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.
From Roosevelt and Stalin’s “Big Two” to Putin and Trump’s ‘Odd Couple’, history might not be repeating itself, but it does feel like it’s having a laugh at our expense.
What happened in Alaska felt less like the deliberations from an encounter between two warring figureheads, and more the choreographed delivery of a joint position statement long held and worked out.
A big reveal of the commonality between capitalism’s war mongers usually lost in the facade of rival narratives. As such, an actual sneak peek behind the veil.
Is it conceivable that Trump is imagining an axis with Putin ultimately against China? Disregarding Europe, already treated as a backwater on the one hand and aligning their own strategic objectives on the other, may well be the best last-ditch superpower throw of the dice for Russia and the necessary counterweight the US needs to fully pivot East.
Together, they meet on a strategic level over their relationships to Europe, and Putin cannot regain the central Asian ‘Stans against Chinese opposition without US support.
Similarly, detaching Russia from its Chinese chaperone leaves the latter surrounded and alone to face the US in the Pacific. In this region and potential future conflict theatre, the US has just concluded its biggest war game since the cold war, it involving hundreds of aircraft and 50 locations thousands of miles apart.
The former ‘partnership’ of Europe has seen the writing on the wall. It has not been idle, though possibly futile, in its efforts to respond.
It has been buying time telling Trump what he needs to hear. While talk of increased defence spending and rearmament might look like dancing to the US tune, they are more likely a gallop towards an attempt at defence autonomy in the anticipation of the abandonment that is their likely fate. The realities of the global power competition they’re about to confront alone.
Back to the future? “Thank God for the French army!”, Churchill said in 1933. History tells us we are really in trouble when the Anglo-French entente is the answer to a crisis!
Yet here we are again. Prime Minister Starmer and President Macron held in early July what was effectively billed as a nuclear summit. They declared a mutual combining of their nuclear capacities against unspecified yet forthcoming, “extreme threats”.
French President Macron declared this both, “.. a message to our partners, and our adversaries”. This begging the question: is an Anglo-French nuclear deterrent a salvation or does it bring us closer to war?
If a pragmatic alliance against populism and multi-polarism could find its own slogan of provocative militancy, it might be:
What do we want? Pragmatism! When do we want it? Within an appropriate timescale when circumstances are optimally aligned!
Now maybe, the circumstances are urgently aligning for Starmer and Macron. A patriotic toast in the last chance saloon of Europe making its last mark as a global defining entity.
Each successive conflict seems to dwarf the other in horror. From Ukraine to Gaza, from Gaza to Sudan; to name only a few. Whilst they all risk becoming sidelined footnotes on the march to a superpower reckoning. The horizon of which could be accelerating towards us.
There will be no history nor analysis after that. Tragically, given all the potential we have as a species, here will exist, just the ashes of tyrannical hubris.
Whatever our analysis or speculation, we are revolutionaries not journalists. It is not our role to idly conjecture or to excite the debate. Our purpose here is to emphasise that whatever the twists and turns may appear to be, no matter how unlikely, the trajectory remains the same.
Capitalism and war are two wheels of the same bike driving inexorably towards global destruction in a compulsive competition for power and resources. Its detail becomes secondary to the primacy of our solution: Class war!
The focus for their rivaling attentions may chop and change. Ours, however, remains the same – them and this existing nightmare of a socio-economic system! Them, the exploiting capitalist class who run the economies and nations in their interests and at our expense. The system that has no interests except profit, and which exploits and oppresses us to this end.
We are the world’s producers, the global working class. Without frontiers and beyond borders, we are used as the cannon fodder of their wars of exploitation and domination. Without us, all wealth and our world, would not exist. Without them as a ruling class – war, famine, environmental degradation, exploitation and oppression will cease to exist.
Our choice and our task is a fore gone conclusion. It is also in reality no choice at all. Fight for survival but also for the creation of a truly human community beyond exploitation and destruction.
Gaslighting Gaza: Hunger, hypocrisy and history all over again…
If media promoted photographs are to be believed, crowds of desperate Palestinians surrounding aid convoys in the Gaza Strip have now joined the Great Wall of China as one of the few earthly human spectacles visible from space.
It is an instrument of torture to revive the victim, sustain their capacity to live sufficiently to draw out the terrible suffering inflicted on them, as a warning, revenge, or punishment.
This is the context in which the current rush to drop crumbs from the air into a starving caged mass and the temporary short-term pauses in their exposure to horrific violence in Gaza could be seen. For survival, dignity or resolution, it is neither use nor ornament.
