Insurrectional anarchism emerges as aperspective within the class struggle. This
perspective can be expressed in three key
principles:(i) Permanent conflictuality: the struggle
should never turn into mediation, bargainingor compromise;(ii) Autonomy and self-activity: the struggle
should be carried out without representatives
and ‘specialists’;(iii) Organization as attack: the organization
should be used as a tool in the attack against
state and capital, and not treated as a goal in
and of itself.
What this means, in its most essential andconcrete way, is this: to seize and keep theinitiative...

ILL WILL EDITIONS
ill-will-editions.tumblr.com

INSURRECTIONAL ANARCHISM
a readerIn 2005, the Swedish review
Dissident released its second
issue, which was devoted toinsurrectional
anarchistcommunist perspectives.
Soon after, the journal
disbanded and went outof print, relegating thecollection to the obscurereaches of the internet.
We hope this zine will allow
these ideas to reach a wider
audience, enriching ourunderstanding of the internal
critique and developmentof revolutionary methods inthe late 20th century, andallowing them to assume
a new life in our struggles
today.
-Ill Will Editions,
Chicago, March 2019

Typeset in scala sans, Uni Neue & Meta Serif Pro
ill-will-editions.tumblr.com
illwill@riseup.net

CONTENTS
Foreword
THE BATKO GROUP | 3

Postscript
THE BATKO GROUP | 11

I.

Anarchists and Action
ALFREDO BONANNO | 13

The Insurrectional Project
ALFREDO BONANNO | 15

Insurrectionary Organization
JEAN WEIR | 19II.

Thirteen Notes on Class Struggle
SASHA K. | 29

Some Notes on Insurrectionary AnarchismKILLING KING ABACUS | 33

Insurrectionary Action & Self-Organized Struggle
SASHA K. | 38

The Anarchist Ethic in the Age of the Anti-Globalization
Movement
KILLING KING ABACUS | 42

Insurrectionary Practice and Capitalist Transformation
THE BATKO GROUP AND SASHA K. | 63

III.

The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself
ANONYMOUS | 80

Anti-Mass: Methods of Organization for Collectives
THE RED SUNSHINE GANG | 90

Autonomous Movement of the Turin Railway Workers
MOVIMENTO AUTONOMO DI BASE

| 107

3

Foreword
THE BATKO GROUP (2005)

There is no such thing as “insurrectionalism,” if by that we mean a new
ideological package that claims to contain all the questions and answers thatthe “revolutionary worker” may need. Nor is it simply a negative critique or
denunciation of the contemporary “left,” or a specific tendency or theory. If
you think that is all there is to it, you’ve missed the point. Instead,insurrectionary anarchism should be understood as an attempt to formulate atendency within the revolutionary movement, based in a perspective that isalways present in the class struggle and emerges from it. This might seem
abstract and hard to grasp right now, but hopefully this will become clearer
as you read these texts.
What the insurrectionary anarchists have contributed, and what makes
them so interesting, is that they—with a point of departure in the classicalprinciples of anarchism (direct action, propaganda by the deed, an
undogmatic view on theory etc.), and derived from their own analysis of thecontemporary reality—have tried to cast the whole of the formal workers
movement overboard, along with all the ideological prejudice, traditions andalienating structures this entails. In this respect, they are engaged in an
ambitious project of formulating a completely new and coherent theory of
the totality of revolutionary practice, something that actually can bring us
closer to the revolution, not just talk about it. Their aim is to formulate andrationalize the spontaneous perspectives that constitute the driving force ofthe class struggle; and they have come quite a long way.
At issue is the most ambitious anarchist attempt to draw up a
revolutionary concept of totality (where theory, practice and organizational
form forms a logical unity) since syndicalism was first formulated and put
to the test in the early 1900’s. Apart from this, the two best known andwidely spread attempts to build revolutionary concepts of totality are
Leninism and social democracy. And ever since these two gained hegemony
within the formal workers’ movement, almost every current that has
emerged and crystallized from the class struggle has been either a variant ofthese, or else simply negative denunciations, without formulating any
perspectives of their own. This is, of course, also true for the different
anarchist initiatives that, instead of taking to heart the anarchist theory that
actually exists, often have been satisfied with letting principles descend into
flat dogmas, transforming theory into to ideology, without any real ambitionof change anything.

4

The perspectives put forward by insurrectionary anarchism give voice tomany of the unspoken or spontaneous perspectives that, to greater or lesser
degree, served as the guiding lights of the so-called autonomous movement
and extra parliamentary left throughout the 90’s. But precisely because theperspectives were unspoken and spontaneous, they became eclectic; picking
one bit here and one bit there, building a practice out of fragments. And at
the same time, continuing to identify with the left rather than the class, andstill trying to motivate their practice with selected scraps of ideology fromthe formal leftist movement.
Because of this anti-theoretical stance and negative demarcation, somethings have been successful, while others have gone completely wrong. This
is why you could say that the insurrectionary perspective both confirms andrefutes the theory and practice of this so called “movement.” It confirms it
in so far as it actually was an expression of real tendencies within the classstruggle, and to the extent that groups within it were in the forefront anddeveloped this in an insurrectionary way from the housing-occupations of
the 80’s, through the environmental movement, militant anti-fascism,
women’s struggle and so on, up to the rediscovery of the class struggle, withsome sort of highpoint in the anti-globalization movement. On the other
hand, it refutes it in so far that it actually was/is a part of the activist andalienating left, with everything this implies.
Insurrectionary anarchism is often perceived as being a theory ofactivism (or even ultra-activism). Nothing could be further from the truth.
This misunderstanding is most likely a result of the fact that people who
make this interpretation (both its critics and some of its supporters) arethemselves so deeply entangled in leftist ways of thinking that they have a
hard time conceiving of an autonomous class struggle
without mediating leftist organizations. The insurrectionary perspective isintended to offer a way out of activism. In order to understand this,insurrectionary anarchism must be understood as a theory of classorganization, not a theory for left organization. Insurrectionary anarchism
doesn’t relate to the left; it makes the left meaningless. This simply meansthat the left as a point of reference is meaningless for us as revolutionaries(or communists, or anarchists, or whatever we chose to call ourselves).
The tendencies and currents that the insurrectionary perspective tries tounite as a coherent theory for practice, are an expression of tendencies thatalways are, and always have been, a part of the class struggle; they havealways been present, and have made themselves visible in different ways
and forms. Sometimes it has been called “the other workers movement,”
sometimes “faceless resistance,” and it expresses itself through wild cat
strikes, sabotage, riots, stealing etc.—struggles that have in common that5

they completely break with the bourgeois order. But obviously, no clear line
can be drawn between a “stupid left” and a “pure class struggle”—reality
isn’t that simple. Instead, the fact is that, in the same way that there isalways a striving towards insurrection present in the class struggle, groups
and initiatives are always emerging and crystallizing from these struggles
that try to formulate a new theory and/or adopt already existing theory,
confirming and developing these insurrectionary tendencies. This becomeseven clearer in revolutionary situations and in great upheavals of struggle,
but it is a constant process that goes on all the time, in one way or another.
In this sense these groups actually do become part of the left (if they weren’t
already). This isn’t really a problem in itself, because the tendency
to constitute oneself as an institution within the left is always immanent inall class struggles and class organizations, just as the “real class struggle” isalways, in one way or another, a part of the institutional left as a whole.
The big problem has instead been that the groups and theories that in one
way or another are an expression of the insurrectionary tendency continue tohave the institutional left as their point of reference. Their theory serves
exclusively as a negative demarcation towards certain aspects of leftism, but
uncritically continues to swallow others, and seeking unity with othergroups on the basis of rejecting the formal workers’ movement, even if they
don’t reject the same aspects of it, instead of uniting around a common classstruggle. This creates a confused mishmash of currents and tendencies,
usually called “the extra parliamentary left” or “the autonomous
movement,” that instead of being a tool in the class struggle becomes theborderland, or the uniting cement in the cracks, between the old formal
workers movement and the real communist movement, and in this way
actually counteracts its own expressed purpose. A critique of activism must
always be based on a class struggle perspective. If it is based on a leftist
perspective it misses the point, and in the worst case becomes a renunciationof the class struggle itself.
The insurrectionary perspective is nothing new to anarchism; it has beenpresent since the time of the very first anarchists. Its roots can be traced
back to Bakunin1 and Malatesta..2 Bakunin fought against the conceptionthat democracy and representation (i.e. the state in all its forms) could be
used in the name of social revolution. Instead, he advocated direct anduncompromising attack against state and capital, at the same time as he took
active part in the formation of autonomous grassroots groups all acrossEurope. Bakunin was not the elitist or hypocritical authoritarian his
adversaries accused him of being. Instead Bakunin stood for a direct, nonrepresentative method of organization and struggle that, through the6propaganda of the deed, would push the social conflict to its peak, i.e. toinsurrection, and ultimately to social revolution: “As invisible pilots amidst
the popular tempest, we must steer it not by any open power, but by thecollective dictatorship of all the allies. A dictatorship without any insignia,
without titles, without official rights, and all the stronger for having none ofthe paraphernalia of power.”3
One of Bakunin’s comrades and followers was the Italian anarchocommunist Errico Malatesta. He criticized the platformists from aninsurrectionary perspective. What makes Malatesta’s critique relevant (asopposed to the advocates of synthesis and the individualists) is that he has acommunist standpoint, that he advocates collective and social struggle, i.e.
class struggle. Malatesta agreed with the platformists about the need fortheoretical and tactical unity, and that the class struggle must be a social
struggle, but he criticized the organizational proposition of the Platform forbeing too state-like.
In the footsteps of Malatesta, there was another Italian anarchistcommunist with central importance for insurrectionary anarchism. His namewas Luigi Galleani,4 and he was contemporary of Malatesta, but in 1901 he
was forced to flee to the U.S. to avoid imprisonment for his revolutionary
ideas. Galleani criticized formal organizations of any kind, which he saw as
having a tendency to develop into hierarchical and bureaucratic institutions,and thus lose their anarchist and revolutionary potential. He didn’t see any
contradiction between individual and collective struggle, and he advocatedspontaneity, autonomy, independence and direct action etc., while at thesame time defending anarchist communism and stressing the unity between
Kropotkin’s5 “mutual aid”6 and insurrection. His insistence that there isn’t
any contradiction between individual and social struggle, between
anarchism and communism, and his critique of formal organization, was animportant point of departure for later insurrectionary anarchists.
With the upheaval of struggle in the 60’s and 70’s, the insurrectionary
perspective was revitalized, and was deepened through the analysis of, andparticipation in, the struggles of that time, especially in Italy. In Italy theyoung unschooled industrial workers, the “mass-workers,” revolted
violently against wage slavery, peaking during the “hot autumn” of 1969.
One of the ways that the state responded to this insurrection was with the“strategy of tension,” bombings carried out by the state and then blamed on
the anarchists, provocations that served to justify harder repression. During
the later half of the 70’s a larger movement of students, women, youth andunemployed was formed. This movement was in many ways different fromearlier proletarian movements: anti-hierarchical, ideologically open, and7loosely-organized. In 1977 a radical student was murdered by a fascist, andthe “movement of ’77” exploded all over Italy.
It was in this context that Alfredo Bonanno7 and other Italian anarchists
laid the foundation for a modern insurrectionary standpoint. Their critiqueof the struggles of the 70’s focused on the way in which the organizational
forms affect the content of the struggles, leading to a deeper critique offormal organization. The insurrectionalists were most notably involved in
the anti-nuclear and peace movement, for example in their resistance to themilitary base in Comiso in Sicily. From this, they derived three basic
principles for insurrectionary struggle: 1) permanent conflictuality—thestruggle should never turn to mediation, bargaining or compromise; 2)autonomy and self-activity—the struggle should be carried out without
representatives and “specialists”; and 3) organization as an attack—theorganization should be used as a tool in the attack against state and capital,and not be a goal in itself. In this way, activity becomes primary, and thestruggle doesn’t transform itself into organizational fetishism.
Insurrectionary perspectives have, of course, also been developed outside of
the anarchist tradition. A Marxist variant was the Johnson-Forestfaction8 that started to research ordinary workers’ everyday life in America.
They published writings that were composed by workers themselves, whoanalyzed their own situation. They focused on the workers’ self-activity, andcriticized the left’s view of class consciousness. Their inquiries into how
production is formed and politically met by the workers had parallels to thestudies of Socialisme ou Barbaries9 in France in the 50’s, and the inquiriesof the Operaists10 in Italy.
Those who probably have been of most importance for us in The Batko
Group are the French “ultra-left,” with Gilles Dauvé11 and Jacques
Camatte12 in the forefront. Dauvé’s communist perspective allows him tosee beyond false dichotomies, like democracy/dictatorship. Instead hecorrectly understands the state, in all its forms, as an enemy. It is the selfactivity and autonomous antagonism of the working class this is primary,and the organizational form does not become a fetish, but rather somethingthat has to be adapted accordingly to the content of the class struggle. Thisis put in relation to the real subsumption of labor under capital. This meansthat labor isn’t only formally subsumed by capital (that capitalists own themeans of production) but that capital has colonized the entire social body, so
to speak. The labor-process has been totally subsumed to the logic ofcapital; all social activity has become commodities on the market. From thiswas derived a critique of all forms of synthetic organization, as they serve toreproduce the social relationship between human beings dictated by capital.

8Real subsumption requires a deeper critique of synthesis. For example,
things like democracy and self-management now become something weneed to relate to critically.
In other words, there are ties between different theoretical currents thatbridge ideological boundaries and complement one and other. This is why
it’s important point out that the insurrectionary perspective isn’t some new
ideological package deal, and that you make it much easier on yourself if
you take the old anarchist principle of an undogmatic approach towards
theory seriously.
The content of this issue is divided into three sections. The first two sections
represent two different generations of insurrectionary anarchism. The firstsection contains texts from the first era of modern insurrectionary anarchismin the ’70's and ’80’s, with Bonanno in the forefront, and texts from the
British magazine Insurrection influenced by the struggles of that time. The
second section contains texts from the group around the American
magazine Killing King Abacus that was a part of, and clearly has its point ofreference in, the so called anti-globalization movement in the 2000’s. The
third section consists of texts that are a bit older again, from the ’70’s, thatare not explicitly anarchist, but none the less are very important for anunderstanding of the insurrectional perspective. They complement the firsttwo sections, and perhaps should even be read first. All footnotes in thisissue are written by us unless stated otherwise.
The two texts by Alfredo Bonanno introduce insurrectionary anarchismand the insurrectional approach to organization. The shorter articles from
Insurrection Vol. 4 (May 1988) offer a brief presentation of some central
terminology, such as affinity group, autonomous base nuclei, structure ofsynthesis, and so on, and constitute the conceptual foundation on which thetexts in the second section are based.
The second section also begins with two introductory texts. “13 Notes onClass Struggle” was first published as non-editorial in Green Anarchy issue
18, which was devoted to class struggle, and “Some Notes on
Insurrectionary Anarchism” is taken from the second issue of Killing King
Abacus. These are followed by “The Insurrectionary Act and the SelfOrganization of Struggle,” first published in issue 2 of Aporia Journal. “TheAnarchist Ethic in the Age of the Globalization Movement” was also takenfrom the second issue of Killing King Abacus. In the latter, the authors
explain their understanding of anarchism, and put forward theirinsurrectional view on how anarchists should act in the present time, that isin the “age of globalization.” This text goes deeper, and is more difficult
than many of the other texts, and it can in many ways be seen as an attempt

9

to unite, further develop and go beyond the other texts in this issue.
Together with Anti-Mass: Methods of Organization for Collectives, in thethird and last section, it constitutes one of the cornerstones in this issueof Dissident. Ending this section, is an excerpt from our ongoing
conversation with Sasha, one of the editors of Killing King Abacus.
Section three begins with the two situationist classics, “The
Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself” and "Anti-Mass: Methodsof Organization for Collectives.” Neither of these are explicitly anarchist,
but are still central both for an understanding of where insurrectional
anarchism is coming from, and of a revolutionary way of thinking in
general. The first of these two gives a short and pedagogic explanation of
the difference between a so-called revolutionary self-theory with its base in
the class struggle, and the ideology that is enforced upon us from the outside
to keep us down. The second text tries to highlight the difference between asynthetic organization (referred to as “mass organization” in the text) and aclass organization. In parts, it can be pretty hard to grasp and sometimes theauthors use their own concepts and definitions, drawing their inspirationfrom many different and diverse sources, from Mao to American
situationists, and has sometimes been called “anarcho-Maoist”). All things
considered, it is still highly relevant for revolutionaries today, and it is
written anti-ideologically and should be read “openly” with undogmatic
eyes. The text focuses on self-activity, collectivity, class struggle, innovative
thinking and the need for analysis, long term strategies and initiative. The
third text, “Autonomous Movement of the Turin Railway Workers,” waswritten by a group of militant workers during the Italian struggles of the70s. They were a part in the development of the autonomous forms ofstruggle from which the modern insurrectional current in many ways can besaid to descend. They emphasize the need for organization outside of theunions in autonomous base nuclei, and the need for permanent
conflictuality. If you have a hard time picturing “real life insurrectionalorganization,” you have a great example in the Turin railway-workers.

10

1. Michail Aleksandrovitj Bakunin (1814–1876). Russian revolutionary and agitator.
One of the prominent figures of anarchism.
2. Errico Malatesta (1853–1932). Revolutionary and agitator and one of the mostinfluential anarchists in Italy and the rest of the Latin World. Was one of the first to
advocate “anarchist communism” (1876), and is looked upon as the father of
insurrectional anarchism.
3. Bakunin, in a letter to Albert Richard.
4. Luigi Galleani (1861–1931). Italian anarchist. He was the founder and editorof Cronaca Sovversiva, a major Italian anarchist periodical which was issued about
15 years in Vermont, before being shut down by the American government.
5. Petr Kropotkin (1842–1921). Scientist, revolutionary and anarchist.
6. Peter Krapotkin, “Mutual aid”. Freedom Press, 1987.
7. Alfredo M Bonanno: Italian anarchist. Editor of the Italian journal Anarchismo
Editions. Got the nickname “the anarchist godfather” from the prosecutors during the“Marini Trails”, where he 2003 was sentenced to six years in prison.
8. Johnson-Forest Tendency: The Johnston-Forest tendency was initially a subgroupof the Workers Party, the official Trotskyist party in the USA at the time, in the
1940s . The founders of the group were C.L.R. James (Johnson) and Raya
Dunayevskaya (Forest).
9. Socialisme ou Barbarie: French socialist group that was founded 1949 anddiscontinued 1965. Like the Johnson-Forest Tendency it origins is in the Trotskyist
movement. Influenced the Situationists and their magazine (which also had thename Socialisme ou Barbarie) was read a lot during the students’ and workers’
rebellion in May-June 1968 in Paris. The most prominent intellectuals were Cornelius
Castoriadis and Claude Lefort.
10. The Operaists: In the 60s a strong left movement emerged around the world andin Italy where the movement was very strong, if not the strongest. The main conflicts
circulated around the FIAT factory in Torino. Prominent intellectuals in thismovement were Mario Tronti, Raniero Panzieri and Antonio Negri.
11. Gilles Dauvé: French communist. Further reading: “Eclipse and Re-Emergence of
the Communist Movement”. Antagonism Press, 1997.
12. Jacques Camatte: French communist. Known for, among others, his strong
condemnation of the Leninist and Social democratic view of the party, which he—from his reading of Marx—said opposed the view of the party that Marx himself had.

11

Postscript
THE BATKO GROUP (2007)

More than a year has passed since we finished the second issue of ourjournal Dissident, which introduced insurrectional anarchism in Sweden.
We chose to introduce the insurrectional perspective because we think itbrings us valuable insights and experiences. Some critics, mostly
syndicalists, unfortunately interpreted the insurrectional perspective inabsolute terms. This text aims to answer those concerns and move thediscussion forward.
Following Killing King Abacus and others, we formulated theinsurrectional perspective on the basis of three central principles: 1)
permanent conflictuality—the struggle should never turn to mediation,
bargaining or compromise; 2) autonomy and self-activity—the struggle
should be carried out without representatives and “specialists”; 3)organization as attack—the organization should be used as a tool in theattack against state and capital, and not treated as a goal in and of itself.
What this means in its most essential and concrete way is this: to take andkeep the initiative. That’s the insurrectional perspective in the class struggle.
This perspective must be put into context. The starting point of theinsurrectional perspective has always been the active minority, as opposedto the mass. This is because the “relationship with the mass cannot be
structured as something that must endure the passage of time, i.e., be basedon growth to infinity and resistance against the attack of the exploiters. It
must have a more reduced specific dimension, one that is decidedly that of
attack and not a rearguard relationship.” (Bonanno) The exploitation andsubsumption of our daily lives is a power-relation in constant flux—both on
the grassroots level, and in general social structures. It is a power-relation
based on speed, which means that those who have the initiative, are also incontrol. Therefore, our emancipation must constantly be re-conquered, by
the taking and keeping of initiative. This permanent conflictuality meansthat we must be prepared to make quick decisions and not be tied up by
rigid structures. The self-organization then, has to take on an informal
character, because it can’t be dependent on outside forces; to wait for others
to represent you ensures that the initiative gets lost. We use the concept of
the affinity-group to refer to this initiative-based, flexible, and often
completely informal and invisible association of determined and active
persons. In practice the affinity-group is based on discussion, personalbonds, mutual understanding, and revolutionary, practical solidarity. The
affinity-group cannot be applied in a normative way, because it must always
be based on initiative and not on impersonal structures. It’s not an
organizational form, but a strategic perspective to be practiced.1

12

The insurrectional perspective aims for the generalization of
uncontrollable class struggle, that is: communization. Communization put
into practice simply means that people take control of their own lives. Thisis the production of communism; simultaneous but heterogeneous processes
that strive to move beyond capital by dissolving its logic and making its
forms of communion, interaction and meaning obsolete. However, we cansee that communization has two levels or dimensions: one internal, and one
external.2 The internal movement refers to all the ways we refuse work,
control, and discipline. This could manifest itself in everything fromloitering, sabotage, strikes, and riots, to migration, uprisings andrevolutions. The external dimension, on the other hand, creates the spaces
where relations other than those of capital are produced, i.e. “outsides” of
the capitalistic totality. “They are the rooms and outsides that give humanbeings access to future communities and coming worlds.” (Marcel). The
relation between these two levels is complex, and they interact and relate in
dynamic ways. Communization is neither a simple movement towards
communism through the mediating actions of “revolutionaries” andorganizations, nor a strict division between struggles, in which all forms ofactivity unrelated to the production of “outsides” would find itself
condemned. These problems are best understood by the sober analysis ofconcrete occurrences and by continued theoretical practice; in other words,
by asking ourselves, “where are we going?”
The question of how we move from insurrection to revolution is not then,from this perspective, about how we get more supporters, how we organize
bigger demonstrations, fight for more rights and higher pay, administrate
more of the field of social production, win more seats in parliament, expand
democracy, and so on. The realization of communism through an
irreversible communizing process has more to do with the possibilityof simultaneousness. This means that different struggles are in phase with,and strengthen, each other. The conscious participation in this communizing
process, the active call for a potential outside, is what we, following theinsurrectional anarchists, call projectuality. We want to continue to develop
this perspective on class struggle, capital and communism by giving
concepts such as communization, simultaneousness, the outside, andprojectuality central places in our theoretical practice…
1 See “Proletarian Management” by Kämpa Tillsammans!
2 We take this typology of communization from Marcel’s “Communism of Attack,Communism of Withdrawal”, riff-raff, Vol. 7. See also "Attack/Withdrawal", in riffraff Vol. 8.

13

Anarchists and Action
ALFREDO BONANNO, FROM INSURRECTION (1989)

Anarchists are not slaves to numbers but continue to act against power evenwhen the class clash is at a low level in the mass. Anarchist action should
not therefore aim at organizing and defending the whole of the class of the
exploited in one vast organization to see the struggle from beginning to end,
but should identify single aspects of the struggle and carry them through totheir conclusion of attack. An anarchist’s revolutionary work is neverexclusively aimed at mass mobilization, therefore, otherwise the use ofcertain methods would become subject to the conditions present within thelatter at a given time. The active anarchist minority is not a mere slave to
numbers but acts on reality using its own ideas and actions. There is
obviously a relationship between ideas and the growth of organization, but
the one does not come about as a direct result of the other. The relationshipwith the mass cannot be structured as something that must endure thepassage of time, i.e. be based on a growth to infinity and resistance against
the attack of the exploiters. It must have a more reduced specific dimension,
one that is decidedly that of attack and not a rearguard relationship.
The organizational structures we can offer are limited in time and space.
They are simple associative forms to be reached in the short term. In otherwords, their aim is not that of organizing and defending the whole of the
exploited class in one vast organization to take them through the struggle
from beginning to end. They must have a more reduced dimension,
identifying one aspect of the struggle and carrying it through to its
conclusion of attack. They should not be weighed down by ideology but
contain basic elements that can be shared by all: self-management of the
struggle, permanent conflictuality and attack on the class enemy.
At least two factors point to this road for the relationship between the
anarchist minority and the mass: first, the class sectionalism produced bycapital; second, the spreading feeling of impotence that the individual getsfrom certain forms of collective struggle. There exists a strong desire to
struggle against exploitation, and there are still spaces where this struggle
can be expressed concretely. Models of action are being worked out inpractice, and there is still a lot to be done in this direction.
Small actions are always criticized for being insignificant and ridiculous
against such an immense structure as that of capitalist power. But it would
be a mistake to attempt to remedy this by opposing to them a relationshipbased entirely on quantity, rather than extending these small actions, which14

are easy for others to repeat. The clash is significant precisely because of theenemy’s great complexity which it modifies constantly in order to maintainconsensus. This consensus depends on a fine network of social relations
functioning at all levels. The smallest disturbance damages it far beyond thelimits of the action itself. It damages its image, its program, the mechanismsthat produce social peace and the unstable equilibrium of politics.
Every tiny action that comes from even a very small number of comrades
is in fact a great act of subversion. It goes far beyond the often microscopic
dimensions of what took place, becoming not so much a symbol as a pointof reference. This is the sense in which we have often spoken of
insurrection. We can start building our struggle in such a way thatconditions of revolt can emerge and latent conflict can develop and bebrought to the fore. In this way a contact is established between the
anarchist minority and the specific situation where the struggle can be
developed. We know that many comrades do not share these ideas. Some
accuse us of being analytically out of date, others of not seeing thatcircumscribed struggle only serves the aims of power, arguing that,
especially now in the electronic era, it is no longer possible to talk of revolt.
But we are stubborn. We believe it is still possible to rebel today, even in thecomputer era. It is still possible to penetrate the monster with a pinprick.
But we must move away from the stereotypical images of the great mass
struggles, and the concept of the infinite growth of a movement that is todominate and control everything. We must develop a more precise anddetailed way of thinking. We must consider reality for what it is, not what
we imagine it to be. When faced with a situation we must have a clear ideaof the reality that surrounds us, the class clash that such a reality reflects,
and provide ourselves with the necessary means in order to act upon it.
As anarchists we have models of intervention and ideas that are of great
importance and revolutionary significance, but they do not speak forthemselves. They are not immediately comprehensible, so we must put theminto action, it is not enough to simply explain them. The very effort ofproviding ourselves with the means required for the struggle should help toclarify our ideas, both for ourselves and for those who come into contact
with us. A reduced idea of these means, one that limits itself to simply
counter-information, dissent and declarations of principle, is clearly
inadequate. We must go beyond that, and work in three directions: (i)contact with the mass (with clarity, and circumscribed to the precise
requirements of the struggle); (ii) action within the revolutionary movement(in the subjective sense already mentioned); (iii) construction of specificorganizations, allowing us to both work within the mass, while also
facilitating actions within the revolutionary movement.

