“Together Against Capitalist Wars and Against Capitalist Peace!”
To the comrades of ‘Beach Communism’ assembled in Poznan, Poland, 8th-14th July. Internationalist greetings and love, fun and solidarity! A year since Varna and over 2 years since the bloody ignition of war along the fault line of nuclear imperialism! We hope for and need your decisive class commitment to revolutionary internationalist opposition to all capitalist war, and all partisan combatant forces. We look forward to moving beyond the conciliatory ambivalence of Varna to a decisive choice of internationalist realignment. Procrastination is the thief of time and time is not on our side!
No war between peoples no peace between classes – No War But The Class War!
Taken from a recent reprint by Tyneside Anarchist Archive
The following piece is from the rather excellent ‘TYNESIDE SYNDICALIST‘ No 15 June/July 1987 and was written in the face of yet another looming general election fiasco, quite apt with the current farce in our faces yet again…enjoy, like, care, give a share….
“As we approach another General Election the media circus is regurgitating the usual sickening clichés and nonsense about the difference it will all make. We are not going to go along with this by criticising the parties, policies or manifestos. Instead, we prefer to question the whole idea of parliamentary democracy, and to broaden the argument by talking about the underlying issues of authority, power and control.
Our system of government is geared to fitting in with the needs of capitalism. The small differences there are between the major parties concern how best to accommodate to the quest for profit of the multinationals and financial institutions. As voters we are presented with apparent choices of style, but we have no realistic opportunity to reject the whole sordid assumptions and practices of capitalism. So, our power to wield our votes to change things is mainly an illusion.
But that’s not all. The structure of any political party means that we are made even more passive by supporting or joining it. Parties consist of massive overbearing hierarchies where even straightforward and sensible change is virtually impossible to achieve unless the leadership already desire it. Changes that would imply removing control from the top obviously get nowhere.
Some people enter the party hierarchy with the intention of improving things from within. They very quickly get swallowed up by the dead weight of bureaucracy and neutralised by the control of those at the top, and it’s irrelevant how much support from the base they have.
The only other alternative is to get to the top themselves, but by the time they’ve managed it, the distortions and perverting effects of the hierarchy have inevitably taken their toll – so that the old status quo is now accepted. We can see this very clearly in one-time radical labour politicians or broad-left trade union officials who become more and more reactionary as they climb the ladder and leave the base behind. Meanwhile those at the bottom are left passive and powerless, and maybe worse off because of the time and effort wasted on keeping the faith in a “better leadership”.
Clearly this type of analysis applies to supposedly revolutionary parties and to trade unions just as much as to the big parties. If decision making isn’t placed squarely at the base, then the mass of ordinary member’s maybe active, but only in doing what they are told, what is permissible, and they are in no position at all to challenge the status quo. These days most organisations involving politics make a big show of internal democracy, but when it comes down to it those at the top have to agree before anything gets done.
But we have to take the analysis a bit further than this. Most people seem fully aware that they have no control, but still manage to muster up enough motivation to support the big parties and to make no effort to challenge bureaucratic and authoritarian control. We can present alternatives to hierarchies and powerless membership – in this paper we consistently offer ideas and examples of rank-and-file control, assembly – based decision making, mandated and re-callable delegates and so on. Such ideas are acceptable; people agree that they would be better. But there’s a tendency to say, “it won’t work” (even when given cast iron evidence of it working), and to not really want or be able to apply the ideas in their own real lives. It looks as though people feel more comfortable being passive, don’t want the bother of being responsible, in fact desire to be dominated. Why is this?
‘The desire to be dominated’
People aren’t completely logical; we all behave irrationally quite a lot of the time. So while working class people want freedom, struggle to make our lives better and recognise the injustices of society, other parts of us also desire to be controlled to let others make our decisions for us. That is why it is possible for Thatcher to attract so many of our votes. All of the other parties have massive blind spots to the problems of power and authority too and can’t afford to examine these areas because it would expose their own (equally large) shortcomings.
In this society virtually all of our lives are lived under the shadow of forms of authority that are completely out of our control. It is built into us to be subservient. It’s a difficult pattern to break down, but the best path is in active struggle. Real lived experience of battling against authority begins to give us confidence in our own collective power.
