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Title: The Coming Insurrection Author: comité invisible Date: 2007 Language: en Topics: critique, ecology, France, insurrectionist, communization Source: Retrieved on 2022-01-01 from http://paycreate.com/thecominginsurrection/
The book you hold in your hands has become the principal piece of
evidence in an anti-terrorism case in France directed against nine
individuals who were arrested on November 11 2008, mostly in the village
of Tarnac. They have been accused of âcriminal association for the
purposes of terrorist activityâ on the grounds that they were to have
participated in the sabotage of overhead electrical lines on Franceâs
national railways. Although only scanty circumstantial evidence has been
presented against the nine, the French Interior Minister has publically
associated them with the emergent threat of an âultra-leftâ movement,
taking care to single out this book, described as a âmanual for
terrorism,â which they are accused of authoring. What follows is the
text of the book preceded by the first statement of the Invisible
Committee since the arrests.
Everyone agrees. Itâs about to explode. It is acknowledged, with a
serious and self-important look, in the corridors of the Assembly, just
as yesterday it was repeated in the cafés. There is a certain pleasure
in calculating the risks. Already, we are presented with a detailed menu
of preventive measures for securing the territory. The New Yearâs
festivities take a decisive turnâânext year thereâll be no oysters,
enjoy them while you can!â To prevent the celebrations from being
totally eclipsed by the traditional disorder, 36,000 cops and 16
helicopters are rushed out by Alliot-Marie[1]âthe same clown who, during
the high school demonstrations in December, tremulously watched for the
slightest sign of a Greek contamination, readying the police apparatus
just in case. We can discern more clearly every day, beneath the
reassuring drone, the noise of preparations for open war. Itâs
impossible to ignore its cold and pragmatic implementation, no longer
even bothering to present itself as an operation of pacification.
The newspapers conscientiously draw up the list of causes for the sudden
disquiet. There is the financial crisis, of course, with its booming
unemployment, its share of hopelessness and of social plans, its Kerviel
and Madoff scandals. There is the failure of the educational system, its
dwindling production of workers and citizens, even with the children of
the middle class as its raw material. There is the existence of a youth
to which no political representation corresponds, a youth good for
nothing but destroying the free bicycles that society so conscientiously
put at their disposal.
None of these worrisome subjects should appear insurmountable in an era
whose predominant mode of government is precisely the management of
crises. Unless we consider that what power is confronting is neither
just another crisis, nor a series of more or less chronic problems, of
more or less anticipated disturbances, but a singular peril: that a form
of conflict, and positions, have emerged that are explicitly not
manageable.
Those who everywhere make up this peril have to ask themselves more than
the trifling questions about causes, or the probabilities of inevitable
movements and confrontations. They need to ask how, for instance, does
the Greek chaos resonate in the French situation? An uprising here
cannot be the simple transposition of what happened over there. Global
civil war still has its local specificities. In France a situation of
generalized rioting would provoke an explosion of another tenor.
The Greek rioters are faced with a weak state, whilst being able to take
advantage of a strong popularity. One must not forget that it was
against the Regime of the Colonels that, only thirty years ago,
democracy reconstituted itself on the basis of a practice of political
violence. This violence, whose memory is not so distant, still seems
intuitive to most Greeks. Even the leaders of the socialist party have
thrown a molotov or two in their youth. Yet classical politics is
equipped with variants that know very well how to accommodate these
practices and to extend their ideological rubbish to the very heart of
the riot. If the Greek battle wasnât decided, and put down, in the
streetsâthe police being visibly outflanked thereâitâs because its
neutralization was played out elsewhere. There is nothing more draining,
nothing more fatal, than this classical politics, with its dried up
rituals, its thinking without thought, its little closed world.
In France, our most exalted socialist bureaucrats have never been
anything other than shriveled husks filling up the halls of the
Assembly. Here everything conspires to annihilate even the slightest
form of political intensity. Which means that it is always possible to
oppose the citizen to the delinquent in a quasilinguistic operation that
goes hand in hand with quasi-military operations. The riots of November
2005 and, in a different context, the social movements in the autumn of
2007, have already provided several precedents. The image of right wing
students in Nanterre applauding as the police expelled their classmates
offers a small glimpse of what the future holds in store.
It goes without saying that the attachment of the French to the
stateâthe guarantor of universal values, the last rampart against the
disasterâis a pathology that is difficult to undo. Itâs above all a
fiction that no longer knows how to carry on. Our governors themselves
increasingly consider it as a useless encumbrance because they, at
least, take the conflict for what it isâmilitarily. They have no complex
about sending in elite antiterrorist units to subdue riots, or to
liberate a recycling center occupied by its workers. As the welfare
state collapses, we see the emergence of a brute conflict between those
who desire order and those who donât. Everything that French politics
has been able to deactivate is in the process of unleashing itself. It
will never be able to process all that it has repressed. In the advanced
degree of social decomposition, we can count on the coming movement to
find the necessary breath of nihilism. Which will not mean that it wonât
be exposed to other limits.
Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance.
Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted
by something constituted over there. A body that resonates does so
according to its own mode. An insurrection is not like a plague or a
forest fireâa linear process which spreads from place to place after an
initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points,
though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of
their own vibrations, always taking on more density. To the point that
any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.
When we speak of Empire we name the mechanisms of power that
preventively and surgically stifle any revolutionary becoming in a
situation. In this sense, Empire is not an enemy that confronts us
head-on. It is a rhythm that imposes itself, a way of dispensing and
dispersing reality. Less an order of the world than its sad, heavy and
militaristic liquidation.
What we mean by the party of insurgents is the sketching out of a
completely other composition, an other side of reality, which from
Greece to the French banlieues[2] is seeking its consistency.
It is now publicly understood that crisis situations are so many
opportunities for the restructuring of domination. This is why Sarkozy
can announce, without seeming to lie too much, that the financial crisis
is âthe end of a world,â and that 2009 will see France enter a new era.
This charade of an economic crisis is supposed to be a novelty: we are
supposed to be in the dawn of a new epoch where we will all join
together in fighting inequality and global warming. But for our
generationâwhich was born in the crisis and has known nothing but
economic, financial, social and ecological crisisâthis is rather
difficult to accept. They wonât fool us again, with another round ânow
we start all over againâ and âitâs just a question of tightening our
belts for a little while.â To tell the truth, the disastrous
unemployment figures no longer provoke any feeling in us. Crisis is a
means of governing. In a world that seems to hold together only through
the infinite management of its own collapse.
What this war is being fought over is not various ways of managing
society, but irreducible and irreconcilable ideas of happiness and their
worlds. We know it, and so do the powers that be. The militant remnants
that see usâalways more numerous, always more identifiableâare tearing
out their hair trying to fit us into little compartments in their little
heads. They hold out their arms to us in order to better suffocate us,
with their failures, their paralysis, their stupid problematics. From
elections to âtransitions,â militants will never be anything other than
that which distances us, each time a little farther, from the
possibility of communism. Luckily we will accommodate neither treason
nor deception for much longer.
The past has given us much too many bad answers for us not to see that
the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to
choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and organizational control;
between the âcome one, come allâ of activist networks and the discipline
of hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for
later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in
the name of a paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer
it is put off and flogging the dead horse of how planting carrots is
enough to leave this nightmare.
Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves.
In truth, there is no gap between what we are, what we do, and what we
are becoming. Organizationsâpolitical or labor, fascist or
anarchistâalways begin by separating, practically, these aspects of
existence. Itâs then easy for them to present their idiotic formalism as
the sole remedy to this separation. To organize is not to give a
structure to weakness. It is above all to form bondsâbonds that are by
no means neutralâterrible bonds. The degree of organization is measured
by the intensity of sharingâmaterial and spiritual.
From now on, to materially organize for survival is to materially
organize for attack. Everywhere, a new idea of communism is to be
elaborated. In the shadows of bar rooms, in print shops, squats, farms,
occupied gymnasiums, new complicities are to be born. These precious
connivances must not be refused the necessary means for the deployment
of their forces.
Here lies the truly revolutionary potentiality of the present. The
increasingly frequent skirmishes have this formidable quality: that they
are always an occasion for complicities of this type, sometimes
ephemeral, but sometimes also unbetrayable. When a few thousand young
people find the determination to assail this world, youâd have to be as
stupid as a cop to seek out a financial trail, a leader, or a snitch.
Two centuries of capitalism and market nihilism have brought us to the
most extreme alienationsâfrom our selves, from others, from worlds. The
fiction of the individual has decomposed at the same speed that it was
becoming real. Children of the metropolis, we offer this wager: that
itâs in the most profound deprivation of existence, perpetually stifled,
perpetually conjured away, that the possibility of communism resides.
When all is said and done, itâs with an entire anthropology that we are
at war. With the very idea of man.
Communism then, as presupposition and as experiment. Sharing of a
sensibility and elaboration of sharing. The uncovering of what is common
and the building of a force. Communism as the matrix of a meticulous,
audacious assault on domination. As a call and as a name for all worlds
resisting imperial pacification, all solidarities irreducible to the
reign of commodities, all friendships assuming the necessities of war.
COMMUNISM. We know itâs a term to be used with caution. Not because, in
the great parade of words, it may no longer be very fashionable. But
because our worst enemies have used it, and continue to do so. We
insist. Certain words are like battlegrounds: their meaning,
revolutionary or reactionary, is a victory, to be torn from the jaws of
struggle.
Deserting classical politics means facing up to war, which is also
situated on the terrain of language. Or rather, in the way that words,
gestures and life are inseparably linked. If one puts so much effort
into imprisoning as terrorists a few young communists who are supposed
to have participated in publishing The Coming Insurrection, it is not
because of a âthought crime,â but rather because they might embody a
certain consistency between acts and thought. Something which is rarely
treated with leniency.
What these people are accused of is not to have written a book, nor even
to have physically attacked the sacrosanct flows that irrigate the
metropolis. Itâs that they might possibly have confronted these flows
with the density of a political thought and position. That an act could
have made sense according to another consistency of the world than the
deserted one of Empire. Anti-terrorism claims to attack the possible
future of a âcriminal association.â But what is really being attacked is
the future of the situation. The possibility that behind every grocer a
few bad intentions are hiding, and behind every thought, the acts that
it calls for. The possibility expressed by an idea of politicsâanonymous
but welcoming, disseminate and uncontrollableâwhich cannot be relegated
to the storeroom of freedom of expression.
There remains scarcely any doubt that youth will be the first to
savagely confront power. These last few years, from the riots of Spring
2001 in Algeria to those of December 2008 in Greece, are nothing but a
series of warning signs in this regard. Those who 30 or 40 years ago
revolted against their parents will not hesitate to reduce this to a
conflict between generations, if not to a predictable symptom of
adolescence.
The only future of a âgenerationâ is to be the preceding one, on a route
that leads inevitably to the cemetery.
Tradition would have it that everything begins with a âsocial movement.â
Especially at a moment when the left, which has still not finished
decomposing, hypocritically tries to regain its credibility in the
streets. Except that in the streets it no longer has a monopoly. Just
look at how, with each new mobilization of high school studentsâas with
everything the left still dares to supportâa rift continually widens
between their whining demands and the level of violence and
determination of the movement.
From this rift we must build a trench.
If we see a succession of movements hurrying one after the other,
without leaving anything visible behind them, it must nonetheless be
admitted that something persists. A powder trail links what in each
event has not let itself be captured by the absurd temporality of the
withdrawal of a new law, or some other pretext. In fits and starts, and
in its own rhythm, we are seeing something like a force take shape. A
force that does not serve its time but imposes it, silently.
It is no longer a matter of foretelling the collapse or depicting the
possibilities of joy. Whether it comes sooner or later, the point is to
prepare for it. Itâs not a question of providing a schema for what an
insurrection should be, but of taking the possibility of an uprising for
what it never should have ceased being: a vital impulse of youth as much
as a popular wisdom. If one knows how to move, the absence of a schema
is not an obstacle but an opportunity. For the insurgents, it is the
sole space that can guarantee the essential: keeping the initiative.
What remains to be created, to be tended as one tends a fire, is a
certain outlook, a certain tactical fever, which once it has emerged,
even now, reveals itself as determinantâand a constant source of
determination. Already certain questions have been revived that only
yesterday may have seemed grotesque or outmoded; they need to be seized
upon, not in order to respond to them definitively, but to make them
live. Having posed them anew is not the least of the Greek uprisingâs
virtues:
How does a situation of generalized rioting become an insurrectionary
situation? What to do once the streets have been taken, once the police
have been soundly defeated there? Do the parliaments still deserve to be
attacked? What is the practical meaning of deposing power locally? How
to decide?
How to subsist?
HOW TO FIND EACH OTHER?
âInvisible Committee, January 2009
From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This
is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it
tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are
contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only
get worse. âThe future has no futureâ is the wisdom of an age that, for
all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of
consciousness of the first punks.
The sphere of political representation has come to a close. From left to
right, itâs the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a
savior, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse according to
the findings of the latest surveys. Those who still vote seem to have no
other intention than to desecrate the ballot box by voting as a pure act
of protest. Weâre beginning to suspect that itâs only against voting
itself that people continue to vote. Nothing weâre being shown is
adequate to the situation, not by far. In its very silence, the populace
seems infinitely more mature than all these puppets bickering amongst
themselves about how to govern it. The ramblings of any Belleville
chibani[3] contain more wisdom than all the declarations of our
so-called leaders. The lid on the social kettle is shut triple-tight,
and the pressure inside continues to build. From out of Argentina, the
specter of Que Se Vayan Todos[4] is beginning to seriously haunt the
ruling class.
The flames of November 2005 still flicker in everyoneâs minds. Those
first joyous fires were the baptism of a decade full of promise. The
media fable of âbanlieue vs. the Republicâ may work, but what it gains
in effectiveness it loses in truth. Fires were lit in the city centers,
but this news was methodically suppressed. Whole streets in Barcelona
burned in solidarity, but no one knew about it apart from the people
living there. And itâs not even true that the country has stopped
burning. Many different profiles can be found among the arrested, with
little that unites them besides a hatred for existing societyânot class,
race, or even neighborhood. What was new wasnât the âbanlieue revolt,â
since that was already going on in the 80s, but the break with its
established forms. These assailants no longer listen to anybody, neither
to their Big Brothers and Big Sisters, nor to the community
organizations charged with overseeing the return to normal. No âSOS
Racismâ[5] could sink its cancerous roots into this event, whose
apparent conclusion can be credited only to fatigue, falsification and
the media omertĂ .[6] This whole series of nocturnal vandalisms and
anonymous attacks, this wordless destruction, has widened the breach
between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the
obvious: this was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a
message, and it had nothing to do with âpolitics.â One would have to be
oblivious to the autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years not to
see the purely political character of this resolute negation of
politics. Like lost children we trashed the prized trinkets of a society
that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris at the end of
the Bloody Week[7]âand knows it.
There will be no social solution to the present situation. First,
because the vague aggregate of social milieus, institutions, and
individualized bubbles that is called, with a touch of antiphrasis,
âsociety,â has no consistency. Second, because thereâs no longer any
language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not
share a language. It took half a century of struggle around the
Enlightenment to make the French Revolution possible, and a century of
struggle around work to give birth to the fearsome âwelfare state.â
Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself. But
there is nothing like that today. Europe is now a continent gone broke
that shops secretly at discount stores and has to fly budget airlines if
it wants to travel at all. No âproblemsâ framed in social terms admit of
a solution. The questions of âpensions,â of âjob security,â of âyoung
peopleâ and their âviolenceâ can only be held in suspense while the
situation these words serve to cover up is continually policed for signs
of further unrest. Nothing can make it an attractive prospect to wipe
the asses of pensioners for minimum wage. Those who have found less
humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping
floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison wonât teach them to
love society. Cuts to their monthly pensions will undermine the
desperate pleasure-seeking of hordes of retirees, making them stew and
splutter about the refusal to work among an ever larger section of
youth. And finally, no guaranteed income granted the day after a
quasi-uprising will be able to lay the foundation of a new New Deal, a
new pact, a new peace. The social feeling has already evaporated too
much for that.
