Social Insurrectionary Methods: Some Brief Excited Thoughts

Social Insurrectionary Methods

From Philly Anti-Capitalist

Original title: Social Insurrectionary Methods: Some Brief Excited Thoughts from a Philly Anarchist

Recently, there’s been a lot more motion in terms of Philly anarchy stuff (attacks, events, and actions). I think it can be attributed to a variety of phenomenon. But I think a big part of it is a phrase that a comrade and I recently discussed that I’m gonna call “social insurrectionary methods”.

I think that the social insurrectionary methods have been a tendency in Philly in the past as I understand it but we’re seeing a major return of those methods. Fundamentally, social insurrectionary methods rely upon efforts by anarchists to orient in a more social way while maintaining our insurrectionary anarchist politics. This differentiates us from “civil anarchists” who compromise their own politics in the name of unity or liberalism or leftist politics or deference. The social insurrectionary methods come with some risks obviously in terms of security. I think that is why some people are less interested in those methods due to the risks. However, I think those risk can be counteracted by the fact that every insurrectionary actor does not need to be involved in every direct action. We can practice security culture and have different spheres of activation for different people. We don’t need to be friends with everyone. We just gotta keep social spaces alive.

I think a forward facing or at least a more open anarchist space can provide more opportunities for new comrades (especially those who might not normally be exposed to anarchist politics due to racial and class segregation) to take part in struggle. Some of these things have been visible and others have been less visible. I think efforts like the work parties that took part at Bartrams, the organizing meetings and mob vandalism against Moms for Liberty, the martial arts training space (which is very Black and queer), intervention around ideas at political spaces such as the Block Cop City talk or the George Floyd Uprising Book talk, film screenings, Black anarchist meetups, discussion groups on Palestine solidarity, Philly contingents going to anarchist convergences (we brag about how great Philly anarchy is), friend hangouts in the park, Black anarchists working alongside Black nationalists to do self defense training and study, anarchists fighting in the Eddie Izirarry riots, and various other types of social activities tied to a politics of revolt are good examples of social insurrectionary activity. Or maybe that’s just being a serious anarchist. We build with each other as well as bringing in new people. I just want it to keep happening. I haven’t been this excited about anarchism in Philly in a while. This trend is only continuing with more discussion groups, meet-ups, and an upcoming Anarchist skill share in November. It’s all so exciting. Just keep planning stuff, please!

I think this social tendency of anarchists makes us strong and brings new people to our movement. I think the thing I’ve had conversations with people about a lot over the course of the past 12 months about is basically that anarchists must organize interventions and events on our own. And that’s the important thing for us to do rather than downplaying or diminishing our politics while at the same moment being open to people that might not share our politics. That’s the social insurrectionary method. In some ways, the social insurrectionary method by being uncompromising in our politics forces other political people to either adapt or at least respect the anarchist perspective. By organizing our own spaces and making our position clear we operate from a position of strength that we can communicate our ideas while not downplaying them.

I honestly think this is where affinity comes in to be honest. It’s easier to stand solid on your shit if comrades got your back. Whether it’s going to a work party with some friends, arguing with liberals at a Block Cop City event, moving in the streets as people spray paint, talking shit about how leftists in the city are cowards, anarchist fight training events, attending actions together that end up being wack but having fun being together, drinking cider on the porch, acrobatic exercises to do bad shit, or discussing a new zine that just dropped…social insurrectionary methods are great and fun and it doesn’t have to be FUCKING liberal or sub-cultural. Social insurrectionary methods for the win. Bring your comrades. Have their back. Even if it’s a small thing. Social means we move together and broaden our capacity as we move. We don’t all have to agree, we just gotta have respect, be anarchists and be in conversation. That’s a thing I really like about the anarchist space in Philly right now. Let’s keep up the energy. I love going to things where I see people I don’t know!

PS: Also, for comrades who aren’t in Philly. You can do all of this too. Just begin. We’re able to do it in Philly cause people just wanted cool shit to happen. The secret is to really begin!

