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Author : Anonymous
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The point of departure for what follows is simple: revolution is not around the corner. Presumably most would agree, yet the road forks sharply regarding how best to move forward. The Left maintains that proceeding into open conflict with the state and capital would be premature, given that “the masses” can’t be expected to join any time soon. A reformist agenda is sought instead as the only realistic approach – just until the conditions necessary for revolution arise. But there’s a big problem here, because to merely wait for the revolution ensures it will never arrive. Contrary to Marxian dogma, there’s nothing about revolution that’s inevitable; rather, the only thing that invites the right historical conditions – the only thing that can actually bring revolution any closer – is to proceed to action now, even if the time is not ripe. When undertaking a momentous project of any kind, it’s always necessary to start by taking a few decided steps, even if at first they lead into the fateful unknown. Those who merely wait, too unsure of whether to get going at all, guarantee their destination never comes any closer. Only by testing the boundaries of the existent do you begin to learn just what is and isn’t possible.
In this formula we find our foothold: the nucleus of revolutionary possibility resides in our determination to live free already now. The liberal idea of freedom is that of a ghost, one of meaningless hypotheticals, of incarcerated desires: you can think and do absolutely anything you want, but only insofar as it makes no difference in material terms. Of course, there’s a great deal to power that’s abstract and intangible, open to critique but not physical assault. Yet this is only part of the picture, given that you can only change so much on a subjective level – really not much at all – before your growth becomes limited and deformed by the bars of this cage-society. Enclosed by the system of death, the only way to make sense of our lives – the only way to be sure we’re still breathing – is by striking back against the physical infrastructure that holds social hierarchy in place. Beneath a veneer of calm supremacy, only a little investigation reveals that, through being spread so thinly, such objects are actually quite vulnerable. Even more so in an age in which everything depends on the most fragile of technological flows. Computer algorithms, fiber optic cables, and electrical transmitters hold the system together far more effectively than the words of politicians nowadays. Power is everywhere, yet the repressive forces are not, nor could they ever hope to be.
A single act of sabotage is, of course, of no great concern for the stability of the system overall. But there’s something extra here, something that spans the vast divide between individualistic revolt and insurrection itself, and that’s the capacity for insurgency to spread throughout the population. By acting now, the very quality of revolution – of uncompromising, autonomous revolt – begins to infuse the social terrain. Then it’s only a question of multiplication over creation, something altogether more approachable. There will always come unpredictable moments of future turmoil, moments in which the animosity of state and capital has been violently exposed, the futility of legalistic engagement revealed for all to see. Those who previously disagreed with confrontational tactics might well find themselves grasping for the right means of expression. And at that point the clashes have the potential to spread like wildfire.
This potential can be nurtured by a particular consideration, namely, the reproducibility of our own techniques. By focusing on tactics that require little or no specialization, meaningful revolt is able to avalanche much quicker during moments of heightened social tension, greatly surpassing application only by a handful of experienced militants. This emphasis is exactly what was missing from many of the armed struggle groups active in Europe during the 1970s and ‘80s, such as the Red Army Fraction in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy. These professional revolutionaries required extensive training, specialized weaponry, and vast support networks in order to offer their contribution, promoting an idea of struggle (or at least of its highest forms) as something highly exclusive. Such isolation is forever the swamp of revolutionary potential, distinguishing the insurgents all too clearly from the rest of the population, drawing combatants into a pitched battle between two armies. On the contrary, the extent to which methods of struggle are easily reproducible – focusing on widely accessible tools and information – is the extent to which citizens can, even in a heartbeat, transform themselves into insurgents. Not only that, it also means those just getting involved can already struggle with as much intensity as anyone else, in no way relegated to the indignity of a secondary role. Forget about the vanguard, it has no use to us: generalized revolt, lacking leaders or a focal point, is exactly what no army or police force could ever hope to contain.
