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Title: Towards Anarchist Antimilitarism Author: Alfredo M. Bonanno Date: 1982 Language: en Topics: anti-militarism Source: First published in English in Insurrection 1982. Retrieved on 2020-04-14 from https://archive.elephanteditions.net/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-towards-anarchist-antimilitarism
The theme of war has been present in almost every kind of publication in
recent months, including anarchist ones. War is approaching, it is about
to break out, the two great international blocks are moving towards war:
we must do everything we can to prevent the world from being completely
annihilated through a mad impulse of those who govern us.
But as often happens when a problem sets off a complex reaction of
sentiment and fear in our intimate beings, we have not been capable — or
so it seems to me — of going into it deeply enough.
In fact, when we prepare to fight an enemy that is threatening us we
must ask ourselves what that enemy intends to do so that a maximum
amount of information allows us to retaliate, defend ourselves and go to
the counter-attack. So, it seems to me, we have not asked ourselves the
fundamental question: what is war? We have not done so because we all
believe, one way or another, that we know perfectly well what war is, so
we are quite capable of doing whatever is necessary to fight those
intending to bring it about.
In actual fact our ideas are not all that clear. That even the bourgeois
press does not have clear ideas on the subject matters little because it
is certainly not from there that we will find what we need to produce
the minimum analysis required to make our actions coherent and
meaningful.
Reading most anarchist publications is like reading revised and
corrected editions of the progressive bourgeois press, when not some
international law review with a few alterations in the language and a
little more naivety in outlook.
The vagueness of bourgeois ideas is quite understandable: for the
managers of dominion war is the means of guaranteeing its continuation,
at least within certain limits. But for those who oppose it, what does
war mean?
For the bosses war is nothing other than the accentuated use of the
means they have always used. Armies exist, there are bombs, weapons too.
Wars have continually been in course and are still breaking out here and
there according to a geography and logic that in some way corresponds to
the rules of the development and survival of capitalism. For the bosses
there is no great problem to be solved. They cannot begin to wage war
for the simple reason that they have never stopped waging it. On the
other hand, for those who intend to fight against it things are
different in that their struggle is spread through a series of
interventions and actions that are valid in relation to their
understanding of the phenomenon of war.
This in turn is determined by their own class interests, their limited
knowledge of social and political phenomena, ideological interpretations
of reality and so on and this in a situation such as the present where
one is speaking of the possibility (we do not know how near or how far)
of a nuclear war that is capable of destroying everything and everyone
in the space of a few seconds.
In theory everyone should be against war, especially the kind that is
possible today as we would all be exposed to the prospect of
annihilation. How then can it be explained that this is not so? How can
it be explained that governments find supporters and executors of their
so-called madness? It can be explained through the very simple and
fundamental fact of class in the same way. Clearly many of those who are
near the levers of power and closest to the exploitation of the bosses,
if not bosses or holders of power themselves, overcome the fear of war
through the prospect of increasing their own privileges.
Hence the excogitations that these people are producing in their
newspapers and programmes that all reflect the desire to see war as
something immediate. I am not saying that this is not possible but
rather that we should not accept this conclusion ourselves but through
our analyses demystify the swindles supplied by the organs of power.
So we come back to the fundamental question: what is war? The
publications currently on the market on the subject, including our own
papers, often turn out to be mere hangers on or amplifiers of the
propaganda of the regime when they say that war is near. Then it is
stated that, given that war is imminent, we must do everything we can to
prevent it because anarchists have always been against war and because
war is a great calamity that strikes everybody, it does not have victors
but only victims, and constitutes a great crime against humanity.
