Government has two key jobs to deliver on, ‘bread and circuses. Keeping people fed and distracted is essential to its survival. We know it is in crisis when the circus takes place in the seat of power and the bakery shuts. Hunger and chaos are the death knells of dictatorship.
With the end of preoccupation caused by the demise of Queen Liz and Prime Minister Liz, the government is turning all guns blazing on us. If it can’t deliver, it has to crush.
This will present us as workers with the greatest challenge of the current wave of strikes. As union leaders pause momentum, calling truces for dead monarchs and promises of talks, the government is not preparing to pull its punches. Instead they are training the army to strike-break while escalating legislation to sack and even criminalise strikers.
The government has already got away with criminalising environmental direct action and curbing protest, preparing the ground and precedent to face down the strikers. They are pressuring rail and postal bosses not to make deals that the unions can claim as victories.
The press is already on side. The Times declared “there is no more urgent challenge than to head off the wave of strikes that threaten to cripple large swathes of the public and private sector.” With the Sun revealing plans for. “..new emergency powers to break a winter of strikes”, looking at “..more options to disrupt unions’ co-ordinated bids to paralyse Britain.” This includes amending legislation going through Parliament “…to ensure a minimum level of service on strike days in key industries, such as rail ….making it easier for bosses to replace strikers.”
So far, 500,000 workers have beaten the strike ballot thresholds. With nurses and ambulance staff walking our later this month to join dockers, transport workers, baggage handlers, university staff, and communication workers amongst others, barely a day in December will be strike free.
Whilst public support is high – strikers are the public too – government plans will demand new resolve and new tactics. Apart from the traditional reluctance of the organised Trade Union movement to put their necks on the line by breaking the law and risking their position and finance, union officials are already being targeted. Royal Mail claims this week that 90 CWU reps are now facing serious allegations that have led to suspensions and reports to the police.
Many actions and walkouts are already being coordinated across sectors but this ‘generalisation’ of strike activity in itself may also become a target of legislation. Because it is effective! What should be our response to this and other government threats and attacks? Do it anyway! The TUC and Labour establishment will oppose this, but so far, the staggered ungeneralised walk outs risk bleeding worker’s morale and finances by a thousand cuts.
Negotiations alone, if at all, whatever union leaders say, will not bring victory. Where effective defeat sold as a win may happen, compromise by compromise, it will be at the expense of solidarity and other workers demanding what is theirs. So far strikes have effectively been costly demonstrations of protest. They must step up to resistance. Across sectors and communities, risking the law and demanding change through direct action, against union bureaucracy if necessary.
If the glove is off the fist – let’s step up to meet the challenge – direct action not protest! As the anarchist initiator of the Wall Street Occupation, David Graeber put it: “Protest is like begging the powers that be to dig a well. Direct Action is digging the well and daring them to stop you.” If they want a war against our class, let’s escalate the class war!
What might it be like to have no pain free dentistry or flushing toilets? What is an urban ice age like with no lighting, heat or running water? How could it feel to sleep beside your dead? All the safe assumptions of the post war West are being dismantled in real-time in the war in Ukraine.
In the developed metropolitan centres of the West we have become accustomed to a concept of ‘normality’. A relationship to technology, growth and consumption sold to us as the evidence of the civilising role of commodity capitalism. A normality, that while excluding millions at its margins, beguiles most of us alongside ‘loose celebrities’; ‘coronation soaps’ and ‘who doesn’t want to be a pauper’ quiz shows.
For most Europeans and North Americans at least, this has been presented not just as inevitable, but the promise to all societies seeking development and progress.
For the global majority, millions of people in the deliberately underdeveloped post-colonial world, reality has demanded a bloody price for this fantastical lie since WW2. Western postwar peace and prosperity has been maintained by proxy wars across the globe. From Korea to Vietnam, the Great African War of the late 90’s to Iraq and Syria.
Its wealth underwritten through increasing exploitation of predominantly Asian labour and environmental degradation. The un-sustainability of this has been writ large since the financial collapse of 2008 and the rollback of globalisation. The short-lived post-Cold War consensus died with it.
