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Title: To our friends
Author: The Invisible Committe
Date: October 2014
Language: en
Topics: comité invisible, technology, Tarnac 9
Source: Retrieved on March 31st, 2015 from http://bloom0101.org/?parution=to-our-friends and other sources
Notes: Originally published as *À nos amis* in 2014 & translated from the French by Robert Hurley. Images and cover from the https://illwill.com/print/the-invisible-committee-to-our-friends.

The Invisible Committe

To our friends

Dedication

To those for whom the end of a civilization is not the end of the world;

To those who see insurrection first of all as a breach in the organized

reign of stupidity, lies, and confusion;

To those who discern, behind the thick fog of “crisis,” a theater of

operations, maneuvers, strategems—and hence the possibility of a

counterattack;

To those who strike blows;

To those watching for the right moment;

To those looking for accomplices;

To those who are deserting;

To those who keep going;

To those getting organized;

To those wanting to build a revolutionary force, revolutionary because

it’s sensitive;

This modest contribution to an understanding of our time.

To Billy, Guccio, Alexis, and

Jeremy Hammond then,

---

“There is no other world.

There’s just another way to live.”

—Jacques Mesrine

The insurrections have come, finally

[]

The insurrections have come, finally. At such a pace and in so many

countries, since 2008, that the whole structure of this world seems to

be disintegrating, piece by piece. Ten years ago, predicting an uprising

would have exposed you to the snickers of the seated ones; now it’s

those who announce a return to order who make themselves look foolish.

Nothing more solid, more self-assured, we were told, than the Tunisia of

Ben Ali, the busy Turkey of Erdogan, social-democratic Sweden, Ba’athist

Syria, Quebec on tranquilizers, or the Brazil of beaches, the Bolsa

Familia, and peace-keeping police units. We’ve seen what followed.

Stability is finished. In politics, too, they’ve learned to think twice

before awarding a triple A.

An insurrection can erupt at any time, for any reason, and lead

anywhere. The ruling politicians walk among the abysses. Their own

shadows appear to threaten them. ¡Que se vayan todos! was a slogan; it’s

become a common conviction, the basso continuo of the epoch, a rumble

passing from voice to voice, then lifting up like an ax when it’s least

expected. The cleverest of the politicians have made it into a campaign

promise. They don’t have any choice. Incurable disgust, pure negativity,

and absolute refusal are the only discernable political forces of the

moment.

The insurrections have come, but not the revolution. Rarely has one

seen, as we have these past few years, in such a densely-packed

timespan, so many seats of power taken by storm, from Greece to Iceland.

Occupying plazas in the very heart of cities, pitching tents there,

erecting barricades, kitchens, or makeshift shelters, and holding

assemblies will soon be part of the political reflex, like the strike

used to be. It seems that the epoch has even begun to secrete its own

platitudes, like that All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB) which a strange

internationale emblazons on the rough walls of cities, from Cairo to

Istanbul, and Rome to Paris or Rio, with every thrust of revolt.

But however great the disorders in this world may be, the revolution

always seems to choke off at the riot stage. At best, a regime change

satisfies for an instant the need to change the world, only to renew the

same dissatisfaction. At worst, revolution serves as a stepping stone

for those who speak in its name but only think of liquidating it. In

places, France for example, the nonexistence of revolutionary forces

with enough confidence in themselves clears the way for those whose

profession is precisely to feign self-confidence, and offer it up as a

spectacle: the fascists. Helplessness is embittering.

At this point it must be admitted that we revolutionaries have been

defeated. Not because since 2008 we haven’t achieved revolution as an

objective, but because, under a steady barrage of obscurantism, we’ve

lost sight of of revolution as a process. When we fail, we can blame the

whole world, making up all sorts of explanations, even scientific ones,

based on a thousand resentments, or we can question ourselves about the

toeholds which the enemy may have within us that determine the

non-accidental, repeated character of our failures. We might inquire,

for example, as to what remains of leftism among revolutionaries and

whether it disposes them not only to defeat but also to a nearly general

hostility. A certain way of asserting a moral superiority which they

haven’t earned is doubtless a quirk inherited from the left. As is the

presumed ability to decree the right way to live—the way that is truly

progressive, enlightened, modern, correct, deconstructed, and undefiled.

A claim to which anyone coming under its summary banishment among the

reactionaries-conservatives-obscurantists-narrowminds-bumpkins-fogies

will respond with thoughts of murder. Far from creating a distance, the

heated rivalry of revolutionaries with the left only keeps us moored to

its ground. We should cast off!

Since The Coming Insurrection, we’ve gone to the places where the epoch

was inflamed. We’ve read, we’ve fought, we’ve discussed with comrades of

every country and every tendency. Together with them, we’ve come up

against the invisible obstacles of the times. Some of us have died,

others have seen prison. We’ve kept going. We haven’t given up on

constructing worlds or attacking this one. We’ve returned from our stays

abroad with the certainty that we weren’t living through erratic,

separate revolts that were isolated from each other and would still need

to be connected. This is what “news-reporting” constructs and dramatizes

in its calculated management of perceptions, being the work of

counter-insurrection, which begins at that minute scale. We are not

contemporaneous with scattered revolts, but with an unparalleled global

wave of uprisings that intercommunicate imperceptibly. Moved by a

universal desire to be together that only a universal separation can

explain. By a general hatred of the police that expresses a lucid

refusal of the general atomization which the police oversees. The same

anxiety is visible everywhere, the same deep panic, provoking the same

upwellings of dignity, and not indignation. What is happening in the

world since 2008 isn’t an incoherent series of crazy outbursts occurring

suddenly in hermetically sealed countries. It’s a single historical

sequence unfolding in a strict unity of place and time, from Greece to

Chile. And only a distinctly global perspective can capture its

significance. We can’t leave it to the think tanks of capital to spell

out the practical implications of this sequence.

However localized it may be, every insurrection gestures beyond itself;

it contains something global from the outset. It raises us together to

the level of the epoch. But the epoch is also what we find deep within

us, that is, when we’re willing to descend that far, when we immerse

ourselves in what we’re experiencing, seeing, feeling, perceiving.

There’s a way of knowledge in this, and a code of action; there’s also

what explains the underground connection between the pure intensity of

street combat and the unalloyed self-presence of the loner. The epoch

must be sought deep within each situation and deep within each person.

That is where “we” meet up, where real friends are found, scattered over

the globe, but walking the road together.

The conspiracy theorists are counterrevolutionary in one respect at

least; they reserve the privilege of conspiracy exclusively for the

power elite. While it’s obvious that those in power scheme to preserve

and extend their positions, it’s no less certain that there’s conspiracy

everywhere—in building hallways, at the coffee machine, in the back of

kebab houses, at parties, in love affairs, in prisons. Through capillary

channels and on a global scale, all these connections, all these

conversations, all these friendships are forming a historical party in

operation—“our party,” as Marx said. Confronting the objective

conspiracy of the order of things, there is a diffuse conspiracy of

which we are de facto members. But the greatest confusion obtains within

it. Everywhere it turns, our party stumbles over its own ideological

inheritance. It gets caught up in a whole tangle of defeated and defunct

revolutionary traditions, which demand respect nonetheless. But

strategic intelligence comes from the heart and not the brain, and the

problem with ideology is precisely that it forms a screen between

thinking and the heart. To put this differently: we’re obliged to force

open a door to a space we already occupy. The only party to be built is

the one that’s already there. We must rid ourselves of all the mental

clutter that gets in the way of a clear grasp of our shared situation,

our “common terrestritude,” to use Gramsci’s expression. Our inheritance

is not preceded by any will or testament.

Like any advertising slogan, the catchphrase “We are the 99%” owes its

effectiveness not to what it says but to what it doesn’t say. What it

doesn’t say is the identity of the powerful 1%. What characterizes the

1% is not their wealth—in the United States the wealthy are far more

than 1%—it’s not their celebrity—they tend to be discreet, and nowadays

who doesn’t have a right to their fifteen minutes of fame? What

characterizes the 1% is that they are organized. They even organize in

order to organize the lives of others. The truth of this slogan is quite

cruel, and it’s that the number doesn’t matter: one can be 99% and still

be completely dominated. Conversely, the collective lootings of

Tottenham are a sufficient demonstration that one ceases to be poor as

soon as one begins to get organized. There is a considerable difference

between a mass of poor people and a mass of poor people determined to

act together.

Organizing has never meant affiliation with the same organization.

Organizing is acting in accordance with a common perception, at whatever

level that may be. Now, what is missing from the situation is not

“people’s anger” or economic shortage, it’s not the good will of

militants or the spread of critical consciousness, or even the

proliferation of anarchist gestures. What we lack is a shared perception

of the situation. Without this binding agent, gestures dissolve without

a trace into nothingness, lives have the texture of dreams, and

uprisings end up in schoolbooks.

The daily profusion of news, whether alarming or merely scandalous,

shapes our conception of a generally unintelligible world. Its chaotic

look is the fog of war behind which it is rendered unassailable. Its

ungovernable appearance helps to make it governable in reality. There is

the ruse. By adopting crisis management as a technique of government,

capital has not simply replaced the cult of progress with the blackmail

of threatened catastrophe; it has arrogated the strategic intelligence

of the present, the general assessment of the operations that are under

way. This move must be countered. As far as strategy is concerned, it’s

a matter of getting two steps ahead of global governance. There’s not a

crisis that we would need to get out of, there’s a war that we have to

win.

A shared understanding of the situation cannot emerge from one text

alone, but requires an international discussion. And for a discussion to

take place, statements need to be offered, this being one. We have

subjected the revolutionary tradition and positions to the touchstone of

the historical situation and sought to cut the thousand ideal threads

that keep the Gulliver of revolution attached to the ground. We have

groped for the passageways, the gestures, and the thoughts that might

allow us to extract ourselves from the impasse of the present. There’s

no revolutionary movement without a language that can capture the state

we find ourselves in as well as the fissure of possibility running

through it. What follows is a contribution to its elaboration. To that

end, our text is appearing in eight languages and on four continents at

once. If we are everywhere, if we are legion, then we must now organize

ourselves, worldwide.

1: Merry Crisis and Happy New Fear

[Athens, December 2008.]

1. Crisis Is a Mode of Government.

We other revolutionaries are the great cuckolds of modern history. And

one is always complicit in some way with one’s own betrayal. The fact is

painful, so it’s generally denied. We’ve had a blind faith in crisis, a

faith so blind and so enduring that we didn’t see how the liberal order

had made it the centerpiece of its arsenal. Marx wrote in the aftermath

of 1848: “A new revolution is possible only as a result of a new crisis;

but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself.” And indeed he

spent the rest of his days prophetizing, with every spasm of the world

economy, the great final crisis of capital which he would wait for in

vain. There are still Marxists who try to sell us the current crisis as

“The Big One,” and would have us wait a bit longer for their curious

version of the Last Judgement.

“If you want to force a change,” Milton Friedman advised his Chicago

Boys, “set off a crisis.” Far from fearing crises, capital now tries its

hand at producing them experimentally. The way avalanches are

intentionally triggered in order to control their timing and size. The

way plains are set ablaze so that a menacing fire will extinguish itself

there for lack of fuel. “Where and when” is a question of opportuneness

or tactical necessity. It’s public knowledge that shortly after being

appointed, in 2010, the director of the Greek Statistical Authority,

ELSTAT, set about falsifying that country’s debt accounts, making them

look worse as a way of justifying the Troika’s intervention. So it’s a

fact that the “sovereign debt crisis” was launched by a man still on the

official payroll of the IMF, an institution charged with “helping”

countries get out of debt. Here it was a matter of testing out, in a

European country under real conditions, the neoliberal project of a

complete revamping of a society, to measure the effects of a proper

policy of “structural adjustment.”

With its medical connotation, throughout the whole modern period crisis

was that natural thing which arose in an unexpected or cyclical way,

calling for a decision to be made, a decision that would put an end to

the general insecurity of the critical situation. The conclusion would

be fortunate or unfortunate depending on the effectiveness of the

applied medication. The critical moment was also the moment of

critique—the brief interval in which discussion concerning the symptoms

and the medication was opened. That’s no longer the case at present. The

remedy is no longer there to put an end to the crisis. On the contrary,

the crisis is set off with a view to introducing the remedy. They speak

now of “crisis” in regard to what they intend to restructure, just as

they label “terrorists” those they are preparing to strike down. The

“crisis of the banlieues” in France in 2005 thus served to announce the

biggest urban-planning offensive of the last thirty years against the

so-called “banlieues,” orchestrated directly by the Ministry of the

Interior.

The crisis discourse of the neoliberals is a variety of doublespeak.

Among themselves they prefer to speak of a “double truth.” On one hand,

crisis is the invigorating moment of “creative destruction,” creating

opportunities, innovation, and entrepreneurs of whom only the best, most

highly motivated, and most competitive will survive. “Deep down that is

probably the message of capitalism: ‘creative destruction’—the scrapping

of old technologies and old ways of doing things for the new is the only

way to raise average living standards […] Capitalism creates a

tug-of-war within each of us. We are alternately the aggressive

entrepreneur and the couch potato, who subliminally prefers the lessened

competitive stress of an economy where all participants have equal

incomes,” writes Alan Greenspan, chairman of the American Federal

Reserve from 1987 to 2006. On the other hand, the discourse of crisis

intervenes as a political method for managing populations. The

continuous restructuring of everything—social welfare and organigrams,

companies and urban districts—is the only way to ensure the

non-existence of the opposing party, through a constant disruption of

the conditions of existence. The rhetoric of change is used to dismantle

every custom, to break all ties, to unsettle every certainty, to

discourage every solidarity, to maintain a chronic existential

insecurity. It corresponds to a strategy that can be formulated in these

terms: “Use a continuous crisis to avert any actual crisis.” On the

everyday level, this is akin to the well-known counter-insurgency

practice of “destabilizing in order to stabilize,” which, for the

authorities, consists in deliberately producing chaos so as to make

order more desirable than revolution. From micromanagement to the

management of whole countries, the population is kept in a kind of

constant trauma. The resulting stupefaction and dereliction mean that

the managers can do more or less what they want with each and everyone.

The mass depression currently afflicting the Greeks is the deliberate

product of the Troika’s policy, and not its collateral effect.

If some commentators made fools of themselves by hastily proclaiming the

“death of neoliberalism” with the explosion of the subprime swindle,

it’s because they failed to understand that the “crisis” was not an

economic phenomenon but a political technique of government. We’re not

experiencing a crisis of capitalism but rather the triumph of crisis

capitalism. “Crisis” means: government is growing. Crisis has become the

ultima ratio of the powers that be. Modernity measured everything in

relation to the past backwardness it claimed to be rescuing us from; now

everything is measured in relation to its impending collapse. When the

salaries of Greek civil servants are reduced by half, it’s while

pointing out that one could just as well no longer pay them at all.

Every time the period of pension contribution of French wage earners is

lengthened, the rationale has to do with “saving the retirement system.”

The present crisis, permanent and omnilateral, is no longer the classic

crisis, the decisive moment. On the contrary, it’s an endless end, a

lasting apocalypse, an indefinite suspension, an effective postponement

of the actual collapse, and for that reason a permanent state of

exception. The current crisis no longer promises anything; on the

contrary, it tends to free whoever governs from every constraint as to

the means deployed.

2. The Real Catastrophe Is Existential and Metaphysical.

Epochs are proud. Each one claims to be unique. Our own prides itself on

bringing about the historical collision of a planetary ecological

crisis, a generalized crisis of democracies, and an inexorable energy

crisis, the whole being crowned by a creeping global economic crisis,

but “unmatched for the last hundred years.” And this affirms and

heightens our pleasure at living through an epoch like no other. But one

only has to open the newspapers from the 1970s, or read the Club of Rome

report on the Limits to Growth from 1972, the article by the

cybernetician Gregory Bateson on “The Roots of Ecological Crisis” from

March 1970, or The Crisis of Democracy published in 1975 by the

Trilateral Commission, to see that we’ve been living under the dark star

of integral crisis at least since the begining of the 1970s. A text from

1972 such as Giogio Cesarono’s Apocalypse and Revolution already

analyzes it lucidly. So if the seventh seal was opened at a precise

moment, it certainly wasn’t yesterday.

At the end of 2012, the highly official American Centers for Disease

Control circulated a graphic novel for a change. Its title: Preparedness

101: Zombie Apocalypse. The idea is simple: the population must be

prepared for any eventuality, a nuclear or natural catastrophe, a

general breakdown of the system or an insurrection. The document

concludes by saying: “If you’re ready for a zombie apocalypse then

you’re ready for any emergency.” The zombie figure comes from Haitian

voodoo culture. In American films, masses of rebellious zombies

chronically function as an allegory of the threat of a generalized

insurrection by the black proletariat. So that is clearly what people

must be prepared for. Now that there’s no longer any Soviet threat to

Wield as a way to ensure the psychotic cohesion of the citizens,

anything will do to make sure the population is ready to defend

itself—that is,defend the system. Maintaining an endless fear to

forestall a frightful end.

All of Western false consciousness is compressed into this official

comic strip. It’s plain to see that the real living dead are the petty

bourgeois of the American suburbs. Obvious that the dull concern with

survival, the economic worry about not having enough, the feeling of

having an unsustainable form of life, is not something that will come

after the catastrophe, but what already drives the desperate struggle

for life of each individual in a neoliberal regime. Defeated life is not

what threatens but what is already there, day after day. Everyone sees

it, everyone knows it and feels it. The Walking Dead are the salary men.

If this epoch is crazy about apocalyptic dramatizations, which make up a

large share of film production, there’s more involved than the aesthetic

enjoyment which the distraction authorizes. Besides, John’s Revelation

already has a whole Hollywood-style phantasmagoria with its air attacks

by furious angels, its horrendous floods, its spectacular scourges. Only

universal destruction, the death of everything, comes close to giving

the suburban employee the feeling he’s alive, since he’s the least alive

of all the creatures. “To hell with it all” and “let’s pray that it

lasts” are the two sighs heaved alternately by the same civilized

distress. An old Calvinist taste for mortification has a part in this:

life is a reprieve, never a plenitude. The discussions of “European

nihilism” were not vain talk. Indeed, nihilism is an article that’s been

exported so successfully that the world is now saturated with it. As

regards “neoliberal globalization,” one could say that what we now have

above all is the globalization of nihilism.

In 2007 we wrote that “what we are faced with is not the crisis of a

society but the extinction of a civilization.” At the time, this kind of

statement got you taken for an Illuminatus. But “the crisis” has gone

down that path. And even ATTAC acknowledges a “crisis of

civilization”—which goes to show. More dramatically, an American veteran

of the Iraq war turned “strategy” consultant, wrote in the autumn of

2013 in the New York Times: “Now, when I look into our future, I see

water rising up to wash out lower Manhattan. I see food riots,

hurricanes, and climate refugees. I see 82^(nd) Airborne soldiers

shooting looters. I see grid failure, wrecked harbors, Fukushima waste,

and plagues. I see Baghdad. I see the Rockaways underwater. I see a

strange, precarious world […] The biggest problem climate change poses

isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or

how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we

should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius,

signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest

problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this

civilization is already dead.” In the days after the First World War it

still only called itself “mortal,” which it certainly was, in every

sense of the word.

In reality, the end of civilization has been clinically established for

a century, and countersigned by events. Expatiating on the matter is now

nothing but a means of distraction. But it’s a distraction from the

catastrophe there in front of us, and that has been there for a long

time, from the catastrophe that we are, the catastrophe that the West

is. That catastrophe is existential, affective, and metaphysical first

of all. It resides in Western man’s incredible estrangement from the

world, an estrangement that demands, for example, that he become the

master and possessor of nature—one only seeks to possess what one fears.

It’s not for nothing that he has placed so many screens between himself

and the world. By cutting himself off from what exists, Western man has

made it into this desolate expanse, this dreary, hostile, mechanical,

absurd nothingness which he must ceaselessly devastate, through his

labor, his cancerous activism, his shallow hysterical agitation.

Relentlessly driven from euphoria to stupor and from stupor to euphoria,

he tries to remedy his absence from the world through a whole

accumulation of expertise, prostheses, and relations, a whole

technological hardware store that is ultimately disappointing. He’s more

and more visibly that overequipped existentialist who can’t stop

engineering everything, recreating everything, unable as he is to bear a

reality that is completely beyond him. As that moron, Camus, blandly

admitted, “For a man, understanding the world means reducing it to the

human, stamping it with his seal.” He tries humbly to re-enchant his

divorce from existence, from himself, from “other people”—that hell!—by

calling it his “freedom,” when it’s not by resorting to dismal parties,

stupid entertainments, or heavy drug use. Life is effectively,

affectively, absent for him, because life repels him. Deep down, it

nausetes him. He’s managed to protect himself from everything reality

contains that is unstable, irreducible, palpable, corporal, weighty,

hot, or fatiguing by projecting it onto the ideal, visual, distant, and

digitized plane of the Internet, where there’s no friction or tears, no

death or odors.

The falsity of the entire Western apocalyptic consists in projecting

onto the world the mourning we’re not able to do in regard to it. It’s

not the world that is lost, it’s we who have lost the world and go on

losing it. It’s not the world that is going to end soon, it’s we who are

finished, amputated, cut-off, we who refuse vital contact with the real

in a hallucinatory way. The crisis is not economic, ecological, or

political, the crisis is above all that of presence. To such a point

that the must of commodities—the iPhone and the Hummer being exemplary

cases—consists in a sophisticated absence outfit. On the one hand, the

iPhone concentrates all the possible accesses to the world and to others

in a single object. It is the lamp and the camera, the mason’s level and

the musician’s recording device, the TV and the compass, the tourist

guide and the means of communication; on the other, it is the prosthesis

that bars any openness to what is there and places me in a regime of

constant, convenient semi-presence, retaining a part of my being-there

in its grip. They’ve even launched a smartphone app designed to remedy

the fact that “our 24/7 connection to the digital world disconnects us

from the real world around us.” It is brightly called the GPS for the

Soul. As for the Hummer, it’s the possibility of transporting my

autistic bubble, my impermeability to everything, into the most

inaccessible recesses of “nature” and coming back intact. That Google

has declared the “fight against death” to be a new industrial horizon

shows how one can be mistaken about what life is.

At the apex of his insanity, Man has even proclaimed himself a

“geological force,” going so far as to give the name of his species to a

phase of the life of the planet: he’s taken to speaking of an

“anthropocene.” For the last time, he assigns himself the main role,

even if it’s to accuse himself of having trashed everything—the seas and

the skies, the ground and what’s underground—even if it’s to confess his

guilt for the unprecedented extinction of plant and animal species. But

what’s remarkable is that he continues relating in the same disastrous

manner to the disaster produced by his own disastrous relationship with

the world. He calculates the rate at which the ice pack is disappearing.

He measures the extermination of the non-human forms of life. As to

climate change, he doesn’t talk about it based on his sensible

experience—a bird that doesn’t return in the same period of the year, an

insect whose sounds aren’t heard anymore, a plant that no longer flowers

at the same time as some other one. He talks about it scientifically

with numbers and averages. He thinks he’s saying something when he

establishes that the temperature will rise so many degrees and the

precipitation will decrease by so many inches or millimeters. He even

speaks of “biodiversity.” He observes the rarefaction of life on earth

from space. He has the hubris to claim, paternally, to be “protecting

the environment,” which certainly never asked for anything of the sort.

All this has the look of a last bold move in a game that can’t be won.

The objective disaster serves mainly to mask another disaster, this one

more obvious still and more massive. The exhaustion of natural resources

is probably less advanced than the exhaustion of subjective resources,

of vital resources, that is afflicting our contemporaries. If so much

satisfaction is derived from surveying the devastation of the

environment it’s largely because this veils the shocking destruction of

interiorities. Every oil spill, every sterile plain, every species

extinction is an image of our souls in shreds, a reflection of our

absence from the world, of our personal inability to inhabit it.

Fukushima offers the spectacle of this complete failure of man and his

mastery, which only produces ruins—and those Japanese plains, intact in

appearance but where no one can live for decades. A never-ending

decomposition that is finishing the job of making the world

uninhabitable: the West will have ended up borrowing its mode of

existence from what it fears the most—radioactive waste.

When one asks the left of the left what the revolution would consist in,

it is quick to answer: “placing the human at the center.” What that left

doesn’t realize is how tired of the human the world is, how tired of

humanity we are—of that species that thought it was the jewel of

creation, that believed it was entitled to ravage everything since

everything belonged to it. “Placing the human at the center” was the

Western project. We know how that turned out. The time has come to jump

ship, to betray the species. There’s no great human family that would

exist separately from each of its worlds, from each of its familiar

universes, each of the forms of life that are strewn across the earth.

There is no humanity, there are only earthlings and their enemies, the

Occidentals, of whatever skin color they happen to be. We other

revolutionaries, with our atavistic humanism, would do well to inform

ourselves about the uninterrupted uprisings by the indigenous peoples of

Central and South America over the past twenty years. Their watchword

could be “Place the earth at the center.” It’s a declaration of war

against Man. Declaring war on him could be the best way to bring him

back down to earth, if only he didn’t play deaf, as always.

3. The Apocalypse Disappoints

On December 21, 2012, no fewer than 300 journalists from 18 countries

invaded the little village of Bugarach in the Aude département of

France. No end of time was ever announced for that date on any Mayan

calendar deciphered so far. The rumor that this village had some slight

connection with that non-existent prophecy was an obvious practical

joke. The television broadcasters dispatched a swarm of reporters to the

place nonetheless. One was curious to see if there really are people who

believe in the end of the world, since we can’t even manage to believe

in that any more, and have the hardest time believing in our own loves.

At Bugarach on that day, there was no one, no one apart from the

numerous celebrants of the spectacle. The reporters were reduced to

talking about themselves, about their pointless wait, their boredom and

the fact that nothing was happening. Caught in their own trap, they

revealed the true face of the end-of-the-world: journalists, waiting,

and events that refuse to happen.

One shouldn’t underestimate the craving for apocalypse, the lust for

Armageddon that permeates the epoch. Its particular existential

pornography involves ogling prefigurative documentaries showing clouds

of computer-animated grasshoppers descending on the Bordeaux vineyards

in 2075, juxtaposed with “climate migrants” storming the southern shores

of Europe—the same migrants that Frontex is already making a point of

decimating. Nothing is older than the end of the world. The apocalyptic

passion has always been favored by the powerless since earliest

antiquity. What is new in our epoch is that the apocalyptic has been

totally absorbed by capital, and placed in its service. The horizon of

catastrophe is what we are currently being governed by. Now, if there is

one thing destined to remain unfulfilled, it’s the apocalyptic prophecy,

be it economic, climatic, terrorist, or nuclear. It is pronounced only

in order to summon the means of averting it, which is to say, most

often, the necessity of government. No organization, whether political

or religious, has ever declared itself defeated because the facts

contradicted its prophecies. Because the purpose of prophecy is never to

be right about the future, but to act upon the present: to impose a

waiting mode, passivity, submission, here and now.

Not only is there no catastrophe to come other than the one that’s

already here, it’s evident that most actual disasters offer an escape

from our daily disaster. Many examples attest to the relief from

existential apocalypse that real disaster brings, from the earthquake

that struck San Francisco in 1906 to Hurricane Sandy that devastated New

York in 2012. One generally assumes that the relations between people in

an emergency situation reveal their deep and eternal bestiality. With

every destructive earthquake, every economic crash and every “terrorist

attack,” one desires to see a confirmation of the old chimera of the

state of nature and its train of uncontrollable violent acts. When the

thin dikes of civilization give way, one would like for the “vile core

of man” that obsessed Pascal to show itself, that “human nature” with

its evil passions—envious, brutal, blind and despicable—which has served

the holders of power as an argument at least since Thucydides.

Unfortunately the fantasy has been disconfirmed by most of the

historically known disasters.

The disappearance of a civilization generally doesn’t take the form of a

chaotic war of all against all. In a situation of extreme catastrophe,

that hostile discourse only serves to justify the priority given to the

defense of property against looting, by the police, the army or, for

lack of anything better, by vigilante militias formed for the occasion.

It can also serve to cover misappropriations by the authorities

themselves, like those of the Italian Civil Protection Department after

the Aquila earthquake. On the contrary, the decomposition of this world,

taken on as such, creates openings for other ways of living, including

in the middle of an “emergency situation.” Consider the inhabitants of

Mexico City in 1985, who, among the ruins of their neighborhoods struck

by a deadly quake, reinvented the revolutionary carnival and the figure

of the superhero serving the people—in the form of a legendary wrestler,

Super Barrio. In the euphoria of regaining control of their urban

existence, they conflated the collapse of buildings with a breakdown of

the political system, releasing the life of the city from the grip of

government as much as possible and starting to rebuild their destroyed

dwellings. An enthusiastic resident of Halifax said something similar

when he declared after the hurricane of 2003: “Everybody woke up the

next morning and everything was different. There was no electricity, all

the stores were closed, no one had access to media. The consequence was

that everyone poured out into the street to bear witness. Not quite a

street party, but everyone out at once—it was a happy feeling to see

everybody even though we didn’t know each other.” The same as with those

miniature communities formed spontaneously in New Orleans in the days

after Katrina, faced with the contempt of the public authorities and the

paranoia of the security agencies, communities that organized daily to

feed and clothe themselves and attend to each other’s needs, even if

this required looting a store or two.

