Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là.
Autonomous production will develop in all those fields in which the use-value of time can be seen to be greater than its exchange-value.
Tarnac: L’arbre qui cache la forêt!
A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of autonomous communist activism. A new party is expanding its ranks, “The Imaginary Party,” which has already unnerved the French establishment, rattled Sarkozy’s government, and penned its own intriguing manifesto: L’insurrection qui vient [The Coming Insurrection]. Everybody agrees: current society is about to explode. Even the French daily, Le Monde, was forced to admit “one hasn’t seen power become so fearful of a book for a very long time.”1 Now an English translation has rattled the Anglosphere, too, unleashing a spate of bourgeois paranoia, highlighting for all to see what intelligent people knew already: how very flimsy the ruling class’s hegemony really is, how weak is their grip on political reality. This uncompromising text is in the “vanguard” of disseminating a new brand of Marxism, a non-class-based Marxism that has at its core an incipient neo-communist impulse, one currently pitting its wits against an intransigent neo-liberalism. Not a “party” as such, and certainly not one made to govern, this Imaginary Party is a collectivity that is creating for itself an empowering self-governance: its card-carrying membership thrives off non-affiliated people, whose platform is grounded in everyday life rather than the workplace. Importantly, these people employ a vitality of spirit and a principle of hope, as well as the direct-action anarchism necessary to reinvigorate classical Marxism. Yes, everyone agrees, well, sort of everyone: the exodus from capitalism has already begun.
In 2007, a strange little book called L’insurrection qui vient was released in France under the auspices of the radical publishing house, Éditions la fabrique. No author’s name appeared on its plain-green cover; only the signature “Comité invisible”—Invisible Committee—gave clues to the culprit’s identity. “Culprit,” of course, implies some sort of criminal act, and in this sense the said Invisible Committee pleads guilty as charged: it has knowingly ruffled the French establishment and penned the most radical radical book since Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, itself written on the eve of another great insurrection. “The book is important,” one man said in July 2009 at Union Square’s Barnes & Noble, at an impromptu New York book party launching Sexiotext(e)’s English translation. “It’s important because The Coming Insurrection speaks of the total bankruptcy of pretty much everything. We’re living in a high-end aesthetic with zero content.”2
It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and without prior permission a group of 100-or-so activists merrily fêted the book’s US release in the huge East 17th Street bookstore. As an employee announced to the milling crowd that no reading was scheduled for that night, a man jumped onto a stage and began loudly reciting the opening words of the book’s introduction: “Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.”3 A security guard tried to break up the gathering but failed; then the police arrived in force and the crowd exited, clapping and yelling, only to enter the nearby Sephora cosmetics store, resuming its mantra: “All power to the communes.” Black T-shirted security guards ordered revelers out, and a few minutes later the group marched into Starbucks. “I’ve no idea what’s going on,” said a young male latte-sipper sat behind his laptop. “But I like the excitement.”4
Such was the excitement that a few weeks later it really got the goat of frothing-at-the-mouth reactionary Glenn Beck on his Fox News show, The One Thing (July 1, 2009). Ostensibly mild-mannered, clad in neat-cut suit and red tie, Beck, author of the bestselling book Common-Sense, proceeded almost apoplectically, quivering with rage, to denounce The Coming Insurrection: “This is a dangerous book,” he cried, “that calls for violent revolution. This is an anti-Common-Sense book, written by the enemies within.” He continued:
As world economies go down the tank and unemployment continues to rise, disenfranchised people are set to explode ... This started in France and spread to countries like Greece, where people are out of work, out of money and out of patience. Now it’s coming here ... A few years ago I said that Europe is on the brink of destruction. This is yet another sign that it’s coming. Even in Japan where protests have been seen as taboo since the 1960s, young people angered over the economy and fearing for the future are taking to the streets, beginning to unionize. The Communist Party of Japan says they’re getting 1,000 new members a month.
“It’s important that you read this book,” Beck concluded, “so that you know who your enemies are, so that you know what is coming and be ready when it does.”5
Much of the intrigue and bourgeois anxiety around The Coming Insurrection derives from the anonymity of its author(s), from the clandestine nature of its enterprise: The book’s most radical element is, it seems, its invisibility, its veil of mystery, its ability to frighten, announcing that an opposition—an Invisible Committee—is out there somewhere, plotting something, and power isn’t quite sure who or where it is. Guy Debord always said that the more obscure and subterranean he became, the greater the media feared and loathed him; they were freaked by a mystique and mystery they could little fathom.6 In fact, the “Insurrectionary Style”—as The New Yorker neatly put it—of The Coming Insurrection, is quintessentially Debordian,7 drier and less poetic than The Society of the Spectacle, yet elegant and cutting like late Debord, like his Comments on the Society of Spectacle. As Luc Boltanski wrote in the French journal Tigre: The Coming Insurrection has a burning style, a style that “‘burns like ice’—in the words of Baudelaire.”8
Thus the little rumor, somewhat implausible, that Debord himself wrote The Coming Insurrection, that he never really committed suicide and now lives on reclusively in Champot Haut, in his tiny hamlet, in lost and lonely Auvergne, under its volcanoes; that his taste for intrigue and scandal, like that of his hero Arthur Cravan,9 meant he fabricated his own disappearance in order to better survey the world, to critique it and secretly mastermind its eventual overthrow, four decades down the line. (Didn’t somebody recently spot Debord with wife Alice in the Haute-Loire, both dressed as gypsies, wandering around the summer marché du soir at Chomelix?) Remember what he’d said near the end of The Society of the Spectacle (Thesis #220): those who want to overthrow the spectacle “must know how to wait.” And so, after waiting so long, here is Debord finally announcing the coming of The Coming Insurrection.
