The state, the generals, the military, this profit system and the imperial blocs within it, are beating a march to generalised warfare and our possible extinction. Are we listening? Are we going to try to effectively respond? We can but we need to organise as a conscious internationalist working class now. We can start by communicating and coming together as revolutionary anti-militarists, regionally, nationally and beyond. At the ACN, we are trying to do just this.
Below is a reflective piece from a member of Tyne & Wear, No War But the Class War. We can see from the comrades there and as described in this piece, the necessity of organising directly as a class, by ourselves as workers and for ourselves as workers throughout the world, in a struggle against militarism and capital, and for emancipation.
We also see the hurdles facing us, not only from capitalism, the state and its militarism, but from the tragedy of the ongoing illusions and fantasy of leftists in continuing to support cross class alliances and nationalisms of varying stripes, in a never ending (not so) merry go round.
Read below for more on all this:
In the middle part of last Saturday (20th Jan), I took a stroll into the ‘Toon’ (Newcastle city centre). There was supposedly a trade union bloc forming, as part of the latest “demonstration for Palestine”. Thought I’d take a look and arm myself with some NWBCW literature and statements, and see if there were any parties there interested in our local and international endeavour, limited as it is at present.
At Monument, there were about 300 people in attendance, readying for the march through the streets to the Civic Centre. Amongst this number, were a host of loud speakers, and it was loud (you could hear it right down the bottom of Grey Street, about half a mile away). Amongst calls for a support of ‘Palestine Action’ and their efforts against Rafael, who produce weapons to the state in Israel, there was also a lot of hot air by the array of permanent leftist activist speakers and their close circle of followers.
Only one, maybe two, trade union banners were seen, whilst there were a few members of other similar organisations in attendance. These being organisations involved in a few workplaces elsewhere, if not local ones. This a bloc?!
Anyway, a few leaflets were given out to anyone who appeared they may seem interested in an internationalist working class NWBCW perspective. Good to say that a younger person at least asked a number of relevant questions and said they would look into it and thanked me for the details. But let’s face it, overall it was yet another disappointing reaction and event.
Whilst various members of the military and state officials have been banging the drums of war and warning us to be ready in anywhere from 20 to only 5 years time for possible global catastrophe, yet again we find a desperate need to see the beginnings of a necessary collective understanding that in order to stop this potential extinction event / world war, in all wars we need to see ourselves as workers and struggle together as workers!
We don’t doubt whether anyone is brave when they occupy the roof of a weapons manufacturer. However, we need to see that any such actions should take place effectively on a class and internationalist basis with much practical solidarity. There can be no alliances with a bourgeoisie racing to war, wherever they find themselves. No support for nationalism of whatever stripe. And an end to the shouting of, “How dare someone not support a state for so and so…?” We should not be supporting the state anywhere, whatsoever! Neither should anyone claim to be class conscious and then unquestioningly support this national project or that one, and go about bandwagon jumping.
There can be no doubt that the suffering in Gaza is horrendous and that an end to the shelling and missiles would help alleviate the immediate situation. However, even with this and a pull out by the Israeli state, oppression and exploitation would still take place, both by capital and a proto state controlled by the brutal theocrats, murderers, rapists and torturers of Hamas (or anyone else heading up the local state for that matter).
War would still reveal its ugly head again very soon. It is an inherent part of this system and its craving for territory, resources and profit, via the formation of rival imperial blocs and their increasingly complex web of proxies. This is rapidly putting our very survival in grave danger.
To end the threat of annihilation, we must organise as a class and realise our common interests throughout the world, in a struggle against militarism, oppression and exploitation, and for emancipation. This really needs to start now. As a conscious working class, it can be done but time is likely running out. Anyone interested in this fight, please contact us. We all need each other!
Historical physiology and possible future of these disputes.
Healthcare is vital for our well-being and it affects us all to our core. It is always a potential central focus for the class struggle, with well over 1.9 million of us working in healthcare settings and over 1.25 million working in the NHS alone – the NHS being easily the largest employer in the U.K.
