Highest Rated Comments


EndChartwells10 karma

Hey David! I'm interested on your views on insurrectionary tactics. I just finished reading On The Coming Insurrection after reading the "Action" chapter in Direct Action while poking through Discipline and Punish a bit, and all of this is leaving me a bit confused about the possibility of resistance in the face of totalizing power without resorting to a troubling level of violence. I like how you described the indirect negotiation of a rules of engagement between state forces and resisters. That said I worry that greater escalation of tactics might be required (at least in the US) to really make space for dual power, but how do we raise the stakes without just further endangering those most oppressed? And personally I do appreciate, for example, that there is very little chance I will be drawn and quartered for challenging the state.

Also, if you would prefer to speak to this, what do you think of the relationship of theory to practice in radical academic work? I have found your idea in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology of using ethnography as an starting point for a more participatory and practical way to generate theory quite inspiring. But in your work within academia where have you found your research methods to best prefigure your activist ends? Moreover do you think universities can be turned into important alternative institutions from the inside? Are they salvageable? Or should we just fleece them for grants until we can set up alternative institutions for theory and education?