Request for Workshops – BASTARD 2014: Social War

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We request your participation in the 2014 appearance of the Berkeley Anarchist Students of Theory And Research & Development conference. We meet every year to discuss new, old, and interesting ideas in anarchist theory. This year our emphasis is on Social War. Submit your proposals to BASTARDs.

The 2014 BASTARD conference will be held March 23rd at the UC Berkeley Campus. Workshops that are written up will be collected in a journal after the fact.

Clauswitz defined war as “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.” Foucault famously flipped another Clauswitz-ism on its head: “politics is war by other means.”

What if our opponent was the whole of society and our will was the destruction of the complex network of social ties that hold together and reproduce the present? What would that kind of war look like and how might it happen? How would we grapple with the reality that we, too, as anarchists with our own identities and cultures, are part of that complex network that is to be torn asunder? Is Social War, perhaps foremost, also the incessant war waged by Society against all destabilizing forces?

There was Social War last century during the Vietnam War, an era filled with draft-dodgers, soldier riots on US military bases, troops blowing up their commanders (fraggings), and calls for “Bring the War Home.” Further back, one could perhaps look to the Scorched Earth strategy. The contemporary theory and application of Social War largely focuses on sabotage, rioting, human strike, and squatting reclaimed space.

What is the relationship between the Vietnam War reaction, Scorched Earth, and present day actions of anarchists? How can we expand the notion of war from its narrow military conceptions to include and destroy norms and customs perpetuated by religious and secular logic? Can Social War resist the urge to simply return to guerrilla acts or can it explode across every terrain of present existence, and if so, how would that look? Could manifestations of Social War include something other than a kind of drop-out culture that might include willful participation in the economy with the aim of amassing resources and capital intended to be used as a force of social destruction?

Does Social War create new resistant-to-recuperation subjectivities and strains of revolt or is it just the aggrandizement of a series of survival strategies?

Our next meeting will be on January 25th at 12pm at the Long Haul (3124 Shattuck Ave) in Berkeley, CA.