À travers la dernière décennie, à la fois en Europe et au-delà, une nouvelle génération d’activistes a mis le mouvement pour le climat au premier plan. Des groupes tels que Extinction Rébellion, Fridays for Future, et Ende Gelände ont réussi à sortir des marges, convainquant des millions à s’engager pour la défense de la planète. C’était il n’y a pas si longtemps que peu étaient même conscient·e·s de la possibilité d’une catastrophe climatique – de nos jours c’est tout le contraire. Je n’ai aucune intention de minimiser ces réussites. Ce sur quoi j’aimerais attirer l’attention, toutefois, est que l’activisme pour le climat a fait peu ou pas de différence à quelque chose de très important, la seule chose importante qui compte réellement : de réellement abaisser la quantité de carbone émise par les humain·e·s à travers la planète. De telles émissions continuent à augmenter chaque année, tout comme les températures mondiales moyennes, les catastrophes météorologiques, et le taux d’extinction des espèces. Gagner la reconnaissance de toute la société n’a pas été suffisant. Dans tous ses principaux objectifs, le mouvement pour le climat reste une défaite décisive.
J’ai une suggestion sur pourquoi c’est le cas. Parce que le mouvement pour le climat est resté coincé dans la supposition que ceux au pouvoir doivent être convaincus d’apporter les changements nécessaires pour nous. Malgré le recours à une esthétique de l’action directe, la plupart de l’activisme pour le climat s’est concentrée à obtenir l’attention médiatique (incluant les médias sociaux grand public, ce qui est autant une extension du pouvoir capitaliste que la télévision ou les journaux) dans le but d’atteindre une reconnaissance sociale, finalement pour faire pression sur des politiciens. Toutefois, l’élite politique ne sera jamais capable de résoudre cette crise, parce que le système qui leur accorde le pouvoir est aussi le système qui littéralement prospère en dévastant la planète. Ce qu’on appelle « l’économie » est une mégamachine hors de contrôle qui juge tout ce qui n’est pas une expansion illimitée (un processus qui implique la dévastation écologique) comme une sorte de désastre. Peu importe leur affiliation ou les promesses qu’ils accordent, tous les politiciens et corporations plaident allégeance à la logistique à l’arrière de ce monstre dévoreur du monde.
Certain·e·s rétorqueraient que quelques éléments du mouvement pour le climat échappent à ce malaise. Contrairement à Extinction Rébellion ou Fridays for Future, des groupes anti-capitalistes comme Ende Gelände ne font pas de demandes explicites aux politiciens, se concentrant à la place à perturber directement les infrastructures critiques. Toutefois, on ne peut pas supposer qu’occuper pacifiquement une mine de charbon (ou ses artères) pour quelques heures est une manière réaliste de la mettre à l’arrêt pour de bon ; c’est juste une autre manière d’attirer l’intérêt des médias. De telles actions n’ont aucun sens à moins qu’on espère, consciemment ou non, qu’elles puissent servir à convaincre des politiciens d’intervenir et de réformer l’économie pour nous. D’autres organisations de masse (par exemple, Les Soulèvement de la terre) pourraient apparaître comme un progrès, étant donné qu’elles favorisent le sabotage d’infrastructures écocidaires, et en ce sens encouragent quelque chose qui ressemble à l’action directe (bien que dirigée par une avant-garde secrète). Là encore, toutefois, cela ne serait qu’une manière plus séduisante de recevoir l’attention des médias ; car de telles attaques seraient bien plus effectives si menées par des petits groupes autonomes qui frappent dans l’obscurité, surtout là où les autorités ne s’y attendent pas.
Pour faire court, la plupart de l’activisme pour le climat a pour fixation de demander de l’aide de la part d’un système qui est intrinsèquement incapable de répondre. Elle répand ainsi un ethos de déresponsabilisation et d’infantilisation, insinuant que les gens ordinaires sont incapables de faire face à la crise climatique par elleux-mêmes. Mais vraiment c’est tout l’inverse. On sera tou·te·s réduit·e·s en cendres avant que les gouvernements fassent ce qui a besoin d’être fait. Il revient ainsi au·x rebel·le·s non spécialisé·e·s, dévoué·e·s, de commencer à résoudre la crise directement. À quoi cela pourrait ressembler ? Adopter sans délai les changements nécessaires que ceux au pouvoir ne considéreront jamais sérieusement. Par là je veux dire mettre à l’arrêt les centrales électriques, les aéroports, les autoroutes, et les usines, tout en arrangeant des moyens décentralisés (et ainsi avec dans une esprit écologique) de nos subsistances sans eux. Cette proposition implique sans aucun doute une escalade massive dans la stratégie. Quoiqu’il en soit, étant donné la gravité de la situation, combinée au fait que les méthodes actuelles ont prouvé leur insuffisance, je pense qu’il est temps qu’on considère la révision radicale de notre approche.
L’inspiration est déjà là. Par exemple, la campagne Switch Off ! (initié en Allemagne en 2023, et qui se répand au-delà de l’Europe depuis) a laissé tomber la réforme du capitalisme, se concentrant à la place à paralyser directement l’infrastructure responsable de la dévastation de la planète. De tels exemples de sabotages se répandent, qu’ils soient associés à cette bannière, une autre, ou pas revendiqués du tout. Pour ne mentionner que quelques unes des actions pertinentes : en septembre 2023, le réseau ferroviaire de la périphérie d’Hambourg a été saboté en plusieurs points, provoquant une perturbation majeure dans l’un des plus grands ports d’Europe ; en mars 2024, une attaque incendiaire du réseau électrique proche de Berlin a fermé l’immense Gigafactory Tesla pendant plusieurs jours ; en mai 2025, une double attaque sur une centrale électrique et un pylône à haute-tension a causé un blackout dans une partie importante de la France, privant d’électricité un aéroport, plusieurs usines, et le Festival du Film de Cannes. On pourra aussi se rappeler que l’aéroport de Londres-Gatwick a été fermé pendant plusieurs jours en 2018, selon certaines sources (et pour des motivations inconnues) parce que un drone portatif a survolé les pistes. Malgré les massifs efforts policiers, celleux qui ont réalisé cette action facilement reproductible n’ont jamais été retrouvé·e·s ; les autres actions mentionnées ici n’ont pas mené à de quelconques arrestations non plus. En contraste, les tactiques activistes conventionnelles pour le climat (par exemple, le recours aux lock-ons, aux trépieds, à la superglu) tiennent le fait d’être arrêté·e comme acquis, sacrifiant en cela nos camarades aux tribunaux, aux prison, et à la surveillance continue. C’est un prix cher pour des actions qui, à côté du fait qu’elles favorisent une attitude de soumission envers les autorités, ont peu ou pas d’impact sur les capacités de fonctionnement des industries qui trash le climat.
