Graffiti reading in French,"the coming insurrection."
Publication of, The Coming Insurrection.
“To free ourselves from this misfortune would require a long and consistent learning process,and multiple, massive experiments. We’ll have to know how to fight, how to pick locks, how to set fractures and deal with throat infections; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street cafes; how to aim straight; how to gather together scattered knowledge and set up wartime agronomics; understand plankton biology;soil composition; study the way plants interact and thus rediscover lost intuitions; get to know possible uses for and connections with our immediate surroundings, and the limits we can’t go beyond without exhausting them; and we have to start to do all that today, and on the days when we’ll need to be able to get more than just a symbolic helping of food and a meager satisfaction of our other needs.”–excerpt from The Coming Insurrection p. 46
It is a feeling pressed deep down inside of you, crushed behind your spine, twisting, turning, wrenching to breath. It is the feeling of the stable ground beneath your feet, that comes to the surface every once in a while when you misstep and almost fall. It is the lie defeated, when you realize that the ground you walk on, that you rely on, that you believe in, disintegrates underneath you. It is the terrifyingly painful, but elated feeling you get when your stomach drops.
I want this feeling, I need this feeling. Im scared as hell but completely overjoyed by the future prospects of this feeling. To see fires burning in the distance, all meaningful objects annihilated, no economy, no institutions; just the raw world untamed.
I am not speaking of anarchy, but rather a destruction of western culture. I guess that could be considered a form of anarchy to some, but not in the context I have been exploring.
The book The Coming Insurrection compiled by an anonymous collective named “The Invisible Committee,” urges the decay and destruction of the dominant, capitalistic, western worldview by mapping out the tangible processes and scenarios of what this intentional collapse would actually entail. In addition to what we must do to initiate it and what it would look like. Published in 2007 by La Fabrique, a French publication before being published in English by Semiotext(e) in August 2009, was articulated a few years after the suburban uprising in Paris which ignited the violent riots of 2005. However, this book is more than just a response to the events that took place at that time. It is a call to action for all who are constantly bombarded with the feelings I just described, and are fed up with path western culture and conditioning have led us. This book is not just a theory or contemplation of a hypothetical collapse that has often been argued in a philosophical sense. In other words, this book is revolutionary because it aims to utilize actual direction and outline the tools necessary to kick over western society as we know it, as opposed to other literary bodies of work that are perfectly content with just merely entertaining the idea.
Like I said, this book calls people to action. Not just to galvanize, but to forcibly overthrow this entrenched economic system. To take up arms, gather resources, and live communally. Naturally, violence will indeed occur and be prevalent in this kind of revolution which is why this book has been the source of much controversy in America among all facets of the political spectrum. Despite the negative connotations associate with this publication, I feel that with almost any significant revolution, violence really cannot be avoided; it is a reality.
We see it in nature, animals take each others lives in order to live and defend themselves. Now I know this logic hardly compares when it comes to human acts of violence, however it remains difficult for me to envision the collapse of a western worldview going down peacefully without a fight. Moreover, I don’t really see how this publication is any different from the numerous pamphlets that circled around during the American Revolution which moved to overthrow Britain’s hold on the U.S. colonies.
Granted, this book does challenge a lot more than just a break away from an oppressive government, meaning that resistance, brutality, and fighting will have to occur in order to extinguish everything that has deluded us from the truth, which is a difficult concept for most to swallow or accept. But when you are talking about seriously killing an established sickly culture that nurses us to death, there is going to be severe opposition because you are challenging a concrete foundational way of life that almost everyone is afraid to leave behind.
Just imagine for a minute, waking up one day only to see yourself face to face with the world, every concept you use to understand the world is gone. You look out and see no billboards, no buildings, no cars. You are naked, terrified, and alone. In this moment of ultimate self-reflection, you have nothing to reflect on except your senses. You think this is the apocalypse, you think this is judgment day, but it is not. It is true freedom. Now you are left with two choices. You can either flee from this horrible moment and never look back. Or you can head off into the unknowable future of this moment. This book wants to inform you on how to realize this moment and why we need to choose the latter of these two choices, loosing everything as you understand it via the collapse of western culture.
So whats it gonna be?
