.l

" 4
LAPPEL .

\\\\\\\\

Call

l'appel

Before you starting using the term insurrection-
ary communist with a straight face (e comments)

We chose to re-publish and re-layout the Engiish translation of The Call,
perhaps against our betier judgment Who knows? W do this however with
an intent to engage in crfical cialogue with the anarchist milieu. Some of
the notions within the text, such as *The Party” are subjects one tends to
View with suspicion when one holds that a self-organized anti-authoritarian
practice of spontaneous revolt s the vessel to total ransformation of saciety:
Other concepts, such as Existential Iberalisms offer us a new framework for
contributing to an understanding of postmodernity’s cultural logic, Particu-
larly ata fime when many new and old projects for calectve struggle are be-
ing tested against Capitalism's narrative of The Western Individual, The Call
stands out as being something useful. The Invisible comittee's affimation
of insurrection s not without an affirmation of a diferent new word(s) in the
shellof the old. Whichis to say, thei creative urge is articulated through the.
consiruction of new worlds that don't seek o replace the current one, but
instead, ntend to be our homes during the demolition party. It would be nice.
to live in something, rather than just surviving somewhere.

Al powerto the reading groups!

Dec. 2007 | in a flat part of The South.
Liam Sionnach | IEF
THE TRIUMPH OF
CIVILISATION LACKS
NOTHING.

neither political terror nor affective poverty.
nor universal sterility. the desert cannot grow
anymore: it is everywhere. but it can still deepen.
faced with the evidence of the catastrophe, there
are those who get indignant and those who take
note, those who denounce and those who get or-
ganised. we are among those who get organised.

"BHé
Scholium

this is a call.

That s to say it aims at those who can hear it. The question is not
to demonstrate, to argue, to convince. We will go straight to the
evident. The evident is not primarily a matter of logic or reasoning.
It attaches to the sensible, to worlds.

There is an evident to every world.

The evident is what is held in common

or what sets apart.

After which communication becomes possible again,
communication which is no longer presupposed,

whichis to be built

And this network of evidents that constitute us, we have been
taught so well to doubt it, to avoid it, to conceal it, to keep it to
ourselves. We have been so well taught, that we cannot find the
words when we want to shout

As for the reigning order, everyone knows what it

consists in:

that a dying social system has no other justification to ts arbitrary
nature but its absurd determination — its senile determination - to
simply linger on;

that the police, global or national, have got a free hand

to get id of those who do not toe the line;

that civilisation, wounded in its heart, no longer encounters any-
thing but its own limits in the endless war it has begun;

that this headlong flight, already almost a century old, produces
nothing but a series of increasingly frequent disasters;

that the mass of humans deal with this order of things by means of
lies, cynicism, brutalisation or medication;

— these things no one can claim to ignore.

And the sport that consists in endlessly describing the present
disaster, with a varying degree of complaisance, is just another
way of saying: “that's the way it is"; the prize of infamy going to the
journalists, to all those who pretend to rediscover every morning
the misery and corruption they noticed the day before.
But what is most stiking, for the time being, is not the ar-
rogance of empire, but rather the weakness of the counter-attack.
Like a colossal paralysis. A mass paralysis. Which will sometimes
say - when it still speaks

that there is nothing to do, sometimes concede — when

pushed to s limit that “there is so much to do”.

Which is to say the same thing.

‘Then, on the fringe of this paralysis, there is the “something,
anything, has to be done" of the activists. Seattle, Prague, Genoa,
the struggle against gm or the movements of the unemployed, we
have played our part, we have taken sides in the struggles of these
last years; and certainly not the side of att ac or the Tute Bianche.

‘The folklore of protests no longer entertains us.

In the last decade, we have seen the dull monologue of
Mancism-Leninism regurgitate from still juvenile mouths. We have
seen the purest anarchism negate also what it cannot compre-
hend.

We have seen the most tedious economism ~ that of Le
Monde Diplomatique ~ becoming the new popular religion. And
Negriism imposing itself as the only alternative to the intellectual
rout of the global left
Leftist militantism has everywhere gone back to raising its tottering
constructions, its depressive networks, until exhaustion.

It took no more than three years for the cops, unions, and
other informal bureaucracies to dismantle the short-lived *anti-glo-
balisation movement”. To control it To divide it into separate “areas
of struggle’, each as.
profitable as it s sterile.

In these times, from Davos to Porto Alegre, from the meper
toTHE oNT, capitalism and anti-capitalism describe the same absent
horizon. The same truncated prospect of managing the disaster.

What eventually opposes this prevaiiing desolation is
merely another desolation, just one that is not as wellstocked.

Everywhere there is the same idiotic idea of happiness.
The same games of power that are paralysed with fear. The same.
disarming superficiality. The same emotional iliteracy. The same
desert
We say that these times are a desert, and that this desert
incessantly deepens. This is no poetic device, it is evident. An evi-
dent which harbours many others. Notably the rupture with all that
protests, all that denounces, and all that glosses over the disas-
ter.

Whoever denounces exempts themselves,

Everything appears as if leftists were accumulating rea-
sons
torevolt the same way a manager accumulates the means to domi-
nate. That is to say with the same delight. The desert is the pro-
gressive depopulation of worlds — the habit we have adopted to
live s if we were not of this world. The desert is present in the
continuous, massive and programmed proletarianisation of popu-
lations, just as itis present in the suburban sprawl of Florida, where
the misery lies precisely in the fact that no one seems to feel it.

That the desert of our time is not perceived only
makes it harsher.

Some have tried to name the desert. To point out what
has to be fought not as the action of a foreign agent but as a sum
of relations. They talked about spectacle, biopower or empire. But
this also added to the current confusion.

‘The spectacle is not an easy abbreviation for the massme-
dia. It lies as much in the cruelty with which everything endlessly
throws us back to our own image. Biopower is not a synonym for
social security, the welfare state or the pharmaceutical industry,
but it pleasantly lodges itseff in the care that we take of our pretty
bodies, in a certain physical estrangement to
oneself as well as to others.

Empire is not some kind of extraterrestial entity, a world-
wide conspiracy of governments, financial networks, technocrats,
and multinational corporations. Empire is everywhere nothing is
happening. Everywhere things are working. Wherever the normal
situation prevails.

By dint of seeing the enemy as a subject that faces us
~ instead of feeling it as a relationship that holds us — we con-
fine ourselves to the struggle against confinement. We reproduce.
under the pretext of an “alterative” the worst kind of dominant
relationships. We start selling as a commodity the very struggle
against the commadity. Hence we get the authorities of the
anti-authoritarian struggle, chauvinist feminism, and anti-fascist
lynchings.

‘At every moment we are taking part in a situation. Within
asituation there are no subjects and objects - | and the other, my
desires and reality — only a sum of relationships, a sum of the flows
that traverse it.

There is a general context - capitalism, civilisation, empire,

call it what you wish — that not only intends to control each situa-
tion but, even worse, tries to make sure that there is, as often as
possible, no situation.
The streets and the houses, the language and the affects, and the
worldwide tempo that sets the pace of it all, have been adjusted
for that purpose only. Worlds are everywhere calibrated to slide by
or ignore each other. The “normal situation” is this absence of situ-
ation. To get organised means: to start from the situation and not
dismiss it. To take sides within it. Weaving the necessary material,
affective and political solidarities. This is what any strike does in
any office, in any factory. This is what any gang does. Any revolu-
tionary or counter-revolutionary party.

To get organised means: to give substance to the situation.
Making it real, tangible.

Reality is not capitalist.

‘The position within a situation determines the need to forge
alliances, and for that purpose to establish some lines of communi-
cation, some wider circulation. In tum those new links reconfigure
the situation. The name we give to the situation that we are in is
“world civil war". For there is no longer anything that can limit the
confrontation between the opposing
forces. Not even law, which comes into play as one more form of
the generalised confrontation. The ‘we' that speaks here is not a
delimitable, isolated
we, the we of a group. It is the we of a position. In these times this.
position is asserted as a double secession: secession first with
the process of capitalist valorisation; then secession with all the
sterility entailed by a mere opposition to empire, extra-parliamen-
tary or otherwise; thus a secession with the left. Here “secession"
means less a practical refusal to communicate than a disposition
to forms
of communication so intense that, when put into practice, they
snatch from the enemy most of its force.

