💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anonymous-total-liberation-zero-war.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:46:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Total Liberation – Zero War
Author: Anonymous
Date: Summer 2003
Language: en
Topics: green anarchy, Green Anarchy #13, militarization, war, protest
Source: Retrieved on 11 September 2018 from http://greenanarchy.anarchyplanet.org/files/2012/05/greenanarchy13.pdf
Notes: from Green Anarchy #13, Summer 2003

Anonymous

Total Liberation – Zero War

Introduction

This article has had to go though numerous revisions and rewrites in a

desperate and often failing attempt to stay ‘current’. Indeed one of the

most difficult things we face in resisting Capital’s bloody adventures

(or bloody banalities if you prefer) is the global dimensions of this

global war. By this I don’t just mean physical space, but maybe less

tangible elements that work to reinforce the tangible nature of our

current oppression. For one the “war on terror” is working to reinforce

and deepen a globalised temporal order. The global size of the planning

and execution of the war (and its simultaneous transformation into

news/entertainment/marketing) happens in a digital/artificial “Real

Time”© . The speed of these endeavors is ever increasing, and the

multitude on the whole is left to spectate on a bewildering display of

men in suits, tanks and special effects. The ever increasing pace of the

war (and for that matter the rest of the global order - can you make a

distinction?) makes it difficult to think, conceptualize and act.

Beyond Anti-Americanism

... I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream

- Amebix

One of the first failings of the resistance against militarization is

intellectual. There seems to be a sloppy anti-Americanism that abounds

throughout anti-war sentiment in Australia. This anti-Americanism is

attractive to many because it is something of an antidote to the cynical

flag waving and rhetoric that parades across our screens. It is also

credible since it identifies the litany of violent and abusive acts

carried out by the US State. However, to identify the causes of global

militarization as a product of a particularly nauseating element of US

foreign policy (the idea that “the seppos [1] want to take over the

world” or that “George W is a moron” – common sentiments in Australian

society) is overly simplistic. Militarisation arises not from the US

specifically but from a general crisis within the global empire of

capital. Whilst the US does have a specific role in this world order as

a major spoke in the composition and organization of military and

economic forces, the current war is a product of the capital generally.

Indeed if anything the “war on terror” - loose short-hand for multiple

conflicts between numerous states and states in waiting - is a failing

and destructive attempt by capitalism to resolve its unsolvable

contradictions: it is an attempt to control an increasingly combative,

self-organized and revolutionary multitude.

The Re-colonization of the Globe

And the history of this, their expropriation is written in the annals of

mankind in letters of blood and fire.

- Karl Marx

The individual motivations of Generals in Washington or Saudi

Princelings are beyond the ken of lowly proles such as myself. The

specific individual histories of individual conflict that motivate the

“war on terror” are beyond the scope of this article, however we can

make some general observations about the role of war to the global

ruling class.

The cyber-industrial civilization of capital is literally always at war.

In fact, since the first development of class society violence has been

a key component to the maintenance of order. Wars of extermination and

colonization were fought to include more and more territories within the

sphere of individual imperialist markets. Wars were fought between

individual imperialist powers. As Zerzan identifies, the motivations of

imperialist conflicts were often attempts to control the population at

home. [2] Class society has never seen peace and is always in a constant

state of conflict. The so-called “war on terror” may appear to be a

sudden and sharp break with the past, but in reality it is an

intensification of a process that has accompanied neo-liberalism as

capitalist rackets around the globe have moved to direct violence to

reinsure their power.

It is this later motivation for war that is increasingly important to

the status quo. As Hardt and Negri write in Empire the entire globe has

fallen under the domination of Capital, and a shifting multi-centered

world order now administers it all. Thus war today is not between

different, separate imperialist powers or to include territories within

capitalism. Rather it is between factions within a unitary – if hybrid –

empire that dominates the globe yet struggles to control the resistance

from the multitude. Whilst in their respective propaganda Islamists and

‘Western’ politicians try to define each other as mortal enemies, they

both have the same goal in mind: the continuation of the empire of

capital.

War thus is increasingly used to re-colonize the globe – however not for

one single nation-state but for capital generally. This is achieved

through the application and extension of bio-power. “Bio-power is the

form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following

it, interpreting it, absorbing it and rearticulating it. Power can

achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only

when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual

embraces and reactivates of his [3] or her own accord”. Bio-power is the

way that control is created when life is subsumed by the logics and

apparatus of capital. It is the way that the discipline of the system is

found in the entire minutiae that constitute everyday life. It is used

in numerous ways. Firstly there is no better way to enclose land and

destroy subsistence non-market ways of life than war. Throughout the

globe militarization is used to force people into proletarianization.

