This post has a few of the problems associated with insurrectionary anarchists groups.
Just because the media lies are rampant, and is the master at manipulating the masses to believe anarchist insurrectionists are ‘enemies of the people’ does not change the truth that those who practice propaganda by the deed are not. They are enemies of the state, and enemies of the ruling classes. They are not enemies of the proletariat, what about those who are not defiant towards their oppression?
How are you defining ‘defiance’ here?
Just because it is omitted by those who deny the reality of revolutionary struggle anarchist insurrectionists operate on the same principles that will be found in the anarchist societies they envision, however now these principles are used for destruction (which is needed to create a new world),
not for creation when we will have anarchy,
Does this mean you regard the destructive and creative aspects of revolt as separated by time? Meaning first we’ll have to attack and defeat capitalism and the state, then afterward we’ll proceed to build an anarchist society? If so, you have it wrong, comrade. Insurrection and communization must occur simultaneously because the success of one depends on the other.
does not change from the fact they are setting examples of anarchism in practice, the most effective way, by the deed and through action. They remain anarchists at all stages of the revolutionary struggle and this should not be overlooked. They practice and are examples of autonomy, mutual aid, anti-authoritarianism, federation, and solidarity.
The problem with many insurrectionary anarchist groups is not their politics—it’s their activity. It doesn’t matter if I agree with their goals and methods of organization if I can’t stand behind their tactics. This isn’t to say i’m a pacifist who has a moral opposition to things like property destruction, kidnapping, intimidation, and so on, but these tactics in and of themselves won’t win the class struggle and have the potential to turn people off of anarchism entirely, leading them toward reactionary politics or the dead end of Leninism.
Are insurrectionists enemies of the proletariat that do not resist against their oppressors? No.
What do you mean by ‘resistance’?
No, because they like all anarchists want everyone to be free, but the people will only truly be free if they liberate themselves. Every oppressed person, every member of the proletariat has it inside of them to be strong, inside of them to be brave, courageous, daring, imaginative, innovative, creative and destructive, versatile, we all possess the ability to accomplish anything we set out to do, even creating a new world. All we have to do is hold our dream inside of our heart(s) and set our mind(s)to it. None of us are incapable of destroying what destroys you.
Agreed.
We all have the ability to reclaim our dignity, just in the act of fighting back. Anarchism is of this philosophy, that you are the master of your own life, your life only and that you are the creator of your own fate… You have endured so much already and this proves you are able to use your strength for change than merely surviving in the pathetic existence of chains and constraints, to take your freedom back. You can use the voice you were born with to use and propel yourself into action, end the abusive relationship you are in which you do not need, you can leave your parents if they have no respect for you, you can sabotage anyone who has treated you unfairly, you can wisely organize and beat the shit out of the person who made you want to kill yourself, who called you a ‘faggot’, a ‘slut’ or ‘prude’, a ‘nigger’, or did anything that disrespected you as a human being. You are also just as capable of attacking the very systems of hierarchy and domination that have created and support such people that have committed injustice after injustice against you and your fellow oppressed brothers and sisters. You can kidnap your bastard boss, bomb a bank and a murderous corporation, throw rocks at cops, rob a corporate store and give everything out to the members of your community, expropriate and expropriate some more! Assassinate a symbol, a cop, a corporate CEO, a president. Insurrectionists are exemplary in proving action is possible and can always hopefully be replicated and improved through action. We all can be militants! We all can be revolutionaries! Through direct action we will live free and fight to gain total freedom.
Sure, we could do these things, but then what? Again, i’m not fundamentally opposed to any of these things, but how will any of this bring us closer to an anarchist-communist society? We can all be revolutionaries, but blowing up buildings and shooting people isn’t much of a path to revolution if that’s the only plan the revolutionaries have.
No anarchist would ever aim to harm an innocent proletariat through propaganda by the deed or any direct action, ever.
Doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. Intentions don’t excuse idiotic behavior.
If you are a pacifist or an authoritarian you are an instrument for the ruling classes and are traitors to your own freedom. You are an enemy of your own life. You will live through the chains of slavery and be slowly murdered by capitalism, if only you could understand that life without freedom is dead existence, that it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
If you want a life of suffering and misery, if you want to be a coward and just another cog in the machine for the rulers then go ahead. You are a parent and a slave to the capitalists for your children? Do you think your children will grow up and thank you for a world with mass extinctions, oceans being poisoned, the mass deforestation, all of the wars raged by the rich for profit, the debts, the wage slavery, and the crises and inevitable rampant crime induced by the bankers and state? They will despise you, just as without destroying your oppressors you should despise yourself for having no dignity, not even trying to fight for a better life.
