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by Comité Invisible

Dit boek, dat diverse vormen van sociale vervreemding niet toeschrijft aan individuen, behorende tot kapitaalgedreven samenlevingen, maar aan abstracties als het kapitalisme en de staat zelf, kan op veel aandacht rekenen.

De Komende Opstand bracht in Frankrijk veel discussie teweeg. Gegrepen door de sociale disfunctionaliteiten die voortvloeien uit het mondiale kapitalistische systeem, stelt Het Onzichtbaar Comité dat het verzet dat daar vandaag de dag mee gepaard gaat slechts een van de symptomen van een pervers systeem is ― een epifenomeen dat meer en meer de vorm aanneemt van een opstand, een revolte, nu de staat dat radicale verzet alsmaar meer verkettert als ware het een vorm van terrorisme. Het Onzichtbaar Comité traceert de terugkerende uitbarstingen van volkswoede in Griekenland naar die in de Franse voorsteden. De opstand-op-komst lijkt in weinig gelijk aan die van 1789 en 1917, of aan de revolte van ’68.

‘Onze geschiedenis is er één van kolonisering, van migraties, van oorlogen, van verbanningen, van de vernietiging van alle wortels. Het is de geschiedenis van alles wat ons tot vreemden maakte in deze wereld, gasten in onze eigen families. We zijn losgerukt van onze eigen taal door onderwijs, van onze liederen door talentenjachten op TV, van onze eigen lichamen door massale pornografie, van onze steden door de politie, van onze vrienden door loonarbeid.’

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, History, France, Essays

152 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 2007

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

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five fucking stars. With reservations.

This book says some very unpopular things that happen to be very true. You will most likely disagree with me on this. The book is essentially a stituationist manifesto for the present day. It's a book that has seen the bullshit that the sixties produced, the harmless liberalism, snide little self-righteous products like Adbusters, feel good community programs where priveleged suburbanites descend upon poor neighborhoods and enlighten the savages in some kind of neo-liberalism colonization hegemony invasion, where minority rights has basically been more hegemonic bullshit that just means more of the worst white males represent in the world, but now being diffused to people with different skin colors and who are forced to pee sitting down, a world where the asthectics of discontent is now high art that can sit on a Park Ave coffee table, a la Bansky; and on and on. What all of these things have in common is that they are all safety valves of the 'system', the 'spectacle' or whatever catchy word one wants to use. This book basically says fuck all of that. Fuck community organizing, voting, buying enviornmentally aware organic grocery's, fuck all of it because getting really into anything like that is only returning one to the role of a consumer, a spectator, a cog? of the system that is so beyond fucked that now it expects part of the population to make things right again.

And most of the population would love to step into that role, buy some recyclable bags, go to Green Markets, organizing some DIY workshop in a bad neighborhood, extol the virtues of riding a bike to your graphic design job instead of using public transportation and pray (or hope really hard) that things will get better; that Obama will save the day, that politics will miraculously change in a way that it never has in the past, and that everything will be better.

I'm sounding much more cynical than I probably really am. The problems facing the world scare the shit out of me, but I don't believe in the idea that government will fix it, and I know that companies won't (no matter how green they are according to this weeks Newsweek). Why do I know this to be true? Why don't I believe that deep down Obama will be no better than any other president we've had, and that things will be just as fucked when the next asshole takes office? Because the whole system is held together by a collective delusion stronger than anything else ever. Flat-Earth Creationists believe in something more credible than the economy that our entire existence is based on (ok maybe not, but if not then they are equal in the nothingness lurking right behind their beliefs). You can't fix the economy, you can only induce the collective idea that things are now getting better. That the pieces of paper with nothing backing them up are now worth something more so we should spend more of them, etc., etc.,.

I'm going all over the place here. Should I admit that I don't believe in government, or organizations for that matter? That I don't like leaders, I have no desire to lead, or be led? That I find myself to be mature enough to think for myself, and that potentially we all have that ability, and that if we all just matured in our thinking we could stop being assholes and be civilized to one another without the threat of coercion? Am I an anomaly that I don't feel an urge to go out and rape, kill and pillage, and that the only thing holding me back is the legality involved in it? Now this is basically the idea of anarchism, which is a much derided idea, and one that when I say I don't like being told what to do I'm usually treated like an angry teenager stuck in a punk phase; but I rather think of it as a quite mature way of seeing the world, one where I don't feel the need for a parent to keep an eye over me, and where I don't feel the need to be the overlording figure to someone else. I feel like I developed in a mature enough manner that I don't need to enact revenge on others for the overbearingness of my own parents (which they really weren't), and now try to be the important asshole with the most power on the block.

I'm still going all over the place here.

The book is called a "handbook for terrorism", but really it's a manifesto of sorts of how to live outside of the dominant society. It's in the same vein as Debord and company were writing about in the 1960's, and that Adorno was critiquing in his work; only it a move in another direction, knowing full well that the spectacle has an endless capacity to ingest dissent and make it part of itself. This book is a guide of trying to live on the fringes of the dissent and the importance of staying ahead of the powers that be if one doesn't want to just be safely co-opted. The terrorist aspects I'm guessing are towards the end, where they advocate learning how to fight, how to use weapons, and to arm oneself; because only by being armed can one then be a pacifist by refusing to use the weapons.

Of course I'm just a consumer of this book. But it's still pretty inspiring.

Ah, the reservations, I almost forgot this. The publisher of this book advocated the stealing of the book from bookstores, and staged a 'reading' (takeover?) at the store I work in that was guerrilla style. Of course they sent out press releases and alerted the media, and really only served to make a spectacle out of it all, and piss off employees at the store who they were kind of assholes to. Congrats Semiotext, and MIT for being exactly like what this book is railing against, a media event that is pushing a commodity, getting free publicity for your product that you will be paid for, no matter if the reader pays for or steals your book; and to boot you've been just like some entitled asshole and pissed on the people who work a job for very little money. Fuck you.

