"Engaging with the war that is present, acting strategically, requires that we start from an openness to the situation, that we undersand its inner dynamic, the relations of force that configure it, the polarities that give it its dynamism. An action is revolutionary or not depending on the meaning it acquires from contact with the world. Throwing a rock is never just 'rock-throwing.' It can freeze a situation or set off an intifada."

"A movement lives only through a series of shifts that it effects over time. So at every moment there is a certain distance between its present state and its potential. If it stops developing, if it leaves its potential unrealized, it dies. A decisive act is one that is a notch ahead of the movement’s state, and which, breaking with the status quo, gives it access to its own potential. This act can be that of occupying, smashing, attacking, or simply speaking truthfully."

- To Our Friends

"The real question for revolutionaries is how to make the lively powers in which one participates increase, how to nurture the revolutionizing developments so as to arrive finally at a revolutionary situation."

This is abstract but gives me hope but also makes me feel overwhelmed. I think a lot of To Our Friends has made me feel like I'm falling off a cliff in slow motion.

And now I shall start section three - Government as counter-insurgency...

which, true

"What is happening to us at present can be summed up more or less in this way: from being a military doctrine, counterinsurgency has become a principle of government."

TIC uses snitching in the UK around August 2011, citizen militias in Michoacan, and Golden Dawn in Greece as examples of this - but how would it apply to the US? Probably Oathkeepers and 3%ers, right?

"There is no world government; what there is instead is a worldwide network of local apparatuses of government, that is, a global, reticular, counterinsurgency machinery... In this regard, there is no center and periphery, internal security and foreign operations. What is tried out on faraway peoples will be the fate that is in store for one’s own people."

THING IS, there seems to still be centers and peripheries and I'm not... entirely... sure that this vibes with postcolonial theory

^am i being too nitpicky y/n

Because, and maybe I'm wrong, trying out specific methods of repression and violence on the Global South before trying it in the imperial core

seems like

a continuation of the center and periphery.

"The counter-insugency doctrines should be read, therefore, as theories of the war being waged against us, doctrines that partly define, among so many other things, our common situation in this era. They should be read both as a qualitative leap in the concept of war, short of which we cannot situate ourselves, and as a deceptive mirror. "

See, this I can agree with. Not that the center and periphery doesnt exist.

This bit about asymmetrical warfare is really good, especially this:

"The smashed window of an Air France office in retaliation for the expulsion of undocumented migrants is declared to be an 'act of social war,' on a par with a wave of arrests targeting people fighting against detention centers... Only the forces involved in this case are dysemmetrical. A crushing defeat is inevitable."

"If the insurgents’ war against the government needs to be asymmetrical, it’s because there is an ontological asymmetry between them, and hence a disagreement about the very definition of war, about its methods as well as its objectives."

"We are the environment in which the governmental agents evolve and which they mean to subdue, and not a rival entity in the race for power. We don’t fight in the midst of the people 'like fish in water'; we’re the water itself, in which our enemies flounder—soluble fish."

This is heartbreaking and also true and also

exactly why nihilism is partially weirdly tantalizing

"It’s not a matter of snatching the 'support of the population,'... we must make it so there is no longer a population... It ceases to exist once it ceases to be governable. This is what’s involved in the muffled battle that rages after every uprising: dissolving the power that had formed, focused, and deployed in that event. Governing has never been anything but denying the people all political capacity, that is, preventing insurrection."

"Nothing is more effective for crushing an insurrection than causing a split within the insurgent mass between an innocent or vaguely consenting population and its vanguard, who are militarized, hence minoritarian, usually clandestine, and soon to be 'terrorist.'"

"We shouldn’t think they are out to destroy us. We should start rather from the hypothesis that they’re out to produce us. Produce us as a political subject, as 'anarchists,' as 'Black Bloc,' as 'anti-system' radicals, to extract us from the generic population by assigning us a political identity... a subject the representation of which serves mainly to produce the 'population' as a foil—the population as an apathetic and apolitical heap, an immature mass just good enough for being governed."

"We need to give the same care to the smallest everyday details of our shared life as we give to the revolution. For insurrection is the displacement of this organization that is not one—not being detachable from ordinary life— onto an offensive terrain. It is a qualitative leap in the ethical dimension, not a break with the everyday, finally consummated."

" Accommodating internal conflict when it presents itself honestly, doesn’t interfere at all with the concrete elaboration of an insurrectionary strategy. On the contrary, it’s the best way for a movement to stay vital, to keep the essential questions open, to make the necessary shifts in a timely manner."

"If being revolutionary implies an attachment to certain truths, it follows from the irreducible plurality of the latter that our party will never enjoy a peaceful unity. As far as organization is concerned, then, there will be no choosing between fraternal peace and fratricidal war. We will need to choose between the forms of internal confrontations that strengthen revolutions and those that hinder them."

Starting Chapter 6 of To Our Friends after a long hiatus

"Our Only Homeland: Childhood"

" [in Athens 2010] There was a re-emergence of the old question of whether to engage with society in order to change it, suggesting and offering it examples of other forms of organization, or to set about simply destroying it, without sparing those who, through their passivity and submission, ensured its perpetuation... Perhaps there is no longer a 'society' to destroy or persuade."

Oh no! Another big ol' paragraph that is too important to chop up into a neat 500-character quote.