But if truth be told, the style of The Coming Insurrection is younger at heart: its voice is too fiery and naive, too innocent and agile to be crafted by any ageing, 70-something revolutionary—dead or alive. It has the stamp of somebody on the brink of mastering their art, a Young Turk who, for the time being anyway, has less to lose, and everything to gain: the world is ahead of him (or her), and it’s time to act now, before one becomes too old, too cynical, too embittered by past failings. As such, the idea that a 33-year-old freelance rebel, a certain Julien Coupat (born 1974), was the hand behind the deed, seems the most likely, and is increasingly the most touted media thesis. A brilliant polyglot philosophy student, graduating from Paris’s elite École des hautes études en sciences socials with a doctorate in Debordian thought and Situationist theory, Coupat has all the intellectual credentials, and all the subversive wit, for the job. Equally steeped in Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, Coupat, who fervently denies he wrote The Coming Insurrection, also has Debord’s talent for obscurity and conspiracy, for lying low while plotting high.
Since 2005, Coupat and several comrades have assumed proprietorship of a farmhouse at Le Goutailloux, a little hamlet about the size of Debord’s own Champot, a couple of kilometers outside Tarnac, a prim village of 350 inhabitants in the Corrège department. There, in one of rural France’s most sparsely populated corners, miles away from any discernible urban life, Coupat and his crew have created their very own eco-community and velvet underground, rehabbed an ancient cottage, re-energized a worn-out bar, reorganized as a cooperative an adjacent épicerie, helped out with the running of a mobile library and ciné-club, and participated in the daily affairs of the traditionally communist commune, giving it an autonomous left-wing bent, all of which unnerves the powers that be, threatening their status quo by somehow changing the dominant order of things. Power get twitchy once it loses its grip on ordinary everyday life, faced with another sort of everyday life it barely understands.
Accordingly, in the early hours of November 11, 2008, 150 heavily armed riot police, with helicopters overhead, made a sweeping raid on the sleeping hamlet; amid barking dogs, nonplussed goats, and terrified chickens, they arrested nine humans. Accused by the Sarkozy government of sabotaging a TGV train near the German border, and of illicit political activity, the so-called “Tarnac Nine” immediately faced charges in a Paris court of “criminal association for the purpose of terrorist activity,” an offense that carries up to 20 years in jail. In early December 2008, with no supporting evidence, all but Coupat were acquitted under judiciary control. In May 2009, after six months of “preventive detention,” Coupat too was eventually released. As he said in an interview with Le Monde (May 25, 2009): “anti-terrorism, contrary to what the term itself insinuates, is not a means of fighting against terrorism, but is the method by which one positively constructs the political enemy as terrorist.”10
Several days after the Tarnac arrests, the “Anti-Terrorist Division” of the “Central Police Judiciary and Prosecutor” drafted a criminal report in Paris. It makes for a fascinating, if scary, read.11 Apparently, secret police had now “dismantled a clandestine autonomist-anarchist structure based in France that devotes itself to destabilizing the state by violent actions.” This group, “constituted around the charismatic and ideological leader Julien Coupat, keeps itself on the margins of large political events” and has hitherto been “engaged in the sabotage of transport infrastructure,” “participating regularly in political demonstrations,” such as at the G8 Summits at Evian in June 2003 and at Isola San Gorgio (Italy) in 2004; at assorted ecological forums; at anti-anti-immigrant legislation gatherings; at a festival of support for protesting Greek activists at Thessalonica in September 2008; and at a demonstration in Vichy in October 2008 during a meeting of 27 European Union Ministers of Interior. “These activists,” the report adds, aren’t just a group of reveler “casseurs”—rioters—but constitute “a group well versed in techniques of urban guerilla warfare and act in a planned and concerted manner.” Moreover, their discourse is “very radical and they have links with foreign groups.”
According to the report, secret police surveillance uncovered the Tarnac Nine’s plot to sabotage a rapid train line in the Moselle—and sabotage, the prosecutor reminds the jury, is exactly what The Coming Insurrection advocates. Still, during the police ransacking of Coupat’s house, police found no explosives or weapons of mass destruction, no Molotov cocktails or monkey wrenches, only “documents containing detailed information on railway transportation, including exact arrival and departure times of trains.” As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote in his defense of the Tarnac Nine: “in simple language,” what all that boils down to “is a SNCF [French National Train] schedule.” Police also confiscated “climbing gear,” which again “in simple language,” Agamben says, means “a ladder, such as one might find in any country house.”12 In short, there’s little there for convicting anyone of terrorism. For Agamben, the “only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those engaged in activism against the way social and economic problems are managed today are considered ipso facto as potential terrorists. We must have the courage to say with clarity that today, numerous European countries (in particular France and Italy), have introduced laws and police measures that we would previously have judged barbaric and anti-democratic ... laws that criminalize association and that allow the classification of political acts as having terrorist ‘intentions or inclinations’.”13
Giorgio Agamben’s own The Coming Community, as its title implies, was not without influence in shaping Coupat’s political imagination.14 The coming community, Agamben says, is something that humans are and have to be. Yet the solidarity people forge amongst themselves doesn’t concern any essence like a “united working class”; rather, Agamben affirms an “inessential commonality,” a belief that one’s existence now hinges on one’s possibility or potentiality, on what one can become in the future. Agamben beckons us to enter with him and with others into a mystical and blurry “zone of indistinguishability,” a realm of liberation and friendship, in which, in the words of Coupat’s journal of political ideas and analysis, Tiqqun, we can become card-carrying members of “an Imaginary Party.”
