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Title: Living Communism
Author: Spencer Beswick
Date: July 29, 2022
Language: en
Topics: Institute for Anarchist Studies, infrastructure, attack, insurrectionary, communes
Source: Retrieved on July 30, 2022 from https://anarchiststudies.org/living-communism-spencer-beswick/
Notes: Spencer Beswick (he/him) is a PhD Candidate at Cornell University researching the history of anarchism and the left; his dissertation, “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century,” explores the transformation and revitalization of the anarchist movement in the 1980s-90s. He is one of the organizers of the Anarchist Oral History Project. Spencer has been active with a number of radical projects since his life was transformed by Occupy Boston in 2011, including labor organizing, Food Not Bombs, Ithaca’s Antidote Infoshop, and DSA.

Spencer Beswick

Living Communism

May Day, 1987: thousands of black-clad Autonomen (“those who are

autonomous”) riot in West Berlin. After a decade spent honing their

street-fighting tactics, they stage an offensive against state

repression by blocking streets, occupying buildings, and fighting a

low-intensity urban war against the police. The Autonomen expand their

liberated zone throughout much of the neighborhood of Kreuzberg that is

their base. After a night of rebellious jubilation, they return to their

squatted houses and social centers to nurse their wounds, curse the

police, and celebrate a temporary victory. Although the German media

depict the Autonomen as little more than violent mobs whose only

motivation is destruction, the radicals have simultaneously constructed

an extensive network of squatted alternative infrastructure across West

Berlin and throughout West Germany.

During the 1980s, the Autonomen turned hundreds of abandoned buildings

into group housing, social centers, movement bars, and cultural

centers—spaces that provided both alternative forms of living and bases

of attack. At their best, the squats constituted urban liberated

territory in which thousands of young people practiced a communism of

everyday life. More recently, in France, the Invisible Committee has

drawn on the German autonomous experiences to theorize the commune as a

destituent space of everyday communism. In this view, communes do not

form a constituent power whose aim is to establish a new order with more

representative state institutions. Rather, drawing on Giorgio Agamben,

the Invisible Committee argues that communes destitute the state (i.e.,

render it inoperative and powerless) by challenging the need for state

institutions. Development of new communal forms of life outside the

state and capitalism provides the basis for “suppressing them in a

positive way. To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution,

but to attack the need we have of it.”[1] It is in this sense that

communes provide the material foundation to “live communism” and attack

the rule of capitalism and the state.

The Invisible Committee is a collective of post-autonomist communists

(formerly operating under the moniker Tiqqun) who trace their

intellectual lineage through Italian Autonomia and the German Autonomen,

among others. Though born in the Parisian squatting scene, they grew

disillusioned with the radical subcultural milieu and moved to the tiny

town of Tarnac, where they live communally and collectively run a farm,

bar, and general store. They were introduced to the American popular

imagination primarily through the controversy surrounding their book The

Coming Insurrection (2007, 2009), which Glenn Beck featured on his Fox

News show, as well as engagement from friendlier groups like Endnotes

and CrimethInc. The Invisible Committee continued to develop their

particular variety of post-autonomist communization theory in To Our

Friends (2014), which reflects on the European movements of the squares

and associated spectacular, short-lived insurrections (especially in

Greece). Their latest book, Now (2017), explores the possibilities and

practices of communism within the fragmented world of capitalism.

Although the collective is relatively widely read, their historical and

theoretical background is less well known in the United States.

This article combines historical insights from the Autonomen with

theoretical interventions from the Invisible Committee in order to make

several related arguments. First, the commune form creates alternative

worlds in which liberalism is combatted and collective struggle against

alienation takes place. Second, communes operate according to a unique

spatial logic that ruptures capitalist geography, promotes new spatial

practices, and establishes non-alienated inhabitation of territory.

Third, the Autonomen and the Invisible Committee theorize and act upon a

new conception of communism as a collective practice of living the “good

life” in revolutionary struggle rather than as solely a (future)

economic system. Fourth, alternative infrastructure provides the means

to practice this in daily life. Finally, revolutionary practice entails

networks of autonomous communes seceding from the capitalist system to

form liberated territories that function as bases from which to attack

capitalist state power.

1. The Commune Form

“The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality. . . . All power to

the communes!”

