Introduction to Insurrection

1. Do not preach to the privileged; they will not listen. At best they will mock you, at worst they will seek to silence you.

2. Never make deals with the state. Never settle for concessions. Any deal made by them can be broken by them. Any concession given to you by them can be rolled back by them. Any deal forged or concession made will be held up as the pinnacle of progress. It will later be taught that it was made not through violent rebellion against the system, but rather, through peaceful protests and participation in the electoral process.

3. Do not bank on the inevitable arrival of some great crisis that will shatter the fabric of social order and set off the revolution. The crisis is here. The crisis is now. Because we live in a constant state of crisis, it has become incredibly difficult to recognize this fact. Crisis has become the new normal.

4. Any out of the ordinary crisis that occurs (a crisis that is seemingly disconnected from the never ending crisis we currently live in) will be used by Capital as a justification as to why the current power structures must be further reinforced. Crisis becomes a tool used by the powerful in order to prevent the real crisis from actually unfolding. Collapse always seems inevitable, but it never comes. 

5. Regard all political happenings with immense suspicion and skepticism. Treat every event that occurs as a possible media stunt meant to gauge your reaction. As such, regard all news and reporting as a tactic by some political force (whether friend or foe) to influence your thought and behavior in a certain way.

6. Regard all official organizations that are not outwardly radical with immense suspicion. Their interests are not your interests. They seek only to gain more members and expand their sphere of influence within the current political and cultural hegemony, whereas the task of the insurrectionary is to smash it to pieces.

7. Understand that the world you see on the internet, the world presented to you on the TV, the world of bourgeois politics and liberal activism, is just a ploy to distract you from yourself, and suck you back into the world of political masochism.

8. Understand that any image, symbol, sign or slogan used by insurrectionaries can and will be co-opted by liberal activists who, acting on the behalf of Capital, reinforce its authority by reducing the struggle to nothing more than a struggle against perceived malfunctions of the system, rather than the system itself. This can be seen happening right now, with slogans such as ACAB (meaning “All Cops Are Bastards”) being taken up by liberals, who took its original implications, which were literally just “fuck the police, I deny their authority over me and my fellow human beings, and all authority for that matter,” to something more milquetoast and acceptable to the status quo; “oh no, of course we don’t think all cops are bastards, what ACAB really means is that the police are a bastardization of true law and order, not that law and order is itself bad,” (newsflash: it is bad).

9. In this way, liberals are not only not fighting the system, but they are actively helping it; what they are advocating for (police reform, universal healthcare, free/reduced tuition, reduced working hours, etc) is not in any way opposed to what the system wants. Rather, it is exactly what the system wants. The system wants its citizens to have a certain degree of education so that they can perform more skilled jobs. It wants people to be able to afford medical treatment so that they can be at their best at work and be productive members of society. It wants cops to follow the law in all cases, go through with proper procedures, and enforce the law exactly as it is written down. It wants this because it will make people feel secure, make them feel as if the system is serving them (when in reality it isn’t). It wants people to be content with their jobs, their homes and their lives in general so that they keep getting up in the morning and going to work everyday. When people don’t have to worry about making enough money to pay rent, medical bills, or college tuition for their children, they will have very little incentive to revolt. When people don’t have to worry about being beaten or killed by the police for no reason, they will be less likely to resent them and view their authority as illegitimate, and thus less likely to revolt. And if people remain passive, the system will keep chugging along, cutting down forests, melting the ice caps, pumping toxic fumes into the air, and heating the planet. It will subject us to further indignities and humiliations that we will willingly comply with, because what can we do about it?

10. Understand that the political struggle being sold to you by so-called “dissident” liberals is a lie, and a particularly insidious lie at that. No matter how they frame it, whether as a wealth issue, a race issue, or a gender issue, it is a lie, and always will be. If framed as a wealth issue, the liberal will tell you that the fight is against the “top 1%,” but any reflection on this statement will reveal just how utterly absurd it is. First, why has the line been drawn at “the 1%”? Why not the top 2%, or top 10%? Second, it is obvious to anyone who looks hard enough that the violence of the system isn’t being perpetuated and enforced solely by the “top 1%.” The top 1% are part of it, sure, but they are far from the only people that benefit from and contribute to the existence of capitalism. The list of people who participate in the capitalist system is as long as the list of people who live within the so-called “first world,” because the truth of the matter is, everyone is a part of it. Is that to say that Jeff Bezos and the average person benefit equally from the system? Of course not. It is obvious that someone like Bezos benefits far more from the system than someone like you or me. But this is where the liberal pulls his sneakiest trick; rather than framing the fight as a fight against capitalism itself, he frames it as a fight against its symptoms, and by doing so ignores the real issue. The liberal would have you believe that all we have to do to save the world is eliminate the billionaire class, and maybe even (if they happen to feel “radical”) the millionaire class as well. The liberal doesn’t frame it as a struggle against systems and structures, but rather, as a struggle against people, a moral struggle. What the liberal doesn’t understand (or pretends to not understand) is that people like Jeff Bezos are not the cause of all the world’s suffering, that they are not the ones who maintain capitalism, but rather, that it is capitalism that maintains them, and the world’s suffering that is the cause of their immense wealth.

11. It is for this reason that the struggle of liberal activists (and their radicalized counterparts, social anarchists) is so ineffective; it is a struggle that is based not in material analysis, nor in personal anger, but rather, in moralism. More often than not, the liberal activist does not protest because they themselves are part of the marginalized group, but rather, they do it as someone with privilege who feels that they have a duty towards their fellow human beings. It is of course fine to feel this way, but such feelings cannot form the basis of your political activity if you wish to succeed in anything.

12. The liberal “fights” because he views the state as having unjustly infringed upon some abstract notion of justice or equality. The insurrectionary, on the other hand, fights not because of the abstract principle of the rights of man, but because of the concrete, material conditions that he and his comrades are subjected to. For this reason, the insurrection is all inclusive; it is the field where people from all walks of life meet, people with all sorts of different ideas, united by their material discontent. It is on the battleground of the insurrectionary struggle that all differences are put aside, and individuals come together as single entities, for, as Stirner writes in The Ego and its Own, “Only when you are single can you have intercourse with each other as what you are.” (134).

13. The immediate goal of any insurrectionary activity is the destruction (temporary or permanent) of the world of unequal relations and commodified individuality and the immediate establishment of true, unregulated communal relations based on the unfiltered and uncorrupted individuality of each participant. “When I am engaged in activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others,” writes Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, “then I am social, because I am active as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product…; my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of my social being.” (105). For this reason, the insurrection does not necessarily have to achieve its end goal (if it even has one at all), for the act of insurrection alone is enough to give you a taste of true freedom and companionship that could last ‘till the end of your days. The hope, however, with engaging in insurrectionary activity, is that you will be able to continue it until the forces that rule over your life have been done away with completely. However, this does not mean that a failed insurrection is an insurrection that accomplished nothing, for in truth, the smallest, most insignificant insurrection accomplishes more than an election in the largest nation on earth.

14. Never forget; insurrection is fluid, insurrection can roar like a wildfire or whisper like a campfire. It spreads throughout the soil for years, unnoticed, unobserved, until finally it rises from the ground and shatters the earth in two. Insurrection is in each and every one of us. It is the becoming of freedom and ownness. Will you embrace it?