The AnarCom Network is a group of like-minded individuals organising in local groups (where possible) under a loose national network.
We are a revolutionary anarchist communist working-class organisation that advocates the abolition of the State and capitalism in favour of a horizontal network of voluntary associations through which everyone will be free to satisfy their needs.
It has been revealed that the new Prime Minister Liz Truss received £100,000 as a donation for her leadership campaign from the wife of an ex-BP executive – somewhat buried in the news due to the death of Elizabeth II. In total, the amount of money her campaign received was £420,000 and apparently consisted of 21 different donations – those being the ones she declared.
The largest amount came from Fitriani Hay – the wife of James Hay, who has a luxury goods empire and is a former BP executive. She donated £100,000 to Truss. Other donations included from the Tory peer Greville Howard and Michael Spencer also donated £25,000 to Truss at the beginning of August, one week after gifting the same amount to Rishi Sunak and two weeks after doing the same for Penny Mordaunt, another failed candidate in the leadership contest. Truss also received £20,000 from Jon Moynihan, a former prominent member of the pro-Brexit Vote Leave campaign along with £10,000 donated by a smoked salmon firm run by former Brexit party MEP Lance Forman.
Another detail revealed in the release by parliament on Thursday was the £23,853 cost for Boris and Carrie Johnson’s wedding party in the summer, paid for by Anthony and Carole Bamford. The two of them run JCB who have gifted Liz Truss with £5,316 worth of transport costs at the start of August. Rishi Sunak managed to amass £449,570 for his leadership campaign.
But of course, the most significant donation here is the £100,000 from a wife of an ex-BP executive, which definitely stands out when we consider Truss allowing the energy price cap to remain so high while ordinary working-class people will struggle to get by and keep themselves warm, fed and housed this coming winter. It is also alarming for anyone who cares about the environment and the alarmingly out of control climate. Truss’ plans for fracking are also very worrying for the environmental harm that will cause, as well as the absurd cost of fracking. And of course, it seems very relevant that Truss used to work for Shell, which is of course why she is so against taxing the enormous profits of the energy companies. But yet again this is another blatant example of the us and them problem built into this capitalist system and its magic money tree for the ruling class while we have to suffer worsening precarity and fuel poverty, another clear reason why we so need to fight back against capitalism and abolish it.
Before the wheels of war have a chance to stick in the mud of Ukraine’s autumn rains, they are turning to reverse in a direction entirely contrary to Russia’s intended war aims.
Vladimir Putin’s speech on September 7th at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, indicated the potential scale of strategic defeat Russia is facing from its conflict with the West over Ukraine.
More significant than his denial that Russia had lost ‘nothing’ because of the operation, (news to the thousands of injured and the bereaved families), was his assertion that the world is now orientating economically towards the East, as the West declines.
This would be wishful thinking if Russia was to actually benefit from this. In reality it’s tantamount to an admission that Russia’s destiny now is to effectively be a vassal state of Chinese imperialism. A tarmacked petrol station of the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative.
This, accompanied by the humiliating intelligence that the Russian army is increasingly dependent on North Korean castoffs as NATO rapidly integrates the high-tech military assets of its imminent new members Sweden and Finland, couldn’t be further from the plan of February 24th.
While the world’s fuel industries enrich themselves on war profiteering and arms manufacturer’s fortunes mount with new contracts to replace equipment at home and keep the Western war effort supplied. Russia is now forced to give up its strategic initiative in eastern Ukraine. In surrendering its few key strategic gains of the last 7 months, including its supply and control base for its Donbas offensive, the city of Izyum, Russia faces further retreat or reinforcing from the south, risking the loss of Kherson before winter sets in.
The Ukrainian government is hailing a turning point – again perhaps news to the fighters and the dying – but it could in fact lead to a dramatic and frightening escalation. Russia is now under increasing pressure to change the categorisation from a ‘Special Military Operation’ to a war, it’s only constitutional route to official mobilisation and mass call up.
