In 1977, my father graduated from a high school in a tiny, insular northern Italian neighborhood in New Jersey, and vowed to leave his uterine hometown forever. The same year, in Italy, a strange, eccentric old man was arrested in my father's ancestral city and sentenced to 18 months in prison for writing a book. Over those 18 months, my father would break with everything he ever knew, declare himself a Quaker and devout pacifist, and be fired for starting a union organizing drive in a mental institution. Meanwhile, the old man remained in his cell, his grim expression failing to conceal the burning intensity behind his eyes, refusing to apologize for his eloquent proposal for the hanging of judges, the shooting of policemen, and the abolition of mental institutions and unions alike.

The Social is a Cigarette: Towards an Insurrectionary Platform

The Social is a cigarette.
Rupture, in its fluidity, is fire.
Platforms, the crystallized possibility of ignition, are lighters.
Dogma is a dead lighter.
Praxis is a butane refill.

"Only the struggle is real."
--Alfredo Bonanno

For my father, severing his connection with the violent, passionate Italian Catholic world of his youth was a rupture at least as world-shaking as the schism Bonanno made with all bourgeois morality when he wrote Armed Joy. Perhaps there is something about the alpine culture that produced both men that makes the lives of it participants particularly conducive to rupture. One hundred years before my dad left Jersey, an impetuous young anarchist, not twenty miles from where the old man would later be born, rallied together a group of his fellow teenage comrades. They raised red flags, armed themselves with rifles, stormed their tiny hamlet's courthouse, and began to burn public records in the streets. These would-be revolutionaries urged bewildered onlookers to spontaneously develop proletarian consciousness and join their insurrection, but, much to the kids' dismay, the exploited masses simply stared. In a matter of hours, the army arrived and promptly arrested our failed heroes without firing a shot. The boy the authorities identified as the ringleader of this botched venture was one Errico Malatesta, who later became a legendary enemy-of-the-state, and whose memory still enjoys folk hero status among my cousins in a small town outside Venice. Before fleeing the country, and ultimately Europe, he had organized our a number of our mutual ancestors into revolutionary cells.

Twenty-four years after my father fleed his Italian villiage, he had settled down to raise me in Baltimore, where I was getting an earlier start than Malatesta (albeit a less dramatic one). I had grown up listening to stories about great great grandfather fighting the National Guard in the 1877 B&O Railroad strikes, or about the one on the other side of my family dynamiting a hole under his outhouse to rain its contents down on to the heads of scabs working in a mineshaft below. When I was eleven and homeschooled, I read the writings of Iqbal Massih, a teenage figurehead of the Pakistanian Labor movement who was shot and killed when he was sixteen. My ex-hippie parents were deligthed that I was taking intrest in a "Social Justice Issue", and they made sure that I went to an anti-sweatshop conference. There I met two Bangladeshi women who had also lost family members to bosses assassins when they tried to organize. Talking to them via a translator was, for my young mind, a paradigm-shifting rupture in my world. The next year, I organized my first protest at a local Wal-Mart, along with 40 other seventh-graders. We stormed no buildings and burned nothing in the street, but the general manager looked like he might have shat himself at the sight of us. He had a score of riot police brought out too stand between the store and the angry, pre-pubescent mob.

"Art, the best I've done by far, is all about the class war. I should send the poor a thank-you card."
--Mischief Brew

With this background, perhaps it was inevitable that after I was introduced to the anarchist movement by a magical place called Red Emma's, I befriended the only radicals in town who were regularly involved with labor unions. I took communist anarchism for granted--yeah, class struggle, isn't that what radicals do? My mentors, the first people from the anarchist scene I really felt I could trust, were leftists who put vast amounts of energy into volunteering with a wide variety of movements, from the Algebra Project (a group of inner city black kids organizing against school closings) to the United Workers (a Baltimore sister organization to the more lauded Coalition of Immokallee Workers) in their campaign to win a living wage for day laborers at a baseball stadium. This culminated in much-publicized hunger strike by workers that lasted only one day before the stadium caved, cut out the day labor agency middle man, and gave the cleaners a $7 raise. When I went to the victory celebration to serve Food Not Bombs, I found the most joyous carnival I had ever seen. The dull, glazed over faces that usually inhabit my city's streets had suddenly vanished, and hundreds of people laughed, cried, played music, and danced with wild abandon. That day, I decided I would stop drifting through demos for whatever activist cause was being pushed at the moment. Now, I excitedly promised to no one in particular, I would throw all my energy into workplace organizing.