Beautiful and profoundly humanitarian arguments with only one defect:
they do not move the State’s programmes of genocide an inch and say
nothing new to anybody. Let us make an hypothesis that corresponds to
what has happened in the past and which once infected some of the
anarchists of the best intellectual tradition (i.e. Kropotkin and the
Manifesto of the Sixteen). As we have said we are all against war (in
words!). Even the most convinced supporters of the virtues of armed
solutions to State conflicts never have the courage to say so openly,
apart from a few delirious maniacs, immediately rebuffed by their more
cautious and shrewd collaborators. Those preparing for war are always
the most impassioned propagandists of peace. Moreover, they base their
peace propaganda on the fact that it is necessary at all costs to do
everything possible to save the values of civilization, values which
systematically come to be threatened by what is happening in the field
of the adversary. (The adversary, in turn, acts and operates in the same
way.) We must do everything to prevent war and often people end up
convinced that doing everything can even mean going to war in order to
avoid a greater catastrophe. At the outbreak of the first “world” war,
Kropotkin, Grave, Malato and other illustrious anarchists reached the
conclusion that it was necessary to participate in the war in order to
defend democracy (in the first place French) under the threat of the
central empires (Germany in the first place). This tragic error was
possible and always will be so, because the same mistake as that which
is being made today was made: they did not develop an anarchist
analysis, but had faith in an anarchist re-elaboration of the analysis
supplied by the intellectuals and divulgers in the service of the
bosses. From that it was easy for them to reach the conclusion that,
although war was still an immense and terrible tragedy, it was
preferable to the more serious damage that might result from the victory
of Teutonic militarism. Certainly not all anarchists were blind to the
serious deviations of Kropotkin and comrades; Malatesta reacted
violently, writing from London, but the damage done caused not
inconsiderable consequences in the anarchist movement all over the
world.
Today, in the same way, many anarchist comrades do not stop at the
unpardonable superficialities that can be read in some of our papers and
reviews. But let us for a moment go back to the generalizations that
abound in our analysis. It is certainly not enough to appeal to
universal brotherhood,humanity, peace, the values of civilization, in
order to mobilize the forces that are really prepared to fight the
State.
Otherwise why, when dealing with problems relative to the social and
economic clash in a specific sense (unemployment, housing, schools,
hospitals, etc.) do we avoid resorting to such banalities? Now that we
are concerning ourselves with war we are suddenly authorized perhaps to
let ourselves fall to the level of the generalizations of the radical
humanists?
The fact is that we resort to these commonplaces with fear as the common
denominator because we do not know what to do or say, nor what in
reality — in the present situation of power in Italy, Europe or the
world — the phenomenon of war really is.
Panic-stricken by our incapacity, profoundly aware that neither our
glorious anti-militarist tradition (with the above exception), or the
whole just as glorious baggage of anarchist ideas, can save us, we have
recourse to the analytical laboratories of power. And so we transform
ourselves into dilettante scholars of international problems. Our
journals fill their pages with reflections, comical to say the least, on
the relationship between the US and the USSR, between the NATO and the
Warsaw pact, between the Middle Eastern countries and Europe; economic
problems intersect with military strategies; technical data relative to
the A, H, N, bombs find their way into our pages (and heads, having the
effect of psychological propaganda). Great confusion results, giving the
true measure of how far we are from the reality of the struggle and how
much each of our attempts to get closer takes us away from the target.
So we become ostentatious. We insist on constructing our analysis with
more and more data borrowed from the State-produced manuals and we
explain to the people with fear as the central point of the argument. We
do not realize that in so doing we are becoming functional to that part
of the bosses’ alignment that plays precisely on fear to obtain two
fundamental results: to divert the exploited masses from the
increasingly heavy exploitation that awaits them and prepare them, why
not, for war. Let us not forget that the best way to push the masses
towards acceptation of war is through spreading the fear of war.
Tomorrow, with a few adjustments in the regime’s propaganda, this fear
of war will easily transform itself into the will and desire to accept a
circumscribed war in order to prevent total war, and who knows whether a
new Kropotkin will appear (from among the many neo-Kropotkinians who
infest our pages) and support the need for the small war in the face of
the total one. (After all “small is beautiful”).
Of course, we anarchists are against all wars, big or small as they
might be, but once we limit ourselves to basing our argument exclusively
or fundamentally on fear we place ourselves at the extreme left of
capital, supplying it with the opening it needs to attenuate the dissent
that is automatically produced within the mass of exploited.
