Author: anarcomnet

“Together Forever” is no longer just a pop song, but the title of Moscow’s celebration of its annexation of the four eastern provinces of Ukraine.  This single act has locked in the intractability of its conflict with the West.

Before the invasion, it already controlled most of Ukraine’s coal through is satellite statelets in the Donbass region (accepted de facto in the Minsk Accord stalemate), and most of Ukraine’s Black Sea oil following its annexation of Crimea (not recognised but largely unchallenged).

The annexed territories amount to 15% of the recognised territory of Ukraine, though barely register a percentage as part of Russia as a whole.  So why has Russia decided that this is the hill to die on?

From a purely military point of view it might look like there simply was no coherent ‘Plan B’ following the rout at Kyiv of its much-vaunted military machine.  This seemed as good a corner as any to be painted into. It has an additional value of allowing conscripts to be deployed on new  ‘Russian’ territory and throwing a ‘spanner in the works’  as neither NATO nor the EU will accept an accession state with an active border dispute.

 At it’s heart though, the annexation is a desperate and, for Putin, irreversible move born out of real existential threat to Russian capital.

The collapse of the USSR as a global superpower and Russia’s relative lack of development since has led to it being caricatured as a giant nuclear armed petrol station.  The parody though reveals a lot.  The total economy is around the size of Italy’s, okay, but not that significant. In fossil fuels however, it is a colossus. 

With little else going for it other than its military power, and the world appearing to be moving towards dropping hydrocarbons within the next generation, Russia has few places to go.  It is a giant facing extinction.

The driver of the next industrial revolution is climate change and essential to achieving that is access to rare earth minerals and metals such as iridium. lithium, terbium, europium et al.  From the 1960’s their value was mainly gadget-based, colour TVs, computers, mobile phones et cetera.  Now they are essential for electronic engines, satellites, power storage, electronic batteries and other clean power technologies – hydrocarbon free mid-21st century capitalist planning.

Despite their name, they are not ‘rare’, just often inaccessible, complex to mine, and often toxic.  90% of the world’s production currently takes place in China. Putin knows what this means. China already sees Russia as week and future pickings.  The glimpses of dependence are already emerging. 

The European Union also sees the danger and in 2019 contracted with, amongst others, Ukraine for access to its vast resources of these elements.  According to a specialist advisor quoted in the Financial Times: “Ukraine has deposits of 117 of the 120 most widely used minerals and metals. At least 40 of them are needed for the green transition. It is a resource superpower.”

Ukraine sits on an estimated $15 trillion worth of rare earth elements, most of which are in the east, and half of which Russia now controls.  Neither Russia nor the EU will be prepared to compromise when the future wealth and profit of their capitalist heartlands are so invested.

Many, including some who think of themselves as revolutionaries, have struggled to understand our opposition to both sides, summed up in the internationalist revolutionary position of ‘no war but the class war’, instead myopically seeing it in moral terms: David versus Goliath, imperialism versus national liberation, good versus evil. 

This is of little help to the ordinary people like us, the workers and producers on both sides whose lives are being squandered because Ukrainian oligarchs want to sell their stolen riches to the west and Russian oligarchs want to steal the riches for themselves.

The suffering is obviously real, the war barbarous, the tragedy is the continuing slaughter of our class who only have their labour and their lives, neither owning, controlling, directing nor benefiting from the wealth they are being conned or coerced into dying for. 

It hasn’t stopped being capitalist exploitation by virtue of its distance. This is the way we need to see through the moral mist to the class reality.  This is a bosses war over resources for their future profiteering. 

Our side is our class, at home and abroad. This is what we mean by No War But The Class War!

By Dreyfus

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.” Aesop

Coordinated strike plans will result in over 165,000 workers from Aslef, the RMT, Royal Mail and the Felixstowe and Liverpool docks being on strike together on the 1st October.  The staggered and rolling strikes commence on September 30th with the members of the Communication Worker’s Union. 

The miss-judged truce for a dead queen is over and not a moment too soon!  They took no time out.  Behind the charade they planned and plotted their next assault on us and unleashed it’s  brutality in the budget of September 23rd! 

Billions for business and the rich that has crashed the pound, accelerating the rising price of food, fuel, heating, travel and nearly destroying national pension funds.  Saved at the last minute by the government’s bank buying £65 billion of the government’s own debt for us to repay with interest at a later date!

Yet still they make the unbelievable claim that soaring inflation is driven by workers wages which have yet to be satisfied by any account.  And the pressure on workers is growing on every side. Rising interest rates are not only going to make people with mortgages unable to afford their indebted homes but will reverberate through the rental system, making already overcharged tenants unable to sustain a roof over their heads.  Increasing personal debt just to eat and heat adds more links to our chains.