The moment of rupture is always much closer than it seems. The substratum underpinning all the everyday monotony is one of wild rebellion, and spontaneous community, which the present order must work day and night to subdue – often unsuccessfully. No longer can we profess to know in advance whether our intervention will not lead to a future insurrectional situation. The social conditions that gave rise to economic determinism have fallen apart: the metamorphosis of the economy has ransacked the factories, creating generations of non-citizens with no solid identity to bind them to this rotten world. Particularly in the ghettoes of the modern metropolis – in Paris 2006, London 2011, and Baltimore 2015 – the unpredictable nature of the historical moment has already been revealed, each case offering a clear image from the future. It’s as if the air is steadily getting drier, the slightest spark ready to set off a blaze. Especially once the environmental crisis can no longer be ignored, that dryness will become much more literal, calling into doubt the once undisputed stability of many regimes. Surely the only option is to make the most of the inevitable volatility, transforming these blind moments of rage into conscious insurrections – even revolutions. Any social order founded so strongly on hierarchy forever contains the seeds of its own collapse. Insurrection is merely the sudden bang let off as a structure, which had already long been falling, finally crashes to the ground.
Imagine a collective gasp for oxygen in a life defined by suffocation. A million gestures of indignity, previously suffered in silence, abruptly come to the surface. The illusion of social control – held together by fear, not respect – has been decisively cast off, all sections of society invited to project their newfound freedom into the void. Insurrection doesn’t divert the course of the dominant order, it derails it. Work grinds to a halt, students refuse to study, the economy is thoroughly paralyzed; goods are circulated without money, public spaces transformed into theaters of discussion and festivity, the laboratories of exploitation overrun in broad daylight. Free play streams through the streets, manifest in a million different ways. Such is the spirit of insurrection. It is social, not military – the moment in which dissonance resonates.
The point of insurrection is to begin the revolutionary process in its full intensity, bypassing any notions of a transitional period. Such an event is clearly far more profound than any riot; nonetheless, it’s also defined by the fact it stops short of bringing about an actual revolution, failing to hold down either the necessary time or space. The quantitative limits of the uprising, however, are no excuse to label it a failure: such an intense encounter is its own reward, wholly worthwhile even when taken in isolation. Not only that, insurrections nurture the potential for more ambitious experimentation, for ruptures that last. Even once the fires have gone out, what remains are forged affinities, honed skills, deepened perspectives. And the population at large has gotten a taste for freedom no queue at the polling booth can soon quell. This is a concrete idea of what it looks like to do serious damage to Leviathan, even if it isn’t yet a deathblow. Along the insurrectional path, we forge beyond the revolutionary impasse.
Of course, there’s a strong sense in which this topic – equal parts festivity and devastation – shouldn’t be dressed up in too much poetry. Especially when true freedom is a novelty, there are many risks involved, risks that shouldn’t be trivialized. But what also cannot be denied is that every path, including inaction, necessarily comes with its own hazards. There are no easy options here. No promises to escape the gravity of the situation. As if allowing things to continue like this would be the nonviolent option? Such is the right of the dominant culture, to present itself as neutral, ambient, even as it ravages the fabric of life to its very core.
It’s not as if we chose to be born into such miserable conditions. Yet how we respond remains entirely down to us, an infinity of potential choices vibrating through every moment. The opportunity to live passionately lies open to us still – no authoritarian regime could ever take that away. As Bonanno once put it, “It is not a question of opposing horror with horror, tragedy with tragedy, death with death. It is a confrontation between joy and horror, joy and tragedy, joy and death.”
How do we coordinate with one another, comrades and beyond, in order to transform society? The history of anarchism – especially its most revolutionary moments – is rich with examples of large, formal organizations that concentrated most or all aspects of the struggle within a single structure. These were organizations of synthesis, some of which still exist: they promote a specific political program, hold periodic congresses to make unified decisions, and aim to serve as a mediator between power and the masses. However, it would be a big mistake for anarchists to place such an organization – indeed, the route of formal organization altogether – at the center of revolutionary struggle today. At the very least, the option should be considered only in light of some major risks.
