The Invisible Committee are going to be taking their message to their friends in the south of England on Saturday March 21.
A representative will be talking at a meeting hosted by Sussex Anarchists at the Cowley Club, 12 London Road, Brighton, at 6pm.
For those who have not heard of them, The Invisible Committee are a France-based collective who published the well-known 2007 pamphlet The Coming Insurrection.
This got a lot of attention across the world, and was even denounced on Fox News in an amusingly rabid manner – you can see the video here.
Now they have a new book out in French – with the English version to follow soon – called A nos amis (To Our Friends).
In this work, as I explained in my full review posted in November, they refer to the whole gamut of uprisings we have witnessed over the last seven years – from Cairo to Rio, Athens to London, Istanbul to Madrid and beyond.
The problem, from an anti-capitalist point of view is that despite all of that resistance the system is still standing – everywhere. Revolutions never seem to develop any further than rioting.
But, on the positive side, there is an increasing feeling of something happening, the commonly-shared intuition that “an insurrection can break out at any moment, for whatever reason, in any country and lead anywhere”.
This, insist The Invisible Committee, is not just wishful thinking on the part of the world’s dissidents – there really is a pattern emerging: “What has been happening in the world since 2008 isn’t an incoherent series of random eruptions in sealed national spaces, but one big historical sequence”.
The authors are clearly inspired by the Zapatista movement and indigenous Indian thinkers are quoted in support of the importance of interconnections between people and land, which the Committee also pinpoints as a crucial motivation behind uprisings elsewhere in the world.
Threats to our environment – whether it be the felling of hundreds of trees in an Istanbul park, the construction of high-speed rail line through the Italian Alps or the building of a new airport at Nantes – are prompting many of the most significant outbreaks of resistance against capitalism.
Moreover, this resistance is targeting the very infrastructure which in fact now constitutes the essential reality of capitalism. Blocking infrastructure is becoming the most effective way of fighting power.
“More and more revolutionaries are coming to thrown themselves as greedily into what they call ‘local struggles’ as they yesterday did into ‘social struggles’”, note the authors. “What connects them are the gestures of resistance that flow from them – blocking, occupying, rioting and sabotaging as direct attacks on the production of value by the circulation of information and goods…”
Nurturing and developing those international connections is part of the Committee’s vision for the future, so it will be interesting to see what can come out of meetings like this one in Brighton…
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