To put it briefly, such a position refers to the force of ir-
ruption of the Black Panthers and the collective canteens of the
German Autonomen, to the tree houses and art of sabotage of the
British neo-luddites, to the
careful choice of words of the radical feminists, to the mass self-
reductions of the ltalian autonomists, and the armed joy of the June
2nd Movement.

From now on all friendship is political.
THE UNLIMITED ESCA-
LATION OF CONTROL IS
AHOPELESSRESPONSE
TO THE PREDICTABLE
BREAKDOWNS OF THE
SYSTEM.

Nothing that is expressed in the known distribu-
tion of political identities is able 1o lead beyond
the disaster.

Therefore, we begin by withdrawing from them.
We contest nothing, we demand nothing. We con-
stitute ourselves as a force, as a material force,
as an autonomous material force within the world
civil war. This call sets out the conditions.

pmposiioi
Scholium II

'A NEW WEAPON of crowd dispersal, a
kind of fragmentation grenade made
of wood, is being subjected to live

field tests. Meanwhile — in Oregon — demonstrators blocking traf-
fic face sentences of twenty-five years imprisonment. In the field of
urban pacification the Israeli army is becoming the most prominent
consultant. Experts from all over the world rush to marvel at the latest,
most formidable and subtle findings in anti-subversive technology. It
would appear that the art of wounding — wounding one to scare a
hundred - has reached untold summits. And then there is “terrorism".
That s to say, according to the European Commission: “any offence
committed intentionally by an individual or a group against one or
several countries, their institutions or their populations, and aiming at
threatening them and seriously undermining or destroying the politi-
cal, economic or social structures of a country” In the United States
there are more prisoners than farmers.

As it is reorganised and progressively recaptured, public space is
covered with cameras. Not only is any surveillance now possible, it
has become acceptable. All sorts of lists of “suspects” circulate from
department to department, and we can scarcely guess their probable
uses. The social space once

traversed by flaneurs is now militarily marked and sealed, and its ties
of chatter and gossip have been transformed into recriminate whi
pers, the substance of new micro-legal constraints. In the uk the Anti
Social Behaviour Orders have turned the most petty disputes among
neighbours into personally tailored edicts of exile, banishing a marked
individual from a street comer or proscribing the wearing of hooded
tops within a specific zone.

Meanwhile the Metropolitan Police, working with members of the
special forces, pursue their campaign against terror with a series of
“mistaken"

shootings. A former head of the cia, one of those people who, on the
opposing side, get organised rather than get indignant, writes in Le
Monde: *More

than a war against terrorism, what is at stake is the extension of

democracy to the parts of the [Arab and Muslim] world that
threaten liberal civilisation. For the construction and the de-
fence of which we have worked throughout the 20th century,
during the First, and then the Second World War, followed by
the Cold War — or Third World War

Nothing in this shocks us; nothing catches us unaware
or radically alters our feeling towards life. We were born inside
the catastrophe and with it we have drawn up a strange and
peaceable relation of habit.

Almost an intimacy. For as long as we can remember
we have received no news other than that of the world civil
war. We have been raised as survivors, as surviving machines.
We have been raised with the idea that life consisted in walk-
ing; walking until you collapse among other bodies that walk
identically, stumble, and then collapse in tum in indifference.
Uttimately the only novelty of the present times is that none of
this can be hidden anymore, that in a sense everyone knows it.
Hence the most recent
hardening of the system: its inner workings are plain, it would
be useless to try and conjure them away.

Many wonder how no part of the left or farleft, that
none of the known political forces, is capable of opposing this
course of events. “But we live in a democracy, right?” They can
o on wondering as long as they like: nothing that is expressed
in the framework of politics will ever be able to limit the ad-
vance of the desert, because politics is part of the desert.

We do not say this in order to advocate some extra-
parliamentary politics as an antidote to liberal democracy. The
popular manifesto “We are the Left’, signed a couple of years
ago by all the citizen collectives and “social movements” to
be found in France, expresses well enough the logic that has
for thirty years driven extra-parliamentary politics: we do not
want to seize power, overthrow the state, etc.; so we want it to
recognise us as valid
interlocutors.

Wherever the classical conception of politics prevails,
prevails the same impotence in front of the disaster. That this
impotence is widely distributed between a variety of eventually
reconcilable identities does not make the slightest difference.
The anarchist from THe F4, the council communist, the Trotskyist
from ATTaG and the Republican Congressman start from the same
‘amputation, propagate the same desert.

Politics, for them, is what s settled, said, done, decided be-
tween men. The assembly that gathers them all, that gathers all hu-
man beings in abstraction from their respective worlds, forms the
ideal political circumstance. The economy, the economic sphere,
ensues logically: as a necessary and impossible management of
all that was left at the door of the assembly, of all that was consti-
tuted, thus, as non-political and so becomes subsequently: family,
business, private life, leisure, passions, culture, etc.

That is how the classical definition of politics spreads the
desert: by abstracting humans from their worlds, by disconnecting
them from the
network of things, habits, words, fetishes, affects, places, solidari-
ties that make up their world, their sensible world, and that gives.
them their specific
substance.

Classical politics is the glorious stagecraft of bodies with-
out worlds. But the theatrical assembly of political individualities
‘cannot mask the desert that it is. There is no human society sepa-
rated from the sum of beings. There is a plurality of worlds. Of
worlds that are all the more real because they are shared. And that
coexist.

The political, in truth, is the play between the different
worlds, the alliance between those that are compatible and the
confrontation between those that are irreconcilable.

Therefore we say that the central political fact of the last
thirty years went unnoticed. Because it took place at such a deep
level of reality that it cannot be considered as “political” without
bringing about a revolution in the very nation of the political. Be-
cause this level of reality is also the

one where the division is elaborated between what is regarded as
real and what s not. This central fact is the triumph of existential
liberalism. The fact that it is now considered natural for every-
one to relate to the world on the basis of his own distinct lfe
That life consists in a series of choices,

good or bad. That each one can be defined by a set of qualities,
of properties, that make him or her, by their variable weighting,
a sole and ieplaceable being. That the idea of the contract
adequately epitomises the relations of commitment between
individuals, and the idea of respect epitomises all

virtue. That language is only a tool to come to an understand-
ing.

That the world is composed on the one hand of things
to manage and on the other of an ocean of atomic individuals.
Which in turn have an unfortunate tendency to turn into things,
by letting themselves get managed.

Of course, cynicism is only one of the possible fea-
tures of the infinite clinical picture of existential liberalism. It
also includes depression, apathy, immunodeficiency (every im-
mune system is intrinsically
collective), dishonesty, judicial harassment, chronic dissatis-
faction, denied attachments, isolation, ilusions of citizenship
and the loss of all generosity.

Existential liberalism has propagated its desert so well
that in the end even the most sincere leftists express their uto-
pia in its own terms. “We will rebuild an egalitarian society
to which each makes his or her contribution and from which
each gets the satisfactions he expects from it. [..] As far as
individual desires are concerned, it could be egalitarian if each
consumes in proportion to the efforts he or she is ready to
contribute. Here again the
method of measurement of the effort contributed by each will
have to be redefined? This is the language chosen by the or-
ganisers of the “alternative,
anti-capitalist, and anti-war village" against the g8 summit in
Evian in a text entitled When capitalism and wage labour will
have been abolished! Here is a key to the triumph of empire:
managing to keep in the background, to surround with silence
the very ground on which it manoeuvres, the front on which it
fights the decisive battle

- that of the shaping of the sensible, of the forming of sen-
sibilities. In such a way it preventively paralyses any defence
in the very moment of its operation, and ruins the very idea of
a counter-offensive. The victory is won whenever the leftist
militant, at the end of a hard day of “political work", slumps in
front of the latest action movie.

When they see us withdraw from the painful rituals
- the general assembly, the meeting, the negotiation, the pro-
test, the demand — when they hear us speak about the sen-
sible world rather than about work, papers, pensions, or free-
dom of movement, leftist militants give us a pitying look. “The
poor guys" they seem to say, “they have resigned themselves
to minority politics, they have retreated into their ghetto, and
renounced any widening of the struggle. They will never be a
movement” But we believe exactly the opposite: itis they who
resign themselves to minority politics by speaking their lan-
quage of false objectiity, whose weight consists only in rep-
etition and hetoric. Nobody is fooled by the veiled contempt
with which they talk about the worries “of the people”, and
that allows them to switch from the unemployed person to the
illegal immigrant, from the striker to the prostitute without ever
putting themselves at stake ~ for this contempt forms part of
the sensibly evident. Their will to “widen” is just a way to flee
those who are al ready there, and with whom, above all, they
would fear to live. And finally, it is they who are reluctant to
admit the political meaning of the sentiments,
‘who can only count on sentimentality for their pitiful prosely-
tising. All in all, we would rather start from small and dense
nuclei than from a vast and
loose network. We have known these spineless arrangements
long enough
THOSE WHO
WOULD RESPOND
TO THE URGENCY
OF THE SITUATION
WITH THE URGEN-
CY OF THEIR RE-
ACTION ONLY ADD
TO THE GENERAL
ASPHYXIATION.