Too late to change events on the ground in what millionaire Zelensky describes as the most crucial 90 days ahead in Ukrainian history, but conflicts have only ever escalated from mobilisation and workers on both sides will ultimately pay an ever-higher price.
The war continues to serve the West as its ‘go to’ excuse as to why bosses’ profits must rise while workers’ wages fall in real terms, but as the Queen’s death in the UK shows, the rich will resort to any opportunity to say we are all in this together.
Here the unions and the Labour Party seem to agree with them, calling off our only effective weapon against the war abroad, which is class struggle at home.
We are told by Ukraine’s First Lady, Madame Zelensky, that we in the UK should count our blessings, as we are only paying for war in the price of fuel while Ukraine is paying the price in blood.
This “let them eat cake.” response may well come back to bite her as anger mounts when poverty, cold and shortages increase the deaths of workers and the poor in the western capitalist heartlands.
Social peace because of a dead queen will only last so long. If too long, the class struggle will rightly bite the union bosses too.
So, the queen died today!
What you gonna do?
What you gonna say?
Do you love the royalty?
Love the pomp and ceremony?
Was she your hero, someone you admired?
A good friend who never retired.
So, the queen died today!
What you gonna do?
What you gonna say?
Do you hate the royalty
Hate the pomp and ceremony.
See the poverty across the land.
Starvation and cold go hand in hand
Do see her as the rich elite
Fuck the monarchy take to the street!
So, the queen died today!
What you gonna do?
What you gonna say?
Do you care that a lady has died?
But hate the fake royalist lies.
People die every day,
it's part of life I say.
So, my question to you is this
What's so special about Liz?
So, the queen died today!
What you gonna do? What you gonna say?
What's so special about this Liz
Why do we need all this jiz.
Not allowed to criticize cos that's disrespectful!
But people starving oh that's acceptable!
So, the queen died today
I am gonna do
I am gonna say.
That the Queen is dead is hard to miss, you’d probably have to be dead yourself not to notice. More noticeable still is the 24/7 obsequious TV coverage reminiscent of what a ‘very British coup’ might look like. Slow, soft, deceitful and repetitive.
Instead of marshal music and rolling tanks, or the massed show formations of a North Korean junket (that’s coming later at the coronation), we get Vaselined soft photoshops, innocent and ancient child-like voice recordings and a complete inversion of “horrible histories”.
A monarch forced to preside over the decolonisation of a thousand years of her predecessor’s violence, welcoming (under arms, blackmail or bribery) rich and poor nation alike into her father’s new extended British family. The commonwealth of exploitation.
A pastoral symphony of unbroken harmony of oppressor and oppressed uniting in the divinely ordained body of the sovereign. The murderous queen bee of a hive dominated by her parasites. We are told of Elizabeth’s gentle and generous nature, leaving us unable to imagine her capable of doing harm.
As if she needed to. She was the apex of a thousand-year tyranny where the greedy, ambitious, patronised or paid lackeys around her took over a quarter of the globe and a third of its population.
The grandfather that brought us Amritsar, the father that brought us the Indian famine and partition, the daughter who brought us Bloody Sunday and Iraq. Every single living lackey and killer sworn to her by oath. Neither a century nor generation over that last thousand years has failed to raise a hand against this slaughter in our story of resistance which remains largely untold because the victors possess the whitewash.
Perhaps amongst the best known, still living in popular legend, the North and East Anglia against Norman Feudalism, the great Peasants Revolt in the south east of 1381 against tyranny and Poll Tax, the midlands and the east in the 15th/16th centuries against the theft of and private enclosure of common land, the radical dissenters of the English Civil War that ended one of our three Charles’s, the Luddites and loom wreckers of the 18th century, and perhaps most famously, the martyrs of Tolpuddle and Peterloo in the 19th century. Their global imperialist wars of slaughter and the defeated revolutions that opposed them dominate the next century.
