I mean here we go!
https://anticapitalist.party/media/wGxMeEKwof12LMHWnRI
https://anticapitalist.party/media/9E-A831GMYiSrqvaPKo

This essay is available as a PDF online but I’m reading a book version (as pictured above) but anyways!
https://anticapitalist.party/media/N9Hdq-MnLTV5M4tjGJw

here it is https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends

"In reality, the end of civilization has been clinically established for a century, and countersigned by events... the catastrophe there in front of us, and that has been there for a long time, from the catastrophe that we are, the catastrophe that the West is. That catastrophe is existential, affective, and metaphysical first of all. It resides in Western man’s incredible estrangement from the world, an estrangement that demands, for example, that he become the master and possessor of nature."

"The falsity of the entire Western apocalyptic consists in projecting onto the world the mourning we’re not able to do in regard to it. It’s not the world that is lost, it’s we who have lost the world and go on losing it. It’s not the world that is going to end soon, it’s we who are finished, amputated, cut-off, we who refuse vital contact with the real in a hallucinatory way. The crisis is not economic, ecological, or political, <i> the crisis is above all that of presence </i>."

"Man has even proclaimed himself a 'geological force' ... For the last time, he assigns himself the main role, even if it’s to accuse himself of having trashed everything—the seas and the skies, the ground and what’s underground... What’s remarkable is that he continues relating in the same disastrous manner to the disaster produced by his own disastrous relationship with the world."

^this bit about the anthropocene is fascinating to me because I know that "capitalocene" is a little more ~acceptable~ in certain circles

Makes me think of Donna Haraway's recent works : http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.7.pdf

"He has the hubris to claim, paternally, to be 'protecting the environment,' which certainly never asked for anything of the sort. All this has the look of a last bold move in a game that can’t be won."

This makes me think about how conservation efforts are almost always framed in terms of biodiversity and survival but ofc whose survival blah blah blah

"If so much satisfaction is derived from surveying the devastation of the environment it’s largely because this veils the shocking destruction of interiorities. Every oil spill, every sterile plain, every species extinction is an image of our souls in shreds, a reflection of our absence from the world, of our personal inability to inhabit it."

"We other revolutionaries, with our atavistic humanism, would do well to inform ourselves about the uninterrupted uprisings by the indigenous peoples of Central and South America over the past twenty years. Their watchword could be “Place the earth at the center.” It’s a declaration of war against Man. Declaring war on him could be the best way to bring him back down to earth, if only he didn’t play deaf, as always."

"Nothing is older than the end of the world. The apocalyptic passion has always been favored by the powerless since earliest antiquity. What is new in our epoch is that the apocalyptic has been totally absorbed by capital, and placed in its service. The horizon of catastrophe is what we are currently being governed by."

"The decomposition of this world, taken on as such, creates openings for other ways of living, including in the middle of an 'emergency situation.' Consider the inhabitants of Mexico City in 1985... In the euphoria of regaining control of their urban existence, they conflated the collapse of buildings with a breakdown of the political system, releasing the life of the city from the grip of government as much as possible and starting to rebuild their destroyed dwellings."

When I think about how this can be applied to my own life and organizing, I think about how much I don't want things to get to a crisis for new communities and ways of living/thriving to exist, but to build the networks early, preventative stuff in the case of earthquakes, idk

"Faced with the Western catastrophe, the left generally adopts the position of lamentation, denunciation, and thus helplessness, which makes it loathsome in the eyes of the very ones it claims to be defending. The state of exception in which we are living shouldn’t be denounced, it should be turned back against power itself.

...

For us there is now only a historical battlefield, and the forces that move upon it. Our range of action is boundless. Historical life extends her arms to us."

"It’s not the people that produce an uprising, it’s the uprising that produces its people, by re-engendering the shared experience and understanding, the human fabric and the real-life language that had disappeared. Revolutions of the past promised a new life. Contemporary insurrections deliver the keys to it...

There is where the event resides: not in the media phenomenon fabricated to exploit the rebellion through external celebration of it, but in the encounters actually produced within it"

"In contemporary insurrections there is something that especially unsettles the revolutionaries: the insurrections no longer base themselves on political ideologies, but on ethical truths...

A truth, we were taught, is a solid point above the abyss—a statement that adequately describes the World... Far from serving to describe the world, language helps us rather to construct a world. Ethical truths are thus not truths about the world, but truths on the basis of which we dwell therein."

I wonder about this. Truth. Ethical truths. I think that in practice I agree. Based on what I have learned in demos and occupations, this is true. But I am curious about the overlap/feedback loop/connection between ethical truths AND political ideologies.

I don't have any answers or even any arguments to make about this but I'm interested in it. But also truth as a philosophical concept kind of bores me (it might be bc I'm not well-versed in The Debates)

"Truths are what bind us, to ourselves, to the world around us, and to each other... If earthlings are prepared to risk their lives to prevent a square from being transformed into a parking lot as at Gamonal in Spain, a park from becoming a shopping center as at Gezi in Turkey, woods from becoming an airport as at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, it’s clearly because what we love, what we are attached to—beings, places, or ideas—is also part of us"

"The true content of Occupy Wall Street was not the demand, tacked onto the movement a posteriori like a post-it stuck on a hippopotamus, for better wages, decent housing, or a more generous social security, but disgust with the life we’re forced to live. Disgust with a life in which we’re all alone, alone facing the necessity for each one to make a living, house oneself, feed oneself, realize one’s potential, and attend to one’s health, by oneself."

