Via our Czech comrades Tridni Valka the Communist Bulletin #15
The Voice of Wrath is being heard from Iran
Once again, the eyes of the communist militants all around the world have turned towards Iran, as a battleground of the gigantic proletarian upheaval, another one in the series of class confrontations that had shaken Iran and the surrounding region in the last decade.
This baseball batting rule, and punitive US incarceration policy against the poor under successive Republican administrations, could well be applied to the now flailing and failing strike movement of the last 18 months.
Beginning primarily in construction and the transport sector, those sections of the RMT and Aslef still involved in action have recently been joined by hospital consultants joining junior doctors as the most recent sector to back their demands with strike action.
Instead of bracketing a mass movement whose momentum has built to a crescendo to these latest actions, the current strikes appear more like bookends on an empty shelf where a wave once broke and dissipated.
The largest strike wave since the days Thatcherism relentlessly assaulted our class appeared at one point to achieve the improbable if not impossible.
Anti-labour and anti-strike laws have raised the bar high to limit the possibility of strikes ever taking place, demanding not just majorities but a 50% turnout in a voting process rigged by methodology – secret ballots by post, not collectively, in person nor electronically unlike other voting processes in the UK from an X on a card in local elections to the X-Factor. Valid for only six months, any action has to begin with two weeks’ notice to enable bosses’ preparations to limit our impact.
Despite these hurdles, almost every working sector in the UK met the bar. Over the last 18 months this has included road and rail transport; health: midwives, physios, nurses, doctors, radiographers and ambulance services; fire and highway services; border security and civil service; schools and higher education; postal and communications workers; airports and ports, construction and power.
At its peak in February ‘23, more than half a million workers were out culminating in 4 million lost working days. The achievement was seismic but squandered. What an earth has happened?
Despite an inflationary peak driven by war profiteering of 11% In October ‘22 (19% on food, on top of the cumulative increases previously and since), combined with a restorative pay gap of 30-40% since the 2008 banking collapse, most strikes have ended with an average settlement of 6.5%.
A humiliating defeat by any measure, and, one might argue that, with how the strikes were conducted, virtually no shots being fired. Our enemies inside and outside the Government and Trade Union bureaucratic establishments have played a blinder of delay and deceit, enabling a contrasting bosses pay rise of 17%, averaging 110 times the salary of an average worker.
This is no reflection on the workers who have taken action, they, despite a generation without engaging in industrial disputes and being far from the militant traditions of their parents and grandparents, took the courageous decisions to risk all to resist the assault of austerity.
Would, could they do it again? Why, when they have seen their energy and commitment wasted in penny-packets, losing them as much as they’ve gained in outcomes. Months of a day here, two days there, has bled their resources, morale, commitment and patience.
Class struggle is by no means over, certainly not for the bosses who are increasing the precariousness of our survival through increased inflation and indebtedness to frighten us off the streets. But not for us either, aware of this travesty and our brooding resentment. It is not however too early for an obituary for the lost promise of this current strike wave.
The loyal opposition Labour Party ‘government in waiting’ is breathing a sigh of relief, as the challenge to its reputation as the ‘party of the working class’ recedes. No need to continue embarrassing bans of its members from picket lines.
The loyal opposition to the Labour Party, the left-wing of capitalism in the form of social democrats and Leninists like the SWP will soon be trotting out the usual mantras on the lessons we should be learning from them on this.
They will tell us the problem is the wrong kind of leadership (they will say it should be them). They will say we shouldn’t forget that the Labour Party is not a friend of the workers (though we should still vote for them). They will say the Trade Union bureaucrats cannot be trusted (though you should still try to be one). They will say that the TUC is a spineless ally of establishment legalism (while still insisting we should demand they call a general strike). They will say what they have said after every strike. Ultimately, they will criticise while supporting the institutions that shut us out preserving the systems status quo
The slogan ‘Enough is Enough!’ was meant to be that of a movement of social resistance and solidarity that was growing. It should instead be turned against those whose alliances or weaknesses have actively derailed this movement. These include not just the government and establishment parties. It should include those who claim to oppose while objectively supporting the status quo.