Consider, for one, the central tension of any anarchist organization: the tradeoff between size and horizontality. The larger an organization becomes, the more hierarchy becomes necessary to maintain its basic functions – in other words, the more quantitatively successful the organization, the less anarchist it can be. This is something no amount of conscious procedures, such as consensus decision-making or a rigid constitution, can successfully alleviate. As a matter of necessity, any organization incorporating thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of members can maintain direction and coherence only at the cost of extensive specialization. In particular, those tasks that command the most influence – mediation, accounting, publicity – begin to stagnate in the hands of a few experts, either implicitly or explicitly. And what a sorry outcome that offers: any large anarchist organization soon becomes incapable of prefiguring the very world it’s supposed to be building, the principle of nonhierarchical association relegated to a mere abstraction. If there’s any doubt on this point, that can only be because the vast majority of anarchist organizations remain woefully small nowadays. An honest look at the towering bureaucracy of the CNT in Spain during the 1930s – the largest anarchist organization there’s ever been, incorporating a million and a half members – provides an unambiguous picture.
The link between formal organization and hierarchy runs deeper yet; besides internal hierarchies, a second major problem concerns external ones. Built into the logic of the organization of synthesis is the hidden assumption that ordinary people are incapable of organizing themselves. Society is split between the passive masses on the one hand, and the enlightened revolutionaries on the other; the role of revolutionaries cannot be to engage horizontally with the rest of the population, but instead to approach them from the point of view of recruitment or education, to make them one of us. All potential social realities are distilled into a single way of doing things, as if we alone hold the one true set of revolutionary aims and principles. Such a monolithic approach was never realistic, much less so today: honestly speaking, most people will never see the need to join our organization, to stomach all the long meetings and tedious subculture. The 21st century has ushered in a human condition that’s unfathomably complex, calling for a much richer diversity of organizational forms than the “one big union” model that worked so well in the past. That means opening ourselves up to a more pluralistic notion of struggle, one that abandons any notions of revolutionary primacy, especially that of the organization of synthesis.
It isn’t even as if what formal organizations lack in principle they make up for in pragmatism. Merely in terms of their capacity to actually engage in struggle, the organization of synthesis has proven ineffective. Any structure of significant size must spend the bulk of its time and energy merely on maintaining itself, the task of physically confronting power always coming second. Meetings are now insufferably long, and the only viable collective decisions have become increasingly timid and legalistic, members always going for the lowest common denominator just so everyone can agree. Having succumbed to the quantitative game of putting recruitment before all else, reputation has become a prime virtue, and combative actions are normally condemned in the name of not upsetting public opinion. Compromise and conciliation are instead always favored by the emerging bureaucracy, the rank and file of the organization betrayed time and time again. Nor could it be any other way: with obvious leaders, headquarters, and membership lists, the threat of state repression is forever present, severely limiting the scope of militant activity. What you’re left with, therefore, after funneling so much time and effort into a grand synthesizing effort, is a lumbering, introspective mass that can be used for little more than putting the brakes on real struggle.
With this critique in mind, some would respond that the risks posed by the organization of synthesis are indeed a necessary evil. Perhaps this route offers us something quite indispensable, namely, the prospect of unity itself? The nation state towers over us more ominously than ever, its military, police force, and repressive technology contained within a single, cohesive structure. It might seem like folly not to build our own structure, rigid and undivided, to contend with power on its own terms – an organization stronger and more unified than the state itself.
However, the problem with taking unity as an end it itself, rather than simply as a tool to be applied depending on the situation, is that it actively invites the concentration of power. Any structure that fancies itself to be building the new world in the shell of the old can only turn out to be a state in waiting. Remember that social hierarchy, besides being localized in certain physical objects, is also a state of mind; it’s always seeking to revive itself, and nobody is immune to the threat, anarchists included. We need not repeat the painful lessons of the past: there’s never been a large organization of synthesis that hasn’t also been stale and bureaucratic, even subtly authoritarian, functioning like a political party to the extent it grows in size, ultimately favoring to collaborate with power rather than destroy it. This is no attempt to denigrate some of the most inspiring moments of anarchist history, but we also need to learn some hard lessons; let’s not forget the integration of the CNT into the government during the Spanish Civil War, to the extent that even an anarcho-syndicalist trade union ended up running its own forced labor camps.
