Articles

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!

Article by Dreyfus

On 10 August 2022, protests broke out in Freetown and other areas of the country amid mounting frustrations over the soaring cost of living. Some demonstrators called for President Bio to resign.  These protests where violently suppressed by security forces with an unknown number of people killed.

According to Amnesty International “we collected testimonies alleging excessive use of force by Sierra Leonean security forces to crack down on protests which turned violent in Freetown, Makeni and Kamakwie in August 2022, in which six police officers and more than 20 protesters and bystanders were killed, including at least two women. Yet, it took more than two months for the State to release the non-police bodies for their burial, Amnesty International said today after having investigated the events”.

Since then repression has continued.  On June 21^st 2023 security forces forcibly dispersed a political gathering held by the All People’s Congress (APC) opposition party near the APC headquarters in Freetown. Police have reportedly used live ammunition. Casualty figures remain unclear.

Report via Punk 4 the Homeless:

Terrifying scenes emerging in Sierra Leone the past few days as the country prepares for elections on Saturday 24th June.

People have taken to the streets to protest, violence has broken out between opposing factions, innocent civilians and the police.

Videos are circulating of horrifying scenes and reports are coming out that people have been killed by the police – yet the western media is silent.

Hope Orphanage [which is supported by the Punk 4 the Homeless], has reported that the girls and young women are very scared and trying to keep indoors and as safe as is possible.

Video:

Videos are circulating of security forces again using deadly violence against protestors and innocent bystanders. Information is difficult to get out of the country at the moment and most news services are ignoring what is happening, after all it is more important to focus on millionaires trapped in a death trap of a submersible and the millions spent trying to rescue them. 

Article by Mikey Dredd

The tragic sinking of a fishing boat packed with over 700 migrants on June 14th off the coast of Greece, inside the boundaries of the European superstate, is an atrocity in capitalism’s war on humanity. The number of lives lost is an estimated 500.

It follows the deaths of around 100 people in Italy in February when another boat from Turkey sank off Cutro – then seen as the worst single migrant disaster. As one excess exceeds the other, countless smaller and often unnoticed examples are a weekly if not daily occurrence.  Including the sending of refugees back out to sea as happened in Greece in May.

The acknowledged Mediterranean death toll alone so far this year is 1,800, already exceeding the annual average over the last decade that has cost more than 26.000 lives – that we know of.

Is this a war?  Yes. The war of profit and greed that is tearing the planet to pieces, destroying its ecosystems through exploitation driven climate change and its social systems through its inevitable infliction of poverty, hunger and war.

According to the United Nations, the numbers of displaced from climate change and war is approaching the hundreds of millions. (UNHCR calculates 2,000,000 dead and 21,000,000 displaced annually through climate change; 110,000,000 through conflict (not counting the dead).

 Madagascar is becoming a desert, island peoples are submerging, Pakistan briefly became a lake.  40,000 have just lost their homes to floods in Haiti as the earth’s lungs gasp in the Amazon.  

The stolen treasure violently accrued over the last 300 years in the heartlands of capitalism’s hyper-wealth is tilting the globe, and the hungry dispossessed are sliding to where the grass still grows. 

Refugees and migrants are increasingly numerous and desperate across most of the world.  Climate change and exploitation accelerate as the ‘developed’ states pull up the drawbridge and carry on vilifying and blaming the victims. 

How is this not genocide?  Because the weasel words of international lawyers are designed to keep guilty hands clean.

The ICC (International Criminal Court) defines as genocide as:       “…characterised by the specific intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group by killing its members or by other means: causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Capitalism’s ruthless plunder and destruction is not considered ‘deliberate’ enough to qualify as ‘intent’ despite every other characteristic being there.

There is a deliberate refusal of responsibility and the intent neither to redress nor repair but to carry on regardless.  Despite the huge diversity of needs and contexts amongst migrating communities, they certainly have very specific characteristics.  Most centre around them being from the global colonial looted world of 300 years of capitalist imperial expansion.

There is no solution that doesn’t involve the abolition of imperial legacy and capitalist global domination.  Capitalism not just won’t solve it, it’s simply can’t. It’s not profitable. And in its attempt to preserve itself, it is the driver of this genocide by stealth.

Article by Dreyfus

As the brutal horror of capitalism’s war in Ukraine again floods our screens. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam sees the waters of the Dnipro reservoir pour south while thousands of Ukrainian deserters flow east.

The desperate struggle to survive this catastrophe and ecocide is obscured from being seen as the inevitable consequence of the crime of capitalist war, behind the hypocritical mutual allegations of war crimes by the respective warring states, echoed internationally in the heartlands of rival imperialist blocs

It has happened literally weeks after the British state commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Dam-busters Raid which destroyed the Eder and Möhne dams flooding the Ruhr valley, drowning 1,600 people (most of them POW’s and slave labourers), not as a great allied war crime but as a heroic victory!

