We are saddened to see disturbances that began in Leicester, seemingly made worse with the influence of Hindu nationalists and to then be exploited by the Islamic far right and which the so-called ‘indigenous’ far right are very happy with. The far right, whether Hindu, Muslim, western or whatever is cancer and cannot truly help us or solve our problems, which are mainly caused by this increasingly dystopian capitalist society and the class system and state that comes with it.
Leicester has for a long time been known for its good cross community relations, but now the current situation is to be exploited nefariously by the far right in all its manifestations and has spread. The only war that should be waged is the class war, not religious, sectarian or racist/xenophobic war, which can only divide and divert working class anger and action into a counter-productive, self-defeating dead end of nationalism.
The working class of any so-called ‘race’, nationality or belief has more in common with each other really than it does with those in the international ruling class, whose interests are served by nationalism, sectarianism, religion and conservativism of all types. Class war is ever more crucial today when we see the developments that have occurred and are happening in this country and around the world and we the working class should unite, provide solidarity to each other no matter our differences and fight together against the ruling class and their increasingly repressive and barbaric capitalist system that ultimately has nothing real to offer us. We are diverted from this at our peril.
The collapse of the Russian army’s northeastern front in Ukraine has weakened the Russian centre, creating an exploitable power vacuum in what Putin calls the ‘near abroad’. The fallout of the proxy superpower conflict is moving east. Putin’s post Soviet era security club, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) is either turning in on itself or on Russia.
In the Caucasus, the frozen conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan which has already cost 7,000 lives since 2020, has erupted again as a direct result of the invasion of Ukraine. Workers on both sides are being killed as global capital struggles at the edges of Russian decline. Azerbaijan, emboldened by the weakening of the Russian peace keeping force to shore up its Ukrainian front, and it’s new found favour with the West following a lucrative gas supply contract with the EU, is testing the limits of its master’s voice. Both sides have seen Russia’s weakness in their failure to invoke collective security guarantees under the CSTO, and it is Europe that is stepping in to fill the gap.
The conflict thaw continues in central Asia between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, both with Russian military bases. Tajiks are being sacrificed in their states aggression to secure a dynastic succession to power, bringing further instability to China’s Uyghur border state of Xinjiang. Russia’s impotence is China’s opportunity as Putin discovers that his new “partnership with no limits” is a concept with distinctly Chinese characteristics.
The two leaders met on the sidelines of the Samarkand ‘Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’ summit in Uzbekistan 14th-16th September. Putin presents this as a global shift to the East against the “empire of lies” as he recently called the West. Unfortunately for Russia it is actually a $35 billion funded takeover bid of the region by Chinese capital as part of its ‘Belt and Road’ initiative.
For all the talk China has offered little in practical terms for Putin other than getting his gas at knock down prices. In reality China is biding its time, waiting to catch a failing Russia like a ripe fruit.
If proof were needed, it lies in Kazakhstan. Despite Putin sending troops in in January to prop up the regime in the face of widespread unrest, it too is testing the limits of Russian power. Having vowed not to break western sanctions nor recognise the puppet Ukrainian statelets, Moscow has questioned its sovereignty too. Putin’s henchman though, Dmitry Medvedev, had to withdraw his tweet that it was an “artificial state” when China made clear who is actually in charge.
In the Kazak capital Nur-Sultan, shortly before his meeting with Putin, Xi spelt it out: “We will continue to resolutely support Kazakhstan in protecting its independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The fault line is no longer a European continental one between Russian capital and the West, but a Eurasian one over who controls Russian capital.
That Russia knows this, however reluctantly, was given away by Kremlin policy-wonk Dimitry Babich from Moscow State University in an Al Jazeera interview as the Samarkand summit ended:
“Compared to what Russia faces from the West which is total hostility, being in junior partnership with China does not seem so terrible”.
None of this is accidental nor coincidental. The US and Europe have been stirring this mix for a long time recognising that chaos in this ‘near abroad’ is a potential second front in its global power struggle.