Their manner of intervention implies the
rest of their politics, of their agitation. As
for us, the urgency of the situation just
allows us to be rid of all considerations of
legality or legitimacy. Considerations that
have, in any case, become uninhabitable.
That it might take a generation to build
avictorious revolutionary movement in all
its breadth does not cause us to waver,
We envisage this with serenity. Just like
we serenely envisage the criminal nature
of our existence, and of our gestures.

prnpniiioi
Scholium

WE Have kniown, we still know, the temptation of activism. The
counter-summits, the No-Border camps, the occupations,
and the campaigns against evictions, new security laws, the build-
ing of new prisons; the succession of all of this. The ever-increas-
ing dispersion of collectives responding to the same dispersion of
activity.

Running after the movements.

Feeling our power on an ad hoc basis, only at the price of
returning each time to an underlying powerlessness.

Paying the high price for each campaign. Letting it consume
allthe energy that we have. Then moving to the next one, each time
more out of breath, more exhausted, more desolated.

And little by lttle, by dint of demanding, by dint of denounc-
ing, becoming incapable of sensing the presumed basis of our
engagement, the nature of the urgency that flows through us.

Activism is the first reflex. The standard response to the ur-
gency of the present situation. The perpetual mobilisation in the
name of urgency is what our bosses and governments have made
us used to, even
when we fight against them.

Forms of life disappear every day, plant or animal species,
human experiences and countless relationships between them .
But our feeling of urgency is linked less to the speed of these ex-
tinctions than to their irreversibility, and even more to our inability
to repopulate the desert.

Activists mobilise themselves against the catastrophe. But
only prolong it. Their haste consumes the little world that is left
The answer of the activist to urgency remains itself within the re-
gime of urgency, with no hope of getting out of it or interrupting
it. The activist wants to be everywhere. She goes everywhere the
thythm of the breakdown of the machine leads her. Everywhere
she brings her pragmatic inventiveness, the festive energy of her
opposition to the catastrophe. Without fai, the activist mobilises.
But she never gives
herself the means to understand how it is to be done. How to
hinder in concrete terms the progress of the desert, in order to
establish inhabitable worlds here and now.

We desert activism. Without forgetting what gives it
strength: a certain presence to the situation. An ease of movement
within it. A way to apprehend the struggle, not from a moral or
ideological angle, but from a technical and tactical one.

Old leftist militantism provides the opposite example. There

is something remarkable about the impermeability of militants in
the face of situations. We remember a scene in Genoa: about 50
militants of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire wave their red
flags labelled *100% to the Left”
They are motionless, timeless. They vociferate their calibrated slo-
gans, surrounded by peace-police. Meanwhile, a few meters away,
some of us fight the lines of carabinieri, throwing back teargas
canisters, ripping up the sidewalk to make projectiles, preparing
Molotov cocktails with bottles found in the trash and gasoline from
upturned Vespas. When compelled to comment on us the miltants
speak of adventurism, thoughtlessness. Their pretext is that the
conditions are not right. We say that nothing was missing, that
everything was there, but them.

What we desert in leftist militantism is this absence to the
situation. Just as we desert the inconsistency to which activism
condemns us.

Activists themselves feel this inconsistency. And this is
why, periodically, they turn toward their elders, the militants. They
borrow their ways, terrains of struggle, slogans. What appeals to
them in leftist militantism is the consistency, the structure, the fi-
delity they lack. This allows the activists to resort to slogans and
demands - “citizenship for all! “free movement of people;” “guar-
anteed income!’ “free public transport”

The problem with demands is that, formulating needs in
terms that make them audible to power, they say nothing about
those needs, and what real transformations of the world they re-
quire. Thus, demanding free public transportation says nothing of
our need to travel rather than be transported, of our need for slow-
ness.
But also, demands often end up masking the real confliots.
whose stakes they set. Demanding free public transportation only
retards the diffusion of the techniques of fare-dodging, at least for
this specific milieu. Calling for the free movement of people just
eludes the issue of practical escape

from the tightening of control.

Fighting for a guaranteed income is, at best, condemning
ourselves to the illusion that an improvement of capitalism is nec-
essary to get out of
it. Whatever form it takes, it is always the same dead end: the sub-
jective resources mobilised may be revolutionary; yet they remain
inserted in a
program of radical reforms. Under the pretext of overcoming the
alternative between reform and revolution we sink into an oppor-
tune ambiguty.

The present catastrophe is that of a world actively made
uninhabitable. Of a sort of methodical devastation of everything
that remained liveable in the relations of humans with each other
and with their worlds. Capitalism could not have triumphed over
the whole planet if it was not for techniques of power, specifically
political techniques. There are all kinds of techniques: with or with-
out tools, corporal o discursive, erotic or culinary, the disciplines
and mechanisms of control, and it is pointless to denounce the
“reign of technics” The political techniques of capitalism consist
first in breaking the attachments through which a group finds the
means to produce, in the same movement, the conditions of its
subsistence and those of its existence. In separating human com-
munities from countless things ~ stones and metals, plants, trees
that have a thousand purposes, gods, djinns, wild or tamed ani-
mals, medicines and psycho-active substances,

amulets, machines, and all the other beings with which human
groups compose worlds.

Ruining all community, separating groups from their
means of existence and from the knowledge linked to them, it is
political reason that dictates the incursion of the commodity as the
mediator of every relation. Just as the witches had to be disposed
of, their medicinal knowledge as well as the
communication between the spheres which they allowed to
existtoday peasants have to renounce their abiliy to plant
their own seeds in order to maintain the grip of multinational
corporations and other bodies of agricultural policy.

These political techniques of capitalism find their
maximal point of concentration in the contemporary metro-
pole. The metropole is the place where, in the end, there is
almost nothing left to reappropriate. A milieu in which every-
thing is done so the human only relates to himsetf, only cre-
ates himself separately from other forms of existence, uses or
rubs shoulders with them without ever encountering them.

In the background of this separation, and to make it
durable, the most minor attempt at disregarding commoity
relationships has been made criminal. The field of legality was
long ago reduced to the multiple constraints which make life
impossible, through wage labour or seff-management, volun-
tary aid or leftist militancy.

As this field becomes always more uninhabitable, ev-
erything that can contribute to making life possible has been
tumed into a crime.

Where activists claim that “No one s ilegal” one must
recognise the opposite: today an entirely legal existence
would be entirely submissive. There is tax evasion, fititious
employment, insider dealings and fake bankruptcies, em-
bezzlement of grants and insurance fraud, forged documents
and welfare scams. There are the voyages across borders in
aeroplane baggage holds, the trips without a ticket through a
town or a country. Fare-dodging and shoplifting are the daily
practices of thousands of people in the metropole. And there
are illegal practices of trading seeds that have saved many
plant species. There are illegalities that are more functional
than others for the capitalist worldsystem. There are some
that are tolerated, others that are encouraged, and eventually
others that are punished. An improvised vegetable garden on
awasteland has every chance of being flattened by a
bulldozer before the first harvest.
If we consider the sum of the laws of exception and cus-
tomary rules that govern the space that anyone goes through in
one day, there is henceforth not a single existence that can be
assured of impunity. There exist laws, codes and decisions of juris-
prudence that make every existence punishable; it would just be a
matter of applying them to the letter.

We are not ready to bet that where the desert grows also
grows a salvation. Nothing can happen that does not begin with a
secession from everything that makes this desert grow.

We know that building a power of any scale will take time.
There are lots of things that we no longer know how to do. In
fact, as all those who benefited from modernisation and the educa-
tion dispensed in our developed lands, we barely know how to do
anything. Even gathering plants for cooking or medicinal purpose
rather than for decoration is regarded at best as archaic, at worst
as quaint.

