Now

This stimulating anticapitalist polemic by an anonymous French collective follows up on the group’s prescient 2007 The Coming Insurrection—which gained mainstream notoriety as a hotly contested tract of the radical left—as well as that work’s 2014 sequel, To Our Friends. Referencing recent global crises and drawing on key strands in continental political theory, it argues that civilization is in a process of fragmentation in which the legitimacy of both the state and the historic left have been irreparably eroded, and a profoundly alienated populace is “fleeing” the system in unexpected ways. The tract’s prescriptive aspect again emphasizes communism, with a small c, not as a monolithic discourse or movement but as a series of grassroots and uncoordinated political protests—the “real movement that destitutes the existing state of things.” Rather than fighting “for communism,” the authors insist, “what matters is the communism that is lived in the fight itself.” While the argument remains international in scope, French politics are an important focus, in particular the business-friendly reforms to the labor code that sparked mass protests in spring 2016. Nevertheless, in explaining populist impulses as symptomatic of the fragmenting order, the argument hums with relevance for American and British contexts as well, and will resonate with the disenchanted across the political spectrum. (Dec.)