Most of the dying in these new conflicts are conscripts and poor farmers – the workers and producers of poor countries of little interest to the West other than what they add to Russia’s destabilisation. Except fuel rich Azerbaijan and the relatively wealthy geographic giant Kazakhstan. Both of which are listening to the West’s enticements.
Events in Ukraine are far from over despite the hype. As Churchill put it once “this not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”.
The war spreading, the vested interests in the conflict are deepening, the losses of our class in capitalism’s bloody power struggle are growing exponentially. It remains the single most urgent existential threat we currently face.
‘No War but the Class War’ is no mere slogan. It is our necessary response to survive and share solidarity with our class internationally. The fight at home is the only way we can resist the slaughter unleashed in the bosses pursuit of profit here and abroad.
For workers there is no “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing” as they would have us believe. There is our class against theirs. We, the workers and producers worldwide, resisting spilling our blood for their gold.
In their last resort they would see us die in this unfolding conflict rather than thrive in the abolition of it. In response we must see that their abolition is our class obligation!
It has been revealed that the new Prime Minister Liz Truss received £100,000 as a donation for her leadership campaign from the wife of an ex-BP executive – somewhat buried in the news due to the death of Elizabeth II. In total, the amount of money her campaign received was £420,000 and apparently consisted of 21 different donations – those being the ones she declared.
The largest amount came from Fitriani Hay – the wife of James Hay, who has a luxury goods empire and is a former BP executive. She donated £100,000 to Truss. Other donations included from the Tory peer Greville Howard and Michael Spencer also donated £25,000 to Truss at the beginning of August, one week after gifting the same amount to Rishi Sunak and two weeks after doing the same for Penny Mordaunt, another failed candidate in the leadership contest. Truss also received £20,000 from Jon Moynihan, a former prominent member of the pro-Brexit Vote Leave campaign along with £10,000 donated by a smoked salmon firm run by former Brexit party MEP Lance Forman.
Another detail revealed in the release by parliament on Thursday was the £23,853 cost for Boris and Carrie Johnson’s wedding party in the summer, paid for by Anthony and Carole Bamford. The two of them run JCB who have gifted Liz Truss with £5,316 worth of transport costs at the start of August. Rishi Sunak managed to amass £449,570 for his leadership campaign.
But of course, the most significant donation here is the £100,000 from a wife of an ex-BP executive, which definitely stands out when we consider Truss allowing the energy price cap to remain so high while ordinary working-class people will struggle to get by and keep themselves warm, fed and housed this coming winter. It is also alarming for anyone who cares about the environment and the alarmingly out of control climate. Truss’ plans for fracking are also very worrying for the environmental harm that will cause, as well as the absurd cost of fracking. And of course, it seems very relevant that Truss used to work for Shell, which is of course why she is so against taxing the enormous profits of the energy companies. But yet again this is another blatant example of the us and them problem built into this capitalist system and its magic money tree for the ruling class while we have to suffer worsening precarity and fuel poverty, another clear reason why we so need to fight back against capitalism and abolish it.
Before the wheels of war have a chance to stick in the mud of Ukraine’s autumn rains, they are turning to reverse in a direction entirely contrary to Russia’s intended war aims.
Vladimir Putin’s speech on September 7th at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, indicated the potential scale of strategic defeat Russia is facing from its conflict with the West over Ukraine.
More significant than his denial that Russia had lost ‘nothing’ because of the operation, (news to the thousands of injured and the bereaved families), was his assertion that the world is now orientating economically towards the East, as the West declines.
This would be wishful thinking if Russia was to actually benefit from this. In reality it’s tantamount to an admission that Russia’s destiny now is to effectively be a vassal state of Chinese imperialism. A tarmacked petrol station of the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative.
This, accompanied by the humiliating intelligence that the Russian army is increasingly dependent on North Korean castoffs as NATO rapidly integrates the high-tech military assets of its imminent new members Sweden and Finland, couldn’t be further from the plan of February 24th.