As an attempted solution, the pressure to ensure that nothing happens,
together with police surveillance of the territory, will only intensify.
The unmanned drone that flew over Seine-Saint-Denis[8] last July
14^(th)âas the police later confirmedâpresents a much more vivid image
of the future than all the fuzzy humanistic projections. That they were
careful to assure us that the drone was unarmed gives us a clear
indication of the road weâre headed down. The territory will be
partitioned into ever more restricted zones. Highways built around the
borders of âproblem neighborhoodsâ already form invisible walls closing
off those areas from the middle-class subdivisions. Whatever defenders
of the Republic may think, the control of neighborhoods âby the
communityâ is manifestly the most effective means available. The purely
metropolitan sections of the country, the main city centers, will go
about their opulent lives in an ever more crafty, ever more
sophisticated, ever more shimmering deconstruction. They will illuminate
the whole planet with their glaring neon lights, as the patrols of the
BAC[9] and private security companies (i.e. paramilitary units)
proliferate under the umbrella of an increasingly shameless judicial
protection.
The impasse of the present, everywhere in evidence, is everywhere
denied. There will be no end of psychologists, sociologists, and
literary hacks applying themselves to the case, each with a specialized
jargon from which the conclusions are especially absent. Itâs enough to
listen to the songs of the timesâthe asinine âalt-folkâ where the petty
bourgeoisie dissects the state of its soul, next to declarations of war
from Mafia Kâ1 Fry[10]âto know that a certain coexistence will end soon,
that a decision is near.
This book is signed in the name of an imaginary collective. Its editors
are not its authors. They were content merely to introduce a little
order into the common-places of our time, collecting some of the
murmurings around barroom tables and behind closed bedroom doors.
Theyâve done nothing more than lay down a few necessary truths, whose
universal repression fills psychiatric hospitals with patients, and eyes
with pain. Theyâve made themselves scribes of the situation. Itâs the
privileged feature of radical circumstances that a rigorous application
of logic leads to revolution. Itâs enough just to say what is before our
eyes and not to shrink from the conclusions.
âI AM WHAT I AM.â This is marketingâs latest offering to the world, the
final stage in the development of advertising, far beyond all the
exhortations to be different, to be oneself and drink Pepsi. Decades of
concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I =
I. Heâs running on a treadmill in front of the mirror in his gym. Sheâs
coming back from work, behind the wheel of her Smart car. Will they
meet?
âI AM WHAT I AM.â My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and
somethingâs wrong. Mass personalization. Individualization of all
conditionsâlife, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant
depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of
contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The
more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after
myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job
title. Weâve become our own representatives in a strange commerce,
guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like
an amputation. We insure ourselves to the point of bankruptcy, with a
more or less disguised clumsiness.
Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the
latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, whoâs fucking who ...
whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an âIâ! If âsocietyâ hadnât
become such a definitive abstraction, then it would denote all the
existential crutches that allow me to keep dragging on, the ensemble of
dependencies Iâve contracted as the price of my identity. The
handicapped person is the model citizen of tomorrow. Itâs not without
foresight that the associations exploiting them today demand that they
be granted a âsubsistence income.â
The injunction, everywhere, to âbe someoneâ maintains the pathological
state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong
produces the very weakness by which it maintains itself, so that
everything seems to take on a therapeutic character, even working, even
love. All those âhowâs it goings?â that we exchange give the impression
of a society composed of patients taking each otherâs temperatures.
Sociability is now made up of a thousand little niches, a thousand
little refuges where you can take shelter. Where itâs always better than
the bitter cold outside. Where everythingâs false, since itâs all just a
pretext for getting warmed up. Where nothing can happen since weâre all
too busy shivering silently together. Soon this society will only be
held together by the mere tension of all the social atoms straining
towards an illusory cure. Itâs a power plant that runs its turbines on a
gigantic reservoir of unwept tears, always on the verge of spilling
over.
âI AM WHAT I AM.â Never has domination found such an innocent-sounding
slogan. The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of
deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept
secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed,
self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable
subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production, the
accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of
social norms, and generalized flexibility. It is at the same time the
most voracious consumer and, paradoxically, the most productive self,
the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the
slightest project, only to return later to its original larval state.
âWHAT AM I,â then? Since childhood, Iâve passed through a flow of milk,
smells, stories, sounds, emotions, nursery rhymes, substances, gestures,
ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every
way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages,
memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything
that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the
forces that compose me donât form an identity, a thing displayable on
cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emergesâat
certain times and placesâthat being which says âI.â Our feeling of
inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the
permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us
what we are.
Itâs dizzying to see Reebokâs âI AM WHAT I AMâ enthroned atop a Shanghai
skyscraper. The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the
exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and
the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isnât the act of
shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to
move around in their space, to form or dissolve them. The family only
exists as a family, that is, as a hell, for those whoâve quit trying to
alter its debilitating mechanisms, or donât know how to. The freedom to
uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We canât rid
ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very
thing to which our forces would be applied.
âI AM WHAT I AM,â then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising
campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry directed against everything
that exists between beings, against everything that circulates
indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything that
prevents complete desolation, against everything that makes us exist,
and ensures that the whole world doesnât everywhere have the look and
feel of a highway, an amusement park or a new town: pure boredom,
passionless but well-ordered, empty, frozen space, where nothing moves
apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles, and ideal
commodities.
France wouldnât be the land of anxiety pills that itâs become, the
paradise of anti-depressants, the Mecca of neurosis, if it werenât also
the European champion of hourly productivity. Sickness, fatigue,
depression, can be seen as the individual symptoms of what needs to be
cured. They contribute to the maintenance of the existing order, to my
docile adjustment to idiotic norms, and to the modernization of my
crutches. They specify the selection of my opportune, compliant, and
productive tendencies, as well as those that must be gently discarded.
âItâs never too late to change, you know.â But taken as facts, my
failings can also lead to the dismantling of the hypothesis of the self.
They then become acts of resistance in the current war. They become a
rebellion and a force against everything that conspires to normalize us,
to amputate us. The self is not something within us that is in a state
of crisis; it is the form they mean to stamp upon us. They want to make
our self something sharply defined, separate, assessable in terms of
qualities, controllable, when in fact we are creatures among creatures,
singularities among similars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the
world. Contrary to what has been repeated to us since childhood,
intelligence doesnât mean knowing how to adaptâor if that is a kind of
intelligence, itâs the intelligence of slaves. Our inadaptability, our
fatigue, are only problems from the standpoint of what aims to subjugate
us. They indicate rather a departure point, a meeting point, for new
complicities. They reveal a landscape more damaged, but infinitely more
sharable than all the fantasy lands this society maintains for its
purposes.
We are not depressed; weâre on strike. For those who refuse to manage
themselves, âdepressionâ is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a
sidestep towards a political disaffiliation. From then on medication and
the police are the only possible forms of conciliation. This is why the
present society doesnât hesitate to impose Ritalin on its over-active
children, or to strap people into life-long dependence on
pharmaceuticals, and why it claims to be able to detect âbehavioral
disordersâ at age three. Because everywhere the hypothesis of the self
is beginning to crack.
A government that declares a state of emergency against fifteen-year-old
kids. A country that takes refuge in the arms of a football team. A cop
in a hospital bed, complaining about being the victim of âviolence.â A
city councilwoman issuing a decree against the building of tree houses.
Two ten year olds, in Chelles, charged with burning down a video game
arcade. This era excels in a certain situation of the grotesque that
seems to escape it every time. The truth is that the plaintive,
indignant tones of the news media are unable to stifle the burst of
laughter that welcomes these headlines.
A burst of laughter is the only appropriate response to all the serious
âquestionsâ posed by news analysts. To take the most banal: there is no
âimmigration question.â Who still grows up where they were born? Who
lives where they grew up? Who works where they live? Who lives where
their ancestors did? And to whom do the children of this era belong, to
television or their parents? The truth is that we have been completely
torn from any belonging, we are no longer from anywhere, and the result,
in addition to a new disposition to tourism, is an undeniable suffering.
Our history is one of colonizations, of migrations, of wars, of exiles,
of the destruction of all roots. Itâs the story of everything that has
made us foreigners in this world, guests in our own family. We have been
expropriated from our own language by education, from our songs by
reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city
by the police, and from our friends by wage-labor. To this we should
add, in France, the ferocious and secular work of individualization by
the power of the state, that classifies, compares, disciplines and
separates its subjects starting from a very young age, that
instinctively grinds down any solidarities that escape it until nothing
remains except citizenshipâa pure, phantasmic sense of belonging to the
Republic. The Frenchman, more than anyone else, is the embodiment of the
dispossessed, the destitute. His hatred of foreigners is based on his
hatred of himself as a foreigner. The mixture of jealousy and fear he
feels toward the âcitĂ©sâ[11] expresses nothing but his resentment for
all he has lost. He canât help envying these so-called âproblemâ
neighborhoods where there still persists a bit of communal life, a few
links between beings, some solidarities not controlled by the state, an
informal economy, an organization that is not yet detached from those
who organize. We have arrived at a point of privation where the only way
to feel French is to curse the immigrants and those who are more visibly
foreign. In this country, the immigrants assume a curious position of
sovereignty: if they werenât here, the French might stop existing.
France is a product of its schools, and not the inverse. We live in an
excessively scholastic country, where one remembers passing an exam as a
sort of life passage. Where retired people still tell you about their
failure, forty years earlier, in such and such an exam, and how it
screwed up their whole career, their whole life. For a century and a
half, the national school system has been producing a type of state
subjectivity that stands out amongst all others. People who accept
competition on the condition that the playing field is level. Who expect
in life that each person be rewarded as in a contest, according to their
merit. Who always ask permission before taking. Who silently respect
culture, the rules, and those with the best grades. Even their
attachment to their great, critical intellectuals and their rejection of
capitalism are branded by this love of school. Itâs this construction of
subjectivities by the state that is breaking down, every day a little
more, with the decline of the scholarly institutions. The reappearance,
over the past twenty years, of a school and a culture of the street, in
competition with the school of the republic and its cardboard culture,
is the most profound trauma that French universalism is presently
undergoing. On this point, the extreme right is already reconciled with
the most virulent left. However, the name Jules FerryâMinister of Thiers
during the crushing of the Commune and theoretician of
colonizationâshould itself be enough to render this institution
suspect.[12]
When we see teachers from some âcitizensâ vigilance committeeâ come on
the evening news to whine about someone burning down their school, we
remember how many times, as children, we dreamed of doing exactly this.
When we hear a leftist intellectual blabbering about the barbarism of
groups of kids harassing passersby in the street, shoplifting, burning
cars, and playing cat and mouse with riot police, we remember what they
said about the greasers in the 50s or, better, the apaches in the âBelle
Ăpoqueâ: âThe generic name apaches,â writes a judge at the Seine
tribunal in 1907, âhas for the past few years been a way of designating
all dangerous individuals, enemies of society, without nation or family,
deserters of all duties, ready for the most audacious confrontations,
and for any sort of attack on persons and properties.â These gangs who
flee work, who adopt the names of their neighborhoods, and confront the
police are the nightmare of the good, individualized French citizen:
they embody everything he has renounced, all the possible joy he will
never experience. There is something impertinent about existing in a
country where a child singing as she pleases is inevitably silenced with
a âstop, youâre going to stir things up,â where scholastic castration
unleashes floods of policed employees. The aura that persists around
Mesrine[13] has less to do with his uprightness and his audacity than
with the fact that he took it upon himself to enact vengeance on what we
should all avenge. Or rather, of what we should avenge directly, when
instead we continue to hesitate and defer endlessly. Because there is no
doubt that in a thousand imperceptible and undercover ways, in all sorts
of slanderous remarks, in every spiteful little expression and venomous
politeness, the Frenchman continues to avenge, permanently and against
everyone, the fact that heâs resigned himself to being trampled over. It
was about time that fuck the police! replaced yes sir, officer! In this
sense, the un-nuanced hostility of certain gangs only expresses, in a
slightly less muffled way, the poisonous atmosphere, the rotten spirit,
the desire for a salvational destruction in which the country is
completely consumed.
To call this population of strangers in the midst of which we live
âsocietyâ is such an usurpation that even sociologists dream of
renouncing a concept that was, for a century, their bread and butter.
Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the connection of
cybernetic solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions under names
like âcolleague,â âcontact,â âbuddy,â âacquaintance,â or âdate.â Such
networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared but
codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant
recomposition of identity.
It would be a waste of time to detail all that which is agonizing in
existing social relations. They say the family is coming back, that the
couple is coming back. But the family thatâs coming back is not the same
one that went away. Its return is nothing but a deepening of the
reigning separation that it serves to mask, becoming what it is through
this masquerade. Everyone can testify to the rations of sadness
condensed from year to year in family gatherings, the forced smiles, the
awkwardness of seeing everyone pretending in vain, the feeling that a
corpse is lying there on the table, and everyone acting as though it
were nothing. From flirtation to divorce, from cohabitation to
stepfamilies, everyone feels the inanity of the sad family nucleus, but
most seem to believe that it would be sadder still to renounce it. The
family is no longer so much the suffocation of maternal control or the
patriarchy of beatings as it is this infantile abandon to a fuzzy
dependency, where everything is familiar, this carefree moment in the
face of a world that nobody can deny is breaking down, a world where
âbecoming self-sufficientâ is a euphemism for âhaving found a boss.â
They want to use the âfamiliarityâ of the biological family as an excuse
to eat away at anything that burns passionately within us and, under the
pretext that they raised us, make us renounce the possibility of growing
up, as well as everything that is serious in childhood. It is necessary
to preserve oneself from such corrosion.
The couple is like the final stage of the great social debacle. Itâs the
oasis in the middle of the human desert. Under the auspices of
âintimacy,â we come to it looking for everything that has so obviously
deserted contemporary social relations: warmth, simplicity, truth, a
life without theater or spectator. But once the romantic high has
passed, âintimacyâ strips itself bare: it is itself a social invention,
it speaks the language of glamour magazines and psychology; like
everything else, it is bolstered with so many strategies to the point of
nausea. There is no more truth here than elsewhere; here too lies and
the laws of estrangement dominate. And when, by good fortune, one
discovers this truth, it demands a sharing that belies the very form of
the couple. What allows beings to love each other is also what makes
them lovable, and ruins the utopia of autism-for-two.
In reality, the decomposition of all social forms is a blessing. It is
for us the ideal condition for a wild, massive experimentation with new
arrangements, new fidelities. The famous âparental resignationâ has
imposed on us a confrontation with the world that demands a precocious
lucidity, and foreshadows lovely revolts to come. In the death of the
couple, we see the birth of troubling forms of collective affectivity,
now that sex is all used up and masculinity and femininity parade around
in such moth-eaten clothes, now that three decades of non-stop
pornographic innovation have exhausted all the allure of transgression
and liberation. We count on making that which is unconditional in
relationships the armor of a political solidarity as impenetrable to
state interference as a gypsy camp. There is no reason that the
interminable subsidies that numerous relatives are compelled to offload
onto their proletarianized progeny canât become a form of patronage in
favor of social subversion. âBecoming autonomous,â could just as easily
mean learning to fight in the street, to occupy empty houses, to cease
working, to love each other madly, and to shoplift.
be an exception?â
No question is more confused, in France, than the question of work. No
relation is more disfigured than the one between the French and work. Go
to Andalusia, to Algeria, to Naples. They despise work, profoundly. Go
to Germany, to the United States, to Japan. They revere work. Things are
changing, itâs true. There are plenty of otaku in Japan, frohe
Arbeitslose in Germany and workaholics in Andalusia. But for the time
being these are only curiosities. In France, we get down on all fours to
climb the ladders of hierarchy, but privately flatter ourselves that we
donât really give a shit. We stay at work until ten oâclock in the
evening when weâre swamped, but weâve never had any scruples about
stealing office supplies here and there, or carting off the inventory in
order to resell it later. We hate bosses, but we want to be employed at
any cost. To have a job is an honor, yet working is a sign of servility.