Fortunately, though, this critique warrants no strategic compromise. In short, the quality of unity is essential only for those movements attempting to seize power rather than dismantle it. Among Marxists, liberals, and fascists alike, unity is the vital ingredient of their organizing, the intention almost always being to assume the functions of the state in one sense or another. Without unity, the state is inconceivable; such a complex structure can only function properly when operating in a centralized way, forming a robust whole that maintains cohesion by relaying orders to the different parts. Any genuine shows of diversity are a threat to its integrity, because they undermine the singularity of the social body, lessening the capacity for a single will to be imposed upon it. But remember just how little applicability this framework has to our own desires: the point isn’t to emulate the state, as if to treat it as a rival, but instead to destroy it. And for this project a fundamentally different logic is required.
Here’s an idea: as far as effective libertarian struggle is concerned, a high degree of multiformity is the essential ingredient. There’s much to be said for social movements that are messy and fragmented, even to the extent that you’re not looking at a single movement any more, but many different ones with fuzzy lines between them. Building strong links between different fronts of the struggle is essential for encouraging one another to go further, yet the circulation of energies must also remain decentralized, diffuse, or else risk denying vigor to key areas of engagement. The repressive task undertaken by power – by the media, especially – will always be to sculpt us into a cohesive subject, something with discernible leaders and demands, which can thus be easily crushed or assimilated. This is why the struggle must always prize a diversity of tactics and perspectives, empowering all participants to fight on their own basis, and for their own reasons, yet nonetheless against a common enemy.
Multiform struggles are far too disjointed and unpredictable for the state to repress in a straightforward way, and also for the Left to co-opt. They’re more inviting to newcomers as well, offering massive variation of potential involvement, allowing everyone to find their niche without compromising. And multiform struggles, finally, are much more effective at going on the offensive, given that the structures of domination are nowadays far too multifaceted and complex – quite devoid of any center – for a monolithic approach to successfully unhinge. It would be far better to avoid the fatal error made both by formal organizations and armed struggle groups, namely, to engage with the state symmetrically, in a frontal assault, which is precisely where it will always be militarily superior.
Often we see a split between comrades as a disaster, but that depends entirely on your perspective: diversity is only a curse only when crammed into the stubborn rubric of a movement demanding unity. Remember that it’s rarely the differences between us that cause conflict, but instead one’s refusal to respect them. Such differences are inevitable, and we should be thankful, too, because disagreement is one of the surest signs of vitality, if not of freedom itself. Especially with the struggle for total liberation – defined, in part, by the plurality of its concerns – these unavoidable differences can only be a blessing. The challenge is merely to nurture disagreement respectfully, bearing in mind that, despite the divergent methods we employ, each of these is ultimately grounded in a shared need to dismantle social hierarchy altogether.
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This critique surely begs the question: if not formal organization, what instead? For some time already, insurrectionary anarchists have been organizing the attack mainly through small affinity groups, often incorporating around half a dozen (or fewer) comrades. Affinity here refers to reciprocal knowledge and mutual bonds of trust, as well as a shared project for intervening in society. Affinity groups are temporary and informal, incorporating no official members or branches, refusing to take numerical growth as a basic goal. One doesn’t “join” an affinity group any more than you join a group of friends; the act of signing up to an organization is done away with, including the largely symbolic notion of involvement it offers. Theoretical agreement is often a good starting point for building affinity, but the vital thing is to find those with whom one can combine long-term trajectories for practical engagement – an ongoing process in which discussion is only the first step.
By remaining small and tightly-knit, affinity groups remain unhindered by the cumbersome procedures that inevitably come with organizing as a mass. They can respond to any situation with utmost rapidity, continually revising the plan in light of unexpected developments, melting away whenever faced with unfavorable odds. This fluid, informal terrain of struggle is also immensely difficult for law enforcement to map out and undermine, especially when it comes to infiltration. A decentralized anatomy shouldn’t discourage groups from coordinating with one another horizontally, fostering the broader networks of friendship and complicity necessary to undermine power on a large scale. The point is only that affinity groups remain fully autonomous, in no way bound to sacrifice spontaneity for the sake of cohesion, always waiting for the green light from some higher body prior to taking action. Perhaps this description sounds familiar: anonymous, flexible, and leaderless, such is exactly the informal composition utilized with great success by the ALF/ELF. The main difference is that insurrectional struggle includes a broader range of activity, the question of how best to generalize revolt always taken into consideration.