A 1000 people at least have been killed in the sadistic “hunger games” conducted by the Israeli state and US mercenaries over the last few months, to the increasing ‘tut-tut’ of an apparently disapproving world.
The fact that a pause has occurred at all is not a measure of the commitment and efforts of Israel’s allies to reign it in, but of their complicity, having clearly always possessed such power but refused to apply it for the sake of their global imperialist goals.
The ruling socialites of the Labour Party have proved themselves again as one cheek of the capitalist arse as Shammy Lammy and Starmer Chameleon perform the full pragmatic masquerade to serve their master Trump. They will never serve the interests of the working class they rob.
It might be better, observed President Lincoln, to avoid such treachery by choosing somewhere “…where despotism can be taken pure… without the base alloy of hypocrisy”. He was referring to Russia verses the US, we might well ask today, what’s the difference?
The far-right administration of the Israel state continues to squander the last of its historic good will or guilt credits, still peddling the line that the hunger it has created doesn’t exist.
This while juggling between military pauses and renewed bombing costing around 30 lives a day – double that currently caused by the induced famine. That any in the West can seriously claim this as a success is again masking a cynical complicity.
Hamas, meanwhile, the ‘state-aspiring’ anvil on which the Palestinian working class is being hammered, unapologetically continues to feed the meat grinder at the other end.
The western governments continue to supply Israel, block refugees fleeing war zones and suppresses even the flimsiest internal descent against their Israeli ally as antisemitism.
The banning of Palestine Action as terrorists for their nonviolent direct action has fooled no one, not even the usually supine United Nations which has called for the ban to be lifted.
We don’t support the ultimate goals of Palestine Action as we believe none of the artificially divided sections of the worlds working class should be subjected to the brutalising local policeman of capital that is the state, Palestinian or Israeli. We do however acknowledge this as a sign of greater repression to come and raise the alarm against it on that basis.
We have seen the seeding of periodic challenges to the power of Hamas brutally repressed by the Palestinian state-in -exile, while in Israel resistance is beginning to emerge to both genocide and forced military service.
While this initially appears small and far from the reality we are seeing elsewhere on the ground, we must counterpose it by asking what have those marching in their millions have achieved over the last three years other than sore feet and burnout.
Objectively they have bought time for the slaughter to continue by refusing to confront it with vigour and class interest with which this slaughter has been perpetrated. So far, our focus on the horror abroad has served to divert our attention to how it is paid for – by our increasing exploitation at home through austerity.
We must continue to argue that capitalism’s Social Peace at home is its violent immiserating pause enroute to the next generalised global bloodletting for profit, whose pathway is being paved almost everywhere we look at the moment.
The frontiers of capitalism are ablaze in preparation for our destruction; it’s destruction through the global struggle of our Class War is our necessary response.
Ironically, in the face of capitalism’s accelerating drive towards its global war of destruction in the ‘national interests’, the flags of ‘other patriotisms’ are coming back to hide the existential struggle of our class and humanity behind the claims of those nationalists who want the ‘states in exile’ like a United Ireland or Palestine to take over from those ‘states in power’.
The keyword here is the State. The bourgeois political entity that’s become the local franchise of international capitalism, it inevitably siding with one imperialist bloc or other.
Taking sides here has its own appeal. You can blow up a political relationship and achieve the illusion of change. Social revolution, however, is not a change of management and rearranging of deckchairs. It is the abolition of an exploitative social and economic relationship that cannot be reformed but requires our liberation and the solidarity of class struggle.
The flag of any nation will only ever lead us to one or other imperialist camp to die for. All claims pushing us to take the side of one state, bloc and camp or another are a betrayal of the historical internationalist interests of our class
Whoever broke woke is now haunting the political playgrounds of bourgeois Bohemian liberalism, the performance and the festival.
Who is this Glastonbury that now so openly opines on the political partisanships of the capitalist state and who must be obeyed?
A direct inheritor, if not usurper, of the free festival movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it has long been a haven for leftist and liberal ideas. It used to be joked that breaking into Glastonbury was mandatory training for the peace movement!
Its organisers have promoted this with pride. Its founder, Michael Eavis, stated as recently as the current festival, “people that don’t agree with the politics of the event can go somewhere else.” To follow this by endorsing the establishment voices in condemning Bob Vylan’s sloganeering against the IDF (the 170,000 conscript Israeli army) appears to be a response to external political pressure.
