“Global Civil War”
a short film by Void Network
http://voidnetwork.blogspot.com
directed by Tasos Sagris
edited by Alkistis Kafetzi
feat. global movement videos
from all over the world
and handcamera footages
from Athens riots during summer 2011
by Markos Gounelas / Alkistis Kefatzi
film created as a part of theatre play
“I am Dying as Country” directed by Tasos Sagris
written by D.Dimitriadis / produced by +the Institute for Experimental Arts
and Void Network
music by George Kouvaras
In an era when the global economy is so intertwined that the primary conflict between nation-states involves demolishing their borders for “free
trade,” a military war on the scale of the Second World War is simply a financial impossibility. Increasingly, such traditional military war is reduced to the periphery of empire, while a different kind of war is waged inside the centre of empire.
civil war [emfylios] and the social war [koinonikos polemos].
The civil war, emfylios, is the primordial taking of positions that binds together opposing collectivities. From the perspective of the state, civil war can be a war interior to itself, such as the English Civil
War or the French Revolution of 1789, but it can also be a war before and beyond the existence of the state, ranging from the various religious wars that came before the formation of the modern nation state to the Commune of Paris in 1871 or the revolt in Oaxaca in 2006.
empire, civil war polarizes an otherwise uniform citizenry, forcing them to take either the side of the partisans or the side of the empire itself.
Let us remember that a civil war is between any collectivities that may be latent within a state, and these collectivities may very well
be counter-revolutionary, as the phenomenon of political Islam in the
Middle East shows all too well. (…)
As no individual nation-state stands as an island due to their interlocking into the global state of empire, so the insurrection in different countries also naturally raises the possibility of global civil war against empire.
The true nightmare of empire is revealed:
The seeming historic abnormality of civil war is always present even within the so-called “peace” of capitalist representative democracy, and global
civil war will return to the stage of history as that very image of “peace” rapidly unravels in the wake of the financial crisis.
In Greek, “koinonikos polemos” means the social war. “Koinonikos polemos” is separate from emfylios “civil war”, although in other languages there is only a single word for both kinds of war, like Burgerskrieg in German.
Although the term “social war” is often thrown around in a sloppy and confused manner in anarchist propaganda, yet the history of this term
reveals that a certain powerful concept is being deployed, a concept that can help us understand a distinct transformation in the form of warfare since the Second World War. The concept of “social war” should directly address the repressive side of the transition from the localized nation-state to the global state of empire—as the function of counter-insurrection is too often ignored by certain ivory-tower theorists, but of immense and immediate concern to practising revolutionaries.
In contrast to civil war, which signifies the breakdown of the apparatus of the state, social war is the low-intensity war by the state
against the social relationships of its own population in order to maintain its continued existence.
The social war then encompasses the totality of everyday life: To be alive today is to be at war, to never sleep properly, to awaken at odd hours to work, to be constantly surrounded by surveillance and police. A further recital of the various symptoms
is unnecessary. Unlike in military war, demands of any kind are futile:
demands would only make sense as long as the social war was limited in time and space, yet the capitalist form of life today encompasses the
entire globe and imagines its reproduction extending into the infinite future. Another response is to pretend the social war doesn’t exist—per-
haps the most popular option. More so than in any other moment in history, the temporary relief that bread and circuses provide the population from the social war has been transformed into an entire global
industry. One does not win a war by pretending it does not exist. One does not even survive a war in that manner. One wins a war by understanding the terrain and acting accordingly. So a theory of social war will be our weapon against the social war itself, allowing us to recognize our common terrain and devise a strategy to end this state of affairs.(…)
you can read all text titled “FOR THE INSURRECTION TO SUCCEED, WE MUST FIRST DESTROY OURSELVES” by Alex Trocchi here: https://translationcollective.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/self-destruct.pdf
