From Puget Sound Anarchists
June 26, 2024

“Our task as anarchists, our main preoccupation and greatest desire, is to see the social revolution come about: a terrible upheaval of men and institutions which finally succeeds in putting an end to exploitation and establishing the reign of justice.

For we anarchists the revolution is our guide, our constant point of reference, no matter what we are doing or what problem we are concerned with. The anarchy we want will not be possible without the painful revolutionary break. If we want to avoid turning this into no more than a dream we must struggle to destroy the State and the exploiters through revolution.”
-Alfredo Bonanno, Why Insurrection?

Few anarchists today have any speak of social revolution. Many laugh off or roll their eyes at the mention of it or worse, talk about realism and reform. The few who talk talk about it as if it were a religious desire or an otherworldly force. But what is social revolution, and what is anarchy without the social revolution? A desire, a goal, an over arching project of our entire lives – without it, what are we, what are we doing, and why?

The anarchist movements in the U.S. today are largely a reactive force, always waiting for another movement or uprising to come along to attach ourselves to. Emptying anarchy of its content, anarchists are content to be the militant auxiliary or informal organizational vanguard of social movements or simply sit back and look for forms of anarchy in other peoples and places so we can rest assured that anarchy is a latent impulse in all peoples, that we are less alone than we really are and that it’s a simple matter of time before everything falls into place. If I were to sum it up, I would say that there is a great confusion about what it means to be an anarchist and what it is anarchists aspire to.

The last time I spoke to someone about the idea of revolution the person responded with how it has become such a meaningless word. I couldn’t agree more, but the conclusions we drew from this were totally different. For him it meant that we shouldn’t bother with the idea. For me it means that we must return to the basics of anarchy – reexamine, explore and draw out our ideals to their conclusions and the means to realize them lest they get captured and killed by the enemy like what has happened with once dangerous ideas like Direct Action, Mutual Aid, Anti-Authoritarianism and Free Association.

Our ideals and actions – what anarchism is and what it means to be, act, fight and live as an anarchist – are not static, unchanging things. They must be continually gone back to and re-examined or else we will unconsciously fall into paths and ideas defined and re-defined by those who aren’t anarchists. It’s no different than when we don’t examine our own lives and fall into unconscious patterns and suddenly wake up 5 years down the line somewhere we don’t recognize and someone we didn’t want to be. It’s the same because anarchy, too, must be lived and examined.

So this is my small contribution to the re-examination of anarchy with a particular focus on the concept of social revolution, a long neglected desire gathering dust in the old tomes and broken dreams of anarchists past. I hope to take it out, dust it off a little and rekindle its fire to help us orient ourselves in struggle. Anarchy isn’t merely a beautiful idea to be dreampt about yet never realized but it is a concrete condition of possibility – something that can be realized at any point in time but only if we set about the task of realizing it ourselves. But we will not stumble our way into anarchy, without an idea of the ways and means to get there we will find ourselves in a great confusion, running around in circles conflating ourselves with reform movements, labor movements, leftist movements, helping others realize their goals but finding ourselves no closer to our own. No, we need to know our goals and desires, we need to study and examine the means and processes to actualize them, we need to dig into the grand process of destruction and creation and get re-acquainted with it.

I do this as much for myself as for others because I am tired of half baked ideas leading to half baked action, of being led around by others whims or waiting around for someone or something else rather than concretely moving towards something. Because I am tired of stopping half way because I have no conception of what to do, or what could happen, next.

I can no longer be unsure, I have one life to live and it is what I wager each day I take up the fight for anarchy.

A Personal Reflection

For the longest time I was among those who didn’t think or care about revolution. It didn’t matter to me, all that mattered was the fight today. But you go and go and go and all the time you are going you’re not thinking, not reflecting. It wasn’t until I went to jail that I took time to slow down and think and reflect, because that’s all you could do in jail. Suddenly the immortality of youth was beginning to wear off – in the previous years, and years to come, friends and comrades have been intensely injured, some went to jail and prison, some were murdered by the weight of the world through suicide and overdose. The stakes were real and the consequences were real and I couldn’t afford to run around without thinking anymore.

