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Title: Spread Anarchy, Live Communism
Author: comité invisible
Date: April 13th, 2015
Language: en
Topics: insurrection, commune, Communism, anarchy, police, The Coming Insurrection
Source: Retrieved on September 17, 2021 from https://illwill.com/spread-anarchy-live-communism

comité invisible

Spread Anarchy, Live Communism

There is a confrontation underlying this world. There is no need to be

in Misrata today to perceive it. The streets of New York, for instance,

reveal the extent to which this confrontation has been refined, for here

we find all the sophisticated apparatuses needed to contain what is

always threatening. Here is the mute violence that crushes down what

still lives under the blocks of concrete and fake smiles. When we talk

of ‘apparatuses’, we don’t only invoke the New York Police Department

(NYPD) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), surveillance

cameras and body scanners, guns and denunciation, anti- theft locks and

cell phones. Rather, in the layout of a town like New York – the

pinnacle of the global petit-organic-hipster-bourgeoisie – we mean

whatever captures intensities and vitalities in order to chew them up,

digest them, and shit out value. But if capitalism triumphs every day,

it is not merely because it crushes, exploits and represses, but also

because it is desirable. This must be kept in mind when building a

revolutionary movement.

There is a war going on—a permanent, global civil war. Two things

prevent us from understanding it or even from perceiving it. First, the

denial of the very fact of confrontation is still a part of this

confrontation. And second, despite all the new prose of the various

geopolitical specialists, the meaning of this war is not understood.

Everything said about the asymmetrical shape of the so-called ‘new wars’

only adds to the confusion. The ongoing war we speak of does not have

the Napoleonic magnificence of regular wars between two great armies of

men, or between two antagonistic classes. Because if there is an

asymmetry in the confrontation it is less between the forces present

than over the very definition of the war itself. That is why we cannot

talk about a social war: for if social war is a war that is led against

us, it cannot symmetrically describe the war that we wage from our side

and vice versa. We have to rethink the words themselves in order to

forge new concepts as weapons.

We call hostility that which governs almost completely the relationships

between beings, relationships of pure estrangement, pure incompatibility

between bodies. It may take the shape of benevolence or malevolence, but

it is always a distance:

I beat you down because I am a cop and you are a shit. I invite you to

the restaurant because I want to fuck you. I leave you the bill because

I don’t know how to tell you how much I hate you. I never stop smiling.

This is hostility. We need to act toward this sphere of hostility with

the same non-relationships that it imposes within itself: to reduce it,

to take aim at it and annihilate it. In other words, Empire is not a

subject that is in front of me but a milieu that is hostile to me. It

cannot be a question of being victorious over it, only of annihilating

it. All that we learn to know singularly escapes from the sphere of the

non-relationship. All that gives rise to a circulation of affects

escapes the sphere of hostility. It is what friendship is about. It is

what enmity is about. That is why we don’t try to crush any enemies;

rather, we try to confront them. ‘My enemy is my own question taking

shape’, said a horrible jurist. In this confrontation, it is less

existence that is at stake than potentiality. All means are not equally

useful in the confrontation between these two political positions. To

say it differently, a political enemy is not to be crushed, it must be

overcome. Distinguishing the sphere of hostility from that of friendship

and enmity leads to a certain ethic of war.

For the anarchists, the paradox of the current historical situation can

be formulated thus: everything proves them right, and nowhere do they

manage to intervene in a decisive way, which means the obstacle does not

come from the situation or from the repression but from the very inside

of the anarchist position. For more than a century, the figure of the

anarchist indicates the most extreme point of Western civilization. The

anarchist is the point where the most hard-lined affirmation of all the

Western fictions – the individual, freedom, free will, justice, the

death of God – coincides with the most declamatory negation. The

anarchist is the Western negation of the West.

Schürmann 1 rightly characterized our time as a deeply anarchic one, a

time where all the principles of the unification of phenomena collapsed.

Anarchy describes our epochal situation. From there, calling oneself an

anarchist is to say nothing. It means either, when directed against a

dominant order (as is the case in Greece), a way to expose to everyone

the inner split and malaise of civilization, or a posture.

