Tag: imperialism

Farce followed by Vicious Oppression and Further Exploitation?  Or Class Wide Liberation?

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Report from Newcastle upon Tyne and Hull, 27th Oct

A mass of flag waving was threatened to descend upon the people of Newcastle last Saturday, as thousands upon thousands were promised to be led / manipulated by xenophobic nativists.

This claim, through the convergence of UKIP, Advance UK and the so-called ‘Great British National Protest’, didn’t seem as quite as ridiculous as past such threats.  For the far right has been buoyed up nationally by a number of recent governments, hell bent determined to be an enabling force at every turn.  While the likes of the very wealthy, journalists and social media, endlessly platform their claimed grievances and “othering” of members of our class.

The recent result, a very large and concerning turnout in London, beamed into our homes for all to see and to be nauseatingly endured by that city’s residents. 

Concurrently, there still is the flying of seemingly endless daft bits of material on a variety of streets up and down the country but mostly around roundabouts going nowhere.  Then there’s the spraying of graffiti, mostly on bins for dog waste, if local experience is anything to go by.  All this together provides a further intimidating feel for working class communities, both locally and wider afield.  Dog shit politics, anyone?

However, in Newcastle, as midday arrived, rumours / excuses(?) spread of “coaches breaking down”, one wannabe leader living it up, lounging about on the continent – yet again, another failed one / “actor” turning up desperately trying to appear relevant, and a march planned ironically in the middle of a boat race; maybe all was not as could have been or as feared?

In the end, on the day, the far right mustered a paltry 300 in the Toon, compared to the counter demonstration’s number of around 12 to 15X that.  Only stopped from being run out of the city by numerous lines of uniformed agents of the state, the far right was reduced to trying to claim “victory” by carrying out a mini march in undercover of near darkness as their main planned one was stopped, countered, re-routed and countered again, several times over.

Meanwhile, a number of those on the counter in Newcastle, shouted about the rightists, “Not being even able to stop a boat race!”   This too embarrassed smiles and nervous laughter from some of the less hardcore, probably more confused younger ones with national flags?  Whilst others on the counter demonstration asked the nationalists where they thought their flags were made and didn’t that show the whole thing to be at best, ridiculous?

Then, on the day, there were a handful of Kippers with religious crosses seemingly knocked off from some crap car boot sale around the MAGA movement in the US.  More nationalists, with endless flags, engaged in strangely dull monotone speeches, lacking both wit and intonation, polluting the aural experience for those just out an about in town.  One of these Tannoy based characters is known for being detained recently, for, “nutting their own side”.  To top it all, spectators of the boat race had joined in the opposition, telling the wannabe marchers to “piss off”, for disrupting their viewing pleasure of the Tyne. 

Much to the relief of many on Tyneside, the whole thing appeared at times to be pure farce!

Yet not only were several people arrested on the counter demonstration in Newcastle, some for apparently not telepathically understanding orders to disperse but the underlying pressures, locally and beyond, remain intensely difficult.

This is shown by those endless vitriolic attacks upon refugees by both government and national commentators throughout the country.  It was also shown locally by the fact that those owning the venue that eventually hosted the Advance UK launch near the Quayside by the Tyne, also own the refugee hotel near the city centre that has been subject to demonstrations by the far right and naive, week after week after week.  Where there’s muck and dirty dealings, there’s brass alright for those with capital, in this system.

Locally through to internationally, years of attacks upon our class, crises in capitalism, atomisation, quietism on the class struggle front, immiseration / flatlining or even falling living standards, have enabled a vacuum and space to appear for the hard and far right to exploit.

Having no scruples about empowering a divide and rule agenda to deflect from not offering an optimistic future, state and capital have opened up a chasm to be occupied by those who even appeared to want a 21st century style nation-wide pogrom against refugees last year, as decaying occupied hotels were set alight.

This all then further fuelled by social media, their billionaire owners and ever tweaked algorithms, so the forces of intense reaction have hit new heights – both electorally and also now as a (re)emerged street force, based on nativism, nationalism and bitter xenophobia.  Throughout the UK, continental Europe and beyond, this appears the case. On the day however, the situation in Newcastle offered some very welcome optimism and the opportunity to catch up with and stand with comrades and our wider community.  It provided at least, that collective sigh of relief.

This situation though will likely be only temporary.  As comrades on the same day in Hull reported, the reality, countrywide, is variable at best.