Experience of the double-dealing, betrayal and manipulation of politicians and trade union officials clinging onto their positions in the hierarchy tests our faith in their influence, whilst we know we can trust one another. So, rank and file control is not enough – we need also to be conscious of why we need it. Because otherwise we will find ourselves trusting the next plausible dominator who comes along, and the gains of our experience of collective self-control will be lost.”
On the 40th anniversary of the Battle of Orgreave, we re-publish an article by the revolutionary group ‘Wildcat’ from the time on the central role of women to the success and extension of the strike towards its wider generalisation. A lesson that still inspires us.
Miners! Learn from your wives!
Thousands of women are playing a vital supporting role in mining areas. Without this involvement initiated by the women themselves miners would have been in a far weaker position to fight. As a woman canteen worker at Parkside pit said: “it mustn’t be forgotten that this strike wouldn’t have lasted more than three months without the self sacrifice of the miners wives and the participation of thousands of women in support groups”.
However, many NUM branches have refused to give money to the kitchens. Women from Fitzwilliam in Yorkshire say that they haven’t had a penny from the union.
Other branches have tried to impose strict conditions on the way money is used in the kitchens, to make sure the women know who’s boss. Women from Upton Miners support Group refused NUM money. They said “they wanted to give a donation on condition that they had to say in the menu! But we are answerable to nobody!”. At Tower Lodge in Hirwaun, Wales, NUM officials insisted that £100 collected by the women had to go to them instead. A miners wife told how “it’s like working with the Mafia. Terry Thomas (Vice President of South Wales NUM) came chasing after the money, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Neil Kinnock wasn’t far behind”.
When women want to go beyond the kitchen sink and go picketing, they have had an even harder time of it. At Wistow colliery miners themselves organised a picket of the local power station, inviting all their supporters along. A miner described what happened: “The NUM officials came down and told us to leave because the pickets had not been organised by the NUM and not all the pickets were NUM members. They also told the female pickets to get back to the soup kitchens ‘where they belonged’. One official went over to the police lines, inviting them to deal with us as they wished, because we were nothing to do with the NUM”. This shows which side the NUM is on!
Militant women want more than to be allowed on the picket line. They want a say in running the strike. But despite their support and involvement the wives and families of miners are not allowed into meetings to discuss the strikes strategy and tactics. It is vital that everyone who is actively supporting the strike is treated as equal in taking decisions about what to do and how to conduct it. Women from a Welsh pit village were told why they were banned from strike committee meetings – they had criticised the running of the strike, whereas the men were afraid to criticise “their own” leaders.
Why are union officials so hostile to women becoming more actively involved in the strike? This demand challenges the very heart of trade unionism. For once you let the miners wives into the branch meetings, and elect them onto strike committees, a precedent is established. Once non-miners are allowed to fully participate in the strike, the way is open for more and more people to be drawn into the struggle until what you have is no longer a trade union dispute but a mass strike! In this situation, union leaders would lose any special claim to authority. They recognise this threat to their power. They are afraid of women activists who bluntly refuse to do what they tell them. No wonder they tell the women to “get back to the kitchens”.
Women’s Pickets
Women who want to go picketing have met other problems. If they are the wives of militant miners who have already been arrested, they are reluctant to risk arrest as well, especially with children to look after. There is no reason why this should be organised by women , men on strike should take their share of caring for the children and let the women go picketing. Not just because everyone should be involved, but also women make very good pickets. For many it is their first experience of apicket line but they know what to do.
A women’s picket of Sutton Manor pit in Lancashire where I was present, stood out in contrast to the usual picket line ritual of a few shouts and people generally not knowing what’s going on. We discussed beforehand what we wanted to do and despite being heavily outnumbered by the police we did give them a run for their money. And they hated it! They just couldn’t think of enough sexist insults to fling at us there was a feeling of solidarity and collectivity that comes from struggling together. Without the union leaders and union traditions to tell them how to behave, which the men have, women are able to simply do what they decide to be done.
