Since October 2022, nearly 5000 hate crimes against transgender people have been recorded. On trans day of remembrance, look to the perpetrators in parliament who refuse to protect trans rights, hide their crimes with debates about bathrooms, and stir hatred at every opportunity. When the working class is divided, the ruling class wins.
The culture war is the bosses’ war.
When African-American folk and blues legend, Huddie Ledbetter, known professionally as Lead Belly, recorded a version of his song about the Scottsboro Boys case for the Smithsonian Institute in 1938, he told black people visiting Alabama to “Stay woke, keep your eyes open.” The term had been in use in African American vernacular in its sense of political engagement and political awareness for perhaps a century by then.
Two years into the Great Depression, the 1931 Scottsboro Boys case involved 9 black teenage migrant workers – the youngest being 13- who had jumped a freight train in order to look for work and who were falsely accused of raping 2 white women. The sentence for black men raping white women in Alabama at that time was death, and in the rushed trials that were accompanied by baying lynch mobs, all but the youngest were handed the death sentence.
The NAACP and others campaigned against the miscarriage of justice and forced retrials, but the impact on the youths’ lives was devastating.
Lead Belly had met the men and wrote the song in order to warn other black people to “stay woke”, as he puts it in the Smithsonian recording. And his political engagement and anti-racism had a class consciousness to it too, as shown in his song Bourgeois Blues, which he wrote about the racism he faced on a visit to Washington to record for the Library of Congress’s folk collection. Lead Belly’s cry for change addresses poor blacks and poor whites alike. His commentary had a class as well as a race awareness.
“Home of the brave, land of the free
I don’t wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie”.
In contemporary mainstream commentary race and class have been separated in a strange way. To many commentators, class is something that it seems only applies to whites. We are used to the media using the phrase “white working class”, and we are used to the implied disparagement for assumed reactionary views that are projected onto that group. But those same commentators are blind to the effects of class on black people and other groups. We hear of “black communities” and “community leaders”, but no class division in those communities, as if only the white population is affected by class.
We in the ACN are very clear that our class, the working class, is made of people who are black, white, gay, straight, trans, cis, Asian, disabled, and of all genders. What binds us together is the experience of the effects of class under capitalism. All working class people have to sell our labour to live, and we all have our surplus value appropriated. We are all, in Lead Belly’s words, “mistreated by the bourgeoisie”.
We cannot ignore the other oppressions that people face, and we must ensure the revolutionary movement listens to all the voices of our class. But we must use the power of those voices to draw attention to the economic injustices of capitalism, and the environmental destruction it is doing, felt for longest in the Global South. And we must not allow the class analysis with which we examine those injustices to be knocked off the agenda by the liberal establishment.
Lead Belly knew anti racism and class consciousness were stronger together. So when we take up the magnificent Kathy Burke’s war cry, “I’d rather be woke than an ignorant twat”, we join with Lead Belly in forging that awareness in the fire of class consciousness.
By Duncan Dundonald
Globally, there are 32 countries currently in armed conflict. The types of conflict vary widely. While the severity and duration of these conflicts differ, they all have significant impacts on our class and result in a high number of casualties as well as humanitarian crises. The common factor is capitalism and its local state proxies.
Gaza, despite being so small it would disappear in any of the battlefronts currently taking place in Ukraine, has nonetheless pushed that war out of the public mind – for now. What characterizes both is the hypocrisy and double standards of all involved.
Gaza must rank along with Khorramshahr, Vukovar, Sarajevo, Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol in the great urban annihilations of the last 50 years. Though atrocity it seems remains in the eye of the beholder.
On November 5th, in an act of self-promotion to his West Bank settler constituency, Israel’s now suspended Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, said on Hebrew language radio station that “…throwing a nuclear bomb on Gaza was one of the possibilities”.
This normalisation of nuclear rhetoric is also characteristic on both the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. Such threats at the moment underplay the enormity of the ‘conventional’ violence currently deployed. Already, the destruction of Gaza has detonated the explosive equivalent of 2 Hiroshima bombs.
And while Gaza takes the attention, 40 raids a day are taking place in the occupied West Bank leading to thousands of detentions, land grabs and 170 deaths.
The window of opportunity for the Israeli state’s collective punishment of Palestinian workers and destruction of Hamas is however, narrowing. More of its erstwhile allies (France, Canada, it’s Arab ‘friends’) are increasingly forced by popular anger to call for a ceasefire.
