Anonymous Comrade writes:
This text from The Commoner is written by the editor of Autonomedia's new book Revolutionary Writing.
"Against War and the Preconditions of War"
Werner Bonefeld, The Commoner
On Sundays, holidays, there's naught I take delight in,
Like gossiping of war, and war's array,
The foreign people are a-fighting.
One at the window sits, with glass and friends,
And sees all sorts of ships go down the river gliding;
And blesses then, as home he wends
At night, our times of peace abiding. (Goethe, Faust I).
IGoethe's depiction of the saturated bourgeois to whom war is a Sunday entertainment and for whom the times are bliss, has an eerie contemporary ring: war as televised entertainment. Even Hollywood can not compete for this is the real snuff movie. Since 1945, wars have been fought mostly in those areas of the world where the integration of populations into the world market society of capital is precarious, that is, where capitalist forms of social reproduction are deemed underdeveloped. Between 1945 and the early 1990, Latin America has had 396.000 war death, Africa 5.3 million, the Middle and Far East, 1.8 million, Asia 4.6 Million and Europe 238.000 (Gantzel and Schwinghammer, 1995, p. 150). This development has continued unabated. How many wars have been fought since the end of the Cold War? How many will be fought, not in years ahead, but in the next few months? Afghanistan has again been transformed into rubble. Iraq is to follow soon, and where next?