Mass bombings, the torturing of civilians, the imprisoning of whole

villages in camps, their transformation into refugees, even supposedly

beneficial food aid, enforces the logic of capital – of being governed

and controlled by agencies of the state and dependent on the global

economy – into peoples’ everyday lives. Indeed in many parts of the

world war is the only business in town and soldiering the only

‘profession’.

Subtle methods are often at work. The mapping of land by the military,

the construction of military infrastructure is often the vanguard for

the construction of the general apparatus of the global economy and the

inclusion of previously peripheral populations into the matrix of

cyber-industrial civilization. Indeed there is no better example of this

than that of the Laguasa marsh in the Philippines (the site of a decades

long Islamic insurgency which is now just a sphere of the “war on

terror”), where the military napalmed the marsh into black soil thus

literally clearing it of people and life and opening the way for its

development into a tourist resort.

For populations already proletarianized, war is a crucial tool used to

decompose their agencies of self-activity. A case in point would be that

after and during the last Gulf War, the militant oil proletariat

throughout the region (including in newly “liberated” Kuwait) suffered

greatly through intensified state violence. War increased the naked

violence of the state in peoples’ lives, whether it was through the

carpet-bombing of Basra or the torturing and disappearance of

Palestinians at the hands of US trained Kuwaiti secret police. The

increased marginality people face in their lives from war, their

increased insecurity, their displacement, works to break down the

feelings of empowerment often necessary for people to launch assaults on

capital. Intimidated by soldiers in the streets, planes in the air and

the rule of martial law, disobedient populations can be cowed into

acquiescence.

In what remains of the global “North” (as much as that has any meaning

in these post-modern times of Empire) the use of war to increase the

governmentality of the society of control is far more subtle. The recent

experience in Australia suggests that the pretext of the war on terror

is being used to legitimize and intensify state violence against

dissidents. Even more all-encompassing is the use of the discourse of

national security to intensify the repressive nature of all the networks

of bio-political authority. Militarization is a society-encompassing

spectacle that radiates and mutates out from TVs, radios, and

conversations in the street. It takes on emotional, psychological forms

that generate a sense of fear and hopelessness within the population

about the very future of humanity. The real alienation and atomization

that make up daily life in cyber-industrial civilization are telescoped

to unbearable proportions. This spectacle of militarization makes

individuals feel completely powerless and at the mercy of global

political and economic forces. Faced with a seeming gulf of violence

beyond comprehension, people begin to long intensely for the strong hand

of the state to protect and guard them. Paranoia reaches fantastic

heights as ethnic minorities become increasingly focused on as the

“enemy within”. Coupled with this are feelings of sympathy for the armed

wing of the state and its successes. A savage brutalization takes place

where people in the malls and workplaces of Sydney begin to believe the

security of themselves and their loved ones can only be guaranteed by

the deaths of people in Iraq.

Bio-political control, however, is not the just the ideological hegemony

of the system: it is not simply the dominance of ideas. Bio-political

power arises when all of society is subsumed within the apparatus of

capital: when life becomes dominated by the mega-technological world of

work. Militarization is, if anything, an extension of all the techniques

and technologies of control. The division of labor, specialization, the

reduction of the individual into a cog in a machine, the reification of

technological ability and the dominance of functional reason – isn’t all

this expressed perfectly in the armed forces, in the military-industrial

complex? And conversely is not the process of militarization the

intensification of all of the above throughout all of society? The

post-modern nature of the society of control is evidenced in the

collapse of rigid subjectivities. The intensification of the “soldier”

socially is the intensification of the “soldier” in all of us: our

willingness to be trained, ordered, obedient and subjected to

surveillance. Conversely, it is also our willingness to produce

ourselves and others as soldiers: to order, to command and to subject

those around us to surveillance.

Evidence of the above is the announcement that Australia Post now

requires that you show photo ID if you are sending a package over 500 gm

overseas. Here is an example of where the practice of surveillance and

policing intensifies in seemingly innocent every-day situations. Thus

mass society, made up of the lashing together of alienated and atomized

individuals, becomes even more atrophied as everyone carries out the

work of the state.

Military Forces of the Social Factory

Through the history of capitalism revolutionary resistance to war was

based on the refusal to participate in the war machine. Soldiers would

mutiny; others would resist conscription or refuse to sign up.

