Articles

Control of our borders, or bored of our controllers?

On the day that far right Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration Freedom Party (PVV) looked set to win 37 seats in the country’s general election, making them the largest party, the BBC News website decided to lead with some far right “populism” of their own, running the headline “UK net migration in 2022 revised up to record 745,000”.

It’s worth taking this figure into context. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) estimates that the current population of U.K. in 2023 is 67,736,802, a 0.34% increase from 2022. On the other hand, the global population growth is around 0.88%, so the UK increase rate is still much less than half the general world increase rate. This is not expressed in the news items, which are left context-free.

Here the BBC is playing to the right-wing narrative of Farage, Sunak and Braverman.

We in the ACN are very clear that we want an end to capitalism. But even in capitalist terms, and plain old racism aside, the fear-mongering over immigration does not make sense.  “They are taking our jobs” is the implication, but that doesn’t happen. The size of the workforce does not stay static while the population rises.

In 1960, the UK population was 52,543,017. The workforce (16 – 64 year-olds in employment) was around 25,250,000. When the population rose to the estimated 67,826,318, the number of jobs in the economy did not remain at 25,250,000. The number of 16-64 year-olds currently estimated to be in work is 75.7%, compared with 72.8% when the population was 15 million less. Of course, employment rates go up and down, but this is the result of the inherent booms and busts of capitalism, and does not correlate with population growth.

It’s worth noting that under capitalism, people on low to average earnings spend more of their money than the rich do. The wealthy tend to save it, or worse still send it to tax havens, out of reach of the economy.

If an immigrant is allowed to work (and remember the rules do not allow asylum seekers to do so), they buy food, clothes, bus fares. This is money that goes into circulation, unlike the tax haven hoardings of the rich which goes out of circulation.

Please note, we are not making an argument for capitalism, just describing how things work at the moment.

So, the argument that immigrants are a drain is false. Of course, it could be argued that there is not sufficient infrastructure. But that is a political decision. A decision not to invest in primary health, or hospitals, or schools. Governments could decide to spend that money if they wanted, but they’d rather subsidise the wealthy. Those same wealthy who are hiding their fortunes from the revenue in tax havens.

Thus, we have demonstrated that even by the standards of capitalism, immigration is not too high. It is therefore just another scare story to divide the working class against itself.

Were governments actually concerned about immigration, rather than just using it to divide and rule, then they would act now on climate change. For as more and more areas of the globe become inhospitable, more and more people will inevitably flee to the temperate zones.

But ask yourself this. What would it take you to flee your home and community with barely any possessions, and take desperate chances on dangerous sea crossings? Would you do it on a whim or for an “easy life”? You would not. And so, we must act with human compassion and with human solidarity for those driven to do so. And we must recognise that as capitalism continues to destroy the planet more and more people will need our compassion and solidarity.

By Dundonald

Our comrades of Třídní Válka (Class War) translated the below PDF from Italian, a pamphlet originally published in June by comrades from Milan.

The 16-page PDF by Class War can be downloaded from the link at the end of their introductory text, which we reproduce here:

Class War’s presentation

We present here our translation of the text “Defeatism and antimilitarism: Only possible class response to the war in Ukraine” written by “Centro di documentazione contro la guerra” originally published in June 2023 in Italian on their website.

We consider this text to be one of the clearest expressions of the revolutionary defeatism in the current anti-war movement. We would like to especially underline several very strong points, that the comrades are developing in this text:

• The insistence on the necessity to organize practical actions on the “home front” of “our own” camp, like blocking the deliveries of the military material to the front.
• The insistence on an uncompromising stance opposing both sides of the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine and defending the third camp of revolutionary defeatism even against the pacifist calls of the social-democratic forces.
• The insistence on the fact that “War in Ukraine” is not just one of many wars, but has a central place in the forming global military confrontation between two opposing blocks. The recently unfolding war in the Middle East, centered on the relentless slaughter of the proletarians in “Gaza” seems to becoming the second such a place.

