This statement was produced following the Varna International gathering of anti authoritarian groups in September. It has been co signed by our comrades in France [ASAP] and Bulgaria [FCAB] and was in response to the war in Ukraine. Its release was delayed as recent events took precedence, but is relevant to any war, conflict or state violence.
“The position of revolutionaries confronted with capitalist war is always the same: to oppose social revolution to war, to struggle against ‘their own’ bourgeoisie and ‘their own’ national state.”
GCI-ICG, The Invariance of the Revolutionary Position on War: The Meaning of Revolutionary Defeatism – Communism No.12
October 7th, 2023 – another day of a bloody, decades-long conflict between opposing capitalist factions in the territory of “Israel/Palestine”. Our bourgeois masters are once again pushing our proletarian brothers and sisters to murder each other and expect us – depending on where we live – to rally in support of one or the other side.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad are launching rockets against the towns in “Israel” as well as sending their militias to go street by street and execute or kidnap “civilians” and “soldiers”… just like what happened in Srebrenica, in Sabra and Shatila, in Bucha…
IDF is bombing and shelling indiscriminately across the Gaza ghetto, flattening whole neighborhoods, as well as cutting off the supply of water, electricity, food, medicine… just like what happened in Fallujah, in Homs, in Mariupol… or just like it did so many times before.
We have heard justifications for support of the war in the territory of “Palestine/Israel” many times – perhaps more than any other conflict since the WW2 is this one portrayed as a “Holy War” between “good and evil”. We see this warmongering bourgeois argumentation coming from media, politicians, “right”, “left” and “ultra-left” as well as some of the so-called “communists” and “anarchists”.
The bourgeois ideological construct of “Israeli/Jewish exceptionalism” is tossed around both in a positive and in a negative sense and used by our class enemies to prevent, hinder and crush the development of the class solidarity between “Jewish/Israeli” and “Arab/Palestinian” proletarians.
On one hand “Jews/Israelis” are allowed to defend their “state and identity” even by some of those that claim to be revolutionaries and to oppose all states and national identities, because they “uniquely suffered” during the Holocaust.
On the other hand, different groups that also claim to be revolutionaries and to “fight for the working class interests” never extend their call for fraternization to “Jewish/Israeli” proletarians and instead lump them together with their “own” bourgeoisie and call for destruction of Israel as “uniquely oppressive state”. At the same time, instead of supporting the proletarians in Gaza and West Bank to rise up against their “own” exploiters, they call for a support of the “Palestinian” national state.
As communists, we totally reject all false communities that try to unite the exploited with their exploiters; the proletariat in the territory of “Israel/Palestine” has no common interests with its “own” bourgeoisie, just as global proletariat has no common interests with global bourgeoisie!
“Anti-imperialism” and “national liberation” are nothing else than defense of imperialist interests of that faction of the bourgeoisie, that is not currently dominant. Nothing changes in this regard, if that side is much weaker, or if some of its leaders are willing to sacrifice themselves for their cause!
As communists, we call for a destruction of all states equally, as they are nothing else than the local expression of the global capitalist State, a structure of organized violence of the bourgeois class against the proletarian class!
Proletarians in the “Israeli” forces – you have no interest in defending any “Jewish Homeland”, it is a land of “your” bourgeoisie, not yours! Refuse to shoot and refuse to enforce the blockade that is starving millions of your class brothers and sisters. As you have shown many times before, refuse to follow the orders, resist the military service!
Proletarians in the “Palestinian” forces – you have no country to conquer! Refuse to kill or be killed for the interests of your exploiters!
Proletarians on the “home” front – how many times have you suffered bombing, shelling, shooting? How many times you were violently repressed by your “own” State when you dared to strike or protest? For how long have you lived in misery? Rise up and refuse to support “your” State and its wars, you can lose nothing but your chains!
In “Palestine/Israel” as well as in “Ukraine”, “Azerbaijan/Armenia”, “Sudan” and elsewhere, our class enemies are turning us either into cannon fodder or into cannon makers. More and more, all these “local” bourgeois conflicts are helping with the formation of few opposing super-blocks, that are coming closer and closer to the open, possibly nuclear, military confrontation. Confrontation that has potential to end all life on this planet.
