Hannah Gadbois, Leili Adibfar, Elise Archias and Blake Stimson to present at NY conference on “No War but the Class War”
No War but the Class War
Historical Materialism and
Institute for the Radical Imagination Conference
May 31 - June 2
New York 2024
@ Long Island University - Brooklyn
The ongoing proliferation of violent conflicts and antagonisms has once again brought the question of warfare to the forefront. Unfortunately, the dominant discourse that has accompanied these antagonisms is simplistic moralism; war as a matter of good and evil. Relatedly, anti-war movements in the United States and beyond have waned, the fight against 'evil' overcoming all else. The startling lack of critical perspectives on and mass social movements against these recent and ongoing wars (from Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza and the West Bank, to Yemen, Sudan, and beyond) as well as increasingly possible future wars (China, Russia) is a direct consequence of the Manichean perspective that has dominated the understanding of the many (including some on the left). Equally worryingly, the broader disruptions and impact of these wars, from rising poverty in the global south to the displacement of tens of millions of people, has not been adequately understood as one of the consequences of these ongoing antagonisms.
It is against this backdrop that a return to a more analytical and rigorous understanding of conflict and war is needed. More precisely, a class analysis of conflict and antagonism is necessary for understanding the complexity of these conflicts and the social conditions that engender them. The analysis of class is always concurrently an analysis of movement and struggle, there is no class without war and there is no war without class. Thus, a class analysis of war also makes visible the deeper social agencies and stakes of these conflicts, highlighting the importance of anti-war movements as well as the necessity of class struggles from below. Similarly, a class analysis shows which conflicts extend and deepen the control and interests of the capitalist classes and which conflicts combat capitalism and benefit the working and other subaltern classes.