Tiqqun, “the Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party”—which takes its name from the Hebrew Cabbalist tikkun: to repair, to transform, to heal—saw only two issues:15 one of 162 pages at the beginning of 1999, the other of 292 pages in October 2001; yet these two book-length treatises are full of startling analysis and stinging polemic, of dense philosophical discourse and imaginative utopian desire, reminiscent of the pages of the early Situationist International, or of the Lettrists’ home-baked Potlatch from the early 1950s. Perhaps Arthur Cravan’s equally short-lived Maintenant (five issues) is also close to the heart of Tiqqun, its goal having been a little like that of Tiqqun, or of the Imaginary Party: “to present itself simply as a community of defection, as the Party of Exodus, as the slippery and paradoxical reality of subversion.”16 At any rate, in Tiqqun the “Imaginary Party” declares war on the bourgeois status quo, and lays down a few of the theoretical and political seeds that a few years later will bloom into The Coming Insurrection.
Indeed, one of the most brilliantly enduring concepts from the ephemeral pages of Tiqqun, which reappears unnamed in The Coming Insurrection, is the beguiling “théorie du Bloom”—“theory of Bloom.” Bloom suggests growing: a person, or a community, taking root somewhere, trying to assert itself, pushing up from this sad earth, out of ashes that fertilize, emerging from the decomposition of the old world, blossoming anew. Thus the theory of Bloom is the theory of the coming community, an insurrection announced, a chronicle of a capitalist death foretold. Bloom, of course, also suggests the everyman Leopold Bloom, citizen Bloom from Joyce’s Ulysses, the outsider in a hostile sectarian land, who’s mocked for his superior intellect, for his preaching of love: “I mean the opposite of hatred,” he stammers.17 Joyce’s Bloom wanders through the pages of Tiqqun as he wanders through the streets of Dublin, almost invisibly, clandestinely, searching for reconciliation; Leopold Bloom’s presence is implied, suggested, hinted at only in the epigraph to the théorie du Bloom, where Ulysses is cited, where Bloom over a breakfast of fried kidneys offers milk to his purring cat, musing on this furry friend: “They call him stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them.”18
They call us stupid, but we understand them better than they understand us. That’s why they fear us; hence their paranoia, their mania with trying to surveil us, to infiltrate us, to criminalize us, to prosecute us. Such is the logic of the “theory of Bloom.” “Bloom can be defined as what resides inside each of us beyond advertising stunts and which constitutes the form of universal existence common to particular people who live inside the Spectacle. In this sense, Bloom is first of all a hypothesis, but it’s a hypothesis that is becoming true.”19 Bloom signals an inner human potentiality, the becoming of a man and woman without qualities, a person who determines their own worth and whose worth is not ascribed by an external force, by any institution or ruling power. Bloom is nothing, rien, a person without qualities simply because they are a certain quality of person, someone who is indifferent to the dominant order, who prefers not to. To be sure, it’s evident that Bloom’s kindred souls might also bear the name Ulrich, from Musil’s Man Without Qualities, or Bartleby, from Melville’s story about the passively deferring scrivener. “At the same time,” Tiqqun says, “it is certain that Bloom bears within himself the ruin of the society of the commodity,” of spectacular society, because within this character we find the vocation of the “I prefer not to,” the “I prefer not to be a little reasonable” because we want to do something else.20
This spirit of “I prefer not to” refuses to lie down and die because, following Sartre in L’existentialisme est un humanisme (1946), “we are condemned to be free” [“l’homme est condamné à être libre”].21 Liberty can’t entirely be suppressed. We can forget it, unlearn it, especially through our contact with society, with its institutions and norms, with its schools and expectations; but we, as individuals, and more problematically as collectivities, have no real choice: each of us was born free and needs to be free: it’s our curse, our condition. The “I prefer not to” merely expresses overtly the attendant slippage, the “non-coincidence,” between the self we are and the self that society wants us to be. It’s a non-coincidence, Sartre says, between an individual subject and his or her social being, a gap that bequeaths dissent, has to breed dissent. It’s a non-coincidence that means we won’t be squeezed into any dominant whole, or flattened by any spectacular image; the non-coincidence is a philosophical anti-concept, an affirmation of residue, of remainders, of marginal leftovers, of autonomy, of the power and radicality of the ragged and the irreducible.