Dans le but de commencer à faire face au problème à l’échelle du changement climatique, toutefois, les attaques contre les infrastructure écocidaires doivent devenir encore plus ambitieuses. Cela pourrait être formulé en termes de dépassement de la focalisation sur les industries spécifiques en ciblant la civilisation industrielle dans son ensemble. Les centres de production, d’extraction, et de recherche pertinents doivent être pris pour cibles ; ainsi que le réseau électrique qui les lie ensemble, à savoir, le réseau même qui donne sa puissance (dans les deux sens du terme) au système de la destruction au départ. Une vision aussi audacieuse paraît déplacée pour beaucoup de gens. Mais il est trop souvent oublié que le changement climatique et la civilisation industrielle sont en fait exactement le même problème. La dégradation humaine du climat n’est pas quelque chose d’ancien ; elle est autant datée que l’industrialisation elle-même. Depuis à peu près 150 ans, la vie humaine s’est centrée de façon croissante sur l’usage des machines qui convertissent les combustibles fossiles en énergie, émettant en cela du dioxyde de carbone. La culture humaine, en d’autres termes, a été mise de force dans une relation de dépendance envers une infrastructure en perpétuelle expansion qui ne peut pas fonctionner sans empoisonner le climat. La Révolution industrielle a été initiée il y a seulement quelques générations, et ses conséquences ont déjà mené beaucoup à questionner la viabilité de la vie elle-même au-delà du siècle. Il ne pourrait y avoir de plus accablant de ce tournant technologique relativement récent.
Certain·e·s répondront, bien sûr, que la civilisation industrielle n’est pas intrinsèquement dévastatrice de la terre, et est déjà dans le processus d’être réformée. On parle là de la dite « Transition verte » annoncée à travers le spectre politique comme la solution à la crise climatique. Toutefois, c’est une erreur courante de penser que les énergies éolienne, solaire, ou hydroélectrique représentent d’authentique alternatives aux méthodes conventionnelles ; car en réalité elles sont harnachées aux combustibles fossiles, qui sont en train de brûler en quantités plus élevées que jamais. Penser que l’économie capitaliste consentirait jamais à laisser des réserves inexploitées de charbon, de gaz, ou de pétrole dans le sol c’est méconnaître la principale logique d’un système basé sur la croissance illimitée. La conséquence de l’investissent record dans la green tech, ainsi, n’a été que pour catapulter la consommation mondiale d’énergie à des niveaux sans précédent.
Par ailleurs, à côté du fait qu’elle échoue à engager une transition, la restructuration économique en cours est tout sauf verte. Premièrement, les combustibles fossiles sont des sources d’énergie hautement denses, que ni l’énergie solaire, éolienne, ou hydraulique ne sont prêtes d’égaler ; il s’ensuit que les « énergies renouvelables », si attendues qu’elles maintiennent les niveaux actuels d’absorption, doivent consommer des étendues de terre bien plus grandes que celles qui sont déjà dédiées à la production d’énergie. Deuxièmement, les technologies clés d’une telle restructuration dépend lourdement de l’extraction de minéraux, en particulier par l’exploitation minière. Par exemple, le nickel et les minéraux de terres rares sont nécessaires à la construction de panneaux solaires et d’éoliennes ; le lithium et le cobalt sont des composants clés de leurs batteries, ainsi que celles des voitures électriques, des vélos électriques et des smartphones. En tant que tel, et au nom du devenir « vert », l’économie capitaliste est en train de piller chaque recoin du globe à la recherche de ressources lucratives, conduisant donc à la dévastation écologique, au travail forcé, et aux conflits géopolitiques. Même les profondeurs inexplorés des océans sont sur le point d’être saccagées ; ensuite ce seront les astéroïdes et d’autres planètes. En somme, donc, ce qui a été promu comme la solution technologique à la catastrophe climatique n’est qu’un vaste mensonge camouflant la poursuite de l’expansion de la mégamachine.
Est présente dans le discours de presque tou·te·s celleux que l’on rencontre de nos jours une compréhension que les humains sont en train de dévaster la biosphère – et simultanément de se suicider. Pourtant, beaucoup moins sont prêt·e·s à envisager la crise pour ce qu’elle est réellement, à savoir, la résultante d’une fuite en avant dans le développement technologique. Ceci n’est pas un problème auquel on peut faire face par le vote, la pétition, la manifestation, le boycott, ou l’investissement. La seule réponse réaliste à la crise climatique est l’attaque de la civilisation industrielle. Je ne m’attends pas à ce que cette proposition s’apprête à recevoir une popularité large ; après tout, elle garantit de déstabiliser le seule monde que presque n’importe qui n’a jamais connu. Toutefois, on pourrait devoir tenir compte du fait que beaucoup ou la plupart des humains insisteront toujours pour maintenir leurs voitures, frigos, et smartphones en marche – même au prix d’abandonner l’air même que l’on respire. Il incombe donc à celleux dont les priorités sont ailleurs de procéder à l’action courageuse et intransigeante.
Comments Off on Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence 2025
Aug232025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Technology is a steaming pile of whatever. The salad of transistors, capacitors, and wires that we marinate in for 17.2 minutes before we drink our coffee are the first thing we see each morning, while our subversions of the droppings of surveillance capitalism are the last things burning their images into our retinas before we close our eyes each night. The AI-augmented totality that numbs our senses and optimizes our labour lumbers on, vulnerable but unhindered. Let’s not say we never tried.
The Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence is a yearly gathering on the intersection of anarchism and technology.
A 2-day event: October 11 and 12 2025 At Batiment 7 in Tiohtia:ke Montreal
workshops
presentations
skill shares
discussions
and more!
Welcome to anarcho-curious techies, tech-curious anarchists, and everyone in between.
Our goal is to connect with each other, to practice, to throw that rectangle that constantly demands your attention into a blender and sculpt the shattered pieces into the shape of a butt to plaster onto your landlord’s porch.
Tonight, people engaged in combative mutual aid. Food should be free, as with all essential items. The scourge of capitalism has made it so that necessities such as food and housing are things to be earned rather than inalienable basic needs.
Today we are making food free in our own way, by liberating sustenance to redistribute amongst the community. And we will do it again. The state apparatus may try to stop us, and in doing so, show its true colors. The government and the corporate interest it serves are not your friends. They will sooner let you starve than sacrifice their bottom line. Eat freely!
Comments Off on A Response to the Commentary on “When There Are Many of Us, We Do What We Want”
Apr252025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Following the repeated failures of so-called “combative” demonstrations in Montreal between 2023 and 2025, two militant texts sought to offer, on the one hand, a strategic analysis focused on massification through autonomous structures, and on the other, a skeptical critique of that orientation, denouncing the fetishization of demonstrations and militant voluntarism. Both texts share a common diagnosis: our collective weakness in the face of the state, our isolation, and the routinization of our mobilizations. The present text is a critique of the second piece, written by N.
The Fetishization of Spontaneity: A Critique of Anti-Strategy
The core disagreement between the two texts seems to me to hinge on a central strategic question: how can we explain the fact that the majority of the working class—including its most exploited segments—does not spontaneously respond to calls for radical mobilization, and instead, in advanced capitalist countries, remains largely passive or aligned with various forms of reformism?
