these groups don’t have

serious flaws they need to work on. I don’t even believe both sides are

equally to blame. In fact I tend to get into pretty nasty throw-downs

myself with people who prefer some bullshit, hippy “I’m okay, you’re

okay, everyone’s okay” form of conflict resolution that avoids criticism

in favour of an appearance of peace. But in Thessaloniki and Athena I

met people from both sides, and most of them were very nice, people whom

I would love to have as neighbors after we smashed the state together.

Some of them badmouthed the other group, some of them were really trying

to make peace, also talking critically to members of their own group who

had wronged someone from the other side. On the whole, though, they are

a minority, and the divide grows. Posters for a presentation I was

giving in Athena got ripped down because the social center hosting me

was associated with AK (though the people actually organizing the event

and putting me up were not members, and tried to stay in the middle).

The squat I stayed at in Thessaloniki was occupied by people aligned

with the insurrectionists, and several of them told me not to mix with

the AK people in Athena.

I might classify those problems as peculiar to Greece if I had not seen

similar divides in Germany and Bulgaria, heard invective from the same

kind of infighting in France spill over into the Montreal Anarchist

Bookfair, and read plenty of these arguments in the anarchist press of

the UK and US. Since the US is where I’m from and where I’ll return, I

will focus on the schism as it appears there. Because most US anarchists

seem to focus on their day to day activities, I think many have not

taken sides in this schism, are not even aware of it. So to a certain

extent it exists as a theoretical disagreement, without yet the

improbable weight of strident personalities thrown into the fray (well,

some people from Anarchy magazine or NEFAC might say otherwise), fixing

intransigent frontlines by virtue of the fact that an ideology

personified is all the more stubborn. So we have a greater opportunity,

for now, to deal with the problem theoretically.

As a sort of appendix, I’ve included critiques of four essays from the

two sides of the debate, but first I will generalize what I see as the

strengths and weaknesses of each. Insurrectionists make a number of

vital contributions, perhaps the most important being that the time is

now, that the distinction between building alternatives and attacking

capitalism is a false one. The critique of leftist bureaucracy as a

recuperating force, the state within the movement that constantly brings

rebellion back into the fold and preserves capitalism, is also right-on,

though often the word “organization” is used instead of bureaucracy,

which can confuse things because to many people even an affinity group

is also a type of organization. Or it can lead to a certain

fundamentalism, as some people do intend to excommunicate all formal

organizations, even if they are understood by the participants as a

temporary tool and not a “one big union.”

The insurrectionists also nurture a number of weaknesses. Their frequent

criticisms of “activism” tend to be superficial and vague, reflecting

more an inability to come to terms with their personal failures (or

observed failures) in other modes of action, than any improved

theoretical understanding, practically guaranteeing that the faults they

encountered in activism will be replicated or simply inverted in

whatever they end up doing as insurrectionists. (This point will be

developed more in the appendix). There is also a certain lack of clarity

in insurrectionist suggestions for action. Insurrectionists tend to do a

good job in making a point of learning from people who are not

anarchists, drawing on recent struggles in Mexico, Argentina, Algeria,

and so on. However this also allows them to blur the difference between

what is insurrectionary and what is insurrectionist. Much as most of

them forswear ideology, by mining historical examples of insurrection to

extract and distill a common theory and prescription for action, they

earn that “ist” and distinguish what is insurrectionary from what is

insurrectionist. They have perceptively grasped that what is

insurrectionary in a social struggle is often the most effective, most

honest, and most anarchist element of the struggle; but by seeing

through an insurrectionist lens they discount or ignore all the other

elements of the struggle to which the insurrectionary is tied, even, in

many cases, on which it is based. In this instance the “ist” carries

with it that monotheistic insistence that any elements reducible to

another “ism” must be incorrect. So we are told to open our eyes when

the people in Oaxaca burn buses and defend autonomous spaces, but close

our eyes when the strikes carried out by the teachers’ union give birth

in large part to the insurrection, when the rebels choose to organize

themselves formally or above ground for a certain purpose.

Insurrectionists call for action inside or outside social movements,

which I agree with. People should fight for themselves, for their own

reasons and own lives, even if they have to fight alone. This is, after

all, how many social movements exist at the beginning, before they are

recognized as social movements. To contradict a criticism I have seen

from some more organizationally minded anarchists, it is not at all

vanguardist to take action first or even attempt to escalate actions,

because fighting for your own reasons or attempting to inspire other

people to action by example is quite the opposite of vanguardism. In

fact a common sign of a vanguardist is one who objects to other people

running ahead of the flock (and consequently ahead of the flock’s

vanguard). However this insurrectionist stance is sometimes accompanied

by a disparaging view of social movements, as though any movement is

inherently authoritarian, inherently bureaucratic, inherently

recuperative (in Green Anarchy I even read one fairly silly call for

“momentum” instead of movements, though if the author of this piece was

doing anything besides redefining “movement” as “the bad sort of

movement” and defining everything else as “momentum” it wasn’t very

clear, because of that preference for words instead of meanings

fashionable among many [anti]political writers). But we should not

underestimate the importance of social movements. I recently had the

opportunity to spend five months among anarchists in the former Soviet

bloc, primarily in Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria. Unanimously, the

anarchists I met told me that the socialist dictatorships had destroyed

and subsequently prevented any social movements, and left a legacy of

people who hate and distrust the government (many of them are also

dissatisfied with capitalism) but who also have no tradition or

inclination to trust and participate in social movements, or even

cooperate with their neighbors. The anarchist situation there is far

bleaker than it is in the US: the anarchists are alone, isolated,

without any clear starting point for action, much less insurrection. One

Romanian anarchist said organizing in his home country was like going to

a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and trying to build

anarchy. (In Poland and Czech [Republic], the anarchist movement is much

stronger, and these are also the countries that developed dissident

social movements in the ‘80s. Incidentally the dictatorship in Romania

was toppled not by a movement but by an insurrection that was largely

stage-managed — these too can be recuperated). In light of this, it

seems a glaring absence that insurrectionists tend to avoid actions or

analysis focused on building up social movement (if by movement we only

mean a large informal network or population, that may include formal

organizations, and that constitutes itself as a social force in response

to perceived problems, initially acting outside the scope of previously

routinized and institutionalized forms of social activity).

Insurrectionist suggestions for action tend to revolve around creating

autonomous spaces that support us, allow us to practice communal,

anarchist living now, and serve as a base for waging war against the

state. This is as good as any other singular anarchist strategy, in fact

it’s a good deal better than a few, but also like the other strategies

in circulation it has already been defeated by the state.