At a certain point you have to ask – what am I in this for? Where are we going with this? What’s the point? What even is the anarchy I’m risking myself for? I think everyone gets there eventually. For most people there isn’t an answer and they drop off and try to “get their life together” and return to the bloody complicity of normality, or they try to keep going as they have until their life and/or body falls apart and they drop off, or they die.

The rest of us try to find something.

In jail I read a lot – Alfredo Bonanno, Assata Shakur, Ursula K. LeGuin, and the works,exploits and dreams of various other anonymous or otherwise lesser know anarchists, revolutionaries and rebels. When I got out I kept reading and kept thinking while trying to get my feet back on the ground. Then 2020 came, both the pandemic and the riots. It’s these two events that put things in perspective for me – opened my eyes to the possibilities and the horrors.

Me and some comrades went to Minneapolis – we saw the flames, the joy, the power but we also bore witness to the police, military and fascist repression on a scale we hadn’t experienced before. We returned to Olympia to experience for a few months a total power over the city. Everything was smashed and every night we would come out and smash more. We never thought we would get to this point and it was obvious we never thought beyond it because the same question came up over and over – now what?

Insurrection came and ripped space and time from the vicious maws of the state – its forces in retreat. But an opening is just an opening and we still have to make the conscious choice to walk through but we were unprepared – perhaps even scared – to ask important questions. Questions of land, of food, of expropriation, of arms (and particularly in ways that disempowered the professional ‘security’ teams – organized petty authoritarians – that bullied, injured and killed more of “us” than they ever did of cops and fascists – rest in power Antonio Mays Jr).

Downtown cores were wrecked, state security forces were in retreat, yet our everyday lives were untouched. We returned to our largely segregated neighborhoods which remained untouched, many of us still had to return to jobs or sleeping in cars or shelters or on the streets. The old forms of power – misogyny, white supremacy, citizenism, settler anxieties and the old baggage of many people’s class position still persisted and the struggle against these were pushed aside “for the movement” while numerous people on the receiving end of these forms of petty authoritarian domination were forced out. It was clear quickly that “the movement” had replaced the insurrection – the project of our very lives.

Without a vision, a goal, a total project and deep understanding of it we were unable to even imagine taking the opening which was forced open. We couldn’t grasp the totality of the project we were embarking on, only recognizing the streets as a terrain of struggle yet nowhere else.

And then the opening closed.

It’s in these past few years since and in the wake of the collapse of the anarchist movements here in which I’ve been doing the most thinking, studying and reflecting. Slowly in the last year we’ve really begun to re-emerge and yet still we are largely making the same, unconscious mistakes as before of waiting for another movement or uprising and attaching ourselves to it – of being reactive because we don’t think about where we are trying to go, of relegating Anarchism simply to a form of organizing social struggles and emptying it of its specific content.

It’s this desire to not repeat these mistakes of the past, to no longer aimlessly run around in circles or make complex excuses for waiting, to fully embrace Anarchy and delve into the self discovery of what that means that have brought me to the reexamination of the basics of anarchy and in particular the idea of social revolution – a total view of the project of destruction and transformation in all it’s facets, imperfections and particularities.

Social Revolution

The great process of destruction and creation. Some imagine this as a singular moment of battle after which we shall be free. Some see it like a force of nature that will come regardless of what we do – or specifically that we cannot do anything to make it come faster – to justify waiting forever. Others, also seeing it in a religious or natural manner, say it will never come so better to toss it aside, forget about it, and simply act.

It is neither mystical, nor a force of nature, nor something that happens outside of and to us but a concrete process which we undertake. It’s constantly beginning but it has no end because it is the project of our lives – how we live, how we understand ourselves, how we relate to others and the world around us.

In this way we talk of social revolution rather than Political Revolution like the Communists, Socialists, Democrats and Fascists do. The Political is concerned with the taking of power and exerting it over others, the administration of people and things, while the social is concerned with changing the very fabric of our lives – an undertaking no power can demand of us, force upon us, or undertake for us. It’s the very essence of autonomous self organization, we have to do it ourselves for ourselves.