All the tired chatter of the particular anarchist literature today is

held to this: how is it possible to violently affirm our existence

without ever affirming any singular ethical content? Those who said,

‘There are no nihilists, only impotence’, were not mistaken. To claim to

be a nihilist is only claiming one’s own impotence. Isolation is a cause

for impotence more dreadful than that caused by repression. Those who

don’t let themselves be isolated do not let themselves be reduced to

impotence. Malatesta understood this well in his time.

All the doctrines of government are anarchist doctrines. They do not

trouble themselves with any principle. They do not presuppose order;

they produce order. This world is not unified a priori by some fantasy

of truth, by some universal norm or principle that would be posed or

imposed. This world is unified a posteriori, pragmatically, locally.

Everywhere is organized the material, symbolic, logistical and

repressive condition of an ‘as if’. Everywhere, in every locality,

everything goes ‘as if’ life obeyed this principle, this norm compatible

with other localities. It is how empire covers globally the anarchy of

our time. We manage, we manage phenomenality.

This is what testifies to the insurrectional movements of the last years

in the Maghreb, in Europe or in Asia. And that is precisely why they are

meant to always disappoint anarchists.

The contemporary figure of a man without qualities that we call the

Bloom 2 is struck by what we must call an ethical impotence. It cannot

live one particular thing without worrying about missing everything

else. It never is here without its own being-here being doubled by the

anxiety of not being everywhere else too. That is why it is so dependent

on ubiquitous technological apparatuses: the cell phones, internet and

global transportation. Without this prosthesis, he would collapse on the

spot. New York, as the absolute metropolis, condenses this experience

where the price of not missing anything is to not live anything.

Anarchism is the spontaneous political consciousness of the Bloom. The

ambition to deny everything is what legitimates people to never fully

deny something and thus to start to affirm something singular.

The desperate conservatism that presently spreads in the political

sphere only expresses our inability to seize the ethical underpinnings

implicit in Western civilization. We need to settle up with the muted,

unnoticed totality of what underlies all our actions, words, feelings

and representations. But the scale of the task is such that, for an

isolated individual, any stupid affirmation of any neo-conservatism is

always more reassuring in the end. The current fallback toward the most

dogmatic ideological forms of anarchism or communism, towards the

fetishism of a radical political identity, comes from the same fear of

throwing yourself into the unknown of such an adventure.

It is necessary to do away with the reigning confusion. One of the main

flaws of the revolutionary movement is that it remains imprisoned in

false oppositions; or worse, that it forces us to think in the shackles

of these very false alternatives. Activism or wait and see? The great

evening or the process? Vanguard or mass movement? They are called false

not because they will not express actual differences. Quite the

contrary, it is because they transform all the decisive questions into

binary and unsatisfying polarized alternatives. This said, the debate

around the necessity to create our own little oasis or to wait for the

insurrection to come before creating troubles within the radical milieu,

was firstly a theological question. We could wait for the coming of the

Messiah, staying at the very position God gave him, or we could pretend

to fasten the second coming. There is another way, of a different

nature. There is a Messianic time that is the abolition of the time that

passes: the rupture of the continuum of history, the end of waiting.

That also means there are sparks mixed with the blackness of reality. It

means there exists something Messianic: the kingdom is not merely to

come but already, by fragments, here among us.

What we say is that it is not more urgent to act than it is urgent to

wait. Because we want to get organized, we have time. We don’t think

there is any outside to capital, but we don’t think that reality is

capitalist. Communism is a practice that starts from those sparks, from

those forms-of-life.

We said ‘all power to the communes’, but a commune is never something

given. It is not what is here, but what takes place. A commune is not

two people who meet or ten people buying a farm. A commune is two people

who meet to become three, to become four, to become a thousand. The only

question for the commune is its own potentiality, its constant becoming.

It is a practical question. To become a war machine or collapse into a

milieu? To end up alone or begin to love each other? The commune does

not describe what we organize but how we organize ourselves, which is

always at the same time a material question. A commune is only as it

becomes. There is no preliminary to communism. Those who believe

otherwise, by dint of pursuing their goal, manage only to lose

themselves in the accumulation of means.

Communism is not a different way to distribute wealth, to organize

production or to manage society. Communism is an ethical disposition, a

disposition that lets itself be affected, at the contact of being,

through what is common to us. Communism is as much the beyond and the

below of capitalist misery. What we put behind this vocable ‘communism’

is radically opposed to all those who use and used it to lead it to

dislocation. War also passes through words. How many times in activist

circles have we had this dead-end discussion? What are we fighting

against? You just have to raise the issue and everyone will go for their

own petty fantasy that, in the last resort, subsumed all the others.