In 2007 I joined the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC). I implore you, dear rebel readers, to hear me out nonetheless. In the federation's Baltimore collective, I found my new home. Here were the smartest, most pissed-off comrades I had ever met - the few comrades who came out to picket lines - and I instantly respected and looked up to them.

Over the five years I've identified myself as an anarchist, I've received ire from both sides of the aisle. Some friends have scoffed at me for going to endless meetings, writing for a tiny sectarian newspaper, volunteering with labor unions and even doing a brief stint as an intern organizer with a large business union. Others have given me an equal amount of shit for travelling around the country to summit protests, doing Food Not Bombs religiously, and working on other projects deeply entrenched in the punk scene. I unapologetically run in both worlds - I'm in both the Dancing Cat Baltimore NEFAC collective, which focuses on local labor solidarity, and the regional, loosely-organized Self-Described Anarchist Collective, which focuses on mass protests. In the latter, I work alongside insurrectionary anarchists, primitivists, and others who reject adjectives altogether - my deepening relationships with some of these comrades prompted me to begin this text. Faced with every old grudge, every animosity that divides our movement, I have struggled to retain faith that we can, someday, win. I sit writing this tract today because, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, I have not lost hope in the revolutionary potential of the labor movement - and I have not lost hope in the fierce, emancipatory potential of anarchism. I have not lost hope, in short, in you.

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"For anarchy to succeed or simply to advance towards its success it must be conceived not only as a lighthouse which illuminates and attracts, but as something possible and attainable, not in centuries to come, but in a relatively short time and without relying on miracles."
--Errico Malatesta

Unions, I maintain, are still a worthwhile form of struggle, regardless of whatever academic objections might be raised by the radical avante-garde (whether situationist, "left communist", or insurrectionary). While the parasitic mediators between labor and capital cannot be a revolutionary force precisely because of their role as mediators, the people they represent can be, and workers who resist on the job will continue to form local unions for as long as we find those structures useful, whether or not the anarchists among us like it. In rejecting the bureaucrats of organized labor, we run the risk of also rejecting its members. We forget that communes, factory committees, workers' councils, and recuperated workplaces do not appear out of thin air in the whirlwind of insurrection - they are made up of people who had lives before the revolution. Opposing labor struggles because they are inextricably tied to the workplace makes as much sense as opposing slave rebellions because they are tied to the plantation. Employment must be considered a necessary inconvenience - and a battleground for struggle - until our class has built up the social capital to end it once and for all. Whether they start in 1871, 1917, 1936, 1956, 1968, 1994, 2001, or 2009, revolutionary Events include the creation of new social forms by the former faceless hoards...beginning the instant we dethrone our "responsible" representatives.

The irony of most internal controversy between anarchists is that insurrectionary anarchism, as it's currently being promoted, has its roots in autonomous Marxism and the thought of European anarchists who were grounded in theories about class struggle. Today, however, the major tendencies in our movement seem unable to address each other without resorting to name-calling, from "lifestylist" to "anarcho-liberal," even though we're all too often pushing precisely the same points. The most interesting seed in the heart of insurrectionary anarchist thought is the unyielding demand that revolutionaries be considered as among the exploited, not as a separate elite from it; that we are individuals who exist in and have been created by capitalism as it exists today, not time-travellers from a post-revolutionary future with an exact blueprint for destroying power. If there is another consistent line running through insurrectionary theory, it is the proposition that social reality arises from everyday life; that capital as a social relationship reproduces itself on the level of our daily actions, and not outside of them; that material conditions do not dictate social conditions, but merely influence them insofar as they are factors in every choice that every person makes at every moment. In the recent anarcho-blockbuster The Coming Insurrection, the Invisible Committee pithily asserts, "In truth, there is no gap between who we are, what we do, and what we are becoming."