[Madeleine]

a dear friend once told me: "ur on goodreads? u want to really have a laugh? try reading 1-star reviews of the coming insurrection"

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished at last. In review of this inflamatory little tract, let me start off with some background.

The Coming Insurrection has gained traction thanks to two readership groups. It is popular among anarchists as an expression of their thought and methods. It has also gained readership among the American "populist right" as a go-to treatise on "what the enemy thinks." For this we can thank Glen Beck. Say what you will about Beck, but he has actually made deeper discourse about his pet issues possible by bringing such books as this and Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" to the wider public consciousness.

So this book does three things: First it presents an anarchist analysis of the ways in which we are controlled within our current culture, and what those controlling structures are meant to conceal. Then it sets out a variety of tactics to oppose and undo the current culture and it's controlling mechanisms. Lastly (but also throughout the book too) it urges us not just to understand but to organize and act.

According to the authors, we (persons outside the ruling elite) are subject to control by elitist society. We, as individuals, are isolated within a variety of "circles.” These might be the enclosures used in ven diagrams, they might be fences to hem us in, they might be an image to make us recall Dante's circles of hell - The book is less than clear on what is actually meant by the term. But it’s more clear on what these circles do. They isolate us from others, divert our attention towards false problems, and neutralize our ability to think and act both independently and within independent groups outside the context of societal control.

What do the circles conceal? It’s the fact that OUR economic activity serves to perpetuate the power and wealth of the few. All these circles exist to blind us to that reality. Further, some of those circles (environmentalism for instance) exist to create new sources of wealth and control for the few.

So what do the authors propose? Simply put, the control of the few should be broken by abandoning their values, destroying "their" economy (destroying the means of production and exchange), opposing all government, committing anonymous criminal and violent acts on a small scale until the opportunity to riot and burn on a larger scale comes. As soon as possible, the authors say, we should join communes of people with whom we share common beliefs and likes. When a multiplicity of self sufficient communes arises in the city and country, a critical mass will be achieved to wipe away the current state, either through guerrilla war and rioting against local authorities, or through total disinterest in those authorities. In short, they advocate the 60's, hippies, and class war leading to Charlie Manson's utopia (but perhaps with less drugs and more intellectualism and solidarity, as befits French hippies).

In judging this book, my thought is that the Invisible Committee underestimates the consequence of "the coming insurrection."

If that insurrection comes to pass as imagined, there will be a lot of babies thrown out with the bathwater, literally. Productivity is undermined by the lifestyle of shoplifting, mooching off of welfare, and rioting whenever the opportunity arises. How do you figure the world can sustain the many mouths here if you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs - the common human productivity that has the potential to feed, cloth, and educate us all (not just the rich), and can allow man leisure and conquest of the moon besides?

This book, if implemented, leads to an implosion of human productivity and a calamity of starvation and population reduction on a scale that only a Khmer Rouge or Ted Kazinsky could love. Or failing that it leads to a stalemate of perpetual war between "us and them" that hinder our productivity, limits our consumption, and hems in our future. The anarchists would create a malignant and limiting circle of their own.

This isn't to advocate preserving the status quo. But the real problem with society isn't the need to destroy the productive order, but to humanize it, and alter the order of distribution. Yes, the circles are a problem, but the bigger problem is what the circles exist to protect... which is the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few, and the impoverishing and silencing of the many. Our institutions aren't bad in themselves, it's only that they are hijacked and turned against us. This is true even if those institutions have almost never been in the hands and at the service of the many.

For those really interested in promoting the good of the many, maybe the better solution is not destroying the economic order but diverting it's profit and output to at least a greater service of public rather than private good. Taxation and reinvestment (if not welfare redistribution) seem like more useful vehicles than firebombs and shoplifting in the long run. Of course the right would find this contrary to the conservative religion of "economic fundamentalism." So to achieve this democratically we need to convince the wider public that such things as Galbraith's "Good Society" are possible and superior to the present order.

Lastly, I'm giving this book five stars, not because I agree with everything in it, but because I've never read a better pamphlet in these times. This book ranks up there with Thomas Paine's Common Sense and Marx's Manifesto. I personally fault it only because it isn't Roosevelt's Four Freedoms.

***

p.s. -- One late thought regarding the use of violence. A couple of years ago I saw a bunch of public school teachers protesting budget and job cuts when our new Gov. Scott (in Florida) decided to slash and burn the public sector. NOTHING whatsoever has come of those and following protests since. The school system is a wasteland of underfunding and underachievement, and the same goes for the rest of the public sector that has been raped to allow tax cuts that have produced ZERO of the jobs promised. I thought then, and am convinced now, that if the school teachers really want to get the Governor's attention they will have to set something on fire or blow something up. Not that I'm exactly encourage this... But frankly, I do think that it's an empirical sound observation that peaceful protest has achieved nothing and has been steamrolled by the police. Notice how the Occupy camps have been cleared from every city.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I discovered this book because of TikTok, of all places. Some random girl on my FYP gave it a glowing review, and I want to be cool, so I bought it. This book is a short, mostly enjoyable read that offers some good points mixed with a heavy dose of spicy, melodramatic language and anarchist idealism. This book does come off like an angsty manifesto (probably because it is), and I often found myself agreeing with it but also rolling my eyes.

Here’s a taste of the vibe:

“Soon this society will only be held together by the mere tension of all the social atoms straining towards an illusory cure. It’s a power plant that runs its turbines on a gigantic reservoir of unwept tears, always on the verge of spilling over.”

Damn, that’s an image.

I’ve been lately obsessed with thinking about and reading books about work. This book has one chapter on work, and it was better than I expected. It has a good discussion of work as a means for social control, and a pretty savage takedown of how people often pretend that they don’t care about their jobs, but they also work long hours and are terrified of being unemployed. There’s an interesting tension in our attitudes about work (we hate it but we also love it) that other leftists I’ve read often miss.