Insurrectionists in the US don’t even need to use that typical American

excuse of amnesia; in this case, isolationism is to blame. The largely

anarchist squatters’ movement that thrived across Western Europe in the

‘70s and ‘80s (and shadows of which still survive), including the German

Autonomen, already attempted — in a very serious way — the same strategy

that US insurrectionists are now circulating without any differences

serious enough to be considered a revision or lesson from past failures.

And they are likely, if they ever get a half of the momentum the

Europeans had, which under present circumstances is improbable, to end

up exactly the same way: an isolated, drug-addicted wasteland of

ghettoized subculture frozen in a self-parodying gesture of defiance

(yes, this is a pessimistic view, and one that discounts the several

wonderful squats and social centers that are still hanging on, but I

think insurrectionists would agree there’s no point in looking for the

bright side of a movement that has come to accommodate capitalism). It

goes something like this: the state and the culture industry isolate

them (operating almost like Daoist martial artists, pushing them in the

direction they’re already going, only harder than they intended), by

many accounts flood in addictive drugs, which come to fill a new need as

the stress mounts from the prolonged state of siege brought about by

frequent attacks from police; not everyone can live under those

conditions, especially older folks and those with children [who] drop

out or turn to more escapist, less combative forms. The militants stay

within their circle of barricades for so long that in-crowd aesthetics

and mentalities entrench, they are, after all, at war with the rest of

the world by now. Eventually the rebels lose any real connections with

the outside world, and any possibility to spread the struggle. Thus

weakened and lacking external solidarity, half the squats are evicted,

one by one, and the others become exhausted and give up the fight.

Because of their proximity to that history, a particular group of French

anarchists could not just ignore the weaknesses of the strategy. This

group, the authors of Appel (Call), the most intelligent and insightful

insurrectionist (if I can give it a label it has not claimed for itself)

tract I have come across, hit the nail on the head when, advancing a

more developed and lively form of this strategy, they pointed out that

the squatters’ movement died because it stopped strategizing (and thus

stopped growing and changing, stagnated). However, more than one nail is

needed to hold the strategy together. Stagnation was the likely outcome

of the squatters’ movement due to its very structure, and the consequent

structure of state repression. The falling off of strategizing was a

probable result of the strategy itself.

And what about the organizationalists? First I should note that this is

a rather amorphous group, and few people actually identify themselves as

organizationalists. A good part of them are the old or classical

anarchists — anarchist-communists whose strategy rests in part on

creating a strong federation of anarchists, or syndicalists building

anarchist labor unions, or otherwise working in the labor movement. Some

in this camp are social anarchists who prefer an involvement in

mainstream society to waging anything that resembles war (class or

insurrectionary). More than a few are anarchist activists working above

ground with some organization around a particular issue, perhaps without

a clear long-term strategy, who have been swept in with the others by

insurrectionist criticisms. I will focus on the classical anarchists,

because they have more clearly articulated strategies (this is not at

all to criticize the others, after all no strategy can be better than a

simplistic, dogmatic one). Hopefully the criticisms I make there will be

informative for all anarchists who consider the use of formal

organizations.

On the one hand, the emphasis of these anarchists on building social

movements and being accessible to outsiders is well placed. Clearly a

major problem of US anarchists is isolation, and organizing in

above-ground groups around problems that are apparent to broader

populations can help overcome this isolation. It is extremely helpful

when there are types of anarchist action people can get involved in that

are relatively easy, that don’t require a plunge straight from

mainstream life into uncompromising war against the system (to go off on

a tangent, insurrectionists often praise the replicability of certain

actions, but I wonder how many started off as activism-oriented

anarchists and how many were insurrectionists from the beginning. In

other words, how replicable is insurrectionist anarchism for most

people?)

The communication and coordination that, say, a federation can provide

can be helpful in certain instances. In Europe many of the prisoner

support organizations that anarchists of all kinds rely on are organized

as federations. Organizations can also build and escalate the struggle.

For example, the actions of an anarchist labor union can make anarchism

accessible to more people, by providing an immediately apprehendable way

to get involved, a forum for spreading ideas, and a demonstration of the

sincerity and practicality of anarchists winning improvements in the

short-term. I would also wager that people who have gotten some practice

in a union, and learned first-hand about strikes for example, are more

likely to launch a wildcat strike than people who have never been part

of a union.

An approach that relies heavily on formal organizations also has a

number of weaknesses. Since these weaknesses have appeared and

reappeared in no uncertain terms for over a century, it’s a damn shame

to have to repeat them, but unfortunately there seems to be the need.

Democratic organizations with any form of representation can quickly

become bureaucratic and authoritarian. Direct democratic organizations

still run the risk of being dominated by political animals (as Bob Black

pointed out in more detail in Anarchy After Leftism). And there is

something problematic in the first instance [when] a society separates

the economic from the political and creates a limited space for

decision-making wherein decisions have more authority than those

decisions and communications enacted elsewhere in social life.

Organizations should be temporary, tied to the need they were formed to

address, and they should be overlapping and pluralistic. Otherwise, they

develop interests of their own survival and growth that can easily

conflict with the needs of people. This organizational self-interest has

been used time and time again to control and recuperate radical social

movements. It should long ago have become obvious that using formal

organizations is risky, something best done with caution. Yet some

organizational anarchists even persist in believing that all anarchists

should join a single organization. I have never seen an argument for how

this could possibly be effective, and the question is irrelevant since

it is neither possible nor would it be liberating. Voluntary association

is a meaningless principle if you expect everyone to join a particular

organization, even if it is perfect. But I’ve still heard a number of

anarchist-communists use that obnoxious line, “they’re not real

anarchists,” on the basis that these not-anarchists did not want to work

with them. The interest of working together in an effective

organization, especially if it is singular (as in, The Only Anarchist

Group You’ll Ever Need to Join!), encourages conformity of ideas among

members, which can cause them to waste a great deal of time coming up

with the Correct Line and can make them a pain in the ass for other

folks to work with. (The 1995 pamphlet “The Role of the Revolutionary

Organization” by the Anarchist Communist Federation is very clear that

they see theirs as only a single one of many organizations working in

the movement, and they renounce the aim of any kind of organizational

hegemony; perhaps the problem is the lack of a deep recognition that

these many organizations may approach, relate to, or conceive of the

movement in entirely different ways).

Hopefully by now it is clear how these two tendencies can cooperate for

greater effect. First of all, by abandoning that horrible pretension

that just because the Other disagrees with our point of view, they have

nothing valid to offer. It follows from this that we recognize different

people will prefer to be active in different ways, and in fact different

temperaments draw people towards different anarchist tendencies before

theory ever comes into it. Some people will never want to go to your

boring meetings or organize in their workplace (they won’t even want to

have a workplace). Some people will never want to set foot in your

nasty-assed squat or live in fear that the state will take away their

kids because of the lifestyle of the parents (or they won’t even want to

subject their kids to the stress of a life of constant warfare). And

guess what? That’s fine and natural. If. If we can cover each other’s

backs. Above ground organizers who build support for the

insurrectionists, who stand by those masked terrorists instead of

denouncing them, will create a stronger movement. Insurrectionists who

carry out the waves of sabotage the organizers are too exposed to call

for, who keep in touch with the outside world and also keep the

organizers honest and aware of the broader picture, the horizon of

possibility, will create a stronger movement. Organizationalists who

exclude the insurrectionists help them isolate themselves.

