For comrades, sympathisers, capitalist haters, revolutionaries, proletarians, working class people and those who hate capitalism in general – not from the right!
Gondolkodó Autonomous Bookshop has been operating for 30 years now in Budapest, Hungary. We distribute and archive Communist, Anarchist, Anarcho-communist, Marxist, Anarcho-syndicalist, Leftist, etc. publications, as well as other things: literature in fiction, social studies, history, fine arts, philosophy, etc.) It is a meeting point for comrades, sympathizers, activists, friends. We organize debate events, and produce our own publications regularly. We are the only continously operating radical distribution place in this region.
And now we are in the look for a new place ( our dear landlord will kick us out in July). We’re looking for a place above 15 sqm (rentfree, would pay overhead costs) ideally with functioning bathroom. For this purpose, we’re asking for your help!
We would also need regular financial support. Please circulate our appeal and support us according to your possibilities.
Gondolkodó will continue to distribute at events, online, at our own events, at a local community centre Gólya, and, if we can find one, at our new place.
Hungary is a very conservative country, it is nationalist with strong fascist tendencies – this, combined with the world-wide crisis of capitalism force us to ask your regular support to maintain the functioning of Gondolkodó.
Comrade, sympathizer, activist, friend: please share our call for Aid, and support us, if you can, according to your possibilities in the name of the international solidarity of the Proletariat!
Over the last few days, 2,000,000 workers have taken to the streets nationwide, closing one of the largest industrial ports, blocking factories and refineries, cutting the energy system while ensuring supply to vulnerable communities – a social or ‘Robin Hood’ action. In the capital half a million brought the city and work to a standstill forcing even national monuments to close.
If you missed it, it’s because this happened in France. The capital is Paris and the port city Le Havre. War Austerity is being resisted there too as elsewhere in Europe, where the task ahead is increasingly clear. As one French worker told a journalist: “It’s less joyous, less a feeling we can win with a few demos. But it is serious and sober about the job in front of us,”. Such scale and combativity has yet to find expression here.
It is a year since we saw the birth of the current industrial unrest in the UK, beginning in the construction and education sectors. It’s nearly 8 months since one of the key sections of our class still organised and confident, the transport unions, began to take on the Tory government. The growth of the strike movement since then has spread to health, legal and civil services as well as postal and delivery, fire and ambulance emergency services amongst others.
We’ve just seen the largest single number of people on strike, across sector and industry, than we have seen in more than a generation. How much longer can you go on like this? Striking by rote, one or two days at a time and weeks apart. Drip by drip gains neither momentum nor progress.
It risks bleeding energy, funds and morale from workers and the strike movement ultimately empowering the status quo and thus the bosses. Combat fatigue and mission drift will be the consequences of the cautious trade union strategy designed more to stay on the right side of the bosses law than win by overwhelming it.
By refusing and sabotaging negotiations, the government is revealing its hand. Firstly, it believes it can win by dragging things out and demoralising those on strike and secondly, it is clearly not feeling threatened. It is prepared to pay in lost production what it would have cost to settle the disputes because it’s aim is not resolution but our defeat! Current tactics risk dancing to their tune.
We need to recall that before inflation, the war in Ukraine and these strikes, was Covid, Trump and Grenfell. Before that was the Syrian war, Brexit and the Islamic State. And still earlier, banking collapse, recession and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This isn’t new, it never stops. This relentless war of capitalism and all its needs devouring us in its wake. This is class war, our subjugation for their ruthless adventures in search of profit. How does it change? What change have we seen? What have we gained?
Challenging the social peace and costing capital a fortune by withdrawing labour is not ‘very little’, though nowhere near enough. Our role is to highlight that, as frustration grows. We sink or swim together as workers, not judge from the sidelines. Those on strike know what they are risking and will at some point see it could all have been in vain if there is no escalation, risking the safe TU strategy and taking some more radical leaders with them.
At this stage it is a process not an event and we have written about ‘social (‘Robin Hood’) strikes’ as in France, being a possible step forward. Trade Union caution though is clearly a restraining factor and we need to say what we see – postal strikes called off due to legal challenge, nursing unions in Wales pausing for ‘considering’ an offer, rail strikes delayed to allow talks. And for what result?
Our role as workers and militants is to highlight what we see and experience ourselves and on the picket lines – where strikers are unambiguously clear, we want to win! Enough is enough must not just apply to our increasing impoverishment and drift towards capitalist war. It must equally apply to the timidity of our strategy and tactics to fight against this.
