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

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

Becoming Animal: My Feral Individualism

From back cover:

“Caught in this schismatic abyss, I find myself compelled towards a practice of individualism. Why individualism, rather than collectivism? My body is often found within the machinery of Leviathan which is that collective known as society. The ultra­left collectivists and supporters of communisation would whisper in my ear that I am duty bound to the means­-of­-production of Leviathan and would seek to draw me into their economic-­politics. But I’d say that projects, such as Tiqqun and others, which seek to synthesis communisation theory with anarchist praxis, are little more than bad
faith preachers, as they locate freedom exclusively within the domain of society and deny the immediate power and freedom of their flesh.”

Becoming Animal_ My Feral Individualism pdf

Communes & Land Projects: A Nomadic Critique of Communization

From back cover:

“…what is unappetizing about the call for attack by the communisateurs and Tiqqunists is exactly that they are communisateurs — they are Marxists — they want the communes so they can have spaces to build their Party, or build whatever of their organizations, to opportunistically centralize and “increase power” (anonymous 2009, 17). This is in preparation of them launching their inevitable revolutionary war against the bourgeoisie, and following their victory, the communizers would of course seek to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat (also referred to in some circles of the Marxist far-left as the proletarian semi-State).”

Communes and Land Projects A Nomadic Critique of Communization pdf

Communization: The Senile Decay of Anarchy by Conspiracy of Cells of Fire Imprisoned Members

Text from back cover:

“Anarchy, however, demands the organization of the new anarchist urban guerrilla, if we don’t want it to degenerate into a meaningless poetic chatter, doomed to be followed by the alternative integration in the system. Concepts that are not armed, like anarchist individualism, nihilism end up being harmless words in the mouths of even more harmless individuals who confuse anarcho-nihilism with the subculture of “antisocial lifestyle”. Anarcho-nihilism combines the propaganda of words with the propaganda of shootings, fire, dynamite. Its dynamic is forged on the anvil of actions where consciousness and experience meet in a never ending dance and not in the keyboards of the digital world of nothing.”

Communization-Decay-of-Anarchy pdf

On the poverty of “Joyful Militancy”

From back cover:

““Their notion of “troubled joy” that they implicitly allude to in such roundabout ways, comes off sounding  somewhat like a ruined orgasm (but not in a kinky way), cut short by thoughts of white guilt and internalized Christianity roaming the back of its head. This truncated notion of joy, though carefully detailed as to be all­inclusive, is felt as if manicured to trim off any palpable trace of lust, wrath, or any of the remaining “deadly sins”. Though they reproduce criticism of a Catholic moralism that warns against excesses, one comes off with the impression that if ever playing “fuck, marry, kill” they would only ever choose  “marry”, under the Church no less, lest anyone think they are of ill repute.

Perhaps they should have titled the book “Sad Militancy” since it deals mainly with that, as a problem. Not daring so much to propose ­much less embody­ a concrete way out of that impasse, while also seemingly still being held hostage by its affects. One wonders how they thought they could ever overcome “rigid radicalism”, while paralyzed by the rigor mortis of academia that was so palpable to me during my intercourse with this text.”

On the Poverty of Joyful Militancy pdf

Old Habits Die Hard: At Daggers Drawn with “Inhabit”

From back:

“They speak of collective power; no power can support itself without the voluntary servitude of those it dominates. Power is a social relationship, a social hierarchical organization model, a way of life­management. Reformism acts on detail, quantitatively. It mobilizes vast numbers of people in order to change a few isolated aspects of power.
“Inhabit” is the sugarcoating of decentralized D.I.Y. biopolitics.

Security, territory, population. They encourage the reader to target an area with the logic of occupation.

Building hubs is an act of bordering, delimiting a zone of exclusion. An intimate act of social cohesion producing productive subjectivities, set apart from external superfluous strangers. The opposite of rewilding; re­civilizing pockets of wildness…

…The time to attack is now.

There is nothing and no one to wait for. To act now, with determined projectuality where our
destructive tension is the defining factor in our lives, not something that is built upon by following a 9­step program or a 5­year plan.”

Old Habits Die Hard pdf