– The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (117, 133)

The commune centers two core components: an anti-individualistic

collective bond and a concomitant radical transformation of everyday

life. In liberal ideology, which is grounded in the capitalist

marketplace, human community is reduced to unmoored individuals who are

forever in competition. In the face of this atomization, communes are

formed around the desire to carry out collective projects. Communes

arise when we transform our relationships with each other and face the

world together. As the Invisible Committee defines it, “what constitutes

the commune is the mutual oath sworn . . . to stand together as a body .

. . a commune was a pact to face the world together. It meant relying on

one’s own shared powers as the source of one’s freedom. What was aimed

for in this case was not an entity; it was a qualitative bond, and a way

of being in the world.”[2] Communes construct community out of isolation

and replace individualism with collective self-determination and

well-being. They form when groups of individuals attempt to directly

“communize” their lives (put them in common) and face the problems of

the world together.

Although capitalism has colonized every aspect of our lives, it is

possible to resist and collectively establish alternatives. As radical

geographer Alexander Vasudevan puts it in his book on squatting in

Berlin, “the squat was a place of collective world-making; a place to

imagine alternative worlds. . . . At stake here was the opportunity to

build an alternative habituswhere the very practice of ‘occupation’

became the basis for producing a different sense of shared city

life.”[3] Accordingly, the Invisible Committee argues that communes

“immediately organize a shared form of life” according to alternative

values.[4] As one activist put it, “Aspiring [to] autonomy means first

of all to struggle against political and moral alienation in life and

work. . . . It means to reclaim our lives.”[5] Further, as the historian

of autonomous movements George Katsiaficas explains, “the Autonomen seek

to live according to a new set of norms and values within which everyday

life and all of civil society can be transformed. Beginning with overt

political beliefs, they seek to change isolated individuals into members

of collectives within which egalitarian relationships can be created. .

. . Their collective forms negate atomization.”[6] The Autonomen

organized around those collective values and everyday practices rather

than a rigid ideology or party-line.

The Autonomen approached everyday life according to their values of

self-determination, equality, and autonomy. Drawing from Italian

Autonomia and the German autonomous women’s movement, they employed a

“politics of the first person,” rather than a Marxist orientation

towards the proletariat or an anti-imperialist one for Third World

national liberation.[7] In line with this foundational belief,

autonomous activists emphasized self-determination within subcultures

over traditional workplace struggle, embraced a “vague anarchism,” and

called for “no power to no one.” Although they critiqued the

“alternative movement” for its willingness to exist alongside

capitalism, they emphasized the need to build alternative worlds that

would form a basis to fight against the ruling order. The Autonomen

organized themselves organically in small, non-hierarchical groups that

faced everyday problems collectively and came together for larger

actions. They sought to establish the possibility and reality of an

autonomous, lived communism.

2. The Spatial and Cultural Production of Communes

“Every declared commune calls a new geography into existence around it.”

– The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends (229)

Communes challenge the spatial order of the capitalist world, establish

an inhabited territoriality, and provide a setting for experimental

spatial practices. Social space is important to contest because it

performs an important material and ideological function for liberalism.

As the Invisible Committee explain, “We inherit from modernity a

conception of space as an empty, uniform, and measurable expanse where

objects, creatures, or landscapes occupy their place. But the sensible

world does not present itself to us in that way. Space is not neutral. .

. . Places are irreducibly loaded—with stories, impressions,

emotions.”[8] Capitalist space presents itself as a non-political,

static stage upon which the narrative events of history take place. But

neoliberalism has fragmented the space of capitalism, and the Invisible

Committee identifies a “new spatial ordering of the world.” In their

most recent work, they posit fragmentation as the defining feature of

contemporary social life, arguing that “we are the contemporaries of a

prodigious reversal of the process of civilization into a process of

fragmentation.”[9] Fragmentation occurs on every level: Fordism becomes

post-Fordism; the modern capitalist spatial organization of cities

splinters; the last vestiges of collectivity, sociality, and non-market

values are destroyed as humanity fragments into the “Needy Opportunists”

who interact through screens. This fragmentation provides the situation

with which communes engage. Communes challenge fragmentation while

mobilizing it for their own aims towards a new, inhabited spatiality.

Against the fragmented, unmoored movement of capital, communes propagate

a logic of inhabitation. Over the course of centuries, capital has

become increasingly detached from physical territory. Against capitalist

abstraction,

the commune regards itself first of all as a concrete, situated rupture

with the overall order of the world. The commune inhabits its

territory—that is, it shapes it just as much as the territory offers it

a dwelling place and a shelter. It forms the necessary ties there, it

thrives on its memory, it finds a meaning, a language, in the land. . .