To start with, therefore, rethinking an idea of revolution capable of

interrupting the disastrous course of things is to purge it of every

apocalyptic element it has contained up to now. It is to see that

Marxist eschatology differsonly in that regard from the imperial

founding aspiration of the United States—the one still printed on every

dollar bill: “Annuit coeptis. Novus ordo seclorum.” Socialists,

liberals, Saint-Simonians, and Cold War Russians and Americans have

always expressed the same neurasthenic yearning for the establishment of

an era of peace and sterile abundance where there would no longer be

anything to fear, where the contradictions would finally be resolved and

the negative would be tamed. The dream of a prosperous society,

established through science and industry, one that was totally automated

and finally pacified. Something like an earthly paradise organized on

the model of a psychiatric hospital or a sanitorium. An ideal that can

only come from seriously ill beings who no longer even hope for a

remission. “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens,” the song

says.

The whole originality and the whole scandal of Marxism was to claim that

to reach the millennium it was necessary to pass through the economic

apocalypse, whereas the others judged the latter to be superfluous. We

won’t wait for the millennium or the apocalypse. There will never be

peace on earth. Abandoning the idea of peace is the only real peace.

Faced with the Western catastrophe, the left generally adopts the

position of lamentation, denunciation, and thus helplessness, which

makes it loathsome in the eyes of the very ones it claims to be

defending. The state of exception in which we are living shouldn’t be

denounced, it should be turned back against power itself. We will then

be relieved in our turn of any consideration for the law—in proportion

to the impunity that we claim, and depending on the relative force that

we create. We have an absolutely clear field for any decision, any

initiative, as long as they’re linked to a careful reading of the

situation. For us there is now only a historical battlefield, and the

forces that move upon it. Our range of action is boundless. Historical

life extends her arms to us. There are countless reasons to refuse her,

but they all spring from neurosis. Confronted with the apocalypse in a

recent zombie film, a former United Nations official comes to this

clearheaded conclusion: “It’s not the end, not even close. If you can

fight, fight. Help each other. The war has just begun.”

2: They Want to Oblige Us to Govern. We Won’t Yield to that Pressure

[Oaxaca, 2006.]

1. Characteristic Features of Contemporary Insurrections.

A man dies. He was killed by the police, directly, indirectly. He’s

anyone, an unemployed person, a “dealer” of something or other, a high

school student, in London, Sidi Bouzid, Athens, or Clichy-sous-Bois.

He’s said to be a “young person,” whether he’s 16 or 30. He’s called a

“young person” because he’s socially nil, and because, back when one

became someone on reaching adulthood, the young people were precisely

those who were still nobodies.

A man dies, a country rises up. The one is not the cause of the other,

just the detonator. Alexandros Grigoropoulos, Mark Duggan, Mohamed

Bouazizi, Massinissa Guesma—the name of a dead person became, during

those days, those weeks, the proper name of the general anonymity, of

the shared dispossession. And at its beginning, insurrection is the

doing of those who are nothing, of those who hang out in the cafés, in

the streets, in life, at the university, on the Internet. It coalesces

the whole floating element, plebeian and petty bourgeois, that is

secreted in excess by the continuous disintegration of the social.

Everything regarded as marginal, obsolete, or without prospects returns

to the center. At Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine, Thala, it was the “crazies,”

the “lost souls,” the “good-for-nothings,” the “freaks” who first spread

the news of the death of their companion in misery. They climbed onto

chairs, tables, monuments, in all the public places all over town. Their

tirades stirred everyone willing to listen. Right behind them, there

were the high school students who swung into action, those without any

remaining hope of a career.

The uprising lasts a few days or a few months, and brings about the fall

of the regime or the exposing of every illusion of social peace. It is

itself anonymous: no leader, no organization, no demands, no program.

The slogans, when there are any, seem to reach no farther than the

negation of the existing order, and they are abrupt: “Clear out!,” “The

people want the system to fall!,” “We don’t care about your shit.”

“Tayyip, winter is coming.” On TV, on the airwaves, the authorities

pound out their same old rhetoric: “they’re gangs of çapulcu [looters],

smashers, terrorists out of nowhere, most likely in the pay of foreign

interests.” Those who’ve risen up have no one to put on the throne as a

replacement, perhaps just a question mark instead. It’s not the bottom

dogs, or the working class, or the petty bourgeoisie, or the multitudes

who are rebelling. They don’t form anything homogenous enough to have a

representative. There’s no new revolutionary subject whose emergence had

eluded observers. So if it’s said that the “people” are in the streets

it’s not a people that existed previously, but rather the people that

previously were lacking. It’s not the people that produce an uprising,

it’s the uprising that produces its people, by re-engendering the shared

experience and understanding, the human fabric and the real-life

language that had disappeared. Revolutions of the past promised a new

life. Contemporary insurrections deliver the keys to it. The shifts made

by the Cairo ultras were not those of groups who were revolutionary

before the “revolution.” Before, they were only gangs capable of

organizing against the police. It’s from having played such an important

role during the “revolution” that they were forced by the situation to

raise questions usually reserved for “revolutionaries.” There is where

the event resides: not in the media phenomenon fabricated to exploit the

rebellion through external celebration of it, but in the encounters

actually produced within it. This is something much less spectacular

than “the movement” or “the revolution,” but more decisive. No one can

say what an encounter is capable of generating.

This is how insurrections continue, in a molecular fashion,

imperceptibly, in the life of neighborhoods, collectives, squats,

“social centers,” and singular beings, in Brazil as in Spain, in Chile

as in Greece. Not because they implement a political program but because

they trigger revolutionary becomings. Because what was lived through

shines with such a glow that those who had the experience have to be

faithful to it, not separating off but constructing what was missing

from their lives before. If the Spanish movement of plaza occupations,

once it had disappeared from the media radar screen, had not been

continued in the neighborhoods of Barcelona and elsewhere via a process

of communalization and self-organization, the attempt to destroy the Can

Vies squat in June of 2014 would not have been placed in check by three

days of rioting by the whole Sants district and we would not have seen a

whole city participating in rebuilding the site that was attacked. There

would have been just a few squatters protesting against another eviction

in a climate of indifference. The construction in question here is not

that of a “new society” at its embryonic stage, nor an organization that

will eventually overthrow an authority so as to constitute a new one,

it’s the collective power which, with its consistency and its

intelligence, consigns the ruling power to powerlessness, foiling each

of its maneuvers in turn.

Very often the revolutionaries are those whom the revolutions take by

surprise. But in contemporary insurrections there is something that

especially unsettles the revolutionaries: the insurrections no longer

base themselves on political ideologies, but on ethical truths. Here we

have two words that, to a modern sensibility, sound like an oxymoron

when they’re brought together. Establishing what is true is the role of

science, is it not?—science having nothing to do with moral norms and

other contingent values. For moderns, there is the World on one side,

themselves on the other, and language to bridge the gulf. A truth, we

were taught, is a solid point above the abyss—a statement that

adequately describes the World. We’ve conveniently forgotten the slow

apprenticeship during which we acquired, together with language, a

relationship with the world. Far from serving to describe the world,

language helps us rather to construct a world. Ethical truths are thus

not truths about the world, but truths on the basis of which we dwell

therein. These are truths, affirmations, stated or not, that are felt

but not proved. The silent gaze, fists closed, into the eyes of the

little boss, staring him down for a long minute, is one such truth, and

worth as much as the loud phrase, “one is always right to rebel.” Truths

are what bind us, to ourselves, to the world around us, and to each

other. They give us entry into an immediately shared life, an undetached

existence, regardless of the illusory walls of our Selves. If earthlings

are prepared to risk their lives to prevent a square from being

transformed into a parking lot as at Gamonal in Spain, a park from

becoming a shopping center as at Gezi in Turkey, woods from becoming an

airport as at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, it’s clearly because what we love,

what we are attached to—beings, places, or ideas—is also part of us,

because we are not reducible to a Self lodging for a lifetime in a

physical body bounded by its skin, the whole entity being graced with a

set of properties which this Self believes it possesses. When the world

is fucked with, it’s we ourselves who are being attacked.

Paradoxically, even where an ethical truth is uttered as a refusal, the

fact of saying “No!” places us squarely in existence. Just as

paradoxically, the individual is discovered to be so unindividual that

sometimes the suicide of a single one can collapse the whole edifice of

social untruth. Mohamed Bouazizi’s gesture involving self-immolation in

front of the Sidi Bouzid prefecture is sufficient evidence of this. Its

explosive power is due to the potent affirmation it contains. It says,

“The life laid out for us is not worth living,” “We weren’t born to let

ourselves be humiliated like that by the police,” “You can reduce us to

nothing, but you’ll never take away the share of sovereignty that

belongs to living beings,” or “Look at us little people, barely

existing, humiliated, see how we’re beyond the miserable means by which

you cling to your sick man’s power.” That is what was distinctly heard

in the gesture. If the televised interview, in Egypt, of Wael Ghonim

after his secret incarceration by the “services” had the effect of

reversing the situation, it’s because a truth broke through his tears

and also exploded in the hearts of everyone. In the same vein, during

the first weeks of Occupy Wall Street, before the usual movement

managers instituted their little “working groups” responsible for

preparing the decisions which the assembly would only need to approve,

the model for the speeches made to the 1500 persons present was the guy

who stepped forward one day and said, “Yo! What up? My name is Mike. I’m

just a gangster from Harlem. I hate my life. Fuck my boss! Fuck my

girlfriend! Fuck the cops! Just wanted to say, I’m happy to be here,

with you all.” And his words were repeated seven times by the chorus of

“human megaphones” that had replaced the microphones prohibited by the

police. The true content of Occupy Wall Street was not the demand,

tacked onto the movement a posteriori like a post-it stuck on a

hippopotamus, for better wages, decent housing, or a more generous

social security, but disgust with the life we’re forced to live. Disgust

with a life in which we’re all alone, alone facing the necessity for

each one to make a living, house oneself, feed oneself, realize one’s

potential, and attend to one’s health, by oneself. Disgust with the

miserable form of life of the metropolitan individual—scrupulous

distrust / refined, smart skepticism / shallow, ephemeral loves /

resulting extreme sexualization of every encounter / then the periodic

return to a comfortable and desperate separation / constant distraction,

hence ignorance of oneself, hence fear of oneself, hence fear of the

other. The life in common that was attempted in Zuccotti Park, in tents,

in the cold, in the rain, surrounded by police in the dreariest of

Manhattan’s squares, was definitely not a full rollout of the vita

nova—it was just the point where the sadness of metropolitan existence

began to be flagrant. At last it was possible to grasp our shared

condition together, our equal reduction to the status of entrepreneurs

of the self. That existential epiphany was the pulsing heart of Occupy

Wall Street, for as long as it was fresh and lively.

What is at issue in contemporary insurrections is knowing what a

desirable form of life would be, and not the nature of the institutions

that would loom over it. But recognizing this would immediately mean

recognizing the ethical inanity of the West. And this would rule out

attributing the victory of this or that Islamic party after this or that

uprising to a presumed mental backwardness of the populations. It would

have to be admitted on the contrary that the strength of the Islamists

lies precisely in the fact that their political ideology presents itself

as a system of ethical prescriptions first of all. To put it

differently, if they were more successful than the other politicians,

it’s precisely because they didn’t situate themselves mainly on the

terrain of politics. And so people here in France can stop whining or

crying wolf every time an earnest adolescent chooses to join the ranks

of the “jihadists” instead of our suicidal army of wage workers of the

service sector. And, adults that we are, it may be possible for us to

accept the face we discover in that unflattering mirror.

In Slovenia in 2012, in the calm city of Maribor, a street revolt

erupted which inflamed a good part of the country in the days that

followed. Such a thing was unexpected in a country with Swisslike

features. But what is more surprising is that its starting point was the

revelation that road-radar flashes were proliferating in the city

because a private company was pocketing nearly all the fines. Could

anything be less “political” as the starting point of an insurrection

than radar Hashes? But could anything be more ethical than the refusal

to let oneself be fleeced like sheep? It’s like a 21^(st) century

Michael Kohlhaas. The importance of the theme of prevailing corruption

in almost all the contemporary revolts shows that they are ethical

before being political, or that they are political precisely to the

degree that they’re contemptuous of politics, including radical

politics. As long as being of the left will mean denying the existence

of ethical truths and correcting for that impairment with a morality

that’s as feeble as it is expedient, the fascists will continue to look

like the only affirmative political force, being the only ones who don’t

apologize for living as they do. They’ll go from success to success, and

will go on deflecting the energy of nascent revolts back against

themselves.

This may also be the reason for the failure, incomprehensible otherwise,

of all the “anti-austerity movements” which, given current conditions,

should take off like wildfire, but instead are sluggishly relaunching in

Europe for the tenth time. The problem is that the question of austerity

is not being addressed on the ground where it’s truly situated: that of

a serious disagreement about what it means to live, to live well. Put in

a summary way, austerity in countries with a Protestant culture tends to

be seen as a virtue, whereas in a large part of southern Europe being

austere basically means being a pathetic loser. What is happening

currently is not just that some are trying to impose an economic

austerity on others who don’t want to accept it. It’s that some consider

austerity to be a good thing in the absolute, while others consider it

to be, without really daring to say so, an absolute misery. Limiting

oneself to fighting against austerity doesn’t just add to the

misunderstanding, it also ensures that one will lose, by implicitly

accepting an idea of life that one doesn’t agree with. We don’t have to

look elsewhere for an explanation of “people’s” reluctance to throw

themselves into a battle that is already lost. What is required rather

is to acknowledge what the conflict is really about: a certain

Protestant idea of happiness—being hard-working, thrifty, sober, honest,

diligent, temporate, modest, reserved—is being pushed everywhere in

Europe. What is needed for contesting the austerity plans is a different

idea of life, which consists for example in sharing rather than

economizing, conversing rather than not saying a word, fighting rather

than suffering, celebrating our victories rather than disallowing them,

engaging rather than keeping one’s distance. Something should be said in

this connection about the incalculable strength given to the indigenous

movements of the American subcontinent by their embrace of buen vivir as

a political affirmation. On one hand, it brings out the visible contours

of what one is fighting for and what against; on the other, it opens one

up to a calm discovery of the thousand other ways the “good life” can be

understood, ways that are not enemy ways for being different, at least

not necessarily.

2. There’s No Such Thing as a Democratic Insurrection.

Western rhetoric is unsurprising. Every time a mass uprising takes down

a satrap still honored in all the embassies only yesterday, it’s because

the people “aspire to democracy.” The stratagem is as old as Athens. And

it works so well that even an Occupy Wall Street assembly saw fit, in

November 2011, to allocate 29,000 dollars to twenty or so international

observers to go monitor the Egyptian elections. Which drew this response

from comrades of Tahrir Square, who were intended recipients of the

assistance: “In Egypt, we didn’t make the revolution in the street just

for the purpose of having a parliament. Our struggle—which we hope to

share with you—is broader in scope than the acquisition of a well-oiled

parliamentary democracy”

That one is fighting against a tyrant doesn’t mean that one is fighting

for democracy—one may also be fighting for a different tyrant, for the

caliphate, or for the simple joy of fighting. But above all, if there is

one thing that has nothing to do with any arithmetical principle of

majority, it is insurrections, the victory of which depends on

qualitative criteria—having to do with determination, courage,

self-confidence, strategic sense, collective energy. If for two whole

centuries elections have been the most widely used instrument after the

army for suppressing insurrections, it’s clearly because the insurgents

are never a majority. As for the pacifism that is associated so

naturally with the idea of democracy, we should hear what the Cairo

comrades say about that as well: “Those who say that the Egyptian

revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that the police visited

upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even the force that

revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative

occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission, 99 police

stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed

and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down.”

Insurrection doesn’t respect any of the formalisms, any of the

democratic procedures. Like any large-scale demonstration, it imposes

its own ways of using public space. Like any specific strike, it is a

politics of the accomplished fact. It is the reign of initiative, of

practical complicity, of gesture. As to decision, it accomplishes that

in the streets, reminding those who’ve forgotten, that “popular” comes

from the Latin populor, “to ravage, devastate.” It is a fullness of

expression—in the chants, on the walls, in the spoken interventions, in

the street—and a nullity of deliberation. Perhaps the miracle of

insurrection can be summed up in this way: at the same time that it

dissolves democracy as a problem, it speaks immediately of a

beyond-democracy.

As we know, there’s no shortage of ideologists, such as Antonio Negri

and Michael Hardt, who will deduce from the uprisings of the past few

years that “the constitution of a democratic society is on the agenda”

and propose to make us “capable of democracy” by teaching us the

“skills, talents, and knowledges necessary for governing ourselves.” For

them, as a Spanish Negriist encapsulates it none too neatly: “From

Tahrir to the Puerta del Sol, from Syntagma Square to Placa Catalunya, a

cry is repeated from plaza to plaza: ‘Democracy!’ That is the name of

the specter that is moving through the world today.” And in fact

everything would be all right if the democratic rhetoric were nothing

more than a voice emanating from heaven and applied to every uprising

from the exterior, either by those governing or by those wanting to

succeed them. People would receive it piously, like a priest’s homily,

while trying not to laugh. But one has to admit that this rhetoric has

an actual hold on minds, on hearts, on struggles, as the much talked

about “indignants” movement attests. We write “indignants” between

quotes because in the first week of the Puerta del Sol occupation,

reference was made to Tahrir Square, but no mention of the innocuous

little volume by the Socialist Stéphane Hessel, which advocates a

citizens’ insurrection of “consciences” only as a way of averting the

threat of a real insurrection. It was only after a recoding operation

conducted in the second week of occupation by the newspaper El País,

also linked to the Socialist Party, that the movement received its

peevish name, which is to say, a good part of its echo and the signifier

of its limits. Something related happened in Greece, moreover, where the

occupiers of Syntagma Square rejected the label “aganaktismenoi”

(“indignants”) which the media had stuck on them, opting en bloc to call

themselves the “movement of the squares.” All in all, with its factual

neutrality “movement of the squares” accounts for the complexity, indeed

the confusion, of those strange assemblies where Marxists cohabited with

Buddhists of the Tibetan way, and Syriza adherents with bourgeois

patriots. Spectacle’s maneuver is well known, which consists in taking

symbolic control of movements by celebrating them in a first phase for

what they are not, the better to bury them when the right moment comes.

By assigning indignation as their content, one was consigning them to

helplessness and untruth. “No one lies more than the indignant man,”

Nietzsche observed. He lies about his estrangement from what makes him

indignant, pretending he has no part in what upsets him. He postulates

his powerlessness so as to wash his hands of any responsibility for the

way things are going; then he converts it into a moral affect, into an

affect of moral superiority. He believes he has rights, poor thing.

While angry crowds have been known to make revolutions, indignant masses

have never been known to do anything but protest powerlessly. The

bourgeoisie takes offense, then takes revenge; the petty bourgeoisie

waxes indignant, then goes back to the doghouse.

The slogan that was associated with the “movement of the squares” was

that of “Democracia real ya!” because the occupation of the Puerta del

Sol was initiated by about fifteen “hacktivists” at the conclusion of a

demonstration called by the platform with that name on the 15^(th) of

May, 2011—“15M” as they say there. Here it was not a question of direct

democracy as in the workers’ councils, of even true democracy in the

style of antiquity, but real democracy. It’s not surprising that the

“movement of the squares” was established, in Athens, a stone’s throw

from the place formal democracy, the National Assembly. Up to then we

had naively thought that real democracy was the kind that was there, as

we’d known it forever, with its electoral promises made to be broken,

its recording chambers called “parliaments,” and its pragmatic

negotiations aimed at fooling the world for the benefit of the different

lobbies. But for the “hacktivists” of 15M, democracy’s reality was the

betrayal of “real democracy.” That it was cybermilitants who launched

the movement is not insignificant. The slogan “real democracy” means

this: technologically, your elections that take place once every five

years, your pudgy representatives who don’t know how to use a computer,

your assemblies that resemble a bad theater play or a free-for-all-all

this is obsolete. In today’s world, thanks to the new communication

technologies, thanks to the Internet, biometric identification,

smartphones, social networks, you are completely outmoded. It is

possible to set up a real democracy, that is a continuous polling, in

real time, of the opinion of the population, to really submit every

decision to them before making it. An author anticipated this in the

1920s: “One can imagine that one day some subtle inventions will permit

everyone to express their opinions about political problems at any time

without leaving their homes, thanks to equipment that would record all

these opinions on a central device where we could simply read the

results.” For him this would be “a proof of the absolute privatization

of the State and of public life.” And, though they were gathered on one

plaza, it was this constant polling that the raised and lowered hands of

the “indignants” would silently manifest during the successive speeches.

Here even the old power to acclaim or jeer had been taken away from the

crowd.

On one hand, the movement of the squares was the projection—the crash—of

the cybernetic fantasy of universal citizenship onto reality, and on the

other an exceptional time of encounters, actions, celebrations, and

reappropriations of communal life. This is what eluded the eternal

microbureaucracy that tries to pass off its ideological whims for

“assembly positions” and seeks to control everything based on the

requirement that every action, every gesture, every declaration be

“validated by the assembly” to have the right to exist. For all the

others, this movement had laid to rest the myth of the general assembly,

that is, the myth of its central role. The first evening, May 16, 2011,

at the Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona there were 100 persons, the next day

1000, 10,000 the day after, and the first two weekends there were 30,000

persons. So everyone could observe that when so many were present there

was no longer any difference between direct democracy and representative

democracy. The assembly is where one is forced to listen to bullshit

without being able to reply, just like in front of the TV, in addition

to being the place of an exhausting theatricality all the more false for

its mimicking of sincerity, affliction, or enthusiasm. The extreme

bureaucratization of committees got the better of the toughest

participants, and apparently it took two weeks for the “content”

committee to deliver up an unbearable and calamitous document that, in

its opinion, summed up “what we believe in.” To a point that, seeing the

ridiculousness of the situation, some anarchists put to the vote that

the assembly become simply a space for discussion and an information

nexus, and not a decision-making body. The thing was comical: voting on

not voting anymore. More comical still: the voting was sabotaged by

thirty or so Trotskyists. And since that type of micropoliticians exudes

boredom and hunger for power in equal measure, everyone ended up

avoiding the tiresome assemblies. No surprise, many Occupy participants

had the same experience, and drew the same conclusion from it. In

Oakland and Chapel Hill alike, people concluded that the assembly had no

business validating what any group could do or intended to do, that it

was a place of exchange and not of decision. When an idea voiced in an

assembly took, it was simply that there were enough people who thought

it was good enough to be implemented, and not owing to a principle of

majority. The decisions took, materialized, or didn’t; they were never

made. In this way Syntagma Square voted “in general assembly,” one June

day, 2011, with several thousand individuals voting, to initiate actions

in the subway; on the scheduled day, however, not twenty persons showed

up at the rendezvous prepared to act in an effective way. Thus the

problem of “decision-making,” an obsession of all the flipped-out

democrats of the world, is revealed to have been nothing but a false

problem from the beginning.

The fact that, with the movement of the squares, the fetishism of the

general assembly fell into the void doesn’t tarnish the assembly

practice in the least. We just have to keep in mind that nothing

different can come out of an assembly than what is there already. If, on

the same plaza, thousands of strangers are brought together, who don’t

share anything apart from the fact of being there, we can’t expect that

anything more will emerge from it than what their separation authorizes.

One shouldn’t imagine for example that an assembly will somehow by

itself create the mutual trust necessary for risking an illegal action

together. That something so repugnant as an assembly of co-proprietors

is possible should already put us on our guard against the passion for

GA’s. What an assembly actualizes is simply the degree of existing

commonality. An assembly of students is not a neighborhood assembly,

which is not a neighborhood assembly organizing against the

neighborhood’s “restructuring.” An assembly of workers is not the same

at the beginning of a strike and at the end of one. And it definitely

bears little resemblance to a popular assembly of Oaxacan peoples. The

only thing an assembly can produce, with the right effort, is a shared

language. Where the only experience in common is separation, one will

only hear the amorphous language of separated life. Then indignation is

in fact the maximum political intensity attainable by the atomized

individual, who mistakes his screen for the world just as he mistakes

his feelings for his thoughts. A plenary assembly of all these atoms, in

spite of its touching togetherness, will only expose the paralysis

induced by a false understanding of the political, and hence their

inability to alter the world’s drift in the slightest. It makes one

think of a sea of dumbstruck faces pressed against a glass wall and

watching the mechanical universe continuing to function without them.

The feeling of collective helplessness, after the joy of meeting up

andbeing counted, did as much to scatter the owners of those “Quechua”

tents as the clubs and the tear gas attacks did.

Yet it’s true that there was something going beyond that feeling in

these occupations, and it was precisely those things that had no place

in the theatrical moment of the assembly, everything having to do with

the miraculous ability of living beings to inhabit, to inhabit even the

uninhabitable: the heart of the metropolis. In the occupied squares, all

that politics since classical Greece has basically held in contempt, and

relegated to the sphere of “economy,” of domestic management,

“survival,” “reproduction,” “daily routine,” and “labor,” was affirmed

instead as a dimension of collective political potential, escaping in

this way from the subordination of the private. The organizational

ability that was routinely demonstrated every day and that managed to

feed 3,000 persons at every meal, construct a village in a few days, or

take care of wounded rioters can be seen as marking the real political

victory of the “movement of the squares.” To which the occupation of

Taksim and Maidan added the art of maintaining barricades and making

Molotov cocktails in industrial quantities.

The fact that a form of organization as banal and predictable as the

assembly was invested with such an intense veneration says a lot about

the nature of democratic affects. If insurrection has to do with anger

at first, then with joy, direct democracy, with its formalism, is an

affair of worriers. We want to be sure that nothing will occur that is

not covered by some procedure. That no event will exceed our capacities.

That the situation will remain something we can handle. That no one will

feel cheated or in open conflict with the majority. That absolutely no

one will ever have to count on their own powers to make themselves

understood. That no one will impose anything on anyone. To that end, the

different mechanisms of the assembly—from turn-taking to silent

applause—organize a cottony space with no edges other than those of a

succession of monologues, disabling the need to fight for what one

thinks. If democrats must structure the situation to this degree, it’s

because they have no trust in it. And if they don’t trust the situation,

this is because at bottom they don’t trust themselves. Their fear of

allowing themselves to be overwhelmed by the situation makes them want

to control democracy at any cost, even if this often means destroying

it. Democracy is first of all the set of procedures by which it gives

form and structure to this anxiety. It doesn’t make much sense to

denounce democracy: one doesn’t denounce an anxiety.

We can only be freed from our attachment to democratic procedures

through a general deploying of attention—attention not only to what is

being said, but mostly to what is unspoken, attention to the way things

are said, and to what can be read on people’s faces and in silences.

It’s a matter of swamping the emptiness that democracy maintains between

the individual atoms by a full attention to one another, a new attention

to the world we have in common. What’s called for is to replace the

mechanical regime of argumentation with a regime of truth, of openness,

of sensitivity to what is there. In the 12^(th) century, when Tristan

and Iseult found each other again by night and set to conversing, it was

a “parlement”; when, through street encounters and the pressure of

circumstances, people gather and start discussing things, it’s an

“assembly.” This is What should be contrasted with the “sovereignty” of

general assemblies, with the palaver of parliaments: the rediscovery of

the affective charge linked with speech, with true speech. The opposite

of democracy is not dictatorship, it is truth. It’s precisely because

they are moments of truth, where power is laid bare, that insurrections

are never democratic.

3. Democracy Is Just Government in Its Pure State.

Without causing any major stir, the “world’s greatest democracy”

embarked on a global manhunt for one of its agents, Edward Snowden, who

had the bad idea of revealing its program of generalized surveillance of

communications. In actual fact, most of our precious Western democracies

have become unabashed police regimes, whereas most of the police regimes

of this period proudly wear the title of “democracy.” No one took much

offense that a Prime Minister like Papandreou was dismissed without

notice for having had the outrageous idea of submitting the policies of

his country, that is, of the Troika, to the voters. Moreover, in Europe

it has become customary to suspend elections when an uncontrollable

outcome is anticipated, or to require citizens to revote when a first

vote doesn’t produce the result that was counted on by the European

Commission. The democrats of the “free world” who strutted twenty years

ago ought to be tearing out their hair. Isn’t it well known that Google,

faced with the scandal of its participation in the espionage program,

Prism, was reduced to inviting Henry Kissinger to explain to its workers

that they would have to resign themselves, that our “security” came at

that price? It’s almost comical to imagine the goto man of all the

fascist coups of the 1970s in South America speechifying about democracy

in front of the very cool, very “innocent,” very “apolitical” employees

of the Google headquarters in Silicon Valley.

One is reminded of the statement by Rousseau in The Social Contract: “If

there were a nation of gods, it would govern itself democratically. A

government so perfect is not suited to men.” Or the one, more cynical,

by Rivarol: “There are two truths that must not be separated in this

world: 1. That sovereignty resides in the people. 2. That they must

never exercise it.”

Edward Bernays, the founder of public relations, began the first chapter

of his book Propaganda, titled “Organizing Chaos,” in this way: “The

conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and

opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society.

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an

invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

That was in 1928. What one has in mind, basically, when one speaks of

democracy, is the equivalence between those who govern and those who are

governed, whatever the means by which that equivalence is obtained.