We had been led to believe the the horrors of the Yugoslav wars with the destruction of Vukovar and the Srebrenica massacre were an aberration born out of the collapse of the West’s rival bloc. The defeat of the Arab Spring with its impact on migration and the now hot war on the border of the EU shows it to have been business as usual but getting closer to home. Capitalism’s bloody fault line is ablaze.
The deliberate destruction of the technological infrastructure of a modern European economy is an abyss the we are staring into. While Ukrainian workers face an increasingly perilous winter of suffering and militarisation, conscripted Russian workers taken from the poorest sections of society, untrained and ill equipped, are thrown into Putin’s meat grinder “….in human waves..”, with elite forces at their backs to shoot them should they retreat according to opposition sources.
As capitalist barbarism is increasingly unmasked at home, we are told to do our bit by getting hungrier, colder, poorer and closer to Armageddon. Every act of resistance we take, every strike, occupation and refusal to participate in the great lie is a blow against the war and it’s slaughter. Every demand, every act of solidarity, every gain is a blow for peace.
Resistance to their wars is our only hope of survival, and our daily struggle to survive is our class war. The Class War is the peace movement to end all wars. We must do our bit, resist, strike, no war but the class war!
In Gordon Brown’s last budget just before the 2008 financial crash, he declared that the state had effectively resolved the instability of capitalism promising “we will never return to the old boom and bust”.
Since then we have seen a banking collapse, 10 years of austerity, a flight from Europe, a pandemic, a war, a government inflicted fiscal catastrophe, a return to austerity and the promise of the longest recession in our history. All against the backdrop of mounting climate emergency.
Far from being resolved, capitalist crisis and the depth of their cycles are intensifying. The government tells the truth on one thing, it’s not just Britain. Capitalism’s crisis is global and it’s war against us all intensifies in equal measure.
The latest emergency budget presents a bill of £50 billion in cuts and tax hikes to workers and the poor already facing a 10% real term cut in living standards due to supply-driven inflation. This sum equals the combined war profits of UK gas and oil producers for this year leaving no doubt of the political and class nature of this choice.
That this is a war against our class, against all of us, is more evident day by day to people struggling to survive. 500,000 workers are actively in dispute or on strike at the moment with many more actions pending, not least amongst nurses and elsewhere in the NHS, the U.K.’s largest employer.
The need for resistance is clear but the need for planning and tactics clearer. Unless we link our demands, be they wages, conditions, housing or bills, social care, environment or benefits, we will be pulled apart and defeated piecemeal. Solidarity, unity and coordination are everything.
The slogan of the ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign that “It’s time to turn anger into action” will be pissing in the wind if we abandon our own struggles at the first offer of talks as the RMT decided to do without consulting its members. The role of such truces is to break momentum and spirit.
If the RMT cave in now, it says ‘stuff you’ to the other transport workers, posties, nurses. If the bosses pull the rug, they risk ‘crying wolf’ when they call their members out again. This is why union leaderships and the Labour establishment TUC are a real and present danger to their rank and file members.
Strikers, activists and supporters should begin grassroots networking to develop alternative cooperation and decision centres away from union structural leadership to ensure solidarity is maintained and fragmentation avoided. Where possible, electing delegated liaison committees or councils for coordination and mutual support to bypass bureaucratic maneuvering.
It is clear that the Loyal Opposition Labour Party offers nothing but betrayal and commitment to more austerity. Or worse, plain anti-working-class racism to divide and defeat the threat of class struggle to Labour’s pretensions. Starmer say’s “…we’re recruiting too many people from overseas into…the health service.’ That’s why you won’t see him on a picket line then!
But it’s not about the Tories or Labour, it’s their rich greedy puppet master boss-class capitalists, managing their class war on the social, economic and military fronts across the globe.
Likewise, it’s not about transport workers, nurses, renters or migrants, but about us all. As an Albanian woman recently put it “They say there’s not war here, but there’s a big war. The economy is weak and prices are too high…we cannot live.”.
An entire trade union movement in a European country is now facing extinction as courts declare unions to be “extremist” or “Western agents” — simply for doing what unions do.
That is the situation today in Belarus. A national trade union centre and major unions have been made illegal. Union leaders are in jail facing long prison terms. The regime has unleashed defamation campaigns targeting unions and their allies. Pressure on the regime in Belarus is intensifying. We join them in demanding the immediate release of all the jailed activists and the restoration of independent, democratic trade unions in the country.