15

The Insurrectional Project
ALFREDO BONANNO (2000)

An anarchist insurrectional project requires a method that reflects the world
we desire and the reality of the world we seek to destroy. Acting in small
groups based on affinity fits both of these requirements. Power in thepresent world no longer has a real center, but spreads itself throughout thesocial terrain. Acting in small groups allows projects of attack to spread
across the terrain as well. But more significantly, this method brings one’s
aim into one’s method—revolt itself becomes a different way of conceiving
relations. Anarchists always talk of refusing vanguardism—but such arefusal means refusing evangelism, the quantitative myth that seeks to win
converts to an ideology of anarchism. Acting in small groups to attack thestate and capital puts anarchy into practice as the self-organization of one’s
own projects, in relations based on affinity—real knowledge of and trust ineach other—rather than adherence to a belief system. Furthermore, this sortof action, liberated from the quantitative, does not wait until “conditions areright”, until one is guaranteed a large following or until one is certain of theresults—it is action without measure. Thus, it carries within it the world wedesire—a world of relations without measure.
Once one has decided not to put up with being ruled or exploited andtherefore to attack the social order based on domination and exploitation,
the question of how to go about this arises. Since those of us who rise up inrebellion cannot let themselves be organized by others without falling undera new form of domination, we need to develop the capacity to organize ourown projects and activities—to put the elements together that are necessary
for acting projectually in a coherent manner.
Thus, organization, as I’m using the term here, means bringing together
the means and relations that allow us to act for ourselves in the world. This
starts with the decision to act, the decision that our thirst to have all of ourlife as our own requires us to fight against the state, capital and all of thestructures and institutions through which they maintain control over theconditions of our existence. Such a decision puts one in the position ofneeding to develop the specific tools that make intelligent action possible.
First a thorough analysis of the present conditions of exploitation isnecessary. Based on this analysis, we choose specific objectives to aim forand means for achieving these objectives based upon our desires and theideas that move us. These means, these tools for action must first andforemost include ways of making our objectives, desires and ideas known to16others in order to find affinities, others with whom we can create projects ofaction. Thus, we look to create occasions for encounters and discussion inwhich similarities and differences are clarified, in which the refusal of false
unities allow the real affinities—real knowledge of whether and how we canwork together—can develop. These tools allow the projectuality of
individuals in revolt to become a force in movement, an element propelling
toward the insurrectional break. Since affinity is the basis for the relations
we are aiming to use in action, informality is essential—only here can its
forms be expressions of real needs and desires.
So our desire to create insurrection moves us to reject all formalorganization—all structures based on membership and the attempt tosynthesize the various struggles under one formal leadership—that of theorganization. These structures for synthesis share some common traits. They
have a formal theoretical basis, a series of doctrine to which all members are
expected to adhere. Because such groups are seeking numbers this basis
tends to be on the lowest common denominator—a set of simplistic
statements with no depth of analysis and with a dogmatic tendency thatmilitates against deep analysis. They also have a formal practical orientation—a specific mode of acting by which the group as a whole determines what
they will do. The necessity such groups feel to synthesize the various
struggles under their direction—to the extent they succeed—leads to aformalization and ritualization of the struggles undermining creativity andimagination and turning the various struggles into mere tools for thepromotion of the organization. From all of this it becomes clear, thatwhatever claims such an organization may make about its desire for
insurrection and revolution, in fact its first aim is to increase membership.
It is important to realize that this problem can exist even when no
structures have been created. When anarchism promotes itself in anevangelistic manner, it is clear that a formal theoretical basis has imposed its
rigidity on the fluidity of ideas necessary for developing real analyses. In
such a situation, the practical orientation—the modes of action also become
formalized—one need only look at the ritualized confrontations by which somany anarchists strive to get their message across. The only purpose that
this apparently informal formalization serves is to try to convince thevarious people in struggle that they should call themselves anarchists—that
is, to synthesize the struggles under the leadership of the black flag. In otherwords to gain numbers of members for this formal non-organization.
Dealing with the media to explain who anarchists are seems to enforce thisway of interacting with the other exploited in struggle, because it reinforces
the separation of anarchists from the rest of those exploited by this society
and leaves the impression that the anarchists have some special

17

understanding of things that makes them the de facto vanguard of therevolution.
So for the purpose of creating our insurrectional project we want toorganize informally: without a formal theoretical basis so that ideas andanalyses can be developed fluidly in a way that allows to understand thepresent and act against it and without a formal practical orientation so that
we can act with an intelligent projectual spontaneity and creativity. A
significant aspect of this informal organization would be a network of likeminded people. This network would base itself on a reciprocal knowledge ofeach other which requires honest, straightforward discussions of ideas,
analyses and aims. Complete agreement would not be necessary, but a real
understanding of differences would. The aim of this network would not be
the recruitment of members—it would not be a membership organization—
but rather developing methods for intervening in various struggles in an
insurrectional manner, and coordinating such intervention. The basis forparticipation would be affinity—meaning the capacity to act together. This
capacity stems from knowing where to find each other and studying andanalyzing the social situation together in order to move to action together. .
Since there is no formal organization to join, this network would only growon the basis of real affinity of ideas and practice. This informal network
would consist of the tools we develop for the discussion of social analyses
and the methods for intervening in struggles that we create.
This network is basically a way for individuals and small groups tocoordinate their struggles. The real point of action is the affinity group. An
affinity group is an informal, temporary group based on affinity—that is realknowledge of each other—that comes together to accomplish a specific aim.
Affinity develops through a deepening knowledge of each other: knowledgeof how the other thinks about social problems and of the methods ofintervention they consider appropriate. Real affinity cannot be based on alowest common denominator, but must include a real understanding ofdifferences as well as similarities between those involved, because it is in
the knowledge of our difference that we can discover haw we can really act
together. Since the affinity group comes together for a specificcircumscribed aim, it is a temporary formation—one that ceases to exist
once the aim is accomplished. Thus it remains informal, without
membership.
With this informal basis, once we recognize that our own freedom willremain impoverished as long as the masters continue to control theconditions under which most people exist, depriving them of the ability tofreely determine their own lives, we recognize that our own liberation
depends on intervention in the struggles of the exploited classes as a whole.

18

Our involvement is not one of evangelism—the propagandistic method
would place us on the same level as political movements, and we are notpoliticians or activists, but individuals who want our lives back andtherefore take action for ourselves with others. Thus, we do not propose any
specific anarchist organization for the exploited to join, nor a doctrine to put
faith in. Rather we seek to link our specific struggle as anarchists to that of
the rest of the exploited by encouraging self-organization, selfdetermination, the refusal of delegation and of any sort of negotiation,accommodation or compromise with power, and a practice based on direct
action and the necessity of attack against the structures of power andcontrol. The point is to encourage and participate in specific attacks against
specific aspects of the state, capital and the various structures andapparatuses of control.
Since our purpose is to struggle against our own exploitation with otherexploited people, certainly with the aim of projecting toward insurrection,
there can be no guaranteeing of any results—with no organization striving
to gain members, we can’t look for an increase in numbers. There is no way
to know the end. But though we have no guarantees, no certainty ofaccomplishing our aim, success is not the primary reason for our struggle.
The primary reason is that not to act is the guaranteed defeat of an empty
and meaningless existence. To act to take our life back is to already regain iton the terrain of struggle, to already become the creator of one’s own
existence, even if in constant battle with a monstrous order determined tocrush us. Why we are insurrectionary anarchists:* Because we are struggling along with the excluded to alleviate andultimately abolish the conditions of exploitation imposed by the included.
* Because we consider it possible to contribute to the development of
struggles that are appearing spontaneously everywhere, turning them into
mass insurrections, that is to say, actual revolutions.
* Because we want to destroy the capitalist order of the world which,thanks to computer science restructuring has become technologicallyuseful to no one but the managers of class domination.
* Because we are for the immediate, destructive attack against thestructures, individuals and organizations of Capital and the State.
* Because we constructively criticize all those who are in situations ofcomprise with power in their belief that the revolutionary struggle is
impossible at the present time.
* Because rather than wait, we have decided to proceed to action, even if
the time is not ripe.
* Because we want to put an end to this state of affairs right away rather
than wait until conditions make its transformation possible.

19

Insurrectionary Organization
JEAN WEIR, FROM INSURRECTION, VOL. 4 (1988)1

Beyond the Structure of Synthesis
Instead of an anarchist organization of synthesis we propose an informal
anarchist organization based on struggle and the analyses that emerge fromit.
Anarchists of all tendencies refuse the model of hierarchical andauthoritarian organization. They refuse parties and vertical structures that
impose directives from above in a more or less obvious way. In positing theliberatory revolution as the only social solution possible, anarchists consider
that the means used in bringing about this transformation will condition theends that are achieved. And authoritarian organizations are certainly not
instruments that lead to liberation.
At the same time it is not enough to agree with this in words alone. It isalso necessary to put it into practice. In our opinion an anarchist structuresuch as a structure of synthesis presents not a few dangers. When this kindof organization develops to full strength as it did in Spain in ‘36 it begins toresemble a party. Synthesis becomes control. Certainly in quiet periods thisis barely visible, so what we are saying now might seem like blasphemy.
This kind of structure is based on groups or individuals who are in moreor less constant contact with each other, and has its culminating moment inperiodic congresses. In these congresses the basic analysis is discussed, aprogram is drawn up and tasks are divided covering the whole range ofsocial intervention. It is an organization of synthesis because it sets itself up
as a point of reference capable of synthesizing the struggles taking place
within the class clash. Various groups intervene in the struggles, give theircontribution, but do not lose sight of the theoretical and practical orientationthat the organization as a whole decided upon during the congress.
Now, in our opinion, an organization structured in this way runs the riskof being behind in respect of the effective level of the struggle, as its main
aim is that of folding the struggle into its project of synthesis, not of pushingit towards its insurrectionary realization. One of its main objectives isquantitative growth in membership. It therefore tends to draw the struggle tothe lowest common denominator by proposing caution aimed at putting a
brake on any flight forwards or any choice of objectives that are too
exposed or risky.

20

Of course that does not mean that all the groups belonging to theorganization of synthesis automatically act in this way: often comrades areautonomous enough to choose the most effective proposals and objectives ina given situation of struggle. It is a mechanism intrinsic to the organizationof synthesis, however, that leads it to making decisions that are not adequate
to the situation, as the main aim of the organization is to grow to develop as
wide a front of struggle as possible. It tends not to take a clear and neat
position on issues, but finds a way, a political road that displeases the fewest
and is digestible to most.
The reactions we get when making criticisms such as this are often
dictated by fear and prejudice. The main fear is that of the unknown which
pushes us towards organizational schemas and formalism among comrades.
This safeguards us from the search hinged on the risk of finding ourselves
involved in unknown experiences. This is quite obvious when we see thegreat need some comrades have for a formal organization that obeys therequirements of constancy, stability and work that is programmed inadvance. In reality these elements serve us in our need for certainty and not
for revolutionary necessity.
On the contrary we think that the informal organization can supply valid
starting points for getting out of this uncertainty. This different type oforganization seems to us to be capable of developing—contrary to anorganization of synthesis—more concrete and productive relationships as
they are based on affinity and reciprocal knowledge. Moreover, the moment
where it reaches its true potential is when it participates in concrete
situations of struggle, not when drawing up theoretical or practicalplatforms, statutes or associative rules.
An organization structured informally is not built on the basis of aprogram fixed in a congress. The project is realized by the comrades
themselves in the course of the struggle and during the development of the
struggle itself. This organization has no privileged instrument of theoreticaland practical elaboration, nor does it have problems of synthesis. Its basic
project is that of intervening in a struggle with an insurrectionary objective.
However great the limitations of the comrades involved in the informalkind of anarchist organization might be, and what the latter’s defects mightbe, the method still seems valid to us and we consider a theoretical andpractical exploration of it to be worthwhile.
The Affinity Group
Contrary to what is often believed, affinity between comrades does notdepend on sympathy or sentiment. To have affinity means to have

21knowledge of the other, to know how they think on social issues, and how
they think they can intervene in the social clash. This deepening of
knowledge between comrades is an aspect that is often neglected, impeding
effective action.
One of the most difficult problems anarchists have had to facethroughout their history is what form of organization to adopt in the
struggle. At the two ends of the spectrum we find on the one hand theindividualists who refuse any kind of stable relationship; on the other those
who support a permanent organization which acts on a program establishedat the moment of its constitution. Both of the forms sketched out here havecharacteristics that are criticizable from an insurrectional point of view.
In fact, when individualists single out and strike the class enemy they aresometimes far ahead of the most combative of the class components of thetime, and their action is not understood. On the contrary, those who support
the need for a permanent organization often wait until there is already aconsiderable number of exploited indicating how and when to strike theclass enemy. The former carry out actions that turn out to be too far ahead ofthe level of the struggle, the latter too far behind.
One of the reasons for this deficiency is, in our opinion, a lack ofperspective. Clearly no one has a sure recipe that contains no defects; wecan, however, point out the limitations we see in certain kinds oforganization, and indicate possible alternatives. One of these is known
as affinity groups.
The term requires an explanation. Affinity is often confused withsentiment. Although not distinctly separate, the two terms should not be
considered synonymous. There could be comrades with whom we consider
we have an affinity, but whom we do not find sympathetic, and vice versa.
Basically, to have an affinity with a comrade means to know them, tohave deepened one’s knowledge of them. As that knowledge grows, theaffinity can increase to the point of making an action together possible, but
it can also diminish to the point of making it practically impossible.
Knowledge of another is an infinite process which can stop at any levelaccording to the circumstances and objectives one wants to reach together.
One could therefore have an affinity for doing some things, but not others. It
becomes obvious that when we speak of knowledge, this does not mean it isnecessary to discuss one’s personal problems, although these can become
important when they interfere with the process of deepening knowledge of
one another.
In this sense having knowledge of the other does not necessarily mean
having an intimate relationship. What it is necessary to know is how the
comrade thinks concerning the social problems which the class struggle

22

confronts him with, how he thinks he can intervene, what methods he thinks
should be used in given situations, etc.
The first step in the deepening of knowledge between comrades isdiscussion. It is preferable to have a clarifying premise, such as something
written, so the various problems can be gone into thoroughly.
Once the essentials are clarified, the affinity group or groups arepractically formed. The deepening of knowledge between comrades
continues in relation to their action as a group and the latter’s encounter
with reality as a whole. While this process is taking place, their knowledge
often widens and strong bonds between comrades often emerge. This,
however, is a consequence of the affinity, not its primal aim.
It often happens that comrades go about things the other way around,
beginning some kind of activity and only proceeding to the necessary
clarifications later, without ever having assessed the level of affinity
required to do anything together. Things are left to chance, as though somekind of clarity were automatically to emerge from the group simply by its
formation. Of course this does not happen: the group either stagnates
because there is no clear road for it to take, or it follows the tendency of thecomrade or comrades who have the clearest ideas as to what they want todo, while others allow themselves to be pulled along, often with little
enthusiasm or real engagement.
The affinity group on the other hand finds it has great potential and isimmediately addressed towards action, basing itself not on the quantity of
its adherents, but on the qualitative strength of a number of individuals
working together in a projectuality that they develop together as they goalong. From being a specific structure of the anarchist movement, and thewhole arc of activity that this presents—propaganda, direct action, perhaps
producing a paper, working within an informal organization—it can also
look outwards to forming a base nucleus or some other mass structure andthus intervene more effectively in the social clash.
Autonomous Base Nuclei
Mass structures, autonomous base nuclei, are the element linking thespecific informal anarchist organization to social struggles. The autonomousbase nucleus is not an entirely new form of struggle. Attempts have been
made to develop these structures in Italy over the past ten years. The mostnotable of these was the Autonomous Movement of the Turin Railway
Workers2, and the self-managed leagues against the cruise missile base inComiso3.

23

We believe the revolutionary struggle is without doubt a mass struggle.
We therefore see the need to build structures capable of organizing as manygroups of the exploited as possible. We have always been critical of the
syndicalist perspective, both because of its limitations as an instrument, andbecause of its tragic historical involution that no anarchist lick of paint cancover up. So we reached the hypothesis of building autonomous base nuclei
lacking the characteristics of mini-syndicalist structures, having other aims
and organizational relations.
Through these structures, an attempt has been made to link the specificanarchist movement to social struggles. A considerable barrier of reticenceand incomprehension has been met among comrades and this has been an
obstacle in realizing this organizational method. It is in moments of actionthat differences emerge among comrades who all agree in principle withanarchist propaganda, the struggle against the State, self-management anddirect action. When we move into an organizational phase, however, wemust develop a project that is in touch with the present level of the clash
between classes.
We believe that due to profound social transformations, it is unthinkablefor one single structure to try to contain all social and economic struggles
within it. In any case, why should the exploited have to enter and become
part of a specific anarchist organization in order to carry out their struggle?
A radical change in the way society—exploitation—is being run can only
be achieved by a revolution. That is why we are trying to intervene with aninsurrectional project. Struggles of tomorrow will only have a positive
outcome if the relationship between informal specific anarchist structure
and the mass structure of autonomous base nuclei is clarified and put into
effect.
The main aim of the nucleus is not to abolish the State or Capital, which
are practicably unattackable so long as they remain a general concept. The
objective of the nucleus is to fight and attack this expression of the State andthis formation of Capital in their smaller and more reachable structures, bymeans of an insurrectional method.
The autonomous base groups are mass structures and constitute the pointof encounter between the informal anarchist organization and social
struggles. Organization within a nucleus distinguishes itself by thefollowing characteristics:* Autonomy from any political, trade union or syndical force;* Permanent conflictuality (a constant and effective struggle towards theaims that are decided upon, not sporadic occasional interventions);* Attack (the refusal of compromise, mediation or accommodation thatquestions the attack on the chosen objective).

24

As far as aims are concerned, these are decided upon and realized
through attacks upon the repressive, military and productive structures, etc.
The importance of permanent conflictuality and attack is fundamental.
These attacks are organized by the nuclei in collaboration with specificanarchist structures which provide practical and theoretical support,
developing the search for the means required for the action by pointing out
the structures and individuals responsible for repression, and offering aminimal form of defense against attempts at political orideological recuperation by power, and against repression more generally.
At first sight, the relationship between specific anarchist organization
and autonomous base nucleus might seem contradictory. The specificstructure follows an insurrectional perspective, while the base nuclei seemto move in quite another dimension, that of intermediate struggle. But thisstruggle only remains such at the beginning. If the analysis on which the
project is based coincides with the interests of the exploited in the situationin which they find themselves, then an insurrectional outcome to thestruggle is possible. Of course this outcome is not certain. That cannot be
guaranteed by anyone.
This method has been accused of being incomplete and of not taking into
account the fact that an attack against one or more structures always ends up
increasing repression. Comrades can reflect on these accusations. We think
it is never possible to see the outcome of a struggle in advance. Even alimited struggle can have unexpected consequences. In any case, the leap
from the various insurrections—limited and circumscribed—to revolution
can never be guaranteed in advance by any procedure. We move forward bytrial and error, and to whoever has a better method, we say ‘carry on’.
Beyond Workerism—Beyond Syndicalism
The end of syndicalism corresponds to the end of workerism. For us it isalso the end of the quantitive illusion of the party and the specific‘organization of synthesis’. The revolts of tomorrow must seek out newroads. Trade unionism is in its decline. For good and for evil, this structuralform of struggle that defined an era is disappearing. It was a model and afuture world seen in terms of an improved and corrected reproduction of theold one. Meanwhile, we are moving towards new and profoundtransformations. In the productive structure, in the social structure. Methodsof struggle, perspectives, even short term projects are also transforming.
In an expanding industrial society, the trade union tends to shift frombeing an instrument of struggle to an instrument supporting the productive
structure itself. Revolutionary syndicalism has also played its part: pushing

25

the most combative workers forward but, at the same time, pushing thembackwards in terms of their capacity to see the future society or the creativeneeds of the revolution. Everything remained parceled up within thedimension of the factory. Workerism is not just common to authoritariancommunism. Singling out privileged areas of the class clash is still today
among the most deep-rooted habits, one difficult to shake.
The end of trade-unionism, therefore. We have been saying so for fifteen
years now. At one time, this caused criticism and amazement, especiallywhen we included anarcho-syndicalism in our critique. We are more easily
accepted today. Basically, who does not criticize the trade unions today? No
one, or almost no one. But the connection is overlooked. Our criticism oftrade unionism was also a criticism of the “quantitive” method that has all
the characteristics of the party in embryo. It was also a critique of thespecific organizations of synthesis. Finally, it was a critique of a certain kindof class respectability politics, one inherited from the bourgeoisie andfiltered through the clichés of so-called ‘proletarian morals’. All this cannot
be ignored. If many comrades agree with us today in our now-traditional
critique of trade-unionism, those who share a view of all the consequencesthat it gives rise to are still but a few.
We can only intervene in the world of production using means that do notplace themselves in a quantitive perspective. They cannot therefore claim tohave specific anarchist organizations behind them working on the
hypothesis of revolutionary synthesis. This leads us to a different method ofintervention, that of building factory “nuclei” or zonal “nuclei” which limit
themselves to keeping in contact with a specific anarchist structures, and are
exclusively based on affinity. It is from the relationship between the basenucleus and specific anarchist structure that a new model of revolutionary
struggle emerges to attack the structures of capital and the State throughrecourse to insurrectional methods.
This allows for a better following of the profound transformations thatare taking place in the productive structures. The factory is about todisappear, new productive organizations are taking its place, based mainly
on automation. The workers of yesterday will become partially integrated
into a supporting situation or simply into a situation of social security in the
short-term, and survival in the long run. New forms of work will appear on
the horizon. Already the classical workers’ front no longer exists. The samegoes for the trade union. At least, it no longer exists in the form in which it
was previously known. It has become an enterprise like any other.
A network of increasingly different relations, all under the banner ofparticipation, pluralism, democracy, etc., will spread over society bridlingalmost all the forces of subversion. The extreme aspects of the revolutionary

26

project will be systematically criminalized. But the struggle will take newroads, will filter towards a thousand new subterranean channels emerging ina hundred thousand explosions of rage and destruction with new andincomprehensible symbology.
As anarchists we must be careful—as carriers of an often heavymortgage from the past—not to remain distanced from a phenomenon that
we end up not understanding, and whose violence could one fine day evenscare us, and in the first case we must be careful to develop our analysis in
full.
Breaking out of the Ghetto
The struggles taking place in the inner city ghettos are often misunderstoodas mindless violence. The youth struggling against exclusion and boredom
are advanced elements of the class clash. The ghetto walls must be broken
down, not enclosed.
The young Palestinians throwing stones at the Israeli army rightly havethe sympathy and solidarity of comrades who see them in their just struggle
for freedom from their colonial oppressors. When we see the youth ofBelfast throwing stones at British soldiers, we have no doubt about theirrebellion against the occupying army whose tanks and barbed wire enclose
their ghettos.
There is an area of young people today however who find themselves injust as hard a battle against their oppressors, who find themselves constantly
marginalized and criminalized. These young people do not find themselves
fighting a liberation struggle against an external invader, but are immersed
in an internal class struggle that is so mystified that its horizons are unclear
even to themselves. This war is taking place within what have come to be
known as the “inner cities” of Britain, areas that are now recognized by theclass enemy—the capitalists, with the monarchy leading, and the State in allits forms—as the most fragile part of the class society, one that could open
up the most gigantic crack and give way to unprecedented violence.
The youth struggling for survival from exclusion and boredom in thedeadly atmosphere of the ghettos of the eighties are in fact among the mostadvanced elements in the struggle in Britain. As such they find themselves
surrounded by a sea of hostility and incomprehension, even by those who, in
terms of their official class positions, should in principle be their comrades.
No trade union or left-wing party has anything to say about their struggle.
They are among the first to criminalize it, relegating its protagonists to therealm of social deviance, perhaps with the distinguishing variable that,27

instead of the “short sharp shock treatment,” they prefer to employ an armyof soft cops and social psychiatrists.
The anarchist movement itself, anti-authoritarian by definition andrevolutionary in perspective, has so far produced nothing tangible as aproject of struggle to encompass the ‘real’ anarchists, the visceral antiauthoritarians. The forms that violence from the ghettos take do not have thecontent of moral social activity that anarchists want to find. This cannot
emerge spontaneously from situations of brute exploitation such as exist in
the urban enclosures. The idea of importing this morality into the ghettos,
which are then to be defended and ‘self-managed’, are in our opinion quite
out of place. They smack of the old ‘Takeover the City’ slogans of Lotta
Continua4 years ago, now just as dead as that organization itself. The
problem is not one of self-managing the ghettos, but breaking them down.
This can only come about through clear indications of a class nature,indicating objectives in that dimension and acting to extend the class attack.
The article by the Plymouth comrades gives an indication of what ishappening in most major (and many smaller) cities in Britain today. These
events do not reach the headlines, if they’re reported at all.
Clearly, the conditions of the clash are very different to those where thepresence of a tangible “outside enemy” has clarified the position of thewhole of the exploited against the common enemy. There is no doubt in
Sharpeville or Palestine or Belfast about what happens to those who
collaborate with the police. In this country, on the contrary, the fact that thelatter have made inroads into gaining the active collaboration of people
within the ghettos themselves shows the barriers of fear andincomprehension that exist and divide the exploited in one area.
Levels of cultural and social mystification have succeeded to some extent
in confusing class divisions. By defining the violence of the youth inpathological or ethnic terms, the latter find themselves isolated andostracized even by those who are nearest to them in terms of exploitation.
The dividing line is a fine one, however, and it can take only a massconfrontation with the “forces of order” to demonstrate to all where the realenemy lies. This happened in the Brixton Riots, for example, where parents,
seeing the police brutality at close hand, immediately moved from a tacit
consensus to open antagonism towards them.5
Maintaining the consensus of people who have very little to gain fromthe “social order” involves a complex network of media, social workers,
school teachers, community leaders, community police, etc., all of whom
are recognized as being in positions of authority. That authority is tolerated
unwillingly today. It could break down completely tomorrow.

28

Our work must therefore be in the direction of continually clarifying andextending the class attack, by identifying and striking objectives that areeasily attainable and comprehensible in the perspective of breaking down
the walls of the ghettos and opening up a perspective of mass action against
the common enemy.
1. Jean Weir: British anarchist who has translated many of Bonanno’s texts toEnglish. Was in the editorial staff of the magazine Insurrection and the publishinghouse Elephant Editions.
2. See “Autonomous Movement of the Torino Railway Workers,” below.
3. Refers to the struggle in the 1980s against the construction of a military base with
nuclear weapons in Comiso, Sicily. See “Insurrectionary Practice and Capitalist
Transformation,” below.
4. Lotta Continua (The Struggle Continues): A Leninist Party which was a part of the“autonomous movement” in Italy in the 1970s.
5. The Brixton Riots: Riots in the London suburb Brixton 10-12 April 1981. Brixton
was a suburb with a large black population and huge social problems. The riots
started when a stabbed man was taken by the police.

