ACFM - ACFM Trip 23: War

Episode Date: April 16, 2022

Just what is it good for? This time on ACFM, Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn respond to the Ukraine invasion with a conversation about war. Is it an aberration, or an unavoidable product of human power struggles? Are conflicts between nations better understood as a reflection of domestic divisions? And how is war […]

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as ever with my friends, Nardier Idol. Hello. And Keir Milbin. Hello. And today we are talking about war.

So Nadia, this was your idea. So why do we want to talk about this subject? So several things really. I mean, the main thing, the obvious thing that's instigated it is at the time of recording now, I think we're well into the second week of war raging in Ukraine. And that has had an effect, both emotional, in terms of how, how it's affected people, seeing those images and hearing what's going on and how people are fleeing and refugees and all of that,

just a horrible kind of war scenes. And I've had different kind of feelings about it and feeling like we want to talk about war in a general sense, but also because on a personal level, I started my political life effectively as coming through the anti-war movement about the war in Iraq in 2001, 2002. So I kind of, I've got all of these thoughts about, you know, self-determination and how people interpret war and how it shows up sort of different things in the discourse

that I thought would be really important for us to talk about, really. And obviously, like I said, this is, it's, it's, this, this podcast is going to go out way later. So we want to just talk about some of the general aspects around, I think, war and the imaginary as well. So that's why I want to talk about war. Yeah, I mean, because it's a timeline from when we record and then it gets edited and these sorts of things. We don't actually know what the situation was going to be with the Ukrainian war by the time this podcast comes out. So I think we want to talk a little bit about we're going to start with the Ukrainian war and then move out and talk about war.

on a more abstract level, but the way people have tried to understand, war the way war has developed over, through history, it's changed shape several times. And also the way we can understand how war fits into the general pattern of human behavior and also how war fits into capitalism and imperialism.

I think you'd have to talk about all of those things if you wanted to talk about war. But I suppose the place to start would be about, about our own sort of impressions of the last couple weeks. Like I can say that I was incredibly shocked when Russia invaded Ukraine. I just didn't expect that to happen. Or the experts I was reading or listening to on podcasts were all, you know, we're all saying that it's absolutely not going to happen because there's no upside to for Putin. There's no upside for Russia. It's just bad for Russia.

Looks like that's probably going to turn out to be true. So it was one of those moments when your conception of the world obviously was inadequate, or my conception of the world was inadequate, and something else was going on. I think that's a question we might come back to later on, like what causes war? How much of it is can you get at through like this thinking about this rational calculation of interests

and how much of it is other stuff, perhaps psychological stuff, perhaps ideological stuff, we'd have to get to that. So anyway, I was shocked, and obviously you're seeing this, you're understanding that there's going to be, huge movements of people is going to be huge death and suffering, and that's upsetting and shocking.

But at the same time, there's also, you know, I've been quite shocked and scared. I'm going to put my hands up to that about the way that the sort of shocking news of that invasion has affected the UK, about the way people are talking in the UK and thinking about this. You know, one of those things, one of the things that's happened is that, you know, a lot of the sort of underlying assumptions people carry around with them, perhaps journalists carry around with them, commentators carry around with them. They sort of come out in these sort of moments of shock. And so we've seen basically just straight out racist and white supremacist

commentary from journalists, you know, which is just received as normal. So there's been numerous journalists saying, we can't believe this. This is bombing against civilized people, not not these people in the Middle East are these people who are who aren't civilised presumably this is white European people I'm not actually sure if anyone said white but that's what that's what civilised

and European stand for And they have cars like us that was one of the comments It's just incredible, it's just incredible Yeah no but it's one of those things where that you know all of a sudden what's not said become said Exactly and you sort of you see it

But then as it's gone on, it's become even more frightening because, you know, basically people discussing whether nuclear war, you know, how bad is nuclear war actually? Is it survivable? You know, is it a bad thing if we, if nuclear weapons become used? And this is in relation to should NATO install a no-fly zone, which would mean engaging directly in the war and shooting down Russian planes. threat of escalation and that escalating into nuclear war. I saw an estimate from, I think it was a financial company who said there was a, they thought there was a 10% chance of, of world destroying nuclear war within the next five years, basically. Who knows whether that's accurate or not. But this is a level of talking about the prospect of a nuclear war, which I hadn't seen since the 1980s, basically. And you grew up on the sort of, or you became politicized, around the sort of Iraq war, anti-war movement, Nadia. I probably became politicised, probably, it's hard to remember now,

around the sort of fear of nuclear war in the early 80s, particularly the growth of CND around the importation of cruise missiles, nuclear cruise missiles into the UK, and it became a huge, huge movement. My mum took me up to the hands around the base. protests around Greenham Common in, I'd imagine, 1983. I'd have to Google. I've also got this anecdote that I remember the other day about,

I was absolutely obsessed with nuclear war when I was a young kid. I knew everything about it, and I used to worry a lot about it. And I remember sitting in my bedroom with probably like a ZDX81 or perhaps a BBC Acon, one of the early computers. Nice. And I hear this huge explosion and I immediately thought that nuclear Armageddon had started. And then I looked at my computer and it was still working. And I knew that a nuclear explosion would cause an electromagnetic pulse,

which would shut down the electrical system. So I knew that it wasn't nuclear war. When I found out later what it was, it was somebody who owned a factory who basically set it on fire and a load of stuff blew up and they set it on fire because what was actually going on the early 80s was this huge economic crisis, basically, with lots and lots of businesses and factories, and basically that moment of the big moment of de-industrialisation in the UK. Yes, I was a very strange child,

but there was a lot of fear of nuclear war around. And so it's just an absolute shock that has come back, that people are talking in really quite a blazé way. Yeah, I've just found it very difficult to cope with, Like you said, that this kind of blasé way that people are talking about the potential for nuclear war is just incredible. I mean, I don't know what you've thought, Jeremy, about this. Well, yeah, I don't, I wouldn't say I found it incredible, to be honest. I found it completely unsurprising, you know, the people who've been talking in a really blazay way about nuclear war,

the people who've been, you know, who've been demanding that, you know, the people on the left who are, you know, in any way hostile to NATO, be publicly punished and expelled from the Labour Party. I'm not surprised that they're behaving that way because it's pretty consistent with the way they've normally behaved. And a lot of those type of people have been behaving, you know, since the early 20th century, which is that I think it's really fundamental to their way, their worldview. Do you do not acknowledge, like, what, you don't acknowledge Western imperialism as a phenomenon. You just don't acknowledge that it. ever happened or if it's a phenomenon it's a phenomenon that only ever happened like a hundred

years previously to when you happen to be speaking therefore for example it's just not allowed at all just epistemologically is not allowed to be for example skeptical about NATO and or to dispute NATO's claim to be a defensive alliance with no offensive with no offensive role or capabilities and, you know, I just think even, I mean, my, you know, I'm not like, I'm not uncritical of stop the war. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I don't, honestly, I don't follow geopolitics with enough expertise to even have a view, to be honest, on whether, you know, you can say that Putin was, Putin was justified in feeling threatened by the expansion of NATO. But I do know that the people who've declared that a statement, which is not allowed to be made in public, are

people who belong in a political and ideological lineage, within which it is forbidden to acknowledge that there is such a thing as Anglo-American imperialism, like, after the end, especially after the end of the British Empire, that there have ever been, that have ever been hostile actions and all morally problematic actions undertaken by British and American governments and military since that time. And it is essentially a Cold War. It's essentially an extension of Cold War liberalism, to that extent. I mean, it is really sort of extraordinary. But I haven't been at all surprised, to be honest.

