The Russian Revolution might be understood as a series of eruptions between 1905. Each built on the others (and not necessarily in a linear way) and each contributed to the construction of critical narratives cobbled together by a large group of groups united only in their ambition to topple the IMperial government--one way or another. Each of these events, then, semiotically at least, might be understood as knots in a very special kind of garrote which, when strung together on the narratives being woven, could be used to strangle the apparatus of a Russian Imperial government who collectively were unable to grasp the meaning of and serving as moments in and through which a quite anarchist environment of opposition groups could be both sustained and solidified. All that was needed for the necessary context in which that garrote could be used, and that context could be constructed by inflamed passions and a successful effort to de-legitimate the apparatus selected for extinction. Once done, the anarchist space could do its own work, leaving it only for the groups united in opposition, to cull their ranks until only one remained.

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That, of course, has absolutely nothing to so with events since Seattle in 1999; Genoa G8 in 2011; or the 2011 Occupy movement (for an interesting take here). They could not be understood as knots on a revolutionary garrote. Nor does the methodologies of 19th century anarcho-revolutionary movements and the well ordered disciplinary cells built around it have anything to tell us about the semiotics of engineering social disintegration--especially with respect to the value and understanding (much less the application) of its core norms and fundamental mission. Nor does it offer any insight into the ossification, dissipation, and decay of contemporary boyars who through a combination of arrogance, laziness, and a sense that neither time nor context change as generations are born and die, add their contribution to the decay of political solidarity, a core solidarity which at the fundamental level is necessary element of the cohesion required to preserve a mass political collective.

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Still, it may be instructive to understand the impulse toward revolutionary action. In this case not so much as a morality story about the preservation of a society unwilling or unable to defend itself and protect its values, instill loyalty and commitment to its values, enhance the solidarity of its mass organs in principle and action. Rather, it is useful for understanding key insights about successful revolutionary movements, and, of course, the successful utilization of decay and corruption as a sort of compost in which revolutionary mass organizations can cultivate what might emerge--out of violence necessary for the destruction of one, and the constitution of another, binding collective orthodoxy.

To those ends it may be useful to consider how contemporary revolutionary movements operate and what that might tell us about the enduring principles from out of which any society can be de-stabilized, its strengths used against it, and the ruthless exploitation of the laziness, decay and self-absorption of that society's leadership caste, as well as its mindless self indulgence of exaggerated tendencies toward its edges, can be turned into knots in contemporary garrotes to be vigorously tightened by the leadership castes of revolutionary movements. One useful venue for acquiring a glimpse of this are the folks at CrimethInc.

Crimethink is everything that evades control: the daydream in the classroom, the renegade breaking ranks, the spray-painted walls that continue to speak even under martial law. It is the persistent sense that things could be otherwise, that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the prevailing social order. In a world optimized for administration, everything that cannot be classified or displayed on a screen is crimethink. It is the spirit of rebellion without which freedom is literally unthinkable. (About CrimethInk)

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In the context of the anarchist movements which, like their predecessors that became so potent after the constitution of Empire in Europe from 1848 but took on a more permanent institutional form the 1860s, contemporary anarchist movements became so potent in the wake of the constitution of global empire after the collapse of the Soviet imperial systems (the last--to that point of territoriality based ethno-nationalist Empire fueled by some sort of religious solidarity structures, in that case their version of Marxist-Leninism). There are enormous differences of course. Each is activated by the "flavor of the month" triggers that ignites passions: in the 19th century those included issues of class, hierarchy, and the positive values of ethno-xenophilia. In this century the triggers are identitarian, self-actualizing, and "anti" (anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-(hetero)nomrative and like their predecessors committed to a "re-set" or "re-boot" of societies as a function of some sort of ideal state). Until then, secrecy, anonymous collective action, and interlinking of disparate revolutionary groups connected principally by their opposition to whatever orthodoxy they seek in their own contextual circumstances to overthrow (the CrimethInk version here) . Each are parts of the weave through which the collection of eruptive knots can again be strung together in a revolutionary garrote.

