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The Coming Insurrection: A Tiny Book That Could Change The World

Keith Farnish | 27.07.2009 16:04 | Analysis | Free Spaces | Social Struggles | South Coast | World


This is a review of the radical French publication, The Coming Insurrection. Because of its availability for free, and importance as a text, I think this is considered worthy of Indymedia.




There is such a thing as “word exhaustion”, the feeling of weariness that comes over a reader when they feel that a piece of text has outstayed its welcome and the author should probably learn at what point the reader is likely to lose interest. I have a two volume version of “The World As Will And Representation” by Schopenhauer on my bookcase, which runs to 1200 pages — I barely made my way through the explanation of what The Will entails before giving up; The Coming Insurrection [ http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/] is ninety pages long, and is sufficient to start a world-changing revolution.

Written in the aftermath of the 2005 Paris riots by a French group calling themselves The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection really only has one aim: to prepare the burgeoning, but clearly disorientated, radical elements of urban society for a period of rapid social change. In the words of the “authors”:

"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. It’s 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 determinant – and 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."

What is remarkable about this statement, from the introduction, is how self-limiting it appears to be: there are no policies, no agendas, there is no call for collective action or organisation; just a set of statements that declare what is and what must be in the barest, most stripped down manner. Yet, within this austere text is an energy and motivation entirely missing from any of the so-called “programs for change” that are published on an almost annual basis by the social and environmental mainstream. There is also a turn of phrase that is utterly poetic but somehow manages to remain far removed from the romantic visions of the French enlightenment.

Social change was never so clearly, and appetisingly stated.

And perhaps that is what prompted Glenn Beck of Fox News [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKyi2qNskJc] to decry the formerly low-key booklet as a “dangerous leftist book” and “a call to arms for violent revolution”. In his panicky opinion piece, Beck quotes a section from The Coming Insurrection thus:

"Take up arms. Do everything possible to make their use unnecessary. There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection. Weapons are necessary."

What he does not do is quote the rest of the paragraph, which is taken from a relatively small section near the end of the text concerning the need to defend against the almost inevitable militerisation of any government reaction to potential uprising. Had he done so, he would have had to have quoted as follows:

"There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection. Weapons are necessary: it’s a question of doing everything possible to make using them unnecessary. An insurrection is more about taking up arms and maintaining an “armed presence” 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 10th 1792, March 18th 1871, October 1917. When power is in the gutter, it’s 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."

In other words: “Accept that weapons may be necessary, but only use them as a last resort.” This is not some mindless rant by gun-toting revolutionaries; it is a beautifully written, carefully thought out digest of a set of pertinent ideas in dire need of communication. French text is sublime at its best, although terrifically difficult to translate while still keeping its original meaning: what I find particularly heartening is the effort that has gone into the English language translation; it still feels French; you can almost smell the damp corners of the squats, and taste the bitter dregs of coffee at the bottom of the cups recently emptied by those people who are likely to have a hand in whatever comes afterwards in their parts of the city.

Of course there are problems, but these are few: uppermost is the bloody-minded determination to remain in the aforementioned squats and abandoned office buildings in order to remove the power base that has turned humanity into an apathetic mass of automata. Those who wish to take up the call in the cities will either be incredibly brave or incredibly foolish; but there are other ways, and this is perhaps the omission that will put many readers off. Those that have to stomach to face the system head-on are to be praised, but not at the expense of those who wish to persue other, less confrontational forms of rebellion [ http://earth-blog.bravejournal.com/entry/27638/].

Less critical, but nevertheless worth mentioning, is the term “Ecology” earlier in the text, which is met with scorn because it is seen to legitimise the separation between nature and humanity. This seems to be no more than a translation issue, for the term “L’Ecologie” in French has been usurped to have the same meaning as the English “Environmentalism”. In this sense the criticism is justified, for the modern environmental movement across the Industrial West has little to do with the ecology that humanity is utterly dependent upon.

Regardless of whether you disagree with the need for fundamental, self-imposed social change or not, The Coming Insurrection needs to be read to be fully understood; it will only take you a short while to read, but like it or not, it will affect you.

To buy the booklet, go to Amazon.com [ http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Insurrection-Semiotext-Intervention/dp/1584350806]. Alternatively you can read the full text online, or download both the French and English text (in booklet form for printing) from the Support the Tarnac 9 website [ http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/].


Keith Farnish is author of “Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis“

Keith Farnish
- Homepage: http://www.amatterofscale.com

Comments

Hide the following 8 comments

other reviews

27.07.2009 20:00

here are some links to other reviews of the same article. Causing a stir in european autonomist circles, hence its publication in occupied London I imagine.

I quite like it, not all of it, but some of the analysis. Also, on a personal note I like its style, quite readable.

Z-net review:  http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090726161656635

Occupied London:  http://www.occupiedlondon.org/strike

also, a libcom forum at  http://libcom.org/forums/theory/coming-insurrection-30052009

thought there were more knocking about but I cant track them down.

intrigued


in the name of my rich parents....

28.07.2009 09:27

folks...

as you may know... or not. Julian Coupat's parents live in Paris's Hauts-de-Saine region...
that is where also the head of french police lives and many others loaded individuals...
(the parents are going to have problems with his neighborhood I guess... )

While this book create a sort of romance of a possible future, according to many, fails to put in the picture a proper class analysis, because it can not find reasons why people should be working in factories and why should they struggle with food and cash ...

"la lutte ce classe" ....

class war not a bourgeois war...

 http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/2008/11/29/le-monde-article-on-the-tarnac-nine/

“Julien told me: ‘I want to live frugally,’” shares his father, a physician who co-founded a pharmaceutical laboratory, today retired. “He could have become a financial executive at Barclay’s.” But this only son who lives on 1000 euro per month has turned his back to the cozy universe where he grew up in the Hauts-de-Saine region (the wealthy north-west suburbs of Paris). “In a way this must have been a wonderful catalyst for his thinking”, reflects the father out loud amidst the rich residence nestled in a kind of forested enclave.

Mr. Coupat, who discovered Tarnac a year ago, bought the house next to the grocery store. He also purchased for his son an old craftsman studio of 50 square meters in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, which was going to house the future project of a militant journal. Unduly presented in the media as a luxury loft, the studio was Julien and Yldune’s current refuge.

souf - France


ha ha out come the nay-sayers

28.07.2009 09:48

so what Juliens dad is well off!!! kropotkin was a prince!!! what a bullshit way to smear some-one!!

some of the tedious middle-class fools who run around the UK 'class struggle' web 'scene' (it doesn't exist off-line), they hardly come from salt-of-the-earth working class families. oh the much fetishised 'class struggle', what a load of old bolloxs you keep sucking

pathetic! also who gives a fuck if the book doesn't go on about Mcworkerist factoryism that you brits webgeeks all wank on over - keep up your usual scraping of the bottom of the barrel of the labour 'movement'.



autonomist


Autonomist, would you care...

28.07.2009 10:40

Autonomist, would you care to elaborate further your objection to class struggle as a means to over throw capitalism especially in relation to the decent but somewhat utopian visions of the writings of the Invisible Committee?

I for one would appreciate it.

@


Class Struggle is not the only struggle

28.07.2009 15:27

Class, as an analytical tool is adequate to the tasks sketched out by Hegel and his descendants. Working-Class is, quite rapidly, becoming non-existent.

A Class analysis need not be a Working-Class analysis. Ponder on the number of 1968 "radicals" now in positions of power. The Coming Insurrection is a work of Class Political Analysis. Tough luck to those clinging to the outmoded notion of "Working Class analysis being the only possible analysis".

Today, Marx is studied by marketing people who then go on to perform class analysis in terms of the class interest of their employer or client. The notion that they are not class conscious is laughable: they actually want their employers class interests to be served.

The biggest failure of the class politics is the presumption that only class politics has any importance. Class politics - as the Nomenklatura of the Soviet Union or the Oligarchy of the Demopublicans - is domesticated and without any impetus for change. Unless there is radical, sustained and articulate thought put into what constitutes change, then the future is a series of project managed transitions without any human spirit.

All those screaming "we must have a class analysis" should put up that analysis as an essay and see how it fares. Much like Governments who say "we must reform X" - without actually stating what "reform" constitutes or what "X" actually is, the class analysis has become an empty signifier of intellectual fetishism. The truth is that "class analysis" failed in 1968 when those radicals failed to transform the world. The Coming Insurrection is part of the Thesis-Antithesis process that _is_ class analysis embodied as a social transformation and not some reified text.

Situationist


Class

28.07.2009 18:09

Actually, the book has a lot to say about almost all of this: including the pointlessness of "class war" and a pretty scathing attack on Marxism. What seems to upset most readers on the left, is its refusal to accept that the "left" (whatever that is) holds the keys to divesting us of the status quo. Left, right, upper, middle, lower, working, black, white...all irrelevant. We've all been screwed in some way or another and no one group has any right to take the moral high ground; they are nearly all as bad as each other.

Keith


Coming Insurrection - good but a mess

30.07.2009 12:03

But is it fair enough to point out that most people can't move to the countryside and grow carrots for all because they can't afford too. It doesn't necessarily follow that the book is shit though but I wonder if this background does tend to give the book's utopian strategy of exodus and withdrawal a slightly compromised tone.

Elsewhere the book talks of the modern world of work in the following terms -

'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.'

This may be partially true in Europe but who is doing the outsourced work in China, Mexico? Even more so, nurses working 12 hours shifts for low pay in a hospital in Bradford for example are not living a world of workers without work.

Although the political categories 'worker', 'class' etc are overdetermined, you can't be surprised that people remain suspicious of such descriptions of the world esp when accompanied by alternative lifestyles in the Tarnac countryside.

It's a good book though.

AA


Audio version of the book

30.07.2009 12:54

The Coming Insurrection (first half) 1:  http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/34693

The Coming Insurrection (second half) 2:  http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/34699

audiophile