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Interview with an anti-militarist from Odessa

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The following interview was carried out by comrades from the Československé anarchistické sdružení – CAS a Czech Internationalist Anarchist Group.

1)Please introduce yourself briefly to the readers of our magazine. Are you from Ukraine, where you were born and spent your youth?

Hi. My name is Vadym Yakovlev, I’m Ukrainian queer writer and journalist and I’m against the war and nationalism. I was born in Odesa, the largest southern multicultural city in Ukraine, a few months before the collapse of the USSR. My mother is Ukrainian and my father is Russian. Their fathers were military. My father worked in a factory. With the collapse of the USSR, the factory was closed, and my father lost his job. It affected my family and my childhood. I grew up in Odesa, but one year before I escaped Ukraine I was living in Lviv, the biggest city of the Western part of Ukraine. At home my relatives spoke Russian and Ukrainian, so I never focused on issues such as national identity. My family was an unhappy international family that lost a lot with the collapse of state communism in Ukraine. I guess all of that influenced me a lot in my search of my true political views and my desire to do something that can have influence on society.

2)You left Ukraine, what led you to this decision?

On the one hand, I could no longer work in Ukraine because of my political beliefs. The Ukrainian intelligentsia, journalists and artists as a community with the beginning of the war decided to become privileged elite propagandists in the service of the state. I didn’t want to be a propagandist, so I lost the opportunity to publish my articles. And if you publicly express in Ukraine the views I have, authorities can put you in the jail. On the other hand, of course due to my views, I didn’t want to go to war on the frontline. That’s why I escaped.

3)What is your attitude towards war and antimilitarism?

Much of my work in Ukraine was related to my anti-patriotic beliefs. My articles and participation in art projects were very often devoted to criticism of Ukrainian patriotism, Ukrainian nationalism and the mainstream privileged “pro-Western” and pro-war civil and cultural Ukrainian elite. I have always been interested in anti-war art and anti-war activism. Since 2022, I had to start doing this, even at the cost of losing the opportunity to stay and work in my native country and the loss of close friends who abandoned me because of my beliefs.

4)The war in Ukraine changed a lot of things. Are you in touch with your friends back home? What are their attitudes towards the war? How do they live

As I said in answer to the previous question, I lost most of my friends from the privileged art scene and the journalist-activist community. Almost all of them became propagandists, receiving support from the state and Western foundations. I also lost touch with the majority of the Ukrainian leftists, who are supporting militarism, nationalism and NATO. This type of leftists is supporting by the state and Western foundations too. But I’m still in touch with my friends, who are don’t work with the state and have nothing to do with privilaged classes. They support me and my anti-war views. A lot of them, if they are men, are living an awful life now, cause they have to hide all the time at their apartments in the fear of getting outside. Ukrainian army is kidnapping people from the street and sending them on the frontline without their permission. And majority of people with man gender marker in the documents are not allowed by the law to left the country.

5)Have many people, including anarchists joined the army and left antimilitarism? And not much is known about them? Maybe they are afraid. Do they exist? Are you in contact with them?

Regarding anti-war anarchists in Ukraine, we have anti-war collective called Assembly. They are from Kharkiv and have their own website where they are publishing anti-war and anti-conscription texts. This group of anarchists is anonymous and they hide the names of their team members. This is the only way to conduct any anti-war activity in Ukraine. There was only one Ukrainian organization that did not hide the names of its members and openly spoke out against the war – Ukrainian Pacifist Movement. The Security Service of Ukraine accused them of support of Russia and sent its leader to court. After that, the organization significantly softened its public position, fearing prison. Many Ukrainian leftists sided with the war, it seems to me, because of conformity. They are afraid to express their real position or simply don’t even have one, as it seems to me, and just are following mainstream trend. But these are just my assumptions. In Ukraine, as an authoritarian militaristic country, it is extremely unsafe to be against war.

6)What about Ukrainians in exile? Are they doing any anti-war activities? Are they organizing in workplaces?