Our only hope is to turn the weapons against our “own” generals, against our “own” bosses, to refuse to obey the orders, to refuse to produce the war materials – to oppose both the carnage of the capitalist war and the misery of the capitalist interbellum (or as our class enemies call it “peace”)!
Let’s take the example from our comrades that mutinied in “Russia” and “Germany” against the slaughter of the WW1, or those that fraternized across the trench line in the war between “Iraq” and “Iran”, or those in the “American” uniforms during the war in “Vietnam” “fragging” their officers!
Proletarians with and without uniform, let’s organize together against the capitalist system of exploitation of the human labor that lies in the root of all the misery, all the State oppression and all the wars!
Let’s turn this war into class war for the global communist revolution!
Class War – October 8th, 2023
How do you live How do you die A war between states The working class die Our brothers and Sisters across the world. Degenerate patriotism, flags unfurled Swallowing all the news tells us Believe this or that but make no fuss Political apathy, thousands die. Thoughts and prayers pie in the sky! National flags on your profile Taking sides such Statist bile! War about money, war about power War about oil, war about Land No peace between classes The world is burning make a stand.
1500 dead in the first day alone – not Ukraine this time but again in the Middle East.
“If war begets war, it feels like it’s spawning at an alarmingly bloody rate across the globe” was a UK journalists introduction to the outbreak of the Israel/Gaza war.
As if war were a contagiousness natural phenomenon independent of cause and effect. War does not beget war, capitalism does.
As French Socialist Jean Juarès said just before WW1: “Capitalism carries war within it, just like clouds carry rain”.
The hypocrisy of those claiming to offer solutions is demonstrated in Turkey’s president Erdogan’s statement inviting “…all parties to act reasonably and to stay away from impulsive steps that raise tensions” just days after bombing Kurdish communities in Rojava, northern Syria.
‘Honest Broker’ the USA promises Israel “We will always have your back”, effectively issuing a blank cheque for a license to kill.
Whole families wiped out in their homes in Gaza; hundreds of kids hunted down on bikes and butchered at a music festival. The slaughter has become immediately vast and merciless. We know who is doing the killing, we must ask, who is doing the dying?
People like us, workers, Jew and Arab alike. Without ownership and control, our class, without power killed by those fighting for it.
The suffering of the Palestinians is an open sore of the West’s stronghold in the Levant. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has been the West’s ‘boots on the ground’ since the ’50’s, playing pivotal roles in such imperialist ventures as the Suez Crisis of ’56. Armed to the teeth, it wants for nothing.
Despite the Israeli state’s West leaning Democratic credentials, it de facto maintains an apartheid system over the Palestinians, enabling their movement to work when it suits them and locking them in when not. It’s slow march to the theocratic Right has generated a massive resistance from its own working class.
The tragedy of Gaza is that it rests in the horns of a dilemma. Because of the blockade by the Israeli state, it has been described as the “largest open prison in the world “. Its further misfortune is to be guarded by the Hamas Islamic Statelet.
‘Hamas’, meaning ‘Zeal’ is a viscous theocratic dictatorship worse than that which the world has been protesting against in Iran. As liberals and leftists chant ‘we are all Hamas now’, they might do well to reflect on how long they would survive there.
Hamas even butchers its own, like Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a former Hamas commander who was, according to the New York Times, “…accused of moral turpitude, by which Hamas meant homosexuality” then was tortured and shot in 2016.
As with the Vietnam Têt Offensive of ’68, this brutal ‘David’ assault on a brutal ‘Goliath’ is an attempt at a paradigm shift.
It is as much aimed at the Fatah faction of the West Banks Palestinian Authority to usurp its leadership as to scupper Israel’s attempts to freeze the conflict through rapprochement with its Arab neighbours.
While it might seem counter intuitive for Hamas to have united a divided Israeli entity, it may prove a timely exploitation of the West’s focus on the European war to widen the conflict by dragging in an unwilling Iran.