Insurrectionists who see the organizers as the enemy help them

recuperate the struggle. These are self-fulfilling prophecies.

Insurrectionists can be helped by the movement-building and social

resources of the organizationalists, who in turn can be helped by the

more radical perspective and sometimes stronger tactics, the dreams put

into practice, of the insurrectionists.

Because the US anarchist movement often looks to Greece for inspiration,

especially the insurrectionists, I find it interesting that the Greek

experience seems to show the two approaches to be complementary, even if

the organizations involved are bitter enemies. In the [U.S.] we usually

hear about the Greeks when they attack a police station or burn

surveillance cameras; basically every week. But we do not hear about the

foundation that makes this possible. For starters Greece enjoys a more

anarchic culture. Family ties are stronger than state loyalties (Greek

anarchists were shocked to learn that a number of prisoners in the US

were turned in by relatives), there is widespread distrust of authority,

and many people still remember the military dictatorship and understand

the potential necessity of fighting with cops. US culture is not nearly

so supportive of our efforts, so we need to figure out how to influence

the broader culture so it will be more fertile for anarchy.

The state has been doing the opposite for centuries. I couldn’t tell how

much the anarchists in Greece influenced the surrounding culture and how

much they just took advantage of it, but there were many clearly

conscious attempts to influence the social situation. A great deal of

activism goes into opposing the European Union immigration regime,

working with and supporting immigrants, and the squatted social centers

play a role in this. Such work also helps make the anarchist movement

more diverse. Labor organizing plays a role in Greece, though I learned

much less about this while I was there. In Athena the foundation that

keeps much of the local anarchist movement alive and kicking is a

neighbourhood — Exarchia. This entire quarter, located in the center of

the capital, has the feel of a semi-autonomous zone. You can spraypaint

on the walls in broad daylight with little risk (wheatpasting is even

safer), you see more anarchist propaganda than commercial advertising,

and you rarely encounter cops. In fact you’re likely to find nervous

squads of riot police standing guard along the neighbourhood’s borders

(nervous because it’s not uncommon for them to be attacked). The

autonomous spaces, the destruction of surveillance cameras, the Molotov

attacks on cops are all characteristic of the insurrectionary approach.

But also important to the rebellious makeup of Exarchia are the language

classes for immigrants organized by social centers, the friendly

relationships with neighbors (something the Black Bloc types don’t

always excel at cultivating) and even, curiously, some anarchist-owned

businesses. In the US, the phrase “anarchist business” would be scoffed

at contemptuously, though one would also avoid applying it to anarchist

bookstores, which are recognized as legitimate. But in Exarchia (and

this was also the case in Berlin and Hamburg) the anarchist movement was

bolstered by a number of anarchist-owned establishments, particularly

bars. I think the rationale is fairly solid. If some anarchists need to

get jobs in the meantime, and this is certainly more the case in the US

than in most of Europe, it can be better to own your own bar that you

open as a resource to the movement than to work at a Starbucks.

Likewise, if anarchists are going to gather at a bar every Friday night

(and this could also apply to movie theaters and a number of other

things), why not go to one that supports a friend, and supports the

movement (as an event space and even a source of donations)? It can also

provide experience building collectives, and edge out the local

bourgeoisie who would otherwise be a reactionary force in a

semi-autonomous neighbourhood. I sure as hell ain’t advocating “buying

out the capitalists” as a revolutionary strategy, but in Exarchia and

elsewhere anarchist businesses, in this strictly limited sense, have

played a role in creating a stronger movement.

Most important, if we want to consider the strength of Greek anarchists,

has been the student movement. For a year, university students (along

with professors and even many high school students) have been on strike,

protesting a neoliberal education reform that would corporatize

universities, privatize some of them, and end the official tradition of

asylum that forbids police to set foot on Greek campuses. At the most

superficial level, this student movement has allowed the anarchists many

more opportunities to fight with the police. Getting a little deeper, it

is perhaps the social conflict in Greece with the most potential to lead

to an insurrectionary situation, similar in some regards to Paris in

1968. A strictly organizational strategy, whether of the typical

syndicalist or anarchist-communist varieties, will be too weak, and too

tame. Another organization will just be a competitor with the communist

parties, and will have a conservative effect on the passions of the

students, who show the tendency to blow up and act out quite ahead of

the plans and predictions of the organizations, which are the ones

getting the heat from the authorities. A strictly insurrectionary

approach will isolate the anarchists from the student movement, who will

increasingly view them as parasites who only come to fight with the

cops. Without the involvement of an anarchist perspective, nothing will

stop the political parties from controlling the movement. And anarchists

are unlikely to gain much respect in the student movement if they

disdain working for the short-term goal of defeating this education law.

Putting aside the dogma about reformism, everyone should be able to see

the tragic tactical loss anarchists would suffer if the universities had

their asylum privilege revoked (right now, people can attack a group of

cops and then run back into the university and be safe), and of course a

fierce movement using direct action is much more likely to dissuade the

government from putting this education reform into effect than a passive

movement dominated by party politics.

By fighting the police, taking over the streets, and squatting the

universities, anarchists can inspire people, ignite passions, capture

the national attention and raise the fear, which everyone immediately

smells and is intoxicated by, that things can change. By spreading

anarchist ideas, turning the universities into free schools, setting up

occupation committees, organizing strikes, and preventing the domination

of the student assemblies by the political parties, other anarchists can

provide a bridge for more people to be involved, make overtures for

solidarity to other sectors of society, and strengthen the movement that

has provided a basis for the possibility of change. If these two types

of anarchists work together, the insurrectionary ones are less likely to

be disowned as outsiders and isolated, thrown to the police, because

they have allies in the very middle of the movement. And when the state

approaches the organized anarchists in the movement in an attempt to

negotiate, they are less likely to give in because they have friends

outside the organization holding them accountable and reminding them

that power is in the streets.

Similar lessons on the potential compatibility of these two approaches

can be drawn from anarchist history in Spain of ’36 or France of ’68.