Lately, many Ukrainian anti-war initiatives have appeared abroad. For example, Ukrainians are now organizing demonstrations against mobilization and human rights violations in Ukraine. These demonstrations are taking place in Germany, Italy, and France. Often, these actions are organized by Ukrainian leftists who have nothing to do with the pro-war Ukrainian left mainstream such as the so-called “Ukrainian anti-authoritarians” or Solidarity Collectives. All these groups of anti-war Ukrainian leftists are not financed by anyone, they are a personal initiative of convinced and active young people. There will be more of these actions, and I am in active communication with the organizers and members of this initiatives, this is very inspiring! In addition, in the West there are a certain number of Ukrainian scientists and artists who are against the war and who are constantly being marginalized and silenced here in the West.  But we have all been silenced for too long, our voices have been erased for too long, and now we are increasingly trying to build horizontal connections at various levels, organizing an anti-war front here abroad against the war and the propagandists. There are many more of us than even we think.

7)The media is silent about the forced mobilization of the Ukrainian government. Rarely does information about deserters leak out? What can you tell us about it?

Nobody knows the exact number of deserters from the Ukrainian side, but according to official and unofficial statistics, there are about 150-200 thousand people! These are huge numbers. The official Ukrainian media are controlled by the state or the Security Service of Ukraine. Ukrainians mainly consume information from anonymous news channels on Telegram or TikTok. It is there that videos of violence against civilians by the Ukrainian army are constantly published. These videos, full of terrible scenes and evidence of human rights violations, do not make it into the official media. The Ukrainian authorities are constantly trying to find the authors of anonymous Telegram channels who criticize the actions of the Ukrainian army or advocate for peace, and put them in prison. Sometimes the authorities succeed. The Ukrainian government, police and the Security Service of Ukraine do not hesitate to use any methods to silence alternative voices. For example, the police recently arrested the mother of a blogger who is abroad and speaks out against forced mobilization, for publishing his post! There are also unofficial ways to shut up dissenters. I remember one teenager who had his own channel on Telegram, where he criticized Ukrainian nationalism and mobilization. He identified himself as an anarchist. Fascists came to his home for a “conversation”, after which he publicly renounced his beliefs. But the pro-war Ukrainian leftists, who are propagandists and accomplices of all these crimes against Ukrainians, will never tell you about such things.

8)Do you have acquaintances who have deserted or evaded the draft? How can we in Czechoslovakia help them?

I know people who have illegally fled the country, and I have many acquaintances and friends in Ukraine who are hiding from the army and conscription. Perhaps, over time, it will be necessary to create initiatives to help such people within the framework of anti-war Ukrainian movements abroad, which have only just begun to emerge. If such initiatives appear, I hope that there will be people in the Czech Republic and Slovakia who will want to help these Ukrainians.

9)What message would you give to Ukrainian and Russian workers at home and abroad?

The only thing I want to convey to those who are not part of the privileged classes (and this is not only the proletariat), regardless of their nationality and location: never trust those who build their happiness on your exploitation, marginalisation and systemic discrimination, and especially do not be fools and do not participate in their wars, it is simply stupid!

10)Thank you for the interview and if you have anything else to say, we would be happy to.

Thank you, comrade, for interviewing me.

Please see my Facebook page for more: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100013291847024

Martin (CAS)

Myths and the truth about the enemies of our enemies

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A new article by our Czech comrade Lukas

Let me start by asking a question: Are the enemies of our enemies automatically our friends and allies? This is a question that people have always asked themselves when deciding with whom and how to ally in pursuit of their goals. Even today, questions of this kind are relevant to us. For example: if our enemy is Putin and his supporters, is anyone who takes up arms and uses them against Putin’s supporters automatically our friend and ally? Some may argue that a question posed in this way is too vague to be answered immediately. I will therefore try to be more specific. I will describe a few specific people who have died in the war in Ukraine and have become uncritically glorified martyrs for quite a few people.

Full article can be found here: https://lukasborl.noblogs.org/myths-and-the-truth-about-the-enemies-of-our-enemies/

Anarchist Communist Memories of the Miners Strike [Pamphlet Review] – Kate Sharpley Review.

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Miner Conflict – Major Impact : an Anarchist Communist perspective on the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 by Dreyfus

Dreyfus shows how and why the anarchists were involved. ‘This wasn’t altruism or an act of goodwill to support our mining communities. […] This was the instinctive yet enlightened self-interest of class solidarity.’[p.4]

Impressionistic in places, ‘Misty early morning picket lines took on a surreal air against the back drop of growing ghost towns’[p.18], elsewhere there’s a comic moment from heckling Kinnock at Hanley, ‘I remember one steward shouting to another “You get him!”, pointing to one of our number. After a second thinking about it, he responded “No way, YOU get him!” We were secure.’[p.30]

It’s good to have an anarchist communist view, and one from the potteries. Most importantly, this is history that means something: ‘What remains an enduring impact for me is the experience that class struggle changes people.