Like, I haven't been surprised by it. It's exactly what I would have expected from those people. I think from like the sort of Labour right ideologues, I think you're right, yeah, that's what you would expect. Like, NATO membership plays this very weird psychopolitical or psychosocial role in their worldview, you know. It seems to be like the only geopolitics thing that they really love kind of, you know.

Well, they're going to get behind any war, basically. I think there's something about war as like, you know, basically giving them agency that they basically like. So if we're going to war, they're fucking for it, basically. Yeah, well, there's a couple of things, we talked about this when we were preparing for the show. There's a couple of different things. On the one hand, there's just their obsessive commitment to Atlantisism.

By Atlantis'ism, I mean the assumption that America is a force for good in the world and Britain's alliance with America really has to override all other policy considerations, domestic or foreign, military or otherwise. And I wrote an article for New Statesman about this a few years ago saying, really, within British politics, it's only the far left. And actually, the sort of left, far left of the Tory party as well, actually. who historically have just had any real critique of Atlantisism, that most strands of the Labour Party and the Tory Party

have just in their different ways, been obsessively Atlantis. So there's been mad pro-Raganite Atlantisists. But there's also like a tradition of Labour Atlanticism, which basically thinks that America remembers the America of the New Deal, as if that's like the real America, and that's the America to which we must always be loyal forever under all circumstances. And they all end up justifying a sort of effectively a Cold War politics and a post-cold war politics.

And then there's also, yeah, there's this thing about just agency, which I think is significant because, you know, my own view, this is a sort of, this is a somewhat psychological reading, which I don't like to do too often of, of an individual, which I also am always saying we shouldn't do. But let's do it anyway. Let's do it anyway. Like, I mean, one of the, in some ways, one of the weirdest and least analyzed, like things that happens over the. in British politics over the past 30 years is Tony Blair. And Tony Blair, we're used to condemning Blair and his government as neoliberal. The thing is, by sort of 2005, Blair isn't even a neoliberal. He's a full-blown neocon.

I mean, we know, we know as a matter of record that he had secretly converted to Roman Catholicism during that time. So he seriously becomes converted to what is this kind of class of civilizations like conservatism, like while he's prime minister, He starts off a Clintonite neoliberal, but he becomes like a proper, like, neo-imperialist neocon. And my sort of analysis of that is that, and it's true of a number of the people around him, and it's something that it tends to happen to these sort of centrist technocrats,

is these people find themselves in office. They find themselves in government, and they realize that they have got themselves into office under circumstances, which mean they are not going to be able to, implement any sort of a heroic reform program. You know, they're not going to be at Lee or they're not going to be FDR. They're not even going to be Lyndon Johnson, like implementing the war, you know, carrying out the war on poverty, which we're going to talk about in other terms later.

All they've signed themselves up for is administering a political and economic program whose coordinates have entirely been determined elsewhere and by other people. Yeah, they're just managers of advanced neoliberal capitalism. That's all the job history has for them. And they want something else to do. You know, this is Blair. He wants a more heroic role than just being the person who completed the project of Thatterism. And so what heroic role does he think, does he decide history has allocated to him?

He decides that history has allocated to him the heroic role of defender of the West. You know, like fucking Aragon, you know, with a, you know, defender of the West against the Islamic threat, basically, against the threat of the swarthy hordes from the east. And they love that role. And you can see it now. You can see with a lot of the FBPE people who were so into the idea of a nuclear war with Russia. You know, they want Putin to play the role of the swarthy, the leader of the swarthy hordes from the East so that they can be heroic defenders of Western values against this perceived existential threat. And I think it is all the displacement from the fact that on some level these people, they sort of know.

or if they don't know, they at least experience the fact that they are people who have authority, they have prestige, they have status, but they have no real power because they have accepted their roles in a political system which doesn't really give them the opportunity to change anything or to be remembered by history for having changed anything. And so I think they love the idea of a war because it gives them a sense of being great leaders and being able to do something. one song we could mention is shipbuilding the lyrics of which were written by Elvis Costello actually about it was performed by Robert Wyatt he did the I think he did the main performance of it

anyway it's a beautiful song and it's sort of linked to the to the Falklands War I think it comes out in like 83 or something it gets into the charts in 1983 I think but it's sort of linked to the to the Falklands War And it's sort of a story of the lyrics sort of are a story of, of, this sort of industrial collapse that happens there.

And then the Falklands War happens and it gives a sort of like temporary revival to the shipbuilding industry. But like it's a really, really mournful song in which, you know, you recognize that those sort of towns and cities are also supplying the soldiers who are going to be sent off to die in the Falklands. And it's got this really famous line,

diving for dear life and we could be diving for pearls. It's just a beautiful song anyway. Well, I ask you, the boys said that they're going to take me to task. But I'll be back by Christmas. It's just a rumor that was spread around town. I think the FBPE thing, which was followed back pro-EU and then people have been joking, it's followed back pro-extinction because FBPE in your Twitter tagline would basically indicate

you're probably going to be in favour of provoking a nuclear war with Russia. But I think there's something else going on with that. I think that those people are generally not those sorts of ideologues. I think that I think those people are the ones who've moved, who've found something in themselves once again, that we probably wouldn't expect it to be there, basically. And I think that this idea of shock provokes some sort of war on nuance.

God, we're going to use wars a metaphor a lot today. We're going to talk about wars and metaphor, perhaps a bit later. But like it's that shock, which sort of like basically cramps people's analysis or suspends people's analytical abilities or basically prohibits nuance and thinking, I think. Did these people ever have any nuance? You know, if they had no nuance about Europe either, you know. No, I agree.