Abroad, rebellion, famine and massacre are redescribed as civilisation, development and order. Only Antarctica remains unbloodied by the Realm, unless you count the near extinction of its wildlife species (and we do).
Charles deserves neither sympathy nor support, he is bent on dynastic continuation, historical sanitisation and validation of the power of capital and the state that continues to wage its relentless war of exploitation and annihilation.
The power of this might appear symbolic but it is not immaterial. It is being used at this minute as a potent and successful weapon against our class, as it’s supposed representatives, the unions, so vocal moments ago, capitulate and submit to a pause in the renewed but still nascent wave of class struggle, an armistice. In reality a submission in the face of power and its control of our history and whitewash of our story.
The tragedy is the illumination of the relationship between those who claim class leadership and the class they claim to oppose. History screams rebellion and redress, not submission and participation. The Queen is dead, it is an opportunity not a tragedy.
Our class is at war. Thousands are striking or preparing to strike. We all have a part to play, and for those of us in work, there is much we can do to show solidarity and undermine the boss class short of striking itself
Capitalist economy is a ‘war of all against all’, where we are not only robbed of the value of the produce of our labour, but subjected to a tyranny of authority that demands we all leave our humanity out of the equation.
Work can affect our families, our social networks, our belief systems, our health, our leisure, our desire for change, our communication, our frustrations. At the same time, it demands that we should not bring any of these ‘personal issues’ into the workplace.
When was the last time you had a call and your boss asked if it was personal? When was the last time you were five minutes late and got docked 15 minutes pay? Or you asked for time off because you were just knackered and they told you ‘computer say’s no’? This way of existence is not human but corporate. We are reduced from people to things. Cogs in a machine.
A key goal of revolutionary transformation for anarchist-communists, is to move from a top down, capitalist hierarchical society’s administration of people (governments, local ‘authorities’, bosses, managers, HR departments, quality assurers, compliance, key performance enforcers, police, tax inspectors, bailiffs, teachers and so on), to a horizontal, communal, egalitarian administration of ‘things’ based on common need: What to produce; how and for whom; how much, why and where. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. The big picture is the abolition of Capital: it’s state, coercion, profit, wage labour, money and exchange. But hmmmm, how do we get from here to there?
Come the revolution of course, we’ll sort it, but until then, “Off with their heads!’ might not work. The boss class have often been resistant to that. But in the same drip, drip, drip way they chip away at our souls, we can erode their power, drop by drop.
The simplest way we generally encounter their power is the clock. One way we can respond to a ‘clock on’ mentality is simply a ‘work to rule’ response. Above/below my pay grade etc. Let your organisation’s lack of capacity fall upon managerial shoulders. Every one below a certain level is feeling equally dehumanised so let that corrosion sink in.
Regularly refer to your job description. Demand training for anything new and a review of your terms and conditions. Ask all the questions you know they can’t answer and question the answers they give.
Take your time, longer than you need to slow things up. Call it thorough and responsible, or under resourced and unavoidable. Go slow and blame your tools. Other colleagues will have been doing this for years, learn from and share each other’s examples. Communication is key, share your discontent, ideas and solidarity. Offer it, seek it.
Take care of yourself first, health and mental well-being. They’ll get by – or not – without you. The graveyard is full of indispensable people. So, take sick leave when you can. Promote your mental health needs at work and make them ‘reasonably adjust’ as the law requires – it is there to defend them from liability more than to protect you. Know your workplace policies to time when, maximise impact and reduce the repercussions on you.
Make their laws work for you. Use your unique individual characteristics to get concessions and make them fearful of the legal consequences of not meeting them. Consider your health status, does it qualify as disability? Represent your real life (outside work) relationships. Are parental needs or caring responsibilities amongst them? Our class has fought for the concessions they’ve made, use them to fight for more.