Despite the near certainty that this atrocity was the work of Putin’s forces, this may have been more dictated by circumstance and timing rather than the competing moral positions of either side.  Dams are targets and the ensuing deluge, weapons of war – either side would have done if it suited their aims.  It was even mooted at the beginning of the war as a way of stopping the Russian advance on Kherson.

While millions continue to be affected by catastrophic flooding due to climate change, out of sight, out of mind, in Pakistan and Haiti, the manufactured Dnipro disaster is as much a part of war as genocide and concentration camps.

The Belgians did it to stop the Germans in WW1, the Dutch in WW2.  The Chinese nationalists drowned 1 million of their own people to slow down the Japanese.  Even Ukraine, when it was part of the Soviet Union, suffered the same event initiated by their own side.

But this is not Ukraine’s only flood.  War weariness and compulsory militarisation backed by lengthy prison sentences are leading to a second outpouring of refugees. 

It has been well reported that up to 1,000,000 Russians have crossed their borders to avoid the war since the invasion. Much less focus is given to what’s happening for those Ukrainians who don’t want to heed national patriotism or fight.

The BBC reports that Ukrainian military service has been hard to enforce due to reluctance and corruption. Many are paying a monthly sum to avoid being called up.  Ukrainian frontline commanders are reportedly complaining that the increasing number of conscripts too scared or unwilling to fight is proving a burden on the battlefield.

Many are risking their lives to cross the Tisa river in the west to seek refuge from combat in Romania.  According to the Romanian government, at least 20,000 military aged men eligible for military service have entered the country since the beginning of the war, ostensibly to visit and then simply not return to the Ukraine.

Another 7,000 deserters have crossed the Tisa river despite armed patrols and road blocks, as the only way to save their lives.  Ukraine’s police force claim they are detaining at least 20 men a day on the international border – each facing up to 10 years in prison in ‘free’ Ukraine.

Numbers appear to be growing despite the cost of ‘people smugglers’ and the dangers of the journey itself.  Ukrainian sources say that at least 90 people have died from exposure, frostbite and drowning.  One deserting combat veteran describes how even after reaching the Romanian side of the river, he was spotted by a Ukrainian patrol on the other bank: “I heard shots first, then a string of insults”. 

Capitalism’s lust for profit and its consequential wars with rivals, targets our class.  They shoot us, starve us, drown us and displace us.  Ukraine’s two floods, the Dnipro south and the dissident’s west are mirrored on the Russian side of the front-lines.  It is not about freedom or justice, it is about slaughter and greed. These are not war crimes, this is the crime of war.

Desertion is only one form of resistance. Perhaps at the height of the battle, it is the easiest one to take.  However, to end the war, this war and the next, all of capitalism’s wars, resistance has to be globalised and militant.

The working class is in the firing line for capitalist greed whatever side of the frontier we are on. That is why we say that the fight to end it begins at home.

Uncompromisingly pursuing our class agenda here against their social peace to undermine their war, there.  No war but the class war means exactly that.

Article by Dreyfus

The current situation with the strikes is not good enough at all, not going far enough and sadly it appears to be a lost cause – but they do highlight the fact that it’s us versus them. And striking workers themselves are rightly dissatisfied with how things are at the moment –  we need autonomous collective action, revolt from below, militant grass roots sabotage and subversion, workplace occupations, popular assemblies and worker’s councils, or coordinating committees, workers’ resistance groups and things like that. Not unions – not reformist ones anyway.

And really, trying to make workers content with capitalism by trying to get them better pay and conditions is not truly sufficient or effective. We need proper resistance to worsening capitalist barbarism and real, militant revolutionary upheaval from below. And the current strikes very much seem to be going nowhere and stand to put people off of unions and strikes altogether. The TUC unions are also centralised, bourgeois organisations, and cannot be relied on. The independent unions do good work, but are also basically reformist in practice and therefore limited – though they are much smaller than the reformist unions.

The strike wave should really have been a starting point, but this doesn’t seem to have happened, at least not yet, and it seems very unlikely that this will change. Mick Lynch has been great at showing up pundits and commentators on telly for being the idiots and stooges of the establishment they are, but it was people such as him who called off the rail strikes when the queen died. The reformists and union bureaucrats have deliberately failed to make the most of the strikes, which does the ruling class a huge favour. People like Lynch are too close to the Labour Party and are getting behind Starmer for the next general election. They are also, in their own way, part of the establishment – union leaders whose job is to divert and pacify discontent and negotiate social peace with the bosses. It’s up to workers what they do, but if the reformist unions are not doing what is necessary, lacking militancy and escalation, then we advocate the idea that workers can always organise and fight outside of such organisations.