It’s at the same time Individualistic and Collective and does away with the distinction all together. Individualistic because the changing of relations starts at the level of the individual – from the moment we decide to be done with our old selves, be done with submission, with the humiliations thrust upon us by this world. When we begin to see and understand oppression, our suffering and our complicity in the suffering of others, and undergo a process of internal transformation. Collective because once we begin we can no longer turn back, forget, return to our old selves and very quickly we come upon the violent limits of this world – the landlord, the boss, the police and every petty authoritarian along the way. We begin to understand that our lives, our freedom, is bound in the lives and freedom of the Other, that we are not an island, that we rely on other people. We also realize that we are weak. By ourselves we are at the mercy of the dominators, we can strike out in small ways and at first it is freeing but quickly we come face to face with the enormity of the world of horrors. It’s at this point we reach out for the Others and for the first time stumble awkwardly through how be together on our own terms – to add up our Individual power to make a Collective power that doesn’t diminish but empowers. All this to live better and fuller. All this to attack and for the first time claim our lives and our futures.

It is a dance between Destruction and Creation. We Destroy our old selves and the baggage of this world – the inhibitions, the roles thrust onto us, the small ways we keep crawling back to the Masters. Knowing the bourgeoisie, the nationalists, the colonists, the authoritarians won’t simply give up their power – that is what police, armies and militias are for, after all – we lay waste to the old world to clear the time and space for ourselves. It is only with this Destruction that we can talk of Creation – we destroy our old selves to open the possibilities to – for the first time – a free and full existence that is determined on our terms. We destroy the old world and its wretched defenders to claw out the space and time to experiment with all the ways we can exist together. One does not exist without the other.

This is the essence of social revolution, it is conscious steps we take day by day inside ourselves and with each other that is both wildly destructive and beautifully creative. If all we do is think about it, it will be nothing as we are not doing it. If we sit, examine and debate its nature it will be nothing because we are not doing it. It is not a matter of belief, it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in it or care about it because it is something we do, do for our entire lives and it is only by doing does it come to be.

This is all well and good, but it’s still too vague for my taste, so let’s go a little further.

Here is my greatest desire: Anarchy, the autonomy of the individual in the freedom of association assured by the full, free, and equitable access to the means of life, joy and self fulfillment. The understanding that all that exists and will exist is so by the collective effort of all living creatures since the beginning of life and as such it is the rightful collective inheritance of all living creatures, belonging to us all, simply by virtue of birth. It is the negation of authority and hierarchy, the universal emancipation of all living creature from all forms of domination – to neither rule nor be ruled.

It is this view of anarchy which shapes my understanding of social revolution and the process in which we bring it to be. For me, there is no difference between our ends and means, our means must also be our ends – this is why we oppose political parties, vanguardism, a military discipline, bureaucracy and alienating structures that subdue the individual. Not just on tactical grounds, but for the fact that to try to attain anti-authoritarian ends through authoritarian means is an inherent negation of anarchy. It is to explicitly say that means and principles of anarchy are not up to the task of its realization.

The means in which we realize revolution will give anarchist principles their precise historical content – individual autonomy, direct action, the refusal of mediation and compromise, freedom of association, solidarity and mutual aid, etc. Directly putting these into practice in the insurrectionary moment will be chaotic, many will accuse the process and the new individuals it creates of going too far – first and foremost among the terrified pearl clutchers will be those who know that a person who has the means to directly satisfy their needs cannot so easily be managed, mediated, controlled and passed through the gamut of half way measures and incrementalism.

Realism, slow steps, transitory stages will not curb the desires of the barbarous individual born of the insurrection. The revolutionary process is aborted by half measures and it is from the corpse of this process that the monster of the reaction is born and tightens around our necks its claws of Law and Order – a reality we are currently living in the aftermath of the 2020 insurrection.

The first and most important part of the revolutionary process is the abolition of private property – in all of its forms from land and capital to food, clothing, shelter, etc. – by a total and complete expropriation expressed in the opening up and looting of all stores and warehouses, taking stock of all empty houses and apartments and letting those who need them house themselves, the refusal of paying or recognizing rents and debts, the take over and self-organization, mass abandonment, or destruction of all workplaces and opening up their use to all.

This is the actualization of the phrase “Everything for everyone” and it’s negation is the establishment of a revolutionary dollar, a barter system, labor vouchers. The very first revolutionary act is the destruction of Capitalism, exchange economics and the wage system by the immediate self organization by the exploited to assure – through arms – that everyone has the means of access to food, clothing, dignified housing without any intermediary or committee.