All disputes in the health sector then are of vital concern for our class. This time it’s the ‘junior doctors’’ strike and the results are described as stalemate, again. This is despite it including the largest number of consecutive strike days (6 days) within the NHS. The dispute is now into its second year.
With the handshake (enthusiastically or stated as somewhat reluctantly) between health unions and government in regard to many other health workers, the state has felt emboldened to both flatly refuse the doctors’ demands and to accuse them of being selfish and irresponsible. Meanwhile, some Trusts reflecting government policy, tried enforcing a return to work through the use of derogation (demands for temporary cover by striking health workers on a regular basis instead of previously, where it was only used only in emergency situations).
It all appeared so different the previous winter. As a class, our living standards had been under the cosh of state and capital for years. We had been patronised, including being clapped, by the parasites in power. This as many of us had put our lives on the line during a horrific pandemic. Around Westminster there were raucous parties but for health and other workers, long hours and emotionally tumultuous days spent away from family and friends, had often been the norm. A number of friends and colleagues died. Others were facing a long slog back to health.
The RCN had since its inception been seen primarily as a professional nursing body and had as an organisation never supported health workers taking industrial action. It had always maintained a no strike agreement and totally hamstrung its members. The situation though, was now so bad in the health service and among our class, that members of the RCN obtained an overwhelmingly positive mandate for action and were out on historic picket lines (2022-23). This was with nurses making up the single largest part of the workforce in the NHS.
Parallels with other historic and concurrent international actions by nurses (France, Germany, N. Ireland, USA, Argentina…) were drawn and expected by some to be surpassed. Over ½ a million nurses, health visitors and support workers in the NHS were involved in the actions. Joining them were the physiotherapists, radiographers and ambulance workers.
There was a massive swelling of good will among many members of the public. The initial feeling on the picket line was one of determination. “Surely, we could win this?!” Indeed, for those of us who were on the picket lines, it was hard to remember such a degree of support that was clearly evident now. Car and bus horns were blaring, our communities joined the picket line, well-wishing and food was readily provided by passers-by and other striking workers in transport, warehouses and telecommunications.
Contrasting this though, there was unease at the backs of some minds over what would or wouldn’t happen next? For as sure as night follows day, to those with a long memory of struggle, the usual happened: whilst the state clearly showed whose side it was on (not ours!), paralysed by fear of legislation and wanting to appear reasonable to capital, union representatives did little to encourage co-ordinated, unified and determined action. Though there was the usual bluster in speeches, meetings and marches.
On the one hand, ambulance workers were holding widely differing days of action depending on the union involved (GMB, Unite, Unison), whilst the state viciously attacked them, sensing blood. Meanwhile, Unite and Unison failed to organise effective ballots and even encouraged workers in the health sector, including nurses, to accept crumbs. We even heard the excuse, “Well, the RCN used to scupper our actions…”. Occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and associated technicians had no involvement officially at all in these disputes, despite having taken action in the past.
Then, leading into the summer of 2023, a “unique deal for nurses” was discussed through the RCN “leadership”. This was something that would have accentuated the existing divisions between health workers. It also threatened to exacerbate the worst aspects of the already dreadful, NHS health wide, ‘Agenda for Change’ pay scales and job descriptors, and made a total nonsense of the same thing. When this failed to happen, the same officialdom recommended the end of industrial action and a humiliated handshake with employers and government.
Though defying this call in a further mandate for strike action, the determination of the nurses had gone. The momentum was lost and strikes discontinued. Health workers felt demoralised and their positions far weaker than the previous winter. Poor pay and condition deals were now the order of the day, once again! True, not 1% this time but now … wow, 3% plus 6%! Or is it? The lame pay deals are so confusing that who actually understands them? Maybe that’s the point?
Concurrently, little to nothing was offered to address staff shortages and burn out. 50,000 extra nursing students were going to be recruited, or already had apparently, in a complete fantasy land existing purely in the heads of our delightful ruling class representatives.
At the root of what happened, is the tragedy that we have lost confidence as a class. We have been on the back foot for so long that we have forgot what it is like to take unified non collaborative action, determined by ourselves.
