Insurrectionary Anarchism - Theory

Theory

A few main points can be identified within contemporary insurrectionary anarchism that go back to tactics employed by illegalism and propaganda by the deed anarchists:

1. "The concept of 'attack' is at the heart of the insurrectionist ideology". As such it is viewed that "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 to act". In the state of action is in the state that one learns. The Italian text Ai ferri corti says: "An individual with a passion for social upheaval and a 'personal' vision of the class clash wants to do something immediately. If he or she analyses the transformation of capital and the State it is in order to attack them, certainly not so as to be able to go to sleep with clearer ideas." "Attack is the refusal of mediation, pacification, sacrifice, accommodation, and compromise in struggle."

2. Insurrection(s) and Revolution: Revolution is seen as "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 the most 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."

3. "The self-management of struggle" as "those that struggle are autonomous in their decisions and actions; this is the opposite of an organization of synthesis which always attempts to take control of struggle. Struggles that are synthesized within a single controlling organization 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." It is seen that the system and its institutions are afraid of rebellious acts becoming propaganda by the deed and thus making rebellion extend itself. "Small actions, therefore, easily reproducible, requiring unsophisticated means that are available to all, are by their very simplicity and spontaneity uncontrollable." This also means that insurrectionary anarchists should not see themselves as a vanguard or as the conscious ones but just as part "of the exploited and excluded".

4. Temporary affinity groups instead of permanent organizations: This means rejection of ": 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." Instead the view that "organization is for concrete tasks". "The informal anarchist organization is therefore a specific organization which gathers around a common affinity."

5. The transcendence of the dichotomy between the individual and the rest of society and of individualism and communism: "Insurrection begins with the desire of individuals to break out of constrained and controlled circumstances, the desire to reappropriate the capacity to create one's own life as one sees fit." But the view that "Individuality can only flourish where equality of access to the conditions of existence is the 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 no equality or identity of individuals implied in true communism."

Insurrectionary anarchists are generally interested in class struggle. Many also identify with related theoretical positions such as anarchist communism, Situationist theory, autonomism, post-left anarchy, anarcho-primitivism, and green anarchism.