The Coming Insurrection Book

Finished at last. In review of this inflamatory little tract, let me start off with some background.

The Coming Insurrection has gained traction thanks to two readership groups. It is popular among anarchists as an expression of their thought and methods. It has also gained readership among the American "populist right" as a go-to treatise on "what the enemy thinks." For this we can thank Glen Beck. Say what you will about Beck, but he has actually made deeper discourse about his pet issues possible by bringing such books as this and Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" to the wider public consciousness.

So this book does three things: First it presents an anarchist analysis of the ways in which we are controlled within our current culture, and what those controlling structures are meant to conceal. Then it sets out a variety of tactics to oppose and undo the current culture and it's controlling mechanisms. Lastly (but also throughout the book too) it urges us not just to understand but to organize and act.

According to the authors, we (persons outside the ruling elite) are subject to control by elitist society. We, as individuals, are isolated within a variety of "circles": these might be the enclosures used in ven diagrams, they might be fences to hem us in, they might be an image to make us recall Dante's circles of hell - I don't know exactly what is meant by the term. But the circles divert our attention toward false problems, isolate us from others, and neutralize our ability to think and act both independently and within independent groups outside the context of societal control.

What do the circles conceal? Through the text it is suggested that it is the fact that our economic activity serves to perpetuate the power and wealth of the few. All these circles exist to blind us to that reality. Further, some of those circles (environmentalism for instance) exist to create new sources of wealth and control for the few.

So what do the authors propose? Simply put, the control of the few should be broken by abandoning their values, destroying "their" economy (destroying the means of production and exchange), opposing all government, committing anonymous criminal and violent acts on a small scale until the opportunity to riot and burn on a larger scale comes. As soon as possible, the authors advocate that we join communes of people with whom we share common beliefs and likes. When a multiplicity of self sufficient communes arises in the city and country, a critical mass will be achieved to wipe away the current state, either through guerrilla war and rioting against local authorities, or through total disinterest in those authorities. In short, they advocate the 60's, hippies, and class war leading to Charlie Manson's utopia (but perhaps with less drugs and more intellectualism and solidarity, as befits French hippies).

In judging this book, my thought is that the Invisible Committee underestimates the consequence of "the coming insurrection."

If that insurrection comes to pass as imagined, there will be a lot of babies thrown out with the bathwater, literally. Productivity is undermined by the lifestyle of shoplifting, mooching off of welfare, and rioting whenever the opportunity arises. How do you figure the world can sustain the many mouths here if you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs - the common human productivity that has the potential to feed, cloth, and educate us all (not just the rich), and can allow man leisure and conquest of the moon besides?

This book, if implemented, leads to an implosion of human productivity and a calamity of starvation and population reduction on a scale that only a Khmer Rouge or Ted Kazinsky could love. Or failing that it leads to a stalemate of perpetual war between "us and them" that hinder our productivity, limits our consumption, and hems in our future. The anarchists would create a malignant and limiting circle of their own.

This isn't to advocate preserving the status quo. But the real problem with society isn't the need to destroy the productive order, but to alter the order of distribution. Yes, the circles are a problem, but the bigger problem is what the circles exist to protect... which is the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few, and the impoverishing and silencing of the many. Our institutions aren't bad in themselves, it's only that they are hijacked and turned against us. This is true even if those institutions have almost never been in the hands and at the service of the many.

For those really interested in promoting the good of the many, maybe the better solution is not destroying the economic order but diverting it's profit and output to at least a greater service of public rather than private good. Taxation and reinvestment (if not welfare redistribution) seem like more useful vehicles than firebombs and shoplifting in the long run. Of course the right would find this contrary to the conservative religion of "economic fundamentalism." So to achieve this democratically we need to convince the wider public that such things as Galbraith's "Good Society" are possible and superior to the present order.

Lastly, I'm giving this book five stars, not because I agree with everything in it, but because I've never read a better pamphlet in these times. This book ranks up there with Thomas Paine's Common Sense and Marx's Manifesto. I personally fault it only because it isn't Roosevelt's Four Freedoms.

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p.s. -- One late thought regarding the use of violence. A couple of years ago I saw a bunch of public school teachers protesting budget and job cuts when our new Gov. Scott (in Florida) decided to slash and burn the public sector. NOTHING whatsoever has come of those and following protests since. The school system is a wasteland of underfunding and underachievement, and the same goes for the rest of the public sector that has been raped to allow tax cuts that have produced ZERO of the jobs promised. I thought then, and am convinced now, that if the school teachers really want to get the Governor's attention they will have to set something on fire or blow something up. Not that I'm exactly encourage this... But frankly, I do think that it's an empirical sound observation that peaceful protest has achieved nothing and has been steamrolled by the police. Notice how the Occupy camps have been cleared from every city.