À nos amis

by Comité Invisible

À ceux pour qui la fin d’une civilisation n’est pas la fin du monde ;
À ceux qui voient l’insurrection comme une brèche, d’abord, dans le règne organisé de la bêtise, du mensonge et de la confusion ;
À ceux qui devinent, derrière l’épais brouillard de « la crise », un théâtre d’opérations, des manœuvres, des stratégies – et donc la possibilité d’une contre-attaque ;
À ceux qui portent des coups ;
À ceux qui guettent le moment propice ;
À ceux qui cherchent des complices ;
À ceux qui désertent ;
À ceux qui tiennent bon ;
À ceux qui s’organisent ;
À ceux qui veulent construire une force révolutionnaire, révolutionnaire parce que sensible ;
Cette modeste contribution à l’intelligence de ce temps.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, France, Essays, French Literature

250 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 21, 2014

About the author

The Invisible Committee is the nom de plume of an anonymous author or authors who have written French works of literature based on far-left politics, and anarchism. The identity of the Invisible Committee has been associated with the Tarnac Nine, a group of people including Julien Coupat who were arrested "on the grounds that they were to have participated in the sabotage of overhead electrical lines on France's national railways." Common topics addressed in works by the Invisible Committee include anarchism, anti-capitalism, anti-statism, communism, French culture, global protest movements, and 21st-century civilization.

Reviews

[Ashley]

To Our Friends is an expansion of The Invisible Committee's earlier manifesto, The Coming Insurrection. Gone are the sweeping passages of metaphorical language that characterized the earlier work, and instead these pages are taken up with a mixed bag of political and social analysis. There are, regrettably, a number of forgettable throwaway chapters in this book. But there are also several that offer a perspective on our current political economy that is surpassingly brilliant.

"Merry Crisis and Happy New Fear" explores the expediency of weaponized fear. Governments and corporations (to the extent there is any division between the two) make use of a social climate of unending crisis to manipulate increasingly confounded populations. This observation isn't particularly novel, but the exploration of the specific crisis of global warming and its value as ideological blackmail is. They put our parents to work wrecking whole ecosystems and they're putting us to work cleaning them up. "Saving" them. At a profit. We proles are many moves behind the world suzerains in this horrorshow chessmatch, I'm afraid, and while this crisis is real the mystification surrounding it is growing. Legions of the goodhearted will knowingly finger the Global Capitalist System as responsible for global warming and related environmental problems, but mostly, these legions have been extorted into assuming themselves the kind of responsibility that leads to any action at all. Are you doing your bit? Do you recycle? Drive an environmentally friendly vehicle? Vote Democrat? None of the burden is shouldered by the System itself, and therefore there are no systemic rearrangements of the sort that might actually do any good. Instead we're left feeling guilty on an individual basis while we stare down the next mutation in an incredibly resilient--and incredibly pernicious--Capitalism we prematurely call "Late": Green Capitalism. This is the checkmate leftists now face. The ideological groundwork has been laid and laid solidly. If you think people are afraid and plastic now, just wait.

"Fuck Off, Google". Indeed. Fuck off, Google. In many ways the twin nightmare to the above comes in our ass pocket. Digital technology, the dim crossroads to which our infinite hubris has led us, and which our mania for convenience fully condones, is fundamentally altering our course. We talk a lot about "fake news", for example, but underneath the specifics is a more disturbing phenomenon: the subjectivization of truth long underway has reached crisis proportions. An atomized, fractured existence in the industrial world is pushed to a new level by technologies we adopt long before we understand fully, if we ever do, their consequences. Wild-eyed apologists will still point to the screens that divide us from the world and repeat the tired old lie: digital media will offer us hitherto unknown democratic access, will educate us in ways we've never known, will unite us in Tahrir Square and on Wall Street! Indeed, the Utopia is at hand! But I, for one, am not convinced. Our faith in science and technology is just that--a faith. And more importantly, digital technology offers myriad new pitfalls for you and me and the overall-wearing tinfoil hat Mid-Westerners who helped elect His Royal Orangeness. Technological Utopians I ask you: how do you really feel about Google logging your keystrokes? Yeah, sure, small price to pay for having a free email account and a rad search engine, I know, but really? Deep down you have no misgivings?

The Invisible Committee asks you to think. To challenge your beliefs, however unpopular it may be to do so. Yes, there are lurid mentions of producing Molotov cocktails in industrial quantities, and a charming essay about the origins of democracy in continuing war by another means, but whether the combative prescriptions made in this book are sound political advice I leave to you, gentle reader.

[tout · Rating 5 out of 5]

What the book is saying isn't particularly new theoretically, though in ways it is practical use of many of the concepts from the Tiqqun journals, which many people often have much of a harder time engaging with. Tiqqun was a collective experiment in developing some theoretical tools and reframings. These tools are then used to discuss the last seven years since The Coming Insurrection came out, since Arab Spring insurrections, the movement of the squares, plaza occupations, various counter-revolutionary maneuvers and horizons within the struggles themselves.

The chapters that resonated with me the most were "Let's Disappear" and 'Omnia Sunt Communia.'

Something that can't help feeling strange about this book, which requires a corrective (that could easily come from within the same discourse influenced by militant continental philosophy), is the absence of the role race has played in the recent wave of revolts in the US. How could something so foundational and felt not be confronted if a revolutionary situation is to arise? This has to be more than simply saying race discourse is problematic and that we must transcend identity or to say "fuck identity politics." Fuck identity politics, but it's so much more than that. Taking this book absolutely literally would ensure the invisibility (in the worst sense) of that problem. Despite the horrific and particularly European blindspot this book is still saying some very important and essential things for revolutionaries.

[clinamen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Frankly, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I wrote a review for this book a few years ago which was more than a little glowing. Sometime later, having participated in a few reading group discussions of this and other IC material and listened to more than a few pseudo-poststructuralists and communards (the kind who join the IWW for the card and like to cosplay as members of the Spartacus League) loudly affirm its praises, I began to feel there wasn’t much substance to their glib, oft-imperious proclamations; though I couldn’t articulate why at the time.

Reading a few scathing interactions with these texts from anarchist critics really helped me to clarify why I experienced them as empty and absolutely equivocal. I suggest reading the anonymously-authored To The Customers: Insurrection and Doublethink, Wolfi/Apio’s piece A Sales Pitch For The Insurrection, and the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire’s Communization: The Senile Decay of Anarchy for critiques of these texts from a post-left, egoistic, insurrectionary anarchist perspective. I’m tempted to let some of the Tiqqun material (Intro to Civil War and This Is Not A Program in particular) off a little bit lighter than the IC books, but will refrain from doing so as I suspect that my latent and perverse fascination with philosophical discourse of this sort (Agamben, Badiou, and the like) encourages me to ascribe them a depth which is lost when translated into the more Activist voice of the IC books. Or maybe Stirner just completely ruined metaphysical speculation for me (I’m fine with that).

