I don't think this group needs an introduction, at any rate I don't feel fit to give one. Suffice to say that I give their perspective some weight since it is learned. Mind you they are French and they like to write about destitution of authority and riots. In France we see people in the streets throwing stones and molotovs, groups of riot cops huddled together in defense. No reason Burgercops wouldn't out and out kill everyone and Burgers would clap for it. All the same I should think being anti-cop and spreading the general will to disobedience is fine. One must start somewhere. Consider also the Baltimore cops who were charged with racketeering. This is not even the same case as the blatant drug planting and an obvious ploy by the state to very publicly crucify SOME members to give the rotten organization as a whole an air of legitimacy.
Started reading it. I really like their first chapter, will see how the rest goes
Adrian Diaz
I've read it, quite good stuff. Philosophically speaking it's quite heavy. First it defines communism as an authentic mode of being-in-the-world (this kills the right Heideggerians). Then explains how normie social networks are the natural extension of neoliberal govermentality where we're all expected to become entrepeneurs of the self who farm likes but never quite manage to have a real connection with anyone or anything, downright predicts the rise of Chinese social credit (which, you know, its bound to become a global phenomenon). The weirdest, most esoteric stuff (and I mean this in a good way!) is when they say instead of being individuals we are all fragments of being who are separated by capitalism, with communism being how these fragments of being are finally united.
Lincoln Robinson
it's anarcho-liberalism
Camden Long
I guess id have to know what they mean by united. It sounds like the human instrumentality project, the way they put it
Connor King
...
Grayson Thompson
I like that he calls love an experience. Makes it less spooky. Beautiful and not really in conflict with what I believe.
Ryder Miller
It's very interesting. Do they self-identify as any tendency?
Michael Lopez
OP here. They are sort of their own thing, but are influenced by a number of philosophers. Beyond Hegel and Marx you have Heidegger who in turn massively influenced Foucault, Marcuse, and Agamben. They are also indebted to the Situationists, Deleuze, and Guattari. They are also probably an offshoot of the journal Tiqqun which was short-lived between 98-01.
Thank you for goodposts. Finishing the last chapter right now.
Landon Phillips
I agree with most of the stuff written, but they are repeating themselves. There is not much of the things they haven't already said in The Coming Insurrection and To Our Friends
Luke Edwards
Empty bombastic phrases, as usual. Defends blac blocs, can't think tactically, etc.
overrated
Bentley Stewart
I'm reading The Coming Insurrection right now, and even though they're talking about 2000s France, it's spooky how well they describe the present state of things. Just swap out a few names and places, and it describes late 2010s America perfectly.
Leo Cooper
this, rank adventurism.
Ayden Morales
That explains it! I have heard nothing but praise for the Cybernetic Hypothesis and it has been on my to read list for a long while, I figure if I liked this I'll like TCH
The eternal ☭TANKIE☭ strikes again
Hudson Baker
That's just the French writing style. It's a mouthful, but not empty.
As genuine outpourings of proletarian insurrection.
On the contrary. The problem is not thinking strategically. It outlines the tactics by which capitalism and dominant institutions can be overcome, but it doesn't appear to outline the overlaying strategies necessary to join the various conflicts into a force that can overcome the counter-revolution. It both rejects the narcissism and spectacle of assemblies, as well as ego-driven autocracies.
By literally who?
It literally demolishes the political heritage of the (liberal) enlightenment. Critiquing not only the nation-state, but also the Law, and the concepts of politics and the republic.
James Butler
Why do you post as a Nazi again?
Jordan Wood
In favor of the narcissism of individualism and spectacle of riot porn.
Carson Wilson
Did you read ? I’m not seeing how it’s in favor of bourgeois indivualism, when they call it a “fragment”.
Landon Powell
*call the individual a fragment
Justin Morgan
It really hit home when they talked about the Common Ground collective in New Orleans post-Katrina. Mutual aid networks established after ecological or economic collapse is unironically the only way for the anarchism or communism to really lay its roots in post-modern, industrial society. Some may call it LARPing but the Invisible Committee does a great critique of how infrastructure itself is essential to upholding the system of capitalism. To our Friends is 10/10 must read though, so I'm excited to push through this.