*sighs*

There are a lot of italics in this book that I can't always mark because I've run out of character space for <i></i>

There's a bit where the book talks about austerity and anti-austerity measures and I'm not quite sure what to make of it! I will have to sit with this one a lot I think.

"As for the pacifism that is associated so naturally with the idea of democracy, we should hear what the Cairo comrades say about that as well: 'Those who say that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that the police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even the force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces.'"

WHEWWWWWWWWWW 🎉

I think one of my favorite things about this book/essay/letter is how it uses examples from across the entire world - the emphasis is on moments of insurrection, rebellion, or “new ways of existing with each other” (that’s me paraphrasing), which are, in certain ways, “universal”*

*even so, “universal” as a qualifier is dangerous Sticky ground to be treading into. But! Still something to think about

This book is really really fascinating and good, and is resonating with me as a person who feels hopeless, close to burnout, cynical, etc

The CrimeThinc zine “We Are All Very Anxious” made me feel similarly. For some reason these writings give me more of an affective response than “classical” anarchist theory (which I still love and delight in!).

I don’t like feeling like this but for some reason, To Our Friends makes it slightly more bearable lol

"So to destitute power it’s not enough to defeat it in the street, to dismantle its apparatuses, to set its symbols ablaze. To destitute power is to deprive it of its foundation. That is precisely what insurrections do... 'The king has no clothes,' one says then, because the constituent veil is in tatters and everyone sees through it. To destitute power is to take away its legitimacy, compel it to recognize its arbitrariness, reveal its contingent dimension."

One of the harder things about reading this is that I’m not reading it on a computer so typing up quotes is much harder! but I’m gonna try to get back into it ❤️

One thing that “classical” anarchist theorists didn’t seem to anticipate was the emergence of the surveillance state and how power is abstracted, which The Invisible Committee talks about a LOT. I think that’s one of the things I find the most interesting about To Our Friends

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends#toc15

This was my favorite section so far:

4: Fuck Off Google

a. There are no “Facebook revolutions”, but there is a new science of government, cybernetics

b. War against all things smart!

c. The Poverty of Cybernetics

d. Techniques against Technology

"In the era of networks, governing means ensuring the interconnection of people, objects, and machines as well as the free - i.e., transparent and controllable—circulation of information that is generated in this manner. This is an activity already conducted largely outside the state apparatuses, even if the latter try by every means to maintain control of it."

"It’s becoming clear that Facebook is not so much the model of a new form of government as its reality already in operation. The fact that revolutionaries employed it and still employ it to link up in the street en masse only proves that it’s possible, in some places, to use Facebook against itself, against its essential function, which is policing."

I don't know that this is true anymore, given that Facebook events can be used to doxx people now...

"We’re not experiencing a 'crisis of trust' but the end of trust, which has become superfluous to government. Where control and transparency reign, where the subjects’ behavior is anticipated in real time through the algorithmic processing of a mass of available data about them, there’s no more need to trust them or for them to trust."

This is the kind of thing that I was talking about WRT classical anarchist theory vs this book/essay in particular

"Cybernetic government is inherently apocalyptic. Its purpose is to locally impede the spontaneously entropic, chaotic movement of the world and to ensure 'enclaves of order,' of stability, and - who knows? - the perpetual self-regulation of systems, through the unrestrained, transparent, and controllable circulation of information."

I liked this paragraph too much to split it up into multiple toot-quotes

And yes, I don't think Kropotkin or Goldman anticipated this. Even now, as this very "Quantified Self" that they speak of, I don't know how to stop it or opt out of being "a system-being which is itself part of an ensemble of complex information systems"

I find this stuff chilling and fascinating and I love/hate it

https://anticapitalist.party/media/eSD9Gko_y883A-dxsGY

"Behind the futuristic promise of a world of fully linked people and objects, when cars, fridges, watches, vacuums, and dildos are directly connected to each other and to the Internet, there is what is already here: the fact that the most polyvalent of sensors is already in operation: myself... I appear not to do much and yet I produce a steady stream of data. Whether I work or not, my everyday life, as a stock of information, remains fully valuable."

"The question of cybernetic government is not only, as in the era of political economy, to anticipate in order to plan the action to take, but also to act directly upon the virtual, to structure the possibilities."

- "To Our Friends," by the Invisible Committee

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends

One of the things I love most about this book/essay/letter is just that it doesn’t claim to have answers or a plan in the way that Kropotkin did. It feels nihilistic in the most beautiful way, because everything feels possible at once.

I’m still reading and digesting and processing, but I’m really glad I finally read it.

"Eventually, however, with Western man’s abstract relation to the world becoming objectified in a whole complex of apparatuses, a whole universe of virtual reproductions, the path towards presence paradoxically reopens. By detaching ourselves from everything, we’ll end up detaching ourselves even from our detachment."

"The expansion and networking of Do It Yourself has produced a gamut of purposes: it’s a matter of fooling with things, with the street, the city, the society, life itself. Some pathological progressives have been quick to see the beginnings of a new economy in it, even a new civilization, based this time on 'sharing.' Never mind that the present capitalist economy already values “creation,” beyond the old industrial constraint."