Matt Broomfield
The emergence of new technologies brings about new modes of political organisation defined by and thus capable of responding to those technologies, as theorists from Marx onward have noted. As such, then a deadly weapon like the drones now defining battlefields across the globe, and particularly Turkey’s war of extermination against the Kurds and their political and military representatives in the struggle for democracy and self-determination, does more than strengthen an already powerful army, or even entrench the military-industrial complex in a given state. It contributes to the redefinition of political subjectivity and necessitates new modes of resistance, capable of responding to this paradigm shift.
Industrial capitalism did not only result in the immiseration of the urban proletariat, and subsequent emergence of the Marxist-Leninist party as the organisation of this despair to revolutionary ends. It also produced the industrial killing-fields of World War 1, catalysing the catastrophe which produced state socialism across half the globe.
Or again, as the Marxist historian EP Thompson wrote in 1980 in his Notes on Exterminism, nuclear technology is more than merely a symptom of the Cold War. Rather, a nuclear-armed society takes on its own logic, analogous to but going beyond militarism or imperialism by committing the world to a potential cataclysm which “no-one willed’ and refashioning both NATO-led capitalism and Soviet state socialism in its deadly image. Thompson urgently called for the “broadest possible popular alliance” to emerge in response to this threat, uniting neutral and non-aligned forces in the Third World, democrats in the Soviet bloc, socialists in the West, and actors as diverse as “churches, Eurocommunists, Labourists, East European dissidents… Soviet citizens unmediated by Party structures, trade unionists, ecologists” as the only body capable of overcoming this seemingly-inexorable logic.
But no such alternative coalition emerged. Rather, the ideological differences between West and East could not prevent capitalism’s own logic from propelling it to a nightmarish victory where even global hegemony could not engender any lasting peace.
Now, we are living in an era of drone warfare, a dispersed, dehumanised, lethal technology which is itself clearly a product of an age in which we are all expected to individually produce value even as we sleep, relax and use emergent digital technologies in our day-to-day lives. The subject of contemporary capitalism is never free, and the drone makes explicit the totalising logic of contemporary exploitation. As we are pursued by faceless, distant, unnameable capital in every corner of our existence, so too the drone pursues its victim across modern-day urban battlefields.
Throughout Kurdistan and on killing fields across the Middle East, Turkey’s Bayraktar drones buzz ceaselessly overhead, as maddening as the hum of a five-tonne mosquito. Drone warfare aims to break the spirit of a resisting people, offering no easy target to strike, not even a readily-defined battlefield into which comrades in arms can throw themselves with wild abandon. Life goes on, dull, desperate, until that constantly-anticipated moment of death arrives all at once, proving that it was always there.
But this constant presence has not defeated the Kurdish people. Drone warfare demands a particular response on the battlefield – dispersal, swarming, scattering. It’s tempting to view this tactical response as analogous to the wave of new theorisations of political organisation, subjectivity and resistance which emerged after the collapse of state communism, theorising the 21st century as set to be defined by newfound political resistance in which all of us as the “99%”, “the swarm”, or “the multitude” must necessarily play our part.
If so, the main parallel we can identify is necessarily a pessimistic one. It’s proven as challenging to achieve effective, horizontal, decentralized organisation against contemporary capitalist hegemony as it has been for unarmed or poorly-armed resistance movements to withstand drone warfare, geothermal imaging, motion-activated weaponry, and all the other technologies of the contemporary moment.
It’s with these adverse conditions in mind that we must read the Kurdish movement’s defiant Newroz statement, announcing on the occasion of Kurdish New Year that they have been able to respond to Turkey’s ceaseless warfare by shooting down a handful of unarmed drones. These blows may be small, but they nonetheless demonstrate a spirit of resistance which has weathered the killing-fields of two World Wars and the Cold War alike, and will not be eradicated in the era of decentralized drone warfare.
*Matt Broomfield is a freelance journalist, poet and activist. He writes for VICE, Medya News, the New Statesman and the New Arab; his prose has been published by The Mays, Anti-Heroin Chic and Plenitude; and his poetry by the National Poetry Society, the Independent, and Bare Fiction. His work was displayed across London by Poetry on the Underground, and he is a Foyle Young Poet of the Year.