An intensely inhabited territory ends up becoming an affirmation in

itself, an articulation, an expression of the life that’s lived

there.[10]

Inhabitation of communes aims to make territory impenetrable to dominant

power. By increasing the number of free spaces, deepening the

connections and circulations between them, and overcoming our reliance

on capitalist infrastructure, “the territory becomes unreadable, opaque

to authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the

territory.”[11] This is a diametrically opposed orientation to space

from that of liberalism and capitalism.

Communes propagate an autonomous logic of geography and cartography. The

territory of communes cultivates variety and fertility in place of the

bleak monotony of capitalist space. Reading the Invisible Committee’s

description of communal geography, we may appropriate the Zapatista

slogan and call for “a world in which many geographies fit”:

Every declared commune calls a new geography into existence around it,

and sometimes even at a distance from it. Where there had only been a

uniform territory, a plain where everything was interchangeable, in the

greyness of generalized equivalence, it raises up a chain of mountains,

a whole variegated relief with passes, peaks, incredible pathways

between friendly things, and forbidding precipitous terrain between

enemy things. Nothing is simple anymore, or is simple in a different

way. Every commune creates a political territory that extends out and

ramifies as it grows. [12]

Communes thus call into being new communist geographies that are defined

by a variety of collective forms of life. Vasudevan calls alternative

spaces of everyday life “an expanded counter-geography through which

alternative support networks were created, friendships made, and

solidarities secured.”[13] Communes thus form new geographies of

possibility and non-capitalist relationality.

Commune inhabitants experiment with new collective spatial practices.

Squatting enables practices of creative architecture and

self-determination of living space that facilitates new forms of life.

As Vasudevan explains, occupying dilapidated buildings “offered the

potential for squatters to cultivate new forms of sociality and, in so

doing, reconcile a ruinous artefact of urban modernity with alternative

expressions of human collectivity. . . . Squatters responded to

normative assumptions about living and the ‘home’ through the

questioning of its more basic spatialities.”[14] For instance, squatters

re-engineered buildings to produce enlarged communal space:

[W]alls were removed in order to increase the size of social spaces

while stairwells were created to produce a new geography of movement

through the building, now connected and held together by an interspatial

network of doors, passageways, courtyards, and vestibules. These

experiments with the built form became a key process for exploring a new

micro-politics of alignment, interdependency, and connection.[15]

The spatial construction of communal life offers a chance to practice

new forms of relationships with each other in an everyday communism of

equality, autonomy, and democracy. Thus, “it is the very performance of

architecture itself that has become, in this context, a key source of

inspiration for a whole host of self-organized and collective everyday

practices.”[16] This collective performance transforms its participants.

Collectively building radical spaces produces what we may call a new,

autonomous form of life.

Beyond architectural transformation, the internal world of squatted

communes is organized to facilitate the construction of alternative

modes of being. Life itself is structured differently within a commune:

the very fact of group living forces previously atomized humans into

contact with each other in daily life. As an open letter from the Berlin

squatters council puts it, “when we occupied [buildings], it was not

only for preserving living space. But we also wanted to live and work

together again. We want to put a stop to the process of isolation and

destruction of collective living. Who in this city is not aware of the

torturing loneliness and emptiness of everyday life?”[17]

Communes often organize themselves around collective spaces. Most

important, many squatters argue, is the kitchen, which operates “as the

key ‘socio-spatial centre of the house.”[18] Collectively running a

kitchen makes several political interventions. First, it combats the

gendered division of labor that relies on women to cook for men. Second,

it connects food with community: collective meals establish a connection

between people, as well as with the food they eat. Finally, “outside”

political life is enhanced. As one squatter puts it, “[P]olitics assumes

an entirely different relation to everyday life when last night’s

meetings are discussed over breakfast. Not only is the movement’s

progress accelerated, but truly important issues, ones which are lost in

the shuffle when we live in isolation, are topics of immediate concern

and action.”[19] Collective kitchens are but one example of radical uses

of space.