All totalizing systems that interpellate individual subjects to coincide strictly with their chosen role as social beings always “expulse” a certain residue; and each residue constitutes its dialectical “other,” something precious and essential in its irreducibility, its implacability, its refusal to comply: technocracy expulses desire and imagination; state bureaucracy expulses “deviancy” and subversion; reason and rationality expulse irrationality and spontaneity. So it goes. The non-coincidence reveals the limit of power’s political desire to control totally, of its quest for ultimate and indomitable mastery. No system of control can ever be total, can ever be without possibility, contingency, inconspicuous cracks, without little holes in the net, glimmers of light and pockets of fresh air. There is always leakiness to culture and society, a non-coincidence between capitalist subjects and capitalist society, always unforeseen circumstances buried within the everyday, immanent moments of prospective subversion. The “I prefer not to” thereby becomes a key progressive motif, signifying that all is not lost, that all can never be lost, not quite. The non-coincidence is there, always there, if you look hard enough, is always written between the lines, lurking within the whole, unnerving society, out of place, out of sync with time, an opportunity to be seized and invented.
The Coming Insurrection draws us into a Dantesque inferno, yet instead of nine circles descending into a hell of fierce and hideous monsters, we plunge into seven circles of a grubby hell that’s everyday and commonplace, above ground and instantly recognizable to many of us. It’s the neo-liberal, anti-democratic inferno before us now. In it, the breach between the professional world of politics and “the political” has widened to such a degree that the two no longer have anything to do with one another, and it has bequeathed a new world order from which there is no way out if you follow its logic, if you accept its rules. We have to invent this way out for ourselves; we have to demonstrate that all the roads are blocked save this one, the one we make, the one we make work. The Imaginary Party asks us to desist from partaking in this hell, asks that we “prefer not to” together, that we affirm our inadaptability as the point of departure, as the meeting point for “new complicities”: “We’re not depressed; we’re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, ‘depression’ is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a side-step towards a political disaffiliation.”22 Thus unfolds a political struggle to create a community and language in which a new order can express itself, a non-coincidence and non-coincidental commonality that conveys something affirmative, that gets going, that finds itself, organizes itself, rises up. This is really the most innovative part of The Coming Insurrection, its utopian element, the most original path to paradise voiced for a very a long time.
“Excuse us we don’t give a damn” sets the subversive tone of the opening sequences to The Coming Insurrection, updating Bartleby’s discourse of quiet rebellion, turning the screw of mild effrontery and passive refusal.23 On the one hand, comes a sensitive cry, an appeal for gentle intimacy, for “everything that has so obviously deserted contemporary social relations: warmth, simplicity, truth, a life without theater or spectacle”; on the other hand, comes an angry, seething demand, a wish to see it all blow up, a call for wildness, “for a wild, massive experimentation with new arrangements, new fidelities.”24 What’s being offered here is a more experimental communist ideal, explicitly anarchistic in its call for autonomy and loathing of the state, and its invocations of sabotage; but implicitly Marxist, too—though in a mischievous sense, in a piratical and fruitful sense, in the sense that follows Marx through his utopian pages of the Grundrisse. There, Marx’s yearning was to replace the realm of necessity—the grim reality of endless work and endless alienation—with the realm of freedom, with the dream of working less or even not at all. Communism, Marx says, means a state where “the overwork of the masses has ceased to be a condition for the general development of riches.” Individual free development, he says, “is no more a question of reducing the time of necessary labor vis-à-vis overwork, but to reduce to an absolute minimum the necessary labor time in society. From the free-time liberated, and the means created to the benefit of all, this reduction supposes the artistic, scientific, etc. development of individuals”25
The Coming Insurrection’s call “to get going” bases itself on a new form of Marxist organization, on a notion “of finding each other,” on a solidarity that moves beyond the narrow confines of a unified “working class.”26 In fact, it offers another brand of Marxism, a more open one, certainly a more threatening version than that espoused by academic aficionados and purists. We’ve only to remember how little Marx himself spoke of “class,” and how the foremost task he set himself was that of probing the possibilities of overthrowing the economic and political system we call “capitalism.” To be Marxist is to be communist, and The Coming Insurrection proposes a new communism “elaborated in the shadows of barrooms, in print shops, squats, farms, occupied gymnasiums.” Communism is “a sharing of sensibility and elaboration of sharing, the uncovering of what is common and the building of a force.”27 Once upon a time, says The Coming Insurrection:
pioneers of the labor movement were able to find each other in the workshop, then in the factory. They had the strike to show their numbers and unmask scabs. They had the wage relation, pitting the party of capital against the party of labor, on which they could draw lines of solidarity and of battle ... We have everyday insubordination for showing our numbers and for unmasking cowards.28
You get the impression the Invisible Committee has read its André Gorz, and agrees with the man who bids farewell to the working class, and who wants to free us from work, to find a path to paradise, to tunnel narrow trails of post-industrial subversion. “It’s no longer a question of winning power as a worker,” Gorz says in Farewell to the Working Class, “but of winning the power no longer to function as a worker. The power at issue is not at all the same as before. The [working] class itself has entered into crisis.”29 Interestingly, if we believe Gorz’s provocative idea that there’s now no such thing as a working class, or that its ranks have shrunken (or fragmented) to an insignificant number, then the old argument between Marxists and anarchists on the exact role of the state in the “dictatorship of the proletariat” becomes largely redundant. Since there’s no longer any definable proletariat, certainly one that workers identify themselves with or feel passionate about, then there’s presumably no one left to assume dictatorship. Consequently, anarchists and Marxists have no real beef with one another, seemingly concurring with what Henri Lefebvre told us long ago: that there’s essentially no distinction between anarchism and Marxism, at least no significant difference that precludes one practically identifying with the other.30 All of which presents itself as a political opportunity for Marxists, as a loosening of its historical shackles, both epistemologically (in terms of its object of analysis) and politically (in terms of the agents in this object of analysis). Post-capitalist living has no need to feel threatened by the tradition of dead historical-materialist generations.
