W-TINA-W'

(war-there is no alternative-more war)

The horror of the televised sight of people smoked out of the Twin Towers jumping to certain death, the burned, the crashed, the smashed inside the collapsing buildings and those anticipating their fate on the planes mirrors the horror of non televised site of people massacred by hi tech bombs and missiles, maimed by cluster bombs and executed in cold blood in Kabul, Mazar-i-Shariff, Kunduz. Horror versus horror, terror versus terror, tied together by an inextricable dialectical rope that make them dance. What a macabre dance is this for the rest of us who refuse to take side when both sides have ugly faces and ulterior motives, who refuse to be defined by one or the other pole of these false alternatives, who see the latter not as the realm of hope, but that of continuous reproduction of despair in always new contexts, in always new forms. Nothing better complements the pathogenic belief system at the basis of the reproduction of the very reality that alienates us. War-there is no alternative-more war = Money-commodities-more money that is, the accumulation of war and that of capital share the same middle ground: turning human aspirations and needs into those compatible with humans as objects of war in the first case; and turning commodities as the ruling subjects of human life. What a crazy world this is, strangled by this dialectic of terror, reification and fetishism!

But didn’t we say loud and clear that another world is possible? Didn’t we march for another world in Seattle, Porto Allegre, Prague, and Genoa? Don’t we make that possibility a reality any time we reach out of the ghetto that defines us only as women, men, workers, black, whites, gays, straight, of this nationality, of that nationality, Christian, and Muslims to build bridges that create new ways of coordinating, interacting, and seeing the "other"? Isn’t this other world a world full of meaning, beyond terror, fetishism and reification?

"Another world is possible!" Or "one no, many yesses!" These slogans summarized the long journey of at least the last decade of struggles, encounters and debates, that have pervaded mixed territories, and have been articulated in the heterogeneous and multilanguage spaces of the peripheries, homes, streets, neighborhoods, metropolis, countrysides, schools, temples, and community centers of the world. The famous social subject was not born. What instead emerged with discreet strength was a milieu, a context within which to pose the question of alternatives, of debating, articulating, envisaging and speaking out our dreams, without fear to be humiliated or interned in a psychiatric hospital by the reality-police.

"Another world is possible!" "One no, many yesses", that is, instead of accepting the competitive logic of global capital, we put to the world the question of solidarity and co-operation. "Another world is possible!" that is, we believe in the possibility of other kinds of social relations between you and me, us and them. This opened therefore a series of questions, those concerning how this different world might be possible, how could we make this world of justice, dignity and freedom come true. The determinate search for answers that were not constrained within the claustrophobic logic of competitive markets, but peep out on the horizon of co-operation and solidarity, was beginning to put the neoliberal orthodoxy in front of a serious impasse.

In Genoa therefore, Berlusconi's government pushed ahead with the strategy of criminalization of the movement, attempt that failed also thanks to the large popular reaction, and the alternative production of communication and information. The gain in strength of the no-global capitalism movement did not leave much room of maneuver to the political, business and financial elites of the world, in a context in which profit driven world accumulation faces a slump. Despite the fall of about 14% in stock prices and the collapse of sectors related to travel and leisure in the week after September 11, the attacks on the World Trade Center did not cause the recession. Far from it. This was already on the way, and manifested in the heavy fall of profit in the private sector, the evaporation of the messianic wealth fantasies surrounding the "new economy", the growth of private debt among US workers and families, the incoming likely explosion of the social security time bomb in a context in which decent pensions are largely dependent on rising stock markets which instead insist in their flat or falling trend. Not to mention the South and the "transition economies" strangled by debt, poverty, unemployment or sweatshop labor conditions, all nicely wrapped in the cellophane of market branding. In this context of global recession, the gain in strength and visibility of the no-global capitalism movement both in the North (where it was beginning to open up debates) and in the South (where in many areas movements and society were largely overlapping) was dangerously closing off legitimate spaces for extending neoliberal policies, such as the scope for trade liberalization, privatization, debt, and so on.