Many will no doubt continue to laud this kind of hogwash as important and try to glean some insights out of it, but to me the Party (imaginary or otherwise), economism, and socially- and politically-oriented action are utterly repulsive. So to, then, is the entirety of the IC/Tiqqun output—along with all the other ‘communization’ theory which I found compelling once (Dauvé, Theorie Communiste, Endnotes) and is no doubt making a mint for “revolutionary” publishers like semiotext(e) and AK Press.

I would encourage anyone with a genuine desire for anarchy and a hostility toward the management, recuperation, and reification of revolt to avoid this shit like the clap and spend the time you would’ve spent trudging through this morass getting lost in Kafka’s short stories or some Bataille.

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

To Our Friends is an interesting extension of The Coming Insurrectionand continues to parse the failures of revolutionary moments. At the same time, the effort seems to eat itself by the tail.

We have a class consciousness without a class, a population that is first the product of government before it is the object, repression that produces the political object before it can repress it, control is premised in individual freedom, Ordo ab chao, and so on.

I enjoyed the free-wheeling ideas and the peripheral truth behind the paradox. But I couldn’t help feel that there was a tone of defeat permeating the text –
“The militant can then sally forth against this or against that, but it will always be against a form of emptiness, a form of his own emptiness – powerlessness and windmills.

Hey, chin up Invisible Committee – today we may be tilting at windmills, but tomorrow, well, maybe we’ll do more that tag walls with slogans: “Que se vayan todos.”

[Adam McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

About a third of it is very fine stuff, interesting ideas that I still have to digest and think about, but that ultimately I think are good and useful ideas. The next third is very moving rhetoric, and the final third is the usual anarchist posturing.

We are not contemporaneous with scattered revolts, but with an unparalleled global wave of uprisings that intercommunicate imperceptibly. Moved by a universal desire to be together that only a universal separation can explain. By a general hatred of the police that expresses a lucid refusal of the general atomization which the police oversees. The same anxiety is visible everywhere, the same deep panic, provoking the same upwellings of dignity, and not indignation. What is happening in the world since 2008 isn’t an incoherent series of crazy outbursts occurring suddenly in hermetically sealed countries. It’s a single historical sequence unfolding in a strict unity of place and time, from Greece to Chile. And only a distinctly global perspective can capture its significance. We can’t leave it to the think tanks of capital to spell out the practical implications of this sequence.


The conspiracy theorists are counterrevolutionary in one respect at least; they reserve the privilege of conspiracy exclusively for the power elite. While it’s obvious that those in power scheme to preserve and extend their positions, it’s no less certain that there’s conspiracy everywhere—in building hallways, at the coffee machine, in the back of kebab houses, at parties, in love affairs, in prisons. Through capillary channels and on a global scale, all these connections, all these conversations, all these friendships are forming a historical party in operation—“our party,” as Marx said.


On the other hand, the discourse of crisis intervenes as a political method for managing populations. The continuous restructuring of everything—social welfare and organigrams, companies and urban districts—is the only way to ensure the non-existence of the opposing party, through a constant disruption of the conditions of existence. The rhetoric of change is used to dismantle every custom, to break all ties, to unsettle every certainty, to discourage every solidarity, to maintain a chronic existential insecurity. It corresponds to a strategy that can be formulated in these terms: “Use a continuous crisis to avert any actual crisis.” On the everyday level, this is akin to the well-known counter-insurgency practice of “destabilizing in order to stabilize,” which, for the authorities, consists in deliberately producing chaos so as to make order more desirable than revolution. From micromanagement to the management of whole countries, the population is kept in a kind of constant trauma. The resulting stupefaction and dereliction mean that the managers can do more or less what they want with each and everyone. The mass depression currently afflicting the Greeks is the deliberate product of the Troika’s policy, and not its collateral effect.


Neoliberalism looks toward a collapsing future, instead of progressing from the past: Modernity measured everything in relation to the past backwardness it claimed to be rescuing us from; now everything is measured in relation to its impending collapse. When the salaries of Greek civil servants are reduced by half, it’s while pointing out that one could just as well no longer pay them at all. Every time the period of pension contribution of French wage earners is lengthened, the rationale has to do with “saving the retirement system.”

Apocalyptic thinking enforces passivity: Now, if there is one thing destined to remain unfulfilled, it’s the apocalyptic prophecy, be it economic, climatic, terrorist, or nuclear. It is pronounced only in order to summon the means of averting it, which is to say, most often, the necessity of government. No organization, whether political or religious, has ever declared itself defeated because the facts contradicted its prophecies. Because the purpose of prophecy is never to be right about the future, but to act upon the present: to impose a waiting mode, passivity, submission, here and now.

Obligatory hometown highlight: An enthusiastic resident of Halifax said something similar when he declared after the hurricane of 2003: “Everybody woke up the next morning and everything was different. There was no electricity, all the stores were closed, no one had access to media. The consequence was that everyone poured out into the street to bear witness. Not quite a street party, but everyone out at once—it was a happy feeling to see everybody even though we didn’t know each other.”

Use the internet to make real democracy: It is possible to set up a real democracy, that is a continuous polling, in real time, of the opinion of the population, to really submit every decision to them before making it. An author anticipated this in the 1920s: “One can imagine that one day some subtle inventions will permit everyone to express their opinions about political problems at any time without leaving their homes, thanks to equipment that would record all these opinions on a central device where we could simply read the results.”