The crisis is deepening, and whatever we couldn’t afford a week ago we can afford still less now. The strikes are timely and will draw anger and support from our class.

While the Loyal Labour Opposition play for power by refusing to join picket lines and offering us a ‘fairer greener future’, we scream for action and resolution now! 

For the coordination of the strike action, for more and extended strikes, for the escalation of action, for connectivity of solidarity and engagement across communities, industries, trades, employed and unemployed! 

Forward to a real Red October!

By Dreyfus

Our new pamphlet is available at £2 plus postage:

 “You can’t blow up a social relationship!”  A new pamphlet published by the AnarCom Network

Capitalist crisis is again asserting itself across the globe with increasing ferocity and violence – superpower conflict, global hunger, fuel crisis, inflation, climate crisis and ecological collapse.

The charade of social peace between classes is unsustainable. Everywhere our class is forced to face an increasingly binary choice: life or death, war or revolution.

Anarchist Communism is faced with a fundamental paradox. That paradox centres on it’s relationship to the conceptual use of violence. Far from being violent, we are drawn to revolution by the need and passion to abolish a system so violent that it kills millions every day through indifference, neglect or design.

New edition of our newsletter Rebel Rose (8 page special) is available now – Free but a donation to postage is always welcome

“Comrades, know that the darkest hour is before dawn. Do not give up, no matter how hard it is! In the past behind us are generations and generations of anarchists who, through their own struggle, brought us to this moment. And in the future, generations and generations of anarchists are looking at us with hope.

We cannot let them down.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

Viva la anarchia!”

Message from the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organisation (BOAK) in Russia who are heroically sabotaging rail lines supplying ammunition to the Putin regime’s war efforts.

Via a Comrade Nick H

There is little point us giving a detailed breakdown of the recent ‘Fiscal Event’ as the bourgeois media is totally on it, and fair to say as aghast as everyone else! Government debt costs rise and currency falls as global capital mocks Truss’s policy time machine. 

A meme doing the rounds says: ‘I’d tell you a joke about trickle-down economics, but 99% of you won’t get it’.  The detail is secondary to the logic and the impact. 

Liz Truss explained during interviews at the UN that allowing the wealthy of The City to get richer and lifting the cap on bankers’ bonuses was essential to the levelling up agenda!!  Liz engages in a Thatcher Cosplay to resurrect a neoliberal model that even most capitalists have turned their backs on since it crashed and burned in 2008. 

For all the bells and whistles (including Putin’s trick of calling something blatant by a different name), the first detailed impact analysis by the Resolution Foundation says that the only net beneficiaries will be those earning in excess of £150,000.  The idea that they will all spend their money in Poundland and Pizza Hut creating more well-paid jobs for the rest of us is, well, laughable or tragic. 

Even western capitalism’s CEO Joe Biden chipped in with: “I am sick and tired of trickle-down economics. It has never worked.”  Ironic given that the US inspired bloody coup against the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973 turned Pinochet’s dictatorial Chile into an economic laboratory for the neoliberal ideas of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School. 

Reagan then Thatcher ran with its powerful anti-working-class agenda and the rest is history.  A history of attacks on the working class, it’s communities and social cohesion and deregulated land grab that trashed the planet. 

The optics couldn’t be worse, this is a robber baron’s budget for the rich from newly converted monarchist Liz Truss marking her out as a vicious class enemy – in case we didn’t know. 

Against the back drop of mass impoverishment and mounting class struggle this should prove the red rag for the enraged proletarian bull! The dead queen’s truce is over, it provided the smokescreen for this planned attack on any sense of decency, logic, and our class. 

Buried with intent in its detail, as if anticipating our response are further planned restrictions of the already highly regulated right to strike.  Our labour is our only possession and the class war, like Putin’s, has unmasked and come out in the open.

The struggle not only continues – it just escalated.

Article by Dreyfus

Putin’s bluff is called and the mask of ‘special’ has fallen away from the operational war being engaged in Ukraine.  Russia had thought that Ukraine was the capital asset up for grabs to be wrestled from the West.

Events at the Sino-Eurasian summit in Uzbekistan mid-September showed that Putin’s failures have put Russian capital on the menu too.  Putin is now that most dangerous beast, a tyrant in a hurry. 

As Russia desperately announces referenda and partial mobilisation to stay in control through a strategy of momentum, we risk the tragedy of ‘the beginning’ being a side show by comparison.  Bluff though is exposed and war it unambiguously is.

Resistance to the call up has been nationwide, visible and significant despite statewide repression and severe penalties.  Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov confirmed that some protesters are being punished by being issued with, and forced to sign on camera, call up papers in detention and released to report for active service. 

Peskov’s son was pranked by a satirical pro-war radio station pretending to be a recruitment centre issuing him his call-up papers – he explained whose son he was and that he would  “obviously not” serve in the Ukraine.  Another bluff called!  Dying for the rich and their state is for the poor.  Conscription, like the war, is being deployed as an active attack on our class! 