In any case, large anarchist organizations are apparently a thing of the past, having disintegrated in unison with the workerist glue that once held them together. But that doesn’t mean we’re in the clear. There’s still a very real risk of exactly the mindset underpinning the organization of synthesis – the emphasis on uniformity and respectability, as well as the subtle mistrust of autonomous struggle – merely reinventing itself in whatever contemporary form, as it will always attempt to do. We saw exactly that manifest in the bureaucratic, centralizing tendencies that stifled much of the energy of Occupy and Nuit Debout (most memorably, there were those who refused to condone absolutely anything that hadn’t first received permission from the general assembly). This insistence on sculpting a multiform population into a monolithic subject – in essence, the determination to lay down the law – is always lurking among movements with revolutionary potential. Perhaps it’s no exaggeration to say that such an attitude, writ large, is exactly what devoured the initial beauty of the 1789 French Revolution, 1917 Russian Revolution, and 2011 Egyptian Revolution alike. Almost all previous revolutions were defined at first by a spontaneous, ungovernable outpouring of discontent; once that energy lost pace, however, it was gradually remolded into representational forms – elections, negotiations, bureaucracy – and its original content decisively choked out. Between these two phases, the possibility of a revolution that gets to the root of dismantling power, rather than merely reshuffling it, depends on eliminating this second phase completely. In its place, the first must be extended towards encompassing the whole of everyday life. Informal organization facilitates this outcome to the highest degree, precisely because it promotes a terrain of struggle that is inconvertible to the functions of state power.
In any case, nothing offered here amounts to a complete blueprint. This is not a program! Comrades might well decide, according to their local circumstances, that some degree of formal organization remains indispensable for tasks such as getting new people involved, planning aboveground events, and procuring resources. Which is to say, once again, that the conclusion offered here is only a minimal one: formal organizations cannot be considered the locus of revolutionary struggle altogether, as may have been the case in years gone by. They must instead be ready to adopt a more modest, supportive role, sticking to objectives both specific and temporary, remaining eager to take a step back or even disband entirely if needed. Rather than falling back on outdated formulas, tired and inflexible, total liberation means embracing the fullest multiformity, wild and ungovernable – the only kind of energy capable of bringing social hierarchy to ruin.
December 6, 2008, Athens. For the neighborhood of Exarcheia, it’s a familiar scene. The central square is buzzing, interspersed with youths hanging out and travelers fraternizing. They’re surrounded by the usual bustle of cafes and bars, as well as crowded corner shops selling cheap beer. A few blocks away, riot cops stand guard, but only as they do every evening, marking out the border of this unruly neighborhood. Such is how things start out, anyway, but it’s not how they end. At around 9pm, something unusual happens, something that tears a hole in the very social fabric. Two cops start mouthing off at a group of kids on Tzavella Street, only to leave in their patrol car. They park round the corner, returning on foot. Now one of the cops pulls out his gun, firing a few bullets, striking young Alexis Grigoropoulos – a fifteen-year-old anarchist – in the heart. Alexis dies in the arms of his friends, if not instantly. It’s a dizzying moment, the kind that doesn’t seem real. And within seconds everything explodes.
Already inside the hour, fierce rioting erupts throughout Exarcheia. Then it spreads beyond the neighborhood, permeating the city of Athens with lightning pace. In countless locations, banks are trashed, police stations laid to siege, luxury shops ransacked – even a shopping mall is burnt to the ground. Meanwhile, three universities are occupied, and idle revelers are quickly drawn into the fray. The news spreads fast, mainly between friends rather than the media, and already that night concurrent riots take place in dozens of cities across Greece. The next day, there are thousands on the streets in every corner of the country, the clashes continuing to multiply without interruption. Most expect things to calm down now, what with the weekend drawing to a close, but instead the very opposite happens. On Monday morning, students everywhere abandon their classes, and hundreds of schools and universities are occupied. In villages no one has heard of, there are scenes of twelve-year-olds defeating the police, reclaiming the streets from state occupation. Clearly there’s something special in the air, causing the illusion of social control to dissipate. The Christmas tree in Syntagma Square, Athens, is torched and re-torched; in Zefyri, the Roma community attack a police station with their rifles; almost everywhere town halls are occupied amid a backdrop of looted supermarkets. Even the state-owned broadcasting studios are invaded, with protesters interrupting an announcement by the prime minister on live television. They display a banner that reads simply “stop watching, get out into the streets.” But they were merely pointing out the obvious. Only towards the end of the month does normality begin to return, and cautiously at that.