Use what you have, toilet breaks, medical appointments, treatments, lunch breaks, consultation time, union meetings. Travel delays, add that extra minute, anything to take back those minutes and hours they steal from you disguised as wage (slave) labour. Be confident – let them know we have rights we have won (however limited) and push responsibility back on them.
Use your beliefs, take your faith holiday, Eid, Easter, Hanukkah, Diwali, May Day. You have the same rights in secular belief as religious. Encourage others to do the same in the spirit of celebration and diversity.
Let responsibly for your disruption and sabotage lie with them. Blame unreasonable expectations and call it what it is, bullying. Blame technology and poor management for workplace pressure and stress. Where you can, force them to resort to due process and resolution, block and delay half arsed attempts to resolve and ultimately where possible, take collective action. Strike. Picket. Bring and share your struggle in solidarity to the street and in your communities.
Solidarity beats exploitation. If work was so good, the rich would have kept it for themselves by now. Remember, they would work you until you die, liberation is for life!
It has been revealed that a firm connected to the Tory peer Michelle Mone was awarded £203 million worth of government PPE contracts during the pandemic and has dodged taxes. It has been reported that Michael Gove was approached by Lady Mone in May 2020 with an offer to supply personal protective equipment. It is under investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA) for potential fraud already.
The company in question PPE Medpro Ltd was awarded two contracts via the government’s ‘VIP Lane’. A winding up petition has been issued by HMRC, who have refused to comment further on the matter and the petition was only issued on Thursday morning.
It has already previously been reported that Mone emailed Theodore Agnew, her fellow conservative peer, on 8th May 2020, informing him that Gove had requested her to “urgently” contact him. Mone proposed supplying large quantities of face masks to the government, telling Agnew they could be sourced through “my team in Hong Kong”.
Agnew, at the time a government cabinet minister in charge of procurement, referred Mone’s offer to civil servants who processed it through the VIP “high priority lane” for politically connected people. PPE Medpro Ltd, the company that was provided with the contracts, was not incorporated until four days after Mone approached Agnew (incorporated on 12th May 2020).
The company was given its initial contract, for £80.85 million to supply 210 million face masks, a month later.
Both contracts were provided directly, without competitive tenders, under covid emergency regulations.
The surgical gowns were rejected by the DHSC which caused a dispute. The DHSC has stated that it wants to recover the money lost through a dispute resolution process. PPE Medpro has of course stated that it operated in accordance with the terms of its gowns contract and was entitled to keep the money it was paid. PPE Medpro Ltd also owes £913,019 in tax and social security due within a year. This has been revealed in the companies initial financial accounts for the year to 5th April 2021. It was claimed that the company had no assets. The company made a profit of £3.9m and was apparently owed a further £4m.
Mone has repeatedly denied being involved in PPE Medpro. Her husband is the Isle of Man-based financier Douglas Barrowman, who has also distanced himself from the company. In January this year however, the Guardian reported that leaked files appeared to indicate that Mone and Barrowman were indeed secretly involved in the PPE Medpro business. Mone’s lawyers have denied that there was any wrong doing.
Yet again it appears to be another example of how the ruling class benefit and profit from our misery and death and no doubt these particular parasites will get away with it, the system operating in their interests as it is designed to do. This is also linked to the increasingly dire situation we find ourselves in. It is why members of the ruling class such as Nadhim Zahawi are able to keep their stables heated for their horses while we and our friends and family members look set to freeze and starve this winter onwards, those of us who are not starving already that is. It explains the absurd, disgusting and never-ending advice from wealthy people for us to simply wear extra layers, buy extra kettles, eat potatoes and porridge or use a microwave while the rich remain heated and inconvenienced in their lives of privilege and luxury, including the obscenely privileged royals who leech off us in pure delight.