You are aware of how miserably elitist this whole paragraph sounds, aren’t you?
Insurrectionary anarchists do not compromise with the state, with the bosses, and rulers, they do not seek better slave conditions but total liberation. They fight for their freedom as individuals. Their language is action. Do you disagree or have concerns with an action by a propaganda by the deed group?
Insurrectionary anarchists also tend to miss the point of fighting for better conditions. By fighting for better conditions within the capitalist system, we gain the strength to move beyond it. These kinds of groups have to (and often fail to) take care that their language of “action” doesn’t turn into just doing things ‘just because.’
“Communication must be based on a horizontal and anonymous debate, which will come out of the practice (claims of actions) and of the widespread of theories through the means of communication of the movement. In other words, the meeting will be substituted by an anonymous and horizontal debate between groups or individuals who communicate through practice.” They ”do not want any democratic federation, as this would involve representatives, delegates, official meetings, committees, and organs implying the election of leaders, charismatic figures and the imposition of specialists of speech.” From a statement made by the Informal Anarchist Federation.
Insurrectionary groups are forced into secrecy by the nature of their activity. How can anyone expect to build an anarchist movement based upon anonymous activity? When one gets involved in bombings, bank robberies, and things of that sort, their circle of trust necessarily becomes smaller. I would imagine it difficult to do anything in a positive manner when one spends a large part of their time carrying out attacks against the physical manifestations of capital and the state and worrying about the heat such attacks brings down.
Insurrectionary anarchists constructively criticize all those who are in situations of compromise with power in their belief that the revolutionary struggle is impossible at the present time. Asanarchists they would never aim to harm an innocent proletariat through propaganda by the deed or any direct action, they hope to see them standing for liberty and equality at the barricades.
Whether or not they aim to harm innocent people, it does happen.
If you don’t want to suffer and die just as a victim, a capitalist casualty, nothing but a number, a consumer, an obedient slave, to fight back properly you will need gasoline, some matches, bombs and guns, but most importantly that fire inside of your heart that beholds solidarity which spreads revolutionary resistance like wildfire.
Okay, so we need weapons, but what else? Propaganda of the deed is about much more than blowing things up and killing people. Reducing the idea of insurrection to an unwinnable (we’ll never be able to defeat the state in a purely armed struggle) war against the government is not only pointless but deprives the concept of most if not all of it liberatory potential.
As someone who’s been deeply influenced by communization theory, I am highly sympathetic to the cause of the insurrectionists. However, it seems that all the current insurrectionary groups have to offer us is violence. Yes, revolution will require a certain degree of it, but we also need to change the way we are organized economically (toward communism) and politically (toward anarchism). Our actions need to reflect our goals, so yes, bomb, shoot, kidnap, assassinate—but they will need to have some level of involvement with working class, student, feminist, anti-racist, and LBGT-liberation movements as well.
“To change masters is not to be free.” —
Jose Marti (via chavista)
We must always remember this.
(via amodernmanifesto)
(Source: mellowedpunker, via amodernmanifesto)
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The question is not: who has the guns? But rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000 proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they recognise will take away the guns which they failed to use against it.
[…]
There is no revolution without the destruction of the state. But how? Beating off armed bands, getting rid of state structures and habits, setting up new modes of debate and decision — all these tasks are impossible if they do no go hand in hand with communisation. We don’t want “power”, we want the power to change all of life.
” — Gilles Dauvé, When Insurrections Die [emphasis added]The relevance of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution today -
As the ferocious crisis of Pakistani capitalism devastates society, we hear frantic cries of “revolution” from mainly the right-wing politicians and intellectuals. This reflects their utter desperation and impotent rage at the historical failure of their system to run society.
They refer to the French revolution, and go on about “bloody revolution” etc. Their intention is clear: it is to inculcate fear of “revolution” among the masses; but in reality it also reveals how terrified they are of such a prospect. However, in this hue and cry about revolutions they conveniently avoid mentioning the Bolshevik revolution as they are well aware of the real dangers that that tradition poses for this exploitative and oppressive system.
The Bolshevik, or the Russian Revolution, triumphed on November 7 (October 26 according to the orthodox Byzantine calendar) 1917. Apart from the heroic episode of the Paris Commune, for the first time millions of downtrodden workers and peasants took political power into their own hands, sweeping aside the despotic rule of the capitalists and landlords, and set out to create a socialist world order.
John Reed, the iconic American writer, described it in the following words, “No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is undeniable that the Russian revolution is one of the greatest events in human history, and the rule of the Bolsheviki a phenomenon of worldwide importance.” (Ten Days that Shook the World, p.130).
Yes, because now we have historical evidence that the statist route is how not to carry out a revolution.