Yes, no, no, I do agree. But there's a bigger catchment than the followback pro EU, which is kind of like also the centrist dad club, like, you know, in terms of how they comment on culture, etc. There's just people, you know, the commentariat to who we're saying, well, you know, would it, would it be that bad, the no-fly zone? Like maybe we need, and you're just like, well, the absolute fuck are you saying. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I, what we think, what they absolutely fucking are saying. I just don't agree. I don't think the war has changed them or done anything new to them. I think they were that bad. I think, you know, they're hysteria. They're hysteria. Well, they are if you think there's a real threat of nuclear war, which I'm dubious about. I would say, given the stakes around climate change.

for example, and these people's willingness to just annihilate, you know, you have absolutely hysterics and annihilate any chance of a government in this country for the next 10 years that would do anything about climate change. I'm just saying I don't find it surprising. I don't think, I think it's just consistent. It's consistent with their hysterical, you know, their hysterical attachment to a certain kind of technocratic liberalism and it's obverse, which is just this kind of muscular militarism. I just don't think it marks a change. I think for me it's just completely... I don't think it marks a change, but when you see it, when you see it displayed in words,

some of the things that people have been saying, I think it, there is more of a, like Keir said, a suspension of analytical ability than you'd expect even from those people. Because, you know, those people are not stupid. Some of them might have terrible analysis, but they're not stupid. It's also that the general,

sort of, the general sort of feeling in the country, you know, I, you know, obviously I was horrified that Putin invaded Ukraine. And, you know, obviously Putin bears a responsibility for that. So it's a war of aggression. Do you know what I mean? We can talk about British wars or, yeah, British and American wars of aggression, such as Iraq, etc. And the parallels between them. But basically, this sort of mood, what I was reminded of most actually of the mood, as soon as the invasion happened and just after that was a little bit like the 2011 riots and like the that sort of you know those sort of those centrist commentators talking about sending in the army and you know we need to talk about you're talking about the riots in london the london

the london riots yeah well they're around england as well but that sort of mood of like people switching like suppose liberals switching to like absolute vicious authoritarian and like That's really interesting that you make that parallel. Well, the reason I thought of it's because David Cameron at the time had this really famous statement, which is saying, we need to condemn a little more and understand a little less. And that's definitely going on about this, you know, if people want to talk about and think about what are the circumstances

in which we reach this incredible situation where Russia invades Ukraine. There was a meme I saw go around Twitter today of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, phoning the future and saying, you're fighting a war Russia's fighting a war in Ukraine who are they fighting against because it's utterly inconceivable on that moment

that that could happen do you know what I mean that condemn a little more understand little left that wasn't Cameron that was John Major in like years before that it's not your fault

I've been seeing loads of people have been quoting that and it's just it's a meme are you sure yeah absolutely then he brought it back so that proves you know Cameron was trying to position

the Tories as more liberal it wasn't Cameron someone just completely misremembered that and gone on circulating it. Okay. I thought he did. One of the great historical events to produce a lot of musical response around the question of war was obviously the Vietnam War. There's a few famous songs which come out of the protest and folk movement of the 60s. One of the most famous figures to come out of that

moment while the most famous single individual was Bob Dylan I think by far the most sophisticated actually of Dylan's protest songs is his song with God on our side lyrically it's the only one that's interesting really because it does offer a real critique of the relationship between American national self-identity and imperialism and colonialism

and contemporary forms of militarism And the Civil War II was soon laid away And the names of the heroes I was made to memorize With guns in their hands And God on their side I wrote an article about shock a little bit after the 2001-level riots. And I was sort of using Naomi Klein's book a little bit, The Shock Doctrine,

where she links up a few things. So she starts that book with CIA Torture Manuals and how they use both shock and electric shock to try to rupture a prisoner's ability to make sense of the world, basically. So you get people vulnerable, they can't make sense of the world anymore. therefore they're you know they're not quite a tabular rasa but like basically they're therefore unable to resist um interrogation and these sorts of things and then she applies that to to both like the what was called the shock therapy which introduced oligarchization into

into russia and other countries in eastern europe following the fall of the berlin war in the 1990s that's where Putin comes from of course that's where the russian system as we know it now comes from. Naomi Klein is writing just after the Iraq war, perhaps around the same time. And there there was this military doctrine of shock and awe, where you just send huge amounts of bombing in order to create shock within the population and basically disrupt people's ability to make sense of the world and to disrupt lines of military hierarchy, etc., etc. And so, yeah, that's sort of like, it's almost as though there's sort of a deluge of, expected information, information you didn't expect to happen, which disrupts your sense of the

world and prevents you from making sense of the world, which sort of almost pushes you or makes you vulnerable to really simplified versions of simplified narratives or simplified versions of world events, basically. And I think that's one of the things that opens people up for this, this suspension of analytical abilities and this sort of like this idea that like nuance, nuance or explanation equals too much sympathy for somebody who is the baddie at this moment, et cetera. And that brings in this thing of like, if it's a big problem, what do you do?

What does shock absorbers for the left look like? You know, they must, it must be some repertoire of like collective analysis, presumably, that you have to go back to in moments of shock because if, you know, you have to then start to remake sense of the world, etc. But like, how do you do that in a way that can even, and reach the centrist dad's Twitter.

I think that's really difficult, basically. And in those moments, what you really need, the left needs that sort of like liberal center as a guard or as a, you know, not quite to make up the numbers, but that's the moment in which liberals need to be liberal in the idea that people think what liberalism is, i.e. some sort of regard for human rights, etc.

But in fact, that's the exact moment when liberalism just suspends all of that and checks human rights in the bin. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, it comes back to the question of consciousness, doesn't it? And what it means to have radical consciousness or even revolutionary consciousness. I think the difference between something like revolutionary consciousness and less developed forms of political consciousness is that it's less, I think,

properly understood, it's less susceptible to shock. and it's left susceptible to shock because it is not naive about the nature of historical change. Yeah, so that information will be less unexpected and therefore easier to... Yeah, exactly, yeah. And it is a big problem. I mean, I think I've been...

I mean, it's a formula I used years ago when writing about this kind of thing. A huge problem for the left, and this is true across Europe in the States, is that the people who are willing to engage, who are emotionally inclined to militancy are completely disinclined kind of long-term strategic thinking

and patience and people who are inclined to long-term thinking and patience are disinclined to militancy whereas in fact you just have to have both and what does all that have to do what we're talking about is you know it's a huge problem it's a problem that we're always coming back to

it's a huge problem for the left is this big block of people whose outlook on historical changes. They are basically liberal progressivists. They basically think the historical norm is gradual progress, social progress. And every deviation from that norm is a deviation. It's not normal. And therefore, they can be very, very critical of neoliberalism and all of its legacies, for example.

But they still can't get their heads around the fact that actually, like, neoliberal is more normal in terms of the whole history of capitalism than the post-war expansion of the welfare state was and that you only get victories like that occasionally and you only get them by fighting very, very hard for them. It's people's inability to get their heads around that. It's really people which I think creates this situation

in which they're constantly shocked. They're constantly shocked by both the corruption and decadence of the right. They're easily duped by, centrist technocrats claiming to be progressives like them. And they're easily convinced that anybody with a more left-wing critique is a wild and dangerous revolutionary. You can only be a threat to progress rather than its agent. And it is really a problem.

