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.
‘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!
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.
We, the anarchist front of Iran and Afghanistan, reaffirm our unshakable and principled position:
Every war – on every scale and on every excuse – initiated or sustained by states, must be unequivocally condemned.
Countries, regardless of their shape or appearance, use war as a tool for survival and control. And in this process, the lives, dignity and future of ordinary people are trampled under their feet.
At a time when the world is once again plagued by violence, bombs, death, displacement, and insecurity, we insist on this ongoing truth: the real victims of war are always the people—not the countries, not ideologies, not borders.
Our fight, as always, is not for the redistribution of power among the elites, but against the institution of the state itself and all forms of organized control.
We stand in solidarity – carefully and decisively – alongside the people of Iran, Afghanistan and the wider region.
What we are witnessing today is, on the one hand, the blatant crimes of the Israeli regime, targeting civilians in Gaza and elsewhere with wild cruelty. On the other hand, we see the Islamic Republic of Iran manipulating public fear, playing geopolitical games at the cost of the lives of Iranians, and imposing the burden of war on society.
We see the Islamic Republic not only as the outbreak of a regional war, but as part of a global chain of control and oppression – a regime that has for decades been attacking the Iranian people with censorship, poverty, imprisonment, torture and execution, and recklessly endangering millions through military provocations.
While we condemn the atrocities of the Zionist regime in the harshest terms, we also state that the struggle against the Islamic Republic is part of our broader struggle against all states and structures of control – a struggle that will continue.
We fight for a world without borders, without countries, without armies or authorities – a world in which humanity, life and freedom are at the center. Our main war has always been the war against political authority, totalitarianism and the state itself.
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.”
It is already officially recognized that after the law on partial decriminalization of unauthorized leaving a military unit (SZCh in Ukrainian) and desertion came into force, desertions from the army of Ukraine have increased significantly. “I spoke with our elite units, both with the Airborne Assault Forces and with the Marines: the number of SZCh increased by 60%,” said Roman Kostenko, secretary of the parliamentary defense committee, at the end of January. Seeing that the ground is slipping from under its feet, the Ukrainian state is trying to take punitive measures.
We recently wrote about the post of war correspondent Yury Butusov on December 31 which received a wide resonance in Ukraine. In the post, Butusov described how 1,700 people fled from the 155th Mechanized Brigade “Anna of Kyiv” before the first shot was fired. By the time it was sent to France, there were already 935 fugitives. In France itself, more than 50 fled. Less well known is that on January 8, the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) detained a senior lieutenant from this brigade, who himself went into SZCh and incited his fighters to do the same. He was taken from the Rivne region to Kiev and sent to custody without bail. Then, the former brigade commander, Colonel Dmytro Ryumshin, was detained with the possibility of bail for 90 million hryvnya ($2,161 million, a very large sum of money in Ukraine). According to the SBI, there may have been a scheme operating in the brigade in which those wishing to leave the country were registered for money. “If I’m not mistaken, about 12 draft dodgers were included in the lists for training in France,” said bureau spokesperson Tatyana Sapyan on the air of the telethon.
The magazine Forbes reported on January 27 that the second brigade of the Ukraine’s Armed Forces was in the process of disintegrating within a month during deployment at the Donetsk front. We are talking about the 157th Mechanized Brigade, which consisted of new recruits and was sent to defend Pokrovsk. There are a total of 8 such brigades of the 150th series,“that formed in 2023 or early 2024 and, after a lengthy period of training, began arriving on the front starting late last year. The brigades are big, some with roughly double the usual 2,000 manpower billets of a Ukrainian ground combat brigade. But they’re also fragile—with inexperienced leaders, too few modern armored vehicles and poor morale that often results in a high desertion rate. (…)There were reports of brigade troopers taking one look at their trenches—and promptly abandoning their positions,” the publication noted. According to it, the brigade had not received the necessary combat training and “began falling apart before they even arrived in Pokrovsk.” It was the second such case in a month.