Some Suggestions for social insurrectionaries

-More anarchist work parties

-Anarchist meetups/potlucks of every variety (for queer anarchists, black anarchists, disabled anarchists, anarchists who DJ, etc)

-Anarchist reading groups or film screenings

-Anarchist crew up and go to a wack event and critique it (a personal preference)

-More anarchist fight meetups (maybe with a debate interlude)

-Anarchist jogging meetups

-More Anarchist bike rides

-More Black bloc please

-More anarchist rave

-Anarchist hip hop show (no white race traitors allowed)

-More anarchist meetups at wack actions for activities

-No phone hangouts

-More Philly anarchist road trips to other cities (I hear harrisburg and pittsburgh are pretty cool)

-More anarchist skill shares that are not fight training

-More mob vandalism

-attack level 1 communist enemies with your level 25 anarchist crew

There are 80 Comments

Sounds, predictably, like this is exclusively focused on the reproduction of your subculture, and not on making your efforts more relevant to social struggles in the larger world outside of your subculture.

Ask not what the rest of the world can do for your subculture - ask what your subculture can do for the larger world outside. But then it's in the nature of subcultures to be insular and inwardly-focused.

'subculturalism'(there really is no such thing) and in particular insularity can be very good things with the right focus. The problem with the current radical milieu is not the presence of an insular milieu, it's that the make up of that milieu has been hollowed out of any radically enchanting language. Part of what will make a new radical milieu will be new marginal milieu with language properly equipped for the 21st century.

Again, there is no such thing as an 'outside world' in and of itself.

I'm working on the new language. It's the language of the 21st century schizoid man, of intersectional scenecraft and combative urbanomics.

A lot of the activities mentioned in this article sound like fun to me. I would add that hacky sack circles are a good way to loosen up and get some exercise together. I typed race traitor in a search engine and clicked a link to a Boston Review article about Noel Ignatiev. In the article was a link to libcom.org which has a trove of old zines and other publications.

respectfully, these activities are not anything social insurrectional. insurrectionalism means preparing society to stage a revolution by engaging in large-scale physical assaults on power, or by attempts to topple the government. social insurrectionary practices could include: building enough infrastructure to call for demonstrations with reasonable attendance, responding to acts of repression or unpopular legislature with escalatory acts of sabotage, vandalism, attacks, etc.; participating as a group in a strategy around a specifically militant housing complex, workplace, neighborhood, or layer of the population, and helping that group to express its politics in physical clashes with the police, the landlords, the bosses, etc.

everything you named sounds like it could be a fun activity for people of the same age group and sociology! worth doing anyway.

Some things are a matter of scale, insurrections have a substantial impact on the social order. So what would be a good example the Rodney King or George Floyd riots? Would those even count as an insurrection? This is more like intersectional DIY punk or urban scenecraft with riots, anti-police aggro, protests and demonstrations. Which is cool and I'm impressed that you can get this much done by way of group activities. I saw on the blog that they did some demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine so they are thinking globally and acting locally.

this is the "insurrectionary" scene shit of the 90s, which i love. i'm about this, tbc. debated many a zine while drinking on the porch after fight training and i love all that stuff.

but anon is correct that it's always been a weird use of the term, a tendency somewhat trapped in its earliest developmental stages by a collective failure of imagination or ambition or whatever. and here's the part where i ask wtf "attack lv 1 commie enemies" means... you mean like, go to the local uni and beat up some children in a marxist reading group .. or what?

did you randomly become the baddies, right at the end there? we punch up, not down
pull your head out of your ass

There could be some boot stomping tankies around that are in conflict with the anarchists. Hopefully not the peaceful book nerds in their leftcom reading groups.

do not trust to hope ... forsaken lands. it says "lv 1"

nobody is dangerous at lv 1, that's how levels work

can the moderators please delete lumpy for using "we" statements again?
thank you.

"insurrectionalism means preparing society to stage a revolution by engaging in large-scale physical assaults on power, or by attempts to topple the government"

Nope, that's being revolutionary. Insurrection and revolution are different strategies.

what do you think the difference is?

for insurrectional /anarchism/ the normal view is essentially that it is the task of the comrades to stage physical assaults on power at the soonest occasion, either to shock the public into mass resistance, or to procur arms or other materials necessary for future actions. the insurrection is the phase of the revolution in which the exploited do not yet retain the power to impose their will on the authorities outright, but they are seeking to establish that power through the force of deeds and actions. perhaps you have another idea? obviously for nihilists, liberals, reformers, or lifestylists, the insurrection is not connected to the concept of the revolution, rather it is connected to the principle of fun ("joy") or self-actualization. but for I@ comrades, the revolution is still the horizon.

anarchists dont believe in the revolution we believe in individual self-fulfillment and finding our true identity as unique individuals

same thing... self-fulfillment, unique individuality, etc. can only be realized through revolutionary struggle.

but normally we mock the idea of waiting for "after the revolution"....does that mean we are actually liberals pushing a complicated version of reformism?