So, now we are at this moment, where the medics (doctors and perhaps soon, consultants) are the only ones taking action. Their demands go ignored or ridiculed by the useless Master class and opposition is whipped up by the press. This, a class and its cheerleaders that see no problem in throwing resource after resource down the drain, in pursuit of the Narnia of an attempt at a return of profit rates in capitalism. Whilst enforcing austerity on our class and being unable to provide for a comprehensive healthcare system, they and the capitalist system can always afford mass slaughter in war after war.
A complete mistitle, these doctors are “Junior” in name only. Many have immense responsibilities and stress. The BMA has 46,000 of these ‘junior doctors’ as members. Its demands around pay and better staffing numbers to prevent burnout, if actually taken literally, are in reality more realistic than those of the previous health union ones. But even this would only sets things back partly to the pre-2008 position and then only after a number of years of staged increases. It would hardly be a bed of roses for anyone. It is also true to say that the BMA members failed to stand soon enough alongside other health workers, when the chance arose. Again, hidebound by professionalism and convention, legalism and trade unionism’s sectional and collaborative approach, an opportunity to win a dispute at the most opportune moment had been scuppered.
Still, we need to stand alongside the doctors’ actions outside of union officialdom and magnify them. Indeed, despite naysayers amplified by the bourgeois press, some health workers and members of the public are doing precisely this.
We need to amplify this dispute and lift our horizons. Our living standards continue to fall, exhaustion through work intensification and low staffing levels continue apace. The recent pay deals are already made null by inflation, particularly food inflation. As health workers and as a class generally, there is no choice but to take up the struggle once again. Some doctors say they have learnt lessons about the importance of taking continual action from the recent defeat of other health workers. Such insights, if true in reality, need encouraging.
In response to the raising of their demands, we should also lift our own. A victory for the doctors would represent a victory for all of us! A lifting of the ceiling and a victory in one of the battles of the class war is something to be celebrated. We should never resent or resist the more ambitious material and social demands of other members of our class. Furthermore, the best way to achieve victory is always to unite on the basis of clear class consciousness and solidarity.
Action in dispute need not be demoralising, uncoordinated or result in crap handshake deals between union “leaders”, employers and government officials. The attempted frequent use of derogation seen recently in the daily running of services to allegedly maintain minimum service and staffing levels, can be seen as a weakness on behalf of employers, capital and state. It was clearly an attempted manipulation and it proved extremely controversial. It also demonstrated once again the crucial importance of our class in society. Doctors were only striking for a few hours before derogation was called for or, “services would simply cease to operate and be available”.
Rather than simply threaten to work elsewhere if we can (however tempting), we can unify class wide and build our confidence for future possibilities. Meetings and discussions with other health workers (including agency and locum ones), patients and community members can take place. These via networks and in assemblies run directly by ourselves collectively. Securing the support of other members of our class (which health workers are already in a good position to do), imaginative and effective means of struggle across “job boundaries” that best protects patients and working class communities can be devised.
Though demanding much solidarity and determination in the face of severely restrictive legislation – such tactics as, lightning strikes, the social solidarity strike, slow downs, lock outs of employers, provision for all without question for those attending A&E and various clinics, are all possible. Such actions would obviously vary depending on appropriateness per service and patient group.
Health workers should not fall into the trap of sacrificing their lives for “a calling”. This, a term used not to encourage social solidarity but to simply work us into an early grave. We should not roll over for an insurance based health system but struggle for a truly integrated one built upon real free access; one that provides for all human health needs.
Effective health provision is clearly collapsing within capitalism. There is regular resource sapping state interference, profiteering and brutal cuts (medication, community provision, ambulance, staff and bed numbers…). Health provision could also do without the awful stifling bureaucracy and hierarchy endemic both to the NHS and private services.
No more rationing of provisions, no more obsessive professional and sectional boundaries nor the dreadful merry go round of useless and badly informed managers giving orders. No more collapsing living standards and poor public health. No more divisions between work and play. No more wars in capitalism preyed upon us, where health workers and others in our class face the dreadful results.