“Insurrection and communization are intimately linked. There would not be first an insurrection and then, subsequently permitted by this insurrection, the transformation of social reality.The transition period, or rather the period of rupture, is characterized by the contradiction between one side of absolutely communist methods and the other a reality steeped in commercialism.” — Les Amis de 4 Millions de Jeunes Travailleurs (The Friends of the 4 Million Young Workers), A World Without Money (1975)
“Those who developed the theory of communisation rejected this posing of revolution in terms of forms of organisation, and instead aimed to grasp the revolution in terms of its content. Communisation implied a rejection of the view of revolution as an event where workers take power followed by a period of transition: instead it was to be seen as a movement characterised by immediate communist measures (such as the free distribution of goods) both for their own merit, and as a way of destroying the material basis of the counter-revolution. If, after a revolution, the bourgeoisie is expropriated but workers remain workers, producing in separate enterprises, dependent on their relation to that workplace for their subsistence, and exchanging with other enterprises, then whether that exchange is self-organised by the workers or given central direction by a “workers’ state” means very little: the capitalist content remains, and sooner or later the distinct role or function of the capitalist will reassert itself. By contrast, the revolution as a communising movement would destroy — by ceasing to constitute and reproduce them — all capitalist categories: exchange, money, commodities, the existence of separate enterprises, the state and — most fundamentally — wage labour and the working class itself.” —
Endnotes: Communisation and Value-Form Theory (via sigma-x)
I don’t like that the writer(s) include money, commodities, and separate enterprises—pretty much a market—as distinctly capitalist;it’s possible to have all these things but not have capitalism. Otherwise, i’ve always found communization theory to be interesting.
(via arielnietzsche)
[video]
“Accompanying these various descriptions of the crisis – as a financial crisis, a crisis of credit, a sovereign debt crisis, a crisis of the euro, a crisis of confidence, and a political crisis – we see these same commentators put forward an array of so-called “solutions”. In response to the financial crisis, we are told that we simply need more regulation of the financial industry; to combat the crisis of credit we must restore liquidity. To tackle the sovereign debt crises, the reformist leaders suggest that we “tax the rich”, introduce a “Tobin” or “Robin Hood” tax, and “stimulate growth”. Meanwhile, to solve the crisis of the euro, we are told either that insolvent countries must leave the euro or that there must be a fiscal union to accompany the eurozone monetary union. Finally, the bourgeois representatives suggest that “confidence” must be restored by cold, impassionate, ruthless governments through “reforms” (i.e. austerity). Where democratically elected governments are unable to do this adequately and reliably for the demands of the markets, then these governments are simply replaced by unelected technocrats in “the national interest” (i.e. the interest of the money lenders).” — There is no reformist way out of the crisis of capitalism – Part One (via arielnietzsche)
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In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission.
The anarchist prophets of the “propaganda of the deed” can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses. Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. The more “effective” the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organization and self-education.
But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy
” —Trotsky, The Bankruptcy of Individual Terrorism (via arielnietzsche)
Propaganda of the deed isn’t just about acts that could be deemed terroristic, like bombings, arson, intimidation, kidnapping, murder, etc. It’s more about the relationship between individual acts of rebellion and more generalized insurrection. From this point of view, the “trick” to revolution is figuring out how we can go from small actions like expropriating goods from a store to bigger activities like riots and general strikes.
The reason we get bombings and other foolishly destructive tactics is because insurrectionist groups tend to develop a militaristic mindset that feeds upon itself. Having failed in their goal to spread revolutionary sentiment and disconnected from from the working class, they often have no choice but to step up their own activity, which as Trotsky points out here only results in police repression.
c4ss:
Confiscation and the Homesteading Principle
The essential encapsulation of Rothbard’s radically anti-state version of Lockean property theory as the basis for the revolutionary redistribution of property.
Part of the Market Anarchy Zine Series.
Title is a reference to a popular rallying cry of peasants and factory workers who were scared that the Bolsheviks would impose centralized authority over their autonomous farms, coops and seized workplaces. Of course in the most quintessentially cynical Russian move Lenin had his Bolshevik goons start using the anti-Bolshevik slogan, thus confusing the workers into supporting State Power when they thought they were supporting local autonomy. On the one hand this is reminiscent of “zaxlebax” principle, which reminds us that the terminologies and definitions of left and right have shifted so drastically over the years that we should pay attention to the underlying ideas and not stop at false assumptions. On the other, it expresses the overlap of Rothbard’s call for the establishment of repossessed producer’s coops with the slogan’s original meaning.