Power is infrastructure, and the proof is Belgium: et the truth about the actual localization of power is not hidden at all; it’s only we who refuse to see it for fear of having our comfortable certainties doused with cold water. For confirmation of this, one only has to look for a moment at the banknotes issued by the European Union. Neither the Marxists nor the neoclassical economists have ever been able to admit that money is not essentially an economic instrument but a political reality. We have never seen any money that was not attached to a political order capable of backing it. That is also why the bills of the different countries bear the personal images of emperors and great statesmen, of founding fathers or personified allegories of the nation. But what is it that appears on euro banknotes? Not human figures, not emblems of a personal sovereignty, but bridges, aqueducts, arches—pieces of impersonal architecture, cold as stone. As o the truth about the present nature of power, every European has a printed exemplar of it in their pocket. It can be stated in this way: power now resides in the infrastructures of this world. Contemporary power is of an architectural and impersonal, and not a representative or personal, nature. Traditional power was representative: the pope was the representation of Christ on Earth, the king, of God, the President, of the people, and the General Secretary of the Party, of the proletariat. This whole personal politics is dead, and that is why the small number of orators that survive on the surface of the globe amuse more than they govern. The cast of politicians is actually composed of clowns with varying degrees of talent—whence the phenomenal success of the wretched Beppe Grillo in Italy or the sinister Dieudonné in France. All in all, at least they know how to entertain you, which is their profession of course. ... Power is indeed somewhere else, somewhere other than in the institutions, but it’s not hidden for all that. Or if it is, it’s hidden like Poe’s “purloined letter.” No one sees it because everyone has it in plain sight, all the time—in the form of a high-voltage line, a freeway, a traffic circle, a supermarket, or a computer program. And if itis, it’s hidden like a sewage system, an undersea cable, a fiber optic line running the length of a railway, or a data center in the middle of a forest. Power is the very organization of this world, this engineered, configured, purposed world. That is the secret, and it’s that there isn’t one.

...

Anyone who means to undertake anything whatsoever against the existing world must start from there: the real power structure is the material, technological, physical organization of this world. Government is no longer in the government. The “power vacuum” that lasted in Belgium for more than a year is a clear example in point. The country was able to function with no government, elected representatives, parliament, political debate, or electoral issues, without any part of its normal operation being affected.

Sophistication generally leads to societal collapse: It’s generally when they reach their maximum degree of sophistication that civilizations fall apart. Every production chain is now reaching such a level of specialization through so many intermediaries that if one of them disappeared that would be enough to paralyze, or even destroy, the whole chain. Three years ago, Honda factories in Japan went through the longest period of layoffs since the sixties simply because the supplier of a particular computer chip had disappeared in the earthquake of March, 2011 and no one else could produce it.

I had no idea twitter came from the protests against the 2004 RNC (but it can't be used for that now, because it's too easy to surveil): The genealogy is not well known, and it deserves to be. Twitter descends from a program named TXTMob, invented by American activists as a way to coordinate via cellphones during protests against the Republican National Convention in 2004. The application was used by some 5000 people to share real-time information about the different actions and movements of the police. Twitter, launched two years later, was used for similar purposes, in Moldova for example, and the Iranian demonstrations of 2009 popularized the idea that it was the tool for coordinating insurgents, particularly against dictatorships. In 2011, when rioting reached an England thought to be definitively impassive, some journalists were sure that tweeting had helped spread the disturbances from their epicenter, Tottenham. Logical, but it turned out that for their communication needs the rioters had gone with BlackBerry, whose secure telephones had been designed for the upper management of banks and multinationals, and the British secret service didn’t even have the decryption keys for them. Moreover, a group of hackers hacked into BlackBerry’s site to dissuade the company from cooperating with the police in the aftermath. If Twitter enabled a self-organization on this occasion it was more that of the citizen sweepers who volunteered to sweep up and repair the damage caused by the confrontations and looting.

The algorithm hasn't lead to a crisis of trust, but it's end–replaced w control: “The surest way for all government is to rely on the interests of men,” said Hamilton. Once the “natural” laws of economy were elucidated, governing meant letting its harmonious mechanism operate freely and moving men by manipulating their interests. Harmony, the predictability of behaviors, a radiant future, an assumed rationality of the actors: all this implied a certain trust, the ability to “give credit.” Now, it’s precisely these tenets of the old governmental practice which management through permanent crisis is pulverizing. We’re not experiencing a “crisis of trust” but the end of trust, which has become superfluous to government. Where control and transparency reign, where the subjects’ behavior is anticipated in real time through the algorithmic processing of a mass of available data about them, there’s no more need to trust them or for them to trust. It’s sufficient that they be sufficiently monitored. As Lenin said, “Trust is good, control is better.”

counter-insurgency as government: The irony of our epoch has it that the only ones who situate war where it is conducted, and thus reveal the plane where all government operates, happen to be the counterrevolutionaries themselves. It is striking to note that in the last half-century the non-militaries began rejecting war in all its forms, and at the very time when the militaries were developing a non-military concept, a civil concept of war. ... What is happening to us at present can be summed up more or less in this way: from being a military doctrine, counter-insurgency has become a principle of government.

Reminds me of Peter Frase's exterminism in Four Futures: It’s not so easy anymore to say, definitively, who’s in and who’s out. In the smart world, a smart trash receptacle is much more a part of society than a homeless person or a hick. By re-forming on a horizontal, fragmented, differentiated plane—that of territorial planning and development—and not on the vertical and hierarchical plane derived from medieval theology, “society” as a playing field of government only has vague, shifting, and hence revocable, boundaries. Capital even takes to dreaming of a new “socialism” reserved for its adherents. Now that Seattle has been emptied of its poor people in favor of the futuristic employees of Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing, the time has come to establish free public transportation there. Surely the city won’t go on charging those whose whole life is nothing but value production. That would show a lack of gratitude.

The resolute selection of populations and territories has its own risks. Once the division has been made between those to be supported and those to be allowed to die, it’s not certain that those knowing they’re destined for the human trash pile will still let themselves be governed. One can only hope to “manage” this cumbersome remainder—assimilating it being unlikely, and liquidating it being indecent no doubt. The planners, whether indifferent or cynical, accept the “segregation,” the “increasing inequalities,” the “stretching of social hierarchies” as a fact of the times and not as a drift that needs to be halted. The only wayward drift is one that could cause the segregation to morph into a secession—the “flight of a part of the population to peripheries where it might organize into autonomous communities,” potentially “at odds with the dominant models of neoliberal globalization.” There we have the threat to be managed—but also the way for us to proceed.


The common and the commune: 3. That the core of the commune is precisely what eludes it, what traverses it yet always remains beyond its appropriation, was already what characterized the res communes in Roman law. The “common things” were the ocean, the atmosphere, the temples, that which could not be appropriated as such. One could take possession of a few liters of water, or a strip of shore, or some temple stones, but not the sea as such, and not a sacred place. The res communes are paradoxically what resists reification, their transformation into res, into things. It’s the designation in public law of what falls outside of public law: what’s in common use is irreducible to juridical categories. Language is typically “the common”: while one can express oneself thanks to it, by means of it, it is also something which no one can possess as his own. One can only make use of it.





