Mark NEOCLEOUS

The Social Wars of Belligerent Accumulation

The paper will argue for a recuperation of the concept of social war within Marxist thought. The concept of social war has a long history, stretching back to the Romans and running through the history of political and legal thought. Marx and Engels also often used it. And yet it has been lost to us, usurped by “civil war” or just plain “war,” and also usurped by the liberal claim that capitalism’s social realm (“civil society”) is by definition a realm of peace. This has led to Marxism having its arguments about war determined by non-Marxist thought. The paper will argue that we need the concept of social war to make better sense of the class war and of how the class war is permeated by the countless other social wars declared by the ruling class and the state, not least the permanent “war on waste.” Unravelling such wars offers a way of understanding the process of pacification since, as we discover, carrying out such wars undergirds the police power, and demands that we think of social wars as police wars. In this sense, the concept of social war highlights some of the issues undergirding the idea of belligerent accumulation.
 

Mark NEOCLEOUS is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University London. He is the author of a number of books, most recently The Politics of Immunity (Verso, 2022), taking his ongoing critique of security and interest in the body politic in a new direction. In 2021, a new edition of A Critical Theory of Police Power was published by Verso, 20 years after first publication. His new book Pacification is forthcoming in 2024. Also forthcoming in 2024 is The Security Abolition Manifesto, a collectively-authored book being simultaneously published in English, Spanish, Turkish and Greek. He is currently working on a book called The Most Beautiful Suicide.