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.
“The war massacre in Ukraine continues, affecting populations on both sides of the war line. While Putin’s army bombs Ukrainian cities, the Ukrainian government has turned them into prisons for a significant portion of the local population. People are being maimed, imprisoned, raped and murdered as a result of the actions of the rulers in the Kremlin and Kiev. Let’s not look away. Let’s support those who are affected.
War and nationalist propaganda are deceiving and manipulating us, while at the same time obscuring important facts. Among other things, for example, the fact that the State borders in Ukraine are closed to men of conscription age. They are guarded by the army, which sends men to prison, shoots them and drowns them in the river when they try to cross the border to safe place. Army gunmen also chase men in the streets to drag them to the front and use them as “cannon fodder”. Yes, this is the same Ukrainian army that is praised by many as if it was a noble form of liberation institution. If we look to Russia, we can see a similarly disturbing reality. For the slightest protest against the war, people end up in prison; forced mobilization has obliged many proletarians to flee or go into hiding. Deserters, saboteurs and conscientious objectors are massacred, judged and imprisoned in Russia, as well as in the Ukraine.
We do not care how the bourgeoisie justifies this aggression against the working class in Russia and Ukraine. It is necessary not only to condemn and criticize it, but also to give practical support to those who are concerned, i.e. deserters, rebels, saboteurs, refugees, those who avoid forced conscription to the front and many others. It is necessary to stand consistently against Putin’s aggressors, as well as against aggressors acting at the instigation of the Ukrainian Government.
What can we do, we who currently live outside the war zone? At the very least, we can share resources with those who desperately need them. The Anti-Militarist Initiative (AMI) is therefore launching a public fundraising campaign starting the 1 February 2025. The money raised will support proletarians from Russia and Ukraine who are trying to avoid mobilization, who have deserted, who face repression or are trying to save their lives by fleeing a war zone.
How to Support the Fundraising?
1) You can deposit money into the account.
Payment details:
“IBAN: CZ1955000000001024164477 Account holder: Historický spolek Zádruha, z.s. Bank: Raiffeisenbank bank code: 5500 Swift code: RZBCCZPP
2) It is also possible to arrange to hand over the money in person in cash.
3) Fundraising gigs, solidarity parties and dinners, etc. are welcome.
4) Sharing information about the fundraiser is an important part of the fundraiser. It can be translated into different languages, and sharing a flyer or poster, publishing the appeal on websites, social networks, magazines etc. is also welcome.
5) We plan to successively publish statements from collectives and individuals who have supported the fundraising. They will explain their motivations and reflections on anti-war resistance. Write your own contribution.
In the past, I have publishedan extensive analysis of how specific individuals and groups try to isolate me, attack my private life, they’re threatening my safety and sabotage the Anti-militarist activities I engage in. One of the examples given was a description of how a member of the Trhlina infoshop and the Anarchistická federace (Anarchist federation) told a friend of mine that I was at risk of a strong reaction from militant anti-fascists. In other words, the person from Trhlina and the Anarchistická federace was threatening me. At that time it was not yet clear whether the threat would come true. Now it is clear. On Saturday, February 8, 2025, I was physically attacked by one such militant anti-fascist in Prague’s Club 007.
What happened?
The attacker waited until most of my friends had left the club, followed me into the toilets, where he punched me several times in the face. No, I’m not surprised he chose such an insidious method. I’ve seen so much scheming from his cronies that I expect nothing but meanness, unscrupulousness and hypocrisy from them now.
Before “Mr. Hero” physically attacked, he also tried to “explain” to me in a few words that I should not oppose the defence of Ukraine. He did not give me any chance to express my arguments as to why I do not support the defence of Ukraine or the defence of Russia, the defence of the Czech Republic or the defence of any other state. I am an anarchist, therefore I fight against all states. Against fascist states, as well as democratic, stalinist, monarchist…
The following interview was carried out by comrades from the Československé anarchistické sdružení – CAS a Czech Internationalist Anarchist Group.
1)Please introduce yourself briefly to the readers of our magazine. Are you from Ukraine, where you were born and spent your youth?