A lot of people throw the term post-left anarchy at them but honestly they just come off as your typical black flag anarchist, not saying its a bad thing but I feel its a waste of time trying to come up with labels for each specific ideological tendency that differs from other practically similar thoughts of leftism/anarchism etc.
is dis prole serious?
Dominic Torres
If this is the level of discourse of proponents of this "Invisible committee" (it's invisible because it doesn't fucking do anything) then it's definitely an obstacle to proletarian revolution.
Austin Hernandez
have you considered that the French fucking suck?
Adrian Carter
I've burned out on a lot of continental philosophy precisely because of the writing style.
Why the fuck should I try and torture myself by trying to make sense of Guattari when somebody like Manuel DeLanda, for all his deviations from D&G's marxism, can explain that shit to me in 5 minutes
Cooper Gray
t. Anglo
Ayden Richardson
...
Ian Morales
pomobullshitters gonna pomobullshit That's why people get trampled to death in mass panics? Nonsense. t. le deep frenchman 2radical2go on strike with you Wot. Approvingly quoting some psychiatrist: If beehives are at high risk of getting attacked when located close to the ground, how come I've seen so few located higher? Because I haven't been looking. Suicide in times of peace is a more transparent affair than in war. I suspect the cause of that strange pattern is due to how the psychiatrist did (or rather: did not) collect the data. I see these radical renegade philosophers are too cool to look up what cybernetics actually is. Communism is bad because 2deep4u PHILOSOPHY reasons. >There is a good reason why Munch’s painting, The Scream, portrays, still today, the true face of contemporary humanity. Pffft, that's the picture equivalent of Lincoln Park. No. Regulations cut into profits, so the boss class devises means of circumventing these. There are rules that apply to employees, but not people who are self-employed, so let's create people who are self-employed on paper, and other dick moves like that. The Uber-exploited could be exploited otherwise. When the boss class does hideous things, it isn't necessarily because of a reason called "otherwise no profits", otherwise smaller profits is a good enough reason. >Capitalism is the universal expansion of measurement. Math is evil and you are only a real revolutionary if you are a super-spontaneous spaz about everything and never use numbers in your life! Marx highlighted that it's your ability to perform tasks (not so mysterious, I think) that you usually rent out as a worker, you aren't selling dead fixed things, and the employer often doesn't know in advance what exact tasks he needs you for, and doesn't need to. You can do a lot of tasks and switch between them on very short notice; machines exist for all sorts of tasks (and are often better than the best human), but they lack flexibility. Literally muke-tier (he tweeted that "girlfriends are becoming commodities" and that's true for muke because pillows are commodities). People have aesthetic preferences and beautiful people have it easier in the dating game. And you think that wasn't the case 2000 years ago? And you think this example shows that Marxism is outdated?
I rate this text AIDS/10.
Austin Brown
This is true, but to be fair the real development of their thought is from Tiqqun texts such as Introduction to Civil War. Tiqqun tends to describe the world in "Figures" such as Bloom and the Young-Girl which I find to be helpful. Also I found the last chapter of "Now" to contain some new things that I will need to go over again such as critique of the sharing economy and 'collectives' and the talk of fragments of being. Their position, which makes much more sense if you read Civil War, is that the state is secondary to civil war, and that the idea of a neutral inviolable center be it a prole state or a bourg state is not tenable. I think "forms of life" is something they might have lifted from Wittgenstein but I have not read his work. For them there is no such thing as THE community, only community that circulates, or acts and experiences of community. THE community is a spook.
read Tiqqun. they are not 'individualists'.
ahahahaha who are the Tarnac 9 anyway?
whole thread: btfo
Guattari does suck tbf and it's not like I've read Lyotard either but not all (French) theory is equally good or hard to read
the first line is an affirmation of multiple forms of life. Like I said above, they argue in an earlier text that the modern state was a means of suppressing civil war and is secondary to it. Thinking in terms of the future, acting in the present, I think this is a slightly bombastic phrase you shouldn't consider holy writ. After all it is in the introduction whereas there is plenty of meat in the main body of the text, and don't forget the title of the text. General strike really should be reconsidered in the wake of May 68 and how CGT and other unions act. I say this as an outside observer however. As for cybernetic power I encourage you to read at least the first few chapters of Cybernetic Hypothesis which would explain their conception (the last few chapters are iffy).