Wildcat does not support the aims of the Greenham movement, but pickets can learn from their organisation. The women at Greenham Common in 1982 and 1983 had no officials to say what they could do. They organised several hundred people around an 11 mile perimeter fence at night keeping one stop ahead of the police by using walkie-talkie radios, organising actions through group delegates to small central planning meetings making sure that all participants knew what was going on and everyone playing their part, however small.
What people involved in the miners strike have learnt, that the Greenham women never did, is the need to respond to state violence with our own violence. As one miners wife puts it: “I’ve always respected the police, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll watch a Bobby being kicked to death in the street in the future and I’ll walk across to the other side. They show their true colours now.”
Far from being the weakest section of the working class, unable to fight back against the bosses onslaught because they are marginalised, women have shown time and again that it is their very lack of involvement in the organisations which hold men back, that enables them to organise themselves and carry out their own decisions and actions. This puts them at the forefront of working class struggle. If miners are to win, they must learn from their wives and mothers, girlfriends and daughters.
“Together Against Capitalist Wars and Against Capitalist Peace!” May 2024.
After a promising start on Wednesday 22nd, things appeared to fall apart on Thursday. After an event hosted by Kites not Drones, news of cancellations came as the original Congress Centre, secured, and paid for in February withdrew at the last minute to the consternation of delegates,
It was at this point the various visiting comrades decided to proceed with a parallel program in the absence of confirmation of alternatives. This group of around 50 secured spaces on the Friday to initiate discussion and debate.
59 predominately anarchist groups were invited to the ‘official’ Congress. 10 decided to work with the parallel group (for easy ref calling itself the ‘Self Organised Assembly’ or SOA.), 8 of them exclusively. Whilst not all the invitees were able to attend, the remainder that did continued to focus on the Congress weekend.
The context was hard for outsiders to grasp, but threats and provocations had preceded any events compelling the organisers to issue the following statement:
“The organizing team …has been facing provocations and sabotages for a long time, which are supposed to complicate the organization of the anti-war activities… we are watching the attacks of our opponents grow in intensity.”
AnarCom made the decision to devote its limited resources to meeting and discussing with specific groups who had approached us while waiting for further news on the Congress venue.
We remained in contact throughout with both the Organising Committee and comrades from the Czechoslovak Anarchist Society (CAS), gaining insights from their experience. From them we learned:
“The anarchist movement in the Czech Republic has been in crisis and in retreat for several years now, including the split over the war in Ukraine. Afed has few members, but it has strong media coverage and background (autonomous centres, contacts to ex-anarchists, nowadays left liberals at universities).
So, when they started to preach pro-war propaganda, the anti-militarist voice was not heard, and they poisoned the thinking of many people – especially the youth.”
There was general consensus the loss of the first venue was attributable to sectarian (or rather pro war partisan) sabotage.
Additionally: “…there was an anarchist bookfair in Prague this weekend. It’s very well attended, last year about 2000 people passed through. We, as anti-militarists, were not invited, as it was co-organised by Afed and the Ukrainian Solidarity Collective were performing there with their pro war propaganda.”
There may have been a lot more going on for them than we were privy to. It is worth remembering as context that Czechia is a firm supporter of Ukraine in the middle of an election, next to a country (Sovakia) which just had an assassination attempt on its PM.
We were able in part to attend the relocated Congress on Saturday and participate in some discussion. There were around 50 people there at any one time and litterature stalls. It took place in an ecology training centre with lunch provided and amenities for other refreshments. We had not seen the majority of attendees before.
Amongst key topics were the splits in the so-called movement, the division of our class through the exploitation of culture-wars and the centrality of the action of our class rather than our own efforts to change the forces on the ground.
Though good examples of blockade actions at some Italian ports in conjunction with unionised workers were shared – acknowledging the implied limits of ideology and bureaucracy on the potential for more.
A recurring question from the Wednesday to the Saturday had been “what can we do?”. We suggested this question be turned around to ask ourselves “what are we doing?”
Only we can answer this ourselves on the ground and our defining geographies and political and social circumstances will inform us of resources and potential.
Continuing security concerns had led to request for mobile phones not to be used to communicate for the Sunday session which we were unable to attend as unfortunately we couldn’t access the email links notifying us.