Whence the epidemic of hypocrisy and hysteria that afflicts our lands.

In a democratic regime, one governs without really appearing to. The

masters clothe themselves in the attributes of the slave and the slaves

believe they are the masters. The former, exercising power on behalf of

the happiness of the masses, are condemned to a constant hypocrisy, and

the latter, imagining they possess a “purchasing power,” “rights,” or

“opinions” that are trampled on all year round, become hysterics as a

result. And because hypocrisy is the bourgeois virtue par excellence,

something irreparably bourgeois becomes permanently attached to

democracy. The popular feeling on this point is not mistaken.

Whether one is an Obama democrat or a fierce proponent of workers’

councils, and however one imagines “government of the people by the

people,” what the question of democracy overlays is always the question

of government. Its premise, its unthought assumption, is that there must

be government. But governing is a quite specific way of exercising

power. To govern is not to impose a discipline on a body, it is not to

compel respect for the Law in a territory even if that means torturing

the violators as under the Ancien Régime. A king reigns. A general

commands. A judge judges. Governing is something different. It is

managing the behaviors of a population, a multiplicity that one must

watch over like a shepherd his flock in order to maximize its potential

and guide its freedom. So this means taking into account and shaping its

desires, its ways of doing and thinking, its habits, its fears, its

dispositions, its milieu. It means deploying a whole ensemble of

tactics, of discursive, material, and policing tactics, paying close

attention to the people’s emotions, with their mysterious oscillations;

it is acting to prevent rioting and sedition, based on a constant

sensitivity to the affective and political climate. Acting upon the

milieu and continually modifying the variables of the latter, acting on

some to influence the behavior of the others, to keep control of the

flock. In short, it means waging a war that’s never called one and

doesn’t look like one, in almost every sphere of human existence. A war

of influence—subtle, psychological, indirect.

What has continued to develop since the 17^(th) century in the West is

not state power but, through the construction of national states and now

through their deterioration, government as a specific form of power. If

today the rusty old superstructures of nation states can be allowed to

crumble without fear, it’s precisely because they must give way to that

vaunted “governance”—flexible, plastic, informal, Taoist—which is

imposed in every domain, whether it be management of oneself, of

relationships, of cities, or of corporations. We others, we

revolutionaries, can’t keep from feeling that we’re losing every battle,

one by one, because they are all waged at a level we still haven’t

gained access to, because we mass our forces around positions already

lost, because attacks are conducted where we are not defending

ourselves. This is largely the result of our still imagining power in

the form of the State, the Law, Discipline, and Sovereignty, when it’s

as government rather that it continues to advance. We look for power in

its solid state when it was a long time ago that power passed into a

liquid, if not gaseous, state. Frustrated and baffled, we develop a

suspicion of anything still having a definite form—habits, loyalties,

rootedness, mastery or logic—when power is manifested rather in the

ceaseless dissolution of all forms.

Elections don’t have anything particularly democratic about them. For a

long time, kings were elected and it’s a rare autocrat who will say no

to a pleasant little plebiscite here and there. Elections are democratic

only in that they make it possible to ensure, not people’s participation

in government, but a certain adherence to it, through the illusion that

elections create of people having chosen it to some small extent.

“Democracy,” wrote Marx, “is the truth of all the forms of the state.”

He was mistaken. Democracy is the truth of all the forms of government.

The identity of the governing and the governed is the limit where the

flock becomes a collective shepherd and the shepherd dissolves into his

flock, where freedom coincides with obedience, the population with the

sovereign. The collapsing of governing and governed into each other is

government in its pure state, with no more form or limit. It’s not

without reason that liquid democracy has begun to be theorized, because

every fixed form is an obstacle to the exercise of pure government. In

the great movement of general fluidification, there are no stop-blocks,

there are only stages on an asymptote. The more fluid it is the more

governable it is, and the more governable it is the more democratic it

is. The metropolitan single is clearly more democratic than the married

couple, which is itself more democratic than the family clan, which is

more democratic than the mafia-run neighborhood.

Those who thought that the forms of Law were a definitive acquisition of

democracy, and not a transitory form in the process of being

outstripped, must be feeling disappointed. Those forms are now a formal

hindrance to the elimination of democracy’s “enemy combattants” and to

the continual reorganization of the economy. From Italy of the 1970s to

Obama’s dirty wars, antiterrorism is not a regrettable violation of our

fine democratic principles, a marginal exception to the latter; it is

rather the uninterrupted constitutive action by which contemporary

democracies are held together. The United States maintains a list of

“terrorists” of the entire world containing 680,000 names, and feeds a

corps of 25,000 men, the Joint Special Operations Command, secretly

charged with going to kill just about anyone at any time anywhere on the

surface of the globe. With their fleet of drones that are not so

attentive to the exact identity of those they blow to smithereens,

extrajudicial executions have supplanted the Guantánamo-type of

extrajudicial procedures. Those who raise objections to this don’t

understand what it means to govern democratically. They are stuck in the

preceding phase, where the modern state still spoke the language of Law.

In Brazil, under anti-terrorism provisions some young people were

arrested whose crime was to have tried to organize a demonstration

against the World Cup. In Italy, four comrades were jailed for

“terrorism” on the grounds that an attack on the work site of the TAV,

the high-speed train line, seriously damaged the country’s “image” by

burning a compressor. Useless to multiply the examples, the fact is

universal: everything that resists the schemes of governments risks

being treated as “terrorist.” A liberal mind might fear that governments

are detracting from their democratic legitimacy. That is not at all the

case; in fact, through such a practice they reestablish it. That is, if

the operation works. If they’ve read the prevailing mood correctly and

prepared the public sensibility. Because when Ben Ali or Mubarak

denounced the crowds filling the streets as terrorist gangs, and that

didn’t take, the restablishment operation turned back against them. Its

failure sucked the ground of legitimacy out from under their feet and

they found themselves pedaling above the void, in view of everyone—their

downfall was imminent. Such an operation appears for What it is only at

the moment it fails.

4. Theory of Destitution.

Coming out of Argentina, the slogan “¡Que se vayan todos!” jarred the

ruling heads all over the world. There’s no counting the number of

languages in which we’ve shouted our desire, during the past few years,

to destitutethe power in place. And the most surprising thing still is

that in several cases we managed to do that. But however fragile the

regimes succeeding such “revolutions,” the second part of the slogan,

“¡Y que no quede ni uno!” (“And let not a single one remain!”), has gone

unheeded: new puppets have taken the places left vacant. The most

exemplary case has to be Egypt. Tahrir had Mubarak’s head and the

Tamarod movement that of Morsi. Each time, the street demanded a

destitution that it didn’t have the strength to organize, so that it was

the already organized forces, the Muslim Brotherhood then the army, that

usurped that destitution and carried it through to their benefit. A

movement that demands is always at a disadvantage opposite a force that

acts. We can marvel in passing at how the role of the sovereign and that

of the “terrorist” are basically interchangeable, seeing how quickly one

transitions from the palaces of power to the basements of its prisons,

and vice versa.

So the complaint that is commonly heard among yesterday’s insurgents

says: “The revolution was betrayed. We didn’t die to make it possible

for a provisional government to organize elections, then a constituent

assembly to draw up a new constitution that would lay out the modalities

of new elections from which a new regime would emerge, which would be

almost identical to the previous one. We wanted life to change, and

nothing has changed, or very little.” On this point, radicals always

give the same explanation: it’s that the people have to govern

themselves instead of electing representatives. If revolutions are

consistently betrayed this may be the result of fate, but perhaps it’s a

sign that some hidden flaws in our idea of revolution condemn it to such

an inevitability. One of those flaws is in the fact that we still tend

to conceive of revolution as a dialectic between the constituent and the

constituted. We still believe in the fable that tells us all constituted

power is rooted in a constituent power, that the state emanates from the

nation, as the absolute monarch does from God, that beneath the

constitution in force there always exists another constitution, an order

that’s underlying and transcendent at once, silent normally, but capable

at certain moments of flashing into presence. We like to think that “the

people” only have to assemble, ideally in front of the parliament, and

shout “You don’t represent us!” for the constituent power to magically

depose the constituted powers through its simple epiphany. This fiction

of the constituent power actually only serves to mask the strictly

political, fortuitous origin, the raw coup by which power is instituted.

Those who’ve taken power project the source of their authority back onto

the social totality which they henceforth control, and in this way

legimately silence it in its own name. So it happens that the feat of

getting the people fired upon in the name of the people is regularly

accomplished. Constituent power is the matador’s costume which the

squalid origin of power always sports, the veil that hypnotizes everyone

and makes them believe that the constituted power is much more than it

is.

Those who propose, like Antonio Negri, to “govern the revolution” only

see “constituent struggles” everywhere, from the banlieue riots to the

uprisings in the Arab world. A Madrid-based Negriist who supports a

hypothetical “constituent process” coming out the movement of the

squares, even calls for the creation of “the party of democracy,” “the

party of the 99%,” for the purpose of “articulating a new democratic

constitution just as ‘ordinary,’ as non-representative as 15M was.”

Misdirections of this kind encourage us to reconceive the idea of

revolution as pure destitution instead.

To institute or constitute a power is to give it a basis, a foundation,

a legitimacy. For an economic, judicial, or police apparatus, it is to

ground its fragile existence in a dimension that is beyond it, in a

transcendence designed to place it out of reach. Through this operation,

what is never anything but a localized, specific, partial entity is

elevated to an elsewhere from which it can then claim to encompass the

whole. As a constituted thing, a power becomes an order with no outside,

an uncontested existence with no counterpart, which can only subject or

annihilate. The dialectic of the constituent and the constituted comes

to confer a higher meaning on what is never anything but a contingent

political form. This is how the Republic becomes the universal banner of

an indisputable and eternal human nature, or the caliphate the single

locus of community. Constituent power names that monstrous piece of

magic that turns the state into that entity that’s never wrong, having

its basis in reason; that has no enemies, since to oppose it is to be a

criminal; that can do anything, being without honor.

So to destitute power it’s not enough to defeat it in the street, to

dismantle its apparatuses, to set its symbols ablaze. To destitute power

is to deprive it of its foundation. That is precisely what insurrections

do. There the constituted appears as it is, with its thousand

maneuvers—clumsy or effective, crude or sophisticated. “The king has no

clothes,” one says then, because the constituent veil is in tatters and

everyone sees through it. To destitute power is to take away its

legitimacy, compel it to recognize its arbitrariness, reveal its

contingent dimension. It’s to show that it holds together only in

situation, through what it deploys in the way of strategems, methods,

tricks—to turn it into a temporary configuration of things which, like

so many others, have to fight and scheme in order to survive. It’s to

make the government lower itself to the level of the insurgents, who can

no longer be “monsters, criminals,” or “terrorists” but simply enemies.

To force the police to be nothing more henceforth than a gang, and the

justice system a criminal association. In insurrection, the power in

place is just one force among others from the perspective of common

struggle, and no longer that meta-force which regiments, commands, or

condemns all potentialities. All motherfuckers have addresses. To

destitute power is to bring it back down to earth.

Whatever the outcome of the street confrontations, insurrection has

always-already torn holes in the tight fabric of beliefs that enable

government to be exercised. That is why those in a hurry to bury the

insurrection don’t waste their time trying to mend the broken foundation

of an already invalidated legitimacy. They attempt instead to infuse the

movement itself with a new claim to legitimacy, that is, a new claim to

be founded on reason, to preside over the strategic plane where the

different forces clash. The legitimacy of “the people,” “the oppressed,”

“the 99%” is the Trojan horse by which the constituent is smuggled back

into insurrectionary destitution. This is the surest method for undoing

an insurrection—one that doesn’t even require defeating it in the

streets. To make the destitution irreversible, therefore, we must begin

by abandoning our own legitimacy. We have to give up the idea that one

makes the revolution in the name of something, that there’s a

fundamentally just and innocent entity which the revolutionary forces

would have the task of representing. One doesn’t bring power back down

to earth in order to raise oneself above the heavens. Destituting this

epoch’s specific form of power requires, for a start, that one challenge

the notion that men need to be governed, either democratically by

themselves or hierarchically by others, returning it to its status as a

hypothesis, not a “self-evident” truth. The assumption goes back at

least to the birth of politics in Greece—its power is such that even the

Zapatistas have gathered their “autonomous communes” under the umbrella

of “good-government councils.” A definite anthropology is at work here,

which is found in the anarchist individualist aspiring to the full

satisfaction of their personal passions and needs and in seemingly more

pessimistic conceptions, seeing man as a voracious beast who can only be

kept from devouring his neighbor by a coercive power. Machiavelli, for

whom men are “ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers, fearful of danger

and greedy for gain,” is in agreement on this point with the founders of

American democracy: “In contriving a system of government, man ought to

be supposed a knave,” asserted Hamilton. In every case, one starts from

the idea that the political order is designed to contain a more or less

bestial human nature, where the Self faces the others and the world,

where there are only separate bodies that must be bound together through

some artifice. As Marshall Sahlins has shown, this idea of a human

nature that “culture” must contain is a Western illusion. It expresses

our misery, and not that of all earth dwellers. “For the greater part of

humanity, self-interest as we know it is unnatural in the normative

sense: it is considered madness, witchcraft or some such grounds for

ostracism, execution or at least therapy. Rather than expressing a

pre-social human nature, such avarice is generally taken for a loss of

humanity.”

But in order to destitute government, it’s not enough to criticize this

anthropology and its prev sumed “realism.” One must find a way to grasp

it from the outside, to affirm a different plane of perception. For we

do move on itdifferent plane. From the relative outside of what we’re

experiencing, of what we’re trying to construct, we’ve arrived at this

conviction: the question of government only arises from a void—more

often than not, from a void it was obliged to create. Power must have

sufficiently detached itself from the world, it must have created a

sufficient void around the individual, or within him, created a deserted

space between beings large enough, so that it becomes a question of

organizing all these disparate elements that nothing connects any more,

of reassembling the separate elements as separate. Power creates

emptiness. Emptiness attracts power.

Leaving the paradigm of government means starting politically from the

opposite hypothesis. There is no empty space, everything is inhabited,

each one of us is the gathering and crossing point of quantities of

affects, lineages, histories, and significations, of material flows that

exceed us. The world doesn’t environ us, it passes through us. What we

inhabit inhabits us. What surrounds us constitutes us. We don’t belong

to ourselves. We are always-already spread through whatever we attach

ourselves to. It’s not a question of forming a void from which we could

finally manage to catch hold of all that escapes us, but of learning to

better inhabit what is there, which implies perceiving it—and there’s

nothing certain about that for the myopic children of democracy.

Perceiving a world peopled not with things but with forces, not with

subjects but with powers, not with bodies but with bonds.

It’s by virtue of their plenitude that forms of life will complete the

destitution.

Here, subtraction is affirmation and affirmation is an element of

attack.

3: Power is Logistic. Block Everything!

[Turin, January 28, 2012.]

1. Power Now Resides in Infrastructures.

Occupation of the Kasbah in Tunis and of the Syntagma Square in Athens,

siege of Westminster in London during the student movement of 2011,

encirclement of the parliament in Madrid on September 25, 2012 or in

Barcelona on June 15, 2011, riots all around the Chamber of Deputies in

Rome on December 14, 2010, attempt on October 15, 2011 in Lisbon to

invade the Assembleia da Republica, burning of the Bosnian presidential

residence in February of 2014: the places of institutional power exert a

magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents manage

to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters

of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to

discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without

any taste. It’s not to prevent the “people” from “taking power” that

they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them

from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There

are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but

stage sets—real traps for revolutionaries. The popular impulse to rush

onto the stage to find out what is happening in the wings is bound to be

disappointed. If they got inside, even the most fervent conspiracy

freaks would find nothing arcane there; the truth is that power is

simply no longer that theatrical reality to which modernity accustomed

us.

Yet the truth about the actual localization of power is not hidden at

all; it’s only we who refuse to see it for fear of having our

comfortable certainties doused with cold water. For confirmation of

this, one only has to look for a moment at the banknotes issued by the

European Union. Neither the Marxists nor the neoclassical economists

have ever been able to admit that money is not essentially an economic

instrument but a political reality. We have never seen any money that

was not attached to a political order capable of backing it. That is

also why the bills of the different countries bear the personal images

of emperors and great statesmen, of founding fathers or personified

allegories of the nation. But what is it that appears on euro banknotes?

Not human figures, not emblems of a personal sovereignty, but bridges,

aqueducts, arches—pieces of impersonal architecture, cold as stone. As

to the truth about the present nature of power, every European has a

printed exemplar of it in their pocket. It can be stated in this way:

power now resides in the infrastructures of this world. Contemporary

power is of an architectural and impersonal, and not a representative or

personal, nature. Traditional power was representative: the pope was the

representation of Christ on Earth, the king, of God, the President, of

the people, and the General Secretary of the Party, of the proletariat.

This whole personal politics is dead, and that is why the small number

of orators that survive on the surface of the globe amuse more than they

govern. The cast of politicians is actually composed of clowns with

varying degrees of talent—whence the phenomenal success of the wretched

Beppe Grillo in Italy or the sinister Dieudonné in France. All in all,

at least they know how to entertain you, which is their profession of

course. So, in addition to stating the obvious, reproaching politicians

for “not representing us” only maintains a nostalgia. The politicians

are not there for that, they’re there to distract us, since power is

elsewhere. And this correct intuition is what turns nutty in all the

contemporary conspiracisms. Power is indeed somewhere else, somewhere

other than in the institutions, but it’s not hidden for all that. Or if

it is, it’s hidden like Poe’s “purloined letter.” No one sees it because

everyone has it in plain sight, all the time—in the form of a

high-voltage line, a freeway, a traffic circle, a supermarket, or a

computer program. And if it is, it’s hidden like a sewage system, an

undersea cable, a fiber optic line running the length of a railway, or a

data center in the middle of a forest. Power is the very organization of

this world, this engineered, configured, purposedworld. That is the

secret, and it’s that there isn’t one.

Power is now immanent in life as it is technologically organized and

commodified. It has the neutral appearance of facilities or of Google’s

blank page. Whoever determines the organization of space, whoever

governs the social environments and atmospheres, whoever administers

things, whoever manages the accesses—governs men. Contemporary power has

made itself the heir, on the one hand, of the old science of policing,

which consists in looking after “the well-being and security of the

citizens,” and, on the other, of the logistic science of militaries, the

“art of moving armies,” having become an art of maintaining

communication networks and ensuring strategic mobility. Absorbed in our

language-bound conception of the public thing, of politics, we have

continued debating while the real decisions were being implemented right

before our eyes. Contemporary laws are written in steel structures and

not with words. All the citizens’ indignation can only end up butting

its dazed forehead against the reinforced concrete of this world. The

great merit of the struggle against the TAV in Italy is in having firmly

grasped all that is involved politically in a simple public works

project. Symmetrically, this is something that no politician can

acknowledge. Like that Bersani who snapped back one day at the NO

TAVmilitants: “After all, we’re talking here about a train line, not a

bomber.” But “a construction site is worth a battalion,” in the

estimation of Marshal Lyautey, who had no rival in the business of

“pacifying” the colonies. If struggles against big infrastructure

projects are multiplying all over the world, from Romania to Brazil,

it’s because this intuition itself is becoming widespread.

Anyone who means to undertake anything whatsoever against the existing

world must start from there: the real power structure is the material,

technological, physical organization of this world. Government is no

longer in the government. The “power vacuum” that lasted in Belgium for

more than a year is a clear example in point. The country was able to

function with no government, elected representatives, parliament,

political debate, or electoral issues, without any part of its normal

operation being affected. Same thing in Italy, which has been going from

“technical government” to “technical government” for years now, and it

doesn’t bother anyone that this expression goes back to the

Manifesto-program of the Futurist Party of 1918, which incubated the

first fascists.

Power, henceforth, is the very order of things, and the police charged

with defending it. It’s not simple to think about a power that consists

in infrastructures, in the means to make them function, to control them

and to build them. How do we contest an order that isn’t articulated in

language, that is constructed step by step and wordlessly? An order that

is embodied in the very objects of everyday life. An order whose

political constitution is its material constitution. An order that is

revealed less in the President’s words than in the silence of optimal

performance. In the age when power manifested itself through edicts,

laws, and regulations, it was vulnerable to critical attack. But there’s

no criticizing a wall, one destroys it or tags it. A government that

arranges life through its instruments and its layouts, whose statements

take the form of a street lined with traffic cones and surveilled by

overhead cameras, may only invite a destruction that is wordless itself.

Aggression against the setting of everyday life has become sacrilegious,

consequently; it’s something like violating its constitution.

Indiscriminate smashing in urban riots expresses both an awareness of

this state of things, and a relative powerlessness in the face of it.

The mute and unquestionable order which the existence of a bus shelter

embodies will not lie shattered on the ground, unfortunately, once the

shelter is demolished. The broken windows theory will still stand after

all the shop windows have been smashed. All the hypocritical

proclamations about the sacred character of the “environment,” the holy

crusade for its defense, can only be understood in light of this

mutation: power has become environmental itself, has merged into the

surroundings. It is power that we’re asked to defend in all the official

appeals to “preserve the environment,” and not the little fish.

2. On the Difference Between Organizing and Organizing Oneself.

Everyday life has not always been organized. For that to be

accomplished, it was necessary first to dismantle life, starting with

the city. Life and the city have been broken down into functions,

corresponding to “social needs.” The office district, the factory

district, the residential district, the spaces for relaxation, the

entertainment district, the place where one eats, the place where one

works, the place where one cruises, and the car or bus for tying all

that together are the result of a prolonged reconfiguration of life that

devastated every form of life. It was carried out methodically, for more

than a century, by a whole caste of organizers, a whole grey armada of

managers. Life and humanity were dissected into a set of needs; then a

synthesis of these elements was organized. It doesn’t really matter

whether this synthesis was given the name of “socialist planning” or

“market planning.” It doesn’t really matter that it resulted in the

failure of new towns or the success of trendy districts. The outcome is

the same: a desert and existential anemia. Nothing is left of a form of

life once it has been partitioned into organs. Conversely, this explains

the palpable joy that overflowed the occupied squares of the Puerta del

Sol, Tahrir, Gezi or the attraction exerted, despite the infernal muds

of the Nantes countryside, by the land occupation at

Notre-Dame-des-Landes. It is the joy that attaches to every commune.

Suddenly, life ceases being sliced up into connected segments. Sleeping,

fighting, eating, taking care of oneself, partying, conspiring,

discussing all belong to the same vital movement. Not everything is

organized, everything organizes itself. The difference is meaningful.

One requires management, the other attention—dispositions that are

incompatible in every respect.

Referring to the Aymara uprisings in Bolivia at the beginning of the

2000s, a Uruguayan activist, Raúl Zibechi, writes: “In these movements,

organization is not separate from daily life. In insurrectionary action

it is daily life itself that is deployed.” He observes that in the

neighborhoods of El Alto, in 2003, “a communal ethos replaced the old

trade-union ethos.” Very cool, that, because it clarifies what a

struggle against infrastructural power consists in. Say infrastructure

and you’re saying that life has been detached from its conditions. That

conditions have keen placed on life. That life now depends on factors

out of its control, that it has lost its footing. Infrastructures

organize a life without a world, suspended, expendable, at the mercy of

whoever is managing them. Metropolitan nihilism is only a brash way of

not admitting this to oneself. Contrariwise, Raúl’s statement also

indicates what is being sought in the experiments that are underway in a

large number of neighborhoods and villages throughout the world, and the

inevitable pitfalls. Not a return to earth but a reinhabiting of earth.

What gives insurrections their punch, and their ability to damage the

adversary’s infrastructure in a sustained way, is precisely their level

of self-organization of communal life. That one of the first reflexes of

Occupy Wall Street was to go block the Brooklyn Bridge or that the

Oakland Commune along with several thousand people undertook to paralyze

the city’s port during the general strike of December 12, 2011, are

evidence of the intuitive link between self-organization and blockage.

The fragility of the self-organization that barely took shape in the

occupations did not allow these attempts to be pushed further,

apparently. By contrast, Tahrir and Taksim squares are central hubs of

automobile circulation in Cairo and Istanbul. To block those flows was

to open up the situation. The occupation was immediately a blockade.

Hence its ability to throw the reign of normality out of joint in a

whole metropolis. At a completely different level, one can’t help but

draw a connection between the fact that the Zapatistas are currently

proposing to link together twenty-nine defensive struggles against

mining, highway, power-plant, and dam projects involving different

indigenous peoples all over Mexico, and the fact that they themselves

have spent the past fifteen years establishing their autonomy vis-à-vis

the federal and economic powers.

3. On Blockage.

A 2006 sign posted by the French movement against the “first employment

contract,” the CPE, said: “It’s through flows that this world is

maintained. Block everything!” This rallying cry, propagated by a

minority of a movement that was itself minoritarian, albeit

“victorious,” has enjoyed a successful run since then. In 2009, the

movement against “pwofitasyon,” which paralyzed all of Guadaloupe, used

it in a big way. And we have seen the practice of blockading, during the

French movement against retirement restructuring, become the staple

tactic of struggle, applied uniformly to a fuel depot, a mall, a train

station, or a production site. Now, there is something, surely, that

reveals a certain state of the world.

The fact that this movement against the overhaul of retirement centered

around the blockading of refineries is not politically negligible. At

the end of the seventies, refineries became the vanguard of what were

called “process industries,” “flux” industries. It can be said that

refinery operation has served as the model for the restructuring of most

factories since that time. Moreover, one should not talk about factories

any longer, but about sites, production sites. The difference between

the factory and the site is that a factory is a concentration of

workers, technical know-how, primary materials, stocks, whereas the site

is only a node on a map of productive flows. Their only shared trait

being that what comes out of both, compared with what went in, has

undergone a certain transformation. The refinery is that place where the

relation between labor and production was first overturned. There the

worker, or rather the operator, doesn’t even have the job of maintaining

and repairing the machines, which is generally assigned to temporary

workers, but simply of bringing a certain attention, a certain vigilance

to bear on a totally automated production process. There may be an

indicator light that switches on when it shouldn’t, an abnormal gurgling

in a pipe, smoke escaping where there shouldn’t be any, or that doesn’t

look the way it should. The refinery worker is a kind of monitor of

machines, an idle figure, full of nervous concentration. And this is the

trend now in most sectors of industry in the West. The classic worker

could be gloriously imagined as the Producer; here the relationship

between labour and production is simply inverted. There is work only

when production stops, when a malfunction gets in the way. The Marxists

can stick to their day jobs: the process of commodity valorization, from

extraction to the pump, coincides with the process of circulation, which

itself coincides with the process of production. It depends in real time

on the final fluctuations of the market. Saying that the value of the

commodity crystallizes the labor time of the worker was a political

operation that was as fruitful as it was fallacious. In refineries just

as in any completely automated factory, it has become a mark of hurtful

irony. Give China ten more years, ten years of workers’ demands, and it

will be the same situation there. Obviously, it’s not insignificant that

refinery workers have long been among the best paid industrial workers,

and that it was in this sector, at least in France, that what is

euphemistically called the “fluidification of social relations,” union

relations in particular, was first tried out.

During the movement against retirement reform, most of France’s fuel

depots were blockaded not by their five workers, but by teachers,

students, drivers, railroad men, postal employees, unemployed people,

and high school students. This wasn’t because those industry workers

don’t have the right. It’s simply that in a world where the organization

of production is decentralized, fluid, and largely automated, where each

machine is now but a link in an integrated system of machines that

subsume it, and where this system-world of machines, of machines

producing machines, tends to be unified cybernetically, each particular

flow is a moment of the overall reproduction of capital’s society. There

is no longer a “sphere of reproduction” of labor power and social

relations distinct from the sphere of production, which itself is no

longer a sphere, but rather the web of the world with all its relations.

To physically attack these flows, at any point, is therefore to

politically attack the system as a whole. If the subject of the strike

was the working class, the subject of the blockade is whoever. It’s

anyone at all, anyone who takes a stand against the existing

organization of the world.

It’s generally when they reach their maximum degree of sophistication

that civilizations fall apart. Every production chain is now reaching

such a level of specialization through so many intermediaries that if

one of them disappeared that would be enough to paralyze, or even

destroy, the whole chain. Three years ago, Honda factories in Japan went

through the longest period of layoffs since the sixties simply because

the supplier of a particular computer chip had disappeared in the

earthquake of March, 2011 and no one else could produce it.

In this blockading craze that now accompanies every movement of any

size, we cannot help but read a reversal of our relation to time. We

look toward the future in the same way Walter Benjamin’s Angel of

History looked toward the past. “Where we see the appearance of a chain

of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles

rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.” The time that’s

passing is no longer seen as anything but a slow progression towards an

end that will likely be horrendous. Every coming decade looks like

another step closer to the climate chaos that everyone has understood to

be the truth lurking in the insipid phrase “climate warming.” The heavy

metals will continue, day by day, to accumulate in the food chain, along

with radioactive nuclides and all the other invisible but fatal

pollutants. So every attempt to block the global system, every movement,

every revolt, every uprising should be seen as a vertical attempt to

stop time, delay the catastrophe and begin to branch off in a less fatal

direction.