-TV

Rishi Sunak chose the Global Food Security Summit at Lancaster House in London to reaffirm his commitment to the government’s Rwanda scheme.

“I’m completely committed to doing what is necessary to get those flights off and that scheme up and running,” he said of the plan send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which the UK’s top judges last week ruled was illegal.

Clearly the departure of Suella Braverman did not mean the end of the far-right rhetoric.

The Global Food Security Summit was billed as an opportunity to plan how to stop food crises before they start. It would seem that in the Prime Minister’s mind that means once again scapegoating refugees and keeping up the culture war tactic of pitting working class people against each other.

The destruction of the planet by capitalism continues apace. And governments are more than just inactive in the face of climate change: they are actively retreating from their promises. According to analysis by the climate change journal, Carbon Brief, these retreats put not only the UK’s legally binding sixth carbon budget out of reach, but also its international pledge under the Paris Agreement. Indeed, the carbon emissions of the richest 10% is up to 40 times bigger than the poorest, and ignoring the divide may make ending the climate crisis impossible, according to experts.

The newly ennobled David Cameron wrote in his introduction to the food summit that “Today’s answer cannot be about rich countries ‘doing development’ to others. We need to work together as partners, shaping narratives which developing countries own and deliver.” This seems to put the blame on “tardy developing nations”, despite the vast majority of climate damage having been caused by the so-called developed countries of the global north. On the other hand, the worst effects are being felt in the global south.

This government’s idea of “partnership” is clearly victim blaming. Blaming the global south for dragging their feet, despite it being our governments who are reneging on promises. Blaming the global south for poverty after centuries of plunder by capitalist greed. And blaming refugees for fleeing war, hunger and human misery, all of which will only multiply as the climate heats up.

We reject the right-wing rhetoric which seeks to divide workers from each other by labelling some “migrants” and threatening them with expensive, illegal and racist deportment to a country deplored for human rights abuses. Our ancestors all migrated from somewhere. Our enemy comes not in small boats but in limousines.

We call out the government’s lies on both global food security and climate change. Their promises are empty and are being broken before our eyes.

We must destroy capitalism before it destroys us.

By Duncan Dundonald

Since October 2022, nearly 5000 hate crimes against transgender people have been recorded. On trans day of remembrance, look to the perpetrators in parliament who refuse to protect trans rights, hide their crimes with debates about bathrooms, and stir hatred at every opportunity. When the working class is divided, the ruling class wins.

The culture war is the bosses’ war.

 

When African-American folk and blues legend, Huddie Ledbetter, known professionally as Lead Belly, recorded a version of his song about the Scottsboro Boys case for the Smithsonian Institute in 1938, he told black people visiting Alabama to “Stay woke, keep your eyes open.” The term had been in use in African American vernacular in its sense of political engagement and political awareness for perhaps a century by then.

Two years into the Great Depression, the 1931 Scottsboro Boys case involved 9 black teenage migrant workers – the youngest being 13- who had jumped a freight train in order to look for work and who were falsely accused of raping 2 white women. The sentence for black men raping white women in Alabama at that time was death, and in the rushed trials that were accompanied by baying lynch mobs, all but the youngest were handed the death sentence.

The NAACP and others campaigned against the miscarriage of justice and forced retrials, but the impact on the youths’ lives was devastating.

Lead Belly had met the men and wrote the song in order to warn other black people to “stay woke”, as he puts it in the Smithsonian recording. And his political engagement and anti-racism had a class consciousness to it too, as shown in his song Bourgeois Blues, which he wrote about the racism he faced on a visit to Washington to record for the Library of Congress’s folk collection. Lead Belly’s cry for change addresses poor blacks and poor whites alike. His commentary had a class as well as a race awareness.

“Home of the brave, land of the free

I don’t wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie”.