With US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, talking up the potential of Iran’s role, this could go anywhere. Sending their western Mediterranean Carrier strike force eastwards ‘to deter Iran’ would certainly free up Israel to take on a wider military venture against Irans nuclear program that it has been itching to do.
Whatever the truth, this is not Arab versus Jew, this is workers on both sides slaughtered and manipulated by capitalisms Power Bloc rivalry carried out through their bloody proxies. Capitalist war, red in tooth and claw!
Neither one state nor two states can end this cycle, no agent of capitalism is able or willing too. All their wars are against our class. Class War is our only response which is why there, as in the Ukraine we say resist their drive to war – No War But The Class War!
It has come to our attention that some so-called anarchists have accused the ACN of Transphobia and have said that members were kicked out of the ACG for being transphobic. This is untrue and ill -informed to say the least. A small group of people resigned from the ACG as we felt that transphobia was not being robustly enough challenged within the ACG and that a very small minority were using what could be considered transphobic language.
We later formed a new group with people who had left AFed and Solfed and had been inactive for a time, amongst others so we could continue to be a voice for class-based anarchist communism within the UK.
We have tried to keep out of the rumour and back stabbing that has gone on but this is a step too far. Baseless accusations with not even a hint of truth by people who have no knowledge of what happened. At least try to get the facts straight rather than attack what you don’t know and then pretend you are so clever.
Winter is coming. Not a line from Game of Thrones but a meteorological reality in the Northern Hemisphere.
Before the rains stagnate the battle lines for another 6 months, a new victim falls in this conflict of rival capitalist blocs. Azerbaijan’s barely reported attack on its besieged Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has led to Armenia’s complete surrender.
Despite being a member of Putin’s ‘near abroad’ Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). Russian peacekeepers have only been able to negotiate the terms of Armenian surrender.
Putin’s humiliation has been orchestrated by Azerbaijan’s key ally, NATO’s Turkish president Erdogan. The Special Military Operation in Ukraine has made Russia impotent in its own backyard.
This lightning war did not last long enough to present those who claim to oppose war to agonise over which belligerent to support.
In Ukraine, despite the bloodiest three months of carnage in a NATO resourced offensive, frontlines that have barely changed will once again be frozen.
The wars. second anniversary on February 24th will be energetically marked by a reconstruction and strengthening of the unbreachable frontiers of conflict.
A conflict that has an echo in dividing lines between pro (supporters of one or other belligerent) and anti-war (against all belligerents) in what was once the revolutionary milieu.
Why is opposing war so controversial amongst some of those who lay claim to revolutionary tradition? It is an unmitigated catastrophe. 10 million displaced, an estimated 500,000 casualties with 150,000 dead. $1 trillion cost and half the world hungry or paying the price of austerity driven by war profiteers.
In part this is explained by our natural reaction of horror and sympathy at the scale of suffering and injustice – laudable instincts that are then manipulated to support one side or the other on the basis of just or unjust, legal or illegal war. This is the fog which leads us do a distorted narrative of good versus evil.
Rather than seeing the Ukraine and Russia conflict as corporate corrupt capitalist states fronting international capitalisms global rivalry at the expense of workers on both sides, the false narratives direct us to moral platitudes.
A David versus Goliath. An innocent victim against a violent aggressor, leading us to a simple binary outcome of supporting the goodie against the baddy. This is the logic of the pantomime not the analysis of revolutionary internationalists.
The individuals here are not Russia and Ukraine, but their thousands of workers with everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Those who can’t see the fault of this logic should ask themselves why and whom did they choose to support when Ethiopia attacked Tigre? Or when Eritrea attacked Ethiopia, or Rwanda attacked DRC? Indeed, where was their moral outrage over Nagorno-Karabakh?
Some argue it’s not for revolutionists in the capitalist heartlands to form a perspective on conflicts elsewhere. This they say, in the contemporary language of culture wars, is ”West-splaining’. An uncomfortable resonance with Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 comment that we have no business
in a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”. That was at the abyss of WW2.
Internationalists then knew how to respond. Freedom Press’s ‘War Commentary’ and the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation’s ‘Solidarity’ opposed the war throughout, culminating in a prosecution in 1945 for their categorisation of Britain as a ‘Warfare State’.