Paralleling industrial action in the mass factory, it was the withdrawal

of labor from the military factory. This undoubtedly reached a high

point in the Vietnam War where the refusal to accept military labor

inside and outside of the armed forces reached epidemic proportions. The

desertion and mutiny by Iraqi soldiers did far more to end the last Gulf

War than US smart bombs.

It is thus increasingly obvious that the use of mass soldiering with

mass casualties creates political unrest both inside and outside the

ranks. The days of mass soldiering were tied to those of the dominance

of the nation-state. In contrast the process of globalization has seen

with it the creation of global networks of organized violence that are

coordinated through many points. At the center is always a hub of the

covert, intelligence and special forces of the Global North and around

them cheap proxy armies and mercenaries which the former often trains

and co-ordinates. In the muddied world of international politics, these

networks are often constructed with whatever is at hand and often appear

quite illogical and contradictory. Also whilst capitalism is a global

system having no home country, it is not homogeneous: splits and rifts

at all levels of the ruling class are common and often violent. In fact

the change in relationship between US forces and Islamist groups like

Al-Qaeda is proof of this. Is this current conflict not in many ways an

officers’ rebellion within a single military force?

We have, however, still seen the deployment of large numbers of ground

troops from the Global North. Though whilst their last deployment is a

massive operation, and creates the feeling of total war, the soldiers

themselves seemed to be put into very little real danger. Their purpose

is spectacular, to create the feeling at home that there is a lot on the

line. Thus the few soldiers that do die are transformed into heroes and

martyrs whose deaths are given a weight and importance that in life the

system never gave them. For us then in Australia (and I suspect the rest

of the Global North) our refusal to fight is relatively meaningless as

our labor is superfluous to the global war machine. We are unneeded, and

thus new ways of struggle, more active insurgencies are needed to

destabilize Capital.

Protest As Usual

So far the anti-war struggles in Australia have been confined mainly to

street demonstrations of varying size. They have been largely organized

by social democratic and Leninist groupings, though the political flavor

of them is generally liberal: clergy, trade union leaders, and various

do-gooders dominate the podium. Originally after the September 11

attacks these demos were a breath of fresh air. They worked to undermine

the consensus that “everyone” supported the war, and combated the

feelings of isolation felt by the dissenters. Street demos do and will

have a place in struggle. They can draw people together and can have an

important morale lifting effect. However this only works when the demos

take place in the context of larger, more combative militant struggles.

In their current context they are proving to be increasingly

disempowering, ineffectual and demoralizing. Why is this so?

Demos are in many ways left over from the last great upsurge in

struggle. Throughout the 20th century, the working class engaged in long

running militant actions: strikes, occupations, pickets, etc. Rallies

played a part in this. However since the early '80s the combative

elements of struggle have become largely submerged, only to explode out

in various direct actions. On the whole though the praxis of the Left

focuses on just a strategy of demo after demo.

Generally these demos replicate all that is wrong with mass society.

Small groups of “organizers” fight bitterly in meetings over slogans and

speakers; groups of “activists” engage in hyperactively paced work to

build the rally, such as postering and leafleting in an attempt to get

the “masses” to show up. Those who then do show up are asked to follow a

strict and regimented path, often marshaled, chant when they are

required to chant and listen to speakers. The success of the rally is

based on either the number of people who turned up, media coverage, or

how many people joined the various left grouplets. They are generally

regimented and boring. They seem to mirror the symbols of destruction

(guns, hand grenades, etc) can feed this rest of everyday life: being

ordered around by our betters.

The essential flaw is that the strategy of demos is based on mediating

away the power of people to a different source. The argument goes that

through a show of numbers or good copy in the paper, that the rally will

convince the relevant authorities to change their mind.

There is a kernel of truth in this in that often the state will worry

about the potential of demos to transform into more radical activity and

thus change their behavior. On the whole though the demonstration is

largely either ridiculed or ignored.

It is incredibly depressing when people go to a rally to protest, say,

the increased bombing of Iraq, on numerous occasions and witness that

the rally has no effect what-so-ever. Here a strategy of “protest as

usual”, with its regimentation and ineffectuality works to complement

the effects of the state: to convince people that they are powerless.

Indeed the strategy of rally after rally is now thoroughly exhausted

with numbers dwindling after the coalition military victory, and the

“leadership” is fracturing as various Leftist sects battle for control

and recruits.