And no doubt it’s not just Tories and royals. Much the same is also no doubt going on regarding all other politicians such as those in the Labour Party, who fire blanket and divert working class anger and autonomous alternatives from below. And no doubt that includes Andy Burnham, being put forward from some quarters as some kind of ‘champion of the working class’. But at the end of the day he’s a member of the bourgeoisie, He’s a Blairite, privatiser of hospitals, Iraq War criminal and expenses fiddler. While we suffer the cold and inflation the likes of Burnham will be unaffected, living in their warm, cosy homes with no money worries. The system punishes working class people for being poor and rewards the wealthy and the ruling class for their class privilege and sociopathy.
This is why we need to reject the entire ruling political class and their system, no matter how left wing they purport to be, no matter how much they claim to be on our side. We are not all in the same boat and never will be for as long as we still have to suffer this capitalist system built on inequality and injustice. It’s time to make sure the entire ruling political class is not unaffected or secure, that we make it perfectly clear what the situation is. As we have always said, it is increasingly urgent for as many of the working class to come together and fight back and organise against this barbaric system from below. It is now time, more than ever, for autonomous subversion and revolt from the working class. To do what we can for the cause of solidarity, working class unity and class war.
While war rages in Europe and mass impoverishment continues at home, an apocalyptic trailer of a global picture in the making is tragically playing out in Pakistan.
Contributing only around 1% to global carbon emissions, the world’s 5th most populous country, (ranked 8th in the most likely to be affected by climate change), has now become the no.1 poster child of climate catastrophe.
After months of desertification in 50+ degree temperatures, an extended monsoon seasion has washed away crops and topsoil dropping between 3 to 6 times the average annual rainfall. In a country where tribalism and kleptocracy have stifled development leaving it largely dependent on ageing colonial infrastructure, it is at a standstill leaving millions stranded as a third of the country floods.
A million homes are uninhabitable displacing 33 million people (15% of the population) and wiping out a million livestock on which the rural poor depend.
The crisis is exacerbated by glacial melting. Pakistan’s 7000 glaciers (the largest number outside the polar regions) are continuing to shrink at an accelerating rate pouring meltwaters into overflowing natural and man-made dams and turning rivers into bridge and road destroying torrents.
Already torn apart by the Sharif and Bhutto political dynasties battle against Imran Khan’s Pakistan Movement for Justice Party, the paralysis, political and physical, is near total. The potential consequences of a military prone nuclear armed power on the brink of ecological collapse is a plot of dystopian horror proportions.
With two thirds of the country declared to be in a ‘state of calamity’ it is being described the first national climate catastrophe (an unwelcome accolade already bestowed on Madagascar following its years of drought).
Who will learn the lesson? This is a direct product of the short-termist, profit driven and growth obsessed capitalist ruling class. The same forces at work domestically and in the Ukraine. The Sharif’s, Bhutto’s and Khan’s will survive but the workers and poor of Pakistan huddling on embankments or camps in an imminent state of famine and disease are already paying – and dying.
But the lesson is global, the crisis demonstrably upon us, and the solution glaringly obvious. Capitalism has no solution, the rich continue grab and retreat to their resorts, islands and gated community ‘arks’ blaming us, the working class and the poor as greedy disrupters.
It’s time to disrupt, here against the war, here against climate crisis and planetary slaughter, here against the bosses and capitalist class who will not stop until the Pakistan example is the global picture or until they are stopped. If not by us, who? If not now, when?
Nationalisation is often proposed by state so called ‘socialists’ as the answer to some of the problems we face. At the moment it is often being put forward as a remedy to the current energy price crisis. But in this article, I attempt to lay out why nationalisation is not really a solution for the working class.
Nationalisation is often described as ‘public ownership’ but this is not the case. With nationalisation it’s not the public that owns the industries and infrastructure, it is the state and therefore the ruling class and the nationalised industries and infrastructure will be run in the interests of the ruling class and their capitalist system, not in the interests of the working class.