Alberto Toscano has recently attacked The Coming Insurrection’s “diagnosis of the dissolution of class solidarity as a foothold for social critique,” suggesting it spells “an indifference to a Marxist discourse of class struggle” and a “de-linking of anti-capitalism from class politics.”31 But Gorz himself gives a nice rejoinder to Toscano’s accusation, remarking that the former doesn’t necessarily imply the latter, that the dissolution of the working class doesn’t necessarily mean that Marxism has dissolved as a guide for revolt. “The negativity which, according to Marx, was to be embodied in the working class has by no means disappeared,” notes Gorz.
It has been displaced and has acquired a more radical form in a new social area ... It has the added advantage over Marx’s working class of being immediately conscious of itself; its existence is at once indissolubly subjective and objective, collective and individual. This non-class encompasses all those who have been expelled from production by the abolition of work, or whose capacities are under-employed as a result of the industrialization (in this case, the automation and computerization) of intellectual work. It includes all the supernumeraries of present-day social production, who are potentially or actually unemployed, whether permanently or temporarily, partially or completely. It results from the decomposition of the old society based upon the dignity, value, social utility and desirability of work.32
Arguably, class continues to evoke something meaningful only in the context of a class-conscious ruling elite; on the other hand, those who don’t rule, the bulk of us, are an assorted and fragmented layering of disparate peoples who are neither conscious of class nor motivated to act in the name of any class. Nevertheless, these peoples are often motivated by a desire to act against a ruling class, against a system that this class so evidently props us, a system from which a non-class feels alienated and abused by. We might say that these people aren’t so much class-conscious as collectively-conscious of an enemy, conscious of their desire to do something about that enemy, conscious about wanting no truck with that enemy’s game. As Gorz remarks, this non-class “is no more than a vague area made up of constantly changing individuals whose main aim is not to seize power in order to build a new world, but to regain power over their own lives by disengaging from the market rationality of productivism.”33 The notion of a “non-class” opens up the political terrain, makes it both potentially more fruitful and decidedly more inclusive, yet clearly more uncertain, too, because nothing can be taken for granted, because it precludes Messianic dogmatism, militates against “bearers” of history in our midst. Instead, it implies a challenge, and begets a possibility: “it reminds individuals,” says Gorz, “of the need to save themselves and define a social order compatible with their goals and autonomous existence.”34
The associative connections and potential solidarities latent in the realm of everyday life are vastly larger than those made explicit in the world of work. In daily life, the balance of power is so much more even because the plane of battle is so much broader, so much more dynamic. Subversion can happen anywhere and at anytime. Strikes are willy-nilly general, and can paralyze the whole fabric of society rather than just threaten the deep pockets of the factory owners. The reserve army of labor now has the potential to become a laboring army of reservists, joining hands and merging their minds around affinity rather than occupation, cooperating in a division of labor they themselves have formulated. “Don’t back away from what is political in friendship,” says the Invisible Committee.35 This is a novel idea that gives political muscle to a politics of affinity, as well as to an affective politics, to the non-power of conviviality, as Ivan Illich might have said. Affinity politics is based on such a relation of conviviality, and a convivial relation happens when people participate together in the creation of their social life, when they renounce technical and productive values and replace them with an ethical value.36
“We’ve been given a neutral idea of friendship,” says the Invisible Committee, “understood as a pure affection with no consequences. But all affinity is affinity within a common truth. Every encounter is an encounter within a common affirmation. No bonds are innocent in an age when holding onto something and refusing to let go usually lead to unemployment, where you have to lie to work, and you have to keep on working in order to continue lying.”37 As such, a movement comes into being when like-minded people find each other, when they get along with each other, when they make friends, when they decide upon a common path together. They come together because they “prefer not to,” because they prefer to do something else, together, because they have established a concrete convivial relation. They don’t find each other because of some abstract ideal, some specific consciousness with which they should associate themselves, one assorted theorists, leaders and politicos tell them it is in their best interests to identify with. Instead, they wage war around “things they can touch with their own hands,” as Colonel Buendia put it (p. 85).
It’s the realm of affects that binds, that’s causal in any social movement formation. Affinity becomes the cement that bonds people across frontiers and barriers. In desiring another reality, inventing it, dreaming it up, people find their kindred souls, perhaps nearby, perhaps faraway; and in finding one another they struggle together for the realization of their common hopes. Struggle becomes a flesh and blood practice that tries to realize a deep desire, a friendship, a collective dream, maybe even a collective fantasy. In so doing, along the way, like a rolling snowball, participants discover other people desiring likewise, and they gather both size and momentum. And in struggling together, struggling to realize common dreams, maybe beyond work relations, beyond the state, beyond working-class affiliation, political engagement becomes a real fantasy. People discover an “interpellated” group commonality hinging upon a double movement, upon a dream and a hatred; a hatred of what is done to them in today’s system of circulation and accumulation of capital; a dream of opting out and releasing themselves from political subjugation, of doing their own thing. And in struggling together, in organizing themselves around their own thing, power frequently rears its ugly head in concrete form. To that degree, struggling to realize common desires usually means protagonists encounter a common enemy. In seeking to expand its own platform and to deepen its base, resistance seeks to neutralize this power, to subvert it, to sabotage it.