This is the first expression of self organization and the revolutionary process lives or dies by it.

What comes next is an uncontrollable extension of fire, self organization and collectivization reaching into every corner of the old world.

The destruction of all records and torching of all financial and property based institutions – banks, treasuries, debt collectors, real estate, property management, etc.

The re-appropriation of the pool of collective knowledge and skill and the self organization of social life to abolish the division of labor which brings an end to the reign of specialists.

The looting of gun stores and armories for the free arming of all peoples and self organization of revolutionary violence – rejecting uniforms, ranks, professionalization, militarization and the armed vanguard – for the routing of state security forces and opening the way to the destruction of all state records and state buildings, the opening up and destruction of jails and prisons, juvies and reformatories.

The take over and collectivization of the means of communication – radio and television stations, printing presses and internet infrastructure for free access and flow of communication, information and more broad spread of the insurrection.

The self organization of specific peoples and struggles into their own collectives, assemblies, networks, federations, or what other forms they choose, no longer content to be smothered by an enforced universalism built on their backs and at their expense, to best discuss by themselves and for themselves the particularities of their oppression and exploitation and how to make the Social Revolution just as much their own.

To sum it all up – it is the total upsetting of normality and creating the conditions that make it impossible to return to the old world when the fires settle and the smoke clears. The steps we take are the clearing away of the physical structures of domination and with it seizing for ourselves the time and space to finally decide, on our own terms without any mediation or intermediary, who we are and how we wish to live.

In drawing out the potentials of this process I am not trying to devise a blueprint to be followed to the letter but am trying to bring light to the means to realize our goals and desires. This will all depend on the specifics of location and situation and needs a deep examination of the local and regional terrain and context to concretely figure out what to do.

Insurrectionary ruptures will come, as they always have, but they will not deliver us to somewhere else on their own. No act of divine providence, no cataclysmic event, no decree passed down from above will deliver us from the wretched position we find ourselves in – prostrated before our oppressors with the burden of their world on our backs.

It is only by the intentional, determined action of us as individuals and together with the rest of the great mass of the exploited individuals that we will pull the emergency break on the death machine of capitalism and industrial civilization and make a break for it, never to return.

Comments

anon (not verified) Wed, 07/10/2024 - 09:08

This is welcome and refreshing. The social revolution is not only an anarchist concept though, and you can find the concept described and defined almost identically in communist literature from last century, which is fine! Also, the armed moment of the insurrection cannot ONLY culminate around the looting of gun stores. More preparation will be needed.

lumpy (not verified) Thu, 07/11/2024 - 09:04

In reply to by anon (not verified)

yeah, the last paragraph is indistinguishable from most other anti-capitalist revolutionary sentiment. the devil is in the details that always play out within the "openings". once the jackboots pause or have been beaten back, temporarily, the next thing that happens is dozens or hundreds of petty power struggles from within "the mass of the exploited"

personally saw it recently within the free palestine encampments, seen it several times before that too

it's act 2 of probably every temporary autonomous zone ever, that lasts beyond the first reaction

anon (not verified) Thu, 07/11/2024 - 09:17

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Correct, which is where things are tough. What form does this additiONAL preparation take? Forming armed cells capable of clandestine attacks prior to or during events of mass revolt is precisely how the armed ML vanguards of the 70s (including self described anarchist ones) were formed. If we DONT want that, we will need to figure out what forms of preparation can allow lots of people to confront the question of arms without relying only on looting or on small anonymous groups.

anon (not verified) Wed, 07/10/2024 - 23:21

There is much that is good and useful in this post, especially against the pale backdrop of the militantly passive and terminally disengaged drop-out culture that  gets called anarchism in the 21st century United States.

However...

"the opening up and destruction of jails and prisons, juvies and reformatories."

There is a jumbo-sized problem with this.

Most people in juvies, jails and prisons probably shouldn't be there -- probably.  But are you seriously claiming that absolutely no one incarcerated in the United States should be locked up?  What about males who rape women and girls, or who rape other males -- there's plenty of this going around. What about violent abusers of children? What about murderers? What about multiple murderers  -- are we just supposed to kiss and make up here? This is the incredibly violent United States that we are talking about now. What about a lumpen sociopath who pistol-whips an old man cashier during a thirty dollar liquor store robbery?  Every convict in the U.S. isn't a more noble version of Mac the Knife in The Threepenny Opera -- almost none of them are.