Yes and no... traditionally reformists were the Fabian socialist types, seeking change within the established state institutions, so this is how the Dual Power strategy is reformist. Revolutionaries seeked an abolition of the dominant order, and replacement by revolutionary institutions they might have already developed (ideally). In that sense, the Black Panther and the Castrists were consistently revolutionary... even if not really anarcho-friendly.

Yes, only by LARPing through workerist mythologies from 100 years ago can we reach the FULL sellf-fulfillment and unique individuality that a Revolutionary Struggle allows us.

Then a few years later, hipsterism, n such n such...

insurrection is about opening up new spaces (by force or guile) where the power of the state is limited, this creates many possibilities for all types of anarchists worthy of the name. at a very advanced stage of power's decline, one of those possibilities might be revolution, during which, anarchists would do well to remember their history.

but long before having to worry about any of that rev shit, seeking out or opening up these spaces is THE anarchist project.

the relationship between insurrection and revolution should be pretty obvious ... and if you're worried about how The Rev will play out, YOU SHOULD BE but also, don't worry too much sweetheart, a lot has to happen before the red guards return

you have laid out a specific strategy which in military terms is known as "clear, hold, build." for activists, i think this attempt was tried repeatedly from 2011 (occupy wall street) until 2020 ("""autonomous zones""") and somewhat in ongoing cop city movement (although those encampments much less utopian in their orientation). this is by know means the only way to approach the question of the insurrection. in some sense, this is more a strategy of just like creating a free zone. i think what we can see is that the enemy encircles the zone and chokes it out. we need some new ideas

Just tent cities to accommodate (mostly) homeless derelict men with high levels of testossterones ain't exactly the rev... unless there's some effective ways to deterritorialize the class gaps between the petty bourgie organizers and their temporary homeless henchmen

Oh wait... Is it not-invitation-only orgies? Not quite sure about that.

didn't read your desert? no need to splain

you're not going to "innovate" out of this but luckily the climate apocalypse
but hey, keep chasing "new ideas" if it makes you feel clever

I have 52 lbs of freeze dried venison in my 2' thick concrete bunker near an underground freshwater aquifer. I can do 300 pullups in a row and while you were reading books I was practicing the art of subterfuge. I think we both know who will enjoy the climate apocalypse more!

me? because i don't need internet to entertain myself?

You will give me many children. We will be a happy family.

ew! hard no

I have a pallet of Spam with a shelf life of 10 years, nya nya nya nya nyaaaaaa!

Was a big desert fan. War in Syria proved that its basic thesis was false. Abandonment and governmental retreat not the same.

"clear, hold, build" is the state's answer to an insurgent force that aims to reduce governance and domination in an area.

imo the cop city encampment was pretty utopian(not that I *really* believe in that in the purest sense) it was free, it was a large gathering of people free in some sense from the clutches of the usa and capitalism ("you are now leaving the USA" placard), who lived however they wanted to for approximately 2 years and any encroachment by the cops or machines was met with combative resistance.

Arguably as anarchists,
*the goal*(trademark pending lol) is not to slowly chip away at areas and claim them and build a new smaller society as anarchists, but to make governance and domination less able to function by reducing their capacity and hold on an area and their ability to function in general, making everyone who is subjected to them more free in their absence. So yes, kindof... like "clear" except that it never stops.

We should only be attempting to *hold* in the sense that we don't want the tendrils of levaithan that we cut to wrap themselves around our necks again after severing them. We want leviathan to die.

The idea of building anything doesn't make sense at all. Imo we should already be attempting to live as free and as anarchistically as possible because we want to be free, and as anarchists we presumably enjoy living like that.

Anarchy is not a territorial struggle, it is a struggle of destroying what kills us, cages us, confines us, domesticates us, and to make it less able to function. It is a walk towards anarchy.
I have no answers for a society to present to everyone, and I don't want that, I want to be free, and noone is free until we all are free.

^Same commenter adding^

insurrectionary anarchism is a way to engage with the world that wants to move towards an insurrection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrectionary_anarchism

An insurrection is not the same thing as a mass movment or a revolution. Insurrectionary anarchism aims to make attack and conflictuality spread uncontrollably through informally organized means and methods. It's not concerning itself with a revolution, but with immediate destruction and attack right now.