N. rightly points out the routinized and sometimes performative nature of certain activist practices. However, in attempting to explain this passivity, his response leans into a kind of mechanical determinism that legitimizes a cynical skepticism—one that dismisses any form of political mediation as a futile avant-garde project: “It is the social contradictions themselves that produce struggles, not a group of revolutionary evangelists trying to convince proletarians dulled by capitalism one by one.”
If it is necessary to break with the “fetishization of the demonstration”—the idea that it constitutes the core of our political practice—it is equally important to be wary of the fetishization of spontaneity, which consists in rejecting the necessity of organization in favour of a passive expectation, based on the illusion that the contradictions of capitalism will mechanically trigger a mass uprising. This posture amounts to a strategic retreat that cloaks political powerlessness in the mystique of spontaneity.
The Passivity of the Exploited Classes
The passivity or reformist orientation of the working class is largely explained by the fundamentally episodic nature of the class struggle. The contradictions of capitalism are not, in themselves, sufficient to make workers revolutionary. As Charles Post argues, class consciousness does not arise mechanically from exploitation, but rather emerges primarily through the lived experience of self-organization and collective struggle—experiences that open space for receptivity to radical ideas.
However, this foundational condition for the development of class consciousness—active participation in mass struggles—can only ever be partial, rare, and temporary. Structurally, the vast majority of workers cannot sustain long-term engagement in the struggle, since their position within capitalist social relations requires them to sell their labour power in order to ensure their own material reproduction. The imperative of individual survival therefore limits, under normal conditions, the possibility of sustained collective engagement.
In the absence of collective struggles, capitalist logics, reformism, and the institutional forms of liberal politics tend to regain hegemonic status. Workers are then less inclined to seek a transformation of the system and instead aim to secure what they perceive as a fair share of it—without challenging its underlying structures of power. Worse still, when reformism fails and no credible radical alternative is available, capitalism is able to produce the very material conditions for its own ideological reinforcement: individualization, social fragmentation, and competition among the exploited. In this vacuum, reactionary, racist, and patriarchal movements flourish—even within segments of the working class itself.
It is therefore deeply irresponsible to abandon the self-organization of direct action and the construction of alternatives—whether in the name of reformism or out of a fetishization of spontaneity. The contradictions of capitalism, on their own, do not generate class consciousness, nor do they lead to human emancipation.
The Avant-Garde
The inherently episodic nature of class struggle means that only a small minority of the working class remains durably engaged in militant activity. What we might call an “avant-garde”—without any dogmatic overtones—refers here to those who, in the lulls between waves of struggle, strive to keep alive practices of solidarity and confrontation, whether in the workplace or within communities.
To avoid any misunderstanding, this is not a classical “Leninist” or “Trotskyist” notion of the avant-garde as an enlightened minority bearing a political truth to impose upon the masses. Rather, it is a way to designate a concrete role: that of individuals who, despite isolation, exhaustion, and defeat, persist in sustaining institutions, practices, and imaginaries of struggle—often invisible, yet essential to the reproduction of a militant collective memory. This role can—and should—be debated, renamed, and critiqued. But to abandon it altogether would be to surrender to strategic disarmament.
It is true that some militant figures, in certain contexts, become the social base of a working-class bureaucracy, detached from the concrete realities of waged labour and prone to the logic of reformism: distance from sites of production, freedom from the constraints of wage labour, and the adoption of organizational jargon and apparatus-driven practices.
But there are many others who continue to organize while living the contradictions of capitalist work: precarity, alienation, subordination. These are militants embedded in the everyday life of the class, patiently organizing their co-workers, neighbours, and communities.
Any organization, no matter how well intentioned, can generate its own inertia, rigidity, and hierarchical tendencies. But this should not serve as a justification for rejecting political mediation altogether. The fetishization of spontaneity, which draws a strict line between conscious militancy and popular authenticity, runs the risk of discrediting organic militant activity—that is, the kind of organizing that emerges from the lived experience of the oppressed—by reducing it to a suspicious form of avant-gardism, or even to a so-called “revolutionary racket.”
N.’s article illustrates this tendency when it cites contemporary movements perceived as spontaneous—such as the BLM/George Floyd uprisings, the Yellow vests movement, or the social revolts in Chile—highlighting the absence of mass organizations guiding them from the outset. However, it is highly unlikely that these movements emerged without the active involvement of a core group of experienced individuals, shaped by various militant traditions, whether or not they explicitly identified with a revolutionary consciousness.
Moreover, despite their strength, these movements did not articulate a clear revolutionary project—which might in fact serve as an argument in favour of the initial text. In the absence of autonomous mass structures grounded in explicitly anti-capitalist practises and discourse, social conflict tends to express itself in reformist, incoherent, or contradictory ways. Had a structured revolutionary counter-power existed over the past two decades—one rooted in collective memory, political culture, and autonomous forms of organization—it is likely that the political consciousness emerging from these popular movements would have been more clearly oriented toward systemic rupture.
Post-Industrial Society and Class Consciousness
Social classes are historically dynamic relations, and their political expression requires both a shared experience of exploitation and an organizational effort to build a collective force conscious of its own interests.
Yet many activists today resist the project of constructing class consciousness, often drawing on assumptions rooted in post-industrial society theories. According to these perspectives, the expansion of the service sector, the growing complexity of professional structures, the rise of theoretical knowledge, increased living standards, and the emergence of state regulation have reshaped social conflict around the control of information. This, in turn, is said to have enabled the emergence of a new middle class composed of managers and skilled employees. For these approaches, contemporary society is no longer structured primarily by class conflict, but rather by identities and discourses capable of defining themselves. As such, our societies are seen as less constrained by socioeconomic factors like class, and as offering greater room for individual agency—unlike the more rigid industrial societies of the past.
Nevertheless, these analyses tend to overestimate the impact of changes in the division of labour on relations of exploitation. As Peter Meiksins aptly puts it, “capitalism has never, not in the past, and not now, generated a homogeneous working class. On the contrary, it has consistently created a varied, highly stratified working class, and capitalists have had an inherent interest in making sure that it is as divided as it possibly can be.” Likewise, the increasing complexity of the contemporary division of labour does not eliminate the structural conditions of reproduction for the working class—namely, the obligation to perform surplus labour by selling one’s labour power on the market.
Although specific relations of exploitation characterize particular sociohistorical conditions and shape class formation, class consciousness has always been a contingent, relational, and collective process—constantly in flux between formation and disintegration. In this sense, class consciousness is not a mechanical product of socioeconomic factors, but the outcome of conscious agents acting within given social, political, and economic conditions. In the past as today, the development of a collective class consciousness has been a difficult and demanding process, forged through sustained and deliberate efforts of militant organization.
In short, capitalism still generates “fields of attraction” that polarize society into lived class positions. Sociohistorical processes can—and have—led to the emergence of groups becoming conscious of themselves as a class opposed to another. The challenge today is to bring about such a process through sustained organizational efforts, as was achieved in previous periods.