Both of these episodes ultimately showed that insurrection is a higher

form of struggle, that waiting for the right moment is reactionary, that

bureaucratic organizations such as the CNT or the French students’ union

end up collaborating with power and recuperating the movement. But what

is easier to miss is that insurrectionary tactics were not the major

force in creating the necessary foundation. The CNT and the French

students’ union were both instrumental in building the revolution (the

former by spreading anarchist ideas, launching strikes and

insurrections, building connections of solidarity, preparing workers to

take over the economy, and defeating the fascist coup in much of Spain;

the latter by disseminating radical critiques [at least by certain

branches], organizing the student strike and occupation, and organizing

assemblies for collective decision making). The failing was when they

did not recognize that their usefulness had passed, that as vital as

they were those organizations were not the revolution. (This is not at

all to say there should be a preparatory period, during which

insurrectionary tactics are premature. Clandestine attacks at any stage

can help build a fierce movement. Waiting to attack until the movement

is large leaves you with a large, weak movement, with no experience in

the tactics that will be necessary to grow or even survive the mounting

repression. It might even leave you with a large, pacifist movement,

which would just be awful.)

Between living in a squat or living in an apartment and organizing a

tenants’ association, there are inevitably going to be people who

strongly prefer one or the other, whether or not we bring theory into

the picture. This should be a good thing, because both of these actions

can help bring about an anarchist world. When anarchists give up our

narrow dogmatism and embrace the complexity that exists in any

revolutionary process, we will [be] closer.

Because I guess I’m not really happy with a happy ending, I’ll conclude

by pointing out some problems that I think are common to both

tendencies. I’ve already mentioned the monotheistic mentality that leads

to schisms within the movement, but especially in the US this exists on

a larger scale as an inability of most anarchists to work in a healthy

way with those outside the movement. This has been a failure to figure

out what makes other Americans tick, what they are passionate about,

what sphere of their lives is illegal, under what circumstances they

will rebel, and how to engage them on this. There is no simple answer,

and the complex answers will differ between regions, communities, and

individuals, but I think most anarchists of all stripes have stuck to

self-referential and repetitive actions rather than plunging into this

tedious work. Granted, people in the US aren’t the easiest population

for anarchists to engage; our culture encourages conformity, isolation,

and the Protestant work ethic more strongly than most others. But we

should take this as a challenge and get on with it.

The inability to work well with others is also the manifestation of

another Western value that contradicts anarchism more blatantly than

monotheism, and it is the Risk board mentality, that ingrained view of

the world from above, with ourselves positioned as the architect or

general. It is the understanding that you change society by forcing

people to organize themselves in a certain way. The more classical

anarchists put themselves at one extreme, thus occasioning many of the

criticisms that they are authoritarian or Marxist, by pushing a program

or insisting that revolution only occurs when people see the world

through the narrow lens of class consciousness. The insurrectionists

have caught a whiff of this and they go to the other extreme by

forswearing activism and to a large extent avoiding contact with people

who are much different from them. That way they don’t have to worry

about forcing their views on anyone. It should be apparent that both of

these approaches rest on the assumption that contact between people who

are different must result in a missionary relationship, with one

converting the other. The idea of mutual influence, of organizing as

building relationships with people rather than organizing as recruiting

people, is generally absent.

In my view, the largest problem shared by both the insurrectionary and

organizational camp, and most other anarchists, is whiteness: and even

more than the failure of white anarchists to solve the mystifying

problem of checking our white privilege, I mean intentionally preserving

a movement narrative that tells the stories and contains the values of

white people, and refusing to recognize the importance of white

supremacy as a system of oppression every bit as important as the state,

capitalism, or patriarchy.

Different white anarchists find different ways of minimizing race,

depending on their analysis. But a common thread seems to be that

perennial colonial belief that for salvation — or hell, just for us to

get along, the Other must become like me. On the one hand, this could be

the insistence that white supremacy is nothing but a tool and invention

of capitalism, perfectly explainable in economic terms, and that for

people of color to liberate themselves, they must surrender whatever

particular experience and history the world’s ever present reaction to

their skin color may have given them, and identify primarily as workers,

with nothing but fictive barriers standing between them and the white

anarchists sitting in their union halls waiting for a little diversity

to wander in. The minimization of race can also mask itself behind a

misuse of the recognition that race is an invention without

physiological justification. I’ve heard many anarchists take this

further to say that race does not exist. I imagine this could come as a

slap in the face to a great many of the world’s people, it certainly

contradicts my own lived experiences, and it is also a supremely idiotic

statement. By definition something that does not exist cannot cause

results in the real world. I think most anarchists who make this

statement would be horrified by someone who denied the existence of

racism, but they must be using another kind of denial, that which

accompanies abusive relations, to not see this is exactly what they have

just done. (Other anarchists take a more dishonest but unassailable

route by simple denouncing as “identity politics” any excessive

preoccupation with race). Race is a harmful categorization that must be

abolished, and like capitalism or the state it cannot be wished away or

solved by exclusion from one’s analysis any more than AIDS or the scars

of a beating can be wished away. The liberal “color blind” mentality to

which so many anarchists adhere can only be a way of prolonging white

supremacy.

Until white anarchists of all stripes allow — no, encourage — anarchism

to adapt to non-white stories, anarchism is likely to remain about as

relevant to most people of color as voting is to immigrants. And as long

as anarchists continue to view differences in the same way the state and

civilization we oppose has taught us to, we will never encompass the

breadth of perspective and participation we need to win.

Comments on a couple articles from each side of the schism

The two insurrectionist essays I’ll touch on are “Rogues Against the

State” by crudo (

anarchistnews.org

) from Modesto Anarchist (California), and “Fire at Midnight,

Destruction at Dawn: Sabotage and Social War” (

www.geocities.com

) from A Murder of Crows, out of Seattle. Both of these are well

written, thoughtful pieces, and neither in itself is terribly sectarian.

But they both contain weaknesses, and I think they both could have been

more useful if they had not set themselves in opposition to another way

of doing things.

“Fire at Midnight” advocates sabotage carried out inside of or outside

of social struggles, without spending much time criticizing other

methods. However, the article makes it clear that “We must be willing to

examine and scrutinize the methods and strategies of the past so that we

do not follow in the footsteps of history’s failed attempts at

revolution. To this end we will focus on a method that is as powerful as

it is easy to put into practice: sabotage.” However, it does not really

discuss how to build the social struggles they acknowledge are necessary

for the total abolition of capitalism, and I think most readers would

get the impression that sabotage itself is meant to build up such a

struggle. Towards the end the article does criticize more organized

forms of resistance, though it chooses its targets carefully, in a way

that borders on setting up a strawman argument because the effect is

that one must either be part of a vanguard party, an institutionalized

group that always counsels waiting, or one must take part in autonomous

and anonymous, insurrectionary tactics like sabotage. To the author,

nothing in the middle is worth mentioning.