A lot could be said about December ‘08, but perhaps the most remarkable thing was how profoundly it broke down social barriers. This wasn’t just another flurry of anarchist riots, but instead a moment in which the revolutionary spirit resonated unmistakably across the population. Students, workers, migrants, and the unemployed all offered unique contributions, their involvement vastly exceeding what anyone could have expected. Methods that for years had been exclusive to anarchists – attacks against power, horizontal organization, the refusal of demands – suddenly became mainstream, blurring the boundaries between the insurgents and the population at large. And that, in essence, is the meaning of insurrection: anarchy beyond the anarchists.
Such an outcome was no accident. It was instead made possible only by years of considered participation in the struggle, laying the groundwork for revolt to generalize. One of the most visible features of the Greek anarchist movement had always been an emphasis on attack, which communicated reproducible tactics to the rest of the population that could easily be utilized en masse in the future. Had the years of struggle prior to 2008 been defined by timid, legalistic protest, it’s likely the death of Alexis would have been met with more of the same. Yet by defying the submissive logic of the Left, and proving that meaningful resistance is always possible, the outcome was that an insurrectional storm had already long since been brewing, merely waiting for the right moment to smash the floodgates of the anarchist milieu.
Not only that, these years of combative engagement served to prepare the anarchists themselves at least as much as anyone else. It’s no small matter that only through acting do you learn how to act, developing the skills and affinity necessary to proceed further, maximizing your potential to intervene effectively in the unpredictable moments of turbulence forever on the horizon. This is the kind of knowledge that cannot be taught in any book. And yet without it the insurrection in Greece would have been impossible.
Another thing to note about December ‘08 was its informal, leaderless composition. Had the anarchist movement in Greece been unified within a single structure, with comrades always seeking to reach widespread consensus before taking action, there’s no way the insurrection would have happened. It’s only because various affinity groups were forever ready to take the initiative – immediately kicking off the riots with a high degree of intensity, and occupying the universities so everyone could gather – that the rage felt at the murder of Alexis wasn’t simply internalized. Moreover, had the insurrection held a single program or a unified set of objectives, the state would have had an easy time repressing it, knowing exactly where to mass its forces. It was precisely because the insurrection was so brilliantly multiform – expressing a vast diversity of tactics and participants, whilst remaining grounded in a shared desire to fight the system altogether – that it proved impossible to contain.
But there were also key limitations to the insurrection, blockages which need clearing for next time. In particular, it has often been said that December ‘08 wasn’t brought down by external forces, but instead by its failure to provide an alternative to what it was fighting. Throughout the month, the authorities had no chance of clearing the insurgents off the streets, at least not by force. The modern Greek state has always been pretty weak, and here it was in a critical condition, as if ready to collapse. The police, who at times ran out of tear gas, had been vanquished. And the government was too afraid to call in the army, quite aware of the rumors of mass defection. In this moment, revolution was literally possible. Yet for some reason the population didn’t go further. By the time Christmas came round, everyone was exhausted from weeks of fighting, and with all the banks already gutted, it was unclear what should happen next. Once the rage began to subside, therefore, the demonstrations stopped and the occupations were abandoned, even though everyone knew what they had set out to destroy would soon recuperate. Clearly it wasn’t a matter of desire, but instead of imagination: the uprising had bridged the gap between riot and insurrection, but not between insurrection and revolution. Nor should we really be surprised. Perhaps we no longer know what a revolution would even look like.