Marlboro workers continue protests at union busting factory in Turkey:
Workers at the Philip Morris factory in Izmir, Turkey, are paid less than the poverty threshold — despite the company earning massive profits. The workers’ incomes are dwindling as a result of the country’s economic turmoil. Furthermore, there is discrimination between permanent and subcontracted workers, though they perform the same tasks and use the same machines.
Recently, almost all the workers joined the union — but the company then sacked 124 of them in a brazen attempt at union-busting. While the workers conduct daily protests in front of the factory, the company refuses to negotiate.
1. – Can we have a brief history of the Kate Sharpley Library?
A: The Kate Sharpley Library was established in 1979 by comrades connected with 121 Bookshop in Brixton. Originally it covered a broad range of subjects of interest to anarchists. After it moved out of London in 1992 the focus changed to be a collection of material by and about the anarchist movement. In 1999 the physical library moved to California, but with the same focus on preserving anarchist history and the stories of the people who made the movement.
2. – As with other archives, we share a passion for collecting and preserving past printed anarchist material. With (predominantly) instant online reading these days… are the days of physical literature numbered?
A: We are constantly getting newspapers/pamphlets/leaflets etc. that have been recently produced. These are coming from across the world and seem to me to evidence that anarchists are not moving to a (purely) digital movement but are staying loyal to printed matter and physical objects.
3. – I’ve seen previous online comments from some who say that now the KSL is mainly based in California, with much of the UK anarchist archive based there too, then why donate material (or even support) when such aforementioned literature ‘should be available/ accessible in the UK’ What do KSL say?
A: If people don’t want to donate that is fine. It is their material and they have every right to decide where it goes. I think/hope that scanning material which is available to all may appease some people’s worries. We’re very grateful to everyone who does support us, in particular the Friends of the KSL who have set up regular donations.
4. – There was discussion quite some time ago of making the KSL archive available online somehow, or a listing of what it holds, is this still planned?
A: I am not certain that we would need to scan our whole collection. Some of what we have is replicated online by other groups/libraries/archives etc. To scan what is already available wouldn’t serve much purpose. What we do scan, more often than not, can’t be found anywhere on the web and we see that as being a service that helps people. We could certainly do much more: papers like Iconoclast, Rational Review, The Syndicalist etc. etc. as well as historic personal correspondence certainly could do with being put on line. We could also, we sense, supplement what is already available. For example, we have a lot of 1940s Anarchist Federation correspondence that could supplement the Syndicalist Workers Federation material up at The Sparrows Nest; or a collection of Freedom Press leaflets from 1912 onwards that might be better placed on the Freedom Press website. That needs talking about with them and others, of course. Sometimes seeing scanned material sitting in isolation from any context doesn’t really help! We do have a catalogue and we are a little embarrassed by our earlier entries in it. To be fair to us we were a lot less experienced and far too casual with it in those long ago days. We want the catalogue to be an educational tool with as much detail as we can add for each item. We also want it on line.
5. – You have moved from producing regular pamphlets to (in conjunction with AK Press) releasing some great books. What forthcoming titles are planned? any future pamphlets?
A: Our next publication with AK is Agitated by Joni D., a translation of a great work on the Spanish Autonomous groups during the 1970s. Readable and thoughtful it adds to our knowledge as well as expanding our understanding of anarchism. We have a project underway on the writings of Camillo Berneri and one or two other topics and we are always on the lookout for interesting material that can be translated into English. We may also publish more on-line such as our work on the 1945 split in British-anarchism, http://katesharpleylibrary.pbworks.com/w/page/139511268/The%201945%20split%20in%20British%20anarchism which makes available scans of contemporary documents and newspapers which people may find useful.
6. – We have previously talked about our ‘encroaching old age’ and lack of ‘younger comrades’ eager to ‘take over the reins of running an archive’ what can be done to encourage the next generation to realise the importance of ‘dusty old anarchist papers’?