“The notion of work,” say the authors, “has always included two contradictory dimensions: a dimension of exploitation and a dimension of participation. Exploitation of individual and collective labor power through the private or social appropriation of surplus value; participation in a common effort through the relations linking those who cooperate in the universe of production.”

While work is inherently exploitative, it is also something that we feel like we choose to participate in. While I have to work in order to live, I do have some choice over what jobs I do—so work often feels like a free choice.

The authors argue that this is why so much Marxist discussion of “exploited” workers doesn’t always resonate with the workers themselves. Many of them see their job as a free choice they made. Managers, on the other hand, swing in the other direction, asserting that work is purely participatory, obscuring the fact that we work not primarily out of choice but because we need a paycheck to live. See also: every boring corporate onboarding presentation you've ever sat through. This book does a good job articulating the weird contradictions and ambivalence we often feel about work.

The thing that this book really nails is its argument that in order for a revolution to get going, there must be a disruption of the status quo. Societal disruptions get people to realize that all this stuff we do every day—all the rules of our world—are essentially a collective performance.

As the authors put it, “In order for something to rise up in the midst of the metropolis and open up other possibilities, the first act must be to interrupt its perpetuum mobile.”

In his book The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber calls these disruptions to business as usual “revolutionary moments.” These are moments where the mask slips, when we realize that society is a thing that we made up, and that we’re all just a bunch of mostly hairless primates running around on the top of a molten hot sphere that’s hurtling through the universe. While these “revolutionary moments” may not lead to a revolution, these little societal hiccups are when people are more likely to realize that we could decide to do things a different way.

In this vein, though it was published in 2007, this book has an oddly prescient discussion of COVID-19 pandemic:

“A brutal shutting down of borders to fend off a raging epidemic, a sudden interruption of supply lines, organized blockades of the axes of communication—and the whole facade crumbles, a facade that can no longer mask the scenes of carnage haunting it from morning to night. The world would not be moving so fast if it didn’t have to outrun its own collapse.”

I told you this book is dramatic.

The moments where stuff gets a little weird and uncertain, where it’s not business as usual, allows people to pause and imagine ways that things could change.

This is likely part of the reason that many politicians and industry leaders were so eager for us to get “back to work” during the pandemic that they memorably suggested sacrificing our grandparents for the economy. It’s partly about the profits, but it’s also partly about maintaining the order of the status quo. Disruption is dangerous in more ways than one.

Though I agreed with many of the ideas in this book, the fiery language got tiresome in places. For example, we are not waiting for the collapse of civilization, the authors claim. In fact the collapse is already here and we must “choose sides” accordingly. If the line at the DMV is any indication, though, civilization is still hanging in there—and it was definitely hanging in there back in 2007. If we keep saying civilization has already collapsed when it pretty clearly hasn’t, we will put ourselves in a Boy Who Cried Wolf situation.

And while I’m sympathetic to anarchist ideals, anarchism seems implausible for dealing with large-scale problems like the ones the authors spend the entire book outlining. The book instructs us to avoid joining organizations because all organizations are primarily concerned with their own self-preservation and they are ultimately ineffective. But I don’t really see how we are meant to take on the myriad of crises detailed in this book if we aren’t very well organized.

Ironically, the authors then unveil their blanket solution to everything: communes! I love a good commune, but presenting them as a viable model for large-scale social change strikes me as wishful thinking at best.

The book says that communes form “when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path.”

Okay, sure, but isn’t this also what an organization is? It wasn’t clear to me why organizations totally suck but communes are somehow awesome. The book asserts that we must all urgently get organized, learn new skills, travel, build self-defense networks, and disrupt the status quo wherever possible. It doesn’t explain, however, how we are supposed to do that at any scale without a broader organizational structure.

The authors’ disdain for stifling bureaucracy of large organizations certainly makes sense. As someone who has endured far too many dull DSA general meetings, this resonated with me. But the authors didn’t really present any meaningful alternatives to it. We don’t want leaders, but we want things to be organized. We want every voice to be heard, but we have no way to make final decisions or resolve disputes.

The authors’ proposed decision-making framework is “each person should do their own reconnaissance, the information would then be put together, and the decision will occur to us rather than being made by us.”

I’m skeptical we could even order dinner with this approach, much less carry out a revolution or run a city.

The Coming Insurrection offers a lot to like, and much that I agreed with, but it fell on its face when describing a meaningful alternative to our current situation, and it was a bit melodramatic for my taste.

This book really drove home just how much I don’t want an insurrection, even though I believe that capitalism is terrible and must be abolished. The current system sucks but rather than overthrowing it, I’d prefer to work to make it more palatable in my lifetime. I don’t think we are anywhere near the proletariat revolution that I ultimately hope will happen. That’s a challenge for a future society. I’m too much of a wuss to live through a revolution.

[Max Renn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some reviewers here have already said it and quite well. This is a situationist tract for the 21st century and it is less a plan or handbook than it is a sort of clear-eyed meditation. Think Hakim Bey's T.A.Z. shorn of its mysticism or the Unabomber manifesto written by someone who believes there is something to be salvaged in humanity.

It is true, there are ideas here that are explored in depth and better elsewhere but i dont think that is this books purpose. This books value is as a "get on the same page" transmission for people interested in and actively working towards solutions, written by people who have been on what passes for the front in the strange new sort of wars that are waged between corporate states and the people who live in them. It lays out many of the philosophical and practical predicaments facing serious changemakers and proposes possible work-arounds without elaborating on specifics. this is one of its strengths, as it allows for and indeed emphasizes localized autonomy worldwide.

I have to disagree with the commenters who say that the final emphasis on communes is an error. the communes as defined in the book are not your parents communes but rather something along the lines of oaxaca, a workable, and less abstract form of connectedness. In fact it is this connectedness that shapes the primary intention of the book, that working towards a real and sustainable form of community that undoes the alienation of an increasingly mediated society is the first step towards a world we can actually live in.

Sure, many of us will recognize the ideas and emotions in these pages, but it is good to sometimes to hear them out loud now and again and all at once.