I prefer the anarcho-syndicalist justification—the ruling class produces no wealth, and therefore have no claim to ownership over property—over Rothbard’s Lockean explanation, but if the result is the same…
interesting. i prefer the marxian justification - that anything less than the fullest-possible economic democracy results in regular crises, stupendous waste of resources, and a general decline in human welfare.
I agree here. However, crises, waste and the decline in human welfare that result are problems within capitalism. I’ve yet to come across a Marxist analysis of Mutualist economics, but since in a workers’ co-op share the profits equally among themselves, overproduction probably wouldn’t be a major concern and the only waste likely to occur would that made necessary by market competition. Socialist markets don’t involve a profit motive (cost is the limit of price), so they’re much more efficient than the global capitalist system.
i understand the Lockean argument “i own what i produce”, but it does not point to any particular solution to the problem of workers getting properly compensated for their labors, and most theorists i’ve encountered who really like Locke tend to emphasize “correcting the market” rather than seeing bourgeois market relations as the underlying source of the problem.
Lockean property rights in the age of big business come to syndicalist conclusions. Since the owners of large corporations get tax breaks, subsidies, and other market-distorting benefits—not to mention the point that shareholders and those at the top of the management hierarchy haven’t “mixed their labor with the land” where the workers themselves labor—they have no legitimate title to any of their stores, and therefore the workers should take them over.
Worker control resolves the problem of labor not being given its full product. If the workers took over a place of business (like the recovered factories in Argentina ,for example) it is highly unlikely that they would choose to keep the wage system.
Chicago Factory Occupiers Form Worker Cooperative -
First, they occupied the factory to get their wages from the bosses that owned the machinery. Then, they occupied their factory to keep the second bosses from shutting down their machinery. And, now, they are on their way to owning and running the machinery.
The group of workers who occupied their Chicago factory in 2008 and again in 2012 incorporated a worker-run cooperative on May 30, 2012. The factory window makers will take over was formerly owned by Republic Windows and Doors and then Serious Energy, and will now be run by New Era Windows, LLC.
(Source: sarahlee310, via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)
c4ss:
Confiscation and the Homesteading Principle
The essential encapsulation of Rothbard’s radically anti-state version of Lockean property theory as the basis for the revolutionary redistribution of property.
Part of the Market Anarchy Zine Series.
Title is a reference to a popular rallying cry of peasants and factory workers who were scared that the Bolsheviks would impose centralized authority over their autonomous farms, coops and seized workplaces. Of course in the most quintessentially cynical Russian move Lenin had his Bolshevik goons start using the anti-Bolshevik slogan, thus confusing the workers into supporting State Power when they thought they were supporting local autonomy. On the one hand this is reminiscent of “zaxlebax” principle, which reminds us that the terminologies and definitions of left and right have shifted so drastically over the years that we should pay attention to the underlying ideas and not stop at false assumptions. On the other, it expresses the overlap of Rothbard’s call for the establishment of repossessed producer’s coops with the slogan’s original meaning.
I prefer the anarcho-syndicalist justification—the ruling class produces no wealth, and therefore have no claim to ownership over property—over Rothbard’s Lockean explanation, but if the result is the same…
c4ss:
This school of libertarianism has inscribed on its banner the reactionary watchword: “Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.” For every imaginable policy issue, the good guys and bad guys can be predicted with ease, by simply inverting the slogan of Animal Farm: “Two legs good, four legs baaaad.” In every case, the good guys, the sacrificial victims of the Progressive State, are the rich and powerful. The bad guys are the consumer and the worker, acting to enrich themselves from the public treasury. As one of the most egregious examples of this tendency, consider Ayn Rand’s characterization of big business as an “oppressed minority,” and of the Military-Industrial Complex as a “myth or worse.”
The ideal “free market” society of such people, it seems, is simply actually existing capitalism, minus the regulatory and welfare state: a hyper-thyroidal version of nineteenth century robber baron capitalism, perhaps; or better yet, a society “reformed” by the likes of Pinochet, the Dionysius to whom Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys played Aristotle.
Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term “free market” in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because “that’s not how the free market works”—implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of “free market principles.”
All of this.
No, because the capitalists won’t give up their power without a fight. Take struggles between unions and employers for example. Through sabotage, strikes, and occupations the bosses can be forced to give concessions, like improved conditions and higher wages, but the one thing they will never do is give up control of the business. Therefore, the working class will have to organize itself to gain enough power to carry out expropriations and then arm itself and form militias to defend the businesses taken over from attacks by the police and the military, as well as fascist and reactionary elements within the population.
I don’t like the term “overthrown” because it implies toppling the government is all we want, which isn’t the case. What we’re aiming for is a change in socioeconomic relations; all the guns in the world can’t change how we interact with each other in any meaningful way by themselves.
(Source: occupyallstreets)