The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee

ALL POWER

TO THE COMMUNES

THE COMING
INSURRECTION

The Invisible Committee

A point of clarification

Everyone agrees. It's about to explode. It is acknowledged,

with a serious and self-important look, in the corridors of the
Assembly, just as yesterday it was repeated in the cafes. There
is a certain pleasure in calculating the risks. Already, we are
presented with a detailed menu of preventive measures for
securing the territory. The New Years festivities take a decisive
turn — "next year there'll be no oysters, enjoy them while you
can!" To prevent the celebrations from being totally eclipsed
by the traditional disorder, 36,000 cops and 16 helicopters are
rushed out by Alliot-Marie' — the same clown who, during the
high school demonstrations in December, tremulously watched
for the slightest sign of a Greek contamination, readying the
police apparatus just in case. We can discern more clearly every
day, beneath the reassuring drone, the noise of preparations
for open war. It's impossible to ignore its cold and pragmatic
implementation, no longer even bothering to present itself as an
operation of pacification.

The newspapers conscientiously draw up the list of causes
for the sudden disquiet. There is the financial crisis, of course,
with its booming unemployment, its share of hopelessness and
of social plans, its Kerviel and Madoff scandals. There is the
failure of the educational system, its dwindling production of
workers and citizens, even with the children of the middle class
as its raw material. There is the existence of a youth to which no
political representation corresponds, a youth good for nothing
but destroying the free bicycles that society so conscientiously put
at their disposal.

None of these worrisome subjects should appear
insurmountable in an era whose predominant mode of
government is precisely the management of crises. Unless we
consider that what power is confronting is neither just another
crisis, nor a series of more or less chronic problems, of more or
less anticipated disturbances, but a singular peril: that a form

I. Michele Alliot-Marie, the French Interior Minister.

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of conflict, and positions, have emerged that are explicitly not

manageable.

Those who everywhere make up this peril have to ask

themselves more than the trifling questions about causes, or the
probabilities of inevitable movements and confrontations. They
need to ask how, for instance, does the Greek chaos resonate in
the French situation? An uprising here cannot be the simple
transposition of what happened over there. Global civil war still
has its local specificities. In France a situation of generalized
rioting would provoke an explosion of another tenor.

The Greek rioters are faced with a weak state, whilst being able
to take advantage of a strong popularity. One must not forget that
it was against the Regime of the Colonels that, only thirty years
ago, democracy reconstituted itself on the basis of a practice of
political violence. This violence, whose memory is not so distant,
still seems intuitive to most Greeks. Even the leaders of the
socialist party have thrown a molotov or two in their youth. Yet
classical politics is equipped with variants that know very well how
to accommodate these practices and to extend their ideological
rubbish to the very heart of the riot. If the Greek battle wasn't
decided, and put down, in the streets — the police being visibly
outflanked there — it's because its neutralization was played out
elsewhere. 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.

In France, our most exalted socialist bureaucrats have never
been anything other than shriveled husks filling up the halls
of the Assembly. Here everything conspires to annihilate even
the slightest form of political intensity. Which means that it is
always possible to oppose the citizen to the delinquent in a quasi-
linguistic operation that goes hand in hand with quasi-military
operations. The riots of November 2005 and, in a different
context, the social movements in the autumn of 2007, have
already provided several precedents. The image of right wing
students in Nanterre applauding as the police expelled their
classmates offers a small glimpse of what the future holds in store.

It goes without saying that the attachment of the French to the
state — the guarantor of universal values, the last rampart against

the disaster — is a pathology that is difficult to undo. It's above all
a fiction that no longer knows how to carry on. Our governors
themselves increasingly consider it as a useless encumbrance
because they, at least, take the conflict for what it is — militarily.
They have no complex about sending in elite antiterrorist units
to subdue riots, or to liberate a recycling center occupied by its
workers. As the welfare state collapses, we see the emergence of
a brute conflict between those who desire order and those who
don't. Everything that French politics has been able to deactivate
is in the process of unleashing itself. It will never be able to
process all that it has repressed. In the advanced degree of social
decomposition, we can count on the coming movement to find
the necessary breath of nihilism. Which will not mean that it
won't be exposed to other limits.

Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination
but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates
with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there.
A body that resonates does so according to its own mode. An
insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire — a linear process
which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather
takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed
in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own
vibrations, always taking on more density. To the point that any
return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.