The Gaza conflict will likely end sooner rather than later. And, as Israel demands the emptying of hospitals and further mass movements from south to west, more with a bang than a whimper.
The sooner this happens the less likely an escalation that Israel doesn’t choose itself – though the ending of conflict on one front may be a great temptation to open a new one to finish the job long anticipated against Iran’s regional power and nuclear program.
As ethnic cleansing in Azerbaijan and a new genocide unfolding in Darfur slip under the radar, Ukraine can expect a repeat of last year’s winter bombing campaign, aimed at the country’s energy grid.
Since June 4th, the NATO sponsored Ukrainian offensive has progressed only 10km at its deepest point. While the front remains active, the war there has lost any pretense of mobility. Winter has come again as will the literal and metaphorical freeze of the front lines.
On November 1st in an interview in the Economist magazine, this reality was acknowledged by Ukrainian commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi: “Just like in the first world war, we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate.”
This will strategically benefit Putin allowing a reconstruction of the defensive lines of the meat grinder, and providing respite from the equally high casualty rate that the Russian army has recklessly suffered in defence.
But the Russian state’s challenge of recruitment has led to increasingly perverse and sinister abuse not just of Russian workers but prisoners of war.
On November 7th Russia announced it was sending Ukrainian captives to the front lines of their country to fight on Moscow’s side in the war
The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported the Ukrainians will operate as part of another unit in eastern Ukraine, and the unit’s website said it has about 7,000 fighters.
Video shows the Ukrainian POWs in uniform swearing allegiance to Russia and are expected to be deployed to the front lines in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
The ‘Rules of War’ like genocidal atrocity are equally in the eye of the beholder.
If either conflict escalates, it would present a real risk that these wars will cross-pollinate each other and merge their violence. Iran, Turkey, and the West already have their feet firmly planted in both conflicts. The wider Middle East cauldron is ripe for ignition.
The risks to our class, like the scale of our losses and suffering, have not diminished in the two years of conflict. Rather they have escalated and the urgency of resistance increases.
The resistance begins on the home front. Wherever we find ourselves we can oppose the narratives that draw us towards support for one side or the other! We can assert our needs against their war profiteering and austerity in our workplaces and communities.
We can challenge their attempts to divide us on employment status, race, immigration status, gender, identity, sexuality, disability. Our communities are stronger for our diversity.
We must pose our class war against their exploitation and war against our class in all its forms. This is what we mean by the practical manifesto: No War but the Class War!
By Dreyfus
Despite a chill in the air and winter on the horizon, the ACN attended its 6th bookfair of the year. Organised by the Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh, the final day of the 4-day event attracted a couple of hundred people through the doors to browse the various stalls and engage in a variety of discussions. These included: the lack of community control and input over public health policy in capitalism; attacks upon women, in particular with regard to bodily autonomy; enforced poverty and oppression among communities globally.
During the day, it became evident that as is often found currently within leftist gatherings, there was a general omission of discussion regarding the need for working class internationalism and of the universality and centrality of class exploitation and oppression, in all its forms – and the need to mobilise on this basis. In contrast to this though, we managed to distribute several dozen of our publications, including having them placed at the various stalls and given out in person, whilst getting a nice welcome from the organisers spoken to. The literature then initiated at least the beginnings of a hopefully ongoing productive dialogue around revolutionary class based, anti-statist and anti-militarist, emancipatory politics, with both some of the organisers and a number of the attendees, authors and speakers. These conversations encompassed the need for resistance from our class to ongoing attacks upon our living standards and environmental destruction, as well as to the murderous wars in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and those potentially in the future, closer to “home”, by the current system of state and capital.
From Sheffield early in the year to Glasgow in the spring, from Hull and Bradford in the summer to Manchester / Salford and now, Edinburgh, in the autumn – we have been busy arranging and/or attending bookfairs throughout this year. Moreover, we continue to organise and attempt to reach out to our class, especially to potentially like-minded people in our communities and workplaces, locally through to internationally alike.
By Bloque Ade
We note with anger and derision the fanfare being made at a fall in the rate of inflation as if it were pennies from heaven!
In whose straw poll do hands shoot up to the question ‘have you noticed your pay/benefits/tax credits outstripping inflation?’
The way the current pundits portray the reduction in the rate of inflation as a beneficial experience in our daily lives is a complete fiction. The rate of increases in prices has slowed a little. Prices are not coming down our lives are not becoming more affordable.
