BREAKING RANKS: Subverting the Hierarchy & Manipulation Behind Earth Uprisings


“At this point, many anarchists in the US are already familiar with how tiqqunists destroyed the struggle at the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD (Zone to Defend) occupation in France in favor of legalization and property ownership [1]. The narrative that this tragic conclusion to the decade-long struggle was actually a victory has been regurgitated ad nauseum by tiqqunist platforms in the US. For example, Ill Will Edition’s “The Strategy of Composition” is about applying this “strategy” to the struggle against Cop City: “The territorial phase of the struggle took shape gradually over a ten year period from 2008 until its eventual victory in 2018, and has since continued to nourish collective experiments on the Zone to this day”.

The next initiative of the ex-ZAD tiqqunists failed when those familiar with their methods of recuperation and authoritarianism sabotaged their attempts to take the vanguard of a ZAD located in Carnet. Comrades from the Carnet ZAD along with those from several other struggles co-authored a statement outlining the attempts at cooptation and centralization, which we included as an appendix in this zine as an inspiring example of anti-authoritarians making a struggle inhospitable to authoritarian power plays.

After this failed attempt at bringing autonomous and decentralized struggles under their control, the tiqqunists of the ex-ZAD moved on to their most recent initiative: Soulevements de la Terre (which translates to “Earth Uprisings”, aka SDT). Exploiting the momentum of groups like Extinction Rebellion, and the broader youth climate movement, SDT offers activists a militant alternative to civil disobedience: mass demo-actions against ecologically destructive targets. While these have included some notable acts of sabotage, it is important to notice that their actions are often just as limited to symbolic engagement as those of the non-violent environmentalists, designed to promote the organization through sensationalism aimed at capturing the attention of the mass media. A recent mass action against a water basin on March 25th resulted in serious injuries, prompting anarchists to more broadly articulate warnings about this organization’s political foundations and motivations. The authors of these texts are careful to critique the centralized forces behind SDT and not the participants, clarifying that they are not telling anyone to stop attending SDT actions, but rather encouraging them to maintain a critical eye towards how the actions are organized and what they are being asked to do.

Predictably, the two primary tiqqunist platforms in the US have championed Soulevements de la Terre: Ill Will Editions republishes their propaganda, and Inhabit does the same while proclaiming that their actions are “an exhilarating example of all that has gone well in the movement up until this point and chart a path forward we hope others can imagine walking themselves”. [2] The following three critiques from anti-authoritarians in France are therefore also relevant to our context. These texts focus on manipulative and vanguardist practices, the spectacularization of the struggle, and the use of radicals as shock-troops. The goal of these texts, and our translation effort, is to increase familiarity with these deceptive practices and strategies, an essential first step towards sabotaging the influence and control of any similar attempts in our own neck of the woods.”

BREAKING RANKS_Subverting the Hierarchy & Manipulation Behind Earth Uprisings pdf

Has the Insurrection Come Yet? A Cartography of The Coming Insurrection, Tiqqun, and their Party

From back cover:

“A major problem with The Coming Insurrection is that it basically dresses up a tried and defeated strategy in new clothes, the strategy of a good part of the European autonomous struggles of past decades. Perhaps this is why it was way more popular in the US than in France: because its suggestions aren’t all that groundbreaking, except here, where there never was an autonomous movement…

…one wonders how else European radicals could repackage the strategy of revolution through the networking of autonomous spaces as though it were a new idea…

…For the Invisible Committee, in the insurrection they prophesy, the real one, their insurrection, we are all “whatever singularities,” without predicates, an emptiness brimming with possibilities. It’s a beautiful dream, and I, for one, believe in fighting for dreams. But there is a certain ownership they exercise over their insurrection, a certain power of exclusion the Invisible Committee have vis a vis the Imaginary Party, that could make this dream nothing more than a maneuver identical to the one by which the communists suppressed difference by demanding adherence to the unified identity of the Working Class. There are no women, there are no blacks, there are only members of the Imaginary Party.”

Has the Insurrection Come Yet pdf

A Sales Pitch for the Insurrection: A Critical Look at The Coming Insurrection

From back cover:

“The Coming Insurrection is selling a feel ­good ideology that rids us of any responsibility for our lives or our rebellion. It is an empty book, with no more content than any other sales pitch. There are only two possible excuses for writing it. Either the scribes were, indeed, simply carried away by the “truth” of events (perhaps their commune’s need for extra money?) and couldn’t help themselves—in which case they would be justified in denying their role as authors, but would be rather pathetic as human beings—or … the book was simply a pataphysical hoax… In either case, their Insurrection is a joke.”

A Sales Pitch for The Insurrection pdf

Beyond the “Movement” – Anarchy!

Text from back cover:

“The collectivist message of The Coming Insurrection has little in common with insurrectional anarchy: the revolutionary theory flowing from the individual’s passionate uprising to appropriate the fullness of life for themselves, attacking all that controls and exploits, finding commonalities and affinities with others from which spring the real commune – the friends and accomplices of the guerrilla war against the totality of authoritarian society. Their insurrection may be coming, mine has come, it is an individual revolt. With no sovereign systems of morality, theory, principles or social abstractions standing above the singular individual, the nihilist­ anarchist attacks all systems, including identity and ideology systems, as obstacles to our self­ realisation. The struggle is against not only the domination of controlling social organisation and widespread tranquilisation, but also against inherited repressive programming and the force of daily life, and so our struggle is a constant tension where what we must destroy and transcend is much more obvious than where we might end up.”

Beyond The Movement_Anarchy! pdf