4. On Investigation.

It’s not the weakness of our struggles that explains the disappearance

of any revolutionary perspective; it’s the absence of any credible

revolutionary perspective that explains the weakness of our struggles.

Obsessed as we are with a political idea of the revolution, we have

neglected its technical dimension. A revolutionary perspective no longer

focuses on an institutional reorganization of society, but on the

technical configuration of worlds. As such, it is a line traced in the

present, not an image floating in the future. If we want to regain a

perspective, we have to couple the vague awareness that this world can’t

last with the desire to build a better one. For if this world keeps

going, it’s largely owing to everyone’s material dependence on the

smooth general operation of the social machine for their survival. We

need to have a technical knowledge of the organization of this world at

our disposal; a knowledge that enables us both to neutralize the

dominant structures and to secure the necessary time for organizing a

material and political disengagement from the general course of the

catastrophe, a disengagement not haunted by the specter of extreme

poverty, by the urgency of survival. To say that plainly: so long as we

can’t do without nuclear power plants and dismantling them remains a

business for people who want them to last forever, aspiring to abolish

the state will continue to draw smiles; so long as the prospect of a

popular uprising will signify a guaranteed fall into scarcity, of health

care, food, or energy, there will be no strong mass movement. In other

words: we need to resume a meticulous effort of investigation. We need

to go look in every sector, in all the territories we inhabit, for those

who possess strategic technical knowledge. Only on this basis will

movements truly dare to “block everything.” Only on this basis will the

passion for experimenting towards another life be liberated, a largely

technical passion that is the obverse, as it were, of everyone’s state

of technological dependence. This process of knowledge accumulation, of

establishing collusions in every domain, is a prerequisite for a serious

and massive return of the revolutionary question.

“The workers’ movement wasn’t defeated by capitalism, but by democracy,”

said Mario Tronti. It was also defeated by failing to appropriate the

substance of working-class power. What defines the worker is not his

exploitation by a boss, which he shares with all other employees. What

distinguishes him in a positive sense is his embodied technical mastery

of a particular world of production. There is a competence in this that

is scientific and popular at the same time, a passionate knowledge that

constituted the particular wealth of the working world before capital,

realizing the danger contained there and having first extracted all that

knowledge, decided to turn workers into operators, monitors, and

custodians of machines. But even there, the workers’ power remains:

someone who knows how to make a system operate also knows how to

sabotage it in an effective way. But no one can individually master the

set of techniques that enable the current system to reproduce itself.

Only a collective force can do that. This is exactly what it means to

construct a revolutionary force today: linking together all the worlds

and all the revolutionarily necessary techniques, shaping these into a

historical force and not a system of government.

The failure of the French struggle against retirement restructuring in

the autumn of 2010 taught a bitter lesson on this subject. If the CGT

had control of the whole struggle, it was due to our inadequacy in the

technical sphere. All the union needed to do was turn the blockade of

the refineries, where it was hegemonic, into the spearhead of the

movement. That way it was free at any moment to signal the end of the

game by reopening the refinery valves, thereby releasing all the

pressure on the country. What the movement lacked at that point was

precisely a minimal knowledge of the material functioning of that world,

a knowledge scattered among some workers, concentrated in the egghead

brains of a few engineers, and shared no doubt, on the opposing side, in

some obscure military agency. If we had been able to cut off the

police’s supply of teargas, or interrupt the televised propaganda for a

day, or deprive the authorities of electricity, we can be sure that

things would not have ended so pitifully. Moreover, it has to be

concluded that the main political defeat of the movement was to have

surrendered the strategic prerogative of deciding who would have

gasoline and who would not to the State, with its requisitions at the

prefectural level.

“Nowadays if you want to get rid of someone, you go after his

infrastructure,” writes an American academic, incisively. Since the

Second World War, the American Air Force has been developing the idea of

“infrastructure warfare,” seeing the most ordinary civil infrastructure

as targets for bringing its opponents to their knees. This explains, in

fact, why strategic infrastructure facilities are enveloped in a growing

secrecy. For a revolutionary force there is no sense in its knowing how

to block the opponent’s infrastructure if it can’t make such facilities

operate for its benefit if there’s a need. Being able to destroy the

technological system presupposes that one has tried out / implemented

the techniques that make the system superfluous. Reinhabiting the earth

means, to start with, no longer living in ignorance of the conditions of

our existence.

4: Fuck Off Google

[Oakland, 20. Dezember 2013]

1. There are no “Facebook revolutions”, but there is a new science

of government, cybernetics

The genealogy is not well known, and it deserves to be. Twitter descends

from a program named TXTMob, invented by American activists as a way to

coordinate via cellphones during protests against the Republican

National Convention in 2004. The application was used by some 5000

people to share real-time information about the different actions and

movements of the police. Twitter, launched two years later, was used for

similar purposes, in Moldova for example, and the Iranian demonstrations

of 2009 popularized the idea that it was the tool for coordinating

insurgents, particularly against the dictatorships. In 2011, when

rioting reached an England thought to be definitively impassive, some

journalists were sure that tweeting had helped spread the disturbances

from their epicenter, Tottenham. Logical, but it turned out that for

their communication needs the rioters had gone with BlackBerry, whose

secure telephones had been designed for the upper management of banks

and multinationals, and the British secret service didn’t even have the

decryption keys for them. Moreover, a group of hackers hacked into

BlackBerry’s site to dissuade the company from cooperating with the

police in the aftermath. If Twitter enabled a self-organization on this

occasion it was more that of the citizen sweepers who volunteered to

sweep up and repair the damage caused by the confrontations and looting.

That effort was relayed and coordinated by Cri- sisCommons, a “global

network of volunteers working together to build and use tecnology tools

to help respond to disasters and improve resiliency and response before

a crisis.” At the time, a French left-wing rag compared this undertaking

to the organization of the Puerta del Sol during the Indignants

Movement, as it’s called. The comparison between an initiative aimed at

a quick return to order and the fact of several thousand people

organizing to live on an occupied plaza, in the face of repeated

assaults by the police, may look absurd. Unless we see in them just two

spontaneous, connectedcivic gestures. From 15-M on, the Spanish

“indignados,” a good number of them at least, called attention to their

faith in a citizens’ utopia. For them the digital social networks had

not only accelerated the spread of the 2011 movement, but also and more

importantly had set the terms of a new type of political organization,

for the struggle and for society: a connected, participatory,

transparent democracy. It’s bound to be upsetting for “revolutionaries”

to share such an idea with Jared Cohen, the American government’s

anti-terrorism adviser who contacted Twitter during the “Iranian

revolution” of 2009 and urged them to maintain it’s functioning despite

censorship. Jared Cohen has recently cowritten with Google’s former CEO,

Eric Schmidt, a creepy political book, The New Digital Age. On its first

page one reads this misleading sentence: “The Internet is the largest

experiment involving anarchy in history.”

“In Tripoli, Tottenham or Wall Street people have been protesting failed

policies and the meager possibilities afforded by the electoral

system... They have lost faith in government and other centralized

institutions of power. There is no viable justification for a democratic

system in which public participation is limited to voting. We live in a

world in which ordinary people write Wikipedia; spend their evenings

moving a telescope via the Internet and making discoveries half a world

away; get online to help organize a protest in cyberspace and in the

physical world, such as the revolutions in Egypt or Tunisia or the

demonstrations of the the ‘indignados’ throughout Spain; or pore over

the cables revealed by WikiLeaks. The same technologies enabling us to

work together at a distance are creating the expectation to do better at

governing ourselves.” This is not an “ indignada”speaking, or if so,

she’s one who camped for a long time in an office of the White House:

Beth Noveck directed the “Open Government Initiative” of the Obama

administration. That program starts from the premise that the

governmental function should consist in linking up citizens and making

available information that’s now held inside the bureaucratic machine.

Thus, according to New York’s city hall, “the hierarchical structure

based on the notion that the government knows what’s good for you is

outdated. The new model for this century depends on co-creation and

collaboration.”

Unsurprisingly, the concept of Open Government Data was formulated not

by politicians but by computer programmers — fervent defenders of open

source software development, moreover — who invoked the U.S. founding

fathers’ conviction that “every citizen should take part in government.”

Here the government is reduced to the role of team leader or

facilitator, ultimately to that of a “platform for coordinating citizen

action.” The parallel with social networks is fully embraced. “How can

the city think of itself in the same way Facebook has an API ecosystem

or Twitter does?” is the question on their minds at the New York mayor’s

office. “This can enable us to produce a more user-centric experience of

government. It’s not just the consumption but the co-production of

government services and democracy.” Even if these declarations are seen

as fanciful cogitations, as products of the somewhat overheated brains

of Silicon Valley, they still confirm that the practice of government is

less and less identified with state sovereignty. 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. This is an activity already conducted largely outside the state

apparatuses, even if the latter try by every means to maintain control

of it. It’s becoming clear that Facebook is not so much the model of a

new form of government as its reality already in operation. The fact

that revolutionaries employed it and still employ it to link up in the

street en masse only proves that it’s possible, in some places, to use

Facebook against itself, against its essential function, which is

policing.

When computer scientists gain entry, as they’re doing, into the

presidential palaces and mayors’ offices of the world’s largest cities,

it’s not so much to set up shop as it is to explain the new rules of the

game: government administrations are now competing with alternative

providers of the same services who, unfortunately for them, are several

steps ahead. Suggesting their cloud as a way to shelter government

services from revolutions — services like the land registry, soon to be

available as a smartphone application — the authors of The New Digital

Age inform us and them: “In the future, people won’t just back up their

data; they’ll back up their government.” And in case it’s not quite

clear who the boss is now, it concludes: “Governments may collapse and

wars can destroy physical infrastructure but virtual institutions will

survive.” With Google, what is concealed beneath the exterior of an

innocent interface and a very effective search engine, is an explicitly

political project. An enterprise that maps the planet Earth, sending its

teams into every street of every one of its towns, cannot have purely

commercial aims. One never maps a territory that one doesn’t contemplate

appropriating. “Don’t be evil!”: let yourself go.

It’s a little troubling to note that under the tents that covered

Zucotti Park and in the offices of planning -a little higher in the New

York sky—the response to disaster is conceived in the same terms:

connection, networking, self-organization. This is a sign that at the

same time that the new communication technologies were put into place

that would not only weave their web over the Earth but form the very

texture of the world in which we live, a certain way of thinking and of

governing was in the process of winning. Now, the basic principles of

this new science of government were framed by the same ones, engineers

and scientists, who invented the technical means of its application. The

history is as follows. In the 1940’s, while he was finishing his work

for the American army, the mathematician Norbert Wiener undertook to

establish both a new science and a new definition of man, of his

relationship with the world and with himself. Claude Shannon, an

engineer at Bell and M.I.T., whose work on sampling theory contributed

to the development of telecommunications, took part in this project. As

did the amazing Gregory Bateson, a Harvard anthropologist, employed by

the American secret service in Southeast Asia during the Second World

War, a sophisticated fan of LSD and founder of the Palo Alto School. And

there was the truculent John von Neumann, writer of the First Draft of a

Report on the EDVAC, regarded as the founding text of computer science —

the inventor of game theory, a decisive contribution to neoliberal

economics — a proponent of a preventive nuclear strike against the

U.S.S.R., and who, after having determined the optimal points for

releasing the Bomb on Japan, never tired of rendering various services

to the American army and the budding C.I.A. Hence the very persons who

made substantial contributions to the new means of communication and to

data processing after the Second World War also laid the basis of that

“science” that Wiener called “cybernetics.” A term that Ampere, a

century before, had had the good idea of defining as the “science of

government.” So we’re talking about an art of governing whose formative

moments are almost forgotten but whose concepts branched their way

underground, feeding into information technology as much as biology,

artificial intelligence, management, or the cognitive sciences, at the

same time as the cables were strung one after the other over the whole

surface of the globe.

We’re not undergoing, since 2008, an abrupt and unexpected “economic

crisis,” we’re only witnessing the slow collapse of political economy as

an art of governing. Economics has never been a reality or a science;

from its inception in the 17^(th) century, it’s never been anything but

an art of governing populations. Scarcity had to be avoided if riots

were to be avoided — hence the importance of “grains” — and wealth was

to be produced to increase the power of the sovereign. “The surest way

for all government is to rely on the interests of men,” said Hamilton.

Once the “natural” laws of economy were elucidated, governing meant

letting its harmonious mechanism operate freely and moving men by

manipulating their interests. Harmony, the predictability of behaviors,

a radiant future, an assumed rationality of the actors: all this implied

a certain trust, the ability to “give credit.” Now, it’s precisely these

tenets of the old governmental practice which management through

permanent crisis is pulverizing. We’re not experiencing a “crisis of

trust” but the end of trust, which has become superfluous to government.

Where control and transparency reign, where the subjects’ behavior is

anticipated in real time through the algorithmic processing of a mass of

available data about them, there’s no more need to trust them or for

them to trust. It’s sufficient that they be sufficiently monitored. As

Lenin said, “Trust is good, control is better.”

The West’s crisis of trust in itself, in its knowledge, in its language,

in its reason, in its liberalism, in its subject and the world, actually

dates back to the end of the 19^(th) century; it breaks forth in every

domain with and around the First World War. Cybernetics developed on

that open wound of modernity. It asserted itself as a remedy for the

existential and thus governmental crisis of the West. As Norbert Wiener

saw it, “We are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a

shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish,

and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a

manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity”.

Cybernetic government is inherently apocalyptic. Its purpose is to

locally impede the spontaneously entropic, chaotic movement of the world

and to ensure “enclaves of order,” of stability, and — who knows? — the

perpetual self-regulation of systems, through the unrestrained,

transparent, and controllable circulation of information. “Communication

is the cement of society and those whose work consists in keeping the

channels of communication open are the ones on whom the continuance or

downfall of our civilization largely depends,” declared Wiener,

believing he knew. As in every period of transition, the changeover from

the old economic govern- mentality to cybernetics includes a phase of

instability, a historical opening where governmentality as such can be

put in check.

2. War against all things smart!

In the 1980’s, Terry Winograd, the mentor of Larry Page, one of the

founders of Google, and Fernando Flores, the former finance minister of

Salvador Allende, wrote concerning design in information technology that

“the most important designing is ontological. It constitutes an

intervention in the background of our heritage, growing out of our

already existent ways of being in the world, and deeply affecting the

kinds of beings that we are...It is necessarily reflective and

political.” The same can be said of cybernetics. Officially, we continue

to be governed by the old dualistic Western paradigm where there is the

subject and the world, the individual and society, men and machines, the

mind and the body, the living and the nonliving. These are distinctions

that are still generally taken to be valid. In reality, cybernetized

capitalism does practice an ontology, and hence an anthropology, whose

key elements are reserved for its initiates. The rational Western

subject, aspiring to master the world and governable thereby, gives way

to the cybernetic conception of a being without an interiority, of a

selfless self, an emergent, climatic being, constituted by its

exteriority, by its relations. A being which, armed with its Apple

Watch, comes to understand itself entirely on the basis of external

data, the statistics that each of its behaviors generates. A Quantified

Self that is willing to monitor, measure, and desperately optimize every

one of its gestures and each of its affects. For the most advanced

cybernetics, there’s already no longer man and his environment, but a

system-being which is itself part of an ensemble of complex information

systems, hubs of autonomic processes — a being that can be better

explained by starting from the middle way of Indian Buddhism than from

Descartes. “For man, being alive means the same thing as participating

in a broad global system of communication”, asserted Wiener in 1948.

Just as political economy produced a homo economicus manageable in the

framework of industrial States, cybernetics is producing its own

humanity. A transparent humanity, emptied out by the very flows that

traverse it, electrified by information, attached to the world by an

ever-growing quantity of apparatuses. A humanity that’s inseparable from

its technological environment because it is constituted, and thus

driven, by that. Such is the object of government now: no longer man or

his interests, but his “social environment”. An environment whose model

is the smart city. Smart because by means of its sensors it produces

information whose processing in real time makes self-management

possible. And smart because it produces and is produced by smart

inhabitants. Political economy reigned over beings by leaving them free

to pursue their interest; cybernetics controls them by leaving them free

to communicate. “We need to reinvent the social systems in a controlled

framework,” according to M.I.T. professor Alex Pentland, in an article

from 2011. The most petrifying and most realistic vision of the

metropolis to come is not found in the brochures that IBM distributes to

municipalities to sell them software for managing the flows of water,

electricity, or road traffic. It’s rather the one developed in principle

“against” that Orwellian vision of the city: “smarter cities” coproduced

by their residents themselves (in any case by the best connected among

them). Another M.I.T. professor traveling in Catalonia is pleased to see

its capital becoming little by little a “fab city”: “Sitting here right

in the heart of Barcelona I see a new city being invented where everyone

will have access to the tools to make it completely autonomous” The

citizens are thus no longer subalterns but smart people, “receivers and

generators of ideas, services, and solutions,” as one of them says. In

this vision, the metropolis doesn’t become smart through the

decision-making and action of a central government, but appears, as a

“spontaneous order”, when its inhabitants “find new ways of producing,

connecting, and giving meaning to their own data.” The resilient

metropolis thus emerges, one that can resist every disaster.

Behind the futuristic promise of a world of fully linked people and

objects, when cars, fridges, watches, vacuums, and dildos are directly

connected to each other and to the Internet, there is what is already

here: the fact that the most polyvalent of sensors is already in

operation: myself. “I” share my geolocation, my mood, my opinions, my

account of what I saw today that was awesome or awesomely banal. I ran,

so I immediately shared my route, my time, my performance numbers and

their self-evaluation. I always post photos of my vacations, my

evenings, my riots, my colleagues, of what I’m going to eat and who I’m

going to fuck. I appear not to do much and yet I produce a steady stream

of data. Whether I work or not, my everyday life, as a stock of

information, remains fully valuable.

“Thanks to the widespread networks of sensors, we will have a God’s eye

view of ourselves. For the first time, we can precisely map the behavior

of masses of people at the level of their daily lives,” enthuses one of

the professors. The great refrigerated storehouses of data are the

pantry of current government. In its rummaging through the databases

produced and continuously updated by the everyday life of connected

humans, it looks for the correlations it can use to establish not

universal laws nor even “whys,” but rather “whens” and “whats,” onetime,

situated predictions, not to say oracles. The stated ambition of

cybernetics is to manage the unforeseeable, and to govern the

ungovernable instead of trying to destroy it. The question of cybernetic

government is not only, as in the era of political economy, to

anticipate in order to plan the action to take, but also to act directly

upon the virtual, to structure the possibilities. A few years ago, the

LAPD bought itself a new software program called PredPol. Based on a

heap of crime statistics, it calculates the probabilities that a

particular crime will be committed, neighborhood by neighborhood, street

by street. Given these probabilities updated in real time, the program

itself organizes the police patrols in the city. A founder cybernetician

wrote in Le Monde in 1948: “We can dream of a time when the machine a

gouverner will — for good or evil, who knows? — compensate for the

shortcomings, obvious today, of the leaders and customary apparatuses of

politics.” Every epoch dreams the next one, even if the dream of the one

may become the daily nightmare of the other.

The object of the great harvest of personal information is not an

individualized tracking of the whole population. If the surveillants

insinuate themselves into the intimate lives of each and every person,

it’s not so much to construct individual files as to assemble massive

databases that make numerical sense. It is more efficient to correlate

the shared characteristics of individuals in a multitude of “profiles,”

with the probable developments they suggest. One is not interested in

the individual, present and entire, but only in what makes it possible

to determine their potential lines of flight. The advantage of applying

the surveillance to profiles, “events,” and virtualities is that

statistical entities don’t take offense, and individuals can still claim

they’re not being monitored, at least not personally. While cybernetic

governmentality already operates in terms of a completely new logic, its

subjects continue to think of themselves according to the old paradigm.

We believe that our “personal” data belong to us, like our car or our

shoes, and that we’re only exercising our “individual freedom” by

deciding to let Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon or the police have

access to them, without realizing that this has immediate effects on

those who refuse to, and who will be treated from then on as suspects,

as potential deviants. “To be sure,” predicts The New Digital Age,

“there will be people who resist adopting and using technology, people

who want nothing to do with virtual profiles, online data systems or

smart phones. Yet a government might suspect that people who opt out

completely have something to hide and thus are more likely to break

laws, and as a counterterrorism measure, that government will build the

kind of ‘hidden people’ registry we described earlier. If you don’t have

any registered social-networking profiles or mobile subscriptions, and

on-line references to you are unusually hard to find, you might be

considered a candidate for such a registry. You might also be subjected

to a strict set of new regulations that includes rigorous airport

screening or even travel restrictions.”

3. The Poverty of Cybernetics

So the security services are coming to consider a Facebook profile more

credible than the individual supposedly hiding behind it. This is some

indication of the porousness between what was still called the virtual

and the real. The accelerating datafication of the world does make it

less and less pertinent to think of the online world and the real world,

cyberspace and reality, as being separate. “Look at Android, Gmail,

Google Maps, Google Search. That’s what we do. We make products that

people can’t live without,” is how they put it in Mountain View. In the

past few years, however, the ubiquity of connected devices in the

everyday lives of human beings has triggered some survival reflexes.

Certain barkeepers decided to ban Google Glasses from their

establishments — which became truly hip as a result, it should be said.

Initiatives are blossoming that encourage people to disconnect

occasionally (one day per week, for a weekend, a month) in order to take

note of their dependence on technological objects and re-experience an

“authentic” contact with reality. The attempt proves to be futile of

course. The pleasant weekend at the seashore with one’s family and

without the smartphones is lived primarily as an experience of

disconnection; that is, as something immediately thrown forward to the

moment of reconnection, when it will be shared on the Internet.

Eventually, however, with Western man’s abstract relation to the world

becoming objectified in a whole complex of apparatuses, a whole universe

of virtual reproductions, the path towards presence paradoxically

reopens. By detaching ourselves from everything, we’ll end up detaching

ourselves even from our detachment. The technological beatdown will

ultimately restore our capacity to be moved by the bare, pixelless

existence of a honeysuckle vine. Every sort of screen coming between us

and reality will have been required before we could reclaim the singular

shimmer of the sensible world, and our amazement at what is there. It

will have taken hundreds of “friends” who have nothing to do with us,

“liking” us on Facebook the better to ridicule us afterwards, for us to

rediscover the ancient taste for friendship.

Having failed to create computers capable of equaling human beings,

they’ve set out to impoverish human experience to the point where life

can be confused with its digital modeling. Can one picture the human

desert that had to be created to make existence on the social media seem

desirable? Just as the traveler had to be replaced by the tourist for it

to be imagined that the latter might pay to go all over the world via

hologram while remaining in their living room. But the slightest real

experience will shatter the wretchedness of this kind of illusionism.

The poverty of cybernetics is what will bring it down in the end. For a

hyper-individualized generation whose primary sociality had been that of

the social media, the Quebec student strike of 2012 was first of all a

stunning revelation of the insurrectionary power of simply being

together and starting to move. Evidently, this was a meet-up like no

other before, such that the insurgent friendships were able to rush the

police lines. The control traps were useless against that; in fact, they

had become another way for people to test themselves, together. “The end

of the Self will be the genesis of presence,” envisioned Giorgio

Cesarano in his Survival Manual.

The virtue of the hackers has been to base themselves on the materiality

of the supposedly virtual world. In the words of a member of Telecomix,

a group of hackers famous for helping the Syrians get around the state

control of Internet communications, if the hacker is ahead of his time

it’s because he “didn’t think of this tool [the Internet] as a separate

virtual world but as an extension of physical reality.” This is all the

more obvious now that the hacker movement is extending itself outside

the screens by opening hackerspaces where people can analyze, tinker

with, and piece together digital software and tech objects. The

expansion and networking of Do It Yourself has produced a gamut of

purposes: it’s a matter of fooling with things, with the street, the

city, the society, life itself. Some pathological progressives have been

quick to see the beginnings of a new economy in it, even a new

civilization, based this time on “sharing.” Never mind that the present

capitalist economy already values “creation,” beyond the old industrial

constraints. Managers are urged to facilitate free initiative, to

encourage innovative projects, creativity, genius, even deviance — “the

company of the future must protect the deviant, for it’s the deviant who

will innovate and who is capable of creating rationality in the

unknown,” they say. Today value is not sought in the new features of a

product, nor even in its desirability or its meaning, but in the

experience it offers to the consumer. So why not offer that consumer the

ultimate experience of going over to the other side of the creation

process? From this perspective, the hackerspaces or “fablabs” become

spaces where the “projects” of “consumer-innovators” can be undertaken

and “new marketplaces” can emerge. In San Francisco, the TechShop firm

is developing a new type of fitness club where, for a yearly membership

fee, “one goes every week to make things, to create and develop one’s

projects.”

The fact that the American army finances similar places under the Cyber

Fast Track program of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency)

doesn’t discredit the hackerspaces as such. Any more than they’re

condemned to participate in yet another restructuring of the capitalist

production process when they’re captured in the “Maker” movement with

its spaces where people working together can build and repair industrial

objects or divert them from their original uses. Village construction

sets, like that of Open Source Ecology with its fifty modular machines —

tractor, milling machine, cement mixer, etc. — and DIY dwelling modules

could also have a different destiny than serving to found a “small

civilization with all the modern comforts,” or creating “entire new

economies” or a “financial system” or a “new governance,” as its current

guru fantasizes. Urban farming which is being established on building

roofs or vacant industrial lots, like the 1300 community gardens of

Detroit, could have other ambitions than participating in economic

recovery or bolstering the “resilience of disaster zones.” Attacks like

those conducted by Anonymous/LulzSec against banking firms, security

multinationals, or telecommunications could very well go beyond

cyberspace. As a Ukrainian hacker says, “When you have to attend to your

life, you stop printing stuff in 3D rather quickly. You find a different

plan.”

4. Techniques against Technology.

The famous “question concerning technology,” still a blind spot for

revolutionary movements, comes in here. A wit whose name can be

forgotten described the French tragedy thus: “a generally technophobic

country dominated by a generally technophilic elite.” While the

observation may not apply to the country, it does apply in any case to

the radical milieus. The majority of Marxists and post-Marxists

supplement their atavistic inclination to hegemony with a definite

attachment to technology-that- emancipates-man, whereas a large

percentage of anarchists and post-anarchists are down with being a

minority, even an oppressed minority, and adopt positions generally

hostile to “technology.” Each tendency even has its caricature:

corresponding to the Negriist devotees of the cyborg, the electronic

revolution by connected multitudes, there are the anti-industrials

who’ve turned the critique of progress and the “disaster of

technological civilization” into a profitable literary genre on the

whole, and a niche ideology where one can stay warm at least, having

envisaged no revolutionary possibility whatsoever. Technophilia and

technophobia form a diabolical pair joined together by a central

untruth: that such a thing as the technical exists. It would be

possible, apparently, to divide between what is technical and what is

not, in human existence. Well, no, in fact. One only has to look at the

state of incompletion in which the human offspring is born, and the time

it takes for it to move about in the world and to talk, to realize that

its relation to the world is not given in the least, but rather the

result of a whole elaboration. Since it’s not due to a natural

compatibility, man’s relation to the world is essentially artificial,

technical, to speak Greek. Each human world is a certain configuration

of techniques, of culinary, architectural, musical, spiritual,

informational, agricultural, erotic, martial, etc., techniques. And it’s

for this reason that there’s no generic human essence: because there are

only particular techniques, and because every technique configures a

world, materializing in this way a certain relationship with the latter,

a certain form of life. So one doesn’t “construct” a form of life; one

only incorporates techniques, through example, exercise, or

apprenticeship. This is also why our familiar world rarely appears to us

as “technical”: because the set of artifices that structure it are

already part of us. It’s rather those we’re not familiar with that seem

to have a strange artificiality. Hence the technical character of our

world only stands out in two circumstances: invention and “breakdown.”

It’s only when we’re present at a discovery or when a familiar element

is lacking, or breaks, or stops functioning, that the illusion of living

in a natural world gives way in the face of contrary evidence.

Techniques can’t be reduced to a collection of equivalent instruments

any one of which Man, that generic being, could take up and use without

his essence being affected. Every tool configures and embodies a

particular relation with the world, and the worlds formed in this way

are not equivalent, any more than the humans who inhabit them are. And

by the same token these worlds are not hierarchizable either. There is

nothing that would establish some as more “advanced” than others. They

are merely distinct, each one having its own potential and its own

history. In order to hierarchize worlds a criterion has to be

introduced, an implicit criterion making it possible to classify the

different techniques. In the case of progress, this criterion is simply

the quantifiable productivity of the techniques, considered apart from

what each technique might involve ethically, without regard to the

sensible world it engenders. This is why there’s no progress but

capitalist progress, and why capitalism is the uninterrupted destruction

of worlds. Moreover, the fact that techniques produce worlds and forms

of life doesn’t mean that man’s essence is production, as Marx believed.

So this is what technophiles and technophobes alike fail to grasp: the

ethical nature of every technique.

It should be added that the nightmare of this epoch is not in its being

the “age of technics” but in its being the age of technology. Technology

is not the consummation of technical development, but on the contrary

the expropriation of humans’ different constitutive techniques.

