“Politics is the continuation of war by other means.” (Foucault) This war can best be understood as the social war, or the war by the state and other institutions to maintain social control, as well as the resistance to this control. Social war is all around us. It is present in the cop cars that patrol our streets, in our schools, in the design of our cities and suburbs, and in the boundaries of what it means to be a man or a woman. To wage social war is to either exercise social control or destroy it, to govern or to be uncontrollable, or to forfeit your agency to a representative or to take direct action. Social war is all around us, we cannot choose whether we are subjected to it, but whether we choose to fight back. In this piece, I will explore a few concepts from a nihilist understanding of social war, the realm of representation, identity and class war, domination, and autonomy. Each concept will be introduced and informed by incidents from my own life. My goal is to ground our understanding of social war in a concrete terrain of struggle as social war expresses itself in day-to-day conflict, and thus should not be divorced from reality.
Download: A Nihilist Understanding of Social War