Hundreds of thousands have marched repeatedly in London and across these islands against the carnage of the Gaza war. Many expressing their impotent outrage at the suffering.
Most however as partisans of one capitalist state solution or another, blind to or ignoring of their own experience of the state’s relationship to war and our class. How’s that working? It isn’t. It is instead weaponised turning communities against each other as alleged hate speech.
Without open class conflict it can achieve nothing that doesn’t suit the interests of the rival belligerents and their respective capitalist bloc sponsors. And why one war but not another?
It’s hardly surprising that people are fatigued by their exposure to the horror of war. A sense of powerlessness threatens to overwhelm us. Easier to imagine that it could never be us rather than acknowledge the blood is spilling on our doorstep.
We are daily witness to such horrors that t it seems beyond our imagination. How could this be? What could it be like? Could it ever be us?
If we want to conjure an image of what Ukraine might be like think of towns like Cannock or Whitby or Newport reduced to rubble. If you think of Gaza imagine somewhere between the size of the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Man flattened by the bombs of the proud capitals of ‘democracy’.
Beyond where we want to go are the shocking memories of Sarah Everard at the hands of a serving police officer. Think of the tens of thousands raped, murdered, slaughtered by proud men in uniforms endorsed by their governments! ‘Democratic’ or otherwise makes little difference to the victims.
This is neither far away or long ago but now, no further than a holiday you may have thought of in Gran Canaria or Cyprus. And these are only the wars the media is reporting on, much of the rest of the world is aflame: Sudan; Ethiopia; Congo; Myanmar, to name a few.
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.
The blood and treasure of our labour is being stolen and squandered to steal the treasure of the labour of others like ourselves!
Where we notice and try to act our protest and resistance is squandered too. Marshalled by capitalisms loyal ‘left wing’ opposition into the passivity of marches to support or oppose one side or the other. The abattoir or the slaughterhouse!
This is not peace! It is capitalisms ‘Social-Peace’ of order, discipline, defamation and control. The bloodied Home-Front of their fratricidal wars next door.
If in doubt of the violence of their Social-Peace, reflect on the defeated strikes, the disaster of the care sector, Covid and the collapsing health services, the 25% annual increase in rough sleepers and the lengthening food banks queues!
This is their war against our class at home while they openly talk of expanding their wars abroad fed by enforceable military service. If it achieves nothing else, it creates fear and a misplaced gratitude for the devil you-know – their Social Peace.
Here and abroad, it is capitalism and its state that is the disrupter, the extremist, the terrorist! Don’t just march, organise and act: this ‘Warfare State’ is the enemy at home and our resistance to it, our struggle with it, our ‘Class War’ is our necessary, best and urgent response against it!
From 20 to 26 May 2024, groups and individuals from different parts of the world will meet in Prague to coordinate anti-war activities as part of the Week of Action https://actionweek.noblogs.org/.
The series of events will also include an anti-war congress, which will take place from Friday 24 to Sunday 26 May 2024. Campaigns, direct actions, projects, publications and analyses related to the issue of war will be presented at the congress.
Among other things, this internationalist event will serve as an open assembly that will try to combine theoretical background with practical activities. We consider it necessary, in the process of resistance to war, to develop an anti-capitalist practice which seeks to preserve political autonomy. In concrete terms, this means that we want to organize outside the political parties, outside the structures of the states, and against all states.
We are particularly interested in the ways how we can oppose all the harsh conditions to which we have been exposed and subjected during interstate wars and capitalist peace. We are interested in ways to sabotage wars, how to deprive our enemies of resources, how to undermine the ability of states and their armies to continue wars. Which way to go and what is to be done? How to join forces and get organized?
We will look for answers based on class, not national differentiation; answers that take into account the sheer contradiction between rank-and-file soldiers and officers, between wage laborers and bosses, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. We will look for ways to make soldiers in uniform of any state army identify themselves with the social struggle of their brothers and sisters on the other side of the front line, and not in the murderous orders of their officers. We will also look for ways to oppose false friends, all those who seek to transform the class struggle into a national or religious struggle for a new state, a new capitalist space, better adapted to their needs.