Sebastian Carter
mate have you considered that people might feel differently about the world than you? Tiqqun and IC talk about metaphysics for a reason because it is the realm of "why?". Why appropriate a highway, an Amazon warehouse? That's the real question that we will have to grapple with. Yes, their interpretation is that the man is wondering "How to live?", and all you have to say is an anodyne. they said universal you twat.
Carter Kelly
This is a real excerpt. Great "theory", cumrades.
Because that's where I drive and that's where I work, and that's a good enough reason, you dense cunt.
Jaxson Gonzalez
bumping with texts
Jayden Martin
user don't you wish there was more to life? Other ways to live? Don't you want to imagine new freedoms and new values? Don't you yearn for a ''re-enchanted life? Socialism means nothing if it is just our same grey dull burgeois civilization but painted red.
Joseph Baker
I've read it between the two rounds of the French presidential elections, and I was pretty disappointed tbh.
My main gripe with the Invisible Committee is that they seem to be believe that technology can magically disappear. They seem to believe that every radical want to be part of a black bloc and live in small frugal communes. They dismiss Marxists and cybernetics kinda offhandedly (I must admit I haven't read their Tiqqun piece on the latter though), and generally eschew complex modes of organization. Adventurism is actually a good noun to describe their ideology.
That said, they make some good points. Their critique of popular assemblies is spot on, and the third chapter of Now basically restates what they already said in To Our Friends (their best book IMO) at the light of the protests against the Loi Travail/Macron instead of the Arab Spring and Occupy. They were proven right. I also liked the chapter where they discuss Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo. Why almost no one on the left talk about this ? More generally, I like their Situationist-influenced analysis of everyday life and how it has been transformed by capital. It is nice that some people out there are updating this for the 21st century.
If you like the Invisible Committee and can read French, they/their friends have an interesting webzine at lundi.am
Joshua Davis
If you don't adopt platformism or a party you are an individualist in practice.
Landon Miller
Basically pseudo-radicals with horrible theory and praxis. You are truly idiotic and incapable of political thinking if you don't see how this is seriously flawed on many, many levels.
William Smith
I thought the point was that they could never prove the Tarnac 9 was them? If I remember right, they arrested a bunch of people on speculation more than anything
Jace Phillips
En francais, c'est les gendarmes, mon amie.
Juan Lewis
>therealmovement.wordpress.com/2017/04/29/the-implausible-logic-of-an-invisible-committee/ >The idea that interrupting or blockading reproduction and circulation of the industry allows us to “politically attack the system as a whole” is ludicrous. Have these fools even read Capital? Do they not know the difference between use value and exchange value, between constant capital and variable capital, between value and surplus value? If they did, they would know that both the commodity and labor have a two-fold character; that useful labor is not the same as value-producing labor; and that the use value of the infrastructure of society is not — and has never been — the same as its exchange value. The problem then becomes how to abolish the exchange value of the infrastructure of production, without destroying its use value. Spot on criticism.
Their idiotic total opposition to measuring thing and using numbers (stats and math are capitalism, apparently) reminds me of David Graeber and other touchy-feely romantic anarchist types.
Luis Peterson
I might get flamed for saying this, but I really wish we would have a Marxist blogger comparable to Scott Alexander tbh, someone who would talk about the latest findings in social sciences under the prism of Marx and Engels. Some people on the left don't like the idea of trying to quantify human behaviors, and it's a shame because their enemies are using these techniques and it works quite well for them.
Which is funny because whenever civilization appeared mathematics and its application followed (Egypt, Sumer, China, Greece, Maya, etc.). They are pushing a primitivist line without realizing it.
Nicholas Adams
They are against Modernity but they know exactly what they are doing.