The labour establishment Trade Unions, unlike their members, are as reluctant to escalate as the loyal opposition Labour Party. Their caution, their priorities, indeed, their role is to prevent that happening. They are the log on the line that can yet derail the strike movement and the fortunes of the millions who are already sacrificing through struggle and solidarity. Stepping up is not just an option, it is a necessity to challenge the social peace and shake the bosses.
We have said it before and will continue to argue for and encourage other workers and communities to keep or seize the moment and momentum. Form where possible grassroots coordination and decision bodies or assemblies. Networking and showing solidarity across industry and trade for a unification of demands and action, under our direct control not through a bureaucratic filter.
For direct action and the self organised generalisation of strike action everywhere! BEWARE BUREAUCRACY SELL OUT! ESCALATE! COORDINATE! VICTORY TO THE STRIKE MOVEMENT!
AnarCom members joined the hundreds of thousands who marched and rallied in over 40 cities across the UK at the beginning of February, in solidarity with the half million workers out on strike and the half million more in between strike days. The central focus of many though was opposition to the new ‘slap not clap’ essential workers legislation going through Parliament.
Modernisation (meaning sackings) and reform of labour practices (meaning sackings) to tackle wartime austerity have left many workers, not just here but throughout Europe, nowhere else to go than to lose pay and withdraw their labour. The sacrifice is theirs.
A list of what ballots have successfully overcome existing legal hurdles or are being considered, let alone wildcat actions without formal TUC recognition, would just be a list that changes day by day. Suffice to say that it already includes such sizeable and significant sectors as transport, health, education, legal and civil services as well as postal and delivery and fire and ambulance emergency services.
Potentially a greater strike wave than the late ‘70 early 80’s. This is not a winter of discontent, but the culmination of a generation of discontent. This despite all the legislation setting targets and conditions aimed at making strike action illegal. A class is awakening!
For revolutionists this has been long expected. For capital too! This is why the government was so determined to provoke the rail strike last summer and defeat it at all costs, aiming to smash the last remaining organised stronghold of industrial labour since the defeat of the miners in ‘84/85. This failed to shatter the sharp wedge of resistance and stop those that have now chosen to follow suit.
Parallels with the great miners’ strike are inevitably being drawn, though the differences are as deeply significant as any similarity – the latter largely limited to government intent.
In 1984 Tories took on the NUM after 5 years of active preparation, stockpiling coal and negotiating some agreed ‘safety’ closures with the NUM under the new Plan For Coal. Through this latter facade they had spun Scargill who kept the miners quiet, whilst taking on and defeating other significant sections of the working class, from steel to shipbuilding, nurses to the railways (in 1982 ships returning from the Falklands War, having secured Thatcher’s second election, hung banners saying “call off the rail strike or will call an airstrike”).
The miners arrived late to the slaughter, driven by need and an avenging passion to redress those defeats and stop Thatcherism in its tracks. But the organised working class they needed solidarity from had already suffered bloody defeats. The TUC, guarding what little corporate presence it retained resolutely resisted the left’s simpering cries of “TUC, get off your knees, call a General Strike!”. The TUC didn’t, defeating capitalism was never their job, and the rest is history. It was the last kick of the last major cross-sectional strike wave – until now.
The difference now is that this is not at the edge of what is collapsing, but at the centre of what is rising. The icecap on the concept of class struggle is melting and those facing the challenge, whilst not from the generation accustomed to victory, are neither accustomed to defeat.
The formidable class weapon of transport spearheaded this renewed fight-back and those choosing to follow are motivated by their own need and resolution. A generalisation of strike action without the stultifying patronage of the TUC is unfolding in spite of them, raising possibilities of solidarity and unification of demands not experienced previously in the lifetime of most of those in work.
Supporting the linking and unification of class struggle is a central task of all anarchist communists, the more formidable with the blocking saboteur role of capitalist and Labour Party endorsed organised trade unionism. For this we unapologetically advocate autonomy, combativity, solidarity and the collective escalation of demands as confidence and coordination grow.
Crucial will be the rank and file taking control of their strike, communicating with other workers and encouraging each other to share and coordinate their own struggles in solidarity. Building for united action must include coordinating committees between different industries and groups of workers and building links with the struggles in the communities all workers come from. Winning will rely on each other, certainly not the bureaucrats of the TUC, or worse, the Labour Party that has banned its MP’s from attending picket lines!