Shitting on cooperatives (bad) and Naomi Klein (not necessarily bad):poverty, no insurrection. Pure Galula. “The security of the Republic,” wrote McNamara in 1968, “doesn’t depend exclusively, or even primarily, on its military might, but also on the creation of stable economic and political systems, as much here at home as in the developing countries all over the world.” From such a viewpoint, the fight against poverty has several things going for it: first, it makes it possible to hide the fact that the real problem is not poverty, but wealth—the fact that a few hold, together with their power, most of the means of production; further, it turns the problem into a question of social engineering and not a political issue. Those who make fun of the near-systematic failure of the World Bank’s interventions to reduce poverty, from 1970 on, would do well to note that for the most part they were clear successes in terms of their true goal: preventing insurrection. This excellent run was to last until 1994. (Zapatistas etc) Since then, the World Bank is all about microcredit, “reinforcing the autonomy and empowerment of poor people”, cooperatives, mutual societies-in short: the social and solidarity economy. “Promote the mobilization of poor people into local organizations so they can act as a check on the state institutions, participate in the process of local decision-making, and thus collaborate to ensure the primacy of law in everyday life,” says the same report. Meaning: coopt the local leaders into our networks, neutralize the oppositional groups, enhance the value of “human capital,” bring into commodity circuits, even marginal ones, everything that escaped them previously. The integration of tens of thousands of cooperatives, even rehabilitated factories, into the program Argentina Trabaja, is the counter-insurrectionary masterwork of Cristina Kirchner, her calibrated response to the uprising of 2001.

They like the commune and I'm happy for them but I dunno, I've watched Adam Curtis: A friend who had been camping for a long spell on Syntagma Square did a double take when he was asked how the Greeks would have been able to organize their food supply if the movement had burned down the Parliament and brought down the country’s economy in a definitive way: “Ten million persons have never let themselves die of hunger. Even if that might have caused a few skirmishes here and there, the disorder would have been tiny compared to the disorder that’s ordinarily the case.”

What characterizes the situation that a commune faces is that by giving oneself to it unreservedly, one always finds more in it than one brought to it or sought from it: one is surprised to find one’s own strength in it, a stamina and an inventiveness that is new, plus the happiness that comes from strategically inhabiting a situation of exception on a daily basis. In this sense, the commune is the organization of fertility. It always gives rise to more than it lays claim to. This is what makes irreversible the unheaval that affected the crowds that descended on all the squares and avenues of Istanbul. Crowds forced for weeks to deal on their own with the crucial questions of provisioning, construction, care and treatment, burial, or armament not only learned to organize themselves, but learned something that most didn’t know: that we can organize ourselves, and that this capacity is fundamentally joyful. The fact that this fertility of the street was not mentioned by any of the democratic commentators is a rather clear indication of its dangerous potential. The memory of those days and nights makes the orderly everydayness of the metropolis appear even more intolerable, and exposes its pointlessness.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

To start with, rethinking an idea of revolution capable of interrupting the disastrous course of things is to purge it of every apocalyptic element it has contained up to now. It is to see that Marxist eschatology differs only in that regard from the imperial founding aspiration of the United States—the one still printed on every dollar bill: “Annuit coeptis. Novus ordo seclorum.” Socialists, liberals, Saint-Simonians, and Cold War Russians and Americans have always expressed the same neurasthenic yearning for the establishment of an era of peace and sterile abundance where there would no longer be anything to fear, where the contradictions would finally be resolved and the negative would be tamed. The dream of a prosperous society, established through science and industry, one that was totally automated and finally pacified. Something like an earthly paradise organized on the model of a psychiatric hospital or a sanitorium. An ideal that can only come from seriously ill beings who no longer even hope for a remission. “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens,” the song says.”

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Sceox · Rating 3 out of 5]

When the Invisible Committee have urged revolutionaries to secede from the revolutionary milieu and create points of secession from society (Call), I have read with greater interest than when they have urged society to be revolutionary (The Coming Insurrection, roughly speaking). In their third book, TIC again direct themselves inward--to the milieu was my initial thought, but now I think, in places, to those who have departed, are departing, intend to depart, the milieu: to their friends. Especially in "Let's Disappear", which I found the most compelling, probably due at least in part to finding myself in the audience.

Several sections focus on dispelling illusions (illuminating truths?) about certain topics--crisis, democracy, technology, society. Of these, I gathered the most from the last, "Our Only Homeland: Childhood", which argues that society is the product of government rather than its basis. A clever, perhaps useful, way to address a particularly polarized debate.

Then there are the proscriptive parts, which is how I'd classify the final two and "Power Is Logistic" (though the last also dispels a certain idea about power). In these, in contrast to the feeling that Rhys' review expresses (that TOF carries a tone of defeat) I read them as often fervently optimistic, not about the militant or the milieu, in which they have little faith, but about the special revolutionary character of our historical moment, or of the near future. Even when they admit "Nothing guarantees that the fascist option won't be preferred to revolution", they suppose those are the only two options. The total insurrection is coming, they repeat, the only question is its total outcome. This lends a definite rhetorical strength to many of their pronouncements (yes that's the right word for it), but how strange when, since their last book, "the insurrections have come, finally," and left democracy in their wake.

For those interested in theories of asymmetric conflict, you will find in "Let's Disappear" a slight nod coupled with a strong counter to that way of thinking.

The use of graffiti slogans for the titles was inspired and fun. A final note: the more I contrast the slogan from the US to the others, the more starkly I feel its deficiency.

[Cristhian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neo anarquismo.
Neo revolucionario.
Noa noa vamos a bailar.

The Invisible Committee es un grupo de escritores y activistas que permanecen anónimos pero están cobijados por el MIT en su departamento editorial. Dicho esto, no es un compendio de escritos de activistas de sofá en algún post perdido en medio de la red o en la Jornada.

Destacan:
Fuck off Google - que abre con un statement que dice "There are no "Facebook revolutions", but there is a new science of government, cybernetics", lo cuál es totalmente cierto.

Lets disappear - que habla sobre los movimientos en Alemania y Grecia. Además cita a Focault “Civil war is the matrix of all the power struggles, of all the power strategies and, consequently, the matrix of all the struggles over and against power. Civil war not only brings collective elements into play, but it constitutes them..."

