Michael Loadenthal's "The Politics of Attack"

Michael Loadenthal is Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Miami University of Oxford, Ohio and Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and insurrectionary violence, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The structuring of social war

Insurrectionary struggle must be understood as more than the sum of its communiqués. To understand it only in this regard is reductionist and misses important occurrences, such as frequent street-level confrontations, marches, building occupations, riots, blockades, and clandestine attacks. A defender of insurrectionary strategy commented in an anarchist message board, trying to succinctly explain this strategy and framework, writing:

The insurrection purposed by many contemporary anarchists is an informal non-military non-non-violent communization or egoist campaign. An insurrection is the actualization of our desires that go against the ruling order. An insurrection spreads cracks in the spectacle of social peace. The anarchist insurrection is the riot, the social war, the blockade, the strike, the gang, the commune, and so much more. (Anonymous 2014h)

The insurrectionary strategy, or rather the strategy proposed by insurrectionists is a multifaceted initiative based around building autonomous spaces (e.g. squats, communes, police-free neighborhoods, zones of opacity (IEF 2013, 50; TIC 2007, 107–108), temporary autonomous zones (Bey 1991)), fostering conflict to expose inequality (i.e. making social war), and directly attacking forms of domination through informal, individualist, illegal action including property destruction, sabotage, propaganda, expropriation, and strikes at individuals.

Unlike Marxism and other revolutionary frameworks, insurrectionary anarchism is not rooted in a specific theory of change (e.g. historical materialism) but is rather a theory of critique and action, not prefiguration. In his discussion of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, conflict theorist Richard Rubenstein (1987, 29–30) points to a two-stage understanding advocated by Vietnamese leader and military strategist General Vo Nguyen Giap who divided the conflict into two stages, beginning with guerrilla war before moving into more conventional forms of warfare. General Giap (1965, 52 [Emphasis in original]) understood the role played by guerrilla violence, stating:

At the price of their hard-won experiences, our compatriots in the South realized that the fundamental trend of imperialism and its lackeys is violence and war; that is why the most correct path to be followed by the peoples to liberate themselves is revolutionary violence and revolutionary war. This path conforms strictly to the ethics and the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism on class struggle, on the state and the revolution. Only by revolutionary violence can the masses defeat aggressive imperialism and its lackeys and overthrow the reactionary administration to take power.

While the guerrilla warfare resembles the strategies and tactics of the insurrectionists, it is in this second stage, where one moves into a phase of more regular combat, that the comparison breaks down. While the Marxist and nationalist struggles of this era were defined by the desire to foster a “mass- based guerrilla army” in order to “move from large-scale rebellion to revolution” (Rubenstein 1987, 30), the insurrectionary perspective lacks this prescriptive chronology and sees only the moment of the attack, the resulting rupture, and the attacks that follow.

While I'm not sure if the Page 99 Test holds true for a book covering such a long historical timeline, here is a sample page from the book (from page 99-100) that can stand alone to provide the reader with a bit of insight as to what the book covers in total.

Learn more about The Politics of Attack at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue