The Invisible Committee: "Spread anarchy, live communism"

The Invisible Committee: "Spread anarchy, live communism"

“When we are looking for an enemy, we often start by projecting ourselves on an abstract scene, in which the world has disappeared. Let us ask ourselves the same question, but starting from the neighbourhood where we live, from the company where we work, from the professional sector we are familiar with. Then the answer is clear; then the front lines can be distinctly seen, and who is on what side can easily be determined. This is because the question of the confrontation, the properly political question, only makes sense in a given world, in a substantial world. For those who are nowhere, cybernetic philosophers or metropolitan hipsters, the political question never makes sense.”

 

"There is a confrontation underlying this world. There is no need to be in Misrata today to perceive it. The streets of New York, for instance, reveal the extent to which this confrontation has been refined, for here we find all the sophisticated apparatuses needed to contain what is always threatening. Here is the mute violence that crushes down what still lives under the blocks of concrete and fake smiles. When we talk of ‘apparatuses’, we don’t only invoke the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), surveillance cameras and body scanners, guns and denunciation, anti- theft locks and cell phones.


Rather,  in  the  layout  of  a  town  like  New  York  the  pinnacle  of  the global  petit-organic-hipster-bourgeoisie  we  mean  whatever  captures intensities and vitalities in order to chew them up, digest them, and shit out value. But if capitalism triumphs every day, it is not merely because it  crushes,  exploits  and  represses,  but  also  because  it  is  desirable. This must be kept in mind when building a revolutionary movement.
There  is  a  war  going  on a  permanent,  global  civil  war.  Two  things prevent  us  from  understanding  it  or  even  from  perceiving  it.  First,  the denial of the very fact of confrontation is still a part of this confrontation.  And  second,  despite  all  the  new  prose  of  the  various  geopolitical specialists,  the  meaning  of  this  war  is  not  understood.  Everything  said about  the  asymmetrical  shape  of  the  so-called  ‘new  wars’  only  adds  to the confusion. The ongoing war we speak of does not have the Napoleonic magnificence of regular wars between two great armies of men, or between  two  antagonistic  classes.  Because  if  there  is  an  asymmetry  in the confrontation it is less between the forces present than over the very definition  of  the  war  itself. That  is  why  we  cannot  talk  about  a  social war:  for  if  social  war  is  a  war  that  is  led  against  us,  it  cannot  symmetrically  describe  the  war  that  we  wage  from  our  side  and  vice  versa. We have to rethink the words themselves in order to forge new concepts as weapons..."

 

Updated cover and US-Letter-sized formatting of a zine from a couple years ago.

 

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Source: ill will editions