‘The lessons the “Left” drew were administrative and all about leadership. They pushed the lessons that the TUC can’t be trusted, that Labour Party is not a friend of our class while continuing to try and infiltrate and take over both. Political memories of that sort of thing are relatively short-lived. 

https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/qftwkm

How many more corpses do you need to understand what’s going on?

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An article by Lukas Borl – https://lukasborl.noblogs.org

The Russian and Ukrainian state sends people to war to defend the rule of the Russian and Ukrainian bourgeoisie. The Israeli state and Hamas do the same for their own local bourgeoisie. People are dying by the thousands under the flags of “their” states and nationalist movements. They murder each other for the sake of “their own” rulers, for the business of “their own” bosses, for the property and power of “their own” bourgeoisie. “We are defending the survival of our own nation”, these people shout, while running towards their own destruction on the field of war. “We are fighting for the right to national self-determination” they chant in chorus, while overlooking that everywhere in the world it is the bourgeoisie that dictates the conditions of our lives. There is no self-determination anywhere. The bourgeoisie in Ukraine determines (i.e. imposes and dictates) the conditions of the local proletariat, the bourgeoisie in Russia does the same to the local proletariat. The various bourgeois factions around the world are uniting in transnational alliances to compete with their rivals. How can anyone believe the delusion that by waging war for one of these factions the working class can gain the possibility of self-determination? So, if the proletariat in the Ukraine, Gaza or Israel sacrifices enough lives on the front, the bourgeoisie will give it as a gift the voluntary surrender of its own power and will no longer exploit the proletarian masses?

War between states will never bring us the opportunity to determine the free conditions of our lives. Even if the “smaller and weaker” or “invaded” state wins the war with the help of the allies, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie will be preserved. Being exploited by the local bourgeoisie and oppressed by the local state is no victory. It’s not something we should sacrifice our lives for. Yet some are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives for the illusion that the victory of one state is important for the future liberation from all states. It’s one of the many oxymorons of these people. In the name of fighting against states, they urge us to defend a particular state and its nationalist/democratic ideology. In the name of fighting against war, they tell us that we must engage in war. How many more people have to die on the front for these oxymoron lovers to realise that war between states cannot bring peace, that against tyranny of states cannot be fought by collaboration with states, that capitalist exploitation cannot be fought by working class alliances with capitalists?

Warmongers on both sides of the war line use economic, violent and ideological pressure to mobilize people for war. If we proclaim the struggle against all factions of the bourgeoisie, including the struggle against the bourgeoisie of the “invaded” states, they accuse us of aiding the more aggressive, dictatorial, imperialist states, as if it were not perhaps obvious that we are also waging the struggle against them at the same time. They believe that collusion with this or that local bourgeoisie and state is a question of survival. They do not take into account that the same bourgeoisie they defend does everything to avoid being conscripted to the front itself, while the state authorities forcibly dress the proletarians in uniforms and drive them to their deaths in the front struggle. They sees that, the “friendly” bourgeoisie, uses the state to close the borders to men who want to travel to safety. They fail to see that the bourgeoisie is not concerned with saving the lives of the entire bombed population, but with forcing the proletarian part of the population to shed blood to save their own power, property and sphere of economic influence. When it comes to saving lives in a war zone, the proletarians certainly have to look for other options than enlisting in the army.

Whether the warmongers are capitalists, nationalists or the left of capital, they are all terrified by the idea that the enemy state will win the war, but they are not at all terrified by the corpses of proletarians that war always “produces” on both sides. No matter what banner they stand under, no matter what ideological label they put on themselves, we must repudiate all warmongers. When the question is put to us as to which side we take in the war, we clearly answer that we take the side of the proletariat in Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Israel and all over the world. We do not choose the side of this or that state in the war, but the side that organises against states. We do not stand aside while war massacres our class brothers and sisters. We stand on the side of those who rebel against the war and resist all efforts to drag us into the war. The only way to stop wars is to undermine the ability of all states to continue to wage war.

The aim of ‘revolutionary defeatists’ today is not that one side should win and the other lose but to draw a clear line between the capitalist perspective which entails ever more war and misery, and the proletarian revolutionary perspective, which entails humankind’s liberation. There is no compromise between them possible.