We support the internationalist community affirming the struggle against the bourgeoisie of all warring sides, against the armies of all states, against the capitalists of each country. Current manifestations of resistance, however contradictory and fragmented they are, undoubtedly contain the seeds of a social polarization that can turn wars between states into class confrontation.
What is meant is the confrontation between the defenders of the nation, the states and capitalism on the one hand, and the social class on the other, which is beginning to realize that defending the nation to which it is bound in chains only serves the interests of those who exploit it.
Direct action against wars now takes various forms, more or less targeted, more or less organized. Let’s strive for a qualitative shift whereby individual acts of resistance break out of their isolation through interconnection and coordination.
The common enemy in every epoch is, first of all, capitalism, and therefore every state that structures it, the army that defends it, the bourgeoisie that embodies it. The only way out of the nightmare of capitalist wars and capitalist peace is a collective awakening: we must see and sabotage the whole machinery of war, overthrow its representatives and reclaim our power as creators of the world. We call on groups and individuals interested in participating in the anti-war congress in Prague to contact us well in advance with proposals for the program. Together against capitalist wars and capitalist peace! https://actionweek.noblogs.org/post/2024/02/28/anti-war-congress-prague-24-to-26-may-2024/#more-490
“My fellow Americans, I…will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” – President Ronald Reagan 1984.
A 20 year truce until war breaks out, suggests a senior NATO commander. As General Foch described the end of the First World War in 1919, “This is not peace…. It is an armistice for 20 years.” World War Two in Europe began in 1939.
The worst global crisis since the Second World War, as Gaza witnesses more deaths than in the London Blitz. The UN is considering legal action on ‘Genocide’, the concept itself defined by the annihilation events of that last great international conflagration.
This is not history on the edge of repeating itself, nor the consequences of a lesson unlearned. The current crisis is a continuation of the drive inherent in Capitalism for domination of our Class through control of global markets for profit. This rivalry and the destruction it demands, once again puts us on the brink of extinction.
These are not paranoid conspiracy theories, but the words of our rulers and their military class themselves.
UK Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps said on 15th January that we are “moving from a post-war to pre-war world…. The enemies are gathering all around us, we need to make sure we lead our allies in the conflicts to come.”
Two days later, Admiral Bauer, of the Royal Netherlands Navy, said that preparation “starts there. The realisation that not everything is plannable and not everything is going to be hunky dory in the next 20 years.”
Within a week, General Sir Patrick Sanders, the outgoing UK Chief of the General Staff chipped in that ordinary citizens should be “trained and equipped” to fight in the military in the event of a war with Russia.
Shapps’s ex-army predecessor, Tobias Ellwood, said the military chief should be “listened to carefully…. What’s coming over the horizon should shock us. It should worry us and we are not prepared.”
It took a few days for coverage of this to emerge in the popular press, and politics and military might not yet be exactly on the same page. Though let’s not delude ourselves, the preparation for global war has begun. Not just by parts of the globe lighting up with bombs from one side or the other, but in the propaganda, softening us up for more sacrifice beyond austerity, militarisation and even conscription.
Since these comments we have seen the dial, already high, turned up dramatically with speculation, as we have suggested before, that an attack on Iran itself from the US (or franchised out to Israel?) is now in open debate.
While any revolutionary class based opposition to these drives to war may seem a long way off, the steps towards that war are now seemingly uncomfortably close.
There’s been no shortage of wars since 1945, and no shortage of bodies. Conservative estimates are around 90 million dead from 1945 to the present day. As many as died in both world wars put together. Yet we are led to imagine that this has been an era of relative peace.
This alleged bloody peace has been a prolonged and inevitable preparation for the next round of global imperialist conflict. The Eurasian frontier from the Indian Ocean to the arctic sea is aflame or bristling in preparation.
Whilst we are being encouraged in the West to see ‘our side’ as the benign party in the coming conflict, we should recall that it is precisely ‘our side’ that is the major obstacle in calls for an end to the bloodbath in Gaza. This while US arms sales abroad reached a record of a quarter of a trillion dollars last year.