The thing is I would say, and this is sort of consistent with other stuff I've said on the show lots of times. I mean, part of the problem for the post-Corby night left is I think a lot of people, a lot of pro-Corbyn people who've thought, who think of themselves as being like really radical and really revolutionary. I don't, they're not, they don't have this consciousness. They sort of thought Jeremy becoming leader

was a restoration of a historically, of a sort of historical norm. And when it turned out not to be, it turned out that the norm was for the right to fight back very hard, to kick everyone as hard as they could at every chance they got. They got very upset by that.

They haven't got over it emotionally. They're still very angry at it happening and they're angry at everybody who tells them, well, that's normal. So, but ultimately, if you're, on some level, if you're really angry and shocked by that stuff, then you're not, you're still not getting it. You're not getting that this is what it's like, just like you're not getting that, you know, war is normal. War is really a normal part of history. But also on an energetic level, like being angry, I mean, as a woman, this is a difficult thing.

I mean, this is like going off topic, but, you know, as a woman, once you see the world through feminism, it makes you angry all the time because of patriarchy. But it's kind of the say, it's kind of a similar situation to what you're talking about, but what you're saying is on a grander scale, Jeremy, which is that if you're, if you're constantly going through this shock at like how this other terrible thing has happened or systemically, or like you were saying, like a maneuver that the right has done, it actually wastes a lot of your energy. You get very tired very quickly and you lose the ability to have some kind of strategic thinking about what next or how do I change.

change my behavior or how do I change my point of analysis to move forward and through this moment, whether you're talking about war or whether you're talking about the next thing that the right has done to expel the left from the party or whatever. Yeah, yeah. It's exactly the same. It's exactly the same. That's a really good analogy. I'm thinking about arguments I've heard between sort of veterans of women's liberation and sort of younger feminists. And one of the things I've heard from the sort of veterans, which I find quite persuasive, is that there's too much emphasis in contemporary, liberal and radical feminism on creating safe spaces and not enough emphasis on basically enabling girls and women to toughen up and tough it out. And their position,

the reason they say that is for exactly that reason. It's not that women should just tolerate patriarchy. It's that at some level at the point of developing your feminist consciousness, You have to accept patriarchy exists. It's not going to stop existing just because you've realised it existed and are angry about it. And you've got to both fight against it and try to create spaces where its effects are minimised. But you've also got to just stop being perpetually outraged

and shocked and surprised, but as if, you know, it's a surprise that it's happening. From a meditative practice space, my intervention on that, like talking about stuff around war, is that once you, it's the level of going back to consciousness, it's the level of being able to be aware that I am now in shock or what I am experiencing is shock and therefore how do I process this rather than say I can't be shocked, like something has happened and it shocked me,

how do I deal with that emotion as it undulates through me? Yeah, yeah, you're right. And how do I allow that and therefore how does that interface with my political energy and my relationships with other people and my analysis. And that is what, that's why, where consciousness is important. And that's why consciousness raising in left groups is really important because you're bringing people to a level of being able to, and I don't, I don't really like using the word cope,

but I think actually it's important here, of being able to cope with the reality under late capitalism, whether you're talking about war or like human rights abuse or rape or whatever. And like, and to be able to move through that and forward and kind of build something progressive rather than be constantly in a state of, you know, which is a base state of like panic or anxiety. That's a really important point because also,

I mean, the logical conclusion of what we were saying a minute ago, what I was saying, the logical conclusion might be that what we're saying is that everybody should be a sort of, like a sort of caricature Lenin, like kind of cold revolutionary with no feelings, no outrage and no morality. And that's wrong as well. You know, we know where that ends up and it's not a good play. that somehow you've got to be able to manage both to being completely unsurprised by the evil

which is done in the world not sure about evil i don't i wouldn't use the word evil personally all right but also you have still got to still you know we've got to remain retain our human capacity to be to be shocked by war you know it is important that people are it is important to be outraged on that level and war is an outrage i mean war is outrageous like it's a weird thing that humans do, that like no other animals do, that is just, that is appalling and it's almost, and we should never be sort of, um, desensitized. Yeah. Part of the reason why I wanted to talk about this is because of, like Keir, you know, talked about his experience in the beginning, like I had a similar experience, like coming from a background of working on conflict

issues, you know, self-determination of people in Palestine, etc. Like having to deal with day on day out as part of my daily work like you know people being killed people being harassed like human rights abuse like the pictures the stories the narratives like i thought that something like ukraine i just i just thought i wouldn't go through kind of that the emotional cycle that i did and it actually has affected me when i caught up with the news in a kind of in that kind of basic way so i so i was going through that myself and thinking what is the how do i develop this? How do I accept what I felt? Because these images and stories and whatever are coming to me live, which is, you know, not to say that this stuff isn't happening all over the world to other

people as well, but because of the way it's being reported in the UK and I'm in the UK, so I'm on the receiving end of this, it's going to affect me and it's affecting me because I'm an empathetic human being. But then how do I let it not influence too much my ability to have analysis and create strategy and build alliances. I mean, what we probably all did was go and read about it and listening to listen to podcasts about it. And I did that and it basically totally helped me cope with the situation, if we're just going to use the word cope.

That is again on the left that there is access to actually pretty solid analysis that you can go to. Yeah, I thought I have to say. That's right, people. Podcasting is the most useful militant activity there is. No, I withdraw that statement. I infamously don't listen to podcasts, but I did think the Novara Tisky Sauer on the second of, I think it was of March was just incredible. And that's the, I mean, as in it was fantastic.

And that's the one where they got the clip of Hillary Clinton, which I did think was extraordinary. My understanding is Hillary Clinton was saying, yes, we funded the Mujahideen, you know, the Islamic extremists in the 1980s to fight the Russians and the same should be done again in Ukraine, which she was talking about the level of geopolitics and US interests. She was not talking about the thousands of people who are going to die. She's not talking about how the outcome of Afghanistan is absolutely catastrophic in terms of human life. And she's basically saying, yeah, but it seemed to be, she was saying, it worked for us.

So, you know, if we have a civil war in Ukraine, it seemed to be. saying the inference was it wouldn't be the worst thing for us. There was a guy, one of the brave Mujahideen, Osama bin Laden, I think his name was. I don't know what happened to him afterwards. I've lost track of his story,

but I think there was some blowback, you know. Fitting into all of that is people have been raising it a little bit over the last week or so about Tony Blair's support for Putin when Putin raised Chechnya or invaded Chechnya, or invaded Chechnie Actually, probably wouldn't count as an invasion.