Technology is the systematizing of the most effective techniques, and

consequently the leveling of the worlds and the relations with the world

that everyone deploys. Techno-logy is a discourse about techniques that

is constantly being projected into material reality. Just as the

ideology of the festival is the death of the real festival, and the

ideology of the encounter is the actual impossibility of coming

together, technology is the neutralization of all the particular

techniques. In this sense capitalism is essentially technological; it is

the profitable organization of the most productive techniques into a

system. Its cardinal figure is not the economist but the engineer. The

engineer is the specialist in techniques and thus the chief expropriator

of them, one who doesn’t let himself be affected by any of them, and

spreads his own absence from the world everywhere he can. He’s a sad and

servile figure. The solidarity between capitalism and socialism is

confirmed there: in the cult of the engineer. It was engineers who drew

up most of the models of the neoclassical economy like pieces of

contemporary trading software. Recall in this regard that Brezhnev’s

claim to fame was to have been an engineer in the metallurgical industry

in Ukraine.

The figure of the hacker contrasts point by point with the figure of the

engineer, whatever the artistic, police-directed, or entrepreneurial

efforts to neutralize him may be. Whereas the engineer would capture

everything that functions, in such a way that everything functions

better in service to the system, the hacker asks himself “How does that

work?” in order to find its flaws, but also to invent other uses, to

experiment. Experimenting then means exploring what such and such a

technique implies ethically. The hacker pulls techniques out of the

technological system in order to free them. If we are slaves of

technology, this is precisely because there is a whole ensemble of

artifacts of our everyday existence that we take to be specifically

“technical” and that we will always regard simply as black boxes of

which we are the innocent users. The use of computers to attack the CIA

attests rather clearly that cybernetics is no more the science of

computers than astronomy is the science of telescopes. Understanding how

the devices around us work brings an immediate increase in power, giving

us a purchase on what will then no longer appear as an environment, but

as a world arranged in a certain way and one that we can shape. This is

the hacker’s perspective on the world.

These past few years, the hacker milieu has gained some sophistication

politically, managing to identify friends and enemies more clearly.

Several substantial obstacles stand in the way of its

becoming-revolutionary, however. In 1986, “Doctor Crash” wrote: “Whether

you know it or not, if you are a hacker you are a revolutionary. Don’t

worry, you’re on the right side.” It’s not certain that this sort of

innocence is still possible. In the hacker milieu there‘s an originary

illusion according to which “freedom of information,” “freedom of the

Internet,” or “freedom of the individual” can be set against those who

are bent on controlling them. This is a serious misunderstanding.

Freedom and surveillance, freedom and the panopticon belong to the same

paradigm of government. Historically, the endless expansion of control

procedures is the corollary of a form of power that is realized through

the freedom of individuals. Liberal government is not one that is

exercised directly on the bodies of its subjects or that expects a

filial obedience from them. It’s a background power, which prefers to

manage space and rule over interests rather than bodies. A power that

oversees, monitors, and acts minimally, intervening only where the

framework is threatened, against that which goes too far. Only free

subjects, taken en masse, are governed. Individual freedom is not

something that can be brandished against the government, for it is the

very mechanism on which government depends, the one it regulates as

closely as possible in order to obtain, from the amalgamation of all

these freedoms, the anticipated mass effect. Ordo ab chao. Government is

that order which one obeys “like one eats when hungry and covers oneself

when cold,” that servitude which I co-produce at the same time that I

pursue my happiness, that I exercise my “freedom of expression.” “Market

freedom requires an active and extremely vigilant politics,” explained

one of the founders of neoliberalism. For the individual, monitored

freedom is the only kind there is. This is what libertarians, in their

infantilism, will never understand, and it’s this incomprehension that

makes the libertarian idiocy attractive to some hackers. A genuinely

free being is not even said to be free. It simply is, it exists, deploys

its powers according to its being. We say of an animal that it is en

liberte, “roaming free,” only when it lives in an environment that’s

already completely controlled, fenced, civilized: in the park with human

rules, where one indulges in a safari. “Friend” and “free” in English,

and “Freund” and “frei” in German come from the same Indo-European root,

which conveys the idea of a shared power that grows. Being free and

having ties was one and the same thing. I am free because I have ties,

because I am linked to a reality greater than me. In ancient Rome, the

children of citizens were liberi : through them, it was Rome that was

growing. Which goes to show how ridiculous and what a scam the

individual freedom of “I do what I feel like doing” is. If they truly

want to fight the government, the hackers have to give up this fetish.

The cause of individual freedom is what prevents them from forming

strong groups capable of laying down a real strategy, beyond a series of

attacks; it’s also what explains their inability to form ties beyond

themselves, their incapacity for becoming a historical force. A member

of Telecomix alerts his colleagues in these terms: “What is certain is

that the territory you’re living in is defended by persons you would do

well to meet. Because they’re changing the world and they won’t wait for

you.”

Another obstacle for the hacker movement, as every new meeting of the

Chaos Computer Club demonstrates, is in managing to draw a front line in

its own ranks between those working for a better government, or even the

government, and those working for its destitution. The time has come for

taking sides. It’s this basic question that eludes Julian Assange when

he says: “We high-tech workers are a class and it’s time we recognize

ourselves as such.” France has recently exploited the defect to the

point of opening a university for molding “ethical hackers”. Under DCRI

supervision, it will train people to fight against the real hackers,

those who haven’t abandoned the hacker ethic.

These two problems merged in a case affecting us. After so many attacks

that so many of us applauded, Anonymous/LulzSec hackers found

themselves, like Jeremy Hammond, nearly alone facing repression upon

getting arrested. On Christmas day, 2011, LulzSec defaced the site of

Strafor, a “private intelligence” multinational. By way of a homepage,

there was now the scrolling text of The Coming Insurrection in English,

and $700,000 was transferred from the accounts of Stratfor customers to

a set of charitable associations — a Christmas present. And we weren’t

able to do anything, either before or after their arrest. Of course,

it’s safer to operate alone or in a small group — which obviously won’t

protect you from infiltrators — when one goes after such targets, but

it’s disastrous for attacks that are so political, and so clearly within

the purview of global action by our party, to be reduced by the police

to some private crime, punishable by decades of prison or used as a

lever for pressuring this or that “Internet pirate” to turn into a

government snitch.

Invisible Committee, October 2014

5: let’s disappear

[Istanbul, June 2013.]

1: A Strange Defeat

Anyone who lived through the days of December, 2008 in Athens knows what

the word “insurrection” signifies in a Western metropolis. The banks

were in pieces, the police stations under siege, the city in the hands

of the assailants. In the luxury shops, they were no longer repairing

the windows, which would need to be done every morning. Nothing that

embodied the police reign of normality was untouched by this wave of

fire and stones whose bearers were everywhere and representatives

nowhere—even the Syntagma Christmas tree was torched. At a certain point

the forces of order withdrew, after running out of tear-gas grenades.

Impossible to say who took over the streets then. They say it was the

“600 euros generation,” the “high schoolers,” the “anarchists,” the

“riffraff” from the Albanian immigration, they’ll say anything. As

usual, the press blamed the “koukoulofori,” the “hooded ones.” The truth

is that the anarchists were overrun by this faceless outpouring of rage.

Their monopoly on wild, masked action, inspired tags, and even Molotov

cocktails had been taken from them unceremoniously. The general uprising

they no longer dared to imagine was there, but it didn’t resemble the

idea of it they had in their minds. An unknown entity, an egregore, had

been born, a spirit that wouldn’t be appeased till everything was

reduced to cinders that deserved to be. Time was on fire. The present

was fractured as payment for all the future that had been stolen from

us.

The years that followed in Greece taught us the meaning of the word

“counter-insurgency” in a Western country. Once the wave had passed, the

hundreds of groups that had formed in the country, down to the smallest

villages, tried to stay faithful to the breach which the month of

December had opened. At one spot, people might empty the cash registers

of a supermarket, then film themselves burning the loot. At another, an

embassy might be attacked in broad daylight in solidarity with some

friend hounded by the police in his or her country. Some resolved, as in

Italy of the 1970’s, to carry the attack to a higher level and target,

using bombs or firearms, the Athens stock exchange, cops, ministries or

perhaps the Microsoft headquarters. As in the 1970’s, the left passed

new “antiterrorist” laws. The raids, arrests, and trials multiplied. For

a time, one was reduced to militating against “repression.” The European

Union, the World Bank, the IMF, in agreement with the Socialist

government, undertook to make Greece pay for the unpardonable revolt.

One should never underestimate the resentment of the wealthy towards the

insolence of the poor. They decided to bring the whole country to heel

through a string of “economic measures” more or less as violent,

although spread over time, as the revolt.

This was met by dozens of general strikes called by the unions. Workers

occupied ministries; inhabitants took possession of city halls;

university departments and hospitals that had been “sacrificed” decided

to self-organize. There was the “movement of the squares.” May 10, 2010,

five hundred thousand of us flooded into the center of Athens. There

were several attempts to burn the Parliament. February 12, 2012, an

umpteenth general strike was staged in desperate opposition to the

umpteenth austerity plan. That Sunday, all of Greece, its retirees, its

anarchists, its civil servants, its workers and its homeless

demonstrated in a state of near-insurrection. With downtown Athens again

in flames, that evening was a paroxysm of jubilation and weariness: the

movement perceived all its power, but also realized it didn’t know what

to do with it. Over the years, in spite of thousands of direct actions,

hundreds of occupations, millions of Greeks in the streets, the euphoria

of rebellion was dampened in the drop-box of “crisis.” The embers stayed

active under the ashes, certainly. The movement found other forms,

providing itself with cooperatives, social centers, “networks of

exchange without middlemen,” and even self-managed factories and health

clinics. It became more “constructive” in a sense. The fact remains that

we were defeated, that one the biggest offensives of our party during

the past few decades was repulsed through debt impositions, exaggerated

prison sentences, and generalized bankruptcy. The free used clothing

won’t make Greeks forget the counter-insurgency’s determination to

plunge them up to their necks in privation. Power may have tottered and

given the momentary impression of disappearing, but it was able to shift

the terrain of confrontation and catch the movement off balance. The

Greeks were blackmailed by this alternative: “government or chaos.” What

they got was government and chaos—plus immiseration as a bonus.

With its anarchist movement stronger than anywhere else, with its people

largely uneasy with the very fact of being governed, with its

always-already failed state, Greece stands as a textbook case of our

defeated insurrections. Jacking the police, smashing the banks and

temporarily routing a government is still not destituting it all. What

the Greek case shows us is that without a concrete idea of what a

victory would be, we can’t help but be defeated. Insurrectionary

determination is not enough; our confusion is still too thick.

Hopefully, studying our defeats will serve at least to dissipate it

somewhat.

2. Pacifists and Radicals — an infernal couple

Forty years of triumphant counterrevolution in the West have inflicted

two matching weaknesses on us: pacifism and radicalism. They’re both

harmful, but in combination they form a pitiless apparatus.

Pacifism lies, and lies to itself, by making public discussion and

general assembly the be-all and end-all of political practice. That

explains why the squares movement, for example, was incapable of

becoming anything more than a terminal starting point. To grasp what the

political means, there seems to be no choice but to take another detour

through Greece, but ancient Greece this time. After all, the political

was invented there. Pacifists are reluctant to remember this, but early

on the ancient Greeks invented democracy as a continuation of war by

other means. The assembly practice on the scale of the city-state came

directly from the assembly of warriors. Equality of speech stemmed from

equality in the face of death. Athenian democracy was a hoplitic

democracy. One was a citizen because one was a soldier—hence the

exclusion of women and slaves. In a culture as violently agonistic as

classical Greek culture, debate itself was understood as a moment of

warlike confrontation, between citizens this time, in the sphere of

speech, with the arms of persuasion. Moreover, “agon” signifies

“assembly” as much as “competition.” The complete Greek citizen was one

who was victorious both with arms and with discourse.

Above all, the ancient Greeks conceived assembly democracy in

combination with warfare as organized carnage, and the former as the

guarantor of the latter. It’s significant that the Greeks are credited

with the invention of democracy only on condition that its link with

that rather exceptional type of massacre based on the phalanx is glossed

over—that is, with the invention of a form of line warfare that replaces

skill, bravery, prowess, extraordinary strength, and genius with pure

and simple discipline, absolute submission of each to the whole. When

the Persians found themselves facing such an effective way of waging

war, but one that reduced the life of the foot soldier in the phalanx to

nothing, they rightly judged it to be perfectly barbaric, as did so many

of those enemies whom the Western armies were to crush subsequently. The

Athenian farmer getting himself heroically slaughtered in the front rank

of the phalanx in view of his friends and relatives was thus the flip

side of the active citizen taking part in the Boule. The lifeless arms

of the corpses strewn over the ancient battlefield were the necessary

counterparts of the arms raised to intervene in the deliberations of the

assembly. This Greek model of warfare is so firmly entrenched in the

Westerm imaginary it’s almost forgotten that at the very time when the

hoplites were awarding the victory to that phalanx of the two that would

accept the maximun number of deaths in the decisive clash rather than

yield ground, the Chinese were inventing an art of war that consisted

precisely in minimizing losses and avoiding battle as much as possible,

in trying to “win the battle before the battle”—even if this also meant

exterminating the defeated army once the victory was obtained. The

equation “war=confrontation army=carnage” extended from ancient Greece

down through the 20^(th) century. It’s basically been the aberrant

Western definition of warfare for two thousand five hundred years. That

“irregular warfare,” “psychological warfare,” “little war” or “guerilla”

are the names given to what is elsewhere the norm of warfare is only one

aspect of that particular aberration.

The sincere pacifist, one who is not simply rationalizing his own

cowardice, performs the feat of being doubly mistaken about the nature

of the phenomenon he claims to be combating. Not only is war not

reducible to armed confrontation or carnage, it is the very matrix of

the assembly politics that the pacifist advocates. “A real warrior,”

said Sun Tzu, “is not bellicose. A real fighter is not violent. A victor

avoids combat.” Two world conflicts and a terrifying planetary fight

against “terrorism” have shown us that the bloodiest campaigns of

extermination are conducted in the name of peace. At bottom, the

rejection of war only expresses an infantile or senile refusal to

recognize the existence of otherness. War is not carnage, but the logic

that regulates the contact of heterogeneous powers. It is waged

everywhere, in countless forms, and more often than not by peaceful

means. If there’s multiplicity of worlds, if there’s an irreducible

plurality of forms of life, then war is the law of their co-existence on

this earth. For nothing allows us to foresee the outcome of their

encounter: contraries don’t dwell in separate worlds. If we are not

unified individuals endowed with a definitive identity as the social

policing of roles would have it, but the locus of a conflictual play of

forces whose successive configurations only form temporary equilibriums,

we have to recognize that war is in us—holy war, as Rene Daumal called

it. Peace is neither possible nor desirable. Conflict is the very stuff

of what exists. So the thing to do is to acquire an art of conducting

it, which is an art of living on a situational footing, and which

requires a finesse and an existential mobility instead of a readiness to

crush whatever is not us.

Pacifism attests therefore either to a deep stupidity or a complete lack

of good faith. Even our immune system depends on the distinction between

friend and enemy, without which we would die of cancer or some other

autoimmune disease. Actually, we do die of cancers and autoimmune

diseases. The tactical refusal of confrontation is itself only a

stratagem of warfare. It’s easy to understand, for example, why the

Oaxaca Commune immediately declared itself peaceful. It wasn’t a matter

of refuting war, but of refusing to be defeated in a confrontation with

the Mexican state and its henchmen. As some Cairo comrades explained it,

“One mustn’t mistake the tactic we employ when we chant ‘nonviolence’

for a fetishizing of non-violence.” It’s amazing, furthermore, how much

historical falsification it takes to find fore-bears who are presentable

to pacifism! Think of poor Thoreau who was barely deceased when they

made him into a theoretician of Civil Disobedience, by amputating the

title of his text, Resistance to Civil Government. This was the man who

wrote in longhand in his Plea for Captain John Brown: “ I think that for

once the Sharpe’s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous

cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them. The same

indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it

again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you

use it.” But the most farcical case of false genealogy has to be the way

Nelson Mandela, the founder of the armed-struggle organization of the

ANC, was turned into a global icon of peace. He lays it out himself: “I

said that the time for passive resistance had ended, that nonviolence

was a useless strategy and could never overturn a white minority regime

bent on retaining its power at any cost. At the end of the day, I said,

violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid and we must be

prepared, in the near future, to use that weapon. The crowd was excited;

the youth in particular were clapping and cheering. They were ready to

act on what I said right then and there. At that point I began to sing a

freedom song, the lyrics of which say, ‘There are the enemies, let us

take our weapons and attack them.’ I sang this song and the crowd joined

in, and when the song was finished, I pointed to the police and said,

‘There, there are our enemies!”’

Decades of pacification of the masses and mas-sification of fears have

made pacifism the spontaneous political consciousness of the citizen.

With every movement that develops now one has to grapple with this awful

state of affairs. One can cite the pacifists delivering black-clad

rioters over to the police at the Plaqa Cataluya in 2011, or the

harassment and verbal lynching of “Black Bloc” protesters by the same in

Genoa in 2001. In response to that, the revolutionary milieus secreted,

as a kind antibody, the figure of the radical— someone who always takes

the opposing view to the citizen. To the moral proscription of violence

by the one, the other always replies with his purely ideological apology

of violence. Where the pacifist always seeks to absolve himself of the

state of the world, to remain good by doing no evil, the radical seeks

to absolve himself of participation in the “existing state of things”

through minor illegalities embellished with hardcore “position

statements.” Both aspire to purity, one through violent action, the

other by abstaining from it. Each is the other’s nightmare. It’s not

certain that these two figures would go on existing for long if each one

didn’t have the other deep inside him. As if the radical only lived to

make the pacifist shudder inside, and vice versa. It’s fitting that the

bible of American citizen struggles since the 1970’s is titled Rules for

Radicals—by Saul Alinsky. Because pacifists and radicals are joined

together in the same refusal of the world. They take pleasure in their

disjunction from every situation. It gets them high, makes them feel

like they’re in touch with some sort of excellence. They prefer living

as extraterrestrials— such is the comfort that is authorized, for a

while still, by life in the metropolis, their privileged biotope.

Since the catastrophic defeat of the 1970’s, the moral question of

radicality has gradually replaced the strategic question of revolution.

That is, revolution has suffered the same fate as everything else in

those decades: it has been privatized. It has become an opportunity for

personal validation, with radicality as the standard of evaluation.

“Revolutionary” acts are no longer appraised in terms of the situation

in which they are embedded, the possibilities they open up or close.

What happens instead is that a form is extracted from each one of them.

A particular sabotage, occurring at a particular moment, for a

particular reason, becomes simply a sabotage. And the sabotage quietly

takes its place among certified revolutionary practices on a scale where

throwing a Molotov cocktail ranks higher than throwing rocks, but lower

than kneecapping, which itself is not worth as much as a bomb. The

problem is that no form of action is revolutionary in itself: sabotage

has also been practiced by reformists and by Nazis. A movement’s degree

of “violence” is not indicative of its revolutionary determination. The

“radicality” of a demonstration isn’t measured by the number of shop

windows broken. Or if it is, then the “radicality” criterion should be

left to those in the habit of measuring political phenomena and ranking

them on their skeletal moral scale. Anyone who begins to frequent

radical milieus is immediately struck by the gap between their discourse

and their practice, between their ambitions and their isolation. It

seems as if they were dedicated to a kind of constant

self-incapacitation. One soon understands that they’re not engaged in

constructing a real revolutionary force, but in a quest for radicality

that is sufficient in itself— and is played out equally well on the

terrain of direct action, feminism or ecology. The petty terror that

reigns there and makes everyone so stiff is not that of the Bolshevik

Party. It’s more like that of fashion, that terror which no one exerts

in person, but which affects everyone alike. In these milieus, one is

afraid of not being radical anymore, just as elsewhere one fears not

being fashionable, cool or hip. It doesn’t take much to spoil a

reputation. One avoids going to the root of things in favor of a

superficial consumption of theories, demos, and relations. The fierce

competition between groups and inside them causes them to periodically

implode. But there’s always fresh, young, and abused flesh to make up

for the departure of the exhausted, the damaged, the disgusted, and the

emptied-out. An a posteriori bewilderment overtakes the person who’s

deserted these circles: how can anyone submit to such a mutilating

pressure for such enigmatic stakes? It’s approximately the same kind

ofbewil-derment that must take hold of any overworked ex-manager turned

baker when he looks back on his previous life. The isolation of these

milieus is structural: between them and the world they’ve interposed

radicality as a standard. They don’t perceive phenomena anymore, just

their measure. At a certain point in the autophagy, some will compete

for most radical by critiquing the milieu itself, which won’t make the

slightest dent in its structure. “It seems to us that what really

reduces our freedom,” wrote Malatesta, “and makes intiative impossible,

is disempowering isolation.” This being the case, that a fraction of the

anarchists declare themselves “nihilists” is only logical: nihilism is

the incapacity to believe in what one does believe in—in our context,

revolution. Besides, there are no nihilists, there are only powerless

individuals.

The radical defining himself as a producer of actions and discourses has

ended up fabricating a purely quantitative idea of revolution—as a kind

of crisis of overproduction of acts of individual revolt. “Let’s not

lose sight of the fact,” wrote Emile Henry back then already, “that

revolution will not be the resultant of all these particular revolts.”

History is there to contradict that thesis: whether it’s the French,

Russian, or Tunisian revolution, in every instance revolution results

from the shock encounter between a particular act—the storming of a

prison, a military defeat, the suicide of a mobile fruit vendor—and the

general situation, and not the arithmetical addition of separate acts of

revolt. Meanwhile, that absurd definition of revolution is doing its

foreseeable damage: one wears oneself out in an activism that leads

nowhere, one devotes oneself to a dreadful cult of performance where

it’s a matter of actualizing one’s radical identity at every moment,

here and now— in a demo, in love, or in discourse. This lasts for a

time—the time of a burnout, depression, or repression. And one hasn’t

changed anything.

A gesture is revolutionary not by its own content but by the sequence of

effects it engenders. The situation is what determines the meaning of

the act, not the intention of its authors. Sun Tzu said that “victory

must be demanded of the situation.” Every situation is composite,

traversed by lines of force, tensions, explicit or latent conflicts.

Engaging with the war that is present, acting strategically, requires

that we start from an openness to the situation, that we undersand its

inner dynamic, the relations of force that configure it, the polarities

that give it its dynamism. An action is revolutionary or not depending

on the meaning it acquires from contact with the world. Throwing a rock

is never just “rock-throwing.” It can freeze a situation or set off an

intifada. The idea that a struggle can be “radicalized” by injecting a

whole passel of allegedly radical practices and discourses into it is

the politics of an extraterrestrial. A movement lives only through a

series of shifts that it effects over time. So at every moment there is

a certain distance between its present state and its potential. If it

stops developing, if it leaves its potential unrealized, it dies. A

decisive act is one that is a notch ahead of the movement’s state, and

which, breaking with the status quo, gives it access to its own

potential. This act can be that of occupying, smashing, attacking, or

simply speaking truthfully. The state of the movement is what decides. A

thing is revolutionary that actually causes revolutions. While this can

only be determined after the event, a certain sensitivity to the

situation plus a dose of historical knowledge helps one intuit the

matter.

Let’s leave the radicality worry to the depressives, the Young-Girls,

and the losers, then. The real question for revolutionaries is how to

make the lively powers in which one participates increase, how to

nurture the revolutionizing developments so as to arrive finally at a

revolutionary situation. All those who draw satisfaction from

dogmatically contrasting “radicals” with “citizens,” “active rebels”

with the passive population, place obstacles in the path of such

developments. On this point, they anticipate the work of the police. In

the current period, tact should be considered the cardinal revolutionary

virtue, and not abstract radicality—and by “tact” we mean the art of

nurturing revolutionizing developments.

Among the miracles of the Susa Valley struggle, one has to include the

way it succeeded in tearing a good number of radicals away from their

painfully constructed identity. It brought them back down to earth. In

contact again with a real situation, they were able to shed most of

their ideological spacesuit—not without incurring the inexhaustible

resentment of those still confined in their interstellar radicality

where breathing is such a problem. Undoubtedly, the happy outcome was

due to this struggle’s special art of avoiding capture in the image that

power holds out to it— whether it’s that of an ecology movement of

legalistic citizens or that of an armed-violence vanguard. Alternating

family-style demonstrations with attacks on the TAV construction site,

resorting to sabotage at one moment and partnership with the valley’s

mayors the next, associating anarchists and Catholic grandmas, this

struggle is revolutionary at least insofar as it has been able to

deactivate the infernal coupling of pacifism and radicalism. “Living in

a political manner,” reflected a Stalinist dandy shortly before dying,

“means acting instead of being acted upon, it means doing politics

instead of being done by it, remade by it. It’s to engage in combat, a

series of combats, to wage war, one’s own war with war objectives,

immediate and longterm perspectives, a strategy, a tactic.”

3. Government as counter-insurgency

“Civil war,” said Foucault, “is the matrix of all the power struggles,

of all the power strategies and, consequently, the matrix of all the

struggles over and against power.” He added, “Civil war not only brings

collective elements into play, but it constitutes them. Far from being

the process through which one comes down again from the republic to

individuality, from the sovereign to the state of nature, from the

collective order to the war of all against all, civil war is the process

through and by which a certain number of new collectivities that had not

seen the light of day constitute themselves.” It’s on this plane of

perception that basically every political existence deploys. Pacifism

that has already lost and radicalism that only intends to lose are two

ways of not seeing this. Of not seeing that war is not essentially

military in nature. That life is essentially strategic. The irony of our

epoch has it that the only ones who situate war where it is conducted,

and thus reveal the plane where all government operates, happen to be

the counter-revolutionaries themselves. It is striking to note that in

the last half-century the non-militaries began rejecting war in all its

forms, and at the very time when the militaries were developing a

non-military concept, a civil concept of war. A few examples, casually

excerpted from contemporary articles:

“The locus of collective armed conflict has gradually expanded the

battlefield to include the whole earth. In like manner, its duration may

now be indefinite, without there being a declaration of war or any

armistice (...) For this reason contemporary strategists emphasize that

modern victory results from conquering the hearts of the members of a

population rather than their territory. Submission must be gained

through adherence and adherence through esteem. Indeed, it’s a matter of

imposing one’s purpose on the inner individual, where the social contact

between human collectivities is established at present. Stripped bare by

world homogenization, contacted by globalisation, and penetrated by

telecommunication, henceforth the front will be situated in the inner

being of each of the members that make up the collectivities. (... )

This sort of fabrication of passive partisans can be summed up by the

catchphrase: ‘The front within every person, and no one on any front.’

(...) The whole politico-strategic challenge of a world that is neither

at war or at peace, which precludes all settlement of conflict by means

of the classic military juridical voices, consists in preventing passive

partisans on the verge of action, at the threshold of belligerence, from

becoming active partisans.” (Laurent Da-net, “La polemosphere”)

“At present, given that the terrain of warfare has extended beyond the

ground, sea, space, and electronic fields into those of society,

politics, economics, diplomacy, culture, and even psychology, the

interaction among the different factors makes it very difficult to

maintain the preponderance of the military domain as the dominant one in

every war. The idea that war can unfold in unwarlike domains is foreign

to reason and hard to accept, but events increasingly show this to be

the trend. (... ) In this sense, there no longer exists any area of life

that cannot serve war and there are almost no areas remaining that do

not present the offensive aspect of war.” (Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui,

La guerre hors li-mite)

“The probable war is not waged ‘between’ societies, but ‘within’

societies (...) Since the objective is human society, its governance,

its social contract, its institutions, and no longer this or that

province, river, or border, there is no longer any line or terrain to

conquer or protect. The only front that the engaged forces must hold is

that of the populations. (... ) To win the war is to control the milieu.

(... ) It’s no longer a question of perceiving a mass of tanks and of

pinpointing potential targets, but of understanding social milieus,

behaviors, psychologies. It’s a matter of influencing human intentions

through a selective and appropriate application of force. (...) Military

actions are truly ‘a manner of speaking’: henceforth, every major

operation is above all a communication operation whose every act, even a

minor act, speaks louder than words. (...) To wage war is first and

foremost to manage perceptions, those of the set of actors, whether

close by or far away, direct or indirect.” (General Vincent Desportes,

La guerre probable)

“The developed postmodern societies have become extremely complex and

hence very fragile. To prevent their collapse in the event of a

‘breakdown,’ it’s imperative that they decentralize (the salvation will

come from the margins and not the institutions) (... ) It will be

necessary to rely on local forces (self-defense militias, paramilitary

groups, private military associations), first from a practical

standpoint owing to their knowledge of the milieu and the populations,

second, because on the part of the State it will be a mark of confidence

that federates the different initiatives and reinforces them, and last

and most important, because they are more apt to find appropriate and

original (unconventional) solutions to delicate situations. In other

words, the response called for by unconventional warfare needs to be

citizen-based and paramilitary, rather than having a police and military

focus. (...) If Hezbollah has become a first-rate international actor,

if the neo-Zapatista movement manages to represent an alternative to

neoliberal globalization, then one has admit that the ‘local’ can

interact with the ‘global’ and that this interaction is truly one of the

major strategic characteristics of our time. (...) To put it briefly, a

local-global interaction must be answered by a different interaction of

the same type, supported not by the state apparatus (diplomacy, army),

but by the local element par excellence—the citizen.” (Bernard Wicht,

Vers l’ordre oblique : la contre-guerilla a l’age de l’infoguerre)

After reading that, one has a slightly different take on the role of the

militias of citizen sweepers and the appeals for snitching following the

riots of August 1011 in England, or the bringing in— then the opportune

elimination when “the pitbull got too big”—of the Golden Dawn fascists

as players in the Greek political game. To say nothing of the recent

arming of citizen militias by the Mexican federal state in Michoacan.

