Author: anarcomnet

You can allow superficial class characteristics to fuel your prejudice in favour of a particular faction of the ruling political class, yet the reality is that the specific role of the Labour Party in maintaining the dominance of capital is to divert and smother working class anger and potential to act. And they have ALWAYS done it while carrying out heinous anti-working-class policies – they did it under Callaghan as well as Blair, they did it under Corbyn as well as Starmer. They did it with the Atlee and Wilson governments. This is why they are a particular enemy of the working class and why we should reserve so much hatred for them. These are very real reasons to have contempt for the Labour Party.

Singling out the Tories is misleading and damaging. The problem is the capitalist system, not a particular faction of its administration wing.

Labour Party members and supporters create the false impression that we can fix our problems by reforming the present system and by getting the so called “right party” or “right Individuals” into government. This diverts working class energy that could be put into building autonomous alternatives from below.

And there will be people who criticise Labour a little bit, but when an election comes around they’ll be basically campaigning as if getting them into power is the most important thing in the world (this is the same whether the Labour Party, Green Party, SNP or whoever). These people are no real alternative, they are just for another niche part of the established order. Despite what they say they don’t have a socialist bone in their body!

If we’re going to make comparisons, as far as harm to the working class cause goes, we say Labour are considerably worse than the Tories.

We’re not into comparing them though, they act in partnership with each other and with capital. The whole thing is a single enemy. Like all the parts in an engine for example, they are all part of the same device and work in unison all with the same goal – to maintain and preserve capitalism and enact bourgeois rule and wield bourgeois power – this is always done at our expense.  

At the end of the day the Labour Party, whether it is acknowledged or not, and whether we are talking about the left or right of that party, has always been a party of capitalism and have always been anti-working class and this fact is proven when looking at its history.

Article by Ben Henderson 24/08/22

Liberalism is an ideology not an ideal.  At the heart of its concept is the idea of a benign state that offers protection, freedom, rights, participation, order and justice in return for our consent and obedience. 

This is the so called ‘Social Contract’ articulated by its philosophical founder, John Stuart Mill in the early 19th Century.  Something we allegedly bind ourselves to at birth.  It is the utopian origin myth of western capitalist democracy. 

Masquerading as liberty, liberalism is a contract aimed at binding capitalist factions to a common alibi for the exploitation of the working class.

As philosopher Bertrand Russell puts it: “Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim:  The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.” 

The dilemma however is that the ‘unfortunate’ (The exploited mass of producers, the working-class,) must be governed, and this is done better with the illusion of participation. 

Rarely granted however through commitment, but largely through expedience, the calibrated need to stifle dissent or stave off a social crisis, the 19th century saw the forced concessions of the fundamentals we associate with contemporary liberalism: Freedom of speech, press, property, religion, and politics, and of course, an increasing franchise in the vote. 

The latter, of all the lies that pervade liberalism, is perhaps the biggest.  The idea that the ballot box makes us equal, that the banker and the beggar somehow share power in the voting booth – at least every 5 years!  The other, “lesser” auxiliary freedoms largely exist in order to perpetuate this myth. 

The press is only free to those who own it.  It is the mouthpiece for capitalist factions to speak for power or shape and control our understanding of it. As the Mexican revolutionary Zapata reportedly replied when criticised for shutting down American papers,

‘…what point is a free press in a nation that cannot read!’  Or whose thought is pre-shaped by it.   

The only real freedom liberals truly care about, capitalists truly care about, is that of property ownership. The more you own the freer you are.   And whilst freedom of speech might allow us to criticise it – the anarchist Proudhon was allowed to say “property is theft” – the State will ensure, through the promised ‘order’ it provides, that we can’t do anything about it! 

As The popular song lyric puts it “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”. It is the triumphant illusion of liberalism.   Its dull familiarity creates the attitude in most of us summed up as “I don’t believe in politics” or “what has politics got to do with me?”  And that is exactly what they want us to feel.   Distanced and docile. 

Liberalism Is designed to enthrall not liberate us.  The false debates and fake alternatives it offers us, through its auxiliary freedoms:  right, left, Tories, Labour, starve by debt or starve by poverty, blinds us to what it’s destruction through our solidarity in class struggle has to offer

Instead of the right to complain that we have no job, no housing, no food, no heating, no health care, we should instead be controlling our Labour, our wealth, our communities, our planet through the abolition of capitalism and property, and the liberal mythology that sustains it.

