In 1978-1979, the Libertarian Socialist Organisation in Australia published a complete liberal, counter-insurgent drivel that the state couldn’t have written better titled “You can’t blow up a social relation”.
Thank god that not only do I not have any expectations of Australian anarchists similarly to UK anarchists, but I expect them also to be anti-militant cowards that are democratic socialists in-denial. It is almost a surprise they didn’t advocate for a transitional state during the course of the article. If you ever read this article and found it worthwhile, I know you’re the pathetic kind of anarchist I refuse to consider among my peers!
It isn’t even just alone because of their critique of “terrorism”, it is their eagerness to compare Palestinians seeking continued resistance against Israel to Spanish fascists while calling them terrorists, their eagerness to condemn Sacco and Vanzetti, their eagerness as settlers to condemn indigenous resistance while parading as if having theoretical superiority, it victim-blames all resistance, and it essentially argues that only non-violence is the right path without ever uttering non-violence (because of the implication that ANY violence allows the state to repress the left, so we should just not).
They want to point out the failures of revolutionaries, I’m looking at the Australia and I, too, can see generations of anarchist failures using their own measurements. From 1978 to 2025, the apple didn’t fall far from the sickly tree.
They condemn guerrilla movements as a “very poor showing in the area of ideas” while having offered nothing that is meaningful to the anarchist current anywhere beyond being a place to shit.
I’ll take it a step further, I have critiques of the Spanish anarchists and their choices in the Spanish Civil War, but my critiques aren’t remotely akin to the liberalism written in these pathetic ramblings. They then drop the biggest tell of being a shit anarchist even ignoring their incredible painful critiques and that’s by positively associating democracy with anarchism.
It’s annoying enough that Crimethinc, of course, uncritically referred to this article when providing an analysis on assassinations in 2018. With the way the LSO writes about Palestine, you’d assume they want them to roll over and die or as they’d describe it, wait for the appropriate material conditions to develop through creating a mass movement under a campaign of political education. Despite the fact they keep listing urban guerrillas with whatever authoritarian label, some of their arguments sound akin to crypto-Leninism. I digress.
I hope the authors of this article suffered or are suffering if they’re alive. Their insolence is astounding and I can all ready visualize what these motherfuckers look like. What trash.
That’s besides the point. You can blow up a social relation. It is like when people conceptualize the digital cloud as something immaterial, something that cannot be done about it.
This is simply not true.
The cloud is material. It is server farms galore. You can destroy it, just like you can destroy anything else. My only concern is blowing things up lacks the precision the moment demands of us (sometimes).
The semi-problem is, and what these authors fail to understand, is that guerrilla warfare despite it being irregular and unconventional, still holds to certain premises of warfare that undermine it.
When we confine conflict to territorial ambitions or resource control or strategic locations or even acts of propaganda, we restrict ourselves in our offensive capabilities. Liberating a city in a traditional sense, i.e., clearing the place block by block until the “enemy” is gone forces us to fight in a way that we merely may not have a capacity for, but interrupting the ability to carry out normal economic life or the ability to enforce laws can open up the realm for what actions look like.
Dams are an ecological harm wherever they exist unless the beavers made them. A more traditional look of fighting may have us wanting to secure the dam for some purpose like controlling water or generating power, but we seek the liberation of all to include the land. The dam is not a site to be secured, it too is an enemy to be destroyed. Perhaps just a little more carefully. Yes, I did start this by discussing social relations, but I couldn’t help to make the point here. Let’s think of another one.
The docks that bring in trade. The only time we’ve seen the world make progress globally in terms of the environment was global trade shutting down as the result of the pandemic. This should’ve given us food for thought, this should’ve been a call to action.
We cannot go after every ship in the ocean, but we can go after the docks in our backyard and the ones responsible for all the freight? All the boxes? The massive sites of logistics? If we can shut them down permanently, what wonders could we accomplish? A hundred people would struggle to be successful pirates against so many ships within the pacific, but a hundred people demolishing the nearest trade port? Doable, completely.
Oh, but the workers! No, I don’t subscribe to the leftist myth of the workers being in an inherent moral position. The ILWU regularly regurgitates their radical laurels of how they didn’t load supplies for ships aiding in South African apartheid. Which, great, except they’ve willingly loaded ships for the genocide in Palestine, they’ve not done a damn thing to actually contribute to blocking boats beyond telling some militants that they should maybe do. They hold an outsized influence to what they actually are now: a counter-insurgent force ensuring no militant on the west coast will risk blocking a boat without the bigger so-called left condemning them.
Fascist Italy couldn’t have existed without the the fascist unions, which outnumbered the fascist party by 3 to 1.
I will make no mistake in assuming unions as inherently radical, I will make no mistake in assuming workers holding a moral position and to center strategy around that. We are in a fight for our lives, condemned by the lack of urgency of those radicals before us, and we must recognize ways that social “abstractions” are very material and real targets, much like the cloud’s server farms.