The causes of inflation are invariably political, the result of choices of who pays for capitalist crisis. Those in power, those with the money make those choices. The rest of us choose between heating, clothing, accommodation and food.
All over the country, record numbers are queueing at food banks, warm hubs and social supermarkets. These voluntary institutions themselves being clear that they are increasingly unable to fulfill their remit, with rising running costs and costs of goods, production, delivery etc.
The pound in our pocket buys a third less than a decade ago. Nearly 15% less than two years ago.
Whatever measly increase in our wages they have given, still less in the paltry level of benefits, may look like on paper now inflation is claimed at 4.6%, it is nothing but a charade of smoke and mirrors.
It hides the reality that our standard of living has declined and our struggle to survive has grown harder since the great banking collapse of 2008.
And it’s not just about numbers on paper, it’s about the disappearance of services of social value to meet the needs of working-class people and our communities.
It’s no good being able to afford your heating if you can’t afford your home! You may be able to buy a cushion, but you can’t afford the sofa; if you can afford dental care, you can’t find an NHS dentist, if you can afford your medication, the treatment to remove your need for it is put of further and further into the future for the absence of doctors and medical care.
As for social care, disability aids, childcare, mental health services, children’s activities, holidays, well, most just can’t have access for love nor money.
And of course, it’s the poor and marginalised to take the blame. Too lazy to work, not really unfit. Refugees gaming the system while our government games Rwanda. Banks raking-in interest driven profits while the homeless make selfish lifestyle choices.
Perhaps little highlights the lies behind the cost of living more than the unacceptable cost of dying. It’s no wonder our TV screens of full of adverts for “we’ll come and take your body away and deliver back your ashes by van for a fraction of the cost”.
It’s hardly surprising that we can’t afford to live with dignity when we can’t even afford to die with it!
Where has all the money that is supposedly unavailable, gone? We know it’s there; we produced it through our work, our skills, through the labours of our minds and bodies.
It is there, not hiding, but in plain sight. The billions that aren’t personally Rishi’s and his friends, we see blowing up Gaza and Ukraine every day. Making room for more profit-making expansion plans. The profit driven inflation claimed back from us through austerity.
The poverty of our daily lives is a reflection of the poverty of morality and values of the capitalist class and its proxies. The only good news about inflation is that it ends with the end of capitalism.
By Dreyfus
Thanks to the organisers of the Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair for enabling a successful event with around 30 stalls and 8 workshops in the great surrounds of the Peoples History Museum.
The was our second attendance as AnarCom and very different from our first. Last time, just a couple of months after coming together as internationalist activists we were barely known, with few materials, bar a couple of newsletters, with which to engage.
This year, 14 months of coming together and a month before the anniversary of our formal constitution, we were widely recognised, welcomed and able to present a full body of work we have produced to a receptive gathering.
We had arranged to form a NWBTCW block with our close working comrades of the CWO, Friends of Working Class Struggle (FOWCS) and Old Moles Collective, which comedically became referred to as ‘Class Reductionist Corner!’
We had a wide range of our own publications including four of the pamphlets and the last five issues our newsletter, as well as new badges and banners.
It was very well attended and busy throughout the day enabling us to be continuously engaged with attendees and new and old comrades alike.
With 120 of our newsletters distributed as well as other items, and a vibrant social media presence throughout the day, we represented a solid Class Struggle Internationalist presence at the event.
The three of us who attended had a great day and are delighted to see a consequent increase in following and communication since. Thanks to the organisers and to all those who came to see us for making it such a successful day.
The bloodletting of our class is continuous. The attention on where we are bleeding changes to where Capitalist power bloc dynamics directs media focus.
While genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza marches apace, up to 8,000 Russian conscripts have died in a fruitless offensive on the Donetsk town of Avdiika.
More are now being thrown back into the meat grinder of Bakhmut. As winter threatens to re-freeze the frontlines, Russia, perhaps taking from Israel’s playbook has stepped up the shelling of civilian centres.
On November 1st shells rained down on 118 settlements in 10 different regions – the most widespread bombardment this year. Putin started a war he didn’t need and now can’t afford a peace.
All eyes though are on the Gaza War which, while barely a month old, has reached some grim new milestones. The accepted figures for civilian deaths have now exceeded those verified in the Ukraine war according to the OHCHR, (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). More children have been killed than in all the armed conflicts of the last year put together.