The Guardian newspaper observed that, “the Gaza discourse has been Vylanised” as a diversion. However, that was clearly not working given the number of voices mobilising in its favour – the duo’s album miraculously climbing the charts again!
Starmer then, condemned the allegedly antisemitic chants of, “Death to the IDF” as, “unacceptable hate speech”. Yvette Cooper with similar timing banned Palestine Action’s peaceful (if injurious to the deity of property) protest against the mass indiscriminate targeting of people with devastating high explosive bombs and bullets, including the massacre of noncombatants, as “terrorism”. This, ironically just as the Yoorrock Justice Commission in Australia found Britain guilty of genocide against the indigenous First Nations of Victoria during colonisation.
Not to be outdone, journalist and broadcaster Andrew Neil took the festival accusations one step further, for he stated, “I was going to say that they (Glastonbury) seem to have more in common with the Nuremberg rally,” though even the Nazis didn’t say, ‘Death to the Jews’”. This prompting some conservatives to even call for the prosecution of the BBC simply for showing the festival!
So, Bob Vylan, Kneecap’s Gaelic republicanism and even Palestine Action are cast as the villains in the fog of war, predominantly as a diversionary tactic. Not just from an ongoing mass slaughter but from the state’s shared interests with its enemies to not undermine its monopoly on the use of violence. And if ‘your army’ questions whether “right is actually on its side?” and then falls for the desertion argument, so could ‘ours’. “We (they) can’t be having that!”
However close one might be to the strictly defined legal characteristics that name a mass slaughter a genocide, the horrific trauma of Gaza is an atrocity by any measure. Consensus amongst experts is between 60 to 90,000 dead and perhaps treble that wounded. This represents in excess of 10% of the pre-war population of Gaza.
Vylan’s error is not in trying to find one enemy to accuse, but to find the wrong one and find itself colluding with the state’s tactic to avoid the real significance of the commentary. “Death to the IDF” is no more antisemitic than ‘death to the Nazis’ is calling for the killing of all Germans. It does however pitch us as one state entity against another – one side of the prospect of imperialist slaughter. Supporting the killing of our class to oppose the other side where our class is also dying!
The cycle of war doesn’t end because our class has died in sufficient numbers to support our state in killing our class in the enemy state. The prospect of war ends when our class flat out refuses to fight for both the state and for appointed leaders within capital and instead fights the very system and barbaric ruling class which wants to pit us against and murder each other.
Far from calling for the death of the IDF conscripts, revolutionists should be calling for the working class treated as canon fodder, as the producers of wealth who have nothing in common with those who control and manipulate that wealth through its extorted acquisition, to see what they have in common with the repressed and exploited working class conscripts of the fundamentalist bands of Hamas and its Iranian backers in the anti-western camp.
War ends when the fighting stops forever. That can only be brought about in the long-term by the internationalist action of the world’s working class, refusing all sides but its own and the negating of the power and wealth of capitalism and imperialism for a free world commune.
While there may be an increasing number of voices criticising the ‘Vylanising’ of the Gaza debacle, that voice yet needs to find its target against the warring factions of this imperialist conflict, against the system of capitalism and state, and not upon workers dying because of it.
‘Two-Tier Kier’ is no longer a smear following the compromise made with his back benchers to only do over one section of disabled people in the UK.
Like some inverse promo for loan deals or Internet packages, the government will lay off existing disability claims in exchange for duffing up people with the new ones. ‘Get it while it lasts – new customers only.’ *Although a relevant change of circumstances such as a change in your condition classes you as a “new claim” and therefore under the new rules.
Despite it being only five years since the worst global pandemic in a century affected half the UK population killing quarter of 1 million, the government proclaimed its surprise that the numbers of people with long-term health issues have increased at all since 2020. Another example of them paying zero attention to people they would rather clap than pay during the pandemic.
That fatigue, respiratory issues and depression are running riot apparently has no link to what an ill-prepared society and our class had to survive under their watch.
That the scale of benefits is so high, if nothing else, tells us what an unhealthy ‘shitpit’ surviving capitalism is. Ironically, maybe only a Labour government masquerading as the people’s friend could carry out such an assault on such vulnerable groups and hope to get away with it.
The financial reasoning of such decisions is of no interest to us as revolutionists. The well-being of our class versus the protection of the interests of the rich and their wars is always a political decision and, as such, we find no justification ever in the latter outcome. Democracy serves us no better than dictatorship on this.