Nationalisation is often, wrongly, seen as socialist, however nationalising industries increases the profits of capitalists which is why it was done by the Atlee government of 1945-51 and why it has been popular with the statist left ever since. In return for their ownership of particular firms, the ruling class were given lavish compensation which could then be invested in other, more profitable industries. A good example of this was the nationalisation of the Bank of England.
Workers on the other hand, according to Herbert Morrison, could only get the benefits of social insurance, “by increasing the total national income … it could only be done by work, thought, drive and initiative.” (Times, September 6th 1945). What this meant of course was increased productivity, greater exploitation to extract more surplus value out of the working class – in return for which a few crumbs would be thrown off the bosses table.
And I’m afraid The Labour Party and the Unions were hand in hand with the bosses, aiming to extract more out of the working class by conning them that the promised land had arrived.
Notable features of the Atlee government were the building of the British atomic bomb and Hydrogen bomb, the rising of the cost of living by 30% and the demand that workers exercise ‘restraint’ and not ask for pay rises. Wartime rationing was kept in place, which ensured that money was spent not on consumption but on investment. This meant not only less for workers, but a drabber, more monotonous existence. In fact, between 1947 and 1951 working class people suffered a drop in their real wages.
The Atlee government gave little to the working class. In this it revealed once again just whose side it was on. This time its membership began more closely to reveal this fact too. In 1945 more than 40 of the Labour MPs were lawyers…… “between 20 and 30 were business men, and a good sprinkling of farmers, accountants, consulting engineers and other professions” were among the rest. Arthur Greenwood, the Labour Lord Privy Seal, said at the time, “I look around among my colleagues, and I see landlords, capitalists and lawyers. We are a cross-section of
the national life, and this is something that has never happened before. A party originally set up to protect the unions had acquired a constitution written by middle class intellectuals and was now being run by a coalition of union bureaucrats and traditional members of the ruling class.
Nationalisation is not socialism. Socialism means the common ownership of the means of production and distribution. It means getting rid of the bosses, getting rid of working for a wage or salary, getting rid of the whole rotten buying and selling system. It means that people will freely come together to produce what is needed if they can and will freely take from the abundant products of their labour. It is based on human need not on the privileges and interests of a minority and not on profit margins.
It will involve the abolition not only of the ruling class, but also their state. It will not mean that state being replaced by a new state. It would be a decentralised and libertarian structure run from below for the common benefit of humanity. This can also be described as anarchist communist and an economy and society based on these principles is much more likely to be of real help to us and be fairer and more efficient and innovative while giving us more freedom.
This may be new to many of you out there but it’s not a new idea and there has really always been one version of it or another that has manifested throughout human history and people are conditioned to think that it couldn’t work while also being conditioned that the best we can do is capitalism, despite the very grave problems that come along with that system and that only get worse and direr and more urgent. As for nationalisation it is just one form of state capitalism.
It is hardly surprising that the Labour Party and the unions ended up as the firmest supporters of state capitalism. Trade unions do not exist to change society, they are to get a larger slice of the capitalist cake, not take over the bakery. Indeed, without the buying and selling economy, based on wage labour, there is no role for a trade union. With no role for a trade union, there is no job for a union official.
However, the power, privileges and status of the union bureaucrats are very much determined by how much their status is recognised by the capitalist class. To protect their position, it is natural for unions to look for a more regulated capitalism, a capitalism based on partnership between employers and labour organisations. It was to achieve this that the Labour Party was set up in the first place.
Their position was recognised and they were welcomed as junior partners in the state machine during the First World War. It was a logical step for them to go beyond mere regulation and favour full blown state ownership, with the state as the major employer working in partnership with the unions.
Thus, Clause Four was adopted as a means of selling this to the working class at the same time as the Unions’ control over the party was established. Their function as part of the state machine was re-emphasised during the Second World War, and continued afterwards with the various tripartite commissions, quangos like the National Economic Development Corporation, and the routine appointment of Trade Union General Secretaries to the House of Lords.