In contemporary mainstream commentary race and class have been separated in a strange way. To many commentators, class is something that it seems only applies to whites. We are used to the media using the phrase “white working class”, and we are used to the implied disparagement for assumed reactionary views that are projected onto that group. But those same commentators are blind to the effects of class on black people and other groups. We hear of “black communities” and “community leaders”, but no class division in those communities, as if only the white population is affected by class.

We in the ACN are very clear that our class, the working class, is made of people who are black, white, gay, straight, trans, cis, Asian, disabled, and of all genders. What binds us together is the experience of the effects of class under capitalism. All working class people have to sell our labour to live, and we all have our surplus value appropriated. We are all, in Lead Belly’s words, “mistreated by the bourgeoisie”.

We cannot ignore the other oppressions that people face, and we must ensure the revolutionary movement listens to all the voices of our class. But we must use the power of those voices to draw attention to the economic injustices of capitalism, and the environmental destruction it is doing, felt for longest in the Global South. And we must not allow the class analysis with which we examine those injustices to be knocked off the agenda by the liberal establishment.

Lead Belly knew anti racism and class consciousness were stronger together. So when we take up the magnificent Kathy Burke’s war cry, “I’d rather be woke than an ignorant twat”, we join with Lead Belly in forging that awareness in the fire of class consciousness.

By Duncan Dundonald

 

 

Globally, there are 32 countries currently in armed conflict.  The types of conflict vary widely. While the severity and duration of these conflicts differ, they all have significant impacts on our class and result in a high number of casualties as well as humanitarian crises.  The common factor is capitalism and its local state proxies.

Gaza, despite being so small it would disappear in any of the battlefronts currently taking place in Ukraine, has nonetheless pushed that war out of the public mind – for now.  What characterizes both is the hypocrisy and double standards of all involved.  

Gaza must rank along with Khorramshahr, Vukovar, Sarajevo, Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol in the great urban annihilations of the last 50 years. Though atrocity it seems remains in the eye of the beholder.

On November 5th, in an act of self-promotion to his West Bank settler constituency, Israel’s now suspended Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, said on Hebrew language radio station that “…throwing a nuclear bomb on Gaza was one of the possibilities”.

This normalisation of nuclear rhetoric is also characteristic on both the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts.  Such threats at the moment underplay the enormity of the ‘conventional’ violence currently deployed.  Already, the destruction of Gaza has detonated the explosive equivalent of 2 Hiroshima bombs.

And while Gaza takes the attention, 40 raids a day are taking place in the occupied West Bank leading to thousands of detentions, land grabs and 170 deaths.

The window of opportunity for the Israeli state’s collective punishment of Palestinian workers and destruction of Hamas is however, narrowing.  More of its erstwhile allies (France, Canada, it’s Arab ‘friends’) are increasingly forced by popular anger to call for a ceasefire.

 The Gaza conflict will likely end sooner rather than later.  And, as Israel demands the emptying of hospitals and further mass movements from south to west, more with a bang than a whimper.

The sooner this happens the less likely an escalation that Israel doesn’t choose itself – though the ending of conflict on one front may be a great temptation to open a new one to finish the job long anticipated against Iran’s regional power and nuclear program.

As ethnic cleansing in Azerbaijan and a new genocide unfolding in Darfur slip under the radar, Ukraine can expect a repeat of last year’s winter bombing campaign, aimed at the country’s energy grid.

Since June 4th, the NATO sponsored Ukrainian offensive has progressed only 10km at its deepest point.  While the front remains active, the war there has lost any pretense of mobility.  Winter has come again as will the literal and metaphorical freeze of the front lines.

On November 1st in an interview in the Economist magazine, this reality was acknowledged by Ukrainian commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi:  “Just like in the first world war, we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate.”

This will strategically benefit Putin allowing a reconstruction of the defensive lines of the meat grinder, and providing respite from the equally high casualty rate that the Russian army has recklessly suffered in defence.