In short: the perfect clinical illustration of hysteria. We love while
hating, we hate while loving. And we all know the stupor and confusion
that strike the hysteric when he loses his victimâhis master. More often
than not, he doesnât get over it.
This neurosis is the foundation upon which successive governments could
declare war on joblessness, pretending to wage a âbattle on
unemploymentâ while ex-managers camped with their cell phones in Red
Cross shelters along the banks of the Seine. While the Department of
Labor was massively manipulating its statistics in order to bring
unemployment numbers below two million. While welfare checks and drug
dealing were the only guarantees, as the French state has recognized,
against the possibility of social unrest at each and every moment. Itâs
the psychic economy of the French as much as the political stability of
the country that is at stake in the maintenance of the workerist
fiction.
Excuse us if we donât give a fuck.
We belong to a generation that lives very well in this fiction. That has
never counted on either a pension or the right to work, let alone rights
at work. That isnât even âprecarious,â as the most advanced factions of
the militant left like to theorize, because to be precarious is still to
define oneself in relation to the sphere of work, that is, to its
decomposition. We accept the necessity of finding money, by whatever
means, because it is currently impossible to do without it, but we
reject the necessity of working. Besides, we donât work anymore: we do
our time. Business is not a place where we exist, itâs a place we pass
through. We arenât cynical, we are just reluctant to be deceived. All
these discourses on motivation, quality and personal investment pass us
by, to the great dismay of human resources managers. They say we are
disappointed by business, that it failed to honor our parentsâ loyalty,
that it let them go too quickly. They are lying. To be disappointed, one
must have hoped for something. And we have never hoped for anything from
business: we see it for what it is and for what it has always been, a
foolâs game of varying degrees of comfort. On behalf of our parents, our
only regret is that they fell into the trap, at least the ones who
believed.
The sentimental confusion that surrounds the question of work can be
explained thus: the notion of work has always included two contradictory
dimensions: a dimension of exploitation and a dimension of
participation. Exploitation of individual and collective labor power
through the private or social appropriation of surplus value;
participation in a common effort through the relations linking those who
cooperate at the heart of the universe of production. These two
dimensions are perversely confused in the notion of work, which explains
workersâ indifference, at the end of the day, to both Marxist
rhetoricâwhich denies the dimension of participationâand managerial
rhetoricâwhich denies the dimension of exploitation. Hence the
ambivalence of the relation of work, which is shameful insofar as it
makes us strangers to what we are doing, andâat the same timeâadored,
insofar as a part of ourselves is brought into play. The disaster has
already occurred: it resides in everything that had to be destroyed, in
all those who had to be uprooted, in order for work to end up as the
only way of existing. The horror of work is less in the work itself than
in the methodical ravaging, for centuries, of all that isnât work: the
familiarities of oneâs neighborhood and trade, of oneâs village, of
struggle, of kinship, our attachment to places, to beings, to the
seasons, to ways of doing and speaking.
Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other
ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become
superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization,
automated and digital production have so progressed that they have
almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the
manufacture of any product. We are living the paradox of a society of
workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only
underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us. The
mine in Carmaux, famous for a century of violent strikes, has now been
reconverted into Cape Discovery. Itâs an entertainment âmultiplexâ for
skateboarding and biking, distinguished by a âMining Museumâ in which
methane blasts are simulated for vacationers.
In corporations, work is divided in an increasingly visible way into
highly skilled positions of research, conception, control, coordination
and communication which deploy all the knowledge necessary for the new,
cybernetic production process, and unskilled positions for the
maintenance and surveillance of this process. The first are few in
number, very well paid and thus so coveted that the minority who occupy
these positions will do anything to avoid losing them. They and their
work are effectively bound in one anguished embrace. Managers,
scientists, lobbyists, researchers, programmers, developers, consultants
and engineers, literally never stop working. Even their sex lives serve
to augment productivity. A Human Resources philosopher writes, â[t]he
most creative businesses are the ones with the greatest number of
intimate relations.â âBusiness associates,â a Daimler-Benz Human
Resources Manager confirms, âare an important part of the businessâs
capital [ ... ] Their motivation, their know-how, their capacity to
innovate and their attention to clientsâ desires constitute the raw
material of innovative services [ ... ] Their behavior, their social and
emotional competence, are a growing factor in the evaluation of their
work [ ... ] This will no longer be evaluated in terms of number of
hours on the job, but on the basis of objectives attained and quality of
results. They are entrepreneurs.â
The series of tasks that canât be delegated to automation form a
nebulous cluster of jobs that, because they cannot be occupied by
machines, are occupied by any old humanâwarehousemen, stock people,
assembly line workers, seasonal workers, etc. This flexible,
undifferentiated workforce that moves from one task to the next and
never stays long in a business can no longer even consolidate itself as
a force, being outside the center of the production process and employed
to plug the holes of what has not yet been mechanized, as if pulverized
in a multitude of interstices. The temp is the figure of the worker who
is no longer a worker, who no longer has a tradeâbut only abilities that
he sells where he canâand whose very availability is also a kind of
work.
On the margins of this workforce that is effective and necessary for the
functioning of the machine, is a growing majority that has become
superfluous, that is certainly useful to the flow of production but not
much else, which introduces the risk that, in its idleness, it will set
about sabotaging the machine. The menace of a general demobilization is
the specter that haunts the present system of production. Not everybody
responds to the question âwhy work?â in the same way as this ex-welfare
recipient: âfor my well-being. I have to keep myself busy.â There is a
serious risk that we will end up finding a job in our very idleness.
This floating population must somehow be kept occupied. But to this day
they have not found a better disciplinary method than wages. Itâs
therefore necessary to pursue the dismantling of âsocial gainsâ so that
the most restless ones, those who will only surrender when faced with
the alternative between dying of hunger or stagnating in jail, are lured
back to the bosom of wage-labor. The burgeoning slave trade in âpersonal
servicesâ must continue: cleaning, catering, massage, domestic nursing,
prostitution, tutoring, therapy, psychological aid, etc. This is
accompanied by a continual raising of the standards of security,
hygiene, control, and culture, and by an accelerated recycling of
fashions, all of which establish the need for such services. In Rouen,
we now have âhuman parking metersâ: someone who waits around on the
street and delivers you your parking slip, and, if itâs raining, will
even rent you an umbrella.
The order of work was the order of a world. The evidence of its ruin is
paralyzing to those who dread what will come after. Today work is tied
less to the economic necessity of producing goods than to the political
necessity of producing producers and consumers, and of preserving by any
means necessary the order of work. Producing oneself is becoming the
dominant occupation of a society where production no longer has an
object: like a carpenter whoâs been evicted from his shop and in
desperation sets about hammering and sawing himself. All these young
people smiling for their job interviews, who have their teeth whitened
to give them an edge, who go to nightclubs to boost the company spirit,
who learn English to advance their careers, who get divorced or married
to move up the ladder, who take courses in leadership or practice
âself-improvementâ in order to better âmanage conflictsâââthe most
intimate âself-improvement,ââ says one guru, âwill lead to increased
emotional stability, to smoother and more open relationships, to sharper
intellectual focus, and therefore to a better economic performance.â
This swarming little crowd that waits impatiently to be hired while
doing whatever it can to seem natural is the result of an attempt to
rescue the order of work through an ethos of mobility. To be mobilized
is to relate to work not as an activity but as a possibility. If the
unemployed person removes his piercings, goes to the barber and keeps
himself busy with âprojects,â if he really works on his âemployability,â
as they say, itâs because this is how he demonstrates his mobility.
Mobility is this slight detachment from the self, this minimal
disconnection from what constitutes us, this condition of strangeness
whereby the self can now be taken up as an object of work, and it now
becomes possible to sell oneself rather than oneâs labor power, to be
remunerated not for what one does but for what one is, for our exquisite
mastery of social codes, for our relational talents, for our smile and
our way of presenting ourselves. This is the new standard of
socialization. Mobility brings about a fusion of the two contradictory
poles of work: here we participate in our own exploitation, and all
participation is exploited. Ideally, you are yourself a little business,
your own boss, your own product. Whether one is working or not, itâs a
question of generating contacts, abilities, networking, in short: âhuman
capital.â The planetary injunction to mobilize at the slightest
pretextâcancer, âterrorism,â an earthquake, the homelessâsums up the
reigning powersâ determination to maintain the reign of work beyond its
physical disappearance.
The present production apparatus is therefore, on the one hand, a
gigantic machine for psychic and physical mobilization, for sucking the
energy of humans that have become superfluous, and, on the other hand,
it is a sorting machine that allocates survival to conformed
subjectivities and rejects all âproblem individuals,â all those who
embody another use of life and, in this way, resist it. On the one hand,
ghosts are brought to life, and on the other, the living are left to
die. This is the properly political function of the contemporary
production apparatus.
To organize beyond and against work, to collectively desert the regime
of mobility, to demonstrate the existence of a vitality and a discipline
precisely in demobilization, is a crime for which a civilization on its
knees is not about to forgive us. In fact, itâs the only way to survive
it.
Weâve heard enough about the âcityâ and the âcountry,â and particularly
about the supposed ancient opposition between the two. From up close or
from afar, what surrounds us looks nothing like that: it is one single
urban cloth, without form or order, a bleak zone, endless and undefined,
a global continuum of museum-like city centers and natural parks, of
enormous suburban housing developments and massive agricultural
projects, industrial zones and subdivisions, country inns and trendy
bars: the metropolis. Certainly the ancient city existed, as did the
cities of medieval and modern times. But there is no such thing as a
metropolitan city. All territory is synthesized within the metropolis.
Everything occupies the same space, if not geographically then through
the intermeshing of its networks.
Itâs because the city has finally disappeared that it has now become
fetishized, as history. The factory buildings of Lille become concert
halls. The rebuilt concrete core of Le Havre is now a UNESCO World
Heritage site. In Beijing, the hutongs surrounding the Forbidden City
were demolished, replaced by fake versions, placed a little farther out,
on display for sightseers. In Troyes they paste half-timber facades onto
cinderblock buildings, a type of pastiche that resembles the Victorian
shops at Disneyland Paris more than anything else. The old historic
centers, once hotbeds of revolutionary sedition, are now wisely
integrated into the organizational diagram of the metropolis. Theyâve
been given over to tourism and conspicuous consumption. They are the
fairy-tale commodity islands, propped up by their expos and decorations,
and by force if necessary. The oppressive sentimentality of every
âChristmas Villageâ is offset by ever more security guards and city
patrols. Control has a wonderful way of integrating itself into the
commodity landscape, showing its authoritarian face to anyone who wants
to see it. Itâs an age of fusions, of muzak, telescoping police batons
and cotton candy. Equal parts police surveillance and enchantment!
This taste for the âauthentic,â and for the control that goes with it,
is carried by the petty bourgeoisie through their colonizing drives into
working class neighborhoods. Pushed out of the city centers, they find
on the frontiers the kind of âneighborhood feelingâ they missed in the
prefab houses of suburbia. In chasing out the poor people, the cars, and
the immigrants, in making it tidy, in getting rid of all the germs, the
petty bourgeoisie pulverizes the very thing it came looking for. A
police officer and a garbage man shake hands in a picture on a town
billboard, and the slogan reads: âMontaubanâClean City.â
The same sense of decency that obliges urbanists to stop speaking of the
âcityâ (which they destroyed) and instead to talk of the âurban,â should
compel them also to drop âcountryâ (since it no longer exists). The
uprooted and stressed-out masses are instead shown a countryside, a
vision of the past thatâs easy to stage now that the country folk have
been so depleted. It is a marketing campaign deployed on a âterritoryâ
in which everything must be valorized or reconstituted as national
heritage. Everywhere itâs the same chilling void, reaching into even the
most remote and rustic corners.
The metropolis is this simultaneous death of city and country. It is the
crossroads where all the petty bourgeois come together, in the middle of
this middle class that stretches out indefinitely, as much a result of
rural flight as of urban sprawl. To cover the planet with glass would
fit perfectly the cynicism of contemporary architecture. A school, a
hospital, or a media center are all variations on the same theme:
transparency, neutrality, uniformity. These massive, fluid buildings are
conceived without any need to know what they will house. They could be
here as much as anywhere else. What to do with all the office towers at
La DĂ©fense in Paris, the apartment blocks of Lyonâs La Part Dieu, or the
shopping complexes of EuraLille? The expression âflambant neufâ[14]
perfectly captures their destiny. A Scottish traveler testifies to the
unique attraction of the power of fire, speaking after rebels had burned
the HĂŽtel de Ville in Paris in May, 1871: âNever could I have imagined
anything so beautiful. Itâs superb. I wonât deny that the people of the
Commune are frightful rogues. But what artists! And they were not even
aware of their own masterpiece! [ ... ] I have seen the ruins of Amalfi
bathed in the azure swells of the Mediterranean, and the ruins of the
Tung-hoor temples in Punjab. Iâve seen Rome and many other things. But
nothing can compare to what I have seen here tonight before my very
eyes.â
There still remain some fragments of the city and some traces of the
country caught up in the metropolitan mesh. But vitality has taken up
quarters in the so-called âproblemâ neighborhoods. Itâs a paradox that
the places thought to be the most uninhabitable turn out to be the only
ones still in some way inhabited. An old squatted shack still feels more
lived in than the so-called luxury apartments where it is only possible
to set down the furniture and get the décor just right while waiting for
the next move. Within many of todayâs megalopolises, the shantytowns are
the last living and livable areas, and also, of course, the most deadly.
They are the flip-side of the electronic décor of the global metropolis.
The dormitory towers in the suburbs north of Paris, abandoned by a petty
bourgeoisie that went off hunting for swimming pools, have been brought
back to life by mass unemployment and now radiate more energy than the
Latin Quarter. In words as much as fire.
The conflagration of November 2005 was not a result of extreme
dispossession, as it is often portrayed. It was, on the contrary, a
complete possession of a territory. People can burn cars because they
are pissed off, but to keep the riots going for a month, while keeping
the police in checkâto do that you have to know how to organize, you
have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly,
and share a common language and a common enemy. Mile after mile and week
after week, the fire spread. New blazes responded to the original ones,
appearing where they were least expected. Rumors canât be wiretapped.
The metropolis is a terrain of constant low-intensity conflict, in which
the taking of Basra, Mogadishu, or Nablus mark points of culmination.
For a long time, the city was a place for the military to avoid, or if
anything, to besiege; but the metropolis is perfectly compatible with
war. Armed conflict is only a moment in its constant reconfiguration.
The battles led by the great powers resemble a kind of never-ending
police work in the black holes of the metropolis, âwhether in Burkina
Faso, in the South Bronx, in Kamagasaki, in Chiapas, or in La
Courneuve.â No longer undertaken in view of victory or peace, or even
the re-establishment of order, such âinterventionsâ continue a security
operation that is always already at work. War is no longer a distinct
event in time, but instead diffracts into a series of micro-operations,
by both military and police, to ensure security.
The police and the army are evolving in parallel and in lock-step. A
criminologist requests that the national riot police reorganize itself
into small, professionalized, mobile units. The military academy, cradle
of disciplinary methods, is rethinking its own hierarchical
organization. For his infantry battalion a NATO officer employs a
âparticipatory method that involves everyone in the analysis,
preparation, execution, and evaluation of an action. The plan is
considered and reconsidered for days, right through the training phase
and according to the latest intelligence [ ... ] There is nothing like
group planning for building team cohesion and morale.â
The armed forces donât simply adapt themselves to the metropolis, they
produce it. Thus, since the battle of Nablus, Israeli soldiers have
become interior designers. Forced by Palestinian guerrillas to abandon
the streets, which had become too dangerous, they learned to advance
vertically and horizontally into the heart of the urban architecture,
poking holes in walls and ceilings in order to move through them. An
officer in the Israel Defense Forces, and a graduate in philosophy,
explains: âthe enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical
manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his
traps. [ ... ] I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I
need to win [ ... ] This is why that we opted for the methodology of
moving through walls [ ... ] Like a worm that eats its way forward.â
Urban space is more than just the theater of confrontation, it is also
the means. This echoes the advice of Blanqui who recommended (in this
case for the party of insurrection) that the future insurgents of Paris
take over the houses on the barricaded streets to protect their
positions, that they should bore holes in the walls to allow passage
between houses, break down the ground floor stairwells and poke holes in
the ceilings to defend themselves against potential attackers, rip out
the doors and use them to barricade the windows, and turn each floor
into a gun turret.