For in Hull, the counter gathering was unfortunately outnumbered as a far-right rally hit the city.   Around 100 far right gathered although accurate figures were difficult to assess, as the area also had a large number of the public around, wondering what all the fuss was about?

The static counter demo by Stand Up To Racism had around 30 people.  Despite this, 6 comrades who refused to join the static counter demo stood firm whilst also mingling with the far right and public, chatting to some people nominally on “the other side”, to try to get them to peel away.  This then, those who were on the edges of the right rally and who were perhaps still able to question what is happening and see through how they are being used and manipulated?!  The far-right stewards (feeling important in the high-vis waistcoats) were not happy with this and kept rushing over to try and bully both our comrades and those they were talking too.

It is one thing to stand there with confidence as you vastly outnumber the opposition, it is quite another to try and positively confront the situation in your local area, when you are clearly outnumbered yourselves.

As both last weekend and recent events throughout the country and beyond have clearly shown, as a class we cannot rely on those in power, nor on our current socio-economic system, to offer us any solution.  In fact, they and this current system fuel the attacks we face.

Let’s face it, the far right internationally are fake rebels and represent literally a defence mechanism for capital and state in times of crises.  Fantasies about liberal democracy being any kind of answer to this, are clearly that, fantasies!

To effectively confront and resist, we must unify as a class, locally and internationally.  We must stand with our communities, especially those on the sharp end of being attacked and “othered”.  We need to meet, discuss and stand with comrades and potential comrades, and help enable where we can, others in our class to resist a disastrous agenda.

It is a massive task but still not an impossible one.  Whilst we may appear small and relatively weak at the present time, the struggle can take twists and turns, and our class can still show impressive determination in the face of those who dream of further oppressing us. 

Wherever we find ourselves, we must collectively turn the tables now by organising, discussing, meeting, and standing firm on a definite anti-capitalist, internationalist basis.  It is only with the ending of capitalism and state internationally, that the threat of the far right will be ended and our prosperity and even existence ensured.

Locally, nationally and internationally, we must engage with offering a far more optimistic future, where we are able class wide, to challenge exploitation, resist manipulation and confidently stand together in solidarity; stand for a world of liberty and equality. 

A failure to do so hardly bears thinking about!

Article by Bloque-Ade

Glastonbury and the Warfare State – Know thine enemy

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Ironically, in the face of capitalism’s accelerating drive towards its global war of destruction in the ‘national interests’, the flags of ‘other patriotisms’ are coming back to hide the existential struggle of our class and humanity behind the claims of those nationalists who want the ‘states in exile’ like a United Ireland or Palestine to take over from those ‘states in power’.

The keyword here is the State.  The bourgeois political entity that’s become the local franchise of international capitalism, it inevitably siding with one imperialist bloc or other.  

Taking sides here has its own appeal.  You can blow up a political relationship and achieve the illusion of change.  Social revolution, however, is not a change of management and rearranging of deckchairs.  It is the abolition of an exploitative social and economic relationship that cannot be reformed but requires our liberation and the solidarity of class struggle. 

The flag of any nation will only ever lead us to one or other imperialist camp to die for.  All claims pushing us to take the side of one state, bloc and camp or another are a betrayal of the historical internationalist interests of our class

Whoever broke woke is now haunting the political playgrounds of bourgeois Bohemian liberalism, the performance and the festival.

Who is this Glastonbury that now so openly opines on the political partisanships of the capitalist state and who must be obeyed?

A direct inheritor, if not usurper, of the free festival movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it has long been a haven for leftist and liberal ideas.  It used to be joked that breaking into Glastonbury was mandatory training for the peace movement!

Its organisers have promoted this with pride.  Its founder, Michael Eavis, stated as recently as the current festival, “people that don’t agree with the politics of the event can go somewhere else.”  To follow this by endorsing the establishment voices in condemning Bob Vylan’s sloganeering against the IDF (the 170,000 conscript Israeli army) appears to be a response to external political pressure.

The Guardian newspaper observed that, “the Gaza discourse has been Vylanised” as a diversion.  However, that was clearly not working given the number of voices mobilising in its favour – the duo’s album miraculously climbing the charts again!