The military intervention does not solve this recession with stimulus on demand. From the economic point of view, this is a neoliberal war, not a Keynesian one. This means that its reason d'être is not the stimulation of demand, but the creation of a suitable and manageable context for opening market opportunities and reproducing neoliberal subjects. In this framework, the recession is not a disease, but part of the medicine that imposes discipline within the competitive game, it allows restructuring, it decomposes labor, it restructure the terrain upon which all kind of dissenting and struggling organizations have gained ground in the last few years. Within this logic, recession is necessary as necessary is the accompanying management of social control arising out of the tough measures that recessions always brings about. The neoliberal war is today the other face of economic liberalism. With the incoming economic doom, and emergence of political recomposition of social subjects that want a different world, the neoliberal war seems to be, from the perspective of capital, and for that perspective only, a necessary war. It brings bombs, it brings special laws to reduce the liberties of all, it helps to create the criminalization of those people that most will be affected by the incoming restructuring, like the large population of immigrants in the U.S., and finally, it helps displacing hopes away from the dreams of real subjects into the forecasts of banks, production and marketing managers, a hope that in the future we will all run in the competitive rat race like we are today, if not more.

Within the logic of the macabre dance of horrors, every bomb thrown, every lie enounced, every airplane hijacked and turned into a weapon, any victim scarified of this war between opposed terrors, seem it wants to tell us: "Hey, look, another world is not really possible. Don’t you see that your debates, your demonstrations, yours teach-ins and sit-ins, your dreams are pathetic in front of the reality of war? Don’t you see that to speak of alternatives, of a world other than this one, while we are engaged in this heroic defense of the "values" of this world, turns you from useless dreamers, into dangerous irresponsible and criminalizable traitors?" While fighting a war, logic goes, we cannot think about peace. We can only fight the war so as at the end we get peace. War is like competition, either we win or we loose. But as competition does not come to an end with my victory or my defeat, so "this war against terror" cannot come to an end with the defeat of bin Laden, or of Al Qaida. This "war of a new kind" seems is going to be quite long. Some say three years, others even fifty, with the military might eager to shift from one target to another, one city to another, across continents and countries.

Indeed, this is what they want, both sides of terror. But reflecting on the rationale of the Western "legitimate" side of terror, the war lords with suits and Cadillac and cute small dogs and civilized manners, we find a connection between the rationale of contemporary war and that of the perspective of "no alternative" to endless accumulation.

All the ambiguities of the official reasons of this war seem to point towards a war not so much understood as a means to a discrete end (the end of the other side of terrorism, the end of Al Qaida, this or that overall objective), but as an end in itself. This because through the war discourse a new context of human action is created, and especially a new horizon of aspirations emerges, one that regards the normal course of business-war as the only peaceful alternative possible. Those wonderful contradictions of dialectics that sustain power! The strategic meaning of this new emerging context, is thus to dam out the emergence of any alternative context incompatible with the business war.

A self-sustaining and self-reproducing war is a war that poses itself as a broader context of human action. This means that it becomes more difficult, and indeed even less central from a critical perspective, to identify the "true causes" of the war. True causes require an understanding of the war as means to an end. War in this framework is violence organized by powerful social networks for some discrete end. The ends of the war, following the classic idea of von Clausewitz, are political ends (or economic and strategic ends). The definition of war as context of human action implies that it is not so much important to see if war is the continuation of politics with other means (von Clausewitz), or if it is politics to be the continuation of war with other means (Virilio). From the perspective of building a new world, of new social relations, what really matter is not only (an not so much) to "expose" the war mongering so as to reveal the true cause of their intervention to the "masses", to "enlighten" them of the ulterior motives behind their propaganda war. All this is fine and necessary political and intellectual work, because it helps to critically understand and problematize the nature of the system in which we live as well as the forces we are up against. But in terms of the envisaging and posing the question of alternatives, of dreaming, debating our dreams and fighting for radically different social relations, it is quite insufficient work. Also, if left on its own without at the same time posing the question of alternatives, the denunciation of the ulterior motives of our ruling elites opens up an opportunity of manipulation by some political group who claim to know for us what is the real alternative.

We can pose a radical alternative in terms of the transcendence of the dialectic of horror and terror, the dialectic that ties together the opposite poles of war. It is a dialectic that brings with itself a social, cultural and economic organization that represent the new context within which we live and struggle. In other words, we have to accompany the analyses of war a la Chomsky (that is the denunciation of the lies we are generally told regarding the contingent real objectives and means of particular wars) with analyses of the context created by the war paradigm in terms of the restructuring of social conflict and accumulation on a world sale. We must think the war as a strategy to create a context, a context that needs both sides of terrors to be continuously recreated, so as we can reclaim the initiative in the process of constitution of alternatives within the movement of no-global capitalism.

