Strategies for the Struggle: A Brief Introduction

In my last post I briefly talked about what strategies for the struggle I think are best. Now, I’d like to take the time to dedicate four separate full length articles to all of my preferred strategies. In addition I shall have one more after that to bring them all together. Because next week will be hectic for me (my birthday and other events are going on) I doubt I’ll be able to start next Wednesday/week. On the plus side that will give me a little bit more time to research and so on.

I shall start with discussing agorism, its history, some of the original strands of thought, how it evolved, etc. With direct action I’ll be discuss Voltairine de Cleyre’s essay as well as other resources on how best to use this tactic against the state. For dual power/counter power I’ll use quite a few essays, videos and so on on what it is and how it can be used. Finally with education I’ll try to give some sort of rough outline of how best to educate people and more importantly yourself.

First though, to introduce this whole new series I’d like to define some of the words in the title. What do I mean by strategy and struggle? What sort of struggle lays ahead for us as anarchists?

Strategies

So Wikipedia (the final arbiter of all knowledge…I swear this will catch on someday as a meme) says that strategies are plans of action that have a particular goal. Now the word strategy also has a lot of military contexts but for the purposes of this series I’m not referring that. I’m just referring to a plan of action with a goal of a certain kind in mind. In this case it’s a plan of action to abolish the physical and mental construct of the state.

Struggle

Struggle (1-3 and 5 are applicable) here means in this context that the energy going towards something is going to face resistance. So putting into place ideas towards a particular goal will always be some sort of struggle but in this case it’s especially so. What sort of struggle? Well it depends on which strategies we’re going to use in the struggle itself. If we use violent means it might eventually result in more physically demanding than mentally demanding energy. If we use non-violence it might be a lot more of thinking but not as much physical demand insofar as the cops don’t decide to beat you. So the type of struggle is largely contextual on what sort of strategy we’re using for it.

Looking ahead

As the title suggests this article wasn’t intended to be long but I just wanted to give you guys a look at some of my thought processes involved with this. I also think it’s important for anarchists to get out of theory and start discussing concrete action more. I have my doubts that this series will somehow spring some sort of big social revolution but I hope it’ll at least keep a conducive conversation starting and perhaps have it result in something tangible if possible.