We make a simple observation: everyone has access to a
‘certain amount of resources and knowledge made available by the
simple fact of living in these lands of the old world; and can com-
munise them. The question is not whether to live with or without
money, to steal or to buy, to work or not, but how to use the money
for increasing our autonomy from the commodity sphere. And if we
prefer stealing than working, producing for ourselves than steal-
ing, it is not out of concern for some kind of purity. It is because
the flows of power that accompany the flows of commodities, the
subjective submission that conditions the means of survival, have
become exorbitant. There would be many inappropriate ways to
say what we envisage: we neither want o leave for the country-
side nor gather ancient knowledge to accumulate it. We are not
merely concerned with the reappropriation of means. Nor would
we restrict ourselves to the reappropriation of knowledge. If we put
together all the knowledge and techniques, all the inventiveness.
displayed in the field of activism, we would not get a revolutionary
movement. It is a question of temporality. A question of creating
the conditions where an offensive can sustain itself without fading,
of establishing the material solidarities that allow us to hold on.
We believe there is no revolution without the con-

stitution of a common material force. We do not ignore the
anachronism of this belief.

We know itis too early and also that it is too late, that
is why we have time.

We have ceased to wait.
Wsi‘ion

WE SET THE POINT
OF REVERSAL,
THE WAY OUT OF
THE DESERT, THE

END OF CAPITAL,

in the intensity of the link that each
manages to establish between what he
or she lives and what he or she thinks.
Against the partisans of existential
liberalism, we refuse to view this as
a private matter, an individual issue, a
question of character. On the contrary,
we start from the certainty that this link
depends on the construction of shared
worlds, on the sharing of

effective means.
Scholium

“link between life and thought” is evidently naive, out of

date, and shows at root a simple absence of culture. We
consider this a symptom. For this evident is just an effect of that
most modern liberal redefinition of the distinction between the
public and the private. Liberalism works on the assumption that
everything must be tolerated, that everything can be thought, so
long as it is recognised as being without direct repercussions on
the structure of society, of its institutions and of state power. Any
idea can be admitted; its expression should even be favoured, so
long as the social and state rules are accepted. In other words,
the freedom of thought of the private individual must be total, as
well as his freedom of expression in principle, but he must not
want the consequences of his thought as far as collective life is
concerned,

Evzmus 1 DALY ENJOINED to accept that the concern of the

Liberalism may have invented the individual, but it was
bom mutilated. The liberal individual, which expresses him or
herself better than ever in the pacifist and civil rights movements
of today, is supposed to be attached to his or her freedom as far
as this freedom does not commit him or herself to anything, and
certainly does not try to impose itself upon others. The stupid pre-
cept “my freedom ends where that of another begins" is received
today as an unassailable truth. Even John Stuart Mill, though one
of the essential agents of the liberal conquest, noticed that an
unfortunate
consequence ensues: one is permitted to desire anything, on the
sole condition that it is not desired too intensely, that it does not
go beyond the limits of the private, or in any case beyond those
of public “free expression’.

What we call existential liberalism is the adherence to a
series of evidents marked by a constant propensity of the subject
to betrayal. It is evident, for example, that everyone acts in their
own interest, and no-one can be accused of infamy for becom-
ing exactly the kind of bastard he would spit on as a young man.
We have been taught to function at a lower gear in which we are
relieved of the very idea of betrayal. This emotional lower gear is

the guarantee we
have accepted of our becoming-adult. Along with, for the most
zealous, the mirage of an affective self-sufficiency as an insuper-
able ideal. And yet there is simply too much to betray for those
who decide to keep the promises which they have carried since
childhood.

Among the liberal evidents is that of behaving like an own-
er, even towards your own experiences. This is why not behaving
like a liberal individual means primarily not being attached to ones
properties. Or yet again another meaning must be given to “prop-
erties”: not what belongs to me peculiarly, but what attaches me
to the world, and that is therefore not reserved for me, has nothing
to do with private property nor with what is supposed to define an
identity (the “that’s just the way | am", and its confirmation “that's
just like you!"). While we reject the idea of individual property, we.
have nothing against attachments. The question of appropriation
or re-appropriation is reducible to the question of knowing what is
appropriate for
us, that s to say suitable, in terms of use, in terms of need, in terms
of relation to a place, to a moment of a world.

Existential liberalism is the spontaneous ethics suitable for
social democracy considered as a political ideal. You wil never be
abetter citizen
than when you are capable of renouncing a relation or a struggle
in order to maintain your place. It will not always be exactly easy
going, but thatis
precisely where existential liberalism is efficient: it even provides
the remedies to the discomforts that it generates. The cheque to
Amnesty International, the fair trade coffee, the demo against the
last war, seeing the last Michael Moore film, are so many non-acts
disguised as salvational gestures. Carry on exactly as normal, that
is to say go for a walk in the designated spaces and do your shop-
ping, the same as always, but on top of that, additionally, ease your
‘conscience; buy No Logo, boycott Shell, this should be enough to
convince you that political action, in fact, does not require much,
and that you too are capable of “engaging” yourseff. There is noth-
ing new in this trading of indulgences, just another false trail in the
prevailing confusion.

The invocatory culture of the other-possible-world and fair-trade-
thought leave lttle room to speakof ethics beyond that on the label.
The increase in the number of environmentalist, humanitarian and
“solidarity" associations opportunely channels the general discon-
tentment and thus contributes to the perpetuation of the state of
affairs, through personal valorisation, recognition by public opin-
ion, through the worship, in short, of social

usefulness.

Above all no more enemies. At the very most, problems,
abuses or catastrophes - dangers from which only the mecha-
nisms of power can protect us.

If the obsession of the founders of liberalism was the neu-
tralisation of sects, it is because they united all the subjective
elements that had to be banished in order for the modem state
to exist. For a sectarian life is, above all, what is adequate to its
particular truth ~ namely a certain disposition towards things and
events of the world, a way of not losing sight ofwhat matters. There
is a concomitance between the birth of “society" (and of its cor-
relate: “economy’) and the liberal redefinition of the public and
the private. The sectarian community is in itself a threat to what
is referred to by the pleonasm “liberal society”. It is so because
it is a form of organisation of the secession. Here lies the night-
mare of the founders of the modern state: a section of collectiv-
ity detaches itself from the whole, thus ruining the idea of social
unity. Two things that society cannot bear: that a thought may be
incorporated, in other words that it may have an effect on an ex
tence; that this incorporation may be not only transmitted, but also
shared, communised. All this is enough to discredit as a “sect” any
collective experience beyond control.

The evident of the commodity world has inserted itself ev-
erywhere. This evident is the most effective instrument to discon-
nect ends from means, to release “everyday life” as a space of ex-
istence that we only have to manage. Everyday life is what we are
supposed to want to retun to, like the acceptance of a necessary
and universal neutralisation. It s the ever-growing renunciation of
the possibility of an unmediated joy. As a friend once said, it is
the

average of all our possible crimes.

Rare are the communities that can avoid the abyss that is
awaiting them, in the extreme dullness of the real, the community
as the epitome of average intensity, a slow dwindling it cannot es-
cape, clumsily filled with the stuff of kitchen-sink romances.

This neutralisation is an essential characteristic of liberal
society. Everybody knows the centres of neutralisation, where it
is required that no emotion stands out, where each one has to
contain himself, and everybody experiences them as such: enter-
prises (the family included), parties, sports centres, art galleries,
etc. The real question is to know why, since everyone knows what
these places are about, they can nevertheless be so popular. Why
would one prefer, always and above all, that nothing happens; that
nothing occurs, in any case, that might cause shocks that are too
deep? Out of habit? Because of despair? Because of cynicism?
Or else: because you can feel the delight of being somewhere
while not being there, of being there while being essentially some-
where else; because what we are at heart would be preserved to
the point of no longer even having to exist.

These ethical questions must be addressed first, and
above all, because they are those that we find at the very heart
of the political: how to answer the neutralisation of the affective,
and of the effects of decisive thoughts? How do modern societies.
work with these neutralisations or rather put them to work? How
does our tendency towards attenuation reflect in us, and in our col
lective experiences, the material effectiveness of empire?