Self-Organization as a Conclusion
The lack of people in our demonstrations is a symptom of the current passivity of the working classes, in the sense that the street is an extension, not the centre, of social conflict. This passivity is rooted in the absence of collective struggles that provide an alternative to individualized or reactionary responses.
To claim that we should avoid organizational efforts for fear of becoming “revolutionary evangelists” is irresponsible. It condemns us to remain what we have been for the past three decades in Quebec: a radical fringe within reformist social movements; a weak political mediation with no real capacity to constitute a social force capable of threatening the existing order.
What is needed is not a dogmatic return to a rigid form of organization, nor a moralistic conception of militancy, but a materialist strategy for rebuilding the autonomous social power of the working class. This is not about imposing a universal model, but about affirming that without durable forms of mediation between experiences of exploitation and a political horizon, no counter-power can take shape.
A coherent revolutionary politics today should:
Identify the sites where exploitation is most intense, visible, and collectively experienced;
Build struggles that aim to democratize and repoliticize production and social reproduction;
Make the street an extension, not the centre, of social conflict;
Focus on the patient construction of class consciousness as a historical process;
Build popular organizations capable of demanding democratic control over economic spheres, through the unification, not the mere juxtaposition, of struggles.
Comments Off on Among the Fragments – A Response to Inaction
Apr252025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Struggle isn’t a puzzle we solve by sharpening definitions.
It is mud. It is cold dawn. It is the door that must be knocked on twice because the first knock was fear and the second is a promise. Like we’ve always been told.
He insists: “We must write, because only then will we be able to tell who is serious and who is not”.
We need theory that walks like the body does: limping when we limp, sprinting when sirens grow, picking glass from its heel after the march, then laughing about it around the kitchen table while the kettle shrieks.
Remember how it felt when the names were lighter? We called ourselves anarchists, autonomist, anti-authoritarian, some remained nameless, only to be used as a shorthand for the impossible promise we carried like contraband in our chests: that no hierarchy is eternal and that ordinary people can and should arrange their life without overseers.
We were meant to be the crowbar; we were meant to pry open rooms we were locked out of. Then the rooms multiplied, each declaring itself the only legitimate sanctuary. We became curators of micro‑identities: anti‑authoritarian but not anarchist, autonomist but not left, insurrectionist but suspicious of the autonomists. Language then turned itself into something heavier than the deeds it was meant to inspire.
Writing is not the enemy. Writing is a whetstone — but the blade must leave the house. Let pamphlets circulate, but let every pamphlet end with a time and place: “Meet here. Bring tools. No Phones.”
Let zines be passports that expire unless stamped by action.
Our word need be scrawled on cardboard, rehearsed in networks, corrected in practice, revised by failure, annotated in bruises, and eventually sung — without copyright — by crowds that forget who wrote the first verse, by crowds we won’t be apart of.
Hold the pen lightly, hold one another firmly, and hold no illusion that theory absolves us from the necessity of risk that is expected from each of us. Our pages must be worth the dirt that clings to their margins. So dirty them.
Fred Hampton claimed that only revolutionaries die, not revolutions. Yet, I can’t help but smell the reeking odor of formaldehyde off of both me and those around. Our rallies feel like wakes: we chant slogans that sound like last rites, we smash storefronts like mourners breaking dishes, hoping the clatter will bring about the insurrection, the revolution, le grand soir. The streets reply with sirens, batons, no red sun. Insurance replaces the window, we keep the bruises, lose momentum again.
Meanwhile, the rest of us exchange theoretical love letters across online boulevards where eye contact is impossible. We scroll, applaud, eviscerate, scroll again, waiting for the curtain to fall on the academic pageantry. If the pen must be hoisted like a holy relic above all else, I would sooner snap it, scatter the ink into garden soil, let it nourish tomatoes for me to eat, as only then would it be of use to me.
To the comrades in our Montreal milieu, who walked away, who have been seduced by the glow of theory, who are disillusioned, your absence gapes like an open ravine; it’s filled with ritualized quarrels. We keep circling the same questions — what now, how, with whom — discovering each time that the void is expanding because we have no base, no ground compacted by shared labour, no community. Inaction does not merely leave a space; it deepens the chasm that now threatens to swallow what little remains of our common ground.
To those who’ve departed: where are you now? Will we only cross paths under tear gas, silhouettes lit by dumpsters on fire? Will we be worthy of your presence then? Must devotion be visible only in the strobe of police batons? Will your labour be lent for barricades only? Come argue across the table while the coffee burns, scream at me in raw disagreement, have an unexpected laugh.
When you are all satisfied after the ink is finally dry, close the laptop, lace your boots, find the fraction of the faction you cannot stand and invite them to hash this out over a beer no obscure webpage can overhear. Let our factions braid themselves into something sturdier than agreement — into familiarity, into a landscape where contradiction is welcomed and nobody is exiled. Only dialogue, stubborn and messy, can weld practice back onto principle until sparks fly and the metal holds.
Writing is a spark, not a furnace. The furnace is built in kitchens, meetings, late night phone calls, and beer soaked arguments that end with a workable list of next steps, and a solid plan.
Respond to this post if you must, but understand I won’t scroll back to read it. I only seek a tap on the shoulder, a chair pulled out for us to sit.
A Partisan Reading of the Events from Spring to Fall 2024 in Tiohtià:ke-Montreal
This text seeks to take stock of the political sequence that unfolded from the McGill encampment of April 27, 2024, to the student strike of November 21 and 22 against the NATO summit. We wish to bring forward a number of remarks and lessons that the events of the past months have revealed to us.
At the heart of this text is the concern with the conditions of possibility for a conflictual situation and its possible passage into an insurrectional situation. Throughout the past year, we have tried to understand what unfolded in the movement of solidarity with Palestine in Montreal, stretching from spring to summer and up to November 2024. It is a matter for us of discerning the openings and the limits of such an overflow.
This text is addressed to those who feel concerned by the political experiments that took place throughout the spring, summer, and fall. It is addressed to those who want to engage head-on with the conflictual, insurrectional, and revolutionary political situation. That things were difficult, disappointing, enraging, and wounding is, to us, simply the obvious fact of any unusual political moment. These difficulties are not an end, but a starting point.
This past year has been a surprising one. Many people have lived through the most intense and overwhelming political and existential moments of their lives.
This text is also addressed to them.
⸻
“We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine And the machine is bleeding to death”
“For the first time, workers felt at home in these factories where, until then, everything constantly reminded them they were on someone else’s property. Every moment of the working day, some painful little detail reminded the worker, at his machine, that he was not at home. These men and women, who had belonged to the factory every day of their lives, for a few days, the factory belonged to them. And that is the tragedy of such an existence: for them to feel at home in the factory, the factory had to stop. Now that the machines are running again, they find themselves under the same constraint. Yet at least they can become conscious of this tragedy. They have once felt what a factory should be. For the first time in their lives, the sight of the factory, the workshops, and the machines was a joy.” — Strikes and Pure Joy, Simone Weil
Weil’s words feel distant to us. Between the four walls of the university, the machines are imperceptible. Yet the factory illuminates the amphitheater. The feeling of being “other” — everywhere. The intimate catastrophe of that.
