The anti-war movment has not taken an aggressive enough posture in regards to their opponent, which is the spirit of war coursing through modern society.
We try and oppose wars when they occur, occassionally before they begin. But if we want to act against war, especially modern resource wars, we must go a little further. We must focus on the very conditions of production of war.
This includes opposing drafts/conscription as well as anti-recruitment campaigns. These deal with wars at the point of labor.
But we should also deal with war at the point of capital. To this end, we should organize major divestments from war industries and war profiteers, any and all of them.
And finally, we must fight on the virtual plane of the production of warfare. By this I mean we must change the material organization of the world that allows our wars to develop.
In the current ridiculous American adventurism, this vague comment becomes immediately clear. We must demolish the oil economy, utterly. We must completely eliminate the use of limited sources for the production of energy and electricity.
Wars are fought for something, to gain something, land, titles, power over resources. This is crude but tends to be true throughout time. Yet at the base of this lies a little trick, a clever manoeuver that takes decades or centuries.
Some item in the world must be found or constructed that is inherently limited, or can be made limited. Economic society must then be organized around that thing, that little set, and the increased demand enforces a constant limitation of the good's supply relative to its economic demand. Currently, we see oil taking this position. In centuries past it was spices, access to trade routes. In millenia past (and soon enough in times to come) it was (will be) control of irrigation and water sources for imperial states in the Near East and China. The pattern holds across time, and this pattern is simply- engineer a grand Lack and then bleed your people fighting over it.
We must take Lack out of our economy, and to do this we must create around and outside of it. Meaning? We must invent and work our way out of dependence on limited petroleum resources. Indeed, we must invent our way around any system of energy based on production that is necessarily limited in space and time.
[For instance, nuclear power is no great salvation here, so long as it must be regulated and enforced by global powers because of the threat of nuclear weapons. Nuclear power is tailor-made to be bound to massive state and corporate interventions.]
To fight wars, we must fight the condition of Lack that demands the production of wars; to fight Lack, we must invent around limited power sources that an be easily monopolized.
Meaning, to fight against our modern oil wars we must build an energy infrastructure based on solar, wind, and biomass energy and fuels.
So, once again, to fight against war we must address the three major points that collide to generate warfare:
*labor: fighting military recruitment and the draft
*capital: divesting from the war economy
*the underpinning of war, its "concrete virtual space": replacing the petroleum economy with a solar, wind, and biomass economy
Saturday, February 03, 2007
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