On December 25, in the public Telegram group UFM which provides assistance in leaving Ukraine, a member wrote:
“My wife’s brother escaped from training without a weapon (I won’t say the exact date), three days later the cops were already looking for him at his registered address, and he was on the cops’ criminal wanted list..… So everything is going fast now. It was a week ago. He went to the place of registration to surrender himself, there were familiar cops (he wanted to negotiate), but something went wrong, and as far as I understand, he was again shoved in the training center, but in where he lived. Before that he was caught by TCR [Territorial Center for Recruitment and Social Support] in Kirovograd region. Now he’s in Kharkov, [there is] no contact with him. All this he personally told, as well as the fact that in the training schools of Vinnitsa region they kick people with a buttstock if you f*** off, he lost a few teeth..…”
Despite this intensification of the efforts to persecute deserters, the possibilities of the repressive system are still very limited. A man from Kharkov named Andrey reported on January 12: “As for the search. There is one character who disappeared into the sunset in June. Recently cops checked him for the 4th time when he was coming from work —he was not wanted. So it’s a lucky break. He works as a packer in the workshop. Unofficially, of course. He’s been on a relatively quiet sector, northbound, so it didn’t come to the meat grinder. It’s more likely the liver that needs to be repaired, not the head.” Another resident of Kharkov, who went into SZCh last summer together with his commander and the entire company from the southern front, was mentioned by us last month — he now lives at home and goes to the store, and no one is looking for him. On the morning of January 13, the disappearance of the first company commander with the rank of captain was discovered in the 3rd Mechanized Battalion of the 143rd Mechanized Brigade near Kupyansk. The mobilized officer left his weapon, took his personal belongings and personal car.
There is also new evidence of mass desertions from training camps in the Dnipropetrovsk region, where those mobilized in Kharkov are usually sent. We wrote a little earlier about massive desertions in this area. One woman in Kharkov shared the following information anonymously on January 30: “I talked to a local policeman, he says every day there are about 100 people near Novomoskovsk who go into SZCh. The efficiency of efforts to catch them is so-so. In my opinion, network marketing has better recruitment rates. How many a day they catch out of these 100 he will not, of course, say. He complained that there is a lot of paperwork”.
On the same day, January 30, the above mentioned journalist Yury Butusov posted information, according to which in some radio engineering brigade of the Ukrainian Air Force ten radar station operators had been taken for marine rifle positions. “Each operator has more than two years of experience, but no one asked for their opinion. After receiving the information, three military men made certificates of care and resigned, three went into SCZh”. It is strange that there were only three! On February 2, the Assembly received the following information: “In our military unit, in the summer, you could still officially go abroad on vacation. Then two of us didn’t return and the unit commander forbade us from going abroad on vacation… and I was transferred from the Air Force to the Land Troops at zero [front line], and it took me 7 days to figure everything out. And I went into SZCh. And then a buddy policeman picked me up in his car, he drove from home. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have left there. They would hit the brake at every checkpoint, but the [service] certificate decides. He gave me a ride home. If only it had been to the border… I was going from the Zaporizhzhia region, the checkpoints there are crazy. We had many guys who went into SZCh on their own, then they were caught at the checkpoint and sent them back to the infantry on the move to zero [to the front line].” Since the interlocutor is still in Ukraine, we will not give other details.
Against this background, individual rebellions receive a particularly strong resonance in the media. According to the Rivne Regional TCR, during the check of military registration documents on February 11, unknown persons of mobilization age inflicted bodily harm on their employees and damaged transport. Despite the arrival of the police, the attackers fled and are wanted. The next day, according to the Kharkov Regional TCR, in some district enlistment office of Kharkov their serviceman was sprayed with tear gas and injured with a knife. The suspect was detained by the cops.
Two examples of workplace struggle from women convicted by local courts of Kharkov on November 19 and on February 12. In the first case, some controller of the Kharkov metro automatic checkpoints, according to the investigation, messaged at least 8 times from November 2023 to April 2024 in one of the Telegram chats how the enlistment teams operated at the subway station. The judge found the woman guilty and sentenced her to five years in prison with a three-year probationary period. She was released from custody and her cell phone was confiscated. Another one from February 2022 to August 2024 supposedly stole 10 sets of earrings, 19 rings, three necklaces and two chains from the Quetzal jewelry store. The total amount of material damage caused to the entrepreneur for whom she worked was 2,281,581 hryvnia (about $55 000). “She disposed of the jewelry at her own discretion. In the courtroom, the accused fully admitted her guilt. She noted that she had drawn the appropriate conclusions for herself and that this would not happen again,” the court verdict states. She was sentenced to five years in prison and was taken into custody in the courtroom, she must also pay the store owner 2,281,581 hryvnia in material damages and 56,796 hryvnia in favor of the state for conducting expertises.