I think they were invited it. But anyway, they raised Grozny, which is the capital city of Chechnya, killed, I think, 300,000 people or something. Like, really, really horrific. And, but at that time, Putin was, that was seen as Putin was a good guy because he was fighting Islamic militancy, basically. But it depends whether the Islamic militants or the goodies or the baddies, like over history, whether they're useful or not for the Western powers.

And this is, this is what I mean, is that I don't think it's about memory-holing. It's about showing up the interests of like going back to imperialism and that 2005 discourse, which we seem to be at again, like what are the global interests and power here? And I think that always has to be the left's job. It's like where are the interests, where is the power? And look at that first and understand that as a point of departure to understand what some of these people are saying,

you know, when Hillary Clinton and Reagan, etc., like I have this conversation. you know that might be a good a good way to go into this discussion about why wars occur but the traditional left thing is to think about it's almost you know there's a little bit of a parallel with with the realist position in international relations is to think of it in terms of of rational calculation of interests and competing perhaps competing imperialisms and so forth and to be honest you're going to get quite a long way with that but of course other people think about war in other ways

there are things such as ideologies involved which give people a different conception of the world and therefore give them a different conception of what's possible and what's not possible etc then there are sort of like psychological explanations of war I think it's interesting to talk about those I haven't actually got a solution to why wars occur

and then there's also sort of like perhaps more anthropological angles into this you know, like what role does war play in human history? When we talk about war, we're talking about the same thing all the way through because they look very, very different at different times in history. You know, what's the relationship between war and the state, you know, the development of states, you know, all of these things, I think, you know,

basically they complicate a picture in which we can just say it's a do with interimperious rivalries. Yeah, I mean, it complicates. on one level, but I think from a state's perspective, often it simplifies it. Like, what going to war often does is it kind of cleans the slate when you have, when you have, like, internal dynamics in a country. I'm talking about like from a national borders perspective, but when you have, you know, a state that has, you know, issues in terms of its relation to its populace or the social contract or economically or whatever, like a good war with, you know, an external enemy, fictitious or real or whatever, kind of cleans that space for you to kind of start over

again in terms of whatever your political program is, which is one of the reasons why it's so horrendous is because, you know, they, you know, why did the, why did the UK get involved in the Iraq war? You know, it's not direct. We're not being invaded by Iraq. Yeah, I don't move too fast here, but like, yeah, that opens up another set of questions, which is, can you have collectivity without an enemy because that's sort of that simplification of the of the of the of the of the of the of the public sphere or even the social sphere you know that's something that that somebody like ernesto la clow would sort of point out of you know that um setting up clear lines of antagonism is and for him it would be between the people and the and the elite or an analogy for the elite you know so you then say well look you know there's war that one of the one of the one of the one of the the slogans that you haven't seen so much this time, but you normally see is this idea of no war but the class war, no war between nations, no peace between classes, do you know what I mean? And so in some ways it's this, you know, people sort of see it as a debate about

who is the enemy, where do the enemy's lines lie. And so that's another version of what you're, or what something you were gesturing at, I think, Nadia, which is wars can be very, very attractive in some sort of way to governments because they can eliminate some of the social divisions that are existing in society and redraw them. And of course, at this moment, they're trying to be redrawn around eliminating pacifism or eliminating, trying to draw an analogy between the far left and the far right as both pooting lovers somehow and therefore positioning centriism as the rational position, I'm not quite sure, or something like that. But also what it does is put Britain in an interesting position because the UK is now

able to speak as a European again through the voice of NATO despite Brexit, which is a very interesting position because suddenly there's kind of this alliance again despite despite Brexit. So NATO has offered Britain that role at the moment. And you know, it's an interesting position. a stung dynamic on a geopolitical scale again. A really interesting feature of mid-70s, like punk music, which is easy to overlook now, partly because it seems a bit anachronistic to us, was it anti-militarism?

So the clash, stiff little fingers, various other people had songs really sort of condemning, mostly sorts of condemning army life as an option for working-class young men. So it was an interesting feature and obviously it became a really absolutely essential feature of the ideology of an arco-punk and people like Krasse. One of my favourite versions of that is stiff little fingers,

the Great Bellfast punk band, their song Tin Soldier, which is an expression of that sort of anti-militaryism. He joined up coast and new best to do right by his son. And now he hates and counts the dates that mark time on Square War. At the age of 17 he did as he was told

Now at the age of 21 He still won't turn to God Ten soldier He signed away his name Ted Soldier Because the Cashro's played Ten Soldier Now he knows the truth

In Soldier Although in Belfast There's an ever war going on Isn't there basically Which is you know The troubles as they were called at the time. But I mean for SLF at that moment, writing this song

it's condemnatory but it's also slightly sympathetic. I mean the line is tin soldier. He's signed away his youth. You know, it was presenting the soldiers who were on the streets of Belfast policing and sometimes killing members of the

Republican Catholic community. It presents him as a victim to some extent which is, was consistent with their policy. I mean the politics of SLF was very sophisticated in terms of being sort of Republican but not sectarian. You raised this question of what, on a kind of anthropological level or psychological, you know, what level, like what's the nature of war?

And it is, I mean, it is really important question, although I don't know if it's answerable. Because I think it's one of the three unique human activities, a war language and tool use, arguably are the three sort of uniquely human activities that other animals don't do. and like why it I mean to be able to answer it why you'd really have to have a whole sort of theory of to some extent a theory of human nature which is quite obviously difficult I mean as far as I understand it if you go into the sort of prehistory if you go to the early history you know the times when human beings first start having wars what you usually seem to have on the basis of the latest scholarship is some agricultural societies for the first time so they're able to expand these the population are able to expand beyond which like nomadic or pastoralist or hunter-gatherer societies can produce. But they're dependent on quite a strict division of labour. They become very hierarchical and they're dependent upon a really specific set of climactic circumstances. And then what often

happens is climate change interrupts those circumstances. So you have these big populations and there isn't enough resources to go around and then people start fighting over them. And, you know, there's this famous exchange between Freud and Einstein. It's not really an exchange. Einstein asked Freud, like, why does war happen? And Freud in some of his later work, he has all these theories about human aggressivity and kind of displaced feelings of aggression and hostility that would be expressed in some sort of state of nature being central to under the formation of culture. but actually in the in the in the why war exchange its explanations of like where where all that comes from are a bit less i mean they're less psychological than you might expect i mean he talked about just the irreconcilability of particular sets of interests and i mean one thing i think from my i think it's important from my point of view for understanding any of the recent wars we've been talking about and i think this is sort of always true to some extent and it's consistent with what you guys were just saying a minute again

