Insurrection!

           Away back in the old olden days when crowds could meet up and you walked with carefree abandon, mask free, the year 2009, a book came out and I read it and read it again, I still have a copy. The book was "The Coming Insurrection" by The Invisible Committee. I found the facts, analysis and pointers quite inspiring. I'm delighted to say that a revamped edition of the book is back out in circulation, on line for free download and printing. Go get it, read it and think.

 An excerpt:

    In the subway, there’s 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 mayor’s office; they settle in. A company manager is inspired to blow away a handful of his colleagues in the middle of a meeting. There’s 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 “events” began. And the prime minister seems very alone in his appeals for calm.

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Tomorrow Is Cancelled.

          Why no hordes on the streets, why no peasants with pitchforks, why no revolution? It is not as if the death and destruction is invisible, or the exploitation unfelt and unseen, or the gross inequality in living standards hidden, it is all there glaringly obvious for all to see. We are awash with information, we see through the lies and illusions, we accept that the propaganda portrayed world and the real world we, the ordinary people live in, are universes apart. Still the vast majority conform to the biased rules, turn up at work, pay their taxes, and run to the ballot box to make their X in the appropriate spot, believing that somehow, this time it will be different. It is a puzzling phenomenon.
       The Invisible Committee have already produced two excellent thought provoking pamphlets/booklets, the first, The Coming Insurrection, the second one, To Our Friends, they have recently come up with a third, Now. Again, interesting, insightful, and thought provoking. The following is an extract from the chapter called Tomorrow Is Cancelled.

 

 

TOMORROW IS CANCELLED

         All the reasons for making a revolution are there. Not one is lacking. The shipwreck of politics, the arrogance of the powerful, the reign of falsehood, the vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of industry, galloping misery, naked exploitation, ecological apocalypse—we are spared nothing, not even being informed about it all. “Climate: 2016 breaks a heat record,” Le Monde announces, the same as almost every year now. All the reasons are there together, but it’not reasons that make revolutions, it’s bodies. And the bodies are in front of screens. One can watch a presidential election sink like a stone. The transformation of “the most important moment in French political life” into a big trashing fest only makes the soap opera more captivating. One couldn’t imagine Koh-Lanta with such characters, such dizzying plot twists, such cruel tests, or so general a humiliation. The spectacle of politics lives on as the spectacle of its decomposition. Disbelief goes nicely with the filthy landscape. The National Front, that political negation of politics, now that negation of politics on the terrain of politics, logically occupies the “center” of this chessboard of smoking ruins. The human passengers, spellbound, are watching their shipwreck like a first-rate show. They are so enthralled that they don’t feel the water that’s already bathing their legs. In the end, they’ll transform everything into a buoy. The drowning are known for that, for trying to turn everything they touch into a life preserver. This world no longer needs explaining, critiquing, denouncing. We live enveloped in a fog of commentaries and commentaries on commentaries, of critiques and critiques of critiques of critiques, of revelations that don’t trigger anything, other than revelations about the revelations. And this fog is taking away any purchase we might have on the world. There’s nothing to criticize in Donald Trump. As to the worst that can be said about him, he’s already absorbed, incorporated it. He embodies it. He displays on a gold chain all the complaints that people have ever lodged against him. He is his own caricature, and he’s proud of it. Even the creators of South Park are throwing in the towel: “Its very complicated now that satire has become reality. We really tried to laugh about what is going on but it wasn’t possible to maintain the rhythm. What was happening was much funnier that what could be imagined. So we decided to let it go, to let them do their comedy, and we’ll do ours.” We live in a world that has established itself beyond any justification. Here, criticism doesn’t work, any more than satire does. Neither one has any impact. To limit oneself to denouncing discriminations, oppressions, and injustices, and expect to harvest the fruits of that is to get one’s epochs wrong. Leftists who think they can make something happen by lifting the lever of bad conscience are sadly mistaken. They can go and scratch their scabs in public and air their grievances hoping to arouse sympathy as much as they like; they’ll only give rise to contempt and the desire to destroy them. “Victim” has become an insult in every part of the world.

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The Death Of A Failed System.

        I recently posted about 2008 being a missed opportunity, and the fact that the disintegrating system will of course throw up other opportunities, and we should be organising for that next, system convulsion. However there is a line of thought that maintains that to wait for that opportunity is foolish, or worse, it is being complicit in prolonging the death-rattle of an already dangerous disintegrating civilisation. We are in the midst of the last convulsions of a crumbling system, its demise will not be a peaceful affair, it will be violently brutal, and savage as it devours itself and humanity, in a vain attempt to survive. For the survival of the planet and humanity, sanity demands the we bring about its death as quickly as possible. However, I believe, sadly, this can only happen when, what I often refer to as, “that great apolitical apathetic horde” open their eyes to the reality of their situation and see the full blown disaster of which they are an integral part. It is all there, the struggling midst poverty and deprivation, brutal wars for power and wealth, the arrogant flaunting of wealth by the few, midst the misery of the many, the vulgar spectacle of opulence trampling the poor, the many dressed in misery and humiliation, justice and compassion battered and blooded. This failed economic system has turned our planet into a theatre where the darkest and most brutal of dystopian plays is being enacted, we are the willing players, who can carry the story to it cataclysmic end, or we can change the script, to one of hope and sustainable survival, but time is running out. 

Tomorrow is cancelled

        It’s useless to wait-for 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.
       The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

       The Invisible Committee, is one group who advocate the second line of thought, they have already produce two insightful essays, The Coming Insurrection, and, To Our Friends, their third Maintenant(Now) is being translated, one chapter at a time, into English, by Autonomies.

Tomorrow is cancelled         All the reasons for carrying out a revolution are present. None is missing. The sinking of politics, the arrogance of the powerful, the reign of the false, the vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of industry, rampant poverty, naked exploitation, ecological apocalypse – we are spared nothing, not even that of being informed. “Climate: 2016 breaks the record of heat”, tells us Le Monde on its first page, as almost every year nowadays. All the reasons are united, but it is not reasons that make revolutions, it is bodies. And the bodies are all in front of screens.

Continue reading HERE:

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A Poem Is Not Enough.

      If only to write a poem would be enough. A note from The Invisible Committee:

We would have liked to be brief. To forgo genealogies, etymologies, quotations.
That a poem, a song, would suffice.
We wished it would be enough to write “revolution” on a wall for the street to catch fire.
But it was necessary to untangle the skein of the present, and in places to settle accounts with ancient falsehoods.
It was necessary to try and digest seven years of historical convulsions. And decipher a world in which confusion has blossomed on a tree of misunderstanding.  
We’ve taken the time to write with the hope that others would take the time to read.
Writing is a vanity, unless it’s for the friend. Including the friend one doesn’t know yet.
In the coming years, we’ll be wherever the fires are lit.
During the periods of respite, we’re not that hard to find.
We’ll continue the effort of clarification we’ve begun here.
There will be dates and places where we can mass our forces against logical targets.
There will be dates and places for meeting up and debating.
We don’t know if the insurrection will have the look of a heroic assault, or if it will be a planetary fit of crying, a sudden expression of feeling after decades of anesthesia, misery, and stupidity.
Nothing guarantees that the fascist option won’t be preferred to revolution.
We’ll do what there is to be done.
Thinking, attacking, building – such is our fabulous agenda.
This text is the beginning of a plan.

See you soon,

                                                       invisible committee

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk