Red Emma's is a worker cooperative, owned and democratically managed by its workers.

Red Emma’s

Michael Loadenthal presents The Politics of Attack

This event has already happened.

Wednesday, March 21st 2018

7:30 pm

Red Emma's

Postponed due to snow! Rescheduling for May, stay tuned!This study is an exploration of insurrectionary anarchist praxis, with a particular focus on how the rhetoric, discourse, and theory is both informed and conveyed through communiques. It challenges the reader to consider the marginalized ideas put forth by those political actors that communicate through bombs, arson, and broken windows, who are rejected through the state’s construction of terrorism. When a police station is firebombed, the subsequent discussions focus more on the illegality of the act rather than the sociopolitical critique the actor put forth. What if we were to embrace the means through which the militant ‘organic intellectual’ acts, and consider the communique’s content, the way one would consider any political text? This inter-textual analysis is presented within a political and historical context, with the hopes of elevating the discussion of insurrectionary praxis beyond notions of terrorism and securitization and towards its application for intersectional challenges to structural violence and domination.

In the social war being waged by insurrectionary anarchists, small acts of violence are announced and contextualized through written communiques, which are posted online, translated, and circulated globally. This book offers the first contemporary history of these post-millennial, digitally-mediated, insurrectionary anarchist networks, and seeks to locate this tendency within anti-state struggles form the past. Through an examination of thousands of movement documents, this book presents the discourse offered by clandestine, urban guerrillas fighting capitalism, the state, and the omnipresent forces of violence and coercion. Michael Loadenthal is Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Miami University of Oxford, Ohio and Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

See all upcoming events