What is happening to us at present can be summed up more or less in this

way: from being a military doctrine, counterinsurgency has become a

principle of government. One of the cables of American diplomacy

revealed by Wikileaks confirms this, bluntly: “The program of

pacification of the favelas incorporates certain characteristics of the

doctrine and strategy of counterinsurgency of the United States in

Afghanistan and Iraq.” The era can be reduced ultimately to this

struggle, this race, between the possibility of insurrection and the

partisans of counter-insurrection. Moreover, this is what the rare

outburst of political chattering triggered in the West by the “Arab

revolutions” served to mask. To mask, for example, the fact that cutting

off all communication in the working-class areas, as Mubarak did at the

start of the uprising, was not just the impulsive act of an addled

dictator, but a strict application of the NATO report, Urban Operations

in the Year 2020.

There is no world government; what there is instead is a worldwide

network of local apparatuses of government, that is, a global,

reticular, counterinsurgency machinery. Snowden’s revelations show this

amply: secret services, multinationals, and political networks

collaborate shamelessly, even beyond a nation-state level that nobody

cares about now. In this regard, there is no center and periphery,

internal security and foreign operations. What is tried out on faraway

peoples will be the fate that is in store for one’s own people. The

troops that massacred the Parisian proletariat in June of 1848 had honed

their skills in the “street war,”with its torchings called enfumades, in

Algeria during colonization. The Italian mountain infantry batallions,

recently returned from Afghanistan, were redeployed in the Susa Valley.

In the West, using the armed forces on national territory in cases of

major disorder is longer even a taboo, it’s a standard scenario. From

health crisis to imminent terrorist attack, their minds have been

methodically prepared for it. They train everywhere for urban battles,

for “pacification,” for “post-conflict” stabilization. They maintain

their readiness for the coming insurrections.

The counter-insugency doctrines should be read, therefore, as theories

of the war being waged against us, doctrines that partly define, among

so many other things, our common situation in this era. They should be

read both as a qualitative leap in the concept of war, short of which we

cannot situate ourselves, and as a deceptive mirror. Although the

doctrines of counter-insurgency warfare are patterned after the

successive revolutionary doctrines, one cannot negatively deduce any

theory of insurrection from counter-insurgency theories. That is the

logical trap. It no longer suffices for us to wage the “little war,” to

attack by surprise, to deprive the adversary of any target. Even that

kind of asymmetry has been diminished. As far as war as strategy is

concerned, it’s not enough to catch up: we have to move into the lead.

We need a strategy that’s aimed not at the adversary but at his

strategy, that turns it back against itself, making it so that the more

he thinks he’s winning the more surely he’s heading towards his defeat.

The fact that counterinsurgency has made society itself its theater of

operations doesn’t at all indicate that the war to be waged is the

“social war” that some anarchists mouth off about. The main defect of

this notion is that by lumping the offensives carried out by “the State

and Capital” and those of our adversaries under the same rubric, it

places subversives in a relation of symmetrical warfare. The smashed

window of an Air France office in retaliation for the expulsion of

undocumented migrants is declared to be an “act of social war,” on a par

with a wave of arrests targeting people fighting against detention

centers. While we have to recognize an undeniable determination on the

part of many upholders of “social war,” they accept fighting the state

head-to-head, on a terrain that has always belonged to it and no one

else. Only the forces involved in this case are dysemmetrical. A

crushing defeat is inevitable.

The idea of social war is actually just an unsuccessful updating of

“class war,” maintaining that each one’s position in the relations of

production no longer has the formal clarity of the Fordist factory. It

sometimes seems as if revolutionaries are doomed to constitute

themselves on the same model as what they’re fighting. Thus, as a member

of the International Workingmen’s Association summarized it in 1871, the

bosses being organized worldwide around their interests as a class, the

proletariat must likewise organize itself worldwide, as a working class

and around its interests. As a member of the young Bolshevik Party

explained it, the tsarist regime was organized into a disciplined and

hierarchical politico-military machine, so the Party should also

organize itself into a disciplined and hierarchical politico-military

machine. One can multiply the historical cases, all equally tragic, of

this curse of symmetry. Take the Algerian FLN, which in its methods came

to closely resemble the colonial occupiers well before its victory. Or

the Red Brigades, who imagined that by taking out the fifty men who were

thought to constitute the “core of the State” they would be able to

appropriate the whole machine. Today, the most wrongheaded expression of

this tragedy of symmetry comes out of the mouths of the new left. What

they say is that set against the diffuse Empire, which is structured

into a network, but endowed with command centers all the same, there are

the multitudes, just as diffuse, structured into a network, but endowed

nonetheless with a bureaucracy capable of occupying the command centers

when the day comes.

Marked by this kind of symmetry, revolt is bound to fail—not only

because it presents an easy target, a recognizable face, but above all

because it eventually takes on the features of its adversary. To be

convinced of this, open Counter-insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice,

by David Galula, for example. One finds therein, methodically laid out

in detail, the steps to a definitive victory of a loyalist force over

generic insurgents. “The best cause for the insurgent is one that, by

definition, can attract the largest number of supporters and repel the

minimum of opponents... It is not absolutely necessary that the problem

be acute, although the insurgent’s work is facilitated if such is the

case. If the problem is merely latent, the first task of the insurgent

is to make it acute by ‘raising the political consciousness of the

masses’...The insurgent is not restricted to the choice of a single

cause. Unless he has found an overall cause, like anti-colonialism,

which is sufficient in itself because it combines all the political,

social, economic, racial, religious, and cultural causes described

above, he has much to gain by selecting an assortment of causes

especially tailored for the various groups in the society that he is

seeking to take over.”

Who is Galula’s “insurgent’? None other than the distorted reflection of

the Western politician, official, or publicist: cynical, external to

every situation, devoid of any genuine desire, except for an outsize

hunger for control. The insurgent that Galula knows how to combat is a

stranger to the world just as he’s a stranger to any belief. For that

officer, Galula, insurrection never emanates from the population, which

only aspires to security, basically, and tends to go with the party that

protects it the best or threatens it the least. The population is only a

pawn, an inert mass, a marsh, in the struggle between several elites. It

can seem astonishing that power’s notion of the insurgent wavers between

the figure of the fanatic and that of the crafty lobbyist—but this is

less surprising than the eagerness of so many revolutionaries to put on

those unpleasant masks. Always this same symmetrical understanding of

warfare, even the “asymmetrical” kind—grou-puscules competing for

control of the population, and always maintaining an outsider’s relation

with it. In the end, this is the monumental error of counterinsurgency:

despite its success absorbing the asymmetry introduced by guerilla

tactics, it still continues to produce the figure of the “terrorist”

based on what it is itself. And this is to our advantage, then, provided

we don’t allow ourselves to embody that figure. It’s what all effective

revolutionary strategy must accept as its point of departure. The

failure of the American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan bears witness.

Counterinsurgency did such a good job of turning “the population” around

that the Obama administration has to routinely and surgically

assassinate, via drone, anything that might resemble an insurgent.

4. Ontological asymmetry and happiness

If the insurgents’ war against the government needs to be asymmetrical,

it’s because there is an ontological asymmetry between them, and hence a

disagreement about the very definition of war, about its methods as well

as its objectives. We other revolutionaries are both the focus and the

target of the permanent offensive that government has become. We are the

“hearts and minds” that must be conquered. We are the “crowds” that are

to be controlled. We are the environment in which the governmental

agents evolve and which they mean to subdue, and not a rival entity in

the race for power. We don’t fight in the midst of the people “like fish

in water”; we’re the water itself, in which our enemies flounder—soluble

fish. We don’t hide in ambush among the plebs of this world, because

it’s also us that the plebs hide among. The vitality and the plundering,

the rage and the craftiness, the truth and the subterfuge all spring

from deep within us. There is no one to be organized. We are that

material which grows from within, which organizes itself and develops

itself. The true asymmetry lies there, and our real position of strength

is there. Those who make their belief into an article of export, through

terror or performance, instead of dealing with what exists where they

are, only cut themselves off from themselves and their base. It’s not a

matter of snatching the “support of the population,” nor even its

indulgent passivity, from the enemy: we must make it so there is no

longer a population. The population has never been the object of

government without first being its product. It ceases to exist once it

ceases to be governable. This is what’s involved in the muffled battle

that rages after every uprising: dissolving the power that had formed,

focused, and deployed in that event. Governing has never been anything

but denying the people all political capacity, that is, preventing

insurrection.

Separating those governed from their political power to act is what the

police are about whenever they try to “isolate the violent ones” at the

end of a righteous demonstration. Nothing is more effective for crushing

an insurrection than causing a split within the insurgent mass between

an innocent or vaguely consenting population and its vanguard, who are

militarized, hence minoritarian, usually clandestine, and soon to be

“terrorist.” We owe the most complete example of such a tactic to Frank

Kitson, the godfather of British counterinsurgency. In the years

following the extraordinary conflict that engulfed Northern Ireland in

August 1969, the great strength of the IRA was to stand together with

the Catholic districts that had declared themselves autonomous and

called for its assistance, at Belfast and Derry, during the riots. Free

Derry, Short Strand, Ardoyne: three of those no-go areas that one finds

so often in apartheid territories, and still encircled today by

kilometers of “peace lines.” The ghettoes had risen up, barricading

their entry points and closing them to the cops and the loyalists.

Fifteen-year-old kids alternated mornings at school with nights on the

barricades. The most repectable members of the community did the

shopping for ten and organized clandestine grocery outlets for those who

couldn’t safely go out on their own. Although caught unprepared by the

summer’s events, the Provisional IRA blended into the extremely dense

ethical fabric of those enclaves that were in a constant state of

insurrection. From that position of irreducible strength, everything

seemed possible. 1972 would be the year of victory.

Somewhat taken aback, the counterinsurgency deployed its major means. At

the end of a military operation with no equivalent for Great Britain

since the Suez crisis, the districts were emptied out, the enclaves were

broken, in this way effectively separating the “professional”

revolutionaries from the riotous populations that risen up in 1969,

tearing them away from the thousand complicities that had been woven.

Through this maneuver, the Provisional IRA was constrained to being

nothing more than an armed faction, a paramilitary group, impressive and

determined to be sure, but headed toward exhaustion, internment without

trial, and summary executions. The tactic of repression seems to have

consisted in bringing a radical revolutionary subject into existence,

and separating it from everything that made it a vital force of the

Catholic community: a territorial anchorage, an everyday life, a

youthfulness. And as if that wasn’t enough, false IRA attacks were

organized to finish turning a paralyzed population against it. From

counter gangs to false flag operations, nothing was ruled out for making

the IRA into a clandestine monster, territorially and politically

detached from what constituted the strength of the republican movement:

the districts, their sense of making-do and of organization, their

custom of rioting. Once the “paramilitaries” were isolated, and the

thousand exceptional procedures for annihilating them were routinized,

it was just a matter of waiting for the “troubles” to dissipate of their

own accord.

When the most indiscriminate repression comes down on us, we should be

careful, then, not to see it as the conclusive proof of our radicality.

We shouldn’t think they are out to destroy us. We should start rather

from the hypothesis that they’re out to produce us. Produce us as a

political subject, as “anarchists,” as “Black Bloc,” as “anti-system”

radicals, to extract us from the generic population by assigning us a

political identity. When repression strikes us, let’s begin by not

taking ourselves for ourselves. Let’s dissolve the fantastical terrorist

subject which the counterinsurgency theorists take such pains to

impersonate, a subject the representation of which serves mainly to

produce the “population” as a foil—the population as an apathetic and

apolitical heap, an immature mass just good enough for being governed,

for having its hunger pangs and consumer dreams satisfied.

Revolutionaries have no call to convert the “population” from the bogus

exteriority of who knows what “social project.” They should start

instead from their own presence, from the places they inhabit, the

territories they’re familiar with, the ties that link them to what is

going on around them. Identification of the enemy and effective

strategies and tactics are things that come from living and not from any

prior declaration of belief. The logic of increasing power is all that

can set against that of taking power. Fully inhabiting is all that can

be set against the paradigm of government. One can throw oneself onto

the state apparatus, but if the terrain that’s won is not immediately

filled with a new life, government will end up taking it back. Raul

Zibechi writes this about the Aymara insurrection in Bolivia in 2003:

“Actions of this magnitude cannot be consummated without the existence

of a dense network of relationships between persons—re-lationships that

are also forms of organization. The problem is that we are unwilling to

consider that in everyday life the relationships between neighbors,

between friends, between comrades, or between family, are as important

as those of the union, the party, or even the state itself. (...)

Established relationships, codified through formal agreements, are often

more important in Western culture than those loyalties woven by informal

ties” We need to give the same care to the smallest everyday details of

our shared life as we give to the revolution. For insurrection is the

displacement of this organization that is not one—not being detachable

from ordinary life— onto an offensive terrain. It is a qualitative leap

in the ethical dimension, not a break with the everyday, finally

consummated. Zibechi goes on to say: “The same bodies that sustain

everyday life sustain the uprising (the neighborhood assemblies in the

local councils of El Alto). The rotation of tasks and the obligatory

character ensures everyday community life, just as it guaranteed the

task of blocking roads and streets.” In this way the sterile distinction

between spontaneity and organization is dissolved. There’s not on one

hand a prepolitical, unreflected, “spontaneous” sphere of existence and

on the other a political, rational, organized sphere. Those with shitty

relationships can only have a shitty politics.

This doesn’t mean that in order to conduct a winning offensive we must

ban any inclination to conflict among us—conflict, not double dealinand

scheming. It’s largely because the Palestinian resistance has never

prevented differences from existing within it—even at the cost of open

confrontations—that it has been able to give the Israeli army a hard

time. Here as elsewhere, political fragmentation is just as much the

sign of an undeniable ethical vitality as it is the nightmare of the

intelligence agencies charged with mapping, then annihilating,

resistance. An Israeli architect writes as follows: “The Israeli and

Palestinian methods of fighting are fundamentally different.

The fractured Palestinian resistance is composed of a multiplicity of

organizations, each having a more or less independent armed wing—Iz Adin

al-Qassam for Hamas, Saraya al Quds (the Jerusalem Brigades) for Islamic

Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Force 17 and Tanzim al-Fatah for Fatah.

These are supplemented by the independent PRC (Popular Resistance

Committees) and imagined or real members of Hizbollah and/or Al-Qaeda.

The fact that these organizations shift between cooperation,

competition, and violent conflict increases the general complexity of

their interactions and with it their collective capacity, efficiency,

and resilience. The diffuse nature of Palestinian resistance and the

fact that knowledge, skills, and munitions are transferred within and

between these organizations—and that they sometimes stage joint attacks

and at others compete to outdo each other—substantially reduces the

effect that the Israeli occupation forces seek to achieve by attacking

them.” Accommodating internal conflict when it presents itself honestly,

doesn’t interfere at all with the concrete elaboration of an

insurrectionary strategy. On the contrary, it’s the best way for a

movement to stay vital, to keep the essential questions open, to make

the necessary shifts in a timely manner. But if we accept civil war,

including in our midst, it’s not only because in itself this constitutes

a good strategy for defeating imperial offensives. It’s also and above

all because it accords with the idea we have of life. Indeed, if being

revolutionary implies an attachment to certain truths, it follows from

the irreducible plurality of the latter that our party will never enjoy

a peaceful unity. As far as organization is concerned, then, there will

be no choosing between fraternal peace and fratricidal war. We will need

to choose between the forms of internal confrontations that strengthen

revolutions and those that hinder them.

6: Our Only Homeland: Childhood

[Crete, 2008.]

1. There Is No “Society” to Be Defended or Destroyed.

On May 5, 2010, Athens is experiencing one of those days of general

strike where everyone is in the streets. The atmosphere is springlike

and combative. Trade unionists, Maoists, anarchists, civil servants and

pensioners, young people and immigrants, the city center is literally

flooded with demonstrators. The country has discovered the incredible

memorandums of the Troika and reacted with a rage that’s still intact.

Parliament, which is in the process of passing a new set of “austerity”

measures, has come within an inch of being stormed. Failing that, it’s

the Ministry of Economics that yields and begins to burn. Pretty much

everywhere on the routes, cobblestones are wedged out, banks are

smashed, there are confrontations with the police, who are generous with

their flashbangs and horrible tear gas canisters imported from Israel.

The anarchists ritually launch their Molotov cocktails and, less

customary, are applauded by the crowd. People chant the classic “cops,

pigs, killers” and some shout “burn down the parliament!” “Government

kills!” What resembles the beginning of an uprising will come to a halt

in early afternoon, brought down in full flight by a government

bulletin. It seems that anarchists, after having tried to light up the

Ianos bookstore on Stadiou Street, set fire to a bank that had not

respected the general strike proclamation. There were employees inside.

Three of them died of suffocation, one of them a pregnant woman. It was

not immediately specified that the management had locked the one

emergency exit. The Marfin Bank event stunned and deflated the anarchist

movement. The movement, and not the government, found itself in the role

of killer. Under the pressure of the event, the rift between “social

anarchists” and “nihilist anarchists” that had been growing since

December 2008 reached its maximum intensity. There was a re-emergence of

the old question of whether to engage with society in order to change

it, suggesting and offering it examples of other forms of organization,

or to set about simply destroying it, without sparing those who, through

their passivity and submission, ensured its perpetuation. People got

into a worse muddle than ever on this point. It went beyond diatribes.

Blood was shed in the fighting that took place, to the great amusement

of the police.

The tragic aspect of this affair, perhaps, is that people tore each

other apart around a question that is no longer relevant, which would

explain why the debate has remained so sterile. Perhaps there is no

longer a “society” to destroy or persuade. Perhaps that fiction which

was born at the end of the 17^(th) century and which occupied so many

revolutionaries and rulers for two centuries has breathed its last

without our realizing it. But we would still need to know how to mourn

its passing, since we’re immune to the nostalgia of the sociologist who

laments The End of Societies as well as to the neoliberal opportunism

that declared one day with martial aplomb: “there is no such thing as

society.”

In the 17^(th) century, “civil society” was what stood in contrast to

the “state of nature.” It was the fact of being “joined together under

the same government and the same laws.” “Society” was a certain state of

civilization, or it was “the good aristocratic society,” one that

excluded the multitude of commoners. In the course of the 18^(th)

century, as liberal governmentality developed along with the “dismal

science” corresponding to it, “political economy,” “civil society” came

to denote bourgeois society. It no longer stood in contrast to the state

of nature, it became “natural” as it were, as the habit spread of

considering it natural for man to behave as an economic creature. So

“civil society” was now understood as the entity that was counterposed

to the State. It would take all the Saint-Simonism, all the scientism,

all the socialism, all the positivism, and all the colonialism of the

19^(th) century to impose the self-evidence of society, the

self-evidence that, in all the manifestations of their existence, humans

form a great family, a species totality. At the end of the 19^(th)

century, everything became “social”: housing, the question, economy,

reform, sciences, hygiene, security, labor, and even war—social war. In

1894, at the height of this movement, a group of concerned

philanthropists even established a “Social Museum” in Paris with the

mission of testing and disseminating techniques for improving,

pacifying, and sanitizing “social life.” In the 18^(th) century, no one

would have dreamed of founding a “science” like “sociology,” much less

doing so on the model of biology.

At bottom, “society” only denotes the projected shadow of the successive

modes of government. It was the whole set of subjects of the absolutist

state in the age of the Leviathan, then that of economic actors in the

liberal state. From the viewpoint of the welfare state, it was man

himself, with his rights, needs, and labor power, who constituted the

basic element of society. What is perverse about the idea of “society”

is that it has always helped government to naturalize the product of its

activity, its operations, its techniques. It was constructed as what

essentially preexisted it. It was only after the Second World War,

really, that one dared to speak explicitly about “social engineering.”

Since then, society has officially become what one constructs, sort of

like doing nationbuilding by attacking Iraq. Moreover, this doesn’t

really work as soon as one openly claims to be doing it.

From era to era, defending society was never anything else but defending

the object of government, even when this was being done against those

who governed. Up until now, one of the mistakes of revolutionaries has

been to fight on the terrain of a fiction that was essentially hostile

to them, to appropriate a cause behind which government itself was

advancing, wearing a mask. But a good part of our party’s current

disarray has to do with the fact that, since the 1970s, government has

abandoned this fiction. It has dropped the idea of integrating all

humans into an ordered totality—Margaret Thatcher just had the candor to

admit this. In a sense, it has become more pragmatic, and has abandoned

the exhausting task of constructing a homogeneous human species that

would be well-defined and distinctly separate from the rest of creation,

bounded below by things and animals, and above by God, heaven, and the

angels. The entry into the era of permanent crisis, the “years of easy

money” and the transformation of everyone into desperate entrepreneurs

of themselves dealt such a whack to the social idea that it came out of

the 1980s somewhat dazed. The next blow, sure to be fatal, consists in

the dream of the globalized metropolis, induced by the development of

telecommunications and the parceling of the production process on a

planetary scale.

One can continue seeing the world in terms of nations and societies, but

the latter are now traversed, permeated, by an uncontrollable ensemble

of flows. The world presents itself as an immense network in which the

large cities, become metropolises, are no longer anything but platforms

of interconnection, entry and exit points—stations. Henceforth, one can

live the same life, it is claimed, in Tokyo or London, in Singapore or

New York, with all the metropolises forming one world where what counts

is mobility and no longer attachment to a place. Here individual

identity serves as a universal pass ensuring the possibility, wherever

one is, of connecting with the sub-population of one’s fellow creatures.

But a collection of uber-metropolitans caught up in a constant shuffle

from airport terminals to Eurostar toilets doesn’t make a society, even

a global one. The hyper-bourgeoisie that negociates a contract near the

Champs-Élysées before going to hear a set of music on a Rio rooftop and

recovers from its emotions with an afterlude at Ibiza symbolizes the

decadence of a world—to be enjoyed hastily before it’s too late—more

than it anticipates any sort of future. Journalists and sociologists cry

endlessly over our moribund “society” with their litany about the

post-social, the increasing individualism, the disintegration of the old

institutions, the loss of reference points, the rise of communalisms,

the steady worsening of inequalities. And why wouldn’t they, since what

is passing away in this case is their livelihood. One will need to think

about reinventing oneself.

The revolutionary wave of the years 1960‐1970 delivered a fatal blow to

the project of a capitalist society into which everyone would integrate

peacefully. In response to that, capital undertook a territorial

restructuring. Since the project of an organized totality was crumbling

at its base, it was from there, from secure and interconnected bases,

plural, that the new global network of value production would be

created. It was no longer from “society” that the new form of

productivity was expected, but from the territories, from certain

territories. These last thirty years, capital’s restructuring has taken

the form of a new spatial ordering of the world. Its focus is the

creation of clusters, of “centers of innovation,” offering “individuals

possessing significant social capital”—for the others, sorry, life will

be a little more difficult—the best conditions for creating, innovating,

and launching, and above all, for doing it collaboratively. The

universally recognized model is Silicon Valley. The agents of capital

everywhere are getting down to the business of creating an “ecosystem”

enabling the individual with the right team to develop fully, to

“maximize his talents.” This is the new credo of the creative economy—in

which the couple engineer / hub of competitiveness is on the dance floor

with the duo designer / gentrified neighborhood. According to this new

orthodoxy, especially in the Western countries, value production depends

on innovation capability. But, as the planners themselves recognize, an

environment favorable to creation and its sharing, a productive

atmosphere, can’t be invented, it is “situated,” it sprouts in a place

where a history, an identity, can enter into resonance with the spirit

of innovation. A cluster cannot be imposed, it emerges in a territory on

the fertile ground of a “community.” If your city is decaying, the

solution will not come from investors or the government, explains an

entrepreneur who’s in fashion. One has to get organized, find other

people, get to know each other, work together, recruit other motivated

persons, form networks, shake up the status quo… It comes down to the

mad dash for a technological advance and the creation of a niche, where

the competition is temporarily eliminated and where for a few years one

can draw a situational rent. While continuing to think in strategic

terms globally, capital deploys a whole casuistry of territorial

planning. This allows a bad urbanist to say, concerning the ZAD, a

territory under occupation in order to prevent the construction of an

airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, that it seemed to afford “the

opportunity for a kind of Silicon Valley of ecology and society […]

Silicon Valley itself was born in a place that presented little of

interest at the time, but where the low cost of space and the

mobilization of a few persons contributed to making it the special,

internationally acclaimed place it is today.” Ferdinand Tonnies, who

believed there had never been a society that was not commodity-based,

wrote: “Whereas in the community, they stay together in spite of

everything that separates them, in societythey remain separate in spite

of everything that unites them.” In the “creative communities” of

capital, people are bound together by separation itself. There is no

longer any outside from which to distinguish between life and the

production of value. Death is in its element. It is young, dynamic, and

it smiles at you.

2. Selection Needs to Be Turned into Secession.

The constant incitement to innovate, create, start up, never works so

well as on a pile of ruins. Hence all the promotional publicity the past

few years around the cool, digital enterprises that are trying to make

the industrial desert named Detroit a field of experimentation. “If you

think of a city that was near death and that’s coming into a new life,

it’s Detroit. Detroit is a city where something is happening, an open

city. What Detroit has to offer is for interested, engaged young

people—artists, innovators, musicians, designers, city-makers,” writes

the man who has oversold the idea of a new urban development articulated

around the “creative classes.” Yes, he’s talking about a city that has

lost half its population in fifty years, that has the second highest

crime rate of the large American cities, 78,000 abandoned buildings, a

former mayor in prison, and whose unofficial unemployment rate

approaches 50%—but where Amazon and Twitter have opened new offices.

While the fate of Detroit is not yet decided, a promotional operation on

the scale of a city has already sufficed to transform a postindustrial

disaster lasting several decades, comprising unemployment, depression,

illegalities, into a hip district that only swears by culture and

technology. It’s the same waving of the magical wand that has

transfigured the fair city of Lille since 2004, when it was the

ephemeral “European capital of culture.” No need to point out that this

involves drastically “renewing” the population of the inner city. From

New Orleans to Iraq, what has been aptly called a “shock strategy” makes

it possible to obtain, zone by zone, a profitable fragmentation of the

world. In this controlled demolition-renovation of “society,” the most

conspicuous desolation and the most outrageous wealth are just two

aspects of the same method of government.

When one reads the prospective reports of the “experts,” one finds

roughly the following geography: the great metropolitan areas in

competition with each other to attract both capital and smart people;

the secondary-zone metropolitan poles that manage well enough through

specialization; the poor rural zones that cope by becoming places

“likely to draw the attention of citizens needing nature and

tranquility,” zones of agriculture, preferably organic, or “biodiversity

preserves”; and lastly, zones of exclusion pure and simple, that will be

ringed sooner or later with checkpoints and controlled from a distance

with drones, helicopters, swift operations, and massive phone-call

interceptions.

So one sees that capital no longer has the problem of “society” but

rather that of “governance,” as it says politely. Spitting in its face,

the revolutionaries of the years 1960‐1970 were quite clear that they

wanted nothing to do with it. Since then, it selects its people.

Capital doesn’t frame itself any longer in national terms, but territory

by territory. It doesn’t spread itself evenly in every place; it

concentrates itself locally by organizing each territory into a milieu

of cultivation. It doesn’t try to get everyone moving at the same rate,

with progress on their radios, but allows the world to delink into zones

of intense surplus-value extraction and neglected zones, into theaters

of war and pacified spaces. There is the Italian northeast and the

Campania, the second just being worthy of receiving the garbage of the

first. There is Sofia-Antipolis and Villiers-le-Bel. There is The City

and Nottinghill, Tel Aviv and the Gaza strip. The smart cities and the

horrible banlieues. Ditto for the population. There is no longer a

generic “population.” There is the young “creative class” that makes its

social and relational capital bear fruit in the heart of the smart

metropolises, and all those who have so clearly become “unemployable.”

There are lives that count and others that aren’t even factored into the

accounts. There is a plurality of populations, some being at risk and

others having a substantial purchasing power.

If there still remained a cement in the idea of society and a bulwark

against its dislocation, it was certainly the hilarious “middle class.”

All through the 20^(th) century, it went on expanding, at least

virtually—so that today two thirds of Americans and French people

sincerely believe they belong to that non-class. But the latter is prey

to a pitiless process of selection in its turn. One can’t explain the

proliferation of reality TV programs staging the most sadistic forms of

competition except as a mass propaganda aimed at familiarizing everybody

with the little everyday murders among friends that life in a world of

constant selection comes down to. According to the oracles of the DATAR,

the French governmental agency that plans and coordinates government

actions relating to territorial development, in 2040 “the middle class

will have shrunk in size,” a projection it is pleased about. “The most

favored of its members will make up the lowest fraction of the

transnational elite,” and the others will see “their way of life draw

closer to that of the lower classes,” that “ancillary army” who will

“meet the needs of the elite” and will live in deteriorated districts

with an “intellectual proletariat” awaiting integration or estranged

from the upper level of the social hierarchy. Put in less opaque terms,

their vision is more or less the following: devastated exurban zones,

their former inhabitants having moved into the shantytowns to make way

for the “metropolitan market gardeners who organize the supply of fresh

edible goods to the metropolis over short distances” and the “numerous

nature parks,” “zones of disconnection,” “of recreation for

city-dwellers wishing to experience the wild and the unfamiliar.”

