Insurrectionary anarchism is the tendency within anarchism that emphasizes informal organization, the immediacy of action, and the refusal of programmatic politics — pre-written platforms, party structures, mass organizations, and the deferral of freedom to a post-revolutionary future. Its primary theorist in the late twentieth century was Alfredo Bonanno.
The insurrectionary position holds that revolutionary organization should be informal and temporary: small affinity groups that form around specific actions, not permanent organizations that accumulate bureaucracy and reproduce internal hierarchies. Formal organizations — even anarchist ones — tend to develop self-preservation instincts that compete with their stated aims. The federation, the union, the party: each becomes a thing to be maintained, and maintenance displaces insurgency.
Insurrectionary anarchism insists on the unity of theory and practice: action is not the implementation of a pre-existing analysis but the site where analysis is produced. The armed joy Bonanno describes is not recklessness but the refusal to separate the experience of freedom from the struggle for it. This connects to anarcho-nihilism in its refusal to require hope or a program as preconditions for action, though not all insurrectionary anarchists adopt nihilist positions.