Something I found posted on Milwaukee Indymedia. It's interesting to see the proliferation of the use of the term "social war" and the spread of insurrectionalist tendencies -- Santa Cruz, Olympia/Seattle, Vancouver, Portland and now Milwaukee are becoming notable hot-spots of, at least, insurrectionalist chatter. The contemporary expression of insurrectionalism deserves a look here at some point.This is critique as attack from those who attack as critique. It is an attempt to make apparent what is evident to us: a separation between the ideology and practice of activism and those who seek a complete destruction of this world (domination in its totality) in search of the unknown world of possibilities that lie only in its ruin. Recent conversations have shown it to become more and more necessary to articulate this divide most importantly for ourselves and others still open to possibilities.
As capital has accumulated and thus reproduced the world, so have good intentions.
The ever constant activity of the activist in their efforts to petition this, reform that, vote, educate the masses, and always with the guidance of them and others as experts, perpetuate the logic of alienation. Theirs is a relationship managed and on the terms of the state, whose goal is always the maintenance of dominance by whatever means. And while they may have good intentions in their reactions to an always expanding set of outrageous issues, the many contradictions within capitalist social relations, they merely assimilate themselves into the disease from which no cure can be found within. To the extent that they adopt and perpetuate this ideology, they spread disease.
This disease is the same disease we've been building for thousands of years, dead yet alive in its spread of social decomposition and society as prison. It is the corpse of our social relations, conditioning the reproduction of the expert, hierarchy, and class division. This corpse in the mouth of the activist vomits out not only how life should be lived, but also how it should change, effectively changing nothing.
Always there is that feeling of unreality, estrangement, otherness, that stinking fucking smell underneath the stairs of our everyday lives.
To the pathetic calls for unity, mediation, compromise, restraint in our discourse with our conditions, our reply is "we'd rather not."
Our conditions are a social war.
Our social war is discourse.
3 comments:
I don't get it. On the one hand you call for the kind of false opposition demonstrated at the RNC. On the other hand you call for insurrectionary tactics and social war.
Maybe these concepts have become buzz words among radically posturing anarchists but to me they tend to have specific meanings. They relate to the ways in which we might be able to organize our activity in direct ways to resist the forces of capitalism and intervene in it's constant restructuring of the world around us. They have little to do with the anarcho-assclownism demonstrated at mass demo's by a largely irrelevant subculture.
Practically speaking insurrectional organizational strategies revolve around a nuclei organization to frame and provide some logistical support for struggle. While participants who might be disenfranchised from other forms of political participation carry out a struggle that can reach far and wide among different groups of people identifying around a common struggle. In the U.S. for some reason insurrectional often just means having a confirmation bias that distorts the meaning behind any violence to support some bizarre, confused, and irrelevant politics.
I think there is a sizeable (perhaps also in your view confused) collection of anarchists that don't believe in the dichotomy between summits and insurrectionary tactics.
That is, with what strength can we currently intervene? How do we find each other? No one is saying summits are the only way to do this, but some of us do see possibilities.
Insurrectionalism as developed in Italy was the result of experimentation in struggle. The US hasn't seen a lot of experimentation, and anarchism as a movement has been dominated by the Left and Leftist ideology. But finally all those years of insurrectionalists printing tons of zines has paid off -- the recent spread of insurrectionalism (if only in packaging) is the result of a slow development and consideration of these ideas, and the form it takes is due to its youthfulness and weakness -- as said in Wrecking You:
We were there this time because we do not yet have the force to manifest such conflict outside of the context of mass mobilizations.
I'd hope so... Recuperation and misdirection are serious issues even from the inception.
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