‘What we need to confront is patriarchy.’ ‘No, it’s racism.’ ‘No, it’s

capitalism.’ ‘No, it’s exploitation, and alienation is only a moment of

it.’ ‘No, it’s alienation, and exploitation is only a moment of it.’ The

finest theologians even managed to build a small activist trinity that

articulates a triple oppression. At the same time one and three: sexism,

racism and capitalism. All the good will of the world failed to produce

the decisive answer to this question. That failure sums up the impotence

to which our false conception condemns us.

When we are looking for an enemy, we often start by projecting ourselves

on an abstract scene, within which the world has disappeared. Let us ask

ourselves the same question, but starting from the neighbourhood where

we live, from the company where we work, from the professional sector we

are familiar with. Then the answer is clear; then the front lines can be

distinctly seen, and who is on what side can easily be determined. This

is because the question of the confrontation, the properly political

question, only makes sense in a given world, in a substantial world. For

those who are nowhere, cybernetic philosophers or metropolitan hipsters,

the political question never makes sense. It refuses itself to them and

leaves them walking backward into abstraction. And that is the price to

pay for so much superficiality. As compensation, they will prefer to

juggle with some great folkloric significance, to give themselves some

post-Maoist or post-situationist thrills. Or, perhaps they will

accommodate their nothingness with the last glosses of the ultra-left

logorrhoea.

To all the metaphysical principles overhanging reality, Schürmann

opposed a ‘faithfulness to the phenomena’. That is also what we need to

oppose to the political impotence. For, besides a few heroic moments, it

is over the ordinary and the daily that the anarchist discourse breaks

itself. There we experience the same disjunction between the political

and the sensible that is the disastrous background of classical

politics. The powerful things that we live leave us mute. And what we

experience in terms of silent but manifest failures, these we have no

words for. Only the anarchist gesture sometimes comes to save its

profound inconsistency, and yet during this gesture we only obey an

order corresponding to our anarchist identity. That we have from time to

time to obey our identity in order to realize our discursive existence –

this reveals our poverty in worlds, a poverty that one is not even

distracted from by belonging to a milieu. Identity politics captures us

in the negation of all the implicit, all the invisible, all the unheard,

which composes the frame of the world.

We have called this the ethical element. It is the same underlying

principle behind Wittgenstein’s forms of life. It is on the basis of

everyday life, of the ordinary, that this war against the world must be

conceived. From Oaxaca to Keratea, from the Val di Susa to Sidi Bouzid,

from Exarchia to Kabylie, the great battles of our time emanate from a

local consistency. A street vendor who will self-immolate in front of

the local administration after being slapped in public by a policewoman

expresses the implicit and adiscursive affirmation of a form-of-life.

This gesture of negation contains a clear affirmation that this life

does not deserve to be lived. At root it was the power of this

affirmation that took over Tunisia. Genoa would never have become the

summit of the counter-summits without the rebellious Genovese

proletarians.

To say that the war against Empire arises from everyday life, from the

ordinary, that it emanates from the ethical element, is to propose a new

concept of war stripped of all its military content. In any case, it is

comical to see that for the last ten years the strategy of all the

Western armies, as well as the Chinese army, is to approximate a concept

which, because of their forms-of-life, escapes them. It is enough to see

a special forces soldier speak of battles of hearts and minds to

understand that they have already lost. It is an asymmetrical war not

because of the forces present but because the insurgents and

counter-insurrectionists are not waging the same war. This is why the

notion of social war is inadequate. It gives rise to the fatal illusion

of symmetry in the conflict with society, that the battle takes place

over the same representation of reality. If there actually is an

asymmetric war between people and governments, it is because what sets

us apart is an asymmetry in the very definition of war. We welcome, in

passing, the nomination of General Petraeus to the head of the Central

Intelligence Agency (CIA). It no doubt ushers in an exciting decade in

the United States.

