Creativity and Insurrection

Coast Salish Territories – Vancouver, Canada

As insurrectionary anarchists, we consider the struggle to demolish this world to be contingent most of all on creativity. To retaliate against daily humiliation is to create new social relations and transform the conditions under which we live. Creativity is an expression of freedom, in its infinite outlets and potential. Our limitless creative capacity makes possible the willful ending of the world as we know it.

Social revolution is one of the potential ends this world might come to, although it could not possibly be the final resolution of all social conflict. The revolution is a creative process that is international in scope, since the institutions of exploitation and social control extend to all corners of the globe. The conscious struggle to end this world is a revolutionary struggle, even in its smallest, initial phase. Wherever it takes place, revolutionary struggle affects the entire planet.

Many exploited or excluded people who do not yet consciously seek to destroy this world are nonetheless involved in limited struggles and rebellions that can contribute to the destructive process of the revolution. As insurrectionary anarchists, we can and do intervene in these situations with our own project and in solidarity with those who rebel against the conditions and relations imposed upon them. This intervention can be described as a creative process of combining various subversive practices.

Rebellion occurs on many scales, from individual or collective acts of sabotage and insubordination to riots and insurrections. We insurrectionary anarchists are also rebels, but our rebellion is directed towards the total destruction of all political and economic institutions, all the structures through which the dominant class controls and exploits everyone else. Our revolt is part of a project we create for ourselves and that we carry through to its end, or our own, as in the case of death. We see our lives as a project to be created, and putting this project into practice requires an analysis of the local and global conditions of the class war, social struggles that are underway, and the projects designed and implemented by the exploiters. It requires communication between anarchist companions, the deepening of mutual understanding that if referred to as “affinity”. It involves the development of an infinite variety of specific projects that antagonize the authorities and expand our freedom.

Informal organization is the unification of the creative powers of individuals and groups. It is a concept and practice of organization founded on incessant innovation and adaptation to circumstances, as is required by a project of attack upon the power structure of global society. It is an expression of the desire for an expansive freedom that surges against all institutional limitations everywhere.