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Title: A Strategy for War
Author: Rui Coelho
Date: 2021
Language: en
Topics: social war, insurrection, insurrectionary anarchism, eco-anarchism, activism

Rui Coelho

A Strategy for War

1. This world is a declaration of war. An actual or imminent threat is

generally recognized as sufficient justification for proportional

self-defense. Many endure this world as an aggregation of life threats.

Not abstract or ideological ones, but very concrete and material

menaces, experienced as poisoned air and water, impoverishment,

transphobic aggressions, work, street harassment and other forms,

according to each own particular circumstances. All the ways in which

many find themselves under attack by this world are not accidents, but

the way those regimes of power are meant to work. It is, therefore, a

declaration of war justifying proportional self-defense.

2. Where there is resistance, there is war. A declaration of war is not

enough for war to happen, it takes two to tango. Where no one answers

the call, the killing goes on unopposed. Where someone fights back and

disrupts the regimes that threaten her, she is at war with those in

power. It is not an exaggeration to use a belligerent language as acts

of resistance, unlike the declaration of war, never go unanswered.

Resistance is not the privilege of an exceptional few, it is already all

around us if we know how to look. It takes many forms with various

degrees of visibility, antagonism, intensity and success. Those who

resist are those who resist, nothing more. They are not “the workers”,

as resistance does not depend on employment status, or “the oppressed”,

as many oppressed do not resist and would never accept those who do as

their “representatives”. It should also be obvious that the expression

“those who resist” does not refer to those who do not, no matter how

hard they pretend to. It hence excludes those on the right that dream of

making the current regimes of power more violent and closed, as it does

those on the left who would rather have them be more humane and

inclusive. Amongst them, are especially repugnant to us all those who

opt for the populist project, that is, to channel social conflict back

into the existing forms of domination.

3. The question is, essentially, a strategic one: how to win? The goal

of resistance is destitution, to disrupt threatening regimes of power to

the point that they cease to operate. Thus, the only question that

matter is: what makes resistance stronger, closer to its goal? By asking

this, one abandons the moral paradigms of revolutionary purity, as well

as the debate on violence/non-violence that usually accompanies them.

The planning of a future utopia is also outside the realm of our

concerns. We offer no models for whatever is to come. Maybe by standing

up to this world we create what is needed for those who will come next

to address such concerns, or maybe not. There are no ready-made recipes

nor ahistorical solutions. Occupations, riots, expropriations, popular

assemblies, strikes, election campaigns and assassinations are some of

the tactical forms that resistance as taken throughout history, but the

best tactic is always determined by the specific circumstances of each

particular battle. Strategy is the logic that provides those who resist

with criteria to choose and combine tactics.

4. Such war cannot be won by a military strategy. The war against

everything that threatens to destroy us is inherently asymmetrical. Be

it in terms of weapons, recruitment, funding or any other belligerent

resource, those who resist never have the same means as their enemies. A

military strategy, that is, the army-logic for the selection and

combination of tactics, is, for this reason, terribly inadequate for the

task at hand. Even military strategies that take asymmetry into account,

as terrorism and guerilla warfare, more often than not become impotent

because of the isolation inherit in their logic of secrecy,

specialization and hostility towards all those who do not resist. If

victory, in the form of destitution, is the goal of resistance, another

strategy must be adopted.

5. Activism is, likewise, not the right answer. Some of those who do not

resist use activism as a mean to increase their power and advance their

interests. This makes activism very visible, to the point of becoming an

infectious disease that spread to many, if not most, of those resisting

against the world as it is now. If the defect of belligerent strategies

was to understand the current war as one to be fought in a military

terrain, the failure of activism, including its abstract and moralist

tone, stems from the fact that it conceives the fight as taking place in

the argumentative realm. This means that, every demonstration, petition,

or attack is a publicity stunt, what is at stake is always to turn

enemies into sympathizers by convincing them of the righteousness of the

cause. For activism, disruption never aims for destitution, but for

sensibilization. At the hearth of the argumentative approach to struggle

is the severe disempowerment resulting from how it requires an

interlocutor (the government, the media, the “public opinion”…) on which

all the power to recognize or ignore demands resides. Our refusal of

activism should not be confused with an abandonment of all the tactics

traditionally associated with that strategy. There is nothing inherently

inadequate about demonstrations, marches, petitions, or boycotts, as

there is nothing inherently wrong with kidnappings, bombings, or

assassinations. The question is a strategic one: how to choose and

articulate them?

6. To win, we need to adopt, instead, a logic of social war. Social war

is the strategy that orients all tactical selection and articulation

towards the goal generalizing conflict across the social plane. It

consists of two interdependent processes: the contagious spread of

disruptive acts of dissent and their rooting in the social plane to the

point of being indistinguishable from it, creating the illusion of a

perfect overlap between resistance and population. While military

threats may be easily crushed, power as we know it is extremely

vulnerable to effective social war campaigns. In fact, terrorist and

guerilla movements have only been successful inasmuch as they manage to

subordinate their military logic to a social war strategy. Let us be

clear, social war requires no ideological or organizational unity

between those who resist. Victory, for this strategy, does not come from

planned coordination, but rather looks like the demolition of a building

plagued by thousands of cracks of different sizes and origins.

7. Social war requires the intensification of social conflict, that is

to say, insurrection. The generalization of conflict across the social

plane is not achieved by softening struggles in search of the minimum

common denominator but, on the contrary, by the escalation of social

tensions into open hostilities. Such process corresponds to the

constitution of an insurrectionary force that derives all its power from

social conflict. Such a potency is inherently negative as it has

antagonism as its own end, relegating any demands, programs or political

projects to mere means towards it.

8. It also requires the material task of rooting conflict across the

social plane. Social war depends on the growth of the social permeation

of struggles. The greater obstacle to this has not come from our

enemies, but from the obstruction and mediation of antagonism by a class

of professionals of resistance. Hence, the strengthening of the

insurrectionary force stems from an intensification, multiplication and

permanence of conflict that can only be achieved by the following means:

privileging the use of tactics that are easily reproducible without the

need for any specialized technical knowledge; opting for direct action,

taking matters in our own hands without the mediation professional

activists; building and sharing the resources demanded at each point by

the struggle, be them spaces, knowledges, or social ties.