Other comrades continued their parallel program throughout and elements of the SOA were working on some form of communiqué by the time we left. We look forward to seeing the outcome of the work of that group.
We have continued to liaise with comrades – perhaps a coalition of the willing – to draw learning from this and to find common ground for a joint statement, primarily relating to the wars and the veritable split in our movement. We will report more on progress on this in the coming days.
Why vote? Look at the person you are thinking of voting for, what makes them not look sound, or feel like any politician you’ve ever seen strutting and lying on your TV screens?
What makes them so excel in virtues you don’t have that you should hand your power and autonomy over to them?
Would you hand the contents of your home so easily over to a burglar, or your family without a murmur to a kidnapper? Of course not! That would be ridiculous, yet it’s the same principle they don’t want us to see in the carnival of election time.
The idea that we willingly handover all agency over our neighbourhoods, our welfare and our futures to professionals who excel in some of the worst human arts of manipulation, deceit, lies and corruption is the stuff of nightmares and dark graphic novels. That they want to have power in the first place should be clue enough.
For all the lies that pervade election times, perhaps the biggest is that the ballot box makes us equal, that Rishi with his million-pound swimming pool and the shop worker with a paddling pool have the same rights and responsibilities as each other. Except that what we give Starmer or Rishi is theirs for the duration, while we wait for our right to place an X in five years-time on another piece of paper.
And how precious that X is made to feel given that you probably only have 10 of them to use in your lifetime. 10 moments of feeling equal is your lifetime ration of influence or participation.
In the process, its dull familiarity creates the attitude in most of us summed up as “I don’t believe in politics” or “what has politics got to do with me?” And that is exactly what they want us to feel. Distanced and docile.
However, always pushing back against this is our innate humanity and our struggle for a dignified existence. Our own lives are social, economic, and emotional all of which combine to make our existence deeply political. We care massively about our friends, our loved ones, our neighbourhoods and environment, our welfare, and our futures.
On a day-to-day level we demonstrate this actively with our colleagues, communities, and the kinds of social family we consciously choose to construct. We come together all the time in free, and yes, political association.
To combat litter, to look after our vulnerable neighbours, to volunteer, to assist and to commune with others like us in football teams, choirs, for feeding people, hospital transports or knitting circles. And to strike against them!
It’s often said that we must vote because people fought and gave their lives for that right. How odd then that we vote in elections only put in power those who want us to continue fighting and dying to protect their power! Nice try, but even the most dedicated voter can recognise the army of ‘mini me’s’ starting to climb the greasy pole.
Political parties, election campaigns whether national or local are not the community in action! They are the definition of our blindsided manipulation and exclusion from anything meaningful that looks like change.
They want our participation in this staged event – it looks good for them. It encourages them and allows them to claim their greed is in our name. Look at the last time you used your X, what did it change? We feel sure if they thought it could really change anything they would make it illegal.
Wouldn’t it be great if these elections receive the contempt they deserve. Let’s have an election strike!
Voting leaves them feeling empowered and subjects us to passivity at best, state sanctioned brutality at worst. Refusing to vote in favour of community mobilisation is not apathy, on the contrary, if you vote you may feel you’ve no right to complain.
If we live long enough to complain that is! What makes this election different is that it is happening in a time war! We are rearming towards a generalised war as Ukraine/Russia; Gaza/Israel, Britain, Yemen, Iran, China, and the US all coalesce along front lines of capitalist rivalry.
Whoever you vote for will not end the war but pursue its escalation in the ‘national interest’. That is in fact the interests of the capitalists, their local state operatives and the imperialist blocks whose boots on the ground they are.
Both parties promise to maintain war austerity and increase military spending, one is openly committed to conscription, and we have seen where the Tories go labour goes. Vote labour and still die horribly!
Taking us beyond these points, the question arises what can we do instead? Practically, individually, and collectively. Locally and nationally, at home and abroad?
On the most basic level, as individuals, thinking globally but acting locally, refuse the imposed consensus and say what we see.
Call out the hypocrisy and advocate for ourselves and our class across frontiers. Collectively, refuse to subsume our needs to any so called ‘national interest’.