A: There are young people who are interested in the KSL. They’re a bit like ourselves in the beginning: we were excited by the content and not so much by the means of conserving and protecting the material. And that still is very common. In the past students writing on anarchist history have helped us. That said, we are all volunteers and we understand that the problem has been maintaining the ability to regularly work with us, either on site or remotely. As we all know the throughput within anarchism is a distinct phenomenon and we suffer as much as anyone.
7. – With the last question in mind, what projects have the KSL planned, and what is the future for the KSL itself?
A: As outlined above, we do have lots of plans. As an ageing affinity group we are looking to add younger people and with ideas. Covid affected our work quite badly – especially in terms of people being able to work in the archive. Much of what we do isn’t necessarily public facing. It’s the ordering and cataloging of material together with constant work on the conservation of old newspapers, pamphlets and leaflets etc. We are still working on a sizeable backlog. We have mentioned plans for scanning and working on the catalogue for putting on line above. There is always the Bulletin which takes time to put together as well as individual bits of writing Collective members might want to do. Never mind the regular search for publications and the constant work on those we think are good! Please bear in mind that we are a small affinity group some of whom have full time jobs. Consequently, we are wary of promising what, in the end, we can’t deliver. The KSL plans to be here for a long, long time and as people can see from our replies there’s a lot for us to do. The public facing projects we will be working on will need some prioritizing. Some of these plans may change.
8. – Thank you for answering. Is there anything you would like to add / say?
A: If people want to know more about the KSL or explore what we have already put online, our website is www.katesharpleylibrary.net
The issue of migration and immigration has deliberately been with us for a considerable time, the climate around it getting evermore hysterical. There are currently around 37,000 asylum seekers in hotels in Britain and we are led to believe that there’s a so called ‘problem’ of ‘unprecedented migration’ leading to the so called ‘solutions’ to get evermore extreme.
This has even resulted in an attempted terrorist attack by a fascist individual on a migrant processing centre and it is possible that asylum seekers will be targeted further and the possibility of hotels being a focus of protest etc by the far right. The Home Secretary Suella Braverman has used the word ‘invasion’ and flown to Manston in a Chinook helicopter, which has fascistic connotations in itself.
Of course, this is a distraction and diversion by the ruling class as its always been. This originates from the bourgeois media which has shifted further to the right over the years and the ‘issue’ has sidelined austerity from view and provided a useful scapegoat for the predicament of millions of ordinary working class people in Britain prior to the upcoming announcement of further misery related to the impending continuation of cuts, increasing inflation, low wages and crap work conditions, the housing crisis and rising energy bills accompanied by increased authoritarianism, including the attack on the right to protest and go on strike.
The capitalist class controls the agenda with their media, education system etc and has managed to persistently convince a large section of ordinary people that the cause of their problems is those from overseas, rather than the very people who’ve sold them this lie. The ruling class divide, rule and fool – after all the entire society is set up by and for them, conditioning working class people from the cradle to the grave in various ways.
There are those who are racist and xenophobic but many people simply know not what they do, its not that they’re ‘thick and horrible’ (as asserted by the liberal left) but simply that the way they think and behave is cleverly manipulated, much money, time and work being put into that endeavour. They’ve simply not known another way and, in a sense, we can’t expect them to be any other way in this society where the parameters of debate are tightly controlled along with the prevalence of misinformation.
The game is rigged every which way and people will think and feel a certain way based on irrationalities that this society and those who control it propagate and strengthen. To unsuspecting people, it makes sense that what the newspapers and news channels are telling them is true, whether they be more respected sources or more shoddy and unorthodox ones. The false ‘reasons’ are readily provided for the very real nightmare of austerity and class inequality and injustice, the dire situation that working class people find themselves in.
The issue is distorted when in reality there is only really asylum applications, Britain being awful at actually accepting asylum seekers despite what we’re expected to believe, especially compared to other countries, something that is not even acknowledged.
‘Unprecedented migration’ is a myth, especially when we consider that according to the latest figures we are merely 16th on the list of countries with a population born overseas, the country at the top of that list being Luxembourg, and with no alarming ‘problems’ to speak of.
Its also important to remember that immigrants and refugees who leave the country are never mentioned, only those who have entered, a vital piece of information to leave out, as well as a falling birth rate and annual deaths which debunks all the stuff about ‘over-population’.
And the anti-overseas sentiment is not just a Tory or even right-wing phenomena really. The Labour Party, including the left of that party have a dire track record here.