That status quo includes the mindset of Trade Unionism as the labour-management arm of the state, the fantasy that capitalism can be reformed and that we should be patient for those better to lead us to bring that about. That status quo includes the paralysing legalism and passivity sold to us as reasonableness that ultimately puts a target on our back.
Anyone who has been involved in committed rolling strike action, community defence and mobilisation, collective struggle in solidarity knows what lessons will endure.
Striking is our break with capitalist normality where we glimpse our autonomy and the absurdities we had accepted as normal.
Breaking with normality lets us imagine an alternative and share new horizons with our class peers.
The struggle against that normality is where we experience solidarity, often for the first time with people and communities we had been encouraged to see as strangers and different to us. The community it creates has little in common with capitalist normality and where we as individuals discover we have power and strength in numbers.
Whether by design or incompetence, even the opportunity to experience these dynamics on a minimal level were unavailable to most strikers. A movement without the living experience of their previous generation of militancy was exposed to little more than a couple of hours of tooting horns – encouraging diversion before returning to the isolation of domestic tasks and resuming working normality for another few weeks.
On many pickets those on strike were told when to turn up and those who wanted to support them to turn up later for an hour – so much for building solidarity. Even the Enough is Enough campaign issued such instructions to its members.
The Trade Union bureaucrats were not the naive failures here. They are long-standing institutions with deep historic memory, and jobs and salaries and professional futures they wish to preserve.
They knew full well the legal limitations and they chose to follow those liability limiting instructions. They are risk averse corporations of the establishment and pursued this minimum strategy with eyes wide open. Ultimately defeat in the form of the minimal outcomes suited their purpose and design.
But even historically, the memory of that sense of liberation through struggle is more than just a fuzzy feeling. It is the learning, the evolving and the implementation of an expanding strategy of escalation and coordination.
To a significant extent the learning from strikes of previous generations have been gerrymandered to stay there. Those lessons however remain as significant now and for the future of strike action and success as they were then.
When such opportunity for defending and advancing our needs is taken by or presents itself to us, we must consciously challenge and counter the power of Trade Union sectionalism to divide and control our struggle.
We must not be hamstrung in our first steps by the self-preserving legalism of Trade Union bureaucracy nor it’s rigged electoralism that seeks to set our agenda.
To empower this, we need to go beyond the artificial divisions of us as workers by industry and trade, indeed beyond work, to connect to all communities of action and struggle.
To protect our autonomy from their limitations and sabotage we need to develop the mechanisms of mass and direct decision making through our own assemblies and councils.
Place our confidence and resources in direct action built on cross-sector coordination where our strength and numbers lie. Nothing short of this will threaten the capitalist social peace that they need to make war on our class at home and abroad.
Capitalism never delivers, it can’t, it’s greed and our need are not compatible. It’s State always represses us and cannot be reformed. We only ever have the power of our labour and the solidarity of class war, not to change, but to overthrow their wretched apparatus of oppression.
The lesson for us is that the choice lies between the death of capitalism and its exploitation of us that sustains it, or its vengeance and our ruin should we fail.
This is what we mean when we say no war but the class war!
These days it can be a controversial thing to say that, by design, gets unpleasant, contentious and irrationally angry and absurd responses and reactions from some quarters. It’s a viewpoint that is deliberately marginalised because doing so benefits the status quo and those who rule society. But the fact is that it’s always a mistake to put any trust in any politician. We cannot vote our way out of this dystopian capitalist mess. Bourgeois politics is a counter-productive waste of time and that includes all political parties and politicians. The entire capitalist class and their system is the enemy and none of them deserve our support, and that includes our votes (no matter who they are). Representative so-called ‘democracy’ has completely failed and is not worth participating in at all and that includes social capitalist politics, which sometimes falsely claims to be ‘socialist’. In reality voting is a disgusting submissive act of self-abasement and should be completely rejected and scorned. Ultimately, in various ways, it is not something that is in the interests of working-class people to do in the society that we are currently lumbered with much to our detriment.