Some of the most oft-cited passages of The Coming Insurrection, used as incriminating evidence by an inquisitorial Sarkozy state, are those on the necessity of sabotage, on the necessary of “removing obstacles, one by one.”38 Sabotage is valid retribution for the incivilities that reign in our streets.
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. Ours certainly can’t hope to match 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.39
The power of surprise, of secret organization, of rebelling, of demonstrating and plotting covertly, of striking invisibly, and in multiple sites at once, is the key element in confronting a power whose firepower is vastly superior. “FLEE VISIBILITY: TURN ANONYMITY INTO AN OFFENSIVE POSITION”: anonymity must be used to provoke fear and distraction, to spread rumor, to conspire in “nocturnal or faceless actions, creating an invulnerable position of attack.” To be explicitly visible—in a maneuver, in organizing—“is to be exposed, that is to say above all, vulnerable.”40 Here black ski-masks become emblems of veritable nobodies, of invisible Bartlebys and underground men and women, of people without qualities who want to disguise their inner qualities, who shun visibility in public, who have little desire to be the somebody the world wants them to be, insists they ought to be: “just looking at the faces of some of this society’s somebodies,” jokes the Invisible Committee, “illustrates why there’s such joy in being nobody.”41
A black-masked Subcomandante Marcos, staked out in Chiapas jungle, comes to mind here; the hero Marcos whose Zapatistas symbolize grassroots rebellion and revolt against a dominant neo-liberal order; Marcos who keeps his cover for as long as it takes, until it’s no longer necessary to wear a disguise, until it’s safe to expose himself, until his “nakedness” renders him free not fair game. “Why hide your face?” a journalist once asked Marcos, just after the Zapatistas had captured key towns in Mexico’s southernmost state in January 1994. “What are you afraid to show?” El sup thinks of removing his mask yet suddenly the people cry “No, no, no!” So the mask stays, the allure persists, and an icon is in the making.42 Behind the mask Marcos does away with his own self and creates another self, the non-self of the everyman and everywoman in revolt: “To be socially nothing isn’t a humiliating condition,” concurs The Coming Insurrection, “the source of some tragic lack of recognition—from whom do we seek recognition?—but is on the contrary the condition of maximum freedom of action.”43
Power, wealth, and ruling institutions reside in the metropolis, and thus the metropolis is an obvious target for covert sabotage. The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is most vulnerable to subversion, most vulnerable to hijacking and détournement, most vulnerable to being tampered with and scuppered. At one time, sabotaging work through organized slow-downs, machine breaking, or working-to-rule comprised a valid modus operandi, an effective weapon for hindering production and lock-jamming the economy; now, the space of twenty-first-century urban flows—of the ceaseless and often mindless current of commodities and people, of information and energy, of cars and communication—becomes the “whole social factory” to which the principle of sabotage can be applied. Wire networks, fiber optic channels, energy grids—all this can now be attacked, brought down in order to construct something saner than this “hopeless mobility”: “Nowadays, sabotaging the social machine with any real effect involves re-appropriating and reinventing ways of interrupting its networks. How can a high-speed TGV train line or an electrical network be rendered useless? How does one find the points in computer networks, or scramble radio waves and fill screens with white noise?”44
Thus “jam everything” becomes a reflex principle of critical negativity, of Bartlebyism brought back to radical life, of one part of the weaponry for all those who rebel against the present order. Ironically, the more the economy has rendered itself virtual—the more value derives from the interconnectivity of circulation as well as production, the more “delocalized,” “dematerialized” and “just-in-time” its infrastructural base—the easier it is to take down, to stymie, and to redirect. The recent movement in France against the CPE (contrat première embauche) bill, the first of a series of state laws to make job contracts for young people more insecure, “did not hesitate to block train stations, ring roads, factories, highways, supermarkets and even airports. In Rennes, only three hundred people were needed to shut down the main access road to the town for hours and cause a 40-kilometer long traffic jam.”45 Blanqui, too, during the 1871 Paris Commune, recognized that urban space isn’t simply the theater of confrontation; it’s also the means and stake in an insurrection, the battleground of a guerrilla warfare that builds barricades and gun turrets, that occupies buildings and employs the methodology of moving through walls.46
In Instruction pour une prise d’armes (Manual for an Armed Insurrection), Blanqui gives us some useful tactics for insurrection and offers handy tips for prospective barricade builders. Always critical of what he calls “inkstand radicals,” Blanqui knew better than anyone else that insurrectional magic doesn’t happen by magic: it is created, comes about through discipline and careful organization, as well as a lot of hope and will, to say nothing of a good deal of force: “something we should not count as one of the new advantages of the enemy,” Blanqui writes,
is the strategic thoroughfares which now furrow the city in all the directions. They are feared, but wrongly. There is nothing to be worried about. Far from having created a danger for the insurrection, as people think, on the contrary they offer a mixture of disadvantages and advantages for the two parties. If the troops circulate with more ease along them, they are also, on the other hand, heavily exposed and in the open. Such streets are unusable under gunfire. Moreover, balconies are miniature bastions, providing lines of fire on their flanks, which ordinary windows do not. Lastly, these long straight avenues deserve perfectly the name of boulevard that is given to them. They are indeed true boulevards, which constitute the natural front of a very great strength. The weapon par excellence in street warfare is the rifle ... The grenade, which people have the bad habit of calling a bomb, is generally secondary, and subject besides to a mass of disadvantages. It consumes a lot of powder for little effect, is very dangerous to handle, has no range and can only be used from windows. Paving stones do almost as much harm but are not so expensive. The workers do not have money to waste. For the interior of houses, it’s the revolver, then the bayonet, the sword, saber and dagger. In a boarding house, a pike or eight-foot long halberd would triumph over the bayonet.47
There’s no such thing as a peaceful insurrection, Blanqui said, and the Invisible Committee concurs: “weapons are necessary” they say. Still, and again like the Zapatistas, participants know
it’s a question of doing everything possible to make using arms unnecessary. An insurrection is more about taking up arms and maintaining an ‘armed presence’ than it is about armed struggle. We need to distinguish clearly between being armed and the use of arms. Weapons are a constant in revolutionary situations, but their use is infrequent and rarely decisive at key turning points.48