Perhaps even more important for the Autonomen was the function of the

squatted commune as a space of cultural production. Subculture, not

work, was the driving force of everyday life. As a document of

autonomous theses stresses, “we have not found one another at the

workplace. Engaging in wage labor is an exception for us. We have found

one another through punk, the ‘scene,’ and the subculture we move

in.”[20] Squats provided space for cultural activity controlled by the

movement. In the KuKuCK squat, for instance, “fifty people lived in a

complex that included three stages, performance areas for ten theater

groups, practice rooms for five bands, a studio, a café, and an auto

repair shop.”[21] Squats were also covered in beautiful art that hinted

at the fertility inside. Finally, the Autonomen produced collective

identity in the streets. Marching in black bloc produces a sense of

exhilarating comradery between accomplices and gives a shared identity

to the movement: “[T]he black leather jackets worn by many people at

demonstrations and the black flags carried by others signaled less an

ideological anarchism than a style of dress and behavior—symbols of a

way of life that made contempt for the established institutions and

their U.S. ‘protectors’ into a virtue. . . . Black became the color of

the political void—of the withdrawal of allegiance to parties,

governments, and nations.”[22] Writing in a similar context, anarchist

anthropologist David Graeber stresses the connection between punk and

street actions in his ethnography of the North American anarchist scene.

He quotes an activist who explains that

[i]n a mosh pit at a punk or hardcore show, all the kids are going nuts,

all together, stage diving, circle pits, crowd surfing, asshole bouncers

twice your size, so you develop a feel for space, for fluid motion and

action. Linking arms to force a wedge through police lines at an action

is just like forcing your way to the front of a crowd at a show with

slow steady pressure. It’s not that all Black Bloc’ers are punk rockers,

or vice versa, but when the Black Bloc’er leapt over the heads of riot

police at the navy memorial during George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001

to escape arrest, he was just stage diving and body surfing.[23]

3. Living Communism

“The real communist question is not ‘how to produce,’ but ‘how to

live.’”

– The Invisible Committee, Now (154)

Autonomists act on the desire to experience communism today, in our

everyday lives, even within the bleak world of capitalism. Rather than

naive nostalgia for the world we have lost, the Invisible Committee

invites us to embrace fragmentation and fight where we stand: “One can

deplore [fragmentation] and try to swim back up the river of time, but

one can also begin from there and see how to proceed.”[24] Fragmentation

brings numerous problems of which we are all too aware, including

atomization, alienation, and isolation. But it also brings new

possibilities, for “with the endless fragmentation of the world there is

a vertiginous increase in the qualitative enrichment of life, and a

profusion of forms—for someone who thinks about the promise of communism

it contains.”[25] Fragmentation leads to the possibility of the good

life within the fragments of the world that we come to inhabit and

control. Indeed, “in the fragmentation there is something that points

toward what we call ‘communism.’”[26] In a fragmented world, bringing

people and places into contact becomes ever more crucial. As the

Invisible Committee puts it, “[T]he thing to do, it would seem, is to

leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards

forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between

the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been

anything else than loving each other.”[27] Ultimately, this means living

communism now, in our practices, gestures, and relationships.

Challenging traditional Marxist and anarchist conceptions of communism

that focus solely on seizing the means of production, the Invisible

Committee highlights a communism of everyday life. For them, communism

does not exist someday in the future; it is not just an ideal to

struggle towards but is instead something to live and practice. Indeed,

“it’s not a question of fighting for communism. What matters is the

communism that is lived in the fight itself.”[28] This is not an

anarchistic prefigurative politics that models the world in which we

hope to someday live; instead, we must live communism now, in today’s

conditions and struggles. Communism is to be practiced in each of our

actions and relations. “Communism does not hinge on self-renunciation

but on the attention given to the smallest action. It’s a question of

our plane of perception and hence of our way of doing things. A

practical matter.”[29] It is an affirmative response to the horrors of

life under capitalism. This is why “we need to give the same care to the

smallest everyday details of our shared life as we give to the

revolution,” and “the first duty of revolutionaries is to take care of

the worlds they constitute.”[30] Communism is a question of the everyday

practices of healthy community, not solely of the organization of

production. The goal of communism is not just socialization of the means

of production or the “superior economic organization of society,” but

rather “it is the great health of forms of life. This great health is

obtained through a patient re-articulation of the disjoined members of

our being, in touch with life.”[31]

We should be clear, however, that possessing the means to produce

non-commodified goods—and life itself—is crucial to living communism.

The Invisible Committee is perhaps too eager to distance themselves from

the traditional Left, so they underemphasize the importance of the means

of production. They do, however, recognize the importance of controlling

the production of our own means of life. In their discussion of

blockading infrastructure, they concede that “a blockade is only as

effective as the insurgents’ capacity to supply themselves and to

communicate, as effective as the self-organization of the different

communes. How will we feed ourselves once everything is paralyzed? . . .

