“May Day, 1987: thousands of black-clad Autonomen (“those who are autonomous”) riot in West Berlin. After a decade spent honing their street-fighting tactics, they stage an offensive against state repression by blocking streets, occupying buildings, and fighting a low-intensity urban war against the police. The Autonomen expand their liberated zone throughout much of the neighborhood of Kreuzberg that is their base. After a night of rebellious jubilation, they return to their squatted houses and social centers to nurse their wounds, curse the police, and celebrate a temporary victory. Although the German media depict the Autonomen as little more than violent mobs whose only motivation is destruction, the radicals have simultaneously constructed an extensive network of squatted alternative infrastructure across West Berlin and throughout West Germany”
“During the 1980s, the Autonomen turned hundreds of abandoned buildings into group housing, social centers, movement bars, and cultural centers—spaces that provided both alternative forms of living and bases of attack”
“At their best, the squats constituted urban liberated territory in which thousands of young people practiced a communism of everyday life”
“More recently, in France, the Invisible Committee has drawn on the German autonomous experiences to theorize the commune as a destituent space of everyday communism”
“In this view, communes do not form a constituent power whose aim is to establish a new order with more representative state institutions. Rather, drawing on Giorgio Agamben, the Invisible Committee argues that communes destitute the state (i.e., render it inoperative and powerless) by challenging the need for state institutions”
“Development of new communal forms of life outside the state and capitalism provides the basis for “suppressing them in a positive way. To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution, but to attack the need we have of it.”(1) It is in this sense that communes provide the material foundation to “live communism” and attack the rule of capitalism and the state”
“The Invisible Committee is a collective of post-autonomist communists (formerly operating under the moniker Tiqqun) who trace their intellectual lineage through Italian Autonomia and the German Autonomen, among others. Though born in the Parisian squatting scene, they grew disillusioned with the radical subcultural milieu and moved to the tiny town of Tarnac, where they live communally and collectively run a farm, bar, and general store”
“This article combines historical insights from the Autonomen with theoretical interventions from the Invisible Committee in order to make several related arguments”
“First, the commune form creates alternative worlds in which liberalism is combatted and collective struggle against alienation takes place”
“Second, communes operate according to a unique spatial logic that ruptures capitalist geography, promotes new spatial practices, and establishes non-alienated inhabitation of territory”
“Third, the Autonomen and the Invisible Committee theorize and act upon a new conception of communism as a collective practice of living the “good life” in revolutionary struggle rather than as solely a (future) economic system”
“Fourth, alternative infrastructure provides the means to practice this in daily life”
“Finally, revolutionary practice entails networks of autonomous communes seceding from the capitalist system to form liberated territories that function as bases from which to attack capitalist state power”
““The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality. . . . All power to the communes!”
– The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (117, 133)”
“The commune centers two core components: an anti-individualistic collective bond and a concomitant radical transformation of everyday life”
“communes are formed around the desire to carry out collective projects. Communes arise when we transform our relationships with each other and face the world together”
“Communes construct community out of isolation and replace individualism with collective self-determination and well-being. They form when groups of individuals attempt to directly “communize” their lives (put them in common) and face the problems of the world together”
“As radical geographer Alexander Vasudevan puts it in his book on squatting in Berlin, “the squat was a place of collective world-making; a place to imagine alternative worlds. . . . At stake here was the opportunity to build an alternative habituswhere the very practice of ‘occupation’ became the basis for producing a different sense of shared city life.”(3)”
“Drawing from Italian Autonomia and the German autonomous women’s movement, they employed a “politics of the first person,” rather than a Marxist orientation towards the proletariat or an anti-imperialist one for Third World national liberation”
“autonomous activists emphasized self-determination within subcultures over traditional workplace struggle, embraced a “vague anarchism,” and called for “no power to no one.””
““Every declared commune calls a new geography into existence around it.”
