Book Club: The Coming Insurrection

[Rumckle]

"The Coming Insurrection" is our new book club book, and is available:

http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/

and a number of PDF's that are good for printing:

http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html

(Thanks Enki for the links)

There is a tract that originated in France, with some situationist influences, called "The Coming Insurrection".  It is kind of a big deal in radical circles, because the text is associated with the Tarnac 9, French anarchist saboteurs who were arrested in a very high profile case on the Continent, not least because of the use of draconian anti-terrorism legislation against the 9, who never hurt anyone physically with their actions.

Being non fiction I don't think we have to worry about spoilers, so I'm going to post a bit after I read a section or two.

I am going to start with The First Circle: "I AM WHAT I AM", because I want to read up more on the events mentioned and the recent history of France before I say anything about the introduction.



First Circle
"I AM WHAT I AM"


I was reminded of the Law of Eristic Escalation, the more we try to define ourselves, as individuals, the further we get from our "self". We start to define ourselves as our jobs, our race, our gender, our preference in cola, the trainers we wear, but this just leads to us no longer identifying with our self, but identifying with the products we use, and various other meaningless descriptions.

It reminded me of the Apple ad campaign, "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC", while this was a campaign designed for and payed for by Apple, it is not just an advertising campaign for Apple. It creates strong feelings of association for both Apple and Microsoft, depending on which you use. It goes beyond someone who uses Macs, beyond someone who prefers Macs, to the point where the person is identified by the product. And, although the ads were designed to make PCs look dorky, the same identifying idea works just as well for PCs (and by extension Windows).

This leads to people making certain that they are an individual, they have to strive to show how they are special and unique (just like everyone else), rather than just live their lives. Thus we seem to have people wasting their time and energy, running themselves down, not just to differentiate themselves from the group, but to make damn sure that everyone can see how they are different. The problem of course is that everyone is striving to do that, which means that even though everyone's individualism is just different form of the same marketed bullshit, people are shouting louder and louder to get people to pay attention to them.


This chapter brings up two points I found particularly interesting:

1. The way the author refers to the military struggle between the "Empire" and the people.

"I AM WHAT I AM," then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign

This partly seems like hyperbole on part of the author, but it also seems like the author wants to get us to consider this "rebellion" in terms of a military conflict (which it is pointed out in the introduction the "Empire" is doing anyway). If we consider it as a military conflict, then, even with the disorganised nature of "our" campaign, we would have a better chance of succeeding with "our" goals.
(As an aside, calling the enemy/machine the "Empire" is in the introduction in one of the bloom0101 PDFs that is not present on the html version of the text, I just like using it because it gives a Star Wars feel to the whole thing)


2. The way in which we are urged to stand our ground, in a way. Consider:

Freedom isn't 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.

and

Contrary to what has been repeated to us since childhood, intelligence doesn't mean knowing how to adapt – or if that is a kind of intelligence, it's the intelligence of slaves. Our inadaptability, our fatigue, are only problems from the standpoint of what aims to subjugate us.

This would be an effective method of standing up to the "Empire", if you have the numbers. But, I feel that this early on in the campaign, there must be some kind of adaptability needed in the way we attempt to take down the "Empire".


Though, I could be reading this wrong, I guess the other option is that we shouldn't have to adapt our "selves", or sacrifice our own individualism, making it become what the "Empire" thinks an individual should be. In which case it would be okay to adapt our techniques and tools of war, as long as we do not compromise our own morals or individualism.


There was one part that I really did not understand however:

The family only exists as a family, that is, as a hell, for those who've quit trying to alter its debilitating mechanisms, or don't know how to.

I can't see what they are trying to get at here, are they saying that our family will only hold us back from our goals, or is "family" another term for the "Empire", or something else entirely?

[the last yatto]

someone said there was a good followup to this, but he was a spag so i didnt write it down

[Cain]

Nice pic, Yatto. 

I just discovered copying and pasting from the PDF will be difficult, since it all comes out like )ZIV]SRIEKVIIW-X·WEFSYXXSI\TPSHI-XMWEGORS[PIHKIH[MXLEWIVMSYW when I try.  One of the other PDFs works better, but is harder to read.  Argh.  Anyway.

My copy has a quote just before the Point of Clarification, which reads:

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 things can only get worse.  "The future has no future" is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks.