The acceptance of these neutralisations can of course go
hand in hand with great intensities of creation. You can experiment
as far as madness, provided that you are a creative singularity, and
that you produce in public the proof of this singularity (the “oeu-
vre"). You can still know the meaning of the sublime, but on condi-
tion that you experience it alone, and that you pass it on indirectly.
You will then be recognised as an artist or as a thinker, and, if you
are "politically engaged”, you will be able to send out as many mes-
sages as you want, with the good conscience of one who sees
further and will have warned the others.
We have, like many, experienced the fact that affects
blocked in an “interiority" tum out badly: they can even tur into
symptoms. The rigidities we observe in ourselves come from the
dividing walls that everyone felt obliged to build, in order to mark
the limits of themselves and to contain what must not overfiow.
When, for some reason, these walls happen to crack and shatter,
then something happens that might essentially have to do with
fright, but a fright capable of setting us free from fear. Any calling
into question of the individual limits, of the borders drawn by civili-
sation, can be salvational. To any material community corresponds
a certain jeopardising of bodies: when affects and thoughts are
no longer ascribable to one or the other, when a circulation seems
to be restored in which affects, ideas, impressions and emotions.
transmit indifferently among individuals. But it has to be under-
stood that community as such is not the solution: itis its incessant
and ubiquitous disappearance that is the problem.

We do not perceive humans as isolated from each other
nor from the other beings of this world; we see them bound by
multiple attachments that they leamed to deny. This denial blocks
the affective circulation through which these multiple attachments
are experienced. This blockage, in turn, is necessary to become
accustomed to the most neutral, the dullest, the most average in-
tensity, that which can make one long for the holidays, the lunch-
breaks, or the tv dinners as a godsend — that is to say something
just as neutral, average and dull, but freely chosen. The imperial
order revels in this average intensity.

We will be told: by advocating emotional intensities expe-
rienced in common, you go against what living beings require to
live, namely gentleness and calm — quite highly priced these days,
like any scarce commodity. If what this means is that our point
of view is incompatible with permitted leisure, then even winter
sports fanatics might admit that it would be no great loss to see all
the skiresorts burn and give the space back to the marmot. On the
other hand, we have nothing against the gentleness that any living
being, as a living being, carries. *It could be that living is a gentle
any blade of grass knows it better than all the ciizens of the

TO ANY MORAL PRE-
OCCUPATION, TO
ANY CONCERN FOR
PURITY, WE SUBSTI-
TUTE THE COLLEC-
TIVE WORKING OUT
OF A STRATEGY.

Only that which impedes the increase of our
strength is bad. It follows from this resolution
that economics and politics are no longer to
be distinguished. We are not afraid of form-
ing gangs; and can only laugh at those who

will decry us as a mafia.
Scholium

Have Bee soLp this lie: that what is most par-
ticular to us is what distinguishes us from the
common. We experience the contrary: every

singularity is felt in the manner and in the intensity with which a
being brings into existence something common.

‘At root itis here that we begin, where we find each other.

That in us which is most singular calls to be shared. But
we note this: not only is that which we have to share obviously
incompatible with the prevailing order, but this order strives to
track down any form of sharing of which it does not lay down
the rules. For instance, the barracks, the hospital, the prison, the
asylum, and the retirement home are the only forms of collective
living allowed in the metropole. The normal state is the isolation
of everyone in their private cubicle. This is where they return
tirelessly, however great the encounters they make elsewhere,
however strong the repulsion they feel.

We have known these conditions of existence, and never
‘again will we return to them. They weaken us too much. Make us
to0 vulnerable. Make us waste away.

In “traditional societies” isolation was the harshest sen-
tence that could be passed on a member of the community. It is
now the common condition. The rest of the disaster follows logi-
cally. It is only the narrow idea that everybody has of their own
home that makes it seem natural to leave the street to the police.
The world could not have been made so uninhabitable, nor soci-
ality so intently controlled - from shopping centres to bars, from
company headquarters to illit backrooms ~ had not everyone
beforehand been granted the shelter of private space.

In running away from conditions of existence that mutilate
us, we found squats; or rather, the intenational squat scene.
In this constellation of occupied spaces where, despite many
limits, it is possible to experiment with forms of collective aggre-
gation outside of control, we have known an increase of power.
We have organised ourselves for elementary survival - skipping,
theft, collective work, common meals, sharing of skills, of equip-
ment, of loving inclina
tions - and we have found forms of political expression - concerts,
leaflets, demos, direct actions, sabotage. Then, little by litle, we
have seen our surroundings tur into a milieu and from a milieu into
a scene. We have seen the enactment of a moral code replace the
working out of a strategy. We have seen norms solidify, reputations.
built ideas begin to function; and everything become so predict-
able. The collective adventure tured into a dull cohabitation. A
hostile tolerance grasped all the relations. We adapted. And in the
end what was believed to be a counter-world amounted to nothing
but a reflection of the prevaiing world: the same games of personal
valorisation as regards theft, fights, political correction, or radical-
ism — the same sordid liberalism in affective lffe, the same scraps
over access and territory, the same scission between everyday life
and political activity, the same identity paranoia. In addition, for the
luckiest, the luxury of periodically fleeing from their local poverty by
introducing it somewhere else, where its still exotic.

We do not impute these weaknesses to the squat form.
We neither deny nor desert t. We say that squatting will only make
sense again for us provided that we clarify the basis of the shar-
ing we enter into. In the squat like anywhere else, the collective
creation of a strategy is the only altemative to falling back on an
identity, either through integration into society or withdrawing into
the ghetto.

As far as strategy is concerned, we have leant all the les-
sons of the “tradition of the defeated”. We remember the begin-
nings of the labour movement. They are close to us.

Because what was put into practice in its initial phase re-
ates directly to what we are living, what we want to put into prac-
tice today.

The building up of what was to be called the “labour move-
ment" as a force first rested on the sharing of criminal practices,
‘The hidden solidarity
funds in case of a strike, the acts of sabotage, the secret societies,
the class violence, the first forms of mutualisation, developed with
the consciousness of their illegal nature, of their antagonism.

It is in the United States that the indistinction between
forms of workers’ organisation and organised criminality was the
most tangible. The power of the American proletarians at the be-
ginning of the industrial era stemmed from the development, within
the community of workers, of a force of destruction and retaliation
against capital, as well as from the existence of clandestine soli-
darities. In response to the perpetual reversibilty of

the worker into the criminal, a systematic control was called for:
the “moralisation” of any form of autonomous organisation. All that
exceeded the ideal of the honest worker was marginalised as gang
behaviour. In the end there was the mafia on the one hand and the
unions on the other, allied in their reciprocal amputation.

In Europe, the integration of workers' organisations into
the state management apparatus — the foundation of social de-
mocracy - was paid for with the renunciation of all ability to be a
nuisance. Here too
the emergence of the labour movement was a matter of material
solidarities, of an urgent need for communism. The Maisons du
Peuple were the last shelters for this indistinction between the
need for immediate communisation and the strategic requirements
of a practical implementation of the revolutionary process. The “la-
bour movement” then developed as a progressive separation be-
tween the co-operative current, an economic niche cut off from its
strategic raison d'étre, and the political and union forms working
on the basis of parliamentarism or joint management. It is from the
‘abandonment of any secessionist aim that the absurdity we call the
Left was bor. The climax s reached when the unionists denounce
violence, loudly proclaiming that they will collaborate with the cops.
to control the rioting demonstrators.

The recent securitisation of the State proves only this: that
the western societies have lost all force of aggregation. They no
longer do anything but manage their inexorable decay. That is, es-
sentially, prevent any re-aggregation, smash all that emerges.

All that deserts.

Al that stands out.

But there is nothing to be done. The state of inner ruin of
these societies lets a growing number of cracks appear. The con-
tinuous refurbishment of appearances can achieve nothing: here,
worlds form. Squats, communes, groupuscules, barios, all try to
extract

themselves from capitalist desolation. Most often these attempts.
fail or die from autarchy, for lack of having established contacts,
the appropriate solidarities, for lack also of conceiving themselves.
as parties to the world civil war.

Butall of these re-aggregations are stillnothing in compari-
son with the mass desire, with the constantly deferred desire, to
drop out. To leave.

In ten years, between two censuses, a hundred thousand
people have disappeared in Great Britain. They have taken a truck,
bought a ticket, dropped acid o joined the maquis. They have dis-
affiliated. They have left.

We would have liked, in our disaffilation, to have had a
place to rejoin, a stand to take, a direction to follow.

Many that leave get lost.

Many never arrive.