Hi. My name is Vadym Yakovlev, I’m Ukrainian queer writer and journalist and I’m against the war and nationalism. I was born in Odesa, the largest southern multicultural city in Ukraine, a few months before the collapse of the USSR. My mother is Ukrainian and my father is Russian. Their fathers were military. My father worked in a factory. With the collapse of the USSR, the factory was closed, and my father lost his job. It affected my family and my childhood. I grew up in Odesa, but one year before I escaped Ukraine I was living in Lviv, the biggest city of the Western part of Ukraine. At home my relatives spoke Russian and Ukrainian, so I never focused on issues such as national identity. My family was an unhappy international family that lost a lot with the collapse of state communism in Ukraine. I guess all of that influenced me a lot in my search of my true political views and my desire to do something that can have influence on society.
2)You left Ukraine, what led you to this decision?
On the one hand, I could no longer work in Ukraine because of my political beliefs. The Ukrainian intelligentsia, journalists and artists as a community with the beginning of the war decided to become privileged elite propagandists in the service of the state. I didn’t want to be a propagandist, so I lost the opportunity to publish my articles. And if you publicly express in Ukraine the views I have, authorities can put you in the jail. On the other hand, of course due to my views, I didn’t want to go to war on the frontline. That’s why I escaped.
3)What is your attitude towards war and antimilitarism?
Much of my work in Ukraine was related to my anti-patriotic beliefs. My articles and participation in art projects were very often devoted to criticism of Ukrainian patriotism, Ukrainian nationalism and the mainstream privileged “pro-Western” and pro-war civil and cultural Ukrainian elite. I have always been interested in anti-war art and anti-war activism. Since 2022, I had to start doing this, even at the cost of losing the opportunity to stay and work in my native country and the loss of close friends who abandoned me because of my beliefs.
4)The war in Ukraine changed a lot of things. Are you in touch with your friends back home? What are their attitudes towards the war? How do they live
As I said in answer to the previous question, I lost most of my friends from the privileged art scene and the journalist-activist community. Almost all of them became propagandists, receiving support from the state and Western foundations. I also lost touch with the majority of the Ukrainian leftists, who are supporting militarism, nationalism and NATO. This type of leftists is supporting by the state and Western foundations too. But I’m still in touch with my friends, who are don’t work with the state and have nothing to do with privilaged classes. They support me and my anti-war views. A lot of them, if they are men, are living an awful life now, cause they have to hide all the time at their apartments in the fear of getting outside. Ukrainian army is kidnapping people from the street and sending them on the frontline without their permission. And majority of people with man gender marker in the documents are not allowed by the law to left the country.
5)Have many people, including anarchists joined the army and left antimilitarism? And not much is known about them? Maybe they are afraid. Do they exist? Are you in contact with them?
Regarding anti-war anarchists in Ukraine, we have anti-war collective called Assembly. They are from Kharkiv and have their own website where they are publishing anti-war and anti-conscription texts. This group of anarchists is anonymous and they hide the names of their team members. This is the only way to conduct any anti-war activity in Ukraine. There was only one Ukrainian organization that did not hide the names of its members and openly spoke out against the war – Ukrainian Pacifist Movement. The Security Service of Ukraine accused them of support of Russia and sent its leader to court. After that, the organization significantly softened its public position, fearing prison. Many Ukrainian leftists sided with the war, it seems to me, because of conformity. They are afraid to express their real position or simply don’t even have one, as it seems to me, and just are following mainstream trend. But these are just my assumptions. In Ukraine, as an authoritarian militaristic country, it is extremely unsafe to be against war.
6)What about Ukrainians in exile? Are they doing any anti-war activities? Are they organizing in workplaces?
Lately, many Ukrainian anti-war initiatives have appeared abroad. For example, Ukrainians are now organizing demonstrations against mobilization and human rights violations in Ukraine. These demonstrations are taking place in Germany, Italy, and France. Often, these actions are organized by Ukrainian leftists who have nothing to do with the pro-war Ukrainian left mainstream such as the so-called “Ukrainian anti-authoritarians” or Solidarity Collectives. All these groups of anti-war Ukrainian leftists are not financed by anyone, they are a personal initiative of convinced and active young people. There will be more of these actions, and I am in active communication with the organizers and members of this initiatives, this is very inspiring! In addition, in the West there are a certain number of Ukrainian scientists and artists who are against the war and who are constantly being marginalized and silenced here in the West. But we have all been silenced for too long, our voices have been erased for too long, and now we are increasingly trying to build horizontal connections at various levels, organizing an anti-war front here abroad against the war and the propagandists. There are many more of us than even we think.