But the Russian state’s challenge of recruitment has led to increasingly perverse and sinister abuse not just of Russian workers but prisoners of war.

On November 7th Russia announced it was sending Ukrainian captives to the front lines of their country to fight on Moscow’s side in the war

The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported the Ukrainians will operate as part of another unit in eastern Ukraine, and the unit’s website said it has about 7,000 fighters. 

Video shows the Ukrainian POWs in uniform swearing allegiance to Russia and are expected to be deployed to the front lines in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

The ‘Rules of War’ like genocidal atrocity are equally in the eye of the beholder.

If either conflict escalates, it would present a real risk that these wars will cross-pollinate each other and merge their violence.  Iran, Turkey, and the West already have their feet firmly planted in both conflicts.  The wider Middle East cauldron is ripe for ignition.

The risks to our class, like the scale of our losses and suffering, have not diminished in the two years of conflict. Rather they have escalated and the urgency of resistance increases.

The resistance begins on the home front.   Wherever we find ourselves we can oppose the narratives that draw us towards support for one side or the other!  We can assert our needs against their war profiteering and austerity in our workplaces and communities. 

We can challenge their attempts to divide us on employment status, race, immigration status, gender, identity, sexuality, disability.  Our communities are stronger for our diversity.

We must pose our class war against their exploitation and war against our class in all its forms. This is what we mean by the practical manifesto: No War but the Class War!

By Dreyfus

 

 

Despite a chill in the air and winter on the horizon, the ACN attended its 6^th bookfair of the year. Organised by the Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh, the final day of the 4-day event attracted a couple of hundred people through the doors to browse the various stalls and engage in a variety of discussions. These included: the lack of community control and input over public health policy in capitalism; attacks upon women, in particular with regard to bodily autonomy; enforced poverty and oppression among communities globally.

During the day, it became evident that as is often found currently within leftist gatherings, there was a general omission of discussion regarding the need for working class internationalism and of the universality and centrality of class exploitation and oppression, in all its forms – and the need to mobilise on this basis.  In contrast to this though, we managed to distribute several dozen of our publications, including having them placed at the various stalls and given out in person, whilst getting a nice welcome from the organisers spoken to.  The literature then initiated at least the beginnings of a hopefully ongoing productive dialogue around revolutionary class based, anti-statist and anti-militarist, emancipatory politics, with both some of the organisers and a number of the attendees, authors and speakers. These conversations encompassed the need for resistance from our class to ongoing attacks upon our living standards and environmental destruction, as well as to the murderous wars in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and those potentially in the future, closer to “home”, by the current system of state and capital.

From Sheffield early in the year to Glasgow in the spring, from Hull and Bradford in the summer to Manchester / Salford and now, Edinburgh, in the autumn – we have been busy arranging and/or attending bookfairs throughout this year. Moreover, we continue to organise and attempt to reach out to our class, especially to potentially like-minded people in our communities and workplaces, locally through to internationally alike.

By Bloque Ade

We note with anger and derision the fanfare being made at a fall in the rate of inflation as if it were pennies from heaven!

In whose straw poll do hands shoot up to the question ‘have you noticed your pay/benefits/tax credits outstripping inflation?’

The way the current pundits portray the reduction in the rate of inflation as a beneficial experience in our daily lives is a complete fiction.  The rate of increases in prices has slowed a little. Prices are not coming down our lives are not becoming more affordable.

The causes of inflation are invariably political, the result of choices of who pays for capitalist crisis. Those in power, those with the money make those choices. The rest of us choose between heating, clothing, accommodation and food.

All over the country, record numbers are queueing at food banks, warm hubs and social supermarkets. These voluntary institutions themselves being clear that they are increasingly unable to fulfill their remit, with rising running costs and costs of goods, production, delivery etc.

The pound in our pocket buys a third less than a decade ago. Nearly 15% less than two years ago. 

