Gen-X Marxist daydreaming delivered in a puerile and snotty tone and sprinkled with forced 90's pop-culture references. At times, it reads like a parody of Fight Club. ( )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKyi2qNskJc

Yeah there's a lot of buzz surrounding this book. No it's not as buzzworthy as you're being told. Yeah it's pretty good. No it's not gonna bring about the revolution.

A lot of this book was written from a position of pretty impressive privilege. In a country where boss kidnappings are not uncommon, and an auto-plant is rigged up with explosives and the workers threaten to blow the joint sky high if they don't get re-hired and their back wages, it seems trifling to say: don't involve yourself in organizations. It seems there is a strong left wing and labor movement, one that has the power to acquire qualities of life that most of the United States barely dreams of.

Are we are at any stage in the US where we can abandon organizing in favor of insurrection or commune? After Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush returned us to pre-Keynes/Ford/Leninist neoliberalism/neoconservativism? We are in the dark ages here. Our cities don't burn when teenagers die at the hands of police. My city cries quiet tears when it hears about it at all. Our labor unions can't cripple the economy in solidarity with uprising students against the change of youth labor laws. Mostly it is done without anyone knowing. Our political landscape looks a whole lot different from France's, from much of Europe. Abandoning the organization seems a little premature for us.

The biggest highlight for me (after the garbage set of two introductions) was the First Circle: I AM WHAT I AM. A thorough slaying of "the individual," the self, that exposes the war of all against all that is capitalism and the future within capitalism. "The self is not some thing within us that is in a state of crisis; it is the form they mean to stamp upon us."

"The more I run after myself, the more tired I get." We are not ourselves. We are a collection of interactions and memories of things that are not ourselves, but the events, actions, cultures, of others. Our "selves," in the only meaningful sense that we can know them, are nothing more than our connections to one another.

"I AM WHAT I AM then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign against everything that exists between beings,[...:] against everything that makes us exist." Capitalism, that wishes to destroy everything and remake in it's image, necessarily redirects us from what we are in order to decieve us and confuse us. It cleans the slate of what we are as social beings, and then has us carefully create ourselves with products and the creation of "self."

Other parts were strange and stupid. For example, the consistent anti-porn message ("expropriated from our flesh by mass pornography," "pornographic innovation have exhausted all the allure of transgression and liberation"), and prudish ("now that sex is all used up") echoing of anti-sex feminism, a relic of the 70s and 80s that seem really awkward in the day where pro-sex feminism has truly become the discourse in current feminism.

In one paragraph, the authors give mention to "interminable subsidies" of their relatives, clearly a position of class privilege: subsidy doesn't exist or is VERY terminable if your parents can't afford to support you and themselves. If they are talking about wealthy children who are subsidized, then you'd think they'd be able to come up with better solutions to this access to wealth than: "learning to fight in the street, to occupy empty houses, to cease working, to love each other madly, and to shoplift." These are definitely individualized and individualistic goals, whose nihilism isn't going to take a single step towards the overthrow of capitalism.

"Marxist rhetoric-- which denies the dimension of participation" (p29) I think is a ridiculous misreading of Marxism, which saw in the nucleus of production, in the way that workers related to one another in the factory different from their separated lives outside of urban environment, the nucleus for an industrial communism. If Marxist rhetoric is to exclude Marx, then I suppose the point could be taken. But that's a little silly.

There were parts of the book that I related to personally, especially in my current employment/economic situation, where I have been avoiding work, and chasing paper with freelance jobs instead for the last year. I am often creating my "self" with business cards, portfolio websites, and selling my skills and availability for these skills instead of working. It's been nerve racking to say the least. Perhaps I've privatized myself and made myself precarious, thinking this was an escape from the worker/boss relationship. I think I jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. ( )

Pretencioso y barroco. Un discurso insurreccional muy espeso y poco pedagógico. Incendiario en gran parte, para acabar en los capítulos finales proponiendo las conunas y comités como solución para la convivencia humana. ( )

From the Foreward: "The Book you hold in your hands has become the principle piece of evidence in an antiterrorism case in France directed against nine individuals who were arrested on November 11 2008, mostly in the village of Tarnac... What follows is the text of the book preceded by the first statement of the Invisible Committee since the arrests."

In bad times, one must write manifestos.

This is less than an active handbook for active resistance than an indictment, a prosecution, a rant. It has unreserved cynicism for not just the Negri-Imperial style of economic/political power, but also the easy comforting hedonism of the 1960s, and the 'organic' 'we can still enjoy the fruits of modern industry and extraction and not feel guilty about it' capitalism.

Being as picky as I am, I'd like more citations than fancy rousing slogans, more action than ignorant proclamation. Something substantial.

But not necessarily violence. The sort of people who win through violent revolution are typically not those that you would rather have run a country.

That is reserved for the very end, and they admit there is so much wrong with the present system, it's almost impossible to determine where to start, except smaller and on the local level - anarcho-communes. This is more interesting.

As much I must disagree with this, I'm more tempted to agree with them the longer I watch the RNC's Policy Committee on C-SPAN. ( )