Over the past month or so, I’ve probably had at least half a dozen conversations with different colleagues and comrades regarding the need to get this pan-secessionist, national-anarchist, tribal-anarchist, anarcho-pluralist, alternative right, conservative revolutionary, whatever we are movement off of the internet and into the realm of real-world action. Some of our colleagues (most notably, the Bay Area National Anarchists) are already doing this. So what are the rest of us waiting for?
I’ve come full circle on this. For some years (roughly 1986-1992) I was heavily involved in activism of all different kinds. If it was part of the radical Left during those years, I was part of it. After developing the desire to move past some of the deficiencies I found on the Left, I became inactive for a good number of years and devoted myself instead to private study, radical journalism, and what might be called “behind the scenes” efforts. I recall a conversation with a close comrade circa 2003 where I said that I wasn’t interested in any activism at that point, on the grounds that before we could have a fresh and dynamic radical movement, we first needed to have a solid intellectual foundation for such a movement. After observing subsequent events in radical circles for a few years after that, I wrote in 2006:
In the realm of strategy, I have to confess to being a fairly orthodox Bakuninist. This perspective emphasizes the necessity of a militant vanguard and conspiratorial secret societies composed of radical intellectuals and activists acting as a leadership corps of a larger populist movement of which the lumpenproletariat and the rural population are the class vanguard. This is the strategy that was utilized by history’s most successful anarchist movement, that of the Spanish anarchists. Indeed, it was Bakunin’s emissary Fanelli who first planted the seeds of what was to become classical Spanish anarchism. As I will attempt to demonstrate, this approach might be quite feasible for modern North America as well. At present, the primary intellectual framework of a new American radicalism is pretty well complete…
The next step is the assembling of the “principled militants” whom Bakunin recognized as the intellectual and activist vanguard of the insurgency. This is not to be confused with the Marxist-Leninist concept of the “vanguard” whose only purpose is the achievement of military dictatorship for the sake of managing a centrally planned economy. We are now in need of an organizational framework that can play the same role as that of the FAI in the development of Spanish anarchism. Translated into modern American terms, such an organization would be a combination think-tank and activist and propaganda front, sort of an anarchist alternative to ruling class entities of a similar nature…
Four years later, such “militant vanguard” groups have slowly started to emerge. With increasing frequency, websites, blogs, editorials, and new articles have started to appear that present the alternative anarchist tendencies, the alternative right, secession, and other related outlooks in a positive light. Consequently, our enemies have begun to take notice as well. Last night, it was suggested to me by a leading figure in the new radical milieu that there could and should be at least 30 alternative anarchist “tribes” active in North America. Unfortunately, there are only about five at present and plans for a few more in the works. Another comrade recently suggested to me that a present we have all the theoretical work floating around that we need at present, but what we are lacking are serious volunteers who can turn theory and action into strategy.
In recent times, as I’ve been working on networking projects for the North American secessionist movement, it has occurred to me that it will be the local groups who from the foundation of any future pan-secessionist effort. That has always been my position, but the difficulties I’ve encountered involving regional secessionist efforts have driven the point home further that localism is really where it’s at. With regards to secession, Norman Mailer rather than Jefferson Davis should be our role model. Some years ago I came up with an idea called the “100 Cities Project.” The idea was to find a hundred volunteers in a hundred different cities in the U.S. to run symbolic campaigns for mayor of their respective cities on Mailer’s model, and to do so simultaneously during the same election season so as to generate a blitz of media coverage regarding issues of decentralization and secession. But before such an effort could work, there would have to be strong local organizations capable of supporting such efforts with resources, time, and manpower.
So let’s get busy building functional and active local organization, collectives, “tribes” whatever we want to call them. Recently new groups have emerged in Dayton and Ontario. I’m told plans for a queer-oriented national-anarchist group are in the works. We can build local organizations around whatever themes or cultural identities the participant wish: race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, class, ecology, philosophical beliefs, economic preferences, etc. There can be different groups for Eurocentrists, pagans, Christians, Muslims, queers, blacks, native peoples’, women, primitivists, anarcho-capitalists, syndicalists, Evolans, Nietzscheans, and so forth. But whatever our individual or collective preferences, let’s just get something going. With these considerations in mind, I am announcing the launching of a new project for my own local area, Richmond Attack the System (RATS).