Starmer then, condemned the allegedly antisemitic chants of, “Death to the IDF” as, “unacceptable hate speech”.  Yvette Cooper with similar timing banned Palestine Action’s peaceful (if injurious to the deity of property) protest against the mass indiscriminate targeting of people with devastating high explosive bombs and bullets, including the massacre of noncombatants, as “terrorism”.  This, ironically just as the Yoorrock Justice Commission in Australia found Britain guilty of genocide against the indigenous First Nations of Victoria during colonisation.

Not to be outdone, journalist and broadcaster Andrew Neil took the festival accusations one step further, for he stated, “I was going to say that they (Glastonbury) seem to have more in common with the Nuremberg rally,” though even the Nazis didn’t say, ‘Death to the Jews’”.  This prompting some conservatives to even call for the prosecution of the BBC simply for showing the festival!

So, Bob Vylan, Kneecap’s Gaelic republicanism and even Palestine Action are cast as the villains in the fog of war, predominantly as a diversionary tactic.  Not just from an ongoing mass slaughter but from the state’s shared interests with its enemies to not undermine its monopoly on the use of violence.  And if ‘your army’ questions whether “right is actually on its side?” and then falls for the desertion argument, so could ‘ours’.  “We (they) can’t be having that!”

However close one might be to the strictly defined legal characteristics that name a mass slaughter a genocide, the horrific trauma of Gaza is an atrocity by any measure.  Consensus amongst experts is between 60 to 90,000 dead and perhaps treble that wounded. This represents in excess of 10% of the pre-war population of Gaza. 

Vylan’s error is not in trying to find one enemy to accuse, but to find the wrong one and find itself colluding with the state’s tactic to avoid the real significance of the commentary.  “Death to the IDF” is no more antisemitic than ‘death to the Nazis’ is calling for the killing of all Germans.  It does however pitch us as one state entity against another – one side of the prospect of imperialist slaughter.  Supporting the killing of our class to oppose the other side where our class is also dying!

The cycle of war doesn’t end because our class has died in sufficient numbers to support our state in killing our class in the enemy state. The prospect of war ends when our class flat out refuses to fight for both the state and for appointed leaders within capital and instead fights the very system and barbaric ruling class which wants to pit us against and murder each other.

Far from calling for the death of the IDF conscripts, revolutionists should be calling for the working class treated as canon fodder, as the producers of wealth who have nothing in common with those who control and manipulate that wealth through its extorted acquisition, to see what they have in common with the repressed and exploited working class conscripts of the fundamentalist bands of Hamas and its Iranian backers in the anti-western camp.

War ends when the fighting stops forever. That can only be brought about in the long-term by the internationalist action of the world’s working class, refusing all sides but its own and the negating of the power and wealth of capitalism and imperialism for a free world commune.

While there may be an increasing number of voices criticising the ‘Vylanising’ of the Gaza debacle, that voice yet needs to find its target against the warring factions of this imperialist conflict, against the system of capitalism and state, and not upon workers dying because of it.

Article by Dreyfus

Too many wars to notice…

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Compassion fatigue is being replaced by stress and trauma as people can no longer bear to focus on so much misery and potential fear. In the wars around us there is a sense that we are not just witnessing the terrible lives of others, but the future that awaits us and gets closer each day and with every news broadcast.   We prefer to notice that we did not change the curtains as the grenade crashes through our own window.

Are we moving from passive voyeur to active anticipant?  More than half of the world’s nuclear powers, six nations, Russia, North Korea, Israel, recently Pakistan and India, and now the US are strutting on the battlefield.

Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear sites has changed the rules of the diplomatic game, perhaps to the point of no return. Foreshadowed by Israel’s surprise attack under the smoke screen of forthcoming US-Iran negotiations, the US’s second ‘Pearl Harbour’, punching through the false security of a two-week window for Iran to reconsider its position, has put all of us on an exponential path to military destruction.

This lesson will not be lost on China, which suffered the greatest casualties at the hands of imperial Japan’s 20th century wars, prefigured by the surprise attacks of Port Arthur and Pearl Harbour.  Trump’s new IED – improvised explosive diplomacy – risks detonating the Pacific region in the struggles over Taiwan and strategic sea lanes.

Not lost on other belligerents, Russian strategists observe that, “… on a tactical level there are pluses [for Russia] from the conflict between Iran and Israel”, including, “higher global oil prices and distraction from Russia’s war in Ukraine” (Moskovsky Komsomolets).