Acquiring the skills to provide, over time, for one’s own basic

subsistence implies appropriating the necessary means of its

production.”[32] But the Invisible Committee encourages establishing our

own means of production rather than expropriating those of capitalism.

For the problem is that

capital has taken hold of every detail and every dimension of existence…

In doing so, it has reduced to very little the share of things in this

world that one might want to reappropriate. Who would wish to

reappropriate nuclear power plants, Amazon’s warehouses, the

expressways, ad agencies, high-speed trains, Dassault, La Defense

business complex, auditing firms, nanotechnologies, supermarkets and

their poisonous merchandise? . . . No one with any sense. [33]

While the Invisible Committee perhaps overstates it, this line of

reasoning is compelling. What might it look like to establish our own

infrastructure as the basis of constructing alternative worlds?

4. Alternative Infrastructure

“A revolutionary movement is not just a result of ‘objective

conditions’: it is the result of the structures we are able to build.”

– Arbeitskreis Politische Okonomie, quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames

(89–90)

The Invisible Committee locates contemporary power in infrastructure.

Power resides in the material functioning of the world, the networks of

just-in-time production, and the unending flows of commodities, people,

and ideas. Thus, “in the era of networks, governing means ensuring the

interconnection of people, objects, and machines as well as the

free—i.e., transparent and controllable—circulation of information that

is generated in this manner.”[34] The consequences of this are far

ranging, but two implications are particularly relevant here. First,

power’s location within infrastructure makes it vulnerable to attack.

Sabotage, blockage of infrastructural projects and disruption of flows

immediately limits power’s ability to manage the world.[35] Second, our

ability to construct counter-infrastructure of our own takes on new

importance. Alternative infrastructure takes many forms, from collective

houses and squats to community gardens, women’s health clinics, and free

schools.[36] Construction of alternative infrastructure becomes itself

an affirmative attack on capitalist power—or, as the Invisible Committee

prefers, a destitution of power—and provides the base for sabotage and

other assaults. But perhaps most importantly, alternative infrastructure

provides the space in which it is possible to live communism. It

establishes the conditions within which we may live differently, relate

to each other in new ways, and fully inhabit our lives in connection

with the earth. Yet both the Autonomen and the Invisible Committee have

a fraught relationship with alternative institutions and infrastructure.

They are to be used and exploited for revolutionary purposes but also

critiqued and radicalized.

The Autonomen were based in the alternative movement’s infrastructure as

well as networks of squatted buildings that they directly controlled.

Throughout the 1970s, networks of radical spaces were established to

support the movement. As one Autonomen member known by the pen name

Geronimo explains, “in the beginning, many of the alternative projects

saw themselves as everyday support structures for the general political

struggle: left-wing bookstores, bars, cafes, print shops, etc.”[37]

Alternative activists believed in the “strong ‘utopian’ element: all of

these projects should provide tangible examples of a future socialist

society established in the midst of capitalism. In this sense, the

beginning of the alternative movement was strongly connected to the

autonomous impulse of rejecting wage labor and resistance in everyday

life.”[38] This developed into the central strategic commitment to

squatting. As a group called Proletarian Front put it, “to squat means

to destroy the capitalist plot for our neighborhoods. It means to refuse

rent and the capitalist shoe box structure. It means to build communes

and community centers. It means to recognize the social potential of

each neighborhood. It means to overcome helplessness. In squatting and

in rent strikes we can find the pivotal point of anticapitalist

struggles outside of the factory.”[39] Alternative infrastructure thus

provided a new world for its inhabitants—one based in solidarity,

self-determination, and equality. It was seen by many activists as both

communism in action and as the foundation upon which anti-capitalist

struggle was based.

However, the alternative movement began to emphasize the importance of

alternative infrastructure for its own sake, especially as the West

German working class largely continued to accept the payoffs of social

democracy rather than revolt. The Autonomen were clear that although

they “use the alternative movement’s infrastructure . . . our ideas are

very different from those of the alternative movement. . . . We are

aware that capitalism is using the alternative scene to create a new

cycle of capital and labor, both by providing employment for unemployed

youth and as a testing field for solving economic problems and pacifying

social tensions.”[40] As time went on, alternative institutions were

progressively pacified and integrated into the capitalist economy. The

Invisible Committee is also critical of the alternative or “solidarity”

economy. They write in 2014, soon after the movements of the squares

(the Spanish indignados, Greek anti-austerity protests, and Occupy Wall

Street in the US), of a recent proliferation of networks of cooperatives

that respond—inadequately—to a desire to escape the capitalist order of

the world and the alienation of wage labor.[41]

At their best, cooperatives support social movements by providing a

concrete alternative to traditional capitalist economic organization.