The loudest story of this winter occurred in the usually quiet Lubny district of the Poltava region. On January 31, a resident of Poltava, Yevgen Shcherbak, was being transported to a military unit for training, accompanied by servicemen from the district enlistment office. Intend on evading service, he called his relative’s partner, Vadym Kuzub, from Lubny and told them the bus route. During a stop in Pyriatyn, the Lubny resident in a grey balaclava and pixelated pants killed one of the guards with a hunting rifle he had brought with him. Shcherbak and Kuzub disappeared with the dead soldier’s automatic rifle. However, the next day the head of the regional police reported their arrest. The two men were born in 1984 and 1988, respectively. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that the shooter previously served in the territorial defense at road checkpoints.
Piryatin shooter Vadim Kuzub on trial. From the state TV
The murder suspect Vadym Kuzub admitted his guilt at a court hearing on February 3, confirming that he had helped his woman’s relative escape. According to him, he wanted to scare the guards, but he failed, and then he fired his weapon. “The ambulance arrived about 40 minutes later, and he died quickly. I didn’t know that he had died, I thought he was alive. I didn’t want to kill him, I just wanted to take Shcherbak Yevgen.” The shooter’s lawyer, Valery Masyuk, said that his client is actively collaborating with the investigation. Yevgen Shcherbak, who fled from the enlistment agents, is now charged with obstructing the activities of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Both are in custody without the right to bail.
There are not as many stories from the army of the neighboring chamber as there were in our previous piece about this. For example, the Telegram channel “Atesh”, working for Ukrainian intelligence in Crimea, on January 2 gives the following information from its agents: “They report that in the village of Lazurnoye in the Kherson region, Russian occupiers are complaining about a sharp increase in the number of breakdowns of equipment arriving at the repair base. The Russians suspect that the growing number of breakdowns of watercraft (boats and jet skis) is due to deliberate sabotage by the Russian military themselves. Russian military personnel are increasingly choosing sabotage as a way of survival, which disrupts the plans of the Russian military team to use these watercraft to force the Dnieper.” They narrate about how the watercraft are disabled in a post on December 9: “The number of cases of sabotage among Russian military personnel is growing, aimed at avoiding being sent to storm the islands in the Dnieper delta. Soldiers intentionally break engines, puncture rubber boats and even transmit coordinates to the Ukraine’s Defense Forces about the location of boat bases and fuel reserves. It is known that three service investigations related to sabotage have been recorded in the 126th Separate Coastal Defense Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces. For the Russian command, this has become a real problem.” On February 1, another channel of the Ukrainian special services, “I Want to Live”, posted photographs and data of a group of Russian convicts from the 1437th Motorized Rifle Regiment. According to the post, at least 8 stormtroopers went on the run near Pokrovsk. “In short, we have some deserters here. They are hiding behind that they are the 300th [injured], they want to storm something, take a car and come to Selidovo, so the situation is quite serious. Now I will give you their call signs if they introduce themselves (…) These are dangerous people, warn anyone nearby if possible,” says the voice on the audio recording.
Nikita Posmetukhov. From the VK page
On February 10, the Southern Military District Court reported on another incident in the battles for the Dnieper delta in the Kherson region. Corporal Nikita Posmetukhov from the 70th Motorized Rifle Division of the RF sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of four colleagues, including two officers. On the night of November 28, 2023, Posmetukhov was drinking with his fellows, then took an assault rifle and went to the command dugout, the document says. When he knocked on the door, patrolmen called out to him. He started shooting at them and killed a junior sergeant. Then he got into the dugout and shot a lieutenant colonel, captain and private (they were sleeping at that moment). After that, the shooter was detained by two privates. As noted in the document, the attacker got angry at Captain Komarovsky, which was not killed or wounded. He applied disciplinary punishment to Posmetukhov and promised to send him to the assault unit.
Overall, our forecast from last year is being confirmed step by step. The number of Russian assaults and their pace of advancement since the start of 2025 have dropped sharply, the trend seems too long and strong to have been caused only by the weather conditions. It appears that the drop is due to peace talks, during which the Russian authorities hope to achieve a deal with the new administration of US President Donald Trump.
