"The Coming Insurrection" Quotes

The Logic of the State is at the opposite extreme from the logic of anarchy. It is the logic of a fixed order that sustains itself, of a world that is closed in upon itself. It is an order that is supposed to be sustained by the very absence of any possibility of change.

The strike is a counterattack against the economy. It is not a means of negotiation, nor a means of pressure. It is a weapon, and one that is all the more effective in that it is launched directly against what is most essential in the enemy camp: its economy.

The futility of the individual revolt is not a matter of the scale of forces deployed against it; it is a matter of the absence of a shared perspective capable of giving it a future.

The only game worth playing is a game that has no end. The only way to be part of the game is to play without ever winning, to struggle without ever succeeding.

The role of the police, which is to ensure the permanent circulation of the commodity throughout the social body, is fundamentally a role of circulation, of the circulation of the commodity, and of cars, and of people. It is a role of circulation that is also exercised upon discourse.

Any attempt to escape from the existent, from the reigning order of things, is doomed as long as it remains an individual attempt, a simple matter of personal experience.

The refusal of work is not a refusal of the activity of living – it is refusal of the dead time accumulated behind it.

We know it has become necessary to sever the link between work and income. But it’s not enough to demand a basic income – that is to say, a wage that is paid to those who have no work. It is necessary to break with the principle of work itself.

We know that we are supposed to find ourselves in this world that is falling apart, but we don’t find ourselves there. We don’t find ourselves at all.

The enemy is not out there, it is here, in each one of us. We are the enemy.