There can be no stalemate! Health care is of universal concern for all. So is a truly free, universal healthcare system – one where we have a real say in its operation. Capital exploitation needs to be and can be ended, if we build our self-confidence, united as a class, in struggle for emancipation.
“The histories of whole peoples were wiped out for precisely the same reason that the history of the working class movement in recent times is wiped out: it does not suit the conquerors for it to be known, because traditions keep alive the spirit of revolt.” Albert Meltzer
Who remembers the “Christmas Truce”? As 1,200,000 soldiers from both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict face each other across a 600-mile-long frozen line of no-man’s land in dugouts and trenches, we scream at the manipulation and violence against our class!
We recall the spontaneous ‘refusal’ truce that broke out in similar circumstances 109 years ago along the Western Front in the First World War.
Spanning the borders of Belgium and France, this ‘Christmas Truce’ as it became known, saw 100,000 or more combatants from the opposing armies making the decision to connect and not fight.
A fifth of the front line ceased to function because of the instinctive mutual solidarity of workers, not yet fully militarised or traumatised by the warfare-state.
Some of us will remember the firsthand stories of our grandparents. Others, the tales of their family. For most it will be unheard off, and if it is, with little acknowledgement. The memory of peace and solidarity is subversive.
Those precious two days are largely hidden from us by official censorship and denial. In reality, given the betrayal of the organised Labour Movement at the outbreak of the First World War, choosing bosses and states over our class, real workers face-to-face making peace was our last best chance.
Finally, ordered and even shelled back to their trenches, at least 22,000,000 workers were to die in the next seven years until the bloodletting of the capitalist meat grinder tired itself out.
Ukraine has called for another 500,000 men under arms. admitting that that is doubling its current force. What is not admitted is the growing lack of public support for the conflict, and the attempt by many to avoid conscription by one means or another. Including fleeing or buying their way out. Over 40,000 are now documented.
Russia, despite its advantage in numbers. is so desperate to avoid the obvious impact of mass mobilisation on its society, that having run out of prisoners to force into combat, it is now resorting to pressing into service migrants and asylum seekers taken from the border with Finland and Ukrainian prisoners of war. For the refugees, if they survive the higher casualty rate than the Ukrainians, after six months they win residency in a militarised autocracy.
In a paradoxical irony, the Gaza- Israel war is turning the lands where the mythology that originated the concept of Christmas was born, into a blood bathed Armageddon. In 3 months twice as many civilians have died and four times the civilian infrastructure destroyed than in the Ukraine after two years.
Truce here at best is a violent pause that continues the starvation and immiseration of our class. The working-class have no borders, but nor does the pitiless butchery carried out under the banners of nation states and their proxies.
In all cases, refusing to fight, desertion, protestation or demanding peace against the goals of capitalisms agents is greeted by states first as cowardly disloyalty and second as seditious treason. Yet how else can war be stopped in a combatant zone?
In the latter half of the First World War in the absence of truce, mutinies became more widespread and more frequent culminating ultimately in revolutionary upheaval in an attempt to change the world. A desperate and divided capitalism managed then to unite long enough to defeat it.
And here we are again. The path to world war has been described as a conglomeration of numerous conflicts. With an eye on history, opposition to war now is more than needed but urgent if our class Is not to be consumed again by the millions in another global conflagration. One that this time could end all wars through our extinction!
The call for ceasefires, the demand for peace is rejected because if it doesn’t meet the goals of the capitalist class, it is subversive, seditious, and a threat to their power. We should not delude ourselves that peace is the opposite of the active struggle against war.
Refusal or annihilation, war or revolution? This is the existential question our class faces. That is why we say the class war is the peace movement. No war between peoples, no peace between classes, that is what we mean by No War But The Class War!
2023 has been the first full calendar year of AnarCom Net being formally constituted as an anarchist communist organisation. We came together as activists who recognise the reality and strategy of the social class struggle, and despite our small size and wide geographic spread in these islands, we seem at least to have made some mark.
Looking at the statistics for our website as a year end exercise was both interesting and encouraging. We have had views from all over the world, and our reach has exceeded our expectations.