Merry crisis - (el capítulo inicial, que a su vez pone el tono a lo que será este compendio "Crisis is a Mode of Government") que se extiende a las áreas del existencialismo y la metafísica.

y lo que consideraría la pièce De résistance, They want to oblige us to Govern. We won't yield to that pressure (el segundo capítulo que parece fortalecer los cimientos del primero aún cuando son dos plumas diferentes) - que ahonda en el por qué los movimientos contra el poder de los últimos tiempos no han llegado a perdurar: "There's no such thing as a Democratic Insurrection".

La única forma de crear una Tabula rasa es la anarquía total y verdadera, no solo la insurrección que se han tenido desde la Primavera Árabe and such. De nada sirve cambiar una cabeza para poner otra tratando de ignorar que todo el cuerpo está descompuesto.

El libro viaja por varias partes del mundo (sí, incluso México), cubriendo revueltas y movimientos contadas por quien las vive en muchos de sus casos.

Denle una checada.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

French anarchists are mad and serious.

It's a mess, but there's a lot to agree with in here. The translation is not perfect and definitely overblown, but I am still glad that it exists and if you are interested in the slightest (and you probably are if you're reading this review), you should give it a read. They complain constantly, they make ridiculous claims about "hackers" (French anarchists love them), but there are still good ideas buried in here.

(note: if you can fluently read French, I am sure it would be better to read the original À nos amis ... which I see gets 2.5 stars, a big hit. Étienne says, "I don't know who 'their friends' are, but I shan't be taking part!" It's ok Étienne. They'll probably be fine without you.)

[Rui Coelho · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a global insurrectionary wave, from Athens to Istanbul and Ferguson. In the first chapter the authors promisse to contribute to a shared syntax for this revolt. Unfortunately, like the Comming Insurrection, this book ends up being too fragmented, making it hard to see the main point.
Despite that, this is one of the main contributions to insurrectionary theory. With its poetic and iconoclastic tone it addresses the main questions of contemporary radical politics such as popular assemblies, permanent crisis, the revolutionary subject and, of course, insurrection.

[Étienne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Adoré certains passages, et pourtant, comment dire? ce livre m'a fait chier.

Sans doute à cause de la suffisance du ton, du sexisme sous-jacent, et (soyons honnêtes) des nombreux passages auxquels je n'ai rien compris. Au final, je ne sais pas exactement ce qu'on propose ni à qui on s'adresse. Je ne sais pas qui sont « leurs amis », mais je ne dois pas en faire partie.

[Elon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Revolutionärt orbajseri 🤷‍♀️

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“When the most indiscriminate repression comes down on us, we should be careful, then, not to see it as the conclusive proof of our radicality. We shouldn't think they are out to destroy us. We should start rather from the hypothesis that they're out to produce us. Produce us as a political subject, as "anarchists," as "Black Bloc,"as "anti-system" radicals, to extract us from the generic population by assigning us a political identity. When repression strikes us, let's begin by not taking ourselves for ourselves. Let's dissolve the fantastical terrorist subject which the counterinsurgency theorists take such pains to impersonate, a subject the representation of which serves mainly to produce the "population" as a foil—-the population as an apathetic and apolitical heap, an immature mass just good enough for being governed”

“The fractured Palestinian resistance is composed of a multiplicity of organizations, each having a more or less independent armed wing—Iz Adin al-Qassam for Hamas, Saraya al Quds (the Jerusalem Brigades) for Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Force 17 and Tanzim al-Fatah for Fatah. These are supplemented by the independent PRC (Popular Resistance Committees) and imagined or real members of Hizbollah and/or Al-Qaeda. The fact that these organizations shift between cooperation, competition, and violent conflict increases the general complexity of their interactions and with it their collective capacity, efficiency, and resilience. The diffuse nature of Palestinian resistance and the fact that knowledge, skills, and munitions are transferred within and between these organizations—and that they sometimes stage joint attacks and at others compete to outdo each other—substantially reduces the effect that the Israeli occupation forces seeks to achieve by attacking them."

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually thought this was much more relevant and coherent than The Invisible Committee's first work, The Coming Insurrection. Some of it is rather too anarchist and communist, nihilist and dispossessed for most, but it compares favorably to The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (Zizek/Verso) and Democracy Disrupted (Krastev/Univ of Pennsylvania Press) in analyzing Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring.

[Vincent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Naja.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful and worth a read/re-read.

[Fabiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

"When one asks the left of the left what the revolution would consist in, it is quick to answer: 'placing the human at the center.' What the left doesn't realize is how tired of the human the world is, how tired of humanity we are-of that species that thought it was the jewel of creation, that believed it was entitled to ravage everything since everything belonged to it." (34)

"We can only be freed from our attachment to democratic procedures through a general deploying of attention—attention not only to what is being said, but mostly to what is unspoken, attention to the way things are said, and to what can be read on people’s faces and in silences. It’s a matter of swamping the emptiness that democracy maintains between the individual atoms by a full attention to one another, a new attention to the world we have in common. What’s called for is to replace the mechanical regime of argumentation with a regime of truth, of openness, of sensitivity to what is there." (64)

"The dialectic of the constituent and the constituted comes to confer a higher meaning on what is never anything but a contingent political form. This is how the Republic becomes the universal banner of an indisputable and eternal human nature, or the caliphate the single locus of community. Constituent power names that monstrous piece of magic that turns the state into that entity that’s never wrong, having its basis in reason; that has no enemies, since to oppose it is to be a criminal; that can do anything, being without honor." (75)

No better place to read The Invisible Committee than at work, whilst helping my coworkers learn English (because the 'revolution' is more local than one might suspect or care to admit).
I remember many many moons ago when I first learned about cybernetics. I was Truly horrified. Was never really interested in social media or the internet to begin with, which is probably what made it all the more terrifying in how expansive its territory is. It was only until recently that this fear subsided after working it out in my head and on paper.

They speak of a certain "truth" here, an embracement of the veil to be lifted. I think this is what makes revolution so mysterious, so unknown. The truth is not in anonymity. The truth is not in profiles or black blocs or soulless tweets calling to "act now" or to do x, y or z. Revolution is owning your position. To lose fear of what can supposedly be "done" to you since the doers can no longer monopolize on fear. If more people were adamant about their lack of fear of government, then the advent of a promised future would no longer be a promise. We lack organization because we lack ownership over ourselves. Instead of masks we need name tags, to individuate each person so that the scope of consequences are useless in the face of governmental oppression. Masks are for cowards (police/ICE/insert whatever pig belongs in this lineup). The fear of being known (in all regards) subsides when there are no meaningful ramifications to who you are and what you believe. I used to be understanding of the apolitical stance but as time progresses I am learning to weed out those that would rather remain uninvolved in fear of either knowing too much or upsetting peabrains. Im all in favor or "going so far left that you get your guns back."
I deliberately worked chronologically backwards for this reason, I wanted to see where this ended before it began. And to be fair this is much stronger than "Now." It has the fervor that "Now" lacks. and tbh if theyre ever looking for a recruit there's so much I could add to the constituent power fantasy because they nail it on the head every time.