Whatever measly increase in our wages they have given, still less in the paltry level of benefits, may look like on paper now inflation is claimed at 4.6%, it  is nothing but a charade of smoke and mirrors. 

It hides the reality that our standard of living has declined and our struggle to survive has grown harder since the great banking collapse of 2008.

And it’s not just about numbers on paper, it’s about the disappearance of services of social value to meet the needs of working-class people and our communities.

It’s no good being able to afford your heating if you can’t afford your home!  You may be able to buy a cushion, but you can’t afford the sofa; if you can afford dental care, you can’t find an NHS dentist, if you can afford your medication, the treatment to remove your need for it is put of further and further into the future for the absence of doctors and medical care.

As for social care, disability aids, childcare, mental health services, children’s activities, holidays, well, most just can’t have access for love nor money.

And of course, it’s the poor and marginalised to take the blame. Too lazy to work, not really unfit.  Refugees gaming the system while our government games Rwanda. Banks raking-in interest driven profits while the homeless make selfish lifestyle choices.

Perhaps little highlights the lies behind the cost of living more than the unacceptable cost of dying. It’s no wonder our TV screens of full of adverts for “we’ll come and take your body away and deliver back your ashes by van for a fraction of the cost”. 

It’s hardly surprising that we can’t afford to live with dignity when we can’t even afford to die with it!

Where has all the money that is supposedly unavailable, gone?  We know it’s there; we produced it through our work, our skills, through the labours  of our minds and bodies. 

It is there, not hiding, but in plain sight. The billions that aren’t personally Rishi’s and his friends, we see blowing up Gaza and Ukraine every day.  Making room for more profit-making expansion plans.  The profit driven inflation claimed back from us through austerity.

The poverty of our daily lives is a reflection of the poverty of morality and values of the capitalist class and its proxies. The only good news about inflation is that it ends with the end of capitalism.

By Dreyfus

 

Thanks to the organisers of the Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair for enabling a successful event with around 30 stalls and 8 workshops in the great surrounds of the Peoples History Museum.

The was our second attendance as AnarCom and very different from our first.  Last time, just a couple of months after coming together as internationalist activists we were barely known, with few materials, bar a couple of newsletters, with which to engage.

This year, 14 months of coming together and a month before the anniversary of our formal constitution, we were widely recognised, welcomed and able to present a full body of work we have produced to a receptive gathering.

We had arranged to form a NWBTCW block with our close working comrades of the CWO, Friends of Working Class Struggle (FOWCS) and Old Moles Collective, which comedically became referred to as ‘Class Reductionist Corner!’

We had a wide range of our own publications including four of the pamphlets and the last five issues our newsletter, as well as new badges and banners.

It was very well attended and busy throughout the day enabling us to be continuously engaged with attendees and new and old comrades alike. 

With 120 of our newsletters distributed as well as other items, and a vibrant social media presence throughout the day, we represented a solid Class Struggle Internationalist presence at the event.

The three of us who attended had a great day and are delighted to see a consequent increase in following and communication since.  Thanks to the organisers and to all those who came to see us for making it such a successful day.

The bloodletting of our class is continuous. The attention on where we are bleeding changes to where Capitalist power bloc dynamics directs media focus.

While genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza marches apace, up to 8,000 Russian conscripts have died in a fruitless offensive on the Donetsk town of Avdiika. 

More are now being thrown back into the meat grinder of Bakhmut.  As winter threatens to re-freeze the frontlines, Russia, perhaps taking from Israel’s playbook has stepped up the shelling of civilian centres. 

On November 1^st shells rained down on 118 settlements in 10 different regions – the most widespread bombardment this year.  Putin started a war he didn’t need and now can’t afford a peace.

All eyes though are on the Gaza War which, while barely a month old, has reached some grim new milestones. The accepted figures for civilian deaths have now exceeded those verified in the Ukraine war according to the OHCHR, (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights).  More children have been killed than in all the armed conflicts of the last year put together.

