First of three publications by the [[Invisible Committee]].
Everyone agrees. Itâs about to explode.
The Invisible Committee says we live in a time of crisis management.
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.
Empire, for the Invisible Committee, is simply the confluence of [[counterrevolutionary]] forces.
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 âcome one, come allâ 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.
The Invisible Committee is frustrated at previous attempts of revolutionary activity, from [[anarchism]] to 20th century [[communism]] alike.
For the Invisible Committee, [[communism]] is âthe matrix of a[n]⌠assault on [[domination]]â.
How does a situation of generalized rioting become an insurrectionary situation?
How, indeed!
From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out.
This has been true for quite some time!
Those who still [[vote]] seem to have no other intention than to desecrate the ballot box by voting as a pure act of protest. Weâre beginning to suspect that itâs only against voting itself that people continue to vote.
The Invisible Committee posits that there is no social solution to todayâs problems, because:
Trite couple of paragraphs about Rebockâs marketing slogan. Modern life imposes a âselfâ rather than letting us be free, I suppose is the gist.
We are not depressed; weâre on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, âdepressionâ is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep towards a political disaffiliation. From then on medication and the police are the only possible forms of conciliation. This is why the present society doesnât hesitate to impose Ritalin on its over-active children, or to strap people into life-long dependence on pharmaceuticals, and why it claims to be able to detect âbehavioral disordersâ at age three. Because everywhere the hypothesis of the self is beginning to crack.
The Invisible Committee complains of alienation at every level of society. This section could be summed up with the Marx quote about fast-fixed relations melting.
The Invisible Committee argues, correctly, that work has become all-consuming. This is, again, not news. In this circle it stakes out a specifically [[anti-work]] position.
The Invisible Committee asserts that there is no [[division between town and country]] because modern life has eliminated the distinction.
âŚ[T]o keep the riots going for a month, while keeping the police in checkâto do that you have to know how to organize, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly, and share a common language and a common enemy. Mile after mile and week after week, the fire spread. New blazes responded to the original ones, appearing where they were least expected. Rumors canât be wiretapped.
The Invisible Committee asserts that the United States imposed a [[cybernetic]] regime in the [[Iraq war]], and that this was the source of the defeat of the US: the guerrillas were simply able to out-maneuver the US by giving them new ways to organize. (I am somewhat skeptical of this claim) (Ironically, what the Invisible Committee is asserting here itself shows the cybernetic efficiency of the guerrillas)
We have to see that the economy is not âinâ crisis, the economy is itself the crisis.
A graphic designer wearing a handmade sweater is drinking a fruity cocktail with some friends on the terrace of an âethnicâ cafĂŠ. Theyâre chatty and cordial, they joke around a bit, they make sure not to be too loud or too quiet, they smile at each other, a little blissfully: we are so civilized. Afterwards, some of them will go work in the neighborhood community garden, while others will dabble in pottery, some Zen Buddhism, or in the making of an animated film. They find communion in the smug feeling that they constitute a new humanity, wiser and more refined than the previous one. And they are right. There is a curious agreement between Apple and the negative growth movement about the civilization of the future. Some peopleâs idea of returning to the economy of yesteryear offers others the convenient screen behind which a great technological leap forward can be launched. For in history there is no going back. Any exhortation to return to the past is only the expression of one form of consciousness of the present, and rarely the least modern. It is not by chance that negative growth is the banner of the dissident advertisers of the magazine Casseurs de Pub.[20] The inventors of zero growthâthe Club of Rome in 1972âwere themselves a group of industrialists and bureaucrats who relied on a research paper written by cyberneticians at MIT.
The Invisible Committee considers âcyberneticsâ a dirty word!
The Invisible Committee calls out the hypocricy of the typical environmentalist messaging, that the environment itself is a crisis because it threatens modern capitalist life.
What makes the crisis desirable is that in the crisis the environment ceases to be the environment. We are forced to reestablish contact, albeit a potentially fatal one, with whatâs there, to rediscover the rhythms of reality. What surrounds us is no longer a landscape, a panorama, a theater, but something to inhabit, something we need to come to terms with, something we can learn from. We wonât let ourselves be led astray by the ones whoâve brought about the contents of the âcatastrophe.â Where the managers platonically discuss among themselves how they might decrease emissions âwithout breaking the bank,â the only realistic option we can see is to âbreak the bankâ as soon as possible and, in the meantime, take advantage of every collapse in the system to increase our own strength.