It is however another irony that a decision driven by the desire to send us to war and increase the manufacture of disability is to be funded by the starving of the existing disabled communities.
We saw such a strategy fail already in the plan to cut winter fuel payments. While at first glance significantly different demographics, there are some striking similarities: Both ‘passive’ recipients of hard fought for state benefits – though now deemed less entitled; both largely seen as passive politically – physically limited and without economic muscle. Consequently, both are not just seen as vulnerable but beatable.
What the state failed to notice is that elder people and people with disabilities are not discreet entities like trans people, migrants, or asylum seekers, but diversely dispersed throughout every house and community in the country. Embedded enough for every sinew of our class to scream no!
That such opposition to injustice can be seen and shared on such a widespread level needs extension to those truly vulnerable communities made invisible by prejudice. The lesson of the response to disability and the elder community should be extended to every section of our class because we are all targets for elimination to facilitate and finance the coming war.
Division is diversion! Labour didn’t invent that. The state requires all its political representatives to divide our class in whatever way it can to divert us from seeing the importance of our unity in our struggle against it.
At times it tries to get us to participate in this by ‘othering’ the other dispossessed of our class, on race, gender, origin, sexuality etc. Each time we fall for this ruse we widen the opening of the avenue of attack back to the main targets of class and vulnerability in all its diverse forms again.
Racism breeds attack on disability, disability discrimination breeds attack on our class made workless by capitalism, et cetera. The cycle of division and defeat begins and ends with the ‘isms’ and the targeting of difference.
The partial defeat of Labour in power was led by activist mobilisation and opposition of our class. The scale was small but indicative of potential. To upscale we need to link struggles of one community with another and identify the ultimate challenges that confront us – growing austerity and impoverishment to meet the war aims of the state’s imperial ambition.
Hunger and austerity are about war and our opposition must oppose war with the energy it refuses division and poverty. Resistance, survival and victory are both the right and obligation of our class. It is our necessity not just to survive from day to day but to abolish an economic class system that offers us no better way of survival.
The class struggle is the peace movement, and victory on the Homefront is its defeat of their plans for war!
Compassion fatigue is being replaced by stress and trauma as people can no longer bear to focus on so much misery and potential fear. In the wars around us there is a sense that we are not just witnessing the terrible lives of others, but the future that awaits us and gets closer each day and with every news broadcast. We prefer to notice that we did not change the curtains as the grenade crashes through our own window.
Are we moving from passive voyeur to active anticipant? More than half of the world’s nuclear powers, six nations, Russia, North Korea, Israel, recently Pakistan and India, and now the US are strutting on the battlefield.
Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear sites has changed the rules of the diplomatic game, perhaps to the point of no return. Foreshadowed by Israel’s surprise attack under the smoke screen of forthcoming US-Iran negotiations, the US’s second ‘Pearl Harbour’, punching through the false security of a two-week window for Iran to reconsider its position, has put all of us on an exponential path to military destruction.
This lesson will not be lost on China, which suffered the greatest casualties at the hands of imperial Japan’s 20th century wars, prefigured by the surprise attacks of Port Arthur and Pearl Harbour. Trump’s new IED – improvised explosive diplomacy – risks detonating the Pacific region in the struggles over Taiwan and strategic sea lanes.
Not lost on other belligerents, Russian strategists observe that, “… on a tactical level there are pluses [for Russia] from the conflict between Iran and Israel”, including, “higher global oil prices and distraction from Russia’s war in Ukraine” (Moskovsky Komsomolets).
The business daily, Kommersant, continued that: “Any escalation in the Middle East distracts from Ukraine and alters the priorities for Western military assistance,” adding incredibly: “Russia could…play the role of impartial arbiter, helping if not to resolve the crisis, then at least to de-escalate it.”! Perhaps more realistically it laments conversely that it, “…was unable to prevent Israel’s mass strike on a country with which five months ago, Russia signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement.” That fact will also not be lost in China.
The unclaimed banality is – if you want war, prepare for war! On the Home Front, “battle ready and armour clad… “, is the Labour government’s echoing of George Washington’s now ubiquitous militaristic slogan, “peace through strength”. Whose peace whose strength?
In the late 15th century at the birth of European colonial expansionism, Italian military commander Marshal Trivulzio expressed the military maxim for the next 500 hundred years: “To carry out war, three things are necessary: money, money and yet more money.”