Around 1500 have so far been arrested protesting, as flights out of the country to the few available visa free destinations sell out.  500,000 Russians have left since March though borders are now slamming shut.  Many men trying to leave are being examined for eligibility for enlistment and turned back or detained. 

The state claims this call up is limited, only applicable to active reservists and military specialisms.  The signed legislation however contains no such stipulation and regions will be required to fill quotas. 

The now published in exile opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta alleges that the stipulated target of 300,000 is again a bluff, hiding a classified target in the legislation of 1 million.  Whoever had their head in the sand before Putin’s conscription speech is wide awake now leaving him with few cards left to play. 

The West has been well ahead in its war planning.  No military eligible male between the ages of 18-60 has been allowed to leave Ukraine since February 24th.  It’s target of a million workers in uniform to defend millionaire Zelensky’s oligarchs is already met.  With NATO’s arms depots pouring in, the results are showing too. 

Putin’s last gambit is claiming the brutally occupied eastern Ukraine as sovereign Russian territory following rigged plebiscites and annexation.  The new military intake won’t be deployable until spring, following a pause in offensives during the winter freeze.  In the interim Putin again rattles his nuclear saber. 

Western capital’s brinkmanship claim’s the threat it real, though survivable.  NATO’s retired General Petraeus claims the alliance “wouldn’t even have to resort to nuclear weapons, we could simply take out any Russian force of size or substance in Ukraine”. 

Both sides are fudging their way to nuclear showdown as capitalisms rival blocs paint each other into a corner.  The fallout could be more radioactive than riches galore for either side. 

We, the working class and the collateral or intended damage of their fight over resources don’t have bunkers.  We only have our labour and our solidarity. 

Resistance to militarisation abroad and class struggle at home are our necessary weapons against the existential threat of mass destruction.  As a popular social media meme puts it: “whatever things you think good Germans should have been doing in 1933, start doing them now!”.  Solidarity with the war resisters!  Oppose war abroad and escalate the class struggle at home!  No war but the class war – by any means necessary!

Article by Dreyfus

The Iranian Islamist theocracy is rightly in trouble, due to the tragic murder of Mahsa Amini by the Islamist morality police. Mahsa travelled to Tehran from the Kurdish part of Iran and was picked up by the morality police for so called ‘improper hijab’ on the 13th, an absurd ordeal for all women in Iran and the sort of thing that was stepped up by Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi, himself also responsible for mass repression and killings of political prisoners in the 1980’s.

The veil is compulsory in Iran and millions of women face harassment, beatings, prison and being fined etc even if they are veiled but it is considered by the morality police to be ‘improper’. In April a man was shot by the morality police four times for attempting to defend his wife who was being arrested by the morality police. Mahsa Amini was severely beaten and went into a coma and died in hospital on the 16th September.  X rays revealed that she was beaten so intensely that her skull was fractured. Not just the Morality police but Raisi himself and the entire regime are directly responsible for her death.

This has rightly enraged many people in Iran, the vast majority of who do not want to live in a theocratic state in the first place and about 75% of who were not alive when the Islamic revolution happened.  The regime is run by an out of touch clique of traditionalist old religious fundamentalist men. Though Mahsa’s death is deeply sad it has been heartening to see the courage of Iranian women standing up to the regime and burning their hijabs and veils and it pleases us as anarchist communists and as human beings to see women and men of all ages uniting and defying the regime, with chants of “Women, Life and Freedom!” and “Death to the Dictator!” and calling for an end to an Islamic state. These are the largest protests and disturbances in Iran since 2009 and can be, in a sense, seen as feminist.

And thankfully it’s not just the burning of veils and the chanting of slogans, this is outright revolt – a governor’s home was set on fire in Amol, police stations have been set on fire in Mashad, posters of leaders and ideologues of the Islamic Republic have been torn down and burnt and morality police have been beaten up in Tehran, police vehicles have also been trashed and the unrest has spread widely.

We acknowledge that religion divides, rules and fools and oppresses people and that theocracy and patriarchy should not be tolerated. And even if we are realistic about the likely limitations of this revolt, we as anarchist communists, are very glad to see the Iranian people coming together to stand up and fight back against theocracy and patriarchy. We should have solidarity with this uprising in whatever way we can and we condemn the British government for its continued relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Article by Tom Hughes

We are saddened to see disturbances that began in Leicester, seemingly made worse with the influence of Hindu nationalists and to then be exploited by the Islamic far right and which the so-called ‘indigenous’ far right are very happy with. The far right, whether Hindu, Muslim, western or whatever is cancer and cannot truly help us or solve our problems, which are mainly caused by this increasingly dystopian capitalist society and the class system and state that comes with it.