29

II.
Thirteen Notes on Class Struggle
SASHA K, FROM GREEN ANARCHY, ISSUE 18 (2004)

1) Classes have existed since the beginning of civilization. Civilization has
always been a class society.
2) Class is not just an economic category, it is social. Class relations
structure and discipline the whole of society, not just the economy.
3) Class social relations have always been linked to a series of otheroppressions such as patriarchal social relations and different forms ofracism.
4) Classes are one of the primary structures organizing all societies since
the beginning of civilization, although the form of class has changed
through the development of civilization. This development of classsociety and social relations has always been intimately linked to thedevelopment of technology (society may be called a ‘sociotechnological regime’). As class society develops, so too does social
specialization and its technologies. A deep critique of society must
always include a critique of class social relations and their links to thedominant material culture of that society, including the technologies
that it both makes possible and that make it possible.
5) Class struggle has existed since classes have existed.
6) Class struggle exists even when people don’t recognize that they aretaking part in it. It exists throughout daily life. One of the ways
revolutionaries can intervene in class struggle, therefore, is to help
people recognize that this is what they are doing. There are many ways
to do this and we need to be creative.
7) When revolutionary, the dispossessed class struggles to end theexistence of all classes. However, leftist managers of revolt often
attempt to channel class struggle, to recuperate it to capitalist ends, in30

order to put themselves into power over others and into a position tobenefit materially. For true revolutionaries, those who really seek to end
the rule over life by the state, capitalism and all commodity relations,the discipline of work, patriarchy and the socio-technological regime,
the auto-destruction of the proletariat/dispossessed as a class is the goal,
and not for one class (the dispossessed/proletariat) to take over the
position of another class (the capitalist or ruling class). The point ofclass struggle is not to claim workers are better people than capitalists,
to morally judge each class, or to celebrate one class over another, but
to destroy the social institution of classes as a whole. Class struggle
originates in the contradiction between our desires and the way classstructures limit, control, exclude and exploit our life. Our struggle
begins with our desires to live in a different way, to break out of classsociety’s disciplining control. Yet the recuperation of class struggle willcontinue in various guises as long as class relations exist, but thisshould not make us give up on class struggle, it should make us more
careful in our analysis and more creative in the fight for our lives.
8) Class struggle is always global as is capitalism, but it is often
recuperated by nationalist forms. We need to find where therevolutionary content of class struggle pushes to break from thenationalist form and put our force behind such a move. Thus it is not
simply a matter of ignoring national liberation movements, nor certainlyof celebrating them, but of a critical and revolutionary solidarity withthe force of class struggle that pushes for the complete destruction ofclass relations.
9) The root of class struggle is not to be found in economics. Production is
not just economic either: it doesn’t only take place in factories, butspreads over society as a process of social production and reproductionthat includes the control and discipline of workers as well as all othermembers of society. It is this whole social factory, which produces
social roles, relations and subjectivities, disciplines our bodies and our
minds, and transforms and controls life itself, that we aim to destroy.
The would-be leftist managers of class struggle usually try totransform class struggle into an economic struggle, a struggle forgreater economic power, for a bigger piece of the pie, for a slightreorganization of the economy. This is the basis for the creation of theleftist bureaucracies, parties and unions, this is their lifeblood. Yet sinceclasses aren’t economic as much as social in character, for classstruggle to be truly radical, for it to move towards the ending of classes

31

as such, it must break away from economic goals and from the leftist
managers that push them.
The synthesis of all struggle under one organization makes struggle
particularly susceptible to control by leftist managers. Thus for classstruggle to maintain its radical force it must remain autonomous, selfmanaged, and self-organized, it must become uncontrolled anduncontrollable, and it must spread and deepen socially. The goal of thedispossessed’s revolution is never economic, it is anti-economic, itpushes to break out of and destroy economy, all commodity exchange,
and the mediation of relationships by all forms of money, ideology andmorality.
10) Work is a disciplined behavior within the economy. As an activity, it isseparated from other aspects of life and relegated to the sphere of theeconomy. As class society has developed and transformed, work has
been further and further alienated from our life and our desires. It
becomes an activity that disciplines and oppresses us, an activity that
we can’t control, that instead controls us. The revolutionary classstruggle of the dispossessed fights to break all the separations imposed
upon us by class society: the separation between ourselves and ouractivity, between work and play, and between ourselves and those withwhom we interact.
11) Within the transforming capitalist system, different regimes ofaccumulation have organized how the capitalist class accumulates
capital through the exploitation of labor and energy of the exploited,
excluded, and dispossessed. Regimes of accumulation are different
forms of capitalist labor discipline and organization. In the U.S. andmuch of Europe, most of the 20th century operated under the Fordist
regime of accumulation (this is named after Ford’s model of production,
whose ideology was Keynesianism). Beginning in the 1970’s, thisregime was replaced by the regime of flexible accumulation (tempwork, no unions, flexible hours, no guaranteed employment or
retirement, outsourcing, the end of welfare, no controls on the
movement of capital across borders, the increased importance of global
trade and of technologies of communication, surveillance and control,etc.; its reigning ideology is neo-liberalism, and it is often referred to as“globalization”).
Many other countries are being pushed to take on the cast of Fordist
jobs, but without the Fordist guarantees for workers (this is true ofmuch of the third-world, for example). But the death of Fordism in32some countries does not mean the death of class struggle, only its
continued global transformation. This means we need to analyze suchtransformations and our responses, not that we simply give up on classstruggle as some within the anti-civilization milieu seem to besuggesting. The regime of flexible accumulation has been accompanied
by an increased financialization and privatization of all forms of social
life and the increased commodification of life itself as well as a newlooting of the third-world. This has shaped the character of present dayclass struggle. This transformation of capitalism and class relations
should point out new targets for intervention (social, material,
technological, etc.) and new contradictions of class society to exploit.
12) As anarchists or revolutionaries, it is not up to us to invent, produce ormanage class struggle. Class struggle will continue to occur whether weacknowledge it or not. We can intervene in class struggle, but we don’t
make it up in entirety. The question, therefore, is not whether we should
recognize class struggle or not, but always, how do we intervene inclass struggle which will continue whether we intervene or not.
13) Since civilization, through all its transformations, has always been aclass society, the destruction of classes as such through therevolutionary class struggle of the dispossessed will always be a central
goal of anarchism. This is one aspect that separates revolutionary
activity from the bland leftist managers of revolt who often hang around
revolutionary movements hoping to discipline and channel the force ofclass struggle to their own ends, saving capitalism and all its separations
and alienations in the process.

33

Some Notes on Insurrectionary AnarchismKILLING KING ABACUS, VOL. 2 (2001)

Insurrectionary anarchism is not an ideological solution to all social
problems, a commodity on the capitalist market of ideologies and opinions,but an on-going praxis aimed at putting an end to the domination of the state
and the continuance of capitalism, which requires analysis and discussion toadvance. We don’t look to some ideal society or offer an image of utopia for
public consumption. Throughout history, most anarchists, except those who
believed that society would evolve to the point that it would leave the statebehind, have been insurrectionary anarchists. Most simply, this means thatthe state will not merely wither away, thus anarchists must attack, forwaiting is defeat; what is needed is open mutiny and the spreading ofsubversion among the exploited and excluded.
Here we spell out some implications that we and some otherinsurrectionary anarchists draw from this general problem: if the state will
not disappear on its own, how then do we end its existence? It is, therefore,
primarily a practice, and focuses on the organization of attack.
These notes are in no way a closed or finished product; we hope they area part of an ongoing discussion. Much of this comes from past issuesof Insurrection and pamphlets from Elephant Editions.
1. The state will not just disappear; attack!
The State of capital will not “wither away,” as it seems many anarchists
have come to believe—not only entrenched in abstract positions of“waiting,” but some even openly condemning the acts of those for whom
the creation of the new world depends on the destruction of the old. Attackis the refusal of mediation, pacification, sacrifice, accommodation, andcompromise.
It is through acting and learning to act, not propaganda, that we will open
the path to insurrection, although propaganda has a role in clarifying how toact. Waiting only teaches waiting; in acting one learns to act.
The force of an insurrection is social, not military. The measure for
evaluating the importance of a generalized revolt is not the armed clash, buton the contrary the amplitude of the paralysis of the economy, of normality.

34

2. Self-activity versus managed revolt: from insurrection to revolution
As anarchists, the revolution is our constant point of reference, no matter
what we are doing or what problem we are concerned with. But therevolution is not a myth simply to be used as a point of reference. Precisely
because it is a concrete event, it must be built daily through more modest
attempts which do not have all the liberating characteristics of the social
revolution in the true sense. These more modest attempts are insurrections.
In them the uprising of the most exploited and excluded of society and themost politically sensitized minority opens the way to the possible
involvement of increasingly wider strata of exploited on a flux of rebellion
which could lead to revolution.
Struggles must be developed, both in the intermediate and long term.
Clear strategies are necessary to allow different methods to be used in acoordinated and fruitful way.
The self-management of struggle means that those who struggle areautonomous in their decisions and actions; this is the opposite of an‘organization of synthesis,’ which always attempts to take control ofstruggle. Struggles that are synthesized within a single controllingorganization are easily integrated into the power structure of present society.
Self-organized struggles are by nature uncontrollable when they are spread
across the social terrain.
3. Uncontrollability versus managed revolt: the spread of attack
It is never possible to see the outcome of a specific struggle in advance.
Even a limited struggle can have the most unexpected consequences. The
passage from the various insurrections—limited and circumscribed—to
revolution can never be guaranteed in advance by any method.
What the system is afraid of is not these acts of sabotage in themselves,
so much as their spreading socially. Every proletarianized individual who
disposes of even the most modest means can draw up his or her objectives,
alone or along with others. It is materially impossible for the State andcapital to police the apparatus of control that operates over the whole social
territory. Anyone who really wants to contest the network of control canmake their own theoretical and practical contribution. The appearance of thefirst broken links coincides with the spreading of acts of sabotage. The
anonymous practice of social self-liberation could spread to all fields,
breaking the codes of prevention put into place by power.
Small actions, therefore, easily reproducible, requiring unsophisticatedmeans that are available to all, are by their very simplicity and spontaneity

35

uncontrollable. They make a mockery of even the most advanced
technological developments in counter-insurgency.
4. Permanent conflictuality versus mediation with institutional forces
Conflictuality should be seen as a permanent element in the struggle against
those in power. A struggle which lacks this element ends up pushing us
towards mediating with the institutions, grows accustomed to the habits ofdelegating and believing in an illusory emancipation carried out by
parliamentary decree, to the very point of actively participating in our own
exploitation ourselves.
There might perhaps be individual reasons for doubting the attempt toreach one’s aims with violent means. But when non-violence comes to beraised to the level of a non-violable principle, and where reality is divided
into “good” and “bad,” then arguments cease to have value, and everythingis seen in terms of submission and obedience. The officials of the antiglobalization movement, by distancing themselves and denouncing others,
have clarified one point in particular: that they see their principles—to
which they feel duty-bound—as a claim to power over the movement as awhole.
5. Illegality; insurrection isn’t just robbing banks
Insurrectionary anarchism isn’t a moral critique of survival: we all survive
in various ways, often in compromise with capital, depending on our social
position, our talents and tastes. We certainly aren’t morally against the useof illegal means to free ourselves from the fetters of wage slavery in order tolive and carry on our projects. Yet we also don’t fetishize illegalism or turnit into some kind of religion with martyrs; it is simply a means, and often agood one.
6. Informal organization; not professional revolutionaries or activists, notpermanent organizations
i. From party/union to self-organization
Profound differences exist within the revolutionary movement: the anarchist
tendency towards quality of the struggle and its self-organization and theauthoritarian tendency towards quantity and centralization.
Organization is for concrete tasks: thus we are against the party,
syndicate and permanent organization, all of which act to synthesize
struggle and become elements of integration for capital and the state. Their

36

purpose comes to be their own existence, in the worst case they first build
the organization then find or create the struggle. Our task is to act;
organization is a means. Thus we are against the delegation of action orpractice to an organization: we need generalized action that leads toinsurrection, not managed struggles. Organization should not be forthe defense of certain interests, but of attack on certain interests.
Informal organization is based on a number of comrades linked by acommon affinity; its propulsive element is always action. The wider therange of problems these comrades face as a whole, the greater their affinity
will be. It follows that the real organization, the effective capacity to act
together, i.e. knowing where to find each other, the study and analysis ofproblems together, and the passing to action, all takes place in relation to theaffinity reached and has nothing to do with programs, platforms, flags ormore or less camouflaged parties. The informal anarchist organization istherefore a specific organization which gathers around a common affinity.
ii. The anarchist minority and the exploited and excluded
We are of the exploited and excluded, and thus our task is to act. Yet somecritique all forms of action that is not part of a large and visible social
movement as “acting in the place of the proletariat.” They counsel analysis
and waiting, instead of initiative. Supposedly, we are not the exploitedalongside the exploited; our desires, our rage and our weaknesses are notpart of the class struggle. This is nothing but another ideological separation
between the exploited and subversives.
The active anarchist minority is not slave to numbers but continues to act
against power even when the class clash is at a low level within the
exploited of society. Anarchist action should not therefore aim at organizing
and defending the whole of the class of exploited in one vast organization to
see the struggle from beginning to end, but should identify single aspects ofthe struggle and carry them through to their conclusion of attack. We mustalso move away from the stereotypical images of the great mass struggles,
and the concept of the infinite growth of a movement that is to dominate andcontrol everything.
The relationship with the multitude of exploited and excluded cannot be
structured as something that must endure the passage of time, i.e. be basedon growth to infinity and resistance against the attack of the exploiters. It
must have a more reduced and specific dimension, one that is decidedly thatof attack and not a rearguard relationship.
We can start building our struggle in such a way that conditions of revolt
can emerge and latent conflict can develop and be brought to the fore. In

37this way, a contact is established between the anarchist minority and thespecific situation where the struggle can be developed.
7. The individual and the social: individualism and communism, a false
problem.
We embrace what is best in individualism and what is best in communism.
Insurrection begins with the desire of individuals to break out of constrained
and controlled circumstances, the desire to reappropriate the capacity tocreate one’s own life as one sees fit. This requires that they overcome theseparation between them and their conditions of existence. Where the few,
the privileged, control the conditions of existence, it is not possible for mostindividuals to truly determine their existence on their terms. Individuality
can only flourish where equality of access to the conditions of existence isthe social reality. This equality of access is communism; what individuals
do with that access is up to them and those around them. Thus there is noequality or identity of individuals implied in true communism. What forces
us into an identity or an equality of being are the social roles laid upon us by
our present system. There is no contradiction between individuality andcommunism.
8. We are the exploited, we are the contradiction: this is no time for waiting.
Certainly, capitalism contains deep contradictions which push it towards
procedures of adjustment and evolution aimed at avoiding the periodic
crises which afflict it; but we cannot cradle ourselves in waiting for thesecrises. When they happen they will be welcomed, if they respond to therequirements for accelerating the elements of the insurrectional process. As
the exploited, however, we are the fundamental contradiction for capitalism.
Thus the time is always ripe for insurrection, just as we can note thathumanity could have ended the existence of the state at any time in its
history. A rupture in the continual reproduction of this system of
exploitation and oppression has always been possible.

38

The Insurrectionary Act and the
Self-Organization of Struggle
SASHA K. FROM APORIA JOURNAL, VOL. 2 (2004)

For anarchists, the questions of how to act and how to organize are
intimately linked. And it is these two questions, not the question of thedesired form of a future society, that provide us with the most useful method
for understanding the various forms of anarchism that exist. Insurrectionary
anarchism is one such form, although it is important to stress that
insurrectionary anarchists don’t form one unified block, but are extremely
varied in their perspectives. Insurrectionary anarchism is not an ideologicalsolution to social problems, a commodity on the capitalist market ofideologies and opinions, but an ongoing practice aimed at putting an end to
the domination of the state and the continuance of capitalism, which
requires analysis and discussion to advance. Historically, most anarchists,
except those who believed that society would evolve to the point that it
would leave the state behind, have believed that some sort of insurrectionary
activity would be necessary to radically transform society. Most simply, thismeans that the state has to be knocked out of existence by the exploited andexcluded, thus anarchists must attack: waiting for the state to disappear isdefeat.
I will spell out some implications that some insurrectionary anarchists
have drawn from this general problem: if the state will not disappear on its
own, how then do we end its existence? Insurrectionary anarchism isprimarily a practice, and focuses on the organization of attack(insurrectionary anarchists aren’t against organization, but are critical offorms of organization that can impede actions that attack the state andcapital). Thus, the adjective “insurrectionary” does not indicate a specificmodel of the future.
Anarchists who believe we must go through an insurrectionary period torid the world of the institutions of domination and exploitation, moreover,take a variety of positions on the shape of a future society—they could beanarcho-communist, individualist or even primitivist, for example. Many
refuse to offer a specific, singular model of the future at all, believing thatpeople will choose a variety of social forms to organize themselves when
given the chance. They are critical of groups or tendencies that believe they
are “carriers of the truth” and try to impose their ideological and formal
solution to the problem of social organization. Instead, many insurrectionary

39

anarchists believe that it is through self-organized struggle that people willlearn to live without institutions of domination.
While insurrectionary anarchists are active in many parts of the world at
the moment, the points in this article are particularly influenced by theactivities and writings of those in Italy and Greece, which are also thecountries where insurrectionary anarchists are the most active. The current,
extremely varied Italian insurrectionary anarchist scene, which centersaround a number of occupied spaces and publications, exists as an informal
network carrying on their struggle outside of all formal organizations. Thistendency has taken on the “insurrectionary anarchist” label to distinguishitself from the Italian Anarchist Federation, a platformist organization which
officially reject individual acts of revolt, favoring only mass action and an
educational and evangelistic practice centering around propaganda in “nonrevolutionary periods,” and from the Italian libertarian municipalists whotake a largely reformist approach to “anarchist” activity.
Insurrectionary anarchists are not historical determinists; that is, they
don’t see history as following one set path, as something with which weneed to move in tune. On the contrary, history is an open book, and the paththat it will take depends on our actions. In this sense, a true act does not
happen within context, but to context. To break with the present we must act
against context, and not wait for a historically determined time to act, for it
will never come. The act does not grow out of context, it happens to context
and completely changes the context, turning the impossible of one moment
into the possible of the next. And this is the heart of the insurrectionary
event. As the insurrectionary event transforms the context of possibility, italso transforms the human and human social relations.
Yet, for an insurrectionary event to occur that opens a break with thepresent we need to pay attention to the question of organization. Anarchists
must do what they can to open and develop the potential of insurrection.
Certain forms of organization, however, stifle our potential to truly act
against the present and for a new future, to move towards insurrection and apermanent break with the state and capital. Permanent organizations,organizations that attempt to synthesize those struggling into a single,
unified organization, and organizations that attempt to mediate struggle are
all forms of organization that tend to close the potential of insurrection.
These ways of organization formalize and rigidify the relationships of thosestruggling in ways that limit the flexible combination of our power to act.
Our active power, our power to create and transform, is our only weapon,
and that which limits such power from within the movement of the
exploited and excluded is our greatest weakness. This does not mean that
we should remain unorganized (an impossibility—we always have some40level of organization no matter how informal); in fact, it poses the veryquestion of organization: how do we combine in a way that promotes ouractive powers?
1. Against permanent organizations
Permanent organizations tend to take on a logic of their own—a logic thatsupercedes that of insurrection. One just needs to look at the operations ofauthoritarian, Leninist groups or leftist, activist organizations to see this atwork. It is usually all about building the group, recruiting above all else—
permanence becomes the primary goal. Power is separated from those activein struggle and becomes instituted in the organization. The organizer
becomes separated from the organized, and tends to take on the role ofdisciplining and speaking for the struggle.
2. Against mediation with power
As organizations become more permanent and worry about recruiting, theyoften begin to worry about their image, and attempt to limit the actions ofothers within the struggle who might give the movement a bad name. The
more they institute power within their organization the more they tend tolimit direct confrontational action and to encourage dialogue and mediation.
Naively, they come to want to harness the power of a mass of bodies inorder to win a seat at the table of power. This process is heavily at work in
the anti-globalization movement; larger organizations are increasingly
attempting to mediate with power. It is also the role unions take in society.
For anarchists, of course, being against capitalism and the state in their
entirety, there can be no dialogue with instituted power. The willingness of
those in power to initiate a dialogue may be a sign of their weakness, but it
is also the beginning of our defeat when we limit our active power to jointhem in discussion.
3. Formality and informality
Formal organizations separate the people into formal roles of organizer andorganized. The roles of organizer and organized, of course, mirror the verysocial roles necessary to the operation of the society that we as anarchists
are trying to overcome. In addition, formal organization tends to separate
decision from the moment and situation of the act itself, separating decisionfrom its execution, and thus limiting the autonomy of action. Both of thesetendencies rigidify the social relationships that are vital to those in struggle.

41

Formal organizations often also take on the role of the representation of the“movement,” shifting the struggle from social in nature to political.
Insurrectionary anarchists tend to promote informal organization because
they recognize that we, as anarchists, are part of those struggling, and don’t
stand outside and above the exploited and excluded politically organizingthem.
4. Organization grows out of struggle, struggle doesn’t grow out oforganization
Most formal organizations first attempt to build the organization thenorganize the struggle or “movement.” Insurrectionary anarchists see this as
backwards. Informal organization, based on the affinity group, grows out of
struggle. Affinity groups come to build links in struggle and then often
coordinate actions; but, the level of organization depends on the level ofstruggle, not on the demands of a formal organization.
5. Autonomous action and solidarity
Insurrectionary anarchists recognize that the actions of individuals andaffinity groups are autonomous, that no organization should be in a position
to discipline the action of others. But autonomous action becomes strong
when we act in revolutionary solidarity with others in struggle.
Revolutionary solidarity is active and in conflict with the structures ofdomination; it is direct action that communicates a link between one’s
struggle and that of others.

42

The Anarchist Ethic in the Age of theAnti-Globalization Movement
KILLING KING ABACUS, VOL. 2 (2001)

The question always before anarchists is how to act in the present momentof struggle against capitalism and the state. As new forms of social struggles
are becoming more clearly understood, this question becomes even more
important. In order to answer these questions we have to clarify the
relationship between anarchists and the wider social movement of the
exploited and the nature of that movement itself. First of all, we need to notethat the movement of the exploited is always in course. There is no use inanarchists, who wish to destroy capitalism and the state in their entirety,
waiting to act on some future date, as predicted by an objectivist reading of
capitalism or a determinist understanding of history as if one were reading
the stars. This is the most secure way of keeping us locked in the present
forever. The revolutionary movement of the exploited multitude nevertotally disappears, no matter how hidden it is. Above all this is a movement
to destroy the separation between us, the exploited, and our conditions ofexistence, that which we need to live. It is a movement of society against thestate. We can see this movement, however incoherent or unconscious, in theactions of Brazil’s peasants who take the land they need to survive, when
the poor steal, or when someone attacks the state that maintains the systemof exclusion and exploitation. We can see this movement in the actions of
those who attack the machinery that destroys our very life-giving
environment. Within this current, anarchists are a minority. And, as
conscious anarchists, we don’t stand outside the movement, propagandizing
and organizing it; we act with this current, helping to reanimate and sharpen
its struggles.
It is instructive to look back at the recent history of this current. In the
U.S., beginning in the 1970s, social movements began to fracture into
single-issue struggles that left the totality of social relations unchallenged.
In many ways, this was reflected in a shift in the form of imposed social
relations, which occurred in response to the struggles of the 1960s and early
1970, and is marked by a shift from a Fordist regime of accumulation(dominated by large factories and a mediated truce with unions) to a regimeof flexible accumulation (which began to break unions, dismantle thewelfare state, and open borders to the free flow of capital). This shift is also
mirrored by the academic shift to postmodernist theory, which privileges the43fractured, the floating, and the flexible. While the growth of single-issue
groups signals the defeat of the anti-capitalist struggles of the 1960s, overthe 1990s we have witnessed a reconvergence of struggles that are
beginning to challenge capitalism as a totality. Thus the revolutionary
current of the exploited and excluded has recently reemerged in a cycle ofconfrontations that began in the third world and have spread to the firstworld of London, Seattle, and Prague, and in the direct action movementthat has, for the most part, grown out of the radical environmental milieu. In
the spectacular confrontations of the global days of action1, these streams
have been converging into a powerful social force. The key to thisreconvergence is that the new struggles of the 1990s are creating ways tocommunicate and link local and particular struggles without building
stifling organizations that attempt to synthesize all struggle under theircommand. Fundamental to this movement is an ethic that stands against allthat separates us from our conditions of existence and all that separates us
from our power to transform the world and to create social relations beyond
measure—a measure imposed from above. This ethic is a call for the selforganization of freedom, the self-valorization of human activity.
In this article we will outline our understanding of the ethic of therevolutionary anarchist current of society that grows out of the movement of
the exploited in general. Then we will turn to the question of action andorganization, looking critically at the forms of struggle that are appearing in
the recent cycle of social movements and arguing that informal organizationis the best way for anarchists to organize as a minority within the widersocial movement. By organizing along these lines, we believe anarchists can
sharpen the level of struggle and develop social relations in practice that areboth antagonistic to capital and the state and begin to create of new ways ofliving.
Ethics and morality
We use the term ethics in a very specific sense and contrast it to morality.
Morality stands outside what it rules over, it swoops down from above toorganize relationships and discipline behavior. For example, the relationshipbetween two people can be set morally by a third party, the church, the state,or the school. This third party is not a part of the relationship; in otherwords, it stands transcendent to the relationship. The relationship between
two people can also be arranged through an ethic. Unlike morality, an ethic
never comes from the outside; an ethic lets us understand how to relate toother people or objects, other bodies, in a way that is beneficial to us. An
ethic is thus a doctrine of happiness, one which never comes form the44outside of the situation, which never stands above a relationship, but isalways developed from within; it is always immanent to the situation insteadof transcendent to it. An ethic is a relationship of desire. In an ethicalrelationship, desire is complemented by desire, expanded by it. Morality, on
the other hand, always limits and channels desire. A transcendent morality isalien to the situation at hand; its logic has no necessary connection to thedesire of those involved or to increasing their pleasure. It is a fixed law
whose reasoning is always “because I said so,” “because it is the word ofgod,” “because it is wrong,” or “because it is the law and what would
happen without the law.” An ethic is a tool for the active creation of our own
lives; it is never an imposed decision, a bought position in society, or apassively accepted role that we attempt to play. The most valuable thing one
can learn in the struggle against imposed decision is how to act, how to
become more powerful in our action.
Anarchism is an ethic in the most basic sense: it is an ethic because it
calls for decisions to remain immanent to the situation at hand instead ofalienated into a transcendent institution; it moves in an antagonistic
relationship to all transcendent morality and institutions, such as the state,
the party and the church.
Power and the Alienation of Power
Human nature has been a foundational concept for many anarchists. As
such, the argument runs, human nature is good and power, which constricts
and warps that nature, is bad. Anarchism becomes a philosophy that stands
for getting rid of power and allowing the good nature of humans to flourish.
In this section, we develop a different understanding of power, anunderstanding that doesn’t automatically define power as bad. Instead ofsetting a particular conception of human nature as the foundation of
anarchism, therefore, we suggest that an ethic of desire is the proper
foundation for anarchist action and organization.
Power is the potential to exert a force, the ability to create and transform.
Capitalism alienates that potential from us in the production process. The
state also alienates our power; in fact, the state is a form of alienated powerthat has been instituted, that has been constituted in the state form. In its
alienated form, power becomes the potential and ability to make others exert
a force, to do work, or the ability to prevent us from exerting a force. It is a
power that has been extracted from the social body through a complex
process of force and consent.
Capitalism and the state separate the moment of decision from the act of
its realization in both space and time: a decision is made before the action