go is that it's hard for me to think of examples of wars that don't have anything to do with the internal conflicts within one within given societies producing a situation wherein prosecuting a war wasn't necessary to the sort of further into their project you know you can't understand even say the second world war without understanding that on some level you know sections of german society sections of german capital and the peters bourgeoisie are engaged in a desperate backlash against the threat of communism and the threat of socialism. So that's the genesis of fascism and fascism then necessitate, you know, mobilising the resources of the country into this massive imperialist war project because it's basically giving

people something else to do other than, you know, do socialism or have a revolution or whatever. And, you know, the Iraq war was basically about the fact that the American right, the Republican right just had exhausted itself. It didn't have a political project after the Cold War. There was no reason for it to exist, really, given that the Democrats had aligned themselves with the kind of the globally hegemonic bloc of finance capital and tech. The Democrats had aligned themselves fully with that kind of alliance between Wall Street and Silicon Valley. So there was just nothing, there was no reason for the Republicans to exist. They only won the election in 2000 through fraud

and they knew they had only won it through fraud. So what were they going to do? So a military project was like the only thing left for that political social group to engage in. And I think it's hard, I can't think of many exceptions to the idea, this idea that that is

what really usually that is what starts a war. What starts a war is there is some faction within a country a society that has the resources and ability and access to media, etc. to to whip up a war, to get a war going, and it has an interest in doing so,

because the alternative is that it's about to be beaten by some of its rivals for power. I was just wondering, I was thinking, pondering, as you were saying that, Jeremy, whether the reverse is true for civil war. Because I can think of several civil wars where external powers are very much involved in allowing forces to tip a certain way,

whether we're talking about the Lebanese civil war or, you know, it's never confined to borders. There's either internal stuff going on that creates a kind of exothermic need to go to war and expend that energy all the other way around. I mean, I think to link up with what Keir was saying a minute ago as well,

I mean, indeed, the theory of collectivity proposed by people like LeCloin-Moof is that you only get a sense of a collective, a group, a collective agent, when there's an enemy to fight. And so basically when it's basically a sort of default option for ruling elites that are in trouble that need to persuade people to unite behind them and not unite against them to identify an external threat, an external enemy.

And do you mean, do they talk about, sorry to interrupt, but just to be clear, when they talk about that, do they mean a concrete enemy in the form of a nation or can it be, do they talk about, you know, religion and like... Yeah, it can be abstract, yeah. Okay. It can be abstract. So, but I mean, an interesting illustration of this.

I mean, this is something we were going to talk about anyway, is the use of war as a metaphor in political discourse. So since the 60s, we've lived through this sequence in the English-speaking world of wars on abstractions, like the war on terror. It's interesting to think about this, is the Iraq war, they can't justify it just as a war against the Ba'athist regime in Iraq. They know they can't do that. They have to try to sort of justify and narrate the war in Iraq, which is clearly in many ways just an old-fashioned imperialist, militarist adventure. They have to justify it as part of this war on an abstraction, which is the war on terror.

But, you know, that Putin with his denatification chat, I mean, that's also, I would be very interested to hear what the discourse is inside Russia, which I don't feel I know enough of. No, I don't. Well, I think let's come back to the specifics to that in a minute. I think this is a parallel, though, I think that the denatification, I think it's even more of a of a last minute grasp at some sort of justification, but it's a little bit like the link, trying to link 9-11 to the Iraq war. Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, that is a parallel. And we should also, just before we go on, we should also note, a month ago, Boris Johnson, it looked like Boris Johnson was going to be thrown out of office. And of course, Kiyostham was asking for him to resign.

And now Kiyostham is saying she should stay in office. I mean, it does fit quite nicely. That's all I'm going to say. That idea of the war on something, the war on abstraction, it goes back to the mid-60s. And the first... 1951, actually. 51.

Yeah, 1951 was the creation of war on want, the organisation that I worked on, worked at for 12 years. And so that was, you know, Harold Wilson was involved in that. So that was one in the UK, the war on global poverty, which then became the war on want,

the organisation. Yeah, well, that is really interesting. Okay, so it goes back further than that, but I'm still going to talk about this interesting sequence, which, I mean, I was going to see, situator starting in 64 with Lyndon Johnson talking about the war on poverty. And Johnson had this very specific agenda. He wanted to prosecute and legitimate the war in Vietnam, but also to get support for a massive expansion of the New Deal settlement.

Johnson is like the classic, you know, liberal welfare, you know, pro-welfare, but also aggressively pro-war, pro-cold war. This is the United States we're talking about, yeah. Talking about the United States. Well, it's really significant. It's still significant to British politics, because on some level, that is still the ideal politics of like the hard right of the Labour Party. They think that's how you do it.

They think that's the ideal form of politics. Muscular militarism against dictators and communists, you know, and fascists in principle, but they're not so bothered about those, really, as long as they're not threatening us. abroad but at home you know yeah let's have an expanded welfare let's have an expanded welfare provision

and more social equality and even a civil rights act sometimes like when the conditions are convenient that's their politics and then that rhetoric of the war on poverty gets retooled by Nixon who talks who declares war both on crime and on drugs and then the war on drugs like goes on for years and years

it's like and then that rhetoric still around in the US Not really, no It isn't, is it? Well, I can tell you what's happened to the war on drugs in the US has been a massive surrender Drugs won Drugs won that war

Yeah Silicon Valley was a lot Yeah, well that's it Great player Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah We talked about this before That's mine and it's Silicon Valley

was on the side of drugs And they are the most powerful players We need to do an episode That's just called drugs But anyway Isn't that, are you halfway through something, Jim? No, no, I think, well, I just think it's interesting to observe that. That notion of the war on something, whether it's a war on want, indeed, or a war, or the notion of class war,

like from the left and from the right, all of those, all of those ideas. The use of war as a metaphor. Yeah, all of those ideas sort of assume that LeCloa and Mouf are right, that the way you get people behind a project is you make it a war. And that is basically the very nature of any kind of collective agency is that it has to be sort of see itself as an army with an enemy. And of course, the liberal tradition broadly conceived, one of the things I think that defines the liberal tradition is it doesn't like that.

It doesn't really like the rhetoric of war. It doesn't really like the rhetoric of antagonism. It prefers to imagine that there is some reasonable solution that can be found to all these problems that will include everybody's interests. And that's, you know, it's central to the liberal, historical, liberal imaginary is the claim made by Adam Smith and his generations of followers that free trade, like, puts an end to war, that the free market is the alternative to war, it's the alternative to antagonism. It allows people to compete but without fighting each other physically and it enables and ideally it produces a perfect distribution of resources of desires and their satisfactions which makes, which renders war, you know, avoidable. So in between the kind of war or like civilized solution is the kind of reality that almost every war has to end in some sort of diplomacy. Like people have to come to the table at some point

and there be some kind of deal that is cut. So there is brokering and there is dealmaking. It's just not the sexy part of war. It's not the bit that we talk about. But people have to come to the table. You know, war doesn't end. Well, you're right. Well, that's, I mean, that takes us to the famous quote from Bismarck,

the war is politics by other means. And often it's reversed to say actually, politics is the extension of war by other means, which is also something we're thinking about. I mean, it's something we haven't really got into yet is the whole theory that war plays a completely central role

in shaping modern societies and modern states and that it's naive to overlook it. Before we move on to that, though, can we just go back to that war as metaphor? Because when you said the problem with the war on drugs is that drugs won, doesn't not always happen with those?