Internationalist perspective

https://lukasborl.noblogs.org/how-many-more-corpses-do-you-need-to-understand-whats-going-on/#more-1958

The 2nd Annual Radical Bookfair in Hull report

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The second annual radical bookfair took place this Saturday at the Danish Church.  It went ahead against a backdrop of far-right troubles across the country and a riot in Hull the previous Saturday.

The decision to go ahead was taken by the majority of the stall holders.  At the same time as the bookfair there was a anti hate demo in Hull which we publicised. 

We had some stalls drop out and it was a smaller event with only 6 stalls along with a café area and a representative from Unite the Union Community Branch who was there to support us.

Stalls:

ACG:

Socialist Party:

World Socialism:

Claire Gould – Author

Commune in the North:

AnarCom Network

We had a few visitors (over 50 in total) and everyone seemed to enjoy the day making contacts and networking. There was an impromptu poetry reading led off by Claire and finished by our own comrade Grumpaloe who read a selection from our rereleased Rebel Rose Poetry.

Overall, another successful day and something we can build on.

See you next year when we will be back bigger and better.

Report by Mikey Dredd

State inspired Pogrom:  how did the fascists get away with this?

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The recent pogrom against perceived foreigners by the far right asserted its ‘legitimate’ concerns under the former government’s election slogan of “Stop The Boats!” This, the shameful legacy of the last Tory gamble.

Is its comparison with the Nazi ‘Kristalnacht’ against the Jews in Germany 1938 too far a stretch?

Families with children in shuttered shops being smoked out by mobs waiting outside with sticks; individuals beaten in the streets with paramilitary involvement; hotels set alight with blocked fire exits, high streets wrecked, shops shut, and graves defaced.

The numbers involved were only a fraction of those in the urban disturbances of August 2011. Then the eruption, triggered by the police shooting of an unarmed black man, was a reaction to poverty, austerity and arbitrary policing.  That lasted five days.  These racist riots nearly twice that, with only hundreds in place of the thousands arrested then.  The priority of property before people is clear.

The recent mass acts of violence are made more disturbing because their enemy is the perceived foreigner and their targets people.  People like us, other workers!  In 2011, the targets were shops and the palaces of commodities by people who had nothing.

These events aren’t out of the blue. Governments of all shades have long sought to divide the working class and blame sections of it for the problems they created of low wages, austerity, poor housing and collapsing services.

Decades of demonisation and ‘othering’ reaching is crescendo from Brexit to now, with ‘take back control of the borders/country’ and ‘stop the boats’!  Even one of the leading Tory leadership candidates has recently suggested a public profession of faith by Muslims should be an arrestable offence! (“Row over Tory MP’s Allahu Akbar arrest call” BBC 07/08/24). It’s not just the words that have been used by the state’s cronies.  It is the treatment that has been meted out to too many migrants, people seeking refuge and asylum, that is increasingly portrayed as fair and consequently seen as acceptable by the public. The fiction of luxury hotels has hidden the barrack-like nature of accommodation supposed to last families for years.  But there is worse, effectively camps of concentration.

The large-scale containment camp at Wethersfield in Essex is so overcrowded and under resourced that charities like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Doctors of the World (DOTW) are now diverting resources from sites of war, epidemic and natural disaster to provide healthcare to people seeking asylum here in the UK.

While the spark that lit this latest conflagration may well have been the misinformation spread about the suspect in the Southport atrocity, the fuel has been continuously heaped up by the mainstream media and politicians when they talk of immigration as a “problem”.

This is not a creation of social media, but also the usual suspects of the legacy press.  The Mail, the Express and the Sun.  Not just from populist politicians like Farage, Patel and Braverman, but also the now Prime Minister when as opposition leader he said there were “too many immigrants in the NHS”.  The BBC has just amplified this when it constantly portrays migration, of whatever sort, as a “problem” to be “solved”.

The recent election, distilling the right-wing hatred of the ruling party from the last decade, has produced an extreme parody of itself in Reform.  This caricature of ‘democratic’ fascism, styling itself as the ‘Real Conservatives’, has linguistically weaponised these demonstrators  as its paramilitary expression on the streets.

How have the fascists got away with it?  They haven’t, they are still at it. They’ve never gone away. They have always been the ‘democratic’ states last resort against effective opposition to capitalist exploitation.  Wheeled out whenever a ‘strategy of tension’ helps divide our class by fooling some into believing their interests ally with them.