While it remains for the future decades to fully understand the "1905"repercussions of 1999 and the events of Seattle and thereafter Genoa, the Occupy Movement and Ferguson (2014) and George Floyd (2020) protests etc. (contemporary elites in power are caught between fear and infatuation as they have been since the start of the post-colonial era; TIME named “The Protester” the person of the year in 2011), there is little doubt that those lessons and those connections were not lost on contemporary revolutionary movement. While the global empire (in all of its ideological forms) continued to naval gaze after 1999, revolutionary movements reinvested anarchism with its old semiotic potentiality, as a conceptual space within which the bubbling brew of revolutionary multiplicity might find a common space to work on the larger project--the undermining the entire apparatus of global empire, one variation of which at a time. For the moment, the American elite apparatus appears to be an excellent target; others will follow, or will better prepare for what global revolutionary anarchism believes is coming.

Understand that there is a difference between anarchism and chaos. Anarchism speaks to order without a center. Whether it is a stable state remains to be seen. It has certainly sometimes been a violent system in that sense that while order is sublime, its lack of a center provides substantial spaces for contestants within its ordering principles. But not always. Chaos speaks to disorder--a system in which systemicity is itself the enemy; it is the ultimate paradox of solidarity, and thus while extraordinarily potent, has a very short half-life. (Human) Nature tends to find its way back to order--and often to a compulsory orthodoxy of some or other.

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CrimethInk's recent essay, Why the State Can’t Compromise with the Gaza Solidarity Movement:And What That Means for Us (2024-05-03), draws out these themes in its contemporary environment. The context--what for them may be the next important knot in the revolutionary garrote--centers on the exploitation of the war in Gaza. That is an extraordinary opportunity (perhaps in the minds of some of them as useful as the war between Imperial Russia and Germany a century before)--it has it all, the ambivalence of naturalizing Jews within global collectives (good Jews, bad Jews, useful Jews, backwards Jews, court Jews, assimilated Jews etc., the old debates from the end of the 19th century in Mitteleuropa remain resilient and enduring), the exploitable nature of ethno-chavenism through its contemporary triggers of migration, colonialism and imperialism (though those are all antiquarian constructs still useful for the construction of identitarian narrative), the reconsideration of the uses of war, the exploitability of dead babies and women in a human shield environment, the romantic adventurism of student eruptions (again exploiting nostalgia, and the strength of the opposing regime against it), and the temporary utilization of the fight between the current crop of what they might see as the successors to ancient empires in the form of liberal democratic and Marxist Leninist fueled battles over the control of that global empire.

But it is also not the ultimate objective:

"Do not let “centering Palestine” serve as a rationale to become less disruptive. The war machine killing Palestinians is an essential part of the war-making institutions of the US empire, which includes not only universities and weapons contractors, but the economy itself. All of these are interconnected with other governments and colonial projects around the world. Stopping the genocide of the Palestinians means challenging every aspect of the prevailing world order. . . As the struggle against Cop City in Atlanta has made clear, the oppression of the Palestinian people represents a blueprint for a possible future for all of us. . . . In the long run, the only way to end the genocide in Gaza will be to the dismantle the American war machine and the corporate board rooms that drive it." (Why the State Can’t Compromise with the Gaza Solidarity Movement:And What That Means for Us )

The essay considers the strategic questions necessary to be extracted, and the learning equally necessary to absorb, from the events at Columbia University. (Ibid). These are the questions:

"Why are the police being so heavy-handed? Why are the media contorting themselves into increasingly bizarre contradictions to condemn the protests? Why are the Democrats and the Republicans united in opposing these protests? And how is it that, in their haste to crack down, university administrations, politicians, and police appear to have forgotten the basic principles of protest management?" (Ibid.).