Like, so war on drugs, so that's, is it like 1970, it's a purely cynical, political move by Nixon as an attorney, as an attorney general to declare war on drugs in order to combat the black power movement and the anti-war movement, basically. Yeah, yeah. But they create this situation, particularly through the 1980s, the CIA's importing cocaine into the US, just at the point when crack cocaine takes off. they basically create this problem, this situation in which drugs are this huge problem and actually tearing like inner city areas to pieces. You know, so you have this imaginary enemy that you're going to create and you basically create the real enemy by doing so. The other thing is like, you know, you know, pretending that al-Qaeda, that Saddam Hussein

had links to al-Qaeda and was responsible for 9-11 in order to justify the war in Iraq. It actually wasn't true. But you fast forward five, ten years. and you have ISIS, you know, you've created a situation where what you feared was true or what you're pretending was true, do you know what I mean? You've created the terror. Yeah, and in a way, like, you could sort of think of Putin in the same way. Do you know, Putin's invasion of Russia retrospectively justifies NATO in a way.

But Putin is a purely Western creation. In fact, contemporary Russia is a purely Western creation. We created, you know, the oligarchs in Russia. as a political decision. It's shock therapy, in fact. It's shock therapy. Let's go into that bit. It's actually sort of makes sense.

That, you know, what happens is that the Soviet Union and Eastern Germany turns, there's the fall of the Berlin Wall, you know, the collapse of the sort of communist bloc. And what happens is, you know, we don't send in the nuclear missile to defeat Russia once and for all. We send in the economists, basically. And they introduced this shock therapy. where they privatise these huge, of course, all of the economy is in public hands, and they privatise it and give it over to very, very few people.

You know, that has such an effect on living standards, such an effect on life outcomes, the number of deaths in sending over the economists is sort of similar to the number of deaths you'd expect from a limited nuclear war, basically. In terms of deaths, perhaps it would have been better to send the missiles rather than the economist. But we created this thing and we were discussing this.

The story always goes that the reason that that happened, that all of this wealth was put into the hands of these oligarchs into the hands of very, very few people. The reason it was done was to prevent a return of communism. And then when we were discussing this before the show, you made the point, Jeremy,

that in fact what they were really scared of was that Eastern bloc turning into a huge swave of Scandinavian type economies. Yeah. I think I'd be careful about using the word we, as in we made this. I completely washed my hands clean of any responsibility of Western powers intervening into the Soviet Union.

I think we should play the fantastic song, Killing in the Name of, by Rage Against the Machine, which I think was originally released in 1991, and then I was part of the anti-X-Factor campaign. I think it was 2009 where we got that song to number one and I think it's a really, really good song against police aggression and people fighting random wars. Some of those that work forces are the same that bar crosses.

Some of those that work forces are the same that bar crosses. Some of those that workforces are the same that bar crosses. Personally, I do this dimension, which many really serious social and political theories think is important to take account of. And that is the idea that really, the war has been the definitive phenomenon driving social, technological, economic change. Maybe throughout history, at least through the early, through the modern period, going back

to the Middle Ages. And there is a good case for that. I mean, there's a good case that war, it's because of the Napoleonic wars that we get income tax. You know, it's the Second World War that absolutely incubates almost all of the technological developments that give rise to the cybernetic revolution, the revolution in communications and digital technology. And women in the workplace.

Women in the workplace. The whole idea of the modern welfare state, arguably, I mean, it's very fashionable now among British historians to play down the role of World War II in the formation of the welfare state. But historians like to play down any kind of highfalutin theoretical abstraction, which is their job. But there's no getting away from the fact, in my view,

that the war against the Nazis was what, if nothing else, it was critical in reshaping British attitudes to the state and to socialism for one generation at least. Yeah, I just think it's, I don't know what else to say about it, beyond which, yeah, there is a very persuasive argument,

the war has been really crucial, but capitalism, to the extent that capitalism always relies on, to some extent, what Marx calls primitive accumulation, which basically just means accumulating property just by taking it, just by enclosing some land

that some peasants had previously been farming and saying it's now mine and it is basically mine because I control the local militia and you don't so get off it to the logic of colonialism to the logic of just going out around the world and taking other people's stuff and taking even their bodies

because you can because you've got better weapons and better military forces it's very hard to dispute to some extent capitalism does. But then even the thing is, the trouble is, the trouble is a lot of Marxist critique wants to say, well, capitalism has always been about war. Modern capitalism has always been a sort of extension of war. The trouble is, actually, if you go back further into the history, I mean, pre-capitalist societies and queer capitalist, you know, social formations and political

formations that you can't even really accurately describe as states were also organized around war. In fact, one, I mean, one of the best explanations I've seen for the genesis of Canovo, And the reasons why people engaged in early colonialism were able to treat other human beings so appallingly. And in ways which were considered appalling, even by the norms of their own cultures, like back in Europe and their own religious traditions, is because actually those earliest colonialists had a sort of feudal set of norms, this kind of medieval set of norms, according to which war just was the basis for political legitimacy, to just what it meant to be. the legitimate ruler of a place was you had beaten another group of people in a war over who should own that place and that if you won that was basically that either meant that you

were entitled to it because you'd won or maybe it meant that God had endorsed your victory but that was usually a sort of add-on so I'd say war has been really war has been really bound up with notions of political legitimacy and institutionality forever to some extent. I mean, arguably, you can't really separate an idea of war just from an idea of territory. I think it's a pretty persuasive argument that what Deleuze and Grittari called territoriality or what, just not them, but any anthropologists might call territoriality, just the very idea that a people is associated with a particular area of land. And that is what defines them, and they are defined by their relationship to it,

has a tendency to, you know, that idea has a tendency to produce hierarchical institutions. It has a tendency to produce conflicts, you know. But then, of course, Deleuze and Qutari themselves, this is another thing we said we were going to be talk about, doesn't it? Deleuze and Guitari themselves have this really, really weird bit in a thousand plateaus where they talk about this concept of the war machine. and the war machine you have to correct me if you're understanding if this is different

here but the war machine for them is a type of formation a type of social or organisational formation which is not at all the same as the state and when they're writing about the war machine they're getting all excited because they've been reading about the history of the step nomads

how these step nomads these societies based around a nomadic pastoral lifestyle where you spent a lot of time on horseback. So you became very, very good at riding horses and good at mounted archery. And then the step nomads, you know, for really, for a couple of thousand years, there are wave after wave of step nomads

coming out of the Eurasian step and just completely fucking up, like the urban communities, even the big empires that are there in Western and Eastern Europe and the Middle East and the Near East. And as Deleuze and Guitary get really excited, they've been reading about these nomads, they're really excited to say, wow, there's these like groups of people and they just live in tents, but they can just fuck everyone up because they're mobile and they're fast. And they're like, they're distributed, like they're not sitting in one place, they're not sedentary. And then they use the war machine as this kind of abstract term for what the nomads are doing, but also what like a revolutionary organization might have to do or some kind of radical thinking.

