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Title: Review: “The Coming Insurrection”
Author: Anarcho
Date: July 14, 2010
Language: en
Topics: book review, the coming insurrection
Source: Retrieved on 1st February 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=432

Anarcho

Review: “The Coming Insurrection”

This is the English translation of the principle piece of evidence in an

anti-terrorism case in France. Nine people were arrested in 2008, mostly

in the village of Tarnac, under the charge of sabotaging overhead

electrical lines on the French railways. With only little circumstantial

evidence available, the French Interior Minister has associated them

with a ultra-left insurrectionary movement and singled out this book as

a “manual for terrorism.” It is not that, but is it a manual for

revolution?

There is something I like to call “Daily-Mail-Land”, in which “political

correctness” has gone mad, an Englishman’s castle has been squatted by

gay asylum seekers in burqas claiming benefits from “our” apparently

“generous” benefits system while, simultaneously, stealing “our” jobs

and all the while New Labour and their caviar quaffing and Champaign

guzzling public sector workers have organised legions of dole scroungers

to stealth-tax “middle” England and ban them flying the “racist” English

flag. Suffice to say, any relation to reality is purely co-incidental.

The left has its own version of this: “Situ-Autonomist-Land.” Here, we

are always just moments from social revolution. The masses are not only

alienated and exploited, they consciously know it and act on that

knowledge. Workers are just dying to go on strike and if they don’t then

it’s the union-bureaucrats holding them back. If they cross picket

lines, it is because the Labour movement is too moderate and they are

simply showing their contempt for safe reforms. Every development, no

matter how apparently bad, is really (when looked closely enough) a good

sign and an expression of proletarian consciousness. Again, reality is a

passing acquaintance.

“The Coming Insurrection” is firmly part of that world. While I would

like to think fellow workers crossing my picket lines was really an

expression of their (unconscious) contempt for reformism, a more

realistic assessment would suggest 30 years of ruling-class victories

(neo-liberalism) have eroded even basic levels of class consciousness.

While things are somewhat different in France, reading “The Coming

Insurrection” on my way to work made me wonder at times whether it was

an elaborate hoax or satire. One thing is true, it does not describe the

world as I know it. While this may be a reflection on me, I doubt it.

I’m not sure that many people would recognise the world it describes.

But perhaps I’m just past it, as the text proclaims there “remains

scarcely any doubt that youth will be the first to savagely confront

power.” (17) Still, my age does allow me to remember that “I AM WHAT I

AM” is not “marketing’s latest offering to the world,” the “final stage”

in its development (29) but a hit-single from the early 80s and, half a

century before, Popeye’s catchphrase. To proclaim this as “a military

campaign, a war cry directed against everything that exists between

being” (32) seems to be clutching at straws, seeking meaning in the

meaningless. Not the best way to start a book on the current crisis we

face.

Still, good points are often made, just as the striking and imaginative

turn of phrase we come to expect of social protest in France is

exercised. They note that work under capitalism is based on both

exploitation and participation (45) something all too often glossed

over. On ecology, it correctly notes that capitalists “hired our parents

to destroy this world, and now they’d like to put us to work rebuilding

it, and – to add insult to injury – at a profit” (75–6) So bits and

pieces, rarely developed, are of interest but over all the work is

lacking in real analysis and strategy.

No attempt is made to synthesis the proclamation that work has developed

to the level “that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of

living labour necessary in the manufacture of any product” by means of,

amongst others, “outsourcing” and rising productivity. (46) Work is

still being done, just in other countries. As for raising productivity,

they seem to forget they denounced that as the cause of “[s]ickness,

fatigue, depression” so making France “the land of anxiety pills ... the

paradise of anti-depressants, the Mecca of neurosis.” (33) Still, we are

“living the paradox of a society of workers without work” (46) so are we

getting stressed being over-worked to produce things we don’t really

need. Yet is this that new? Much labour under capitalism has been

wasteful, related purely to the needs of the profit system, rather than

meeting human needs. Similarly, the “flexible, undifferentiated

workforce” hardly produces “the worker who is no longer a worker, who no

longer has a trade” (the temp) (48) but rather the 19^(th) century

wage-slave returned. Is there a quantitative difference to suggest a new

era and so radically new tactics and strategies?

