The Insurrecto Cult

In his latest Dark Horse Podcast, Bret Weinstein interviews investigative journalist Jeremy Lee Quinn about the role of insurrectionary anarchists in co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement for their own purposes, and the history behind this. My comments on this movement, and especially its cultic features, are below.

Chris Hedges is even more unambiguously a radical than Bret, being an unabashed socialist. Anarchists could consider him a "reformist" only on the basis of the ultraleft notion that revolutionism means trying to tear things down before you've got something better set up to replace them with. This is what's always differentiated them from the position of Marx, for whom the prerequisite of a socialist transformation was the working class constituting itself as a historical subject, i.e., organizing itself to govern society.

When Bret says none of those involved has a vision of how they're going to create something better, he's only describing those self-identified Marxists who have chosen to align with this movement. Those with a better understanding of Marxism have known for a long time what to do: first organize working people on the political and industrial fields to build power in the workplace and society at large, so that the next time the existing order faces a crisis of legitimacy, structures that can replace it -- structures of workers' democracy -- are ready to take over. This is the situation of dual power in which revolution becomes possible. That some people calling themselves Marxists today don't understand this is just an example of the perennial tendency of youth to be in a rush to change things and want to think it can be done in a hurry, lacking the patience for long-term organizing. Indeed, I remember how, when I was in high school in the late '70s, I seriously thought there might be a revolution within the next five years. I don't think that now, yet because I have more patience, I think that my actions now serve better to make a (hopefully peaceful) revolution possible within my lifetime.

I'm also struck by the many cult-like aspects of this movement. They focus on recruiting youth from high school and even younger because they want to exploit youth's typical excess of eager idealism over critical thinking, often compounded with a need to find something to identify with outside of their families. My own excessive short-term optimism at that age was encouraged by a socialist group that I only later realized had strong cultic characteristics. Fortunately, thanks perhaps to my autism (only identified last year), I was constitutionally incapable of not thinking for myself and got effectively kicked out when they realized this. And, thanks to my parents' still identifying as socialists even though they hadn't been members for decades, this expulsion didn't cause any existential crisis for me. I knew I could remain radical while taking my time finding another group worthy of my membership.

To the above, I might add the use of language loading to effect milieu control. Among themselves, insurrectos use the term reformism, which might sound positive to the average person, to denigrate and reject any approach to social change that to any degree involves working "within the system" rather than attempting its violent overthrow. In this way, realistic, non-destructive efforts to make things better are summarily rejected as "supporting the system." (Note: although Leninists also use this term pejoratively, they mean something different by it. A campaign isn't automatically considered "reformist" merely because it's conducted peacefully or because it advocates for change within the framework of the existing system. This word is reserved specifically for approaches that reject independent working-class activity in favor of subordinating the class movement to demands supported by elements of the ruling class, and to organizations or coalitions dominated by those elements.)

By "milieu control" is meant "the control of information and communication both within the environment and, ultimately, within the individual," which can be accomplished by language loading among other means.