While the world’s fuel industries enrich themselves on war profiteering and arms manufacturer’s fortunes mount with new contracts to replace equipment at home and keep the Western war effort supplied. Russia is now forced to give up its strategic initiative in eastern Ukraine. In surrendering its few key strategic gains of the last 7 months, including its supply and control base for its Donbas offensive, the city of Izyum, Russia faces further retreat or reinforcing from the south, risking the loss of Kherson before winter sets in.
The Ukrainian government is hailing a turning point – again perhaps news to the fighters and the dying – but it could in fact lead to a dramatic and frightening escalation. Russia is now under increasing pressure to change the categorisation from a ‘Special Military Operation’ to a war, it’s only constitutional route to official mobilisation and mass call up.
Too late to change events on the ground in what millionaire Zelensky describes as the most crucial 90 days ahead in Ukrainian history, but conflicts have only ever escalated from mobilisation and workers on both sides will ultimately pay an ever-higher price.
The war continues to serve the West as its ‘go to’ excuse as to why bosses’ profits must rise while workers’ wages fall in real terms, but as the Queen’s death in the UK shows, the rich will resort to any opportunity to say we are all in this together.
Here the unions and the Labour Party seem to agree with them, calling off our only effective weapon against the war abroad, which is class struggle at home.
We are told by Ukraine’s First Lady, Madame Zelensky, that we in the UK should count our blessings, as we are only paying for war in the price of fuel while Ukraine is paying the price in blood.
This “let them eat cake.” response may well come back to bite her as anger mounts when poverty, cold and shortages increase the deaths of workers and the poor in the western capitalist heartlands.
Social peace because of a dead queen will only last so long. If too long, the class struggle will rightly bite the union bosses too.
So, the queen died today!
What you gonna do?
What you gonna say?
Do you love the royalty?
Love the pomp and ceremony?
Was she your hero, someone you admired?
A good friend who never retired.
So, the queen died today!
What you gonna do?
What you gonna say?
Do you hate the royalty
Hate the pomp and ceremony.
See the poverty across the land.
Starvation and cold go hand in hand
Do see her as the rich elite
Fuck the monarchy take to the street!
So, the queen died today!
What you gonna do?
What you gonna say?
Do you care that a lady has died?
But hate the fake royalist lies.
People die every day,
it's part of life I say.
So, my question to you is this
What's so special about Liz?
So, the queen died today!
What you gonna do? What you gonna say?
What's so special about this Liz
Why do we need all this jiz.
Not allowed to criticize cos that's disrespectful!
But people starving oh that's acceptable!
So, the queen died today
I am gonna do
I am gonna say.
That the Queen is dead is hard to miss, you’d probably have to be dead yourself not to notice. More noticeable still is the 24/7 obsequious TV coverage reminiscent of what a ‘very British coup’ might look like. Slow, soft, deceitful and repetitive.
Instead of marshal music and rolling tanks, or the massed show formations of a North Korean junket (that’s coming later at the coronation), we get Vaselined soft photoshops, innocent and ancient child-like voice recordings and a complete inversion of “horrible histories”.
A monarch forced to preside over the decolonisation of a thousand years of her predecessor’s violence, welcoming (under arms, blackmail or bribery) rich and poor nation alike into her father’s new extended British family. The commonwealth of exploitation.
A pastoral symphony of unbroken harmony of oppressor and oppressed uniting in the divinely ordained body of the sovereign. The murderous queen bee of a hive dominated by her parasites. We are told of Elizabeth’s gentle and generous nature, leaving us unable to imagine her capable of doing harm.
As if she needed to. She was the apex of a thousand-year tyranny where the greedy, ambitious, patronised or paid lackeys around her took over a quarter of the globe and a third of its population.
