From: "Neil (practical history)" <practicalhistory-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: AUT: No War but the Class War?
Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2001 11:12:41 +0000


Like quite a few people I have spoken to who have been going to the new No 
War But the Class War (NWBTCW) meetings in London I have serious 
reservations about the name and think we should change it before we become 
stuck with it. I was involved in the NWBTCW group in the Gulf War and I know 
people used the name again during the Kosovo war - but to use a name just 
because it's been used before and it's hard to think of anything better is 
just lazy!

I definitely agree with the sentiments of NWBTCW, of opposition to all sides 
in the war and support for resistance against them by soldiers, workers et. 
in all countries. But for other people not familiar with the history of this 
slogan it might sound different - it seems to say never mind their war, come 
try our war instead.

Although many of us think that the World Trade Centre bombing was no 
different from other massacres in Iraq, Chechnya etc. a big difference is 
that it was seen by most people in the west via TV. Faced with the reality 
of war - of the sudden snuffing out of thousands of lives, each with 
friends, families, histories - there is a natural human revulsion against 
war as such. Do we want to say that our methods are basically the same but 
just informed by different ideas?

Trying to explain war to my kids in the light of recent events, I really 
don't want to define the anarchist/communist/anti-capitalist movement in 
terms of war. There is class struggle, but why use the metaphor of war to 
describe it? War implies seizing power, conquering territory, a 
subordination  of activity to a military appparatus.  The class struggle 
sometimes involves violence, but also talking, thinking, eating, dancing 
etc. Why privilage the violent bit by going on about class WAR?

Of course we are against capitalism in peace time as well as in war time, 
but perhaps at some point we could think of how might reclaim the concept of 
peace in opposition to capitalist social pacification which is no peace at 
all even in the abscence of overt armed conflict. I might write some more 
about this when I have the time

What about alternative names? There was some discussion about this in the 
pub after the demo on Sunday night. In a way we shouldn't get too hung up on 
a name - no single slogan can encapsulate all we want to say. The best idea 
I've heard so far is 'No War, No Borders' - it has a good internationalist 
basis and a positive aspect of looking forward to a world without states. 
Communism is the world human community folks!

Here's some extracts from Jean Barrot and Jacques Camatte  which throw some 
light on the relationship between war and revolution.

Neil  (www.geocities.com/pract_history)
>From 'When Insurrections Die' by Jean Barrot
War Devours the Revolution... Power does not come from the barrel of a gun 
any more than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but the 
military dimension is not the central one. The question is not whether the 
proles finally decide to break into the armories, but whether they unleash 
what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to 
exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes the logic of capitalism. 
Barricades and machine guns flow from this "weapon". The more vital the 
social realm, the more the use of guns and the number of casualties will 
diminish. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from 
any non-violent principle, but because it will be a revolution only by 
subverting more than by actually destroying the professional military.

To imagine a proletarian front facing off against a bourgeois front is to 
conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political 
revolution or a war (seizing someone's power, occupying their territory). In 
so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary moment had 
overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, 
and for techniques to solve problems, in short for everything that 
diminishes the common man. In the service of the state, the working- class 
"militia man" invariably evolves into a "soldier". In Spain, from the fall 
of 1936 onward, the revolution dissolved into the war effort, and into a 
kind of combat typical of states: a war of fronts.

Reducing the revolution to war simplifies and falsifies the social question 
into the alternative of winning or losing, and in being "the strongest". The 
issue becomes one of having disciplined soldiers, superior logistics, 
competent officers and the support of allies whose own political nature gets 
as little scrutiny as possible"

>From 'Against Domestication' by Jacques Camatte

The movement which developed among the lycée students was an assertion of 
the communist revolution in its human dimension. The students took up the 
question of violence (though perhaps not in its full scope) in their refusal 
of the army, refusal of military service and refusal of the universal right 
to kill. By contrast, the groupscules of the left and extreme left, but not 
the anarchists, preach about the necessity of learning to kill because they 
think they can make death "rebound" on capital. But none of them (and this 
is particularly true of the most extreme elements) ever take into account 
the fact that they are suggesting the necessity of destroying human beings 
in order to accomplish this revolution.

How can you celebrate a revolution with a rifle butt ? To accept the army 
for one reason, whatever it may be, is to strengthen the oppressive 
structure at every level. Any kind of argument on this subject serves only 
to reinstate the despotism of repressive consciousness, according to which 
people must repress the desire to not kill because killing will be required 
of them at some stage in the future. (And indeed some people are known to 
actually rejoice in this prospect). Repressive consciousness forces me to be 
inhuman under the pretext that on a day decreed by some theoretical destiny, 
I will at last metamorphosize into a human being.

Violence is a fact of life in present day society; the question now is how 
that violence can be destroyed. Revolution unleashes violence, but it has to 
be under our control and direction; it cannot be allowed to operate blindly, 
and it certainly cannot be glorified and widened in its field of action.


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