On November 1st, bragging of atrocity, Hamas foreign affairs spokesman Ghazi Hamad said of October 7th: “…we will do this again and again…Nobody should blame us for the things we do… everything we do is justified”.
On the same day their political leader Ismail Haniyeh claimed, like a surprised civilian, that Netanyahu is trying to keep himself out of prison by choosing to invade Gaza!
As if they weren’t the butchers who planned the slaughter of October 7th! They might have missed it from their safe houses in Lebanon and Doha – accustomed as all dictators to let others do the dying.
But they know what all Israelis know, Netanyahu can’t afford a peace either. He doesn’t want this war to end. With Hamas, he is holding a wolf by its ears! He dare not let go. His failure as ‘Mr Security’ is destined to break his political carrier once the Gaza War finishes.
After that he is likely, no longer protected by tenure under the constitution, to face a successful if long delayed trial for corruption in office. A long war, and/or a consequent constitutional crisis resulting in a State of Emergency prolonging powers, is his only route through HIS crisis.
He has failed, against public protest, to limit the oversight powers of the Supreme Court. Combine with this the historic failure of any ‘democratic’ state to suppress insurrection by force of arms alone (Algeria, Vietnam, Ireland, Iraq), and the equation is bleak.
Netanyahu’s need for a wolf suggests a long war and a deepening of crisis towards a
constitutional coup. Failing that, a new war for which Iran might suffice. Capitalist War and a State repression may pose themselves as the saviour of liberal democracy.
Despite the fiction of due diligence to protect the innocent, all limits and scope of action have been abolished. Bunker busting munitions level refugee camps killing hostages in Hamas tunnels. Gaza hospitals are shut down and refugees targeted whether an area is designated ‘safe’ or not.
Even away from Gaza, the Israeli Right is arming Jewish citizens and settlers as vigilantes roaming the West Bank to steal more land, murdering 130 Palestinians in the process. The level of violence has even alarmed the Israeli security service, the ‘Shin Bet’ who warn there could be no limit to the escalation at home.
As the Israeli economy crumbles like civilian infrastructure, cost is no obstacle either. It is estimated the war is costing Israel $246m a day totaling around $7 billion to date. That is 1.5% of GDP a month. A so far short-lived conflict on a small scale has already reached epic proportions.
We know who’s fighting, we know who’s dying and we know who’s paying – our class! Conscripted, manipulated or brutalised to die for those either in power or seeking it. The propaganda on all sides is designed to stop us recognising we are the only ones who can stop it.
Workers of the Levant and across the region, as in Ukraine and Russia and across the globe have nothing to gain. We all know those who do, capitalism and its global proxies as state actors.
Our own efforts at home, fighting where we have something to gain, against the barbarity of wage slavery or unemployment, poverty and austerity, homelessness and repression is where we have the power to end their wars. Smashing their Social Peace at home weakens their capacity to wage war abroad.
Organising on the basis of autonomy, solidarity and mutualism and merging our struggles and demands independent of those who, whilst feigning opposition to war, want to become our alternative leaders.
The leftists and liberals of the anti-war campaigns aren’t against capitalist war, they just want to corral us in the direction of the partisan state entity they support under the guise of anti/imperialism or national liberation. Have us serve in another state, meeting the needs of some other claimant to power.
“From the river to the sea…” comes the hackneyed old slogan of these leftist state apologists. Whether it be from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean or the Donets to the Black Sea, no people can be free dominated by capitalism and its warring states.
What awaits us should we fail is shown to us daily in Ukraine, Palestine and Israel, and in the dozens of other conflicts where our attention is not being directed.
We call for No War But The Class War to end this slaughter and liberate our class from lives of threat and misery. We continue to build alliances within and across our class, and with other internationalist militants where we find them to work towards this end.
By Dreyfus
This is the initial statement of NWBCW Tyne & Wear, in which the ACN is involved.
RESIST THE GLOBAL MARCH TO SLAUGHTER
Across the world working class people are being slaughtered, from endless battles in the Ukraine, to mass murder in Israel, to ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The USA and EU are making one military bloc, and China, Russia and Iran are moving to make another. As the working class becomes increasingly impoverished and many of us can now barely afford to eat or heat our homes – and as environmental disaster approaches ever-closer on the horizon – the future looks bleak.
