The Return of The Invisible Committee

[kbot]

I wasn't sure which forum to post this topic to, but last night I started to re-read The Invisible Committee's first book The Coming Insurrection. Originally written and published in France in 2007, reading this very small book in hindsight is illuminating, considering what has transpired in both France, across Europe and now here at home. This new book/ phase, may hold clues to what's in the near future......... In any event, chaos appears to have reared its ugly head with the recent election heer at home, the "spontaneous" protests breaking out across the US during the past week and more unrest sure to come.

Since the End of the Movement of the Squares:
The Return of The Invisible Committee

by Jason E. Smith

Since the end of the movement of the squares, we have seen networks of mutual support cropping up in many cities to stop evictions, of strike committees and neighborhood assemblies, but also cooperatives, for everything and in every sense.

—To Our Friends

“The insurrections have come, finally.”

To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee’s most recent book, appears a little over seven years after 2007’s The Coming Insurrection. Its opening sentence—“The insurrections have come, finally”—savors a note of vindication. Sympathetic readers will indulge them this small triumph, and give them their due. There is little doubt that since the publication of The Coming Insurrection we have witnessed, on a global scale, a welter of riots and revolts the likes and intensity of which have not been seen for 40 years. “Ten years ago,” the authors go on, “predicting an uprising would have exposed you to [...] snickers.” Today, they contend, everyone has on their lips the watchwords of the moment: que se vayan todos! (“out with them all”), or even that old anarchist refrain, all cops are bastards. Rarely do short essays risking themselves in the waters of historical speculation hit their mark. The Invisible Committee was clearly on to something.

All the same, a worry, a quibble, settles in quickly. Did the insurrections really come, after all? We can be sure the authors of To Our Friends are not speaking of the North American Occupy movement which, with the exception of some aspects of Occupy Oakland, was a largely toothless affair, swept away brusquely after a few weeks or months at most. They must have in mind instead some of the more spirited outposts of Occupy’s European counterpart, the so-called “movement of the squares,” such as the 15-M movement in Spain and the Syntagma Square occupation in Athens, both frequent points of reference in To Our Friends. But there was little insurrectionary about these movements, despite the numbers and energies pouring into them: they remained focused largely on developing novel forms of mass democracy in their general assemblies, and denouncing the austerity programs implemented by their respective “caretaker” national governments at the behest of the true power players in Europe, the so-called “troika” of the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. The weeks-long riot in Greece in December 2008 is marshaled as an example, but that moment of disorder, marked as it was by attacks on banks and symbols of the state, and the temporary routing of police in the streets, was in a way an exception to the period in question, unleashed as it was before the austerity programs could firmly take the country hostage and the wheels of crisis grind the social fabric down to powder.
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/06/fie ... -committee

[Doka]

What are these people talking about!?

[kbot]

What are these people talking about!?

Revolution, anarchy, chaos....... as seen from their perspective. It is a confusing book to read at times. I've also read Lenin's What is to be Done?, Mao's "Little Red Book" and works by Marx, Trotsky and Mikhail Bakunin. To me, they're all confusing, but also interesting to see how other's think and their systems.....

snippet:

The Coming Insurrection is a French political tract that hypothesizes the "imminent collapse of capitalist culture".[1] It was written by The Invisible Committee, an anonymous group of contributors and first published in 2007 by French company La Fabrique.

Summary

The book is divided into two parts. The first attempts a complete diagnosis of the totality of modern capitalist civilization, moving through what the Invisible Committee identify as the "seven circles" of alienation: "self, social relations, work, the economy, urbanity, the environment, and to close civilization". The latter part of the book begins to offer a prescription for revolutionary struggle based on the formation of communes, or affinity group-style units, in an underground network that will build its forces outside of mainstream politics, and attack in moments of crisis – political, social, environmental – to push towards anti-capitalist revolution. The insurrection envisioned by the Invisible Committee will revolve around "the local appropriation of power by the people, of the physical blocking of the economy and of the annihilation of police forces".