[Philippe Malzieu]

France live in a revolutionary nostalgia. Many people dream of a Great Evening when damned of the earth will remove their chains, the rich person will be hung with butcher's hooks, a new man will appear in a new era. And then there is this old French passion: the Trotskyism. All the media leader are old Trotskyist.There is thus this conviction that a small group determined is sufficient to take the power. This book goes in this direction. It is a genuine handy guide, including stopping a train. All must be ready for the moment favourable. The power is to be taken.
The problem is not the existence of this book. It is that it is sold with more than 100,000 specimens. And the compost is favourable in France, weak power, poverty, unemployment and this strange third industrial revolution with a weak growth and perhaps a secular stagnation.
I think that we can be legitimately anxious. I think there will be more and more violent incidents. This kind of book legitim It.

[Eric Bauer · Rating 1 out of 5]

An utter piece of trash. A bunch of people with no lives pushing for the cause of socialism or communism (it's hard to tell at times) based on no facts and terrible logic and sweeping generalizations. This is the book that is supposedly inspiring widespread violent protests in Greece, France, and London, and may possibly have an impact in some circles here in America in the near future.

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ultraleft theory. I appreciate the application here of late 20th century ideas to the traditional analysis of capitalist society.

However, when something like "in the advanced degree of social decomposition, we can count on the coming movement to find the necessary breath of nihilism" rolls off the tongue, it seems like there's been a couple missteps into retrograde metaphor and mysticism.

Similarly, agreed, "crisis is a means of governing." The great rule of power is that certain reactions even though rebellious or anarchic are predictable and thus controllable. This is likely inferable from Hobbes and Machiavelli, though I appreciate the restatement here. We should also point out that capitalism's usual modus operandi is crisis.

There's plenty of well stated points--but an equal number of head-scratchers. And of course the thorough rejection of everything in favor of a nebulous 'commune' thesis is hardly to be borne.

Recommended for those who wish to render themselves invisible.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

This essay is more a poetic indictment of post-industrial civilization than an advocation of a coherent political program. As poetic indictment of contemporary living it's very elegant and astute; as political program -- insofar as its rather romantic elaboration of communes could be said to constitute one -- it's suggestive at best, naive at worst. (Anyone remember running into all those books from the '70s detailing the train wrecks that became of many a 1960s' commune??)

If it's true that the authors of The Coming Insurrection (also of the French Tiqqun journal? -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiqqun ) were inspired or influenced, at least in part, by Giorgio Agamben's 1990 book The Coming Community, then the shift from "community" to "insurrection" is no doubt where all the controversy lies. For Agamben, it was enough to speculate that "tanks will appear" whenever whatever-beings "peacefully demonstrate their being in common," as opposed to being subjectivized by a State. But The Invisible Committee wants an actual revolution, not to just summon tanks, and are more in line with the political (vs. philosophical) legacy of the situationists' anarcho-Marxism. The I. C. also seems to share with Hardt & Negri a sense that all of social life has now become, at least potentially, the grounds for contesting the existing capitalist order; and to the I. C.'s credit, at least, they're upfront about the precariousness of their position (for example, echoing the situationists: "Nothing appears less likely than an insurrection, but nothing is more necessary").

Rightly or wrongly the French government seems to have taken The Invisible Committee at their word, arresting several in the group based on little or no evidence of any actual crime (see, for example, G. Agamben's public defenses of the authors: http://notesforthecomingcommunity.blo... ; http://notesforthecomingcommunity.blo... ). It's not surprising that Fox News has used the English publication of the essay (by MIT Press, of all venues) as an opportunity to freak-out ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKyi2q... ) -- whereas in the main text violence is discussed in the context of self-defense, and even acknowledged as a losing strategy, in-itself, when it comes to fighting State power, its last page includes a rather crazed invocation that "...A company manager is inspired to blow away a handful of his colleagues in the middle of a meeting..." That's hardly "revolutionary" in any constructive sense, and even contradicts the much more sensible position on violence (as last resort) expounded in the earlier sections. If the I. C. were to turn their rather vague* allusions to communes into some sort of conscious dual-power strategy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_power ), including a coherent position on violence, then they couldn't be so easily dismissed as "terrorists" -- that they might be seems at least partially to be their own doing.

*For example, the I. C. claims that, in their view, "communes...would not define themselves -- as collectives tend to do -- by what's inside and what's outside them, but by the density of the ties at their core..." (p. 102). That sounds promising, although pragmatically speaking, and especially in a genuinely revolutionary situation, that sort of vague distinction is really a subtle form of proto-defeatism. (Unless their sense of "civil war" is acknowledged to be a perpetual condition, every actual political revolution will eventually define its outside, ipso facto, for better or worse.)

[Myles · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you stapled together four hundred deeply cynical French fortune cookie fortunes, you might end up with something like this tripe, which relies on slogans, speculation, and some oddly translated half-logic that probably sounds better after a few snifters of Calvados.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable book - the best recent expression to date of the 'rage against the machine' that has been emerging for some time at the margins of European life.

This is an intellectual version of a rage that is usually focused on direct action. The bulk of the book appears, despite its claims to come from 'The Invisible Committee', to be drafted primarily by one highly creative and rather witty voice but the impulse here is precisely that fuelling riots in Athens on the one side and the laying of flowers at the home of attempted cop-killer Raoul Moat in Newcastle on the other.

The Moat business confused as much as it horrified Middle England but it represented the alienation of many people who have no economic stake or position of respect within the global economy and yet are housed within its faltering motor, the Western capitalist democracies.

A war of sorts is slowly gathering pace between these marginalised peoples and the authorities. The latter are mobilising the authoritarian petit-bourgeoisie just as the former seem to be learning how to connect and to co-ordinate outside the surveillance systems of a police force that is no longer theirs but often represents, through no fault of its own, the characteristics of an occupying power.