45

has begun and it is made in a different place, in some office of the state,
corporate boardroom, or organizer’s meeting. A law can be made years
before it comes to control an act. The form of alienated power tends towards
fixity, of setting and maintaining an order and a set of institutions—like theheavy-set granite structures that house the institutions themselves—that
stand above society; it can thus be called constituted or transcendent power.
If power is the potential to exert a force, the ability to act in a creative,
transformative, productive, or destructive way, the state as a transcendent
institution is that which cuts us off or separates us from our active power.
Our power is alienated from us, taken from us, and instituted in the state.
We are only allowed to act in certain ways, whereas the state constantly actsand decides for us, acts in our name, or forces us to act in certain ways. It
cuts us off from the creative energy of desire itself.
When power has not been alienated, it remains immanent within
individuals and the social body as a whole. And, so long as it is notseparated from the act itself, it remains a creative, productive, andtransformative potential, for it refuses a fixed order. As Kropotkin states,“Now all history, all the experience of the human race and all social
psychology, unite in showing that the best and fairest way is to trust thedecision to those whom it concerns most nearly.” But there is always adanger that this power will be recuperated by groups to form institutions andwill become a constituted, transcendent power that stands above the social
body: the revolutionary power of those struggling against capitalism and thestate can be frozen in the form of “the Party” and, finally, the state itself.
In studying primitive societies, Pierre Clastres discovered that societies
without a state were really “societies against the state.” They organized thesocial body in such a way that warded off the constitution of alienatedpower into an institution separate from society. Stable, conserved power isprevented from crystallizing into a hardened state form. As Deleuze andGuattari point out, the state “is defined by the perpetuation or conservationof organs of power. The concern of the State is to conserve.” Thus the stateis the political organization of passivity. Anthropologists have noted theappearance of conserved organs of power in small-scale societies and havecalled such early organs impersonal institutions. Impersonal institutions are
distinguished from an authority that is based on personal abilities or
qualities, an authority that ends when either that person dies, they are nolonger seen as holding those personal abilities, or when those abilities are nolonger useful to society. Someone could become known as a great hunter ina band society and trusted as an authority on hunting; that authority isvested personally in the individual. A society could have several individuals
with such authority or it could have none. As such, authority does not46

crystallize into an institution that tends towards permanence, intoimpersonal institutions. But once authority comes to be institutionalized into
a permanent position that is filled as an impersonal role, power begins to beconserved and separated from society itself. The President is an impersonal
institution in that the authority of the Presidency continues after one
President leaves and another takes their place; the authority rests in theinstitution.
Such impersonal institutions are openings that allow the state to slowly
form above society. But the society against the state, that attempts to ward
off or destroy the state, does not die as the state grows into a hardened, ugly
body; in fact, the society against the state is continually reemerging andtransforming its methods as the movement of the exploited and excluded todecide their own fate. The long and twisted history of the development of
the state and the creative movement of the society against the state has been
written and analyzed elsewhere. This history has brought us to our present
moment in which the society against the state rises again. In the present
moment, the form that alienated power takes is also varied: while the party
dictatorship, a form that still exists, is an obvious example of alienated,transcendent power, the democratic form of alienated power no lessseparates decision from the act, no less separates us from our active powers.
As with the society against the state, anarchists must always fight against
the alienation of power, against the formation of transcendent institutions
that turn active power into a constituted order, whether that order be called
democratic or totalitarian. This is not only because such transcendent power
separates us from our power to act on our desires, but also because as soon
as our active power—our power to transform society and to create our own
lives—begins to harden into a permanent order, a permanent organization,
once impersonal institutions form within our midst, we lose the power toattack the state and capitalism effectively.
Value, Measure, and Social Organization
The movement of the exploited, the excluded, of the society against thestate, is a movement to destroy the separation between humans and theirconditions of existence. It is a movement to build new social relations
without measure. It is a revolt against the imposition of a single regime ofvalue. Looking at the many struggles that are being called “the antiglobalization movement,” we can see in their diversity a complex pattern ofattack on, and defense from, capitalist valorization. These struggles areheterogeneous in that no single solution or system of valorization is being
offered to replace capitalism (thus these struggles can not be contained by a

47single organization). Yet, while they are heterogeneous, there is a pattern,
and that pattern is produced by the fact that they are all fighting a singularand hegemonic regime of valorization, capitalism, that is invading every
human practice and relationship. Alienation is the gap between desire andwhat is socially valued, between our potential to transform the world andthe theft and parasitic use of that power by capital and the state. As thatpower comes to be alienated in the state form, society comes to be
increasingly ruled by numbers to the extent that humans themselves areeven reduced to interchangeable numbers.
One of the state’s most important roles is to be the guarantor of measure:the state maintains the value of money, the general equivalent, it sets thelow point for wages, taxes, and guarantees the measure and protection ofproperty. The state uses numbers to reduce social problems to simple mathproblems with solutions. But society isn’t so easily quantified and reduced;
society isn’t just a problem that can be solved with a ruler or an algorithm.
Thus, every solution is in reality a repression of the problem or a shifting of
the problem to a new level or different sector of society. Solution andrepression are a twined pair.
The largest of such social problems that states have to contend with are
the distribution of wealth, the mediation of social conflicts that erupt fromits unequal distribution, and the reproduction of society itself. Over thiscentury, two solutions to the problem of the distribution of wealth, thesetting of value, have dominated the world: Western capitalism and Soviet
communism. Both systems separate humans from their conditions ofexistence, from what they need to live and follow their desires. Bothsystems also rely on transcendent institutions of power to maintain theirsystems of valorization. In the West, capitalist valorization relies on the state
to guarantee the general equivalent and to maintain the private property
structure that separates us from what we need to live. The human is thus
split into a producer of goods for sale and a consumer of other goods. This
split allows the extraction of surplus value, and it is the production of
surplus value that defines one as productive, producing and, thus, having
value in society.
The Soviet system was a different solution to the same problem. One’svalue within the Soviet system was set by a different measure. Within theSoviet system, value operated as a quantified, measured need as set by thetranscendent intuition of the state. The state, as an alien institution, a formof alienated power, decided what was needed through its great, calculating
bureaucratic apparatus. By treating society as a mathematical problem, theSoviet system guaranteed an equality and homogeneity of existence. It
flattened desire and individuals. Desires were judged to be of social value or

48

not by committee. Use value came to be set by a moral system that stoodoutside of society. In the Soviet system humans were no less separated fromtheir conditions of existence, for a transcendent system of property still
existed as the state itself directly controlled property.
There is, however, a different type of communism, one in which theinstitutions of private property backed up by state power are absent; thiscommunism can be defined by the equality of access to the conditions ofexistence. This ethic is at the heart of the movement of the excluded, of thesociety against the state, that always remains antagonistic, however
incoherent, to the separations that capital and the state impose upon it.
This communism offers no mathematical solution, imposed from above,
to social problems. There is no guarantee of what individuals and groups
will do with the conditions of existence once they have access to them, thatis up to their desires and abilities. Rather, in the absence of transcendent
solutions and institutions, social relations and problems remain as tensions
within society, tensions that are worked through immanently in practice.
Value comes to be produced immanently in ethical practice, as a selfvalorization activity by those involved in a certain situation. A single regimeof value no longer covers and organizes the social terrain.
This ethic of desire, which remains fundamental to the movement of the
excluded, is antagonistic to the constituted social order that separates themultitude from its conditions of existence; and, it is out of this antagonismthat anarchist practice—as immanent to the movement of the excluded
multitudes—grows. Just as self-valorization becomes an ethical practice forthe excluded, informal organization, in struggle against capital and the state,becomes an ethical practice for anarchists: both create social relations
beyond measure.

Part II: The Anarchist Ethic and the Organization of Attack
The starting point for understanding the relationship between anarchists andthe new social movements is to recognize that we are a minority within the
movement. This is, of course, the normal position for anarchists, but it does
call for a specific theoretical thinking and practice in order for us toeffectively operate in such a context. Anarchists are hopefully at aninsurrectional level of struggle; they are, for the most part, working towards
insurrection, while the movement in general struggles at an intermediatelevel. What does this mean? Anarchists, except those who hold a deterministand evolutionary view of history, understand that insurrection, which
destroys the transcendent institutions of state and capital and allows the49realization social relations that are immanently organized, is always possible
as an outcome of struggle. Thus anarchists should always be working
towards the goal of insurrection. The struggle of the new social movementsthat have developed over the 1990’s, however, are mostly at an intermediatelevel, a level in which specific institutions may be attacked without a clear
goal of insurrection against capital and the state. Direct action against theWTO, the IMF, and the World Bank, the movement to destroy geneticallymodified crops, the movement of the landless to directly appropriate theconditions of their existence, and the direct action environmental movement
all contain the potential of moving towards insurrection. Anarchists must
open and develop that potential. There are others within these social
movements that, whether consciously or not, work to close the possibility of
insurrection. This often happens as a result of certain forms of organizationand organizing activity. Permanent organizations, organizations that attempt
to synthesize the multitude of those struggling into a single, unified
organization, and organizations that attempt to mediate struggle are allforms of organization that tend to close the potential of insurrection.
Before discussing the question of organization further, we need to clarify
how we will use the terms “the multitude” and “the mass”. The multitude iswhat we will call all those who are excluded and exploited by capitalism; itis the multitude that struggles against the state and capitalism, it is themultitude that makes up the society against the state. The mass is themultitude as it has been synthesized into a singular block and disciplined toact in a unified manner. Just as a nation-state must transform a multitude ofpeople into “the People” or citizens in order to create a disciplined nation,and the church must morally discipline its members to produce a flock,organizations of synthesis, such as “the Party,” must shape the multitude
into a mass in order to control its movement. The nation-state, the church,
and the Party are all transcendent institutions in relation to a multitude, inthat they all stand above and outside the multitude while attempting toorganize its social relations. They swoop down upon the multitude with agrid of identity into which all must fit—all relationships are organized fromthe outside with such a grid.
For anarchists, the question of organization, however, is an ethical(immanent) instead of moral (transcendent) question: in a given situation,
how do we combine in a way that promotes our active powers? How do webring a multitude together in a way that doesn’t limit our potential, ourpower to act, and our different desires?
In the wake of Seattle and Prague many organizers are discussing how tobuild and control the movement. They talk as if they are artists standing
over a lump of clay—the multitude—that needs to be shaped, disciplined.

50

The discussion usually leads to talk of the need to limit the actions of themost confrontational and to be better “organized.” Concerning the Praguedemonstrations, one “American organizer” stated, “If we are really serious
about doing an action, then we need to make certain there are de-escalation
teams, people who are responsible for breaking up the violence.” The goalof the type of organization that they promote, however, is to limit directconfrontational action and to encourage dialogue and mediation. Naively,
they want to harness the power of a mass of bodies in order to get a seat at
the table of power. For anarchists, of course, being against capitalism andthe state in their entirety, there can be no dialogue with constituted power,with the transcendent institutions of the state and capital. The willingness of
those transcendent institutions to initiate a dialogue may be a sign of theirfear and weakness, but it is also the beginning of our defeat when we limit
our active power to join them in discussion.
Our active power, our power to create and transform, is our only weapon,
and that which limits such power from within the movement is our greatest
weakness. This does not mean that we should remain unorganized; in fact, it
poses the very question of organization: how do we combine in a way that
promotes our active powers? The anarchist ethic is always a critical ethic,
and thus it denounces everything that cuts us off from and diminishes ourpower to act.
As noted above, one of the greatest dangers to the development of the
new social movements in a positive direction is that forms of organizationthat cut us off from our active power and close off the potential of
insurrection in the present moment become dominant: these are permanent,
synthesizing, and mediating organizations.
Permanent organizations tend to develop into transcendent institutions inrelation to the struggling multitude. They tend to develop a formal orinformal hierarchy and to disempower the multitude: power is alienatedfrom its active form within the multitude and instituted within theorganization. This transforms the active multitude into a passive mass. The
hierarchical constitution of power-relations removes decision from themoment—the immanence—of its necessity. The practical consequences ofsuch an organization is that the active powers of those involved in the
struggle are stifled by the organization. Decisions that should be made by
those involved in an action are deferred to the organization; and, permanentorganizations tend to make decisions based not on the necessity of a specificgoal or action, but on the needs of that organization, especially its
preservation. The organization becomes an end in itself.
As an organization moves towards permanence and comes to stand above
the multitude, the organizer appears, often claiming to have created the

51struggle, and begins to speak for the mass. It is the job of the organizer totransform the multitude into a controllable mass and to represent that mass
to the media. Organizers rarely views themselves as part of the multitude;
they stand outside of it, transcendent to it, and talk of “reaching out to thecommunity,” “awakening the masses,” and “building the organization andmovement” as if insurrection was a game of numbers. Thus, as outsiders,
they don’t see it as their task to act, to do actions, but to propagandize andorganize, for it is the masses that act.
Their worst fear is alienating the ‘real masses’; thus image becomes allimportant. After Seattle many organizers were worried about the effect thatproperty destruction would have on the image of the movement, and went togreat lengths to distance themselves from the perpetrators of such acts. The
Direct Action Network2 went to the extreme of not offering legal aid tothose charged with felonies during the Seattle protests. Seemingly, they
subscribe to Napoleonic law in which the accused are presumed guilty, notinnocent. Again, their image was at stake. Later, in L.A., the August
Collective asked D.A.N. if they could use its space for the L.A. anarchist
conference. D.A.N. declined, explaining that anarchists in general were too
white and too male, and this would affect D.A.N.’s ability to reach out to thecommunity. In other words, they wanted to appear to be in touch with thecommunity, and anarchists would hurt their image.
For the organizer, who takes as his/her motto “only that which appears in
the media exists,” concrete action always takes a back seat to themaintenance of media image. The goal of such image maintenance is neverto attack a specific transcendent institution, but to affect public opinion,
forever build the movement or, even worse, the organization. The organizer
must always worry about how the actions of others will reflect on the
movement; they must, therefore, both attempt to discipline the struggling
multitude and try to control how the movement is represented in the media.
Image replaces action for the permanent organization and the organizer who
operates within the society of the spectacle.
The attempt to control the vast image and opinion-making factories ofour society is a losing battle, as if we could ever try to match the quantity ofimages put forward by the media or get them to “tell the truth.” To come toa better understanding of the problems involved in such a battle and how the“organizer” operates, we need to first better comprehend how “opinion”
functions in society. On a basic level, we need to ask, what is opinion? An
opinion is not something first found among the public in general and then,afterwards, replayed through the media, as a simple reporting of the public
opinion. An opinion exists in the media first; it is produced by the media not
the multitude. Secondly, the media then reproduces the opinion a million

52times over linking the opinion up to a certain type of person (conservatives
think x, liberals think y). Thirdly, as Alfredo Bonanno points out, “[Anopinion] is a flattened idea, an idea that has been uniformed in order tomake it acceptable to the largest number of people. Opinions are massified
ideas.” Public opinion is produced as a series of simple choices or solutions(“I’m for globalization and free trade,” or “I’m for more national control
and protectionism”). We are all supposed to choose—as we choose ourleaders or our burgers—instead of think for ourselves. It is obvious,
therefore, that anarchists cannot use the opinion-making factory to create
counter-opinions, and hopefully anarchists would never want to operate on
the level of opinion even if we could somehow exert control over thecontent spewed out of the factory gates. Anyhow, the anarchist ethic could
never be communicated in the form of opinion, it would die once massified.
However, it is exactly on the level of opinion that the organizer works, foropinion and image-maintenance are the very tools of power, tools used toshape and discipline a multitude into a controllable mass.
“The Party” is a permanent organization that attempts to synthesize all
struggle into one controllable organization; in doing so, it cuts the multitude
off from its active power and closes the door to insurrection. For the Party,
the struggle is always in the future, at some mythical time; the present is forpolitical work, for recruiting and disciplining party members. Commenting
on Prague, the Communist Party of Great Britain noted that the mostpositive event in the latest Global Day of Action wasn’t the action, but thefact that they sold or distributed 2,100 issues of the Weekly Worker andpassed out 5,000 leaflets (what they call political work). Meanwhile theInternational Socialist Organization (the SWP) concentrated on image at theexpense of action: they claimed they would bring 2500 people but brought
less than 1000 and switched from an agreed upon position within the
structure of the direct action damaging its success. But, of course, the ISO
had other priorities than the action itself; they were present in order torecruit new members for the future, a future that their actions ensure will
never come. As such, their decision wasn’t adequate to the necessity of the
moment; decision had been removed from the immanence within amultitude and brought into a transcendent institution. The ISO left a key
intersection open and a few hundred anarchists, who could make decisions
within the moment itself, covered the intersection as best they could.
Transcendent organizations, such as permanent organizations and mediatingorganizations, by their very logic, will always forgo action and close thepotential for insurrection. But transcendent organizations, such as “theParty,” while they can stifle action, can never contain the desires and powerof the multitude; they are always doomed to failure.

53

But, as anarchists, who refuse such a vanguard, transcendent position, weare part of the multitude, we are within it, we are immanent to it. We are
exploited as the multitude is; we are excluded as the multitude is. While on
the one hand the anarchist ethic is always a critical ethic that denouncestranscendent institutions and morality, it is also always a constructive ethicthat leads towards the building of new social relations and new forms ofactive power. As a minority within the struggling multitude, we choose aform of organization that follows both the logic of our position within the
movement of the exploited and the anarchist ethic of immanently organizedsocial relations—relations that are self-organized instead of organized by atranscendent institution (such as the state, the church, or the party) which
stands outside the multitude. We must organize ourselves in a manner that
won’t tend towards permanence and hierarchy, which won’t come to standabove the multitude, and chooses self-activity over image andrepresentation. We must develop forms of organization that open thepotential for insurrection and move the struggle in that direction, instead ofalways shifting that potential further into the future.
Informal Organization
What type of organization allows decision to occur in the moment of its
necessity? We call organization that lacks the formality and authority which
separate organizers and organized, informal organization. In this section, weare specifically discussing the organization of social struggle. We will
discuss some general principles that have grown out of practice. Just as
some small-scale societies lack formal impersonal institutions, informalorganization lacks offices and hierarchical positions. Because theorganizer’s nature is to plan and control, s/he often privileges theperpetuation of the organization over other goals. Informal organizations
dissolve when their goal is achieved or abandoned, they do not perpetuatethemselves merely for the sake of the organization if the goals that caused
people to organize have ceased to exist. The passage from informal toformal or permanent organization is analogous to the moment when a smallscale society creates impersonal institutions; it is a moment in which thegroup’s power is alienated and placed outside of it.
Informal organization is a means for affinity groups to coordinate efforts
when necessary. We must always remember that many things can be doneeasier with an affinity group or individual, in these cases higher levels oforganization just makes the decision making process cumbersome, it stifles
us. The smallest amount of organization necessary to achieve ones aims isalways the best to maximize our active powers.

54

Informal organization must be based on an ethic of autonomous action;
autonomy is necessary to prevent our active powers from becoming
alienated, to prevent the formation of relations of authority. Autonomy isrefusing to obey or give orders, which are always shouted from above or
beyond the situation. Autonomy allows decision to occur in and during thesituation of its necessity, instead of being predetermined or delayed by thedecision of a committee or meeting. Organizational platforms impose aformality in the decision making process that inhibits autonomy. This does
not mean to say, however, that we shouldn’t think strategically about the
future and make agreements or plans. On the contrary, plans and agreements
are useful and important. What we are emphasizing is a flexibility thatallows people to discard plans when they become useless. Plans should be
adaptable to events as they unfold. It can be dangerous during ademonstration or action to hesitate to change plans when events take an
unexpected turn, because one’s group had originally planned otherwise.
Since autonomy is born out of an ethic that rejects the blocking of active
powers, it therefore implies a refusal to block the actions of others with animportant exception. When others try to impede our action, we will not justsit by and let them. Examples of this include, those who tried to physicallystop protestors from breaking windows in Seattle, those who take photos ofillegal actions, those who unmask people who choose to be masked for
security reasons, and those who mark protestors with paint to be identified
later by the police. These people not only refuse to respect the autonomy ofothers’ action, but take this to an extreme by trying to place those they
disagree with in the hands of the police, enemies who have the power totake away years of our lives. We have no choice but to defend ourselves.
The point where autonomy ends is the point where alienated power isformed, where our only weapon, our power to act is taken from us.
Just as an informal organization must have an ethic of autonomy or it
will be transformed into an authoritarian organization, in order to avoid thealienation of our active powers, it must also have an ethic of no compromisewith respect the organization’s agreed goal. The organization’s goal shouldbe either achieved or abandoned. Compromising with those who we oppose(e.g.; such as the State or a corporation) defeats all true opposition, it
replaces our power to act with that of our enemies. Since Seattle, global
financial and trade organizations have been calling for dialogue. To get us tobargain with them they have tried to look sympathetic and concerned.
During the protests in Prague in September, a World Bank representative
said: “We sympathize with the questions the protestors are proposing but wedisagree with their methods. We think they’re going about this in the wrong
way. We want dialogue not force.” Another World Bank representative said:

55“These are important meetings, about ending AIDS and poverty; what wewant is dialogue not diatribes.” The fact that the World Bank wants dialogue
is a measure of our success in the streets. They hope we will choose
dialogue over direct action, because they know that dialogue with themwould be ineffective, that they would never really concede to our demands.
They can listen to us, politely respond, even make minor adjustments, butthey all eventually go home to a gated community of oblivion and have amartini. This is why they want to channel the force of our direct action into
appeals, petitions and attempts to manipulate the mainstream media. The
World Bank recognizes the power of our direct action and is taking countermeasures; it is trying to convince us to use ineffective methods.
The scraps handed down to appease and divert us by those we oppose
must be refused. Compromise with any transcendent institution (the State,
WTO, WB, IMF, the Party etc.) is always the alienation of our power to thevery institutions we supposedly wish to destroy; this sort of compromise
results in the forfeiture of our power to act decisively, to make decisions andactions in the time we choose. As such, compromise only makes the stateand capital stronger.
For those who wish to open the possibility of insurrection, those who
don’t wish to wait for the supposedly appropriate material conditions forrevolution, for those who don’t want a revolution which is merely thecreation of a new power structure but want the destruction of all structures
which alienate out power from us, such compromise is contrary to theiraims. To continually refuse to compromise is to be in perpetual conflict withthe established order and its structures of domination and deprivation.
Permanent conflictuality means that we will not wait for orders from leadersor organizers who, by nature of their role, aim to control our rebellion andthus alienate our active powers. Permanent conflictuality is uncontrollable
autonomous action.
Informal organizations may be composed of affinity groups with quite
different political perspectives from each other. The disparate perspectives
that may be found in an informal organization would not tend to be foundwithin the affinity group. The affinity group would be based on acommonality of perspective that wouldn’t necessarily exist in a larger
group. Some people wish to open the possibility for insurrection, whileothers are only concerned with an immediate goal. There is no reason why
those who share an immediate practical aim but diverge in their long-termgoals might not come together. For example, an anti-genetic engineeringgroup could form and decide to coordinate the tearing up test crops if there
are many plots in an area and to circulate anti-GE leaflets. (In cases ofsabotage, the fewer the people who know the better, information should

56

only be shared between affinity groups when there is a reason to coordinate
efforts, for example, when it is desirable for several affinity groups to hit
several targets in one night.) In this case those who want an insurrectionary
rupture with this social order and those who merely hate genetic engineering
could easily work together towards this immediate goal. For those who wish
to open the possibility of insurrection, such cooperation will not close thedoor on their dreams. Informal organization, with its ethics of autonomy andno compromise, does not control struggle; and, uncontrollability opens thepossibility for an insurrectionary rupture with this necrophilic social order.
In the above case, we’re assuming that all involved uphold an antiauthoritarian ethic that respects autonomy of action. Because authority canarise in any group, some anarchists feel safer if they only interact with otheranarchists, thus avoiding authoritarians. It is not the label anarchist thatannihilates authority, but an ongoing struggle with all those one interacts
with. Every new situation and relation we enter poses the possibility for therise of authority. Just as Clastres called attention to a “Society against theState,” other anthropologists who have lived in small-scale societies havenoted a process of assertive egalitarianism, an active tendency to squelch
attempts at creating roles of authority, or economic inequality. In an
informal organization, we need to assertively counter the formation of
authoritarian relations. The difficulty of this problem cannot be avoided bystaying in an anarchist ghetto.
Anarchists could be a force that helps the anti-capitalist and antiauthoritarian currents within the anti-globalization movement spread further.
This could be achieved by opening up discussion between anarchists andother anti-capitalist groups, and between anti-capitalists and anti-corporate/anti-globalization groups. This discussion would in some cases lead to linksof cooperation and solidarity. When we discuss the importance of links
between struggles or the spread of struggle we are not talking about agrowth in numbers of an organization or movement. The type oforganization that we have been discussing is not composed of people who
aim to increase its numbers at the sacrifice of the quality of the relationshipsof those who come together; the spark of rebellion cannot be quantified.
Informal organization is a means for discussion between diverse individuals
and groups to become focused action. Informal organizations, affinity
groups and individuals have already given birth to many projects, some ofwhich aim to increase communication and sharing such as gatherings, thecreation of social spaces like info-shops, and publications, these projects are
crucial when capitalism constantly puts up walls to separate us. Others havefocused on the urgent task of directly attacking the existent social order.

