SODOM & GOMORRAH: “It’s useless to wait — for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.”
The Coming Insurrection is a book allegedly written by that Tarnac 9, a group of French anarchists who were arrested in 2008 for plotting to blow up a railroad line. The book discusses the impending collapse of capitalist culture. According to the Invisible Committee, the author(s), civilization is already in the midst of a collapse and activists need to choose sides in the struggle.
The Invisible Committee takes the reader on a journey of exploration of the seven circles of alienation. These are self, social relations, work, the economy, urban life, the environment, and civilization itself. Through it, they attempt to demonstrate the ultimate dehumanization that we undergo by participating in the current society. In true Marxist garb, the state as an agent of capitalistic goals, oppresses us by extracting value from our labor forcibly.
Once this alienation is exposed, the Invisible Committee tells us that the entire capitalist edifice is weak; it is vulnerable to collapse. This is why the activist must form underground networks to gather strength outside of the mainstream in order to strike at critical points. Moments of chaos present themselves as opportunities to strike at the heart of the oppressive system. They use the analogy of an apartment building being used as an urban fortress to fight the police. On the outside, the apartment building appears like every other building in the metropolis, but on the inside the tenants have drilled holes in the walls to form new passages of escape during revolutionary struggles.
The argument in The Coming Insurrection is that a small, persistent revolt against the strata of society will collapse the entire thing, bringing the freedom of the masses.
Why does this matter to us? Some have alleged that the Right’s insistence on the insurrection’s importance as well as the status quo powers’ (i.e. the French police) prosecution and attack of the authors are nothing more than exaggerations. We are, these people say, merely finding a scapegoat for the shortcomings of capitalistic society. Our discussion of the book’s arguments are neither exaggerations nor scapegoatery. We are forced to confront and face the insurrectionary left because they seriously mean us harm. The Invisble Committee may be correct – society may indeed already be collapsing. Each person must choose a side; the activist on the left will choose to join the anarchists in their struggle against authority while those on the Right will choose to find new ways to undo and stop the revolutionary terror.
If the so-called Invisible Committee is correct, if society is the crisis and its collapse is inevitable – if, put another way, the age of modernity is over – we on the Right must choose sides. This does not mean to merely side with the status quo, for there is no safety there and there is no support (they have attempted to eradicate us for hundreds of years). We may simply acknowledge that the collapse is upon us, the time to discover alternatives has come, and that our current persecution is nearing an end. What happens next is up to us.