Insurrectionary Anarchist Practice
The development of an insurrectional anarchist
practise on a projectual basis requires the ability to
look at what one has done critically. When one's aims
are sufficiently clear and one begins to develop more
precise ideas of how to accomplish these aims in
practise with others, the arm of critique becomes a
most useful weapon in the concrete reality of
struggle. However, in this realm, it cannot be reduced
to simplistic acceptance or rejection, to the binary
logic of "yes" and "no". Rather it must involve a
careful examination of the actions we have chosen to
take in light of our aim of destroying the social
order through an insurrectional process. If we find
that a particular type of action has taken us down a
wrong path, then we start over without regret. The
ability to recognize mistakes and start over from
scratch if necessary reflects the creative imagination
and passionate intelligence that any healthy
insurrectional movement--no matter how small--would
have.
Unfortunately, history--including that which we
ourselves have lived--is usually treated as mythology,
that is to say, as a higher reality to be venerated or
as a theology to be examined only on a doctrinal level
to find the true account. Anarchists, in particular,
have tended to create tales of great moments out of
their past. This mythologizing approach turns our
history into a series of "glorious defeats" rather
than an ongoing struggle in which many mistakes were
made and in which many amazing projects were
accomplished. Defined as a series and great moments
and glorious defeats, our history becomes useless to
our ongoing struggle. Rather we need to examine events
in terms of what we can learn that is practical to our
present struggle, not in order to erase the beauty and
poetry that can be found in much of the history of
revolt, but to enhance that beauty and poetry by
making it practical to our daily battle against power.
One recent event that has been mythologized is the
series of demonstrations blockading the WTO summit
conference in Seattle last year. In the months that
have followed, similar demonstrations confronting
various major conferences, meetings or conventions of
those in power have occurred. In most of these
demonstrations, very real acts of revolt occurred, and
my solidarity is with those who carried out these
acts. But at least in the United States, most of these
events were organized by political activists whose
agenda was to make themselves heard--"to speak truth
to power" as so many of thes small time politicians
like to say--and who were willing to negotiate with
the authorities over these events. for the most part
anarchists have retained the mythology developed
around Seattle and limited their discussions and
critical analyses to the questions of property
destruction and the nature os violence and
nonviolence, keeping these discussions on the moral
terrain on which the left political organizers prefer
to argue. None of this threatens the Seattle myth. Nor
does it open the question that is of far more interest
from an insurrectional anarchist perspective: what
place, if any, do such demonstrations have in our
ongoing struggle, in our insurrectional project/ It is
not a matter of refusing to go to such events, but of
going, if one so chooses, with a clear intent, in a
way that flows out of and back into one's daily
struggle. In pursuing questions of this sort, each of
us will draw our own conclusions and act in
consequence, but if we do not ask such questions, we
will continue to be dragged along by the agendas of
power and its loyal opposition, running here and there
to no avail, and complaining that the myth cannot be
relived.
The small bits of new that I have heard about the
events in Prague and about various solidarity
demonstrations around the world indicate that there
were some explicitly anti-capitalist events and that
there was far less domination by "nonviolent"
activists. Below are a few texts intended to encourage
further discussion of these questions.