As for Yemen, they would hard pressed to spot the difference between the bombs and missiles being dropped by the British and Americans from the British and American missiles dropped on them by the Saudi led coalition over the last 9 years.
For most of us, the daily alienation of poverty and wage labour, the struggle to survive with dignity in a hostile sea of austerity and assault has inoculated us against the memory of war and its emerging threat.
For those who don’t remember the Second World War, (spoiler alert) Hitler dies… and with him it was hoped the atrocities of Nazism moved from the naive plain of beyond imagination to the impossible.
In recent years however, fascism has moved from an historic aberration via the theoretically possible to the conceptually plausible. In reality, in some countries, fascist parties already have come to power, however they are practically choosing to understate themselves for the sake of acceptability at the moment. Nationalism, Nazism and the Alt-Right are making themselves and their quest for conflict known all over Europe and America.
From Italy to Hungary, to key opposition groups in Spain, France, and Germany, fascism in reality never lost its potential. It’s just a clever word for capitalism and its state operative, believing that they have the whip hand and can abandon the pretence of tolerance and democracy.
It requires a mixture of populism, a desperate ruling class retreating to narrow national chauvinism, unchallenged by a weakened working class. Our class so conspicuously on the back foot since the banking collapse of 2008 failed to resist when capitalism called for us to rally behind austerity – that is to say the increasing repression and impoverishment of us as workers – in the ‘national interest’.
Austerity, in so many ways driven by war and global rivalry, not to mention climate change causing mass migration, is being weaponised into a call for sacrifice for the sake of preserving the nation state and capitalism.
In the face of this, the bosses have become emboldened as we have been weakened. “..(Our) class is divided because it is weak, not weak because it is divided”. – Anton Pannekoek
Us versus them, ‘our’ state versus its external threat is a key ideological weapon aimed against the unity of our class.
We can see this in the barbarity and deafness of the state of Israel; Hamas’s intransigence, Putin’s relentless sense of impunity and in the threat of a second Trump presidency, despite his populist coup attempt.
In the face of this threat of war and calls for conscription, our unity now is more important than ever. The last 2 years of workplace and industrial struggles have again shone a light on those on the political left, the Labour Party and the organised labour movement, who would seek to weaken and divide us further. Warmongers all for one side or the other – watch Labour’s promises on defence and security as the election approaches!
Enough of disunity and defeat! The generation that could witness our extinction is already here and the fight against the coming war is our most urgent task. Damn their oppressive and hopeless ‘social peace’ and their drive to war! Against their clamour and calls for national unity!
We must prepare to fight and unify on every front of the class struggle. Our very survival depends on it!
No war between peoples – no peace between classes! No War but the Class War!
Despite chauvinistic sentiments in Israeli and Palestinian societies, not everyone on both sides of the front lines agrees with the war that began with the brutal attack by Hamas clerical fascists on October 7. Demonstrations are taking place in Israel and Gaza demanding an immediate ceasefire and holding to account the ruling circles on both sides responsible for escalating the conflict.
Already on October 14, voices were raised in Tel Aviv in solidarity with Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Netanyahu. He is accused that his policies have actually strengthened Hamas in opposition to Palestinian Authority circles willing to seek compromise and coexistence with Israel. The very next day, the government introduced measures authorizing the arrest of those who harm the “spirit of the nation.” After an anti-war demonstration in Haifa, the police chief threatened to send protesters to Gaza on October 19. Despite repression and terror by the far-right, a protest was staged outside the Israeli prime minister’s residence on November 4. On November 8, Israel’s Supreme Court authorized police to disperse anti-war rallies. Nevertheless, on November 18, the first legal demonstration against the war was held in Tel Aviv. A week later, on November 25, demonstrators gathered in Jerusalem, demanding the prime minister’s resignation. The following actions were met with police repression: on November 29, protesters were arrested outside the parliament, and on December 2 – outside the prime minister’s house in Caesarea. On December 16, protesters camped outside the Israeli War Ministry.
On December 28, Israeli Jews and Arabs demonstrated together in Tel Aviv to demand a ceasefire. However, scheduled protest marches for Israeli-Palestinian peace in Tel Aviv on January 11 and in Haifa on January 13 were banned by the police.