On the whole organising tends to come to a standstill every time there is an election, especially when a Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn type politician comes along promising so-called ‘socialism’. Yet history shows who’s side these people are really on and that they have a habit of breaking their promises to the working class or not being able to keep them.
And if we are to gain reforms, how we do so is crucial and we need to build working class power and autonomous alternatives from below and utilise direct action and that’s how we’ve won gains and improvements in the past. Collaborating with any faction of the capitalist class strengthens them and weakens us. Supporting politicians is essential for the continued domination of the working class by capital. And if electoralism actually worked we would actually be getting somewhere and would have achieved socialism – but that hasn’t happened at all.
In any case, the supposedly progressive (or less reactionary) government has always been a diversionary tool for the benefit of the ruling class and this results in the working class ending up demotivated, demoralised and lethargic – eroding any desire for real self-determination. This no doubt contributes to the rightward drift in politics – how ‘pragmatic.’ Simply calling for or enacting an all-out general strike and real, effective action would be a better use of our time and energy. Neither will voting for the ‘lesser evil’ (which remains evil) get rid of poverty and bigotry and at the end of the day representative ‘democracy’ and capitalism do not fight conservatism and ultra-nationalism etc to the death and actually they fuel such things.
We only have a ‘choice’ in voting between one corporate sponsored politician or another corporate sponsored politician. Flip a coin. It doesn’t matter if it comes up heads or tails if the bank owns the coin. So, vote for who you want, but corporations ‘donate’ to all politicians, which is in reality just legalized bribery, so no matter who wins office, the corporations always win. Any vote is a vote for the capitalist class and its capitalist system and this includes the social capitalists and state capitalists of the left.
In a sense it doesn’t even really matter, if voting rights are suppressed or if there is gerrymandering because voting and electoralism is counter-productive and anti-working class, as is representative democracy itself. It is the lie that we are a so-called ‘free society’ and can vote our problems away and that the politicians and their advisers and their corporate backers will save us and that we ourselves are incapable of doing so, or shouldn’t be allowed to do so. Representative ‘democracy’ is the deceptive, hypnotising illusion of a fake, non-existent ‘freedom’ that preserves the status quo, the class system etc and won’t stop disenfranchising us and holding us back. Putting us firmly in ‘our place’. Let’s stop being deceived that we live in a free society that is for our interests when we don’t.
Voting also does the capitalist class a huge favour by using electoralism as a diversion away from effective politics and action. Representative ‘democracy’ has failed. We need to build autonomous alternatives from below and genuinely resist capitalism and the state with collective direct action and practice genuine solidarity with a view to creating our own decentralised structures of working class self-organisation and collective, shared power that also truly give us a voice and empower us as individuals, such as – free federations of communes – popular assemblies and worker’s councils, that are truly fair and directly democratic for ourselves and our communities. And all of that is what voting and electoralism is a deliberate diversion away from and why it is harmful to our class and to society and the political situation in general. That is why they want you to vote. All political parties and politicians should be totally rejected and that, rather than our votes, support and consent, is what they deserve.
This GoFundMe will help several Cleveland-area organizers get through some severe or chronic health emergencies. The funds raised will be shared between various individuals and an organization to help them meet their needs and remain active in our movements.
Health emergencies and chronic health problems are increasingly becoming a part of our daily life, and we need to find ways to organize support and mutual aid not only for our movements to be inclusive but also to face the realities of an increasingly unhealthy world and an increasingly mercenary, poisonous, and exploitative system.
