War is a ghost that flies over all ages. It does not matter what the economic, social, political or cultural conditions are or how far technological advances have come. However, in historical terms it could be said that during the 20th and 21st centuries numerous conflicts of global scope condensed. Today an imperialist war is being fought in Ukraine, Israel is perpetrating a war of extermination in Palestinian territories and there is a proliferation of civil wars (asymmetrical) in different places on the planet. There is no longer any mediation, the populations are at the mercy of violence, a new cycle of accumulation and Western democracies remain paralyzed or act as accomplices.
Faced with the size of a Dantesque painting, the Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato (author of War or revolution and Dollar imperialismamong others) thinks of the civil war as a machine for the production and transformation of mass subjectivity and in his book Towards a new world civil war? (Lemon Ink) He wonders what to do under the conditions that the radicalized right has imposed.
Lazzarato maintains in the prologue: “Imperialist war and civil war return for the fourth time in little more than a century. Capital is by nature cosmopolitan, it continually tends to expand beyond the borders of States, but it encounters obstacles that, Contrary to what Marx thinks, it cannot move either easily or without the intervention of the State, and with astonishing regularity imperialist war arrives to try to resolve this impossibility.
Faced with this scenario, the author proposes that “the rupture, the revolution, the transformation become current when ‘the impossibility of changing becomes the impossibility of living’.” The Italian philosopher maintains that to achieve this rupture a “communist political organization” is required, of which, for now, he sees “no traces.”