57“Make our struggle as transnational as capital.”This slogan is very compelling and has become the most common slogan
heard within the anti-globalization movement. But how do we make ourstruggle as transnational as capital? This brings up some difficult problems
for anti-authoritarians. How can a transnational struggle against capital andthe state occur without creating an overarching massive authoritarian
structure? How can struggle against a common enemy, capital, remain
focused yet disparate, local and global? Transnational struggle, in reality,means struggle on many scalar levels. It also demands the development ofmany practices that allow us to work together and, at the same time, ward
off the growth of transcendent institutions in our midst. Operating on many
scalar levels will create tensions within the movement, and there is no
simple solution that resolves such tensions. Yet, attempting to operate on asingle scalar level, such as the national scale or the building of a massiveinternational organization, dooms our movement to failure; nor can we build
a local cocoon to hibernate in. Waiting only brings us defeat.
Capitalism is a very adaptable force; it has managed to embed itself ininnumerable social and cultural realities. Capitalism operates from aboveand below; it imposes itself through the coercion of deprivation and thenembeds itself in social relations. There is one capitalism, it operates as asystem, yet it functions in millions of particular local ways. Any fightagainst it must destroy both the transcendent institutions that impose it fromabove (the state, companies, etc.) and transform the relations that sustain it
from below. If the structures of domination and deprivation which uphold
capitalism, and the capitalist social relations that have penetrated nearly
every facet of our daily lives are to be destroyed, this destruction must
spring from the desire of the multitude. The desire to destroy capitalism isthe spark which must arise in many localities and spread throughout the
globe, in order for our struggle to become as transnational as capital.
There is no longer anywhere to hide. If we destroy the state and capital in
one place, leaving the industrial military regime in the hands of ourenemies, our little utopia will soon be crushed. Likewise if we try to isolate
ourselves, as Hakim Bey so poetically suggests in T.A.Z., to create a selfsufficient autonomous zone free from capital, we cannot succeed. It is ofcourse very important to create spaces for ourselves where we can breathe
freely; where we can act and think without the immediate strait jacket of
capitalist relations and roles, without the 9-5 production-consumption grind.
But if we stop there we run into a problem, capitalism surrounds us. The
squat is evicted, the self-sufficient rural community is surrounded by towns,
or logging moves in until the only trees left are on ones land. One can no

58

longer be completely outside of capitalism; it is a social disease that has
touched all societies. This is not to say that it has fully penetrated them all,the few Penan of Borneo that remain in the forest do still share a social lifethat is in stark contrast to capitalist relations. But they are fighting for theirlives and there is not much forest left. We must understand that just as a
genetically modified test crop will spread into nearby fields, capitalism is apest which seeks to take over everything it touches; it cannot be contained
without being destroyed as a whole.
Many anarchists in the anti-globalization movement operate on the scaleof the nation-state, imagining that Clastres’ “Society Against the State”
could be rearticulated as the “State Against Capital”; they seem tounderstand capital as becoming pure and separating itself from the state.
And as an index of current pessimism the state is imagined as protecting
culture against global capitalism. As we argued in our section on value,
however, there can be no capitalism without transcendent institutions, suchas the state, to back up its private property system. The state, in some form,
is the condition of possibility of capitalism, that which is necessary forcapitalism to go on existing. Thus capitalism can never free itself from thestate and continue to reproduce itself. Of course, the transcendent
institutions that allow for the reproduction of capitalism are constantly
transforming themselves; they are not static.
As the scale of the state-capital relation changes so too must theorganization of resistance and attack; yet, any argument that we need tocompromise and even ally ourselves with older transcendent institutions
such as the nation-state are sorely misguided. Any compromise withalienated power can only cut us off from our power to transform society andour power to create the life of our desires to the best of our abilities.
Thinking about the issue of the scale of resistance, about how to bring theconcept of a transnational resistance to and attack on capital into practice,
demands a much more careful analysis.
1. When people start thinking on global terms there is sometimes atendency to assume that the only way for a struggle to be global is tofunction like a state or corporation, to try to synthesize all struggle within
one international organization, and thus unify practice through thisorganization. This is undesirable from an anti-authoritarian point of view,
yet it is also impractical. How could one possibly bring all struggle under
one organization, without first suppressing many local struggles. A largeorganization of this sort by nature separates decision from the needs of the
exploited, it makes them wait to act until the moment which is mostadvantageous to the organization. Large organizations that bring together
many social struggles often think only in abstract terms about capital. It thus

59

becomes necessary to wait to act until the appropriate material conditions
arise, for a crisis to arise in capitalism as a whole. Such thinking is blind tothe multifarious local motivations for revolt.
Transcendent organizations can only command revolt; in doing so they
try to deprive revolt of its impetus, the immanent desire of the multitude. It
is this desire that is the spark of insurrection; only it can transform thewhole of social life. No individual, affinity group, or organization cancommand insurrection; insurrection is by nature uncontrollable. Those who
dream of an insurrection cannot just will it into existence, they can only
open up the possibility for its unfolding through direct attacks on this social
order, actions which can communicate and spread throughout society.
2. Capital can never be attacked in the abstract, it can only be attacked inits concrete manifestations; attack is always local, but it can communicate
globally. Local attacks can inspire people elsewhere—who have a common
enemy—to take action. The points at which people perceive thecommonality of an enemy vary widely, from a specific company, specificlaw or politician, to capitalism or the state as a whole. Actions and the
publicizing of actions via communiques and our media are opportunities forpeople to see the commonality between the oppressed in a faraway place
and themselves. In this lies an opportunity for people to take their analysis
one step further, and become critical of capitalism as a totality.
Recently in North America, environmentalists have been more successful
than workers in letting local struggle communicate the global scale ofcapital. The environmental direct action movement is spreading quickly allover the continent, with very little organization at all. The ELF3 is not an
organization, anyone can sign the name ELF (though those who started it
request that those who sign the name meet certain criteria of perspective andgoal). Yet, ELF actions have spread widely without the support of anorganization, ELF actions occur because people are angry that the earth isbeing trashed, this ire spreads more effectively than would a permanentorganization with its committees and paper selling. Not all people who
engage in such acts of sabotage use the name ELF, there are innumerable
other examples, the tearing up of genetically engineered test crops which
has spread over several continents is the most well known example. In thesecases, the local act of sabotage communicates a global enemy the capitalist
industrial machine that is polluting our planet.
3. The recent upsurge of the global days of action offers an opportunity
for specific actions to communicate and build links globally. But we need to
ask what exactly is the nature of the opportunity that the global days ofaction offer anarchists? While the targets chosen, the international
institutions of capitalism, do help to communicate an opposition to60

capitalism in general, perhaps the greatest opportunity these global days ofaction offer is the potential to link-up particular, local actions that attack
specific targets with a general opposition to capitalism. In other words, thefact of the simultaneity of actions on a particular date may be more
important than the spectacular shutting down of a huge meeting. By
skipping the big event and instead doing smaller, local actions, anarchists
can communicate the local consequences of the ever expanding capitalist
death-machine. By the very simultaneity of many actions connections
between regions and struggles are built. We are not saying that our actions
should be determined by the dates set by the institutions of global capitalism
nor should one only conduct actions on such dates, but we also should notignore the historical opportunities offered by the growth of the global daysof action. To be effective such actions should be part of an ongoing struggle.
Doing actions locally also has the potential to involve others who may notunderstand how the big events of the global days of action—the attacks on
institutions such as the WTO, the WB, and the IMF—are connected to theirlives. Doing local actions on the dates of the global days of action is one
important way to intensify such struggles.
4. The final—and possibly most important—key to an active,
transnational attack on capital and the state is developing the practice of a
critical and revolutionary solidarity. When we are critical of those who share
our aims, critical solidarity is a way for disagreements over strategy, tactics
and organization to be aired and discussed without trying to block eachother’s actions. If we continually block the actions of others no action willtake place. Notably, since Seattle previously fierce theoretical divisions
have taken on less importance. This was particularly clear in the call for a
Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Block at the A16 Washington protest4, which
was a significant call for solidarity and joint action by all who consider
themselves to be anti-capitalist revolutionaries. There has been a lot more
activity on many levels since Seattle, people who didn’t go have been
inspired by the stories of those who did, suddenly now that there is plenty to
do, theoretical divisions give way to concerns of practical importance.
As a minority within the movement of the exploited, anarchists must findways to work and interact with those with whom they disagree. At the sametime this doesn’t mean that disagreements are hidden. It is important that theconcept of critical solidarity be understood widely, for all too often a critical
attitude is taken to mean a lack of support. We can be critical of theZapatistas while we act in solidarity with the struggle of the excluded in
Chiapas against the Mexican State and the imposition of neo-liberal
economics. It is always more important to act in solidarity with people’s
decision to create their own lives, than to agree with their theoretical

61

perspective or the tactics they choose. It is the solidarity with the becomingactive and the refusal of the alienation of power that is most vital. As Nikos
Mazotis said at his trial, “For me, solidarity means the unreserved
acceptance and support with every means of the right that the people musthave to determine their lives as they wish, not letting others decide in theirplace, like the State and Capital do.”5
Along with a critical solidarity that is always open to the autonomous
action of others, we need to build revolutionary solidarity. Revolutionary
solidarity should be active and in conflict with the structures of domination.
Revolutionary solidarity allows us to move far beyond the “send-a-check”
style of solidarity that so pervades the left as well as solidarity that relies on
petitioning the state for relief or mercy. One example of revolutionary
solidarity was Nikos Mazotis’ action against TVX Gold in December 1997.
Many people in the villages around Strymonikos in Northern Greece were
struggling against the installation of a gold metallurgy plant in their area. In
solidarity with the villagers, Nikos placed a bomb in the Ministry ofIndustry of Development that was intended to explode when no one was in
the building; unfortunately, it never went off at all. Nikos is now serving a
15-year prison sentence (reduced to five and a half years; he is due out thisyear). TVX Gold is a multinational company whose headquarters is in
Canada, there are thus many points at which revolutionary solidarity withthe villagers of Stryminikos could have been enacted. Fundraising on behalfof one’s comrades is necessary and surely appreciated, but this could be
combined with more active forms of solidarity with those who struggle
against our common enemies. Revolutionary solidarity communicates thelink between the exploitation and repression of others and our own fate;
and, it shows people the points at which capitalism or the state operate insimilar ways in very different places. By creating links between the
struggles against the transcendent power structures that form the State andCapital, revolutionary solidarity has the potential to take our local struggles
to a global level. Solidarity is when you recognize your own struggle in the
struggle of others. Revolutionary solidarity is solidarity with the becomingactive of others and therefore with their refusal to accept the alienation of
their own power. Moreover, revolutionary solidarity is always an active
attack; it always involves the recovery of our own active powers thatmultiply in combination—in solidarity—with the active powers of others.
Conclusion
In this article we have argued that anarchism is a practice that is always intension with the constituted order. The common thread of anarchist practice62is the refusal of a transcendent, constituted order, the demand that decisions
be made by those involved in a situation. Anarchism is an attack on all that
separates us from our active powers; anarchism is the desire that animatesour refusal to allow the alienation of our power. Thus the practice ofanarchism is an ethic. The practices that we have sketched in the above
essay have been developed by anarchists within the struggle of the
excluded, and, as such, they constitute a continuation of the society against
the state.
In order to remain vital, however, anarchism must avoid the constitutionof transcendent power-relations within its midst. For such relations would
both void the effectiveness of our attack and lead to the defeat of selfconstituted social relations. Informal organization is a means for anarchists
to combine with others of the exploited multitude without forming
transcendent institutions. The practice of the anarchist ethic within the wider
struggle will both allow people to remain active in their attack and bring
into existence new, immanently created ways of living and relating.
Through the very practice of informal organization, the anarchist ethic canspread further within the anti-globalization movement. Within the wider
movement of the exploited and excluded, the movement—however coherent—to reclaim the power to create our own social relations beyond measure,anarchists are thus in a position to deepen the struggle against capital andthe state.
1. The global days of action: A initiative by the network People’s Global Action(PGA) during the 1990s, a predecessor to the summit protests. The first global day ofaction was J18 (18 June, 1999) and was against the world’s financial center. The
financial district in London was occupied by 10 000 people, for example. Later thesesummit protests continued and includes the now-famous protests in Seattle, Prague,
Gothenburg, Genoa etc. PGA is a network made up of everything from big social
movement to small activist groups. The network grew out of the international
meetings that the Zapatistas took the initiative to by organizing “The Intercontinental
Meetings for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism” 1996, where different groups andmovements from all over the world met in the jungle of Chiapas.
2. Direct Action Network: Network of organizations and movements who arranged
seminaries and protests against the WTO-summit in Seattle 1999.
3. Earth Liberation Front: A network of environmentalist groups which doesn’t haveany official membership, leadership or a spokesperson. You can say that ELF is moreof a concept you can use if you do some kind of environmentalist action. Kinda likethe Animal Liberation Front which works in the same way.
4. A16 Washington protest: Protests in Washington 16 April 2000 against the IMF andWorld Bank.
5. Nikos Mazotis: “Statement to the Athens Criminal Court”, 1999.

63

Insurrectionary Practice and Capitalist
Transformation
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN THE BATKO GROUP AND SASHA K. (2005)

The Batko Group: Our first contact with American insurrectionary
anarchism was through Killing King Abacus1 and Hot Tide2 on the web. And
it was after this that the word “insurrectionary” began to be used as a label
for a specific theoretical current in Sweden. It would be very interesting to
get a short history and evaluation of that project—the theoreticalbackground and the discussion that preceded it, what movement it grew outof, your initial aims and what you later accomplished, its impact, and last
but not least, why it ended.
Sasha: Well, calling it a “movement” is a bit of a stretch. I’ll primarily
speak for myself here and say what KKA was for me. The three of us who
did KKA, Leila, Wolfi3 and myself, were all involved in the anti-civ4,
anarchist milieu in the U.S. At the time, I found the debate in the U.S.
anarchist scene somewhat stale. It was increasingly turning into a debate
between primitivists and syndicalists, with primitivists claiming thatsyndicalists did not really step outside of our present society. This was true
enough as far as it went. Yet the debate did not really talk that much about
how we would actually move forward and act.
The anti-civ milieu that we came out of was influenced by the likes ofCamatte, Perlman5, the Situationists6, surrealists, and anti-state communists.
In the debates with syndicalists, the critique of work, the link between thematerial form of society and social relations, and the critique of the ideology
of progress were important. But, I increasingly felt the anti-civ milieu wasgetting more closed and fixed in its ideas and, in the process of debatingwith syndicalists and the such, rejecting the importance of class completely.
At the same time, largely because of the Marini Trial7 and Wolfi’s
correspondence with Italian anarchists, we became more aware of the Italian
insurrectionary current. It was on a trip to Europe that we decided to do
KKA.
The practice and writings of various insurrectionary anarchists seemed tooffer a way out of some of the problems of the US anarchist scene. Insteadof debating the neutrality of technology or the origins of alienation, theinsurrectionary anarchists drew on their own experience in practice of how
to act and organize. This was a discussion that didn’t seem to be happening

64

to a large extent in the US at the time. So we wanted to reintroduce some of
the writings of the insurrectionary anarchists into the U.S. We also wanted
to get away from a rather weak debate on class, which seemed to be caught
between, on the one side, a reduced understanding of class and capitalism,
which lacked a critique of work as separate from life and of the link
between productive forms and social relations while celebrating worker
self-management, and, on the other side, a rejection of class struggle.
Primitivism has ended up trying so hard to stress that capitalism is just thelatest stage of civilization that it has washed out an understanding of
capitalism as a specific social form. Another dichotomy within the US
milieu that we wanted to move out of was the one that saw individualism
and communism as in contradiction. So into this situation we wanted to
inject more energy into the discussion of struggles themselves and how weact.
After two issues we had succeeded better than we could have imagined.
Yet we had also fallen into a rather long debate with various primitivists aswell, which have not really been that useful. It is probably time to move on
to other projects. For me, in terms of text projects, this has meant starting
the anti-politics.net website, which is trying to bring people together interms of how they relate to struggle and to further a thorough critique ofcapitalism and unfree social relations.
The Batko Group: You say: “After two issues we had succeeded better
than we could have imagined.” How so? Tell us a little more about that.
Sasha: Well, what I mean is that we generated more discussion than wethought we would. And the ideas and concepts we were translating from
Italy have been quite widely discussed. In turn, several articles from KKA
were then translated into other languages as well. And this discussion has
brought some people together in interesting ways. The anti-politics.net
forum is one example.
The Batko Group: You refer a lot to the Primitivist and “anti-civ”
movement, partly as a problem/opposition but also as a part of yourbackground. Here in Sweden (and we believe in the whole of Europe) thiscurrent is a more or less non-existing phenomenon, or at lest very marginaland unheard of in any debates. Do you have an analysis on why this current
has gained so much influence in the USA? The consensus over here (acrossthe whole spectra of anarchists and left-wing commies) is that they—generally speaking—just are confused nutjobs. Camatte and theSituationists, on the other hand, seem like unlikely influences. And there are65

apparent connections between early writings of Zerzan8 and the US schoolof Autonomous Marxism, like Harry Cleaver9 and Midnight Notes10.
Sasha: First off, I want to be clear that for me and many others, anti-civ
and primitivist are not the same thing. I would say there are a couple ofreasons why primitivism might attract more people here in the U.S. than inEurope. First, America actually has more of a wilderness to try to defend,
and there was a pretty radical environmental movement here. Secondly, I
think that American anti-communism (as in being against anythingcommunist, even anti-state communism) is a very big influence on theAmerican scene. I think the influence of primitivism is actually waning now
in America. More and more people, while possibly initially interested in thecritique, are finding primitivism to be too rigid of an ideology. So I wouldn’t
say that Primitivism has that wide a following at all. But those that do
consider themselves Primitivists are very dedicated to what they are doing.
Camatte has definitely been an influence on the anti-civ critique,especially on Perlman. And Perlman was an influence on KKA. But in the
US only a small number of Camatte’s articles have been translated into
English, mostly only his newest stuff. In Europe, you might have a bit of adifferent view of Camatte because of that. The Situationists were an
influence on Perlman, but not really on Primitivism. In fact, I think they
could use a good dose of reading the Situationists once in a while. The
Primitivists like to name everybody else as a leftist, but they don’t seem tounderstand what the left is, other than that it is bad. Reading the
Situationists could be good for them in that sense, but I doubt that is reallyon their agenda.
The Batko Group: This discussion was not supposed to develop into a
discussion about primitivists. It’s really not that interesting. But, after wesent you the question “Do you have an analysis on why this current has
gained so much influence in the USA?,” some of us discussed the issue andcame up with a theory of our own:
Sooner or later all struggles become recuperated. But depending on their
history and the current hegemony, the recuperation takes different forms. In
Europe we have a long tradition of social-democratic and Leninist
dominance within the formal workers-movement and also in the capitalist
state. So in Europe almost every struggle or movement in one form or
another gets recuperated by these gigantic “left-wing” institutions and/or
their ideology. In the U.S. on the other hand (as you point out) you have an
extreme anti-communist tradition, and you don’t have the same traditions of

66

an institutionalized workers-movement in power, so as a result therecuperation takes other forms as well.
The environmental movement over here probably emerged more or lessin the same way as on your continent (and the amount of wilderness to
defend is probably not a big factor) with one reformist wing, from the start
just in it for the mediation and building of green-parties and so on, and one
radical wing more in line with a direct-action movement. But the differenceis (we think) that over here the radical wing got recuperated mainly into theexisting Leninist perspectives and more or less disappeared from the map.
In the U.S. there was no existing “alternative” perspective big enough tosuck up the environmental movement and (which is important) otherstruggles connected to it. So it kept the shape of an environmental
movement and adapted a straight-up liberal ideology, much in the same way
as parts of the revolutionary workers-movement already had done inEurope.
This theory is a simplification, but the point is that primitivism, eventhough it seems like it, isn’t a unique phenomenon at all, it’s just a different
expression of recuperated struggles. Basically it fills the exact same role as
Leninism and social-democracy within the “activist-movement” over here.
And just as all Leninist-influenced projects and theories is not all bad, there
is a gray-scale within your “activist-movement” but more across theenvironmental axis than the left/right axis.
Sasha: Well, I don’t think that is quite the way I’d put it. I don’t reallysee primitivists as acting as a recuperator for capitalism. But I do see it as arather ideological take on the present. It seems to mix an activist ideology
with essentialism in terms of human nature, or “primal nature.” But I thinkthey play a different role than the leftists in Leninist or social democratic
parties do. But enough on primitivism.
The Batko Group: Our main sources for self-labeled insurrectional
anarchist theory has been Bonanno texts, the English magazine
Insurrection11, publications from Elephant Editions12 and BratachDubh13 and stuff from KKA. But of course there is also a lot of nonanarchist theory with an insurrectional content. For example different kindsof “alternative” Marxism, like the Situationists and the autonomous theories
from Italy or the French ultra-left. The consensus in Sweden seems to be(among the few that read him) that Bonanno is more of historical interest (asthe “father” of this current) than an actual theoretical must-read. What are
your theoretical influences (both anarchist and non-anarchist), and what
historical movements/events do you think your theoretical roots grew out

67of? How have your theoretical discussion developed over time, and were doyou stand now? Here in Sweden the latest input of new insurrectionary
theory was the publication of a Gilles Dauvé anthology last year.
Sasha: I actually found several of Bonanno’s texts and concepts very
important and an inspiration. Diavolo in Corpo14 and Canenero15 werealso very important inspirations for us. For us in KKA, I would say that
Bonanno’s reading of individualism and communism as not in contradiction
was very useful; for example, thinking of communism as equal access to theconditions of our existence, an overcoming of the separations that have been
imposed upon us, instead of as a celebration of a naturalized conception ofworking class culture and life, is important. I personally found
Bonanno’s The Anarchist Tension16 very interesting in the way it defines
anarchism as a tension. But even more important has been the idea ofpractice that developed out of the Italian experience: the centrality of attack
instead of compromise (a critique of politics, therefore, and representation),
informal organization, organization as growing out of struggle and affinity
instead of producing struggle (which seems to be the U.S. way ofunderstanding organization), permanent conflictuality, revolutionary
solidarity, etc.. Bonanno and others have all written about these practices.
Other influences for us are varied: we were all influenced by the
Situationists, Freddy and Loraine Perlman (especially Letters of
Insurgents17), and by surrealism18. Wolfi, like Bonanno and others in Italy, isa reader of Stirner19. I would say Dauvé and some other anti-state
communists were important for me: Dauvé’s “When Insurrections
Die"20 influenced me a lot. It was one of the first texts we put on our
original website.
As to recent developments: with the primitivists seeming to completely
reject class struggle these days, we have less and less in common. I would
say that their critique of class struggle (as we can see in the latest issueof Green Anarchy21) is still stuck in a critique of the weak class politics ofsyndicalists, instead of taking class and class struggle seriously. So I am
interested in continuing to look at class struggle in a more thorough way
instead of just rejecting a weak version of it, to push class struggle as the
struggle to end all classes, for the self-abolition of the dispossessed, theauto-destruction of the proletariat. I have been living on and off in China
and the sharpening conflicts here have helped me in this respect. Sure there
are a lot of contradictions within these struggles, but we can’t just stepoutside of them and find some pure subject to attack totality, some pure
human nature untouched by society’s contradictions. It doesn’t exist; itnever has. Struggle begins within our contradictions. Struggle is a process in68which people develop deeper understandings of what they confront and how
to confront it. And in this process we also learn from the struggles of others.
Through this process struggle can spread and deepen. But none of this isdetermined; it is a very contingent process.
The Batko Group: What do insurrectionalists do? As we understand it,
insurrectional anarchists try to point out the social character of classstruggle, and that anarchists shouldn’t organize as a political organization
separated from the class. Anarchist ought to organize and fight foremost as
the exploited/excluded. The question “what do insurrectionalists do?” might
at first therefore seem quite strange, but still there are political anarchistgroups calling themselves insurrectionalists here and there. So, what dothese insurrectionalist groups you know about do? What ought to be their
purpose vs. do any of them live up to this?
Sasha: They do many different things, of course. But the main point I
would make is that insurrectionaries try to act from where they stand,instead of focusing on organizing others to act. We don’t stand outside ofthe exploited and excluded, the dispossessed, we act as members of thedispossessed. Yet I would stress that we recognize that, while struggle
begins with our own desires it expands from there through revolutionary
solidarity: thus insurrectionaries often act in solidarity with others who seem
to share our desires and struggles. Insurrectionary anarchists also pay close
attention to how struggles spread. Thus they tend to support small actions
that can be easily reproduced by others, such as acts of sabotage—although
we shouldn’t fetishize sabotage either—for it is these types of actions thatwe spread in an uncontrollable way. It is uncontrollability, and not theirformally organized character, that will make struggles strong.
In the struggle against the high speed railway in Italy, insurrectionary
anarchists intervened with acts against the railway, and soon a huge numberof acts of sabotage against the railway spread socially well beyond theanarchist milieu. It is clear that anarchists will never be the main force
within revolutionary moments, so if acts don’t generalize socially anduncontrollably beyond the anarchist milieu then the struggle will fail. So thekey is not to organize everyone who struggles into anarchist organizations
or federations, but to intervene in ways that can help the spread anddeepening of uncontrollable revolt. And it is through becoming
uncontrollable that individuals and groups will be creating new social
relations beyond capitalism and the state. The targets of such struggles are
all over the place. Insurrectionary anarchists have intervened in struggles
over the building of railways, new factories and mines, in wildcat strikes, in69

solidarity with interned immigrants, against war and the building of militarybases, in occupying spaces, and many more areas.
The Batko Group: You seem to have had quite a lot of contact with
Italian anarchists. Can you tell us something about your view on the origin
and development of the insurrectionary theory in Italy, and its status andpractices today? (Due to the language barrier we sadly have almost no
knowledge about the anarchist debate and contemporary theories in either
Italy, Greece or even Spain.)
Sasha: Most of the contact I have in Italy were made through Wolfi. He
is also the one that knows that situation the best. So maybe you should talkto him about this question. I speak Chinese but no Italian or Greek. I did
spend some time there. (There is an article in Do or Die that touches on thedevelopment of insurrectionary anarchism in Italy that you could look at.22)
As I said, we in the U.S. were interested in the insurrectionary anarchist
critique of the movements of the 1970’s. Much of the Italian insurrectionary
anarchist critique of the movements of the ‘70s focused on the forms oforganization that shaped the forces of struggle and out of this a moredeveloped idea of informal organization grew. A critique of the authoritarianorganizations of the 70s, whose members often believed they were in a
privileged position to struggle as compared to the proletariat as a whole,
was further refined in the struggles of the ‘80s, such as the early-’80s
struggle against a military base that was to house nuclear weapons in
Comiso, Sicily.
Anarchists were very active in that struggle, which was organized into
self-managed leagues. These ad hoc, autonomous leagues took three generalprinciples to guide the organization of struggle: permanent conflict, selfmanagement and attack. Permanent conflict meant that the struggle would
remain in conflict with the construction of the base until it was defeated
without mediating or negotiating. The leagues were self-generated and selfmanaged: they refused any delegation of representatives orprofessionalization of struggle. The leagues were organizations of attack on
the construction of the base, not the defense of the interests of this or thatgroup. This style of organization allowed groups to take the actions they
saw as most effective while still being able to coordinate attack when useful,thus keeping open the potential of struggle to spread. It also kept the focus
of organization on the goal of ending the construction of the base instead of
the building of permanent organizations, for which mediating with state
institutions for a share of power usually becomes the focus and limiting theautonomy of struggle the means.