7)The media is silent about the forced mobilization of the Ukrainian government. Rarely does information about deserters leak out? What can you tell us about it?
Nobody knows the exact number of deserters from the Ukrainian side, but according to official and unofficial statistics, there are about 150-200 thousand people! These are huge numbers. The official Ukrainian media are controlled by the state or the Security Service of Ukraine. Ukrainians mainly consume information from anonymous news channels on Telegram or TikTok. It is there that videos of violence against civilians by the Ukrainian army are constantly published. These videos, full of terrible scenes and evidence of human rights violations, do not make it into the official media. The Ukrainian authorities are constantly trying to find the authors of anonymous Telegram channels who criticize the actions of the Ukrainian army or advocate for peace, and put them in prison. Sometimes the authorities succeed. The Ukrainian government, police and the Security Service of Ukraine do not hesitate to use any methods to silence alternative voices. For example, the police recently arrested the mother of a blogger who is abroad and speaks out against forced mobilization, for publishing his post! There are also unofficial ways to shut up dissenters. I remember one teenager who had his own channel on Telegram, where he criticized Ukrainian nationalism and mobilization. He identified himself as an anarchist. Fascists came to his home for a “conversation”, after which he publicly renounced his beliefs. But the pro-war Ukrainian leftists, who are propagandists and accomplices of all these crimes against Ukrainians, will never tell you about such things.
8)Do you have acquaintances who have deserted or evaded the draft? How can we in Czechoslovakia help them?
I know people who have illegally fled the country, and I have many acquaintances and friends in Ukraine who are hiding from the army and conscription. Perhaps, over time, it will be necessary to create initiatives to help such people within the framework of anti-war Ukrainian movements abroad, which have only just begun to emerge. If such initiatives appear, I hope that there will be people in the Czech Republic and Slovakia who will want to help these Ukrainians.
9)What message would you give to Ukrainian and Russian workers at home and abroad?
The only thing I want to convey to those who are not part of the privileged classes (and this is not only the proletariat), regardless of their nationality and location: never trust those who build their happiness on your exploitation, marginalisation and systemic discrimination, and especially do not be fools and do not participate in their wars, it is simply stupid!
10)Thank you for the interview and if you have anything else to say, we would be happy to.
Let me start by asking a question: Are the enemies of our enemies automatically our friends and allies? This is a question that people have always asked themselves when deciding with whom and how to ally in pursuit of their goals. Even today, questions of this kind are relevant to us. For example: if our enemy is Putin and his supporters, is anyone who takes up arms and uses them against Putin’s supporters automatically our friend and ally? Some may argue that a question posed in this way is too vague to be answered immediately. I will therefore try to be more specific. I will describe a few specific people who have died in the war in Ukraine and have become uncritically glorified martyrs for quite a few people.
Miner Conflict – Major Impact : an Anarchist Communist perspective on the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 by Dreyfus
Dreyfus shows how and why the anarchists were involved. ‘This wasn’t altruism or an act of goodwill to support our mining communities. […] This was the instinctive yet enlightened self-interest of class solidarity.’[p.4]
Impressionistic in places, ‘Misty early morning picket lines took on a surreal air against the back drop of growing ghost towns’[p.18], elsewhere there’s a comic moment from heckling Kinnock at Hanley, ‘I remember one steward shouting to another “You get him!”, pointing to one of our number. After a second thinking about it, he responded “No way, YOU get him!” We were secure.’[p.30]
It’s good to have an anarchist communist view, and one from the potteries. Most importantly, this is history that means something: ‘What remains an enduring impact for me is the experience that class struggle changes people.
‘The lessons the “Left” drew were administrative and all about leadership. They pushed the lessons that the TUC can’t be trusted, that Labour Party is not a friend of our class while continuing to try and infiltrate and take over both. Political memories of that sort of thing are relatively short-lived.