New Orleans, a few days after [[Hurricane Katrina]]. In this apocalyptic atmosphere, here and there, life is reorganizing itself. In the face of the inaction of the public authorities, who were too busy cleaning up the tourist areas of the French Quarter and protecting shops to help the poorer city dwellers, forgotten forms are reborn. In spite of occasionally strong-armed attempts to evacuate the area, in spite of white supremacist lynch mobs, a lot of people refused to leave the terrain. For the latter, who refused to be deported like âenvironmental refugeesâ all over the country, and for those who came from all around to join them in solidarity, responding to a call from a former Black Panther, self-organization came back to the fore. In a few weeksâ time, the Common Ground Clinic was set up.[22] From the very first days, this veritable âcountry hospitalâ provided free and effective treatment to those who needed it, thanks to the constant influx of volunteers. For more than a year now, the clinic is still the base of a daily resistance to the clean-sweep operation of government bulldozers, which are trying to turn that part of the city into a pasture for property developers. Popular kitchens, supplies, street medicine, illegal takeovers, the construction of emergency housing, all this practical knowledge accumulated here and there in the course of a life, has now found a space where it can be deployed. Far from the uniforms and sirens.
Whoever knew the penniless joy of these New Orleans neighborhoods before the catastrophe, their defiance towards the state and the widespread practice of making do with whatâs available wouldnât be at all surprised by what became possible there. On the other hand, anyone trapped in the anemic and atomized everyday routine of our residential deserts might doubt that such determination could be found anywhere anymore. Reconnecting with such gestures, buried under years of normalized life, is the only practicable means of not sinking down with the world. The time will come when we take these up once more.
The Invisible Committee praises the spontaneous organization of people in New Orleans who organized themsleves amidst the crisis, in spite of the state.
At the final stage of this evolution, we see the first socialist mayor of Paris putting the finishing touches on urban pacification with a new police protocol for a poor neighborhood, announced with the following carefully chosen words: âWeâre building a civilized space here.â Thereâs nothing more to say, everything has to be destroyed.
The [[Invisible Committee]] are [[anti-civilization]].
The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relationâbecoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structureâas a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.
The Invisible Committee argues that we must rid ourselves of civilization itself, that it is a corpse on our backs.
The following is the entire section:
We can no longer even see how an insurrection might begin. Sixty years of pacification and containment of historical upheavals, sixty years of democratic anesthesia and the management of events, have dulled our perception of the real, our sense of the war in progress. We need to start by recovering this perception.
Itâs useless to get indignant about openly unconstitutional laws such as Perben II. Itâs futile to legally protest the complete implosion of the legal framework. We have to get organized.
Itâs useless to get involved in this or that citizensâ group, in this or that dead-end of the far left, or in the latest âcommunity effort.â Every organization that claims to contest the present order mimics the form, mores and language of miniature states. Thus far, every impulse to âdo politics differentlyâ has only contributed to the indefinite spread of the stateâs tentacles.
Itâs useless to react to the news of the day; instead we should understand each report as a maneuver in a hostile field of strategies to be decoded, operations designed to provoke a specific reaction. Itâs these operations themselves that should be taken as the real information contained in these pieces of news.
Itâs useless to waitâfor a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.
To no longer wait is, in one way or another, to enter into the logic of insurrection. It is to once again hear the slight but always present trembling of terror in the voices of our leaders. Because governing has never been anything other than postponing by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will string you up, and every act of government is nothing but a way of not losing control of the population.
Weâre setting out from a point of extreme isolation, of extreme weakness. An insurrectional process must be built from the ground up. Nothing appears less likely than an insurrection, but nothing is more necessary.
Aside from the [[insurrectionist]] slant, I largely agree with this, but itâs not particularly deep.
The Invisible Committee believes that the movement against civilization will begin by âattaching yourself to what you feel to be true.â Using the example of Georges Guingouin, the Invisible Committee says that insurrection begins with a refusal to give up.
Donât back away from what is political in friendship
The pioneers of the workersâ movement were able to find each other in the workshop, then in the factory. They had the strike to show their numbers and unmask the scabs. They had the wage relation, pitting the party of capital against the party of labor, on which they could draw the lines of solidarity and of battle on a global scale. We have the whole of social space in which to find each other. We have everyday insubordination for showing our numbers and unmasking cowards. We have our hostility to this civilization for drawing lines of solidarity and of battle on a global scale.
We all have the fact that we are wage laborers in common.
