Other than for those gunned, bombed, or starved to death, wartime differs from peacetime mostly psychologically. Injustice and killing accelerate in wartime, though not as much as some analysts think. Meanwhile, peacetime imposes immense suffering and travail in too many places to list, including the global south but also the slums, inner cities, rural counties, sweatshops, classrooms, bars, and bedrooms of even “advanced industrial societies.” 

More, wherever elites spread overt war, rapacious peace, and global boiling—they also feast on the indignities and deprivations of wage slavery, racial repression, and sexual objectification. There is not this or that oppression. There is a totality of oppressions. Rapacious peace is genocidal war by another name. Global boiling escalates and diversifies the carnage. Class, race, gender, and power hierarchies curtail freedom and obliterate fulfillment.

Still, even more than other intersecting ills, war aggressively intensifies and localizes the body count. War reveals death and injustice with vengeful clarity. War trumpets loudly. Everyone hears Gaza. 

War spreads reasons to resist. War grows activism precisely as slaughter grows body counts. With war, corpses assault eyes everywhere. With war, material devastation lays waste to homes and hospitals. With war, souls flee devastation. So who is war good for? The rich, the powerful, and the sadistic.

A question arises for each person who suffers war, endures rapacious peace, or fears global boiling’s suicidal embrace. Should I resist, and, if so, how? 

Should I go to the next available demonstration? Should I resuscitate my activism that has long been mothballed? Should I increase my time or type of involvement? Should I organize others? And if I should do any of these things, what logic should guide my actions?

Wars, like rapacious peace and global boiling, are pursued by elites who have elite reasons for their madness. We may dispute details of what those reasons are, but beneath their contingent contentious details we know elite reasons always seek to enlarge the systems that deliver elite dominance. International law and justice at best weakly watch or at worst cheerlead. Poor suffering humanity becomes at best lamentable collateral damage, at worst a welcome target that elites gleefully bomb and starve.

Then, as battles rage, two additional dynamics emerge. One, the big muddy grabs and holds the war machine. Added dynamic, avoid defeat which would undercut future authority. Two, the dangling putrid prize, more profits to be made, entices new participants. Added dynamic, opportunistically pursue profitable paths that raging battles produce.  Finally, of course and as well, larger systemic schemes of imperial domination of a region’s resources or control of its trade routes underpin war. And while details of all such factors can be tirelessly debated—one might for example point out that a region’s resources are already well in hand, or note how to bypass contested trade routes—we should acknowledge that for purposes of answering “why demonstrate?,” efforts to pinpoint disputed details rarely have much consequence. 

What does have consequence is to realize that war, rapacious peace, and global boiling each persist for reasons of state, economy, geopolity, gender predation, and racial domination that have no regard for the well being of any constituency other than the elites who dictate evil’s pace and scope. What does have consequence is to realize that elites who for whatever warped, immoral, self serving reasons pursue war never relent easily. What does have consequence is to realize that another world is possible. 

War makers’ calculus ignores justice, law, human upheaval, and death. Elite ears ignore moral words. Elite eyes ignore moral pictures. To lecture elites about moral consequences is beside the point of their actual decision-making. The only immediate way to get masters of the universe to curb their violence is to change their accounting of their own personal prospects. The only immediate way to affect elite accounting of their own personal prospects is to raise social costs that they don’t wish to pay so high that elites finally decide they want to reduce and end the dangers for themselves that resistance to their war generates even more than they want to further pursue their war. 

So we ask, what social costs can we raise that can overwhelm elite war-making desires? It can only be the costs of still more dissent. It can only be the costs of constituencies that reject war policy and then reject elites. So why demonstrate against war or for that matter against rapacious peace or global boiling? Because without demonstrating against elite evils we cannot raise for elites such high social costs that they decide they must meet our demands.

But what is a social cost for elites? What kind of demonstrating can reveal to them that to pursue their war has a downside they don’t like? What kind of activism can so enlarge that downside that elites stop the bombing and end the starving?

The only thing elites care about more than the successful completion of their wars is to maintain the system behind their wars—their businesses and status. The only thing that will turn their heads is a feeling that instead of furthering their business as usual, continued pursuit of their war will throw their business as usual into question. So the answer to what should activists do to end a war is that we should do that which conveys most clearly and compellingly that to continue war will seriously threaten still more coveted elite agendas.

But what can convey such a threat? Well, nothing that stabilizes into a calm pattern, that’s for sure. That is, if an anti-war or an anti-rapacious peace or an anti-global boiling movement attains a large size and regularly demonstrates but displays no growth, it is not going to win. What can win is precisely stoking elite fear of unrelenting movement growth and unrelenting diversification of movement focus to wider awareness and greater militancy. 

Put differently, a not growing, not diversifying movement won’t threaten elites sufficiently for them to meet our demands even when it is large. Big rallies plus civil disobedience that threaten to become steadily larger are better than bigger rallies without the threat of more to come. Big rallies that start to question profit-making, racism, misogyny, and authoritarianism are better than bigger rallies that don’t reach to the heart of elite darkness.

To win, movements need to simultaneously attract ever wider sectors of new people to opposition and to welcome its growing membership to slowly and carefully escalate their levels of militancy and address ever-wider issues. To win, movements need to be multi-issue, multi-tactic. To win, movements need to have a clear eye on how to raise social costs by always widening, growing, and deepening their membership.

Large international, national, or regional demonstrations, are important, but so too are means for local expressions of resistance able to attract, inspire, and retain new people. Rallies, marches, teach-ins, encampments, occupations, talks, essays, and especially face-to-face organizing are important, but so too are escalations into civil disobedience and sometimes even riotous behavior whenever such choices enlarge rather than subvert outreach and expand rather than diminish commitment. 

Of course clarification of the nature of an immediate war and its policies is critical to attract and strengthen new dissent, but so too is elaboration of anti-war analysis to address the systems behind war so that dissent acquires a trajectory that makes it fearsome even to elites who only calculate their own interests. Love, hear, and make moral arguments to and with the population. Despise, rebut, and raise social costs to and against elites.

It follows that a singular focus isn’t or shouldn’t be the entire focus of an effective activist’s agenda. Even wars, as disgusting and devastating as wars can be, come and go so that even as life-and-death important as direct immediate resistance is, it won’t help in the long-run to rightly expend huge energy fighting to end a particular war while wrongly leaving no steadily growing and diversifying anti-war structures, peace structures, and justice structures able to continue to enlarge the battle not only against one or even all overt wars, but against all forms of international and domestic unpeace and injustice. My generation did that much. Not enough. A half century later, regrettably, today’s generation needs to do much more.

Therefore, current anti-war activism should of course be conceived to end the current genocidal Israeli war-making in Gaza, but also to develop sustained and lasting structures of activism and commitment with a steadily widening focus. Current anti-war activism should tirelessly seek ceasefire today but also build on-going multi-issue, multi-tactic, movements able to pay attention to all injustice and not just the most overt. We need movements that raise social costs, grow membership, nurture and sustain members, give members high levels of participatory control, and provide members long-run vision and hope.

This may all sound like trivial truisms. If so, good, because in that case we will all have these norms in mind in our anti-war and anti rapacious peace and anti global boiling work. We will nurture diverse efforts. We will seek to raise effective social costs. We will seek to create lasting infrastructure of resistance. We will win reforms for benefit today and to ultimately win revolution tomorrow.

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