To say that war is the new context of accumulation, it is to say that it does not only serve the traditional role of creating the conditions for accumulation, by allowing say the theft and imperial control of strategic resources, the destruction of communal fabrics which allows commodification of labor, land, and so on. This role of modern warfare in creating enclosures, as well as the role of neoliberal policies such as Structural Adjustment in promoting warfare, so well discussed by Federici (2001), is accompanied by another function of war. That of contributing to what we may call, following Foucault, a strategy of subjection, that aims at the creation and reproduction of docile bodies (docile here in the sense of subjects who are not in a position to question the market rules of their interaction). But it is not just conformity to given rules to be at stake in this notion of docility. The boundless war that becomes the context of our lives, the basso continuo of our social interaction, is also the background noise against which we are forced to measure our aspirations, any emergent aspiration that would like to break with false dichotomies. A continuous war among false dichotomies brings us back to the apparently inescapable reality of the continuous competitive war we must fight in our daily lives as soldiers of this or that business, this or that "economy". We wake up, and are reminded that war is really all there is. And fear takes us, as well as fear to acknowledge fear and to break the spell that turns us into things, and so on in an endless spiral.

The war as context of our interaction is not something that has been planned as such. In this sense it is not a "true cause" of war. Rather, the need for continuous war emerges today as the appropriate context for sustaining and reproducing capitalist relations of production at the planetarian level. I don’t want here to suggest that there is a "behindology" or a conspiracy to shape this context. Conspiracy theories are generally fallacious because they take the opposite end of the otherwise fallacious theories that see no plans and machinations. The former believes that history is made of all-powerful pure agencies. The latter that it is made of emergent processes with no agencies, plans and machinations: from the all-powerful lord, to the all-powerful machine. We may even recognize here hints of the false polarity between state and markets during the cold-war era. Beyond this black and white polarity, the reality is more like as Marx puts it, that is that peoples make history in circumstances that they do not choose. This applies not only to the vast majority of us, but also to the people in power, the warlords of the West. The agency of the warlords Bush and Blair engaging in this war did not emerge in a vacuum. Our ability to define what "caused" Bush and Blair intervention presupposes our ability to frame that agency in the context of world accumulation and social conflict. When analyzed in these terms, events such as the attacks of September 11, or the plans for a oil pipeline passing through Afghanistan, or whatever trigger or ulterior motive for intervention, offers no real "causes" for war as context of global capitalist accumulation, only strategic opportunities.

And September 11 gave the war mongering political elites of global capital an excellent opportunity, immediately seized through the definition of the attack to the World Trade Center as act of war. Indeed, Caffentzis suggests that has been the US administration to choose to treat the massacre as an act of war, instead of as a criminal act. The difference between the two is fundamental. In the first case, "once a crime has been committed, the sequential consequences of investigation, indictment, apprehension, trial and then, perhaps, conviction and punishment are rather clear and are ruled over by an elaborate set of rules, laws and institutions." In this case not only the procedure is given but, more importantly " this sequence is built to be an inherently finite structure, which might, however, by accident, never come to a conclusion (e.g., when the agent responsible for the crime is never apprehended)." In principle it could also "by accident, never come to a conclusion (e.g., when the agent responsible for the crime is never apprehended)" (Caffentzis 2000).

We can therefore understand the meaning of the name initially given to the war operation: "operation infinite justice." Not only infinite justice is a divine priority, as claimed by many Muslims living in the West. At the same time, one of the great virtues of human Justice "is that it is finite and aims to bring an end to a harm done. Consequently, `infinite' justice can not be justice." (Caffentzis 2000).

But what takes on a surely infinite character however, is the war. This is inherently without end. In principle it can certainly end with a peace treaty, the capitulation or the destruction of one of the sides. However, there is nothing of inherent in the definition of war that takes it to some conclusion. Besides, the state of war brings with it the forced rewriting of the rules of war itself, of international and national laws.

Beyond the contingent reasons that have brought the Bush administration to consider the attack on the World Trade Center as an act of war and seize the opportunity of September 11, I think that the infinite character of the war logic is the fundamental rationale for military intervention. The choice to fight a "war against terrorism" with a wide and imprecise definition of terrorism, is a conscious choice that has precise implications, by recreating ad infinitum the logic of the war both temporally and as a tool of social control. The inherently infinite character of war is turned into infinite war in the very moment the war objectives are ambiguously and loosely defined and the war means are conducive of reproducing its own conditions of existence. In this way, no end to war can be practically envisaged.