The business daily, Kommersant, continued that:  “Any escalation in the Middle East distracts from Ukraine and alters the priorities for Western military assistance,” adding incredibly: “Russia could…play the role of impartial arbiter, helping if not to resolve the crisis, then at least to de-escalate it.”!  Perhaps more realistically it laments conversely that it, “…was unable to prevent Israel’s mass strike on a country with which five months ago, Russia signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement.”   That fact will also not be lost in China.

The unclaimed banality is – if you want war, prepare for war!  On the Home Front, “battle ready and armour clad… “, is the Labour government’s echoing of George Washington’s now ubiquitous militaristic slogan, “peace through strength”.  Whose peace whose strength?

In the late 15th century at the birth of European colonial expansionism, Italian military commander Marshal Trivulzio expressed the military maxim for the next 500 hundred years:  “To carry out war, three things are necessary: money, money and yet more money.” 

Cue more austerity and an internal conflict against the enemies within, not just the unions but politically prefigured by the banning of such group groups as Palestine Action. Already the status of people with disabilities, gender dysphoria, social and eco-dissidents of all kinds is being downgraded and rights rolled back. 

As we prepare military bases for migrants or North American nuclear weapons, this hunt for enemies will grow.  That soft fascist echo of reason, “If you have nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear” is the ‘arbeit macht frei’ of our time.

In the era of Trump, populism, fascism, never has this phrase been more terrifying. Have you ever identified your gender identity, sexual preferences, political allegiances in official documentation or social media?   Times are changing. Tolerance was always an insidious form of oppression and has paved the pathway for the direct repression to come.

Hypocrisy-a return to traditional values.

While the Israeli state’s slaughter of Palestinians is possibly the greatest self-inflicted reputational damage done to a nation in modern times, despite its own experience of genocidal harm, its double standards rival one of the greatest hypocrisies of war in the Iranian theocratic dictatorships’ condemning of the death of civilians as a war crime and a breach of the rules!

Not because the death of civilians or anyone else for that matter in war is not abhorrent, but that if no one had ever coined the term ‘war crime’ before, the Iranian regime has given them plenty of reason and opportunities to invent the phrase in its near 50-year existence.  Now seen as ‘the good guys’ by the liberal partisans of ‘some(any?) wars before the class war’, those, who would be first up against the wall in the fundamentalist dictatorship, choose to ignore its generational atrocities.

Perhaps less well known than its bulldozing of walls onto homosexuals, its stoning of women for religious infringement and running of mass torture centres, is its mass murder of long-held political detainees.  In 1988, in more than 30 cities across the country, 30,000 political prisoners, many of whom had been in custody for years were taken out and murdered by the Islamic regime, the Godly guardians of Islamic fanaticism.

Despite this, the Trotskyists and the Stalinists – 2 cheeks of the same arse – make companionable bed fellows as they call for the ‘left’ to support Iran and defeat for Israel and USA.  This position dubbed, “revolutionary defencism’, is the left-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus’s obligatory anti-working-class side-taking with the bourgeoisie.  They offer us nothing other than an alternative imperialist camp to die for.

While such crises feel shockingly new on our own front doorstep, we’d do well to remember that patriotic calls to commemorate the last great imperialist slaughter of 70 million souls, the older generation still with us remembers well and we should heed their warnings.  As a recent veteran of the Burma campaign commented:

“I’m not here celebrating, I’m remembering.  The biggest crime is war itself.  If there was no war, there would be no more war crimes.”

When we, along with others, say, No War but the Class War, it is a plea for survival.  Everywhere, the tsunami of global conflict is rising inexorably towards the last great imperialist global configuration that will wipe us out as a species.  Classes for businesses on how to survive or plans to resurrect dad’s army and leaflet every home are mocking the graves they are digging for us.

Only the class of producers who make all wealth, the working class, which has no common interest with those who steal the wealth that we produce can either ultimately prevent this war or perish with it.  War or Revolution!  When we say, No War but the Class War, it is a call to arms for the liberation of ourselves, the producers, the vast majority, against the existential crimes of capital and the ruling class, that tiny parasitical minority.

Article by Dreyfus

How many more corpses do you need to understand what’s going on?