70

As the anarchists involved in the Comiso struggle understood, one of thecentral reasons that social struggles are kept from developing in a positive
direction is the prevalence of forms of organization that cut us off from ourown power to act and closes-off the potential of insurrection: these arepermanent organizations, those that synthesize all struggle within a single
organization, and organizations that mediate struggles with the institutionsof domination.
One of the things we were doing was to develop this critique into a
critique of activism. In the 1990s and even more so in the last 5 years (since
Seattle in 1999), US activists have loudly celebrated their role and identity
as activists. This is something that we wanted to be critical of. I recognizethat capitalist society pushes us into the role of the activist and organizer,
but to be revolutionary means to always try to break with that role and notcelebrate it and become fully identified by it, placed, controlled. Such
identification is part of a process of foreclosing the potential of
uncontrollability. I would say that this is one of the most importantcleavages in the U.S. scene: between those who celebrate the role of theactivist and organizer and those that try to break with it.23 I feel that theinsurrectionary anarchist critique and practice that was developed in Italy
was a good way to discuss this problem and to think of ways to break fromit. Of course, the situationists were influential in this as well. One of themain points of insurrectionary anarchism is that insurrection is a process of
becoming uncontrollable—the insurrection is the moment when the state
begins to lose control and also its own coherence. The whole activist
dichotomy of organizer/organized, of course, fights against that process.
The Batko Group: Do you think Bonanno’s analysis of “post-industrial”
capitalism is accurate? The social outbursts in the early nineties, with the
L.A. riots24, the Poll tax in the UK25, the street protests in France26 and soon, seemed to confirm the thesis of the excluded, but what about today? Did
these riots, social outbursts and insurrections in your opinion fail tocommunicate or spread?
Sasha: I would say that Bonanno captured some aspects of the changes
going on within capitalism. Class relations changed a lot beginning in thelate 1970s. The shift from a Fordist regime of accumulation to neoliberal or
flexible accumulation did mean that a lot more people came to be sociallyand economically excluded, expelled from the normal operations ofcapitalism. And the excluded often are more likely to take part in rebellious
activity. Also, in “From Riot to Insurrection"27 I think Bonanno is right to
pay attention to the role that technology plays in the disciplining of the work

71

force in this shift. Workers today are not only excluded from the benefits ofcapitalist restructuring, but it is harder and harder for people to understandhow society even operates, as they have been excluded from the technicalknowledge that constructs production, workers have been deskilled again.
This is linked to the increased atomization of both our daily lives, we split
from each other, and of the production process. All of this can make itharder to imagine a different world. Yet I think Bonanno also overestimatedthe ability of capitalism to expel the worker—remembering that this text
was produced something like 20 years ago.
Other than Bonanno, who was looking at this shift rather early in theprocess, not many anarchists have tried to think about what this shift incapitalism means for anti-capitalist rebellion; instead, they simply suggest
we need to do more of the same, applying organizational forms from adifferent era, when the relationship between the dispossessed and capital
was very different. An organizational structure that attempts to synthesize
the struggles of the excluded into a single organization, organizations that
often take the factory as their model, will fail. We will find that the strugglesof the dispossessed, when they are active, will always be ahead of suchorganizations.
Instead of trying to synthesize struggles into a permanent anarchist
organization or attempting to have the organization produce struggle, weneed to see how struggles grow organization. This makes us ask what classstruggle is for us. To me, class struggle is not, as it is for many leftists, about
the proletariat taking power and managing the affairs of society; it is not acelebration of proletarian culture, such as we had in the USSR. Class
struggle, for me, is the struggle for the auto-destruction, the self-abolition,of the dispossessed class; it is the struggle to end the existence of all classes
as such.
So the question of how a riot of the excluded, of which we have seen a
lot over the last decade, turns into an insurrection is very important. Living
in China for several year out of the last decade has allowed me to watch thisshift happen in another social and political context; this same process ishappening as they shift from their state capitalist version of Fordism to amore flexible regime of accumulation and a lot of people, especially rural
residents, are being excluded. Increasingly there are riots taking place, andthey are growing in size as well—some up towards 100,000 participants andcontinuing for several days. People active in these events are beginning tocommunicate with each other—this is an important activity that we can takepart in. Methods of struggle are spreading between areas both through directcommunication and through imitation. Some of these struggles seem to be
developing more intermediate aims. The anti-neoliberal-capitalist riots in

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Latin America also spread and deepened. In the 1990s in Europe and the US
there was a large amount of circulation between these riots. And this process
is not over, even if things in the West seem to have quieted down somewhat
at the moment. None of this, of course, happens without a response from
capital, and we can see neo-conservatism in the US as a response to thecontradictions of neo-liberalism.
How do pro-revolutionaries such as ourselves take part in these struggles,
in the insurrectionary process? We can neither replace the struggle of thedispossessed (for we will always be a minority within the dispossessed) nor
can we stand outside of it to organize it or synthesize the struggle into ourorganizations. This is the difficult position we are in. So we have to findways of acting within the struggles of the dispossessed, of communicating
methods we feel are appropriate—both through action and words—of
pushing struggles forwards in an insurrectionary direction. Certain types oforganizational forms and practices block this process, and we need to be
critical of them. And we can note that these organizational forms andpractices are often linked up to a perspective that does not fully leave
capitalism behind—this is no accident. Leftist and activist practices arereally part of the left wing of capitalism—seeking, in the end, to selfmanage capitalism in a more human and organized fashion. And this often
involves a nostalgia for Fordist capitalism.
The Batko Group: Even if Bonanno is correct in his analysis (about the
spread of struggle in the social terrain and so on) isn’t it also possible toargue that the shift of battleground from the workplace to the streets was a
result of us (as a global working class) being pushed back to a much moredefensive position as result of the capitalist restructuring? What do you
think about the argument that in order to regain momentum in the classstruggle we must find a way back to the workplace? Not because of any
romanticism about “real workers” or anything like that, but because that isthe place we are at. That’s the reality where we (consciously or
unconsciously) are struggling with our comrades every day, and as long as
the revolutionary struggle is fought separate from the point of exploitation(as in the anti-globalization movement) we can’t really make an impact asrevolutionaries. We will only reinforce the division between politics (assomething you do in your spare time) and what we perceive as “reallife” (work).
Sasha: Well, I don’t think that is the only place where we are. But I do
agree that a split between politics as something one does in their spare time(or worse, what one does for a living), separate from everyday life, is a big

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problem. This is, of course, one of the points of so-called ‘anti-politics'.
Work, however, is also a separated activity. We need to overcome both, andto do that is part of the insurrectionary or revolutionary process itself. I also
do agree that anti-globalization globe-trotting is a problem—again, it
becomes either a vacation or a job. I think the idea of struggle spreading
across the social terrain is exactly a critique of these positions. It is when it
become a separated activity, separated from everyday life, that it becomes
weak and more controllable. And that is also one of the roots of activism.
The Batko Group: When you say that, “[l]eftist and activist practices
are really part of the left wing of capitalism—seeking, in the end, to selfmanage capitalism in a more human and organized fashion. And this often
involves a nostalgia for Fordist capitalism,” we agree with you. But bothyour projects and ours started as projects within and for this left-wing of
capitalism. Now we and other groups are moving away from activism andleftism, leaving the bubble, returning to reality. But it isn’t the working
class, or the dispossessed, that reads our papers and discuss our theories. So
how do we spread our theories to the working class? And do we need to?
One idea some of us have is that maybe we shouldn’t be trying to further thepolitical project; maybe we should not develop the political organization,
but focus, rather, on the development of the class struggle per se.
Sasha: Yes, we all begin within capitalism. We are trying to break out.
But we are also of the dispossessed. At the same time, you are right that theworking class in general don’t read our papers. The point of journals like
KKA was not, however, propaganda. It was more to find like-mindedpeople, people with whom we have a certain degree of affinity, and tocommunicate with them, make connections with them, and maybe movetoward doing projects with them. We aren’t taking the role of waking up theworking class. That said, I’m not sure I understand your last statement: what
does “focusing on the development of the class struggle per se” mean? If I
hear more from you on this perhaps we can discuss this point further.
The Batko Group: We think that the real subsumption of labor undercapital is a central issue here. If the capital-relation has colonized the entire
social organism and made all social activities productive, that requires of us
as communists to deepen our critique of synthesis. In that sense theinsurrectional perspective makes perfect sense and becomes an essential
tool. The organization of attack, the unification of organizational form anddirect action, is the direct assault on value. This, then, means that politicalorganization has come to an end. The point now is to dissolve (capital’s)

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organization (of life). So, instead of furthering the political project, thefocus should be on the class struggle, on attacking value. However, whilethese attacks become more “lethal” to capital and operate as negations, weknow that these negations will either be recuperated and lead to reforms, orthey’ll get overcome by capital. As we already know, capital’s limit iscapital itself, which is class struggle. So, as the organization of attack
increases the blows leveled against capital—temporary negations—we needto develop the class struggle, or rather, to transcend class struggle. Attack
and withdraw, in order to constitute communist relations. We see this as away to go beyond the negation/affirmation dichotomy.
Sasha: Ok. I hope I am reading you right here. If not, certainly correct
me. This seems somewhat influenced by Negri and Hardt’s thesis in Empire.
And I am pretty suspect of some key aspects of it. With Negri there is theidea that the political project of Leninism made sense until the 1970s when
everything changed and now we are in a new period. And what you havesaid above seems to mirror this sentiment. “The political project ... has cometo an end,” you say. But I would ask if it ever made any sense at all. I would
say that the political project was always a recuperative project. That goes for
Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism and any form of leftism, including,unfortunately, much of anarchism.
I do agree, however, that things have changed since the 1970s.
Capitalism certainly has moved from formal to real subsumption for themost part—a shift from extensive capture to intensification, a social
deepening of capital. Although there are increasing numbers of people whoare excluded from this process and pushed into the human warehouses ofslums or rural poverty. But I don’t see this as entailing a shift from politicalto anti-political struggle. I feel anti-political struggle always made more
sense for those trying to end the domination (formal or real) of capitalism
than political struggle. Political struggle, of course, always was an attempt
to moderate capitalism—it was always and is always a struggle to control
the development of capitalism and its distribution of its benefits. I would
say, therefore, that we should have been developing the class struggle of theproletariat—it’s project of self-abolition—from the very beginnings ofcapitalist society. In short, I believe that anarchy and communism has
always been possible, even before the existence of capitalism.
I do think that attack on capitalism is different in the period of real as
opposed to formal subsumption. During the period of formal subsumption,
struggles were often split between anti-imperialist struggles and anticapitalist struggles in countries that were under real subsumption. This isreally no longer true. I feel this opens the potential for greater connections

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around the globe. Struggles can become global much quicker under thepresent conditions. Revolutionary solidarity more directly attacks the heartof capitalism under these conditions. I would like to hear more by what you
mean about overcoming the negation/affirmation dichotomy and more onwhat you think has changed with the global shift to real subsumption.
The Batko Group: When we define capitalism we include primitive
accumulation, formal subsumption, real subsumption, and so on. So when
we talk about real subsumption we aren’t assuming a strict periodization.
All these historical tendencies within capitalism are merely tendencies. We
do, as you say, see tendencies of primitive accumulation and formal
subsumption today, even though it’s real subsumption that is most dominant.
The political projects, such as platformism and so on, are products of a
relation of formal subsumption. They are a natural response to theexperience of the capital-relation being forced upon us, in circumstanceswhere the latter doesn’t yet seem to occupy all aspects of social life; in suchsituations, we try to establish autonomous areas and fight capitalism as an
intrusive force. Sure, it can be argued that this wasn’t the “right” solution,
but we have to consider the material conditions within which these politicalprojects evolved. Otherwise we fall into voluntarism. It was the politicalprojects of the period of formal subsumption that pushed capitalism into a
dynamic of real subsumption; hence, the political project has now come toan end.
Political struggles were always struggles for power. While the Marxists
saw the state as something to be conquered, the anarchists saw it as thebiggest enemy. Today, however, state and capital cannot so easily beseparated anymore, and this is a result of real subsumption. Politicalstruggles makes no sense. The material conditions for political struggle havebeen eclipsed. So, we don’t justify Leninism, or platformism, or anything
like that, we are not interested in moral considerations on contra-factual
statements. What we are saying is that anti-political struggle is the only
thing that makes sense today. We think it’s important to point this out.
Otherwise we easily fall into voluntarism.
We see the anti-political, insurrectionary project as potentiallyovercoming the negation/affirmation-dichotomy for two reasons. First off,
the perspective of permanent conflictuality negates the capital-relation
constantly through faceless resistance and non-mediating organization (withaffinity groups formed in struggle). But we know that negation isn’t enough.
However, with the unification of direct action and organizational form (theorganization of attack) unmediated affinity is formed between people, but atemporary and fleeing, you could call it “rhizomatic,” affinity. We see this76

as constituting communistic activity. It attacks and withdraws from
capitalism. We act in a cramped space, trying to make the impossible
possible. It isn’t a new ideal to be realized because it isn’t satisfying desires,but rather constantly producing new desires.
Sasha: I see much better now what your argument is, although we still
have points of disagreement. Also, I know platformism is something thatyou are grappling with, but for me it isn’t something I dwell too much upon.
I would say that there is still very much a material basis for the politicalproject you talk of even under real subsumption or domination. First, I don’t
see that platformism was really ever a product of being outside of the real
domination of capital. Its material basis was always inside and always
political. In other words, I don’t see that political project as a project offormal domination versus real domination. The specific political project you
talk of was always of real domination in the first place. I would say it wasalways operating within a society in which the labor process wastransformed and fully dominated by capital.
Second, the material basis for the political project, of whatever type, isalways there under capitalism—there will always be managers of revolt
ready and willing to represent us and then collect their benefits, and, in theend, to save capitalism. Platformism, of course, has never really had thechance to play much of a role, political or otherwise; and we don’t knowwhat would happen if platformists or platformist organizations had such achance. Perhaps their organizations of representation and management
would dissolve into a general social insurrection; perhaps they would
attempt to tighten the reins of management. But there is just as much a basis
for that today as there was in the past—assuming we reached a more
revolutionary moment.
Anyhow, political recuperation of struggle is not the cause of the
weakness of revolutionary tendencies so much as a sign of the weakness
itself. Recuperation works exactly because our revolution is manageable,
controllable. Becoming uncontrollable is the insurrectionary force. And thisis, of course, the problem with specialization, especially militant or military
specialization and its spectacularization—it is so much more controllable.
What we need instead is social generalization. Again, Spain is an exampleof this problem.
The way you say that “political struggles make no sense” under theconditions of real subsumption seems to carry within it a judgment upon thepolitical struggles of the past as if they made same sense. You may not wantto get into such a historical argument but I think your words do seem tocontain it. And I think it isn’t something we should avoid. Is that

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voluntarism? I don’t think so. Anyhow, I think we should be very critical ofdeterminism as it is (we don’t really have time to get into the problematicsof that dichotomy—perhaps some future time!). You say that now thatformal domination is mostly complete “anti-political struggle is the only
thing that makes sense...” My point is that from a revolutionary perspective
anti-political struggle is all that ever made sense. Political struggle simply
never was revolutionary in the sense of moving towards a world without astate, wage labor, work, classes, capitalism, etc. We can see that as clearly inthe moment of Russia, as in Spain.
What seems to be happening in your proposed schema, is that you see thepolitical project as being “progressive” (thus the critique of “voluntarism”?)
during a certain era, but no longer; it has become regressive now. Or at leastI think you imply that—correct me if I am wrong. I, however, don’t see thenegation of capitalism in such a progressive, teleological schema. Instead, I
see it as a radical break, as ending the progressive trajectory itself. During
the era when platformism came into existence, I would argue, there was asmuch of a material basis for this break (a break from the political project
which is also a break from capitalism and all that it entails) then, as there isnow.
I would say that the state was never as autonomous as you seem to be
implying it was, say a century ago. And the case of Russia and Leninism
illustrates this quite well. So the state is not something we can use in therevolutionary project; it isn’t now and it wasn’t then. Certainly its
integration was different than today, but autonomous, never. The conqueringof the state links up with a progressivist view. The state is used to develop
the forces of production in the place of the market and individual capitalists—looking at Russia or China, we have seen very clearly where that leads.
Delinking is a form of developmentalism, whether Maoist or Leninist or
Stalinist or nationalist.
The Batko Group: What would you say is the biggest strengths andweaknesses of insurrectionalist theories? Our impression from this talk andyour writings in Killing King Abacus is that you seem to have a broad range
of influences. Are there any particular theories you consider to be of special
interest? Apart from the anarchist insurrectionalists, our biggest influence is
Dauvé and Camatte. One reason is because they relate the need for
insurrectionary organizing (even though they don’t use the same concepts)
to the dynamic of real subsumption. This has also led us to realize that weneed to reread Marx. In this sense, insurrectionalist theories sometimes feels“incomplete” and need to be complemented. What aspects in78

insurrectionalist theories would you say we need to be critical of, and whatneeds to be developed in your opinion?
Sasha: I certainly read Dauvé and Camatte as well. Dauvé’s newer
writings have been an influence in particular. I think what some people missin insurrectionary writings is the strategic take on our present situation.
Insurrectionary writings focus on the present and on revolt. There is less ofan understanding of our changing circumstances. This allows some to view
insurrection in a very a-historic way. And people tend to just chase after
insurrections wherever they occur, without any understanding of a generalcondition of these uprisings.
Although, Bonanno has done some writing that push against thistendency, as we have already discussed. More thinking on our present
conditions and how they affect our attack and its organization would be
useful, yes. This does seem to be something that people within the antipolitical/insurrectionary milieu are doing. But I would be wary of argumentsthat say that everything had changed at some certain point in time, such as
the 1970s. Real subsumption is important, but it doesn’t change everything.
That, too, is a rather a-historical perspective.
Also, I would say that there really isn’t anything called “insurrectionalist
theory” per se. Insurrection is a process of becoming uncontrollable, not a
branch of theory. Insurrectionary anarchism, if such a thing exists, is atendency that discusses this process and takes part in its practice in a waythat attempts to consciously push things further. People like Bonanno havebeen very useful in this discussion, but so have countless others who areunnamed or not named “insurrectionary anarchists,” at least.
1. Killing King Abacus: A now discontinued American magazine that Sasha did
together with Leila and Wolfi. Published two issues 2000-2001.
3. Wolfi Landstreicher: American anarchist. He was the editor of the anarchist
journal Willful Disobedience, and ran the Venomous Butterfly Anarchist Distribution.
4. Anti-civ: Short for “anti-civilization”. A wide concept, used by everyone fromprimitivists to Camatte. Examples of typical anti-civ perspectives include thearguments that workers cannot just take over the capitalist mode of production andmanage it democratically, and that technical development is not class-neutral.
5. Freddy Perlman (1934–1985): An American Marxist who stressed the importanceof the fetishism of commodities in Marx’s theories. Married to Lorraine Perlman.
6. Situationists: The Situationist International developed, through theirpaper Internationale Situationniste (Paris, 1958-1969), a new reading of Marxism
during the 1960s, which came to inspire a big part of the ’68-radicalization and a
newfound interest in Council Communism.

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7. The Marini Trial: A huge trial in which the State accused about 50 anarchists forbeing double-organized in a underground terror network. Bonanno and Weir, forexample, were sentenced to prison.
8. John Zerzan (born 1943): American primitivist. See for example “Elements ofRefusal” (1988), “Future Primitive” (1994), “Against Civilization: A Reader” (1998).
9. Harry Cleaver: American Marxist; coined the concept “Autonomous Marxism”.
10. Midnight Notes: An Autonomous Marxist magazine in America. The magazine
Zerowork from the 1970’s was a precursor.
11. Insurrection: See “About Insurrectionary Organization”
12. Elephant Editions: Anarchist publisher from the U.K.
13. Bratach Dubh: Precursor to Elephant Editions.
14. Diavolo in Corpo: An Italian insurrectionalist magazine.
15. Canenero: An Italian insurrectionalist magazine.
16. Alfredo Bonanno: “The Anarchist Tension”. Elephant Editions, 1998.
17. Probably referring to Freddy Perlman’s book, Letters of Insurgents.
18. Surrealism is a cultural, artistic, and intellectual movement which is described by
its founder André Breton as “[p]sychic automatism in its pure state, by which one
proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any
control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Together
with Dadaism, it was a major artistic and critical influence for the Situationists.
19. Max Stirner (1806–1856): German left-Hegelian. Most famous work: The Ego
and Its Own.
20. Gilles Dauvé: “When Insurrections Die.”
21. Green Anarchy: The most prominent “anarcho-primitivist” magazine.
22. See “Insurrectionary Anarchy!” in Do or Die issue 10.
23. Cf. “The Necessity and Impossibility of Anti-Activism” by J. Kellstadt
24. The LA Riots: The 1992 Los Angeles riots, also known as the LA riots,
the Rodney King uprising or the Rodney King riots, were sparked on April 29, 1992
when a mostly white jury acquitted four police officers accused in the videotaped
beating of black motorist Rodney King. The riot continued for three days and werecrushed by a massive police and military operation. See “The Rebellion in Los
Angeles: The Context of a Proletarian Uprising” in Aufheben, Issue 1.
25. Poll Tax Riots: riots in London 1990 which started when the cops attacked a big
demonstration against the so-called “Poll Tax,” an attempted tax reform introduced by
Margaret Thatcher. The tax said that “all shall pay equal” which was the Thatcherist
way of redistributing wealth—the rich pay less, the poor pay more. A littlecomparison: the duke of Westminster paid Ł10 255 in taxes before and Ł417 after thePoll Tax. His probably underpaid gardener was also obligated to pay Ł417. The PollTax’s official name was the Community Charge, but it was renamed Poll Tax after a
tax reform in 1381 which led to a peasant rebellion. See Danny Burns: “Poll tax
rebellion” (AK Press, 1996).
26. Street protests in France 1996 against the Neoliberal restructuring. See “The Class
Struggles in France” in Aufheben, Issue 5.
27. Alfredo Bonanno: “From Riot to Insurrection”. Elephant Editions, 1998.

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III.
The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking forYourself
PrefaceThis essay was originally published in the United States in 1975 by The
Spectacle, under the title Self-Theory: the Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself.
An extensively revised edition was published in London in 1985
by Spectacular Times under the title Revolutionary Self-Help: a Beginner’s
Manual, and it has appeared twice since then in American periodicals under
the title Revolutionary Self-Theory; in 1989 it was published in a slightly
revised edition by OVO, and in 1992 in a further revised edition by No
Longer Silent (NLS). This edition is an extensively rewritten and somewhat
expanded version of the text which appeared in NLS.
As the editor of No Longer Silent commented, “...at this point it’s fair tosay that ‘RST’ has been penned by multiple authors, which is as it shouldbe. Hopefully this trend will continue as future editions of this text appear.
After all, the propaganda, literature, and so forth that we produce should not
be considered as immutable tomes, determining the language andboundaries within which we are expected to interpret our experiences, butrather as fluid and alterable, reflecting our experience of reality as we are.”This is entirely in keeping with the sentiments of the previous authors/
editors who stated, “...the ideological supermarket—like any supermarket—
is fit only for looting. It is more productive for us if we move along the
shelves, rip open the packets, take out what looks authentic and useful, anddump the rest.”
In fact, that is exactly the approach which I’ve taken while editing this
text: I’ve retained those portions which were useful and insightful, but I’ve
also jettisoned a lot of waste material, including almost all of the marxist/
situationist jargon plus a number of statements (particularly in the
concluding section) which were factually incorrect or simply missed thepoint; as well, I’ve cleaned up the text by eliminating a number of non
sequiturs and hopelessly fuzzy statements and by using terms (e.g.,“ideology”) in a more precise manner than in the previous editions of thiswork. What I’ve done, essentially, is to take a situationist tract and translate
it into plain English.

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I’ve also introduced a certain amount of new material which contradicts
some of what I’ve deleted. Thus, it’s quite possible—in fact quite probable—that the authors/editors of the previous versions of this essay would takestrong exception to some of the changes I’ve made. While I regret that myalterations and additions may upset the original author(s), the point of thispamphlet is to get people to think for themselves; and I believe that thechanges I’ve made increase the effectiveness of the pamphlet in that regard.
But despite the changes in this edition, the central thesis of this essay
remains unchanged: that all genuine revolutionary impulses and activities
stem directly from the desires of individuals, not from any ideologically
imposed sense of “duty” with its attendant guilt, self-sacrifice, and selfdeadening “should’s.”***
1. Those who assume (often unconsciously) that it is impossible to achieve
their life’s desires-and, thus, that it is futile to fight for themselves—usually
end up fighting for an ideal or cause instead. They may appear to engage inself-directed activity, but in reality they have accepted alienation from their
desires as a way of life. All subjugations of personal desires to the dictatesof a cause or ideology are reactionary no matter how “revolutionary” theactions arising from such subjugations may appear.
Yet, one of the great secrets of our miserable, yet potentially marvelous
time, is that thinking can be a pleasure. Despite the suffocating effect of thedominant religious and political ideologies, many individuals do learn tothink for themselves; and by doing so—by actively, critically thinking forthemselves, rather than by passively accepting pre-digested opinions—they
reclaim their minds as their own.
This is a manual for those who wish to think for themselves, a manual for
creation of a personally (rather than ideologically) constructed body ofcritical thought for your own use, a body of thought which will help you tounderstand why your life is the way it is and why the world is the way it is.
More importantly, as you construct your own theory, you will also developa practice: a method to get what you want for your own life. Theory, then,must be either practical—a guide to action—or it will be nothing, nothing
but an aquarium of ideas, a contemplative interpretation of the world. The
realm of ideas divorced from actions is the eternal waiting room of
unrealized desires. Forming your own practical theory, what could be called“self-theory,” is intimately connected to achieving the realization of yourdesires.

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Therefore, constructing your self-theory is a revolutionary pleasure. It isboth a destructive and constructive pleasure, because you are creating apractical theory—one tied to action—for the destruction and reconstructionof this society. It is a theory of adventure, because it is based on what you
want from life and on devising the means necessary to achieve it. It is as
erotic and humorous as an authentic revolution.
2. Any system of ideas with an abstraction at its center—an abstraction
which assigns you a role or duties—is an ideology. An ideology provides
those who accept it with a false consciousness, a necessary component of
which is other-directedness. This leads those who accept the ideology to
behave as “objects” rather than “subjects,” to allow themselves to be usedrather than to act to attain their own desires. The various ideologies are all
structured around different abstractions, yet all serve the interests of adominant (or aspiring dominant) class by giving individuals (though theterm hardly seems appropriate—“members of the herd” is perhaps moreaccurate) a sense of purpose in sacrifice, suffering, and submission.
Religious ideology is the oldest example: the fantastic projection called“God” is the Supreme Subject of the cosmos, acting on every human being
as “His” object.
In the “scientific” and “democratic” ideologies of “free enterprise,”
capital investment is the “productive” subject directing world history—the“invisible hand” guiding human development. In order to prosper, the early
capitalists had to attack and weaken the power that religious ideology once
held. They exposed the mystification of the religious world and replaced itwith the mystification of technology and commodity capitalism, wherein
Profit becomes the Supreme Subject of the cosmos.
The 57 varieties of Leninism are “revolutionary” ideologies in which theParty is the rightful subject entitled to dictate world history by leading its
object—you, the proletariat—to the promised land through replacement of
the corporate-capitalist “free enterprise” apparatus with a state-capitalist
Leninist apparatus.
The many other varieties of dominant ideologies can be seen daily. The
new forms of religious mysticism help to preserve the status quo in a roundabout way. They provide a cheap and tidy way to obscure the vacuousnessof daily life and, like drugs, make it easier to live, or rather exist, with this
emptiness—and so prevent us from recognizing our real roles in thefunctioning of the socio-economic system.
All of these ideologies differ in the specific sacrifices they demand ofyou, the object, but all are structured in the same way. All demand an
inversion of subject and object; things, abstractions, take on the human

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attributes of power and will, while human beings become things, tools to be
used in the service of these abstractions (God, the dictatorship of theproletariat, the fatherland, etc., etc.). Ideology is upside down self-theory. It
fosters acceptance of the separation of our narrow, daily lives from a worldthat appears totally beyond our control. Ideology offers us only a voyeur’srelationship with the life of the world.
All abstraction-based ideologies demand duty, sacrifice for the cause;and every such ideology serves to protect the dominant social order.
Authorities whose power depends upon docility must deny us our
subjectivity, our conscious will to act for our own desires. Such denial
comes in the form of demands for sacrifices for “the common good,” “thenational interest,” “the war effort,” “the revolution,”…..
3. We rid ourselves of the blinders of ideology by constantly asking
ourselves: How do I feel? How’s my life? What do I want? Am I getting
what I want? If not, why not? This is being conscious of the commonplace,
being aware of your everyday routine. That real life exists—life in which
you are active, a subject acting to achieve your desires—is a public secretthat becomes less secret every day, as the breakdown of daily life
constructed around abstraction-based ideologies becomes more and more
obvious.
4. The creation of self-theory is based on thinking for yourself, on being
fully conscious of your desires and of their validity. Authentic“consciousness raising” can only be the “raising” of people’s thinking to thelevel of positive (non-guilty) self-consciousness, free of imposed morality inall its forms. This type of consciousness can be termed “radical
subjectivity.”
Conversely, what many leftists, therapy mongers, racism awarenesstrainers, and sisterizers term “consciousness raising” is the practice of
beating people into unconsciousness with guilt-inducing, ideological billy
clubs.
The path from self-negation to self-affirmation passes through point zero,
the capital city of nihilism. This is the windswept still point in social space
and time, the social limbo in which one recognizes that there is no real life
in one’s daily existence. A nihilist knows the difference between surviving
and living.
Nihilists reverse their perspectives on their lives and the world. Nothingis true for them but their desires, their will to be. They reject all ideology intheir hatred for the miserable social relations in modern society. From thisreversed perspective they clearly see the upside-down world of commodity

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capitalism in which subject and object are inverted, and people and abstract
concepts are converted into things, commodities to be sold. They see daily
life as a theatrical landscape in which “everyone has their price,” God (via
televangelism) and happiness (smile buttons) become commodities, radio
stations say they love you, and detergents have compassion for your hands.
Daily conversation offers sedatives such as, “You can’t always get what
you want,” “Life has its ups and downs,” and other clichés of the secularreligion of survival. “Common sense” is just the non-sense of common
alienation. Every day people are denied (and deny themselves) an authentic
life and are sold back its representation.
Nihilists constantly feel the urge to destroy the system which destroys
them. They cannot go on living as they are. Soon, most realize that theymust devise a coherent set of tactics in order to transform the world.
But if a nihilist does not recognize the possibility for the transformationof the world, his or her subjective rage will ossify into a role: the suicide,the solitary murderer, the street hoodlum-vandal, the neo-Dadaist, theprofessional mental patient... all seeking compensation for a life of deadtime.
The nihilists’ mistake is that they do not realize that there are othernihilists with whom they can work. Consequently, they assume thatparticipation in a collective project of self-realization is impossible.
5. This project of collective self-realization, the changing of life itself
through the transformation of social relations, can properly be termed“politics.” Politics, however, also signifies a mystified, separate category ofhuman activity, an isolated interest with its own specialists—politicians,
political consultants, etc. It is possible to be interested (or not) in this type ofpolitics just as it is possible to be interested (or not) in football, stamp
collecting, music, or fashion. What people see as “politics” today is thesocial falsification of the project of collective self-realization; it has becomea spectacle and a parody. And that suits those in power just fine.
Authentic collective self-realization is the revolutionary project. It is thecollective transformation of social relations and the natural world according
to the desires of all participants.
Similarly, “therapy” at present usually refers to attempts to “help”
individuals “adjust” to their restrictive social roles and to the banality ofdaily life. Authentic therapy involves changing one’s own life by changing
the nature of social life. Therapy must be social if it is to be of any realconsequence. Social therapy (the healing of society) and individual therapy(the healing of the individual) are linked together: each requires the other,each is a necessary part of the other.