Moreover, once we fully develop our critique of total atomic war and
show — thus becoming the mouthpieces of the extreme left of capital —
how terrible the effects of every kind and level of atomic bomb are, and
once we add, as a simple corollary, that we are not only against atomic
war but against every kind of war between States because all war is
genocide, an abominable misdeed, a crime against humanity, and so on,
with similar commonplaces we become extremely contradictory and
damaging. In fact, we supply well-founded, scientific and concrete
elements against atomic war (because these are supplied by capital
itself), but limit ourselves to the usual humanitarian commonplaces as
far as non-atomic war is concerned, involuntarily pushing the people
(who are rightly repelled by humanitarian commonplaces) to predisposing
themselves towards a refusal of atomic war and a probable acceptation of
the “small war”. And who knows whether it is not precisely this that
capital wants of us.
However, because our good faith certainly cannot be doubted, it only
remains to go more deeply into the argument and ask ourselves whether we
should not develop our anti-war propaganda better.
And here we come back to the initial problem: we do not really know what
war is. Because at the moment in which we start to go into the problem
we realize that war constitutes but one particular moment in the overall
strategy of exploitation that is put into act by capital.
Let us explain better. For States there exist formal aspects that scan
the difference between state of war and state of peace at the level of
international law. It is obvious that this type of differentiation
cannot be of any interest to anarchists, who to understand a real state
of war must certainly not wait for State A, through its diplomacy, to
consign a declaration of war to State B. The task of anarchists is
principally that of breaking up, as far as possible and for as long as
possible, the formal curtain that States pull over the eyes of the
people in order to exploit them and lead them to the slaughter. To do
that, therefore, we cannot wait for the formalities of international law
to be worked out, we must be ahead of the times and denounce the real
situation of war in act even when no officially declared state of war
exists.
To tell the truth, the suspicion that it is not possible to establish a
net frontier between war and peace exists among the theoreticians of
oppression themselves. In his time even Clauswitz felt obliged to
develop an analysis of war as thecontinuation of politics with other
means. In the same way, contemporary scholars (Bouthoul, Aron, Sereni,
Fornari, etc.) have become aware of the problem and have tried to put
together the elements that allow an even minimal differentiation between
state of war and state of peace. After the examination of the elements
characterised by armed conflict, the mass phenomena and the tension used
by public opinion — elements not specific to a state of war — these
scholars have had to conclude that what characterizes war is its
judicial character and that this judicial character comes to be atypical
compared to the judicial structure that normally regulates belligerent
States in “times of peace”. In other words war comes to be characterized
by the legitimization of-murder by a judiciary which in times of “peace”
permits neither murder nor massacre.
From this we can clearly see that the criteria that distinguish war from
peace are not ones which can be considered valid by anarchists. We are
not willing to accept that the state ofwar formally declared by State
power is indispensable in order to distinguish, denounce and attack a
real situation ofwar. And, on its side, the State well knows that the
formal aspect of the “declaration” of war only supplies a simple
judicial alibi for a widening of the death process which it normally
carries out by the specific character of its mere existence.
The State is an instrument of exploitation and death; therefore it is an
instrument of war. To say State is to say war. There is no such thing as
States at war and States at peace. States that want war and States that
want peace do not exist. All States, by the simple fact of their
existence, are instruments of war. To convince ourselves of this and to
overcome the objection of whoever accuses us of maximalism or wants to
see a difference at all costs where there is nothing but uniformity, it
is enough to remember the obvious fact that it will certainly not be the
number of deaths, the means used, the field of combat, or the warriors’
aims to mark a difference between state of war and state ofpeace. To
systematically kill a dozen workers each day at the workplace is a
phenomenon of war which as far as we are concerned differs only
numerically from the deaths that amass in thousands on the battlefield.
Behind this profile it is not possible to single out a real situation of
peace under the capitalist regime, but only the fictitious state of
peace which in practice is equal to a real situation of war.