"The force of an insurrection is social, not military. The measure for evaluating the importance of a generalized revolt is not the armed clash, but on the contrary the amplitude of the paralysis of the economy, of normality."

Anyways, I'd be happy to hear thoughts

I think you present a false choice between revolution and attack. The insurrectionary method does not imply immediate attack instead of or in contrast to revolution, but for it. Bonnano said it very simply:
"This attack could be:
- isolated attacks against individual structures or people
- an insurrectional attack by a specific minority
- a mass insurrectional attack
- a mass revolutionary attack
Each of these levels, starting from the first, may or may not create the conditions leading to the successive one to develop... action itself is the only test for action."

put another way, asking "what does insurrection have to do with revolution?"

is more than a bit like asking "what does the wheel have to do with the car?"

Your comment expresses some of my own sentiments, but you lose me when you say “no one is free until we all are free”. This undermines what you correctly point out concerning the pitfalls of an orientation towards social aggregates. Anarchism is not the social implementation of a political program through struggle, it is an antipolitical destituting. Call that passivity or lifestyle anarchism if you must — I don’t take those charges to be especially damning. You’re doubling back on the “society as a whole” narrative that leads every revolutionary thought into incoherence or self-betrayal. The first thing we must dispense with as anarchists is the idea of “society as a whole”, which has never existed anyway other than as a bureaucrat’s phantasm. Anarchy is the splintering of social aggregates and the formation of relations between something other than organs. It has nothing to do with making everyone ‘free.’

‘Freedom’ (whatever you mean by that and to whatever degree it exists as something more than a millenarian itch) would certainly have to be something lived immediately, in ever-greater degrees of possibility and spontaneity, not a humanist trumpet blown by a Hegelian angel. The struggle that expresses this freedom necessarily implies conflictual means, but we should blush before considering this struggle as a motor toward the moment when we constitute ourselves as ‘free’. (I use “constitute” in the sense of a constituent power which, through struggle, would articulate itself within hegemonic relays) So then, the other thing anarchists must do away with is the notion of “from this point on”; of a epochal juncture where we could totally appropriate ‘freedom’ for ourselves or others, or attain a degree of self-awareness and practical knowledge allowing us to begin doing so. I don’t even like to speak of freedom for this reason: it always constitutes a vague telos which would be appropriated at some point, by someone, through equally vague measures. Anarchist struggle is a wandering. It is an opaque, destitutive process of abandoning and undermining extant relays of power on one side and picking daisies on the other — without closure. By dominant indices of political efficacy, it is a failure.

Can we finally stop effacing this, one of our great virtues as anarchists? We are failures and we should celebrate that fact. We are that element which undermines and forces anemic revolutionary thought to contend with its own duplicity, by showing how the established criteria for success necessarily imply a self-cauterizing. Our failure is directed toward the end of failing or failing upwards, if you like. Our ardor for freedom is so boundless, groundless, and uncompromising that we would never admit it if it announced itself at the door. To me, this is the only anarchy worthy of a comment long and confused as this: one that wanders down mountain wood paths only to end up in a tangled thicket, then calls out to others to attempt a similar wandering, perhaps to a similar thicket.

Zarathustra already announced it: “‘This is my way; where is yours?’ — thus I answered those who asked me “the way.” For THE way — that does not exist.”

respectfully, we have a lot to build. if we believe we can live in anarchy while in fact living within capitalism, we are not anarchists, we are reformists. We have to build, for instance, the infrastructure, columns, fronts, militias, and formations that will allow us to win against the counter-revolutionaries and their imperialist supporters. We have to build skills to train people in arms, politics, medicine, etc if we want to dissolve the power of the state so that it does not return in a new form. We have to re-build dwellings and infrastructure to accommodate life outside of capitalism and with the other species (plant and animal) of this planet. the revolution (and also the insurrection) is absolutely a process of building things up.

The framework of infinite "clearing" away of enemy forces is, frankly, not a real theory. We do not want to build our ideas around the need for animosity and conflict and violence. If we do, we actually *need* our enemies to continue existing, or else we will have to invent new ones over and over again, probably finding them from within the lower classes themselves. This kind of worldview already has a name, but it isn't anarchism.

No.
Anarchists of praxis have no desire to build a new prison while trapped inside this prison.
We recognize that we are far too traumatized and corrupted by this prison to build anything but new prisons.
We accept that we are here simply to burn this prison to the ground and then burn the ground.
We are not here to build a fucking thing.
We are here to destroy.