Their efforts included contributions from such luminaries has Guy Aldred; Paul Mattick; Anton Pannekoek and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Communist Workers Party.
This failure, through confusion or design, to unite on an Internationalist position of Revolutionary Defeatism has necessarily caused rifts with former comrades. It has also forged new links with others. An historical if familiar realignment of revolutionary forces is taking place, as it did after previous betrayals of principle in 1914 and 1939.
We are again at an abyss and the chaff of liberalism and left social democracy is sorting itself out from Revolutionary Internationalism.
We continue to fight for the escalation of class war on the Home Front. Undermining Capitalism’s ‘Social Peace’ here frustrates their drive to war, all war. That is what we mean by ‘No War But The Class War!’
For more articles about the war and resistance to it check out the following articles on LibCom via https://libcom.org/tags/assemblyorgua
https://libcom.org/article/refusals-fight-both-sides-front-entering-second-autumn-war
AnarCom Network has recently attended an assembly of revolutionary anti-war Internationalists on the Black Sea coast, to coordinate our focus and attention on the crisis of war in Ukraine and the intensification of the attacks on our class at home.
Around 70 comrades from 14 countries across 5 continents were in unison in refusing to take sides in capitalist wars, re-asserting No War but the Class War!
Anarcho-Communists like us, Anarchists, Left Communists, Syndicalists and Autonomists agreed on the need for reasserting the fundamental principle of revolutionary defeatism – a plague on both their houses!
Russian capitalism is forcing its workers to slaughter, in order to steal the assets of Ukrainian workers labour. Ukrainian capitalists are militarising Ukrainian workers towards the same meat grinder to sell those same assets themselves for a profit.
Those who are confused by the moral challenge of aggressor violence v self defence should reflect on this false identification of Russia and Ukraine as if they were individuals, they are not! They are rival capitalist entities with their class interests at heart.
Hundreds of thousands of individuals from both sides of their proprietorial national state boundaries have been killed, maimed or displaced. Workers without mutual animosity before this marshalling to war from which our class only loses.
Internationalist work against the rival imperialist blocs continues on the home front where disrupting their ‘Social Peace’ here, slows down their drive to war. The class war at home is the peace movement!
We continue to develop our international work with like-minded revolutionists across their artificial frontiers.
On Tuesday, December 8, 2020, 9 anarchist comrades were arrested by the French anti-terrorist police (DGSI), across France. In Toulouse, in Dordogne, in the Paris region, in Brittany, and in Rennes.
They are accused of being a “..criminal association planning a terrorist attack”, even though there is no real evidence of this. So, what did they do?
The French State has used the following “evidence” to back up the charges of terrorism:
• The use of digital privacy tools (such as Signal, VPN’s etc.) and the refusal to give decryption codes to phones or hard drives;
• The occasional use of air-guns in a “paintball type survival” game;
• Travels (to Belgium, Czechia, Greece, Colombia, etc.);
• Volunteering to in Rojava against Islamic State, and
• Possession of ‘elements or substances’ used in the composition of explosives (everyday household products including bleach and other cleaning items).
None of these activities amount to terrorism and most are not even a criminal offence.
In order to build a case for the resulting “terrorist” threat, the DGSI created the story of a “group” that would conduct “paramilitary training” to prepare “acts of terrorism” against “law enforcement or military”, while consulting for this purpose with members of various groups having the same objectives in France and abroad, and by means of encrypted communication.
This scenario is identical to the one that has been used against many internationalist comrades. Where political opinions (true or supposed), lifestyles (squat, mobile housing, international activism, autonomy) and profiles of the accused people, become sufficient elements to charge activists with the crime of terrorism!
Exactly as we saw in the UK’s famously farcical ‘Persons Unknown’ trial of anarchists in the 1970’s. A familiar déjà vu.
We are aware that our comrades were subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – sensory deprivation and subjection to white noise. Torture in other words!
To be clear: the anarchist ideals of our comrades and the presumption of guilt is what maintains the “terrorist” accusation although there is no proof. ‘Thought Police’ terrorism!