It has been four years since the publication of The Coming Insurrection

in 2007. It was, at that time, crazy but also rational to pose

insurrection as the world’s horizon. We could say that the present

period has confirmed this analysis. A social movement, like that of the

pensioners in France, adopted as its slogan ‘Blockade everything’. An

entire country, like Greece, saw the insurrection coming (though it was

ultimately aborted), over the course of a month. Not to mention Tunisia,

Egypt or Libya – where the determination, often unspoken, to destroy

structures of power remains exemplary. To be sure, there are still too

few heads of state sunning themselves in Saudi Arabia – away from the

countries they once presumed to lead – but something is definitely

accelerating.

We have only to look around in order to see that the content of this

book is realizing itself. Yet, at the same time, it withers. Its limits

are becoming apparent. The real movement provides the only admissible

critique of a text’s historical impact. The field of tactics is always

the domain of the counter-revolution. And so we understand: when we are

forced onto the field of tactics, when we are only a little step ahead,

when we chase after events as they happen, then we can no longer act in

a revolutionary way. At the present moment, in order to escape being

forced onto the field of tactics, we must overcome the question of the

insurrection. That is to say, we must take this horizon as given and

begin to think and act on that basis. We must take the insurrectionary

situation as our starting point – even now, even here, when it is the

counter-insurrection that dominates reality.

In this regard, we locate two crucial questions that pose themselves to

the revolutionary movement.

The first is the exit from the framework of government. Since its origin

in Greece, politics has carried within itself a metaphysics of order. It

begins from the premise that people must be governed, either

democratically by themselves or hierarchically by others. The same

anthropology underlies the notion of the individualist anarchist – who

wants to express their own passions fully, or to govern themself- and

that of the pessimist – for whom people are hungry beasts, who will

devour their neighbours if only they can free themselves from the

binding power of government. Various political positions thus organize

themselves, ultimately, according to the answers they propose to this

question: the question of the government of human beings and their

passions. All are rooted in a readily discernible notion of human

nature.

But in fact, the question of government only poses itself in a void. We

must produce enough of a void around individuals, or even in them – or

within society, a space sufficiently devoid of content – in order to

wonder how we will arrange those disparate, disconnected elements of the

self as much as of the society. If we have a politics to advance, it is

one that begins from an opposite hypothesis. There is no void.

Everything is already inhabited. We are, each of us, points of

intersection: of quantities of affect, of families, of histories, of

realities that fundamentally exceed us. The point is not to constitute a

void in which we finally begin to recover everything that eludes us, but

rather that we already have the means to organize, to play, to form

links and bonds. There is an open battle between, on the one hand, this

fear, at once senile and childish, that we can only live on the

condition of being governed, and on the other hand, an inhabited

politics that dismisses the question of government altogether.

Whether from the Tunisian situation, from attempts to block economic

flows in France, or from the coming insurrection latent in Greece, we

learn that we cannot separate the tearing down of power from the

material establishment of other forms of organization. Everywhere, when

power falters, the same chasm opens beneath our feet. How is it to be

done? We have to figure it out materially, but also technically: how can

we effect a shocking exit from the existing order, a complete reversal

of social relations, a new way of being in the world? We say that this

paradox is not a paradox at all.

All power to the communes! This means: tear down power, globally,

locally – wherever it captures, manages and controls us. It means:

organize by and for ourselves, first of all in the neighbourhood, the

city and the region. Food, transportation, healthcare, energy – in each

case we need to find the level at which we can act without recreating

the power that we only just deposed. The commune is not a form, but

rather a way of posing problems that dissolves them. And so the

revolutionary imperative reduces itself to this simple formula: to

become ungovernable and to remain that way.

It is from this horizon, for example, that we can understand the failure

of the recent movement of pensioners in France. By blocking the

infrastructure that regulates the country – rather than begging the

government for demands, for reforms, or for anything – the movement

implicitly recognized that it is the physical organization of society

that constitutes its real power. By blocking the circulation of

commodities rather than occupying the factories, the movement took leave

of the classical workers’ perspective, which understood the strike as a

prelude to the occupation of sites of production, and understood the

occupation of sites of production as the prelude to their takeover by

the working class. The people who made the blockade were not only those

who worked in the places that were blocked, but also a motley crew of

teachers, students and trade unionists; of workers from other sectors;

of troublemakers of every kind. The blockade was not the prelude to an

economic re-appropriation but to a political act: in each flow, the

sabotage takes aim at the social machine as a whole.