This is not as radical as it sounds. No serious revolt that actually destroys things will ever be done by people who dont know how they will feed their children, secure insulin, shelter from cold. Real destruction and chaos does not come from burning lots of cars, cell phone towers, and breaking lots of windows. It comes from building the peoples army and destroying the actual state. That requires a preponderance of social forces to support us,otherwise we are just constructing a dictatorship or digging our own graves,as the last 12 years of global revolt have proven.

No more weird cliches from southern Europe and the Balkans.
We are not supposed to try to lose, nor to cleanse ourselves like pious christians.

^gotta love how shamelessly impoverished this theory is!

taking pride in the utter failure to even use the word praxis correctly, all while assuming that a centered feeling is somehow better than a strategy. truly, you have become the cul-de-sac of what was always only a critique and nothing more.

can only hope this person is doing satire!

To whom are you talking to, lumpy? Are you blindly rushing to the defense of organizationalist trolls again or ???

the blind, as the anon points out, would be anyone who thinks i-will-dance-in-the-ashes is anything more than a cute slogan

you can't shelter from the cold in the ashes, unless the final stage of your plan is to blow your brains out after you've burnt down the prisons and salted the earth.

i get how it sounds all edgy and sexy to say grandiose bullshit like BUT WE WILL JUST BUILD MORE PRISONS THEREFORE FIRE BURNSFIREBURNSFIREBURNS PRETTYFLAMESPRETYFLAMES

i get it. that shit is super convincing when you're 20 and a total jackass. i'm a bit too old for it, myself!

and to head off further bad faith at the pass, i'm not talking about seizing the state but somebody went so far as to claim NO BUILDING EVER ... which is beyond ridiculous. like i say, can only hope this is just troll bullshit because it's cringe af

"Obviously anarchist organizing has worked wonders since the 1930. We're basically winning everywhere!"

"Every anarchist fighter is a child that should get out of the streets and into more meetings!"

"the utter failure to even use the word praxis correctly"

Describe how whoever you are referring to is using the word praxis incorrectly. Use your words. I'll wait.

oh! don't wait around, i get distracted sometimes, silly me!

how bout this? either that word can be understood as a synthesis of many complex political theories, paired with functional, repeatable actions that lead to demonstrable, desirable outcomes in the real world, which would indicate that egoist, nihilist edgelording has YET to burn all the prisons ...

OR if i'm being unkind, i'd say that this person appears to be referring to something like... shit-tier goblin praxis?

burn the thing! dance around the flames! jump up and down on ashes!

declare victory on behalf of goblin fire and blood gods! ...get hungry!

wander off in search of snacks! GLORY UNTO GODS OF FLAMES AND DEATH!

TAKE THAT! STUPID BUILDERS! DIEDIEDIE!

etc etc ...

I am an insurrectional anarchist just trying to help correct all the Liberal nihilist ideas out of our movement. Not a weird Unionist or an organization guy

How do you do, fellow insurrectional anarchist? Have fun *checks notes* "correcting" "Liberal nihilists" (???) while totally being a insurrectional anarchist trying to get us all away from attacking stuff and into more planning meetings so we can build stuff.

People should attack stuff. We should build up our strength to flatten entire police departments and divisions of the national guard!

Over two centuries of revolutionary thought have proven a different point, that treating a world of objects to be acted upon at societal scales by a principal will (ahem, that of “the people”) is inseparable from state thought concerned with the management of social aggregates and the production and forced confession of subjectivities. “The people” only exists in the thought of would-be commissars in a mode of representation. Anarchists would be better to have done with that. And so far as revolutionary thought is endlessly referred to principia such as justice, law, freedom, etc. it will always be an attempt to palm off shoddy existential merchandise. Your criteria for “serious revolt” are precisely what makes the entire scope of your vision endlessly recuperable and functionally indistinguishable from state thought. Form the people’s army, destroy (seize) the state, a preponderance of social forces supporting you… Give me a break. I would like to laugh if it weren’t so shameless
and derivative. Constitutive, social revolts are always a matter for state thoughts, for reducing beings to organs, for reducing life to an end of millenarian redemption. It’s only when we’ve abandoned all of this that we can act in a way that doesn’t reproduce our fetters. The archē goes much deeper than you’re willing to admit. Anarchy is not an ethico-political dispensation of “people’s justice”, it’s an abandoning of all ground for existence and the courage to live without a why and act without an end. This will no doubt displease you because it lacks your requisite prescriptive criteria for “serious”, successful revolt. That isn’t an oversight — it’s an intention. Anarchist revolt in this epoch looks like accepting the futility of conflictual praxis as we have been conditioned to conceive of it and acting anyway. And while I think your ideas are painfully ingenuous, I’ll still cheer you on in your attempts, for a while, until I’m forced to vomit.