That everything seems impossible, inadequate, futile, exhausting, titanic — this is precisely what shows the gravity of the work ahead. In the trough of the political wave, the specter of defeat still haunts us.
We are a few who share the sensitive affect of disaster, a few who want to organize. The world of a few years ago already feels very distant. Everything is accelerating, and the empire is tightening around the carcass of history. We are only a handful, and we are not satisfied with the small victories some proclaim. Some seem tired by the latest political sequence and take those victories as a balm. So, if these so-called victories are to be lived — reified perhaps, but still lived — so be it; let’s take them seriously, let’s cherish them. Let’s linger on the angles they suggest.
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Since the end of the 2005–2008–2012–2015 sequence, we have witnessed first the festive, then the slow and silent death of something like a student force. Then, in spasms — the internships strike, “No to COP15,” the NATO summit — something like a combative spirit resurfaced. But the aura is no longer really there. Each attempt appears as a fleeting political moment. Its ephemeral character is its illness, not its direction; it is its internal limit. The punctuality of the last strikes is not a decision but a fatality. And it seems that there is something inauthentic in these moments, truly — in the sense that the act of striking does not appear as a moment of rage and breakdown.
The time of the strike should be a time when the empty and homogeneous time of everyday life is suspended, fissured, then broken open to new encounters, new uses, and unexpected moments. But the latest punctual strikes rather appeared as the preparation for a dull, well-known exercise.
Some have evaluated the student strike against NATO as a success, due to the level of combativeness of the nighttime demonstration of November 22, 2024. In our view, this is a misreading. The strike served as a pretext, certainly, but its real meaning lay elsewhere.
That night, as we recall, a few hundred students and pro-Palestinian militants briefly marched through downtown to the Palais des Congrès. In a skirmish, autonomous groups pushed back a police line into an alley, doused them with paint, and launched fireworks at them. A few moments later, trash bins and cars were burning; the windows of the Palais exploded under cobblestones and hammers. The crowd was quickly dispersed.
The media and police treatment of the event quickly took on enormous proportions, and the farce was set. It took the SPVM police chief himself to remind politicians that these were not antisemitic acts, but political gestures by groups known to the services. No arrests to this day — perhaps not so well-known after all.
That said, this demonstration is not representative of what was, overall, a disappointing two-day strike. Let’s rejoice in the brief insurrectionary outburst, certainly and with great joy, but also subject the real exercise of the strike to critique.
At UQAM, the most striking feature of the strike was how few people it managed to mobilize. A strike zone had been improvised in the agora. There were a few activities, leaflets, banners, readings, coffee. That was about it. A small internal demonstration of about half an hour.
At Concordia, the protest was spicier; the crowd, under the initiative of a constellation of autonomous groups, invaded the hallways and marched across several floors, leaving a trail of tags and broken security cameras behind them. At the administration office entrance, there was a moment of hesitation and confusion. One could imagine what could have been. At that moment, there was a real harmony between rage and joy. Initiatives seemed ready to spring up, unpredictable, outside of all expectations.
We say this is what a strike must produce: the play between what is expected and what is not, a proper reshuffling of the deck. But all of it was quickly aborted. Thirty minutes later, it was all over.
On the second day of the strike, a few more people showed up at the agora, mainly because students from striking CEGEPs had converged there. Just before the evening demonstration: security workshops, distribution of defensive materials, formation of teams — the agora was full, and it hadn’t been so lively in a long time. Surely, some people found comfort or real satisfaction in the exercise of the November 21 and 22 strike. We admit that we did too, a little bit at least.
Yet what happened seems to us to highlight mainly what could have happened.
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“While the first form of work stoppage (the political strike of demands) is a form of violence, for it only brings about an external modification of working conditions, the second, as a pure means, is without violence. For it does not set out with the hidden intention of resuming activity after superficial concessions and some modification of working conditions, but with the resolve to resume only an entirely changed work, one not imposed by the State; a change that this kind of strike achieves less by provocation than by realization.” — Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin
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In Critique of Violence, Benjamin focuses on two distinct forms of strike. On one hand, the political strike appears as a demand-driven exercise, where workers use work stoppage as a means to mediate and reach an objective, whether wage-related or otherwise. On the other hand, there is what Benjamin calls the “proletarian general strike.”
We will understand it here as a human strike, a social strike.
The social strike suspends the real temporality of productive labor activities and the normal everyday activities under capitalism. Labor time is freed from its dispossessing and alienating burden; time changes, space becomes inhabitable, and relationships as well.
The social strike achieves more than it provokes — that’s what Benjamin meant.
But the recent punctual student strikes have failed — or no longer manage — to suspend the normal course of everyday life. There was nothing shocking or disturbing about a few couches, a few slogans, and some banners.
Thus, we need to revisit the short list of possible objectives for a strike: apply pressure, change real life, alter the relation to infrastructure, reappropriate the use of spaces, free up time, and so on.
Given that the strike of November 21–22 did not manage to apply real pressure (since obviously it was targeting a counter-summit and no one dismantled NATO), we would have expected that the strike zone would be much more populated, that people would use the punctuality of the moment as a force — after all, it is much easier to overturn everyday life for one day than for six months — and open up much more playful, lighter possibilities than those of an endless unlimited general strike. We would have wanted associative and autonomous slogans, people taking initiatives, painting entire sections, setting up canteens, throwing parties, creating real spaces to meet.
Clearly, we are missing the organizing force needed to achieve something like that.
Yet a reappropriation of space and time — that is precisely what the pro-Palestinian encampments exercised, in their own way, a few months earlier. A melting pot between radlib-leaning students, the Muslim community from various backgrounds, insurrectionalists, the radical student left, familiar faces from community organizations, and a handful of autonomists.
But mass overflow through sheer numbers was the great absentee. Demonstrations organized on autonomous bases rarely reached over a thousand people.
That said, the pro-Palestinian encampments should still shed light on a series of things. Our reading here is that it was indeed the spring and summer 2024 pro-Palestinian encampments — and not the mobilization for the November 21–22 strike — that allowed a scene like the offensive-style demonstration of November 22 at night to emerge.
Our observation: no group, composition of groups, or organizations were capable of making the events of November 22 resonate beyond fantasy and chatter.
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Parenthesis on Composition
The term “composition” became trendy after Les Soulèvements de la Terre and the impressive and macabre riot of Sainte-Soline.
In recent months in Quebec, it has been used to propose a strategic way to seize politics, its binaries, and its tendencies — and to possibly overcome them.
Here, however, we propose reading the concept of composition not as the strategic proposal of a problem, but as the real emergence, the current reality, of every contemporary social or political movement.