The grandfather that brought us Amritsar, the father that brought us the Indian famine and partition, the daughter who brought us Bloody Sunday and Iraq. Every single living lackey and killer sworn to her by oath. Neither a century nor generation over that last thousand years has failed to raise a hand against this slaughter in our story of resistance which remains largely untold because the victors possess the whitewash.
Perhaps amongst the best known, still living in popular legend, the North and East Anglia against Norman Feudalism, the great Peasants Revolt in the south east of 1381 against tyranny and Poll Tax, the midlands and the east in the 15th/16th centuries against the theft of and private enclosure of common land, the radical dissenters of the English Civil War that ended one of our three Charles’s, the Luddites and loom wreckers of the 18th century, and perhaps most famously, the martyrs of Tolpuddle and Peterloo in the 19th century. Their global imperialist wars of slaughter and the defeated revolutions that opposed them dominate the next century.
Abroad, rebellion, famine and massacre are redescribed as civilisation, development and order. Only Antarctica remains unbloodied by the Realm, unless you count the near extinction of its wildlife species (and we do).
Charles deserves neither sympathy nor support, he is bent on dynastic continuation, historical sanitisation and validation of the power of capital and the state that continues to wage its relentless war of exploitation and annihilation.
The power of this might appear symbolic but it is not immaterial. It is being used at this minute as a potent and successful weapon against our class, as it’s supposed representatives, the unions, so vocal moments ago, capitulate and submit to a pause in the renewed but still nascent wave of class struggle, an armistice. In reality a submission in the face of power and its control of our history and whitewash of our story.
The tragedy is the illumination of the relationship between those who claim class leadership and the class they claim to oppose. History screams rebellion and redress, not submission and participation. The Queen is dead, it is an opportunity not a tragedy.
Our class is at war. Thousands are striking or preparing to strike. We all have a part to play, and for those of us in work, there is much we can do to show solidarity and undermine the boss class short of striking itself
Capitalist economy is a ‘war of all against all’, where we are not only robbed of the value of the produce of our labour, but subjected to a tyranny of authority that demands we all leave our humanity out of the equation.
Work can affect our families, our social networks, our belief systems, our health, our leisure, our desire for change, our communication, our frustrations. At the same time, it demands that we should not bring any of these ‘personal issues’ into the workplace.
When was the last time you had a call and your boss asked if it was personal? When was the last time you were five minutes late and got docked 15 minutes pay? Or you asked for time off because you were just knackered and they told you ‘computer say’s no’? This way of existence is not human but corporate. We are reduced from people to things. Cogs in a machine.
A key goal of revolutionary transformation for anarchist-communists, is to move from a top down, capitalist hierarchical society’s administration of people (governments, local ‘authorities’, bosses, managers, HR departments, quality assurers, compliance, key performance enforcers, police, tax inspectors, bailiffs, teachers and so on), to a horizontal, communal, egalitarian administration of ‘things’ based on common need: What to produce; how and for whom; how much, why and where. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. The big picture is the abolition of Capital: it’s state, coercion, profit, wage labour, money and exchange. But hmmmm, how do we get from here to there?
Come the revolution of course, we’ll sort it, but until then, “Off with their heads!’ might not work. The boss class have often been resistant to that. But in the same drip, drip, drip way they chip away at our souls, we can erode their power, drop by drop.
The simplest way we generally encounter their power is the clock. One way we can respond to a ‘clock on’ mentality is simply a ‘work to rule’ response. Above/below my pay grade etc. Let your organisation’s lack of capacity fall upon managerial shoulders. Every one below a certain level is feeling equally dehumanised so let that corrosion sink in.
Regularly refer to your job description. Demand training for anything new and a review of your terms and conditions. Ask all the questions you know they can’t answer and question the answers they give.
Take your time, longer than you need to slow things up. Call it thorough and responsible, or under resourced and unavoidable. Go slow and blame your tools. Other colleagues will have been doing this for years, learn from and share each other’s examples. Communication is key, share your discontent, ideas and solidarity. Offer it, seek it.