The following is our Top Twenty web pages this year, as voted for by your clicks. We think it’s a pretty good representation of us as an organisation, and covers many of our concerns. We might have chosen others, but the choice wasn’t ours, dear reader, it was yours.
If you are new to us, we think the following is a fair representation of us; if you are familiar with our output, it’s a reminder of the year that’s passed; or if you are simply an interested visitor, it’s a selection of what our readers come to us for, decided by their clicks.
The Commission of Relations of the International of Anarchist Federations gathered in Athens on 4-5 November 2023 to discuss and share thoughts and practices of our Federations. Currently, we are particularly active in antimilitarist activities, in a period that is characterised by the intensification of wars, of which the most known, such as the conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine or Sudan should not make forget the globality of the problem.
War is never a solution, but a way for capitalism and the state to reproduce forms of domination, exploitation, patriarchy and oppression. War is the exacerbation of the violence of power and hierarchy. Many people discuss war crimes, we say that war is always a crime. All wars are against the people and use arguments such as nationalism, putting oppressed people the ones against the others, trying to create illusions of common interests of all classes to undermine social conflicts through war propaganda.
We anarchists oppose all borders, states, armies and the very principle of territorial sovereignty. We propose our ideas of international solidarity, actively supporting all the victims of wars, and all those who refuse wars from all sides: objectors, deserters, saboteurs and people who escape the wars.
We support all antimilitarist actions that are in agreement with our anarchist principles, as well as those groups, individuals and collectives who resist the war making social work, helping people, promoting social struggles and continuing to spread anti-authoritarian cultures despite the war.
In addition of making international diffusion of these antimilitarist activities as a work of counter-information before war propaganda though their journals, radios and medias, our federations are promoting activities such as:
Capitalism has been described as a ‘war of all against all’. This is how they would like us to feel.
In reality it is a war of the rich and powerful, the world of corporate Capitalist exploitation and oppression against the rest of us. The producers, the working class! They need to exploit our labour to rob us and to control us.
This begins with our division.
Our communities have been atomised into ‘penny packets’ of humanity. A few individuals here, a couple there. A small nuclear family there, a few intimates as a friendship network here, and neighbours and colleagues, as alienated and atomised as us.
It is hard not to feel alone and powerless as we mentally struggle with our alienation, trying to express our individuality through consuming what they allow us to afford to buy and our independence by managing our debt.
Millions of us, billions of us, on tiny islands of connection where human communities once stood firm. If we are old enough, our parents remember. Our grandparents remember even better, though today, the idea of belonging now feels like fantasy.
Here enters the capitalist state and its wars. Creating consumable images of community in an ‘us versus them’ conflict based on nation, or culture wars against individual identity.
But this experience shrouds a reality. We are billions. We produce the worlds wealth even if, hidden behind smoke and mirrors, we struggle to see it stolen from us. Our numbers and our role as the sole creators of wealth give us powers we have yet to learn to utilise.
Not to benefit the bosses and their states, but to take control of rebuilding our communities through struggle and solidarity and abolishing their wealth and power. But where do we start?
First, we need to be around long enough to do this! That means finding a way to oppose their control and repression at home and their wars abroad threatening our annihilation.
Secondly, we need to break through the fabric of lies and ground ourselves in our compassion and empathy and recognise that the Palestinian screaming in the street, and the Israeli lamenting in a public square are people like us. They are neither the state of Israel nor its rival state-in-waiting Hamas.
The latter, as are the oligarchs of Ukraine and the Kleptocrats of Russia, play the same game of domination and robbery against our class as our bosses on the home front!
Thirdly we need to challenge the Western paradigm. Not accept the cultural ‘purdah’, our silencing on the grounds that we know nothing. In our humanity we see it all and understand what inhumanity is! Beyond language, faith, colour or borders!
Fourthly we can look beyond the shallow glamour of horror so familiarly portrayed on our media, dulling our senses to what has happened. In Gaza 2/3rds of all the housing has been destroyed; nearly 90% of the population has been displaced, 3% of the population is either dead or wounded in just two months – including 1% of the children.