People in the criminal or petty crime life aren't bold rebels sticking it to The Man. Their world view is more akin to that of perpetually unsuccessful small business entrepreneurs. Unless they hit the big time, in which case they become successful businesspeople, and businesspeople successful or unsuccessful have no useful role to play in an authentic anti-capitalist struggle. They are like what Marx writes in 'The Eighteenth Brumaire..' about how the peasantry of France were no more a social class than a bunch of potatoes in a sack.  Lumpens are like those potatoes, only minus the sack. They are like a bunch of potatoes rolling around on the ground.

In a choice between a half-baked notion of freedom that lets America's sizable population of violent criminals run rampant at everyone else's expense and the repressive physical security guaranteed by a police state most working and poor people would probably opt for the police state. I'm not applauding this, but the rest of the world doesn't simply conform to what I might like.  I can't imagine most urban working class African-Americans seriously wanting to see all jails and prisons immediately abolished. Weirdly enough, it's easier to imagine a mass revolutionary upheaval bringing about the abolition of the capitalist state, wage labor, money and commodity relations than it is to imagine simply abolishing all jails and prisons instantly and out of hand. Letting every last individual out of jail or prison isn't going to create a free egalitarian society -- it would create an immediate counterrevolution from a vast majority of the non-exploiter class social strata who would feel completely powerless and menaced in the face of this. 

SirEinzige Thu, 07/11/2024 - 00:06

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Oh Kevin, where do I start...

For one thing just to start on your end point, there's likely never going to be "a mass revolutionary upheaval bringing about the abolution of the capitalist state, wage labor, money and commodity relations"(lol) You're right that proles don't want sudden prison abolition but they don't want THAT either.

Being a true Marxoid commie cunt of course you don't think that petite business capital has anything useful to offer, but people like Proudhon(who's better then Marx) and history say other wise. Read Renegade History by Thaddeus Russell sometime. In that book you WILL find people in the lumpen and petite biz class that did useful things for human freedom on limited and contextual levels. There are living breathing examples of this throughout history. There is no example of your rev turn big red bureaucracy working. You simply replace plutocrats with bureaucrats.

Kevin, the stupid communist cunt that he is, still subscribes to the state being the back end problem that 'withers away'(lol) and capital as the thing to attack right away. WRONG. You got it backward buddy, you attack the state viciously first and you deal with the fallout(and yes this includes prison runaways who I doubt will get out all at once) Bob Black's Wild Justice is how you deal with human pathogens. You kill the worst of them, you don't confine them because the logic of confinement will always suck in those that are not so pathogenic.

There's never going to be a free egalitarian society because society was never free to begin with. There can be and are interstitials however and petite capital can play a role in this. It is capital that you put on the back burner to wither away not the state. The prison abolishers are pipe dreamers but at least they have the correct underlying values. You and your prison maintenance societal scheme not so much.

lumpy (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 14:18

In reply to by IM JUST SOOO S… (not verified)

yeah except bob black was full of shit and by his own version of events, when faced with an unhinged, gun wielding lunatic, he took the spiteful liberal coward's path of calling the cops to distribute "justice" of the civ cuck variety

his writings on "wild justice" aren't bad actually but unfortunately he talked about where he did not always walk

SirEinzige Fri, 07/12/2024 - 22:42

In reply to by lumpy (not verified)

Most people that are born in modern civilization are going to default to its utilities and that includes calling the police. As Black pointed out back then he had no recourse towards anything that could be restorative or outside of law enforcement so he defaulted to what was available to deal with a leftist muslim doped out antisemite.

Most people in low income contexts call the cops when they have to. It's not a sin(though not ideal either)

anon (not verified) Thu, 07/11/2024 - 13:34

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Has this commenter ready any of the prison abolitionist literature which addresses these concerns extensively?

"In a choice between a half-baked notion of freedom that lets America's sizable population of violent criminals run rampant at everyone else's expense"

In other words, the status quo.

"and the repressive physical security guaranteed by a police state"

In other words, a pipe dream that doesn't really like up with historical police states—certainly not the U.S. one.

"the rest of the world doesn't simply conform to what I might like."