The first protests against the Hamas regime in Gaza since the beginning of the war were reported back in the fall, but it was difficult to confirm this information, and the videos circulating on the Internet at the time were from before the war began.
However, there were periodic reports of “hunger riots” in Gaza – attacks on warehouses and food convoys. Now, in January 2024, there is finally evidence of major protests in Gaza against the war with Israel and against the clerical-fascist dictatorship, which, with its bloody provocation on October 7, exposed civilians in the Strip to bombing and fighting. For several days in January, hundreds of residents took to the streets. On January 25, they marched through the Khan Younis humanitarian corridor, chanting, “Down with Hamas!” “The people want a ceasefire! Netanyahu and Sinwar, we want a ceasefire. Enough with war and enough with the destruction!”, – could be heard over loudspeakers. The day before, a video of a protest by Gaza youth in front of a hospital in Deir el-Balah went around. Participants demanded that Hamas release Israeli hostages and end the war so that they could return to their homes in the northern sector.
The state, the generals, the military, this profit system and the imperial blocs within it, are beating a march to generalised warfare and our possible extinction. Are we listening? Are we going to try to effectively respond? We can but we need to organise as a conscious internationalist working class now. We can start by communicating and coming together as revolutionary anti-militarists, regionally, nationally and beyond. At the ACN, we are trying to do just this.
Below is a reflective piece from a member of Tyne & Wear, No War But the Class War. We can see from the comrades there and as described in this piece, the necessity of organising directly as a class, by ourselves as workers and for ourselves as workers throughout the world, in a struggle against militarism and capital, and for emancipation.
We also see the hurdles facing us, not only from capitalism, the state and its militarism, but from the tragedy of the ongoing illusions and fantasy of leftists in continuing to support cross class alliances and nationalisms of varying stripes, in a never ending (not so) merry go round.
Read below for more on all this:
In the middle part of last Saturday (20th Jan), I took a stroll into the ‘Toon’ (Newcastle city centre). There was supposedly a trade union bloc forming, as part of the latest “demonstration for Palestine”. Thought I’d take a look and arm myself with some NWBCW literature and statements, and see if there were any parties there interested in our local and international endeavour, limited as it is at present.
At Monument, there were about 300 people in attendance, readying for the march through the streets to the Civic Centre. Amongst this number, were a host of loud speakers, and it was loud (you could hear it right down the bottom of Grey Street, about half a mile away). Amongst calls for a support of ‘Palestine Action’ and their efforts against Rafael, who produce weapons to the state in Israel, there was also a lot of hot air by the array of permanent leftist activist speakers and their close circle of followers.
Only one, maybe two, trade union banners were seen, whilst there were a few members of other similar organisations in attendance. These being organisations involved in a few workplaces elsewhere, if not local ones. This a bloc?!
Anyway, a few leaflets were given out to anyone who appeared they may seem interested in an internationalist working class NWBCW perspective. Good to say that a younger person at least asked a number of relevant questions and said they would look into it and thanked me for the details. But let’s face it, overall it was yet another disappointing reaction and event.
Whilst various members of the military and state officials have been banging the drums of war and warning us to be ready in anywhere from 20 to only 5 years time for possible global catastrophe, yet again we find a desperate need to see the beginnings of a necessary collective understanding that in order to stop this potential extinction event / world war, in all wars we need to see ourselves as workers and struggle together as workers!
We don’t doubt whether anyone is brave when they occupy the roof of a weapons manufacturer. However, we need to see that any such actions should take place effectively on a class and internationalist basis with much practical solidarity. There can be no alliances with a bourgeoisie racing to war, wherever they find themselves. No support for nationalism of whatever stripe. And an end to the shouting of, “How dare someone not support a state for so and so…?” We should not be supporting the state anywhere, whatsoever! Neither should anyone claim to be class conscious and then unquestioningly support this national project or that one, and go about bandwagon jumping.
