Tag: capitalism

Health poverty is the challenge; Labour is the disability!

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‘Two-Tier Kier’ is no longer a smear following the compromise made with his back benchers to only do over one section of disabled people in the UK.

Like some inverse promo for loan deals or Internet packages, the government will lay off existing disability claims in exchange for duffing up people with the new ones.    ‘Get it while it lasts – new customers only.’  *Although a relevant change of circumstances such as a change in your condition classes you as a “new claim” and therefore under the new rules.

Despite it being only five years since the worst global pandemic in a century affected half the UK population killing quarter of 1 million, the government proclaimed its surprise that the numbers of people with long-term health issues have increased at all since 2020. Another example of them paying zero attention to people they would rather clap than pay during the pandemic.

That fatigue, respiratory issues and depression are running riot apparently has no link to what an ill-prepared society and our class had to survive under their watch. 

That the scale of benefits is so high, if nothing else, tells us what an unhealthy ‘shitpit’ surviving capitalism is. Ironically, maybe only a Labour government masquerading as the people’s friend could carry out such an assault on such vulnerable groups and hope to get away with it.

The financial reasoning of such decisions is of no interest to us as revolutionists. The well-being of our class versus the protection of the interests of the rich and their wars is always a political decision and, as such, we find no justification ever in the latter outcome. Democracy serves us no better than dictatorship on this.

It is however another irony that a decision driven by the desire to send us to war and increase the manufacture of disability is to be funded by the starving of the existing disabled communities.

We saw such a strategy fail already in the plan to cut winter fuel payments.  While at first glance significantly different demographics, there are some striking similarities: Both ‘passive’ recipients of hard fought for state benefits – though now deemed less entitled; both largely seen as passive politically – physically limited and without economic muscle.  Consequently, both are not just seen as vulnerable but beatable. 

What the state failed to notice is that elder people and people with disabilities are not discreet entities like trans people, migrants, or asylum seekers, but diversely dispersed throughout every house and community in the country. Embedded enough for every sinew of our class to scream no!

That such opposition to injustice can be seen and shared on such a widespread level needs extension to those truly vulnerable communities made invisible by prejudice. The lesson of the response to disability and the elder community should be extended to every section of our class because we are all targets for elimination to facilitate and finance the coming war.

Division is diversion! Labour didn’t invent that.  The state requires all its political representatives to divide our class in whatever way it can to divert us from seeing the importance of our unity in our struggle against it. 

At times it tries to get us to participate in this by ‘othering’ the other dispossessed of our class, on race, gender, origin, sexuality etc.  Each time we fall for this ruse we widen the opening of the avenue of attack back to the main targets of class and vulnerability in all its diverse forms again. 

Racism breeds attack on disability, disability discrimination breeds attack on our class made workless by capitalism, et cetera.  The cycle of division and defeat begins and ends with the ‘isms’ and the targeting of difference.

The partial defeat of Labour in power was led by activist mobilisation and opposition of our class. The scale was small but indicative of potential. To upscale we need to link struggles of one community with another and identify the ultimate challenges that confront us – growing austerity and impoverishment to meet the war aims of the state’s imperial ambition. 

Hunger and austerity are about war and our opposition must oppose war with the energy it refuses division and poverty.  Resistance, survival and victory are both the right and obligation of our class.  It is our necessity not just to survive from day to day but to abolish an economic class system that offers us no better way of survival. 

The class struggle is the peace movement, and victory on the Homefront is its defeat of their plans for war!

Article by Dreyfus

Anarchist Communist Memories of the Miners Strike [Pamphlet Review] – Kate Sharpley Review.

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Miner Conflict – Major Impact : an Anarchist Communist perspective on the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 by Dreyfus

Dreyfus shows how and why the anarchists were involved. ‘This wasn’t altruism or an act of goodwill to support our mining communities. […] This was the instinctive yet enlightened self-interest of class solidarity.’[p.4]

Impressionistic in places, ‘Misty early morning picket lines took on a surreal air against the back drop of growing ghost towns’[p.18], elsewhere there’s a comic moment from heckling Kinnock at Hanley, ‘I remember one steward shouting to another “You get him!”, pointing to one of our number. After a second thinking about it, he responded “No way, YOU get him!” We were secure.’[p.30]

It’s good to have an anarchist communist view, and one from the potteries. Most importantly, this is history that means something: ‘What remains an enduring impact for me is the experience that class struggle changes people.

‘The lessons the “Left” drew were administrative and all about leadership. They pushed the lessons that the TUC can’t be trusted, that Labour Party is not a friend of our class while continuing to try and infiltrate and take over both. Political memories of that sort of thing are relatively short-lived. 

https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/qftwkm

ANTI-WAR CONGRESS 24th May to 26th May (Action Week Against Wars – Prague):

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From 20 to 26 May 2024, groups and individuals from different parts of the world will meet in Prague to coordinate anti-war activities as part of the Week of Action https://actionweek.noblogs.org/.

The series of events will also include an anti-war congress, which will take place from Friday 24 to Sunday 26 May 2024. Campaigns, direct actions, projects, publications and analyses related to the issue of war will be presented at the congress.