The metropolis is not just this urban pile-up, this final collision
between city and country. It is also a flow of beings and things, a
current that runs through fiber-optic networks, through high-speed train
lines, satellites, and video surveillance cameras, making sure that this
world never stops running straight to its ruin. It is a current that
would like to drag everything along in its hopeless mobility, to
mobilize each and every one of us. Where information pummels us like
some kind of hostile force. Where the only thing left to do is run.
Where it becomes hard to wait, even for the umpteenth subway train.
With the proliferation of means of movement and communication, and with
the lure of always being elsewhere, we are continuously torn from the
here and now. Hop on an intercity or commuter train, pick up a
telephoneâin order to be already gone. Such mobility only ever means
uprootedness, isolation, exile. It would be insufferable if it werenât
always the mobility of a private space, of a portable interior. The
private bubble doesnât burst, it floats around. The process of cocooning
is not going away, it is merely being put into motion. From a train
station, to an office park, to a commercial bank, from one hotel to
another, there is everywhere a foreignness, a feeling so banal and so
habitual it becomes the last form of familiarity. Metropolitan excess is
this capricious mixing of definite moods, indefinitely recombined. The
city centers of the metropolis are not clones of themselves, but offer
instead their own auras; we glide from one to the next, selecting this
one and rejecting that one, to the tune of a kind of existential
shopping trip among different styles of bars, people, designs, or
playlists. âWith my mp3 player, Iâm the master of my world.â To cope
with the uniformity that surrounds us, our only option is to constantly
renovate our own interior world, like a child who constructs the same
little house over and over again, or like Robinson Crusoe reproducing
his shopkeeperâs universe on a desert islandâyet our desert island is
civilization itself, and there are billions of us continually washing up
on it.
It is precisely due to this architecture of flows that the metropolis is
one of the most vulnerable human arrangements that has ever existed.
Supple, subtle, but vulnerable. A brutal shutting down of borders to
fend off a raging epidemic, a sudden interruption of supply lines,
organized blockades of the axes of communicationâand the whole facade
crumbles, a facade that can no longer mask the scenes of carnage
haunting it from morning to night. The world would not be moving so fast
if it didnât have to constantly outrun its own collapse.
The metropolis aims to shelter itself from inevitable malfunction via
its network structure, via its entire technological infrastructure of
nodes and connections, its decentralized architecture. The internet is
supposed to survive a nuclear attack. Permanent control of the flow of
information, people and products makes the mobility of the metropolis
secure, while itsâ tracking systems ensure that no shipping containers
get lost, that not a single dollar is stolen in any transaction, and
that no terrorist ends up on an airplane. All thanks to an RFID chip, a
biometric passport, a DNA profile.
But the metropolis also produces the means of its own destruction. An
American security expert explains the defeat in Iraq as a result of the
guerrillasâ ability to take advantage of new ways of communicating. The
US invasion didnât so much import democracy to Iraq as it did cybernetic
networks. They brought with them one of the weapons of their own defeat.
The proliferation of mobile phones and internet access points gave the
guerrillas newfound ways to self-organize, and allowed them to become
such elusive targets.
Every network has its weak points, the nodes that must be undone in
order to interrupt circulation, to unwind the web. The last great
European electrical blackout proved it: a single incident with a
high-tension wire and a decent part of the continent was plunged into
darkness. In order for something to rise up in the midst of the
metropolis and open up other possibilities, the first act must be to
interrupt its perpetuum mobile. That is what the Thai rebels understood
when they knocked out electrical stations. That is what the French
anti-CPE[15] protestors understood in 2006 when they shut down the
universities with a view toward shutting down the entire economy. That
is what the American longshoremen understood when they struck in
October, 2002 in support of three hundred jobs, blocking the main ports
on the West Coast for ten days. The American economy is so dependent on
goods coming from Asia that the cost of the blockade was over a billion
dollars per day. With ten thousand people, the largest economic power in
the world can be brought to its knees. According to certain âexperts,â
if the action had lasted another month, it would have produced âa
recession in the United States and an economic nightmare in Southeast
Asia.â
Thirty years of âcrisis,â mass unemployment and flagging growth, and
they still want us to believe in the economy. Thirty years punctuated,
it is true, by delusionary interludes: the interlude of 1981â83, when we
were deluded into thinking a government of the left might make people
better off; the âeasy moneyâ interlude of 1986â89, when we were all
supposed to be playing the market and getting rich; the internet
interlude of 1998â2001, when everyone was going to get a virtual career
through being well-connected, when a diverse but united France, cultured
and multicultural, would bring home every World Cup. But here we are,
weâve drained our supply of delusions, weâve hit rock bottom and are
totally broke, or buried in debt.
We have to see that the economy is not âinâ crisis, the economy is
itself the crisis. Itâs not that thereâs not enough work, itâs that
there is too much of it. All things considered, itâs not the crisis that
depresses us, itâs growth. We must admit that the litany of stock market
prices moves us about as much as a Latin mass. Luckily for us, there are
quite a few of us who have come to this conclusion. Weâre not talking
about those who live off various scams, who deal in this or that, or who
have been on welfare for the last ten years. Or of all those who no
longer find their identity in their jobs and live for their time off.
Nor are we talking about those whoâve been swept under the rug, the
hidden ones who make do with the least, and yet outnumber the rest. All
those struck by this strange mass detachment, adding to the ranks of
retirees and the cynically overexploited flexible labor force. Weâre not
talking about them, although they too should, in one way or another,
arrive at a similar conclusion.
We are talking about all of the countries, indeed entire continents,
that have lost faith in the economy, either because theyâve seen the IMF
come and go amid crashes and enormous losses, or because theyâve gotten
a taste of the World Bank. The soft crisis of vocation that the West is
now experiencing is completely absent in these places. What is happening
in Guinea, Russia, Argentina and Bolivia is a violent and long-lasting
debunking of this religion and its clergy. âWhat do you call a thousand
IMF economists lying at the bottom of the sea?â went the joke at the
World Bank,ââa good start.â A Russian joke: âTwo economists meet. One
asks the other: âYou understand whatâs happening?â The other responds:
âWait, Iâll explain it to you.â âNo, no,â says the first, âexplaining is
no problem, Iâm an economist, too. What Iâm asking is: do you
understand?â Entire sections of this clergy pretend to be dissidents and
to critique this religionâs dogma. The latest attempt to revive the
so-called âscience of the economyââa current that straight-facedly
refers to itself as âpost autistic economicsââmakes a living from
dismantling the usurpations, sleights of hand and cooked books of a
science whose only tangible function is to rattle the monstrance during
the vociferations of the chiefs, giving their demands for submission a
bit of ceremony, and ultimately doing what religions have always done:
providing explanations. For total misery becomes intolerable the moment
it is shown for what it is, without cause or reason.
Nobody respects money anymore, neither those who have it nor those who
donât. When asked what they want to be some day, twenty percent of young
Germans answer âartist.â Work is no longer endured as a given of the
human condition. The accounting departments of corporations confess that
they have no idea where value comes from. The marketâs bad reputation
would have done it in a decade ago if not for the bluster and fury, not
to mention the deep pockets, of its apologists. It is common sense now
to see progress as synonymous with disaster. In the world of the
economic, everything is in flight, just like in the USSR under
Andropov.[16] Anyone who has spent a little time analyzing the final
years of the USSR knows very well that the pleas for goodwill coming
from our rulers, all of their fantasies about some future that has
disappeared without a trace, all of their professions of faith in
âreformingâ this and that, are just the first fissures in the structure
of the wall. The collapse of the socialist bloc was in no way victory of
capitalism; it was merely the bankrupting of one of the forms capitalism
takes. Besides, the demise of the USSR did not come about because a
people revolted, but because the nomenclature was undergoing a process
of reconversion. When it proclaimed the end of socialism, a small
fraction of the ruling class emancipated itself from the anachronistic
duties that still bound it to the people. It took private control of
what it already controlled in the name of âeveryone.â In the factories,
the joke went: âwe pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.â The
oligarchy replied, âthereâs no point, letâs stop pretending!â They ended
up with the raw materials, industrial infrastructures, the
military-industrial complex, the banks and the nightclubs. Everyone else
got poverty or emigration. Just as no one in Andropovâs time believed in
the USSR, no one in the meeting halls, workshops and offices believes in
France today. âThereâs no point,â respond the bosses and political
leaders, who no longer even bother to file the edges off the âiron laws
of the economy.â They strip factories in the middle of the night and
announce the shutdown early next morning. They no longer hesitate to
send in antiterrorism units to shut down a strike, like with the ferries
and the occupied recycling center in Rennes. The brutal activity of
power today consists both in administering this ruin while, at the same
time, establishing the framework for a ânew economy.â
And yet there is no doubt that we are cut out for the economy. For
generations we were disciplined, pacified and made into subjects,
productive by nature and content to consume. And suddenly everything
that we were compelled to forget is revealed: that the economy is
political. And that this politics is, today, a politics of
discrimination within a humanity that has, as a whole, become
superfluous. From Colbert[17] to de Gaulle, by way of Napoleon III, the
state has always treated the economic as political, as have the
bourgeoisie (who profit from it) and the proletariat (who confront it).
All thatâs left is this strange, middling part of the population, the
curious and powerless aggregate of those who take no sides: the petty
bourgeoisie. They have always pretended to believe that the economy is a
realityâbecause their neutrality is safe there. Small business owners,
small bosses, minor bureaucrats, managers, professors, journalists,
middlemen of every sort make up this non-class in France, this social
gelatin composed of the mass of all those who just want to live their
little private lives at a distance from history and its tumults. This
swamp is predisposed to be the champion of false consciousness,
half-asleep and always ready to close its eyes on the war that rages all
around it. Each clarification of a front in this war is thus accompanied
in France by the invention of some new fad. For the past ten years, it
was ATTAC[18] and its improbable Tobin taxâa tax whose implementation
would require nothing less than a global governmentâwith its sympathy
for the âreal economyâ as opposed to the financial markets, not to
mention its touching nostalgia for the state. The comedy lasts only so
long before turning into a sham. And then another fad replaces it. So
now we have ânegative growth.â[19] Whereas ATTAC tried to save economics
as a science with its popular education courses, negative growth
preserves the economic as a morality. There is only one alternative to
the coming apocalypse: reduce growth. Consume and produce less. Become
joyously frugal. Eat organic, ride your bike, stop smoking, and pay
close attention to the products you buy. Be content with whatâs strictly
necessary. Voluntary simplicity. âRediscover true wealth in the
blossoming of convivial social relations in a healthy world.â âDonât use
up our natural capital.â Work toward a âhealthy economy.â âNo regulation
through chaos.â âAvoid a social crisis that would threaten democracy and
humanism.â Simply put: become economical. Go back to daddyâs economy, to
the golden age of the petty bourgeoisie: the 1950s. âWhen an individual
is frugal, property serves its function perfectly, which is to allow the
individual to enjoy his or her own life sheltered from public existence,
in the private sanctuary of his or her life.â
A graphic designer wearing a handmade sweater is drinking a fruity
cocktail with some friends on the terrace of an âethnicâ cafĂ©. Theyâre
chatty and cordial, they joke around a bit, they make sure not to be too
loud or too quiet, they smile at each other, a little blissfully: we are
so civilized. Afterwards, some of them will go work in the neighborhood
community garden, while others will dabble in pottery, some Zen
Buddhism, or in the making of an animated film. They find communion in
the smug feeling that they constitute a new humanity, wiser and more
refined than the previous one. And they are right. There is a curious
agreement between Apple and the negative growth movement about the
civilization of the future. Some peopleâs idea of returning to the
economy of yesteryear offers others the convenient screen behind which a
great technological leap forward can be launched. For in history there
is no going back. Any exhortation to return to the past is only the
expression of one form of consciousness of the present, and rarely the
least modern. It is not by chance that negative growth is the banner of
the dissident advertisers of the magazine Casseurs de Pub.[20] The
inventors of zero growthâthe Club of Rome in 1972âwere themselves a
group of industrialists and bureaucrats who relied on a research paper
written by cyberneticians at MIT.
This convergence is hardly a coincidence. It is part of the forced march
towards a modernized economy. Capitalism got as much as it could from
undoing all the old social ties, and it is now in the process of
remaking itself by rebuilding these same ties on its own terms.
Contemporary metropolitan social life is its incubator. In the same way,
it ravaged the natural world and is driven by the fantasy that it can
now be reconstituted as so many controlled environments, furnished with
all the necessary sensors. This new humanity requires a new economy that
would no longer be a separate sphere of existence but, on the contrary,
its very tissue, the raw material of human relations; it requires a new
definition of work as work on oneself, a new definition of capital as
human capital, a new idea of production as the production of relations,
and consumption as the consumption of situations; and above all a new
idea of value that would encompass all of the qualities of beings. This
burgeoning âbioeconomyâ conceives the planet as a closed system to be
managed and claims to establish the foundations for a science that would
integrate all the parameters of life. Such a science threatens to make
us miss the good old days when unreliable indices like GDP growth were
supposed to measure the well-being of a peopleâfor at least no one
believed in them.
âRevalorize the non-economic aspects of lifeâ is the slogan shared by
the negative growth movement and by capitalâs reform program.
Eco-villages, video-surveillance cameras, spirituality, biotechnologies
and sociability all belong to the same âcivilizational paradigmâ now
taking shape, that of a total economy rebuilt from the ground up. Its
intellectual matrix is none other than cybernetics, the science of
systemsâthat is, the science of their control. In the 17^(th) century it
was necessary, in order to completely impose the force of economy and
its ethos of work and greed, to confine and eliminate the whole seamy
mass of lay-abouts, liars, witches, madmen, scoundrels and all the other
vagrant poor, a whole humanity whose very existence gave the lie to the
order of interest and continence. The new economy cannot be established
without a similar selection of subjects and zones singled out for
transformation. The chaos that we constantly hear about will either
provide the opportunity for this screening, or for our victory over this
odious project.
Ecology is the discovery of the decade. For the last thirty years weâve
left it up to the environmentalists, joking about it on Sunday so that
we can act concerned again on Monday. And now itâs caught up to us,
invading the airwaves like a hit song in summertime, because itâs 68
degrees in December.
One quarter of the fish species have disappeared from the ocean. The
rest wonât last much longer.
Bird flu alert: we are given assurances that hundreds of thousands of
migrating birds will be shot from the sky.
Mercury levels in human breast milk are ten times higher than the legal
level for cows. And these lips which swell up after I bite the appleâbut
it came from the farmerâs market. The simplest gestures have become
toxic. One dies at the age of 35 from âa prolonged illnessâ thatâs to be
managed just like one manages everything else. We shouldâve seen it
coming before we got to this place, to pavilion B of the palliative care
center.
You have to admit: this whole âcatastrophe,â which they so noisily
inform us about, it doesnât really touch us. At least not until we are
hit by one of its foreseeable consequences. It may concern us, but it
doesnât touch us. And that is the real catastrophe.
There is no âenvironmental catastrophe.â The catastrophe is the
environment itself. The environment is whatâs left to man after heâs
lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a
war zone, a workshopâthey donât have an âenvironment;â they move through
a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life
and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency,
which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties
attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places. Itâs only
us, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final
hourâthe ones who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits
at the supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on
televisionâonly we get to have an environment. And thereâs no one but us
to witness our own annihilation, as if it were just a simple change of
scenery, to get indignant about the latest progress of the disaster, to
patiently compile its encyclopedia.