– The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends (229)”
“Communes challenge the spatial order of the capitalist world, establish an inhabited territoriality, and provide a setting for experimental spatial practices”
“Social space is important to contest because it performs an important material and ideological function for liberalism. As the Invisible Committee explain, “We inherit from modernity a conception of space as an empty, uniform, and measurable expanse where objects, creatures, or landscapes occupy their place. But the sensible world does not present itself to us in that way. Space is not neutral. . . . Places are irreducibly loaded—with stories, impressions, emotions.”(8)”
“Against capitalist abstraction,
the commune regards itself first of all as a concrete, situated rupture with the overall order of the world. The commune inhabits its territory—that is, it shapes it just as much as the territory offers it a dwelling place and a shelter. It forms the necessary ties there, it thrives on its memory, it finds a meaning, a language, in the land. . . An intensely inhabited territory ends up becoming an affirmation in itself, an articulation, an expression of the life that’s lived there.(10)”
“Inhabitation of communes aims to make territory impenetrable to dominant power”
“By increasing the number of free spaces, deepening the connections and circulations between them, and overcoming our reliance on capitalist infrastructure, “the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory.”(11)”
“Communes propagate an autonomous logic of geography and cartography. The territory of communes cultivates variety and fertility in place of the bleak monotony of capitalist space”
“Reading the Invisible Committee’s description of communal geography, we may appropriate the Zapatista slogan and call for “a world in which many geographies fit”:
Every declared commune calls a new geography into existence around it, and sometimes even at a distance from it. Where there had only been a uniform territory, a plain where everything was interchangeable, in the greyness of generalized equivalence, it raises up a chain of mountains, a whole variegated relief with passes, peaks, incredible pathways between friendly things, and forbidding precipitous terrain between enemy things. Nothing is simple anymore, or is simple in a different way. Every commune creates a political territory that extends out and ramifies as it grows. (12)”
“Commune inhabitants experiment with new collective spatial practices. Squatting enables practices of creative architecture and self-determination of living space that facilitates new forms of life”
“Life itself is structured differently within a commune: the very fact of group living forces previously atomized humans into contact with each other in daily life”
“Communes often organize themselves around collective spaces. Most important, many squatters argue, is the kitchen, which operates “as the key ‘socio-spatial centre of the house.”(18) Collectively running a kitchen makes several political interventions”
“First, it combats the gendered division of labor that relies on women to cook for men”
“Second, it connects food with community: collective meals establish a connection between people, as well as with the food they eat”
“Finally, “outside” political life is enhanced. As one squatter puts it, “[P]olitics assumes an entirely different relation to everyday life when last night’s meetings are discussed over breakfast. Not only is the movement’s progress accelerated, but truly important issues, ones which are lost in the shuffle when we live in isolation, are topics of immediate concern and action.”(19)”
“Perhaps even more important for the Autonomen was the function of the squatted commune as a space of cultural production. Subculture, not work, was the driving force of everyday life”
“In the KuKuCK squat, for instance, “fifty people lived in a complex that included three stages, performance areas for ten theater groups, practice rooms for five bands, a studio, a café, and an auto repair shop.”(21)”
“Finally, the Autonomen produced collective identity in the streets. Marching in black bloc produces a sense of exhilarating comradery between accomplices and gives a shared identity to the movement”
““[T]he black leather jackets worn by many people at demonstrations and the black flags carried by others signaled less an ideological anarchism than a style of dress and behavior—symbols of a way of life that made contempt for the established institutions and their U.S. ‘protectors’ into a virtue. . . . Black became the color of the political void—of the withdrawal of allegiance to parties, governments, and nations.”(22)”
“David Graeber stresses the connection between punk and street actions in his ethnography of the North American anarchist scene. He quotes an activist who explains that
[i]n a mosh pit at a punk or hardcore show, all the kids are going nuts, all together, stage diving, circle pits, crowd surfing, asshole bouncers twice your size, so you develop a feel for space, for fluid motion and action. Linking arms to force a wedge through police lines at an action is just like forcing your way to the front of a crowd at a show with slow steady pressure. It’s not that all Black Bloc’ers are punk rockers, or vice versa, but when the Black Bloc’er leapt over the heads of riot police at the navy memorial during George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001 to escape arrest, he was just stage diving and body surfing.(23)”
““The real communist question is not ‘how to produce,’ but ‘how to live.’”