The madness of our ideological skirmishes lies in the fact that "platformist" anarchist-communists are saying essentially the same things. "Platformist" is a misnomer - we don't agree with everything in our namesake, Makhno and the Dielo Truda Group's infamous document, the Platform of the General Union of Anarchists; the text was written after the anarchist militias' bitter defeat at the hands of the Russian Red Army in Ukraine, and I don't think a lot of it is even relevant to the 21st century capitalism we inhabit today. Most leftist anarchists, accused sometimes-accurately of stifling social conflict by mediating it, have nevertheless identified with that set of beliefs in the first place because they desire exactly that. We form anarchist organizations now because we recognize there is no gap between what we do and what we are becoming. We look for avenues of struggle where we live and where we work, places we can organize with others on the basis of real common material interests rather than ideology, because we recognize that revolution must begin with everyday life. The only good reason for affiliating with a political label is because its theory directly engages with practice that can be applied in your life - anything else is either disembodiment or masturbation. I'm a red, and I work with labor unions while disputing both companies and bureaucracies' agendas, because I don't think revolutions are neat, orderly, or polite. Social ruptures are built of specific actions by specific people, and are therefore far more chaotic, unpredictable, and fluid than any of us can understand. The role of anarchists should not be to develop an anarchist program to control every aspect of social revolution - we're not going to get everyone to agree with our politics down to the last letter. I do what I do because anarchists are only one social force among many, and we need to analyze how we interact with other forces, not simply what we want in the abstract. I agree entirely with the observation that we ourselves are exploited, that our very existence is political, and that we must fight against the conditions of our own lives (the anti-activism theory of the insurrectionary camp attacks the "oh, I'll do politics for three hours and then I'll get back to my real life" mentality of those who see themselves as spectators of history rather than protagonists). However, there always seems to be a missing second term in this logic - it doesn't necessarily lead to "therefore, every instance of fighting with cops is good and we should do it at every opportunity" conclusion of publications like Fire to the Prisons...too many anarchist journals become crime rosters documenting spraypainted cop cars and broken windows (contrary to popular rhetoric, smashing a window is only direct action if you had a problem with that particular window). That logic could just as easily lead to a platformist practice: to find struggles that impact us directly, places where the people around us are organizing themselves for bread-and-butter demands in neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, military platoons, or any other points at which webs of power intersect with our lives - and to bring direct action to those struggles.

If we genuinely want to build a revolutionary tradition, we should fight in these struggles not as external benevolent "activists" come to save the day and rescue the poor objects of our pity, but as participants with something real at stake. We should form revolutionary cells with people who share our conditions. Nebulous groups of people brought together by chance by an institution can solidify into closely-knit affinity groups whose ultimate goal is the permanent destruction of the monstrosity that united them.

The purpose of an anarchist organization is not mass recruiting, a la most Trotskyist parties, nor is it vanguardist control of movements - we know that movements, like anything else, are the confluence of all the activity of people in them. The purpose of a platform, of an organization, is to bring together anarchists who share same principles but are involved in different struggles. Its role is not to direct but to create the possibility of us coordinating our activity across all sectors of society, all the battlegrounds at which we're positioned to attack capital. Political affiliations mean nothing if they do not pertain to action. They are no more than models of the world we find ourselves trapped within, maps for looking at an infinitely larger and more complex territory. In social conflicts, the practical needs and desires of intertwined people are vastly different - the only universal principle we can apply is "find fire, and carry gasoline to it"...that is to say, form cells specific to particular manifestations of power and escalate the level of struggle against them wherever we can. Sometimes, that might mean vandalism or fighting with cops - often, it will mean something entirely different. Our only condition for action is that it is carried out by cells of directly-affected people. We are not Makhnovites so much as we are Malatestans. Like the Invisible Committee, the extent of our program is all power to the communes.