Expect nothing from organizations. Beware of all existing social milieus, and above all, donât become one.
The Invisible Committee says that you should be skeptical of [[organizations]] because they are only concerned with their own survival. I agree with this, but I think itâs possible to create organizations that do not give into bureaucratic rot, which I suspect is the greater issue for the IC.
Far more dreadful are social [[milieus]], with their supple texture, their gossip, and their informal hierarchies. Flee all milieus. Each and every milieu is orientated towards the neutralization of some truth. Literary circles exist to smother the clarity of writing. Anarchist milieus to blunt the directness of direct action. Scientific milieus to withhold the implications of their research from the majority of people today. Sport milieus to contain in their gyms the various forms of life they should create. Particularly to be avoided are the cultural and activist circles. They are the old peopleâs homes where all revolutionary desires traditionally go to die. The task of cultural circles is to spot nascent intensities and to explain away the sense of whatever it is youâre doing, while the task of activist circles is to sap your energy for doing it. Activist milieus spread their diffuse web throughout the French territory, and are encountered on the path of every revolutionary development. They offer nothing but the story of their many defeats and the bitterness these have produced. Their exhaustion has made them incapable of seizing the possibilities of the present. Besides, to nurture their wretched passivity they talk far too much and this makes them unreliable when it comes to the police. Just as itâs useless to expect anything from them, itâs stupid to be disappointed by their sclerosis. Itâs best to just abandon this dead weight.
All milieus are counter-revolutionary because they are only concerned with the preservation of their sad comfort.
I strongly agree with this.
The IC suggests that [[communes]] be formed rather than milieus or organizations, and that a million communes should flourish across the world, so to speak.
A commune forms every time a few people, freed of their individual straitjackets, decide to rely only on themselves and measure their strength against reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every building occupied collectively and on a clear basis is a commune, the action committees of 1968 were communes, as were the slave maroons in the United States, or Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977. Every commune seeks to be its own base. It seeks to dissolve the question of needs. It seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation; it degenerates into a milieu the moment it loses contact with the truths on which it is founded. There are all kinds of communes that wait neither for the numbers nor the means to get organized, and even less for the âright momentââwhich never arrives.
I would also agree with this, I think.
The IC says that we need to form communes in order to free ourselves from work. I find this a compelling argument.
Communes ought to be able to openly communicate with one another and welcome comrades with open arms.
The IC recommends being anonymous when taking part in actions.
Visibility must be avoided. But a force that gathers in the shadows canât avoid it forever. Our appearance as a force must be pushed back until the opportune moment. The longer we avoid visibility, the stronger weâll be when it catches up with us. And once we become visible our days will be numbered. Either we will be in a position to pulverize its reign in short order, or weâll be crushed in no time.
The police state must be fought, the IC claims, not only actively resisted.
The police are not invincible in the streets, they simply have the means to organize, train, and continually test new weapons. Our weapons, on the other hand, are always rudimentary, cobbled together, and often improvised on the spot. They certainly donât have a hope of rivaling theirs in firepower, but can be used to hold them at a distance, redirect attention, exercise psychological pressure or force passage and gain ground by surprise. None of the innovations in urban guerilla warfare currently deployed in the French police academies are sufficient to respond rapidly to a moving multiplicity that can strike a number of places at once and that tries to always keep the initiative.
Make the most of every crisis
Every crisis is an opportunity to organize.
The IC suggests that communes should not form assemblies and committees, but doesnât offer a better suggestion.
The IC says that voting leads to a reliance on specialization, and that this ends up being counter-productive.
The IC is hostile to [[skill-hoarding]] and [[opportunity hoarding]], and says these should be opposed by circulating knowledge. They say that the right idea will just occur to the group, which I think is wishful thinking.
In an insurrectionary moment, we ought to make the stateâs job as painful as possible, the IC suggests.
The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible. It becomes irreversible when youâve defeated both authority and the need for authority, property and the taste for appropriation, hegemony and the desire for hegemony. That is why the insurrectionary process carries within itself the form of its victory, or that of its defeat. Destruction has never been enough to make things irreversible. What matters is how itâs done. There are ways of destroying that unfailingly provoke the return of what has been crushed. Whoever wastes their energy on the corpse of an order can be sure that this will arouse the desire for vengeance. Thus, wherever the economy is blocked and the police are neutralized, it is important to invest as little pathos as possible in overthrowing the authorities. They must be deposed with the most scrupulous indifference and derision.