On November 1^st, bragging of atrocity, Hamas foreign affairs spokesman Ghazi Hamad said of October 7^th:  “…we will do this again and again…Nobody should blame us for the things we do… everything we do is justified”.

On the same day their political leader Ismail Haniyeh claimed, like a surprised civilian, that Netanyahu is trying to keep himself out of prison by choosing to invade Gaza!  

As if they weren’t the butchers who planned the slaughter of October 7^th!  They might have missed it from their safe houses in Lebanon and Doha – accustomed as all dictators to let others do the dying.

But they know what all Israelis know, Netanyahu can’t afford a peace either.  He doesn’t want this war to end.  With Hamas, he is holding a wolf by its ears! He dare not let go.  His failure as ‘Mr Security’ is destined to break his political carrier once the Gaza War finishes.

After that he is likely, no longer protected by tenure under the constitution, to face a successful if long delayed trial for corruption in office.   A long war, and/or a consequent constitutional crisis resulting in a State of Emergency prolonging powers, is his only route through HIS crisis.

He has failed, against public protest, to limit the oversight powers of the Supreme Court. Combine with this the historic failure of any ‘democratic’ state to suppress insurrection by force of arms alone (Algeria, Vietnam, Ireland, Iraq), and the equation is bleak.

Netanyahu’s need for a wolf suggests a long war and a deepening of crisis towards a

constitutional coup.  Failing that, a new war for which Iran might suffice.  Capitalist War and a State repression may pose themselves as the saviour of liberal democracy.

Despite the fiction of due diligence to protect the innocent, all limits and scope of action have been abolished.  Bunker busting munitions level refugee camps killing hostages in Hamas tunnels.  Gaza hospitals are shut down and refugees targeted whether an area is designated ‘safe’ or not. 

Even away from Gaza, the Israeli Right is arming Jewish citizens and settlers as vigilantes roaming the West Bank to steal more land, murdering 130 Palestinians in the process.  The level of violence has even alarmed the Israeli security service, the ‘Shin Bet’ who warn there could be no limit to the escalation at home.

As the Israeli economy crumbles like civilian infrastructure, cost is no obstacle either.  It is estimated the war is costing Israel $246m a day totaling around $7 billion to date.  That is 1.5% of GDP a month. A so far short-lived conflict on a small scale has already reached epic proportions.

We know who’s fighting, we know who’s dying and we know who’s paying – our class!  Conscripted, manipulated or brutalised to die for those either in power or seeking it.  The propaganda on all sides is designed to stop us recognising we are the only ones who can stop it.

Workers of the Levant and across the region, as in Ukraine and Russia and across the globe have nothing to gain.  We all know those who do, capitalism and its global proxies as state actors.

Our own efforts at home, fighting where we have something to gain, against the barbarity of wage slavery or unemployment, poverty and austerity, homelessness and repression is where we have the power to end their wars.  Smashing their Social Peace at home weakens their capacity to wage war abroad.

Organising on the basis of autonomy, solidarity and mutualism and merging our struggles and demands independent of those who, whilst feigning opposition to war, want to become our alternative leaders.

The leftists and liberals of the anti-war campaigns aren’t against capitalist war, they just want to corral us in the direction of the partisan state entity they support under the guise of anti/imperialism or national liberation.  Have us serve in another state, meeting the needs of some other claimant to power.

“From the river to the sea…” comes the hackneyed old slogan of these leftist state apologists.  Whether it be from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean or the Donets to the Black Sea, no people can be free dominated by capitalism and its warring states.

What awaits us should we fail is shown to us daily in Ukraine, Palestine and Israel, and in the dozens of other conflicts where our attention is not being directed. 

We call for No War But The Class War to end this slaughter and liberate our class from lives of threat and misery. We continue to build alliances within and across our class, and with other internationalist militants where we find them to work towards this end.

By Dreyfus