– The Invisible Committee, Now (154)”
“Autonomists act on the desire to experience communism today, in our everyday lives, even within the bleak world of capitalism”
“Fragmentation leads to the possibility of the good life within the fragments of the world that we come to inhabit and control. Indeed, “in the fragmentation there is something that points toward what we call ‘communism.’”(26)”
“As the Invisible Committee puts it, “[T]he thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.”(27)”
“Challenging traditional Marxist and anarchist conceptions of communism that focus solely on seizing the means of production, the Invisible Committee highlights a communism of everyday life”
“What matters is the communism that is lived in the fight itself.”(28) This is not an anarchistic prefigurative politics that models the world in which we hope to someday live; instead, we must live communism now, in today’s conditions and struggles. Communism is to be practiced in each of our actions and relations”
“We should be clear, however, that possessing the means to produce non-commodified goods—and life itself—is crucial to living communism”
““A revolutionary movement is not just a result of ‘objective conditions’: it is the result of the structures we are able to build.”
– Arbeitskreis Politische Okonomie, quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames (89–90)”
“The Invisible Committee locates contemporary power in infrastructure. Power resides in the material functioning of the world, the networks of just-in-time production, and the unending flows of commodities, people, and ideas”
“The consequences of this are far ranging, but two implications are particularly relevant here.”
“First, power’s location within infrastructure makes it vulnerable to attack. Sabotage, blockage of infrastructural projects and disruption of flows immediately limits power’s ability to manage the world.(35)”
“Second, our ability to construct counter-infrastructure of our own takes on new importance. Alternative infrastructure takes many forms, from collective houses and squats to community gardens, women’s health clinics, and free schools.(36)”
“As a group called Proletarian Front put it, “to squat means to destroy the capitalist plot for our neighborhoods. It means to refuse rent and the capitalist shoe box structure. It means to build communes and community centers. It means to recognize the social potential of each neighborhood. It means to overcome helplessness. In squatting and in rent strikes we can find the pivotal point of anticapitalist struggles outside of the factory.”(39)”
“The Invisible Committee is also critical of the alternative or “solidarity” economy”
“At their best, cooperatives support social movements by providing a concrete alternative to traditional capitalist economic organization. Yet cooperatives as such pose no threat to capitalism, and indeed the most successful of them often become like any other capitalist business”
“Instead of thinking in terms of economic production for the market, we should approach the alternative economy in terms of needs, use, and complicity”
“The commune, the Invisible Committee says, “seeks to dissolve the question of needs. It seeks to break all economic dependence and all political subjugation. . . . The commune addresses needs with a view to annihilating the being of need within us.”(42)”
“The correct orientation towards cooperatives is thus to use their equipment, host meetings in their spaces, commandeer production to fulfill the needs of the movement, and so on”
“The commune coordinates networks of cooperatives in order to build our capacity to exist autonomously”
“Used correctly, alternative institutions become weapons of destitution and replace our dependence on established power with an organic dependence on each other. Liberated territory proliferates via movement of people, ideas, and things between communes”
““Escape, but while escaping look for a weapon.”
