For War, Nothing

For War, Nothing is an exploration of war and peace in Colombia by Colectivo Contrainformativo Sub*versión, an anarchist editorial and political collective based in Bogotá.

An analysis and critique of the 2016 peace agreement signed between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the country’s oldest guerrilla organization, this political tract investigates capital’s interests in war and peace in Colombia.

Debates about the peace agreement dominated Colombian politics in the mid-to-late 2010s; its terms were set by conservatives and the extreme right, while liberals, progressives and NGOs, and the organized left struggled to intervene in the debate. Originally published in Spanish in 2017, For War, Nothing levies an anti-capitalist and anti-statist critique of the accords and the process that produced them, showing that neither the armed conflict, the accords themselves, nor the recent history of Colombia can be understood absent a critique of capitalism.    

This translation hopes to highlight militant and left-libertarian perspectives that shed light not only on the conflict and “post-conflict” in Colombia, but also ongoing dynamics of popular rebellion and electoral socialism that are of interest to the anglophone left. For War, Nothing takes a critical view of the human rights and “dialogue” industries, which seek to divorce violence and atrocity from its endemicity to an economic system that enriches the few and immiserates the many. Colectivo Sub*versión tracks how jurisprudential categories like “victim” and “peace” displace political thinking and calls for Colombians to adopt the kind of autonomous, horizontal organizing that would become a core part of the recent wave of uprisings. Perhaps most importantly for anglophone readers, the collective provides a framework for understanding armed conflict as an extension of the sharpened conditions of class war in which many who live in the periphery of the global circuits of capital accumulation find themselves.