France, as so often, is a central cockpit for this struggle. This book contains many allusions, not always fully explained, to clashes between the police and the disaffected, mostly in the suburbs of the big cities, that began even before the recent economic crisis and are clearly not fully or fairly reported to the rest of the world.

This is a France where the shine has long since come off its President Sarkozy and whose own response to the slow motion breakdown of law and order is to mimic his neighbour, Silvio Berlusconi, by shifting to the populist Right as the middle classes get increasingly frightened.

The last few weeks alone have seen the entire French political class uniting around a ban on the burqa that puzzles freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons in its intensity. On top of this, we have just seen an assault on the Roma which mimics a similar attack last year in Italy.

The trajectory of unreported and intensive surveillance and policing of the suburbs is clear - do not allow these areas to become the source of Athens-style riots or, worse, the basis for the rise of anarcho-communist no-go areas like those of Hezbollah in Beirut or Hamas in Gaza.

This is a struggle that is still being fought out on the margins of society rather than at the centre. It has its 'respectable' counterpart in the war over mass information, epitomised by Wikileaks' publication of secret US Government documentation and Iceland's remarkable decision to make itself what amounts to an anti-captalist safe haven.

In this context, 'The Coming Insurrection' is a key text because it brings a nihilistic intelligentsia into direct contact with the marginalised through a theory (not specifically outlined in the text but on every page) of direct action. This first arose on the radical racist Right but has migrated across to the anarcho-communist Left almost seamlessly. This is the theory of 'leaderless resistance' and it is causing anxiety to the established Governments of the capitalist and semi-democratic West.

My own assessment is that neither side can win in this war. The organisational resources and, as demonstrated both by the German State in the 1970s and by the Israeli State today, ruthlessness of the authorities will ultimately strip away every vestige of liberty, if deemed necessary, from the general population.

States will use every possible trick of cultural manipulation in order to contain, criminalise and break the spirit of the rebels. The general direction of history may, in this respect, be like that of the Tsarist authorities in dealing with the Narodniks - a cycle of repression and terrorism that ends up with a defeat for both anarchism and the State.

Just as with the Tsarism, if there is not some restraining liberal influence (which, fortunately, we believe is the case), the process of breaking the back of revolt not merely degrades the ethical claims of the State (which are pretty dodgy anyway) but raises the sense of something being profoundly wrong amongst sufficient sections of a powerless middle class that a certain sympathy will emerge for the marginalised, even at their most brutal.

A refusal to judge and, in some quarters, a shift into the marginalised camp offer unknown threats and consequences to the existing system. The problem is one of money and modernisation. The resources of the State are much greater than that of the rebels but are still limited and the necessity to strut on the world stage and get a share of world trade conflicts with the necessity for investment in the marginalised zones along local, regional and national lines.

What 'leaderless resistance' does is give permission for anti-social behaviour to become political action against a system with, as this book makes clear, the aim of seizing territory through communal action. The destruction of the tools of the existing system is undertaken through actions that are so random and 'unled' that the authorities have no specific place to clamp down and so must commit to arbitrary action and injustice to make progress. It is deliberately provocative.

As for the book itself, published in 2007, it was apparently the prime piece of evidence in a somewhat dodgy anti-terrorism trial of nine persons in France in 2008, and is now freely available in translation, distributed by no less than the MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an act that, like the widespread publication of the Unabomber Manifesto in its time, indicates that the 'safety valve' of freedom of speech in the Anglo-Saxon world still continues to operate.

The introduction can be skipped. It is different in style and content and lacks the literary panache of the rest of the book. The bulk of the book is a witty and coruscating analysis of modern Western culture that, bluntly, is just about right.

On about every page, the nihilistic author peels away the magic and the illusions and the delusions of late capitalism with a 'bon mot', a 'mot juste', a phrase that might come to be in book of quotations. Read these chapters and you may be horrified but also enlightened or you may simply throw the book away in disgust as a devout Christian might throw away Lavey's 'Satanic Bible'.

The problem with the book is the obvious one - where does it take us in practice?. Its analysis of what is wrong with contemporary culture may be nihilist but it is depressingly accurate.

Again, it reminds one of the analyses by the Russian Nihilists of the combination of comic opera and brutality that was Tsarist Russia. But the book falters in the last fifth when it tries to turn this analysis into a plan of action, a plan that does not have anything of the organisational 'nous' of the Catalonian Anarchists or, say, the Zapatistas.

Certainly, the authors of this text are doing that traditional French thing of revelling in their own intellectual abilities and command of language - these are people who have read their Foucault - but there is no sign that they actually understand the workings of power. Nor do they appear to have learned anything from history or show any sign that they could match the ability of the Zapatistas or even Hamas to manage the instruments of late capitalism, such as the media, to survive, prosper and serve their communities.

The 'Invisible Committee's' policies of direct action are not only self indulgent at the ultimate expense of the marginalised but self-defeating. As Wikileaks has shown, the anarcho-libertarians who play the internet in an informational war that engages the middle classes and then splits them are forcing radical changes in state action that actually reduce their ability to undertake brutal and oppressive actions.

The anarcho-communists behind this text are simply seeking a self-immolation that will destroy the very tools that they use against the system. The inheritors of their strategy are not likely to be libertarians at all but the same sort of revolutionary authoritarians that emerged in Russia in the wake of the collapse in 1917.

In fact, for all the talk of 'internal contradictions' amongst Marxists (foes of the anarcho-communists), capitalist democracy remains exceptionally adaptable and fluid. The sort of war that allowed communism to emerge is unlikely and, if it did take place, China and India would implode long before the United States. So long as the US stands 'free' (whatever that may mean), liberal capitalism, even if socialised to a degree, has its stronghold.

But this book is a highly recommended text because if the authorities do not understand that the rage against the machine is real and justified, they will eventually be doomed to irrelevance. Technological and associated cultural changes are making authoritarian solutions more difficult to sustain. Instead of provoking authority into tyranny, the anarcho-communist are likely to exhaust authority into coming to terms with liberty so, in that sense, they may be doing us all a service.