Nevertheless, this movement was defeated. Whether this was because of

the intervention by unions or because of the architectural flows of

networks that allow their rapid reorganization in the case of

interruption, the gas supply in France – which the movement

spontaneously chose to target – could not be blocked permanently.

We could go on and on about the weaknesses of the movement. What is

certain is that it did not have sufficient knowledge of what it tried to

block.

This example suffices to illustrate how we must henceforth understand

the materiality of domination. We must investigate, we must research: we

must search out, and above all share and propagate, all of the necessary

information about the functioning of the capitalist machine. How is it

fed by energy, information, arms and food? What we need to understand

is: in a situation where everything is suspended, in a state of

exception, what do we turn off, what do we transform and what do we want

to maintain? Refusing to pose these questions today would oblige us to

return to the normal situation tomorrow, if only to survive.

We can predict that such an investigation, having reached a certain

degree of reality, would not fail to produce a scandal as big as the

threat that it poses to the good functioning of everything. Contrarily

to the amusing fraud of Wikileaks, it is the sharing and diffusion of

accessible information to everyone, which would allow them to feed off

or consequently paralyze a region or a country. In a world of lies, the

lie can never be defeated by its contrary, it can only be defeated by a

world of truth.

We don’t want a programme. We must constitute a science of apparatuses

that reveals the structures and weaknesses of the organization of a

world, and at the same time indicates practicable paths outside of the

current hell. We need fictions, a horizon of the world, which will allow

us to hang on, which will give us breath. When the moment comes, we must

be ready.

To conclude, if we have come here to talk, it is only because we have

been persuaded of this: we must be done with radicalism and its meager

comforts – now. The intellectual, the academic, both remain mesmerized

by the contradictions that banish thought to the clouds. By never

beginning from the situation, from their own situation, intellectuals

distance themselves from the world so much that, finally, it is their

intelligence itself that abandons them. If hipsters succeed in

perceiving the world with precision and subtlety, it is only to

aestheticize the sensible ever further, that is to say, to keep it at a

distance, to contemplate their lives and their beautiful souls and

thereby to promote their own impotence – their particular autism, which

expresses itself in a valorization of the tiniest aspects of life.

Meanwhile, the activist, in refusing to think, in adopting the ethic of

middle managers, runs grinning into every single wall before him before

finally collapsing into cynicism. If taking part is the only option in

war, the lines that are offered to us visibly are not the ones that we

should follow. We have to displace them and we have to move ourselves in

between them.

Whether it is the Marxist theologian or the anarchist anti-intellectual,

the identitarian moralist or the playfully transgressive hipster, all of

this is an apparatus. We have said enough about what we want to do to

with apparatuses. Each of these figures – the hipster, the academic and

the political activist – expresses as much a singular attachment to a

power as a common amputation. And here we see the fundamental divisions

on which Western civilization has been built: that is, the separation

between gesture, thought and life. If one wondered what the idea of the

tiqqun means, it might mean, for instance, not letting ourselves be

comfortable in those very splits, those very amputations, but rather

starting from those very attachments—thinking, acting and living—asking

how could this, instead of being maintained separated in figures (the

hipster, the academic, the activist), how could all of this be the plane

of consistency that would actually enable us to draw lines more

interesting than the lines between those figures?

If the life of militant radicals in Western societies shows the

dissatisfaction proper to a revolutionary existence without a

revolution, the recent uprisings in the Maghreb attest to an

insufficiency of revolutions without revolutionaries: that is, the

necessity of building the party. When we speak of building the party, we

do not mean as organization, but as a plane of circulation, of common

intelligence, of strategic thinking, just as much as local

consistencies. There is a threat that weighs on all attacks starting

from singular worlds, and it is that they remain incomprehensible by

lack of translation. The party must be that agent of faithful

translation of local phenomena, a force of mutual knowledge, of

experiences underway. And it must be global.

What is at stake is how we are able to flee and keep our weapons. What

is at stake is how we can extract ourselves from the milieus in which we

are stuck, whether it is a university or the anarchist scene itself.

Many have wondered about the very situation we face now, claiming ‘There

is no situation here’. We respond: there is no ‘no situation’. It does

not exist. From where we are we must run into the first world we

encounter, to follow the first line of power that we get to. Everything

follows from this.