As things are, we have the unions and they are clearly bourgeois and frankly useless.  The strikes are going nowhere and look completely hopeless. We’ve even got Unite helping the smooth operation of an atomic weapons manufacturer (AWE/NG Bailey) by representing the electricians in such an industry and winning them a pay deal. We desperately need some real militant, autonomous, grass roots collective direct action and people need to completely reject this system and genuinely resist it.

Article By Tom Hughes

Look at the person you are thinking of voting for, what makes them not look, sound or feel like any politician you’ve ever seen strutting and lying on your TV screens? 

What makes them so excel in virtues you don’t have that you should hand your power and autonomy over to them? 

Would you hand the contents of your home so easily over to a burglar, or your family without a murmur to a kidnapper?  Of course not! That would be ridiculous, yet it’s the same principle they don’t want us to see in the carnival of election time.

The idea that we willingly handover all agency over our neighbourhoods, our welfare and our futures to professionals who excel in some of the worst human arts of manipulation, deceit, lies and corruption is the stuff of nightmares and dark graphic novels. That they want to have power in the first place should be clue enough. 

For all the lies that pervade election times, perhaps the biggest is that the ballot box makes us equal, that Rishi with his million-pound swimming pool and the shop worker with a paddling pool have the same rights and responsibilities as each other.   Except that what we give Rishi is his for the duration, while we wait for our right to place an X in five years-time on another piece of paper.   And how precious that X is made to feel given that you probably only have 10 of them to use in your lifetime. 10 moments of feeling equal is your lifetime ration of influence or participation. 

In the process, its dull familiarity creates the attitude in most of us summed up as “I don’t believe in politics” or “what has politics got to do with me?”  And that is exactly what they want us to feel.   Distanced and docile. 

However, always pushing back against this is our innate humanity and our struggle for a dignified existence.

Our own lives are social, economic and emotional all of which combine to make our existence deeply political.  We care massively, about our friends, our loved ones, our neighbourhoods and environment, our welfare and our futures.  On a day-to-day level we demonstrate this actively with our colleagues, communities and the kinds of social family we consciously choose to construct.  We come together all the time in free, and yes, political association, To combat litter, to look after our vulnerable neighbours, to volunteer, to assist and to commune with others like us in football teams choirs, for feeding people, hospital transports or knitting circles.  And to strike against them!

It’s often said that local elections affect us directly and are somehow different to the Parliamentary ones.  Nice try, but even the most dedicated voter can recognise the army of ‘mini me’s’ starting to climb the greasy pole. 

Political parties, election campaigns whether national or local are not the community in action! They are the definition of our blindsided manipulation and exclusion from anything meaningful that looks like change. 

They want our participation in this staged event – it looks good for them.  It encourages them and allows them to claim their greed is in our name.  Look at the last time you used your X, what did it change?  We feel sure if they thought it could really change anything they would make it illegal. 

Wouldn’t it be great if these elections receive the contempt they deserve.  Voting leaves them feeling empowered and subjects us to passivity at best, state sanctioned brutality at worst.  Refusing to vote in favour of the community mobilisation is not apathy, on the contrary, if you vote you may feel you’ve no right to complain.

Article by Dreyfus

The AnarCom Network wishes all our comrades across the world a Happy and Revolutionary International Workers Day.

Below are some pictures from protests that have taken place around the world followed by our article on the origins of the modern May Day.

France

Stuttgart Germany

Kosovo

Indonesia

Istanbul Turkey

Belfast Ireland

The origins of May Day

A three-year depression; a banking collapse; falling production; a crisis of living standards and working conditions that lead to continent wide mass strikes and demonstrations. 

Capitalism’s response: the demonisation of migrants, foreign workers and strikers as militant anarchists.  Police violence and state repression.  This familiar story whilst sounding like today, is the birth of May Day as International Workers Day nearly 150 years ago.

The events that led to it were part of a rolling campaign by workers for the eight-hour day.   It began when the American Federation of Labour adopted an historic resolution which asserted that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labour from and after May 1st, 1886”.

In the months prior to this date workers in their thousands were drawn into the struggle for the shorter day. Skilled and unskilled, black and white, men and women, native and immigrant were all becoming involved. This movement was particularly strong in the large industrial cities and on May 1st 1886, 400,000 rallied in Chicago

The beginning of May as a day for the celebration of the fruits of labour go back millennia as a pre-Christian pagan festival.  According to the anarchist historian David Graeber:  

“May day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival.” (Graeber & Wengrow ‘A New History of Humanity’)

A Chicago newspaper of the time reported that that day: “no smoke curled up from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills, and things had assumed a Sabbath-like appearance”.

