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!
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 21st 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.
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.
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.
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.
AnarCom Network 