And to clarify, “accepting the futility… and acting anyway” means that we act with an awareness of the pernicious influence of societally-programmatic teleologies and leave the end of our activity open. This has to be vague, cannot be positive, has to be experimentally elaborated, in order for the clarity you crave not to become a tawdry injunction. The famous “what is to be done?” becomes a “how is it to be done” without an ability to describe the nature of the “what”. But in the doing, the what appears.

Messed up transcribing the end of that thought. Should read: without an ability to describe the nature of the ‘it’. But in the doing, the ‘it’ appears.

was there a "criteria for serious revolt"? i'm looking and i ... can't find any?

“No serious revolt that actually destroys things will ever be done by people who dont know how they will feed their children, secure insulin, shelter from cold. Real destruction and chaos does not come from burning lots of cars, cell phone towers, and breaking lots of windows. It comes from building the peoples army and destroying the actual state. That requires a preponderance of social forces to support us…”

Some of the criteria (more or less explicit) for serious (read: reasonable) action present in just this excerpt are: that it be answerable to the material needs of a population, that it be able to adequately engage in an exchange of violence with extant institutions, that it be representative of a molar subject, that it refer praxis toward the displacing or destruction of state power through positivist activity, that it secure the ‘hearts and minds’ of a population, that it answer to the principle of sufficient reason, that it express and actualize an innate justice, etc. Whenever we speak of “serious revolt that actually destroys things”, a set of criteria by which to assess that seriousness are obviously being put into play. Conversely, I’m suggesting the anarchic answer to the question, ‘why do you do what you’re doing?’ is simply, ‘I do it because I do it.’

if this is the case, your "anarchic" politics is actually conservative because it expresses only what already exists, not what could exist through intentional efforts by a large number of people. this kid of cia-funded post structuralist stuff is just not at all helpful for people who want to emancipate themselves from exploitation and governance. i hope readers can see this. "I do this because i do this" is like a statement only hipsters from the global north would ever say to someone about their politics. as long as this is your politics -- pure aesthetics -- than you will never do what it takes to build a social revolution which requires dedication, sacrifice, risks, straight up scary shit. slowly the world is moving beyond the pax americana and if anarchists want to continue playing the role we have been in struggles, we are going to need to power way way way up. the liberal anarchists (everyone who doesnt believe in the revolution) will continue to do their thing, but insurrectionalists will need to chart our own path without them in the coming years.

What exists does not exist as a rigid boundary, it exists as a contingent frame — in our case a rapidly collapsing one. The presencing of the epochal conditions in which I dwell is the very thing that makes unconditioned activity possible, whether effective or not. For that transgression to be effective, one must listen to those conditions and not drown them out by clinging to the strident bells of inherited clamor. In an anarchist context, nothing could be more conservative than harping on with the same tired insistence about social revolution and the responsibilities, sacrifices, sense of justice, etc. that will supposedly build it. Any revolution that isn’t to devolve into farce would for me need to begin from a lack of injunctions and criteria that specify what one must do, as having no responsibility to do something and DOING IT ANYWAY is the only meaningful sense in which an act can be one’s own. We don’t need it anyway. I’ve never spoken a word against risk, dedication, sacrifice. My comments were directed against the imperative sense of what actions are traditionally thought to respond to those injunctions and the poorly thought out & ostensibly clear paths to achieving them. It is an attempt to clear space for the destitutive withdrawal that is far less articulated and is a necessary correlate to any positive insurrectionary activity. The two quite obviously imply and reinforce each other.

Furthermore, insurrectionary anarchism has always contained a grain of what I’m trying to say here (perhaps poorly). It begins from a refusal to look for any further justification for acting or not acting in prescribed ways and seeks to immediately begin shattering constraints. Despite the fact that there has always been an instinct to set insurrection up as an opening onto social revolution, it has never taken the imminence of the latter to be a condition for acting. Were there no social revolution possible, we would still act, we would still attack. And there is no justification or legitimating criteria for why we would do it other than, ‘it’s what we do.’ The idea that that kind of thinking is “pure aesthetics” or “cia-funded post-structuralist stuff” is just inane and only reflects your inability to see your own activity as anything but the response to a set of injunctions and prescriptions.