Nor does it conform to this hypothetical.

"I can't imagine most urban working class African-Americans seriously wanting to see all jails and prisons immediately abolished."

Can someone imagine any other large population groups, who are quite politically diverse, wanting that? Why single out this one?

"Weirdly enough, it's easier to imagine a mass revolutionary upheaval bringing about the abolition of the capitalist state, wage labor, money and commodity relations than it is to imagine simply abolishing all jails and prisons instantly and out of hand."

This person takes the shape of their own imagination & presumes it fits everyone's.

"Letting every last individual out of jail or prison isn't going to create a free egalitarian society"

Neither is "the abolition of the capitalist state, wage labor, money and commodity relations." Both, however, would likely be significant steps down such a route.

"it would create an immediate counterrevolution from a vast majority of the non-exploiter class social strata who would feel completely powerless and menaced in the face of this."

You have to wonder if the commenter has ever examined any uprisings which cleared "every last individual" from jails & prisons, or what lessons they drew from actual large-scale counterrevolutionary mobilizations.

Billy Butcher (not verified) Thu, 07/11/2024 - 22:10

Fucking marxians and libcoms believe they're brilliant with their cult of power. They seem to think even being after power means some sort of supreme wisdom.

Well I got really bad news for you, wanks: Power is a fucking lie.

And this is why truth is fucking priceless, and I'd possibly trade anything for it. The rest is all fancy factory cakes, rebranded as "cool" by your local marketing thugs. It's really all fuss anyway you look at it... really look at it.

anon (not verified) Thu, 07/11/2024 - 23:25

"The looting of gun stores and armories for the free arming of all peoples and self organization of revolutionary violence...for the routing of state security forces "

This sounds like a conception of full-scale social revolution as Riots-After-George-Floyd's-Murder 2.0. Big mistake. The U.S. Armed Forces are one of the most formidable mechanism of mass murder even spawned by the human species. A bunch of people with no combat experience grabbing firearms willy-nilly from gun stores and trying to 'throw down' against the well-organized forces of the bourgeois state is a formula for our side getting massacred.

Instead of Alfredo Bonnano, it would be better to look at the central role that the collapse of the Armed Forces -- at the degree that this happened, and the degree that it didn't -- has played in the most significant mass revolutionary upheavals of the past 150 years, starting with the mutiny of the National Guard that began the Paris Commune.

Getting the armed forces to collapse and disperse is going to be the make or break moment in a full-scale revolutionary event.

This text examines this in the context of how the "quasi-mutiny" of G.I.s during the Vietnam War helped to render Uncle Sam's war unwinnable:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/10/g-i-resistance-to-the-vietnam-w…

"...The most effective “anti-war” movement in history was at the end of World War One, when proletarian revolutions broke out in Russia, Germany and throughout Central Europe in 1917 and 1918. A crucial factor in the revolutionary movement of that time was the collapse of the armies and navies of Russian and Germany in full-scale armed mutiny. After several years of war and millions of casualties the soldiers and sailors of opposing nations began to fraternize with each other, turned their guns against their commanding officers and went home to fight against the ruling classes that had sent them to war. The war ended with a global series of mutinies mirroring the social unrest spreading across the capitalist world; some of the most powerful regimes on Earth were quickly toppled and destroyed.

"Soldiers and sailors played a leading role in the revolutionary movement. The naval bases Kronstadt in Russia and Kiel and Wilhelmshaven in Germany became important centers of revolutionary self-organization and action, and the passing of vast numbers of armed soldiers and sailors to the side of the Soviets allowed the working class to briefly take power in Russia. The French invasion of Revolutionary Russia in 1919 and 1920 was crippled by the mutiny of the French fleet in the Black Sea, centered around the battleships France and Jean Bart. Mutinies broke out among sailors in the British Navy and in the armies of the British empire in Asia, and even among American troops sent to aid the counter-revolutionary White Army in the Russian Civil War.

"The collapse of the armed forces is a make or break event for any mass revolutionary movement. In July 1936, Francisco Franco’s invasion of Spain from North Africa was hampered by a mutiny that nearly destroyed the Spanish Navy. A study by the Spanish Republican government during the subsequent civil war concluded that roughly 70% of the officers of the Spanish Navy were killed in this revolt. During the May 1968 revolt in France, President Charles de Gaulle fled the country to consult with commanders in Germany, in part over his concern that he did not know if he could count on the loyalty of French troops in the event of the mass strike wave continuing and turning into a civil war."