The Russian and Ukrainian state sends people to war to defend the rule of the Russian and Ukrainian bourgeoisie. The Israeli state and Hamas do the same for their own local bourgeoisie. People are dying by the thousands under the flags of “their” states and nationalist movements. They murder each other for the sake of “their own” rulers, for the business of “their own” bosses, for the property and power of “their own” bourgeoisie. “We are defending the survival of our own nation”, these people shout, while running towards their own destruction on the field of war. “We are fighting for the right to national self-determination” they chant in chorus, while overlooking that everywhere in the world it is the bourgeoisie that dictates the conditions of our lives. There is no self-determination anywhere. The bourgeoisie in Ukraine determines (i.e. imposes and dictates) the conditions of the local proletariat, the bourgeoisie in Russia does the same to the local proletariat. The various bourgeois factions around the world are uniting in transnational alliances to compete with their rivals. How can anyone believe the delusion that by waging war for one of these factions the working class can gain the possibility of self-determination? So, if the proletariat in the Ukraine, Gaza or Israel sacrifices enough lives on the front, the bourgeoisie will give it as a gift the voluntary surrender of its own power and will no longer exploit the proletarian masses?
War between states will never bring us the opportunity to determine the free conditions of our lives. Even if the “smaller and weaker” or “invaded” state wins the war with the help of the allies, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie will be preserved. Being exploited by the local bourgeoisie and oppressed by the local state is no victory. It’s not something we should sacrifice our lives for. Yet some are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives for the illusion that the victory of one state is important for the future liberation from all states. It’s one of the many oxymorons of these people. In the name of fighting against states, they urge us to defend a particular state and its nationalist/democratic ideology. In the name of fighting against war, they tell us that we must engage in war. How many more people have to die on the front for these oxymoron lovers to realise that war between states cannot bring peace, that against tyranny of states cannot be fought by collaboration with states, that capitalist exploitation cannot be fought by working class alliances with capitalists?
Warmongers on both sides of the war line use economic, violent and ideological pressure to mobilize people for war. If we proclaim the struggle against all factions of the bourgeoisie, including the struggle against the bourgeoisie of the “invaded” states, they accuse us of aiding the more aggressive, dictatorial, imperialist states, as if it were not perhaps obvious that we are also waging the struggle against them at the same time. They believe that collusion with this or that local bourgeoisie and state is a question of survival. They do not take into account that the same bourgeoisie they defend does everything to avoid being conscripted to the front itself, while the state authorities forcibly dress the proletarians in uniforms and drive them to their deaths in the front struggle. They sees that, the “friendly” bourgeoisie, uses the state to close the borders to men who want to travel to safety. They fail to see that the bourgeoisie is not concerned with saving the lives of the entire bombed population, but with forcing the proletarian part of the population to shed blood to save their own power, property and sphere of economic influence. When it comes to saving lives in a war zone, the proletarians certainly have to look for other options than enlisting in the army.
Whether the warmongers are capitalists, nationalists or the left of capital, they are all terrified by the idea that the enemy state will win the war, but they are not at all terrified by the corpses of proletarians that war always “produces” on both sides. No matter what banner they stand under, no matter what ideological label they put on themselves, we must repudiate all warmongers. When the question is put to us as to which side we take in the war, we clearly answer that we take the side of the proletariat in Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Israel and all over the world. We do not choose the side of this or that state in the war, but the side that organises against states. We do not stand aside while war massacres our class brothers and sisters. We stand on the side of those who rebel against the war and resist all efforts to drag us into the war. The only way to stop wars is to undermine the ability of all states to continue to wage war.
The aim of ‘revolutionary defeatists’ today is not that one side should win and the other lose but to draw a clear line between the capitalist perspective which entails ever more war and misery, and the proletarian revolutionary perspective, which entails humankind’s liberation. There is no compromise between them possible.
The second annual radical bookfair took place this Saturday at the Danish Church. It went ahead against a backdrop of far-right troubles across the country and a riot in Hull the previous Saturday.
The decision to go ahead was taken by the majority of the stall holders. At the same time as the bookfair there was a anti hate demo in Hull which we publicised.
We had some stalls drop out and it was a smaller event with only 6 stalls along with a café area and a representative from Unite the Union Community Branch who was there to support us.
Stalls:
ACG:
Socialist Party:
World Socialism:
Claire Gould – Author
Commune in the North:
AnarCom Network
We had a few visitors (over 50 in total) and everyone seemed to enjoy the day making contacts and networking. There was an impromptu poetry reading led off by Claire and finished by our own comrade Grumpaloe who read a selection from our rereleased Rebel Rose Poetry.
Overall, another successful day and something we can build on.
See you next year when we will be back bigger and better.
AnarCom Network 