We therefore establish that war is a State activity which does not
characterize a transitory and circumscribed period of its action but has
been the very essence of its structure for as long as we know during the
whole course of exploitation. So the social-democratic illusions of
unilateral disarmament, respectable pacifism and bourgeois nonviolence
collapse. Whoever supports pacifist theories and uses them to prevent
the State from waging war is substantially a warrior himself, a
reactionary who supports the State’s continual state of war, preferring
it to another state of war which is considered different but which is
substantially the same, being in practice no more than an extension of
the conflict already in act.
This explains how the parties in government and those who have betrayed
the workers’ ideals or who nurture the humanitarian whims of the radical
bourgeoisie can, with great impudence or through stupid ignorance of
reality, make great speeches against war. In practice, theirs are the
speeches that guarantee the constitution of real war, preparing the
masses for the acceptance of a future (always possible) extension of the
small war in order to avoid a larger one which is postponed to infinity
while the objective state of conflict is maintained and developed.
These concepts should be — and basically they are — more or less
accepted by all anarchists. But, as it seems from many articles
published over the past few months in our press, it is too easy when on
the subject of war to slip into a dimension that sees it as something
that can be avoided or which alone can be considered a form of struggle
capable of coalizing the revolutionary forces.
It has been said that suddenly, out of the blue, we have come to find
ourselves faced with the danger of world conflict far greater than could
have been imagined in the past. It has been said that we must do
something right away to prevent the world war that is approaching,
against the increase in atomic weapons by both the US and the USSR. It
has been said that there are moments in the life of a people or a
continent where social, economic and political problems come to be
superior to far more pressing and superior needs, referring to absolute
categories such as survival, frontist opposition and raving homicidal
hegemony, etc...
It is all very well to fight against war, militarism, bombs, armies,
generals, missile bases. But if the reason is that it is the only level
of intervention that the anarchist movementpossesses, and that all other
interventions are impossible, we must ask ourselves what is happening.
It is not enough to throw oneself headlong into the only activity that
remains open to us because we have difficulty in other sectors. We
should ask ourselves whether the acceptation of the theme of war and the
inability to place this theme within the specific logic of the State is
not perhaps a consequence of our incapacity to address ourselves towards
the real struggles in act? And whether in burying our heads in the sands
of our weakness and facing the problem of the struggle against war
without a minimum of militant structure, we are not running the risk of
becoming the fanciful carriers of a maximalist ideology that ends up
being convenient to the State?
These questions may not be shared by many comrades, but they remain
before us as so many points that require going into and discussing. It
is not enough to deny them, shrug our shoulders and carry on.
In our opinion it is necessary to go into the general conditions of the
class conflict today and re-examine the function that anarchists can
develop within the conflict itself, either as a specific movement or as
an organizational force capable of expressing itself within the general
movement of the exploited. It is urgent that we single out our
weaknesses immediately and without half measures, without the
persistence of our old paranoia, the stagnant ideologizing that pollutes
many sectors of our movement, the social democratic infiltration,
respectability, hesitation in the face of action, the craze for a priori
judgements and ecclesiastical closure, the aristocratic residual that
made us consider ourselves the monotonous carriers of truth.
To analyze to the extreme consequences our effective possibility of
struggle does not at all mean to take a distance from the problem of
war, and we shall be able to give a far more precise and meaningful
response, a far more detailed indication and project of intervention,
than what is happening at the present time, which sees us only as
suppliers of rehashed theories of the bourgeoisie and vulgar
distributors of a huminatarian maximalism which can be shared by all and
precisely for this reason no one is disposed to support.
Moreover, in addressing our efforts towards the reorganization of the
movement and the realization of what is necessary to overcome this
reflux, we will avoid limiting our discourse simply to that of fear of
war, which by its vagueness and generality constantly runs the risk of
falling into interclassism.
We should not forget that our evaluations of a problem — and war is no
exception — often depend on the objective conditions in which we find
ourselves personally and of those of the movement in general.