Take care of yourself first, health and mental well-being. They’ll get by – or not – without you. The graveyard is full of indispensable people. So, take sick leave when you can. Promote your mental health needs at work and make them ‘reasonably adjust’ as the law requires – it is there to defend them from liability more than to protect you. Know your workplace policies to time when, maximise impact and reduce the repercussions on you.
Make their laws work for you. Use your unique individual characteristics to get concessions and make them fearful of the legal consequences of not meeting them. Consider your health status, does it qualify as disability? Represent your real life (outside work) relationships. Are parental needs or caring responsibilities amongst them? Our class has fought for the concessions they’ve made, use them to fight for more.
Use what you have, toilet breaks, medical appointments, treatments, lunch breaks, consultation time, union meetings. Travel delays, add that extra minute, anything to take back those minutes and hours they steal from you disguised as wage (slave) labour. Be confident – let them know we have rights we have won (however limited) and push responsibility back on them.
Use your beliefs, take your faith holiday, Eid, Easter, Hanukkah, Diwali, May Day. You have the same rights in secular belief as religious. Encourage others to do the same in the spirit of celebration and diversity.
Let responsibly for your disruption and sabotage lie with them. Blame unreasonable expectations and call it what it is, bullying. Blame technology and poor management for workplace pressure and stress. Where you can, force them to resort to due process and resolution, block and delay half arsed attempts to resolve and ultimately where possible, take collective action. Strike. Picket. Bring and share your struggle in solidarity to the street and in your communities.
Solidarity beats exploitation. If work was so good, the rich would have kept it for themselves by now. Remember, they would work you until you die, liberation is for life!
It has been revealed that a firm connected to the Tory peer Michelle Mone was awarded £203 million worth of government PPE contracts during the pandemic and has dodged taxes. It has been reported that Michael Gove was approached by Lady Mone in May 2020 with an offer to supply personal protective equipment. It is under investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA) for potential fraud already.
The company in question PPE Medpro Ltd was awarded two contracts via the government’s ‘VIP Lane’. A winding up petition has been issued by HMRC, who have refused to comment further on the matter and the petition was only issued on Thursday morning.
It has already previously been reported that Mone emailed Theodore Agnew, her fellow conservative peer, on 8th May 2020, informing him that Gove had requested her to “urgently” contact him. Mone proposed supplying large quantities of face masks to the government, telling Agnew they could be sourced through “my team in Hong Kong”.
Agnew, at the time a government cabinet minister in charge of procurement, referred Mone’s offer to civil servants who processed it through the VIP “high priority lane” for politically connected people. PPE Medpro Ltd, the company that was provided with the contracts, was not incorporated until four days after Mone approached Agnew (incorporated on 12th May 2020).
The company was given its initial contract, for £80.85 million to supply 210 million face masks, a month later.
Both contracts were provided directly, without competitive tenders, under covid emergency regulations.
The surgical gowns were rejected by the DHSC which caused a dispute. The DHSC has stated that it wants to recover the money lost through a dispute resolution process. PPE Medpro has of course stated that it operated in accordance with the terms of its gowns contract and was entitled to keep the money it was paid. PPE Medpro Ltd also owes £913,019 in tax and social security due within a year. This has been revealed in the companies initial financial accounts for the year to 5th April 2021. It was claimed that the company had no assets. The company made a profit of £3.9m and was apparently owed a further £4m.
Mone has repeatedly denied being involved in PPE Medpro. Her husband is the Isle of Man-based financier Douglas Barrowman, who has also distanced himself from the company. In January this year however, the Guardian reported that leaked files appeared to indicate that Mone and Barrowman were indeed secretly involved in the PPE Medpro business. Mone’s lawyers have denied that there was any wrong doing.
