Insurrection #3

Issue 3, 1985
Elephant Editions

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES...that of the miners, the unemployed, the low paid workers, immigrant workers, proletarian women, young people...the groups and sub-groups are endless in the great mass of the exploited of advanced capital. The urban ghettoes kindle, there is ferment in the schools. Anger is mounting among the services workers pushed out of their jobs or devalued by privatisation. Shipyard workers, workers in the car industry, skilled and unskilled workers in all the heavy and light industries are finding themselves thrown like rejects on to the scrap heaps of poverty and depression. Meanwhile the rich get richer. And to keep this wealth they are building more and more bunkers, bullet proof cars, training armies, special corps for crowd control, building new prisons, formulating new laws, tightening border controls, perfectioning social control. The obvious place to turn in this situation is the official workers' movement. This however has miserably failed in its historic task. There can no longer be any doubt. The unions need the space to survive and grow that only capital will provide for them. Even the seemingly combative ones have no intention or desire to destroy a system which is happy to delegate to them the role of bargaining over the cost of the restructuring process in course. Their role is indispensable, and is worth the price of policing picket line battles when workers are no longer prepared to accept the results of the conference table.
The only losers are those who fought and gave all-and lost all. What good is the credit balance of 'self-respect' if all it serves to do is to palliate another twenty years down the mines or a life on the dole.
The struggle continues, in spite of the unions. In spite of the parties and hangers on. In spite of the anarchists so long as we remain tied to the illusions that our movement has fostered for so long now.
What to do? Wait for the next confrontation to appear? Improvise next time, become insurrectionalists, abstentionists for the day, anti-militarists or whatever else the occasion demands of us?
Or is it time to work out-and make known in clear terms-what anarchists really are. What we really want: to subvert the present order and be protagonists in the struggle for the new. This is not an abstract concept, a maximalisation to delay the moment of action. Of our final subversive, destructive, aim is forgotten for a moment, allowing ourselves to be fascinated by the pull of activism without clear thought and profound analysis, we can often end up flanking the very counter-revolution we believe we are fighting.
We need organisational proposals that become a clear point of reference beyond the institutionalised haggling of capitalist forces. These proposals must be concrete and we must be present to participate in bringing them about. It is time to come out from our ideological bunkers and confront each other not so much on the immediate and pressing tactical choices for the next demo, but to analyse the reality in which we are trying to work. It is time to come out.

(from the introduction)


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