Destruction is a theme of the book. Thus a “day will come when” Paris

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.” (132) It talks about “sabotaging the social machine”

and ponder “[h]ow can a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered

useless?” (112) That sort of irresponsible rhetoric will, undoubtedly,

be quoted by the Interior Minister but that does not stop it being

stupid. What of the people dependent on said train-line and electricity?

Unlike a strike, such infrastructure cannot be easily repaired once

destroyed.

This is a recurring theme, ultra-revolutionary rhetoric (with the

occasional suggestion which will keep the Interior Minister happy for

selective quotes) and a remarkably reformist and quietist practice. The

book does present the vision of dropping-out and tending your allotment.

It urges us to organise “apprenticeship, and for multiple, massive

experiments” including “understand plankton biology” and “soil

composition; study the way plants interact.” (107) Comments like

understanding “plankton biology” do provoke thoughts of a sophisticated

satire. We also discover that the commune “needs money” and that they

will “have their black markets. They are plenty of hustles” (103) Yet

people fiddling welfare are less likely to cause trouble simply to avoid

the state taking too great an interest in their goings on.

The collective direct action of the Argentine piqueteros they also point

to on the same page is the opposite of hustling the system. That they

cannot see this suggests they favour doing something (“to no longer wait

is ... to enter into the logic of insurrection” (96)) but this seems

more like action for actions sake, with the hope that something positive

will come from it. As a comrade once said in reply to an animal rights

activist’s proclamation that “thought without action means nothing”,

action without thought means Bar-L (the prison said activist was in at

the time).

There is a central paradox of the work. They demonise organisations and

milieus while promoting their own. They proclaim that we must “[f]lee

all milieus. Each and every milieu is oriented towards the

neutralisation of some truth” as they “are the old people’s homes where

all revolutionary desires traditionally go to die.” (100) Their

solution? “Form communes” (101) And their communes are, what, exactly?

Yet another milieu, surely? No, apparently, because the commune only

“degenerates into a milieu the moment it loses contact with the truth on

which it is founded.” (102) Which is nice and vague, as well as sounding

deep…

As for organisations, they are “aren’t needed when people organise

themselves.” (122) So organisations are not needed until people need

them… And yet their communes do sound like organisations for they “come

into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and

decide on a common path ... Why shouldn’t communes proliferate

everywhere? In every factory, every street, every village, every school.

At long last, the reign of the base committees!” (101) Yet we are also

informed that an “assembly is not a place for decisions but for talk”

and that decisions “are vital only in emergency situations, where the

exercise of democracy is already compromised.” (122) So general

assemblies are out, until the very next page when the book points to the

example of “the sections of the Paris Commune during the French

Revolution”! (123–4) They seem aware of this obvious contradiction,

noting that we must seek “to set aside the fantasy of a General Assembly

and replace it with an assembly of presences.” (123) What that actually

means and how they differ are left to the reader, as is how “we must

commit ourselves to their coordination” (127) while the traditional

libertarian means of co-ordination, the mandated delegate, is dismissed

out of hand (“people with mandates are by definition hindered” (123)).

Yet, who can deny that “[e]very wildcat strike is a commune; every

building occupied collectively and on a clear basis is a commune. The

action committees of 1968 were communes”? (102) Or deny that such organs

of working class power have general assemblies (or sections), discuss

and make decisions, federate and mandate delegates for the coordination

of their struggles, and so on? To denounce organisation while urging the

creation of new organisations is not that convincing, no matter the

lovely expressions used.