Link our needs and demands to the austerity of war profiteering and profiteering wars. Everything we do at home, here for ourselves and our class, hinders the operation of the warfare state.
Talk, communicate, share our own struggles and insights – individual, community, workplace, environmental – in solidarity across locality and trade. A victory on the home front is a victory and example abroad.
Make demands opposed the charades of their violent ‘social peace’, linked to opposition to their wars. Workers in the field of arms manufacture or supply, energy, shipping, chemicals, iron and steel, ports, aviation, and docks can all be instrumental in slowing or blocking the supply lines of war. Include these as centres of propagating our own demands and against militarisation.
In direct action choose targets that challenge power and build solidarity. Activists everywhere should target the centres of power, production and decision making instead of paint bombing musicals or obstructing other workers battling to meet our daily needs.
Build hubs of coordination, discussion, communication bringing community and labour together. Develop our own methods of accountable and actionable decision making.
Own these decisions and actions, publicise and promote them. Disseminate in multimedia formats and let others see that resistance is possible. The longest journey, a single step.
We may always ask when and where should I start? Two nuclear armed powers are warring in a capitalist power block crisis on our frontiers. Our state is involved in both! The danger is real, the danger is now.
Instead of voting, let’s organise to change something!
The Czechoslovak Anarchist Society (CAS) expresses solidarity and support for all Ukrainian men who are avoiding mobilization and conscription by taking refuge in the West. The EU estimates that there are roughly 750 thousand Ukrainians who are fit to fight, but refuse to enlist. The Czech Republic currently registers 94 643 men between the ages of 18 and 65, who have been granted temporary protection related to the war in Ukraine, and who are subject to mobilization. As anarchists, we strongly empathize with this immense army of people who refuse to die in a war of the powerful to further the imperialist interests of the West (the USA and the EU) on one side and the East (Russia and China) on the other. None of us can be forced against their will to take up arms and become cannon fodder!
The government and politicians Ukraine face a shortage of expendable manpower, and its minister of foreign affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, is displeased with the number of combat-ready men abroad. However, refusal to fight is more widespread than ever among working-class people even in Ukraine. Polish and Lithuanian statesmen have already declared that they are ready to assist Ukraine in the return of these persons. The Czech minister of foreign affairs Jan Lipavský (Pirates) said that Czechia does not support those who are evading lawful conscription. TOP 09 has joined SPD and ANO. It seeks to return combat-ready Ukrainians against their will. TOP 09 plans to discuss this topic at the next proceedings of the ruling coalition. This proposal came after more than two years of war in Ukraine from TOP 09’s Ondřej Kolář, the son of Petr Kolář, adviser to president Petr Pavel.
The Minister of the Interior, Vít Rakušan (STAN), has confirmed that the coalition is in discussions with the opposition concerning a legal amendment dubbed Lex Ukraine. However, he claims that the return of combat-ready Ukrainians to Ukraine is far from straightforward due to international law. „If the people are already on EU soil, and if they have not committed a crime on this soil, there is little chance to return them,“ said Rakušan, adding „at this moment, repatriation due to failure to obey conscription in another country is simply not possible.”
As anarchists, we protest against the actions of Czech and foreign politicians, who strive to prolong the war instead of working towards an end to the dying of thousands in a senseless geopolitical conflict by negotiating a ceasefire and peace! We protest against the actions of the Ukrainian government, which has never cared for the workers whom it now wants to send to the frontline slaughterhouses against their will. We support all deserters (Russians as well as Ukrainians) and those who refuse mobilization. We respect the conscience of anybody who decides to not take up arms, not fight, and save their own life as well as that of their family. Our lives are more than the interests of states, nations, and capital!
If the wealthy and politicians want to go to war, they themselves should don uniforms and go to the frontlines!
“Together Against Capitalist Wars and Against Capitalist Peace!” May 2024.
Throughout the week between 120 and 150 revolutionary internationalists against capitalist war gathered in Prague for the Congress to begin communicating and coordinating.
From the start the event was fraught with problems. In part due to the lack of experience of the organisers, and in part due to the reality on the ground of a split in the anarchist movement in the Czech Republic.