Article by Dreyfus 22/08/22

The war against our class is being waged relentlessly and now officially endorsed by the government’s bankers, the Bank of England.  According to the bank’s new governor Andrew Bailey, organised workers should not flex their collective muscle against inflation and poverty wages because if they win, it will be at the expense of those less organised without muscle. 

For this we read ‘if you fight against our profits and austerity, we will punish your elderly, you’re sick, your children and your poor.’  As we write, pretty well every sector of transport is preparing to strike, with the government already calling those who simply refuse overtime, of taking illegal industrial action. 

The government knows the stakes are high but while it accuses workers of harming the public, the public (nurses, posties, teachers, refinery workers, firefighters and the mass of other producers) look on in solidarity and hope.  Imaging what winning might look like is turning this into a summer of solidarity!

A distinct set of circumstances created by capital is coming together at the same time and is, out of necessity, not just affecting everyone but unifying their demands.  This hasn’t happened since the ‘70s with Callaghan’s Labour government pay-freeze policy. It’s not us harking back to the 70s, it’s those in power. Their wars and their inflationary attack on wages have put us all in the same boat and they wonder why people are beginning to row together.

Assuming that fuel calculation is modestly right, all workers, if we don’t win, will watch our exploitation grow as our standard of living rolls back. 

This is life or death for those of us without work, but even those of us on minimum or ‘living wage’ will not earn enough in one day to meet our basic needs with 20% inflation for lowest earners on heating, cooking and hot water.  We will have to work one day a week solely to not starve or freeze!  What else has to be met in a debt led, rental economy with spiraling inflation to satisfy them?

Labour, our apparent ‘legal’ alternative, has shown its true colours sacrificing our struggles for their quest for power through respectability.   “We are not a party of a protest but a party of government” they proudly proclaim.  We hear you, we all hear you, those without work, those on poverty wages, we the public, inconvenienced by our need to struggle against you as well as the Tories. 

Demands are shaping on a collective scale as crisis continues to affect us all.  The bosses intend to win, but we intend to win too and what they call inconvenience, we recognise as our common struggle.  Our class IS bringing solidarity to a summer of action and discontent.

Article by Dreyfus 19/08/22

As the class war rages at home and abroad, it is fed by the same capitalist crisis that has brought us to the superpower brinkmanship of the conflict in Ukraine and the consequent global food crisis. 

Less in the eye of the media than when it started 6 months ago, the scale of its casualties are now approaching those of the Bosnian war in the ‘90s, whilst the high risk stand-off around the Ukrainian nuclear facility at Zaporizhzhia puts the whole of Eastern Europe and Turkey in clear and present danger.

Actual figures are a closely guarded state secret on both sides.  Each working to downplay its own statistics whilst inflating that of the other.  But between these figures on each side, from the lowest to highest estimates and from all sources, a median figure of around 70,000 dead and double that wounded or missing is a conservative figure for the Russia Ukraine war.   Even at this level, Russia has lost more in battle than in all its conflicts post WW2 put together.  

The cost in damage to trade, infrastructure and armaments on both sides is now thought to have reached the trillion-dollar mark.  More than a quarter of the entire value of the UK economy or nearly 10% of the cost of the global pandemic – this without factoring in the cost to rest of the world of its repercussions.

The demographic impact is equally obscure with a broad brush estimation of a fifth of the country under Russian occupation and an estimated 25% drop in the total settled population.

While appearing to be stuck on most fronts, the cost and casualties are rising exponentially as high value western technology now pours into Ukraine and Russia draws reserves from the length and breadth of its empire to hold its own. 

Opposition to the war is harder to gauge in Ukraine but even given the level and control and censorship in Russia, mounting legal cases against returning to the front, sabotage at recruitment centres and cash payments to the bereaved to keep them quiet, demonstrates it’s visibility and potential, however small, however stifled.  

This war is very far from over.  All Parties, with the notable exception of those fighting and dying,  have their own vested interest in keeping their side of the conflict going.  Even apparent ‘honest brokers’ like Turkey, hosting peace talks, enabling the renewal of food shipments and International Atomic Energy Agency access to threatened sites, keeps selling its effective drone weaponry to Ukraine while refusing to follow NATO in sanctioning Russia.  

As revolutionaries, we must continue to fight and escalate the class struggle at home as a means of opposing imperialist war abroad – an act of strength and solidarity with each other and the workers of both combatant countries. The war it’s not an appendix of the class struggle, it is one of its most brutal expressions, currently presenting the most immediate existential threat to our class and planet.  We must continue to think globally and act locally, no war but a class war!

Article by Dreyfus 20/08/22