Among other things, this internationalist event will serve as an open assembly that will try to combine theoretical background with practical activities. We consider it necessary, in the process of resistance to war, to develop an anti-capitalist practice which seeks to preserve political autonomy. In concrete terms, this means that we want to organize outside the political parties, outside the structures of the states, and against all states.

We are particularly interested in the ways how we can oppose all the harsh conditions to which we have been exposed and subjected during interstate wars and capitalist peace. We are interested in ways to sabotage wars, how to deprive our enemies of resources, how to undermine the ability of states and their armies to continue wars. Which way to go and what is to be done? How to join forces and get organized?

We will look for answers based on class, not national differentiation; answers that take into account the sheer contradiction between rank-and-file soldiers and officers, between wage laborers and bosses, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. We will look for ways to make soldiers in uniform of any state army identify themselves with the social struggle of their brothers and sisters on the other side of the front line, and not in the murderous orders of their officers. We will also look for ways to oppose false friends, all those who seek to transform the class struggle into a national or religious struggle for a new state, a new capitalist space, better adapted to their needs.

We support the internationalist community affirming the struggle against the bourgeoisie of all warring sides, against the armies of all states, against the capitalists of each country. Current manifestations of resistance, however contradictory and fragmented they are, undoubtedly contain the seeds of a social polarization that can turn wars between states into class confrontation.

What is meant is the confrontation between the defenders of the nation, the states and capitalism on the one hand, and the social class on the other, which is beginning to realize that defending the nation to which it is bound in chains only serves the interests of those who exploit it.

Direct action against wars now takes various forms, more or less targeted, more or less organized. Let’s strive for a qualitative shift whereby individual acts of resistance break out of their isolation through interconnection and coordination.

The common enemy in every epoch is, first of all, capitalism, and therefore every state that structures it, the army that defends it, the bourgeoisie that embodies it. The only way out of the nightmare of capitalist wars and capitalist peace is a collective awakening: we must see and sabotage the whole machinery of war, overthrow its representatives and reclaim our power as creators of the world. We call on groups and individuals interested in participating in the anti-war congress in Prague to contact us well in advance with proposals for the program. Together against capitalist wars and capitalist peace! https://actionweek.noblogs.org/post/2024/02/28/anti-war-congress-prague-24-to-26-may-2024/#more-490

Post Office Scandal – 1st Class Capitalism

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What has Government ever done for you? – The Bloody Sunday scandal; the Windrush scandal; the Hillsborough scandal; the Infected Blood scandal: the Iraq War scandal; the Grenfell Scandal; the Covid disaster scandal…  Liz Truss!

And now the Post Office Scandal.

Tragically it took a representation of real life through TV drama to bring a longstanding injustice to public awareness.  But it did, and its power is both intrinsic and resonant.  We have seen it all before.

The current focus and justified anger in the UK over the scandalous prosecution by the Post Office of over 700 sub-postmasters over a 20 year period reveals an inconvenient truth.  That the modern State in all its forms is a bastard of capitalism!

Perverting the course of justice; bullying and abuse of workers; implications of perjury; the alleged lying to the accused; the relentlessness of pursuit, the suppression of evidence and silencing of those who raised their voices was done by a nationally owned institution that once rivalled the NHS in prestige and affection.  In “Mafia” style.

The public ownership of the nationalised Postal Service has not prevented It from acting as a persecuting agent of state and government interests with the tenacity of an East European secret police.  A business like any other.

The experiences of corporate bullying and injustice will be very familiar to those working in much of the private sector, assumed to be the poorer employer in terms of quality of work experience than the nationalised sector.  What shocks many is the exposure of the myth of the state as a benign controller of capital.

The reality is that nothing about capitalism is benign.  Wage labour always exploits as it never pays us for the true value of the product of our labour. Every employer (bar perhaps the smallest inspirational charitable enterprises) has a boss or hierarchical management that mimics the state without its democratic pretensions.

Even Local Authorities, and the worthiest of charitable Human Rights enterprises see themselves as businesses, with what used to be collaborative personnel sections reconfigured as ‘HR Business Partners’.  Standing not for Human Rights but an Orwellian dehumanising concept of ‘Human Resources’ – serving the corporate structure not the individual or collective. 

Millions of us workers, at home and abroad, witnessed the tooth and claw nature of employment in its totally holy alliance with state and capital as we recently struggled, or continue to, against war driven austerity. 

(Never austere for war though, there’s always enough money for that as they bomb Yemen and hand another £2.5 billion pounds for Ukraine to buy British weapons.)

Whoever controls capital, individual rich exploiters, carpet bagging hedge funders or the powermongers behind state nationalisation, it remains what it is – Capitalism!

State Capitalism and Private Capitalism are two cheeks of the same oppressive arse that needs a damn good kicking!  The whole rotten collaborative structure of government, exploiters, their lackeys and minions needs tearing down.  That will end their austerity and their wars.

We know and feel we have to fight back.  Our lives depend on it.  Millions of us want to, and the workers at the Post Office might not even be at the front or the queue!

Article by Drefuss