An article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine a while back quoted some mook preparing to go to the Jan 6 Slobber-dämmerung at the U.S. Capitol building: "We need a revolution, not a civil war." I was pissed off at reading this - this reactionary stole my dialog line. We need a mass revolutionary movement that will overwhelm this fast-failing old order with as little bloodshed as possible...

anon (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 06:42

In reply to by anon (not verified)

I think this overstates the divergence between the strategic significance of military mutinies & the non-military mass action called for in the piece. You could complement an affinity for Bonanno's conception of social revolution with the examples given rather than pitting them against each other.

Though obviously there was lots of looting in the May & June 2020 uprisings, it seems, in comparison with popular revolts outside the u.s., to have been relatively light on rebellious weapon raids or full-scale attacks on police outposts (rather than largely retaliatory attacks on groups of riot cops).
https://paper.wf/downas/partisan-accounts-of-the-george-floyd-uprising Worth comparing to https://actforfree.noblogs.org/2024/07/01/pandaemonium-france-june-july…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/25/occupy-movement-t… 99 cop shops decommissioned in Egypt 2011.

Also important for the u.s. context specifically is how mutinous conditions in the army were direct extensions of social movements draftees were involved in beforehand.
https://liberatedtexts.com/reviews/mutiny-in-vietnam-richard-boyles-flo…

1960s Black urban rebellions were much more hostile to the National Guard (u.s. troops uniformed) than 2020 uprising which was largely concentrated on police.
https://archive.org/details/e.-tani-kae-sera-false-nationalism-false-in…

anon (not verified) Sat, 07/13/2024 - 09:01

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Every of these instances of uprisings or resistance led by people with military backgrounds had their temporary momentums, yet were brutally crushed by bigger state armies.

Paris Commune especially had a catastrophic ending, as they didn't seem to assume the might of the forces they were up against, and how they were almost sitting ducks on a hill in central Paris. Flight, dispersion and dissemination would have made this uprising last and become greater perhaps... but ideological conviction is a drug, and a prison.

Perhaps the best lessons to be learned is by what's been happening with the situation of anarchists (not those Neonazi 'anarchists") in the Ukraine conflict. Is taking up arms really the way? Have you really considered all the other options?

Not the greatest idea to be challeging states in what they do best, i.e. organized murderous violence.

anon (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 10:13

To 06:42

There is no perspective in this piece for fraternization between anti-capitalist civilians and enlisted people in the military. And there is stuff about looting gun stores as the way forward in some kind of mass revolt. In actual mass revolutionary upheavals the weapons -- and presumably some actual knowledge of how to use them -- mostly comes from mutinous armed forces personnel and from the collapse of the repressive apparatus. That's what happened in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918, Spain in '36, Budapest in '56 and so on.

If you claim to want to see the revolutionary overthrow of this social order but have no conception of how central the armed forces are in this then you need to start thinking about this big time.

lumpy (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 10:36

In reply to by anon (not verified)

true!

i would argue the most significant difference between anarchists and various anti-capitalist revolutionaries from today versus roughly 100 years ago is that everyone was war veterans. not literally but remarkable percentages of the militants who did the heavy shit were hardened war veterans and/or surrounded by friends, comrades and family who were vets.

europe was awash in war veterans, maria nikiforova (somehow?!) fought in the french foreign legion and of course, the style of fighting from that time was only just emerging from the famously brutal trenches, in to mechanization and lightweight machine guns. this same dynamic applies to the far right of course but they unfortunately seem to understand it a lot better

anon (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 10:49

In reply to by lumpy (not verified)

This is exactly right.

One of the reasons that partisans associated with Makhno became such a formidable fighting force in the Southern Ukraine during the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1921 was that as Imperial Russia’s western front collapsed, fighting men deserting the Czar’s armed forces took large quantities of weapons and ammunition home with them, including horse-cart drawn heavy machine guns and small artillery pieces.

