Ironically, in the face of capitalism’s accelerating drive towards its global war of destruction in the ‘national interests’, the flags of ‘other patriotisms’ are coming back to hide the existential struggle of our class and humanity behind the claims of those nationalists who want the ‘states in exile’ like a United Ireland or Palestine to take over from those ‘states in power’.
The keyword here is the State. The bourgeois political entity that’s become the local franchise of international capitalism, it inevitably siding with one imperialist bloc or other.
Taking sides here has its own appeal. You can blow up a political relationship and achieve the illusion of change. Social revolution, however, is not a change of management and rearranging of deckchairs. It is the abolition of an exploitative social and economic relationship that cannot be reformed but requires our liberation and the solidarity of class struggle.
The flag of any nation will only ever lead us to one or other imperialist camp to die for. All claims pushing us to take the side of one state, bloc and camp or another are a betrayal of the historical internationalist interests of our class
Whoever broke woke is now haunting the political playgrounds of bourgeois Bohemian liberalism, the performance and the festival.
Who is this Glastonbury that now so openly opines on the political partisanships of the capitalist state and who must be obeyed?
A direct inheritor, if not usurper, of the free festival movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it has long been a haven for leftist and liberal ideas. It used to be joked that breaking into Glastonbury was mandatory training for the peace movement!
Its organisers have promoted this with pride. Its founder, Michael Eavis, stated as recently as the current festival, “people that don’t agree with the politics of the event can go somewhere else.” To follow this by endorsing the establishment voices in condemning Bob Vylan’s sloganeering against the IDF (the 170,000 conscript Israeli army) appears to be a response to external political pressure.
The Guardian newspaper observed that, “the Gaza discourse has been Vylanised” as a diversion. However, that was clearly not working given the number of voices mobilising in its favour – the duo’s album miraculously climbing the charts again!
Starmer then, condemned the allegedly antisemitic chants of, “Death to the IDF” as, “unacceptable hate speech”. Yvette Cooper with similar timing banned Palestine Action’s peaceful (if injurious to the deity of property) protest against the mass indiscriminate targeting of people with devastating high explosive bombs and bullets, including the massacre of noncombatants, as “terrorism”. This, ironically just as the Yoorrock Justice Commission in Australia found Britain guilty of genocide against the indigenous First Nations of Victoria during colonisation.
Not to be outdone, journalist and broadcaster Andrew Neil took the festival accusations one step further, for he stated, “I was going to say that they (Glastonbury) seem to have more in common with the Nuremberg rally,” though even the Nazis didn’t say, ‘Death to the Jews’”. This prompting some conservatives to even call for the prosecution of the BBC simply for showing the festival!
So, Bob Vylan, Kneecap’s Gaelic republicanism and even Palestine Action are cast as the villains in the fog of war, predominantly as a diversionary tactic. Not just from an ongoing mass slaughter but from the state’s shared interests with its enemies to not undermine its monopoly on the use of violence. And if ‘your army’ questions whether “right is actually on its side?” and then falls for the desertion argument, so could ‘ours’. “We (they) can’t be having that!”
However close one might be to the strictly defined legal characteristics that name a mass slaughter a genocide, the horrific trauma of Gaza is an atrocity by any measure. Consensus amongst experts is between 60 to 90,000 dead and perhaps treble that wounded. This represents in excess of 10% of the pre-war population of Gaza.
Vylan’s error is not in trying to find one enemy to accuse, but to find the wrong one and find itself colluding with the state’s tactic to avoid the real significance of the commentary. “Death to the IDF” is no more antisemitic than ‘death to the Nazis’ is calling for the killing of all Germans. It does however pitch us as one state entity against another – one side of the prospect of imperialist slaughter. Supporting the killing of our class to oppose the other side where our class is also dying!
The cycle of war doesn’t end because our class has died in sufficient numbers to support our state in killing our class in the enemy state. The prospect of war ends when our class flat out refuses to fight for both the state and for appointed leaders within capital and instead fights the very system and barbaric ruling class which wants to pit us against and murder each other.
Far from calling for the death of the IDF conscripts, revolutionists should be calling for the working class treated as canon fodder, as the producers of wealth who have nothing in common with those who control and manipulate that wealth through its extorted acquisition, to see what they have in common with the repressed and exploited working class conscripts of the fundamentalist bands of Hamas and its Iranian backers in the anti-western camp.
War ends when the fighting stops forever. That can only be brought about in the long-term by the internationalist action of the world’s working class, refusing all sides but its own and the negating of the power and wealth of capitalism and imperialism for a free world commune.
While there may be an increasing number of voices criticising the ‘Vylanising’ of the Gaza debacle, that voice yet needs to find its target against the warring factions of this imperialist conflict, against the system of capitalism and state, and not upon workers dying because of it.
AnarCom Network 