The book points to the late 2000s financial crisis, and environmental degradation as symptoms of capitalism's decline. Also discussed are the Argentine economic crisis (1999-2002) and the piquetero movement which emerged from it, the 2005 riots and 2006 student protests in France, the 2006 Oaxaca protests and the grassroots relief work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as examples of breakdown in the modern social order which can give rise to partial insurrectionary situations.

Influences

A few of the Tarnac 9 were involved in producing Tiqqun, a French radical philosophy journal printed from 1999–2001. Tiqqun was steeped in the tradition of radical French intellectuals that includes Michel Foucault, George Bataille, the Situationist International, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. The book bears traces of influence from the works of these philosophers, and also, most notably, Giorgio Agamben's notions of the whatever singularity and being-in-common, and Alain Badiou's ontology of the event and truth procedures. Its analysis of capitalist civilization is clearly informed by Foucault's and Agamben's notion of biopower, Guy Debord's society of the spectacle, and Antonio Negri's concept of Empire. The revolutionary strategy outlined in the latter part of the book is reminiscent in some ways of the "exodus" or "secession" strategy espoused by many autonomist Marxists like Antonio Negri and Jacques Camatte, as well as influenced by the concept of war machine in Deleuze and Guattari's works.

Reaction

The book was mentioned in The New York Times[1] and also in the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters[2] in relation to the case of the Tarnac 9, a group of French leftists arrested on charges of railway sabotage in November 2008. Their alleged authorship of the book is the centerpiece of the government's case. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Michael Moore mentioned the book as being the most recent one he had read.[3]

The book has created major interest in the anarchist movement and in particular the insurrectionary anarchist tendency, as well as among North American radical leftists in general. Bootleg editions of the work have been passed around extensively since before the Semiotext(e) edition. On the other hand, many radical leftists have been severely critical of the book and the movement.

In September 2010, Coline Struyf from the National Theatre of Belgium adapted the book to theatre.[4]

Glenn Beck, host of The Glenn Beck Program, has at various times referred to the book as, "crazy" and "evil".[5] Beck has also urged his viewers to order the book online themselves, so as to better understand what he claimed were the thoughts of leftist radicals.[6]

In 2014, the Invisible Committee published To Our Friends as a sequel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_Insurrection

[Doka]

I don't know Kbot?....? I have worked hard to find some sort of discipline of my mind, to be able to follow a train of thought to it's conclusion and connect the dots to the big picture and then , not without effort to verbalize in as clear, if not a bit "salty" language, what I want to communicate. Hopefully, some understand what my point is. Clarity is my goal. No body has to agree with me, it is just helpful if they have some sort understanding of what I'm saying.

When I try and read stuff like this, I just get the idea that they want to show off their superiority and million dollar education, and more than likely don't know how to tie their shoes and have absolutely no sense of humor and are divorced from their own humanity,their own kind in general. And are lonely. Shesh, sounds like a liberal........ And..........

With some age on me, I seem to be able to confuse and confound just trying to order hamburger, these days.

[kbot]

Yup, the have issues.

But, this is the polar opposite of capitalism, and this is how these people think...... They want to bring down capitalism and replace it with, what, systems that have been proven failures over and over again...... In a vacuum, their systems have appeal, especially to those who have no real world experience - such as kids in college, or the disenfranchised.

Stuff still has to be paid-for.....

[Riddick]

Yup, the have issues.

But, this is the polar opposite of capitalism, and this is how these people think...... They want to bring down capitalism and replace it with, what, systems that have been proven failures over and over again...... In a vacuum, their systems have appeal, especially to those who have no real world experience - such as kids in college, or the disenfranchised.

Stuff still has to be paid-for.....

Just remember, "Failure is success turned inside out!" - and, "Under capitalism, man exploits man... Under communism, it's the other way around"

[kbot]

Just remember, "Failure is success turned inside out!" - and, "Under capitalism, man exploits man... Under communism, it's the other way around"