"What is perverse about the idea of “society” is that it has always helped government to naturalize the product of its activity, its operations, its techniques"

https://anticapitalist.party/media/3-XYw91BI9oWtXypG-s

"One can continue seeing the world in terms of nations and societies, but the latter are now traversed, permeated, by an uncontrollable ensemble of flows. The world presents itself as an immense network in which the large cities, become metropolises, are no longer anything but platforms of interconnection, entry and exit points—stations."

I would insert "to upper-class and mobile people as an immense network" because the network can only be traversed by those ppl.

"[In this global network,] individual identity serves as a universal pass ensuring the possibility, wherever one is, of connecting with the sub-population of one’s fellow creatures. But a collection of uber-metropolitans caught up in a constant shuffle from airport terminals to Eurostar toilets doesn’t make a society, even a global one."

BLOOP

On Silicon Valley:

"In the 'creative communities' of capital, people are bound together by separation itself. There is no longer any outside from which to distinguish between life and the production of value. Death is in its element. It is young, dynamic, and it smiles at you."

"Capital doesn’t frame itself any longer in national terms, but territory by territory. It doesn’t spread itself evenly in every place; it concentrates itself locally by organizing each territory into a milieu of cultivation. It doesn’t try to get everyone moving at the same rate, with progress on their radios, but allows the world to delink into zones of intense surplus-value extraction and neglected zones, into theaters of war and pacified spaces."

see: Detroit, Silicon Valley, Seattle...

"There is no longer a generic 'population.' There is the young 'creative class' that makes its social and relational capital bear fruit in the heart of the smart metropolises, and all those who have so clearly become 'unemployable.' There are lives that count and others that aren’t even factored into the accounts. There is a plurality of populations, some being at risk and others having a substantial purchasing power."

"Seceding is not using the scraps of this world to assemble counter-clusters where alternative communities would bask in their imaginary autonomy vis-à-vis the metropolis... Seceding means inhabiting a territory, assuming our situated configuration of the world, our way of dwelling there, the form of life and the truths that sustain us, and from there entering into conflict or complicity."

Bloop bloop! Building local power is great but we have more to do

Seceding means "linking up strategically with other zones of dissidence, intensifying our circulations with friendly regions, regardless of borders. "

And I think that currently, leftists are not great at that.

"To secede is to break not with the national territory but with the existing geography itself. It’s to trace out a different, discontinuous geography, an intensive one, in the form of an archipelago—and thus to go encounter places and territories that are close to us, even if there are 10,000 kilometers to cover."

- To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends

They start the next section with "there are no local struggles" which

is

not totally accurate and very simplistic/reductive

every struggle is connected and struggles can be shared across borders and physical distances BUT there is something to be said about local struggle in the specificity of a space, especially cities enclosed by boundaries (zoning laws, police patrols and checkpoints, etc etc etc)

"What is capable of linking these different struggles that aren’t about 'territory' at all, is not the fact of being faced with the same capitalist restructuring, but the ways of living that are invented or rediscovered in the very course of the conflict. What ties them together are the acts of resistance they give rise to—blockage, occupation, riot, sabotage as direct attacks against the production of value...'"

- The Invisible Committee, "To Our Friends"

"We risk losing everything if we invoke the local as against the global. The local is not the reassuring alternative to globalization, but its universal product. Before the world was globalized, the place I inhabit was simply my familiar territory—I didn’t think of it as “local.” Local is just the underside of global, its residue, its secretion, and not something capable of shattering it."

And here we come something AK Thompson talked about in Black Bloc, White Riot...

"Local is the name of a possibility of sharing, combined with the sharing of a dispossession."

*sighs deeply and with much feeling*

"Aside from the Mexican state, who would think of categorizing the Zapatista uprising and the adventure that followed from it as a 'local struggle'? And yet what could be more localized than that armed insurrection against the thrusts of neoliberalism which inspired a movement of planetary revolt against 'globalization,' after all."

"Everything is local, including the global, although we still need to localize it. The neoliberal hegemony results from the way it floats in the air, spreads via countless channels that are barely visible for the most part, and appears invincible because it can’t be situated. [We can understand and take down Wall Street] by determining its material, relational networks, tracking the connections from a trading floor out to their last fiber."

Again, The Invisible Committee is really devoted to this idea of "st*pidity" and "id*ocy" in their writing and understanding of the world, which is:

1) ableist
2) wrong
3) not how power works. For a collective seeming to want to address power and its relations and its material affects, what the hell? ableism? ugh

To Our Friends is great UNTIL they start doing this bullshit

"Those whose everyday organization shows them the superfluous character of government may imagine that an underlying, prepolitical society exists... this always entails the postulation of a humanity that is stable, pacified, homogeneous in its positive aspirations, and motivated by a fundamentally Christian disposition to mutual aid, goodness, and compassion."

I don't think people are naive enough to think everyone is INCLINED to this, but rather that it takes work

"We start from a very different premise: just as there is no 'nature,' there is no 'society' either. Pulling humans away from all the non-human elements that, for each one of them, go to make up their familiar world, and lumping together the creatures amputated in that way under the name of 'society' is a monstrosity that has lasted long enough."

So they're arguing not that "society can be good because humans are good" but rather "fuck ~society~ and"... ?