Development Among the earliest inspirations for insurrectionary anarchism was
Max Stirner's 1845 book
The Ego and Its Own, a tract that upheld a kind of proto-
individualist anarchism. Stirner distinguished between "
revolution" and "
insurrection", defining the aims of "revolution" to be a new arrangement of society by a
state, while he considered the aims of an "insurrection" to be the rejection of such arrangements and the free
self-organisation of individuals. During the 1870s, the idea of "
propaganda of the deed" was initially developed by
Italian anarchists to mean small
direct actions that would inspire others to themselves carry out acts of insurrection. Insurrectionists viewed every riot or rebellion as a kind of "revolutionary gymnastics" which could lead to a generalised
social revolution. Driven by this theory, Italian individualist anarchists carried out a series of high-profile assassinations during the 1890s, killing French President
Sadi Carnot, Spanish Prime Minister
Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Austrian Empress
Elisabeth Wittelsbach and Italian King
Umberto Savoy. Meanwhile, the question of organisation had divided the Italian anarchist movement into the syndicalists, who advocated for organisation within the labour movement, and the insurrectionists, who emphasised violent and illegal forms of self-organised direct action. The insurrectionary anarchists rejected all forms of formal organisation, including anarchist federations and trade unions, and criticised the movement's
reformist and
activist tendencies for failing to take "immediate action". Although both tendencies advocated for
anarchist communism, pro-organisationalists such as
Francesco Saverio Merlino and
Errico Malatesta considered the insurrectionists to really constitute a tendency of
individualist anarchism, due to their belief in
individual sovereignty and
natural law.
Galleanist movement , an early leading proponent of insurrectionary anarchism Contemporaneous with the rise of
anarcho-syndicalism, insurrectionary anarchism was promoted in the
United States by the Italian immigrant
Luigi Galleani, through his newspaper
Cronaca Sovversiva. Galleani was a staunch anti-organisationalist, opposing anarchist participation in the labour movement, which he felt displayed reformist tendencies and a receptiveness to
corruption. This stance brought Galleani into conflict with the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) during the
1912 Lawrence textile strike, following which they entered into a fierce polemic. However, outside observers paid little attention to the differences between the anarchist factions, who were generally viewed as part of the same "amorphous inscrutable threat". Galleani advocated for
propaganda of the deed, which was taken up throughout North America by a network of
Galleanist cells, usually consisting of close-knit individuals. Following the
American entry into World War I and the ensuing
political repression that followed, the Galleanists initiated a violent campaign in opposition to the American government. After some Italian anarchists were killed by police for
tearing down an American flag, the Galleanists carried a reprisal attack, which itself triggered a wave of arrests against insurrectionists. When one of the Italian insurrectionists was threatened with deportation, the Galleanists responded with a
bombing campaign, sending
letter bombs to industrialists, politicians and lawyers. None of the bombs hit their targets, instead injuring a housekeeper and accidentally killing one of the insurrectionist conspirators. Although the conspirators themselves were never caught, Galleani and other Italian insurrectionists were deported and the bombings were used as justification for repression of the
1919 strike wave. (1920) During the
subsequent political repression, the Italian anarchists
Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on charges of armed robbery. The Galleanists responded by carrying out the
Wall Street bombing, killing 38 people and making the task of exonerating the pair more difficult. Nevertheless, the Galleanists continued their efforts to aid Sacco and Vanzetti, who they considered to have been framed. In 1922, they began publication of ''
L'Adunata dei refrattari'', in which they encouraged their readers to break the pair out of prison and carry out retributive violence against the responsible state officials. This further exacerbated the split between the syndicalists and insurrectionists, as the two factions excluded each other from their own campaigns. Political repression largely drove the insurrectionary anarchist movement underground, with
Marcus Graham declaring that they would continue to operate on a conspiratorial basis until they could again agitate in the open. During the late 1920s, Graham moved to
San Francisco, where he became involved with insurrectionary anarchists around the Galleanist newspaper ''L'Emancipazione
. As the Great Depression limited their capacity, the paper shifted to publications in the English language and invited Graham to be its editor. In January 1933, the group established the newspaper Man!, intended as a means to revive the Galleanism of the previous decade. For Graham and his collaborators, the social revolution was to be built on individuals achieving a form of enlightenment that would break them from "every law, custom and sham creed in which he now finds himself trapped". Like early insurrectionists, Man!'' rejected syndicalism and the labour movement, which they considered to be inherently
authoritarian, and frequently criticised union officials for corruption. Graham also formulated a
criticism of technology and called for the destruction of civilisation, in arguments that were an early precursor to
anarcho-primitivism.