The Invisible Committee's 'leaderless communal resistance' will not transform the West into what appears (when you analyse it) to be some strange quasi-agrarian but urbanised collaborative and sustainable community of equals (which really means warlordism and anarchy in the popular sense). Their actions will merely prolong the agony by giving an excuse for repression that cannot be sustained - an alternative 'bourgeois' libertarian resistance is emerging at multiple levels to the presumptions of State, religious and cultural authority in any case.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the central section that goes into a direct attack not merely on the 'progressive' trend (clearly exploited by authority in its foreign policy) but the popular environmentalist movement. The 'Invisible Committee' (perhaps with a dash of paranoia but also with some justice) sees this as the creature of the next stage of capitalist enslavement, the means of making us all willing workers in dismantling a failed system in order to build one that will be more effective in its control of us.

There is some merit in this idea which works against the grain of the growing identification of environmentalism and anarchism, certainly in the Anglo-Saxon world. The ecological industries do seem to be built on a framework of increased regulation and centralisation of power and there is no doubt that the European Union as a project has seized control of environmentalism, following German state priorities, in order to enhance its power against nation states.

Meanwhile, the surveillance and tracking systems that late capitalism clearly considers absolutely essential to managing the movement of goods and services cost-effectively seem to cross-link with ease to the tracking of persons required by the security structures of the state and thence to the monitoring of personal use of energy and of individual's waste management.

The environmentalist movement provides the security structures and capitalism with a far more effective ideological buttress for its actions in Europe than security - the reverse of the case in North America.

But whether eco-obsession or fear of terrorism, the constructed mythologies of both, reaching to almost religious proportions amongst the less intelligent in both territories, converge in the creation of massive infrastructures for individual surveillance and management across the West as a whole that are not so very different from those that might have been employed in a more technologically advanced Soviet Empire.

As the Invisible Committee puts it: "The new green asceticism is precisely the self control that is required of us all in order to negotiate a rescue operation where the system has taken itself hostage. Henceforth it is all in the name of environmentalism that we must all tighten our belts, just as we did yesterday in the name of the economy."

To be crude, this is effectively saying that we are like people who have been persuaded to organise the cattle trucks to take us to the camps and so save the authorities the trouble. There is merit in this argument since the ability of states to manage culture and opinion has advanced a great deal over the last thirty or so years.

There is another aspect of the book that surprises. It is ostensibly of the 'Left'. Anarchism is traditionally of the Left and its enemy is the State but the most coruscating attacks are not only on the progressive and environmentalist movements but on the official organised trades union-based Left. The assumption is that fascism (linked to the State) is the enemy but the ideology behind the book has oddly traditionalist and conservative aspects.

There is a belief in place and personal association (only an edge off tribalism), a surprising and not clearly explained rant against cultural relativism and an end-game that may be similar to Marx's withering away of the state but could equally be a post-modern version of the agrarianism and small tribe mentality of the followers of former Leftist and now Right theoretician, Alain de Benoist.

Indeed, since there is no real provenance for the authors, we have to be highly suspicious that the author merges his Foucault with some understanding of De Benoist to create something that is not so much beyond Right and Left as subversively New New Right from the perspective of any establishment Socialist who is in collaborative alliance with the new eco-capitalism.

This is part of a much wider trans-valuation of values in Europe. Official Socialists and the anti-Islamist universalist Rightists merge their aspirations with the security State while both the radical Right and the anarcho-Left move into the position of street resistance and localism.

The difference is that the Left (including the Invisible Committee) have no place for racial or ethnic questions of difference or any radical differentiation between gender roles. The Invisible Committee clearly support the rights of migrants and has no sense of nationality in the way that it has traditionally been used to buttress the State.

Nevertheless, its ideology of place and personal association, as well as of direct action and of violence, is not a million miles from those less hidebound and more intelligent European Rightists with a critique of modern capitalism and a sympathy for traditionalism that extends to respect for, say, Islam and so for Hamas and Hezbollah.

This is a tension and internal contradiction within the 'resistance' (or insurgency) that has yet to work its way through the 'system'. The balance of 'leaderless resistance' protest is different in different countries - from Athens and the Latin world (where it is quite definitely on the Left) to the Anglo Saxon community (where it tends to the quasi-racist Right).

But the real reason to read this book is for its literary merit, often for its wit. It is my belief that it will be an underground classic that will be seen as having, albeit in extreme terms, captured the mood of a time. It will inspire an 'attitude' of resistance to authority that, in very many small ways, may ultimately and positively bring the authorities to heel and into alignment with the general mass of people's expectation that they should serve its interest and not the institutional interests of politicians, lobbyists, corporations, bankers, unions and churches.

So here is a taster of the mood of the moment, as applicable to the marginalised of the Anglo Saxon world as that of France ...

" From Left to Right,it's the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or saviour, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse, according to the findings of the latest surveys. ... In its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more mature than all these puppets bickering amongst themselves about how to govern it."

" The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production, the accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of social norms, and generalised flexibility. It is, at the same time the most voracious consumer, and paradoxically, the most productive self, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest project, only to return later to its original larval state."

" We have arrived at a point of privation where the only way to feel French is to curse the immigrants and those who are more visibly foreign. In this country, the immigrants assume a curious position of sovereignty: if they weren't here, the French might stop existing."

" The aura that surrounds Mesrine has less to do with his uprightness and his audacity than with the fact that he took it upon himself to enact vengeance on what we should all avenge .... the open hostility of certain gangs only expresses, in a slightly less muffled way, the poisonous atmosphere, the rotten spirit, the desire for a salvational destruction by which the country is consumed."

" The couple is like the the final stage of the great social debacle. It's the oasis in the middle of the social desert ... the utopia of autism-for-two."