This is not the whole picture and occasionally those of us who do turn

up have a nice time, make our own networks, or break away from the

marshals to take more combative action. In fact, globally more and more

people are willing to defy both the State and the embodied statist

ideology of the rally organizers. From heckling speakers to fighting the

police, a conscious practical critique of pacifism has exploded onto the

world’s streets, often to the embarrassment and disgust of the liberals

and “cadre” trying to shepherd the multitude.

Militancy as Self-Militarisation

How can you celebrate a revolution with a rifle butt?

- Jacques Camatte

Outside of this, small groups of the multitude, often those that

politically identify as “revolutionaries”, are trying (often in vain) to

find more effective and potent methods of struggle. This is all

happening in a context in Australia, where combative direct action has

flared up in the last couple of years. Coupled with this is an increase

in state repression and the sophistication and brutality of the cops.

Whilst the often boring, rigid, codified and predictable debate between

“violence and non-violence” rages, the reality is that on the streets,

any attempts to disrupt the circuitry of Capital has to take seriously

the issue of confronting and combating the state.

However, some comrades faced with increased state violence have reduced

the questions of confronting the state to purely military ones: a

question of physical strength and conflict. This is a fundamental

mistake. It is a truism that since capitalism is a social system based

on violence that any attempt to overthrow it must be prepared to fight.

It is also true that the process of insurrection, which often involves

physical confrontation, is a crucial part of the upsurge for liberation.

However violence in general is not only distasteful, it is brutalizing

and the product of class society. The revolt against oppression is a

revolt that hopes to remove violence permanently from our lives. The

longer violence lingers the more it deforms and twists movements of

liberation.

Firstly, it is important to realize that the unleashing of continual

global militarization terrorizes people by confronting them with a

seemingly endless cycle of violence. Revolutionaries who fetishize

violence, who adorn the process of social liberation in the symbols of

destruction (guns, hand grenades, etc) can feed this cycle. How can we

celebrate the gun? We can celebrate the human in struggle, but not the

commodity they use as part of the struggle. Indeed the fetishism of

tools of war and thus the devaluation of human life is a continuation of

the logic of class society. The question of confronting the violence and

power of cyber-industrial civilization is a question of how can we

manifest anti-power and anti-violence that can hollow out and topple the

state and the market. We should be realistic about the violence inherent

in Capital, we should celebrate all revolts of the multitude, but we

should not however allow the necessity of combating the state twist the

vision of liberation. If we do, in the current context we extend the

terrorizing of social relationships and thus the feelings of

powerlessness of the people. Revolution is the weaving together of

revolt and dismantling hierarchy, not self-militarization.

Towards Festivals of Refusal

We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and

trust. Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims

are identical and our hearts are open.

- Albus Dumbledore

Stopping war and the revolution against the empire of capital are one

and the same. Militarization is a direct challenge to the recent upsurge

of proletarian fury and self-activity, and war will always exist whilst

class society exists. As a general point then the best way to stop war

is to keep on fighting. The multiplicity of revolts – large and small,

overt and covert - must keep on going, building, circulating and

intertwining. However the broader struggle is difficult, if not

impossible unless it faces the challenges of potentially endless

militarization.

Two difficult tasks loom: how to construct positive social relationships

that allow the opportunity to revolt to manifest; and how to manifest

revolts which will allow the construction of positive social

relationships. What we need is to actualize revolts of insurgent desire.

If the drive behind militarization is to reinforce the governmentality

of the population then the best thing to do is to be as ungovernable as

possible. I imagine the only thing that will prevent war and push back

militarization is a general wave of disobedience and defiance, a

society-wide mutiny that through its own actions makes the continuation

of the status quo impossible. This mutiny would have no “leaders” and

take countless forms of defiance and non-compliance. Thus no single

group or single action can spark it off. However we can make bold

strokes that increase the power and strength of the weave of revolt and

inspire others to do the same.

Firstly, whilst the “realists” of various social democratic and Leninist

groups and the few anarchist rackets desperate to look “hard” may scoff

at counter-culture, never has it been more relevant. Never before has

dancing and socializing, forming friendships and feelings of autonomy

and rebelliousness been so important. To put it another way, the

micropolitical revolts and mutations that make up counter-culture begin

to pull at the atrophied nature of everyday life and create/mutate new

pathways of living. Here can we see the seed of the future. So go ahead,

put on that gig, pirate that CD, write that zine, take those pills and

go dancing. (As always I recommend listening to thrash 7 inches – if

this can be done from the aircraft carrier you have just squatted, all

the better.)