TUC, stay on your knees where you belong! A general strike is de facto already unfolding and coordinating across all sectors. For direct action and the self organised generalisation of strike action everywhere! BEWARE BUREAUCRACY SELL OUT! ESCALATE! COORDINATE! VICTORY TO THE STRIKE MOVEMENT!
“Don’t fear the axe said the tree, the handle is one of us!” Turkish Proverb.
The grotesque public beating of Tyre Nichols on the streets of his hometown of Memphis, taunted by the police who murder him as he lay dying, should animate us as much as the police murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in Iran last year.
That the veneer of ‘social peace’ in capitalist democracies is only skin deep is shockingly exposed in this modern ‘lynching’ of a black man from the south by other black men. This tragically all too familiar event transcends the usual cultural and institutional racism of the police to the nature of policing itself.
These ‘workers in uniform’ as some on the ‘left’ would have it. are not the arbiters but enforcers of capitalist discipline and control, ultimately by any means necessary as countless assaults on prisoners, rioters, demonstrators and dissenters through generations testify.
Since there have been privileged elites with power to enforce and property to defend, there has been a concept of policing going back to Egypt, China, Babylonia, Persia et al. Historically it has been in the form of rewards and bounties for the franchised-out capture and killing to protect the status quo.
The first centralised uniformed police of the modern era was established under Louis XIV in Paris 1667. In the southern states of the USA, they emerged from the Slave Patrols recapturing runaway “property”.
Today they are international capitalisms first physical line of defence in whatever form that system takes across the globe. From neutral Switzerland to warring Ukraine, from pacific superpower China to pacific islands Fiji, they are the franchised bounty hunters of the state.
In the West we somehow imagine this as a vice of non-democracies, looking at Iran for example, where deaths in custody are frequent and at least 500 have been killed since the current wave of protests began. We are thus lulled and fooled into keeping our eyes off our own state’s affairs, but in reality, the figures of brutality speak for themselves.
From the US, some names we know: Eric Garner, George Floyd and now Tyre Nichols. Barely a glint of the tip of an iceberg that sees around 1200 killed after police contact there each year. That’s one person (predominately people who are black or poor) ever 7 hours. Survivors like Rodney King multiply the evidence of that violence exponentially.
‘Only in America’ we like to think but here we have our names too like Mark Duggan or Chris Kaba, who’s enquiry into “potential homicide” according to the Independent Police Office for Conduct, was put on hold in November. The IOPC itself investigates on average around 200 deaths a year following police contact or custody, numerically proportionate to the USA.
In addition, the Metropolitan Police alone Is reviewing 1071 serious and sometimes multiple allegations against serving officers for violent and sexual offence against women and children. Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley emphasised the problem was bigger than “a few bad apples” adding that they “..haven’t applied the same sense of ruthlessness…that routinely apply to confronting criminals”. In a force of 45,000, that is roughly 2.5%.
Before such revelations we already had some appalling examples in the arrest of PC Hussain Chehab for child sex abuse following the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by PC Wayne Cousens and the recent conviction of PC David Carrick for a dozen cases of rape and false imprisonment.
While the media fabricate a threat to us from trans people, it’s clear to us that women are far more in danger from predatory men joining their local police force than a trans person seeking a gender recognition certificate!
The detail however blurs the principle. The police have one objective role, Policing! It speaks for itself: ultimately to control through the contrivance of consent, or brutalisation if necessary, those not in possession of power and wealth. This we will see manifest more blatantly as our current wave of resistance to austerity grows in strength and confidence. Our view is as the internationalist writer and fighter George Orwell put it:
“When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
For the first time in 70 years, western battle tanks are rumbling eastwards at a cost of a $3 billion bonanza for the military industrial complex, to distract from the allegations of ‘trickle up’ corruption uniting the Zelensky and Sunak regimes.
At home, a million workers endure the hardship of strikes in preference to the poverty of capitulation, whilst in Ukraine the combined casualty figures for our butchered class now ranges from a conservative 200,000 to a concealed 400,000.
The figures in both cases are staggering by contemporary standards in the ‘developed’ world, though sadly not surprising to revolutionists who have never stopped predicting it throughout the reign of capitalism.
The stalemate on both fronts, on the battlefield abroad and the class struggle at home, is soon to break in the spring thaw of ice and the frustration at restraint. The two conflicts portrayed as related only in the unavoidable impact on us, are different expressions of one war between the rich boss class and us as workers with no resources but our labour.