Many are still unaware that the Atlee government favoured Eastern European Nazi collaborators and war criminals post-war to Jewish refugees and those from the British commonwealth and China who contributed to the war effort, and that’s just one anomalous example among many throughout the history of the Labour Party as well as their participation in British colonialism and imperialism, which includes the left of the party.
The Blair and Brown years also saw the harsh scapegoating of and cracking down on immigrants and asylum seekers, including the policies of Jack Straw as Home Secretary and of course there was the Iraq War and the rest of the War of Terror which created refugees and demonised and dehumanized people from the middle east.
In more recent years there’s been the fact of anti-immigration sold as Labour Party merchandise with the ‘Controls on Immigration’ mugs (with Ed Miliband as leader). Jeremy Corbyn also used the issue of EU immigration in his general election campaign when he was leader.
And of late Keir Starmer has strived to compete with the tory vote by stating that he thinks that ‘too many of the NHS staff are from overseas’. This is something that Labour Party members and supporters have even defended and tried to make excuses for. It appears that with Starmer in charge Labour front benchers won’t be allowed support striking nurses or join them on the picket lines, but are allowed to claim that “there’s too many foreigners in the health service.” Another example of the similarity between the government and the ‘opposition’ as the rightwards drift continues.
Another missing part of the puzzle when it comes to immigration and asylum is of course the fact that our ruling class has meddled in affairs overseas with wars, bombing raids, corporate colonialism and relations with certain countries abroad, often propping up repressive regimes and dictators. Then there’s the contribution of western capitalism to worsening the climate crisis which in turn creates refugees.
This country is also favoured by immigrants and asylum seekers because it is seen as a place that is freer than where they’re from, something promoted by this country and in contrast to the dire tyranny experienced by asylum seekers etc. Asylum seekers etc also come here because they feel a common bond with this country, already speak English or have family here already and many of the reasons they come here are normal, legitimate reasons which have been the cause of migration since the dawn of humanity. In fact, all populations migrated from somewhere else at some point.
The idea of a supposed ‘immorality’ is also employed here when it comes to immigrants and asylum seekers and its simply misplaced. We’re supposed to automatically think of asylum seekers as ‘dodgy people’ when this is not the case. But myths abound with this issue and emotions played on. Most people who fear asylum seekers don’t know any and have never been close to an asylum seeker, instead the societal conditioning from the bourgeoise is in play. It’s no coincidence that where there is most anti-migrant sentiment there are a low quantity of migrants and immigrants etc.
It’s also a common misconception that asylum seekers are here to ‘sponge off’ this country whereas the truth is that there are plenty able to do professional jobs and desire to contribute to society but are prevented and stifled from doing so when they get here and who will not be allowed to stay, many obstacles and problems being shoved in front of them before they are rejected. But the idea that we ‘give people a fair chance’ has always been false and that also applies to those poor people born here.
It’s also taken for granted in general in capitalist society that people simply use up resources whereas people actually are a resource that make a great contribution to society, both as individuals and as communities and this applies to both people born here and immigrants and asylum seekers. Viewing people as simply units that use up resources has disastrous historical results that we desperately need to move on from, as with much of this, which is reactionary and holds us back by design for the interests of the ruling class. The ‘useless eaters’ mentality is anti-human and mean-spirited.
It is also taken for granted that there is a so-called ‘carrying capacity’ for people entering a country and that if ‘too many’ people are allowed in there ‘will be destabilisation’. But again, this is an assumed negative view that dismisses the fact that large numbers have been accepted by some countries in certain circumstances (Afghan refugees being taken in by Iran, the same thing happening with Ukrainians and Poland and Syrians to Germany). If the will is there it can go well and if its not then the alternative will be much worse and will have a severe human cost. The so called ‘destabilisation’ is never specified either and is kept deliberately mysterious.
At the end of the day all these misconceptions are being pushed by the ruling class and their media and other institutions and this is because it’s the ruling class that are the parasites who are to blame for our woes. It is they who have the control over our society, who have so much of the space (land and property) and ownership rights. It is they who the whole system is set up for and it is run in their interests, by them. They dictate how the show is run and things like the use of land, which ensures that working class people (whether migrant or not) are crammed into towns and cities like we are. It is they who are hoarding all the wealth and resources and maintaining class and wealth inequality, it is they with the sickening amount of class privilege at our expense and at the expense of the environment and the climate.