Some of the people being supported by this fundraiser prefer to remain anonymous, but here are the bios and calls for support from three of the beneficiaries. Peter G just got diagnosed with a potentially fatal brain tumor. He is scheduled for a major brain surgery that comes with a lengthy recovery period, and after that will probably go through a program of chemo or radiation, and after that frequent scans because of the possibility of recurrence. He doesn’t have insurance and is reliant on financial assistance, which requires him to remain at a poverty-level income.
In Ukraine, the Czech Republic, the UK, Italy, Syria, France etc… All over the world there is a voice against capitalist wars and also against capitalist peace. Only class war can end this terror and that is what we mean when we say No War but the Class War!
The new pamphlet contains 14 texts by various groups and individuals. The aim is to explain and affirm the meaning of antimilitarism, internationalism and revolutionary defeatism.
The above pamphlet contains 2 articles submitted by the ACG written by a AnarCom member when they were a ACG member, for the full 20 articles covering the first year of the war from an AC perspective see our pamphlet “No War But The Class War”, £3 plus £1 post and packing direct from us or at one of the many bookfair we will be a part of.
“Those who own and manage the society want a disciplined, apathetic and submissive public that will not challenge their privilege and the orderly world in which it thrives. The ordinary citizen need not grant them this gift.” – Noam Chomsky, “Turning the Tide”.
Constructive self-activity is a demonstration that the power we have is derived from us, from our communities, from the social impulse inherent in our species. That power isn’t someone else’s to give: it is ours to use now. We don’t need anyone’s permission to use it.
The structures of ossified power and ownership in society hate that type of engagement: it’s a direct threat to them because the power we possess as a population greatly outweighs the power they possess. Their power over us depends upon us being passive. That’s why society’s structures depend upon us using the “correct channels”. It saps our power by putting in place the expectation that our options consist in asking other people to do things for us, and waiting to see if requests are fulfilled.
You may have signed online petitions to Westminster, and have seen the petition reach a critical mass. The issue may even have been discussed in Parliament. But how many of those have effected actual change? Most likely there will be some bland response, and no useful action taken. Expecting others to act on our behalf is an act of self-disempowerment. When we allow our self-will to be turned into a request we don’t just dilute its power, we hand that power to someone else.
And as Noam Chomsky writes, in “Turning the Tide”, within “the constraints of existing state institutions, policies will be determined by people representing centres of concentrated power in the private economy, people who, in their institutional roles, will not be swayed by moral appeals but by the costs consequent upon the decisions they make – not because they are ‘bad people,’ but because that is what the institutional roles demand.”
Instead of waiting for change to come through existing institutions, we need to use the constructive self-activity we are all capable of to create for ourselves socialist alternatives in our communities and workplaces. We can make our own changes by ourselves in the places we live and work. We can build up from the bottom, rather than awaiting reform to be handed down to us from the top.
This might be as simple a thing as instead of waiting for the council to make a footpath in your area feel safer to use by cutting back overgrown vegetation, that you get together as a community group and do it yourselves. Community self-empowerment and self-management can begin wherever you want it to. Maybe your community wants to run its own breakfast club for your local schoolchildren. Or a fresh fruit and veg co-op. Whatever it is that sparks your community’s own imagination.
The bureaucracies around you will hate it, because it’s unpredictable, and because they won’t be the ones managing the activity, you will. But that’s its very power. And from your experiences your community will start to repair its natural solidarity; the practical sense of community, of mutual aid, that has been eroded by decades of neoliberal attrition. And that renewed solidarity will lead on to other things.
In radical literature you may have come across the term Self-valorisation. It’s a horrible term, but a useful concept. It’s about activity rooted in practical, everyday life. It’s about what can make practical everyday life in itself a powerful political act.
Negri and Hardt are the people you’d normally turn to for an explanation. But they write incredibly turgidly, so I wouldn’t recommend them for an easy, transparent bedtime read. Their small book Declaration (2012) is valued by many, and is far less to wade through than Empire (2000), but I’m not going to recommend either. Luckily, Harry Cleaver is there to help us out.