" ... we don't work anymore: we do our time. Business is not a place where we exist, it's a place we pass through. We aren't cynical, we are just unwilling to be deceived ... The horror of work is less in the work itself than in the methodical ravaging, for centuries, of all that isn't work: the familarities of one's neighbourhood and trade, of one's village, of struggle, of kinship, our attachment to places, to beings, to the seasons, to ways of doing and speaking."

" The metropolis is a terrain of constant low-intensity conflict, in which the taking of Basra, Mogadishu, or Nablus mark points of culmination. ... The battles conducted by the great powers resemble a kind of never-ending police campaign in the black holes of the metropolis ... The police and the army are evolving in parallel and in lock-step."

" We have to see that the economy is not 'in' crisis, the economy is itself the crisis ... The brutal activity of power today consists both in administering this ruin while at the same time establishing the framework for a 'new economy'"

" There is no 'environmental catastrophe'. The catastrophe is the environment itself. ... they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put is to work rebuilding it, and - to add insult to injury - at a profit. The morbid excitement that animates journalists and advertisers these days as they report each new proof of global warming reveals the steely smile of the new green capitalism ... "

" Tracking, transparency, certification, eco-taxes, environmental excellence, and the policing of water, all give us an idea of the coming state of ecological emergency. Everything is permitted to a power structure that bases its authority in Nature, in health and in well-being."

" A civilisation is not an abstraction hovering over life. It is what rules, takes possession of, colonises the most banal, personal, daily existence ... The French state is the very texture of French subjectivities, the form assumed by the centuries-old castration of its subjects ... In France. literature is the prescribed space for the amusement of the castrated. It is the formal freedom conceded to those who cannot accomodate themselves to the nothingness of their real freedom."

" There is no 'clash of civilisations'. There is a clinically dead civilisation kept alive by all sorts of life-support systems that spread a peculiar plague into the planet's atmosphere."

So there we have it ..

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

It certainly was 2007

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a communist, this is pure anarchist idealism.

Also France sucks.

[Richard Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this book has a bad reputation with law abiding people and it has a good reputation with... the others. It kinda deserves neither.

The book itself is writting poorly more like someone who feels they are better than everyone else. It just feels somewhat pompous. But this is not the kind of book you read for its literary merits.

The information could be dangerous in a way. It talks about how to think during urban warfare, why you should try to overthrow a government, why you should form political gangs err... communes. So if someone was to read this and live by it, it could be dangerous.

But on the other hand this is only a guidebook for organizational situations. There is nothing in there about how to do anything. Nothing to tell you how to avoid police, how obtain firearms, how to raid, loot, pillage... It is kind of a pep rally for wannabe revolutionaries.

But beyond its contraversy there are some interesting ideas in the book. Questions about how economics could work without money back to a barter-ish system. How free riding is ok since it is exploiting a supposedly corrupt system. Why it is that ideas win wars rather than battles... Some of these really got me thinking, but left me with shallow answers that are easily refutable.

It avoids the questions I wanted to pose to it. What about civillians that are ignorant? How do communes exist after the system has been destroyed? What kind of economic system can withstand the barter-ish society you seem to desire? But these are not addressed.

Overall it is an interesting read that could corrupt the minds of those too immature to question the claims the authors make. And since I don't know my European history, it references many things that required extensive research to fully understand.

Not really recomended unless this is your type of book.

[Yoel · Rating 1 out of 5]

white radicals' wet dream

[London Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a tragicomedy to be seen in the 1-star reviews of this magnificent (and magnificently short) book, reviews left by a horde of angry right-wing Boomers, a counterrevolution lead by no less than far right conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck. It's enough to bring back memories of angry and frivolous arguments with propagandized minds over whether or not the establishment's golden boy was actually born in America.

The past, however, is the past. The Boomers moved onwards and rightwards to crypto-fascism, Glenn Beck moved on from Fox News, and Barack Obama is still American. So what can we say of the book itself in lieu of these developments?

Well, it's all kind of irrelevant.

Few of the 2010 era reviews actually discuss the content of the book, instead being generic admonitions against the socialist threat within, clear signs of discontent with simulacra of a movement rather than the movement itself.

Simply put, this book nails the neuroses of our era and recommends tactics to usurp the dominant power structures guiding the neuroses into new markets. It's the lovechild Mark Fisher or Adam Curtis could have produced with the insurrectionary anarchist movement, a document running parallel to the great revolutionary prophets of our era.

I am no anarchist but I can't help admiring even the tactics and the ideology in play. As a Marxist, there are many points of disagreement, but I can't discount the possibility that the insurrectionary anarchists could be entirely right about the fate of the system. The collapse really does appear rapidly approaching and, as with any other collapse in history, it's difficult to speak in the final outcome.

Thankfully, we do have works of these calibers to guide us in at least the revolutionary aspect of the final battles in the temple of capital. Let's hope it works.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I keep coming back to this (and always will):

"'WHAT AM I,' then? Since childhood, I’ve passed through a flow of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions, nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don’t form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges—at certain times and places—that being which says “I.” Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are.

It’s dizzying to see Reebok’s “I AM WHAT I AM” enthroned atop a Shanghai skyscraper. The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antinomy between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn’t the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them. The family only exists as a family, that is, as a hell, for those who’ve quit trying to alter its debilitating mechanisms, or don’t know how to. The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can’t rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied."

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

All you have to do is look at what is happening in Greece to see what is wrong with the ranting of this text. Socialism plus a call to arms; if you believe in this "stuff" then it and you are scary.

[Isa]

this book: is titled 'the coming insurrection'
me when it calls for an actual armed insurrection: 😮

[javisitu · Rating 5 out of 5]

que todo arda y que el mundo sea eso que soñaron las brujas los piratas el lumpen

[Marcos Carrasco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Increíble. Son unos genios.

Filosofía y policía convergen, a pesar de ser dos actividades muy distintas.