The insurrection can triumph as a political force: “It’s not impossible to defeat an army politically.” It’s important, at first, to dispose of power at the local level, to move on from there, to spread outwards like a maggot in an apple, progressively eating itself outwards, to block circulation, to fight in the streets, to sabotage and subvert, to organize and paralyze, to make every action irreversible. But what’s vital in any struggle, what has to be a perpetual source of concern, is “that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you end up as bad as they are. No ideal in life is worth that much baseness.”49
A movement’s capacity to negate, to jam the machine, to orchestrate chaos, is only as effective as its ability to create something positive, something ordered and organized, to live at war while knowing how to live together in peace. At the heart of The Coming Insurrection lies an appeal to create new liberated territories, new communes and “multiple zones of opacity.” Attach yourself to what you feel to be true, the book urges, experience the joy of encounters, of people who’ve shrugged off individual straightjackets and accepted modes of “normal” behavior. “What’s strange,” says the Invisible Committee, “isn’t that people who are attuned to each other form communes, but that they remain separated. Why shouldn’t communes proliferate everywhere? In every factory, every street, every village, every school?”50 Bit by bit, communes displace the dominant institutions of society, form each time a group of people decides to rely upon themselves, to measure their collective strength against an external enemy, a reactionary force. Every commune is at once a territorial and political entity, a milieu as well as a moment, a space as well as a flow; a commune’s collective force is only as strong as the “density of ties. Not by their membership, but by the spirit that animates them,”51 that connects one commune to another, by the passion and imagination that gels them together.
Moreover, communes organize themselves in order that people no longer have to work. This gives a new twist to the famous Situationist mantra of “ne travaillez jamais!”—never work!—because it draws a distinction between working hard and not earning a living, not selling one’s bodily and mental capacity to another, not frittering away the bulk of one’s daily life doing something you hate, something stupefying, alienating. So far as exchanging oneself within a wage relation goes, the twenty-first-century communard prefers not to; instead, they want to make themselves useless, useless as a labor-powering commodity, yet useful as a worker, as a person who works willingly and meaningfully, productively for him or herself and for the commune.
True, a commune needs money, needs some sort of market, of dynamic exchange, even if it’s only a black market; true, too, it “plunders, cultivates, fabricates”52 any way it can; it needs to find its very own hustles and scams to keep it afloat. That its “concrete” labor has to be enacted in accordance with a plan of production and exchange is likewise acknowledged; yet here production and exchange “are transparent in their simplicity,” as Marx says in Capital, and exist within an association of producers and distributors, all of whom buy and sell fairly amongst themselves. It’s important to note that communes can interact and participate in a system of exchange based on simple reproduction not expanded accumulation, predicating itself on need rather than greed. Here, any liberation from wage-labor doesn’t mean time for a vacation, for doing nothing, for hanging out; the commune isn’t a hippy commune: “Vacant time, dead time, the time of emptiness and fear of emptiness—this is the time to work. There will be no more time to fill, but a liberation of energy.”53 Once again, Gorz is instructive:
the abolition of work will only be emancipatory if it also allows the development of autonomous activity. The abolition of work doesn’t mean abolition of the need for effort, the desire for activity, the pleasure of creation, the need to cooperate with others and be of some use to the community. Instead, the abolition of work simply means the progressive, but never total, suppression of the need to purchase the right to live by alienating our time and our lives.54
For the survival of any autonomous self-organizing community, relentless effort and activity, relentless determination, is necessary. Self-organization will always be in constant need of expansion, in need of a practice that can both occupy and be a territory, that can establish a solid and durable life-form. Any commune will need to increase the density of its fellow-traveler communes, and its means of circulation and modes of solidarity with them. The ideal scenario is one where a commune’s own territorial demarcation becomes unreadable, is “opaque to all authority.” As a basic rule, “the more territories there are superimposed on a given zone, the more circulation there is between them, the harder it will be for power to get a handle on them.”55 Bistros and bars, sports facilities and garages, wastelands and second-hand bookstores, building rooftops and improvised street markets, “can all easily be used for purposes other than their official ones should enough complicities come together in them.” Eventually, this kind of local self-organization “superimposes its own geography over the state cartography, scrambling and blurring it,” to the degree that the commune produces nothing else than “its own secession.”56
How to interrupt urban flows, build new communes in the ruins, in abandoned countryside, in overbuilt cities, how to restore local food production, create urban vegetable gardens, as Cuba did to withstand an American embargo and the implosion of the USSR?57 How can little assorted islands of Robinson Crusoes form one great big new continent of liberation? Communes will find their own answers, says The Coming Insurrection, or they’ll get crushed mercilessly; nothing else is possible. The Imaginary Party and its adherents worldwide are starting out from a point of extreme weakness, from relative isolation. All participants know this, even if they know nothing else. The insurrection can begin only from the ground up, somewhere: “Nothing appears less likely than an insurrection, but nothing is more necessary.”58
There are signs, whispers, hearsay, rumors, hints that these magical ideas are getting conjured up, are taking root and taking shape somehow, that they are present realities as much as futuristic yearnings: from the folks at Tarnac to angry students in Greece, from disaffected youth in the French banlieue (the racaille—scum—that Sarkozy indicts) to citizens protesting the CPE law, from the eco-communities sprouting up across rural Europe to squatter and landless movements in urban Latin America, The Coming Insurrection seems to describe an insurrection that has already come. And in the apocalyptic devastation of post-Bush America, The Coming Insurrection is also creating a stir, arousing excitement about an alternative future, and this not only at the counter of Starbucks. Meanwhile, Portuguese and Spanish translations are apparently on their way, ready to hit Brazil and other parts of Latin America, perhaps engendering there another revolution in the revolution.