All you need to do is compare your own situation and your own life to that of someone like Jacob Rees-Mogg, King Charles or Rishi Sunak and you are getting to the root of why the scaremongering and scapegoating of immigrants and asylum seekers is promoted and enacted. Both the people born here and overseas are being used, exploited, conned, robbed and put at a disadvantage by the rich people in the ruling class who are running off with the power and resources while the planet burns up and the situation gets increasingly dire for us.
And at the end of the day the bourgeoisie is international and we must acknowledge and remember that the proletariat, dispossessed and oppressed are also international and we have a shared humanity as part of an international class of people with shared interests. We have more in common than we do with the international ruling class, we share more in our situation and life experiences with each other than with them and it is only in their interests that we are divided and ruled and unnaturally split up and pitted against each other by borders into nation states. At the very least what we need is a return to a spirit of cooperation, hospitality and mutual endeavour and moving away from the inhuman barbarity that we are now left with and being goaded and engineered into by the ruling class.
And it is at the ruling class where our blame and anger should be aimed at, not at each other, whether born in this part of the world or elsewhere. We need to unite as a class against our class enemy, and the truth is that the interests of our class enemy is what the nation is set up for which is why we should be thinking in an international way – the last thing the ruling class want us to do, hence the divide and rule distraction of migration/immigration.
Every Iranian knows that in 1988 the Islamic Republic murdered up to 30,000 political prisoners seen as the ‘enemy within’ during its war with Saddam Hussain’s Iraq. Many had been in detention since the early days of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
So horrific was the violent abuse wrought that even Ayatollah Komeini’s deputy, Ayatollah Montazeri, wrote to him protesting:
“A large number of prisoners have been killed under torture by interrogators … in some prisons of the Islamic Republic young girls are being raped … As a result of unruly torture, many prisoners have become deaf or paralyzed or afflicted with chronic diseases.”
The current Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, was a principal member of the “Judges of Death” committee who decided what fate would befall whom. Every Iranian knows this too. Ruthless brutality is the rock that every wave of resistance has broken on – until now.
The current wave of unrest has been growing and spreading since the police murder of 22 year old Mahsa(Jina) Amini on September 16th. So far, despite 300 deaths, 14,000 arrests and 1,000 already charged with capital offences, rather than break, the wave has flooded from Iranian Kurdistan in the west to Baluchistan in the east, uniting the ethnic diversity of Iran’s youth besieging its urban centre’s with creative rebellious protests.
The spontaneously unifying momentum of events presents a radically different challenge to the dictatorship than it has faced before. Several spells have already been broken.
The first is cultural racism. Ethnically diverse Iran has effectively been a ‘greater Persia’ (first language Farsi speakers are just over 50% of the population). It’s repressive domination of minorities has been through a ‘strategy of tension’ provoking revolt to harness xenophobic Persian nationalism.
Now Kurds, Awaz Arabs, Baluchis and Azeris chant in solidarity with each other as well as Farsi speakers, sharing the unifying slogans of “Death to the Dictator” (Ayatollah Khamenei), and “Woman, Life, Freedom!” originating in the Kurdish resistance in Turkey and Rojava.
The second is the ‘Islamic’ element of the republic. Mahsa Amini was killed by a Guardian Patrol (morality police) for failing to cover her hair correctly with the hijab. These patrols have largely been driven off the streets as thousands of women discard their hijabs and even cut their hair – an Islamic symbol of their immodesty – in public. This is an uncompromising refusal of authority as the hijab is one of the 3 founding pillars of the Islamic Republic.
The potency of this was first seen in the anti-austerity riots of 2017 when Vida Movahed raised herself up to wave her headscarf flag-like from a stick. This protest act, not seen since the first days of the hijab’s imposition in ‘79, has continued on and off, primarily online until now, stepping boldly out into 3D.
65% Iranians are young, still more have no living memory of the Shahs regime or the revolution and protesters show no sign of seeking concessions or compromise.