When we speak of Empire we name the mechanisms of power
that preventively and surgically stifle any revolutionary becoming
in a situation. In this sense, Empire is not an enemy that
confronts us head-on. It is a rhythm that imposes itself, a way
of dispensing and dispersing reality. Less an order of the world
than its sad, heavy and militaristic liquidation.

What we mean by the party of insurgents is the sketching out
of a completely other composition, an other side of reality, which
from Greece to the French banlieues 2 is seeking its consistency.

It is now publicly understood that crisis situations are so many
opportunities for the restructuring of domination. This is why
SARKOZYGAN ANNOUNCE, WITHOUT SEEMING TO LIE too much,
that the financial crisis is "the end of a world," and that 2009 will
see France enter a new era. This charade of an economic crisis is

2. banlieue — French ghettoes, usually located in the suburban periphery.

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supposed to be a novelty: we are supposed to be in the dawn of a
new epoch where we will all join together in fighting inequality
and global warming. But for our generation — which was born in
the crisis and has known nothing but economic, financial, social
and ecological crisis — this is rather difficult to accept. They
won't fool us again, with another round "now we start all over
again" and "it's just a question of tightening our belts for a little
while." To tell the truth, the disastrous unemployment figures no
longer provoke any feeling in us. Crisis is a means of governing.
In a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite
management of its own collapse.

What this war is being fought over is not various ways of
managing society, but irreducible and irreconcilable ideas of
happiness and their worlds. We know it, and so do the powers
that be. The militant remnants that see us — always more
numerous, always more identifiable — are tearing out their hair
trying to fit us into little compartments in their little heads. They
hold out their arms to us in order to better suffocate us, with
their failures, their paralysis, their stupid problematics. From
elections to "transitions," militants will never be anything other
than that which distances us, each time a little farther, from the
possibility of communism. Luckily we will accommodate neither
treason nor deception for much longer.

The past has given us much too many bad answers for us
not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves.
There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity
and organizational control; between the "come one, come all"
of activist networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between
acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between
bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name
of a paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer it
is put off and flogging the dead horse of how planting carrots is
enough to leave this nightmare.

Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves.

In truth, there is no gap between what we are, what we do,
and what we are becoming. Organizations — political or labor,
fascist or anarchist — always begin by separating, practically, these
aspects of existence. It's then easy for them to present their idiotic
formalism as the sole remedy to this separation. To organize is
not to give a structure to weakness. It is above all to form bonds —
bonds that are by no means neutral — terrible bonds. The degree

of organization is measured by the intensity of sharing — material
and spiritual.

From now on, to materially organize for survival is to materially
organize for attack. Everywhere, a new idea of communism is
to be elaborated. In the shadows of bar rooms, in print shops,
squats, farms, occupied gymnasiums, new complicities are to
be born. These precious connivances must not be refused the
necessary means for the deployment of their forces.

Here lies the truly revolutionary potentiality of the present.
The increasingly frequent skirmishes have this formidable
quality: that they are always an occasion for complicities of this
type, sometimes ephemeral, but sometimes also unbetrayable.
When a few thousand young people find the determination to
assail this world, you'd have to be as stupid as a cop to seek out a
financial trail, a leader, or a snitch.

TWO CENTURIES OF CAPITALISM AND MARKET NIHILISM have
brought us to the most extreme alienations — from our selves,
from others, from worlds. The fiction of the individual has
decomposed at the same speed that it was becoming real.
Children of the metropolis, we offer this wager: that it's in the
most profound deprivation of existence, perpetually stifled,
perpetually conjured away, that the possibility of communism
resides.

When all is said and done, it's with an entire anthropology
that we are at war. With the very idea of man.

Communism then, as presupposition and as experiment.
Sharing of a sensibility and elaboration of sharing. The uncovering
of what is common and the building of a force. Communism as
the matrix of a meticulous, audacious assault on domination. As
a call and as a name for all worlds resisting imperial pacification,
all solidarities irreducible to the reign of commodities, all
friendships assuming the necessities of war. communism. We
know it's a term to be used with caution. Not because, in the
great parade of words, it may no longer be very fashionable. But
because our worst enemies have used it, and continue to do so.
We insist. Certain words are like battlegrounds: their meaning,
revolutionary or reactionary, is a victory, to be torn from the jaws
of struggle.