But, for the time being, whether The Coming Insurrection plots a real or imagined insurrection isn’t the point; what’s important is the book’s unquestionable ability to motivate and provoke, to incite and excite, to inspire and to unsettle the status quo and to rile those in power—those who fear losing their power, those who have already revealed that their power is shaky, that it is threatened by the contents of a strange little book. The experimental communes the Invisible Committee evoke and invoke are radical not simply because of their reality principle but also because of their principle of hope: they flag up the passage through which people can come together, can find one another in a “network of hope,” an idea so dear to the mystical heart of German Marxist Ernst Bloch. At the beginning of his great three-volume paean to hope, Bloch describes the “naked striving and wishing” that surges within us, that expresses itself first as a “craving,” as “an expectant counter emotion” which reaches outwards, urges us on, keeps us hoping. Soon this counter-emotion burns away inside us, becomes a “hunger,” a source of rebellious consciousness in the making, “the No to the bad situation which exists and the Yes to the better life that hovers ahead.”59
The Coming Insurrection has kindled passionate debate not only about the nature of insurrection, but also about the nature of insurrectional Marxism. There’s a lot Marxists can take from this book for breaking out of a formalist straightjacket, for drafting a rawer conception of Marxism, a more dynamic, challenging, and radical one, a Marxism that abandons old trusty shibboleths, old crutches that prop up a crippled geriatric. It suggests a Marxism that no longer proposes an abstract model of revolution imposed from above, pushed onto the masses of people who may or may not identify themselves with the working class. Instead, Marxism is treated as offering a utopian vision, an expectant counter-emotion of how people might live post-capitalistically. From this standpoint, it’s a practice that won’t nor cannot be universal, applicable to everybody, everywhere—at least in the short term; it holds for some people, those who, on the basis of what they know and feel, chose to opt out, decide to live differently, to create post-capitalist communes of like-minded adventurers, people who work together, practically, energetically, while expanding their individual selves: they make their project of life a life-project that blooms. This Marxism gets nourished in everyday life and stays there, at ground level; it happens when communes make friends and connections, theorize and act in unison, expand their networks, strengthen the densities at their core, grow stronger and stronger and edge themselves outwards to embrace other communes. Soon, one commune might merge into another, as they mutually exchange know-how and concrete labor; after a while more people opt out and join in, pool their passions.
Before long, what were once particular, fragmented communes enlarge into more widespread modes of existence, denser communities, new kaleidoscopes of possibility: this is how the revolution evolves, how the magical insurrection takes hold, how the Exodus from capitalism commences. “One needs to dare to break with society,” Gorz says, this society of ours “that is dying and which will never be reborn. One needs to dare to make the Exodus.”60 The Exodus will be intellectual and practical, an Exodus of new ideas and of determined action, a bold leap to liberation, a testament to the power of Rebellion, a journey towards a safe haven where refugees can gather, perhaps at first in small numbers, to live free of oppression. This Exodus can establish new kinds of Quilombos, like the fleeing slaves did in Brazil under Portuguese colonization. Quilombos were scattered throughout Brazil during the seventeenth century and were full of fugitive black slaves (frequently Angolans) who’d dared to rise up against the servitude of their masters and who’d set up for themselves self-sufficient plantation communities, eventually consolidating them into proto-socialist republics.61
This insurrection—this Exodus from capitalism, and the establishment of new Quilombos—isn’t set alight like a forest fire, by a decisive spark that spreads linearly, as through some necessary “historical” logic, or by the storming of any winter palace; rather the magical insurrection resonates, takes the shape of music, like Samba, “whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations ... To the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.”62 And, after a while again, people begin to dance, to sway of this music, and the groove becomes instinctive and infectious, a kind of world music that goes beyond any single language, even beyond words, corporeal as much as intellectual, something absorbed as well as understood, a giant rave organized by madmen and women living in the woods: “In 1940, Georges Guingouin, the ‘first French resistance fighter,’ started with nothing but the certainty of his refusal of the Nazi occupation. At that time, to the Communist Party, he was nothing but a ‘madman living in the woods,’ until there were 20,000 madmen living in the woods, and Limoges was liberated.”63