In Israel scores of the dead were raped and mutilated before they were killed; dozens of others were forced to watch their loved ones murdered in front of them, the elderly and infirm were taken away on their mobility vehicles while babies were carried through baying mobs.
In Russia and Ukraine, kids have state security enforcers behind their backs to force them, to ensure they die rather than retreat, while those who run to avoid conscription, 40,000 alone in Ukraine, face prison as traitors for years.
Mesmerising us in a stage-managed horror movie of goodies versus baddies is designed to channel us to support our ‘side’, or state, as paragon of order and our protector. Failing that just burn out our attention span through shame and discomfort.
Behind this paralysing fog, capitalist barbarism accelerates the unacceptable that it could not get away with in times of greater peace and strength for our class.
While we are diverted or numbed by the spectacle, Iran ramps up its judicial murder of dissidents executing 130 since October 7th; Russia effectively recriminalises homosexuality, raiding and closing down gay venues; Israel arms settlers to ethnically cleans the illegally occupied West Bank.
In Europe the British government restricts migration and protests, defining dissent as sedition. while the Dutch follow Italy in electing a fascist government. The US alone vetoed a UN stop to genocide, abandoning its own mythical high ground.
Taking us beyond these points, the question arises what can we do practically, individually and collectively. Locally and nationally, at home and abroad?
On the most basic level, as individuals, thinking globally but acting locally, refuse the imposed consensus and say what we see. Call out the hypocrisy and advocate for ourselves and our class across frontiers. Collectively, refuse to subsume our needs to any so called ‘national interest’.
Link our needs and demands to the austerity of war profiteering and profiteering wars. Everything we do at home, here for ourselves and our class, hinders the operation of the warfare state.
Talk, communicate, share our own struggles and insights – individual, community, workplace, environmental – in solidarity across locality and trade. A victory on the home front is a victory and example abroad.
Make demands linked to war opposition. Workers in the field of of arms manufacture or supply, energy, shipping, chemicals, iron and steel, ports, aviation and docks can all be instrumental in slowing or blocking the supply lines of war. Include these as centres of propagating our own demands and against militarisation.
In direct action choose targets that challenge power and build solidarity. Activists everywhere should target the centres of power, production and decision making instead of paint bombing musicals or obstructing other workers battling to meet our daily needs.
Build hubs of coordination, discussion, communication bringing community and labour together. Develop our own methods of accountable and actionable decision making.
Own these decisions and actions, publicise and promote them. Disseminate in multimedia formats and let others see that resistance is possible. The longest journey, a single step.
We may always ask when and where should I start? Two nuclear armed powers are warring in a capitalist power block crisis on our frontiers. Our state is involved in both! The danger is real, the danger is now.
As a delegate from the climate doomed islands of Tuvalu said in frustration at the 2023 COP 28 climate conference in the oil rich UAE: “How many more stories must you listen to before you take action”. The time is now!
December marks the 1st anniversary of our formal constitution as the AnarCom Network, an organisation of internationalist revolutionary class-struggle anarchist-communists.
Despite having been in discussion and doing some joint work with numerous individuals since August 2022, we took several months to get to what we felt was a fundamental agreement on organisational aims and principles.
Our goal was to create a structurally flexible network around a concise and coherent set of agreed revolutionary positions we would define as Anarchist Communist.
A flexible network to enable comrades from other traditions, local groups and non-aligned, to manage their route to engagement with us.
Coherent because lessons from centuries of revolutionary class struggle are not open to endless debate or unlearning with fleeting fads or expedience.
Anarchist Communist because our consensus lies firmly within this tradition while recognising members bring their own rich experience from the traditions of other anarchist movements, council, left and libertarian communism.
We continue to argue that a new, if historically familiar, tendency is emerging – an internationalist revolutionary class struggle realignment, as a response to the reality of war and its existential threat.
Our response is to share our struggles in solidarity with our class, develop and share our analysis with like-minded class militants and continue building good relationships with revolutionary internationalists.
War will not cease without it.
We are not academics nor researchers but are a dispersed assembly of predominantly veteran working-class militants from a range of traditions and none.