The effectiveness of sabotage is exaggerated. In fact, in most of the

examples mentioned in the article, the people using sabotage lose

(though it almost seems they are celebrated for maintaining a sort of

purity throughout the process). Let’s look at two of the cases where

people won. One is the campaign against Shell Oil and its involvement

with South African apartheid. The article points out that anonymous acts

of sabotage throughout Europe and North America against Shell cost them

much more money than the boycott did. This is an important fact that

demonstrates the effectiveness of sabotage and the silliness of those

people who still claim violence (property destruction) hurts the

movement, but not when it is presented as a substitute for the boycott.

Generally, I am averse to boycotts because they reinforce our role as

consumers, but they go along well with education campaigns about, in

this case, the need to oppose Shell Oil. They are easy for everyone to

do, and harmless to the movement as long as pacifists don’t try to hold

them up as an effective alternative to violence. This article certainly

appreciates the easiness and replicability of tactics, when it comes to

sabotage. The same should apply to the education/boycott campaign

because in many ways this campaign provided a foundation for the wave of

sabotage. Of course sabotage is more effective, but destroying Shell

Oil’s infrastructure and kidnapping their executives would have been

more effective still. That’s a moot point, because the movement wasn’t

strong enough to do this. Its strength needed to be built up, just as it

needed to be built up before a large wave of sabotage could occur. By

disdaining this building process, insurrectionists would be destroying

their own base. By embracing a building process, anarchists could

influence the creation of an education campaign based not on values of

liberal citizenship but on anticapitalist rage, surely a more supportive

foundation for sabotage and other forceful tactics.

The second example comes from the Mohawk (sic) who resisted Canadian

government encroachments at Oka in 1990. Sabotage was a strong tactic in

this struggle, but far more important was that resistance was carried

out by a well organized group united by a common culture (and also

willing and able to escalate well beyond sabotage), and many of the

external, non-Mohawk groups giving solidarity were also formally

organized. Additionally, in such circumstances, the anonymous and

spontaneous form of organization favored by insurrectionists really

disadvantages the type of communication and accountability that are

needed for effective, responsible solidarity actions that don’t end up

hurting the people you’re trying to help. Once again, an exclusively

insurrectionary approach would have been less effective and probably

self-isolating (especially given the inescapable reality that right now

most insurrectionary anarchists — most anarchists — are white, so a

strong, exclusively insurrectionist tendency at Oka would have come off

as yet another example of white people exploiting the struggles of

people of color).

“Rogues Against the State” also comes close to building a strawman in

its critique of activism. Again, it’s a bit vague as to who are the

targets of the criticism, and in this haze a dichotomy is entrenched

between insurrection, which is advocated as the path anarchists should

take, and forms of activism that are inevitably reformist and based on

getting people to join a specific organization. The essay contains a

number of good points — about the problems with building “one monolithic

anarchist organization,” that certain technologies such as cellphones

and computers require the intensive exploitation of global sacrifice

zones so anarchy cannot result from worker control of the present

infrastructure — and the section on “Creating Autonomous Spaces” is

especially valuable.

But there are also serious flaws. As I pointed out earlier, this

strategy does not address the fatal shortcomings that became apparent

when it was put into practice in Western Europe. Point 9 contains the

important point that anarchists can, do, and should learn from

non-anarchist struggles, and that “the masses” do not need to be taught

how to act. Yet a number of examples are misleading. In Oaxaca, much of

the struggle grew from the strike of the teachers’ union, and was helped

along by APPO, the popular assembly (much as this organization may later

have had a pacifying effect, organizationalists take note). In the

countryside, a large, organized anarchist influence was CIPO-RFM, the

association of autonomous anarchist communities, with whom I understand

NEFAC (the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists) works. And

as for “rent-strikes,” another spontaneous occurrence praised in the

article, is the author aware of how many of these come out of tenants

groups, organized quite often by activists (inside or outside the

buildings)? In other words, the inspiring examples of insurrection do

not bear out the strategy of insurrectionism.

But a great part of the essay is a criticism of activism, and here is

one of the weakest parts. The author says much of her/his personal

experience was with an activist group the principal activity of which

was to dole out charity and try to get other people to join the group.

Yeah, that sounds pretty shitty. The assumption that everyone engaged in

activism, community organizing, whatever the hell you want to call it,

is doing the same thing, is equally lacking in depth. Instead of taking

their failures as a sign that they were doing a bad job in their chosen

activities, ‘crudo’ instead jumps ship and denounces activism wholesale.

“Activism” is never defined, and it’s too easy a term to use

disparagingly — many articulate, not-so-active anarchists do. But the

author gives the example of Copwatch and Food Not Bombs. I’ve seen

examples of these groups that have been effective, examples that have

been ineffective, some that have been charity and some that have been

empowering. It depends a great deal, not surprisingly, in how you go

about it, whether your goals, strategy, and tactics line up, or if

you’re just mimicking something anarchists habitually do elsewhere. If

it’s done well and in spite of its weaknesses, activism can teach us how

to talk to mainstream people without hiding, or scaring them away with,

our anarchist politics, it can help us learn how other people see common

problems and thus how we can better communicate a radical critique of

these problems, and sometimes even motivate people to get off the couch

and respond to their problems with direct action. It can allow us to

influence other people’s realities, when they see that there are

anarchists out there, and therefore the possibility of anarchy, and that

by working together and using direct action we can change the situations

most people are used to only watching on television. It’s a fucking

tedious process that rarely brings results quickly, and this has the

advantage of teaching us that in the concrete details of people’s

everyday lives revolution is neither quick nor easy, that simply

overcoming this stifling alienation in a single neighbourhood could take

years. The built-in disadvantages are that it’s too easy to burn out,

lose hope, compromise your dreams, or fall into a holding pattern of

habitual, uninspired actions to spare oneself the energy it takes to be

constantly creative and effective, to keep attacking these walls of

alienation by leaving one’s comfort zone and talking to strangers.

‘crudo’ seems to have an unrealistic view of this process, though since

s/he mentions years of experience in an activist group, it may just be

the failing of a mistakenly simplistic paragraph. But it’s amazing that

in an otherwise intelligent article, the author would suggest

wheatpasting flyers around town calling for a general strike as an

alternative to talking with AFL-CIO leaders, as though these are the two

logical options, as though either one of them could actually accomplish

anything. If it’s unrealistic to say that a union will usher in the

revolution, what is it to suggest that reading a flyer will get people

to launch an insurrection? In both cases, a whole lot more creativity

and patience are called for.