Our strategy is therefore the following: to immediately es-
tablish a series of foci of desertion, of secession poles, of rallying
points. For the runaways. For those who leave. A set of places to
take shetter from the control of a civilisation that is headed for the
abyss. It is a matter of giving ourselves the means, of finding the
scale in which all those questions, which when addressed sepa-
rately can drive one to depression, can be resolved. How to get rid
of all the dependencies that weaken us? How to get organised so
s 10 no longer have to work? How to settle beyond the toxicity of
the metropole without *leaving for the countryside? How to shut
down the nuclear plants? How to not be forced, when a friend
goes mad, to resort to psychiatric pulverisation; or to the acerbic
remedies of mechanistic medicine when he falls ill? How to live
together without mutually dominating each other? How to react to
the death of a comrade? How to ruin empire?

We know our weaknesses: we were born and we have
grown up in pacified societies, that are as if they have been dis-
solved. We have not had the opportunity to acquire the consisten-
cy that moments of intense collective confrontation can give. Nor
the knowledge that is linked to them. We have a political education
to mature
together. A theoretical and practical education.

For this, we need places. Places to get organised, to share
and develop the required techniques. To learn to handle all that
may prove necessary. To co-operate. Had it not renounced any
political perspective, the experimentation of the Bauhaus, with all
the materiality and the rigor it contained, would evoke the idea that
we have of space-times dedicated to the transmission of knowk-
edge and experience. The Black Panthers equipped themselves
with such places; to which they added their politico-military capac-
ity, the ten thousand free lunches they distributed everyday, and
their autonomous press. They soon formed a threat so tangible to
power that the special services had to be sent to massacre them.

Whoever constitutes themselves as a force knows that they
become a party to the global course of hostiities. The question of
the recourse to or the renunciation of “violence" does not arise in
such a party. And pacifism appears to us rather as an additional
‘weapon in the service of empire, along with the contingents of riot
police and jounalists. The things we have to take into consider-
ation concern the conditions of the asymmetrical conflict which is
imposed on us, the modes of appearance and disappearance suit-
able for each of our practices. The demonstration, the action with
faces uncovered, the indignant protest, are unsuitable forms of
struggle for the present regime of domination, they even reinforce
it, feeding up-to-date information to the systems of control. It would
seem to be judicious, in any case, given that the frailty of contem-
porary subjectivity extends even to our leaders, to attack the mate-
tial devices rather than the men that give them a face. This is out of
sheer strategic concern. Therefore, we must tum ourselves to the
forms of operation peculiar to all guerrillas: anonymous sabotage,
unclaimed actions, recourse to easily appropriable techniques, tar-
geted

counter-attacks.
There is no moral question in the way we provide ourselves with
our means to live and fight, but a tactical question of the means we
give ourselves and how we use them.
“The expression of capitalism in our lives" a friend once
said, ‘is the sadness
‘The point now s to establish the material conditions
for a shared disposition to joy.

ON THE ONE HAND,
WE WANT TO LIVE
COMMUNISM;

ON THE OTHER, TO
SPREAD ANARCHY.
Scholium

'ARE LVING through times of the most extreme sep-
aration. The depressive nommality of the metro-
pole, its lonely crowds, expresses the

impossible utopia of a society of atoms.
The most extreme separation reveals the content of the word
“communism!
Communism s not a political or economic system. Commu-
nism has no need of Marx. Communism does not give a damn
about the ussr. And we could not explain the fact that every de-
cade for fifty years they have pretended to rediscover Stalin's
crimes, crying “look at what communism is!",if they did not have
the feeling that in reality everything prompts.
usin that direction.

The only argument that ever stood against communism was
that we did not need it. And certainly, as limited as they were,
there were still, not so long ago, here and there, things, languages,
thoughts, places, that were shared and that subsisted; at least
enough of them to ot fade away. There were worlds, and they
were inhabited. The refusal to think, the refusal to ask the question
of communism, had practical arguments. They have been swept
away. The eighties, the eighties as they endure, remains the trau-
matic indicator of this ultimate purge. Since then all social relations
have become suffering. To the point of making any anaesthesia,
any isolation, preferable. In a way it is existential liberalism tsef
that pushes us to communism, by the very excess of its triumph.

The communist question is about the elaboration of our rela-
tionship to the world, to beings, to ourselves. It is about the elabo-
ration of the play between different worlds, about the communi-
cation between them. Not about the unification of world space,
but about the institution of the sensible, that is to say the plurality
of worlds. In that sense communism is not the extinction of all
conflct, it does not describe a final state of society after which
everything has been concluded.
For it is also through conflict that worlds communicate. “In bour-
geois society, where the differences between men are only dif-
ferences that do not relate to man himself, it is precisely the true
diferences, the differences of quality that are not retained. The
communist does not want to create a collective soul. He wants to
realise a society where false differences are scraped. And those
false differences being scraped, open all their possibilities to the
true differences! Thus spoke an old friend.

Itis evident for instance that the question of what | belong
to, of what | need, of what makes up my world, has been reduced
to the police fiction of legal property, of what belongs to me, of
what is mine. Something is proper to me insofar as it belongs to
the field of that which | use; and not out of any juridical title. In the
end, legal property has no other reality than the forces that protect
it. So the question of communism is, on one hand, to do away with
the police, and on the other, to elaborate modes of sharing, uses,
between those who live together. It is the question that is eluded
everyday with “give me a break!" and “chill outl”. Certainly, com-
munism is not given. It has to be thought out, it has to be made. Al-
most everything that stands against it boils down to an expression
of exhaustion: “But you'll never make i... It can't work... Humans
are what they are...And it's already hard enough to live your own
life.. Energy has limits, we can't do everything” But exhaustion is
not an argument. It is a state.

So communism starts from the experience of sharing. And

first, from the sharing of our needs. Needs are not what capitalist
rule has accustomed us to. To need is never about needing things
without at the same time needing worlds. Each of our needs links
us, beyond all shame, to everything that feels it. The need is just
the name of the relationship through which a certain sensible be-
ing gives meaning to such or such element of his world.
That is why those who have no worlds - metropolitan subjectivi-
ties for instance — have nothing but whims. And that is why capi-
talism, although it satisfies lie nothing else the need for things,
only spreads universal dissatisfaction; because to do so it has to
destroy worlds,
By communism we mean a certain discipline of the attention.

The practice of communism, as we live it, we call “the Par-
ty” When we overcome an obstacle together or when we reach
a higher level of sharing, we say that “we are building the Party
Certainly others, who we do not know yet, are building the Party
elsewhere. This call is addressed to them.
No experience of communism at the present time can survive with-
out getting organised, tying itself to others, putting itself in crisis,
waging war. “For the oases that dispense life vanish when we seek
shelter in them?

As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism
‘can only take the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of
making common suchand- such space, such-and-such machine,
suchand- such knowledge. That is to say, the elaboration of the
mode of sharing that attaches to them. Insurrection itself s just an
accelerator, a decisive moment in this process. As we understand
it, the party is not an organisation — where everything becomes in-
substantial by dint of transparency - and it is not a family - where
everything smells like a swindle by dint of opacity.

The Party is a collection of places, infrastructures, commu-
nised means; and the dreams, bodies, murmurs, thoughts, desires
that circulate among those places, the use of those means, the
sharing of those infrastructures.

‘The notion of the Party responds to the necessity of a mini-
mal formalisation, which makes s accessible as well as allows us
to remain invisible. It belongs to the communist way that we explain
to ourselves and formulate the basis of our sharing. So that the
most recent arrival is, at the very least, the equal of the elder.

Looking closer at it, the Party could be nothing but this:
the formation of sensibility as a force. The deployment of an archi-
pelago of worlds. What would a political force, under empire, be
that didn't have ts farms, its schools, its arms, its medicines,
its collective houses, its editing desks, its printers, its covered
trucks and its bridgeheads in the metropole? It seems more and
more absurd that some of us still have to work for capital - aside
from the necessary tasks of infiltration.

The offensive power of the Party comes from the fact that
itis also a power of production, but that within t, the relationships
are just incidentally relationships of production.

Through its development capitalism has revealed itself to
be not merely amode of production, but a reduction of all relations,
in the last instance, to relations of production. From the company
to the family, even consumption appears as another episode in the
general production, the production of society.

The overthrowing of capitalism will come from those who
are able to create the conditions for other types of relations.

Thus the communism we are talking about is strictly opposed to
what has been historically caricatured as “communism’, and that
was most of the time socialism, monopolist state capitalism.

Communism does not consist in the elaboration of new
relations of production, but indeed in the abolition of those refa-
tions.