There can be no doubt that the suffering in Gaza is horrendous and that an end to the shelling and missiles would help alleviate the immediate situation. However, even with this and a pull out by the Israeli state, oppression and exploitation would still take place, both by capital and a proto state controlled by the brutal theocrats, murderers, rapists and torturers of Hamas (or anyone else heading up the local state for that matter).
War would still reveal its ugly head again very soon. It is an inherent part of this system and its craving for territory, resources and profit, via the formation of rival imperial blocs and their increasingly complex web of proxies. This is rapidly putting our very survival in grave danger.
To end the threat of annihilation, we must organise as a class and realise our common interests throughout the world, in a struggle against militarism, oppression and exploitation, and for emancipation. This really needs to start now. As a conscious working class, it can be done but time is likely running out. Anyone interested in this fight, please contact us. We all need each other!
Historical physiology and possible future of these disputes.
Healthcare is vital for our well-being and it affects us all to our core. It is always a potential central focus for the class struggle, with well over 1.9 million of us working in healthcare settings and over 1.25 million working in the NHS alone – the NHS being easily the largest employer in the U.K.
All disputes in the health sector then are of vital concern for our class. This time it’s the ‘junior doctors’’ strike and the results are described as stalemate, again. This is despite it including the largest number of consecutive strike days (6 days) within the NHS. The dispute is now into its second year.
With the handshake (enthusiastically or stated as somewhat reluctantly) between health unions and government in regard to many other health workers, the state has felt emboldened to both flatly refuse the doctors’ demands and to accuse them of being selfish and irresponsible. Meanwhile, some Trusts reflecting government policy, tried enforcing a return to work through the use of derogation (demands for temporary cover by striking health workers on a regular basis instead of previously, where it was only used only in emergency situations).
It all appeared so different the previous winter. As a class, our living standards had been under the cosh of state and capital for years. We had been patronised, including being clapped, by the parasites in power. This as many of us had put our lives on the line during a horrific pandemic. Around Westminster there were raucous parties but for health and other workers, long hours and emotionally tumultuous days spent away from family and friends, had often been the norm. A number of friends and colleagues died. Others were facing a long slog back to health.
The RCN had since its inception been seen primarily as a professional nursing body and had as an organisation never supported health workers taking industrial action. It had always maintained a no strike agreement and totally hamstrung its members. The situation though, was now so bad in the health service and among our class, that members of the RCN obtained an overwhelmingly positive mandate for action and were out on historic picket lines (2022-23). This was with nurses making up the single largest part of the workforce in the NHS.
Parallels with other historic and concurrent international actions by nurses (France, Germany, N. Ireland, USA, Argentina…) were drawn and expected by some to be surpassed. Over ½ a million nurses, health visitors and support workers in the NHS were involved in the actions. Joining them were the physiotherapists, radiographers and ambulance workers.
There was a massive swelling of good will among many members of the public. The initial feeling on the picket line was one of determination. “Surely, we could win this?!” Indeed, for those of us who were on the picket lines, it was hard to remember such a degree of support that was clearly evident now. Car and bus horns were blaring, our communities joined the picket line, well-wishing and food was readily provided by passers-by and other striking workers in transport, warehouses and telecommunications.
Contrasting this though, there was unease at the backs of some minds over what would or wouldn’t happen next? For as sure as night follows day, to those with a long memory of struggle, the usual happened: whilst the state clearly showed whose side it was on (not ours!), paralysed by fear of legislation and wanting to appear reasonable to capital, union representatives did little to encourage co-ordinated, unified and determined action. Though there was the usual bluster in speeches, meetings and marches.
On the one hand, ambulance workers were holding widely differing days of action depending on the union involved (GMB, Unite, Unison), whilst the state viciously attacked them, sensing blood. Meanwhile, Unite and Unison failed to organise effective ballots and even encouraged workers in the health sector, including nurses, to accept crumbs. We even heard the excuse, “Well, the RCN used to scupper our actions…”. Occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and associated technicians had no involvement officially at all in these disputes, despite having taken action in the past.
