What is social war?

Question

What is it?

Answer 1

It's a contrived "us vs them" ideology that uses unfocused inferences and references to the general misery and violence of class society to provide a polarizing framework where self-organization (the "good guys") can appear without interference from the ambivalent nature of real individuals.

It can be anything anarchists want it to be.

Answer 2

i have a response that is more sympathetic to the concept, although it certainly does not negate madlib's.
i see social war as a reaction to the focus on class war by certain significant portions of political people. class war tends to emphasize rigid distinctions between classes that don't make sense anymore, if they ever did, and a marxist/economic analysis that doesn't address many other causes and effects of hierarchy.
so social war emphasizes both that we are all participants in this war (instead of just the working class-as-revolutionary-agent), and that we are at war with society, and that society is at war with itself.  
that definitely leads to an amorphousness that communists especially (it seems) don't like to deal with, but seems appropriate to the blurry lines and shifting ground that we deal with all the time.


edit: from Occupy Everything:
Rejecting the logic of social peace, we instead assert a different rationale: social war. Social war is our way of articulating the conflict of class war, but beyond the limitations of class. Rather than a working class seeking to affirm ourselves in our endless conflict with capital, we desire instead to abolish the class relation and all other relations that reproduce this social order. Social war is the discrete and ongoing struggle that runs through and negotiates our lived experience. As agents of chaos, we seek to expose this struggle, to make it overt. The issue is not violence or non-violence. What’s at issue in these forays against capital is rather the social peace and its negation. To quote a comrade here in Oakland:
windows are shattered when we do nothing, so of course windows will be shattered when we do something; blood is shed when we do nothing, so of course blood will be shed when we do something.

Social war is this process of doing something. It is our concerted effort to rupture the ever-present deadliness of the social peace.

Answer 3

social war:
The narrative of “class struggle” developed beyond class to include the complexities and multiplicities of all social relations. Social war is conflict within all hierarchical social relations.

Social war means society against the state.

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The above is from a few sources, and I think is a lot more on target than what dot eludes to. The whole "war on society" bit is totally strange to me. More like most of society against a tiny elite that control state and capital.

Comments

hence why madlib says it can be anything anybody wants it to be.

just to clarify - while there is a piece of the "most of society against a tiny elite" that makes sense (because having a defined enemy is a piece of what is meaningful), ONLY paying attention to that ignores that we are all part of the society that we are fighting. power/hierarchy/authoritarianism doesn't just exist in some external form, in some easily identified other (the tiny elite), it is in all of us. it is we (tm - also known as the masses), who continue to accept the fucked up situation we are in, We who have not risen up and cast off the chains. The only way to make sense of that passivity (as far as i can tell) is because we are all implicated, even the people who seem to have the most to gain from a revolution. Society, for lack of a better word.

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that is a much better answer dot. yes it about social relations too that everyone has internalized. and about transforming those. if that is what you mean by society, sure. but i am at war with the state and capital. more in a struggle with my prole neighbor if they are racist.

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struggle/war, hmmm...
okay - but not just with racist neighbors. also with myself - the parts of me that continue to be dominated by the status quo, the expectations and assumptions that keep me thinking as a slave (to use shorthand terminology). the cop in my head, as they say. there is both an external enemy (which holds a particular kind of authority), and an internal enemy (with a different kind of power), and i am at war with both.

the challenge (for me, anyway) is not to use the weapons appropriate for one of those enemies on the wrong one (and vice versa).

Answer 4

the back n forth war (civil war) at times less visible to sum + at times more visible. marginalised ppl know it. sumtimes it explodes n u have to take sides. for authority or against it. the violence of imposing n keeping authoritarian society and the violence of resisting or failing the expectations of or fighting against that society. parents and kids, in relationships, at work, police, the full on military defense of the state that it comes down to.... you fucking know wat i mean