How can we fight war not wars?

Capitalism has been described as a ‘war of all against all’.  This is how they would like us to feel. 

In reality it is a war of the rich and powerful, the world of corporate Capitalist exploitation and oppression against the rest of us. The producers, the working class! They need to exploit our labour to rob us and to control us.

This begins with our division.

Our communities have been atomised into ‘penny packets’ of humanity.  A few individuals here, a couple there.  A small nuclear family there, a few intimates as a friendship network here, and neighbours and colleagues, as alienated and atomised as us.

It is hard not to feel alone and powerless as we mentally struggle with our alienation, trying to express our individuality through consuming what they allow us to afford to buy and our independence by managing our debt.

Millions of us, billions of us, on tiny islands of connection where human communities once stood firm.  If we are old enough, our parents remember. Our grandparents remember even better, though today, the idea of belonging now feels like fantasy.

Here enters the capitalist state and its wars. Creating consumable images of community in an ‘us versus them’ conflict based on nation, or culture wars against individual identity.

But this experience shrouds a reality. We are billions.  We produce the worlds wealth even if, hidden behind smoke and mirrors, we struggle to see it stolen from us.  Our numbers and our role as the sole creators of wealth give us powers we have yet to learn to utilise. 

Not to benefit the bosses and their states, but to take control of rebuilding our communities through struggle and solidarity and abolishing their wealth and power.  But where do we start?

First, we need to be around long enough to do this! That means finding a way to oppose their control and repression at home and their wars abroad threatening our annihilation.

Secondly, we need to break through the fabric of lies and ground ourselves in our compassion and empathy and recognise that the Palestinian screaming in the street, and the Israeli lamenting in a public square are people like us. They are neither the state of Israel nor its rival state-in-waiting Hamas. 

The latter, as are the oligarchs of Ukraine and the Kleptocrats of Russia, play the same game of domination and robbery against our class as our bosses on the home front!

Thirdly we need to challenge the Western paradigm.  Not accept the cultural ‘purdah’, our silencing on the grounds that we know nothing.  In our humanity we see it all and understand what inhumanity is!  Beyond language, faith, colour or borders!

Fourthly we can look beyond the shallow glamour of horror so familiarly portrayed on our media, dulling our senses to what has happened.  In Gaza 2/3rds of all the housing has been destroyed; nearly 90% of the population has been displaced, 3% of the population is either dead or wounded in just two months – including 1% of the children.

In Israel scores of the dead were raped and mutilated before they were killed; dozens of others were forced to watch their loved ones murdered in front of them, the elderly and infirm were taken away on their mobility vehicles while babies were carried through baying mobs.

In Russia and Ukraine, kids have state security enforcers behind their backs to force them, to ensure they die rather than retreat, while those who run to avoid conscription, 40,000 alone in Ukraine, face prison as traitors for years.

Mesmerising us in a stage-managed horror movie of goodies versus baddies is designed to channel us to support our ‘side’, or state, as paragon of order and our protector.  Failing that just burn out our attention span through shame and discomfort.

Behind this paralysing fog, capitalist barbarism accelerates the unacceptable that it could not get away with in times of greater peace and strength for our class.

While we are diverted or numbed by the spectacle, Iran ramps up its judicial murder of dissidents executing 130 since October 7th; Russia effectively recriminalises homosexuality, raiding and closing down gay venues; Israel arms settlers to ethnically cleans the illegally occupied West Bank.

In Europe the British government restricts migration and protests, defining dissent as sedition. while the Dutch follow Italy in electing a fascist government.  The US alone vetoed a UN stop to genocide, abandoning its own mythical high ground.

Taking us beyond these points, the question arises what can we do practically, individually and collectively.  Locally and nationally, at home and abroad?

On the most basic level, as individuals, thinking globally but acting locally, refuse the imposed consensus and say what we see.  Call out the hypocrisy and advocate for ourselves and our class across frontiers.  Collectively, refuse to subsume our needs to any so called ‘national interest’.

Link our needs and demands to the austerity of war profiteering and profiteering wars.  Everything we do at home, here for ourselves and our class, hinders the operation of the warfare state.

Talk, communicate, share our own struggles and insights – individual, community, workplace, environmental – in solidarity across locality and trade.  A victory on the home front is a victory and example abroad.

Make demands linked to war opposition.  Workers in the field of of arms manufacture or supply, energy, shipping, chemicals, iron and steel, ports, aviation and docks can all be instrumental in slowing or blocking the supply lines of war.  Include these as centres of propagating our own demands and against militarisation.

In direct action choose targets that challenge power and build solidarity. Activists everywhere should target the centres of power, production and decision making instead of paint bombing musicals or obstructing other workers battling to meet our daily needs.

Build hubs of coordination, discussion, communication bringing community and labour together.  Develop our own methods of accountable and actionable decision making.

Own these decisions and actions, publicise and promote them.  Disseminate in multimedia formats and let others see that resistance is possible.  The longest journey, a single step.

We may always ask when and where should I start?  Two nuclear armed powers are warring in a capitalist power block crisis on our frontiers.  Our state is involved in both!  The danger is real, the danger is now.

As a delegate from the climate doomed islands of Tuvalu said in frustration at the 2023 COP 28 climate conference in the oil rich UAE: “How many more stories must you listen to before you take action”. The time is now!

By Dreyfus