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For example, in present day society we are expected to repress our real
feelings and play a role. This is called “playing a part in society” (howrevealing that phrase is). Individuals put on “character armor”—a steel-likesuit comprised of role playing, posing, and concealing one’s desires as adefense against other individuals. Transforming social relations andsurpassing the role-playing game requires the conscious decision of most if
not all individuals to shed these roles and truly communicate; therefore, theend of individual role playing is directly related to the end of social roleplaying.
6. To think actively, critically, is to make your life—as it is now, and as you
want it to be—the center of your thinking. This positive self-centering isaccomplished by a continuous assault on externals, on the false issues(“support our troops”), false conflicts (e.g., those arising from notions ofracial “superiority”), false identities (“American,” “patriot,” “Catholic,”“white Christian”), and false dichotomies (“economic survival” versus “aclean environment”) which permeate social life.
People are kept from analyzing the basic nature, the totality, of everyday
life by the media focus—including “consumer” surveys and public opinion
polls—on mere details: the spectacular trifles, the phony controversies, andridiculous scandals. Are you for or against trade unions, cruise missiles,
identity cards? What’s your opinion of soft drugs, jogging, UFOs,
progressive taxation, Michael Jackson’s latest nose job, the royal family’s
sexual relations?
These are diversions, false issues. The only issue for us is how we live.
There’s an old Jewish saying, “If you have only two alternatives, thenchoose the third.” It impels people to search for new perspectives. We cansee the artificiality of false dichotomies by searching for that “third choice.”
Being conscious that there is a third choice allows us to refuse to choose
between two supposedly opposite, but equally repulsive, possibilities which
are presented to us as the only possible choices. In its simplest form, this“third choice” consciousness is expressed by the person brought to trial for
armed robbery and asked, “Do you plead guilty or not guilty?” “I’m hungry
and unemployed,” she replies. A more theoretical, but equally classic,
illustration of this consciousness is the refusal to choose between thecorporate-capitalist ruling classes of the West and the state-capitalist rulingclasses of what’s left of the Eastern bloc. All we need to do is to look at thebasic social relations of production in the USA and Europe on the one hand,
and China, North Korea, and Cuba on the other, to see that they are
essentially the same: over there, as here, the vast majority work for a wage
or salary in exchange for giving up control over their life’s work, control

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over both what they produce and how they produce it. And, of course, what
they produce in both East and West is then sold back to them ascommodities.
In the West, the surplus value, or the value produced over and above thevalue of the workers’ wages, is the property of the corporate management
and stockholders, who keep up a show of domestic competition. In the East,
the surplus value is the property of the state bureaucracy, which does not
permit domestic competition. Big difference.
Like the false issues and false conflicts cited above, false questions areused to distract us from living in the present, from seeing the totality ofexistence. One example is the stupid conversational question, “What’s yourphilosophy of life?” It poses an abstract concept of “life” that has nothing to
do with real life because it ignores the fact that “living” is exactly what weare doing at the present moment, and our “philosophy of life” is clearly
revealed by our actions.
False identities are perhaps an even more potent form of mystification. In
the absence of real community, people cling to all kinds of phony social
identities—they contemplate and attempt to emulate a huge variety of roles
presented to them in school, church, and, especially, the “entertainment”
media. These social identities can be ethnic (“Italian-American”), residential(“New Yorker”), nationalistic (“patriot”), sexual (“gay”), cultural (“Giantsfan”), and so on; but all are rooted in a common desire for affiliation, forbelonging.
Obviously being “black” is a much more real identification than being a“Giants fan,” but beyond a certain point, such an identification only serves
to mask one’s real position in society; and in order to recognize that realposition, you have to reject the false identities, false conflicts, and false
dichotomies, and begin with yourself as the center. From there you can
examine the material basis of your life, stripped of mystification.
An example: Suppose that you want a cup of coffee from the vending
machine at work. First, there is the cup of coffee itself: that involves theworkers on the coffee plantation, the ones on the sugar plantation and in therefineries, the ones in the paper mill, and so on. Then you have the workers
who made the different parts of the vending machine and the ones who
assembled it. Then the ones who extracted the iron ore and bauxite, smelted
the steel, and work for the electric utility which supplies power to themachine. Then all the workers who transported the coffee, cups, andmachine. Then the clerks, typists, and communication workers who
coordinated the production and transportation. Finally, you have all theworkers who produced all the other things necessary for the other ones tosurvive. That gives you a direct material relationship to several million

87people, in fact, to the immense majority of the world’s population. They
produce your life, and you help to produce theirs. In this light, all artificialgroup identities and special group interests fade into insignificance. Imagine
the potential enrichment of your life that at present is locked up in thefrustrated creativity of these millions of workers, held back by obsolete andexhausting methods of production, strangled by lack of control over theirown productivity, warped by the insane rationale of capital-accumulation
which pits one against all and makes life a mad scramble for economic
survival. Here we begin to discover a real social identity—in people all over
the world who are fighting to win control over their own lives we findourselves.
Those who have a vested interested in the political and economic statusquo continually present us with false choices, that is, with choices which
preserve their power (“Vote Democratic!” / “Vote Republican!”—“But
Vote!”). We are constantly being asked to choose sides in false conflicts.
Governments, corporations, political parties, and propagandists of all kinds
constantly present us with “choices” that are no choice at all. We are given
the illusion of choice, but as long as those in power control what our“choices” will be (“choices” which we perceive as the only alternatives
available to us), they will also control the outcome of our “decisions.”
The new moralists love to tell those of us in the rich West how we will
“have to make sacrifices,” how we “exploit the starving children of theThird World.” The choice we are given is between sacrificial altruism or
narrow individualism. (Charities cash in on the resulting guilt.) Yes, byliving in the rich, wasteful West we do exploit the poor of the Third World—but not personally, not deliberately. We can make some changes in ourlives, boycott, make sacrifices, but the effects are marginal. We becomeaware of the false conflict with which we’ve been presented when werealize that under the global socio-economic system we, as individuals, arelocked into our roles as “exploiters” just as others are locked into theirglobal roles as the exploited. We have a role, but little power to change it—
at least individually. Therefore, we reject the false choice of “sacrifice or
selfishness” by calling for the destruction of the global social system whose
existence forces that decision upon us. Tinkering with the system, oroffering token sacrifices, or calling for “a little less selfishness,” simply
won’t do. Charities and reformers never go beyond such false choices as“sacrifice” or “selfishness”—but if any true social progress is to be made,the rest of us must do so.
Those in power continually use such falsifications to divert anddisempower us. By spreading myths like, “If we shared it all there wouldn’t
be enough to go around,” they attempt to deny the existence of any real

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choices and to hide from us the fact that the material preconditions forsocial revolution already exist.
7. Any journey toward self-demystification must avoid the twin quagmiresof absolutism and cynicism.
Absolutism is the total acceptance or rejection of all components ofparticular ideologies, or indeed, of any set of ideas or concepts. An
absolutist cannot see any choice other than complete acceptance or complete
rejection; s/he sees things purely as good or bad, black or white. The
absolutist wanders along the shelves of the ideological supermarket looking
for the ideal commodity, and then buys it lock, stock and barrel. But theideological supermarket—like any supermarket—is fit only for looting. It is
of more practical use to us to move along the shelves, rip open the packets,take out what looks authentic and useful, and dump the rest.
Cynicism is a reaction to a world dominated by ideology and “morality.”
Faced with conflicting ideologies, the cynic says, “A plague on both yourhouses.” The cynic is as much a consumer as the absolutist, but one who hasgiven up hope of finding the ideal commodity.
8. The process of constructive thinking is a process of continually adding toand modifying one’s current body of self-theory as well as resolving
contradictions between one’s new thoughts and perceptions and one’s
previous beliefs. The resulting synthesis is thus more than the sum of its
parts.
This synthetic method of constructing a theory is counter to the eclectic
method in which one collects a rag bag of favorite bits from favorite
ideologies without ever confronting the resulting contradictions. Modern
examples include “anarcho-capitalism,” “christian marxism,” and liberalism
in general.
If we are continually conscious of how we want to live, we can criticallyappropriate from anything: ideologies, culture critics, technocratic experts,
sociological studies, even mystics (though the pickings will probably beslim). All the rubbish of the old world can be scavenged for useful material
by those who want to reconstruct it.
9. The nature of modern society, unified globally through its capitalist
economic system, makes necessary a self-theory which criticizes all areas inwhich socio-economic domination exists (i.e., both the corporate capitalismof the “free” world and the state capitalism of the “communist” world) as
well as all forms of alienation (sexual poverty, enforced participation in the

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rat race for survival, etc.). In other words, we need a critique of the totalityof daily existence from the perspective of the totality of our desires.
Opposed to this project are all the politicians and bureaucrats, preachersand gurus, city planners and policemen, reformers and Leninists, central
committees and censors, corporate managers and union honchos, malesupremacists and feminist ideologues, landlords and eco-capitalists who
work to subordinate individual desires to that hideous abstraction, “thecommon good,” of which they are the supposed guardians. They are allforces of the old world-bosses, priests, and other creeps who havesomething to lose if people extend the game of seizing back their minds into
seizing back their lives.
Revolutionary theory and abstraction-based ideologies are enemies, andevery politically conscious person knows it.
10. By now it should be obvious that self-demystification and the creationof our own revolutionary theory do not eradicate our alienation; “theworld,” with its capitalist economic relations permeating every aspect oflife, goes on and is reproduced every day with the acquiescence andassistance of billions of people.
Although this text has the creation of self-theory as its focus, we do notmean to imply that revolutionary theory can exist separately fromrevolutionary practice. In order to be consequential, to effectively
reconstruct the world, practice must be based in theory, and theory must be
realized in practice. The revolutionary project of ending alienation andtransforming social relations requires that one’s theory be nothing other thana theory of practice, realized in what we do and how we live. Otherwise
theory will degenerate into an impotent contemplation of the world, andultimately into a survival mechanism—an intellectual armor that acts as abuffer between the daily world and oneself. And if revolutionary practice is
not the practice of revolutionary theory, it degenerates into, at best, altruistic
militantism—“revolutionary” activity as one’s social duty or role. At worst,
it degenerates into pure gangsterism.
We don’t strive for a coherent theory purely as an end in itself. For us,
the value of coherency is that it makes it easier to think critically andeffectively. For example, it’s easier to understand future developments insocial control if you have a coherent understanding of present-day social
control ideologies and techniques.
Having a coherent theory makes it easier to put into practice yourstrategy for realizing your desires.

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Anti-Mass: Methods of Organization forCollectives
THE RED SUNSHINE GANG (1970)

Introduction
The writers of this pamphlet were a part of the counterculture in Berkeley,
California which began with troops returning from World War II andevolved in the late 1960s and early 1970s after the Free Speech Movement
and as a reaction to the Viet Nam War, the Civil Rights Movement, theWomen’s Movement and a general rebellion against “The Establishment”.
They quote counter-culture writers and Mao Zedong, but are specificallycritical of both Leninism and Liberalism. They criticize mass society, TV
ideology and following leaders and urge people to organize themselves. The
Anti-Mass is reflective of Michael Bakunin’s “Secret Brotherhood” and theAffinity Groups formed to organize Anarchist resistance in Spain prior to
the 1936 Spanish Civil War. It has become the organizing model of choicefor Do-It-Yourself organizers in the Anarchist and anti-racist movements in
Mexico and the United States. Included in this edition are editorial notes toclarify and expand upon points of the original authors based upon our
experiences using this model in Southern California.
-Insurgency Culture Collective, Los Angeles, 1999.

1. The Difference Between Mass and ClassWhy is it important to know the difference between mass and class? The
chances are that there can be no conscious revolutionary practice without
making this distinction. We are not playing around with words. Look. We
are living in a mass society. We didn’t get that way by accident. The mass isa specific form of organization. The reason is clear. Consumption isorganized by the corporations. Their products define the mass. The mass is
not a cliché—“the masses”—but a routine which dominates your daily life.
Understanding the structure of the mass market is the first step toward
understanding what happened to the class struggle.
What is the mass? Most people think of the mass in terms of numbers—
like a crowded street or stadium. But it is actually structure which
determines its character. The mass is an aggregate of couples who areseparate, detached and anonymous. They live in cities physically close yet

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socially apart. Their lives are privatized and depraved. Coca-Cola andloneliness. The social existence of the mass—its rules and regulations, thestructuring of its status, roles and leadership—are organized throughconsumption (the mass market). They are all products of a specific socialorganization. Ours.
Of course, no one sees themselves as part of the mass. It’s always others
who are the masses. The trouble is that it is not only the corporations whichorganize us into the mass. The “movement” itself behaves as a mass and its
organizers reproduce the hierarchy of the mass.
Really, how do you fight fire? With water, of course. The same goes forrevolution. We don’t fight the mass (market) with a mass (movement). We
fight mass with class. Our aim should be not to create a mass movement but
a class force.
What is a class? A class is a consciously organized social force. For
example, the ruling class is conscious and acts collectively to organize not
only itself, but also the people (mass) that it rules. The corporation is theself conscious collective power of the ruling class. We are not saying thatclass relations do not exist in the rest of society. But they remain passive solong they are shaped solely by objective conditions (i.e. work situations).
What is necessary is the active (subjective) participation of the class itself.
Class prejudice is not class consciousness. The class is conscious of its
social existence because it seeks to organize itself. The mass is unconsciousof its social existence because it is organized by Coca-Cola and IBM. The
moral of the story is: the mass is a mass because it is organized as a mass.
Don’t be fooled by the brand name. Mass is thinking with your ass.

2. Primacy of the Collective
The small group is the coming together of people who feel the need forcollectivity. Its function is often to break out of the mass—specifically fromthe isolation of daily life and the mass structure of the movement. The
problem is that frequently the group cannot create an independent existence
and an identity of its own because it continues to define itself negatively, i.e.
in opposition. So long as its point of reference lies outside of it, the group’s
politics tend to be superimposed on it by events and crises.
The small group can be a stage in the development of the collective, if it
develops a critique of the frustrations stemming from its externalorientation. The formation of a collective begins when people not only havethe same politics, but agree on the method of struggle.

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Why should the collective be the primary focus of organization? The
collective is an alternative to the existing structure of society. Changing
social relations is a process rather than a product of revolution. In otherwords, you make the revolution by actually changing social relations. You
must consciously create the contradictions in history.
Concretely, this means: organize yourselves, not somebody else. The
collective is the organizational nucleus of a classless society. As a formalorganization, it negates all forms of hierarchy. The answer to alienation is tomake yourself the subject, not the object, of history.
One of the crucial obstacles to the formation of collectives is thetransitional period—when the collective must survive side by side with adisintegrating movement and a mass society. The disintegration of the
movement is not an isolated phenomenon but reflects the weakening of the
major institutions in American society responsible for our alienation. Many
people are demoralized by this process and find it bewildering because they
actually depend subconsciously on the continued existence of these
institutions. We are witnessing the break-up and transformation of an
institution integral to society—the mass market. The mass market iscorporate structure which few people are sufficiently aware of to realize
how it affects our political life. We really depend on our “leaders” whether
they be the Chicago 71 or 7up. Our understanding of the collective form oforganization based on a critique of the mass and the dictatorship of the
product.
These contradictions make it imperative that any people who decide tocreate a collective know exactly who they are and what they are doing. That
is why you must consider your collective as primary. Because, if you don’t
believe in the legitimacy of this form of organization, you can’t have apractical analysis of what is happening. Don’t kid yourself. The struggle forthe creation and survival of collectives at this moment in history is going tobe very difficult.
The dominant issue will be how collectives can become part of history—
how they can become a social force. There is no guarantee and we should
promise no easy victories. The uniqueness of developing collectives is theirdefinitive break with all hierarchic forms of organization and thereconstructing of a classless society.
The thinking of radical organizers is frozen in the concept of the mass
movement. This form of struggle, no matter how radical its demands, neverthreatens the basic structure—the mass itself.
Under these circumstances it takes great effort to imagine new forms ofexistence. Space must be created before we can think of these things and beable to establish the legitimacy of acting upon them.

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The form of the collective is its practice. The collective is opposed to themass. It contradicts the structure of the mass. The collective is anti-mass.

3. Size of the Collective
The aim of any organization is to make it as simple as possible, or as
Marshall McLuhan2 puts it, “high in participation, low in definition.” Thetendency is just the opposite. Our reflex is to create administrative structures
to deal with political problems.
Most people cannot discuss intelligently the subject of size. There is an
unspoken feeling either that the problem should not exist or that it isbeneath us to talk about it. Let’s get it out in the open. Size is a question ofpolitics and social relations, not administration. Do you wonder why the
subject is shunted aside at large meetings? Because it fundamentallychallenges the repressive nature of large organizations. Small groups thatfunction as appendages to larger bodies will never feel like small groups.
The collective should not be larger than a band—no orchestras orchamber music please. The basic idea is to reproduce the collective, notexpand it. The strength of a collective lies in its social organization, not its
numbers. Once you think in terms of recruiting, you might as well join the
Army. The difference between expansion and reproduction is the difference
between adding and multiplying. The first based its strength on numbers andthe second on relationships between people.
Why should there be a limit to size? Because we are neither supermen
nor slaves. Beyond a certain point, the group becomes a meeting and before
you know it you have to raise your hand to speak. The collective is arecognition of the practical limits of conversation. This simple fact is thebasis for a new social experience.
Relations of inequality can be seen more clearly within a collective anddealt with more effectively. “Whatever the nature of authority in the largeorganization, it is inherent in the simple organization unit.” (Chester
Barnard, The Function of Executives, 1938). A small group with a “leader”
is the nucleus of a class society. Small size restricts the area which any
single individual can dominate. This is true both internally and in relation toother groups.
Today, the mode of struggle requires a durable and resilient form oforganization which will enable us to cope both with the attrition of daily life
and the likelihood of repression. Unless we can begin to solve problems at
this level collectively, we are certainly not fit to create a new society.
Contrary to what people are led to think, i.e. united we stand, united we fall,

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it will be harder to destroy a multitude of collectives than the largest
organizations with centralized control.
Size is a key to security. But its real importance lies in the fact that thecollective reproduces new social relations—the advantage being that theprocess can begin now.
The limitation on size raises a difficult problem. What do you say tosomeone who asks, “Can I join your collective?” This question is ultimately
at the root of much hostility (often unconscious) toward the collective formof organization. You can’t separate size from the collective because it mustbe small In order to exist. The collective has a right to exclude individuals
because it offers them the alternative of starting a new collective, i.e.
sharing the responsibility for organization. This is the basic answer to thequestion above.
Of course, people will put down the collective as being exclusive. That is
not the point. The size of a collective is essentially a limitation on its
authority.
By contrast, large organizations, while having open membership, areexclusive in terms of who shapes the politics and actively participates in the
structuring of activities. The choice is between joining the mass or creating
the class. The revolutionary project is to do it yourself. Remember,
Alexandra Kollontai3 warned in 1920, “The essence of bureaucracy is whensome third person decides your fate.”4

4. Contact Between Collectives
The collective does not communicate with the mass. It makes contact withother collectives. What if other collectives do not exist? Well, it should talkto itself until the day they do. Yes. By all means, the collective also
communicates with other people, but it never views them as a mass—as aconstituency or audience. The collective communicates with individuals inorder to encourage self-organization. It assumes that people are capable ofself-organization, and given that alternative, they will choose it over mass
participation. The collective knows that it takes time to create new forms oforganization. It simply seeks to hasten the crumbling of the mass.
Much of the problem of “communication” these days is that people thinkthey have got to communicate all the time. You find people setting up
administrative functions to deal with information flows before they have
any idea what they want to say. The collective is not obsessed with“communicating” or “relating” to the movement. What concerns it is theamount of noise—incessant phone calls, form letters, announcements of

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meetings, etc.—that passes for communication. It is time we gave morethought to what we say and how we say it.
What exactly do we mean by contact? We want to begin by taking thebureaucracy out of communication. The idea is to begin modestly. Contact
is a touching on all sides. The essential thing is about its directness andreliability. Eyeball to eyeball.
Other forms of communication—telephone, letters, documents, etc.—
should never be used as substitutes for direct contact. In fact, they should
serve primarily to prepare contacts.
Why is it so important to have direct contact? Because it is the simplest
form of communication. Moreover, it is physical and Involves all the senses—most of all the sense of smell. For this reason, it is reliable. It also takes
account of the real need for security. Those who talk about repression
continue to pass around sheets of paper asking for names, addresses, andtelephone numbers.
There are already a number of gatherings which appear to involve
contact but in reality are grotesque facsimiles. The worst of these and theone most people flock to is the conference. This is a hotel of the mind whichturns us all into tourists and spectators. A lower form of existence is theendless meeting—the one held every night. Not to mention the committees
formed expressly to arrange meetings.
The basic principle of contact between collectives is: you only meetwhen you have something to say to each other. This means two things. First,
that you have a concrete idea what it is you want to say. Secondly, that you
must prepare it in advance. These principles help to ensure that
communication does not become an administrative problem.
The new forms of contact have yet to be created. We can think of single
examples. A member of one collective can attend the meeting of anothercollective or there may be a joint meeting of the groups as a whole. The firstof these appears to be the more practical, however, the drawback is that not
everyone is involved. There are undoubtedly other forms of contact which
are likely to develop. The main thing is to invent them.

5. Priority of Local Action
The collective gives priority to local action. It rejects the mass politics of
the white nationalists with their national committees, organizers, and thesuperstars. Definitely, the collective is out of the mainstream and what ismore it feels no regrets. The aim of the collective is to feel new thoughts
and act new ideas—in a word to create its own space. And that, more than

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any program, is what is intolerable to all the Xerox radicals trying to
reproduce their own images
The collective is the hindquarters of the revolution. It makes no pretensewhatsoever in regard to the role of the vanguard. Expect nothing from them.
They are not your leaders. Leave them alone. The collective knows it will be
the last to enter the new world.
The doubts people have about local action reveal how dependent they areon the glamour of mass politics. Everyone wants to project themselves on
the screen of revolution—as Yippies5 or White Panthers6. Having
internalized the mass, they ask themselves questions whose answers seemlogical in its context. How can we accomplish anything without massaction? If we don’t go to meetings and demonstrations. Will we be
forgotten? Who will take us seriously if we don’t join the rank and file?
Slowly you realize that you have become a spectator, an object. Your
politics take place on a stage and your social relations consist of sitting in an
audience or marching in a crowd. The fragmentation of your everyday
experience contrasts with the spectacular unity of the mass.
By contrast, the priority of local action is an attempt to unify everyday
life and fragment the mass. This level of consciousness is a result of
rejecting the laws of mass behavior based on Leninism and TV ideology. It
makes possible an enema of the brain which everyone so desperately needs.
You will be relieved to discover that you can create a situation by localizing
your struggle.
How can we prevent local action from becoming provincial? Whether or
not it does so depends on our overall strategy. Provincialism is simply theconsequences or not knowing what is happening. A commune, for example,
is provincial because its strategy is based on petty farming and glorificationof the extended family. What they have is astrology, not a strategy.
Local action should be based on the global structure of modern society.
There can be no collective action without collectives. But the creation of acollective should not be mistaken for victory nor should it become an end in
itself. The great danger the collective faces historically is that of being cut
off (or cutting itself off) from the outside world. The issue ultimately will bewhat action to take and when. Whether collectives become a social force
depends on their analysis of history and their course of action.
In fact, the “provinces” today are moving ahead of the centres in politicalconsciousness and motivation. From Minnesota to the Mekong Delta, therevolt is gaining coherence. The centres are trying to decipher what ishappening, to catch up and contain it. For this purpose they must create
centralized forms of organization—or “co-ordination”—as the modernists
call it.

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The first principle of local action is to de-nationalize your thinking. Take
the country out of Salem. Get out of Marlboro country. Become consciousof how your life is managed from the national centres. Lifestyles are roles
designed to give you the illusion of movement while keeping you in yourplace. “Style is mass chasing class, and class escaping mass.” (W.
Rauschenbush, “The Idiot God Fashion,” Woman’s Coming of Age, eds
Schmalhausen and Calvert, 1931).
Local action gives you the initiative by enabling you to define thesituation. That is the practice of knowing you are the subject. Marat7 says:“The most important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair, to turnyourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes.” The collective
turns itself inside out and sees reality.

6. The Dream of Unity
The principle of unity is based on the proposition that everyone is a unit (afragment). Unity means one multiplied by itself. We are not going to say itstraight—in so far as unity has suppressed real political differences—class,racial, sexual—it is a form of tyranny. The dream of unity is in reality anightmare of compromise and suppressed desires. We are not equal andunity perpetuates inequality.
The collective will be subject constantly to pressure from outside groups
demanding support in one form or another. Everyone is always in a crisis.
Given these circumstances, a group can have the illusion of being
permanently mobilized and active without having polities of its own. Calls
for unity channel the political energies of collectives into support politics.
So, as a precaution, the collective must take time to work out its own
politics and plan of action. Above all, it should try to foresee crisis
situations and their “rent-a-crowd” militancy.
You will be accused of factionalism. Don’t waste time thinking about thisage old problem. A collective is not a faction. Responding to Pavlov’s bellputs you in the position of a salivating dog.8 There will be no end to yourhunger when who you are is determined by someone else.
You will also be accused of elitism. This is a risky business and should
not be dismissed lightly. A collective must first know what is meant by
elitism. Instead of wondering whether it refers to leadership or personalities,
you should first anchor the issue in a class context. Know where your ideas
come from and what their relation is to the dominant ideology. You should
ask the same questions about those who make the accusations. What is theirclass background and class interest? So far many people have reacted

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defensively to the charge of elitism and, thus, have avoided dealing with theissue head on. That in itself is a class reaction.
The internal is the mirror of the external. The best way to avoid behaving
like an elite is to prevent the formation of elitism within the collective itself.
Often when charges of elitism are true, they reflect the same class relations
internally.
The ways of undermining the autonomy of a collective are many andinsidious. The call for unity can no longer be responded to automatically.
The time has come to question the motives and effectiveness of such actions—and to feel good (i.e. correct) in doing so, Jargon is pigeon talk and ismeant to make us feel stupid and powerless. Because collective action is notorganized as a mass, it does not have to rely on the call of unity in order toact.
“Does ‘one divide into two’ or ‘two fuse into one’?” This question is asubject of debate In China and now here. This debate is a struggle between
two conceptions of the world. One believes in struggle, the other in unity.
The two sides have drawn a clear line between them and their arguments are
diametrically opposed. Thus, you can see why one divides into two.” (Freetranslation from the Red Flag, Peking, September 21, 1964).

