The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee

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Book can be downloaded here

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http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?hzie5nyezji

I read most of it, skimmed some of it. It reads a bit like a CrimethInc work, if you are familiar with that. Strong, reactionary language tempered with intelligence and cleverness. Mostly it is focused on France, it seems, with the main examples provided being mostly about the situation there, but the Invisible Committee has been thoughtful enough to provide footnotes for those of us not in the thick of that powder keg's blast radius.

It's a short book, and might be worth a peek. Glen Beck recently held it up as a scarecrow to rally the conservatives. It seems to be getting wide circulation in the anark underground.

I didn't find much new myself in this book, aside from, as mentioned, the particulars of the situation in France, which is interesting in itself, to me.
Perhaps I will read it again, and have more to say (as I said I kind of skimmed it).

I think the book may have been discussed elsewhere here, but I couldn't find it. If the link dies and you can't find it, feel free to PM me and I'll upload it somewhere in the cyber.

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I guess this book made it to the cover of Adbusters, that hip, feel-bad liberal rag everyone loves to hate, and hates to love.

Discussion about it here

http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/8569

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The order of work made the order of our whole world. Its collapse is so obvious that just thinking about everything that’s to come gives everyone lockjaw. To work today is less about the economic need of producing commodities than about the political need to produce producers and consumers, to save the order of work by any means necessary.

Producing oneself is about to become the dominant occupation in a society where production has become aimless: like a carpenter who’s been kicked out of his workshop and who out of desperation starts to plane himself down. That’s where we get the spectacle of all these young people training themselves to smile for their employment interviews, who whiten their teeth to make a better impression, who go out to nightclubs to stimulate their team spirit, who learn English to boost their careers, who get divorced or married to bounce back again, who go take theater classes to become leaders or “personal development” classes to “manage conflicts” better – the most intimate “personal development,” claims some guru or another, “will lead you to better emotional stability, a more well directed intellectual acuity, and so to better economic performance.” The croaking of all these little people waiting impatiently to be selected by training themselves to be ‘natural’ is part of an attempt to save the order of work by a ethic of motivation.

To be ‘motivated’ means to report for work not as if it were an activity, but as if it were a whole realm of possibility. If the unemployed take out their piercings, get haircuts and start making ‘plans,’ work hard on their ‘employability’ as they say, they’re proving how motivated they are. Motivation means that kind of a slight detachment from yourself, that minimal tearing ourselves away from what constitutes us, that condition of foreignness, with which it becomes possible for you to sell yourself, not just your labor power, and to be paid not for what you do, but for what you are. It’s the new norm for socialization. Motivation is what fuses together the two opposing poles of Work: here you participate in your own exploitation, and all participation is exploited. Ideally, every one person gets to be a little business enterprise, your own boss and your own product. And whether you’re working or not, you have to accumulate contacts, skills, and a “network:” what one might call “human capital.”

The planet-wide injunction to get mobilized and motivated on the slightest pretext – about cancer, “terrorism,” an earthquake, the homeless – sums up the determination of the ruling powers to maintain the reign of work even beyond its physical disappearance.

The present machinery of production is therefore on the one hand a gigantic mental and physical mobilization-machine, sucking up the energy of those who have become “excess” humans, and on the other it is a sorting machine that allows conformed subjectivities to survive and lets drop any and all “risk individuals,” those who incarnate a different use of life, and in that sense resist it. On the one hand they give life to ghosts, and on the other they let the living die. Such is the specifically political function of the present machinery of production.

To organize beyond and against work, to collectively desert the regime of motivation, and manifest the existence of a vitality and discipline in demobilization itself, is a crime that a civilization in desperate straits will never forgive us; it’s in fact the only way to survive it.

[SonicG]

Sounds good but, and I hate to sound like a cynical burn-out, but it sounds very familiar to me since I was heavily into the AJODA/Autonomedia milieu in the '90s and still try to read it as much as possible. And, of course I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments - I linked Blacks The Abolition of Work in that end of work thread - but, I dunno, we need a praxis that doesn't fall into rote socialism. The crux is to make people realize that the brass ring they are trying to grab can be had by doing the exact opposite: slowing down and decreasing the amount of work done. Breaking people from the hypnotic trance of shiny luxury goods and getting them to appreciate a life where they only have to work 20? 10? 8? hours a week although they will never be able to have their very own Benz, they will be very capable of going off to Hawaii for a few months...Again, I dont have any hard practical suggestions for moving in that direction and perhaps thats why I have, even more cynically, embraced things like peak oil or even 2012 since maybe that is the only way we can reach some sort of "post-work" social order.
I will try to take to take a deeper look at the material though- Cheers.