[Timo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Anyone who thinks he is fighting for a better world should be concerned about the popularity of this book among the radical left.
This book is an example of how many people on the radical left seem incapable of learning from history: the twentieth century proved in a horrible way that although the capitalist status quo is terrible and it is important to replace it with a better form of society, there are far worse forms of society than the capitalist status quo in liberal democracies. National Socialism is just the most horrible example of how much worse things can be, but there are many more and many of them were supported by large parts of the international left such as Stalinism, Khmer Rouge, Maoism, the current Irainian regime, ...

Any leftist who really cares about the well-being of human-beings should urgently reflect on the dangers of revolutions (and the time after them) and take them very seriously. This is the condition of the possibility that the next attempt to improve the world will not end in another nightmare.

But although as anarchists the authors of this book wouldn’t support any of the regimes I mentioned, they do the exact opposite of the necessary critical reflection: an extremely violent destruction of the status quo appears almost as an end in itself and what is to come out in the end remains a minor matter that is only hinted at in nebulous terms. Not a single thought is wasted on how to prevent the new post-capitalist world from becoming even worse than the old capitalist one. It is no wonder that radical right-wingers also refer positively to the book - because it is also perfectly compatible for them in large parts.

What is particularly scary about this book is that it does not reflect on the danger that unleashed violence could turn into progroms; on the contrary, all violence commited from marginalized groups is glorified as somehow part of an emancipatory resistance. At the very least, the fact that the anti-Semitic and mysogynistic massacre of 10/7 is glorified by many left-wing groups as an emancipatory form of resistance should wake up anyone who is still at least halfway sane and show how enormously dangerous the kind of thinking propagated in this book is.

-----

Edit: Of course, war and revolution are very different! But nevertheless, the authors of this pamphlet remind me somewhat of those war-hungry intellectuals who longed for World War I, believing it would act like a cleansing storm to free the world from its encrusted status quo, while ignoring compleatly the unimaginable cruelty and suffering that this storm would bring.

[Ted Heitz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thankfully, this falls short on inspiration. Unfortunately, it is a seed being planted worldwide in misdirected youth. Premise is a new call to action to intentionally invoke crises that the "left" control in a way where they come out in power. Communism run rampant. Read if you're already established and strong willed as an American. It's a peek in the mind of the enemy at best.

[Jacob · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book left me pretty creeped out. It's hard to believe there are really people this delusional. I also find it hard to trust anyone who thinks socialism and scamming the government are the answers to all the world's problems.

[Saleem · Rating 5 out of 5]

life changing

[Bobbi · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's great at the beginning, but towards the end, the solutions just simply wont work in our current system. There needs to be local actions within the system and people moving up who eventually reverse the flow to destroy it. I think the authors have trust issues which leads them to telling people to avoid the system entirely.

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. "The future has no future" is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reach the level of consciousness of the first punks.

This whole book has oddly come back around to relevance ten years later. Shocks of recognition of our current moment litter every page.

There is nothing more draining, nothing more fatal, than this classical politics, with its dried up rituals, its thinking without thought, its little closed world...What this war is being fought over is not the various ways of managing society, but irreducible ideas and irreconcilable ideas of happiness and their worlds. We know it and so do the powers that be... The past has given us far too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves.

[sadeleuze · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an ambivalent way, this book is both very pleasant to read in my eyes, but at the same time I have the impression that there is a tendency to a certain obscurity of the words, which are often abstract and not very practical, concretely.

In this lyricism, we nevertheless find many ideas, more or less interesting, which start from an observation: our world is a ruin and everyone is well aware of it, even if everyone acts daily as if nothing had happened. "The future has no future." The wisdom of an era that has reached the level of consciousness where if the present is hopeless, it is primarily because the social world is fragmented, even in the most intimate spheres, because it has become impossible to speak of society; it no longer means anything and the concept has become inoperative. Our world would be one of loss of ties, of separation; we live as strangers, strangers to the world as well as to ourselves

The main thesis is in this idea of loss of links, we would be children of the final dispossession, dispossessed of what attached us to the daily company. This dispossession is reflected in the way we perceive the very idea of "identity" that the authors strive to dismantle. They call for a kind of new self-awareness, the end of "i am what i am" for something closer to the spirit of commune.

This alternative to the current system is sketched; namely the constitution of self-sufficient communes in relation to the current economic, social and political system, whose start can be financed by various more or less legal processes (fraud in social benefits, scam targeting major actoes of the system, banks, large companies).

Indeed, it is difficult not to join the authors on the question of the consumerist impasse in which our civilization finds itself, on the apogee of the modes of state surveillance in our daily life, on the absurdity of killing ourselves at work...

The book is structured around circles, each of which tackles the deconstruction of a fashionable notion in the discourses and representations. The book ends with a manual of the Insurgent. The methods are not always clear, but they at least open up a reflection.

There is also a new way of learning to live, of subjectivity and of being in the world that seems to take shape as well.

-------

Nothing seems less probable than an insurrection, but nothing is more necessary.

All circles are counter-revolutionary, because their only business is to preserve their bad comfort.

There are all kinds of communes, which do not wait for the number, nor the means, even less for the "good moment" which never comes, to organize themselves.

The Paris Commune had partly solved the problem of registration: by burning the town hall, the arsonists destroyed the civil registers. It remains to find the means to destroy computerized data forever.

Any social movement meets as first obstacle, well before the police itself, the trade-union forces and all this micro-bureaucracy whose vocation is to frame the struggles.

The assembly is not made for the decision but for the palaver, for the free speech exercised without goal.

The important thing is not so much to be the best armed as to have the initiative. Courage is nothing, confidence in one's own courage is everything. Having the initiative contributes to this.

Harassing the police means that, being everywhere, they are nowhere effective.

The crisis is a way of governing. When this world seems to be held together only by the infinite management of its own failure.

Organizations are an obstacle to organizing.

When thousands of young people take to heart to desert and sabotage this world, you have to be as stupid as a cop to look for a financial cell, a leader, or a carelessness.

[Maud · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE REVOLUTION IS HERE
DONT BE AFRAID

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prepare in the shadows
Grow in community
Strike locally
Destroy authority