Understanding politics as a real situation, not an ideal one; striving to grapple with the real political landscape; organizing the counterpoints of the forces at play — the sequence of the pro-Palestinian encampments of spring and summer 2024 managed to express this political grammar differently than we were used to. It forced a number of groups and tendencies to work together.
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Parenthesis on the Barricade
The encampments brought back into favor what we will call here the theory of the barricade.
We argue that what the barricade truly does is not limited to occupying or defending territory. Of course, the barricade is a liberation of a space, a redefinition of its uses, an effective dismantling of the existing landscape.
But the barricade also makes the position emerge.
It forces people not only to acknowledge its existence — something that discourse and calls to struggle often fail to do — but also polarizes and compels people to take a side. One stands either behind or in front of the barricade, and that means a lot. It doesn’t mean that everyone on one side agrees on everything, but that they share a certain sensitive understanding.
To be on one side of the barricade is also to reject the reality that the other side proposes. In a world where touching and affecting constitute real challenges, this is no small thing.
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Parenthesis on Densification
We also note that the encampments managed to create a new mode of relationship-building that was unprecedented in the classical activist landscape of Montreal.
In the momentum of an international movement, McGill students, activists from the Palestinian Youth Movement, Montreal 4 Palestine, many from the Muslim community, Jewish students, and a certain number of folks in black took over McGill Lower Field and made it their own.
One might ask whether the length of time (74 days?!) ultimately showed the inefficiency of the tactic with regard to its demands — that’s a good question. Indeed, strikes or short-lived actions have little direct impact on the transformation of an institutional political situation.
But that’s not the point here.
What we saw, however, was that the exercise allowed for a particular densification of political and sensitive ties among people from all walks of life. The densification was spatial and temporal: in just a few days, strangers became comrades, then friends; people radicalized visibly; day-to-day tasks were taken up collectively; preparations were made for a smart response to eventual police raids.
All this created new forms of trust, but also new fears, new doubts, and new lived realities of struggle.
The densification achieved by the encampments was both their strength and their limit.
The shared conclusion after the camps: the exhaustion of the forces in play, particularly in the daily material reproduction of camp life.
The Dense Hour
That said, the densification also allowed new alliances and new forms of conflict to emerge — ones that agreed on the desire to clash with the police and urban and university infrastructures.
We saw a surprising contamination of offensive and defensive street tactics. Four key moments followed one another (though these do not exhaustively represent all conflictual moments):
i) the nighttime police skirmish at the Al-Aqsa Popular University and the simultaneous brawl; ii) the occupation of the administration offices and the stormy demonstration of June 6 at McGill; iii) the anger at the dismantling of Al-Soumoud and the retaliation against McGill’s administration building; iv) the October 7, 2024 demonstration at Concordia amidst police confusion.
Each of these moments showed how, in a sudden surge of anger, forces that seemed impossible to bring together could realign.
It was a recurring work — both organized and organic — that allowed the normalization and multiplication of a tactic like the Grey Bloc during the summer and fall demonstrations.
In the contingency of spring and summer, where on one side relationships of trust and tactical knowledge were exchanged within the camps, and on the other side where overflow-prone demonstrations multiplied, a confrontation gradient emerged, breaking with the pacified demonstrations of previous autumns and winters.
This sequence is interesting for the questions it raises: it makes us wonder how we could have done better and earlier within the movement — whether, for example, we should have played a role from the beginning in the major demonstrations, offering a reachable presence for those who recognized themselves in rage, anger, and the desire to build a real force of overflow.
It also forces us to ask how we could have channeled the forces present beyond what actually happened. If we had managed to meet and connect with more people, we must still ask: where and how could we have taken the overflow so that it would not just be a repetition doomed to exhaustion?
The sequence of camps and demonstrations seems to have burned out toward the end of the summer. We understand this exhaustion both as an inability to connect widely enough to students, an inability to overflow beyond campuses, an inability to create meeting moments that were not mere repetitions of the so-called revolutionary milieu, an inability to intervene satisfactorily in already existing political spaces, an inability to resonate beyond a fairly limited group of already-convinced individuals.
This exhaustion also appears to us as a real fatigue. As we said, the daily logistics and material demands of the camps consumed internal energy that could have gone into thinking and doing otherwise.
Within the pro-Palestinian movement, this exhaustion had something tragic, tinged with an unbearable sense of helplessness.
Faced with these conclusions, we inevitably have to ask ourselves the following questions: • How can we break through stagnation in conflictual political sequences? • How can we avoid isolating ourselves within radicality while preserving it? • How can we become reachable?
If there was an overflow last year — and we believe there was — it eventually ran into the trenches of a certain lack.
We think that lack is precisely that of organization.
A conflictual or insurrectional situation materializes through the articulation of several elements. We will name just two here:
On the one hand, such a situation can appear as if by itself — in the sense that the overflow seems neither anticipated nor properly organized. This is what appears to have happened with the pro-Palestinian movement in Montreal: it was more the accumulation of small events (and their international resonance) that led to the emergence of the camps and combative demonstrations.
This is also the form that riotous moments like the one on May 31, 2020, in Montreal, following the death of George Floyd, take. We call this spontaneity.
On the other hand, there are movements that are organized and strategized in advance. Here, we think obviously of the 2012 and 2015 student strikes.
These movements were organized based on local, regional, and national organizational structures. The ASSÉ (Association for Student-Union Solidarity) was the structured element of the combative student movement. It allowed the establishment of training camps, mobilization campaigns, media coverage, and the organization of relatively large demonstrations throughout Quebec (especially in Montreal).
It was both a vehicle for student mobilization and something like a democratic front that could be joined on an almost permanent basis.
The relative success of the 2012 and 2015 movements was obviously not solely due to the work of ASSÉ and its various committees. Rather, it was the massive and autonomous overflow of these structures that allowed truly conflictual situations to arise.
We are not here to regret the death of ASSÉ or to advocate for the construction of strictly identical structures, but rather to observe what organizing on a formal basis makes possible.
This type of structure is obviously insufficient and full of limitations, but it still significantly expands the possibilities for mobilization. It is also alongside and starting from these types of structures that autonomous groups and affinity groups reach the height of their effectiveness.
That said, we must not fantasize about the revolutionary character of such structures. Nothing is truly revolutionary unless it dismantles the real course of everyday life under capitalism.
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The coming months are uncertain: the looming shadow of mass impoverishment, the continual state of exception around a vampiric and filthy management of the housing crisis, mass layoffs, exploding inflation, and the doubling-down of extractivist projects everywhere.
The questions raised earlier must be taken seriously if we hope to be up to the situation.
If, trapped in the belly of a bleeding machine, a revolutionary politics is possible, then it must necessarily take place on the long timeline.
We must develop more infrastructures and organizational practices that allow us, collectively, to become reachable by others.
Post-scriptum on the Revolutionary Body
There are things that surge forth. But what surges forth also sweeps away.
We have seen it: insurrection will bear the mark of the strongest signifier. To refuse to play the game of hegemony — a game that inevitably leads to betrayal of oneself and of others — is to refuse to lay claim to insurrection for a program.