During the May 1968 general strike in France, with two-thirds of wage earners in France walking off the job, and in many cases seizing and occupying their workplaces, President Charles de Gaulle secretly left the country to consult with commanders in Germany, in part over his concern that he might not be able to count on the loyalty of French troops in the event of the mass strike wave continuing and turning into a full-scale civil war:

“The left-wing paper Nouvel Observateur reported that after the 5th Army was put on alert for strikebreaking, soldiers’ committees were created to turn against their superiors and to sabotage transport and armored cars. Le Monde reported that “The Ministry of Defense has resisted all attempts to use the army in a way which might involve direct confrontation with the strikers.”

A leaflet issued by a committee of the 153rd RIMECA (Mechanized Infantry Regiment) stationed near Strasbourg stated:

“Like all conscripts, we are confined to barracks. We are being prepared to intervene as repressive forces. The workers and youth must know that the soldiers of the contingent will never shoot on workers. We Action Committees are opposed at all costs to the surrounding of factories by soldiers. Tomorrow or the day after we are expected to surround an armaments factory which 300 workers who work there want to occupy.

“We shall fraternize. Soldiers of the contingent, form your committees!”

GEF (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 15:28

In reply to by lumpy (not verified)

Veterans only avail as insurgents within the context of symmetrical and sometimes asymmetrical warfare they were trained for. 1956 was a stretch, but the society of post-WW2 ain't as Western flick simple as it was 100 years ago.

A toxic culture of collective collaboration and hierarchy of privileges is very rampant across Western countries, especially on the workplace -especially in the military workplace afaik- and you better come up with some clever revolutionary strategy to overcome this mess. If there's any war that can be fought by anarchists it"s an individual one, against the hierarchies that pervade in every social context. Collectives and groups keep gravitating toward exclusive tribalism and this only champions not undermines capitalism.

Btw the French Foreign Legion is a fascist organization. They're a product of the Restoration and reactionary in every other way imaginable. So think twive is anyone ever considers...

anon (not verified) Sat, 07/13/2024 - 10:14

In reply to by anon (not verified)

(Each comment has a "reply" button immediately under it. If you press that button, a new page loads where you can type your response & then the comment will appear directly under whatever you were replying to, but indented so that it can be followed easier.)

"There is no perspective in this piece for fraternization between anti-capitalist civilians and enlisted people in the military. And there is stuff about looting gun stores as the way forward in some kind of mass revolt. " Yes. That's where we come in with our ability to bridge the gap, such as by this conversation or things we do offline.

"In actual mass revolutionary upheavals the weapons -- and presumably some actual knowledge of how to use them -- mostly comes from mutinous armed forces personnel and from the collapse of the repressive apparatus. That's what happened in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918, Spain in '36, Budapest in '56 and so on." All these 20th-century European (why?) examples also featured mass conscription, which means many of the people with military experience had much more ideological distance from the military than the volunteers, however reluctant, who make up the u.s. armed forces today; I think this is also relevant. 'Flipping' state troops or widespread recruitment of (former) state troops seems to me like one path to revolutionary insurrections, but far from the only one, which becomes obvious as soon as you look outside Europe...

anon (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 11:22

It is a testament to the total lack of any kind of real anti-capitalist politics in the United States that although enlisted people played a solid role in hamstringing the war effort in Indochina, there has been no anti-capitalist/anti-statist effort to continue something like the G.I. Coffeehouse efforts of the Vietnam era.

Fascists and white racists have been involved in sustained efforts to establish a presence in the U.S. armed forces since the 1970s. The military has an organic appeal for them, due to their high level of psychopathy and the way that scum like that groove on armed violence. But from supposed enemies of capitalism? -- and where are these to be found, exactly? -- zip, zed, ningun -- nada.

anon (not verified) Sat, 07/13/2024 - 08:03

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Wasn't a serious answer. Academia is a joke and will only get you our well-known crowd of impressionable liberals, at best, waiting in queue for recruitment in the Party or the nonprofit sector. Better be hanging out at Business School at this point... but that crowd is awful and hyperconformist.

So the army? What makes you think your next anarchist secret society in the Service won't be just some other ploy set up as military intelligence 4D chess? Intel divisions weren't that cunning 100 years back.

So this leaves us with... the highway overpass crowd? The same-old train-hopping oogles? Occasional meetups at the dumpster? Dunno, maybe.

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