“When Italian autonomist Marxists, especially Toni Negri, appropriated the term “self-valorization” they changed its meaning from the expanded reproduction of capital to the autonomous, self-determination or self-development of the working class. The new use of the term was designed to denote working class self-activity that went beyond being merely reactive to capital, e.g., fighting back against exploitation, to denote working class self-activity that carried within it the basic positive, creative and imaginative re-invention of the world that characterized the “living labor” that capital-the-vampire has fed on but which is always an autonomous power that has frequently ruptured capital’s controls and limitations and that will ultimately, hopefully, be powerful enough to break free completely and craft new worlds beyond capitalism.”
– Harry Cleaver, “On Self-valorization in Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s ‘Women and the Subversion of the Community’”, (2011).
To put it more simply: The answer to the question “What, then, should social activists do?” is easy. They should…
“Seek out and understand the desires and self-activity of the people, and then to articulate them in ways which contribute both to their circulation and to their empowerment”.
– Harry Cleaver, “Kropotkin, Self-valorization and the Crisis of Marxism”, (1993).
If this whets your appetite for the literature, Cleaver’s “Reading Capital Politically”, is a short (though not easy) and practical book, but you do really need to be familiar with Marx’s Capital for it to be any use to you. It’s online here: https://libcom.org/files/cleaver-reading_capital_politically.pdf
But you don’t need to be well-read in radical literature in order to use the potential that already exists in your own community. You just need the will.
Related to self-valorization is Mario Tronti’s “strategy of refusal”. Tronti points out that since the worker is the provider of capital, the existence of the capitalist class itself depends on the labour power of the worker.
“This is the historical paradox which marks the birth of capitalist Society, and the abiding condition which will always be attendant upon the “eternal rebirth” of capitalist development. The worker cannot be labour other than in relation to the capitalist. The capitalist cannot be capital other than in relation to the worker.”
“We might ask a question: what happens when the form of working-class organisation takes on a content which is wholly alternative; when it refuses to function as an articulation of capitalist society; when it refuses to carry capital’s needs via the demands of the working class? The answer is that, at that moment and from that moment, the systems whole mechanism of development is blocked. This is the new concept of the crisis of capitalism that we must start to circulate: no longer the economic crisis, the catastrophic collapse […]. Rather, a political crisis imposed by the subjective movements of the organised workers, via the provocation of a chain of critical conjunctures, -within the sole strategy of the working-class refusal to resolve the contradictions of capitalism”.
– Mario Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal”, (1965).
Again, useful idea though it is, the essay is over long for the concepts it is attempting to transmit, and written very, very turgidly. Also, much of his work remains untranslated from Italian. But if you are interested, for a partial translation of Mario Tronti’s Workers and Capital go here: http://operaismoinenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/workers-and-capital.pdf
Don’t feel you need to read this stuff, though: the best distillation of this very simple and useful set of ideas is to be found in the quote from Chomsky which heads this article:
“Those who own and manage the society want a disciplined, apathetic and submissive public that will not challenge their privilege and the orderly world in which it thrives. The ordinary citizen need not grant them this gift.”
Those of us who don’t want to grant them that gift need only to remember that the solution is in our own hands. There are many of us. Social media has its place. It’s easy to see its immense potential for communication, for sharing radical ideas and information, but if all we do with that is pass pithy memes amongst ourselves, then the establishment will not quake. If that is all we use it for, then we have been lulled into thinking our own passivity is activism. Similarly, if we wait for a centralised organisation to decide what to do, we might wait a fruitless century, as the communities did who once put their faith in the Labour Party to deliver socialism. Self-management is something that nobody else can do for me. The only driver of social change is constructive self-activity. Why should I wait for others to do what I can start to do for myself today?
We’ve just had the hottest June on record. Dr Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Leipzig warns: “Chances are that July will be […] the hottest month ever: ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian which is some 120,000 years ago”.