However, we must attach uses, ethics, and forms to it. We must embody gestures, and by embodying them, change their course.
When the State or Capital stumbles, someone or something must be there to make it fall. We cannot rely on a body that would surge forth spontaneously and strike the fatal blow. The opportunity is too great, and the risk too high.
What we need is a body capable of clarifying and strategizing this fall. In the same way, we need a body that can build quickly, connect, write, share, diffuse, and organize.
We are not under the illusion that this body would create insurrection itself — the exact recipe for that remains unknown to us. We recognize the role of the revolutionary body in creating movement, but not in creating the movement.
The Groupe révolutionnaire Charlatan said it — and we share their view: the role of the minority is indeed to force a taking of position.
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We also assert that a revolutionary body must not be about a historical political tendency. We have seen in recent years how these tendencies allow us very little understanding among ourselves, even less the means to realize our ambitions or to draw real lines of convergence and fracture.
There is nothing revolutionary about claiming an anarchism or a communism of one kind or another. Everything revolutionary lies in the work of making them happen.
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On the other hand, it is never about denying or hiding radicality. The revolutionary question must cease to be constantly relegated to historical binaries.
These binaries must be brought back down to earth.
The reformist, in a given moment, may tip into insurrectionary action: they are crossed by the situation.
We are among those who prefer to think in terms of situations, strategies, ethics, and uses rather than political identities or moral principles.
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Also, the revolutionary body must not have the subject as its object.
The band, the group, the organization: none are the image of what a revolutionary body should be. There should be no claiming or process of recognition to belong to the revolutionary body — only the material and existential reality of participating in its construction.
We understand the historical necessity of certain groups and their key role in real infrastructural scaffolding. On the other hand, we also understand their insufficiency in constructing strong common revolutionary positions.
A revolutionary position does not consist in charismatic and publicizable proposals. It consists in the creation of an opening, of a faultline within everyday life, a faultline that can be reactivated by others, and differently.
A revolutionary position must be reachable — but being reachable must not be its sacrifice.
We have been told that what enables resonance with others is authenticity in the gesture. We agree.
We have been told that creating relationships while distancing oneself from political identity affirmation is inauthentic and dishonest. Yet the very word “identity” does the thing and performs it.
Calling oneself insurrectionalist does not make an insurrection. Pastors preach to us that to be “anarchist” or “revolutionary” should prefix our political existence.
We will simply say here: calling oneself revolutionary or anarchist has little meaning in itself. It is the gesture, and its articulation with the situation, that gives those terms their meaning and strength.
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We also reply that there is authenticity in wanting to be heard and understood — and that we must strategize the ways to be so.
We say that not everyone is able to understand what is being attempted by 50 people dressed in black standing isolated against an army of police. We say that, often, that does not resonate — or resonates only like a scream in a box, an echo of one’s own voice.
And we are not particularly keen on deafening each other.
We do, however, want to speak loudly enough to be heard and understood. We want neither to scream into the void nor to whisper among ourselves.
We move in the direction of that phrase which says: we cannot force everyone to speak our language; we must become polyglots.
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In the end, being reachable means touching the heart of what is shareable in the intimate and sensible catastrophe of the world.
If the revolutionary position can appear as a secession from the everyday life of the economy and politics — in the sense that it emerges from torpor, incapacity, confusion, and anguish, and seeks to build ways of life harmful to the capitalist mode of production — it must not, at any cost, become a secession from the “individuals” of the social body.
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Being able to formulate revolutionary or insurrectionary positions that are reachable requires a certain level of formalization.
Thus, our conclusion: overcoming the opposition between movement and organization appears more as a necessity than a wish. It seems the only way to get out of the insular “militant milieu” and actually try our luck.
As we said: one role of the revolutionary body is to elaborate revolutionary positions.
But the revolutionary body must also be wary of its own corporality.
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The revolutionary body is not the sum of the identities that compose it, unlike the band or the group.
Its historical function must not be recoverable because it must consist in dismantling the everyday reality of the capitalist mode of production.
It must carry the destructive joy of the band — but without its gregariousness, without its character traits, leaders, and egos.
The revolutionary body must find its meaning only in what it actually achieves.
It must obsess over these questions: analyzing lines of force and weakness; following the evolution of conflictual sequences; distributing tasks for an upcoming situation; theoretical and critical elaboration; strategic and tactical follow-ups of past sequences; mapping and developing the infrastructures needed for building and maintaining said infrastructures; intervening politically at the right time to break the spectacle, etc.
The revolutionary body must fluctuate in intensity depending on the density of social conflict. It must at the same time guard against activist urgency and remain a quiet force in the trough of the wave.
It must constitute itself as the interface for those who live the revolution in the world, head-on, even in the dead time of political sequences.
The revolutionary body must not claim the social body — in part or in whole — but its positions must seek to open it, clarify it, polarize it, and transform the real processes of production and reproduction of everyday life and its aesthetics.
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Thus, the revolutionary body does not deny the forces already present in revolutionary milieus, but surpasses them. It surpasses them because it seizes existing powers, but instead of claiming them or reproducing them, it articulates them strategically and opens them outward.
What must appear essential in the coming months is to succeed in creating a relatively formalized space where the different organizing forces of the revolutionary body can agree on a certain number of real priorities, distribute tasks to build and consolidate an upcoming conflictual situation, identify infrastructural shortcomings, and think about how to fill them.
Learning from the past year, from its successes and failures — and because the times demand it, doing better.
For distribution at protests, festivals, sporting events, waiting rooms, cookouts, libraries, dining halls, courtrooms, traffic jams, emergency rooms, corner stores, public transportation, sideshows, recreation yards, or anywhere else you may encounter others who’ve had enough.
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REMEMBER 2020, 1968, 1878, 1791 — WE CAN WIN
Thousands of years of kings, queens, emperors, presidents, & ministers demanding obedience. 500 years of crackers enslaving & colonizing this planet. 250 years of anglo/yankee domination.
Trump this, Musk that. Democrats, Republicans, Zionists, Confederates, Fascists, Conservatives, Liberals, Progressives. So many flavors of the same expired bullshit.
2020: Cops executed George Floyd. A police station was burnt down. For a brief moment, the world opened up.
1968: White power executed MLK. Black communities erupted into rebellion. For a brief moment, the world opened up.
1878: Indigenous peoples in the South Pacific rose up in arms against european colonizers attempting to exterminate their communities & hijack their homelands. For a moment, the world opened up.
1791: Enslaved Africans & their descendants began an uprising in the Caribbean, destroying property, profit, & slavery. For a long moment, the world opened up.
Whether a handful of friends or a massive crowd, we know that the footsoldiers of every regime can be defeated. The secret is to begin.
« In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us turn their cities into funeral pyres. In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder. Peace By Piece (A) »
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE! ¡QUEREMOS UN MUNDO DONDE QUEPAN MUCHOS MUNDOS!