As part of the state wanting more state control the party attracted to itself those sections of the ruling class who would benefit from it. This helps explain the number of lawyers and other professionals in the Attlee governing party. By the 1940s even the leaders of the party came from this social group. We can clearly see that in this sense as well that the Labour Party is not a party of the working class – and yet neither are any of the state capitalist parties that claim to be socialist – they are always bourgeois in one form or another and if this is not obvious they simply become the new bourgeoise when they gain power as with the various so called revolutionary “socialist” or “communist” political parties.
By Tom Hughes 01/09/2022, adapted from Labouring In Vain: A critical History of the Labour Party by Wildcat.
Postcard caricature of an anarchist produced between the two Russian revolutions of 1917
Against the background of an austerity onslaught and a rising tide of militancy through strikes, ballots and preparations for strikes, the currently cross-union led ’Enough is Enough’ campaign, launched its nationwide tour in Clapham, London on August 17th, following up with the second of 50 such planned events, in Manchester on August 30th.
The packed and oversubscribed rally was attended by AnarCom Network giving us an opportunity to share solidarity and communicate our ideas with other working-class militants.
It is the first time since the ‘84 Miners Strike we have seen an energised, concerted, organised labour attempt at unity and mobilisation against capitalist crisis and its attack on our class in the UK.
It had an energy and fervour reminiscent of the blush of ‘false dawn’ optimism that accompanied and beguiled so many Corbinistas. What marks this as real dawn potential is that it is currently unhobbled by the Unite Union dubbed “get a spine” Labour government in waiting or an overarching TUC collaborationist bureaucracy.
For all of the regressive rhetoric about the ‘70’s, these union spokespeople are not the left establishment hacks of the Wilson/Callaghan/Foot era. The unions taking part are genuinely articulating the expressed needs of their members. So far, language has been committed, uncompromising, and many of the current generation of union leaders are critical of the Labour leadership, wary of the formal role of the TUC, and articulate exponents of their members demands.
For all of that, it remains limited by its clearly trade union minded consciousness. While leaders spoke, picket line workers didn’t, and while their demands are understandable, their resolutions were the lowest common denominator of social democratic, even liberal, policy:
– End poverty, real terms pay rise, £15 minimum wage, benefits increased above inflation;
– End fuel poverty, nationalise energy and restore pre-April price cap;
– End food poverty, restore Universal Credit uplift; free school meals and community kitchens;
– Homes for all, capped rents, 100k annual social housing units, scrap right to buy, renters charter and holiday let limits;
– Tax reform, scrap NI increase and raise wealth and corporate tax.
These in themselves demonstrate the as yet limited level of consciousness, assertiveness, and aspiration. Despite their slogan of ‘It’s time to turn anger into action’ and the insistence that the campaign will go on with or without Labour, historic limitations remain. Labour Mayor Burnham says “Westminster needs to wake up” – that’s the problem, it is awake and doing its job. Nor is Labour spineless, it is a capitalist animal with a capitalist spine that needs breaking not fixing.
With exhortations to support strikers picket lines and get out on the streets, the emphasis that the unions will take the lead and show us the way risks the same compulsory muscularity of the Miners strike, a potentially alienating factor. Nothing was said on the limited nature of the demands nor of the need to raise them through the coordination and unification of struggle and demands across sectors and communities, or of escalation in scale and tactics. Enough maybe enough to start with, but we have to ask, enough for whom?
As anarchist communists we don’t want to cause ripples in the capitalist pond, we want the tsunami that drowns it. That means going beyond calling for solidarity and support to advocating the struggles of all to come out in the open, in streets, factories, schools, workplaces, communities, towns, village and country. Build on action committees to community and workplace assemblies and share, not just support, in solidarity.
Unification, coordination and escalation, not pacification through the limited demands of concession and reform, and never for one sector to claim the leadership to tell us when that has been achieved. It is time to demand the impossible and let only our imagination set the limits.
AnarCom Network 