On The Eve of Invasion:

Soldiers! Fighters! Workers all!

Turn the guns they gave you away from each other and on those who command you to kill your fellow workers for THEIR ambition and THEIR profit!

This, the long-held dream of internationalist resistance against capitalist war, is as urgent now as ever before.  Refuse the recurring and relentless bloodletting of our class who own nothing but our labour and gain nothing from our slaughter!

Such a dream is no less fantastical than the idea that this war will bring peace!  Blood does not wash blood and dying does not bring back the dead. 

The history is so old that it no longer informs the present.  Whatever date it starts from, there is always the day before it.  Only our experience of what the exploitation of our class means and the price we pay for that ‘privilege’ must inform us now.

Every platitude pushed out by the West on the Gaza war is the opposite of what they say about the war in Ukraine.  Destruction and genocide are no longer ‘war crimes’ but legitimised self defence.  The defence of who by whom?

The obscenity of the hypocrisy of Hamas and the Israeli State and their respective power bloc backers, hidden behind their opportunism, is exposed in their words.

On the 19th October the Hamas (‘Zeal’) leader, Khaled Mashaal, said in an interview with the Saudi ‘Al-Arabiya’ network: “We know very well the consequences of our operation on October 7th.”, adding “No nation is liberated without sacrifices.”

When asked how many Palestinian lives Hamas was prepared to sacrifice to meet its aims, he referred to the loss of 30,000,000 Russians to defeat Germany in the Second World War.  That would be more than twice the number of the world’s Palestinian diaspora.

In March 2019, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told his ruling political party, Likud (‘the Consolidation): “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

Hamas has the blood of Israelis and Palestinians on its hands; Israel has the blood of Palestinians and Israelis on its hands.  These bloody hands, so intertwined for decades, are the ones handing you the guns!

The death of 1500 Israelis is a tragedy, the mounting death toll of 5,000 Palestinians is increasingly treated as a statistic.  The State in Power, Israel, and the ‘State in waiting’, Hamas, are equal in their indifference to our suffering and the outcomes.

In this war, as in Ukraine and Russia, our class are the fish in the barrel being killed whatever direction we swim in.  The dead are our dead, the gain is theirs!

As our losses mount, other exploiters are entering the fray as Hezbollah, Iran and even Iraq are joining or being threatened by one side or the other. As if Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi workers have not suffered enough. 

Workers have no oil, have not ports, have no geo-strategic assets – we just build them and die for them.   We ultimately have the power to refuse dying and rebuild again, for our own needs not theirs. 

All war is against our class whichever side of a fence or border we are on. To refuse to fight and die in a war for power, profit and greed is not the dream of our class, but an historical necessity!

Every front is the Class War front. Class war solidarity is our only hope to survive! ‘No War but the Class War’ is not an appeal but a manifesto!

By Dreyfus