The crisis of capitalism is everywhere around us, and we see it so much we virtually breathe it.  War, environmental crisis, worsening mental and physical health, falling living standards, increasing crises in all the social consequences of this and the disappearance of the means of addressing them.

While crisis is in our living experience, so is the potential for its solutions. The last strike waves across the UK a year ago never reached the potential we all know they had, the potential to change something. What they did do was demonstrate that collective action can happen, as it did in the anti-racist rallies to oppose the fascist reaction recently.

Racism and poverty don’t end by good motives and verbal opposition.  They end through solidarity and resistance. The social peace at home is disintegrating as our state representatives of capitalism fight their wars for profit abroad.  Labour will be no different – their pronouncements on law and order will revisit us in the next wave of resistance to cuts and austerity.

The opposition to their peace at home does and must include our opposition to their armed adventurism abroad in search of profit.

To paraphrase the Dutch revolutionary Anton Pannekoek a century ago, our class is not weak because it’s divided, it is divided because it’s weak. The fascist assault on our communities is there to weaken us further. It is not a coincidence that this is happening in a time of war.

Article by Dreyfus

Internationalist Statement Against Capitalism and War from the revolutionist gathering in Arezzo, Italy, June 2024

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While the global capitalist system is dragging the world into ever more war and misery, those who refuse to take sides in these wars and fight to end the system that causes them, are still few and far between. So it is a promising sign that this summer several extended meetings of internationalist revolutionaries from many different countries were organized in Europe. in early June, on the last day of the anti-war congress in Prague, we agreed on the need of a short statement on capitalism and war that expresses our common positions and can serve as a base for further networking and common action. This statement was drafted after the congress ended. It was discussed, amended and approved at the internationalist meeting in Arezzo where the hope was expressed that it will be further discussed by the participants of the Prague congress and those who will gather in Poznan later this month.  

AN INTERNATIONALIST STATEMENT ON CAPITALISM AND WAR  

1. In our times, all wars are capitalist wars. While the specific circumstances in which they break out may be quite different, all are rooted in the capitalist system, which is based on competition and exploitation.

2. While imperialism has been a constant feature of capitalism since its beginning, the systemic crisis which capitalism faces today and the instability it engenders  both push economic competition to military conflict and create opportunities to do so. This crisis will only deepen, making it inevitable that the continuing existence of capitalism would imply the prospect of generalizing wars.

3. The working class, the vast majority of humankind, has nothing to win and everything to lose in war. It is always its main victim. National defense and national liberation means fighting and dying for the interests of one faction of the capitalist class against another. It means killing (and being killed by) other working class people for the power and profit of the class that exploits and oppresses us.

4. We reject both nationalism and democracy, which are the principal ideological tools by which the capitalist class creates the illusion that its interests and those of the working class within its borders are the same, and by which it mobilizes for war and justifies the militarization of society.

5. There are no separate solutions for the many existential threats to humankind. A peaceful capitalism, a green capitalism, a socially just capitalism are all just pipe dreams to hide the growing horror that is real. War, ethnic cleansing, genocide, ecocide, climate disasters, pandemics, poverty, insecurity, forced migration, homelessness, stress and mental breakdown will continue to worsen, together with the crisis of capitalism which causes them all. Therefore there is but one solution to all of them: closing the capitalist chapter of human history.  

6. We are not pacifists. We do not call for negotiations or UN interventions, parliamentary resolutions, disinvestments, etc. We do not appeal to the ruling class to act “reasonably”, because we understand that it can’t. Instead we count on autonomous, class based resistance to capitalism. The global working class is the only social force capable of ending capitalism and establishing a human community based on the fulfillment of needs instead of the compulsion of making profit.

7. But it has a long way to go. Its struggle cannot be merely economic, it has to be political as well and confront the state. It has to refuse to submit to capitalism’s war drive. We support proletarians on both sides of any war who refuse to fight, who desert, who fraternize instead of killing each other. We support sabotage of the war machine and collective resistance against conscription, mobilization and the militarization of society.

8. But the oxygen on which the war-machine depends is the exploitation of the proletariat, the extraction of surplus value. It would be paralyzed without it. So war can’t be stopped without ending exploitation. Furthermore, to make room for the war efforts, the ruling class has to attack the social wage, impose austerity. In fighting against it, workers fight against the war, consciously or not. The more they wage this fight autonomously, without any collaboration with the capitalist class and its state, the more it can blossom into a struggle against exploitation, a revolution which puts an end to capitalism, to its wars and its miserable ‘peace’.