Yet cooperatives as such pose no threat to capitalism, and indeed the

most successful of them often become like any other capitalist business.

Instead of thinking in terms of economic production for the market, we

should approach the alternative economy in terms of needs, use, and

complicity. The commune, the Invisible Committee says, “seeks to

dissolve the question of needs. It seeks to break all economic

dependence and all political subjugation. . . . The commune addresses

needs with a view to annihilating the being of need within us.”[42] The

correct orientation towards cooperatives is thus to use their equipment,

host meetings in their spaces, commandeer production to fulfill the

needs of the movement, and so on. In any case, “the fact remains that we

must organize ourselves, organize on the basis of what we love to do,

and provide ourselves the means to do it.”[43] Communes can also connect

the networks of the solidarity economy and push them to replace power’s

control of infrastructure.

The commune coordinates networks of cooperatives in order to build our

capacity to exist autonomously. It “is what brings all the economic

communities into communication with each other, what runs through and

overflows them; it is the link that thwarts their self-centering

tendency.”[44] The creation of new institutions is meant to suppress the

institutions of capitalist state power: “Withdrawing from the

institutions is anything but leaving a void, it’s suppressing them in a

positive way. To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution,

but to attack the need we have of it.”[45] Used correctly, alternative

institutions become weapons of destitution and replace our dependence on

established power with an organic dependence on each other. Liberated

territory proliferates via movement of people, ideas, and things between

communes.

5. Secession, Attack, and Insurrection

“Escape, but while escaping look for a weapon.”

– Gilles Deleuze, quoted in The Invisible Committee, Now (80)

Rather than orienting towards seizing and wielding power, networks of

communes attempt to secede from power’s grasp and destitute its

institutions. Secession does not mean establishing new borders but

instead practicing communist forms of life and promoting

counter-circulation between a growing archipelago of autonomous

territories.

Seceding means inhabiting a territory, assuming our situated

configuration of the world, our way of dwelling there, the form of life

and the truths that sustain us, and from there entering into conflict or

complicity. So it means linking up strategically with other zones of

dissidence, intensifying our circulations with friendly regions,

regardless of borders. To secede is. . . to trace out a different,

discontinuous geography, an intensive one, in the form of an

archipelago.[46]

This is how communism is built on a large scale. Territory is inhabited

and controlled, the people living within this archipelago of liberated

territory establish contact and material links between themselves, learn

to provide for their needs, and establish liberated relationships with

each other and the land. The means of existence are appropriated and/or

collectively constructed. Organic gardens and farms are established to

directly feed people, free clinics to heal the sick, and worker

cooperatives to produce for the needs of the community rather than

profit. The material construction of another world deprives capitalist

state power of its capacity to manage and control us. This is ultimately

what the Invisible Committee means by destitution, by “becoming

ungovernable.”[47] Secession happens not just in isolated rural

communes, but in the hearts of cities, in small college towns, and in

the connections between communes everywhere.

Dominant power knows its vulnerability, however, and communes cannot

secede without a fight. The struggle against capitalist state power is

based in the communal territories. Communes are not only centers of

alternative life but also bases of liberated territory from which to

attack the state and capitalism. Attack is an affirmative component of

revolutionary life. As one autonomous activist puts it, “[W]herever

people begin to sabotage the political, moral, and technical structures

of domination, an important step toward a self-determined life has been

made.”[48] Destitution attacks and suppresses capitalist state power

while constructing a new world. The Invisible Committee frames it like

this:

[T]he revolutionary gesture no longer consists in a simple violent

appropriation of this world; it divides into two. On the one hand, there

are worlds to be made, forms of life made to grow apart from what

reigns, including by salvaging what can be salvaged from the present

state of things, and on the other, there is the imperative to attack, to

simply destroy the world of capital. . . it’s clear that the worlds one

constructs can maintain their apartness from capital only together with

the fact of attacking it and conspiring against it. . . . Only an

affirmation has the potential for accomplishing the work of destruction.

The destituent gesture is thus desertion and attack, creation and

wrecking, and all at once, in the same gesture.[49]

We must connect destruction with creation, attack the world of

capitalist state power as we build our own, and defend ourselves while

escaping from capital. This is the work of destitution.