Then, leading into the summer of 2023, a “unique deal for nurses” was discussed through the RCN “leadership”. This was something that would have accentuated the existing divisions between health workers. It also threatened to exacerbate the worst aspects of the already dreadful, NHS health wide, ‘Agenda for Change’ pay scales and job descriptors, and made a total nonsense of the same thing. When this failed to happen, the same officialdom recommended the end of industrial action and a humiliated handshake with employers and government.
Though defying this call in a further mandate for strike action, the determination of the nurses had gone. The momentum was lost and strikes discontinued. Health workers felt demoralised and their positions far weaker than the previous winter. Poor pay and condition deals were now the order of the day, once again! True, not 1% this time but now … wow, 3% plus 6%! Or is it? The lame pay deals are so confusing that who actually understands them? Maybe that’s the point?
Concurrently, little to nothing was offered to address staff shortages and burn out. 50,000 extra nursing students were going to be recruited, or already had apparently, in a complete fantasy land existing purely in the heads of our delightful ruling class representatives.
At the root of what happened, is the tragedy that we have lost confidence as a class. We have been on the back foot for so long that we have forgot what it is like to take unified non collaborative action, determined by ourselves.
So, now we are at this moment, where the medics (doctors and perhaps soon, consultants) are the only ones taking action. Their demands go ignored or ridiculed by the useless Master class and opposition is whipped up by the press. This, a class and its cheerleaders that see no problem in throwing resource after resource down the drain, in pursuit of the Narnia of an attempt at a return of profit rates in capitalism. Whilst enforcing austerity on our class and being unable to provide for a comprehensive healthcare system, they and the capitalist system can always afford mass slaughter in war after war.
A complete mistitle, these doctors are “Junior” in name only. Many have immense responsibilities and stress. The BMA has 46,000 of these ‘junior doctors’ as members. Its demands around pay and better staffing numbers to prevent burnout, if actually taken literally, are in reality more realistic than those of the previous health union ones. But even this would only sets things back partly to the pre-2008 position and then only after a number of years of staged increases. It would hardly be a bed of roses for anyone. It is also true to say that the BMA members failed to stand soon enough alongside other health workers, when the chance arose. Again, hidebound by professionalism and convention, legalism and trade unionism’s sectional and collaborative approach, an opportunity to win a dispute at the most opportune moment had been scuppered.
Still, we need to stand alongside the doctors’ actions outside of union officialdom and magnify them. Indeed, despite naysayers amplified by the bourgeois press, some health workers and members of the public are doing precisely this.
We need to amplify this dispute and lift our horizons. Our living standards continue to fall, exhaustion through work intensification and low staffing levels continue apace. The recent pay deals are already made null by inflation, particularly food inflation. As health workers and as a class generally, there is no choice but to take up the struggle once again. Some doctors say they have learnt lessons about the importance of taking continual action from the recent defeat of other health workers. Such insights, if true in reality, need encouraging.
In response to the raising of their demands, we should also lift our own. A victory for the doctors would represent a victory for all of us! A lifting of the ceiling and a victory in one of the battles of the class war is something to be celebrated. We should never resent or resist the more ambitious material and social demands of other members of our class. Furthermore, the best way to achieve victory is always to unite on the basis of clear class consciousness and solidarity.
Action in dispute need not be demoralising, uncoordinated or result in crap handshake deals between union “leaders”, employers and government officials. The attempted frequent use of derogation seen recently in the daily running of services to allegedly maintain minimum service and staffing levels, can be seen as a weakness on behalf of employers, capital and state. It was clearly an attempted manipulation and it proved extremely controversial. It also demonstrated once again the crucial importance of our class in society. Doctors were only striking for a few hours before derogation was called for or, “services would simply cease to operate and be available”.
Rather than simply threaten to work elsewhere if we can (however tempting), we can unify class wide and build our confidence for future possibilities. Meetings and discussions with other health workers (including agency and locum ones), patients and community members can take place. These via networks and in assemblies run directly by ourselves collectively. Securing the support of other members of our class (which health workers are already in a good position to do), imaginative and effective means of struggle across “job boundaries” that best protects patients and working class communities can be devised.
Though demanding much solidarity and determination in the face of severely restrictive legislation – such tactics as, lightning strikes, the social solidarity strike, slow downs, lock outs of employers, provision for all without question for those attending A&E and various clinics, are all possible. Such actions would obviously vary depending on appropriateness per service and patient group.
