Beyond the Governmentality of Liberal War with Nicholas Kiersey, Professor of Political Science, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
This paper is a draft of what will likely be the closing chapter of my current book project, 'Socialist Governmentality; A Manifesto for the Post-Political Left.' The paper turns to a question long evaded by many traditions of socialist strategy: the problem of war.
If socialist governmentality is to be more than a program of domestic reform, it must contend with the global machinery of violence that sustains capitalism through imperial war, border regimes, and permanent security crisis. Liberal war, from Ukraine to Gaza to the Strait of Hormuz, is not a breakdown of modern governance but one of its most rationalized expressions. It is waged in the name of rights, democracy, and civilization, and managed through technologies of surveillance, finance, and logistical control. This paper revisits foundational socialist debates–Kautsky vs. Lenin, Luxemburg vs. war credits–and argues that the collapse of socialist internationalism in 1914 remains a haunting precedent for today’s fractured left.
While war powers have consolidated across the liberal-democratic world, the global left has offered little by way of coordinated response, let alone alternatives. The chapter asks: What might a socialist governmentality of peace require? What infrastructures of solidarity, disarmament, and planetary coordination might challenge the default hegemony of liberal war? Without a strategic vision for peace, the left risks ceding the global terrain to technocratic violence–and leaving socialist governmentality stranded in the nation-state.
Location
Westminster Forum, Room 5.0, Wells Street, London W1T 3UW
