Insurrectionary anarchism
[2] During the 1870s, the idea of "propaganda of the deed" was initially developed by Italian anarchists to mean small direct actions that would inspire others to themselves carry out acts of insurrection.
[7] Contemporaneous with the rise of anarcho-syndicalism, insurrectionary anarchism was promoted in the United States by the Italian immigrant Luigi Galleani, through his newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva.
[8] Galleani was a staunch anti-organisationalist, opposing anarchist participation in the labour movement, which he felt displayed reformist tendencies and a receptiveness to corruption.
[9] This stance brought Galleani into conflict with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) during the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, following which they entered into a fierce polemic.
[12] After some Italian anarchists were killed by police for tearing down an American flag, the Galleanists carried a reprisal attack, which itself triggered a wave of arrests against insurrectionists.
In 1922, they began publication of L'Adunata dei refrattari, in which they encouraged their readers to break the pair out of prison and carry out retributive violence against the responsible state officials.
[18] Political repression largely drove the insurrectionary anarchist movement underground, with Marcus Graham declaring that they would continue to operate on a conspiratorial basis until they could again agitate in the open.
For Graham and his collaborators, the social revolution was to be built on individuals achieving a form of enlightenment that would break them from "every law, custom and sham creed in which he now finds himself trapped".
[24] Insurrectionary anarchism re-emerged within the Italian anarchist movement during the Years of Lead, when the country was marked by instances of left-wing and right-wing terrorism.
As the Cold War drew to a close, he called for insurrectionary anarchists to coordinate themselves into an informal "Anti-Authoritarian Insurrectionist International" in order to build contact and exchange ideas, but this project was stillborn.
[30] Parts of Bonanno's insurrectionary programme have also been taken up by anarchist sections of the anti-globalization movement, as well as by the Sardinian nationalist Costantino Cavalleri and the American individualist Wolfi Landstreicher.
[32] In the United States, insurrectionary anarchism had largely been sidelined until the establishment of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, which promoted the use of violent direct action in solidarity with the King assassination riots.
[33] During the mid-2000s, nihilists that were inspired by the rise of insurrectionism in Europe established Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (AJODA), which took up the insurrectionist calls to violence and whose members participated in occupation protests.
[32] The insurrectionist organisational model has been compared to that of "leaderless resistance", which encourages the independent action of small groups and lone wolves, without an overarching centralised hierarchy.
This model minimises risks of espionage and internal debate, while also fostering a degree of ideological pluralism, so long as it doesn't distract from direct action.