The degree of likelihood of such scenarios matters little. What counts

here is that those claiming to combine future-projection and an action

strategy assume the demise of the former society from the outset. The

overall dynamic of selection contrasts in every particular with the old

dialectic of integration, of which social struggles were a moment. The

partition between productive territories on one side and distressed

territories on the other, between the smart class on one hand and on the

other, the “dummies,” “retards,” “incompetents,” those who “resist

change” and those who are attached, is no longer predetermined by any

social organization or cultural tradition. The challenge is to determine

in real time, in a calibrated way, where the value lies, in which space,

with whom, and for what. The reconfigured archipelago of the

metropolises has few of the features of the inclusive and hierarchized

order called “society.” Every totalizing ambition has been abandoned.

This is what the DATAR reports show. The same ones who developed the

national territory, who constructed the Fordist unity of Gaullist

France, have launched themselves into its deconstruction. They announce

the “twilight of the nation-state” without regrets. Setting definitive

boundaries, whether by establishing sovereign borders or through the

unambiguous distinction between man and machine, between man and nature,

is a thing of the past. It’s the end of the demarcated world. The new

metropolitan “society” is distributed over a flat, open, expansive

space, not so much smooth as essentially fluid, runny. It spreads at its

edges, overruns its contours. It’s not so easy anymore to say,

definitively, who’s in and who’s out. In the smart world, a smart trash

receptacle is much more a part of society than a homeless person or a

hick. By re-forming on a horizontal, fragmented, differentiated

plane—that of territorial planning and development—and not on the

vertical and hierarchical plane derived from medieval theology,

“society” as a playing field of government only has vague, shifting, and

hence revocable, boundaries. Capital even takes to dreaming of a new

“socialism” reserved for its adherents. Now that Seattle has been

emptied of its poor people in favor of the futuristic employees of

Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing, the time has come to establish free

public transportation there. Surely the city won’t go on charging those

whose whole life is nothing but value production. That would show a lack

of gratitude.

The resolute selection of populations and territories has its own risks.

Once the division has been made between those to be supported and those

to be allowed to die, it’s not certain that those knowing they’re

destined for the human trash pile will still let themselves be governed.

One can only hope to “manage” this cumbersome remainder—assimilating it

being unlikely, and liquidating it being indecent no doubt. The

planners, whether indifferent or cynical, accept the “segregation,” the

“increasing inequalities,” the “stretching of social hierarchies” as a

fact of the times and not as a drift that needs to be halted. The only

wayward drift is one that could cause the segregation to morph into a

secession—the “flight of a part of the population to peripheries where

it might organize into autonomous communities,” potentially “at odds

with the dominant models of neoliberal globalization.” There we have the

threat to be managed—but also the way for us to proceed.

We will take on the secession that capital already practices, therefore,

but in our own way. Seceding is not carving a part of the territory out

of the national whole, it’s not isolating oneself, cutting off

communications with all the rest—that would be certain death. Seceding

is not using the scraps of this world to assemble counter-clusters where

alternative communities would bask in their imaginary autonomy vis-à-vis

the metropolis—that already figures into the plans of the DATAR, which

has already foreseen letting them vegetate in their harmless

marginality. 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 break not with the

national territory but with the existing geography itself. It’s to trace

out a different, discontinuous geography, an intensive one, in the form

of an archipelago—and thus to go encounter places and territories that

are close to us, even if there are 10,000 kilometers to cover. In one of

their pamphlets, opponents of the Lyon-Turin rail line write: “What does

it mean to be NO TAV? It means to start from a simple statement: ‘the

high-speed train will never pass through the Susa Valley’ and to

organize one’s life to make it so that this statement is borne out. Many

people have come together around this certitude over the past twenty

years. On the basis of this quite particular point on which there is no

question of yielding, the whole world reconfigures itself. The struggle

in the Susa Valley concerns the whole world, not because it is defending

the ‘common good’ in general, but because a certain idea of what is good

is commonly thought in the struggle. That idea confronts other notions,

defending itself against those wanting to destroy it, and linking up

with those having an affinity with it.”

3. There Are No “Local Struggles,” but a War of Worlds.

One of the geopoliticians of territorial development can write that “the

increasing intensity of the conflicts around development projects over

the past twenty years or so is such that one wonders whether we’re not

witnessing a gradual shifting of conflictuality in our society from the

social to the territorial. As the social struggles have been declining,

the struggles over territory have been gaining strength.” One is almost

tempted to agree, seeing the way the struggle in the Susa Valley has

been setting the tempo of political contestation in Italy for several

years, from its distant mountains; seeing the consolidating power of the

fight against the transport of nuclear waste by the CASTOR trains in

Germany’s Wendland; and noting the determination of those combating the

Hellas Gold mine at Ierissos in Chalkidiki and those who forcibly

blocked the construction of a garbage incinerator at Keratea in the

Peloponnese. So that more and more revolutionaries are also pouncing on

what they call “local struggles” just as greedily as they did on “social

struggles” in the past. There are even Marxists who wonder, just a

century late, if it might be appropriate to reevaluate the territorial

character of so many strikes, so many factory battles that appeared to

involve entire regions and not just workers, and the grounds of which

may perhaps have been life more than simply the wage relation. The

mistake of these revolutionaries is to think of the local in the same

way they thought of the working class, as a reality preexisting the

struggle. So it is logical for them to imagine that the time had come to

build a new international of resistance to the “big useless projects

being imposed on us” that would make the resistance stronger and more

contagious. This overlooks the fact that, by reconfiguring the

everydayness of the territories in struggle, the combat itself creates

the consistency of the local, which prior to that was perfectly

evanescent. “The movement was not satisfied with defending a ‘territory’

in the state it found itself in, but inhabited it with thoughts of what

it could become […] It made it exist, constructed it, gave it a

consistency,” note some opponents of the TAV. Furio Jesi observed that

“one gets a better sense of the city during a time of open revolt, with

its alternation of charges and counter-charges, than one has playing in

the streets as a child, or later walking there with a girl at one’s

side.” It’s the same with the inhabitants of the Susa Valley. They

wouldn’t have such a detailed knowledge of their valley, and such a

strong attachment to it, if they had not been fighting for thirty years

against the European Union’s rotten project.

What is capable of linking these different struggles that aren’t about

“territory” at all, is not the fact of being faced with the same

capitalist restructuring, but the ways of living that are invented or

rediscovered in the very course of the conflict. What ties them together

are the acts of resistance they give rise to—blockage, occupation, riot,

sabotage as direct attacks against the production of value through the

circulation of information and commodities, through the connection of

“innovative territories.” The power they generate is not something to be

mobilized with a view to victory, but victory itself, to the extent

that, little by little, the power grows. In this respect, the “Plant

your ZAD” movement is well-named. They’re in the process of resuming

cultivation of the land expropriated by the company contracted to build

the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport, now occupied by inhabitants. An

undertaking of this kind immediately places those contemplating it on a

long-term basis, longer in any case than that of traditional social

movements, and calls for a more general reflection on life at the ZADand

what it can become. A projection that will doubtless include

dissemination outside Notre-Dame-des-Landes. In fact, this is already

happening in the department of Tarn.

We risk losing everything if we invoke the local as against the global.

The local is not the reassuring alternative to globalization, but its

universal product. Before the world was globalized, the place I inhabit

was simply my familiar territory—I didn’t think of it as “local.” Local

is just the underside of global, its residue, its secretion, and not

something capable of shattering it. Nothing was local before one could

be pulled away from it at any time, for professional or medical reasons,

or for vacation. Local is the name of a possibility of sharing, combined

with the sharing of a dispossession. It’s a contradiction of the global,

which we can give a consistency to or not. Every singular world thus

appears for what it is: a fold in the world, and not its substantial

outside. Reducing to the rather insignificant category of “local

struggles”—akin to the pleasantly folkloric “local color”—struggles like

those of the Susa Valley, Chalkidiki, or the Mapuche, who have recreated

a territory and a people with a planetary aura, is a classic operation

of neutralization. For the state, on the pretext that these territories

are situated at its margins, it’s a matter of marginalizing them

politically. Aside from the Mexican state, who would think of

categorizing the Zapatista uprising and the adventure that followed from

it as a “local struggle”? And yet what could be more localized than that

armed insurrection against the thrusts of neoliberalism which inspired a

movement of planetary revolt against “globalization,” after all. The

counter-operation that was successfully carried out by the Zapatistas

involved immediately extracting themselves from the national framework,

and hence from the minor status of “local struggle,” and linking up with

all sorts of forces worldwide. In this way they applied their pincer

attack to a Mexican state that was doubly helpless, on its own territory

and beyond its borders. The maneuver is unstoppable, and reproducible.

Everything is local, including the global, although we still need to

localize it. The neoliberal hegemony results from the way it floats in

the air, spreads via countless channels that are barely visible for the

most part, and appears invincible because it can’t be situated. Rather

than seeing Wall Street as a celestial raptor dominating the world as

God used to, we would have much to gain by determining its material,

relational networks, tracking the connections from a trading floor out

to their last fiber. One would find, no doubt, that the traders are just

idiots, that they don’t even deserve their diabolical reputation, but

that stupidity is a power in this world. One would ponder those black

holes, the clearing houses such as Euronext and Clearstream. Similarly

for the state, which is perhaps, as an anthropologist has suggested,

nothing more, basically, than a system of personal loyalties. The state

is the mafia that has defeated all the others, and has thus won the

right to treat them as criminals. To identify this system, trace its

contours, locate its vectors, is to restore it to its terrestrial

nature, bring it down to its real level. There is research to be done,

then, which alone can remove the aura from that which claims hegemony.

Another danger lies in wait for what is expediently construed as “local

struggles.” Those whose everyday organization shows them the superfluous

character of government may imagine that an underlying, prepolitical

society exists, where cooperation comes naturally. They are logically

induced to position themselves against government in the name of “civil

society.” But this always entails the postulation of a humanity that is

stable, pacified, homogeneous in its positive aspirations, and motivated

by a fundamentally Christian disposition to mutual aid, goodness, and

compassion. “At the very moment of its triumph,” writes an American

journalist about the Argentine insurrection of 2001, “the revolution

already seems, instantaneously, to have kept its promise: all men are

brothers, anyone can speak freely, hearts are full, solidarity is

strong. Historically, the formation of a new government transfers much

of this power to the state instead of to civil society […] The period of

transition between two regimes seems to be what comes closest to the

anarchist ideal of a stateless society, a time when everyone can act and

no one holds final authority, when society invents itself as it goes

along.” A new day would dawn on a responsible humanity full of common

sense and capable of taking charge of itself in a respectful and

intelligent collaboration. This assumes that the struggle will be

content to allow an essentially good human nature to emerge, whereas

it’s precisely the conditions of struggle that produce the humanity in

question. The apology of civil society merely reenacts on a global scale

the ideal of the passage to adulthood where we could finally do without

our guardian, the state, because we would have finally understood; we

would finally be worthy of self-governance. This litany appropriates

everything associated so sadly with becoming an adult: a certain

responsible boredom, an overplayed benevolence, the repression of vital

affects that inhabit childhood—namely, a certain disposition to play and

to conflict. The basic error is doubtless the following: at least since

Locke, for the upholders of civil society, “politics” has always meant

the tribulations caused by the corruption and negligence of the

government—the social base always being natural and without a history.

History, precisely, would only be the succession of errors and

approximations that delay the coming of a satisfied society into its

own. “The great end which men pursue when they enter into society is to

enjoy their property peacefully and without danger.” Hence those who

fight against the government on behalf of “society,” whatever their

radical claims may be, can only desire, at bottom, to have done with

history and the political, which is to say, with the possibility of

conflict, which is to say, with spirited life.

We start from a very different premise: just as there is no “nature,”

there is no “society” either. Pulling humans away from all the non-human

elements that, for each one of them, go to make up their familiar world,

and lumping together the creatures amputated in that way under the name

of “society” is a monstrosity that has lasted long enough. Everywhere in

Europe there are “communists” or socialists who propose a national way

out of the crisis. Their solution would be to leave the euro and

constitute a nice limited, homogeneous, and well-ordered totality. These

amputees can’t keep from hallucinating their phantom member. And of

course, as far as nice well-ordered totalities are concerned, the

fascists will always have the last word.

No society, then, but worlds. And no war against society either: to wage

war against a fiction is to give it substance. There’s no social sky

above our heads, there’s us and the ensemble of ties, friendships,

enmities, and actual proximities and distances that we experience. There

are only sets of us, eminently situated powers, and their ability to

ramify throughout the endlessly decomposing and recomposing social

carcass. A swarming of worlds, a world made up of a whole slew of

worlds, and traversed therefore by conficts between them, by attractions

and repulsions. To construct a world is to create an order, make a place

or not for each thing, each being, each proclivity, and give thought to

that place, change it if need be. With every manifestation of our party,

whether it’s in the form of a plaza occupation, a wave of riots, or a

deeply moving phrase tagged on a wall, the feeling spreads that it’s

definitely “we” that’s at stake, in all those places where we’ve never

been. This is why the first duty of revolutionaries is to take care of

the worlds they constitute. As the Zapatistas have shown, the fact that

each world is situated doesn’t diminish its access to the generality,

but on the contrary is what ensures it. The universal, a poet has said,

is the local without the walls. There seems, rather, to be a

universalizing potential that is linked to a deepening per se, an

intensification of what is experienced in the world at large. It’s not a

question of choosing between the care we devote to what we are

constructing and our political striking force. Our striking force is

composed of the very intensity of what we are living, of the joy

emanating from it, of the forms of expression invented there, of a

collective ability to withstand stresses that is attested by our force.

In the general inconsistency of social relations, revolutionaries should

stand out by the density of thought, affection, finesse, and

organization that they bring to bear, and not by their susceptibility to

division and pointless intransigence, or by disastrous competition in

the arena of phantasmal radicality. It’s through attention to the

phenomenon, through their sensitive qualities that they will manage to

become a real power, and not through ideological coherence.

Incomprehension, impatience, and negligence are the enemy.

The real is what resists.

To the question, “Your idea of happiness?” Marx replied, “To fight.” To

the question, “Why do you fight?” we reply that our idea of happiness

requires it.

We would have liked to be brief. To forgo genealogies,

etymologies, quotations. That a poem, a song, would suffice.

We wished it would be enough to write “revolution” on a wall

for the street to catch fire. But it was necessary to untangle the

skein of the present, and in places to settle accounts with

ancient falsehoods. It was necessary to try and digest seven

years of historical convulsions. And decipher a world in which

confusion has blossomed on a tree of misunderstanding. We’ve

taken the time to write with the hope that others

would take the time to read. Writing is a vanity, unless it’s for

the friend. Including

the friend one doesn’t know yet. In the coming years, we’ll be

wherever the fires are lit. During the periods of respite, we’re

not that hard to find. We’ll continue the effort of clarification

we’ve begun here. There will be dates and places where we can

mass our

forces against logical targets. There will be dates and places

for meeting up and

debating.

We don’t know if the insurrection will have the look of a heroic

assault, or if it will be a planetary fit of crying, a sudden

expression offeeling after decades of

anesthesia, misery, and stupidity. Nothing guarantees that the

fascist option won’t be

preferred to revolution. We’ll do what there is to be done.

Thinking, attacking, building— such is our fabulous agenda. This

text is the beginning of a plan.

See you soon,

Invisible Committee, October 2014

7: Omnia Sunt Communia

[Poitiers, Baptistery of St. John, October 10, 2009.]

1. The Commune Is Coming Back.

An Egyptian writer, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, wrote in the now-distant

days of the first Tahrir square: “The people I saw on Tahrir Square were

new Egyptians, having nothing in common with the Egyptians I was used to

dealing with every day. It was as if the revolution had created

Egyptians in a higher form […], as if the revolution had not only rid

Egyptians of their fear but also cured them of their social defects. […]

Tahrir Square became like the Paris Commune. The authority of the regime

collapsed and the authority of the people took its place. Committees

were formed everywhere, committees to clean the square and committees to

set up lavatories and washrooms. Volunteer doctors set up a field

hospital.” In Oakland, the Occupy movement held Oscar Grant Plaza as the

“Oakland Commune.” In Istanbul, no better name could be found, already

in the first days, than the “Taksim Commune” for what was coming into

existence there. A way of saying that revolution was not something that

Taksim might lead to one day, but its existence in actuality, its

ebullient immanence, here and now. In September, 2012, a poor Nile Delta

village, Tahsin, 3,000 inhabitants, declared its independence from the

Egyptian state. “We will no longer pay taxes. We will no longer pay for

schools. We’ll operate our own schools. We’ll collect our garbage and

maintain our roads ourselves. And if an employee of the state sets foot

in the village for any other purpose than to help us, we’ll throw him

out,” they said. In the high mountains of Oaxaca, at the beginning of

the 1980s, Indians trying to formulate what was distinctive about their

form of life arrived at the notion of “communality.” For these Indians,

living communally is both what sums up their traditional basis and what

they oppose to capitalism, with an “ethical reconstruction of the

peoples” in view. In recent years, we’ve even seen the PKK convert to

the libertarian communalism of Murray Bookchin, and project themselves

into a federation of communes instead of the construction of a Kurdish

state.

Not only is the commune not dead, it is coming back. And it’s not

returning by chance. It’s returning at the very moment the state and the

bourgeoisie are fading as historical forces. Now, it was precisely the

emergence of the state and the bourgeoisie that put an end to the

movement of communalist revolt that shook France from the 11^(th) to the

13^(th) century. The commune, then, is not the chartered town, it’s not

a collectivity endowed with institutions of self-government. While it

can happen that the commune is recognized by this or that authority,

generally after battles are fought, it doesn’t need that in order to

exist. It doesn’t always even have a charter, and when there is one, it

is quite rare for the latter to stipulate any political or

administrative structure. It can have a mayor, or not. What constitutes

the commune is the mutual oath sworn by the inhabitants of a city, a

town, or a rural area to stand together as a body. In the chaos of

11^(th) century France, the commune involved pledging assistance to one

another, committing to look out for each other and defend each other

against any oppressor. It was literally a conjuratio, and such

conjurations would have remained an honorable thing if royal jurists had

not set about in the following centuries linking them to the idea of

conspiracy as a way of getting rid of them. A forgotten historian puts

it in a nutshell: “Without association through oath, there would have

been no commune, and that association was sufficient for there to be a

commune. Commune had exactly the same meaning as common oath.” So 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. A pact, then, that couldn’t help but implode with

the bourgeoisie’s monopolization of all the offices and all the wealth,

and with the deployment of state hegemony. It was this long-lost,

originary, medieval meaning of commune that was somehow rediscovered by

the federalist faction of the Paris Commune in 1871. And it’s this same

meaning that reemerges periodically since that time, from the movement

of soviet communes—which was the forgotten spearhead of the Bolshevik

revolution till the Stalinist bureaucracy decided to liquidate it—to

Huey P. Newton’s “revolutionary intercommunalism” by way of the Kwangju

Commune of 1980 in South Korea. Declaring the Commune is always to knock

historical time off its hinges, to punch a hole in the hopeless

continuum of submissions, the senseless succession of days, the dreary

struggle of each one to go on living. Declaring the Commune is agreeing

to bond with others, where nothing will be like it was before.

2. Inhabiting as a Revolutionary.

Gustav Landauer wrote: “In the communal life of men there is only one

structure appropriate to the space: the commune and the confederation of

communes. The borders of the commune make good sense (which naturally

excludes disproportion, but not unreason or awkwardness in isolated

cases): they delimit a place that ends where it ends.” That a political

reality can be essentially spatial presents something of a challenge to

the modern understanding. First, because we’ve been accustomed to think

of politics as that abstract dimension where positions and discourses

are distributed, from left to right. Second, because 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. Things and beings don’t occupy a geometric position, but

affect it and are affected by it. Places are irreducibly loaded—with

stories, impressions, emotions. A commune engages the world from its own

place. Neither an administrative entity nor a simple geometric unit of

space, it expresses rather a certain degree of shared experience

inscribed territorially. In this way, it adds a depth to the territory

which no survey agency can ever represent on any of its maps. By its

very existence, it disrupts the reasoned gridding of space, it condemns

any vague attempt at “territorial planning” to failure.

The territory of the commune is physical because it is existential.

Whereas the forces of occupation conceive of space as a continuous

network of clusters to which different branding operations lend the

appearance of diversity, 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. In Mexico, an Indian anthropologist, one of those

defending the “communality” as the guiding principle of their politics,

says in reference to the Ayuujk communes: “The community is described.

as something physical, with the words ‘najx’ and ‘kajp’ (‘najx,’ the

land, and ‘kajp,’ the people). ‘Najx,’ the land, makes possible the

existence of ‘kajp,’ the people, but the people, ‘kajp,’ give meaning to

the land, ‘najx.’” An intensely inhabited territory ends up becoming an

affirmation in itself, an articulation, an expression of the life that’s

lived there. This is seen just as clearly in a Bororo village whose

layout makes manifest the inhabitants’ relationship with their gods as

in the blossoming of tags after a riot, a plaza occupation, any of those

occasions when the plebs start inhabiting the urban space again.

The territory is that by which the commune materializes, finds its

voice, comes into presence. “The territory is our living space, the

stars we see at night, the heat and the cold, the water, the sand, the

gravel bars, the forest, our way of being, of working, our music, our

way of talking.” This is a Nahua Indian speaking, one of the comuneros

who took back—by force of arms, at the end of this century’s first

decade—the communal lands of Ostula seized by a gang of small landowners

of Michoacán. The Nahua went on to declare the autonomous Commune of San

Diego de Xayakalan, there on those lands. It seems that every existence

with some slight purchase on the world needs a land base for its

orientation, whether it’s in Seine-Saint-Denis or the Aboriginal lands

of Australia. To inhabit is to write each other, to tell one’s stories,

from a grounded place. This is something we can still hear in the word

geography. The territory is to the commune what the word is to the

meaning—that is, never just a means. This is what makes the commune and

the infinite space of commodity organization the categorical opposites

that they are. The territory of the commune is the clay tablet that

reveals its meaning as nothing else does, and not a mere expanse endowed

with productive functions skillfully distributed by a handful of

planning experts. There is as much difference between an inhabited place

and a zone of activities as there is between a personal journal and an

agenda. Two uses of the land, two uses of ink and paper, with no other

resemblance between them.

As a decision to confront the world together, every commune places the

world at its center. When a theoretician of communality writes that it

“is inherent in the existence and the spirituality of indigenous

peoples, characterized by reciprocity, collectivity, kinship ties,

primordial loyalties, solidarity, mutual aid, tequio, assembly,

consensus, communication, horizontality, self-sufficiency, territorial

defense, autonomy, and respect for mother earth,” he neglects to say

that it’s the confrontation with our epoch that has required this

theorization. The need to autonomize from infrastructures of power is

not due to an ageless aspiration to autarky, but has to do with the

political freedom that is won in that way. The commune is not

preoccupied with its self-definition: what it means to show by

materializing is not its identity, not the idea it has of itself, but

the idea it has of life. Moreover, the commune can only grow from its

outside, as an organism that only lives by internalizing what surrounds

it. Precisely because it wants to grow, the commune can only take

sustenance from what is not it. As soon as it cuts itself off from the

outside, it weakens, devours itself, tears itself apart, loses it

vitality, or surrenders to what the Greeks call, with their entire

country in mind, “social cannibalism,” for the very reason that they

feel isolated from the rest of the world. For the commune, there is no

difference between gaining in power and concerning itself essentially

with what is not it. Historically, the communes of 1871, that of Paris,

but also those of Limoges, Périgueux, Lyon, Marseille, Grenoble, Le

Creusot, Saint-Étienne, Rouen, as well as the medieval communes, were

doomed by their isolation. And just as it was easy, with calm restored

in the provinces, for Thiers to come and crush the Parisian proletariat

in 1871, in a similar way the main strategy of the Turkish police during

the Taksim occupation was to prevent the demonstrations originating in

the restive neighborhoods of Gazi and Besiktas, or the Anatolian

neighborhoods on the other side of the Bosphorus, from rallying to the

Taksim cause, and Taksim from forming the link between them. So the

paradox facing the commune is the following: it must at the same time

succeed in giving some consistency to a territorial reality at odds with

the “general order,” and it must give rise to, establish links between,

local consistencies—that is, it must detach itself from the groundedness

that constitutes it. If one of the two objectives is not met, either the

commune that’s stuck in its own territory becomes gradually isolated and

neutralized, or it becomes an itinerant troop, away from home ground,

unfamiliar with the situations it passes through, and only inspiring

distrust along its way. This is what happened to the detachments of the

Long March of 1934. Two thirds of the fighters met their deaths on the

journey.

3. Defeating the Economy.

That the core of the commune is precisely what eludes it, what traverses

it yet always remains beyond its appropriation, was already what

characterized the res communes in Roman law. The “common things” were

the ocean, the atmosphere, the temples, that which could not be

appropriated as such. One could take possession of a few liters of

water, or a strip of shore, or some temple stones, but not the sea as

such, and not a sacred place. The res communes are paradoxically what

resists reification, their transformation into res, into things. It’s

the designation in public law of what falls outside of public law:

what’s in common use is irreducible to juridical categories. Language is

typically “the common”: while one can express oneself thanks to it, by

means of it, it is also something which no one can possess as his own.

One can only make use of it.

In recent years some economists have tried to develop a new theory of

the “commons.” The “commons” are said to be the set of those things to

which the market has a very hard time assigning a value, but without

which it would not function: the environment, mental and physical

health, the oceans, education, culture, the Great Lakes, etc., but also

the great infrastructures (highways, the Internet, telephone or

sanitation networks, etc.). According to those economists, who are both

worried about the state of the planet and desirous of improving the

operation of the market, there needs to be invented a new form of

“governance” for these commons that wouldn’t depend on the market alone.

Governing the Commons is the title of the recent bestseller by Elinor

Ostrom, Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, who has defined eight

principles for “managing the commons.” Understanding there is a place

for them in an “administration of the commons” that remains to be

invented, Negri and associates have embraced this theory, which is

perfectly liberal at its core. They’ve even extended the notion of

commons to include everything produced by capitalism, reasoning that all

of it results in the last analysis from the productive collaboration

between humans, who would only need to appropriate it through an

uncommon “democracy of the commons.” The eternal militants, always short

of ideas, have rushed into step behind them. They now find themselves

claiming “health, housing, migration, social care, education, working

conditions in the textile industry, etc.” as so many “commons” that must

be appropriated. If they continue down this path, it won’t be long

before they demand worker management of nuclear power plants and the

same for the NSA, since the

Internet should belong to everyone. For their part, more sophisticated

theoreticians are inclined to make the “commons” into the latest

metaphysical principle to come out of the West’s magical hat. An arche,

they say, in the sense of that which “organizes, commands, and rules all

political activity,” a new “beginning” that will give birth to new

institutions and a new world government. What is ominous about all this

is the evident inability to imagine any other form of revolution than

the existing world flanked by an administration of men and things

inspired by the ravings of Proudhon and the lackluster fantasies of the

Second International. Contemporary communes don’t claim any access to,

or aspire to the management of any “commons.” They immediately organize

a shared form of life—that is, they develop a common relationship with

what cannot be appropriated, beginning with the world.

If ever these “commons” were to pass into the hands of a new breed of

bureaucrats, nothing about what is killing us would substantially

change. The entire social life of the metropolises works like a gigantic

demoralization enterprise. Everyone within it, in every aspect of their

existence, is held captive by the general organization of the commodity

system. One can very well be activist in one organization or another, go

out with one’s group of “buddies,” but ultimately it’s everybody for

themselves, each in his own skin, and there’s no reason to think it

might be different. Every movement, however, every genuine encounter,

every episode of revolt, every strike, every occupation, is a breach

opened up in the false self-evidence of that life, attesting that a

shared life is possible, desirable, potentially rich and joyful. It

sometimes seems that everything is conspiring to prevent us from

believing this, to obliterate every trace of other forms of life—of

those that died out and those about to be eradicated. The desperate ones

at the helm of the ship are most afraid of having passengers less

nihilistic than they are. And indeed, the entire organization of this

world, that is, of our strict dependence on it, is a daily denial of

every other possible form of life.