What has congealed as an environment is a relationship to the world
based on management, which is to say, on estrangement. A relationship to
the world wherein weâre not made up just as much of the rustling trees,
the smell of frying oil in the building, running water, the hubbub of
schoolrooms, the mugginess of summer evenings. A relationship to the
world where there is me and then my environment, surrounding me but
never really constituting me. We have become neighbors in a planetary
co-op ownersâ board meeting. Itâs difficult to imagine a more complete
hell.
No material habitat has ever deserved the name âenvironment,â except
perhaps the metropolis of today. The digitized voices making
announcements, tramways with such a 21^(st) century whistle, bluish
streetlamps shaped like giant matchsticks, pedestrians done up like
failed fashion models, the silent rotation of a video surveillance
camera, the lucid clicking of the subway turnstiles supermarket
checkouts, office time clocks, the electronic ambiance of the cyber
café, the profusion of plasma screens, express lanes and latex. Never
has a setting been so able to do without the souls traversing it. Never
has a surrounding been more automatic. Never has a context been so
indifferent, and demanded in returnâas the price of survivalâsuch equal
indifference from us. Ultimately the environment is nothing more than
the relationship to the world that is proper to the metropolis, and that
projects itself onto everything that would escape it.
The situation like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world,
now theyâd like to put us to work rebuilding it, andâto top it all
offâat a profit. The morbid excitement that animates journalists and
advertisers these days as they report each new proof of global warming
reveals the steely smile of the new green capitalism, in the making
since the 70s, which we waited for at the turn of the century but which
never came. Well, here it is! Itâs sustainability! Alternative
solutions, thatâs it too! The health of the planet demands it! No doubt
about it anymore, itâs a green scene; the environment will be the crux
of the political economy of the 21^(st) century. A new volley of
âindustrial solutionsâ comes with each new catastrophic possibility.
The inventor of the H-bomb, Edward Teller, proposes shooting millions of
tons of metallic dust into the stratosphere to stop global warming.
NASA, frustrated at having to shelve its idea of an anti-missile shield
in the museum of cold war horrors, suggests installing a gigantic mirror
beyond the moonâs orbit to protect us from the sunâs now-fatal rays.
Another vision of the future: a motorized humanity, driving on
bio-ethanol from Sao Paulo to Stockholm; the dream of cereal growers the
world over, for it only means converting all of the planetâs arable
lands into soy and sugar beet fields. Eco-friendly cars, clean energy,
and environmental consulting coexist painlessly with the latest Chanel
ad in the pages of glossy magazines.
We are told that the environment has the incomparable merit of being the
first truly global problem presented to humanity. A global problem,
which is to say a problem that only those who are organized on a global
level will be able to solve. And we know who they are. These are the
very same groups that for close to a century have been the vanguard of
disaster, and certainly intend to remain as such, for the small price of
a change of logo. That EDF[21] had the impudence to bring back its
nuclear program as the new solution to the global energy crisis says
plenty about how much the new solutions resemble the old problems.
From Secretaries of State to the back rooms of alternative cafés,
concerns are always expressed in the same words, the same as theyâve
always been. We have to get mobilized. This time itâs not to rebuild the
country like in the post-war era, not for the Ethiopians like in the
1980s, not for employment like in the 1990s. No, this time itâs for the
environment. It will thank you for it. Al Gore and negative growth
movement stand side by side with the eternal great souls of the Republic
to do their part in resuscitating the little people of the Left and the
well-known idealism of youth. Voluntary austerity writ large on their
banner, they work benevolently to make us compliant with the âcoming
ecological state of emergency.â The round and sticky mass of their guilt
lands on our tired shoulders, coddling us to cultivate our garden, sort
out our trash, and eco-compost the leftovers of this macabre feast.
Managing the phasing out of nuclear power, excess CO2 in the atmosphere,
melting glaciers, hurricanes, epidemics, global over-population, erosion
of the soil, mass extinction of living species ... this will be our
burden. They tell us, âeveryone must do their part,â if we want to save
our beautiful model of civilization. We have to consume a little less in
order to be able to keep consuming. We have to produce organically in
order to keep producing. We have to control ourselves in order to go on
controlling. This is the logic of a world straining to maintain itself
whilst giving itself an air of historical rupture. This is how they
would like to convince us to participate in the great industrial
challenges of this century. And in our bewilderment weâre ready to leap
into the arms of the very same ones who presided over the devastation,
in the hope that they will get us out of it.
Ecology isnât simply the logic of a total economy; itâs the new morality
of capital. The systemâs internal state of crisis and the rigorous
screening thatâs underway demand a new criterion in the name of which
this screening and selection will be carried out. From one era to the
next, the idea of virtue has never been anything but an invention of
vice. Without ecology, how could we justify the existence of two
different food regimes, one âhealthy and organicâ for the rich and their
children, and the other notoriously toxic for the plebes, whose
offspring are damned to obesity. The planetary hyper-bourgeoisie
wouldnât be able to make their normal lifestyle seem respectable if its
latest caprices werenât so scrupulously ârespectful of the environment.â
Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag any and all
objections to the exorbitant progress of control.
Tracking, transparency, certification, eco-taxes, environmental
excellence, and the policing of water, all give us an idea of the coming
state of ecological emergency. Everything is permitted to a power
structure that bases its authority in Nature, in health and in
well-being.
âOnce the new economic and behavioral culture has become common
practice, coercive measures will doubtless fall into disuse of their own
accord.â Youâd have to have all the ridiculous aplomb of a TV crusader
to maintain such a frozen perspective and in the same breath incite us
to feel sufficiently âsorry for the planetâ to get mobilized, whilst
remaining anesthetized enough to watch the whole thing with restraint
and civility. The new green-asceticism is precisely the self-control
that is required of us all in order to negotiate a rescue operation
where the system has taken itself hostage. From now on, itâs in the name
of environmentalism that we must all tighten our belts, just as we did
yesterday in the name of the economy. The roads could certainly be
transformed into bicycle paths, we ourselves could perhaps, to a certain
degree, be grateful one day for a guaranteed income, but only at the
price of an entirely therapeutic existence. Those who claim that
generalized self-control will spare us from an environmental
dictatorship are lying: the one will prepare the way for the other, and
weâll end up with both. As long as there is Man and Environment, the
police will be there between them.
Everything about the environmentalistâs discourse must be turned
upside-down. Where they talk of âcatastrophesâ to label the present
systemâs mismanagement of beings and things, we only see the catastrophe
of its all too perfect operation. The greatest wave of famine ever known
in the tropics (1876â1879) coincided with a global drought, but more
significantly, it also coincided with the apogee of colonization. The
destruction of the peasantâs world and of local alimentary practices
meant the disappearance of the means for dealing with scarcity. More
than the lack of water, it was the effect of the rapidly expanding
colonial economy that littered the Tropics with millions of emaciated
corpses. What presents itself everywhere as an ecological catastrophe
has never stopped being, above all, the manifestation of a disastrous
relationship to the world. Inhabiting a nowhere makes us vulnerable to
the slightest jolt in the system, to the slightest climactic risk. As
the latest tsunami approached and the tourists continued to frolic in
the waves, the islandsâ hunter-gatherers hastened to flee the coast,
following the birds. Environmentalismâs present paradox is that under
the pretext of saving the planet from desolation it merely saves the
causes of its desolation.
The normal functioning of the world usually serves to hide our state of
truly catastrophic dispossession. What is called âcatastropheâ is no
more than the forced suspension of this state, one of those rare moments
when we regain some sort of presence in the world. Let the petroleum
reserves run out earlier than expected; let the international flows that
regulate the tempo of the metropolis be interrupted, let us suffer some
great social disruption and some great âreturn to savagery of the
population,â a âplanetary threat,â the âend of civilization!â Either
way, any loss of control would be preferable to all the crisis
management scenarios they envision. When this comes, the specialists in
sustainable development wonât be the ones with the best advice. Itâs
within the malfunction and short-circuits of the system that we find the
elements of a response whose logic would be to abolish the problems
themselves. Among the signatory nations to the Kyoto Protocol, the only
countries that have fulfilled their commitments, in spite of themselves,
are the Ukraine and Romania. Guess why. The most advanced
experimentation with âorganicâ agriculture on a global level has taken
place since 1989 on the island of Cuba. Guess why. And itâs along the
African highways, and nowhere else, that auto mechanics has been
elevated to a form of popular art. Guess how.
What makes the crisis desirable is that in the crisis the environment
ceases to be the environment. We are forced to reestablish contact,
albeit a potentially fatal one, with whatâs there, to rediscover the
rhythms of reality. What surrounds us is no longer a landscape, a
panorama, a theater, but something to inhabit, something we need to come
to terms with, something we can learn from. We wonât let ourselves be
led astray by the ones whoâve brought about the contents of the
âcatastrophe.â Where the managers platonically discuss among themselves
how they might decrease emissions âwithout breaking the bank,â the only
realistic option we can see is to âbreak the bankâ as soon as possible
and, in the meantime, take advantage of every collapse in the system to
increase our own strength.
New Orleans, a few days after Hurricane Katrina. In this apocalyptic
atmosphere, here and there, life is reorganizing itself. In the face of
the inaction of the public authorities, who were too busy cleaning up
the tourist areas of the French Quarter and protecting shops to help the
poorer city dwellers, forgotten forms are reborn. In spite of
occasionally strong-armed attempts to evacuate the area, in spite of
white supremacist lynch mobs, a lot of people refused to leave the
terrain. For the latter, who refused to be deported like âenvironmental
refugeesâ all over the country, and for those who came from all around
to join them in solidarity, responding to a call from a former Black
Panther, self-organization came back to the fore. In a few weeksâ time,
the Common Ground Clinic was set up.[22] From the very first days, this
veritable âcountry hospitalâ provided free and effective treatment to
those who needed it, thanks to the constant influx of volunteers. For
more than a year now, the clinic is still the base of a daily resistance
to the clean-sweep operation of government bulldozers, which are trying
to turn that part of the city into a pasture for property developers.
Popular kitchens, supplies, street medicine, illegal takeovers, the
construction of emergency housing, all this practical knowledge
accumulated here and there in the course of a life, has now found a
space where it can be deployed. Far from the uniforms and sirens.
Whoever knew the penniless joy of these New Orleans neighborhoods before
the catastrophe, their defiance towards the state and the widespread
practice of making do with whatâs available wouldnât be at all surprised
by what became possible there. On the other hand, anyone trapped in the
anemic and atomized everyday routine of our residential deserts might
doubt that such determination could be found anywhere anymore.
Reconnecting with such gestures, buried under years of normalized life,
is the only practicable means of not sinking down with the world. The
time will come when we take these up once more.
The first global slaughter, which from 1914 to 1918 did away with a
large portion of the urban and rural proletariat, was waged in the name
of freedom, democracy, and civilization. For the past five years, the
so-called âwar on terrorâ with its special operations and targeted
assassinations has been pursued in the name of these same values. Yet
the resemblance stops there: at the level of appearances. The value of
civilization is no longer so obvious that it can brought to the natives
without further ado. Freedom is no longer a name scrawled on walls, for
today it is always followed, as if by its shadow, with the word
âsecurity.â And it is well known that democracy can be dissolved in pure
and simple âemergencyâ edictsâfor example, in the official reinstitution
of torture in the US, or in Franceâs Perben II law.[23]
In a single century, freedom, democracy and civilization have reverted
to the state of hypotheses. Our leadersâ work from here on out will
consist in shaping the material and moral as well as symbolic and social
conditions in which these hypotheses can be more or less validated, in
configuring spaces where they can seem to function. All means to these
ends are acceptable, even the least democratic, the least civilized, the
most repressive. This is a century in which democracy regularly presided
over the birth of fascist regimes, civilization constantly rhymedâto the
tune of Wagner or Iron Maidenâwith extermination, and in which, one day
in 1929, freedom showed its two faces: a banker throwing himself from a
window and a family of workers dying of hunger. Since thenâletâs say,
since 1945âitâs taken for granted that manipulating the masses, secret
service operations, the restriction of public liberties, and the
complete sovereignty of a wide array of police forces were appropriate
ways to ensure democracy, freedom and civilization. At the final stage
of this evolution, we see the first socialist mayor of Paris putting the
finishing touches on urban pacification with a new police protocol for a
poor neighborhood, announced with the following carefully chosen words:
âWeâre building a civilized space here.â Thereâs nothing more to say,
everything has to be destroyed.
Though it seems general in nature, the question of civilization is not
at all a philosophical one. A civilization is not an abstraction
hovering over life. It is what rules, takes possession of, colonizes the
most banal, personal, daily existence. Itâs what holds together that
which is most intimate and most general. In France, civilization is
inseparable from the state. The older and more powerful the state, the
less it is a superstructure or exoskeleton of a society and the more it
constitutes the subjectivities that people it. The French state is the
very texture of French subjectivities, the form assumed by the
centuries-old castration of its subjects. Thus it should come as no
surprise that in their deliriums psychiatric patients are always
confusing themselves with political figures, that we agree that our
leaders are the root of all our ills, that we like to grumble so much
about them and that this grumbling is the consecration that crowns them
as our masters. Here, politics is not considered something outside of us
but as part of ourselves. The life we invest in these figures is the
same life thatâs taken from us.
If there is a French exception, this is why. Everything, even the global
influence of French literature, is a result of this amputation. In
France, literature is the prescribed space for the amusement of the
castrated. It is the formal freedom conceded to those who cannot
accommodate themselves to the nothingness of their real freedom. Thatâs
what gives rise to all the obscene winks exchanged, for centuries now,
between the statesmen and men of letters in this country, as each gladly
dons the otherâs costume. Thatâs also why intellectuals here tend to
talk so loud when theyâre so meek, and why they always fail at the
decisive moment, the only moment that wouldâve given meaning to their
existence, but that also wouldâve had them banished from their
profession.
There exists a credible thesis that modern literature was born with
Baudelaire, Heine, and Flaubert as a repercussion of the state massacre
of June 1848. Itâs in the blood of the Parisian insurgents, against the
silence surrounding the slaughter, that modern literary forms were
bornâspleen, ambivalence, fetishism of form, and morbid detachment. The
neurotic affection that the French pledge to their Republicâin the name
of which every smudge of ink assumes an air of dignity, and any pathetic
hack is honoredâunderwrites the perpetual repression of its originary
sacrifices. The June days of 1848â1,500 dead in combat, thousands of
summary executions of prisoners, and the Assembly welcoming the
surrender of the last barricade with cries of âLong Live the
Republic!ââand the Bloody Week of 1871 are birthmarks no surgery can
hide.
In 1945, Kojeve wrote: âThe âofficialâ political ideal of France and of
the French is today still that of the nation-State, of the âone and
indivisible Republic.â On the other hand, in the depths of its soul, the
country understands the inadequacy of this ideal, of the political
anachronism of the strictly ânationalâ idea. This feeling has admittedly
not yet reached the level of a clear and distinct idea: The country
cannot, and still does not want to, express it openly. Moreover, for the
very reason of the unparalleled brilliance of its national past, it is
particularly difficult for France to recognize clearly and to accept
frankly the fact of the end of the ânationalâ period of History and to
understand all of its consequences. It is hard for a country which
created, out of nothing, the ideological framework of nationalism and
which exported it to the whole world to recognize that all that remains
of it now is a document to be filed in the historical archives.â
This question of the nation-state and its mourning is at the heart of
what for the past half-century can only be called the French malaise. We
politely give the name of âalternationâ to this twitchy indecision, this
pendulum-like oscillation from left to right, then right to left; like a
manic phase after a depressive one that is then followed by another, or
like the way a completely rhetorical critique of individualism uneasily
co-exists with the most ferocious cynicism, or the most grandiose
generosity with an aversion to crowds. Since 1945, this malaise, which
seems to have dissipated only during the insurrectionary fervor of May
68, has continually worsened. The era of states, nations and republics
is coming to an end; this country that sacrificed all its life to these
forms is still dumbfounded. The firestorm caused by Jospinâs simple
sentence âthe state canât do everythingâ allowed us to glimpse the one
that will ignite when it becomes clear that the state can no longer do
anything at all. The feeling that weâve been tricked is like a wound
that is becoming increasingly infected. Itâs the source of the latent
rage that just about anything will set off these days. The fact that in
this country the obituary of the age of nations has yet to be written is
the key to the French anachronism, and to the revolutionary
possibilities France still has in store.