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An article by Lukas Borl – https://lukasborl.noblogs.org

The Russian and Ukrainian state sends people to war to defend the rule of the Russian and Ukrainian bourgeoisie. The Israeli state and Hamas do the same for their own local bourgeoisie. People are dying by the thousands under the flags of “their” states and nationalist movements. They murder each other for the sake of “their own” rulers, for the business of “their own” bosses, for the property and power of “their own” bourgeoisie. “We are defending the survival of our own nation”, these people shout, while running towards their own destruction on the field of war. “We are fighting for the right to national self-determination” they chant in chorus, while overlooking that everywhere in the world it is the bourgeoisie that dictates the conditions of our lives. There is no self-determination anywhere. The bourgeoisie in Ukraine determines (i.e. imposes and dictates) the conditions of the local proletariat, the bourgeoisie in Russia does the same to the local proletariat. The various bourgeois factions around the world are uniting in transnational alliances to compete with their rivals. How can anyone believe the delusion that by waging war for one of these factions the working class can gain the possibility of self-determination? So, if the proletariat in the Ukraine, Gaza or Israel sacrifices enough lives on the front, the bourgeoisie will give it as a gift the voluntary surrender of its own power and will no longer exploit the proletarian masses?

War between states will never bring us the opportunity to determine the free conditions of our lives. Even if the “smaller and weaker” or “invaded” state wins the war with the help of the allies, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie will be preserved. Being exploited by the local bourgeoisie and oppressed by the local state is no victory. It’s not something we should sacrifice our lives for. Yet some are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives for the illusion that the victory of one state is important for the future liberation from all states. It’s one of the many oxymorons of these people. In the name of fighting against states, they urge us to defend a particular state and its nationalist/democratic ideology. In the name of fighting against war, they tell us that we must engage in war. How many more people have to die on the front for these oxymoron lovers to realise that war between states cannot bring peace, that against tyranny of states cannot be fought by collaboration with states, that capitalist exploitation cannot be fought by working class alliances with capitalists?

Warmongers on both sides of the war line use economic, violent and ideological pressure to mobilize people for war. If we proclaim the struggle against all factions of the bourgeoisie, including the struggle against the bourgeoisie of the “invaded” states, they accuse us of aiding the more aggressive, dictatorial, imperialist states, as if it were not perhaps obvious that we are also waging the struggle against them at the same time. They believe that collusion with this or that local bourgeoisie and state is a question of survival. They do not take into account that the same bourgeoisie they defend does everything to avoid being conscripted to the front itself, while the state authorities forcibly dress the proletarians in uniforms and drive them to their deaths in the front struggle. They sees that, the “friendly” bourgeoisie, uses the state to close the borders to men who want to travel to safety. They fail to see that the bourgeoisie is not concerned with saving the lives of the entire bombed population, but with forcing the proletarian part of the population to shed blood to save their own power, property and sphere of economic influence. When it comes to saving lives in a war zone, the proletarians certainly have to look for other options than enlisting in the army.

Whether the warmongers are capitalists, nationalists or the left of capital, they are all terrified by the idea that the enemy state will win the war, but they are not at all terrified by the corpses of proletarians that war always “produces” on both sides. No matter what banner they stand under, no matter what ideological label they put on themselves, we must repudiate all warmongers. When the question is put to us as to which side we take in the war, we clearly answer that we take the side of the proletariat in Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Israel and all over the world. We do not choose the side of this or that state in the war, but the side that organises against states. We do not stand aside while war massacres our class brothers and sisters. We stand on the side of those who rebel against the war and resist all efforts to drag us into the war. The only way to stop wars is to undermine the ability of all states to continue to wage war.

The aim of ‘revolutionary defeatists’ today is not that one side should win and the other lose but to draw a clear line between the capitalist perspective which entails ever more war and misery, and the proletarian revolutionary perspective, which entails humankind’s liberation. There is no compromise between them possible.

Internationalist perspective

https://lukasborl.noblogs.org/how-many-more-corpses-do-you-need-to-understand-whats-going-on/#more-1958

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

The Coming War We Must Resist

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“My fellow Americans, I…will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” – President Ronald Reagan 1984.

A 20 year truce until war breaks out, suggests a senior NATO commander.  As General Foch described the end of the First World War in 1919, “This is not peace…. It is an armistice for 20 years.”  World War Two in Europe began in 1939.

The worst global crisis since the Second World War, as Gaza witnesses more deaths than in the London Blitz.  The UN is considering legal action on ‘Genocide’, the concept itself defined by the annihilation events of that last great international conflagration.