The answer cannot be support for cross-class alliances in the mistaken belief that national liberation equals self-determination and a progressive step forward. Capitalism has been in a continuing deep crisis for decades now, and as capitalists find it harder and harder to make profits, they are left with fewer options to kickstart a new cycle of boom and bust. The last time this happened, the Depression of the 1930s, led to the Second World War. What is happening now in Ukraine and Gaza is what capitalism has in store for all of us unless we can stop it.
The best way to halt capitalism’s drive to war internationally is for workers to break the “social peace” at home. That is why we have come together to say No War But the Class War. We must use whatever means are available to us where we possess the greatest strength – at work and in our communities. From simple day-to-day acts – such as sharing information to challenge the dominant narrative – to strikes, occupations and refusals to serve in the military. The working class’s two main weapons are class consciousness and our ability to organize on a mass scale. We cannot allow ourselves to be pitted against each other to our loss and for the benefit of rulers and the rich.
Working class people are already saying no: in July, thousands of ordinary Palestinians were protesting Hamas and its corruption in Gaza, just as ordinary Israelis have been refusing the call up to serve in the IDF. Groups in Ukraine and in Russia have been documenting the refusals to fight from working class conscripts on both sides of the conflict. There are people and groups saying No War But the Class War all over the world including Liverpool, Glasgow, Paris, Rome, Turkey, South Korea, Australia, the US and Canada.
As the vast majority in society, we have it in our power to create a new world without states, without the profit system, where we can be warm, feel valued and be healthy, where we can control our own lives.
Get in touch:
NWBCWTyneandWear@proton.me
twitter.com/NWBCWTyne_Wear
NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR
Soldiers! Fighters! Workers all!
Turn the guns they gave you away from each other and on those who command you to kill your fellow workers for THEIR ambition and THEIR profit!
This, the long-held dream of internationalist resistance against capitalist war, is as urgent now as ever before. Refuse the recurring and relentless bloodletting of our class who own nothing but our labour and gain nothing from our slaughter!
Such a dream is no less fantastical than the idea that this war will bring peace! Blood does not wash blood and dying does not bring back the dead.
The history is so old that it no longer informs the present. Whatever date it starts from, there is always the day before it. Only our experience of what the exploitation of our class means and the price we pay for that ‘privilege’ must inform us now.
Every platitude pushed out by the West on the Gaza war is the opposite of what they say about the war in Ukraine. Destruction and genocide are no longer ‘war crimes’ but legitimised self defence. The defence of who by whom?
The obscenity of the hypocrisy of Hamas and the Israeli State and their respective power bloc backers, hidden behind their opportunism, is exposed in their words.
On the 19th October the Hamas (‘Zeal’) leader, Khaled Mashaal, said in an interview with the Saudi ‘Al-Arabiya’ network: “We know very well the consequences of our operation on October 7th.”, adding “No nation is liberated without sacrifices.”
When asked how many Palestinian lives Hamas was prepared to sacrifice to meet its aims, he referred to the loss of 30,000,000 Russians to defeat Germany in the Second World War. That would be more than twice the number of the world’s Palestinian diaspora.
In March 2019, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told his ruling political party, Likud (‘the Consolidation): “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Hamas has the blood of Israelis and Palestinians on its hands; Israel has the blood of Palestinians and Israelis on its hands. These bloody hands, so intertwined for decades, are the ones handing you the guns!
The death of 1500 Israelis is a tragedy, the mounting death toll of 5,000 Palestinians is increasingly treated as a statistic. The State in Power, Israel, and the ‘State in waiting’, Hamas, are equal in their indifference to our suffering and the outcomes.
In this war, as in Ukraine and Russia, our class are the fish in the barrel being killed whatever direction we swim in. The dead are our dead, the gain is theirs!
As our losses mount, other exploiters are entering the fray as Hezbollah, Iran and even Iraq are joining or being threatened by one side or the other. As if Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi workers have not suffered enough.
Workers have no oil, have not ports, have no geo-strategic assets – we just build them and die for them. We ultimately have the power to refuse dying and rebuild again, for our own needs not theirs.
All war is against our class whichever side of a fence or border we are on. To refuse to fight and die in a war for power, profit and greed is not the dream of our class, but an historical necessity!
Every front is the Class War front. Class war solidarity is our only hope to survive! ‘No War but the Class War’ is not an appeal but a manifesto!
By Dreyfus
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AnarCom Network 