Whatever their outcome may be, the role of the next presidential
elections will be to signal the end of French illusions and the bursting
of the historical bubble in which we are livingâand which makes possible
events like the anti-CPE movement, which was puzzled over by other
countries as if it were some bad dream that escaped the 1970s. Thatâs
why, deep down, no one wants these elections. France is indeed the red
lantern of the western zone.[24]
Today the West is the GI who dashes into Fallujah on an M1 Abrams tank,
listening to heavy metal at top volume. Itâs the tourist lost on the
Mongolian plains, mocked by all, who clutches his credit card as his
only lifeline. Itâs the CEO who swears by the game Go. Itâs the young
girl who chases happiness in clothes, guys, and moisturizing creams.
Itâs the Swiss human rights activist who travels to the four corners of
the earth to show solidarity with all the worldâs rebelsâprovided
theyâve been defeated. Itâs the Spaniard who couldnât care less about
political freedom once heâs been granted sexual freedom. Itâs the art
lover who wants us to be awestruck before the âmodern geniusâ of a
century of artists, from surrealism to Viennese actionism, all competing
to see who could best spit in the face of civilization. Itâs the
cyberneticist whoâs found a realistic theory of consciousness in
Buddhism and the quantum physicist whoâs hoping that dabbling in Hindu
metaphysics will inspire new scientific discoveries.
The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its
collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny
itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society
as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to
sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a
social relationâbecoming cultural capital and health capital in addition
to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a
religion in order to survive as an affective structureâas a vague
injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has
sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself
as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an
entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to
survive as a form.
The fragmented individual survives as a form thanks to the âspiritualâ
technologies of counseling. Patriarchy survives by attributing to women
all the worst attributes of men: willfulness, self-control,
insensitivity. A disintegrated society survives by propagating an
epidemic of sociability and entertainment. So it goes with all the
great, outmoded fictions of the West maintaining themselves through
artifices that contradict these fictions point by point.
There is no âclash of civilizations.â There is a clinically dead
civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that
spread a peculiar plague into the planetâs atmosphere. At this point it
can no longer believe in a single one of its own âvalues,â and any
affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that
should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state
of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of
the âit all depends on your point of viewâ; itâs the eye-rolling or the
wounded indignation at anyone whoâs stupid, primitive, or presumptuous
enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. You can
see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the
eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary
intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist
thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A
century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and
raucous negation, while today itâs found in any affirmation that fails
to tremble.
No social order can securely found itself on the principle that nothing
is true. Yet it must be made secure. Applying the concept of âsecurityâ
to everything these days is the expression of a project to securely
fasten onto places, behaviors, and even people themselves, an ideal
order to which they are no longer ready to submit. Saying ânothing is
trueâ says nothing about the world but everything about the Western
concept of truth. For the West, truth is not an attribute of beings or
things, but of their representation. A representation that conforms to
experience is held to be true. Science is, in the last analysis, this
empire of universal verification. Since all human behavior, from the
most ordinary to the most learned, is based on a foundation of unevenly
formulated presuppositions, and since all practices start from a point
where things and their representations can no longer be distinguished, a
dose of truth that the Western concept knows nothing about enters into
every life. We talk in the West about âreal people,â but only in order
to mock these simpletons. This is why Westerners have always been
thought of as liars and hypocrites by the people theyâve colonized. This
is why theyâre envied for what they have, for their technological
development, but never for what they are, for which they are rightly
held in contempt. Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud wouldnât be taught in
schools if the kind of truth mentioned above was not discredited in
advance. Containing all affirmations and deactivating all certainties as
they irresistibly come to lightâsuch is the long labor of the Western
intellect. The police and philosophy are two convergent, if formally
distinct, means to this end.
Of course, this imperialism of the relative finds a suitable enemy in
every empty dogmatism, in whatever form of Marxist-Leninism, Salifism,
or Neo-Nazism: anyone who, like Westerners, mistakes provocation for
affirmation.
At this juncture, any strictly social contestation that refuses to see
that what weâre faced with is not the crisis of a society but the
extinction of a civilization becomes an accomplice in its perpetuation.
Itâs even become a contemporary strategy to critique this society in the
vain hope of saving this civilization.
So we have a corpse on our backs, but we wonât be able to rid ourselves
of it just like that. Nothing is to be expected from the end of
civilization, from its clinical death. In and of itself, it can only be
of interest to historians. Itâs a fact, and it must be translated into a
decision. Facts can be conjured away, but decision is political. To
decide on the death of civilization, then to work out how it will
happen: only decision will rid us of the corpse.
We can no longer even see how an insurrection might begin. Sixty years
of pacification and containment of historical upheavals, sixty years of
democratic anesthesia and the management of events, have dulled our
perception of the real, our sense of the war in progress. We need to
start by recovering this perception.
Itâs useless to get indignant about openly unconstitutional laws such as
Perben II. Itâs futile to legally protest the complete implosion of the
legal framework. We have to get organized.
Itâs useless to get involved in this or that citizensâ group, in this or
that dead-end of the far left, or in the latest âcommunity effort.â
Every organization that claims to contest the present order mimics the
form, mores and language of miniature states. Thus far, every impulse to
âdo politics differentlyâ has only contributed to the indefinite spread
of the stateâs tentacles.
Itâs useless to react to the news of the day; instead we should
understand each report as a maneuver in a hostile field of strategies to
be decoded, operations designed to provoke a specific reaction. Itâs
these operations themselves that should be taken as the real information
contained in these pieces of news.
Itâs useless to waitâfor a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear
apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The
catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within
the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must
choose sides.
To no longer wait is, in one way or another, to enter into the logic of
insurrection. It is to once again hear the slight but always present
trembling of terror in the voices of our leaders. Because governing has
never been anything other than postponing by a thousand subterfuges the
moment when the crowd will string you up, and every act of government is
nothing but a way of not losing control of the population.
Weâre setting out from a point of extreme isolation, of extreme
weakness. An insurrectional process must be built from the ground up.
Nothing appears less likely than an insurrection, but nothing is more
necessary.
An encounter, a discovery, a vast wave of strikes, an earthquake: every
event produces truth by changing our way of being in the world.
Conversely, any observation that leaves us indifferent, doesnât affect
us, doesnât commit us to anything, no longer deserves the name truth.
Thereâs a truth beneath every gesture, every practice, every
relationship, and every situation. We usually just avoid it, manage it,
which produces the madness of so many in our era. In reality, everything
involves everything else. The feeling that one is living a lie is still
a truth. It is a matter of not letting it go, of starting from there. A
truth isnât a view on the world but what binds us to it in an
irreducible way. A truth isnât something we hold but something that
carries us. It makes and unmakes me, constitutes and undoes me as an
individual; it distances me from many and brings me closer to those who
also experience it. An isolated being who holds fast to a truth will
inevitably meet others like her. In fact, every insurrectional process
starts from a truth that we refuse to give up. During the 1980s in
Hamburg, a few inhabitants of a squatted house decided that from then on
they would only be evicted over their dead bodies. A neighborhood was
besieged by tanks and helicopters, with days of street battles, huge
demonstrationsâand a mayor who, finally, capitulated. In 1940, Georges
Guingouin, the âfirst French resistance fighter,â started with nothing
other than the certainty of his refusal of the Nazi occupation. At that
time, to the Communist Party, he was nothing but a âmadman living in the
woods,â until there were 20,000 madmen living in the woods, and Limoges
was liberated.
Weâve been given a neutral idea of friendship, understood as a pure
affection with no consequences. But all affinity is affinity within a
common truth. Every encounter is an encounter within a common
affirmation, even the affirmation of destruction. No bonds are innocent
in an age when holding onto something and refusing to let go usually
leads to unemployment, where you have to lie to work, and you have to
keep on working in order to continue lying. People who swear by quantum
physics and pursue its consequences in all domains are no less bound
politically than comrades fighting against a multinational agribusiness.
They will all be led, sooner or later, to defection and to combat.
The pioneers of the workersâ movement were able to find each other in
the workshop, then in the factory. They had the strike to show their
numbers and unmask the scabs. They had the wage relation, pitting the
party of capital against the party of labor, on which they could draw
the lines of solidarity and of battle on a global scale. We have the
whole of social space in which to find each other. We have everyday
insubordination for showing our numbers and unmasking cowards. We have
our hostility to this civilization for drawing lines of solidarity and
of battle on a global scale.
milieus, and above all, donât become one.
Itâs not uncommon, in the course of a significant breaking of the social
bond, to cross paths with organizationsâpolitical, labor, humanitarian,
community associations, etc. Among their members, one may even find
individuals who are sincereâif a little desperateâwho are
enthusiasticâif a little conniving. Organizations are attractive due to
their apparent consistencyâthey have a history, a head office, a name,
resources, a leader, a strategy and a discourse. They are nonetheless
empty structures, which, in spite of their grand origins, can never be
filled. In all their affairs, at every level, these organizations are
concerned above all with their own survival as organizations, and little
else. Their repeated betrayals have often alienated the commitment of
their own rank and file. And this is why you can, on occasion, run into
worthy beings within them. But the promise of the encounter can only be
realized outside the organization and, unavoidably, at odds with it.
Far more dreadful are social milieus, with their supple texture, their
gossip, and their informal hierarchies. Flee all milieus. Each and every
milieu is orientated towards the neutralization of some truth. Literary
circles exist to smother the clarity of writing. Anarchist milieus to
blunt the directness of direct action. Scientific milieus to withhold
the implications of their research from the majority of people today.
Sport milieus to contain in their gyms the various forms of life they
should create. Particularly to be avoided are the cultural and activist
circles. They are the old peopleâs homes where all revolutionary desires
traditionally go to die. The task of cultural circles is to spot nascent
intensities and to explain away the sense of whatever it is youâre
doing, while the task of activist circles is to sap your energy for
doing it. Activist milieus spread their diffuse web throughout the
French territory, and are encountered on the path of every revolutionary
development. They offer nothing but the story of their many defeats and
the bitterness these have produced. Their exhaustion has made them
incapable of seizing the possibilities of the present. Besides, to
nurture their wretched passivity they talk far too much and this makes
them unreliable when it comes to the police. Just as itâs useless to
expect anything from them, itâs stupid to be disappointed by their
sclerosis. Itâs best to just abandon this dead weight.
All milieus are counter-revolutionary because they are only concerned
with the preservation of their sad comfort.
Communes come into being when people find each other, get on with each
other, and decide on a common path. The commune is perhaps what gets
decided at the very moment when we would normally part ways. Itâs the
joy of an encounter that survives its expected end. Itâs what makes us
say âwe,â and makes that an event. Whatâs strange isnât that people who
are attuned to each other form communes, but that they remain separated.
Why shouldnât communes proliferate everywhere? In every factory, every
street, every village, every school. At long last, the reign of the base
committees! Communes that accept being what they are, where they are.
And if possible, a multiplicity of communes that will displace the
institutions of society: family, school, union, sports club, etc.
Communes that arenât afraid, beyond their specifically political
activities, to organize themselves for the material and moral survival
of each of their members and of all those around them who remain adrift.
Communes that would not define themselvesâas collectives tend to doâby
whatâs inside and whatâs outside them, but by the density of the ties at
their core. Not by their membership, but by the spirit that animates
them.
A commune forms every time a few people, freed of their individual
straitjackets, decide to rely only on themselves and measure their
strength against reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every
building occupied collectively and on a clear basis is a commune, the
action committees of 1968 were communes, as were the slave maroons in
the United States, or Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977. Every commune
seeks to be its own base. It seeks to dissolve the question of needs. It
seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation; it
degenerates into a milieu the moment it loses contact with the truths on
which it is founded. There are all kinds of communes that wait neither
for the numbers nor the means to get organized, and even less for the
âright momentââwhich never arrives.
We know that individuals are possessed of so little life that they have
to earn a living, to sell their time in exchange for a modicum of social
existence. Personal time for social existence: such is work, such is the
market. From the outset, the time of the commune eludes work, it doesnât
function according to that schemeâit prefers others. Groups of Argentine
piqueteros collectively extort a sort of local welfare conditioned by a
few hours of work; they donât clock their hours, they put their benefits
in common and acquire clothing workshops, a bakery, putting in place the
gardens that they need.
The commune needs money, but not because we need to earn a living. All
communes have their black markets. There are plenty of hustles. Aside
from welfare, there are various benefits, disability money, accumulated
student aid, subsidies drawn off fictitious childbirths, all kinds of
trafficking, and so many other means that arise with every mutation of
control. Itâs not for us to defend them, or to install ourselves in
these temporary shelters or to preserve them as a privilege for those in
the know. The important thing is to cultivate and spread this necessary
disposition towards fraud, and to share its innovations. For communes,
the question of work is only posed in relation to other already existing
incomes. And we shouldnât forget all the useful knowledge that can be
acquired through certain trades, professions and well-positioned jobs.
The exigency of the commune is to free up the most time for the most
people. And weâre not just talking about the number of hours free of any
wage-labor exploitation. Liberated time doesnât mean a vacation. Vacant
time, dead time, the time of emptiness and the fear of emptinessâthis is
the time of work. There will be no more time to fill, but a liberation
of energy that no âtimeâ contains; lines that take shape, that
accentuate each other, that we can follow at our leisure, to their ends,
until we see them cross with others.
Some former MetalEurop employees become bank robbers rather prison
guards. Some EDF employees show friends and family how to rig the
electricity meters. Commodities that âfell off the back of a truckâ are
sold left and right. A world that so openly proclaims its cynicism canât
expect much loyalty from proletarians.
On the one hand, a commune canât bank on the âwelfare stateâ being
around forever, and on the other, it canât count on living for long off
shoplifting, nighttime dumpster diving at supermarkets or in the
warehouses of the industrial zones, misdirecting government subsidies,
ripping off insurance companies and other frauds, in a word: plunder. So
it has to consider how to continually increase the level and scope of
its self-organization. Nothing would be more logical than using the
lathes, milling machines, and photocopiers sold at a discount after a
factory closure to support a conspiracy against commodity society.
The feeling of imminent collapse is everywhere so strong these days that
it would be hard to enumerate all of the current experiments in matters
of construction, energy, materials, illegality or agriculture. Thereâs a
whole set of skills and techniques just waiting to be plundered and
ripped from their humanistic, street-culture, or eco-friendly trappings.
Yet this group of experiments is but one part of all of the intuitions,
the know-how, and the ingenuity found in slums that will have to be
deployed if we intend to repopulate the metropolitan desert and ensure
the viability of an insurrection beyond its first stages.
How will we communicate and move about during a total interruption of
the flows? How will we restore food production in rural areas to the
point where they can once again support the population density that they
had sixty years ago? How will we transform concrete spaces into urban
vegetable gardens, as Cuba has done in order to withstand both the
American embargo and the liquidation of the USSR?
What are we left with, having used up most of the leisure authorized by
market democracy? What was it that made us go jogging on a Sunday
morning? What keeps all these karate fanatics, these DIY, fishing, or
mycology freaks going? What, if not the need to fill up some totally
idle time, to reconstitute their labor power or âhealth capitalâ? Most
recreational activities could easily be stripped of their absurdity and
become something else. Boxing has not always been limited to the staging
of spectacular matches. At the beginning of the 20^(th) century, as
China was carved up by hordes of colonists and starved by long droughts,
hundreds of thousands of its poor peasants organized themselves into
countless open-air boxing clubs, in order to take back what the
colonists and the rich had taken from them. This was the Boxer
Rebellion. Itâs never too early to learn and practice what less
pacified, less predictable times might require of us. Our dependence on
the metropolisâon its medicine, its agriculture, its policeâis so great
at present that we canât attack it without putting ourselves in danger.
