Over the last few months, various revolutionary internationalist anarchist organisations put their names to the following statement. Though itself ready for an update it was the precursor to establishing a new network of anarchist internationalists to achieve the following:
Collective solidarity, practical on the ground and in revolutionary principle; To be a hub for the exchange and presentation of information and propaganda; To distinguish ourselves from those oppositionist groups that use the name anarchism but no longer defend Revolutionary internationalism and, to provide a coherent reference point in the libertarian tradition as other international initiatives take place around the imperative of ‘no war but the class war.’
The supporting signatories are appended below and more invites will go out to others who hold to revolutionary internationalist opposition to all wars as subsequent meetings to develop the network progress.
“The Network of Anarchist Internationalists is: For revolutionary defeatism in every waring state!
Will: Support war resisters, draft dodgers, deserters, and conscientious objectors!
Calls for: A major libertarian internationalist initiative to counter militaristic propaganda!
Nuclear catastrophe approaches! The ruling classes ‘East’ and ‘West’ are charlatans whose lust for power and profit is increasingly based on the war industry.
The self-styled West is articulating scenarios of a new world war. For them, the ‘free world’ is fighting an existential battle against ‘autocracies’ increasingly identified with orientalist stereotypes threatening to destroy our alleged ‘civilisation’.
Nations in this ‘democratic’ camp such as Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, are lauded as fighting the same global battle of the ‘good guys’ against the ‘evil’. This logic even enlists Syria’s islamists on the side of the ‘good guys’.
On the other side, Russia, China and Iran, totalitarian states ruled by secret police, party enforcers and clerics. Each violently suppresses our class’s struggle against austerity and the march to war.
For a libertarian internationalist initiative against the militaristic propaganda disseminated daily, which presents our supposedly “good” armed states as if they were a humanitarian enterprise!
We need to offer practical and moral support to war resisters, draft dodgers, deserters and groups taking internationalist positions, especially in the war zones.
Supporting refusal, conscience, desertion and draft evasion on all sides of the war fronts, for revolutionary defeatism, is fundamental. Russia and Ukraine themselves recognise desertion as a major obstacle to their death programmes.
This support within the framework of our internationalism, promotes initiatives to challenge nationalism and borders, territorial sovereignty, the nation-state or it’s proto-state rivals, building new mechanisms of international solidarity and siblinghood.
The front lines are closer than you think, no further than the nearest arms or components factory, than the nearest logistics depot, transport hub or communications centre.
The war is where the ports and airports are, the military bases and their reserve barracks. It’s the rail networks and motorways, the towns, estates, cities and factories where we as workers’ pay the price of war in poverty from worsening austerity. And now the threat of conscription.
We cannot move without being at war and when we notice it, the rhetorical guns blaze “disrupter, extremist, traitor!” We must be all these things. It’s time to distinguish our movement clearly from those who support “some wars before the class war”.
We are clear that revolutionaries not only oppose their wars but call for the transformation of war resistance into a social revolution! We do not call for a return to the situation before the war, their “capitalist peace”, which is just their repression of us in preparation for their next bloody enterprise.
What can we do practically, individually and collectively, home and abroad? On the most basic level, thinking globally, acting locally. Refuse their consensus and call out the hypocrisy, advocating for ourselves and our class across frontiers. Collectively, reject their ‘national interest’.
Link our struggles to austerity and their war profiteering. Everything we do for ourselves, and our class hinders their ‘warfare-state’. Join in solidarity across locality and trade – victory on the home front is a victory and example abroad.
From the Arctic rivers to the Red Sea, from Taiwan to the Congo basin, continental frontiers are aflame or bristling in preparation. The changing faces of the superpower masquerades change nothing. They want us to fight – one capitalism, one war! The danger is real, the danger is now!
Although part of a long wave of mass urban mobilizations spanning years, the wild series of uprisings in Indonesia today began on the 25th of August, when students and workers led demonstrations against proposed additional housing allowances for parliament members, raising their salaries 10 times higher than the national minimum wage of the Indonesian working class. Parliamentary allowances are only the latest in Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s ferocious attacks on the working class, aided by creeping militarization and guided by the diktat of neoliberal austerity: cutting spending worth trillions of rupiah on education, welfare, and public health. Since Thursday of August 28th, with the murder of Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old rideshare motorbike driver—run over by an armored military vehicle commandeered by Jakarta police to crush the uprising—we have only seen the acceleration of spreading protests throughout the islands, and the escalation of violence and anger amid the protesters, with a number of politicians’ assets looted and burned to the ground—including, according to Perhimpunan Merdeka (Freedom Association), about half-a-dozen regional offices of the House of Representatives.