This is not history on the edge of repeating itself, nor the consequences of a lesson unlearned.  The current crisis is a continuation of the drive inherent in Capitalism for domination of our Class through control of global markets for profit.  This rivalry and the destruction it demands, once again puts us on the brink of extinction.

These are not paranoid conspiracy theories, but the words of our rulers and their military class themselves.

UK Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps said on 15th January that we are “moving from a post-war to pre-war world…. The enemies are gathering all around us, we need to make sure we lead our allies in the conflicts to come.”

Two days later, Admiral Bauer, of the Royal Netherlands Navy, said that preparation “starts there. The realisation that not everything is plannable and not everything is going to be hunky dory in the next 20 years.”

Within a week, General Sir Patrick Sanders, the outgoing UK Chief of the General Staff chipped in that ordinary citizens should be “trained and equipped” to fight in the military in the event of a war with Russia.

Shapps’s ex-army predecessor, Tobias Ellwood, said the military chief should be “listened to carefully….  What’s coming over the horizon should shock us. It should worry us and we are not prepared.”

It took a few days for coverage of this to emerge in the popular press, and politics and military might not yet be exactly on the same page.  Though let’s not delude ourselves, the preparation for global war has begun. Not just by parts of the globe lighting up with bombs from one side or the other, but in the propaganda, softening us up for more sacrifice beyond austerity, militarisation and even conscription.

Since these comments we have seen the dial, already high, turned up dramatically with speculation, as we have suggested before, that an attack on Iran itself from the US (or franchised out to Israel?) is now in open debate.

While any revolutionary class based opposition to these drives to war may seem a long way off, the steps towards that war are now seemingly uncomfortably close.

There’s been no shortage of wars since 1945, and no shortage of bodies.  Conservative estimates are around 90 million dead from 1945 to the present day.  As many as died in both world wars put together.  Yet we are led to imagine that this has been an era of relative peace.

This alleged bloody peace has been a prolonged and inevitable preparation for the next round of global imperialist conflict. The Eurasian frontier from the Indian Ocean to the arctic sea is aflame or bristling in preparation.

Whilst we are being encouraged in the West to see ‘our side’ as the benign party in the coming conflict, we should recall that it is precisely ‘our side’ that is the major obstacle in calls for an end to the bloodbath in Gaza.  This while US arms sales abroad reached a record of a quarter of a trillion dollars last year.

As for Yemen, they would hard pressed to spot the difference between the bombs and missiles being dropped by the British and Americans from the British and American missiles dropped on them by the Saudi led coalition over the last 9 years.

For most of us, the daily alienation of poverty and wage labour, the struggle to survive with dignity in a hostile sea of austerity and assault has inoculated us against the memory of war and its emerging threat.

For those who don’t remember the Second World War, (spoiler alert) Hitler dies… and with him it was hoped the atrocities of Nazism moved from the naive plain of beyond imagination to the impossible.

In recent years however, fascism has moved from an historic aberration via the theoretically possible to the conceptually plausible.  In reality, in some countries, fascist parties already have come to power, however they are practically choosing to understate themselves for the sake of acceptability at the moment.  Nationalism, Nazism and the Alt-Right are making themselves and their quest for conflict known all over Europe and America.

From Italy to Hungary, to key opposition groups in Spain, France, and Germany, fascism in reality never lost its potential.  It’s just a clever word for capitalism and its state operative, believing that they have the whip hand and can abandon the pretence of tolerance and democracy.

It requires a mixture of populism, a desperate ruling class retreating to narrow national chauvinism, unchallenged by a weakened working class.  Our class so conspicuously on the back foot since the banking collapse of 2008 failed to resist when capitalism called for us to rally behind austerity – that is to say the increasing repression and impoverishment of us as workers – in the ‘national interest’.

Austerity, in so many ways driven by war and global rivalry, not to mention climate change causing mass migration, is being weaponised into a call for sacrifice for the sake of preserving the nation state and capitalism.

In the face of this, the bosses have become emboldened as we have been weakened.   “..(Our) class is divided because it is weak, not weak because it is divided”. – Anton Pannekoek

Us versus them, ‘our’ state versus its external threat is a key ideological weapon aimed against the unity of our class.

We can see this in the barbarity and deafness of the state of Israel; Hamas’s intransigence, Putin’s relentless sense of impunity and in the threat of a second Trump presidency, despite his populist coup attempt.