Health workers should not fall into the trap of sacrificing their lives for “a calling”. This, a term used not to encourage social solidarity but to simply work us into an early grave. We should not roll over for an insurance based health system but struggle for a truly integrated one built upon real free access; one that provides for all human health needs.
Effective health provision is clearly collapsing within capitalism. There is regular resource sapping state interference, profiteering and brutal cuts (medication, community provision, ambulance, staff and bed numbers…). Health provision could also do without the awful stifling bureaucracy and hierarchy endemic both to the NHS and private services.
No more rationing of provisions, no more obsessive professional and sectional boundaries nor the dreadful merry go round of useless and badly informed managers giving orders. No more collapsing living standards and poor public health. No more divisions between work and play. No more wars in capitalism preyed upon us, where health workers and others in our class face the dreadful results.
There can be no stalemate! Health care is of universal concern for all. So is a truly free, universal healthcare system – one where we have a real say in its operation. Capital exploitation needs to be and can be ended, if we build our self-confidence, united as a class, in struggle for emancipation.
What has Government ever done for you? – The Bloody Sunday scandal; the Windrush scandal; the Hillsborough scandal; the Infected Blood scandal: the Iraq War scandal; the Grenfell Scandal; the Covid disaster scandal… Liz Truss!
And now the Post Office Scandal.
Tragically it took a representation of real life through TV drama to bring a longstanding injustice to public awareness. But it did, and its power is both intrinsic and resonant. We have seen it all before.
The current focus and justified anger in the UK over the scandalous prosecution by the Post Office of over 700 sub-postmasters over a 20 year period reveals an inconvenient truth. That the modern State in all its forms is a bastard of capitalism!
Perverting the course of justice; bullying and abuse of workers; implications of perjury; the alleged lying to the accused; the relentlessness of pursuit, the suppression of evidence and silencing of those who raised their voices was done by a nationally owned institution that once rivalled the NHS in prestige and affection. In “Mafia” style.
The public ownership of the nationalised Postal Service has not prevented It from acting as a persecuting agent of state and government interests with the tenacity of an East European secret police. A business like any other.
The experiences of corporate bullying and injustice will be very familiar to those working in much of the private sector, assumed to be the poorer employer in terms of quality of work experience than the nationalised sector. What shocks many is the exposure of the myth of the state as a benign controller of capital.
The reality is that nothing about capitalism is benign. Wage labour always exploits as it never pays us for the true value of the product of our labour. Every employer (bar perhaps the smallest inspirational charitable enterprises) has a boss or hierarchical management that mimics the state without its democratic pretensions.
Even Local Authorities, and the worthiest of charitable Human Rights enterprises see themselves as businesses, with what used to be collaborative personnel sections reconfigured as ‘HR Business Partners’. Standing not for Human Rights but an Orwellian dehumanising concept of ‘Human Resources’ – serving the corporate structure not the individual or collective.
Millions of us workers, at home and abroad, witnessed the tooth and claw nature of employment in its totally holy alliance with state and capital as we recently struggled, or continue to, against war driven austerity.
(Never austere for war though, there’s always enough money for that as they bomb Yemen and hand another £2.5 billion pounds for Ukraine to buy British weapons.)
Whoever controls capital, individual rich exploiters, carpet bagging hedge funders or the powermongers behind state nationalisation, it remains what it is – Capitalism!
State Capitalism and Private Capitalism are two cheeks of the same oppressive arse that needs a damn good kicking! The whole rotten collaborative structure of government, exploiters, their lackeys and minions needs tearing down. That will end their austerity and their wars.
We know and feel we have to fight back. Our lives depend on it. Millions of us want to, and the workers at the Post Office might not even be at the front or the queue!
Murderous conflicts occurring through the system of capital and state continue, intensify and now threaten to engulf entire regions. Both the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East drag on into another year and become increasingly barbarous. Starvation, mass killings, ethnic cleansing, kidnappings, humiliation and torture are clearly encouraged by the powers that be. The war in the Middle East, as well as in Eastern Europe, increasingly involves power and imperial blocs taking up their battle positions. This, despite the war focused on Gaza supposedly being “over by Christmas” (how many times have we heard that before?)!