We’ve broken global heat records two days in a row this week:
Friends in New York State tell of their alarming wake-up to the reality of climate change when smoke from the Canadian wildfires kept them indoors. They had known intellectually, but they have been shocked into a bodily awareness, physically coughing and short of breath because of fires in a neighbouring country.
And let us not forget that these fires release carbon that had been locked in trees. Carbon we cannot afford to add to the CO2 levels recorded at 424 parts per million in May this year, an increase of 3 parts per million compared to the same time in 2022. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/monthly.html
The Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association says the dry conditions in southern Alberta are already resulting in crop losses.
NASA records that Antarctica is losing ice mass at an average rate of about 150 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion tons per year, adding to sea level rise: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ice-sheets/
Every metric shows the global temperature, sea-surface temperature, ice loss, and other parameters, all going through the roof.
Governments and businesses, global power actors, are already not doing enough. This is not a time to go back on existing promises.
The Westminster Government is obsessed with small boats on the English Channel. As the pressures of climate change, biodiversity change, and the global social justice crisis grow, migration will increase. Just as humanity is not separate from the environment, so human migration is not separate from the environment. What we see now on the English Channel is just a beginning as these processes accelerate. Treating it as a discrete issue is pointless. It cannot be separated from the context.
We cannot pretend that “The Environment” is something over there in the “To Do” pile. It is not. We are part of the environment: at the atomic level, we are carbon and water and minerals made from elements forged in ancient stars. At the individual level, we breathe the oxygen, eat the organic matter, live on the soil of the planet, and eventually return to it. At the species level, we roam and herd over the planet’s surface, using its resources, while shaping and being shaped by its processes. We are the environment, and the environment is us.
The “Poly-Crisis” is not something we can procrastinate about any longer.
The police murder of Nahel on June 27th in Nanterre, Paris, a French teenager of North African descent, has detonated an explosive response throughout France and even its Caribbean territories.
The speed and scale have taken the French state by surprise rocking its establishment now threatening a state of emergency.
Every act of violence and repression taken by the police since has resulted in greater mobilisation and violence in the growing insurrection against them.
This is not chaos, the tens of thousands now turning on the police are not fighting each other. They are collectively rebelling against one of the largest and most organised police establishments in Europe, targeting primarily centres of administration and to date 79 police stations.
The rising scale of resistance is to more than just another racist murder – one in a long history of murderous attacks on those of North African heritage. It comes on the back of years of struggle against the attacks on working conditions, changes to pension age and capitalist austerity in general.
These are the same police that recently attacked the pension protests, have murdered environmental activists abroad and brutally suppressed the ‘gilets jaunes’ yellow vest movement.
In Cayenne, French Guiana, the police have already shot and killed one person in the current wave of demonstrations leaving another in critical condition in Mont-Saint-Martin.
Around 3000 arrests have so far been made by the 45,000 strong armed police force whose weapons include grenade launchers and machine guns. The police don’t need a ‘state of emergency’ to be declared, its provisions were written in to the constitution in 2017.
This constitutional change included a relaxation on the use of armed force as “legitimate self defence” resulting in a fivefold increase in the number of police shootings since for “refusal to comply”.
Although the victim in this case was of dual heritage, the thousands of demonstrators are across communities primarily from the working-class districts of the towns and cities.
French North Africans, Algerians in particular, have good reason to hate and fear the French state and its police. During a demonstration in Paris against the French occupation of Algeria on October 17th 1961, the police targeted and slaughtered French citizens of Algerian descent – many simply being thrown alive off bridges into the river Seine.
The police were forced to acknowledge what became known as ‘The Paris Massacre’ in 1998, though only owned up to 40 deaths. The real figure is thought to be between 200 and 300.
As the funeral of Nahel takes place in Nanterre, it is important that we do not see the working class as victims, we are a class at war. The demonstrations have grown in size and ferocity.
