In a country like France, that is, in a country that may very well be a police state on condition that it not declare it publicly, it would be foolish to seek a military victory over the police. Taking aim at a uniform with a paving stone is not the same thing as entering into close-quarters combat with an armed force. The police are a target and not an objective, an obstacle and not an opponent. Whoever takes the cops for an opponent prevents themselves from breaking through the obstacle the police constitute. To successfully sweep them aside, we must aim beyond them. Against the police, the only victory is political. Disorganizing their ranks, stripping them of all legitimacy, reducing them to powerlessness, keeping them at a good distance, giving oneself more room for maneuver at the right moment and at the places one chooses: this is how we destitute the police.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.122-123
While, compared to the police, revolutionaries may currently present themselves as weak, unarmed, unorganized, and watch-listed, they have the strategic advantage, however, of being nobody's instrument, of having no order to main tain, and of not being a corps. We revolutionaries are not bound by any obedience, we are connected to all sorts of comrades, friends, forces, milieus, accomplices, and allies. This enables us to bring to bear on certain police interventions the threat that an operation to enforce order might trigger an unmanageable disorder in return. If since the failure of Operation Caesar, no government has dared to try and expel the ZAD, it's not out of a fear of losing the battle militarily, but because the reaction of tens of thousands of sympathizers could prove to be unmanageable. That a "blunder" in a banlieue sets off weeks of widespread riots is too high a price to pay for the Specialized Brigade's license to humiliate. When an intervention by the police causes more disorder than what it reestablishes in the way of order, it's their very reason for being that's in question. So, either they insist and end up emerging as a party with its own interests, or they go back into their kennel. Either way, they cease being a useful means. They are destituted.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.123-124
There is a basic asymmetry between the police and revolutionaries. Whereas they take us as the target of their operations, our aims reach far beyond them - it's the general policing of society, its very organization, that we have in our line of sight. The outrageousness of police prerogatives and the incredible expansion of the technological means of control delineate a new tactical perspective. A purely public existence places revolutionaries before the alternative of a practical impotence or an immediate repression. A purely conspiratorial existence does allow a greater freedom of action, but makes one politically inoffensive and vulnerable to repression. So it's a matter of combining a capacity for mass dissemination and a necessary conspiratorial level. Organizing revolutionarily entails a subtle interplay between the visible and the invisible, the public and the clandestine, the legal and the illegal. We have to accept that our struggle is essentially criminal, since in this world everything has become criminalizable. Even the militants who go in aid of the migrants have to use clever tricks to evade the surveillance of which they are the object, before they can act freely. A revolutionary force can be constructed only as a network, a step at a time, by relying on sure friendships, by furtively establishing unanticipated ties even with in the enemy apparatus. This is how the "tanzikiyat" were formed in Syria, as a web oflittle autonomous pockets of revolutionaries that would later become the backbone of popular self-organization. In their day, the first French Resistance networks didn't do things differently. In the case of Syria as in the old maquis, by successfully reclaiming urban districts and areas of the countryside, by establishing relatively secure zones, it became possible to go beyond the stage of discrete, anonymous activity on the part of little groups. "Life is in the use, not in the time," as Manouchian put it.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.124-125