The regime had that opportunity in 2009 when the election offered the choice between Ayatollah-u-so and Mullah lite. A cosmetic tinkering at the edges of power seeking some institutional rebalancing. The Dictator chose repression revealing an ideological edifice as seemingly immovable as fascism or Stalinism.
The breaking point was the ending of state subsidies on fuel in winter 2019/20 and the 1500 deaths in the suppression of dissent. Episodic eruptions of protest and violence have continued ever since, over water shortages; pay and conditions in the oil industry, in the regions and over inflation.
All or nothing now appears the most unifying position against the regime in its history. Students have occupied and genders mixing, school students have driven state propagandists off their grounds and industrial unrest is spreading with strikes at several oil refineries in October. The slogans assert themselves in all of Iran’s languages and dialects: Death to the Dictator, Woman, Life, Freedom!
This is more than just challenge to the centrality to Islam of the subjugation of women, but a de facto challenge to its culture of patriarchy. A central feature of the cellular organisation of capitalist reproductive social relations. Iranian women are transcending feminism to the root of class power.
As the de facto homo-hating Tories cement their ‘new’ regime firmly on the right, the Foreign Minister responsible for the safety of UK citizens abroad, James Cleverly, tells LGBTQI+ football fans planning to go to the World Cup fiasco in the Emirati statelet of Qatar to show “a little bit of flex and compromise”
He went on to add that “These are Muslim countries (sic), they have a very different cultural starting point for us. I think it’s important when you’re a visitor to a country that you respect the culture of your host nation.” One wonders what advice he would have found acceptable to give black citizens visiting apartheid South Africa.
This follows the arrest of redoubtable human rights and queer activist Peter Tatchell there for protesting outside the National Museum of Qatar with a placard bearing “Qatar arrests, jails & subjects LGBTs to ‘conversion’ #QatarAntiGay.”
LGBT organisations engaging with FIFA have said “progress has been slow” in ensuring the safety of LGBT fans – and that reassurances from Qatar – where the death penalty applies – had “not been adequate”.
Players wanting to protest the Islamic state’s ‘soccer washing’ of its appalling rights record (6,500 largely migrant workers died in this vanity project), are instructed by FIFA that players “..must not have any political, religious or personal slogans, statements or images”.
The loyal opposition Labour Party takes the high ground of refusing attendance, while Labour in power in the form of Wale’s First Minister Mark Drakeford, will still attend to support his national team.
The collaboration of establishment elites left and right with international sporting institutions to promote their regional powerhouse over queer lives is a collusion in LGBTQI hate crimes that screams ‘Queer lives don’t matter’.
The indulgence in culture wars in the west is a luxury in a region which has a perverse history of devising ways of murdering sexual and gender identity minorities in the name of faith tradition: beheadings in Saudi; throwing off buildings under Islamic State; being crushed under bulldozed walls in Iran, stoning or just mob murder with impunity like the spate of killings by rectal filling with cement in Iraq.
Appeasing the West means resorting more to hanging, lashing and hard labour. Or, more modernly in Qatar now, a attested to by Tatchell, forced ‘conversion’
The UK’s ‘Queertar’ toleration becomes less hypocritical when one judges its own record and refusal to protect trans people at home from subjection to the brutal abuse of conversion.
Conversion Therapy neither converts nor is it therapeutic. It is both a misnomer and a red herring. Condemned by all professional bodies of medical and psychotherapeutic practice as dangerous and unethical, it is not supportive help in changing your mind.
It is directional reversing of where your instincts and insight are taking you. Conversion therapy is no more a therapy than the whip and the branding Iron are gentle reminders of where a slave lives!
Qatar will be a festival of the elites chumming it up on a mass grave of migrant workers, queers and dissidents. We can hardly be surprised that elite soccer has chosen not to boycott it.
We do however call foul, accusing those in power at home and abroad of the continuing abuse of our class and communities in all their forms.
Labour, Tory, Liberal, Green or nationalist, whatever party is in charge, the fundamentals of the system are the same.
Whether we have the present electoral system, proportional representation, or whether many people vote or don’t vote, capitalism is the driving force for state policy. ANY vote is a vote for capitalism.
As working-class people, we are exploited whether we can take part in ‘free’ elections or live under an authoritarian regime. National and international capital continue to control the wealth that we create, and protect it through the police, legal system, and military.