Our activity is within our class, not outside it, and develops our analysis in real time. We are delighted to say in consequence we have had a busy first year!
As activists in our own Unions, communities, workplaces and networks, we have organised, discussed and shared our perspectives.
In our own localities throughout the last strike wave, we have been on marches, to meetings and demonstrations. We have attended picket lines as strikers or in solidarity primarily in post, rail, health or education.
In the process producing a range of resources including banners, badges and stickers to share and engage the wider struggles of our class.
We have been to May Day rallies and participated in solidarity actions particularly against the oppression of workers and comrades on trial in France.
In ideas and communication, we have produced 5 issues of our magazine Rebel Rose, 3 leaflets and 3 pamphlets: on the recent strikes, against terrorism, and against bloodletting of the current wars (another will be out before the years end).
We have distributed our resources on the streets, demos and at 6 radical and anarchist bookfairs across the UK.
Internationally we have developed a good range of contacts and connections, particularly in France, Central and Eastern Europe. As part of this we have attended 2 internationalist gatherings in Switzerland and the Black Sea coast, focusing on realignment of forces of the basis of No War but the Class War!
We have been particularly busy developing our presence across social media and on our website, posting around 60 of our own articles and an equal number of contributions from comrades and contacts at home and abroad.
Many of our articles have been widely shared and translated into half a dozen other languages.
Additionally, we have coordinated an internationalist statement against the Russia-Ukraine war with several NWBTCW projects amongst our European comrades.
We continue energetically to contribute to internationalist opposition to capitalist wars and have written extensively on events currently taking place in Middle East.
All of this is now clearly a matter of public record and available to see through our webpage and other posting sites. Including our new contemporary in-house memes for regular observation and commentary.
We are however still a small group spread across the length of these islands, with all the limitations that inevitably imposes. Despite this, we celebrate what we have achieved in our first year and look forward to the next.
To those who have come to see us; communicated with us and shared their struggles with us, we say thank you!
To our class we say strength through solidarity!
To our critics we say welcome to the debate, engage with us.
To our fellow revolutionists, we say love and comradeship. To the cynics, detractors and enemies of our class, we never expected you to be on our side
Control of our borders, or bored of our controllers?
On the day that far right Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration Freedom Party (PVV) looked set to win 37 seats in the country’s general election, making them the largest party, the BBC News website decided to lead with some far right “populism” of their own, running the headline “UK net migration in 2022 revised up to record 745,000”.
It’s worth taking this figure into context. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) estimates that the current population of U.K. in 2023 is 67,736,802, a 0.34% increase from 2022. On the other hand, the global population growth is around 0.88%, so the UK increase rate is still much less than half the general world increase rate. This is not expressed in the news items, which are left context-free.
Here the BBC is playing to the right-wing narrative of Farage, Sunak and Braverman.
We in the ACN are very clear that we want an end to capitalism. But even in capitalist terms, and plain old racism aside, the fear-mongering over immigration does not make sense. “They are taking our jobs” is the implication, but that doesn’t happen. The size of the workforce does not stay static while the population rises.
In 1960, the UK population was 52,543,017. The workforce (16 – 64 year-olds in employment) was around 25,250,000. When the population rose to the estimated 67,826,318, the number of jobs in the economy did not remain at 25,250,000. The number of 16-64 year-olds currently estimated to be in work is 75.7%, compared with 72.8% when the population was 15 million less. Of course, employment rates go up and down, but this is the result of the inherent booms and busts of capitalism, and does not correlate with population growth.
It’s worth noting that under capitalism, people on low to average earnings spend more of their money than the rich do. The wealthy tend to save it, or worse still send it to tax havens, out of reach of the economy.
If an immigrant is allowed to work (and remember the rules do not allow asylum seekers to do so), they buy food, clothes, bus fares. This is money that goes into circulation, unlike the tax haven hoardings of the rich which goes out of circulation.
Please note, we are not making an argument for capitalism, just describing how things work at the moment.