A chancellor misplaces £5 million in tax and the BBC favours a friend of the PM here, while a deputy leader and a minister in Ukraine siphon off international aid. Is either such a contrast to Putin’s kleptocratic dictatorship?
Putin might be less mithered by scrutiny or opinion, but he can’t ignore the full prison cells, the near million draft dodgers nor an active opposition that has led to nearly 80 attacks nationwide on recruitment centres and military infrastructure by class struggle militants since the invasion began.
Unity in our class at home is growing through struggle, mutual respect and solidarity, as it is growing throughout Europe in resistance to making us pay for wartime austerity, such as the national French strikes to raising the pension age.
Splits amongst our rulers are being exposed. In Britain, tested loyalties at government level and discord over how to resolve the strikes; in Ukraine, the oligarchs fighting the political struggle for power; in the Western alliance over how to preserve post war trade with Russia.
In Russia itself, there is conflict between the once secure military establishment and the ‘court favourites’ in the Wagner group. If those knives aren’t sharp enough, Putin’s inner circle will we wondering where to moor their yachts or send their kids to school if all bridges burn.
Every crack and wound of theirs is an opportunity we must ruthlessly exploit. Every new weakness is our opportunity. Every strike we make is a blow to corrupt power at home and against their war. The front line here is the picket line, the occupation, the civil unrest, the coordination of resistance.
The war is not coming – it is here and escalating. The peace movement wins with victory on the home front!
AnarCom joined the first day of the nurses picket outside Manchester’s world famous hospital The Christie today. Despite the noisy and continuously tooting car horns in solidarity, discussion was widespread.
With a turnout of around 70 for the 8am start it continued in high spirits through the day averaging around 30 at any one time. Mainly striking Christie’s staff but also nurses from other locations on their day off and other workers and well-wishers showing solidarity. Our ‘picket line solidarity’ stickers proved popular with sheets being taken and shared around.
Nurses we spoke too weren’t just striking for the NHS and better patient care, as the Union’s sanitised official version goes, but for themselves and each other, fed up of low morale, over work, under pay and being cold and increasingly vulnerable to debt and hardship.
Russia trumpets victory in Soledar – a name translated as ‘gift of salt’. A town no more than a dot on a landscape that once held 10,000 residents, primarily working in the salt mining industry. Slightly smaller than the old ex-mining town of Bargod in the Welsh valleys. Thousands of workers have died in a deadly Stalingrad cosplay for dust and rubble. The strategic significance is negligible. The significant consequence is disproportionate in its dramatic escalation.
The desperate Putin military machine will accept any portrayal of victory no matter how small, after 6 months of abject failure piled on retreat just weeks before the war’s first anniversary. It also pilots a resurrected military project of franchising out imperialist conquest to private capital in the form of the Wagner Group.
Once a small elite of experienced military adventurers that could grace any Bond film, it has become a ruthless and desperate army of violent criminals promised riches and freedom in exchange for unquestioned obedience and sacrifice. Now their estimated 40,000, accounting for a quarter of effective Russian combat forces, has become a law unto itself with the political implications that go with it, like Caesar letting in the barbarians to protect it from barbarism.
The value to Putin is clear, their desperate dead is not officially a Russian body count and more than that, this paid mob are not bound by the so called ‘rules of war’. Atrocity has been privatised and not a government issue. A successful model of colonial expansion in the 17th-19th centuries.
This onslaught, aided by an estimated $1 billion worth of 2,400 Shadad (meaning ‘Witness’) drones from Iran’s blood-soaked Islamist regime, demonstrates the unholy nature of barrel scraping before escalation.
The West has recognised Russian weakness for the opportunity it offers. Rather the defeat them, leaving a vengeful adversary in intact, Russia can be bled, impotently, to death. The piecemeal upgrading of Ukrainian military technology – always sufficient to avoid defeat but never enough to win – now has added tanks.
No longer Soviet T72 leftovers from the Poles or the Czechs (backfilled but the UK and US with our sophisticated yet outdated upgrades) but 14 British Challenger 2’s. Insufficient in themselves but lifting the escalation taboo, anticipating a Europe wide tithe that could see around 300 first line (primarily the ubiquitous German Leopard) tanks equalising ground forces as the war grinds on. The aim is prolongation not end, though when that happens, Western capital plans to be the victor in every sense.
As the stakes are raised, crisis ridden Iran has decided to shackle itself to Putin’s fate, squaring another circle for Western imperialism. Russia is believed to be paying with technology not just cash for this alliance, just at the point Iran’s nuclear program reaches critical mass.