Point number 8 also displays an unrealistic understanding of the

insurrectionist strategy (along with the obnoxious suggestion, based on

who knows what, that anarchists who are activists seek compromise with

authority instead of complete social transformation). “To be against

activism and for a complete social transformation means that we desire

the destruction of hierarchal [sic] society and openly desire it’s [sic]

abolition. We seek anti-politics, meaning the rejection of

representative forms of struggle and a praxis of insurrectionary attack,

or the use of actions which seek to destroy any existence of the state

and capital and allows for the self-organization of revolt and life.

This does not mean that people shouldn’t use activist approaches from

time to time (for instance organizing events to fundraise for political

prisoners). But in general we need to find a strategy that exists

outside of going from protest to protest and from issue to issue. We are

in the middle of a social war, not a disagreement between various sides

that can reach a compromise.”

Activism is a vague method, or a set of tactics, things like giving away

free food or organizing a fundraiser for prisoners. How does this at all

suggest activists must believe in compromise with the government? And

how exactly does the author imagine setting up autonomous spaces or

fighting the state, if activist approaches like fundraising for

prisoners are only a part of the picture “from time to time” (has the

author ever been to an autonomous space like those he advocates? In

Greece and Spain for example, organizing informational events and doing

fundraisers are a large part of what they do). Ultimately, crudo’s call

for war is meaninglessly abstract, because it lacks the understanding of

what, practically, war entails.

Then there is the question of privilege. ‘crudo’ says “We need to act

along side and with the oppressed for we are of them...” This is another

mixed bag of nuts. For those of us anarchists who were born with racial,

economic, or other privilege, it is vital to recognize that this system

is still poisonous for us, we don’t want it, and we’re not fighting to

save other people but for ourselves, in solidarity with others. ‘crudo’

is clear about this. But there is also a certain sleight of hand

occurring in this article, and that is the conflation of all

oppressions. For the most part, crudo only mentions class: “As those of

the oppressed and excluded we must abolish class society and work. This

is our project.” ‘crudo’ subsequently identifies “we” as “proles”. Near

the end of the article, ‘crudo’ briefly acknowledges problems of gender

and race, and concedes that whites and blacks are not “in the exact same

boat” but this afterthought really does not contradict the overall

minimization of race contained in the article (in fact the very brief

analysis of racism is basically the complaint that race divides the

working class, “pitting racial groups against one another”). The author

is surprisingly honest about the problem with this perspective, but

fails to correct it: “In the ‘glory days’ of anarchism, everyone was

only oppressed by class (or at least, that’s mostly what the white men

tell us). The negatives of class society was simply that of a physically

impoverished existence (poverty, hunger, etc). However, modern life is

much more complicated than that. We have become alienated beyond (or on

top of) class.” It’s telling (hell it’s down right disturbing) that

‘crudo’ acknowledges the white supremacist nature of this analysis, and

then carries on with it anyway. We should be grateful, though, because

most anarchists who discourage any emphasis on race are more

sophisticated at hiding their true motivations.

The result of this is that ‘crudo’ has to remind readers, and presumably

him/herself, that we are oppressed too, and therefore we have license to

intervene in the struggles of all other oppressed people. I think the

effect on readers will be to encourage a kind of solidarity even worse

than we have been guilty of in the past, approaching the movements of

people far more oppressed than us (with more at stake and graver

consequences for action) with a strong sense of entitlement, seeing

their struggles as our opportunities.

As for the organizationalists...

“An Anarchist Communist Strategy for Rural, Southern Appalachia,” (

anarchistnews.org

) by Randy Lowens, written for Anarkismo.net. This article seems to come

from a sincere desire to increase the effectiveness of the movement

against mountaintop removal (MTR) coal-mining in Appalachia. The author

points out how eco-anarchists are an important part of this struggle but

says they intentionally isolate themselves from other Appalachians, and

moreover their strategy, centered around dramatic direct actions taken

by people who operate outside of the community groups also opposing MTR,

isolates them further. Randy suggests overcoming that isolation by

increasing contact with and spreading an anti-capitalist analysis among

Appalachians, and joining the organizations formed to oppose MTR, in

order to subvert liberal leadership. Many of those are decent ideas, but

given the tone of the essay, I have to say I strongly sympathized with a

comment, counterproductive as it was, posted below the article that read

simply: “Stay the fuck out of the dirty south, ideologues!” The author

dusts off a strategy that seems not to have changed in the hundred odd

years of its existence — the stated purpose of the essay is to

“construct an analogy between the historical strategy of bringing a

revolutionary perspective into mass organizations, and doing so in the

particulars of the given place and time, Southern Appalachia in the

early 21^(st) century.” The tone with which he talks about

anarcho-primitivists in one section is reminiscent of a liberal Catholic

Church official during the Inquisition. Essentially: despite their

heresy, many of them are good people and must be saved. The suggestion

that the masses “are in dire need of a revolutionary voice” also sounds

missionary.

“Over time it became apparent to me, that our direct action scenarios

were not building links with the community at large.” Similar to

‘crudo’, Randy Lowens suggests changing strategic tracks entirely, again

in a way that doesn’t leave one very hopeful about the results. His

suggested strategy basically sounds like infiltrating (“penetration” of)

the reformist environmentalist and community groups and turning them

against the liberal leadership, as though that will build better links

with the community. As an indication of that friendly

anarchist-communist outlook just destined to win hearts in Appalachia,

the author refers to the membership in these organizations as “more

attractive terrain” for anarchists. And once again, the locals will be

required to adopt the imported analysis and identify their experiences

strictly with the class struggle. Remember, I have this image of someone

shouting over the bullhorn at the next protest, you are not fighting for

your homes, your mountains, or your personal well being: you are

fighting for your class! I’m not sure what Randy Lowens means by “fellow

workers,” but many of the people in the coal-mining regions of

Appalachia are unemployed, many of the most active anti-MTR organizers

are grandmothers who rarely or never worked a wage job, and those who

jealously hold one of the few jobs actually involved with destroying the

mountains and getting the coal can be among the most strident supporters

of MTR.

But the greatest weakness of this essay by far is its preference for a

vague affiliation with the tried-n-true anarchist-communist strategy

over any actual strategizing itself. After the analysis of the

situation, the reader finally gets to the section entitled “A Strategy

for Rural, Southern Appalachian Anarchists” hoping to find some

intelligent or at least provocative suggestions for how to radicalize

the anti-MTR movement and better connect with (other) Appalachians, only

to find that this section is basically the conclusion of the article,

with a one line overview of what Malatesta said a hundred years ago,

little else of substance, and no details. Need it be said that

strategies are best derived from the specific situation one faces? A

problem with anarchist-communism, or insurrectionism for that matter, is

that at least in their usage by many people these come with pre-packaged

strategies that spare their affiliates from any hard thinking about what

might actually work in the conditions one is dealing with.

Notes on the article “Anarchism, Insurrections, and Insurrectionism” (

www.infoshop.org

) by José Antonio Gutiérrez D.