If the move to militarization works to secure the rule of Capital, by

subjecting the world to a global war machine and by further atomizing

personal relationships, we can fight back by both monkey-wrenching nodes

of the machinery and simultaneously beginning to re/form a community of

struggle. To me the task then is to begin to pick our own battles,

select sites of military power and attack them in ways that both work to

halt their operation and simultaneously bring new ways of living into

being. These acts in themselves may not be enough, but in concert with

other autonomous activities they may just begin to open the door to

rebellions that can dig the grave for Empire.

Post-script

As the cameras turn away from the rubble of Baghdad the official voices

of adjudication have declared the war a “victory”. Those on the Right

triumphantly proclaim the vindication of the U.S. Administration and

laud the prospects for freedom and democracy. Those on the Left rub

their hands and worry that this victory signals the return of

imperialism and a defeat for freedom and democracy. Both sides only see

the clash as one between two nations states and equate victory with the

Coalition’s triumph over the Baathists. But this war was not about a

clash between two states as much as it was about securing the entire

global order of states. There was no doubt that the Coalition’s armed

forces were going to easily smash the Iraqi army. The entire war was

about securing the continuing reign of global capital in a time where

the entire order is increasing divided and bankrupt.

If there was a central goal, it was the unleashing of “shock and awe”

(militarily and ideologically) to terrorize the global multitude and

thus re-enforce our obedience. Did it work? Just like the last Gulf War,

huge sections of the Iraq army deserted. In other words they refused the

basic lie of nation states: that we should lay down our lives for them.

If anything, this act of mass defiance rather than signaling the end of

rebellion amongst the oil proletariat is testament to their continuing

ungovernability and self-organisation.

Waves of mass defiance also swept the globe. Whilst often the mass

rallies were liberal in tone and passive in nature, increasingly large

sections of them challenged the authority of both the state and the

official organizers. In Sydney, Australia, student anti-war rallies

defied their Leninist marshals and were transformed into combinations of

roving festivals and direct confrontations with the police. Young people

of mainly Islamic and Middle-Eastern backgrounds rebelled against the

extra policing that they had subjected them to and exhibited a great

willingness to directly fight the state. At the demonstrations in

Canberra, speakers were heckled, people refused to follow the

established march roots and eventual a group marched on parliament house

confronting the police there. Graffiti and other forms of low level

property damage (include writing “NO WAR” in gigantic letters on the

Sydney Opera House) are widespread. So much so the in Wollongong, the

Returned Services League has had to organize vigilante groups to protect

war memorials.

These are just examples of a global rebellion. It is this rebellion that

was so worrying Chirac and Schroeder. Europe’s original “opposition” to

the war was not based on any commitment to political liberalism, but

rather was an attempt to marshal old liberal and social democratic

ideologies to fend off revolt. What the French state realized is still

plain to see (if you look through the digital-smoke of the simulacrum):

that the global order of capital can not create a harmonious mode of

operation in the face of continuing revolt. The so-called victory has

not stopped this revolt. If anything it has deepened it further by

chipping away the consensus and compliance that civilization requires

for normal operation. The response to this will be of course be more

militarisation: more surveillance, more police, more violence, more

terror. So much so that protesters attempting to interfere with the

running of a detention center in the South Australian desert faced a

raid by police armed with machine guns. This was the first time in

recent memory that this has happened.

Will increased direct state repression and a neo-conservative political

culture of unfreedom secure a future for the cyber-industrial

civilization of Capital? The confusion we are faced with is the weave of

oppression and resistance. We refuse the rule of Capital, but we are

inside Capital and in many ways it is in us; thus living resistance to

civilization is a blur of hope and despair. However, if anything the war

shows that capitalism cannot reach its own totalitarian fantasies: often

attempts to govern work to strip away at the governmentality of the

people. New waves of proletarianisation, of social control may defeat

struggles here and there, but they move on, grow and erupt elsewhere.

Pertinent question remain, liberation may not be inevitable. However for

all the bluster it seems at this point that even in the face of smart

bombs, embedded journalists and Saving Private Lynch, the multitude will

not be terrorized.

[1] Seppo is a WWII era piece of rhyming slang for Americans. Yanks =

Septic Tanks = Seppos.

[2] Zerzan, J. “Origins and Meaning of WWI” in Elements of Refusal.

Columbia Missouri, C.A.L. Press 1999 pp 145-165.

[3] Hardt M. & Negri A. Empire. Cambridge Mass., Harvard University

Press, 2001 p23-24.