The Coming Insurrection (2009) - The Invisible Committee

THE COMING

INSURRECTION

ALL POWER

TO THE COMMUNES

The Invisible Committee

In the subway, theres no longer any trace of the screen of embarrassment that The book you hold in your hands has become the principle piece of evidence in an normally impedes the gestures of the passengers. Strangers make conversation without anti-terrorism case in France directed against nine individuals who were arrested making passes. A band of comrades conferring on a street corner. Much larger on November 11 2008, mostly in the village of Tarnac. They have been accused of assemblies on the boulevards, absorbed in discussions. Surprise attacks mounted in

criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity on the grounds that they city after city, day after day. A new military barracks has been sacked and burned were to have participated in the sabotage of overhead electrical lines on Frances to the ground. The evicted residents of a building have stopped negotiating with the national railways. Although only scanty circumstantial evidence has been presented mayors office; they settle in. A company manager is inspired to blow away a handful against the nine, the French Interior Minister has publically associated them with of his colleagues in the middle of a meeting. Theres been a leak of files containing the the emergent threat of an ultra-left movement, taking care to single out this personal addresses of all the cops, together with those of prison officials, causing an book, described as a manual for terrorism, which they are accused of authoring.

unprecedented wave of sudden relocations. We carry our surplus goods into the old What follows is the text of the book preceded by the first statement of the Invisible village bar and grocery store, and take what we lack. Some of us stay long enough Committee since the arrests.

to discuss the general situation and figure out the hardware we need for the machine shop. The radio keeps the insurgents informed of the retreat of the government forces.

A rocket has just breached a wall of the Clairvaux prison. Impossible to say if it has been months or years since the events began. And the prime minister seems very alone in his appeals for calm.

A point of clarification

Everyone agrees. Its 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 cafs. 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 therell 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-Marie1 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. Its 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 1. Michle Alliot-Marie, theFrench Interior Minister.

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 All power to the communes!

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 wasnt decided, and put down, in the streets the police being visibly outflanked there its 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 88

the disaster is a pathology that is difficult to undo. Its above all the loss of centralized power signifies the end of Paris as the a fiction that no longer knows how to carry on. Our governors center of revolutionary activity. Every new movement since the themselves increasingly consider it as a useless encumbrance strikes of 1995 has confirmed this. Its no longer in Paris that because they, at least, take the conflict for what it is militarily .

the most daring and consistent actions are carried out. To put it They have no complex about sending in elite antiterrorist units bluntly, Paris now stands out only as a target for raids, as a pure to subdue riots, or to liberate a recycling center occupied by its terrain to be pillaged and ravaged. Brief and brutal incursions workers. As the welfare state collapses, we see the emergence of from the outside strike at the metropolitan flows at their point a brute conflict between those who desire order and those who of maximum density. Rage streaks across this desert of fake dont. Everything that French politics has been able to deactivate abundance, then vanishes. A day will come when this capital and is in the process of unleashing itself. It will never be able to its horrible concretion of power will lie in majestic ruins, but process all that it has repressed. In the advanced degree of social it will be at the end of a process that will be far more advanced decomposition, we can count on the coming movement to find everywhere else.