The answers start from the re-imagination of the actions in Gaza as a semiotic signification of something far greater than that microcosm. If Gaza is a semiotic firstness (object), its signification (how to constitute its meaning, secondness) is critical for the elaboration of a powerful interpretation aligned with the imaginaries or lebenswelt (Lifeworld) of the collective, that is, its thirdness. Fundamental to that answer is the notion of contradiction: (1) the contradiction of liberal democratic principles of universal human rights and the support for what the narrative must characterize as white settler-colonialism (which, in another project, must be distinguished from mass migrations that are part of a positive migratory discourse); the inevitable connection between this contradiction and genocide; (2) much more easily exploitable, the contradiction between the idea of the university and its dependence on funding by the forces of genocide, global empire, and conservatism, and (3) the contradiction between the ideal of free speech and the suppression of speech performance by students and their allies (ibid.). The old recourse of class struggle in this context, just a whiff, is quite interesting.

The essay notes that pattern, and indirectly, the power of constituting knots strung together within a coherent narrative structure.

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"There is no way for Democrats to give the Israeli government carte blanche to carry out genocide while buying the votes of those who believe that the lives of Palestinians have inherent value. This makes for a situation that may be unique among all the mass struggles in recent history. Centrist media outlets and Democratic politicians were prepared to countenance the George Floyd Uprising of 2020 in hopes of drawing activists back into the fold of policy negotiations. They thought that they could exploit those protests to build an electoral base against Trump during an election year. This moment is different. It is impossible for the Democrats to budge at all now because both parties have hinged their political platforms on unequivocal support of the Israeli government, condemning any opposition as anti-Semitic. Democratic politicians have continued doubling down on that position even as it has become more and more preposterous. The fact that the Democrats now control the federal government prevents them from benefiting from outrage against what is effectively a bipartisan policy. In that sense, there is a sort of symmetry here. While the (first?) Trump era ended with the George Floyd Uprising, cementing the ascendancy of direct action tactics at the culmination of four years of resistance to Trump, the Biden era appears to be ending with a conflagration of its own, signifying an irreparable break between the centrists and the autonomous movements they have long sought to co-opt." (Ibid., emphasis supplied)

In the larger context then, important insights might be gleaned. The first: "Every occupation that disbands after winning minor concessions will only pave the way for genocide." The second "Do not let “centering Palestine” serve as a rationale to become less disruptive." The third: "This is about you, too." The fourth: "Those concerned with their personal safety should not deny others the freedom to take risks that they are willing to accept." (bid.).

Of course, the tools of revolutionary anarchism do not, in themselves, have an ideology. Any group can utilize its methods, outlooks, premises as and to the extent they like, infusing it with their own ideological flavors. What joins them all, of course, from Antifa to radical libertariansm is the outward commitment to autonomy, but an inward commitment to the ordering principles and expectations, the guardrails, within which that autonomy may be exercised. That, ultimate, contradiction, inevitably ties even the most radical anarchism to global empire in its liberal democratic, Marxist-Leninist, theocratic, or post-colonial variation. No matter how far "out" one is always "in" something. Or, in the language of a more radical anarchism--order requires no center--it is, however, a system of order, and ecologies of order--however they present themselves from era to era. It is this formative insight, of course, that one finds the counter to anarchism--its strength can be used against it as its cadres use the strengths of oppositional systems to the same effect. And back one goes to power relationships and the management and control of collective meaning making, the collective semiotics of control--and the need for power to attach to itself an ordering principle around which a compelling narrative may be spun consisting of the thing itself (object), the attachment of a strategic meaning to that object (signification), and the deployment of that signification in the construction of a shared narrative reality (operationalization of aggregated signified objects that can be applied for problem solving and social control) within which everything can be understood (interpretation).

Links to the essay as well a to reports from the field (universities in which students have been active) follow below. Together, they provide a much better picture from the inside of the larger issues for which Gaza serves as the latest useful eruption.