So, the argument that immigrants are a drain is false. Of course, it could be argued that there is not sufficient infrastructure. But that is a political decision. A decision not to invest in primary health, or hospitals, or schools. Governments could decide to spend that money if they wanted, but they’d rather subsidise the wealthy. Those same wealthy who are hiding their fortunes from the revenue in tax havens.
Thus, we have demonstrated that even by the standards of capitalism, immigration is not too high. It is therefore just another scare story to divide the working class against itself.
Were governments actually concerned about immigration, rather than just using it to divide and rule, then they would act now on climate change. For as more and more areas of the globe become inhospitable, more and more people will inevitably flee to the temperate zones.
But ask yourself this. What would it take you to flee your home and community with barely any possessions, and take desperate chances on dangerous sea crossings? Would you do it on a whim or for an “easy life”? You would not. And so, we must act with human compassion and with human solidarity for those driven to do so. And we must recognise that as capitalism continues to destroy the planet more and more people will need our compassion and solidarity.
Our comrades of Třídní Válka (Class War) translated the below PDF from Italian, a pamphlet originally published in June by comrades from Milan.
The 16-page PDF by Class War can be downloaded from the link at the end of their introductory text, which we reproduce here:
Class War’s presentation
We present here our translation of the text “Defeatism and antimilitarism: Only possible class response to the war in Ukraine” written by “Centro di documentazione contro la guerra” originally published in June 2023 in Italian on their website.
We consider this text to be one of the clearest expressions of the revolutionary defeatism in the current anti-war movement. We would like to especially underline several very strong points, that the comrades are developing in this text:
The insistence on the necessity to organize practical actions on the “home front” of “our own” camp, like blocking the deliveries of the military material to the front.
The insistence on an uncompromising stance opposing both sides of the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine and defending the third camp of revolutionary defeatism even against the pacifist calls of the social-democratic forces.
The insistence on the fact that “War in Ukraine” is not just one of many wars, but has a central place in the forming global military confrontation between two opposing blocks. The recently unfolding war in the Middle East, centered on the relentless slaughter of the proletarians in “Gaza” seems to becoming the second such a place.
Rishi Sunak chose the Global Food Security Summit at Lancaster House in London to reaffirm his commitment to the government’s Rwanda scheme.
“I’m completely committed to doing what is necessary to get those flights off and that scheme up and running,” he said of the plan send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which the UK’s top judges last week ruled was illegal.
Clearly the departure of Suella Braverman did not mean the end of the far-right rhetoric.
The Global Food Security Summit was billed as an opportunity to plan how to stop food crises before they start. It would seem that in the Prime Minister’s mind that means once again scapegoating refugees and keeping up the culture war tactic of pitting working class people against each other.
The destruction of the planet by capitalism continues apace. And governments are more than just inactive in the face of climate change: they are actively retreating from their promises. According to analysis by the climate change journal, Carbon Brief, these retreats put not only the UK’s legally binding sixth carbon budget out of reach, but also its international pledge under the Paris Agreement. Indeed, the carbon emissions of the richest 10% is up to 40 times bigger than the poorest, and ignoring the divide may make ending the climate crisis impossible, according to experts.
The newly ennobled David Cameron wrote in his introduction to the food summit that “Today’s answer cannot be about rich countries ‘doing development’ to others. We need to work together as partners, shaping narratives which developing countries own and deliver.” This seems to put the blame on “tardy developing nations”, despite the vast majority of climate damage having been caused by the so-called developed countries of the global north. On the other hand, the worst effects are being felt in the global south.
This government’s idea of “partnership” is clearly victim blaming. Blaming the global south for dragging their feet, despite it being our governments who are reneging on promises. Blaming the global south for poverty after centuries of plunder by capitalist greed. And blaming refugees for fleeing war, hunger and human misery, all of which will only multiply as the climate heats up.
We reject the right-wing rhetoric which seeks to divide workers from each other by labelling some “migrants” and threatening them with expensive, illegal and racist deportment to a country deplored for human rights abuses. Our ancestors all migrated from somewhere. Our enemy comes not in small boats but in limousines.
We call out the government’s lies on both global food security and climate change. Their promises are empty and are being broken before our eyes.
AnarCom Network 