This article is a response to, and something of an expansion on Joe

Black’s “Anarchism, Insurrections, and Insurrectionism” (

www.wsm.ie

) posted on the website of the Workers’ Solidarity Movement, an

anarchist-communist group in Ireland. José praises Joe Black’s article,

which is a respectful criticism of insurrectionists, but says the latter

only deals with the tactics and organizational forms of the

insurrectionists and ignores the “basic political differences”.

(Accordingly I will also bring up a few points Joe Black makes about

organization, since this article seems to accept those points).

After the necessary introductions, the article starts out: “To

understand the problem at the root of insurrectionalism’s political

conceptions (fundamentally wrong, in my opinion) we have to take into

account that they are the offspring of a certain historical moment...”

This seems to be a typical anarchist-communist approach, and while

obviously history can be elucidating, it can also be obfuscating, and in

the course of this article it is primarily the latter. Quite unfairly,

the author doesn’t deal with actual insurrectionists today, but talks

mostly about times in the past when an insurrectionary tendency has

reared its ugly head, and he doesn’t even do much to convince the reader

the insurrectionists of today and yesterday have anything in common

besides the name, which in many cases they hardly do. I’d say it’s a

manipulative argument but I think the author is sincerely wrapped up in

the narrow and dogmatic historicism common to the dialectical and

reductively materialist. It seems to me that many anarchist-communists

compulsively go to the past to understand, or avoid, present situations,

and I guess this has to do with their Marxist heritage and their

particular subculture, which seems to favor debates and documents long

since dead over innovation or theoretical flexibility.

That said, it also doesn’t help that the historical analysis of this

article, and the facts it pretends to be based on, are flawed (though

because of the obscurantism that goes along with treating history like

gospel, most people would probably be fooled, and this is another point

in favor of the “emotional” insurrectionist “immediatism” that the

author criticizes).

The historical rule the author is intent on constructing is that

insurrectionism is a peculiar product of historical periods with high

levels of repression and low levels of popular struggle. This assertion

does not stand up to the facts. The first example given, “propaganda by

the deed,” may or may not have arisen out of the repression of the Paris

Commune as he says, but it was carried out across Europe and in North

and South America throughout the next decades, at times of low or high

repression, low or high popular struggle. In the US for example, the

Galleanists carried out their bombing campaigns during a period of high

repression, but they had started these bombings while the popular

struggles were still at a high level. Terrorism in Russia did not follow

the 1905 revolution (the author’s second example), it was a major part

of that revolution, and it was well developed before the repression

began, when there was a high level of popular struggle. This

insurrectionary activity was part of the struggle, largely carried out

by workers. Industrial workers, peasants, poor people, and many Jewish

people formed Byeznachalie and Chernoznamets groups that stole from the

rich, bombed police stations and bourgeois meeting points, and so on

(and nearly all of these were anarchist-communists, opposed primarily by

the Kropotkinist anarchist-communists in exile or by the

anarcho-syndicalists). José leaves out insurrectionism in Spain in the

1930s, at the very height of the popular struggle and occurring in

periods of high and low repression — in Spain most clearly, the

insurrectionists proved themselves to be more insightful than the CNT

bureaucrats who always advised waiting and negotiation. And he mentions

insurrectionism in Greece in the ’60s, but ignores its much more

important incarnations today, where it is quite at home in the high

popular struggle of the student movement, and set against a state

repression that cannot be characterized as particularly high.

Gutiérrez provides a good criticism that an increased reliance on

insurrectionary tactics can come as a response to isolation. This is

very true, but trying to make a historical rule out of it is sophomoric.

Another humorous example of reductionism: “the social-democracy

consolidated in the moment of low level of struggles after the Paris

Commune, renouncing to revolution and putting forward a reform by stages

approach as their strategy. For them, the moment of low confrontation

was the historical rule — this is the main reason to their opportunism.”

Oh, so that’s why!

Elsewhere in the article the author strikes another low blow: “Also, the

moments of a low level of popular struggle generally happen after high

levels of class confrontation, so the militants still have lingering

memories of the ‘barricade days’. These moments are frozen in the minds

of the militants and it is often that they try to capture them again by

trying hard, by an exercise of will alone, by carrying on actions in

order to ‘awaken the masses’... most of the times, these actions have

the opposite result to the one expected and end up, against the will of

its perpetrators, serving in the hands of repression.” Saying

clandestine actions serve the repression sounds like pacifism and it

completely misunderstands the nature of the state, which will

manufacture excuses for repression as needed (e.g. the Dog Soldier

Teletypes used against AIM). The only thing that justifies repression is

other radicals who backstab those using different tactics rather than

helping to explain those tactics to the masses with whom they’re

supposedly in touch. If a population is pacified enough, indoctrinated

enough by state propaganda, going on strike or even joining a union can

be popularly seen as justification for repression. Anarchists should

recognize there is no natural threshold of action beyond which people

will automatically see repression as justified.

Gutiérrez also makes a point about insurrectionists doing the work of

provocateurs, but this point is overplayed and ultimately pacifying.

Provocateurs encourage stupid actions to hurt a movement or allow them

to neutralize some key organizers, but they never wait for such excuses

(for example they assassinated Black Panther Fred Hampton even though he

never took the bait suggested by the infilitrator). And more often, the

government encourages passivity, waiting, issuing demands, negotiating,

operating in formal, above-ground organizations that are basically like

a snatch-squad’s goody bag if heavy repression is ever needed (I discuss

this at greater length in ‘How Nonviolence Protects the State’). But

insurrectionists in small affinity groups are better prepared to

discuss, evaluate and plan clandestine and aggressive direct actions in

an intelligent manner (i.e. one that does not at all serve state

interests) than are organizationalists, because the former tend to take

better security precautions and their structures are far more

intelligently designed when it comes to surviving repression. José

Antonio Gutiérrez not only misses the mark, he presents his point in an

exceedingly disgusting fashion, that “irresponsible or untimely action

of sincere comrades” is more dangerous than the conniving of government

provocateurs. This divisive, heavy-handed denunciation is tantamount to

the backstabbing obstructionism vanguardist groups always bring to bear

on those who act without their permission (for example, the Trotskyists

who always said the actions of the Red Brigades, or the Angry Brigade,

were the work of fascist/state provocateurs, or the similar people who

said the same thing about the recent rocket attack on the US Embassy in

Greece). It’s even worse that the article provides no examples of such

“irresponsible” action. By being vague, the author covers himself from

criticisms of “blanket” denunciations like the same kind he faults

insurrectionists for using, but the result of his caution is to feed

into an abstracted, stereotypical image of irresponsible

insurrectionists that is neither respectful, productive, nor, it would

seem, with much factual basis.