Not having relations of production with our world o be-
tween ourselves means never letting the search for results become.
more important than the attention to the process; casting from our-
selves all forms of valorisation; making sure we do ot disconnect
affection and co-operation.

Being attentive to worlds, to their sensible configurations,
is exactly what renders impossible the isolation of something like
“relations of production”. In the places we open, the means we
share, it is this grace that we look for, that we experience.

To name this experience, we often hear about everything
being “free” in the sense of “free shops’, “free transport’, “free
meals”. We would rather speak of communism, for we cannot for-
get what this *freedom" implies in terms of organisation, and in the
short term, of political antagonism.

So, the construction of the Party, in its most visible aspect,
consists for us in the sharing or communisation of what we have
at our disposal. Communising a place means: setting its use free,
and on the basis of this liberation experimenting with refined,

intensified, and complexified relations. If private property is essen-
tially the discretionary power of depriving anyone of the use of the
possessed thing, communisation means depriving only the agents
of empire from it.

From every side we oppose the blackmail of having to
choose between the offensive and the constructive, negativity and
positiviy, life and survival, war and the everyday. We will not re-
spond o it. We understand too well how this altemative divides,
then splits and re-splits, all the existing collectives. For a force
which deploys itself, it is impossible to say if the annihilation of a
device that harms it is a matter of construction or offence, if seiz-
ing sufficient food or medical autonomy constitutes an act of war
o subtraction. There are circumstances, like in a riot, in which the
ability to heal our comrades considerably increases our ability to
wreak havoc. Who can say that arming ourselves would not be
part of the material constitution of a collectivity? When we agree
on a common strategy, there is no choice between the offensive
and the constructive; there is, in every situation, what obviously in-
creases our power and what harms it, what is opportune and what
is not. And when this is not obvious, there is discussion, and in the
worst of cases, there is the gamble.

In a general way, we do not see how anything else but a
force, a reality able to sunvive the total dislocation of capitalism,
could truly attack it, could pursue the offensive until the very mo-
ment of dislocation.

When the moment will come, it will be a matter of actu-
ally turning to our advantage the generalised social collapse, to
transform a collapse like the one in Argentina o the Soviet Union
into a revolutionary situation. Those who pretend to split material
autonomy from the sabotage of the imperial machine show that
they want neither.

Itis not an objection against communism that the greatest
experimentation of sharing in the recent period was the result of
the Spanish anarchist movement between 1868 and 1939,
COMMUNISM IS
POSSIBLE AT EV-
ERY MOMENT.

What we call *History” is to date noth-
ing but a set of roundabout means
invented by humans to avert it. The
fact that this *History” has for a good
century now come down to nothing
but a varied accumulation of disasters
shows how the communist question
can no longer be suspended. It is this
suspension that we need, in turn,

to suspend.
Scholium

\WHAT DO YOU AGTUALLY wanT? What are you
« proposing® » This kind of question may
seem innocent. But unfortunately these

are not
questions. These are operations.

Referring every we that expresses itself to a foreign you
means first warding off the threat that this we somehow calls me,
that this we passes through me. Thus constituting the one who
merely carries a proposition — that cannot itself be attributed to
anyone - as the owner of this proposition. Now, in the methodical
organisation of the prevailing separation, propositions are allowed
to circulate only on condition that they can give proof of an owner,
of an author. Without which they risk being common,
and only that which is proposed by the spectacle is permitted
anonymous diffusion.

And then there is this mystification: that caught in the course
of a world that displeases us, there would be proposals to make,
alternatives to find. That we could, in other words, lift ourselves
out of the situation that we are in, to discuss it in a calm way, be-
tween reasonable people.

But o, there is nothing beyond the situation. There is no
outside to the world civil war. We are irremediably there.

All we can do is elaborate a strategy. Share an analysis of
the situation and elaborate a strategy within it. This is the only
possible revolutionary and practical w, open and diffuse, of who-
ever acts along the same lines.

At the last count, in August 2003, we can say that we face
the greatest offensive of capital since the beginning of the eight-
ies. Anti-terrorism and the abolition of the last gains of the defunct
labour movement set the parameters of a diffuse discipline. Never
have the managers of society known so well from which obstacles
they are emancipated and what means they hold. They know, for
instance, that the planetary middle-class that lives henceforth in
the metropole is too disarmed to offer the slightest resistance to
its planned annihilation. Just like they know that the counter-revo-
lution they conduct is now inscribed in millions of tons of con-
crete, in the architecture of so many “new towns! In the longer
term it
seems that the plan of capital is indeed to bring out on a global
scale a set of high-security zones, continuously linked together,
where the process of capitalist valorisation would embrace all the
expressions of life in a perpetual and unhindered way. This impe-
tial deterritorialised comfort zone of citizens would form a kind of
police continuum where a more or less constant level of control
would prevail, politically as well as biometrically. The “rest of the
world” could then

be treated, in the incomplete process of its pacification, as a foil
and, at the same time, as a gigantic outside to civilise. The cha-
ofic experiments of zone-to-zone cohabitation between hostile
enclaves as it has been taking place for decades in Israel would
be the model of social management to come. We do not doubt
that the real stake in all this, for capital, is to reconstitute from the
ground up its own society.

Whatever the form, and however high the price.

We have seen with Argentina that the economic collapse
of a whole country was not, from its point of view, too high a price
to pay. In this context we are those, all those, who feel the tactical
need of these three operations:

1. Preventing by any means the reconstruction of the Left.
2. Advancing, from *natural disaster” to *social movement
the process of communisation, the construction of the Party.
3. Bringing the secession to the vital sectors of the

imperial machine.

The Left is periodically routed. This amuses us but it
ONE i not enough. We want is rout to be final. With no
remedy. May the spectre of a reconcilable opposition never again
‘come to haunt the minds of those who know they won't fit into the
capitalist process. The Left - everybody admits this today, but will
we still remember the day after tomorrow? — is an integral part of
the neutralisation mechanisms peculiar to liberal society. The more.
the social implosion
proves real, the more the Left invokes “civil society The more
the police exercises its arbitrary will with impunity, the more
they claim to be pacifist. The more the state throws off the
last judicial formalities, the more they become “citizens”. The
greater the urgency to appropriate the means of our exis-
tence, the more the Left exhorts us to appropriate the condi-
tions of our submission, to wait and demand the mediation, it
not the protection, of our masters. It is the Left which enjoins
us today, faced with governments which stand openly on the
terrain of social war, to make ourselves heard by them, to
write up our grievances, to form demands, to study econorm-
ics. From Léon Blum to Lula, the Left has been nothing but
that: the party of the man, the citizen and civilisation. Today
this program coincides with the complete counter-revolution-
ary program. Which consists in maintaining all the illusions
that paralyse us. The calling of the Left is therefore to ex-
pound the dream of what only empire can afford. It represents
the idealistic side of imperial modernisation, the necessary
steam-valve to the unbearable pace of capitalism. It is even
shamelessly written in the very publication of the French De-
partment of Youth, Education and Research: “From now on,
everyone knows that without the concrete help of citizens,
the state will have neither the means nor the time to carry on
the work that can prevent our society from exploding

Defeating the Left, that is to say keeping continuous-
ly open the channel of social disaffection, is not only neces-
sary but also possible today. We witness, while the imperial
structures become stronger at an unprecedented rate, the
transition from the old Labour left, gravedigger of the Labour
movement and born from it, to a new global, cultural left, of
which it can be said that Negriismis at the head. This new left
has not yet fully established itself on the recently neutralised
“anti-globalisation movement

‘The new lures they employ are not yet effective, whilst
the old ones have long been useless. Our task is to ruin the
global left wherever it comes forth, to sabotage methodically,
that is to say in theory as well as in practice, any of its mo-
ments of constitution. Thus for instance our success in Ge-
noalay less in the spectacular confrontations with the police,
orin the damage inflicted on the organs of state and capital,
than in the fact that the spreading of

the practice of confrontation peculiar to the “Black Bloc” to all the
parts of the demonstration scuttled the expected triumph of the
Tute Bianche. And so, in the aftermath, our failure has been to have
not known how to elaborate our position in such a way that this
victory in the street becomes something else than the mere bogey
systematically brandished ever since by all the so-called *pacifist”
movements.