The DGSI and the French Anti-terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) is also trying to transpose the judicial treatment of people who joined the Islamic State to activists who fought against them or who have been designated as far-left.
The fight for a social revolution is not a terrorist act!
The real terrorists are those who hold weapons of mass destruction and the most powerful armies in history. They are the ones who destroy our planet and exploit its resources and us in the pursuit of profit. They are the ones who enslave the people and massacre those that resist.
Both France and the UK welcome bloodthirsty dictators, like Erdogan or Mohammed bin Salman, and are in the top ten arms exporters (France now being the 2nd, with the UK hovering around 7th).
As long as oppression exists, as long as capitalist power continues, its destruction we will continue to exist. We cannot be beaten or destroyed!
The AnarCom Network will be taking action in the form of leafleting/info stalls throughout the week in various locations – reports will follow!
Once again, the eyes of the communist militants all around the world have turned towards Iran, as a battleground of the gigantic proletarian upheaval, another one in the series of class confrontations that had shaken Iran and the surrounding region in the last decade.
Full edition here: https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/wp-content/uploads/class_war_15-2023-en.pdf
For more from Tridni Valka including up to date International News: https://ateneolibertariocarabanchellatina.wordpress.com
Full edition available from their website: https://ateneolibertariocarabanchellatina.wordpress.com
Check out this blog from our comrades at Wessex Solidarity – https://wessexsolidarity.wordpress.com
This baseball batting rule, and punitive US incarceration policy against the poor under successive Republican administrations, could well be applied to the now flailing and failing strike movement of the last 18 months.
Beginning primarily in construction and the transport sector, those sections of the RMT and Aslef still involved in action have recently been joined by hospital consultants joining junior doctors as the most recent sector to back their demands with strike action.
Instead of bracketing a mass movement whose momentum has built to a crescendo to these latest actions, the current strikes appear more like bookends on an empty shelf where a wave once broke and dissipated.
The largest strike wave since the days Thatcherism relentlessly assaulted our class appeared at one point to achieve the improbable if not impossible.
Anti-labour and anti-strike laws have raised the bar high to limit the possibility of strikes ever taking place, demanding not just majorities but a 50% turnout in a voting process rigged by methodology – secret ballots by post, not collectively, in person nor electronically unlike other voting processes in the UK from an X on a card in local elections to the X-Factor. Valid for only six months, any action has to begin with two weeks’ notice to enable bosses’ preparations to limit our impact.
Despite these hurdles, almost every working sector in the UK met the bar. Over the last 18 months this has included road and rail transport; health: midwives, physios, nurses, doctors, radiographers and ambulance services; fire and highway services; border security and civil service; schools and higher education; postal and communications workers; airports and ports, construction and power.
At its peak in February ‘23, more than half a million workers were out culminating in 4 million lost working days. The achievement was seismic but squandered. What an earth has happened?
Despite an inflationary peak driven by war profiteering of 11% In October ‘22 (19% on food, on top of the cumulative increases previously and since), combined with a restorative pay gap of 30-40% since the 2008 banking collapse, most strikes have ended with an average settlement of 6.5%.
A humiliating defeat by any measure, and, one might argue that, with how the strikes were conducted, virtually no shots being fired. Our enemies inside and outside the Government and Trade Union bureaucratic establishments have played a blinder of delay and deceit, enabling a contrasting bosses pay rise of 17%, averaging 110 times the salary of an average worker.
This is no reflection on the workers who have taken action, they, despite a generation without engaging in industrial disputes and being far from the militant traditions of their parents and grandparents, took the courageous decisions to risk all to resist the assault of austerity.
Would, could they do it again? Why, when they have seen their energy and commitment wasted in penny-packets, losing them as much as they’ve gained in outcomes. Months of a day here, two days there, has bled their resources, morale, commitment and patience.
Class struggle is by no means over, certainly not for the bosses who are increasing the precariousness of our survival through increased inflation and indebtedness to frighten us off the streets. But not for us either, aware of this travesty and our brooding resentment. It is not however too early for an obituary for the lost promise of this current strike wave.
The loyal opposition Labour Party ‘government in waiting’ is breathing a sigh of relief, as the challenge to its reputation as the ‘party of the working class’ recedes. No need to continue embarrassing bans of its members from picket lines.