Man! and ''L'Adunata dei refrattari
continued to act as the main expressions of insurrectionary anarchism throughout the 1930s, but failed to revive it as a popular tendency. Before long, Man!'' came under increasing police repression, culminating with Graham's arrest and the subsequent cessation of publication in 1939. By the 1940s, the insurrectionary anarchist movement was only a marginal force, concentrated around ''L'Adunata dei refrattari
in New York. The periodical slowly declined until the early 1970s, when it was finally succeeded by the anti-authoritarian publication Fifth Estate''.
Resurgence Insurrectionary anarchism re-emerged within the Italian anarchist movement during the
Years of Lead, when the country was marked by instances of
left-wing and
right-wing terrorism. In 1977,
Alfredo Bonanno published his book
Armed Joy, which espoused a
critique of work, emphasised the feeling of
joy and advocated for the use of revolutionary violence. Although Bonanno was imprisoned for the book's publication and the Italian state ordered all copies be destroyed, he continued to pen insurrectionist manifestos. As the
Cold War drew to a close, he called for insurrectionary anarchists to coordinate themselves into an informal "Anti-Authoritarian Insurrectionist International" in order to build contact and exchange ideas, but this project was stillborn. (FAI) During the 1980s, Italian insurrectionary anarchists began carrying out small acts of vandalism against "soft targets" such as
telecommunications and
electricity infrastructure. These were usually carried out by small informal groups, largely distributed throughout
Northern and
Central Italy, that focused on localised social conflicts. These attacks escalated into violence during the late 1990s, when insurrectionists began carrying out bombings and assaults. The escalation initially caught the Italian authorities off guard, as they were used to these attacks being carried out without casualties. Between the years of 1999 and 2003, four insurrectionist groups carried out a series of more than 20 bombing attacks, following which they merged into the
Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) in December 2003. To announce their formation, the FAI carried out a series of bombing attacks against various officials of the
European Union, including the European President
Romano Prodi, although none of the letter bombs sent out caused any injuries. A further series of letter bomb attacks were carried out by the FAI in 2010 and 2011, during which a number of people were injured. After a cell of the FAI
kneecapped an executive of
Ansaldo Nucleare in 2012, fears of anarchist terrorism spread rapidly throughout Italy. This led to a wave of arrests against insurrectionary anarchists, including one of the attackers
Alfredo Cospito, which briefly put the FAI into an "operational stasis" before they resumed parcel bomb attacks the following year. Over a decade of active operations, the FAI claimed 50 violent attacks, having caused 10 injuries and no deaths. Since the dissolution of the
Red Brigades, insurrectionary anarchists have been considered by the Italian government to be among the most dangerous
domestic terrorists in Italy, second only to
Islamic terrorists. The FAI's example was followed on an international scale by a number of other insurrectionary anarchist groups, most notably the
Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF) in
Greece, who joined with the FAI to launch what they called the "Black International". Parts of Bonanno's insurrectionary programme have also been taken up by anarchist sections of the
anti-globalization movement, as well as by the
Sardinian nationalist Costantino Cavalleri and the
American individualist Wolfi Landstreicher. " In the United States, insurrectionary anarchism had largely been sidelined until the establishment of
Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, which promoted the use of violent direct action in solidarity with the
King assassination riots. During the mid-2000s, nihilists that were inspired by the rise of insurrectionism in Europe established
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (AJODA), which took up the insurrectionist calls to violence and whose members participated in
occupation protests. Insurrectionary anarchists went onto play a leading role in the
Occupy movement, although they often clashed with activists that promoted
civil disobedience and
prefigurative politics, and ultimately failed to develop a long-term strategy for the movement. ==Theory and practice==