As the social varnish cracks and peels, the urgency of forming into a

force is spreading, under the surface but noticeably. Since the end of

the movement of the squares, we have seen networks of mutual support

cropping up in many cities to stop evictions, of strike committees and

neighborhood assemblies, but also cooperatives, for everything and in

every sense. Production co-ops, consumer co-ops, housing, education, and

credit co-ops, and even “integral co-ops” that would deal with every

aspect of life. With this proliferation, a welter of previously marginal

practices is spreading far beyond the radical ghetto that had more or

less reserved them for itself. In this way they’re acquiring a

seriousness and effectiveness that wasn’t there before, and they

themselves are easier to deal with. Not everyone is alike. People are

facing the need for money together, they’re organizing to have some or

do without. And yet, a cooperative wood shop or auto repair shop will be

just as irksome as a paying job if they’re taken as the aim instead of

the means that people have in common. Every economic entity is headed

for oblivion, is oblivion already, if the commune doesn’t negate its

claim to completeness. So the commune 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. The ethical fabric of the Barcelona workers’ movement at the

beginning of the 20^(th) century can serve as a guide for the

experiments that are underway. What gave it its revolutionary character

was not its libertarian schools or its small operators who printed

contraband money stamped CNT-FAI, or its sectoral trade unions, or its

workers’ co-ops, or its groups of pistoleros. It was thebond connecting

all this, the life flourishing between all these activities and

entities, and not assignable to any of them. This was its unassailable

base. It’s noteworthy, moreover, that at the time of the insurrection of

July 1936 the only ones capable of tying together all the components of

the anarchist movement offensively was the group Nosotros: a marginal

bunch whom the movement had suspected up to that point of

“anarcho-Bolshevism,” and who a month earlier had undergone a public

trial and a quasi-exclusion on the part of the FAI.

In several European countries hit by “crisis,” we’re seeing an emphatic

return of the social and solidarity-based economy, and of the

cooperativist and mutualist ideologies that accompany it. The idea is

spreading that this might constitute an “alternative to capitalism.” We

see it rather as an alternative to struggle, an alternative to the

commune. To convince oneself of this, one only has to look at how the

social and solidarity economy was utilized by the World Bank,

particularly in South America, as a technique of political pacification

over the last twenty years. It’s well known that the noble project of

helping the “Third World” countries to develop was conceived in the

1960s in the notably counter-insurrectionary mind of Robert McNamara,

the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, the McNamara of Vietnam,

Agent Orange, and Rolling Thunder. The essence of this economic project

is not in any way economic: it’s purely political, and its principle is

simple. To guarantee the “security” of the United States, that is, to

defeat communist insurrections, one has to deprive them of their main

cause: excessive poverty. No poverty, no insurrection. Pure Galula. “The

security of the Republic,” wrote McNamara in 1968, “doesn’t depend

exclusively, or even primarily, on its military might, but also on the

creation of stable economic and political systems, as much here at home

as in the developing countries all over the world.” From such a

viewpoint, the fight against poverty has several things going for it:

first, it makes it possible to hide the fact that the real problem is

not poverty, but wealth—the fact that a few hold, together with their

power, most of the means of production; further, it turns the problem

into a question of social engineering and not a political issue. Those

who make fun of the near-systematic failure of the World Bank’s

interventions to reduce poverty, from 1970 on, would do well to note

that for the most part they were clear successes in terms of their true

goal: preventing insurrection. This excellent run was to last until

1994.

1994 was when the National Program of Solidarity (PRONOSOL) was launched

in Mexico with the support of 170,000 local “solidarity committees”

designed to soften the effects of brutal social destructuring that would

logically be produced by the free-trade agreements with the United

States. It led to the Zapatista insurrection. Since then, the World Bank

is all about microcredit, “reinforcing the autonomy and empowerment of

poor people” (World Development Report of 2001), cooperatives, mutual

societies-in short: the social and solidarity economy. “Promote the

mobilization of poor people into local organizations so they can act as

a check on the state institutions, participate in the process of local

decision-making, and thus collaborate to ensure the primacy of law in

everyday life,” says the same report. Meaning: coopt the local leaders

into our networks, neutralize the oppositional groups, enhance the value

of “human capital,” bring into commodity circuits, even marginal ones,

everything that escaped them previously. The integration of tens of

thousands of cooperatives, even rehabilitated factories, into the

program Argentina Trabaja, is the counter-insurrectionary masterwork of

Cristina Kirchner, her calibrated response to the uprising of 2001. Not

to be outdone, Brazil has its own National Secretariat of Solidarity

Economy, which in 2005 already counted 15,000 businesses and is a fine

addition to the success story of local capitalism. The “mobilization of

civil society” and the development of a “different economy” are not an

adjusted response to the “shock strategy,” as Naomi Klein naively

thinks, but the other stroke of its mechanism. The enterprise-form, the

alpha and omega of neoliberalism, spreads along with the cooperatives.

One should not be overly pleased, as some Greek leftists are, that the

number of self-managed co-ops has exploded in their country these last

two years. Because the World Bank keeps exactly the same tallies, and

with the same satisfaction. The existence of a responsive marginal

economic sector of the social and solidarity type doesn’t pose any

threat to the concentration of political, hence economic, power. It even

protects it from every challenge. Behind such a defensive buffer, the

Greek shipowners, the army, and the country’s large corporations can go

on with their business as usual. A bit of nationalism, a touch of social

and solidarity economy, and the insurrection will have to wait.

Before economics could claim the title of “the science of behaviours,”

or even the status of “applied psychology,” the economic creature, the

being of need, had to be made to proliferate on the surface of the

Earth. This being of need, this needy toiler, is not a creation of

nature. For a long time, there were only ways of living, and not needs.

One inhabited a certain portion of this world and one knew how to feed

oneself, clothe oneself, entertain oneself, and put a roof over one’s

head there. Needs were historically produced, by tearing men and women

away from their world. Whether this took took the form of raids,

expropriation, enclosures, or colonization matters little in this

context. Needs were what economy gave to man in return for the world it

took away. We start from that premise, there’s no use denying it. But if

the commune involves taking responsibility for needs, this is not out of

a concern for autarky, but because economic dependence on this world is

a political as much as existential cause of continual abasement. The

commune addresses needs with a view to annihilating the being of need

within us. Where a lack is felt, its elementary gesture is to find the

means to make it disappear as often as it may present itself. There are

those “in need of a house”? One doesn’t just build one for them; one

sets up a workshop where anyone can quickly build a house for

themselves. A place is needed for meeting, hanging-out, or partying? One

is occupied or built and also made available to those who “don’t belong

to the commune.” The question, as you can see, is not that of abundance,

but of the disappearance of need, that is, participation in a collective

power that can dispel the feeling of confronting the world alone. The

intoxication of the movement is not enough for this; a profusion of

means is required. So a distinction must be made between the recent

restarting of the Vio.Me factory in Thessaloniki by its workers and a

number of variously disastrous Argentine attempts at self-management

which Vio.Me takes inspiration from nonetheless. What is different is

that the resumption of factory production was conceived from the

beginning as a political offensive supported by all the remaining

elements of the Greek “movement,” and not merely as an attempt at

alternative economy. Using the same machines, this factory producing

tile-joint compounds was converted to the production of disinfectant

gels that were supplied in particular to dispensaries operated by the

“movement.” It’s the echo made here between several facets of the

“movement,” which has a communelike character. If the commune

“produces,” this can only be in an incidental way; if it satisfies our

“needs,” this is something extra as it were, in addition to its desire

for a shared life; and not by taking productions and needs as the

object. It’s in the open offensive against this world that the commune

will find the allies that its growth demands. The growth of communes is

the real crisis of economy, and is the only serious degrowth.

4. Taking Part in a Shared Power.

A commune can be formed in any situation, around any “problem.” The

workers of the AMO factories, pioneers of Bolshevik communalism, opened

the first communal house of the USSR because after years of civil war

and revolution, they were sorely lacking in places to go for vacation. A

communard wrote this, in 1930: “And when the long rains of autumn began

to beat down on the roof of the collective dacha, under that roof a firm

decision was made: we would continue our experiment during the winter.”

If there’s no privileged starting point for the birth of a commune, it’s

because there’s no privileged point of entry into the epoch. Every

situation, if it’s engaged with in a focused way, brings us back to this

world and links us to it, to its unbearable aspects as well as the

cracks and openings it presents. In each detail of existence, the entire

form of life is at stake. Because the object of every commune is the

world, basically, the commune must be careful not to let itself be

completely determined by the task, the question, or the situation that

led to its formation and were only the occasion of the convergence.

Thus, in a commune’s unfolding, a good threshold is crossed when the

desire to be together and the power that comes from that outstrip the

initial reasons for its formation.

If in the course of the recent uprisings there was one thing conveyed by

the streets, beyond the dissemination of riot techniques and the

now-universal use of gas masks—that symbol of an epoch that’s become

unbreathable—it was the initiation into joy that’s equivalent to a whole

political education. Over these last few years, there was no one, not

even the shaved-neck assholes of Versailles, who didn’t develop a taste

for the wild demonstration and the ruckus with the cops. Each time, the

situations of urgency, riot, occupation gave rise to more than was

committed to them initially in terms of demands, strategy, or hope.

Those who went to Taksim to prevent six hundred trees from being ripped

out soon found something else to defend: the square itself, as a matrix

and expression of a power regained at last, after ten years of political

castration and preventive dismemberment of every semblance of collective

organization.

What partakes of the commune in the occupation of Tahrir Square, the

Puerta del Sol, or some American occupations, or in the forty

unforgettable days of the Free Republic of Maddalena in the Susa Valley,

is discovering that one can organize in so many domains that they can’t

be totalized. This is what exhilarated us: the feeling of taking part

in, of experiencing, a shared power, one that was unassignable and

fleetineg invulnerable. Invulnerable because the joy that haloed each

moment, each gesture, each encounter, could never be taken away from us.

Who’s cooking meals for a thousand persons? Who’s doing the radio? Who’s

writing the communiqués? Who’s catapulting rocks at the cops? Who’s

building a house? Who’s cutting wood? Who’s speaking in the assembly? We

don’t know, and don’t give a fuck: all of that is a force with no name,

as a Spanish Bloom said, borrowing the notion without knowing it from

the 14^(th) century heretics of the Free Spirit. Only the fact of

sensing that what one is doing, what one is living through, participates

in a spirit, a force, a richness shared in common will enable us to be

done with economy, that is, with calculation, measurement, with

evaluation, with all that petty accountant’s mentality which is

everywhere the mark of resentment, in love as well as in the workshops.

A friend who had been camping for a long spell on Syntagma Square did a

double take when he was asked how the Greeks would have been able to

organize their food supply if the movement had burned down the

Parliament and brought down the country’s economy in a definitive way:

“Ten million persons have never let themselves die of hunger. Even if

that might have caused a few skirmishes here and there, the disorder

would have been tiny compared to the disorder that’s ordinarily the

case.”

What characterizes the situation that a commune faces is that by giving

oneself to it unreservedly, one always finds more in it than one brought

to it or sought from it: one is surprised to find one’s own strength in

it, a stamina and an inventiveness that is new, plus the happiness that

comes from strategically inhabiting a situation of exception on a daily

basis. In this sense, the commune is the organization of fertility. It

always gives rise to more than it lays claim to. This is what makes

irreversible the unheaval that affected the crowds that descended on all

the squares and avenues of Istanbul. Crowds forced for weeks to deal on

their own with the crucial questions of provisioning, construction, care

and treatment, burial, or armament not only learned to organize

themselves, but learned something that most didn’t know: that we can

organize ourselves, and that this capacity is fundamentally joyful. The

fact that this fertility of the street was not mentioned by any of the

democratic commentators is a rather clear indication of its dangerous

potential. The memory of those days and nights makes the orderly

everydayness of the metropolis appear even more intolerable, and exposes

its pointlessness.

8: Today Libya, Tomorrow Wall Street

[Sirte, October 2011.]

1. A History of Fifteen Years.

On July 3, 2011, in response to the eviction of the Maddalena, tens of

thousands of persons converged in several columns on the construction

site, occupied by the police and the army. That day, in the Susa Valley,

there was a real battle. A somewhat adventurous carabiniere was even

captured and disarmed by some demonstrators in the boschi, the woods.

From the hairdresser to the grandmother, nearly everybody had equipped

themselves with a gas mask. Those too old to go out cheered us on from

the doorways of their houses, with words like “Ammazzateli!”—“Kill

them!” In the end, the occupation forces were not dislodged from their

nook. And the next day, the newspapers repeated the police’s lies in

unison: “Maalox and ammonia: the Black Bloc guerilla,” and so forth. As

a riposte to this propaganda via slander, a press conference was called.

The movement’s response included this: “Well, all right, if attacking

the construction site makes you a Black Bloc, then we’re all Black

Blocs!” Ten years earlier, almost day for day, the servile press had

served up the same explanation for the battle of Genoa: the Black Bloc,

an entity of indeterminate origin, had managed to infiltrate the

demonstration and wreak bloody havoc on the city, all by itself. The

public discourse pitted the demonstration’s organizers, who defended the

theory that the said Black Bloc was actually composed of plainclothes

policemen, against those who saw them as a terrorist organization based

in a foreign country. The least one can say is that the policing

rhetoric has stayed exactly what it was, while the real movement has

covered some ground.

From our party’s perspective, a strategic reading of the past fifteen

years must start with the anti-globalization movement, the last

worldwide offensive organized against capital. It makes little

difference whether we date its inception from the Amsterdam

demonstration against the Maastricht Treaty in 1997, the Geneva riots in

May 1998 against the WTO, the London Carnival Against Capital in June

1999 or the one in Seattle in November of the same year. Nor does it

matter much whether one considers that it survived the Genoa climax and

was still alive in 2007 at Heiligendam or at Toronto in June 2010. What

is certain is that at the end of the 1990s there emerged a planetary

movement of critique targeting multinationals and global organs of

government (IMF, World Bank, European Union, G8, NATO, etc.). The global

counterrevolution that cited September 11 as its justification should be

understood as a political response to the anti-globalization movement.

After Genoa, the crack that was visible in the very framework of

“Western societies” had to be covered over by every available means.

Logically, in the autumn of 2008, the “crisis” emanated from the very

heart of the capitalist order, from the privileged target of the

“anti-globalization” critique. The fact is that counterrevolution,

however massive it may be, only has the power to freeze the

contradictions, not eradicate them. Just as logically, what returned at

that juncture was what had been brutally repressed for seven years. A

Greek comrade summed it up in this way: “In December 2008, it was Genoa

on the scale of a whole country and lasting for a month.” The

contradictions had been ripening under the ice.

Historically, the anti-globalization movement will remain as the first

attack of the planetary petty bourgeoisie against capital—a touching and

ineffectual one, like a premonition of its coming proletarization.

There’s not a single historical occupation of the petty

bourgeoisie—doctor, journalist, lawyer, artist, or teacher—that hasn’t

been changed into an activist version: street medic, alternative

reporter for Indymedia, legal team, or specialist in solidarity

economics. The evanescent nature of the anti-globilization movement,

volatile down to its counter-summit riots, where a club raised in the

air was enough to excite a crowd like a flock of sparrows, has to do

with the floating character of the petty bourgeoisie itself, with its

historical indecision, its political nullity, as a non-class of the

space between two classes. The paucity of reality of the one explains

the paucity of resistance of the other. The winter winds of

counterrevolution were enough to quell the movement, in a few seasons.

If the soul of the anti-globalization movement was its critique of the

global apparatus of government, we can say that the “crisis”

expropriated the custodians of that critique: the militants and

activists. What was obvious to the limited circles of politicized

creatures is now flagrantly evident to everyone. Since the autumn of

2008, never has it made more sense, and such a widely-shared sense, to

smash banks, but precisely for that reason, so little sense to do it in

a small group of professional rioters. Since 2008, it’s as if the

anti-globalization movement has dissolved into reality. It has

disappeared, precisely because it has been realized. Everything that

constituted its basic vocabulary has entered the public domain, so to

speak. Who still doubts the impudent “dictatorship of finance,” the

political function of the restructurings ordered by the IMF, the

devastation of the environment by capitalist rapacity, the insane

arrogance of the nuclear lobby, the reign of the most brazen lies and

blatant corruption of the rulers? Who is not flabbergasted by the

unilateral consecration of neoliberalism as the remedy for its own

failure? We need to remember how the convictions forming common opinion

today were restricted to militant circles ten years ago.

The anti-globalization movement even saw its own arsenal of practices

looted by “people.” The Puerta del Sol had its Legal Team, its Medical

Team, its Info point, its hacktivists, and its camping tents, just like

any counter-summit or “No Border” camp did in years past. What was

introduced into the heart of the Spanish capital were forms of assembly,

an organization into barrios and committees, and even ridiculous

gestural codes that all came from the anti-globalization movement. Early

in the morning of June 15, 2011, the campers, numbering in the

thousands, tried to blockade the Catalonia parliament to prevent it from

approving the “austerity plan,” just as the demonstrators stopped the

different countries’ IMF representatives from entering the conference

center a few years before. The book blocs of the English student

movement of 2011 were the resumption in a “social movement” setting of a

Tute Bianche practice in the counter-summits. On February 22, 2014 at

Nantes, during the demonstration against the airport project, the riot

practice of acting in small masked mobile groups was so generalized that

to speak of a “Black Bloc” was no longer anything but a way of reducing

what was new to the already-known, when it wasn’t just the language of

the Minister of the Interior. In situations where the police only

discern the action of “radical groups,” it’s not hard to see that

they’re trying to conceal a general radicalization.

2. Pulling Free from the Attraction of the Local.

Thus, our party is everywhere, but it’s at a standstill. With the

disappearance of the anti-globalization movement, the perspective of a

movement as planetary as capital itself, and hence capable of doing

battle with it, was lost as well. So the first question we are faced

with is the following: how does a set of situated powers constitute a

global force? How does a set of communes constitute a historical party?

Or to put it differently: it was necessary at a certain point to abandon

the ritual of counter-summits with its professional activists, its

depressive puppetmasters, its predictable riots, its plenitude of

slogans and its dearth of meanings, and attach ourselves to lived

territories; we had to tear ourselves away from the abstraction of the

global. The question at present is how do we tear ourselves away from

the attraction of the local?

Traditionally, revolutionaries expect the unification of their party to

come from the naming of the common enemy. It’s their incurable

dialectical defect. “Dialectical logic,” said Foucault, “brings

contradictory terms into play in a homogeneous context. I suggest

replacing this dialectical logic with what I would call strategic logic.

A logic of strategy doesn’t stress contradictory terms operating within

a homogeneity that promises their resolution into a unity. The function

of strategic logic is to establish the possible connections between

disparate terms that remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the

logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the

homogenization of the contradictory.”

No effective link between communes, between heterogeneous, situated

powers will result from the designation of a common enemy. If, in the

forty years they have debated, militants still have not decided whether

the enemy is alienation, exploitation, capitalism, sexism, racism,

civilization, or in fact what exists in its entirety, it’s because the

question as it is formulated is basically vacuous. The enemy is not

simply something that can be designated once we’ve detached ourselves

from all our determinations, once we’ve transported ourselves to who

knows what political or philosophical plane. From the standpoint of such

a detachment, all cats are grey, the real is bathed in the very

strangeness that we’ve brought upon ourselves: all is hostile, cold,

indifferent. The militant can then sally forth against this or against

that, but it will always be against a form of emptiness, a form of his

own emptiness—powerlessness and windmills. For anyone who starts from

where they are, from the milieu they frequent, the territory they

inhabit, the frontline defines itself, based on the matter at hand, the

contact. Who is working for the dirtbags? Who’s afraid of getting

involved? Who will take risks for what they believe in? How far will the

opposing party allow itself to go? What does it back away from? What

does it rely upon? It’s not a unilateral decision but experience itself

that outlines the response to these questions, from situation to

situation, from encounter to encounter. Here the enemy is not that

ectoplasm that is constituted by naming it; the enemy is what presents

itself, what imposes itself on all those who aren’t attempting to shed

what they are and where they are and project themselves onto the

abstract terrain of politics—that desert. Although it only presents

itself to those with enough life in them not to instinctively flee from

conflict.

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. It is in this movement that it marks out the paths

leading to other communes, that it forms the lines and links making up

our party. Our strength won’t come from our naming of the enemy, but

from the effort made to enter one another’s geography.

We’re the orphans of a time when the world was falsely divided into

agents and enemies of the capitalist bloc. With the collapse of the

Soviet illusion, every simple grid of geopolitical interpretation was

lost. No ideology enables us from afar to separate friends from

enemies—notwithstanding the desperate attempt to instate a newly

reassuring reading grid where Iran, China, Venezuela or Bashar al-Assad

look like heroes of the struggle against imperialism. Who could have

determined from here the exact nature of the Libyan insurrection? Who

can sort out, in the occupation of Taksim, what falls under the old

Kemalism and what is due to the aspiration for a new world? And Maidan?

What does one say about Maidan? One would have to go see. One would have

to go make contact. And in the complexity of the movements, to discern

the shared friends, the possible alliances, the necessary conflicts.

According to a logic of strategy, and not of dialectics.

“From the start,” wrote our comrade Deleuze more than forty years ago,

“we have to be more centralist than the centralists. Clearly, a

revolutionary machine can’t be satisfied with local and limited

struggles: it has to be super-centralized and super-desiring at the same

time. The problem, then, concerns the nature of unification, which must

function transversally, through multiplicity, not vertically and not in

such a way that the multiplicity characterizing desire will be crushed.”

As long as ties exist between us, the scatteredness, the fragmented

cartography of our party is not a weakness, but rather a way of

depriving the hostile forces of any decisive target. As a friend from

Cairo put it in the summer of 2010: “I think that what may have saved

what has happened in Egypt up to now is that there’s no leader of this

revolution. That may be the most disconcerting thing for the police, for

the state, for the government. There’s no head to cut off to make this

thing stop. Like a virus constantly mutating to preserve its existence,

it’s this way we’ve had of preserving the popular organization, without

any hierarchy, completely horizontal, organic, and diffuse.” Morever,

what is not structured like a state, like an organization, can only be

scattered and fragmentary, and discovers the very motive force of its

expansion in this constellated form. It’s up to us to organize the

encounters, the circulation, the understandings, the collusions between

the local consistencies. The revolutionary task has partly become a task

of translation. There is no Esperanto of revolt. It’s not up to the

rebels to learn to speak anarchist; it’s up to the anarchists to become

polyglot.

3. Building a Force That Is Not an Organisation.

We are faced with this difficulty: how does one construct a force that

is not an organization? Here again, the question must have been badly

formulated since it received no satisfactory answer during a century of

quarreling on the theme of “spontaneity or organization.” This false

problem stems from a blindness, an inability to perceive the

organizational forms implied by the term “spontaneous.” Every life, let

alone every shared life, secretes ways of being, of speaking, of

producing, of loving, of fighting, regularities therefore, customs, a

language-forms. The thing is, we have learned not to see forms in what

is alive. For us, a form is a statue, a structure, or a skeleton, and

never a being that moves, eats, dances, sings, and riots. Real forms are

immanent in life and can only be apprehended in motion. An Egyptian

comrade gave us this account: “Cairo was never more alive than during

the first Tahrir Square. Since nothing was functioning anymore, everyone

took care of what was around them. People took charge of the garbage

collecting, swept the walkways and sometimes even repainted them; they

drew frescos on the walls and they looked after each other. Even the

traffic had become miraculously fluid, since there were no more traffic

controllers. What we suddenly realized is that we had been robbed of our

simplest gestures, those that make the city ours and make it something

we belong to. At Tahrir Square, people would arrive and spontaneously

ask themselves What they could do to help. They would go to the kitchen,

or to stretcher the wounded, work on banners or shields or slingshots,

join discussions, make up songs. We realized that the state organization

was actually the maximum disorganization, because it depended on

negating the human ability to self-organize. At Tahrir, no one gave any

orders. Obviously, if someone had got it in their heads to organize all

that, it would have immediately turned into chaos.” One is reminded of

the famous letter written by Courbet during the Commune: “Paris is a

real paradise: no police, no nonsense, no abuse of any kind, no

quarrels. Paris is cruising by itself, like something on wheels. If only

we could stay like this forever. In a word, it’s a real enchantment.”

From the collectivizations of Aragon in 1936 to the occupations of

squares in recent years, personal accounts of the same enchantment are a

constant of History; the war of all against all is not what comes when

the state is no longer there, but what the state skillfully organizes

for as long as it exists.

And yet, recognizing the forms that life spontaneously engenders does

not mean that we can rely on some kind of spontaneity to maintain those

forms and foster their growth, to bring about the necessary

metamorphoses. On the contrary, that requires a constant attention and

discipline. Not the reactive, cybernetic, punctual attention that is

shared by activists and the management vanguard, who only swear by

networks, fluidity, feedback, and horizontality, who manage everything

without understanding anything, from the outside. Not the external,

vaguely military discipline of the old organizations spawned by the

workers’ movement, which have almost all become appendices of the state,

it should be said. The attention and the discipline we have in mind is

directed towards our power, towards its condition, and its increase.

They watch for signs of anything encroaching on it, and figure out what

makes it grow. They never mistake a letting-go—that bane of communes—for

a letting-be. They take care that everything isn’t mixed together on the

pretext of sharing everything. They’re not the prerogative of a few, but

the entitlement of everyone to initiative. They’re both the precondition

and the object of real sharing, and its gauge of subtlety. They’re our

protection against the tyranny of the informal. They’re the very texture

of our party. In forty years of neoliberal counterrevolution, it’s first

of all this link between discipline and joy that’s been forgotten. It’s

now being rediscovered. True discipline isn’t focused on the external

signs of organization, but on the internal development of our power.

4. Taking Care of Our Power.

The revolutionary tradition is stamped with voluntarism as if it were a

congenital defect. Living strained towards the future, marching towards

victory, is one of the few ways to endure a present whose horror one

can’t conceal from oneself. Cynicism is another option, the worst one,

the most banal. A revolutionary force of this era will attend instead to

the patient growth of its power. This question having long been pushed

back, behind the antiquated theme of seizing power, we’re relatively

unprepared when the moment comes to address it. There’s never a lack of

bureaucrats who know exactly what they intend to do with the power of

our movements, that is, how they intend to make it a means, a means to

their end. But we don’t usually concern ourselves with our power as

such. We sense that it exists, we perceive its fluctuations, but we

treat it with the same casualness we reserve for anything “existential.”

A certain illiteracy in the matter isn’t incompatible with the bad

texture of radical milieus: engaged as it is in a pathetic competition

for miniscule shares of the political market, every little groupuscular

enterprise foolishly believes that it will come out stronger for having

weakened its rivals by slandering them. This is a mistake: one increases

in power by combating an enemy, not by demeaning him. The cannibal

himself is better than that: if he eats his enemy, it’s because he

esteems him enough to want to feed on his strength.

Not being able to draw from the revolutionary tradition on this point,

we can appeal to comparative mythology. We know that in his study of

Indo-European mythologies, Dumézil was led to his famous tripartition:

“Beyond the priests, the warriors, and the producers, there were the

corresponding hierarchized ‘functions’ of magical and juridical

sovereignty, physical and mainly warlike strength, peaceful and fertile

abundance.” Let’s leave aside the hierarchy between “functions” and

speak of dimensions instead. We’ll say this: every power in our sense

has three dimensions—spirit, force, and richness. Its growth depends on

keeping the three of them together. As a historical power, a

revolutionary movement is that deployment of a spiritual

expression—which may take a theoretical, literary, artistic, or

metaphysical form—of a war-making capacity—which may be oriented towards

attack or towards self-defense—and of an abundance of material means and

places. These three dimensions are variously combined in time and space,

giving rise to forms, dreams, forces, and histories that are always

singular. But whenever one of these dimensions loses contact with the

others and becomes independent of them, the movement has degenerated. It

has degenerated into an armed vanguard, a sect of theoreticians, or an

alternative enterprise. The Red Brigades, the Situationists, and the

nightclubs—sorry, the “social centers”—of the Disobedients are standard

formulas of failure as far as revolution goes. Ensuring an increase of

power demands that every revolutionary force progress on each of these

planes simultaneously. To remain stuck on the offensive plane is

eventually to run out of cogent ideas and to make the abundance of means

insipid. To stop moving theoretically is a sure way of being caught off

guard by the movements of capital and of losing the ability to apprehend

life as it’s lived where we are. To give up on constructing worlds with

our hands is to resign oneself to a ghostly existence.

A friend wrote: “What is happiness? It’s the feeling that our power is

increasing—that an obstacle is being overcome.”

To become revolutionary is to assign oneself a difficult, but immediate,

happiness.

We would have liked to be brief. To forgo genealogies, etymologies,

quotations. That a poem, a song, would suffice.

We wished it would be enough to write “revolution” on a wall for the

street to catch fire.

But it was necessary to untangle the skein of the present, and in places

to settle accounts with ancient falsehoods.

It was necessary to try and digest seven years of historical

convulsions. And decipher a world in which confusion has blossomed on a

tree of misunderstanding.

We’ve taken the time to write with the hope that others would take the

time to read.

Writing is a vanity, unless it’s for the friend. Including the friend

one doesn’t know yet.

In the coming years, we’ll be wherever the fires are lit.

During the periods of respite, we’re not that hard to find.

We’ll continue the effort of clarification we’ve begun here.

There will be dates and places where we can mass our forces against

logical targets.

There will be dates and places for meeting up and debating.

We don’t know if the insurrection will have the look of a heroic

assault, or if it will be a planetary fit of crying, a sudden expression

of feeling after decades of anesthesia, misery, and stupidity.

Nothing guarantees that the fascist option won’t be preferred to

revolution.

We’ll do what there is to be done.

Thinking, attacking, building—such is our fabulous agenda.

This text is the beginning of a plan.

See you soon,

Invisible Committee

October 2014

Errata to the first Semiotext(e) printing

3.1 theory of broken panes broken windows theory

3.3 The time that’s passing is no longer seen

5.3 August 1011 2011

6.2 in every place

7.3 if the commune doesn’t negates its claim