You Can't Blow Up a Social Relationship
The Anarchist Case Against Terrorism

http://flag.blackened.net/noterror/cantblowup.html

Publisher:  Anarchist Communist Federation of North America
Year Published:  1981   First Published:  1979
Pages:  24pp  
Resource Type:  Article/Report/Letter
Cx Number:  CX5606

An Australian socialist-libertarian response to terrorism in the aftermath of the 1978 Sidney Hilton bombing, and a meditation on the inferior logic of terrorist-based politics.

Abstract:  While media criticism of the 1978 Sidney Hilton bombing irately condemns "leftist" violence, it ignores the much larger history of violence perpetrated in the name of reactionary politics. Capitalism's own relationship with violence is in fact so extensive as to have become already invisible. Distinction also needs to be made between terrorism and "intimidation," where the latter term expressly refers to guerrilla warfare's unique political objectives, most imporant being an armed opposition or illegality to the most repressive features of the "bourgeois" state. Yet even such "imitidation" obscures the most vital of revolutionary aims - "The 'very act of taking up arms' may defy the law but it says nothing about what is being fought for." Inherent within all guerrilla movements is a belief in vanguard-based revolution, as well as "an irrational faith in action."

Subject Headings

• Anarchism
• Terrorism