Deserting classical politics means facing up to war, which is

also situated on the terrain of language. Or rather, in the way
that words, gestures and life are inseparably linked. If one
puts so much effort into imprisoning as terrorists a few young
communists who are supposed to have participated in publishing
The Coming Insurrection, it is not because of a "thought crime", but
rather because they might embody a certain consistency between
acts and thought. Something which is rarely treated with leniency.

What these people are accused of is not to have written a
book, nor even to have physically attacked the sacrosanct flows
that irrigate the metropolis. It's that they might possibly have
confronted these flows with the density of a political thought
and position. That an act could have made sense according
to another consistency of the world than the deserted one of
Empire. Anti-terrorism claims to attack the possible future of
a "criminal association." But what is really being attacked is the
future of the situation. The possibility that behind every grocer
a few bad intentions are hiding, and behind every thought,
the acts that it calls for. The possibility expressed by an idea
of politics — anonymous but welcoming, disseminate and
uncontrollable — which cannot be relegated to the storeroom of
freedom of expression.

There remains scarcely any doubt that youth will be the first
to savagely confront power. These last few years, from the riots of
Spring 200I in Algeria to those of December 2008 in Greece,
are nothing but a series of warning signs in this regard. Those
who 3° or 4° years ago revolted against their parents will not
hesitate to reduce this to a conflict between generations, if not to
a predictable symptom of adolescence.

The only future of a "generation" is to be the preceding one,
on a route that leads inevitably to the cemetery.

Tradition would have it that everything begins with a "social
movement." Especially at a moment when the left, which has
still not finished decomposing, hypocritically tries to regain its
credibility in the streets. Except that in the streets it no longer has
a monopoly. Just look at how, with each new mobilization of high
school students — as with everything the left still dares to support
— a rift continually widens between their whining demands and
the level of violence and determination of the movement.

From this rift we must build a trench.

If we see a succession of movements hurrying one after the

other, without leaving anything visible behind them, it must
nonetheless be admitted that something persists. A powder
trail links what in each event has not let itself be captured by
the absurd temporality of the withdrawal of a new law, or some
other pretext. In fits and starts, and in its own rhythm, we are
seeing something like a force take shape. A force that does not
serve its time but imposes it, silently.

It is no longer a matter of foretelling the collapse or depicting
the possibilities of joy. Whether it comes sooner or later, the
point is to prepare for it. It's not a question of providing a
schema for what an insurrection should be, but of taking the
possibility of an uprising for what it never should have ceased
being: a vital impulse of youth as much as a popular wisdom.
If one knows how to move, the absence of a schema is not an
obstacle but an opportunity. For the insurgents, it is the sole
space that can guarantee the essential: keeping the initiative.
What remains to be created, to be tended as one tends a fire,
is a certain outlook, a certain tactical fever, which once it
has emerged, even now, reveals itself as determinant — and a
constant source of determination. Already certain questions
have been revived that only yesterday may have seemed grotesque
or outmoded; they need to be seized upon, not in order to
respond to them definitively, but to make them live. Having
posed them anew is not the least of the Greek uprising's virtues :

How does a situation of generalized rioting become an
insurrectionary situation? What to do once the streets have
been taken, once the police have been soundly defeated there?
Do the parliaments still deserve to be attacked? What is the
practical meaning of deposing power locally? How to decide?
How to subsist?

HOW TO FIND EACH OTHER?

-Invisible Committee, January 200g

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THE COMING
INSURRECTION

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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 reached the level of consciousness of the first
punks.

The sphere of political representation has come to a close.
From left to right, it's the same nothingness striking the
pose of an emperor or a savior, the same sales assistants
adjusting their discourse according to the findings of the
latest surveys. Those who still vote seem to have no other
intention than to desecrate the ballot box by voting as a
pure act of protest. We're beginning to suspect that it's only
against voting itself that people continue to vote. Nothing we're
being shown is adequate to the situation, not by far. In its
very silence, the populace seems infinitely more mature
than all these puppets bickering amongst themselves about
how to govern it. The ramblings of any Belleville chibani'

I. Chibani is Arabic for old man, here referring to the old men who play back-
gammon in the cafes of Belleville, a largely immigrant neighborhood in Paris.

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