The loyal opposition to the Labour Party, the left-wing of capitalism in the form of social democrats and Leninists like the SWP will soon be trotting out the usual mantras on the lessons we should be learning from them on this.
They will tell us the problem is the wrong kind of leadership (they will say it should be them). They will say we shouldn’t forget that the Labour Party is not a friend of the workers (though we should still vote for them). They will say the Trade Union bureaucrats cannot be trusted (though you should still try to be one). They will say that the TUC is a spineless ally of establishment legalism (while still insisting we should demand they call a general strike). They will say what they have said after every strike. Ultimately, they will criticise while supporting the institutions that shut us out preserving the systems status quo
The slogan ‘Enough is Enough!’ was meant to be that of a movement of social resistance and solidarity that was growing. It should instead be turned against those whose alliances or weaknesses have actively derailed this movement. These include not just the government and establishment parties. It should include those who claim to oppose while objectively supporting the status quo.
That status quo includes the mindset of Trade Unionism as the labour-management arm of the state, the fantasy that capitalism can be reformed and that we should be patient for those better to lead us to bring that about. That status quo includes the paralysing legalism and passivity sold to us as reasonableness that ultimately puts a target on our back.
Anyone who has been involved in committed rolling strike action, community defence and mobilisation, collective struggle in solidarity knows what lessons will endure.
Striking is our break with capitalist normality where we glimpse our autonomy and the absurdities we had accepted as normal.
Breaking with normality lets us imagine an alternative and share new horizons with our class peers.
The struggle against that normality is where we experience solidarity, often for the first time with people and communities we had been encouraged to see as strangers and different to us. The community it creates has little in common with capitalist normality and where we as individuals discover we have power and strength in numbers.
Whether by design or incompetence, even the opportunity to experience these dynamics on a minimal level were unavailable to most strikers. A movement without the living experience of their previous generation of militancy was exposed to little more than a couple of hours of tooting horns – encouraging diversion before returning to the isolation of domestic tasks and resuming working normality for another few weeks.
On many pickets those on strike were told when to turn up and those who wanted to support them to turn up later for an hour – so much for building solidarity. Even the Enough is Enough campaign issued such instructions to its members.
The Trade Union bureaucrats were not the naive failures here. They are long-standing institutions with deep historic memory, and jobs and salaries and professional futures they wish to preserve.
They knew full well the legal limitations and they chose to follow those liability limiting instructions. They are risk averse corporations of the establishment and pursued this minimum strategy with eyes wide open. Ultimately defeat in the form of the minimal outcomes suited their purpose and design.
But even historically, the memory of that sense of liberation through struggle is more than just a fuzzy feeling. It is the learning, the evolving and the implementation of an expanding strategy of escalation and coordination.
To a significant extent the learning from strikes of previous generations have been gerrymandered to stay there. Those lessons however remain as significant now and for the future of strike action and success as they were then.
When such opportunity for defending and advancing our needs is taken by or presents itself to us, we must consciously challenge and counter the power of Trade Union sectionalism to divide and control our struggle.
We must not be hamstrung in our first steps by the self-preserving legalism of Trade Union bureaucracy nor it’s rigged electoralism that seeks to set our agenda.
To empower this, we need to go beyond the artificial divisions of us as workers by industry and trade, indeed beyond work, to connect to all communities of action and struggle.
To protect our autonomy from their limitations and sabotage we need to develop the mechanisms of mass and direct decision making through our own assemblies and councils.
Place our confidence and resources in direct action built on cross-sector coordination where our strength and numbers lie. Nothing short of this will threaten the capitalist social peace that they need to make war on our class at home and abroad.
Capitalism never delivers, it can’t, it’s greed and our need are not compatible. It’s State always represses us and cannot be reformed. We only ever have the power of our labour and the solidarity of class war, not to change, but to overthrow their wretched apparatus of oppression.
The lesson for us is that the choice lies between the death of capitalism and its exploitation of us that sustains it, or its vengeance and our ruin should we fail.
This is what we mean when we say no war but the class war!
AnarCom Network 