José dismisses the potentially useful criticism coming from

insurrectionists, saying instead that insurrectionism is useful because

it mirrors all the weaknesses in the anarchist movement, so it’s like a

clear illness to be cured. Little if any insurrectionist criticism is

dealt with fairly (instead of quoting insurrectionist criticisms, the

author tends to rely on generalized notions of such criticisms).

Here’s a related example: “Another huge problem in discussion among

anarchists is the use of blanket concepts, as demonstrated by comrade

Black, that in fact help more to obscure than to clarify debate. For

instance, it is too often that “unions” are criticised as if all of them

were exactly the same thing... ignoring the world of difference between,

let’s say, the IWW, the maquilas unions or the AFL-CIO in the US. To

group them all under the same category not only doesn’t help the debate,

but it is also a gross mistake that reveals an appalling political and

conceptual weakness.”

Well, it’s interesting to note that in the “Aims and Principles” of the

Anarchist-Communist Federation (1995 edition), point number seven begins

“Unions by their very nature cannot be the vehicles for the

revolutionary transformation of society” and later clarifies that “even

syndicalist unions” are also subject to this “fundamental” nature.

Elsewhere, Gutiérrez says “the very criticism made by insurrectionalists

can work as a godsend for [the] State to justify repression.” The

example the author uses is of a Mexican anarchist group that apparently

criticized APPO and CIPO-RFM in Oaxaca, during the state repression. The

suggestion that insurrectionist criticism helps the state is

heavy-handed and, no matter what the author may say or intend, fosters

an air of silence and, ultimately, exactly the kind of authoritarianism

insurrectionists have validly warned against. I have not read the

criticism put out by the Informal Anarchist Coordination of Mexico that

is referred to, and I don’t know if it is respectful and accurate or not

(though I have read a few other criticisms of APPO developing a

reformist, conciliatory character towards the end), but the argument

that it was untimely creates an attitude against criticism when

criticism is needed most. I suppose in the autumn of 1936 in Catalonia,

to beat a dead horse, criticism was also untimely, but that was when the

CNT-FAI really needed to be set straight, the point of high pressure

when mass organizations and representative organizations are most likely

to sell out.

He makes a sometimes fair point that insurrectionists are constructing

an ideology around a preference for a single tactic (though if the

author has read any of the better insurrectionary writings he must not

have understood [perhaps they didn’t mention class enough] that they

were very insightfully creating ideologies or theories out of analysis

and contact with reality far more than I think any anarchist-communist

has done since before World War II). But the author says

insurrectionists are ineffective because they are functionally incapable

of evaluating tactics due to their informal organization. The suggestion

that you need a “programme” “to measure the effectiveness of the

actions” comes out of left field without any justification (similar to

the assumption that you need to identify with your class in order to

understand your oppression), and I’m left with the image of a

particularly dogmatic third-grader who insists all solemn-eyed that

without your multiplication table in hand it is impossible to know what

two times seven equals.

I’ve saved his best point for last: “Revolutionaries, above all, have to

learn the art of perseverance. Impatience is not a good adviser as

taught by revolutionary experience. This does not mean to wait, but to

know how to choose the type of actions to perpetrate in certain

moments.” As boring and wooden as organizationalists may sometimes be, I

think many insurrectionists overplay the liberatory potential of fun.

Granted, you can’t really describe how liberating play can be if you

write in as boring a way as, for example, I do, weighing the pros and

cons and blabbering away for, Christ, sixteen pages already?? I don’t

have a problem with “Armed Joy,” to name one, but if this is the only

thing you read your strategy and expectations of revolution will be

sorely handicapped. I agree with the insurrectionist caution against

sacrifice insofar as the Chairman Mao figures typically advocating it

have all been frauds in the past, but as much as we can empower

ourselves here and now we really can’t totally determine the character

of the revolution, and the state sure as hell has the power to make sure

it won’t be fun. A preference for fun too easily becomes a preference

for comfort, and revolution is not comfortable. It occurs to me that an

exclusive emphasis on attack, on action now, and the impatience that

sometimes goes with that, leads to revolutionaries who cannot swallow

the consequences of their actions. As an example I would name the ELF,

and how quickly most of them rolled over and began to cooperate with the

state once they were caught.

There are a few points from Joe Black’s original article that also need

addressing, and most relevant is his defense of formal organization.

“Far from developing hierarchy, our constitutions not only forbid formal

hierarchy but contain provisions designed to prevent the development of

informal hierarchy as well. For instance considerable informal power can

fall to someone who is the only one who can do a particular task and who

manages to hold onto this role for many years. So the WSM constitution

says no member can hold any particular position for more than three

years. After that time they have to step down.” However, constitutions

are not power. The paradox is that what’s written on paper actually

means nothing to the functioning of bureaucratic organizations, and if

some people haven’t digested that fact yet it’s about as safe for them

to work in a large, formal organization as it is to put a

seeing-impaired two-year-old behind the wheel of a five-ton tractor. The

CNT joined the government in Spain in 1936 in a procedure that violated

its constitution, to refer again to that sacred font of historical

anarchist examples. Structure is only part of the equation, and

power-sharing structures can easily be subverted if the group culture is

not also fervently anti-hierarchical. A criticism by insurrectionists

which is valid in at least some instances is that organizations with

formal constitutions and elected, specialized positions tend towards a

rigidity and stagnation that invites the development of hierarchy. I

personally don’t think such groups should be off limits. It’s clear that

both suggested forms of organization have their weaknesses, and informal

organizations are certainly vulnerable to informal hierarchies, but I

think Joe Black has missed the substance of the criticism that, when

apprehended, could hold the weaknesses of formal organizations in check.

I also want to point out the falsehood in the following: “Anarchist

communism was clarified in 1926 by a group of revolutionary exiles

analysing why their efforts to date had failed. This resulted in the

publication of the document known in English as the ‘Organisational

Platform of the Libertarian Communists’ which we have analysed at length

elsewhere.” This is misleading — most anarchist-communists opposed the

Platform. I honestly don’t have an absolute problem with folks who want

a platform to clarify their efforts and basic beliefs, although I don’t

think I could ever limit myself to a few points on paper, but this

suppression of disagreement evident in Joe Black’s historical cherry

picking certainly mirrors the conformity that will accompany a platform

unless its authors are careful, conscious, and well meaning.

Since it looks like that time to slop together some kind of conclusion,

I’ll say that I suppose I don’t believe the structures or forms of

voluntary organization we adopt act deterministically to control our

outcomes (though they have a strong influence, as all tools do, on the

wielder) but all the structures and strategies developed by anarchists

so far have serious weaknesses, and these flaws will be fatal unless we

are more honest, flexible, receptive to criticism, and energetic than we

have been to date.