The Coming Insurrection (Volume 1)

This scraped up to two stars due to the mid section of the book which described in "seven circles" the state of contemporary life. This section was well written (or translated?) and carried a mythic quality in the proper meaning of mythic. It was a poetic revelation of how we live. In some way this is the burden of the book and it rings true. What is wrong then is the vacuity of thought before and after the description of the world. The authors drew no lessons and fail miserably to find a solution beyond a romantic destruction based on "communes", which would inevitably self-destruct or become repressive themselves. The paucity of thought is summarised in the view that the" economy is the crisis". Economies exist, get over it "invisible committee". The crisis is not a system, its human beings failing to grasp life. The solutions border on the inane ramblings of a conspiracy theorist with an "us and them" attitude aimed at anyone that is not acceptable to the authors. The first section written whilst the authors were in prison awaiting trial is a big time wimp out, and references as a symptom of the decline of our civilisation that people now can only afford to take holidays with (horror of horrors) budget airlines! Get real IC. Armchair revolutionaries advocating sanitised violence.

I really enjoyed this little book. It's one of those texts that you find yourself saying 'Yes, that IS the way it is!' with almost a shock of recognition. Certainly, at times the language is a little rhetorical, almost poetic, but that's o.k. - at least it means there's some passion there.So what is in the book? It's divided into a number of sections, the main being seven 'circles' or areas of contention. These rather reminded me of the areas of analysis outlined by David Harvey in his recent and comprehensive ' The Enigma of Capital '.The first 'circle' is the personal:'My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you and something's wrong. Mass personalisation. Individualisation of all conditions - life, work and misery.' (P29)It seems to me that this is related to the ideas in Thomas Frank's ' The Conquest of Cool ' but taken further, and taken personally.The second 'circle' refers to culture in a fairly wide sense, including the media, schools:'A burst of laughter is the only appropriate response to all the serious "questions" posed by news analysts. To take the most banal: there is no "immigration question". Who still grows up where they were born? Who lives where they grew up? Who works where they live?' (P35)The third concerns itself with 'work', the fourth with the 'metropolis' - rejecting the town/country split and seeing the whole as 'one single urban cloth' (P52).The fifth deals with the 'economy' - 'We have to see that the economy is not "in" crisis, the economy is itself the crisis.' (P63)The sixth circle looks at the environment - again, the book turns the terminology on its head by stating that 'There is no "environmental catastrophe". The catastrophe is the environment itself.' (P74)Finally, the seventh 'circle' considers 'civilisation' - specifically Western civilisation and its relation to the State: 'The older and more powerful the state, the less it is a superstructure or exoskeleton of a society and the more it constitutes the subjectivities that people it.' (P87).The seven 'circles' take up most of the book. It seems to me that really what is being described here is a very deep and all-pervasive sense of  alienation . That rings true too.The final sections attempt to put forward strategies to resist this alienation, to re-connect, renew and rethink the relationships between people and the 'circles'. Tending towards a sort of self-help, communard anarchism, it comes close to utopian, but it reminded me of other attempts to think through a different set of social relations - in novel form there's the classic ' The Dispossessed ' or the more recent ' New Model Army '. It also reminded me a bit of Régis Debray's 'Revolution in the Revolution?'.It might be easy, I suppose, to dismiss this book as youthful overblown utopian rhetoric. I really think that that would be a mistake. As I said at the beginning, there is a shock of recognition in the descriptive sections of the book; it is describing real issues and real events. These issues need more than a dry academic exposition - '...we dream of an age equal to our passions.' (P84) The Enigma of CapitalThe Conquest of CoolalienationThe DispossessedNew Model Army

At times naive, a little confused and hopelessly utopian, The Coming Ressurrection is in turn lucid, focussed and able to hit the target effortlessly. And this book is not just about the romance of revolutionary struggle. It is an achingly contemporary, twenty-first century handbook to understand the world we as westerners now live in, and how to change it for the better.This little blue book may have its faults, but despite all of them, it is utterly uplifting.

Everyone should read this book when they ask "why are they rebelling?"

I went into this thinking it was anprim extremism, only to find out it was commie extremism based in france, do your research before buying