A commentary on graffiti created by an “unknown” artist by Lukáš Borl
I used to think that everything had limits. But when I saw the graffiti in the attached photo, I thought that the political confusion of the artist was absolutely limitless. Incorporating an anarchist symbol into the name of a state, that takes a great deal of deranged. Perhaps the author does not know that anarchy is the negation of all states, i.e. Russia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, France and all other states. Perhaps it is not important for him that anarchists have always been persecuted, criminalized, imprisoned and suppressed by all states – totalitarian and democratic. Perhaps the author thinks that if we put an anarchist symbol in the name of a state, the state will cease to be a state and turn into anarchy. If only it were that easy.
Who knows, maybe next time we’ll see the same anarchist symbol in the words stAte or ČeskÁ RepublikA. These words also include the letter “A“, so the confused graffiti artists have good material for their work.
For those who are not into political confusion, other areas may be more interesting. For example, facts about the nature of the state that bears the name Ukraine.
Ukraine is a state that has closed its borders to a large part of its male population, effectively trapping these people in a war zone.
Ukraine is a state whose army persecutes men of draft age and forcibly forces them to the front, putting them in danger of serious injury or death.
Ukraine is a state whose border guards persecutes, tortures and murders deserters.
Ukraine is a state whose courts prosecute deserters and whose prisons imprison them. At the moment, official statistics speak of more than 200,000 deserters, but there are likely to be others who are not officially registered.
Ukraine is a state whose courts are currently conducting political trials against anti-militarists on charges of “discrediting the armed forces of the Ukrainian state.”
Ukraine is a state that criminalizes certain political entities on charges of “supporting and promoting communist ideology,” which logically could also affect anarchist groups that refer to class struggle and anarchist communism.
Ukraine is a state that applies a discriminatory policy towards the Russian-speaking population.
Ukraine is a state that has incorporated far-right formations such as Azov, the Brotherhood, the Right Sector, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), etc.
Ukraine is a state that provides protection for the bourgeoisie that grossly exploits the working class. Workers in Ukraine normally receive 20 000 hryvnia (= 460 Euros) for a month’s work, while the prices of basic commodities are similar to those in the Czech Republic.
The Ukrainian state suppresses workers’ struggles for better working and living conditions.
Ukraine is a state that is less brutal than neighbouring states such as Russia or Belarus, but nevertheless its basic essence is the defence of the privileges of the capitalist class at the expense of the working class.
Ukraine is a state that oppresses, in particular, that section of the working class that, in terms of the state bureaucracy, falls into the category of ‘Ukrainian citizens’.
Ukraine is a state that preserves all the contradictions of class society and therefore all the misery of proletarian life.
Has everything suddenly changed? How can the pot we were watching so intensely suddenly seem to be boiling? Aren’t such turnarounds, back stabbings, treasons and betrayals usually carried in behind our backs, closed doors or dead of night? Is such change too unbelievable to be true? Yes, of course it is. Everything changes but capitalism!
Imperialism’s ‘great game’ never went away, it briefly froze in the headlights of the Cold War. What has changed is the 80-year consensus since the last great world war (2) on how business is done.
Since the end of the Cold War the pieces on the chess board of the power-bloc competition have moved slowly but inexorably towards this point – where some piece or other has to fall to progress towards the end game.
Republican Elephant goes to town…
Trump is the backlash to 40 years of neoliberal economic experimentation. The acceleration and integration of forces of production and distribution that temporarily masked capitalisms drive to hegemonic monopoly. Far from receding, the danger of war has just increased exponentially.
The previous way of doing things aka a ‘world order’ (sovereignty, alliances, mutual agreement and international standards etc) has paradoxically left the ‘mono-polar’ world’s only truly ‘superpower’ constrained against its best interests – a ruthless unfettered challenge to its only true rival, an ascendent China in the east.
What we are seeing is not about Ukraine, Russia or for that matter, Europe. It is about the pacific frontline between rival organisers of capital. The writing has been on the wall since the post Reagan era when the US abandoned the idea of a military strategy based on a simultaneous conflict on two continental fronts. Slowly but surely the centre of gravity has been shifting.
Every US administration has signaled this for a generation or more. Trump has had both the momentum and audacity to move the dial. His position on Ukraine and Russia is neither appeasement nor surrender, it is a strategic realignment.
While Europe has expected the US to engage in the western hemisphere in time of threat, the US could not count on such reciprocation in the east, even if Europe were able – which it isn’t. And it is increasingly clear that the western focus is not US capital’s prime concern.