Itis now the fallback of this global left on the social forums.
- due to the fact that it was defeated in the street — that we must
attack.
TWO [eryting function. A he socia aybermetisation pro-
gresses, the normal situation becomes more urgent. And from then
on, in an absolutely logical way, the situations of crisis and malfunc-
tion multiply. A power failure, a hurricane, or a social movement, do
not differ from the point of view of empire. They are disturbances.
They must be managed. For the moment, that is to say on account
of our weakness, these situations of interruption appear as mo-
ments in which empire arises, takes its place in the materiality of
worlds, experiments with new procedures. For it is precisely there
that it ties itself more firmly to the populations it claims to rescue.
Empire claims everywhere to be the agent of return to the normal
situation. Our task, conversely, is to make habitable the situation
of exception. We will genuinely succeed in “blocking corporate-
society” only on condition that such a “blockage” is made up of
desires other than that of a return to normality.

‘What happens in a strike or in a “natural disaster” is in a

way quite similar. A suspension occurs in the organised stability of
our dependencies.
At that point the being of need, the communist being, that which
essentially binds us and essentially separates us, is laid bare in
each. The blanket of shame that normally covers it is torn apart.
The receptiveness for encounter, for experimentation of other re-
lations to the world, to others, to oneself, as it appears in these
moments, is enough to sweep away any doubt about the possibil-
ity of communism. About the need for communism too. What is
then required is our ability to self-organise, our ability, by organis-
ing ourselves right away on the basis of our needs, to prolong, to
propagate, to give effectivity to the situation of exception, which
has always formed the basis of state terror only because it has
remained a threat on the part of state. This is particularly strik-
ing in “social movements'. The very expression “social movement”
seems to suggest that what really matters is what we are heading
towards, and not what happens here. There has been in all the so-
cial movements up till now a commitment not to seize what is here,
which explains why they follow each other without ever becoming
aforce, like a succession of breaking waves. Hence the particular
texture, so volatile, of their sociality, where any

|:vom year to year the pressure increases to make ev-
commitment appears revocable. Hence also their invariable
drama: a quick ascent thanks to an echo in the media, then,
on the basis of this hasty aggregation, the slow but inevitable
erosion; and finally, the driedup

movement, the last group of diehards who get a card from this
or that union, found this or that association, expecting in this
way to find

an organisational continuity to their commitment. But we do
not seek such continuity: the fact of having premises where we
might meet, and a photocopier to print tracts. The continuity
we seek is the one which allows us, after having struggled for
months, to not go back to work, to not start working again as
before, to keep doing harm. And this can only be built during
movements. It is a matter of immediate, material sharing, the
construction of a real revolutionary waR MAGHINE, the construc-
tion of the Party.

We must, as we were saying, organise ourselves on
the basis of our needs — manage to answer progressively the
collective question of eating, sleeping, thinking, loving, creat-
ing forms, coordinating our forces — and conceive all this as a
moment of the war against empire.

Itis only in this way, by inhabiting the disturbances of
its very program, that we will be able to counter that *econom-
ic liberalism" which is only the strict consequence, the logi-
cal application, of the existential liberalism that is everywhere
accepted and practised. To which each one is attached as if
it were the most basic right, including those who would like
to challenge “neo-liberalism? This is the way the Party will be
built, as a trail of habitable places left behind by each situation
of exception that empire meets. We will not mistake, then, how
the subjectivities and the revolutionary collectives become less
fragile, as they give themselves a world.
h We shall see then that empire is formed in
three [h o consiuior o wo mones
olies: on the one' hand, the scientific monopoly of “objective”
descriptions of the world, and of techniques of experimentation
on it, on the other hand the religious monopoly of techniques of
the self, of the methods by which subjectivties elaborate them-
selves - amonopoly to which psychoanalytic practice s directly
related. On the one hand a relation to the world free of any rela-
tion to the self ~ to the self as a fragment of

the world ~ on the other hand a relation to the self free of any
relation to the world — to the world as it goes through me. It thus
appears as if science and religion, in the very process of being
torn asunder, have created a space in which empire is perfectly
free to move.

Of course, these monopolies are distributed in various
ways according to the spaces of empire. In the so-called devel-
oped lands, where the religious discourse has lost this abiliy,
the sciences constitute a discourse of truth which is attributed
the power to formulate the very existence of the collectivity. This.
is therefore where we must, to begin with, bring secession.

Bringing secession into the sciences does not mean
pouncing on them as if on a stronghold to conquer or raze to the
ground, but making salient the fault ines than run through them,
siding with those who emphasise these lines. For in the same
way that cracks permanently warp the fake density of the social,
every branch of the sciences forms a battlefield saturated with
strategies. For a long time the scientific community has man-
aged to show the image of large united family, consensual for
the most part, and so respectful of the rules of courtesy. This
was even the major political operation attached to the existence
of the sciences: concealing the internal spiits, and exerting, from
that smooth image, unrivalled terror effects. Terror towards the
outside, as deprivation of truth, for all that which is not reco
nised as scientific. Terror towards the inside, as polite but fierce
disqualification of potential heresies.

“Dear colleague..”

Each science implements a series of hypotheses; these
hypotheses are so many decisions regarding the construction
of reality. This is today widely admitted. What is denied is the
ethical meaning
of each of these decisions, in what way they involve a certain life-
form, a certain way of perceiving the world (for instance, experi-
encing the time of existence as the unwinding of

a“genetic program’, or joy as a matter of serotonin).

Considered in this way, scientific language games seem
less made for establishing a communication between those who
use them, than for excluding those who ignore them. The airtight
material apparatus in which scientific activity is inscribed ~ labo-
ratories, symposiums, etc. - carries in itself a divorce between ex-
perimentations and the worlds they configure. It
is not enough to describe the way the “core” research is always
connected in some way to miltary-commercial interests, and how
in their tum these interests define the contents, the very orienta-
tions of research. To the extent
that science participates in imperial pacification itis firstly by carry-
ing out only those experiments, testing only those hypotheses, that
are compatible with the maintenance of the prevailing order. Our
‘capacity to ruin imperial order is conditioned upon opening spaces.
for antagonistic experiments. For these experiments to produce
their related worlds we need such clearings, just as the plurality of
these worlds is needed for the smothered antagonisms of scien-
tific practice to express themselves.

In this process the practitioners of the old mechanistic and
pasteurian medicine must join those who practice medicine of the
“traditional” kind, setting aside all new age confusion. The attach-
ment to research must cease to be confused with the judicial de-
fence of the integrity of the laboratory. Non-productivist agricultural
practices must develop beyond the category of the organic. Those
who feel the insufferable contradictions of “public education’, be-
tween the championing of “citizenship” and the workshop of the
diffuse seff-entrepreneuriat, must be more and more numerous.
“Culture” must no longer be able to take pride in the collaboration
of a single inventor of forms.

Alliances are everywhere possible.
In order to become effective, the perspective of breaking
the capitalist circuits requires that the secessions multiply, and
that they consolidate.

We will be told: you are caught in an alternative which will
‘condemn you in one way or another: either you manage to consti-
tute a threat to empire, in which case you will be quickly eliminated;
or you will not manage to constitute such a threat, and you will
have once again destroyed yourselves.

There remains only the wager on the existence of another
term, a thin ridge, just enough for us to walk on. Just enough for all

those who can hear to walk and live.
NOTES

1. AssociaTion For THE ToBIN Tax FoR THE A oF Cimi-
ZENSAN EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY COALITION OF LEFTISTS, ONCE
INFLUENTIAL IN FRANCE AS THE STATIST FRINGE OF THE ANTI-
‘GLOBALISATION MOVEMENT.

2. THE ‘WHITE OVERALLS' : NEGRIIST MILITANT ORGANISATION
WHICH DOMINATED THE ANTI-GLOBALISATION MOVEMENT IN
[0

3. THE MOUTHPIECE OF ATT AC.

4. MouVeMENT DES ENTREPRISES DE FRANCE (MEDEF), THE
UNION OF FRENCH BOSSES.

5. ANARCHIST FEDERATION.

6. RevoLumionary COMMUNIST LEAGUE, MaIN FRENCH
TROTSKYIST PARTY.
YOUR are waiting, day atter day. 1TRWait
for their time; as do the workers, even the
old. They all wait, those who are are
discontented and who reflect, They are
wailing for a force to arise, something
they will be part of; a kind of new intera-
tional that will not make the same
mistakes as the previous ones. They wait
for a chance to et rid of the past once
and for all—for something new to begin,

WE HAVE BEGUN.

L CHE/lfl,&L“Ufe

the information super highway
| Geocmes.con/asiRa_couscrve |

/¢t( FREEDOM

/