Leicester has for a long time been known for its good cross community relations, but now the current situation is to be exploited nefariously by the far right in all its manifestations and has spread. The only war that should be waged is the class war, not religious, sectarian or racist/xenophobic war, which can only divide and divert working class anger and action into a counter-productive, self-defeating dead end of nationalism.

The working class of any so-called ‘race’, nationality or belief has more in common with each other really than it does with those in the international ruling class, whose interests are served by nationalism, sectarianism, religion and conservativism of all types.  Class war is ever more crucial today when we see the developments that have occurred and are happening in this country and around the world and we the working class should unite, provide solidarity to each other no matter our differences and fight together against the ruling class and their increasingly repressive and barbaric capitalist system that ultimately has nothing real to offer us. We are diverted from this at our peril.

Article by Tom Hughes

The collapse of the Russian army’s northeastern front in Ukraine has weakened the Russian centre, creating an exploitable power vacuum in what Putin calls the ‘near abroad’. The fallout of the proxy superpower conflict is moving east.  Putin’s post Soviet era security club, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) is either turning in on itself or on Russia.

In the Caucasus, the frozen conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan which has already cost 7,000 lives since 2020, has erupted again as a direct result of the invasion of Ukraine.  Workers on both sides are being killed as global capital struggles at the edges of Russian decline.  Azerbaijan, emboldened by the weakening of the Russian peace keeping force to shore up its Ukrainian front, and it’s new found favour with the West following a lucrative gas supply contract with the EU, is testing the limits of its master’s voice.  Both sides have seen Russia’s weakness in their failure to invoke collective security guarantees under the CSTO, and it is Europe that is stepping in to fill the gap. 

The conflict thaw continues in central Asia between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, both with Russian military bases.  Tajiks are being sacrificed in their states aggression to secure a dynastic succession to power, bringing further instability to China’s Uyghur border state of Xinjiang.  Russia’s impotence is China’s opportunity as Putin discovers that his new “partnership with no limits” is a concept with distinctly Chinese characteristics.  

The two leaders met on the sidelines of the Samarkand ‘Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’ summit in Uzbekistan 14th-16th September.  Putin presents this as a global shift to the East against the “empire of lies” as he recently called the West.  Unfortunately for Russia it is actually a $35 billion funded takeover bid of the region by Chinese capital as part of its ‘Belt and Road’ initiative. 

For all the talk China has offered little in practical terms for Putin other than getting his gas at knock down prices.  In reality China is biding its time, waiting to catch a failing Russia like a ripe fruit. 

If proof were needed, it lies in Kazakhstan.  Despite Putin sending troops in in January to prop up the regime in the face of widespread unrest, it too is testing the limits of Russian power.  Having vowed not to break western sanctions nor recognise the puppet Ukrainian statelets, Moscow has questioned its sovereignty too.  Putin’s henchman though, Dmitry Medvedev, had to withdraw his tweet that it was an “artificial state” when China made clear who is actually in charge. 

In the Kazak capital Nur-Sultan, shortly before his meeting with Putin, Xi spelt it out: “We will continue to resolutely support Kazakhstan in protecting its independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The fault line is no longer a European continental one between Russian capital and the West, but a Eurasian one over who controls Russian capital.  

That Russia knows this, however reluctantly, was given away by Kremlin policy-wonk Dimitry Babich from Moscow State University in an Al Jazeera interview as the Samarkand summit ended:

“Compared to what Russia faces from the West which is total hostility, being in junior partnership with China does not seem so terrible”. 

None of this is accidental nor coincidental. The US and Europe have been stirring this mix for a long time recognising that chaos in this ‘near abroad’ is a potential second front in its global power struggle. 

Most of the dying in these new conflicts are conscripts and poor farmers – the workers and producers of poor countries of little interest to the West other than what they add to Russia’s destabilisation.  Except fuel rich Azerbaijan and the relatively wealthy geographic giant Kazakhstan.  Both of which are listening to the West’s enticements. 

Events in Ukraine are far from over despite the hype.  As Churchill put it once “this not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”. 

The war spreading, the vested interests in the conflict are deepening, the losses of our class in capitalism’s bloody power struggle are growing exponentially.  It remains the single most urgent existential threat we currently face.

‘No War but the Class War’ is no mere slogan.  It is our necessary response to survive and share solidarity with our class internationally.  The fight at home is the only way we can resist the slaughter unleashed in the bosses pursuit of profit here and abroad.

For workers there is no “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing” as they would have us believe.  There is our class against theirs.  We, the workers and producers worldwide, resisting spilling our blood for their gold. 

In their last resort they would see us die in this unfolding conflict rather than thrive in the abolition of it. In response we must see that their abolition is our class obligation!

Article by Dreyfus 19/09/22