This isn’t the only time in recent memory a major insurrection in the Global North stopped short of its revolutionary ambitions. Something similar already happened with May ‘68 in France, when weeks of comparably intense rioting more or less simply fizzled out. Student uprisings, workplace occupations, and the largest wildcat strike in French history had led to the decisive breakdown of normality. With the threat of anarchy in the air, and key government buildings at risk of being stormed, the president Charles de Gaulle suddenly left the country, apparently to secure the loyalty of crucial sections of the military. He returned some hours later, taking to the radio to warn the country of absolute paralyzes – indeed, of civil war. Which was a strikingly honest admission! And yet, for many, it was also the obvious turning point. Already for weeks the clashes had thundered on, but they couldn’t continue on that plane forever; either they would progress to the level of something more revolutionary, or else merely run out of steam. It was, of course, the latter that happened. But what a curious situation: even though revolution seemed genuinely possible, somehow the people didn’t go further, as if they had been met with an invisible barrier. Speaking of which: déjà vu, anyone? Apparently the very same barrier has been rediscovered by the gilets jaunes, this time half a century later.
In France, as in Greece, you could say the population had arrived at a revolutionary precipice: the point of no return, beyond which nothing would be the same again. To take that step, smashing all the miserable certainties of this world, is surely the stuff of our wildest dreams. Yet to do so within the current conditions is impossible, because destroying the system we depend upon so heavily in material terms – for food, energy, accommodation, and so on – would be mass suicide, plain and simple. The embarrassing fact is that, by and large, we don’t yet know how to feed ourselves without capitalism (even skipping and shoplifting confirm a relationship of dependence). Which is a massive problem, given that people will always choose government over starvation, even if they know it’s just the lesser of two evils. As such, until we successfully combine fighting and living in a reproducible way, all talk of revolution will forever remain pure theory.
Compare these insurrections with Catalonia, 1936 – the best known example of anarchist revolution. It would be easy to understand the event as having occurred in a day or two, at the moment in which the workers defeated the fascist coup and seized the means of production. Yet such a simplistic perspective risks obscuring the vital years of struggle that took place throughout the preceding decades. This included a number of important insurrections, each of which brought the population at large closer to the possibility of permanent rupture. But the anarchist movement also had a more constructive side, taking years to develop the vital elements of a concrete social alternative, or what Bookchin described in The Spanish Anarchists (2001) as a “countersociety.” This aspect of the movement was characterized, for example, by the importance of various social centers – mainly run by the syndicalist unions – that were used as bases to hold meetings, run workshops, and disseminate literature. Children were educated at self-organized libertarian schools, outside of control by church and state; nor were they baptized or registered for birth certificates, just as their parents refused to enter into legal marriages. Money wasn’t particularly useful here, either, with the fabric of this countersociety being held together mainly by bonds of affinity and mutual aid. One of the things that made the Spanish anarchist movement successful, therefore, is that it had already constructed its own world, fostering the experiences necessary for people to trust in their own abilities. It meant that, when the big day arrived, the anarchists were quite capable of seizing the opportunity, having convinced a critical mass of the population that the risks associated with revolution were lesser than those of keeping things the same.
There’s a great deal of futility that comes with applying insurrectional methods to the exclusion of other forms of struggle. A great deal of miscomprehension, too, because insurrectionary anarchism was never supposed to offer a complete ideology or blueprint for the future, only an ongoing practice aimed at dismantling the most concrete aspects of power – specifically, the state and capital. It can be combined with more substantive political visions, and indeed it must, if it’s going to work. As long as revolution means not only the end of the current order, but also of everyone else along with it, you can be sure it’s not going to happen. Insurrection, maybe, but never revolution. Insurrection is easier, because it doesn’t warrant spending so much time on constructive efforts. But to honestly expect the population to go beyond a few weeks of rage and part ways with the system decisively – to expect parliament not to be rebuilt even after it’s been burnt down – you need to think about offering an alternative. Not necessarily an alternative system, and certainly nothing uniform, but still something. Some kind of assurance revolution won’t be the death of us.
This touches on an important point, both for life and revolution: in order to advance within any given situation, it’s always necessary to balance creation with destruction. Regaining a revolutionary perspective means initiating the attack in conjunction with building working models of anarchy, both of them already now. Because there’s no destroying something you’re physically incapable of living without: “Those who pretend to split material autonomy from the sabotage of the imperial machine show that they want neither” (Call, 2003). Insurrection is vital, given that it opens up the time and space necessary to pose questions with any meaning. But what of the positive content – indeed, the new worlds – with which to sculpt our answers?
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
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January 31, 2021 : Chapter 5 -- Added.
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