I’m all for a social revolution, but to my mind it won’t come from a forced univocity or integral praxis. It may come from the endless play of mutability that results when we have ceased to function as organs within institutional bodies and all projects to which we are beholden have disintegrated. You feel differently. Great. I’m sympathetic to your perspective, even if I am not able to believe in it any longer. Let’s elaborate our desires so far as they resonate, then diverge. My approach allows for that divergence as difference, yours only as divergence from orthopraxis. I will struggle, sacrifice, take risks aside you, so far as I feel the desire to do so. The moment you feel like burning churches, digging up mummified nuns, or putting bourgeois up against the wall, I will take my leave of you — though perhaps not without wishing you luck or trying to unsettle your appalling ardor, only out of love I assure you. Anarchy expresses the choice to act for myself, to be alegitimate, to remain responsive to the conditions and inclinations that present themselves, rather than rooting myself in inflexible and mechanistic programs, principles, solutions, etc. that demand indifference to the presence of the moment and the possibilities that exist in it. Anarchy is precisely this possibility of being alegitimate, unjustified, unmanageable.

There is no ‘way’ to social revolution. To realize this admirable longing now means is to have done with the rule of ‘ways’, with a ‘society’ to which I am unwaveringly responsible, and to let indeterminate presence (of my world, of my self) guide me.

Box Lunch is great: they're exactly the kind of sparring partner Lumpy needs!

I'm not overly concerned with "Lumpy's" needs, but I definately think Box Lunch is a breath of fresh (cybernetic) air in the stagnant, left/liberal ecosystem of A-News. Their analysis is fresh, interesting, quirky, idiosyncratic, and highly original. And best of all, they're CHALLENGING and THOUGHT PROVOKING...

I am the bridgework Emile always wished to carefully examine. Also the phantom that made a game of Sir Einzige.

blatant badge of holier-than-thou activism is showing: your mention of sacrifice. Why would this old and absolutely hypocritical position pose a threat to colonial-decendent power structures? Unless maybe you aren't taking your own grave ideas about perpetual victims of them very seriously?

Yeah used to believe all that stuff but actually ontology is just not a good basis for thinking when you start reading about actual attempts to destroy the state

In western metaphysics, all ‘doing’ IS applied ontology. Ontology establishes the fundamental ground which defines substance, derives entities, assigns them attributes, faculties, etc. It is traditionally referred to as “first philosophy” for a reason; bc it is only on the basis of this adequation between beings and their attributes and capacities that practical philosophy (ethics, politics, etc.) is possible. When you start reading about actual attempts to destroy the state with this in mind, you’ll realize that their tendencies to run aground or turn back to devour themselves always on the implicit ontologies present in their epoch and the character of the presence (the economies of action which determine what actions are possible, just, effective, etc.) that defined it. This is why the October Revolution could not have happened in 1649, or why Plato could not have written a Genealogy of Morals. It is the history of not just all attempts to destroy the state, but the frame of all doing. [cf. Reiner Schurmann’s anarchic reading of Heidegger]

This isn’t meant to imply that actions be grounded in an applied critique of metaphysics, or that actors require a thorough understanding of the historical economies of ontology. The gaze I am putting forth is fully revealed by a simple awareness to the way our current epoch brings itself into presence, i.e. as the evident erosion of all grounding principles, all clear paths to redemption, all substantive identites, all faith in law, production, Man (or at bare minimum an awareness of their contingency) for a simple principle of management through technology. Anarchists are more or less interesting to me depending on how they respond to this. And any attempts to destroy Leviathan which don’t take aim squarely at the epochally-situated principia which even allow for such a dreadful phenomenon, not to mention its persistance, will find themselves reproducing the enclosure — perhaps a more capacious enclosure, but an enclosure nonetheless.