An unspoken awareness of this vulnerability accounts for the spontaneous
self-limitation of todayâs social movements, and explains our fear of
crises and our desire for âsecurity.â Itâs for this reason that strikes
have usually traded the prospect of revolution for a return to normalcy.
Escaping this fate calls for a long and consistent process of
apprenticeship, and for multiple, massive experiments. Itâs a question
of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat
sicknesses; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up
street kitchens; how to aim straight; how to gather together scattered
knowledge and set up wartime agronomics; understand plankton biology;
soil composition; study the way plants interact; get to know possible
uses for and connections with our immediate environment as well as the
limits we canât go beyond without exhausting it. We must start today, in
preparation for the days when weâll need more than just a symbolic
portion of our nourishment and care.
More and more reformists today agree that with âthe approach of peak
oil,â and in order to âreduce greenhouse gas emissions,â we will need to
ârelocalize the economy,â encourage regional supply lines, small
distribution circuits, renounce easy access to imports from faraway,
etc. What they forget is that what characterizes everything thatâs done
in a local economy is that itâs done under the table, in an âinformalâ
way; that this simple ecological measure of relocalizing the economy
implies nothing less than total freedom from state control. Or else
total submission to it.
Todayâs territory is the product of many centuries of police operations.
People have been pushed out of their fields, then their streets, then
their neighborhoods, and finally from the hallways of their buildings,
in the demented hope of containing all life between the four sweating
walls of privacy. The territorial question isnât the same for us as it
is for the state. For us itâs not about possessing territory. Rather,
itâs a matter of increasing the density of the communes, of circulation,
and of solidarities to the point that the territory becomes unreadable,
opaque to all authority. We donât want to occupy the territory, we want
to be the territory.
Every practice brings a territory into existenceâa dealing territory, or
a hunting territory; a territory of childâs play, of lovers, of a riot;
a territory of farmers, ornithologists, or flaneurs. The rule is simple:
the more territories there are superimposed on a given zone, the more
circulation there is between them, the harder it will be for power to
get a handle on them. Bistros, print shops, sports facilities,
wastelands, second-hand book stalls, building rooftops, improvised
street markets, kebab shops and garages can all easily be used for
purposes other than their official ones if enough complicities come
together in them. Local self-organization superimposes its own geography
over the state cartography, scrambling and blurring it: it produces its
own secession.
The principle of communes is not to counter the metropolis and its
mobility with local slowness and rootedness. The expansive movement of
commune formation should surreptitiously overtake the movement of the
metropolis. We donât have to reject the possibilities of travel and
communication that the commercial infrastructure offers; we just have to
know their limits. We just have to be prudent, innocuous. Visits in
person are more secure, leave no trace, and forge much more consistent
connections than any list of contacts on the internet. The privilege
many of us enjoy of being able to âcirculate freelyâ from one end of the
continent to the other, and even across the world without too much
trouble, is not a negligible asset when it comes to communication
between pockets of conspiracy. One of the charms of the metropolis is
that it allows Americans, Greeks, Mexicans, and Germans to meet
furtively in Paris for the time it takes to discuss strategy.
Constant movement between friendly communes is one of the things that
keeps them from drying up and from the inevitability of abandonment.
Welcoming comrades, keeping abreast of their initiatives, reflecting on
their experiences and making use of new techniques theyâve developed
does more good for a commune than sterile self-examinations behind
closed doors. It would be a mistake to underestimate how much can be
decisively worked out over the course of evenings spent comparing views
on the war in progress.
Itâs well known that the streets teem with incivilities. Between what
they are and what they should be stands the centripetal force of the
police, doing their best to restore order to them; and on the other side
thereâs us, the opposite centrifugal movement. We canât help but delight
in the fits of anger and disorder wherever they erupt. Itâs not
surprising that these national festivals that arenât really celebrating
anything anymore are now systematically going bad. Whether sparkling or
dilapidated, the urban fixturesâbut where do they begin? where do they
end?âembody our common dispossession. Persevering in their nothingness,
they ask for nothing more than to return to that state for good. Take a
look at what surrounds us: all this will have its final hour. The
metropolis suddenly takes on an air of nostalgia, like a field of ruins.
All the incivilities of the streets should become methodical and
systematic, converging in a diffuse, effective guerrilla war that
restores us to our ungovernability, our primordial unruliness. Itâs
disconcerting to some that this same lack of discipline figures so
prominently among the recognized military virtues of resistance
fighters. In fact though, rage and politics should never have been
separated. Without the first, the second is lost in discourse; without
the second the first exhausts itself in howls. When words like âenragĂ©sâ
and âexaltĂ©sâ resurface in politics theyâre always greeted with warning
shots.[25]
As for methods, letâs adopt the following principle from sabotage: a
minimum of risk in taking the action, a minimum of time, and maximum
damage. As for strategy, we will remember that an obstacle that has been
cleared away, leaving a liberated but uninhabited space, is easily
replaced by another obstacle, one that offers more resistance and is
harder to attack.
No need to dwell too long on the three types of workersâ sabotage:
reducing the speed of work, from âeasy does itâ pacing to the
âwork-to-ruleâ strike; breaking the machines, or hindering their
function; and divulging company secrets. Broadened to the dimensions of
the whole social factory, the principles of sabotage can be applied to
both production and circulation. The technical infrastructure of the
metropolis is vulnerable. Its flows amount to more than the
transportation of people and commodities. Information and energy
circulates via wire networks, fibers and channels, and these can be
attacked. Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any real effect
involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its
networks. How can a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered
useless? How does one find the weak points in computer networks, or
scramble radio waves and fill screens with white noise?
As for serious obstacles, itâs wrong to imagine them invulnerable to all
destruction. The promethean element in all of this boils down to a
certain use of fire, all blind voluntarism aside. In 356 BC, Erostratus
burned down the temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the
world. In our time of utter decadence, the only thing imposing about
temples is the dismal truth that they are already ruins.
Annihilating this nothingness is hardly a sad task. It gives action a
fresh demeanor. Everything suddenly coalesces and makes senseâspace,
time, friendship. We must use all means at our disposal and rethink
their usesâwe ourselves being means. Perhaps, in the misery of the
present, âfucking it all upâ will serveânot without reasonâas the last
collective seduction.
In a demonstration, a union member tears the mask off of an anonymous
person who has just broken a window. âTake responsibility for what
youâre doing instead of hiding yourself.â To be visible is to be
exposed, that is to say above all, vulnerable. When leftists everywhere
continually make their cause more âvisibleââwhether that of the
homeless, of women, or of undocumented immigrantsâin hopes that it will
get dealt with, theyâre doing exactly the contrary of what must be done.
Not making ourselves visible, but instead turning the anonymity to which
weâve been relegated to our advantage, and through conspiracy, nocturnal
or faceless actions, creating an invulnerable position of attack. The
fires of November 2005 offer a model for this. No leader, no demands, no
organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be socially nothing
is not a humiliating condition, the source of some tragic lack of
recognitionâfrom whom do we seek recognition?âbut is on the contrary the
condition for maximum freedom of action. Not claiming your illegal
actions, only attaching to them some fictional acronymâwe still remember
the ephemeral BAFT (Brigade Anti-Flic des TarterĂȘts)[26]âis a way to
preserve that freedom. Quite obviously, one of the regimeâs first
defensive maneuvers was the creation of a âbanlieueâ subject to treat as
the author of the âriots of November 2005.â Just looking at the faces on
some of this societyâs somebodies illustrates why thereâs such joy in
being nobody.
Visibility must be avoided. But a force that gathers in the shadows
canât avoid it forever. Our appearance as a force must be pushed back
until the opportune moment. The longer we avoid visibility, the stronger
weâll be when it catches up with us. And once we become visible our days
will be numbered. Either we will be in a position to pulverize its reign
in short order, or weâll be crushed in no time.
We live under an occupation, under police occupation. Undocumented
immigrants are rounded up in the middle of the street, unmarked police
cars patrol the boulevards, metropolitan districts are pacified with
techniques forged in the colonies, the Minister of the Interior makes
declarations of war on âgangsâ that remind us of the Algerian warâwe are
reminded of it every day. These are reasons enough to no longer let
ourselves be beaten down, reasons enough to organize our self-defense.
To the extent that it grows and radiates, a commune begins to see the
operations of power target that which constitutes it. These
counterattacks take the form of seduction, of recuperation, and as a
last resort, brute force. For a commune, self-defense must be a
collective fact, as much practical as theoretical. Preventing an arrest,
gathering quickly and in large numbers against eviction attempts and
sheltering one of our own, will not be superfluous reflexes in coming
times. We cannot ceaselessly reconstruct our bases from scratch. Letâs
stop denouncing repression and instead prepare to meet it.
Itâs not a simple affair, for we expect a surge in police work being
done by the population itselfâeverything from snitching to occasional
participation in citizensâ militias. The police forces blend in with the
crowd. The ubiquitous model of police intervention, even in riot
situations, is now the cop in civilian clothes. The effectiveness of the
police during the last anti-CPE demonstrations was a result of
plainclothes officers mixing among us and waiting for an incident before
revealing who they are: gas, nightsticks, tazers, detainment; all in
strict coordination with demonstration stewards. The mere possibility of
their presence was enough to create suspicion amongst the
demonstratorsâwhoâs who?âand to paralyze action. If we agree that a
demonstration is not merely a way to stand and be counted but a means of
action, we have to equip ourselves better with resources to unmask
plainclothes officers, chase them off, and if need be snatch back those
theyâre trying to arrest.
The police are not invincible in the streets, they simply have the means
to organize, train, and continually test new weapons. Our weapons, on
the other hand, are always rudimentary, cobbled together, and often
improvised on the spot. They certainly donât have a hope of rivaling
theirs in firepower, but can be used to hold them at a distance,
redirect attention, exercise psychological pressure or force passage and
gain ground by surprise. None of the innovations in urban guerilla
warfare currently deployed in the French police academies are sufficient
to respond rapidly to a moving multiplicity that can strike a number of
places at once and that tries to always keep the initiative.
Communes are obviously vulnerable to surveillance and police
investigations, to policing technologies and intelligence gathering. The
waves of arrests of anarchists in Italy and of eco-warriors in the US
were made possible by wiretapping. Everyone detained by the police now
has his or her DNA taken to be entered into an ever more complete
profile. A squatter from Barcelona was caught because he left
fingerprints on fliers he was distributing. Tracking methods are
becoming better and better, mostly through biometric techniques. And if
the distribution of electronic identity cards is instituted, our task
will just be that much more difficult. The Paris Commune found a partial
solution to the keeping of records: they burned down City Hall,
destroying all the public records and vital statistics. We still need to
find the means to permanently destroy computerized databases.
The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality. An insurrectional
surge may be nothing more than a multiplication of communes, their
coming into contact and forming of ties. As events unfold, communes will
either merge into larger entities or fragment. The difference between a
band of brothers and sisters bound âfor lifeâ and the gathering of many
groups, committees and gangs for organizing the supply and self-defense
of a neighborhood or even a region in revolt, is only a difference of
scale, they are all communes.
A commune tends by its nature towards self-sufficiency and considers
money, internally, as something foolish and ultimately out of place. The
power of money is to connect those who are unconnected, to link
strangers as strangers and thus, by making everything equivalent, to put
everything into circulation.
The cost of moneyâs capacity to connect everything is the superficiality
of the connection, where deception is the rule. Distrust is the basis of
the credit relation. The reign of money is, therefore, always the reign
of control. The practical abolition of money will happen only with the
extension of communes. Communes must be extended while making sure they
do not exceed a certain size, beyond which they lose touch with
themselves and give rise, almost without fail, to a dominant caste. It
would be preferable for the commune to split up and to spread in that
way, avoiding such an unfortunate outcome.
The uprising of Algerian youth that erupted across all of Kabylia in the
spring of 2001 managed to take over almost the entire territory,
attacking police stations, courthouses and every representation of the
state, generalizing the revolt to the point of compelling the unilateral
retreat of the forces of order and physically preventing the elections.
The movementâs strength was in the diffuse complementarity of its
componentsâonly partially represented by the interminable and hopelessly
male-dominated village assemblies and other popular committees. The
âcommunesâ of this still-simmering insurrection had many faces: the
young hotheads in helmets lobbing gas canisters at the riot police from
the rooftop of a building in Tizi Ouzou; the wry smile of an old
resistance fighter draped in his burnous; the spirit of the women in the
mountain villages, stubbornly carrying on with the traditional farming,
without which the blockades of the regionâs economy would never have
been as constant and systematic as they were.
âSo it must be said, too, that we wonât be able to treat the entire
French population. Choices will have to be made.â This is how a virology
expert sums up, in a September 7, 2005 article in Le Monde, what would
happen in the event of a bird flu pandemic. âTerrorist threats,â
ânatural disasters,â âvirus warnings,â âsocial movementsâ and âurban
violenceâ are, for societyâs managers, so many moments of instability
where they reinforce their power, by the selection of those who please
them and the elimination of those who make things difficult. Clearly
these are, in turn, opportunities for other forces to consolidate or
strengthen one another as they take the other side.
The interruption of the flow of commodities, the suspension of normality
(itâs sufficient to see how social life returns in a building suddenly
deprived of electricity to imagine what life could become in a city
deprived of everything) and police control liberate potentialities for
self-organization unthinkable in other circumstances. People are not
blind to this. The revolutionary workersâ movement understood it well,
and took advantage of the crises of the bourgeois economy to gather
strength. Today, Islamic parties are strongest when theyâve been able to
intelligently compensate for the weakness of the stateâas when they
provided aid after the earthquake in Boumerdes, Algeria, or in the daily
assistance offered the population of southern Lebanon after it was
ravaged by the Israeli army.
As we mentioned above, the devastation of New Orleans by hurricane
Katrina gave a certain fringe of the North American anarchist movement
the opportunity to achieve an unfamiliar cohesion by rallying all those
who refused to be forcefully evacuated. Street kitchens require building
up provisions beforehand; emergency medical aid requires the acquisition
of necessary knowledge and materials, as does the setting up of pirate
radios. The political richness of such experiences is assured by the joy
they contain, the way they transcend individual stoicism, and their
manifestation of a tangible reality that escapes the daily ambience of
order and work.
In a country like France, where radioactive clouds stop at the border
and where we arenât afraid to build a cancer research center on the
former site of a nitrogen fertilizer factory that has been condemned by
the EUâs industrial safety agency, we should count less on ânaturalâ
crises than on social ones. It is usually up to the social movements to
interrupt the normal course of the disaster. Of course, in recent years
the various strikes were primarily opportunities for the government and
corporate management to test their ability to maintain a larger and
larger âminimum service,â[27] to the point of reducing the work stoppage
to a purely symbolic dimension, causing little more damage than a
snowstorm or a suicide on the railroad tracks. By going against
established activist practices through the systematic occupation of
institutions and obstinate blockading, the high-school studentsâ
struggle of 2005 and the struggle against the CPE-law reminded us of the
ability of large movements to cause trouble and carry out diffuse
offensives. In all the affinity groups they spawned and left in their
wake, we glimpsed the conditions that allow social movements to become a
locus for the emergence of new communes.
general assemblies.
The first obstacle every social movement faces, long before the police
proper, are the unions and the entire micro-bureaucracy whose job it is
to control the struggle. Communes, collectives and gangs are naturally
distrustful of these structures. Thatâs why the para-bureaucrats have
for the past twenty years been inventing coordination committees and
spokes councils that seem more innocent because they lack an established
label, but are in fact the ideal terrain for their maneuvers. When a
stray collective makes an attempt at autonomy, they wonât be satisfied
until theyâve drained the attempt of all content by preventing any real
question from being addressed. They get fierce and worked up not out of
passion for debate but out of a passion for shutting it down. And when
their dogged defense of apathy finally does the collective in, they
explain its failure by citing a lack of political consciousness. It must
be noted that in France the militant youth are well versed in the art of
political manipulation, thanks largely to the frenzied activity of
various Trotskyist factions. They could not be expected to learn the
lesson of the conflagration of November 2005: that coordinations are
unnecessary where coordination exists, organizations arenât needed when
people organize themselves.