Yet again it appears to be another example of how the ruling class benefit and profit from our misery and death and no doubt these particular parasites will get away with it, the system operating in their interests as it is designed to do. This is also linked to the increasingly dire situation we find ourselves in. It is why members of the ruling class such as Nadhim Zahawi are able to keep their stables heated for their horses while we and our friends and family members look set to freeze and starve this winter onwards, those of us who are not starving already that is. It explains the absurd, disgusting and never-ending advice from wealthy people for us to simply wear extra layers, buy extra kettles, eat potatoes and porridge or use a microwave while the rich remain heated and inconvenienced in their lives of privilege and luxury, including the obscenely privileged royals who leech off us in pure delight.
And no doubt it’s not just Tories and royals. Much the same is also no doubt going on regarding all other politicians such as those in the Labour Party, who fire blanket and divert working class anger and autonomous alternatives from below. And no doubt that includes Andy Burnham, being put forward from some quarters as some kind of ‘champion of the working class’. But at the end of the day he’s a member of the bourgeoisie, He’s a Blairite, privatiser of hospitals, Iraq War criminal and expenses fiddler. While we suffer the cold and inflation the likes of Burnham will be unaffected, living in their warm, cosy homes with no money worries. The system punishes working class people for being poor and rewards the wealthy and the ruling class for their class privilege and sociopathy.
This is why we need to reject the entire ruling political class and their system, no matter how left wing they purport to be, no matter how much they claim to be on our side. We are not all in the same boat and never will be for as long as we still have to suffer this capitalist system built on inequality and injustice. It’s time to make sure the entire ruling political class is not unaffected or secure, that we make it perfectly clear what the situation is. As we have always said, it is increasingly urgent for as many of the working class to come together and fight back and organise against this barbaric system from below. It is now time, more than ever, for autonomous subversion and revolt from the working class. To do what we can for the cause of solidarity, working class unity and class war.
While war rages in Europe and mass impoverishment continues at home, an apocalyptic trailer of a global picture in the making is tragically playing out in Pakistan.
Contributing only around 1% to global carbon emissions, the world’s 5th most populous country, (ranked 8th in the most likely to be affected by climate change), has now become the no.1 poster child of climate catastrophe.
After months of desertification in 50+ degree temperatures, an extended monsoon seasion has washed away crops and topsoil dropping between 3 to 6 times the average annual rainfall. In a country where tribalism and kleptocracy have stifled development leaving it largely dependent on ageing colonial infrastructure, it is at a standstill leaving millions stranded as a third of the country floods.
A million homes are uninhabitable displacing 33 million people (15% of the population) and wiping out a million livestock on which the rural poor depend.
The crisis is exacerbated by glacial melting. Pakistan’s 7000 glaciers (the largest number outside the polar regions) are continuing to shrink at an accelerating rate pouring meltwaters into overflowing natural and man-made dams and turning rivers into bridge and road destroying torrents.
Already torn apart by the Sharif and Bhutto political dynasties battle against Imran Khan’s Pakistan Movement for Justice Party, the paralysis, political and physical, is near total. The potential consequences of a military prone nuclear armed power on the brink of ecological collapse is a plot of dystopian horror proportions.
With two thirds of the country declared to be in a ‘state of calamity’ it is being described the first national climate catastrophe (an unwelcome accolade already bestowed on Madagascar following its years of drought).
Who will learn the lesson? This is a direct product of the short-termist, profit driven and growth obsessed capitalist ruling class. The same forces at work domestically and in the Ukraine. The Sharif’s, Bhutto’s and Khan’s will survive but the workers and poor of Pakistan huddling on embankments or camps in an imminent state of famine and disease are already paying – and dying.
But the lesson is global, the crisis demonstrably upon us, and the solution glaringly obvious. Capitalism has no solution, the rich continue grab and retreat to their resorts, islands and gated community ‘arks’ blaming us, the working class and the poor as greedy disrupters.
It’s time to disrupt, here against the war, here against climate crisis and planetary slaughter, here against the bosses and capitalist class who will not stop until the Pakistan example is the global picture or until they are stopped. If not by us, who? If not now, when?
AnarCom Network 