might have to operate like um and i've got to say i'm not i'm not i've never totally sure how well it works as a formulation like it all become it becomes very abstract and it big and they do seem to be saying that like yeah fucking up people with your horse and your bow is cool and um whereas having a farm or a city is like uncool and they they they sort of i think they quite fair well they i the thing is i think that is what they're starting with and they know that That's a stupid thing to be saying. And then they just have to keep tacking back and forth between wanting to somehow express what it is that's cool about that.

But is it that what you're saying is that they're taken over by some kind of imaginary of war? No, it's not that I don't think. Because basically, they're really fascinated by this other way of life, which is around smooth space, the smooth space of the steps. Like Ukraine is this smooth space. There's no mountains, there's no forests, et cetera. So you can be really mobile and move anywhere.

They contrast that to striated space, which is sort of static and hierarchized space. So cities, et cetera, where hierarchies come from. So you might go back to that first point about the sort of anthropological idea of war, where war happens when you get the first cities, etc. Because before that, you have Hunter Gavre, as you had nomadic people. so if you came into conflict around something, you just move away from each other, and that would be fine.

But of course, you can't do that when it's static. So Delozing Qatarii, say, you know, basically the war machine, only it doesn't have war as this object until it clashes up against a state or a city, basically, it clashes up against these forces of striation. And it's then that war happens, and he says, the dangerous point is when the war machine gets captured by the state, and then it becomes, war becomes the primary,

object of the war machine, basically, and that's when you get, you know, the horrendous wars of the last whatever. And so when they talk about war machines, really what they're talking about is like spaces where you can do anything, we can go anywhere sort of thing. So they talk about sort of analytical war machines in terms of like revolutionary organizations, which are basically not created in the way that they think about the world. A thousand groups of nerdy postgraduates have decided that they themselves constituted analytical war machines

because they'd read Deleuze and Gratari and didn't like boring old Derridaeans or something. I mean, I don't know if it's of any use at all, basically. And it definitely is because Grutari is reading a book about Genghis Khan and got very excited. There's no doubt about it.

But I think that's the way around they see it. They're trying to say, look, it's not, you know, basically these are, the Mongol hordes only, you know, their object There's only war when they bump into people who are living in a different sort of way or something like that. Yes, that is the point. They basically did pillage the whole of the world. So I think the distinction is probably not particularly apt to somebody on the end of one of their arrows.

Yeah, well, it's just wrong. It's just historically wrong that the war machine only had what its objects when it came up against the state. They were definitely into building a massive empire and subjugating everyone in their way right from the beginning. Yeah, I don't think it happened by accident, yeah. I mean, a real classic, I mean, a chart hit from the 70s, Elvis Costello's Oliver's Army, which is a song about mercenaries and the role that mercenary soldiers were playing in sort of post-imperial conflicts around the world, places like South Africa and Palestine.

Really, it's one of the darkest lyrics. of any top 10 chart here that I'm aware of. Don't start to talking. I could talk all night. My mind was sweet walking while I'm putting the world to write called career's information. Have you got yourself an occupation?

The other way you could take this sort of conversation is to think about Foucault's sort of, it's in one of his lectures in the 70s, I can't remember which when it is, well, what the title was it of it was when it was translated into English. But he sort of, there's a sort of response to that where he sort of, yeah, he takes this sort of like race war as the, as perhaps the model, basically. So, like, war is not this, this sort of like free flow war machine. In fact, he sort of ties it up to colonial and the sort of the need to create certain people as without worth, basically. And then that sort of boomerangs back into European society in terms of the primitive accumulation that takes place in colonial countries, boomerangs back and becomes the enclosure of the commons, you know, the suppression of women, etc., through their sort of witchcraft

hysteriaism and so forth to create the conditions for capitalism in Europe basically so that money that flows in from the empire has to come along with this sort of enclosed proletarianised population in the UK so class war emerges out of race war

is sort of argument but I mean from that though we could talk about the role that war plays in left we have heard the words the phrase is war of position and war of maneuver on this podcast several times, right, because it relates to Gramsky. But it's like war, you can think of, then think of war as like, that is the point of the strategization of politics in a way.

It's that sort of like war is politics by other means or vice versa is, you know, that idea of strategy emerges out of that out of war, but then goes into politics, it goes into revolutionary politics. I think the use of the word war is in a way is to de-abstract. I don't know, is that the right way of saying it, is to take away the abstraction, to concretize things that are otherwise abstract, because a lot of the time the left is making arguments

that left's failure in a sense to capture the imaginary is because you're unable to talk about things except in terms of structures, because that is the analytical point that we have. So once you talk about a war on something, like class war, like people understand it because class in itself is quite a difficult thing for people to. to get their heads around, especially in the late part of the 20th century and the 21st century.

So when you say class war, suddenly at least the war in it is understood because everybody knows what a war is. That's interesting, actually. And that presents us to have a problem of trying to personify capital, basically. You're naming the enemy. Yeah, it's the people that have names and places and whatever and then you get into, you know, exactly. I'm broadly speaking, I'm quite conscious that as a Gramsian, I'm, generally in favour of using these slightly militaristic metaphors

because they're a way of getting to people to think strategically and to understand the need to think strategically about politics and the need to think about the fact that we are engaged in struggles between potentially irreconcilable sets of interests. But I'm also sensitive to and sympathetic to the views of people coming out of maybe an ecological tradition or an anarchist, pacifist tradition, or certain anti-militarist feminist positions,

who would all say, ultimately, that kind of militaristic language is part of the problem or it's part of an imaginary which can't be progressive in its effects or that can't be fully emancipation, and that what we need is some kind of a politics of peace. And I think, but I think that's a whole other subject

for a whole other podcast in the future. Yeah, I agree. We need to do an effort. episode on peace, because I think starting from that word, would produce a very different conversation. So let's end, let's end, let's end, let's end war now. It's a good slogan to end on. End war now. Go ahead.