We are currently the we of our conditions; we seek to cultivate a we of our direction.

This essay from an issue of the Earth First Journal explores the idea of social war from an ecological starting point, expanding beyond activism and becoming a material force.

The we of our conditions is the we of a position within a capitalism, but it is also the we of the capitalism itself. If we are not the we of activism and not merely the we of arson, then what use are the communities we associate with? The point is not to denounce our communities, our identities, but to reveal the true power of those communities and identities if they were liberated from the hand of politics. We are alienated, isolated and disempowered when we are no longer at the Summer Rendezvous, the gathering, the potluck. We are weak without a community of support.

However, the weakness, sadness and alienation, are where we spend most of our time and where most of the human population spends its time too.

If we deconstructed our old selves, our old communities, what would we have left? Social relations, customs, rituals? Exploitation at work, structured gender relations, racialized power, reproductive systems of control, so many prisons? Thus, we will not have class struggle as our objective but social war. What if we recognized ourselves as the we of our conditions, and then attempted to meet and communicate with others who share similar conditions? What’s more, what if we attempted to not merely understand ourselves as a community of capital but to direct our struggle in a way that is intended to make us powerful? This would cause us to inhabit social war—with a clear understanding of our experience as a component of a total system of social relations. Social war can then become both the fruit and the path of an anti-capitalist, ecological social force. Once we’ve cast off the shell of our political identity, a real we will be illuminated. Only then can we talk about rewilding and going feral. It is precisely there—when our we is a mirror to the rest of the human population—that such “escapism” becomes a real force.

The only we of our direction is made up of those of us who are searching for an Other we. It is this Other we that makes social war its object, that will appropriate all knowledge from all existing culture and that will also be appropriated by the aesthetics, sciences and social environments produced through culture. The we of our direction—an anti-capitalist and ecological direction—becomes powerful when it is attached to realities. Thus, the we of our direction is biocentric because it understands itself as inseparable from its conditions. Our anti-capitalist, ecological social force is the union of our need to exist on the Earth as participants in an ecosystem and the desire to edit, transform and play with what being human means.