Cue more austerity and an internal conflict against the enemies within, not just the unions but politically prefigured by the banning of such group groups as Palestine Action. Already the status of people with disabilities, gender dysphoria, social and eco-dissidents of all kinds is being downgraded and rights rolled back.
As we prepare military bases for migrants or North American nuclear weapons, this hunt for enemies will grow. That soft fascist echo of reason, “If you have nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear” is the ‘arbeit macht frei’ of our time.
In the era of Trump, populism, fascism, never has this phrase been more terrifying. Have you ever identified your gender identity, sexual preferences, political allegiances in official documentation or social media? Times are changing. Tolerance was always an insidious form of oppression and has paved the pathway for the direct repression to come.
Hypocrisy-a return to traditional values.
While the Israeli state’s slaughter of Palestinians is possibly the greatest self-inflicted reputational damage done to a nation in modern times, despite its own experience of genocidal harm, its double standards rival one of the greatest hypocrisies of war in the Iranian theocratic dictatorships’ condemning of the death of civilians as a war crime and a breach of the rules!
Not because the death of civilians or anyone else for that matter in war is not abhorrent, but that if no one had ever coined the term ‘war crime’ before, the Iranian regime has given them plenty of reason and opportunities to invent the phrase in its near 50-year existence. Now seen as ‘the good guys’ by the liberal partisans of ‘some(any?) wars before the class war’, those, who would be first up against the wall in the fundamentalist dictatorship, choose to ignore its generational atrocities.
Perhaps less well known than its bulldozing of walls onto homosexuals, its stoning of women for religious infringement and running of mass torture centres, is its mass murder of long-held political detainees. In 1988, in more than 30 cities across the country, 30,000 political prisoners, many of whom had been in custody for years were taken out and murdered by the Islamic regime, the Godly guardians of Islamic fanaticism.
Despite this, the Trotskyists and the Stalinists – 2 cheeks of the same arse – make companionable bed fellows as they call for the ‘left’ to support Iran and defeat for Israel and USA. This position dubbed, “revolutionary defencism’, is the left-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus’s obligatory anti-working-class side-taking with the bourgeoisie. They offer us nothing other than an alternative imperialist camp to die for.
While such crises feel shockingly new on our own front doorstep, we’d do well to remember that patriotic calls to commemorate the last great imperialist slaughter of 70 million souls, the older generation still with us remembers well and we should heed their warnings. As a recent veteran of the Burma campaign commented:
“I’m not here celebrating, I’m remembering. The biggest crime is war itself. If there was no war, there would be no more war crimes.”
When we, along with others, say, No War but the Class War, it is a plea for survival. Everywhere, the tsunami of global conflict is rising inexorably towards the last great imperialist global configuration that will wipe us out as a species. Classes for businesses on how to survive or plans to resurrect dad’s army and leaflet every home are mocking the graves they are digging for us.
Only the class of producers who make all wealth, the working class, which has no common interest with those who steal the wealth that we produce can either ultimately prevent this war or perish with it. War or Revolution! When we say, No War but the Class War, it is a call to arms for the liberation of ourselves, the producers, the vast majority, against the existential crimes of capital and the ruling class, that tiny parasitical minority.
We, the anarchist front of Iran and Afghanistan, reaffirm our unshakable and principled position:
Every war – on every scale and on every excuse – initiated or sustained by states, must be unequivocally condemned.
Countries, regardless of their shape or appearance, use war as a tool for survival and control. And in this process, the lives, dignity and future of ordinary people are trampled under their feet.
At a time when the world is once again plagued by violence, bombs, death, displacement, and insecurity, we insist on this ongoing truth: the real victims of war are always the people—not the countries, not ideologies, not borders.
Our fight, as always, is not for the redistribution of power among the elites, but against the institution of the state itself and all forms of organized control.
We stand in solidarity – carefully and decisively – alongside the people of Iran, Afghanistan and the wider region.
What we are witnessing today is, on the one hand, the blatant crimes of the Israeli regime, targeting civilians in Gaza and elsewhere with wild cruelty. On the other hand, we see the Islamic Republic of Iran manipulating public fear, playing geopolitical games at the cost of the lives of Iranians, and imposing the burden of war on society.
We see the Islamic Republic not only as the outbreak of a regional war, but as part of a global chain of control and oppression – a regime that has for decades been attacking the Iranian people with censorship, poverty, imprisonment, torture and execution, and recklessly endangering millions through military provocations.