7. The Function of Analysis
Not only can there be no revolution without revolutionary theory, there canbe no strategy without analysis. Strategy is knowing ahead of time what you
are going to do. This is what analysis makes possible. When you begin, you
may not know anything. The purpose of analysis is not to know everything,but to know what you do know and know it good—that is collectively. The
heart of thinking analytically is to learn over and over again that the process
is as important as the product. Developing an analysis requires new ways ofthinking. Without new ways of thinking we are doomed to old ways ofacting.
The question of what we are going to do is the hardest to answer and theone that ultimately will determine whether a collective will continue toexist. The difficulty of the question makes analysis all the more necessary.
We can no longer afford to be propelled by the crudest forms ofadvertisement—slogans and rhetoric. The function of analysis is to reveal aplan of action.
Why is there relatively little practical analysis of what is happening
today? Some people refuse to analyze anything which they cannot
immediately comprehend. Basically they have a feeling of inadequacy. This

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is partly because they have never had the opportunity to do it before and,
therefore, don’t know they are capable of it. On the other hand, many
activists put down analysis as being “intellectual”—which is more acommentary on their own kind of thinking than anything else. Finally, there
are those who feel no need to think and become very uncomfortable whensomebody does want to. This often reflects their class disposition. The
general constipation of the movement is a product of all these forces.
One reason for this sad state of affairs is that analysis gives so little
satisfaction. This is another way of saying that it is not practical. What has
happened to all thinking can best be seen in the degeneration of classanalysis into stereotyped, obese definitions. There is little difference
between the theory mongers of high abstraction and the sloganeers of crude
abstraction. Theory is becoming the dialect of robots, and slogans the mass
production of the mind. But just because ideas have become so mechanicaldoes not mean we should abandon thought.
Most people are willing to face the fact that they are living in a societythat has yet to be explained. Any attempt to probe those areas which are
unfamiliar is met with a general hostility of fear. People seem afraid to lookat themselves analytically. Part of the problem of not knowing what to doreveals itself in our not knowing who we are. The motivation to look at
yourself critically and to explain society comes from the desire to changeboth. The heart of the problem is that we do not concretely imagine
winning, except perhaps, by accident.
Analysis is the arming of the brain. We’re being stifled by those who tell
us analysis is intellectual when in reality it is the tool of the imagination.
Just as you can’t tolerate intellectualism, so you cannot act from raw anger—not if you want to win. You must teach your stomach how to think andyour brain how to feel. Analysis should help us to express anger
intelligently. Learning how to think, i.e. analysis, is the first step toward
conscious activity.
No doubt you feel yourself tightening up because you think it sounds
heavy. Really, the problem is that you think much bigger than you act. Be
modest. Start with what you already know and want to know more about.
Analysis begins with what interests you. Political thinking should be part ofeveryday life, not a class privilege. To be practical, analysis must give youan understanding of what to do and how to do it.
Thinking should help to distinguish between what is important and what
is not. It should break down complex forces so that we can understand them.
Break everything down. In the process of analyzing something you will
discover that there are different ways of acting which were not apparent

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when you began. This is the pleasure of analysis. To investigate a problem is
to begin to solve it.

8. The Need for New Formats
The need for new formats grows out of the oppressiveness of print. We must
learn the techniques of advertisement. They consist of short, clear, nonrhetorical statements. The ad words. The ad represents a break with thecollege education and the diarrhea of words. The ad is a concentrated
formula for communication. Its information power has already outmoded
the school system. The secret is to gain as much pleasure in creating theform as in expressing the idea.
How do we defend adopting the style of advertising when its function is
so oppressive? As a medium we think it represents a revolutionary mode of
production. Rejecting it has resulted in the stagnation of our minds and acrude romanticism in political culture. Those who turn up their noses at ads
think in a language that is decrepit. Using the ad technique transforms the
person who does it. It makes writing a pleasure for anyone because it strives
in orality in print.
What we mean by the use of ad technique is to physically use it. Most of
the time we are unconscious of ads and, if we do become conscious, wedon’t act upon them—don’t subvert them. Ads are based on repetition. If
you affect one of them, you affect all of them. Know the environment of thead. The most effective way to subvert an ad is to make the contradiction in it
visible. Advertise it. The vulnerability of ads lies in the possibility of turningthem against the exploiters.
Jerry Rubin9 says you should use the media all the time. At least he goes
all the way. This is better than the toe-dipping approach that seems so
common these days. Of course, there are groups who say don’t use it at all.
And they don’t. They will probably outlast Jerry since the basic technique ofmass media is over-exposure. That is why Jerry has already written his
memoirs. The Situationists say: “The revolt is contained by over-exposure.
We are given it to contemplate so that we shall forget to participate.”10
We are not talking about the packaging of politics. Ramparts is the
Playboy of the Left. On the other hand, the underground press is
pornographic and redundant. Newsreel’s projector is running backwards.
And why in the era of Cosmopolitan magazine must we suffer the
stodginess of Leviathan? We much prefer reading Fortune—the magazine
for “the men in charge of change”—for our analysis of capitalism.

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There is no getting around it—we need new formats, entirely new
formats. Otherwise we will never sharpen our wits. To break out of the spellof print requires a conscious effort to think a new language. We should nolonger be immobilized by other people’s words. Don’t wait for the news totell you what is happening. Make your headlines with presstype. Cut up
your favorite magazine and put it together again. Cut big words in half andmake little words out of then—like ENVIRON MENTAL CRISIS. All you
need is a good pair of scissors and rubber cement. Abuse the enemy’s
images. Turn the Man from Glad into a Frankenstein. Making comic strips
out of great art.
Don’t let anything interfere with your pleasure.
Don’t read any more books—at least not straight through. As G.B. Kay
from Blackpool once said (quoting somebody else), “Reading rots themind.” Pamphlets are so much more fun. Read randomly, write on themargins and go back to comics. You might try the Silver Surfer for a start.

9. Self-Activity
Bad work habits and sloppy behavior undermine any attempt to constructcollectively. Casual, sloppy behavior means that we don’t care deeply about
what we are doing or who we are doing it with. This may come as a surpriseto a lot of people. The fact remains: we talk revolution but act reactionary atelementary levels.
There are two basic things underlying these unfortunate circumstances:* People’s idea of how something (like revolution) will happen shapes
our work habits.
* Their class background gives them a casual view of politics.
There is no doubt that the Pepsi generation is more politically alive. But
this new energy is being channeled by organizers into boring meetings
which reproduce the hierarchy of mass society. After a while, criticalthinking is eroded and people lose their curiosity. Meetings become aroutine like everything else in life.
A lot of problems which collectives will have can be traced to the work
habits acquired in the (mass) movement. People perpetuate the passive roles
they have become accustomed to in large meetings. The emphasis on mass
participation means that all you have to do is show up. Rarely, do people
prepare themselves for a meeting, nor do they feel the need to. Often thissituation does not become evident precisely because the few people who dowork (those who run the meeting) create the illusion of group achievement.

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Because people see themselves essentially as objects and not as subjects,
political activity is defined as an event outside them and in the future. No
one sees themselves making the revolution and, therefore, they don’t
understand how it will be accomplished.
The short span of attention is one tell tale symptom of instant politics.
The emphasis on responding to crisis seems to contract the span of attention—in fact there is often no time dimension at all. This timelessness is
experienced as the syncopation of over-commitment. Many people say they
will do things without really thinking out carefully whether they have thetime to do them. Having time ultimately means defining what you reallywant to do. Over-commitment is when you want to do everything but end up
doing nothing.
The numerous other symptoms of casual politics—lack of preparation,
being late, getting bored at difficult moments, etc. are all signs of a political
attitude which is destructive to the collective. The important thing is
recognizing the existence of these problems and knowing what causes them.
They are not personal problems but historically determined attitudes.
Many people confuse the revolt against alienated labor in its specifichistorical form with work activity itself. This revolt is expressed in an antiwork attitude.
Attitudes toward work are shaped by our relations to production, i.e.
class. Class is a product of hierarchic divisions of labor (including forms
other than wage labor). There are three basic relations which can produce
anti-work attitudes. The working class expressed its anti-work attitude as arebellion against routinized labor. For the middle class, the anti-workattitude comes out of the ideology of consumer society and revolves aroundleisure. The stereotype of the “lazy native” or “physically weak woman” is athird anti-work attitude which is applied to those excluded from wage labor.
The dream of automation (i.e. no work) reinforces class prejudice. The
middle class is the one that has the dream since it seeks to expand its
leisure-oriented activities. To the working class, automation means a loss of
their job, preoccupation with unemployment, which is the opposite ofleisure. For the excluded, automation doesn’t mean anything because it will
not be applied to their forms of work.
The automation of the working class has become the ideology of postscarcity radicals—from the anarchists at Anarcho’s to SDS’s11 new working
class. Technological change has rescued them from the dilemma of a classanalysis they were never able to make. With the elimination of working
class struggle by automation (the automation of the working class) theradicals have become advocates of leisure society and touristic lifestyles.
This anti-work attitude leads to a utopian outlook and removes us from the103

realm of history. It prevents the construction of collectivity and self-activity.
The issue of how to transform work into self-activity is central to theelimination of class and the reorganization of society.
Self-activity is the reconstruction of the consciousness (wholeness) of
one’s individual life activity. The collective is what makes thereconstruction possible because it defines individuality not as a private
experience but as a social relation. What is important to see is that work is
the creating of conscious activity within the structure of the collective.
One of the best ways to discover and correct anti-work attitudes isthrough self-criticism. This provides an objective framework which allows
people the space to be criticized and to be critical. Self-criticism is the
opposite of self-consciousness because its aim is not to isolate you but tofree repressed abilities. Self-criticism is a method for dealing with piggish
behavior and developing consciousness.
To root out the society within us and to redefine our work relations acollective must develop a sense of its own history. One of the hardest things
to do is to see the closest relations—those within the collective—in politicalterms. The tendency is to be sloppy, or what Mao calls “liberal”, about
relations between friends. Rules can no longer be the framework of
discipline. It must be based on political understanding. One of the functionsof analysis is that it be applied internally.
Preparation is another part of the process which creates continuity
between meetings and insures that our own thinking does not become a parttime activity. It also combats the tendency to talk off the top of one’s headand pick ideas out of the air. Whenever meetings tend to be abstract andrandom it means the ideas put forward are not connected by thought (i.e.
analysis). There is seldom serious investigation behind what is said.
What does it mean to prepare for a meeting? It means not coming emptyhanded or empty-headed. Mao says, “No investigation, no right tospeak.”12 Assuming a group has decided what it wants to do, the first step isfor everyone to investigate. This means taking the time to actually look into
the matter, sort out the relevant materials and be able to make themaccessible to everyone in the collective. The motive underlying all the
preparation should be the construction of a coherent analysis. “We must
substitute the sweat of self-criticism for the tears of crocodiles”, according
to a new Chinese proverb.
10. Struggle on Many Levels
Struggle has many faces. But no two faces look alike. Like the Cubists, wemust look at things from many sides. The problem is to find ways of

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creating space for ourselves. The tendency now is toward two-sidedness
which is embedded in every aspect of our lives. Our language poses
questions by making us choose between opposites. The imperialist creates
the anti-imperialist. Before ‘cool’ there was hot and cold. ‘Cool’ was thefirst attempt to break out of two sidedness. Two-sidedness always minimizes
the dimensions of struggle by narrowly defining the situation. We end up
with a one dimensional view of the enemy and of ourselves.
Learn to be shrewd. Our first impulse is always to define our position.
Why do we feel the need to tell them? We create space by not appearing tobe what we really are.
Shrewdness is not simply a defensive tactic. The essence of shrewdness
is learning to take advantage of the enemy’s weaknesses. Otherwise you cannever win. The rule is: be honest among yourselves, but deceive the enemy.
There are at least three ways of dealing with a situation. You canneutralize, activate, or destroy. Neutralize is to create space. Activate is togain support. Destroy is to win. What’s more, it is essential to learn how to
use all three simultaneously.
Struggle on many levels begins with the activation of all the senses. We
must be able to conceive of more than one mode of acting for a given
situation. The response, i.e. method of struggle, should contain threeelements: (1) A means of survival; (2) a method of exploiting splits in theenemy camp; (3) an underground strategy.
The fundamental tendency of corporate liberalism is to identify withsocial change while trying to contain it. Wouldn’t it be ironic (and even a
relief) if we could turn the threat of co-option into a means of survival?
The fear of co-option often leads people to shun the challenge ofcorporate liberals. Some of the purest revolutionaries prefer not to think
about using the co-opter for their own purposes. Too often the mentality ofthe ‘job’ obscures the potential for subversion.
The existence of corporate liberalism demands that we not be sloppy in
our own thinking and response. The strength of the position is that it forces
us to acknowledge our own weaknesses—even before we engage in struggle
against it. The worst mistake is to pretend that this enemy does not exist.
Urban struggle requires a subversive strategy. Concretely, working‘within the system’ should become for us a source of money, information,
and anonymity. This is what Mao means when he says, “Move at night.”
The routine of daily life is night-time for the enemy—when he cannot see
us. The process of co-option should become an increasingly disquieting
exercise for them.
Exploiting splits within the enemy camp does not mean helping one
segment defeat another. The basic aim is to maintain the splits. There are105

significant differences among the oppressors. These have the effect of
weakening them. Under certain circumstances these splits may provide amargin of maneuverability which may be strategic for us. The main thing is
not to view the enemy monolithically. Monolithic thinking condemns you to
one way of acting.
There is a tendency to see the most degenerate forms of reaction as theprimary enemy. The corporations are consciously pandering to such ideas
through films like Easy Rider which also attempts to identify with young
males. The function of analysis is to break down and specify the different
forces within the enemy camp.
The spaces created by these splits are of crucial importance to the
preparation of a long range strategy. It will be increasingly difficult tosurvive with the visibility that we are accustomed to. The lifestyles which
declare our opposition are also the ones which make us easy targets. We
must not mistake the level of appearances for new cultures. The whole point
is not to make a fetish of our lifestyles. In the psychedelic atmosphere of
repression, square is cool.
Always keep part of your strategy underground. Just as analysis helps todifferentiate the enemy so it should provide you with different levels of
attack. Mao says: “flexibility is a concrete expression of initiative.”
Going underground should not mean dropping heroically out of sight.
There will be few places to hide in the electronic environment of the future.
The most dangerous kind of underground will be one that is like an Iceberg.
The roles created to replace our identities in everyday life must become thedisguise of the underground.
An underground strategy puts the impulse of confrontation into
perspective. We must fight against the planned obsolescence ofconfrontations which lock us into the time-span of instant revolution. Goingunderground means having a long range strategy—something which plansfor 2004. The Iceberg strategy keeps us cool. It trains us to control ourreflexes and calculate our responses.
The underground strategy is also necessary to maintain autonomy.
Autonomy preserves the organizational form of the collective, which is
critical to the sharpening of its politics. Nothing will be achieved bysubmerging ourselves in a chaos of revolutionary fronts. The principle
strategy of the counterfeit Left will be to smear over differences withappeals to a class unity that no longer exists. An underground strategy
without a revolutionary form of organization can only emerge as a new classsociety. To destroy the system of oppression is not enough. We must create
the organization of a free society. When the underground emerges, thecollective will be that society.

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1. Chicago 7: Seven prominent figures in the American Left in the 1960s who werecharged with conspiracy, incitement to riot and other charges related to the violent
protests that took place in Chicago, Illinois on the occasion of the 1968 Democratic
National Convention. Among those charged were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin(see note 9). The latter describes the occasion in his autobiography “Do it!—
Scenarios of the Revolution”, Touchstone, 1970. In the beginning they were “Chicago
8,” since Bobby Seale, the founder of Black Panther Party, was also among thecharged. However, for various reasons he was transferred to a separate trial.
2. Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980): Frequently quoted communications theorist,
who foresaw internet before the first personal computers. Came out with the book
“Understanding Media” 1964. Coined slogans such as “the medium is the message”
and “the global village”.
3. Alexandra Kollontay (1872–1952): Russian Marxist and agitator who
participated in the Russian revolution 1917.
4. Alexandra Kollontay: “Workers’ Opposition”, Solidarity, Pamphlet no.7, 1961.
5. Yippies: See note 9.
6. White Panthers: A group made up of white people that supported therevolutionary black separatist organization the Black Panther Party.
7. Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793): Scientist, physician and leader during the French
revolution as a member of the Jacobin faction. He was a devoted advocate of the Reinof Terror; he was later murdered in his bathtub by a royalist. A startlingly modern
personality cult was built up around him.
8. Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936): Discovered by accident that if he rang a bell before
feeding his dogs, they started to salivate whenever they heard the bell, regardless ofwhether or not they were fed. This observation was central to the Behaviorist Schoolof Psychoanalysis.
9. Jerry Rubin (1938–1994) and his friend Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) wereprominent figures in the big American protest movement of the late 1960s and early
1970s. Rubin’s and Hoffman’s so-called “Yippies” were the bridge between thesubversive university intellectuals known as “The new Left” and the increasingly
apolitical hippy and beatnik movements.
10. Quote from the Situationist classic, “On the Poverty of Student Life.”
11. SDS. Students for a Democratic Society: a prominent organization in the student
and grassroots movement that protested against the Vietnam War in USA in the 60s.
Many of the charged in Chicago 7 was leaders in SDS (see note 1).
12. Mao Tse-tung: “Oppose Book Worship”, 1930.

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Autonomous Movement of the Turin Railway
Workers
MOVIMENTO AUTONOMO DI BASE, FROM WORKERS AUTONOMY (1975)1

Organization of the Autonomous Workers’ Nucleus
The present situation is characterized by an alliance between employers,
trade unions and reformist parties.
The first are using the help of the unions and so-called parties of the Leftin order to continue exploitation, finding a way to make the workers pay theprice of the economic crisis through a considerable sum of money paid to
the industrialists by the State, thereby allowing them to survive for a few
more years. To complete the picture, the parties of the Left, (with theCommunist Party in the lead) are asking the working class to makesacrifices in order to save the employers and their servants.
The present characteristic of the unions and reformist parties is therefore
that of collaboration with the employers; their most important task is that ofextinguishing the spontaneous workers’ movement, suggesting sacrifice andcondemning the workers who are disposed to carrying on a tougher form of
struggle with the usual slanders (calling them provocateurs). Under these
conditions it does not seem to us that the trade union can be used as an
instrument of struggle.
The three main unions, the SFI, SAUFI and the SIUF are putting theircollaboration into effect by selling out the railway workers through a projectof restructuring which means a heavier workload for those employed(increased productivity), with less money (wage blocks), and an increase in
unemployment.

1 MAB: Movimento Autonomo di Base (Autonomous Workers’ Movement), of the railway

workers in the Turin region.
SFI: Sindacato Ferrovieri Italiani (Italian Railwaymens’ Union), linked to the Communist
Party dominated CGIL.
SAUFI: Sindacato Autonomo Unitario Italiano (Autonomous Unitarian Italian
Union), linked to Christian Democrat dominated CISL.
SIUF: Sindacato Italiano Unificato Ferrovieri (Italian Unified Railwaymens’ Union), linked to
the UIL (predominantly Socialist Party).
FISAFS: Federazione Italiana Sindacati Autonomi Ferrovieri di Stato (Italian Federation ofAutonomous State Railwaymens’ Unions), autonomous union with no direct links with thelarger confederations.

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These anti-worker objectives are backed up by demagoguery and astrong condemnation of any initiative. In this way they want to get the
proposal accepted that management cannot take on wage increases, that tokeep up productivity the number of working hours must remain unaltered,that the so-called phenomenon of absenteeism must be fought, and that tocontrol the worker better the process of functional skills and work mobility
will have to be re-organized.
Clearly they want to destroy all will to struggle, creating a financial
situation which is unsupportable for most, hence the recourse to overtime,
giving the bosses the arm of blackmail perfected by the use of the selective
mechanism which stops anyone who is not capable and disciplined fromgetting on (in other words, whoever does not let himself be used and who
refuses absolute respect for the bosses).
The autonomous union, FISAFS, is developing a struggle in opposition
to the three central trade unions, and claims to be autonomous.
The FISAFS is trying to exploit the rage and discontent of the workers inorder to gain a mass adhesion to its corporative and reactionary line. The
trade-unionism of this so-called autonomous organization is an ulterior
element in retarding the real possibility of workers’ struggle at the base,which is very strong at the present time. The aim of the FISAFS is therefore
that of channeling the workers into a corporative logic necessary for theindustrialists, political parties, the government and capitalism, in order toconsolidate exploitation and make it last.
The FISAFS therefore, in defending the employers’ interests, cannot
possibly employ the methods of struggle which characterize and qualify
workers’ autonomy. At the level of alliances and political decisions, it
becomes impossible for the FISAFS to differentiate itself from the otherunion organizations who are in opposition to the three central majorityholding unions (for example, the USFI-CISNAL).
True proletarian autonomy is the only possible solution for thecontinuation of the struggle against the employers and their servants. To dothis it is necessary to begin to form Autonomous Workers’ Nuclei. These
nuclei, such as those we want to create among the Turin railway workers,
are born from within a precise productive reality, and should consider
themselves a constant point of reference for the reality outside in the living
areas, the land, the schools and so on, and draw them into the struggle.
Beginning from a clear conception of proletarian autonomy, two dangers
ever present in sectoral or trade union methods of struggle are eliminated:a) the bureaucratization of the structure;b) the tendency towards a corporate vision of the struggle.

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The Autonomous Workers’ Nucleus organizes itself independently of
the political parties and trade unions, in order to better defend the worker asa man. Its perspective of organization and struggle keep in mind the double
necessity of imposing the confrontation both at the level of production(wages, contracts, etc.), and at the level of the individual worker’s life (workrisks, alienation, necessary links between living area, place of work, school,etc.). Autonomy is therefore a re-evaluation of the man in the worker, with aclear view of the struggle directed towards safeguarding the conditions
which render possible work and life itself.
The Autonomous Workers’ Nucleusa) Characteristics•
Is an organization which means to distinguish itself from the tradeunions including the autonomous versions of such.
•
Its autonomy is based on an anti-bureaucratic structure.
•
It is based on the elimination of the permanent delegate and thenegation of professional representatives.
•
All the workers are engaged in the struggle against the employers andtheir servants.
•
This involvement in the struggle is permanent and does not limit itself
to the strike periods fixed by the trade unions.
•
Each component of the Autonomous Workers’ Nucleus considers
himself to be in continual struggle against the employers and his
servants, in the same way as the latter are continually in struggle
against the workers in their attempt to perpetuate exploitation.
•
The Autonomous Workers’ Nucleus has no link with trade union
ideology or practice, while its anti-employer position qualifies it
clearly and without doubt as an instrument which the workers havecreated for their own emancipation.
•
Propaganda activity and struggles directed at obtaining precise results,
and the choice of means for the realization of these struggles, are all
elements to be clarified by the Autonomous Workers’ Nucleus.
•
To belong to an Autonomous Workers’ Nucleus is the logical step for
all those who consider they have been betrayed by the various tradeunion organizations and who want to continue the struggle against theState-employer, widening this struggle in a perspective totally different
to that of trade union power.

110B) Methods•
The repression put into effect by the employers with the help of theirservants is constant. It is exercised over us in many ways: diminishing
the spending power of wage increases; refusing legitimate increases;
putting pressure on the worker to avoid taking on more personnel,
increasing work risks; nullifying our struggles through the unions’politics of recuperation. This repression must be fought with a struggle
which is also constant. Therefore: permanent repression, permanent
conflict.
•
The comrades making up the Autonomous Workers’ Nucleus shouldhave a clear idea of the direction the struggle against exploitation
should take. The employer strikes the worker as a part of a whole (theproductive collectivity), therefore when it strikes him as a railway
worker, the company adapts its exploitation to the general situation of
production. For this reason a sectoral and corporative struggle does notmake sense. The method of workers’ autonomy is basedon exporting the struggle, even if the immediate effects (economic andwork conditions) remain within the sector of production.
•
The method is therefore that of permanent conflict and carrying thestruggle beyond the workplace.
•
The objectives to be reached outside the workplace are the users of therailway service, especially commuters who must be constantly kept up
to date with the evolution of the conflict within the company; and thesame for the other sectors of production nearest to that of the railways(airways, road transport, postal services, telephones, etc.).
•
Hence the great importance of information in the autonomous
organization of the struggle. Obviously in the beginning the means
available for this method of struggle will be inadequate compared tothose of the trade union confederacy; however, even having recourse toleafleting, what matters most is working in the right direction,intervening constantly towards the users who must gradually besensitized to the struggle of the railway workers and our perspectives.
The same goes for the collateral sectors with whom it is necessary to
make contact, favoring, whenever possible, the birth of otherautonomous nuclei which can do the same kind of work.
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In this perspective the strike maintains its validity as a means of
struggle, but must he seen critically, not as a means which
automatically sets conflict in motion whenever the trade union
leadership decides. The strike in that sense becomes an instrument
which puts an end to a situation of conflict, and is thus useful to theemployers and all those seeking to extinguish concrete struggle.

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Another point against the strike is the fact that it is an intermittent
instrument which the counterpart is always warned about in advance,
enabling them to intervene (for example, reducing personnel fromgoods trains and transferring them to passenger ones).
Other means exist which can be used alongside the strike, or in theplace of it, means which attack the company’s productive output
directly and which constitute a very effective threat.
During a strike the technical procedure is arranged at union meetings.
Reading these rules, one is amazed by the care which is taken to avoid
any damage to the company. But, in the other direction, what does thecompany do to try to reduce the exploitation of the workers? All theseprecautions reduce the effectiveness of the strike as an arm in theattack against the bosses, and the responsibility for all that is also dueto the legalism and conservatism of the unions. To hard and constantrepression, we must oppose struggle without half measures and without
warning: hard and constant struggle.
The choice of means to be employed in a certain struggle, and the basic
direction to be given to the information which iras[sic!] to beconstantly circulated towards the exterior, is decided upon by all those
who belong to the Autonomous Workers’ Nucleus, for which they mustmeet periodically.

C) Perspectives•
The concrete development of the struggle must be evaluated from time
to time in the light of the objective situation, and not serve as a shieldfor vague and irresolute ideological constructions.
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Wage increase is one of the most important points of the struggle,
because it allows the worker a greater capacity for resistance and thepossibility of facing other battles which are just as important for his
existence. This is not necessarily the main point of the Autonomous
Workers’ Nucleus, but, for obvious reasons it cannot be considered of
secondary importance.
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The struggle for a different organization of work is undoubtedly moreinteresting, because it indirectly supplements real wages in a way thatcannot be taken back by the mechanism of devaluation. These indirect
supplements to wages are elements of great value during the course of
the conflict. A reduction in working hours, the refusal of mobility or
accumulation of duties, total staff coverage, the improvement ofworking conditions, the modification of rules and working hours fordrivers, ticket collectors, etc., the strengthening of installations, lines,
locomotives, etc. are all elements which improve the general situation

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of the railway worker and can come to be a part of real wages which
are very much inferior[sic!] to the sum written on the pay slip.
The basic perspective in which a longterm struggle could be planned
would be that of the base of the workers getting control ofmanagement, progressively removing it from the bosses and foremen
who find themselves in secure positions with the unions’ approval. In
this way an example could be given through a series of proposals rechanges in management, and the organizational capacity of theworkers, denouncing those responsible for the present disservice at thecost of the passengers and everyone involved.
Capillary penetration in order to explain the mistaken position of the
trade union struggles and their need to collaborate with the company,
the impossibility of any change in this situation in the near future, anda return to struggle at the base. Struggle against the trade union
structures and bureaucrats, not against union members.
The final perspective is therefore that of autonomous management of
the struggle, both for wages and working conditions, as well as the
progressive taking over of management in its totality. Clearly thisautonomy of struggle can only develop through a proper evaluation of
the unions’ position of collaboration with the employers.

Conclusion
The Autonomous Workers’ Nucleus is an organism of struggle for the
defense of the railway workers who mean to affirm the principle ofautonomous struggle. For this reason it denies the validity of the tradeunions, and denounces their collusion with the system.
On the basis of the principle of autonomy, the Autonomous Workers’
Nucleus affirms the need for permanent conflict within the reality of
production, and the need to export the essential characteristics of the
struggle towards the exterior. The objectives of this communication with theexterior are the users of the railway service and the collateral productive
sectors. The methods necessary for the realization of the defense of those
involved and therefore of the whole productive collectivity are chosen inharmony with the principle of autonomy and permanent conflict. The
validity of the strike should be examined critically, and a great deal ofattention paid to the research for other effective forms of struggle not soeasily controllable by the company.
The perspectives of the Autonomous Workers’ Nucleus are the constantones of increasing wages and affecting working conditions, with the aimof safeguarding real wages which is the basis for all concrete possibilities of
struggle by the workers.