An infinite war does not need external causes, only external opportunities. What appears as external cause is only an opportunity seized. An infinite war shares with boundless accumulation this opportunistic mind set. Its driving force is inherent in its own constitution. Today bin Laden and Afghanistan. Tomorrow, Iraq, Somalia or whatever. From the perspective of boundless war the concrete object of the "hit" is secondary. Boundless war is an abstract war, that is a war in which the concrete determinate form of its constitution (the enemy, the weapons used, the concrete and contingent causes and objectives) become secondary. Abstract war is a war that is increasingly indifferent to the form taken by war. What matters is the activity of hitting, and the accompanying process of subjection, that is the formation of human subjects who interiorize the conception that being hit is always a possibility. This irrespective of and unrestrained by international laws (which infinite war has the precise collateral advantage of continuously rewriting it) national boundaries and even respect for "human rights".

What are the reasons that sustain and promote this kind of war? The old good official reasons of all contemporary wars, it is all a question of "national security". However, a concept of national security that reflects the new reality of transnational capital and global production.

In the age of the nation states of the cold war, wars have been fought for reasons of national security. A concept of national security of course defined in terms of geo-political interests. Infinite war is the war that is fought for a "national" security in which capitalist production and sovereignty are transnational in character. Wars are fought for the transnational security of business, and that includes not only access to resources, management and stabilization of population flows, enclosures. Also it includes the creation of an environment conducive for business, the de-valorization of communities and their material wealth for opening up of business opportunities and, increasingly important, the continuous recreation of expectations that tomorrow will be business as usual. Infinite war integrates the creative destruction of the competitive process of Schumpeterian memory, with the destruction of any social creativity that aspires to move beyond the framework of the capitalist market.

Thus, what is this "national security" of transnational capital? In a compilation of essays on current military strategies published by the US army war collage, we find an enlightening hint to what it is meant today, in the military common sense, for national security. We discover it through a discussion of how this national security could be threatened. General Gordon R. Sullivan and Lieutenant Colonel James M. Dubik discuss the social and economic features of the threats to national security. Not in the classical sense that regards national security as a condition for a "good" and "stable" economy and society. Nor vice versa, is security understood as functional to the normal state of economic activity. Here instead it is security that is identified as the normal state of economic activity. A threat to security immediately means a threat to the normal state of affairs. The interruption is the real damage to the psyche of the neoliberal man. One can remember that the day after September 11, Bush himself identified the threats on shopping in New York as a fundamental threat to the American style of life.

The authors indicate two types of threats to economic activity, those that arise out of internal factors and those that arise from abroad. Following the framework proposed by Robert D. Hormats (1991), the authors include in the categories of internal threats to national security the "declining competitiveness and productivity, loss of jobs base — and its corresponding tax base, erosion of the manufacturing base, fiscal and trade deficit, decline of the middle class wage and standard of living, low savings and investments, the savings and loan crisis, and the eroding infrastructure, as well as others." and so on. (Sullivan and Dubik 1999:25) Some of the major external threats to the economic pillar of American’s national security involve US "reliance on foreign oil, much of which is located in areas of the world controlled or threatened by regional hegemons; [US] foreign debt which will top $1 trillion before 1995; [US] loss of market share and manufacturing base to other industrial nations; and political instability in areas that could offer overseas markets for U.S. goods or opportunities for expansion of U.S. companies." (Sullivan and Dubik 1999:25-26; my emphasis)

Remarkably, national security here is identified with a list of market and economic indicators. But the really significant thing is the last sentence. National security is not defined only in term of a threat to the territory. Not even only as a threat to the typical imperial interest of a nation that wants to access strategic resources outside its territory. No, here we are on another terrain, on a terrain I would dare to say, almost "spiritual" rather that only and merely geo-political. It s the "spirit of capital," in its ontological and immanent drive to the boundlessness of accumulation, that enters almost without mediation in the definition of national security and therefore, in providing a rationale for the mobilization for war. Because here we have a concept of threat to national security that defines it in terms of a limit to the expansion of capital. Of American capital by all means. But we should not be here confused by and drawn back into the framework of nation state sovereignty and classical conception of imperialism. It is sufficient to combine that definition of sovereignty with the principle of multilateralism embedded in the conception of trade overseen by the WTO, as well as with the transnational system of global production within which the USA plays only a part, that it becomes clear that whatever matters to American business, it matters also the system of global business in its entirety.

