by Fauvenoir
It can be safely assumed that around the year 2011, we've seen a worldwide momentum of anarchist insurgency. Perhaps we could talk about a 4-years period, or maybe even 7 or 8, that started with the Greek insurgency in December 2008, which might have opened a temporary rupture in the hardening fabric of social reality, unleashing waves of forces from Hell (in the Jungian sense of course!) upon the stagnant, grey, totalitarian liberal-democratic order of the Millenium, the Forteress Europe, and America's War on Terror.
Turmoil has spread at a time where the global capitalist establishments had reached a level of cohesion and unity unseen for about a hundred years. There was a G20 at some point... remember? Then a cop car was burned for all the world to see. The first real actual riot à la Greek happened in the streets of the biggest business urban center of over-pacified Canada. Around 2011 in some parts of Canada and the U.S., some serious anarcho insurgency was taking shape, as more globally we've seen the hey days of anarcho-insurgent ogarnizations like the CCF-FAI.
You had a revolt in Iran, the Arab Spring, wildcat strikes in the south of the African continent, factory occupations in Chinese industrial cities, MEND's Rambo war on big oil exploitation in Nigeria, Somalian piracy, radical subversion unleashed up against the Russian regime, the much derided/despised/missed Occupy movement, insurrectos going actually insurrecto in the U.S., then a huge student strike in Quebec where many "outside agitators" came over there to experiment a bit of social warfare, and yes there was a really big anarchy fest at the ZAD... like THE squat eviction party of the decade (and the last), in the middle of the countryside in France.
To me, all these uprisings have shown that, contrary to a widespread pre-2008 belief in the State's paramount inexorability, of the Police State made into a God, it was still possible to challenge, subvert or negate the power of the State, especially on the public place. That anarchy was still alive and well, somewhere outside of our reinforced bubbles. That you just had to get there. And it all looked neat and fresh. It was a time to remember, tell our grand kids maybe (though you shouldn't have kids. It's really a bad idea, and not at all needed); despite the let down that followed...
2012 did indeed happen! But instead of world-changing catastrophes, big space rock crashing, tidal waves swallowing everything, or a nukular war, we appear to have went to the wrong alternate universe; everything in society that had to go just STAYED, or crept back in, worse and more resilient than before... as the movement of revolt just gradually evaporated, leaving us with the spectacles of our past insurrections to be analyzed by West Coast anarchist outlets.
What happened was otherwise. A subjuguation, a liquidation of entire uprisings through the cheap old tricks of democratic politics and their statecraft. And NATO troops remained in Afghanistan no matter what. Fascism -may it be White or Islamic- just kept getting bigger and deadlier. Billionaires Club kept growing as proles been working overtime to pay the owners of their plaster boxes and to eat over-inflated shit. None of the insurrections "worked", save their own specific, local goals when there were. We've had a few interesting outbursts of rage in the few years that followed, like of course BLM and, to some extent, the Ukrainian and Syrian uprisings -even if those had some really problematic, fascistic aspects- and the recent Nuit Debout in France, and, well, there was another, tougher fight at the ZAD that finally revealed that the State isn't only an externality, but can also be among "Our Friends".
The Insurrection was indeed coming. And it passed. Its MOMENTUM did, at least. Without actually being, and taking hold of the new-old world, changing it down to its roots, contaminating it to a point of no return, where hierarchies of the State are finally abandoned, or their whole world was just trashed. Somewhere someplace, a bomb was watered down... Some dude got a job... Some black bloc dude said something rude to a comrade at the riot porn demo... Some people went too easy on themselves in the summer... Some usual hobo fetish kid got joined a "radical" folk band... I can't really tell, but perhaps YOU can.
But did we really had a plan, anyways? Or at best a vision?
So, instead of renewing the old generic analysis of past uprisings that tend to give them an shoddily-critical impression of success, I wanted for so long to look at what actually went wrong.
What the fuck happened, that made those insurgencies implode, collapse, run out of fuel, or water themselves down? What went on, for instance, in June 2012 in Quebec or around those puzzling Egyptian elections? What was your experience or impression, NOT on any of those fights, but their aftermath, on how they "ended"?