No War But The Class War!

What might it be like to have no pain free dentistry or flushing toilets?  What is an urban ice age like with no lighting, heat or running water? How could it feel to sleep beside your dead?   All the safe assumptions of the post war West are being dismantled in real-time in the war in Ukraine. 

In the developed metropolitan centres of the West we have become accustomed to a concept of ‘normality’.  A relationship to technology, growth and consumption sold to us as the evidence of the civilising role of commodity capitalism.  A normality, that while excluding millions at its margins, beguiles most of us alongside ‘loose celebrities’; ‘coronation soaps’ and ‘who doesn’t want to be a pauper’ quiz shows. 

For most Europeans and North Americans at least, this has been presented not just as inevitable, but the promise to all societies seeking development and progress. 

For the global majority, millions of people in the deliberately underdeveloped post-colonial world, reality has demanded a bloody price for this fantastical lie since WW2.  Western postwar peace and prosperity has been maintained by proxy wars across the globe.  From Korea to Vietnam, the Great African War of the late 90’s to Iraq and Syria. 

Its wealth underwritten through increasing exploitation of predominantly Asian labour and environmental degradation.  The un-sustainability of this has been writ large since the financial collapse of 2008 and the rollback of globalisation.  The short-lived post-Cold War consensus died with it. 

We had been led to believe the the horrors of the Yugoslav wars with the destruction of Vukovar and the Srebrenica massacre were an aberration born out of the collapse of the West’s rival bloc.  The defeat of the Arab Spring with its impact on migration and the now hot war on the border of the EU shows it to have been business as usual but getting closer to home.  Capitalism’s bloody fault line is ablaze. 

The deliberate destruction of the technological infrastructure of a modern European economy is an abyss the we are staring into.  While Ukrainian workers face an increasingly perilous winter of suffering and militarisation, conscripted Russian workers taken from the poorest sections of society, untrained and ill equipped, are thrown into Putin’s meat grinder “….in human waves..”, with elite forces at their backs to shoot them should they retreat according to opposition sources. 

As capitalist barbarism is increasingly unmasked at home, we are told to do our bit by getting hungrier, colder, poorer and closer to Armageddon.  Every act of resistance we take, every strike, occupation and refusal to participate in the great lie is a blow against the war and it’s slaughter.  Every demand, every act of solidarity, every gain is a blow for peace.  

Resistance to their wars is our only hope of survival, and our daily struggle to survive is our class war.   The Class War is the peace movement to end all wars.  We must do our bit, resist, strike, no war but the class war!

Article by Dreyfus