Manchester University Press The Politics of Attack: CommuniquéS and Insurrectionary Violence (Contemporary Anarchist Studies)

This study is an exploration of insurrectionary anarchist praxis, with a particular focus on how the rhetoric, discourse, and theory is both informed and conveyed through communiqués. It challenges the reader to consider the marginalized ideas put forth by those political actors that communicate through bombs, arson, and broken windows, who are rejected through the state's construction of terrorism. When a police station is firebombed, the subsequent discussions focus more on the illegality of the act rather than the sociopolitical critique the actor put forth. What if we were to embrace the means through which the militant 'organic intellectual' acts, and consider the communiqué's content, the way one would consider any political text? This inter-textual analysis is presented within a political and historical context, with the hopes of elevating the discussion of insurrectionary praxis beyond notions of terrorism and securitization and towards its application for intersectional challenges to structural violence and domination. In the social war being waged by insurrectionary anarchists, small acts of violence are announced and contextualized through written communiqués, which are posted online, translated, and circulated globally. This book offers the first contemporary history of these post-millennial, digitally-mediated, insurrectionary anarchist networks, and seeks to locate this tendency within anti-state struggles from the past. Through an examination of thousands of movement documents, this book presents the discourse offered by clandestine, urban guerrillas fighting capitalism, the state, and the omnipresent forces of violence and coercion.