In the face of this threat of war and calls for conscription, our unity now is more important than ever.  The last 2 years of workplace and industrial struggles have again shone a light on those on the political left, the Labour Party and the organised labour movement, who would seek to weaken and divide us further.  Warmongers all for one side or the other – watch Labour’s promises on defence and security as the election approaches!

Enough of disunity and defeat!  The generation that could witness our extinction is already here and the fight against the coming war is our most urgent task.  Damn their oppressive and hopeless ‘social peace’ and their drive to war!  Against their clamour and calls for national unity! 

We must prepare to fight and unify on every front of the class struggle.  Our very survival depends on it!

No war between peoples – no peace between classes!  No War but the Class War!

Article by Dreyfus

ACTION WEEK / PRAGUE / 20 – 26 MAY 2024

anarcomnet

From 20 to 26 May 2024, Prague will host the Action Week, whose motto is:

“Together against capitalist wars and capitalist peace.”

Each weekday during this week will see a different event. There will be presentations, discussions, fundraisers, protests and various types of direct action. Then the end of the week will be devoted to a bookfair and an internationalist conference, where we will try to shift from theoretical matters towards the coordination of concrete anti-war activities.

The overarching theme of the days of action was not chosen at random. It is a topic of global importance. The inter-state wars that have escalated in the last few years are bringing humanity closer to the possibility of another world war breaking out. Millions of people are already being sacrificed in wars and the situation will get worse if there is no adequate response. Therefore, in the spirit of proletarian internationalism and revolutionary defeatism, we seek to give individuals and groups from different parts of the world the opportunity to meet, to associate and to coordinate their joint efforts.

The bourgeoisie and its allies talk about war so that they can turn us into cannon fodder or into those whose life energy keep the wheels of war production spinning.

For our part, let’s talk about how to sabotage the war, how to prevent the proletarians from being sent to the slaughter, how to block the supply and transport of weapons, how to organize desertions, mutinies and fraternization among the proletarians in uniform on both sides of the front line, how to turn our guns against the organizers of the massacre, i.e. against “our own” bourgeoisie and its lackeys…

Let’s talk about how to turn the imperialist war into a revolutionary war for the abolition of the class society of capital based on misery.

Our only answer to the capitalist war is revolutionary defeatism, that we organize ourselves and work for the overthrow of “our own bourgeoisie” and therefore of the world bourgeoisie and capital as a whole.

Let’s discuss and share this call, let’s get organized.

THIS CALL IS ADDRESSED TO:
  • To anyone in the world who is struggling against the attacks of capital, against all wars and against all bourgeois states with the aim of destroying capital and all social relations resulting from it, as well as all forms of exploitation.
  • To all those who are aware that there is no such thing as a just war or a defensive war. There is no camp that represents barbarism while the other represents civilization, there is no camp that is more aggressive than the other, and there is no democratic camp against a dictatorial or fascist camp. All wars are capitalist wars, where different bourgeois factions are pitted against each other. Every war is a war of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat!
  • To those who do not support either faction of the bourgeoisie against the other, but fight against each of them. Those who do not defend or participate in inter-class fronts.
  • To those individuals, and groups, who fight against the policy of “defense of the national economy”, and “sacrifice in favor of the war economy”, to those who do not accept the expansionist tactics of their own bourgeoisie, even if it faces an economic, political or military attack.
  • To all those who do not consider themselves pacifists but revolutionaries. To all those who do not aspire to a bourgeois peace where the exploitation of our labor force can continue in slightly different conditions.
  • To all those who want to turn the inter-bourgeois war into a revolutionary war, the war between states into a struggle for the destruction of all states.
  • To all those who recognize in their practice that the proletariat has no fatherland to defend. Our enemy is not the proletarians driven into the trenches on the other side of the front, but the bourgeoisie – in practice, above all, the bourgeoisie “in our own country”, “our own” bourgeoisie, the one that directly organizes our exploitation.
  • And finally, to those who, according to their strength and situation, fight against the bourgeoisie by promoting the development of the proletariat as a revolutionary class and contributing to the building and development of proletarian internationalism.
THE FOLLOWING GROUPS AND PROJECTS WILL BE INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE ACTION WEEK:

https://actionweek.noblogs.org/post/2023/12/29/action-week-prague-20-26-may-2024/