As power resides in and works through infrastructure, sabotaging or

otherwise attacking infrastructure becomes central to revolutionary

political practice. Given the development of post-Fordist just-in-time

production, blocking infrastructure and circulation has become an even

more potent weapon against the capitalist system. Chokepoints can be

targeted by relatively small groups of people whose force can be greatly

multiplied. Charmaine Chua, a theorist of circulation and logistics,

argues that disruptions and blockades of supply chains serve a dual

purpose: not only do they disrupt capitalist circulation/production, but

“we might also envision such episodes of disruption . . . as an ethics

that reproduces other possibilities for communization and community

where capitalist accumulation has left so many excluded.”[50] Alongside

sabotage of already-existing circulation, the blockade of new

infrastructural projects combines sabotage with the construction of

alternative worlds. Blockades were one of the primary weapons of

autonomous groups. In West Germany, the struggle against nuclear power

plants helped constitute the Autonomen. In what activists called the

“Free Republic of Wendland,” which was established in 1980 to block a

nuclear dump site in Gorleben, George Katsiaficas says that “we became

human beings in some essential meaning of the term, sharing food and

living outside the system of monetary exchange. An erotic dimension was

created that simply could not be found in normal interaction.

Wendlanders lived together not only to build a confrontation but also to

create a space for autonomous self-government through political

discussion.”[51] In this way, each attack is simultaneously the creation

of a new world, and vice versa.

Establishing a new world while destroying the old is ultimately a

question of insurrection. This will not necessarily take the form of the

Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace, nor an extended riot measured by

the number of molotovs thrown and streets liberated from police. As the

Invisible Committee says in The Coming Insurrection, “[A]n

insurrectional surge may be nothing more than a multiplication of

communes, their coming into contact and forming of ties.”[52] Liberation

comes through political victories and control of space, not just through

armed confrontation. “Liberate territory from police occupation. . . .

Take up arms. Do everything possible to make their use unnecessary.

Against the army, the only victory is political. . . . When power is in

the gutter, it’s enough to walk over it.”[53] After the more recent

experiences of failed insurrections, the Invisible Committee is more

cautious, warning of the growing appeal of fascism. Thus, they conclude

To Our Friends: “Thinking, attacking, building—such is our fabulous

agenda. This text is the beginning of a plan. See you soon.”[54]

Conclusion

The Autonomen were unable to transcend subcultural marginality in order

to build beyond a certain level. From a brief high point in the 1980s,

when it appeared that the autonomous movements had the potential to

develop into a truly revolutionary force that could challenge the reign

of the state and capitalism, they rapidly disintegrated in the 1990s.

The reasons are numerous, including the world-changing collapse of the

Soviet Union, but perhaps foremost is that the Autonomen were never able

to truly build lasting counter-power or launch a sustained offensive

against capitalist state power. Of course, one could take a more

classical Marxist stance and say that they failed because of their lack

of a working-class base. There is truth in this, but it is useful to

evaluate them on their own terms as well. Though they could win

individual battles with the police, defending squats took up an enormous

amount of energy and resources. Most fell victim to the state’s

carrot-and-stick strategy that offered favorable leases to squats that

agreed to legal regularization and attacked those that resisted with

unrelenting force. The Autonomen were never able to move beyond a

strategic equilibrium into meaningful secession and destitution of

power. Indeed, defending a squat from the police or rioting in the

street does not destitute the power of the police as a state

institution. What, then, would it take to overcome such forms of state

power?

The Invisible Committee is motivated in large part by a desire to

understand the failure of autonomous movements and correct their

mistakes. Thus, they focus not only on living communism but also

thinking seriously about the contemporary nature and form of power and

how to attack and neutralize it. Their answer lies in blockage,

secession, and destitution. In the wake of the 2011–12 movements of the

squares, many recent irruptions have taken these forms, from the

Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD (Zone to Defend: an autonomous zone that

successful blocked construction of an airport in France, one of a dozen

ZADs across the country)[55] to the Olympia railroad blockade[56] and

Occupy ICE actions across the United States over the years. After their

latest book, the Invisible Committee have largely remained silent,

choosing instead to immerse themselves in political work on the ground

within the ZADs. New innovations, as always, will come from struggle

itself.