On the ground, several of the groups and individuals involved have been among the anarchists and communists, insurrectionaries notwithstanding, organized and otherwise. Demands have been made by various groups, featuring in particular two: Perhimpunan Merderka’s (PM; Freedom Association) demand to abolish the unitary government in favor of direct democracy through “People’s Councils”, and Perhimpunan Sosialis Revolusioner’s (PSR; Revolutionary Socialist Association) call for the workers to take the fight to the factories and workplaces to form and coordinate strike committees and worker’s councils.
In light of recent reports of discouragement, deescalation, and a generalizing urge to retreat, Marxist Forum calls on our anarchist and communist Indonesian comrades to push for a maximalist program within the assemblies and coordinating councils. This entails the organization of self-defense militias—for every worker, a rifle; rearrangement of production away from the capitalists and towards social appropriation, sustaining the rebellions and keeping the workers from going back to work; coordinating with workers of key industries to halt production and operations such as in ports and airfreight, shutting down the national economy; seizing the telecommunication and data centers to facilitate continuous in-flow of information within and with-out of the country, and;
Above all, to RESIST ANY AND ALL ATTEMPTS AT NEGOTIATION. Hijack the union leaderships, expel the middlemen and negotiators of labor, stand against the peace-makers who wish to restore the reproduction of the status quo, resist by any means necessary the cooptation of the rebellions for vested political interests by groups who wish to delimit the Indonesian proletariat’s class anger and make a turn towards liberal pacifism and passivity. The responsibility of the most conscious and organized elements of the rebellions, without taking ownership of the movement and fighting the tendency to lag behind the proletariat in rebellion, is to push the class to advance wherever it lags. The anarchists and communists should not be afraid to go past the proletariat, wherever it is reluctant to advance, and make the class conscious of where it is going and what needs to be done to get there!
The class, while still acting as a class, is now in the political arena. To generalize the rebellions into a full insurrection, it is ever-necessary to imbue the sites of struggle with a clear communising direction and go past the economic and political, to directly and immediately appropriate the social. Comrades, the Indonesian proletariat is on the brink of something potentially bigger than all of us. To take the next step, the class must be compelled to intervene into history directly and begin the conscious communisation of Indonesian society.
BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY; THERE CAN BE NO COMPROMISE.
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.
We reproduce the article from Tridni Valka from their blogCLASS WAR see link at the end
We publish here a text from the German-speaking group AST (Anti-political Social-revolutionary Tendency) that we translated into English and French. Our overall assessment is that we appreciate the militant efforts of these comrades, especially when it comes to revolutionary defeatist action, i.e. the struggle against capitalist war and peace.
There are, however, unresolved points of disagreement in their contributions, particularly on the all-too-famous “question of the party” and its corollary “the transition period”, the question of the State in general and the capitalist State in particular, and not to mention the tricky issue of the very essence of democracy. For communists, the latter can only be grasped as the negation in action of class antagonism (and its revolutionary overcoming) as well as their merging into a national (re)conciliatory entity called “the people” – whether “sovereign” and voting, or under the yoke of a “dictator” or a one-party system, is of little importance. It’s clear that the dividing line is not between “democracy” and “dictatorship”, but between revolution and counter-revolution, between the abolition of capitalist social relations and their consolidation, even if it means painting them red, or even red and black. Fascist or anti-fascist, democracy is always the dictatorship of capital.
In the present text, the AST comrades elaborate in abundance their critique of “the party”, which they too quickly equate with the Leninist party, the Bolshevik party… When criticizing what they call “Party Marxism” (Parteimarxismus), what we see as to be particularly targeted are in fact “the builders of parties and internationals”, the “bearers of consciousness for the class”, this “socialist consciousness [that] is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously” (Kautsky quoted by Lenin in “What is to be done?”).
But more generally, and beyond the terms and expressions used, we can see here a first disagreement with the comrades of AST about the organization of the struggle of the proletariat, which emerges spontaneously from the fertile soil of capitalist social relations, which necessarily asserts itself as a force, as a full energy, and which must bring down any materialization of the social dictatorship of the value, commodity, money, i.e. of Capital and its State. This social force, this destructive energy of “the existing” which destroys our humanity, it’s the proletariat which gets organized as a class (against all classes and for their definitive abolition!), which gets organized as a party (against all parties and for their as well definitive abolition!), which gets organized as a party that is not a party “in the traditional sense of the term” (as the comrades of the KAPD already affirmed over a century ago), but that is in practice an anti-class, an anti-party!!!!
The proletarian revolution has nothing in common with the political “revolutions” of the bourgeoisie. So, the organization of the proletariat as a party has nothing in common with bourgeois political parties and especially not with the Leninist conception of the party. What we refer to is the distinction between the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of Anarchy, of socialism, of communism. (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)
The proletariat organized as a party does not aspire to democratically conquer power but, on the contrary, arises from the imperious necessity to liquidate this power, this democracy and everything which separates the proletariat from its humanity, from its Gemeinwesen.
