The book is notable for the media coverage which it received as an example of a radical leftist manifesto, particularly from American conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

The insurrection envisioned by the Committee entails local appropriation of power by the people, physical blocking of the economy, and rendering police actions irrelevant.

These events serve as examples both of breakdown in the modern, conventional social order, and at the same time of the capacity of human beings to spontaneously self-organize for revolutionary ends, which taken together can give rise to partial insurrectionary situations.

"The book you hold in your hands has become the principal piece of evidence in an anti-terrorism case in France directed against nine individuals who were arrested on November 11, 2008, mostly in the village of Tarnac.

They have been accused of 'criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity' on the grounds that they were to have participated in the sabotage of overhead electrical lines on France’s national railways.

Although only scant circumstantial evidence has been presented against the nine, the French Interior Minister has publicly associated them with the emergent threat of an 'ultra-left' movement, taking care to single out this book, described as a 'manual for terrorism,' which they are accused of authoring.

On the contrary, the author(s) intimate that states, capitalism, and the world economy themselves are the true root causes of the above problems, which really derive from the alienation which they naturally create, to be sketched immediately.

"[12] For the author(s), one implication of this is that wage labor will not readily be replaced by other forms of social control (apart from surveillance, the technology for which is intensifying), so that the possibilities for insurrection will increase.

The city and the country are contrasted, but the metropolis is a metaphor for capitalist, statist political reality which now permeates all territories and physical spaces, whether rural, urban, or otherwise.

Forced by Palestinian guerrillas to abandon the streets, which had become too dangerous, they learned to advance vertically and horizontally into the heart of the urban architecture, poking holes in walls and ceilings in order to move through them.

"[14] Environmentalist and zero-growth or negative-growth concepts, lately adopted by various economists and corporations, are presented as being merely cynical adjustments on their parts, without altruism.

Again, the author(s) dismiss the recent practice of businesses factoring environmental considerations into their plans, as being cynical: "The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put us to work rebuilding it, and—to add insult to injury—at a profit.

The purpose of the chapter is not to say that the author(s) are unconcerned for the natural world (they clearly lament extinction of fish species, among other examples), but rather to disdain the historical hypocrisy which they ascribe to businesses and states about environmental issues.

"[19] Next, make genuine friendships which have a basis in shared politics, avoid official organizations and established milieus, and above all form communes, which for the author(s) are simply common groups of people, living in close proximity, and centered around specific places and particularly causes.

How does one find the weak points in computer networks, or scramble radio waves and fill screens with white noise?Finally, an overall insurrectionary strategy is presented.

Tiqqun was steeped in the tradition of radical French intellectuals which includes Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, the Situationist International, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari.

The Coming Insurrection bears traces of influence from the works of these philosophers, and also, most notably, Giorgio Agamben's notions of the whatever singularity and being-in-common, and Alain Badiou's ontology of the event and truth procedures.

Its analysis of capitalist civilization is clearly informed by Foucault's and Agamben's notion of biopower, Guy Debord's society of the spectacle, and Antonio Negri's concept of Empire.

[28] Science fiction author Jeff VanderMeer writes in the acknowledgements of his novel Acceptance that The Coming Insurrection served for one of the main character's thinking, "quoted or paraphrased on pages 241, 242, and 336.