Final notes: remain unpredictable & militant.

[Orion · Rating 5 out of 5]

"our party is everywhere, but it’s at a standstill. With the disappearance of the anti-globalization movement, the perspective of a movement as planetary as capital itself, and hence capable of doing battle with it, was lost as well. So the first question we are faced with is the following: how does a set of situated powers constitute a global force? How does a set of communes constitute a historical party?... The question at present is how do we tear ourselves away from the attraction of the local?..... "From the start,” wrote our comrade Deleuze more than forty years ago, “we have to be more centralist than the centralists. Clearly, a revolutionary machine can’t be satisfied with local and limited struggles: it has to be super-centralized and super-desiring at the same time. The problem, then, concerns the nature of unification, which must function transversally, through multiplicity, not vertically and not in such a way that the multiplicity characterizing desire will be crushed.""

[veverzay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really doubt the validity of some of the statements made in ‘To Our Friends’. Parts of this book made me feel really hypocritical but I also got that impression from the authors. I mean I hate fascism as much as the next bloke but The Invisible Committee trying to make a point is like trying to visualize a square circle.

[Anís · Rating 5 out of 5]

10/10 como literatura anarquista, de lo que más me ha emocionado leer

[tomi green · Rating 4 out of 5]

As it is the case with similar texts, it is good to be familiar with Foucault's or Deleuze's philosophy and terminology in order to better understand the ideas. Otherwise, the text easily becomes a kind of a search for comprehensible passages and how they fit together - which may not lead to their correct interpretation. Various themes have been raised in the book, with which one can agree sometimes less, sometimes more (the subject of revolution, the absence of identity politics, etc.). This is evidenced by the controversy that arose in activist circles after the book's publication.

After reading the last page, this short passage, irrelevant to the book, resonates with me (although I disagree with the use of the abstraction of "Man"):

"At the apex of his insanity, Man has even proclaimed himself a "geological force," going so far as to give the name of his species to a phase of the life of the planet: he's taken to speaking of an "anthropocene." For the last time, he assigns himself the main role, even if it's to accuse himself of having trashed everything-the seas and the skies, the ground and what's underground-even if it's to confess his guilt for the unprecedented extinction of plant and animal species. But what's remarkable is that he continues relating in the same disastrous manner to the disaster produced by his own disastrous relationship with the world. He calculates the rate at which the ice pack is disappearing. He measures the extermination of the non-human forms of life. As to climate change, he doesn't talk about it based on his sensible experience-a bird that doesn't return in the same period of the year, an insect whose sounds aren't heard anymore, a plant that no longer flowers at the same time as some other one. He talks about it scientifically with numbers and averages. He thinks he's saying something when he establishes that the temperature will rise so many degrees and the precipitation will decrease by so many inches or millimeters. He even speaks of "biodiversity." He observes the rarefaction of life on earth from space. He has the hubris to claim, paternally, to be "protecting the environment," which certainly never asked for anything of the sort. All this has the look of a last bold move in a game that can't be won."

-------------------------

Ako to už pri podobných textoch býva, pre lepšie pochopenie myšlienok je dobré poznať Foucaultovu či Deleuzeho filozofiu a terminológiu. Inak sa text ľahko stane akýmsi vyhľadávaním zrozumiteľných pasáží a ich vzájomného zliepania –, čo nemusí viesť k ich správnej interpretácii. Kniha otvára rôzne témy, s ktorými sa dá súhlasiť niekedy menej, niekedy viac (subjekt revolúcie, absencia politiky identity atď.). Svedčí o tom i polemika, ktorá vznikla v aktivistických kruhoch po vydaní knihy.

Po prečítaní poslednej strany mnou rezonuje hlavne táto, pre knihu nepodstatná, krátka pasáž (i keď nesúhlasím s použitím abstrakcie „Človeka“ ako takého):

„V poslednom štádiu svojej šialenosti sa Človek dokonca prehlásil za „geologickú silu“; dospelo to až tak ďaleko, že prepožičal meno svojho druhu jednej fáze života na tejto planéte: začal hovoriť o „antropocéne“. Nakoniec si pripisuje hlavnú rolu, i keď sa obviňuje z toho, že všetko spustošil – more, nebo, zem i podzemie –, i keď priznáva svoju vinu za bezprecedentné vyhubenie rastlinných i živočíšnych druhov. Je však pozoruhodné, že ku katastrofe, ktorú pôsobí svojim vlastným katastrofálnym vzťahom k svetu, sa neprestáva vzťahovať tým istým katastrofickým spôsobom. Počíta rýchlosť, s ktorou mizne pobrežný ľad. Meria vyhubenie mimoľudských foriem života. O klimatických zmenách nerozpráva na základe svojej zmyslovej skúsenosti – sťahovavý vták, ktorý sa nevracia v rovnakom ročnom období, hmyz, ktorého cvrkot už nepočujeme, rastlina, ktorá už nekvitne v rovnakú dobu ako iná. Rozpráva o nej v číslach, v priemerných hodnotách, vedecky. Má za to, že hovorí niečo podstatné, keď dokazuje, že teplota sa zvyšuje o toľko a toľko stupňov a že zrážky poklesli o toľko a toľko milimetrov. Dokonca hovorí o „biodiverzite“. Z vesmíru pozoruje rednutie života na zemi. A k dovŕšeniu svojej pýchy teraz paternalisticky tvrdí, že „chráni životné prostredie“, ktoré ho o to ani v najmenšom nežiadalo. Existujú všetky dôvody domnievať sa, že je to jeho posledný ústup vpred.“

[Subvert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is going to be a relatively short critique to what may follow later.

I liked this book more than The Coming Insurrection. It's not just a manifesto-like call-out for insurrection like the previous one, it's very much a reflection of all the uprisings of the previous 7 years. From the Greek student riots to Tahrir Square to La ZAD to Occupy and back to Greece since Syriza's electoral victory. It's addressed to all the comrades who have been involved in the anti-capitalist struggle anywhere in the world, hence the title. And therefore it makes for an interesting read for militants anywhere in the world, no matter if you are an insurrectionist or not. It's very good reading-group material for your affinity-groups as there is a lot that probably applies to all sorts of issues that you have encountered yourselves.