While we condemn the atrocities of the Zionist regime in the harshest terms, we also state that the struggle against the Islamic Republic is part of our broader struggle against all states and structures of control – a struggle that will continue.
We fight for a world without borders, without countries, without armies or authorities – a world in which humanity, life and freedom are at the center. Our main war has always been the war against political authority, totalitarianism and the state itself.
We invite individuals, groups and communities around the world to celebrate June 21 as the Day of Desertion: a day of consciousness, resistance and courage to say NO to war.
This day is:
An expression of solidarity with all those who refused or refuse to fight,
A tribute to those who have been executed, jailed or persecuted for desertion,
A reminder that every war can end when people stop fighting it.
The symbol of today is the daisy, a simple but resilient flower that grows even among the ruins of war.
Wear it, draw it, plant it and spread its silent challenge.
MANIFESTO JUNE 21 – DESERTION DAY
We, who refuse to kill or be killed, declare June 21st desertion Day: a day for all those who have defied the war abandoning their mechanisms.
This is a day to celebrate life, not death. We are not heroes from history books, but survivors of conscience.
A deserter is not a traitor. A deserter stays true to what makes us human: compassion, conscience and will to choose.
In every war, someone stands up and says: No! This is not my war!
On the longest day of the year, when light overcomes darkness, we remember that even in the most militarized times there are those who refuse to pull the trigger.
The act of desertion is a cry against war and a whisper of hope for the world beyond.
We reproduce the article from Tridni Valka from their blogCLASS WAR see link at the end
We publish here a text from the German-speaking group AST (Anti-political Social-revolutionary Tendency) that we translated into English and French. Our overall assessment is that we appreciate the militant efforts of these comrades, especially when it comes to revolutionary defeatist action, i.e. the struggle against capitalist war and peace.
There are, however, unresolved points of disagreement in their contributions, particularly on the all-too-famous “question of the party” and its corollary “the transition period”, the question of the State in general and the capitalist State in particular, and not to mention the tricky issue of the very essence of democracy. For communists, the latter can only be grasped as the negation in action of class antagonism (and its revolutionary overcoming) as well as their merging into a national (re)conciliatory entity called “the people” – whether “sovereign” and voting, or under the yoke of a “dictator” or a one-party system, is of little importance. It’s clear that the dividing line is not between “democracy” and “dictatorship”, but between revolution and counter-revolution, between the abolition of capitalist social relations and their consolidation, even if it means painting them red, or even red and black. Fascist or anti-fascist, democracy is always the dictatorship of capital.
In the present text, the AST comrades elaborate in abundance their critique of “the party”, which they too quickly equate with the Leninist party, the Bolshevik party… When criticizing what they call “Party Marxism” (Parteimarxismus), what we see as to be particularly targeted are in fact “the builders of parties and internationals”, the “bearers of consciousness for the class”, this “socialist consciousness [that] is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously” (Kautsky quoted by Lenin in “What is to be done?”).
But more generally, and beyond the terms and expressions used, we can see here a first disagreement with the comrades of AST about the organization of the struggle of the proletariat, which emerges spontaneously from the fertile soil of capitalist social relations, which necessarily asserts itself as a force, as a full energy, and which must bring down any materialization of the social dictatorship of the value, commodity, money, i.e. of Capital and its State. This social force, this destructive energy of “the existing” which destroys our humanity, it’s the proletariat which gets organized as a class (against all classes and for their definitive abolition!), which gets organized as a party (against all parties and for their as well definitive abolition!), which gets organized as a party that is not a party “in the traditional sense of the term” (as the comrades of the KAPD already affirmed over a century ago), but that is in practice an anti-class, an anti-party!!!!
The proletarian revolution has nothing in common with the political “revolutions” of the bourgeoisie. So, the organization of the proletariat as a party has nothing in common with bourgeois political parties and especially not with the Leninist conception of the party. What we refer to is the distinction between the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of Anarchy, of socialism, of communism. (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)
The proletariat organized as a party does not aspire to democratically conquer power but, on the contrary, arises from the imperious necessity to liquidate this power, this democracy and everything which separates the proletariat from its humanity, from its Gemeinwesen.