Similar to the logic of anti-activism, the logic of transforming everyday life is dead-on politically. There too, however, is a missing second term between logic and conclusion; "therefore, we must eschew all organizations" doesn't immediately follow. Organization is not always a mystified obstacle to organizing ourselves. There are more factors, more exigencies that hold us back from social revolution, than we can know. Capitalism and the social reality it constantly births are not static; they are moving patterns, processes that continue themselves discursively in the actions of all those governed by their logic. Bombing every bank, killing every cop, and opening every prison might be a step forward, but it would not eliminate the ongoing customs, ideologies, and fetishisms that render possible the domination of life by the State and the commodity. To achieve this goal, we must operate at a longer timeframe than we currently do.

The task is always to organize. That is the missing link in every radical theory. In a world simultaneously frozen in the context of the structures imprisoning it and, paradoxically, in constant flux, organizations produce fictions that intervene in the Real. At their worst, these fictions serve to integrate people into roles assigned to them by capital. At their best, they spawn new ruptures, new patterns of life that deny the logic of commodities and affirm our human capacity to edit the universe, to determine what our futures will be. Organization divorced from practical action can only result in static dogma, the dead lighter of this text's opening metaphor - NEFAC has been criticized, at times rightly, at least in my collective's case, for falling into this trap. What the insurrectionary tendency discounts, however, is the value of an imagined collective entity to which we can be accountable. This must be capable of motivating us to action, coordinating it on an ever-expanding scale, and forging out of the fire of struggle new relationships that can transform us into subjects who can live communism. By engaging in real, dynamic warfare for control over our conditions - that is, by organizing - can we freeze the pointless, drifting flow of capitalist life, and, conversely, unthaw the frozen social forms (from wage work to gender roles to the police) that rule it.

This argument is by no means exclusive to platformist federations. In fact, Tiqqun, the most fashionable theorists of insurrection, almost echo it in their calls for an Imaginary Party. I find it strange that such a philosophically rigorous project would fail to take the extra step of acknowledging that all parties are imaginary, i.e., they are not flawlessly accurate expressions of the will of each individual member, nor can they be. I am convinced that formally organizing, where it serves the purpose of practical action, is the only realistic way to coordinate our embittered, ruptured movement into an imaginary force that can spark a real social rupture. The cigarette metaphor sums up this approach to the question of organization: the formal structure of a revolutionary group, combined with fluid, flexible activity, is a fired-up lighter - a tool for reproducing and resonating the possibility of igniting insurrection throughout society. It is the dead labor of revolution. It's a matter of crystallizing our actions into sustainable patterns. It's a matter of coordinating our lives, themselves cycles of rupture and stagnation, into a force that can bring about the greatest rupture in history in the least sedentary (yet most stagnant) system it has ever known. It remains to be seen whether Tiqqun's disciples will have better luck starting from scratch with flint and steel.

The objection could be raised, "We need no federation to fight in social movements alongside those who share our predicament. A groupuscule that wants that role is wasting its time and its breath; we can from workplace cells, neighborhood cells, university cells without approval from any idiotic parliamentary procedure." It's true. These form organically all the time. Where we, the exploited, already organize ourselves, the revolutionary organization must not interfere by "implanting" or "social insertion" or any other euphemism the Left has dreamt up for toying with conflicts in which none of us have anything at stake. Provided that the organization remained true to its goals, what cause could there be for such meddling? In the United States, the heart of the commodity spectacle, to be a communist is simply to be pro-struggle. A lighter is a structure made to set fires, not to contain their shape. When our fellow workers fight for their lives, it does not make the slightest difference whether they arrived in those circumstances via our fiction or any other. Only the struggle is real.

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