In this new occasional series, we’ll be speaking to comrades about what being in the ACN means to them. In this first interview, we speak to Steve in Glasgow.
Steve, we describe ourselves as a class struggle organisation. What does class mean to you?
Class is our relationship to the means of production. Do you own the factory, or do you work in it? A class analysis of power in society comes down to one word: ownership. Class is a relationship. Do I need to work in order to live, or can I live off my capital, my investments? For most of us, the answer is we need to work. If we can. Or we draw benefits, which aren’t enough to live on.
The media keep using the phrase “white working class”. Do you think the working class is white?
Well, the working class is most of us. So that means it’s black people, white people, Asians, trans people, cis people, gay, straight, men, women, people with disabilities. People you see all around you. People who need to work to live. And we all have that in common. The same relationship to ownership.
What does direct action mean to you?
It’s kind of there in the question. It means acting directly. Not acting indirectly. Getting directly stuck into what matters to you and your community. It’s the people affected by a problem acting together for the solution of that problem and doing it without external mediation. The structures that are part of the problem, part of the system, love to mediate us. Stick their oar in. That’s how they co-opt and neuter activism.
Direct action means people getting together as equals and deciding our common interests and needs, then going for them. Not believing that politics means going to others to act on our behalf. Like signing petitions, voting for “representatives” once every four years, and so on.
Another term we hear is “solidarity”. What is solidarity?
It’s a process. It’s the way that the powerless discover the power to carry out our own liberation. By acting together, we learn our own power. Solidarity brings about this self-confidence, which comes from within the working class. And this self-confidence is nurtured through solidarity and direct action.
But isn’t the working class reactionary?
That’s the story we’re told to hold us back. But if you’re afraid of the working class, you’re afraid of yourself, to mangle a Fred Hampton quote. A friend of mine said something the other day, we were talking about this, and it made me laugh: “they can come and call me homophobic if they want. I’m queer as fuck. They can fuck right off”. That’s what people forget. Who is the working class? It’s us.
It’s Uber delivery riders, shop workers, care workers, bar tenders, cleaners, flight attendants, call centre workers. That’s what makes us working class. But we’re also gay, straight, trans, cis, black, white and all those other things too.
What is missing is direct, participatory democratic control in the hands of all those people, which means cooperation and solidarity. Listening to each other’s needs. It means direct democracy. It means needs being met rather than wealth being unequally hoarded. It means fighting for common ownership and control of the means of production. We need to overturn ownership as the basis for power and control and replace it with humanity as the basis for control.
It has come to our attention that some so-called anarchists have accused the ACN of Transphobia and have said that members were kicked out of the ACG for being transphobic. This is untrue and ill -informed to say the least. A small group of people resigned from the ACG as we felt that transphobia was not being robustly enough challenged within the ACG and that a very small minority were using what could be considered transphobic language.
We later formed a new group with people who had left AFed and Solfed and had been inactive for a time, amongst others so we could continue to be a voice for class-based anarchist communism within the UK.
We have tried to keep out of the rumour and back stabbing that has gone on but this is a step too far. Baseless accusations with not even a hint of truth by people who have no knowledge of what happened. At least try to get the facts straight rather than attack what you don’t know and then pretend you are so clever.
Winter is coming. Not a line from Game of Thrones but a meteorological reality in the Northern Hemisphere.
Before the rains stagnate the battle lines for another 6 months, a new victim falls in this conflict of rival capitalist blocs. Azerbaijan’s barely reported attack on its besieged Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has led to Armenia’s complete surrender.
Despite being a member of Putin’s ‘near abroad’ Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). Russian peacekeepers have only been able to negotiate the terms of Armenian surrender.
Putin’s humiliation has been orchestrated by Azerbaijan’s key ally, NATO’s Turkish president Erdogan. The Special Military Operation in Ukraine has made Russia impotent in its own backyard.
This lightning war did not last long enough to present those who claim to oppose war to agonise over which belligerent to support.
In Ukraine, despite the bloodiest three months of carnage in a NATO resourced offensive, frontlines that have barely changed will once again be frozen.
The wars. second anniversary on February 24th will be energetically marked by a reconstruction and strengthening of the unbreachable frontiers of conflict.
A conflict that has an echo in dividing lines between pro (supporters of one or other belligerent) and anti-war (against all belligerents) in what was once the revolutionary milieu.
Why is opposing war so controversial amongst some of those who lay claim to revolutionary tradition? It is an unmitigated catastrophe. 10 million displaced, an estimated 500,000 casualties with 150,000 dead. $1 trillion cost and half the world hungry or paying the price of austerity driven by war profiteers.
In part this is explained by our natural reaction of horror and sympathy at the scale of suffering and injustice – laudable instincts that are then manipulated to support one side or the other on the basis of just or unjust, legal or illegal war. This is the fog which leads us do a distorted narrative of good versus evil.
Rather than seeing the Ukraine and Russia conflict as corporate corrupt capitalist states fronting international capitalisms global rivalry at the expense of workers on both sides, the false narratives direct us to moral platitudes.
A David versus Goliath. An innocent victim against a violent aggressor, leading us to a simple binary outcome of supporting the goodie against the baddy. This is the logic of the pantomime not the analysis of revolutionary internationalists.