Non-voters are told that, “If you don’t vote you have no right to complain”, but voting under these circumstances is just pretending that the system we have is credible, that voting gives us power. If that was true, the working class, the class that forms the vast majority of the population, would by now be living in comfortable material conditions, and have the functionaries of the state very clearly acting on our instructions to the benefit of all. This is obviously not the case though – we have next to no say in the decisions that get taken by the people we elect.
The system in the UK is called ‘representative democracy’, yet when have the interests of the working class ever been truly represented? Our standard of living has been consistently eroded for many decades under both the Tories and Labour. This is because the role of government is NOT to represent the interests of the people, but to represent the interests of capital. Whatever way you vote, you are voting for capitalism, you are voting to be exploited, and you are voting to be ruled over, bossed around and bullied by various institutions that can control you with violence or the threat of violence. When we vote we sell out our birthright to be free individuals that fully benefit from our own labour and our collaboration with other workers. This makes no sense and more and more people are beginning to realise it.
Ok, so what can we do instead of this impotent act of submission? Well, if we don’t want others to have power over us, then we shouldn’t willingly put our power in someone else’s hands! History tells us that those we give power to will betray us and abuse that power. Organising horizontally, using some form of direct democracy, where everyone affected by a decision gets a say in that decision, while not perfect, is infinitely more fair and practical than handing over decision making to individuals and institutions who’s class interests are absolutely opposed to our own. So…
DON’T VOTE, ORGANISE!!!
We should organise with our neighbours, workmates, other people we have shared interests with, and other working-class people who are subject to particular modes of oppression because of their identity, such as racism, homophobia, transphobia etc. We are the experts on what we need, and on the best way to run things for the common good. We can use direct action to achieve this…
Direct action is where we individually or collectively (usually collectively) solve a problem without looking to someone else to solve it for us. By this we mean, not just protesting and asking for change, but things like occupying, sabotaging, working to rule, refusing to pay their prices or their rent, and striking when WE decide if it’s time to strike, not when union bureaucrats and the state give us permission to. Plus of course, creating our own, horizontally organised groups and organisations, affinity groups, mutual aid groups and unofficial unions.
For example, when workers aren’t paid the wages owed them, rather than asking the government to give us better legal protection, we take action to force employers to pay. Such things have been achieved with only a few dozen people. Renters unions have had many successes such as getting repairs done and refusing to pay rent increases, sometimes with only a handful of people.
Imagine the power we could wield in our workplaces and our communities if thousands of us decided to refuse to be abused, oppressed and exploited any longer, and began to say NO!!!
Of course, in reality, people are understandably afraid of taking the state on. But direct action doesn’t have to mean an all-out fight to defeat capitalism in one go, but by confronting the system directly at any point we can start to take control. In fact, all the good things we think of as having been created by the state – free healthcare, free education, health & safety laws to protect us at work, housing regulations, sick pay, unemployment benefits, pensions – came about historically to put an end to organised campaigns of collective direct action that threatened their power. Mostly we do this collectively – where we would fail as individuals, together we can win. That doesn’t mean that individuals can never act on their own – sometimes an individual can take an action that can inspire thousands!
It’s time for us to stand up as individuals and as communities, and take our destinies into our own hands. It’s time to reject absolutely the legitimacy of the state and any top-down institutions that say they will represent our interests, such as political parties both large and small.
We, as a class, already produce everything required for our material needs. We, as a class, know very well how to operate and take advantage of the technology we already have, and how to innovate to create even greater technologies. The ruling class, and their illogical, dysfunctional capitalist system just obstruct optimal production of goods and services and prevent a fair, functional and practical distribution of the wealth we create.
This is now in plain sight and it’s time for us to act! It’s inevitable this will sometimes lead to confrontation on the streets and elsewhere. This can be scary but ultimately, we have to stand up for ourselves and our class by whatever means are necessary, otherwise we will continue to be ground into the dirt with increasing austerity, increasing destruction of our communities by local government and their policies of social cleansing, and through increasing authoritarianism and state violence. We can lay down and let it happen, or we can come together, realise our power, and FIGHT BACK!
AnarCom Network 