The Politics of Attack

The politics of attack is an exploration of insurrectionary anarchist praxis, with a particular focus on the rhetoric, discourse, and theory found in communiqués. This book challenges the reader to consider the marginalized ideas put forth by those political actors that communicate through bombs, arson, and broken windows, and 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 socio-political 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.

Dual Powers, Class Compositions, and the Venezuelan People

George Ciccariello-Maher’sWe Created Chávezis the most important book available in English proposing an anti-capitalist framework for understanding the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela, as well as its historical backdrop dating back to 1958. The book contains within it a laudable critique of Eurocentrism and a masterful combination of oral history, ethnography, and theoretical sophistication. It reveals with unusual clarity and insight the multiplicity of popular movements that allowed for Hugo Chávez’s eventual ascension to presidential office in the late 1990s.We Created Chávezhas set a new scholarly bar for social histories of the Bolivarian process and demands serious engagement by Marxists. As a first attempt at such engagement, this paper reveals some critical theoretical and sociological flaws in the text and other areas of analytical imprecision. Divided into theoretical and historical parts, it unpacks some of the strengths and weaknesses by moving from the abstract to the concrete. The intervention begins with concepts – the mutually determining dialectic between Chávez and social movements; ‘the people’; and ‘dual power’. From here, it grounds these concepts, and Ciccariello-Maher’s use of them, in various themes and movements across specific historical periods of Venezuelan political development – the rural guerrillas of the 1960s, the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the new urban socio-political formations of the 1980s, Afro-Indigenous struggles in the Bolivarian process, and formal and informal working-class transformations since the onset of neoliberalism and its present contestation in the Venezuelan context.