– Gilles Deleuze, quoted in The Invisible Committee, Now (80)”
“Rather than orienting towards seizing and wielding power, networks of communes attempt to secede from power’s grasp and destitute its institutions. Secession does not mean establishing new borders but instead practicing communist forms of life and promoting counter-circulation between a growing archipelago of autonomous territories”
“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”
“So it means linking up strategically with other zones of dissidence, intensifying our circulations with friendly regions, regardless of borders. To secede is. . . to trace out a different, discontinuous geography, an intensive one, in the form of an archipelago.(46)”
“This is how communism is built on a large scale. Territory is inhabited and controlled, the people living within this archipelago of liberated territory establish contact and material links between themselves, learn to provide for their needs, and establish liberated relationships with each other and the land”
“The means of existence are appropriated and/or collectively constructed”
“Organic gardens and farms are established to directly feed people, free clinics to heal the sick, and worker cooperatives to produce for the needs of the community rather than profit. The material construction of another world deprives capitalist state power of its capacity to manage and control us”
“This is ultimately what the Invisible Committee means by destitution, by “becoming ungovernable.”(47) Secession happens not just in isolated rural communes, but in the hearts of cities, in small college towns, and in the connections between communes everywhere”
“Dominant power knows its vulnerability, however, and communes cannot secede without a fight. The struggle against capitalist state power is based in the communal territories. Communes are not only centers of alternative life but also bases of liberated territory from which to attack the state and capitalism. Attack is an affirmative component of revolutionary life”
“We must connect destruction with creation, attack the world of capitalist state power as we build our own, and defend ourselves while escaping from capital. This is the work of destitution”
“As power resides in and works through infrastructure, sabotaging or otherwise attacking infrastructure becomes central to revolutionary political practice”
“sabotage of already-existing circulation, the blockade of new infrastructural projects combines sabotage with the construction of alternative worlds”
“Establishing a new world while destroying the old is ultimately a question of insurrection. This will not necessarily take the form of the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace, nor an extended riot measured by the number of molotovs thrown and streets liberated from police”
“As the Invisible Committee says in The Coming Insurrection, “[A]n insurrectional surge may be nothing more than a multiplication of communes, their coming into contact and forming of ties.”(52) Liberation comes through political victories and control of space, not just through armed confrontation”
“they conclude To Our Friends: “Thinking, attacking, building—such is our fabulous agenda. This text is the beginning of a plan. See you soon.”(54)”
“The Autonomen were unable to transcend subcultural marginality in order to build beyond a certain level. From a brief high point in the 1980s, when it appeared that the autonomous movements had the potential to develop into a truly revolutionary force that could challenge the reign of the state and capitalism, they rapidly disintegrated in the 1990s. The reasons are numerous, including the world-changing collapse of the Soviet Union, but perhaps foremost is that the Autonomen were never able to truly build lasting counter-power or launch a sustained offensive against capitalist state power. Of course, one could take a more classical Marxist stance and say that they failed because of their lack of a working-class base”
“Though they could win individual battles with the police, defending squats took up an enormous amount of energy and resources. Most fell victim to the state’s carrot-and-stick strategy that offered favorable leases to squats that agreed to legal regularization and attacked those that resisted with unrelenting force”
“The Autonomen were never able to move beyond a strategic equilibrium into meaningful secession and destitution of power. Indeed, defending a squat from the police or rioting in the street does not destitute the power of the police as a state institution. What, then, would it take to overcome such forms of state power?”
“The Invisible Committee is motivated in large part by a desire to understand the failure of autonomous movements and correct their mistakes. Thus, they focus not only on living communism but also thinking seriously about the contemporary nature and form of power and how to attack and neutralize it. Their answer lies in blockage, secession, and destitution”
“In the wake of the 2011–12 movements of the squares, many recent irruptions have taken these forms, from the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD (Zone to Defend: an autonomous zone that successful blocked construction of an airport in France, one of a dozen ZADs across the country)(55) to the Olympia railroad blockade(56) and Occupy ICE actions across the United States over the years”
“After their latest book, the Invisible Committee have largely remained silent, choosing instead to immerse themselves in political work on the ground within the ZADs. New innovations, as always, will come from struggle itself”
“Spencer Beswick (he/him) is a PhD Candidate at Cornell University researching the history of anarchism and the left; his dissertation, “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century,” explores the transformation and revitalization of the anarchist movement in the 1980s-90s”
“Alexander Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin, (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2015)”
“Fire and Flames**: A History of the German Autonomous Movement, (Oakland: PM Press, 2012)”
“George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, (Oakland: AK Press, 2006)”
“Charmaine Chua, “Logistics, Capitalist Circulation, Chokepoints,” The Disorder of Things, 9 September 2014”