While it’s workers revolt, the Mullah’s seek to create a unifying external crisis by waving a red flag at bullish markets eying their downfall. It would be hard to imagine that Israel, so long eager for a preemptive strike and emboldened by its new nationalist government, is still being kept on as tight a leash by its military underwriter, the USA.
At home we get colder and poorer, in line with our fellow workers either side of the war’s frontiers. The war is meant to distract us from our rulers abuse as much as it is in Russia and Iran.
Our hope lies neither in the success of millionaire Zelensky’s fire sale of his country’s resources to western bankers than it does in mullahs or authoritarian dictators. The conflict escalates towards our annihilation with every victory and defeat on the battlefield.
Our victory lies in the defeat of everyone planning their fortunes on the corpses of our class. We keep on about the war because it is always aimed at us, by bombs or poverty they scrabble for riches from our lands and our labour, our picket lines are a tank trap against their plans. At home and abroad we have to refuse their call for unity in the national interest. Our interests are only internationalist, against boss’s greed, robbery, militarisation and crises, whatever the side of their frontiers we find ourselves. Their war is stepping up, our resistance through class war must too.
Kropotkin Community Garden is located in Mpigi district, in central Uganda, on 6 acres. It is organic, free from pesticides and fertilizers, with 3 inter-cropping planting seasons. Crops grown are sweet potatoes, kale, maize, soya beans, cabbage, passion fruits and beans.
The food feeds victims of gender-based violence and orphans at the nearby ShelterMi Safehouse & Orphanage, with surplus sold to pay tuition fees and buy school supplies for the orphans.
Oloo Livingstone – director of the garden – says
“I find the works of Peter Kropotkin most interesting especially his Mutual Aid: A factor of Evolution. His model if adopted in Africa would propel development and improve the quality of life in our societies. We are excited to put into action his ideas to help our communities.”
Kropotkin Community Garden needs organic fertilizers, seeds for soybeans, cow peas, maize, and passion fruit, and it wants to expand an additional 4 acres.
In the red heat of the greatest strike wave in 50 years, the Trade Union bosses walk once again into a trap choreographed by the state and its capitalist masters.
We warned about this in November when the RMT, without a mandate from its members, paused it’s successfully mounting actions on the ‘promise’ of meaningful talks. That con effectively bought a month’s breathing space for the then reeling rail industry.
In the state’s latest trick to buy time for training up more army strike breakers and introducing a ‘sack not clap’ essential workers bill, almost every active sector has found an open door for a cozy chat with their respective government overlords. All later emerging claiming disappointment or insult.
Both sides knew, the government had been very clear, that only productivity, not wages, would be on the table. However insulted or disappointed union leaders profess to be, they have actively served the bosses propaganda agenda!
The months of sacrifice by hundreds of thousands of workers hasn’t been for the right to access the top table, but to win against the onslaught on our communities, wages and terms and conditions. What the unions are demonstrating is their inability, if not unwillingness, to meet the needs of our class.
With a million workers predicted to be on strike by February, 2023 should be a new year of renewed commitment and militancy! Workers are clearly up to the task, but their ‘representatives’ are feeding the government narrative of listening, caring but constrained by crises not of their making. A reason for us all to be quiet and on the same side – it worked so well when their hive queen died in September.
Our eyes must remain on the prize despite the unions obsequious demonstrations of weakness. We are in a unique situation. We are all being brought together not just by assault but through our struggle against it.
Everyone knows someone impacted by Covid, everyone knows someone who’s too cold, everyone knows someone who’s going hungry, and everyone knows someone striking or thinking about it.
We are usually manipulated to not see how much we have in common. Now though, reality is asserting itself above the spin. We are not isolated individuals but a community of shared experience, need and action. Nothing in our response says we are failing or getting weaker. On the contrary, our community of resistance and solidarity is growing.
Every day of implied concession feeds our bosses, not us. The shameless groveling masquerade and humiliation of the organised Trade Union leaderships should be called out for what it is, cowardice bordering on collaboration, in effect if not intent.
More and more of our class are fighting back, each worker is recognising their struggle in their solidarity with another. The government is mobilising not conceding and will soon confront us with the challenge of criminality – where we don’t already face it through hunger and extortion.
Trust your class, not your Union leaders with their eyes over their shoulders on their bureaucratic corporate interests. Spread the word, spread the struggle, spread the solidarity – build a unity of resistance in strength.
AnarCom Network 