Apart from the bit about it getting worse and the punks, that sounds almost like the BIP, in some ways.  There are no ways out, there are no empty hopes or promises and those who say they have them are proven wrong almost instantly.  I also feel the hope jab is a bit of a not-so-sly poke at the Obama crowd, one which was of course prescient.  Letting go of hope is a process of disillusionment, which, if you break down the word, isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Learning to strip away the illusions from reality and not rely on distant and unlikely solutions, can be a starting point for finding real, concrete solutions to present problems.

To prevent the celebrations from being totally eclipsed by the traditional disorder, 36,000 cops and 16 helicopters are rushed out by Alliot-Marie – the 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. It's impossible to ignore its cold and pragmatic implementation, no longer even bothering to present itself as an operation of pacification.

"The Greek contamination" is an interesting way of putting it.  I remember, being unemployed and having plenty of time on my hands when the Greek protests erupted, taking a certain pleasure in watching the disorder they brought to the towns and cities.  But Greece has always had an activist culture, even more so than the French.  And the way the crisis was being discussed - it was certainly in military terms.  There is in fact a certain irony that Bush's career (post-9/11) started with talking about the threat to Americans posed by terrorists and ended by discussing the threat posed by financial institutions, in almost exactly the same terms and with almost exactly the same method of response, namely that Americans must give up certain of their "freedoms" in return for the threat to be properly vanquished.  The response was more moderated in other European capitals, but the police were certainly mobilized, and warnings of a radicalized middle class and a "summer of rage" were common fodder not just for the attention-seeking tabloids, but more serious publications too.

None of these worrisome subjects should appear insurmountable in an era whose predominant mode of government is precisely the management of crises.

This has a point to it, as well.  Governments seem to enjoy disorder, in the sense that it gives them something to attempt to control and to exert more than the usual amount of power over.  Tony Blair was very fond of this style of governance, as was Bush.  The reason is of course pretty obvious, "the crisis isn't real".  By creating the climate of crisis, you can more effectively ram through legislation and exert force with fewer questions and restraints.  A crisis allows for the potential of government power to be unleashed, something which is fairly rare in our otherwise regimented and bureaucratic political systems (our societies do not require force to hold them together, therefore there are less chances to actually exert force.  If the exertion of force is a pathological desire, then government must by necessity turn to governance via crisis to give this an outlet).

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.

This is, of course, entirely possible.  John Ralston Saul is a Canadian philosopher and politician I've been reading recently, in particular his book Voltaire's Bastards.  In this, he suggests all economic crisis' since the early 70s are in fact the product of a macro-economic trend with temporary recoveries based, essentially on ponzi schemes and cheap credit, which inevitably collapse like the weak house of cards that they are, which puts countries back into a recession, which is then combated by more ponzi schemes.  And this book was written in 1992.  Not much has changed since then, it would seem.  Other trends suggest something did happen in the 70s, which arrested real earnings in the western world, which plunged us into a situation which enriches a few at the expense of the rest, and which is becoming increasingly untenable.  If that system is starting to eat itself, which it most certainly is, considering the vast destruction of wealth in 2009, then it is very plausible that this cannot be fixed.

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.

Which I kind of hinted at above.  The Regime of the Colonels, incidentally, was a Gladio-supported, proto-fascist regime.  Just so you know.  Its short existence also spawned the November 17th terrorist organization, who assassinated many associated with the regime once they fell from power.

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 wasn't decided, and put down, in the streets – the police being visibly outflanked there – it's 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.

This sounds familiar.  They may have had bodies on the street, but the government simply ignored them and did as it wished anyway.  It debated, it went through the motions of being a representative democracy, while ignoring the point that the people who it supposedly represented were pissed off enough to attack riot police in the streets and demand the resignation of said government.

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 quasi-linguistic operation that goes hand in hand with quasi-military operations.

I'm not sure what they are saying here, but I'm going to take a guess: I think they are saying if you show any sort of passion or emotion when involved in politics, you are sidelined by being labelled, at the best "unserious" and at the worst, "extremist", and contrasted against the "good citizen", who is of course docile and does what every good citizen does - express their concern through legitimate channels, and votes at the duly appointed times.  By sidelining such groups as being outside of the citizenry, it then becomes much easier to justify paramilitary operations against them, since they are not really part of the political process.  That's my guess anyhow, other interpretations are welcome.

