Insurrectionary anarchism is the current within anarchism that insists on informal organization, immediate action against structures of domination, and the refusal of permanent organizations, political programs, negotiation with authority, and the deferral of freedom to a future revolutionary moment. Its central claim is structural, not merely tactical: permanent organizations accumulate bureaucracy, reproduce hierarchy, and become ends in themselves. Freedom practiced now, in the act of resistance itself, is the only freedom that is real.
Core claims
Insurrectionary anarchism is not a doctrine of constant armed revolt. It is an analysis of organization. Its starting point is the observation that formal organizations — parties, unions, federations with fixed memberships and permanent structures — tend to reproduce the hierarchy they claim to oppose. Leaders emerge. Bureaucracy accumulates. The organization’s survival becomes more important than its purpose. The means overtake the ends.
The alternative is informal organization: temporary, task-specific coordination among affinity groups that form around shared projects and dissolve when the project is complete. No permanent membership. No leaders. No program. The organizational form is the political content: if you want non-hierarchical relations, you must refuse to create hierarchical organizations, even ones that claim to serve liberation.
Attack and immediacy
Insurrectionary anarchism holds that structures of domination must be attacked directly — not petitioned, not reformed, not gradually undermined through participation, but confronted and disrupted. Direct action is not a supplement to political organizing but its substance. The goal is not to build a counter-power that will eventually replace the existing order but to create ungovernable situations in which self-organization becomes necessary and possible.
This does not mean that all insurrectionary action is violent. Sabotage, blockade, occupation, refusal of work, withdrawal of compliance — these are all forms of attack on structures of domination. What matters is that they are direct (not mediated by representatives), immediate (not deferred to a future moment), and antagonistic (not seeking accommodation with power).
Key figures and texts
Alfredo Bonanno is the most influential theorist of insurrectionary anarchism. His Armed Joy (1977) argues that the experience of freedom in the act of resistance — joy, intensity, the refusal to separate means from ends — is not a byproduct but the point. Revolution is not a future event to prepare for but a quality of present action.
Criticisms within anarchism
Other anarchist currents argue that insurrectionary anarchism’s rejection of permanent organization makes sustained mutual aid, federation, and large-scale coordination impossible. Anarcho-syndicalists in particular argue that the workplace requires durable organization — unions, strike funds, coordinated action across industries — that cannot be accomplished through temporary affinity groups alone.
Insurrectionists respond that durable organizations inevitably reproduce what they oppose, and that the history of anarchist unions (the CNT’s integration into the Spanish Republic, for instance) confirms this.
Related
- informal organization — the organizational principle
- affinity group — the basic organizing unit
- refusal — the political stance toward existing institutions
- direct action — the method
- prefigurative politics — the underlying principle that means must embody ends
- anarcho-syndicalism — the contrasting organizational current