They will need to become more organised to try and limit collateral damage to the assets of our communities like health centres and homes, but this has so far been rare.
In many cases, our class on the streets has routed the police and remained in control. It is becoming an offensive not defensive movement knowing who its enemies are.
Last night in the Rhône region of southern France, a police patrol was ambushed at night and three police officers were shot and wounded. The Rhône police department comment couldn’t have put it better: “We have crossed a red line. We’ve not seen this kind of thing before here and it’s very concerning”.
Having described our class in struggle as “vermin”, the shock troops of the police state should be very concerned. Victory to the insurgents!
No sooner was the spectacle on, then it was off and the Wagner circus never made it to town
The failed Russian coup of June 24th, reminiscent of a comedy ‘banana republic’, is history repeating itself as farce.
To be fair, it was farcical last time round when a clique of die-hard Soviet alcoholics tried to oust Gorbachev in 1991 to preserve a decaying Russian empire drained by war.
Despite the shallow similarity with the past, this farce was much more high stakes. Choosing between Putin and Wagner’s Prigozhin is like choosing between Stalin and Pol Pot. It was not going to turn out well whatever the result.
Like so many aspects of this war, it is both violence and spectacle with patriotism and deceit masking the ruthless pursuit of power and wealth.
However long Prigozhin has until he falls from a Novichok smeared window, he offered nothing but bloody escalation of a brutal capitalist machine.
This was not a war weary army rebellion but a failed warlord coup against another savage palace oligarch.
But Putin’s victory may prove pyrrhic. Where was his army’s emphatic response? Where were the masses in the streets to protest the outrage? Where were his chosen elite?
While rumour has it that he had left the city haven’t been verified, members of the political elites certainly panicked. Flight radar services pinged dozens of private jets leaving Moscow.
Capitalist barbarism doesn’t come to an end by palace coups, it must be ended by it’s deceived, coerced or deluded victims. The working class who produce the wealth to be butchered in the stealing of it, either side of the front lines.
The masters of capital are well read and know their history and the danger they face from our class. Putin more than most as an old Soviet political apparatchik. No wonder that he lied so desperately in his appeal to national patriotism:
“This is a stab in the back of our country and our people. Such a blow was dealt to Russia in 1917, when the country was waging the First World War – but victory was stolen from it. Intrigues, squabbles, politicking behind the backs of the army and the people turned into the greatest shock, the destruction of the army and the collapse of the state, the loss of vast territories.”
Putin misremembers 1917 at his peril. He uses the Nazi defence of the military being stabbed in the back by political intrigue to divert attention that the revolution was exactly the war weary mass of the exploited, in and out of uniform.
The army collapsed when conscripts refused to fight, turning their guns on their generals rather than their own people. Workers and peasants occupied the workplaces and the land creating their own direct forms of self-government to negate the state.
Its ultimate defeat was from the intrigues of the Putins and Prigozhins of the time. masquerading as ‘leaders’ or ‘saviours’ to snatch power from the exhausted masses through bloody counter revolution costing millions of lives.
The chaos we have now is the descendant of the defeat of 1917 when the state again stabbed the workers in the back. The ruling class on both sides know this, and as we have previously written about, both sides are struggling with military discipline and desertion.
The majority of soldiers in the trenches are forced conscripts and the coup will hopefully infect trust and morale at least amongst the Russian forces. Putin will have noted his arse was saved not by their resistance but by another, this time Chechen, warlord.
Whatever else, the morale of ex Wagner soldiers, marched like the Grand Old Duke of York, up the hill only to march down again, should now sink to the level of the rest. Hopefully adding a corrosive cynicism and contempt for their leaderships.
In this lies the key to the end of war. Recognising that our interests are not with our rulers or their generals in whatever uniform, but with each other as the exploited, the working class across frontiers.
Only class war can end this madness and that is what we mean when we say No War but the Class War!
AnarCom Network 