Another reflex is to call a general assembly at the slightest sign of
movement, and vote. This is a mistake. The business of voting and
deciding a winner, is enough to turn the assembly into a nightmare, into
a theater where all the various little pretenders to power confront each
other. Here we suffer from the bad example of bourgeois parliaments. An
assembly is not a place for decisions but for palaver, for free speech
exercised without a goal.
The need to assemble is as constant among humans as the necessity of
making decisions is rare. Assembling corresponds to the joy of feeling a
common power. Decisions are vital only in emergency situations, where
the exercise of democracy is already compromised. The rest of the time,
âthe democratic character of decision makingâ is only a problem for the
fanatics of process. Itâs not a matter of critiquing assemblies or
abandoning them, but of liberating the speech, gestures, and interplay
of beings that take place within them. We just have to see that each
person comes to an assembly not only with a point of view or a motion,
but with desires, attachments, capacities, forces, sadnesses and a
certain disposition toward others, an openness. If we manage to set
aside the fantasy of the General Assembly and replace it with an
assembly of presences, if we manage to foil the constantly renewed
temptation of hegemony, if we stop making the decision our final aim,
then there is a chance for a kind of massification, one of those moments
of collective crystallization where a decision suddenly takes hold of
beings, completely or only in part.
The same goes for deciding on actions. By starting from the principle
that âthe action in question should govern the assemblyâs agendaâ we
make both vigorous debate and effective action impossible. A large
assembly made up of people who donât know each other is obliged to call
on action specialists, that is, to abandon action for the sake of its
control. On the one hand, people with mandates are by definition
hindered in their actions, on the other hand, nothing hinders them from
deceiving everyone.
Thereâs no ideal form of action. Whatâs essential is that action assume
a certain form, that it give rise to a form instead of having one
imposed on it. This presupposes a shared political and geographical
positionâlike the sections of the Paris Commune during the French
Revolutionâas well as the circulation of a shared knowledge. As for
deciding on actions, the principle could be as follows: each person
should do their own reconnaissance, the information would then be put
together, and the decision will occur to us rather than being made by
us. The circulation of knowledge cancels hierarchy; it equalizes by
raising up. Proliferating horizontal communication is also the best form
of coordination among different communes, the best way to put an end to
hegemony.
self-organization
At the end of June 2006 in the State of Oaxaca, the occupations of city
halls multiply, and insurgents occupy public buildings. In certain
communes, mayors are kicked out, official vehicles are requisitioned. A
month later, access is cut off to certain hotels and tourist compounds.
Mexicoâs Minister of Tourism speaks of a disaster âcomparable to
hurricane Wilma.â A few years earlier, blockades had become the main
form of action of the revolt in Argentina, with different local groups
helping each other by blocking this or that major road, and continually
threatening, through their joint action, to paralyze the entire country
if their demands were not met. For years such threats have been a
powerful lever for railway workers, truck drivers, and electrical and
gas supply workers. The movement against the CPE in France did not
hesitate to block train stations, ring roads, factories, highways,
supermarkets and even airports. In Rennes, only three hundred people
were needed to shut down the main access road to the town for hours and
cause a 40-kilometer long traffic jam.
Jam everythingâthis will be the first reflex of all those who rebel
against the present order. In a delocalized economy where companies
function according to âjust-in-timeâ production, where value derives
from connectedness to the network, where the highways are links in the
chain of dematerialized production which moves from subcontractor to
subcontractor and from there to another factory for assembly, to block
circulation is to block production as well.
But a blockade is only as effective as the insurgentsâ capacity to
supply themselves and to communicate, as effective as the
self-organization of the different communes. How will we feed ourselves
once everything is paralyzed? Looting stores, as in Argentina, has its
limits; as large as the temples of consumption are, they are not
bottomless pantries. Acquiring the skills to provide, over time, for
oneâs own basic subsistence implies appropriating the necessary means of
its production. And in this regard, it seems pointless to wait any
longer. Letting two percent of the population produce the food of all
the othersâthe situation todayâis both a historical and a strategic
anomaly.
confrontation.
âThis business shows that we are not dealing with young people making
social demands, but with individuals who are declaring war on the
Republic,â noted a lucid cop about recent clashes. The push to liberate
territory from police occupation is already underway, and can count on
the endless reserves of resentment that the forces of order have
marshaled against it. Even the âsocial movementsâ are gradually being
seduced by the riots, just like the festive crowds in Rennes who fought
the cops every Thursday night in 2005, or those in Barcelona who
destroyed a shopping district during a botellion. The movement against
the CPE witnessed the recurrent return of the Molotov cocktail. But on
this front certain banlieues remain unsurpassed. Specifically, when it
comes to the technique theyâve been perfecting for some time now: the
surprise attack. Like the one on October 13, 2006 in Epinay. A
private-security team headed out after getting a report of something
stolen from a car. When they arrived, one of the security guards âfound
himself blocked by two vehicles parked diagonally across the street and
by more than thirty people carrying metal bars and pistols who threw
stones at the vehicle and used tear gas against the police officers.â On
a smaller scale, think of all the local police stations attacked in the
night: broken windows, burnt-out cop cars.
One of the results of these recent movements is the understanding that
henceforth a real demonstration has to be âwild,â not declared in
advance to the police. Having the choice of terrain, we can, like the
Black Bloc of Genoa in 2001, bypass the red zones and avoid direct
confrontation. By choosing our own trajectory, we can lead the cops,
including unionist and pacifist ones, rather than being herded by them.
In Genoa we saw a thousand determined people push back entire buses full
of carabinieri, then set their vehicles on fire. The important thing is
not to be better armed but to take the initiative. Courage is nothing,
confidence in your own courage is everything. Having the initiative
helps.
Everything points, nonetheless, toward a conception of direct
confrontations as that which pins down opposing forces, buying us time
and allowing us to attack elsewhereâeven nearby. The fact that we cannot
prevent a confrontation from occurring doesnât prevent us from making it
into a simple diversion. Even more than to actions, we must commit
ourselves to their coordination. Harassing the police means that by
forcing them to be everywhere they can no longer be effective anywhere.
Every act of harassment revives this truth, spoken in 1842: âThe life of
the police agent is painful; his position in society is as humiliating
and despised as crime itself ... Shame and infamy encircle him from all
sides, society expels him, isolates him as a pariah, society spits out
its disdain for the police agent along with his pay, without remorse,
without regrets, without pity ... The police badge that he carries in
his pocket documents his shame.â On November 21, 2006, firemen
demonstrating in Paris attacked the riot police with hammers and injured
fifteen of them. This by way of a reminder that wanting to âprotect and
serveâ can never be an excuse for joining the police.
Against the army, the only victory is political.
There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection. Weapons are
necessary: itâs a question of doing everything possible to make using
them unnecessary. An insurrection is more about taking up arms and
maintaining an âarmed presenceâ than it is about armed struggle. We need
to distinguish clearly between being armed and the use of arms. Weapons
are a constant in revolutionary situations, but their use is infrequent
and rarely decisive at key turning points: August 10^(th) 1792, March
18^(th) 1871, October 1917. When power is in the gutter, itâs enough to
walk over it.
Because of the distance that separates us from them, weapons have taken
on a kind of double character of fascination and disgust that can be
overcome only by handling them. An authentic pacifism cannot mean
refusing weapons, but only refusing to use them. Pacifism without being
able to fire a shot is nothing but the theoretical formulation of
impotence. Such a priori pacifism is a kind of preventive disarmament, a
pure police operation. In reality, the question of pacifism is serious
only for those who have the ability to open fire. In this case, pacifism
becomes a sign of power, since itâs only in an extreme position of
strength that we are freed from the need to fire.
From a strategic point of view, indirect, asymmetrical action seems the
most effective kind, the one best suited to our time: you donât attack
an occupying army frontally. That said, the prospect of Iraq-style urban
guerilla warfare, dragging on with no possibility of taking the
offensive, is more to be feared than to be desired. The militarization
of civil war is the defeat of insurrection. The Reds had their victory
in 1921, but the Russian Revolution was already lost.
We must consider two kinds of state reaction. One openly hostile, one
more sly and democratic. The first calls for our out and out
destruction, the second, a subtle but implacable hostility, seeks only
to recruit us. We can be defeated both by dictatorship and by being
reduced to opposing only dictatorship. Defeat consists as much in losing
the war as in losing the choice of which war to wage. Both are possible,
as was proven by Spain in 1936: the revolutionaries there were defeated
twice-over, by fascism and by the republic.
When things get serious, the army occupies the terrain. Whether or not
it engages in combat is less certain. That would require that the state
be committed to a bloodbath, which for now is no more than a threat, a
bit like the threat of using nuclear weapons for the last fifty years.
Though it has been wounded for a long while, the beast of the state is
still dangerous. A massive crowd would be needed to challenge the army,
invading its ranks and fraternizing with the soldiers. We need a March
18^(th) 1871. When the army is in the street, we have an insurrectionary
situation. Once the army engages, the outcome is precipitated. Everyone
finds herself forced to take sides, to choose between anarchy and the
fear of anarchy. An insurrection triumphs as a political force. It is
not impossible to defeat an army politically.
The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible. It becomes
irreversible when youâve defeated both authority and the need for
authority, property and the taste for appropriation, hegemony and the
desire for hegemony. That is why the insurrectionary process carries
within itself the form of its victory, or that of its defeat.
Destruction has never been enough to make things irreversible. What
matters is how itâs done. There are ways of destroying that unfailingly
provoke the return of what has been crushed. Whoever wastes their energy
on the corpse of an order can be sure that this will arouse the desire
for vengeance. Thus, wherever the economy is blocked and the police are
neutralized, it is important to invest as little pathos as possible in
overthrowing the authorities. They must be deposed with the most
scrupulous indifference and derision.
In times like these, the end of centralized revolutions reflects the
decentralization of power. Winter Palaces still exist but they have been
relegated to assaults by tourists rather than revolutionary hordes.
Today it is possible to take over Paris, Rome, or Buenos Aires without
it being a decisive victory. Taking over Rungis would certainly be more
effective than taking over the Elysée Palace.[28] Power is no longer
concentrated in one point in the world; it is the world itself, its
flows and its avenues, its people and its norms, its codes and its
technologies. Power is the organization of the metropolis itself. It is
the impeccable totality of the world of the commodity at each of its
points. Anyone who defeats it locally sends a planetary shock wave
through its networks. The riots that began in Clichy-sous-Bois filled
more than one American household with joy, while the insurgents of
Oaxaca found accomplices right in the heart of Paris. For France, the
loss of centralized power signifies the end of Paris as the center of
revolutionary activity. Every new movement since the strikes of 1995 has
confirmed this. Itâs no longer in Paris that the most daring and
consistent actions are carried out. To put it bluntly, Paris now stands
out only as a target for raids, as a pure terrain to be pillaged and
ravaged. Brief and brutal incursions from the outside strike at the
metropolitan flows at their point of maximum density. Rage streaks
across this desert of fake abundance, then vanishes. A day will come
when this capital and its horrible concretion of power will lie in
majestic ruins, but it will be at the end of a process that will be far
more advanced everywhere else.
In the subway, thereâs no longer any trace of the screen of
embarrassment that normally impedes the gestures of the passengers.
Strangers make conversation without making passes. A band of comrades
conferring on a street corner. Much larger assemblies on the boulevards,
absorbed in discussions. Surprise attacks mounted in city after city,
day after day. A new military barracks has been sacked and burned to the
ground. The evicted residents of a building have stopped negotiating
with the mayorâs office; they settle in. A company manager is inspired
to blow away a handful of his colleagues in the middle of a meeting.
Thereâs been a leak of files containing the personal addresses of all
the cops, together with those of prison officials, causing an
unprecedented wave of sudden relocations. We carry our surplus goods
into the old village bar and grocery store, and take what we lack. Some
of us stay long enough to discuss the general situation and figure out
the hardware we need for the machine shop. The radio keeps the
insurgents informed of the retreat of the government forces. A rocket
has just breached a wall of the Clairvaux prison. Impossible to say if
it has been months or years since the âeventsâ began. And the prime
minister seems very alone in his appeals for calm.
[1] MichĂšle Alliot-Marie, the French Interior Minister.
[2] banlieueâFrench ghettoes, usually located in the suburban periphery.
[3] Chibani is Arabic for old man, here referring to the old men who
play backgammon in the cafes of Belleville, a largely immigrant
neighborhood in Paris.
[4] They All Must Go!âthe chant of the 2001 Argentine rebellion.
[5] A French Anti-Racist NGO set up by Francois Mitterandâs Socialist
Party in the 1980s.
[6] The mafia âcode of silenceâ: absolutely no cooperation with state
authorities or reliance on their services.
[7] The battle that crushed the Paris Commune of 1871, during which
hundreds of buildings around Paris were torched by the communards
[8] Banlieue northeast of Paris, where, on October 27, 2005, two
teenagers were killed as they fled the police, setting off the 2005
riots.
[9] Brigade Anti-Criminalite plainclothes cops who act as an anti-gang
force in the banlieues but also in demonstrations, often operating as a
gang themselves in competition for territory and resources.
[10] Popular French rap group.
[11] citĂ©âa housing project, typically in impoverished areas like the
banlieues.
[12] The Ferry lawsâfounding Franceâs secular and republican system of
educationâwere named after Jules Ferry who initially proposed them in
1881.
[13] A legendary French outlaw, 1936â1979
[14] âflambant neuf,ââliterally, âburning newââis the French equivalent
of the English âbrand new.â
[15] A 2006 movement in France, principally of university and
high-school students, against a new employment law (Contrat premiĂšre
embaucheâCPE) permitting less secure job contracts for young people.
[16] Andropov was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union from 1982 to 1984.
[17] Jean-Baptiste Colbert served as the French minister of finance from
1665 to 1683 under the rule of King Louis XIV
[18] Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid
of Citizens (ATTAC) is a non-party political organization that advocates
social-democratic reforms, particularly the âTobin taxâ on international
foreign exchange intended to curtail currency speculation and fund
social policies.
[19] la décroissance (negative growth) is a French left-ecological
movement which advocates a reduction in consumption and production for
the sake of environmental sustainability and an increase in the quality
of life.
[20] A French equivalent of the English language magazine Adbusters.
[21] ĂlectricitĂ© de France (EDF) is the main electricity generation and
distribution company in France and one of the largest in the world,
supplying most of its power from nuclear reactors.
[22] A certain distance leads to a certain obscurity. Common Ground has
been criticized in North American for the fact that its activities were
geared towards a return to normalityâthat is, to the normal functioning
of things. In any case it clearly remains in the realm of classical
politics. The founder of Common Ground, former-Black Panther Malik
Rahim, eventually used the project as part of his unsuccessful run for
the US Congress in 2008. It was also later revealed that one of the main
spokesmen for the project, Brandon Darby, was an FBI informant.
[23] Perben II is a law introduced in France in 2004 that targets
âorganized crimeâ and âdelinquencyâ and allows for sentencing without
trial.
[24] The âred lanternâ is the last place finisher in the Tour de France.
[25] The enragés and exaltés were both radical groups in the French
revolution.
[26] TarterĂȘts is a banlieue in the Essonne region of France. The
âTarterĂȘts Anti- Cop Brigadeâ was a name that was employed to claim
responsibility for actions against police in this area in the 1980s
[27] The phrase âminimum serviceâ refers to the work that is deemed
necessary in sectors deemed essential to the running of the national
economy which workers are thus legally required to perform during
strikes.
[28] Rungis is a wholesale food market outside of Paris, the largest of
its kind in the world.