This was the main centre of the agitation, and here the anarchists were in the forefront of the labour movement. It was to no small extent due to their activities that Chicago became an outstanding centre organised labour and made the biggest contribution to the eight-hour movement.

2 years earlier they had produced the world’s first Anarchist daily newspaper, the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, plus a weekly, Fackel, and a Sunday edition, Vorbote.  They were among the many labour militants from migrant backgrounds active across the city in many languages.

When on May 1st 1886, the eight-hour strikes convulsed that city, one half of the workforce at the McCormick Harvester Co. came out. Two days later a mass meeting was held by 6,000 members of the ‘lumber shovers’ union who had also come out. The meeting was held only a block from the McCormick plant and was joined by some 500 of the strikers from there.

The workers listened to a speech by the anarchist August Spies, who has been asked to address the meeting by the Central Labour Union. While Spies was speaking, urging the workers to stand together and not give in to the bosses, the strikebreakers were beginning to leave the nearby McCormick plant.

The strikers, aided by the ‘lumber shovers’ marched down the street and forced the scabs back into the factory. Suddenly a force of 200 police arrived and, without any warning, attacked the crowd with clubs and revolvers. They killed at least one striker, seriously wounded five or six others and injured an indeterminate number.

Outraged by the brutal assaults he had witnessed, Spies went to the office of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and composed a circular calling on the workers of Chicago to attend a protest meeting the following night.

The protest meeting took place in the Haymarket Square and was addressed by Spies and two other anarchists active in the trade union movement, Albert Parsons and Samuel Fielden. Throughout the speeches the crowd was orderly. Mayor Carter Harrison, who was present from the beginning of the meeting, concluded that “nothing looked likely to happen to require police interference”. He advised police captain John Bonfield of this and suggested that the large force of police reservists waiting at the station house be sent home.

It was close to ten in the evening when Fielden was closing the meeting. It was raining heavily and only about 200 people remained in the square. Suddenly a police column of 180 men, headed by Bonfield, moved in and ordered the people to disperse immediately. Fielden protested “we are peaceable”.  At this moment a bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police. It killed one, fatally wounded six more and injured about seventy others. The police opened fire on the spectators. How many were wounded or killed by the police bullets was never exactly ascertained.

A reign of terror swept over Chicago. The press and the pulpit called for revenge, insisting the bomb was the work of socialists and anarchists. Meeting halls, union offices, printing works and private homes were raided.

All known socialists and anarchists were rounded up. Even many individuals ignorant of the meaning of socialism and anarchism were arrested and tortured. “Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards” was the public statement of Julius Grinnell, the state’s attorney.

What followed was a famously sham trial that the Governor later, declaring the anarchists, innocent of the charges. described as based on: “hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge”.  Of the eight anarchist workers tried, 4 were judicially murdered while a 5th took his own life.   When Spies himself addressed the court after he had been sentenced to die, he was confident that this conspiracy would not succeed:

“If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labour movement… the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil in misery and want, expect salvation – if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread on a spark, but there and there, behind you – and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out”.

From then on May Day demonstrations spread worldwide to commemorate the “Chicago Martyrs”, until the international labour organisations adopted it across the globe in 1889.

It has internationally become a day when workers express their solidarity and the power on the street. Governments have always feared it and many have tried to cancel or change it – American capitalism introduced Labour Day in October to replace it, Thatcher in the UK abolished it in the early 80s replacing it with the May bank holiday.  It continues to mobilise across the world.

There is no new lesson to learn from this today.  The lesson remains the same. Capitalism and its relentless assault on workers continue to this day as it did then, with austerity, violence and war.  The villainous class remains in power, our struggle against it, to overthrow it, towards emancipation, continues.

Walk around Bradford City Centre

Free Food Distibuted

Stalls after at the 1 in 12 Club

Around 40 people took part in this years Bradford May Day Celebration with more turning up later for the stalls and open mic afternoon at the 1 in 12 Club.

A great start and something to build on.

30^th April – pre May Day event, Bradford @ 1 in 12 Club

13^th May – Banners Held High, Wakefield @ City Centre

27^th May – Red and Black Clydesdale, Glasgow

12^th August – Hull Radical Bookfair, Hull @ Danish Church

2^nd September – Bradford Anarchist Bookfair, Bradford @ 1 in 12 Club

4^th November – Manchester & Salford Bookfair, Manchester @ People’s History Museum

https://www.facebook.com/events/1646012879173017/

WE will be among a select few stalls along with Pirate Press and Yorkshire CND with 1-2 more TBC.