There was a time, in the 19th century and even at the beginning of the 20th, when the formula of the proletariat organizing itself as a class, and therefore as a party, was very well assimilated into the international discussion. It wasn’t a problem for any sincere militant of our class, even among those who claimed the Black Flag of Anarchy. Among the most militant of them, Malatesta, for example, openly referred to the “anarchist party”: “By anarchist party we mean the ensemble of those who are out to help make anarchy a reality and who therefore need to set themselves a target to achieve and a path to follow”. Or in another way thirty years later he was persisting and signing: “We anarchists can all say that we are of the same party, if by the word ‘party’ we mean all who are on the same side, that is, who share the same general aspirations and who, in one way or another, struggle for the same ends against common adversaries and enemies.”
Class and party are not two different historic entities which should be separately defined only to form a relationship later. On the contrary, they are the distinct expressions of one and the same historic being: Communism. The party is the communist movement constituted as an international force, the organization of the revolutionary class which will bring about communism, arising spontaneously and developing on the basis of a community of interests and perspectives, a real community of proletarian struggle.
This tendency towards the worldwide organization of the proletariat, towards its programmatical affirmation and its organic centralization confronts all the forces and ideologies of the counter-revolution.
Or in other words, we are partisans of the revolutionary self-organization of the proletariat, that is, of the “historical party” of the world communist revolution, which springs up spontaneously from the soil of bourgeois society and has nothing to do with self-proclaimed vanguardism. The self-organization of the proletariat, class independence, and direct action are inseparable and mean struggling without intermediaries or representatives; that is, struggling outside and against unions, parties, elections, parliaments, bourgeois legality, etc.
Considering that, when the proletariat rises up and shakes the capitalist order, the right and left wings of Capital unite into one single party against it, that is, “the party of democracy”; in return, the “historical party” of the revolutionary proletariat is a party against democracy, that is, against the social dictatorship of Capital and its State over the proletariat.
The “historical party” is not a formal party in the “traditional” sense, or a State like the Leninist parties wrongly called “communist”. But it is a party of action which, although it needs to structure itself in order to organize revolutionary tasks, goes far beyond formal aspects. It is the proletariat itself that organically organizes and acts as a revolutionary class. It is the real movement that terminates and overcomes the present state of things. It is the party of communism and anarchy against the party of democracy. It is the revolutionary self-organization of the proletariat in action.
A second disagreement also appears clearly in the point 2 “For the revolutionary destruction of all States”. The proletariat in struggle confronts all the organized forms of the capitalist State, which imposes and realizes the social dictatorship of the value valorizing itself through wage labor, exchange, world market, money… But against this reality, our class must organize, structure and impose its world dictatorship of human needs against Capital and revolutionary terror against bourgeois forces, and this process will not be achieved by simply erasing words and expressions that might seem awkward. This is somewhat clumsily expressed in the AST text: “In the world revolution there will therefore be classless and stateless communities as well as capitalist States”. But they fail to see how they confront each other in a life-and-death struggle…
The proletarian dictatorship means abolishment of existing social relations: abolition of wage labor, abolition of useless professions and productions, elimination of exchange relations from all aspects of our lives, abolition of economy and production for profit and subordination of all productive forces to human needs and needs of the world revolution, disappearance of the difference between work and leisure, city and countryside and all other separations, violent destruction of the State and its replacing with organs of proletarian revolutionary self-organization, all of that which the triumph of the revolution turns into a global human community. Through this historical revolutionary process, the proletariat (as last existing class) abolishes itself and thus the whole class society and fully develops worldwide human community.
The dictatorship of the proletariat thus means the violent abolition of wage labor, abolition of the capitalist mode of production and all the social relations it reproduces. It is necessarily violent, repressive and despotic as well as subversive process that uproots the very social fabric of capitalist reality. It directly and immediately imposes the satisfaction of our human needs, which we are dispossessed from under capitalism by our very role as a class, whose labor power is exploited and whose products of labor are alienated from us.