This split, along the lines of opposition to all capitalist wars and support for the state in some. Between revolutionaries and defenders of their national bourgeoisie.
The repercussions of this played out in real time before us in what one foreign delegate noted in their report back, as the consequence of “the fog of war”. A foretaste of the splits to come.
The inaugural session on the theme of the conference took place in the Liben District of Prague on Wednesday May 22nd, attended by around 50 of the first arriving delegates.
Introduced by a comrade from the Anti-Militarist Initiative (AMI), the theme of opposing war at home and abroad and opposing the capitalist social peace at home are two sides of the same coin.
The poverty ‘peace’ at home is the austerity and repression of their class war against us, preparing and enabling the slaughter of our class on the front lines of the conflicts: Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, Yemen, Iran, wherever imperialist blocs grind on their fault lines.
“The war is no further away than the nearest arms or components factory. No further than the nearest logistics depot, transport hub, communications centre. The war is where the ports and airports are, the military bases and their reserve volunteers’ stations.
It is the rail networks and motorways, the towns, estates, cities and factories where we as workers’ pay the price of war in widening poverty and worsening austerity. Worsening conditions, lower pay and the threat of military call up or conscription.
In truth we cannot move without being at war and when we notice it, the rhetorical guns blaze “disrupter, extremist, terrorist!” We are already, through our toleration of their economic planning and its social and political consequences, being partially conscripted by capitalism and its state actors into its destructive rivalry.”
Discussion was widespread but in full agreement on the Internationalist position the workers have no nation and, opposition to all wars. The use of the language of the West’s ‘Culture-Wars’, often used against revolutionists, such as accusations of ‘Westsplaining’ or speaking with the ‘colonial voice’ was undermined by the contributions from Russian and Ukrainian exiles present at the congress.
A Russian comrade from the group New Promethius explained how the social peace in Russia was in part maintained by hiding the impact of the war. Increasing workers’ wages so they have a sense of gain.
He also talked of a policy of recruiting from the poorer republics offering more money than workers could earn in their lifetime to be paid if they live or to their families should they die, thus protecting the large urban centres from the direct experience of depopulation and body bags.
Perhaps most impacting was from a Ukrainian comrade on the Ukrainian worker’s experience:
“There are no more professional soldiers to send. They can pick you off the street and just send you. A guy used to get a few weeks and then few day’s training. Now he gets nothing.
He can get picked up and sent to the front. He’s no idea how to fight, he doesn’t last a month before he’s dead. He’s not a warrior he’s just a guy in the street.”
This was followed by another Russian comrade now living in Germany who said opposition in Russia was limited but often centred around “peace” groups the 2 main exceptions where KRAS [see their short statement to the congress as they couldn’t attend below] and the mothers of dead soldiers who have begun to organise. This was backed up and agreed with by our Ukrainian comrade.
Despite this promising start, organisation from this point began to fall apart. Venues were cancelled through the actions and influence of the pro-war anarchists of the Czech Anarchist Federation, and events were cancelled to enable search for new ones.
From this point effectively two programs began to take shape. A group of foreign comrades attending, in the absence of scheduling and venues, organised alternative meetings at different locations, and we look forward to hearing the outcomes of the work they have done.
While we continued to discuss and have meetings with other different international delegations, we prioritised our meagre resources to continue where we could the revised program of the original, if now truncated Congress and will report more on this later.
Report by Dreyfus
From KRAS -IWA to the Prague Action Week conference:
We, the members of KRAS-IWA, as the inheritors of the anti-militarist anarchist tradition of the 1915 manifesto, welcome the participants of the international conference who gathered to speak out against capitalist war and the so-called capitalist “peace” and reject the alleged leftists and pseudo-anarchists who in capitalist they take sides in wars.
We hope that this forum will be an important step to create a practical interaction from below and regardless of the boundaries of different organizations, among all truly anti-war and anti-militaristic social forces.
Unfortunately, the situation in our country and the difficult connection with other parts of Europe do not give us the opportunity to attend the conference in person. But we are with you in spirit.
We are sending a statement of our view of the war question and request you to make it known to the conference participants.
AnarCom Network 