There are lots of references to struggles of the last decade everywhere in the world, which is nice to read, but perhaps a bit harder to follow for people less versed in radical literature or with less knowledge of all those struggles. And as with many books translated from French, the wording seems sometimes a bit weird, but it's still very readable.

There is a lot of stuff I like in it. The narrative is generally nicely constructed.

Like the critique of the typical Western anarchist milieu, which seems often dedicated to constant self-incapacitation. Not interested in constructing a revolutionary force, but in a quest for radicality. As they say, revolution is not the result of arithmetical addition of separate acts of revolt. So people wear themselves out "to a dreadful cult of performance where it's a matter of actualizing one's radical identity at every moment, here and now - in a demo, in love, or in discourse. This lasts for a time-the time of a burnout, depression, or repression. And one hasn't changed anything". Sadly a really accurate picture of the people in my surroundings... And "the idea that a struggle can be "radicalized" by injecting a whole passel of allegedly radical practices and discourses into it is the politics of an extraterrestrial". I know quite a few extraterrestrials that think it is always the moment to put on balaclavas and smash windows in order to "radicalize" the struggle.

In general I loved the Lets Disappear chapter and its following discussion on pacifism, radicalism and civil war. The excerpts from contemporary counter-insurgency literature were quite telling and its existence was new to me.

The last two chapters with their prescriptions of what's to be done is (as I expected) what I disagreed with most. I understand the enchanting feel of 'communes' formed in struggle by occupying, of Temporary Autonomous Zones to use a hakim bey term, but how long does it last and where do they lead to? What does that lived experience lead to when the movement is down and how with time passed even the people involved start to increasingly look back to it with the nostalgic depoliticized filter about the event produced by the mainstream media. They positively quote a friend from Cairo talking about how beautiful the organic and horizontal organization was at Tahrir Square, its scattered and fragmentary form. Considering what happened in Egypt afterwards, isn't the naivety of the invisible committee here telling? The Muslim Brotherhood that didn't initiate anything could with its superior (and less scattered and fragmented) organization easily take over. In their final chapter their talks of how to increase our power by paying attention and having true discipline without an organization is extremely vague.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ‘Invisible Committee’s’ ‘friends’ have become much more difficult to identify and a much more extensive group in the wake of what seems to be the collapse of the post-2008 insurrectionary movement, as the Arab Spring turned into a rearrangement of the deck chairs, as Syriza become the EU-shock-doctrine-light, Podemos-allies made impressive regional and city advances but have been kept out of national play by the ‘establishment’ and Occupy fizzled out. The key thing about this promiscuous friendship is that The Invisible Committee clearly does not see these set-backs as the end of that round of struggles: hope, as if often said dies last.

As a result we have a fabulous set of open essays – this is not so much a clearly outlined position as a series of position papers exploring key issues for the contemporary left. They are not afraid to shy away from the key organisational issues, as some in the left’s Marxist-Leninist genealogy have begun to revisit the ‘party question’, The Invisible Committee cuts to the quick for those with more of an anarchist descent line when they ask (on p 231) “how does one construct a force that is not an organisation”.

These essays puncture some takens-for-granted, or adopt a way of viewing some key issues that nicely unsettles them – there is a delightfully playful oppositional approach in places – but for the most part it is this organisational question that is opened up only in the final section, that is key: it would have helped to have this question anticipated throughout. If, as Audrey Lorde so succinctly reminds us, we cannot use the master’s tools to demolish the master’s house, and if, as many suspect, horizontalism may have reached its operational effectiveness – how do we organise to build a new, inclusive, democratic, responsive social order? There may be some interesting things happening in the Kurdish struggles as the movement explores anarchist theory, but scaling up is going to be the test of Bookchin in practice. At the same time, many residually Leninist parties are simply failing to garner any traction and in some cases seem to be descending into cult-like organisations – so how to build a force that encapsulates a struggle without falling into the old traps is the key issue for the Left. It is right to be hung up on theory and analysis, but how we do what we do is all too often missing from any consideration.

There is no shortage here of theory, critique and analysis, but as with the organisation/force question the Invisible Committee is open in this ‘letter’ adopting a refreshingly non-sectarian, non-dogmatic outlook in their call for a dialectical approach that does not over-accentuate the local, stressing that ‘the revolution’ (well, most change) is a process, not a thing or event, that requires a continuing focus on and dynamism of spirit, force and richness. It is these dimensions, they argue, that “are variously combined in time and space, giving rise to forms, dreams, forces, and histories that are always singular” (p 236) meaning that previous situations are examples, not models – something the Left is slow to learn.

Confronting power in the interests of profound transformation means building and changing and growing and stepping back and starting again….. and to their credit The Invisible Committee have developed a text that is open, conjectural, non-prescriptive and intended as an early piece in a conversation that might allow us to begin to develop a new plan. It is going to need return visits, and I expect that they will be worth it.

[Roger Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it, but analysis, even if it's good, is not the same thing as actually offering something. If you're offering "consciousness" I'd say I was there already; but obviously it takes more than that. European intellectuals who assume they know what indigenous peoples face are as mistaken as Nicaraguan Sandinistas about indigenous support for their "revolutions." Others should read it for themselves.

[Harry · Rating 2 out of 5]

It certainly was 2014.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

The obscure and totally 'now' 'Invisible Committee' are like a more realistic version of 'anonymous' who seems to do nothing and unfortunately enabled the shit that is Trump/BoJo/Murdoch and the whole 'neo-liberal Globalist Hipster chic' to win elections and thrive and make us all die. These are a series of manifestos based on observation of recent anti neo-Liberalist/neo-Fascist uprisings that ultimately failed - the Arab Spring, Greece, Tahrir square, Occupy whatever etc.. Whilst I *like* the ideas brought to the table here - collectivism, the mocking of the uselessness of the bourgeois and centralism, re-assessing the 'commune' and the ultimate aim of 'difficult' happiness as a panacea to the whole 'wellness' crap that populates neo-Liberalism, this sort of book falls as elitist, bourgeois fluff, which you purchase in hipster bookshops in hipster enclaves - I bought this in an art bookshop in fucking Shoreditch!!

Until the Murdoch Empire totally collapses, books like this simply act as coffee table oddities for Gay Art Administrators to digest as hor d'oeuvres in their post coke fuelled gangbangs and the feelings of ideological bliss they have shortly after. Pfft!

Besides that it was an interesting read.