Two more considerations: First, I’m not describing an ontology, but the genealogy and function of historical ontologies, which are implicit in all revolutionary moments and even made the concept of anarchism as a political movement possible (an experience of societal totalization makes anarchism as such possible). Second, this awareness of and responsiveness to the character of our time makes thoughts of people’s armies and destroying the state seem quixotic and inattentive to the possibilities given by our present situation. I am sympathetic to these orientations, certainly, and to the desires that produce them. I only wish they were more willing to listen (not to me but to the moment). Something like Monsieur Dupont’s ‘prorevolutionaries’ then. As for my own inclinations as to social insurrectionary methods, if it isn’t apparent, I have come to feel that a destitutive approach bringing forth Walter Benjamin’s ‘divine violence’ is the only response that takes itself not from generations of pallid theory, but from what reveals itself as possible in this moment as an opening onto anarchy. The task is not to destroy the state but to render it useless and impossible. And that requires an orientation toward a set of archē which go far deeper than a contingent, historical manifestation of a nation state or economic order, an orientation which has profound consequences not just for our notion of ‘what is to be done’, but for what it means to be and to exist.

Somebody might jump in to say something like anarchism has a long history predating Proudhon and the First International. Of course. I just mean that anarchism as the self-conscious political movement we all act in proximity to was a response to a moment of rapidly eroding faith in traditional grounds which allowed action to be referred to itself. In many ways it was (and remains) an attempt to reinscribe some sort of meaning in those grounds (humanism, justice, freedom, etc.) The intention was obviously not to assert that the principles, strategies, and desires which constellate anarchism became for the first time thinkable in the mid-19th century.

Brah, 5 years olds are always in "revolutionary moments" and individual ontological methodologies will always have a uniquely didtinct character, the context of any group revolutionary democratic moment can ONLY ever occur within a tainted ideological framework, just observe all previous revs, they were materialistic and ressentiment inspired tantrums which Were NEVER satisfactory for the majority.

pretty much

yep ... and if that's where you draw your main conclusion, you completely miss the point. every "rev" was also caused by an even shittier, even older set of shit ideas, breaking apart under the weight of their own contradictions, creating the material conditions for the necessary rupture of whichever stagnating monopoly of violence that came previously. all the way back baby!

That ‘breaking apart’ is the manifestation of the ontological turn I’m describing. Problem is, all these shifts maintain the integral ground of the archē and so start to look like so many displacements only to conserve the principle of being rooted in principles. I’m trying to enunciate, to use Schurmann’s antinomous phrase, the ‘principle’ of anarchy.

sure. for my part, i've always found the ruptures to be more interesting than their intended destinations too.

BUUUT i don't consider that sufficient reason to abandon all goal orientation or medium-longterm planning. i just keep it real small scale and localized to people i actually know, so as to avoid most of the pitfalls of abstraction and representation.

Sure. The point isn’t to abandon teleology entirely but to restrict it to its proper sphere. That sphere might be something like ‘making’, where ends necessarily predetermine materials and applications. But to me, thought and action cannot be a ‘making.’ They have to be a wandering. For anarchists this means being receptive to the situation we find ourselves in and not clinging to anemic inherited knowledges nor acting to instantiate a particular social form, but eroding the plausibility of all the principles that define an era and experimentally elaborating our thinking and activity. We’re already largely doing this when people act responsively to an impulse. But rather than the only impulse that is validated being the smashy one, I feel that the impulse toward contemplation, withdrawal, inactivity are just as and perhaps more vital and, yes, effective in our current moment.

.... are you a god damned bot too?! are any of you NOT large language models?!

Sometimes I feel like one. Too much abiding in books has rendered my speech into a stutter.

You seen this brah?
https://youtu.be/QzFMDS6dkWU?si=EokXh1_NNUj73fEf
I believe aliens have live deep beneath the surface and have been mining rare minerals for millenia and occasionally popup to see what stage of politics the ape men have reached and the mischief they are up to. Then they shrug and go back down to their anarchic techno autonomous zone.

no cop city encampment was not at any point a large gathering of people. during the weeks of action, there were occasionally a few hundred people (which also is not large). the residents absolutely lived inside of capitalism and did not live however they wanted. the encampments were in a public park where joggers and cyclists and park-goers regularly passed, given that this is simply a forested area inside of the city of atlanta. the food and water was dropped off every single day by volunteers who live in houses in the surrounding area. seemingly many of those in the camps relied on mutual aid instead of wage labor. but like....are homeless people outside of capitalism? do they get to do whatever they want? i guess whatever your answer to that might be is the same for the forest occupations.

more lived anarchist culture, and less methods, strategies, tactics, tips & tricks, life hacks!

By definition, a culture includes "methods, strategies, tactics, tips & tricks, life hacks". So what is your "culture" that goes beyond these? Shitcore?

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