Is “fucking it all up” (112) really a revolutionary strategy? No, it is

just a cry of nihilistic alienation at a system which appears to beyond

influence, beyond change. Denouncing everything and postulating the most

radical of spontaneous jolts based on pan-destruction and ruins may

sound extremely revolutionary but it is just shows that they have no

real awareness of how to transform society or how a free world could

function. In the end, this rhetoric is more often than not a disguise

for reformist practice (at best) or inaction (at worse). And this is

reflected in the book, with wishful thinking about global insurrection

sitting side by side with tending your allotment, fiddling welfare and

studying the finer points of plankton cultivation.

Revolution does not mean destruction. It means taking over and

transformation, constructive change. It means recognising where we are

now and developing strategies to get to a freer society while

recognising, and preparing for, the difficulties social movements (never

mind a social revolution) will face. Kropotkin (correctly) argued (in

“The Conquest of Bread” and elsewhere) that a social revolution would

face economic disruption and would need to face those challenges. The

centralisation and industrialisation of production has continued apace

since those days, so it is really not sufficient to glibly suggest “[w]e

must start today, in preparation for the days when we’ll need more than

just a symbolic portion of our nourishment and care” (107) as provided

by allotments and such like. Yes, “a blockade is only as effective as

the insurgent’s capacity to supply themselves and to communicate, as

effective as the self-organisation of the different communes” (125) but

the aim must be to spread out the struggle and ensure what can be

restarted can be done so quickly (something difficult to do if you’ve

destroyed key parts of the social infrastructure). Ironically, it

proclaims mainstream environmentalism as a means of ensuring “Voluntary

austerity” (77) while, at the same time, urging us to acquire “skills to

provide, over time, for one’s own basic subsistence .... it seems

pointless to wait any longer.” (125) Basic subsistence sounds remarkably

austere…

External shocks figure large in the book, as “the suspension of

normality ... liberate[s] potentialities for self-organisation

unthinkable in other circumstances.” (119) That our struggle as a class

within capitalism may create such potentialities is not the focus.

Liberation, if it comes, will come as a result of external forces. Yet

this is just the old Marxist focus on capitalist economic breakdown as

the motivator for socialism (which raises the question, if socialism is

so wonderful why does it need even more misery to make people want it?).

This is applied to history, as the “revolutionary workers’ movement

understood it well, and took advantage of the crises of the bourgeois

economy to gather strength.” (119) Except economic crisis has usually

resulted in a massive weakening of labour’s power. It is harder to

strike facing mass unemployment, as can be seen from the organising

drives in America during the 1930s starting over 4 years into the Great

Depression. Unions in the UK have not recovered from the mass

unemployment of the early 1980s recession.

They point to the Paris Commune to show “the unique attraction of the

power of fire” (55), apparently forgetting that the burning of Paris was

a product of defeat. Similarly, they point to Genoa in 2001 as a

positive example while failing to note that the movement was kicked off

the streets by the state. (127) Is “harassing passersby in the street”

really the same as “playing cat and mouse with riot police”? (38) Is it

really above reproach and a sign of leftism if you do note the

difference? Tellingly, the book seems to confuse Sergei Eisenstein’s

film with the actual revolution, proclaiming that “Winter Palaces still

exist but they have been relegated to assaults by tourists rather than

revolutionary hordes” (131) Yes, it is a cliché that “Nothing appears

less likely than an insurrection, but nothing is more necessary” (96)

The Russian Revolution broke out shortly after Lenin proclaimed that he

would not live to see it. Yet a riot does not equal an insurrection and

the book provides no real clue as to how to go from a riot to (social)

revolution beyond the vaguest of rhetoric.

Rest assured though: “The impasse of the present, everywhere in

evidence, is everywhere denied.” (28) That someone may not be convinced

of the evidence does not seem to be entertained. Over all it just feels

like wishful thinking, but written in a stylish French way and full of

striking expressions.

The Coming Insurrection

The Invisible Committee

Semiotext(e)

intervention

series 1