The bloodletting of our class is continuous. The attention on where we are bleeding changes to where Capitalist power bloc dynamics directs media focus.
While genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza marches apace, up to 8,000 Russian conscripts have died in a fruitless offensive on the Donetsk town of Avdiika.
More are now being thrown back into the meat grinder of Bakhmut. As winter threatens to re-freeze the frontlines, Russia, perhaps taking from Israel’s playbook has stepped up the shelling of civilian centres.
On November 1st shells rained down on 118 settlements in 10 different regions – the most widespread bombardment this year. Putin started a war he didn’t need and now can’t afford a peace.
All eyes though are on the Gaza War which, while barely a month old, has reached some grim new milestones. The accepted figures for civilian deaths have now exceeded those verified in the Ukraine war according to the OHCHR, (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). More children have been killed than in all the armed conflicts of the last year put together.
On November 1st, bragging of atrocity, Hamas foreign affairs spokesman Ghazi Hamad said of October 7th: “…we will do this again and again…Nobody should blame us for the things we do… everything we do is justified”.
On the same day their political leader Ismail Haniyeh claimed, like a surprised civilian, that Netanyahu is trying to keep himself out of prison by choosing to invade Gaza!
As if they weren’t the butchers who planned the slaughter of October 7th! They might have missed it from their safe houses in Lebanon and Doha – accustomed as all dictators to let others do the dying.
But they know what all Israelis know, Netanyahu can’t afford a peace either. He doesn’t want this war to end. With Hamas, he is holding a wolf by its ears! He dare not let go. His failure as ‘Mr Security’ is destined to break his political carrier once the Gaza War finishes.
After that he is likely, no longer protected by tenure under the constitution, to face a successful if long delayed trial for corruption in office. A long war, and/or a consequent constitutional crisis resulting in a State of Emergency prolonging powers, is his only route through HIS crisis.
He has failed, against public protest, to limit the oversight powers of the Supreme Court. Combine with this the historic failure of any ‘democratic’ state to suppress insurrection by force of arms alone (Algeria, Vietnam, Ireland, Iraq), and the equation is bleak.
Netanyahu’s need for a wolf suggests a long war and a deepening of crisis towards a
constitutional coup. Failing that, a new war for which Iran might suffice. Capitalist War and a State repression may pose themselves as the saviour of liberal democracy.
Despite the fiction of due diligence to protect the innocent, all limits and scope of action have been abolished. Bunker busting munitions level refugee camps killing hostages in Hamas tunnels. Gaza hospitals are shut down and refugees targeted whether an area is designated ‘safe’ or not.
Even away from Gaza, the Israeli Right is arming Jewish citizens and settlers as vigilantes roaming the West Bank to steal more land, murdering 130 Palestinians in the process. The level of violence has even alarmed the Israeli security service, the ‘Shin Bet’ who warn there could be no limit to the escalation at home.
As the Israeli economy crumbles like civilian infrastructure, cost is no obstacle either. It is estimated the war is costing Israel $246m a day totaling around $7 billion to date. That is 1.5% of GDP a month. A so far short-lived conflict on a small scale has already reached epic proportions.
We know who’s fighting, we know who’s dying and we know who’s paying – our class! Conscripted, manipulated or brutalised to die for those either in power or seeking it. The propaganda on all sides is designed to stop us recognising we are the only ones who can stop it.
Workers of the Levant and across the region, as in Ukraine and Russia and across the globe have nothing to gain. We all know those who do, capitalism and its global proxies as state actors.
Our own efforts at home, fighting where we have something to gain, against the barbarity of wage slavery or unemployment, poverty and austerity, homelessness and repression is where we have the power to end their wars. Smashing their Social Peace at home weakens their capacity to wage war abroad.
Organising on the basis of autonomy, solidarity and mutualism and merging our struggles and demands independent of those who, whilst feigning opposition to war, want to become our alternative leaders.
The leftists and liberals of the anti-war campaigns aren’t against capitalist war, they just want to corral us in the direction of the partisan state entity they support under the guise of anti/imperialism or national liberation. Have us serve in another state, meeting the needs of some other claimant to power.
“From the river to the sea…” comes the hackneyed old slogan of these leftist state apologists. Whether it be from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean or the Donets to the Black Sea, no people can be free dominated by capitalism and its warring states.
What awaits us should we fail is shown to us daily in Ukraine, Palestine and Israel, and in the dozens of other conflicts where our attention is not being directed.
We call for No War But The Class War to end this slaughter and liberate our class from lives of threat and misery. We continue to build alliances within and across our class, and with other internationalist militants where we find them to work towards this end.
By Dreyfus
AnarCom Network 