There will be a violent insurrection against the State, in which the proletariat will seize the means of production and the infrastructures of communication and distribution, and violently attack and overthrow the centers of State power. Then the proletariat will expropriate factories and land to produce for the direct satisfaction of its needs, rather than for the profit of capitalists. Proletarians in uniform will turn their weapons against their own generals, stop fighting the capitalists’ wars, loot weapons depots and share them with the rest of the proletariat, and together, they will release prisoners and storm the centers of power. The capitalist State will be attacked from all sides and actively repressed and subverted by our class violence. Not only the government and the forces of repression, but also the State as a totality, as a system of capitalist social relations – i.e. trade unions, citizenship, faith, family, education, etc. – will be absorbed into the maelstrom of the revolutionary abolition of the existing. This process, which we call the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the transition period between capitalism and fully-achieved communism, is by no means embodied in “apparatuses of violence separate from the society”, as the AST text assumes, but rather as a dialectical unity between the struggling proletarian class and its most far-sighted leading elements, whose motricity, if not a guarantee of the revolution’s success, at least pushes it to its ultimate consequences.
Let’s be clear, this can only be achieved by extending the revolution worldwide, and all human activity must be subordinated to this goal. There’s no such thing as “socialism in one country” (or group of countries), as the Bolsheviks/Leninists of all kinds claim (including even the libertarians who drool with admiration over the “Rojava Revolution”, the Zapatista “Free Communes” or “Free Palestine”, ad nauseam) – on the contrary, it’s an absolutely counter-revolutionary position! The concept of “socialism in one country” was nothing but a tool to enable and justify the strengthening of capital’s dictatorship over the proletariat in Russia at the hands of the Bolshevik party and its policies.
In order to realize the organized activity of the society up to the achievement of communism, the proletarian revolution must violently destroy all the institutions and apparatuses of the counter-revolution which seek to maintain the dictatorship of value against human needs. We must insist on this point – it means the active suppression of wage labor, of exchange (trade), of any form of regional or local autonomy that could become the basis of future nationalist reaction, of freedom of expression and association for counter-revolutionary forces…
But to come back to the AST’s text, may the few and other points of disagreement we emphasized not spoil the pleasure of sharing internationally and submitting for collective criticism this contribution by comrades who, with strengths and weaknesses (as any revolutionary internationalist militant structure developing under the black sun of capital), are trying to outline and affirm the program of communism and the direct action of the proletariat in struggle. And in this sense, the development/consolidation of our world proletarian community of struggle, to which the present text contributes, beyond the division into ideological families, seems to us more than necessary, and indeed inescapable!
After 25 years in prison, PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan decides to bring down the curtain and dissolve his party. The party was founded in 1984 on the basis of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, but after its leader read Murray Bookchin in prison, it declared itself a “democratic confederalist” party, offering a very peculiar reinterpretation of Bookchin’s ideas as a mixture of Leninism and social democracy with feminist and ecological discourse, all against the backdrop of the cult of personality of the leader.
The PKK actually ran in Turkey’s parliamentary elections a few years ago and won several seats, but because it did not lay down its arms, Erdogan’s government classified it as a “terrorist organization” and it became illegal again.
At the same time, several political shifts have emerged in recent years that could affect the legal status of Ocalan (sentenced to life imprisonment). In October 2024, Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party and a key ally of President Erdoğan, suggested that Öcalan’s sentence could be reviewed if the PKK laid down its arms. Later in February 2025, Ocalan called on the PKK to dissolve itself and give up the armed struggle, prompting the group to declare a ceasefire and announce its future dissolution, which finally happened a few days ago.
According to its recent 12th Congress, the PKK has “destroyed the policy of denial and destruction imposed” on Turkey’s Kurdish population and “brought the Kurdish question to a point where it can be resolved through democratic politics, thus fulfilling its historical mission.” Without a doubt, the only thing that can resolve this is for the former PKK leaders to enter the Turkish parliament, as they have always planned, as part of new political parties free from the historical burden of the PKK. Despite his more or less straightforward statements, Ocalan eventually conceded defeat and is positioning himself as a future social democratic leader after his apparently negotiated release. We will soon see him at the head of a new party. Who knows whether he will again stick to his particular interpretation of Bookchin’s ideas, hoping they will bear fruit, or perhaps take a more traditional position, this time closer to European social democracy.
Despite the disastrous and bitter historical experience of anarchism mixing with movements, trade unions and political parties that put “national liberation” above social revolution, today, in the twenty-first century, many anarchists join such movements, which inevitably end up betrayed in some parliament, begging for a place in power. A position, this time closer to European social democracy.
Let’s not let ourselves be distracted any further. A true anarchist movement is one that openly advocates social revolution above all else, including the “liberation” of any “people” or “nation,” simply because any “national liberation” (even if cloaked in feminist or environmentalist garb) is nothing more than a deception whose goal is to replace one government with another, one oppressor and exploiter with another, deceiving us with promises of “becoming one of us.” Only a social revolution that destroys the government and establishes anarchist communism from the bottom up, organized in free communes, can achieve the liberation of the peoples. And no political party will ever achieve that, even if it calls itself “democratic confederalist.”
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.
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!
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:
AnarCom Network 