These threats to national security presuppose a reformulation to the distinction between domestic and foreign affair politics. Indeed, in the epoch of global capital, these are ""two sides of the same coin; they cannot be viewed as two separate problems" (Sullivan and Dubik 1999: 26). The economic questions at the basis of national security and a war paradigm are intimately linked. The American military strategists can expect that "their political leaders will seek ways in which to use the military element of national power — in conjunction with, and usually subordinate to, other elements of national power —to promote an environment conducive to political and economic stability abroad." Because "American economic security is tied to the world at large" and the "cold war’s veneer of stability has bee lifted, thus revealing significant unrest, fear, hatred, and jealousy", then the U.S. military should expect to conduct operations, usually in conjunction with allies and friends, that are aimed at creating or restoring conditions favorable to economic development and trade." Of course, "operations linked to strengthening or restoring conditions favorable to global trade, investment, and economic development may include combat operations, but not necessarily." (Sullivan and Dubik 1999: 26; my emphasis)

Again, " Many of the markets that might become available for global economic investment, development, and integration are threatened by regional instability. America — in conjunction with allies and friends, as well as global and regional organizations — must do what it can to promote the conditions in which corporations will invest, products can be sold, and economies prosper." (Sullivan and Dubik 1999:27-28; my emphasis).

The military action therefore is seen not as a means to conquer resources or markets, or defense of the territory, or of access to the surplus. The war apparatus, the military function, is that of the creation, restoration or preservation and protection of the conditions of investment and economic activity. And this is seen in a clear global context. For these US military experts, the debate on globalization is taken as resolved. The economy and the conditions of accumulation are no longer defined in national terms.

This understanding of the role of military power, so intimately linked to the conditions of accumulation of the American economy, in turn so intimately linked to the conditions of accumulation of the global economy, creates problems of popular perception and legitimization of the deployment of military might. Because there is a different of degree between war and military operations different from war. In order to be able to politically sell the war to US citizens, it is required that the '"integrity" of the nation is not put under discussion. (Sullivan and Dubik 1999: 29)

But what threatens the integrity of a capitalist nation today? Perhaps it is its violated territory? Or the violation of its geo-political and economic interests? Or a limit, of whatever nature, put in front of the boundless accumulation promoted by its banks and transnational companies? If for the military strategists it seams there is no difference, in the popular perception a difference clearly exists.

And it is precisely for this reason that in the US military quarters is clear that a terrorist act carried within the borders of the USA can be used to catalyze armed intervention and military engagement. In reality, a terrorist act within the US was long expected. The problem for the military was not so much how this act could have been avoided, but what would have been the appropriate response to give. While the increase in terrorist attacks outside national borders could have lead to a dangerous dissent in public opinion, who could have pushed for a reduction of US military intervention in the world, on the contrary, the increase of terror within the US national borders would have created a golden opportunity. It would have allowed intensifying the process of international intervention that we have mentioned before. For example, Steven Metz writes in the same collection of essays on strategic issues:

Only two years before September 11, a major terrorist attack inside the US was seen by experts of military strategy as a golden opportunity that a wise and shrewd government could have used to promote and extend its military engagement abroad to defend the transnational security of capital.

The key question then is what is the way out of the grip of infinite war? Infinite war cannot be stopped without tackling its inherent driving force. Over the next few years, military intervention will jump from a region to another, and the anti-war movement will be out of its breath in trying to catch up with the news attempting to provide the "true facts" behind always new emergencies.

Caffentzis, George. 2001. "Essay on the Events of September 11, 2001 Addressed to the Antiglobalization Movement." In The Commoner, http://www.commoner.org.uk/02-1groundzero.htm

Federici, Silvia. 2001. War, Globalization, and Reproduction. Veronica Benholdt-Thomsen, Nicholas Faraclas, Claudia von Werlhof eds., There is an Alternative. Subsistence and Worldwide Resistence to Corporate
Globallization. London: Zed Books

In Maria Mieses (ed.) There is an Alternative. London: Zed Books

Robert D. Hormats. 1991. "The root of American power." Foreign Affairs. Summer. pp. 132-149.

Metz, Steven. 1999. "To Insure Domestic Tranquillity: Terrorism and the Price of Global Engagement." In Harry H. Almond, Jr., and James A. Burger. The History and Future of Warfare. Selections from the Professional Readings in Military Strategy. The Hague, London, Boston: Strategic Studies of the U.S. Army War College, Kluwer Law International.