There was a time, in the 19th century and even at the beginning of the 20th, when the formula of the proletariat organizing itself as a class, and therefore as a party, was very well assimilated into the international discussion. It wasn’t a problem for any sincere militant of our class, even among those who claimed the Black Flag of Anarchy. Among the most militant of them, Malatesta, for example, openly referred to the “anarchist party”: “By anarchist party we mean the ensemble of those who are out to help make anarchy a reality and who therefore need to set themselves a target to achieve and a path to follow”. Or in another way thirty years later he was persisting and signing: “We anarchists can all say that we are of the same party, if by the word ‘party’ we mean all who are on the same side, that is, who share the same general aspirations and who, in one way or another, struggle for the same ends against common adversaries and enemies.”
Class and party are not two different historic entities which should be separately defined only to form a relationship later. On the contrary, they are the distinct expressions of one and the same historic being: Communism. The party is the communist movement constituted as an international force, the organization of the revolutionary class which will bring about communism, arising spontaneously and developing on the basis of a community of interests and perspectives, a real community of proletarian struggle.
This tendency towards the worldwide organization of the proletariat, towards its programmatical affirmation and its organic centralization confronts all the forces and ideologies of the counter-revolution.
Or in other words, we are partisans of the revolutionary self-organization of the proletariat, that is, of the “historical party” of the world communist revolution, which springs up spontaneously from the soil of bourgeois society and has nothing to do with self-proclaimed vanguardism. The self-organization of the proletariat, class independence, and direct action are inseparable and mean struggling without intermediaries or representatives; that is, struggling outside and against unions, parties, elections, parliaments, bourgeois legality, etc.
Considering that, when the proletariat rises up and shakes the capitalist order, the right and left wings of Capital unite into one single party against it, that is, “the party of democracy”; in return, the “historical party” of the revolutionary proletariat is a party against democracy, that is, against the social dictatorship of Capital and its State over the proletariat.
The “historical party” is not a formal party in the “traditional” sense, or a State like the Leninist parties wrongly called “communist”. But it is a party of action which, although it needs to structure itself in order to organize revolutionary tasks, goes far beyond formal aspects. It is the proletariat itself that organically organizes and acts as a revolutionary class. It is the real movement that terminates and overcomes the present state of things. It is the party of communism and anarchy against the party of democracy. It is the revolutionary self-organization of the proletariat in action.
A second disagreement also appears clearly in the point 2 “For the revolutionary destruction of all States”. The proletariat in struggle confronts all the organized forms of the capitalist State, which imposes and realizes the social dictatorship of the value valorizing itself through wage labor, exchange, world market, money… But against this reality, our class must organize, structure and impose its world dictatorship of human needs against Capital and revolutionary terror against bourgeois forces, and this process will not be achieved by simply erasing words and expressions that might seem awkward. This is somewhat clumsily expressed in the AST text: “In the world revolution there will therefore be classless and stateless communities as well as capitalist States”. But they fail to see how they confront each other in a life-and-death struggle…
The proletarian dictatorship means abolishment of existing social relations: abolition of wage labor, abolition of useless professions and productions, elimination of exchange relations from all aspects of our lives, abolition of economy and production for profit and subordination of all productive forces to human needs and needs of the world revolution, disappearance of the difference between work and leisure, city and countryside and all other separations, violent destruction of the State and its replacing with organs of proletarian revolutionary self-organization, all of that which the triumph of the revolution turns into a global human community. Through this historical revolutionary process, the proletariat (as last existing class) abolishes itself and thus the whole class society and fully develops worldwide human community.
The dictatorship of the proletariat thus means the violent abolition of wage labor, abolition of the capitalist mode of production and all the social relations it reproduces. It is necessarily violent, repressive and despotic as well as subversive process that uproots the very social fabric of capitalist reality. It directly and immediately imposes the satisfaction of our human needs, which we are dispossessed from under capitalism by our very role as a class, whose labor power is exploited and whose products of labor are alienated from us.
There will be a violent insurrection against the State, in which the proletariat will seize the means of production and the infrastructures of communication and distribution, and violently attack and overthrow the centers of State power. Then the proletariat will expropriate factories and land to produce for the direct satisfaction of its needs, rather than for the profit of capitalists. Proletarians in uniform will turn their weapons against their own generals, stop fighting the capitalists’ wars, loot weapons depots and share them with the rest of the proletariat, and together, they will release prisoners and storm the centers of power. The capitalist State will be attacked from all sides and actively repressed and subverted by our class violence. Not only the government and the forces of repression, but also the State as a totality, as a system of capitalist social relations – i.e. trade unions, citizenship, faith, family, education, etc. – will be absorbed into the maelstrom of the revolutionary abolition of the existing. This process, which we call the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the transition period between capitalism and fully-achieved communism, is by no means embodied in “apparatuses of violence separate from the society”, as the AST text assumes, but rather as a dialectical unity between the struggling proletarian class and its most far-sighted leading elements, whose motricity, if not a guarantee of the revolution’s success, at least pushes it to its ultimate consequences.