[the last yatto]

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

(As an aside, calling the enemy/machine the "Empire" is in the introduction in one of the bloom0101 PDFs that is not present on the html version of the text, I just like using it because it gives a Star Wars feel to the whole thing)

Not to screw over the S/N ratio for the thread, but I very much like using the term 'Empire' as well, mostly for the PKD vibe. For PKD, the Empire (which Never Ended) was what other gnostic writers might call the "abortion of matter" -- the whole damn fucked up world infecting and counterinfecting everyone and everything that stood against it. This is very poetically adaptable, and a lot of the things PKD says about 'The Empire" also apply to "The Spectacle" (and its Society), "The Machine", etc.

[the last yatto]

watching faux news for the  and noticed glenn beck say this book was written by a bunch of commies

personally i thought they were anarchist

still need to finish reading this for the second time

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

watching faux news for the  and noticed glenn beck say this book was written by a bunch of commies

personally i thought they were anarchist

still need to finish reading this for the second time

They appear to be anarchists, but (like most French radical groups appear to be) Marxist-inspired. They also specifically suggested living in communes (making them LITERALLY communists, though not politically communist). There is a strong anti-capitalist vibe, but, again, I think that's just something with the French radical culture in general.

[Dr. Paes]

Mostly posting to get updates on thread.
Might contribute after a few re-readings.

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 quasi-linguistic operation that goes hand in hand with quasi-military operations.

I'm not sure what they are saying here, but I'm going to take a guess: I think they are saying if you show any sort of passion or emotion when involved in politics, you are sidelined by being labelled, at the best "unserious" and at the worst, "extremist", and contrasted against the "good citizen", who is of course docile and does what every good citizen does - express their concern through legitimate channels, and votes at the duly appointed times.  By sidelining such groups as being outside of the citizenry, it then becomes much easier to justify paramilitary operations against them, since they are not really part of the political process.  That's my guess anyhow, other interpretations are welcome.

That's pretty much how I read that too.

[Rumckle]

Sorry, been kinda busy/distracted/lazy.

Have almost finished it, so I will post some more in the next few days.

[Dr. Paes]

Hopefully someone has bought ink for the printer at work and I can use it all up again printing books.
I have a laptop whenever my flatmates aren't using theirs, because mine is in pieces on my floor, so it's hard to get time to read it.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I have read it. I will reread and post something about it soon.

[Cain]

Sorry, I've totally dropped the ball on this, I know.  Other things taking up my time.

However, in the meantime, Glenn Beck has now turned The Coming Insurrection into a bestseller http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/449785-Glenn_Beck_Helps_Turn_Anarchist_Book_Into_Bestseller.php

[the last yatto]

sixth printing?
...wow i should keep my first edition in better condition then

[the last yatto]

Greek riots, were echoed around the globe, why?
By Chris Carucci
http://thesop.org/index.php?bio=cooperstown

The December 6th riots of 2008 sprang up again in 2009 as various Anarchists, Labor Unions, Human Rights Activists and others began to protest the killing of Alexandros Grigoropoulos who was shot by a group of two special police, the shooter being Epaminondas Korkoneas. While this has long since been claimed as the main reason for the riots, it is simply the spark to a much greater cause.
London blockade of Greek Embassy

Police statements say that Alexandros Grigoropoulos was about to through a petrol bomb at a police patrol car when Officer Korkoneas shot `warning shots`. There was no evidence present to support this claim by the police. Witness statements refer to the officer "taking direct aim" at Alexandros, who later died of gunshot wounds before he arrived at the hospital. Alexandors was shot at 9pm December 6th, 2008.

Through the global economic decline, Greece has lost a vast amount of jobs within their country, contributing to a large amount of unemployment. The unemployment rate is suspected to be around 10%. Various government scandals. Some of the Scandals are as follows...

http://thesop.org/story/activism/2010/01/29/greek-riots-were-echoed-around-the-globe-why.php

Article on the riot, it`s damages, and main areas of protest January 29th.

-- Credit to Renee Maltezou for the information and texts in regards to the Government Scandals. --

[the last yatto]

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/265482/march-03-2010/greece-s-economic-downfall---scheherazade-rehman

Scheherazade Rehman discusses the likelihood of Greece receiving a bailout from the European Union. (06:59)

EU wary of Greece seeking IMF help
By MATT MOORE and PAN PYLAS (AP) – 4 hours ago
BERLIN — Who's afraid of the IMF? Greece is betting that the major European Union powers just might be.

The heavily indebted Balkan country, facing German and French reluctance to pony up and help bail it out as a fellow euro user, has declared it may turn to the Washington-based international lending agency.

Greece is asking for almost 7 billion dollars,
guessing most of that will be fancy riot gear and tanks