Cameras were blocked, tactics practiced and sharpened, trust and affinity were built and clarified. Taking advantage of these dark and long nights, a festive crew piled up some scavenged Christmas trees, blocking the CN tracks on the property of Ray-Mont Logistics in Hochelaga’s Terrain Vague.
A big bonfire and joyful celebration ensued, and we made an escape before the security guards made their regular rounds – with meters high flames burning into the skyline long after we left.
In the yard beside, a graff on an ugly shipping container read ‘LET’S BURN INDUSTRIALISM!’.
Bonne annee! We will mark the passage of time whenever we want, hopefully also by slowly marking the downfall of our targets.
The UnitedHealthcare CEO’s assassination is a good time to observe the history of class warfare, grievance, and the classic anarchist militancy of “the propaganda of the deed”
“Who is it that provokes the violence? Who is it that makes it necessary and inescapable? The entire established social order is founded upon brute force harnessed for the purposes of a tiny minority that exploits and oppresses the vast majority.” – Errico Malatesta
“Once a person is a believer in violence, it is with him only a question of the most effective way of applying it, which can be determined only by a knowledge of conditions and means at his disposal.” – Voltairine de Cleyre
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the morning of Dec. 4 may have shocked people for several reasons. A masked gunman committing a targeted killing with tactical precision before making an illusive escape stunned authorities and captured the imaginations of others, offering him instant celebrity status. Gunning down an insurance executive became a cathartic scene with all the trappings of cause célèbre. The initial reaction should be analyzed to understand what it communicates to us. This sort of violence holds a special place in the history of insurrectionary anarchism, which has not only theorized about it but actively practiced it to world-changing ends. A killing is not just a killing, and the popular reaction to the shooter can supply us with some important lessons just as police close in on a suspect. If the authorities are not careful with this case, they may end up uniting people behind common interests. Now is a good time to observe the history of class warfare, grievance, and the classic anarchist militancy of a form of direct action meant to catalyze revolution, known as “the propaganda of the deed.”
In 1885, the Chicago Tribune quoted the formerly enslaved Black anarchist Lucy Parsons saying something many wouldn’t dare say almost 150 years later: “Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination and without pity.” Far beyond a mere call for sporadic violence, it’s essential to understand that the impulse to make such a confrontational statement was not so unconventional back then. Different factions of anarchists used calls for revolutionary violence toward different ends and influenced one another.
While some, like Parsons, worked with organizations like the International Working People’s Association (IWPA), doing pivotal work to transform labor conditions, others had individual motives based on self-organized immediate interventions. The historian Paul Avrich noted that the violent rhetoric of anarchists like Parsons attracted the “skilled and unskilled, employed and unemployed” based on the “hopes of immediate redemption.” However, some people took that mandate into their own hands, targeting some of the world’s most powerful elites.
Anarchists went after and often successfully assassinated multiple heads of state, politicians, businessmen, military figures, and police around the world under the proclamation of propaganda by the deed. The idea that killing reviled and oppressive authority figures would be a catalyst for revolution has long been debated. These ideas are not limited to just one faction of anarchists or only the anarchist segments of the historical socialist and communist movements. Furthermore, their effectiveness often produced unintended consequences that the purveyors couldn’t have necessarily predicted. For example, when a self-professed anarchist killed President William McKinley in 1901, it led to the creation of the FBI and a proto-“war on terror” that reshaped international policing and worldwide immigration policy and nearly destroyed anarchism. Understanding this in the context of Thompson’s killing in New York should let us know that the ruling class won’t simply accept this. The protectors of their interests and property, the police, will do their bidding to make an example of the killer (or a necessary scapegoat). Authorities will also be hard at work deciding what agencies, legislation, or punishment should be meted out to stop lethal direct action from becoming too popular. Just as it has been throughout anarchist history, quashing such jubilance and excitement about the collective awakening to the possibilities of violent resistance will be necessary.
Anarchist proponents of violence like Errico Malatesta, Johann Most, and Luigi Galleani saw attacks as a necessary response to the oppression of the working class, immigrants, poor people, and the enslaved. Even Alexander Berkman, who wrote about the anarchist movement’s departure from the propaganda of the deed, attempted to assassinate the industrialist oligarch Henry Clay Frick who turned guns on workers and was tyrannical in his business practices. Berkman once wrote, “You don’t question the right of the government to kill, to confiscate and imprison. If a private person should be guilty of the things the government is doing all the time, you’d brand him a murderer, thief and scoundrel. But as long as the violence committed is ‘lawful,’ you approve of it and submit to it. So it is not really violence that you object to, but to people using violence ‘unlawfully.'”
Berkman’s nearly 100-year-old perspective still holds, though what’s interesting now is seeing a murder bring people together. Anarchist history shows that sometimes it’s unexpectedly hard to find a prominent figure so universally reviled that nearly everyone celebrates their ending. Though many have prefaced their commentary on the current moment with the need to say they don’t “condone” violence, Berkman’s point bites back at inconsistency. The monopoly on violence known as “the state” conducts regular killing both directly and indirectly the world over daily to maintain itself. Also, do those who don’t condone the killing of a businessman by a vigilante announce they don’t “condone” violence before using their conflict mineral technologies with apps that use artificial intelligence powered by slave labor? Do they announce that they don’t condone violence when they pay taxes to fund a genocidal onslaught or militarism that destroys the planet? What about the violence on our plates in our food or in the “fast fashion” we wear? No, that inescapable violence is accepted as ordinary and not worth showy moralizing statements.
Those who denounce killing in response to the shooting of Thompson reinforce the imbalance that upholds oppression. Blood has different weights depending on where it spills from. Who has the power to kill as an acceptable norm versus who doesn’t is what tips the scale. The gravity given to those this society privileges, empowers, and prioritizes dictates how much we’re supposed to care about deaths. It also dictates what’s even considered violent. That’s why we are instructed to mindlessly condemn any and every act of violence that threatens the status quo of capitalism, imperialism, and class-based society. We should be able to respect those who choose not to practice violence while distancing ourselves from those who make false equivalencies out of it. Their “peace” comes at the expense of the most abused, whose screams are drowned out. This is the “peace of the pharaohs, the peace of the tsars, the peace of the Caesars,” as Ricardo Flores Magón once wrote and rightly concluded, “Let such a peace be damned!”
It would be helpful if more of us accepted the fact that we cannot indeed be anti-violence in a society where even our most passive actions are reinforcing the most deplorable crimes against oppressed people around the globe. This is why I’ve argued that we should identify the counterviolence we need in our politics. So, rather than projecting onto a mysterious shooter or endlessly looking for a hero to venerate, the questions of the utility of violence here are answered by past instruction. However, I do not invoke all this history and quotation to suggest it’s inherently instructive for mimicry. Instead, I think it helps us realize that there is something beneath the surface here that people yearn for. There’s a confrontation dying to be taken up by those who refuse to wait for more tragedy and endless pain. Such a clash isn’t expected to be neat, nice, or consistently nonviolent. If force is the tool used to shape our subjugation, then pushing that oppressive momentum back so that we can completely throw it off of us should be the standard.