The individuals here are not Russia and Ukraine, but their thousands of workers with everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Those who can’t see the fault of this logic should ask themselves why and whom did they choose to support when Ethiopia attacked Tigre? Or when Eritrea attacked Ethiopia, or Rwanda attacked DRC? Indeed, where was their moral outrage over Nagorno-Karabakh?
Some argue it’s not for revolutionists in the capitalist heartlands to form a perspective on conflicts elsewhere. This they say, in the contemporary language of culture wars, is ”West-splaining’. An uncomfortable resonance with Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 comment that we have no business
in a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”. That was at the abyss of WW2.
Internationalists then knew how to respond. Freedom Press’s ‘War Commentary’ and the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation’s ‘Solidarity’ opposed the war throughout, culminating in a prosecution in 1945 for their categorisation of Britain as a ‘Warfare State’.
Their efforts included contributions from such luminaries has Guy Aldred; Paul Mattick; Anton Pannekoek and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Communist Workers Party.
This failure, through confusion or design, to unite on an Internationalist position of Revolutionary Defeatism has necessarily caused rifts with former comrades. It has also forged new links with others. An historical if familiar realignment of revolutionary forces is taking place, as it did after previous betrayals of principle in 1914 and 1939.
We are again at an abyss and the chaff of liberalism and left social democracy is sorting itself out from Revolutionary Internationalism.
We continue to fight for the escalation of class war on the Home Front. Undermining Capitalism’s ‘Social Peace’ here frustrates their drive to war, all war. That is what we mean by ‘No War But The Class War!’
AnarCom Network has recently attended an assembly of revolutionary anti-war Internationalists on the Black Sea coast, to coordinate our focus and attention on the crisis of war in Ukraine and the intensification of the attacks on our class at home.
Around 70 comrades from 14 countries across 5 continents were in unison in refusing to take sides in capitalist wars, re-asserting No War but the Class War!
Anarcho-Communists like us, Anarchists, Left Communists, Syndicalists and Autonomists agreed on the need for reasserting the fundamental principle of revolutionary defeatism – a plague on both their houses!
Russian capitalism is forcing its workers to slaughter, in order to steal the assets of Ukrainian workers labour. Ukrainian capitalists are militarising Ukrainian workers towards the same meat grinder to sell those same assets themselves for a profit.
Those who are confused by the moral challenge of aggressor violence v self defence should reflect on this false identification of Russia and Ukraine as if they were individuals, they are not! They are rival capitalist entities with their class interests at heart.
Hundreds of thousands of individuals from both sides of their proprietorial national state boundaries have been killed, maimed or displaced. Workers without mutual animosity before this marshalling to war from which our class only loses.
Internationalist work against the rival imperialist blocs continues on the home front where disrupting their ‘Social Peace’ here, slows down their drive to war. The class war at home is the peace movement!
We continue to develop our international work with like-minded revolutionists across their artificial frontiers.
On Tuesday, December 8, 2020, 9 anarchist comrades were arrested by the French anti-terrorist police (DGSI), across France. In Toulouse, in Dordogne, in the Paris region, in Brittany, and in Rennes.
They are accused of being a “..criminal association planning a terrorist attack”, even though there is no real evidence of this. So, what did they do?
The French State has used the following “evidence” to back up the charges of terrorism:
• The use of digital privacy tools (such as Signal, VPN’s etc.) and the refusal to give decryption codes to phones or hard drives;
• The occasional use of air-guns in a “paintball type survival” game;
• Volunteering to in Rojava against Islamic State, and
• Possession of ‘elements or substances’ used in the composition of explosives (everyday household products including bleach and other cleaning items).
None of these activities amount to terrorism and most are not even a criminal offence.
In order to build a case for the resulting “terrorist” threat, the DGSI created the story of a “group” that would conduct “paramilitary training” to prepare “acts of terrorism” against “law enforcement or military”, while consulting for this purpose with members of various groups having the same objectives in France and abroad, and by means of encrypted communication.
This scenario is identical to the one that has been used against many internationalist comrades. Where political opinions (true or supposed), lifestyles (squat, mobile housing, international activism, autonomy) and profiles of the accused people, become sufficient elements to charge activists with the crime of terrorism!
Exactly as we saw in the UK’s famously farcical ‘Persons Unknown’ trial of anarchists in the 1970’s. A familiar déjà vu.
We are aware that our comrades were subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – sensory deprivation and subjection to white noise. Torture in other words!
To be clear: the anarchist ideals of our comrades and the presumption of guilt is what maintains the “terrorist” accusation although there is no proof. ‘Thought Police’ terrorism!
The DGSI and the French Anti-terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) is also trying to transpose the judicial treatment of people who joined the Islamic State to activists who fought against them or who have been designated as far-left.
The fight for a social revolution is not a terrorist act!
The real terrorists are those who hold weapons of mass destruction and the most powerful armies in history. They are the ones who destroy our planet and exploit its resources and us in the pursuit of profit. They are the ones who enslave the people and massacre those that resist.
Both France and the UK welcome bloodthirsty dictators, like Erdogan or Mohammed bin Salman, and are in the top ten arms exporters (France now being the 2nd, with the UK hovering around 7th).
As long as oppression exists, as long as capitalist power continues, its destruction we will continue to exist. We cannot be beaten or destroyed!
The AnarCom Network will be taking action in the form of leafleting/info stalls throughout the week in various locations – reports will follow!
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.
AnarCom Network 