Let’s be clear, this can only be achieved by extending the revolution worldwide, and all human activity must be subordinated to this goal. There’s no such thing as “socialism in one country” (or group of countries), as the Bolsheviks/Leninists of all kinds claim (including even the libertarians who drool with admiration over the “Rojava Revolution”, the Zapatista “Free Communes” or “Free Palestine”, ad nauseam) – on the contrary, it’s an absolutely counter-revolutionary position! The concept of “socialism in one country” was nothing but a tool to enable and justify the strengthening of capital’s dictatorship over the proletariat in Russia at the hands of the Bolshevik party and its policies.
In order to realize the organized activity of the society up to the achievement of communism, the proletarian revolution must violently destroy all the institutions and apparatuses of the counter-revolution which seek to maintain the dictatorship of value against human needs. We must insist on this point – it means the active suppression of wage labor, of exchange (trade), of any form of regional or local autonomy that could become the basis of future nationalist reaction, of freedom of expression and association for counter-revolutionary forces…
But to come back to the AST’s text, may the few and other points of disagreement we emphasized not spoil the pleasure of sharing internationally and submitting for collective criticism this contribution by comrades who, with strengths and weaknesses (as any revolutionary internationalist militant structure developing under the black sun of capital), are trying to outline and affirm the program of communism and the direct action of the proletariat in struggle. And in this sense, the development/consolidation of our world proletarian community of struggle, to which the present text contributes, beyond the division into ideological families, seems to us more than necessary, and indeed inescapable!
After 25 years in prison, PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan decides to bring down the curtain and dissolve his party. The party was founded in 1984 on the basis of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, but after its leader read Murray Bookchin in prison, it declared itself a “democratic confederalist” party, offering a very peculiar reinterpretation of Bookchin’s ideas as a mixture of Leninism and social democracy with feminist and ecological discourse, all against the backdrop of the cult of personality of the leader.
The PKK actually ran in Turkey’s parliamentary elections a few years ago and won several seats, but because it did not lay down its arms, Erdogan’s government classified it as a “terrorist organization” and it became illegal again.
At the same time, several political shifts have emerged in recent years that could affect the legal status of Ocalan (sentenced to life imprisonment). In October 2024, Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party and a key ally of President Erdoğan, suggested that Öcalan’s sentence could be reviewed if the PKK laid down its arms. Later in February 2025, Ocalan called on the PKK to dissolve itself and give up the armed struggle, prompting the group to declare a ceasefire and announce its future dissolution, which finally happened a few days ago.
According to its recent 12th Congress, the PKK has “destroyed the policy of denial and destruction imposed” on Turkey’s Kurdish population and “brought the Kurdish question to a point where it can be resolved through democratic politics, thus fulfilling its historical mission.” Without a doubt, the only thing that can resolve this is for the former PKK leaders to enter the Turkish parliament, as they have always planned, as part of new political parties free from the historical burden of the PKK. Despite his more or less straightforward statements, Ocalan eventually conceded defeat and is positioning himself as a future social democratic leader after his apparently negotiated release. We will soon see him at the head of a new party. Who knows whether he will again stick to his particular interpretation of Bookchin’s ideas, hoping they will bear fruit, or perhaps take a more traditional position, this time closer to European social democracy.
Despite the disastrous and bitter historical experience of anarchism mixing with movements, trade unions and political parties that put “national liberation” above social revolution, today, in the twenty-first century, many anarchists join such movements, which inevitably end up betrayed in some parliament, begging for a place in power. A position, this time closer to European social democracy.
Let’s not let ourselves be distracted any further. A true anarchist movement is one that openly advocates social revolution above all else, including the “liberation” of any “people” or “nation,” simply because any “national liberation” (even if cloaked in feminist or environmentalist garb) is nothing more than a deception whose goal is to replace one government with another, one oppressor and exploiter with another, deceiving us with promises of “becoming one of us.” Only a social revolution that destroys the government and establishes anarchist communism from the bottom up, organized in free communes, can achieve the liberation of the peoples. And no political party will ever achieve that, even if it calls itself “democratic confederalist.”
AnarCom Network 