[Valdemar Gomes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Após ler as primeiras 70 páginas, escrevi isto:
É por isto que não se deve tirar o discurso de classe. Porque agora é só merda odiosa a tudo e a si mesma, é nihilismo sem o pensamento filósofo (só a filosofice de quem usa um termo marxista e pensa-se estudioso económico), é primitivismo sem o amor ao campo (quiçá a unica coisa que redimia esta teoria troglodita), é neo-ludismo parvo (escolhe o teu pleonasmo favorito); nada se extrai desta obra senão um ódio ao ser humano indiscriminado (o que resulta numa injustiça nojenta), uma prepotência auto-humilhante de ser ocidental e odiar-se por isso pensando assim redimir o sangue que ele próprio pintou nas suas mãos. É por isto que é preciso um discurso de classe, para diferenciar o desperdício em massa da massa que às vezes desperdiça.
Esta obra é o equivalente de um chihuahua a ladrar num metro cheio; ou é ignorado, ou se ri e se dá umas festinhas de tão fofinhos que são e da pena que dá vê-lo a babar-se na sua raiva sem nexo.

Após essas 70 páginas, o livro estabilizou e disse coisas interessantes sobre o internacionalismo e o vazio institucional. Nada que não tivesse dito no livro anterior.
É aborrecido somente.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s funny to me that I would read something like this, but I did and I surprisingly liked it. It’s less funny that I’m now proceeding to write about it on a platform run by the data-mining leviathan that is Amazon, especially with respect to a lot of what was written in this treatise, but I am, and Goodreads has basically become my blog now.

I discovered this book in a Facebook group full of Christian leftists, who are a lot more radical than I am, but I think leftist politics has a tradition of offering very articulate analysis of social and political circumstances, of which I am fairly interested in at the moment. I think I’m not yet convinced about a lot of the prescriptions they offer, but I think it’s good to discuss them. And the way they engage in the Christian tradition has certainly enriched my own relation with the faith.

So maybe I should briefly mention that the Invisible Committee in their text called “The Coming Insurrection” posed a question about how it might be possible to render a TGV rail line or electrical network useless. And so when an actual electrical line feeding TGV rail line was sabotaged, a bunch of people living in this remote commune in a sleepy mountainous village called Tarnac were arrested in 2008, who were mostly linked to journal called Tiqqun (which comes from the Hebrew term ‘Tikkun olam’ related to kabbalistic and messianic traditions, and more generally Jewish notions of social justice. Ward Blanton gave a talk and wrote an essay connecting Paul's epistles with the Invisible Committee, Tiqqun, and Agamben. Some of Tiqqun’s texts were translated by Robert Hurley and published by Semiotext(e), as were The Invisible Committee’s works, so that is maybe why the police made the connection. Hurley was also a translator for a number of texts by Foucault, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari.

Anyways, not long after, Glenn Beck talked very alarmingly about this text on his Fox show, and inadvertently launched it into the bestseller list on Amazon. Aside from the fact that earlier this year, all members arrested from Tarnac were acquitted from the charge of conspiracy to sabotage the TGV electrical line, I should note that squirrels are in fact the vanguard anarchist collective that have already succeeded in sabotaging many electrical lines and are in fact one of the major causes of grid disruptions to date, even beating out anthropogenic ‘cyber-terrorism’ according to some studies. (I use ‘terrorism’ tongue in cheek, as Agamben very astutely problematized this characterization for such acts.)

In the third section of this text, “To Our Friends”, entitled “Power is Logistic. Block Everything!”, the writer argues that power no longer resides in the conventional institutions of power, like government halls and parliaments, but is in fact in the infrastructure and the technocrats who maintain and construct that infrastructure. There is a very good articulation in here of why strikes are no longer as effective, because capital relies far more heavily on infrastructure than the labour of particular humans now, who are a lot more replaceable with technology. Hence the way to stop the flows of the economy is to sabotage infrastructure. I mean this also has shown up in radical Christian groups. For example, two Catholic Workers were arrested for sabotaging a Dakota Access pipeline, and when charged with property damage, claimed hilariously that they were actually engaging in property improvement (in light of our climate crisis).

Whoever it was that was responsible for the TGV line, and if they were in fact related to the Invisible Committee, I can speculate their rationale for it. First of all, many people living in those rural areas have protested the arrival of those train lines. I know in Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”, the “iron horse” as the indigenous people called it, was perceived as a threat to their way of life, and Porcupine the Cheyenne Ghost Dancer, derailed a train in 1867. Now whoever sabotaged the TGV power line did nothing so drastic. The train lost power for a bit, it was an inconvenience for some. But I think whoever wrote “Power is Logistic”, I think they would argue that such a train delay could be an excuse for people not to have to go to work, or some playful anarchist rationalization like that. Now I’m nowhere as radical as these people and I haven’t thought very articulately about the best ways of going about civil disobedience, but I think the analysis done on infrastructure and power are all very well thought out.

Overall though, this text was a mixed bag. You could tell multiple people were writing it, because there are some divergences of opinion within the book as a whole. My favourite sections were “Merry Crisis and Happy New Fear”, “Power is Logistic”, “Fuck Off Google”, and “Our Only Homeland”. I will be writing more about this book when I get the chance. I picked up on some parallels with Paul Virilio and even G. K. Chesterton and Wendell Berry, particularly when they elaborate on ‘alienation’.

I think their critique of engineering is one of the best I’ve come across and expresses so much of what I feel about the discipline. There are some really interesting thoughts about the ‘maker’ movement and ‘fab labs’, and how to think about all this ‘incubator’ and ‘hacker space’ stuff in light of capital today.

Again, I’m surprised I liked this book. And there’s a volunteer-read audiobook version of it on youtube, if you’re a little curious.

[MacArthur Peterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man, I haven’t disagreed with a book more in my life, but this was fascinating. Arrogance seeps from the pages. I’d be right with the author(s) up until they make asinine statements like “nihilism is the incapacity to believe in what one does believe in.”

I found myself agreeing with the premise each time but disagreeing with the action, akin to climbing a mountain but seeing your friend leap off the peak upon arrival. I’m just disappointed they can’t see the whole big picture.

Revolution? Excellent. But if you have no end to revolution, you have only unjustified violence. A self-professed anarchist myself, I love a lot of this book, but this is just the problem with leftist anarchism: there is no determinable end goal that can be achieved without violence. Violence as an end is not only futile, it is immoral; it is abhorrent to anyone with love in their heart.

4 stars because of how thought provoking and passionate it is. Who doesn’t love a book they can disagree with?