As such, effective resistance often demands great bravery on the part of members of our class, their companions, supporters and friends. In this context, a number of us now know the names, Tal Mitnick and Yuval Dag.
Tal Mitnick is an 18-year-old vocal member of ‘Mesarvot’ (‘We Refuse’), which numbers a few hundred. Tal became the first open objector to serving in the IDF since the start of the current conflict and cited his opposition to the attacks upon the collective population of Gaza as a reason. For Tal considers the attacks, a “murderous revenge”, that does nothing to address the root cause of the conflict.
Meanwhile, Yuval Dag is a 21-year-old who served 64 days in Neve Tzedek military prison in Tel Aviv last Spring. He was supported as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and has if anything, become increasing vocal in his criticism of the situation throughout the Middle East and in Gaza and the West Bank, in particular, since then.
In Israel, military conscription is mandatory and is seen as, “defining you as a somebody in Israeli society”. There is also a saying that, “a nation building an army is a nation building itself”. This lays bare the shared roots of nationalism and militarism, as part of the cancerous ethos of state and capital.
Dissent in Israel does have quite a lengthy tradition. However, outside of the ruling class, nationalist religious zealots, and their supporters (who often get a pass on risking their necks), people there trying to avoid military service lately face massive obstacles and are at the least pressurised to keep quiet – or else! For in the wake of the attacks of 7th October last year, the state in Israel and unfortunately among a substantial part of the wider society, has been engaging in a bitter offensive against any who dare to even think about resisting the cry to take up the fight for nation, religion, and the exploitative and oppressive current system. This reflects a call by the master class that increasingly imperils our class and humanity itself.
It is likely then that for such reasons, reports of actual open opposition to the draft in Israel during the Gaza war have not been noted or publicised until very recently. However, in the last month, pieces on Mitnick, Dag, their friends and supporters have appeared. Of note too, these reports describe their increasingly determined stance, where they have made comments strongly alluding to the importance of internationalism among our class. Mitnick has appeared in embracing both radical anti-authoritarian and anti-militarist perspectives.
The bravery of these people in doing this is laid bare by the fact that Mitnick faces at least 30 days (and likely substantially longer) in jail after being sentenced in late December 2023, and will no doubt be bitterly ostracised when is freed. Meanwhile, Dag, though being imprisoned last year and from a nationalist family, has not kept quiet, and vocally supports Mitnick and fellow conscious workers for their anti-militarism. There are others starting to do the same.
The names of those openly resisting is now increasing. Sofia Orr (18 yrs old) and Iddo Elam (17 and also from the ‘Mesarvot’ group) have gone public in stating their opposition to being drafted (the former in the face of being ‘called up’ next month). All have described the importance of having a network of friends and supporters around them, now more than ever.
Iddo has stated that “one massacre doesn’t justify another” and then gone on to say that they are now steadfast in their “rejection of the entire current system”. Iddo and Sofia fear both for their friend Tal in prison and of the same fate whilst receiving death threats awaiting themselves. However, being members of a group showing solidarity with each other has galvanised their collective determination.
Their numbers may appear still relatively few as yet, but they could increase notably further as the murderous battles continue, the reality of the current system perhaps becomes transparent to many more and if the internationalist word spreads. Importantly, as noted above, some appear to be starting to embrace a class struggle, emancipatory position, as opposed to a liberal pacifist one. It is greatly encouraging to see that revolutionary No War But the Class War graffiti has now been spotted in the local urban streets around Tel Aviv.
All is vital to stop the nightmare of war, famine, poverty, nationalism, ethnic cleansing, barbarity, torture, the growing threat of theocrats, as well as the daily dose of oppression, alienation and exploitation. The anti-militarist class war is the only war which will unite us as an international working class to prevent a death spiral, to liberate ourselves and to finally live in harmony with this planet. Total respect to those resisting and to those who share the struggle in solidarity!
AnarCom Network 