[1] The Invisible Committee, Now, (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2017),

80. For a helpful introduction to destituent power by Agamben, see “What

is a Destituent Power?” (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,

2014, 32) 65-74. In her translator’s introduction, Stephanie Wakefield

summarizes the concept of destituent power: “In contrast to attempts to

affirm a constituent power independent of a relation to constituted

power, which for Agamben both reproduce the governmental structure of

the exception and represent the apex of metaphysics, destituent power

outlines a force that, in its very constitution, deactivates the

governmental machine. For Agamben, it is in the sensible elaboration of

the belonging together of life and form, being and action, beyond all

relation, that the impasse of the present will be overcome. Ultimately,

Agamben points not only towards what it means to become Ungovernable,

but towards the potential of staying so.”

[2] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, (South Pasadena:

Semiotext(e), 2014), 199-200. (Emphasis in original).

[3] Alexander Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial

Politics of Squatting in Berlin, (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 15.

[4] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 208.

[5] Quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames: A History of the German

Autonomous Movement, (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 115.

[6] George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous

Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, (Oakland: AK

Press, 2006), 195.

[7] “We do not fight for ideology, or for the proletariat, or for ‘the

people.’ We fight for a self-determined life in all aspects of our

existence, knowing that we can only be free if all are free.”

“Autonomous Theses 1981,” quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames, 173.

[8] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 201.

[9] The Invisible Committee, Now, 26.

[10] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 202.

[11] The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, (Los Angeles:

Semiotext(e), 2007, 2009), 108.

[12] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 229.

[13] Alexander Vasudevan, “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the

City: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin, 1968-2012.” In The

City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the

1970s to the Present, edited by Bart Van Der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and

Leendert Van Hoogenhuijze, 131-151. (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 136.

[14] Alexander Vasudevan, “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the

City,” 141.

[15] Alexander Vasudevan, “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the

City,” 141.

[16] Alexander Vasudevan, “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the

City,” 149.

[17] Quoted in George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 95.

[18] Alexander Vasudevan, “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the

City,” 149.

[19] Quoted in George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 175.

[20] “Autonomous Theses 1981,” Fire and Flames, 174.

[21] George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 95.

[22] George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 90.

[23] David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography, (Oakland: AK Press,

2009), 419.

[24] The Invisible Committee, Now, 40.

[25] The Invisible Committee, Now, 44.

[26] The Invisible Committee, Now, 45.

[27] The Invisible Committee, Now, 49.

[28] The Invisible Committee, Now, 80.

[29] The Invisible Committee, Now, 143.

[30] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 164, 194.

[31] The Invisible Committee, Now, 137, 143.

[32] The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 125.

[33] The Invisible Committee, Now, 85.

[34] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 104. Or as they put it

earlier, “[P]ower now resides in the infrastructures of this world.

Contemporary power is of an architectural and impersonal, and not a

representative or personal nature.” Hence, “government is no longer in

the government. … Power, henceforth, is the very order of things, and

the police charged with defending it. … [G]overnment … arranges life

through its instruments and its layouts.” The Invisible Committee, To

Our Friends, 83, 85-86.

[35] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 111, 125.

[36] George Katsiaficas describes the alternative movement as “a

collection of self-managed institutions built up to serve the everyday

needs of the movement. Bookstores, bars, free schools, ecology centers,

food stores, cooperative living groups … and day-care centers.” The

Kreuzberg neighborhood in West Berlin was the epicenter of the movement.

The Subversion of Politics, 102.

[37] Geronimo, Fire and Flames, 61.

[38] Geronimo, Fire and Flames, 61.

[39] Quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames, 53.

[40] “Autonomous Theses 1981,” Fire and Flames, 174.

[41] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 209.

[42] The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 102; The

Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 214-15.

[43] The Invisible Committee, Now, 110-111.

[44] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 210.

[45] The Invisible Committee, Now, 80.

[46] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 184-85.

[47] The Invisible Committee, Now, 81.

[48] Quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames, 115.

[49] The Invisible Committee, Now, 86-88.

[50] Charmaine Chua, “Logistics, Capitalist Circulation, Chokepoints,”

The Disorder of Things, 9 September 2014.

https://thedisorderofthings.com/2014/09/09/logistics-capitalist-circulation-chokepoints/

[51] George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 84.

[52] The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 117.

[53] The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 127-28.

[54] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 239.

[55] See for instance the “Zad Forever” blog which is the central

English-language source of information https://zadforever.blog/

[56] Anonymous Contributor, “Commune Against Civilization: Dispatches

from Olympia Blockade,” It’s Going Down. 20 November 2017.

https://itsgoingdown.org/commune-civilization-dispatches-olympia-blockade/