Trump could have pulled a blinder. Hiding behind the façade of his own hyperbole he could be on the verge of decoupling Russia from China, silencing the Western Front and force Europe to pay. Sentiment and semantics have no role in this ruthless tour-de-force of realpolitik.
Starmer Chameleon..
To see the cringeworthy homage paid by the Kings socialist emissary Sir Kier at Trumps Republican court was like watching Idi Amin being celebrated as the ‘last king of Scotland’, while the following public castigation of Zelensky added to the theatre with his refusal to sign up to his tormentor’s extortion.
The outcome, however, is possibly cast. This fortuitous yet diversionary chapter from the US point of view, war in Europe, will close with preparation for the conflagration to come with China the next bloody project.
A European volte-face changes little. An armed peace is as austerity driving as war and the threat remains. Besides, the moving of a global battlefront in the era of nuclear warheads and ICBMs is no more significant than a dinosaur ducking to avoid a meteorite.
In My Name..
For our class, everywhere and without frontiers, the challenges and tasks remain the same. Capitalisms existential threat – through war most immediately or climate catastrophe should that fail requires the same unyielding response. Fight it where we find it – on the ‘home front’.
If global power politics feels complex, our daily encounter with its consequences is very familiar! Austerity; cuts to Health and Social Services; food banks, travel costs that keep us geographically confined; poor housing that is killing us; exploitation through rent, low wages, inflation and debt. This is what they call peace!
Fighting this peace is our daily struggle. This Class War, at first for bread and then to live is by its nature a fight against their wars! If we won’t let them kill us at home, we can stop them killing us, or those like us, abroad. Resistance begins at home. It grows with a conversation. It spreads through discussions and shows itself in actions and solidarity.
The drive to war was never more a European affair than the Class Struggle. The opposition to war globally, everywhere is our Class War!
“The war massacre in Ukraine continues, affecting populations on both sides of the war line. While Putin’s army bombs Ukrainian cities, the Ukrainian government has turned them into prisons for a significant portion of the local population. People are being maimed, imprisoned, raped and murdered as a result of the actions of the rulers in the Kremlin and Kiev. Let’s not look away. Let’s support those who are affected.
War and nationalist propaganda are deceiving and manipulating us, while at the same time obscuring important facts. Among other things, for example, the fact that the State borders in Ukraine are closed to men of conscription age. They are guarded by the army, which sends men to prison, shoots them and drowns them in the river when they try to cross the border to safe place. Army gunmen also chase men in the streets to drag them to the front and use them as “cannon fodder”. Yes, this is the same Ukrainian army that is praised by many as if it was a noble form of liberation institution. If we look to Russia, we can see a similarly disturbing reality. For the slightest protest against the war, people end up in prison; forced mobilization has obliged many proletarians to flee or go into hiding. Deserters, saboteurs and conscientious objectors are massacred, judged and imprisoned in Russia, as well as in the Ukraine.
We do not care how the bourgeoisie justifies this aggression against the working class in Russia and Ukraine. It is necessary not only to condemn and criticize it, but also to give practical support to those who are concerned, i.e. deserters, rebels, saboteurs, refugees, those who avoid forced conscription to the front and many others. It is necessary to stand consistently against Putin’s aggressors, as well as against aggressors acting at the instigation of the Ukrainian Government.
What can we do, we who currently live outside the war zone? At the very least, we can share resources with those who desperately need them. The Anti-Militarist Initiative (AMI) is therefore launching a public fundraising campaign starting the 1 February 2025. The money raised will support proletarians from Russia and Ukraine who are trying to avoid mobilization, who have deserted, who face repression or are trying to save their lives by fleeing a war zone.
How to Support the Fundraising?
1) You can deposit money into the account.
Payment details:
“IBAN: CZ1955000000001024164477 Account holder: Historický spolek Zádruha, z.s. Bank: Raiffeisenbank bank code: 5500 Swift code: RZBCCZPP
2) It is also possible to arrange to hand over the money in person in cash.
3) Fundraising gigs, solidarity parties and dinners, etc. are welcome.
4) Sharing information about the fundraiser is an important part of the fundraiser. It can be translated into different languages, and sharing a flyer or poster, publishing the appeal on websites, social networks, magazines etc. is also welcome.
5) We plan to successively publish statements from collectives and individuals who have supported the fundraising. They will explain their motivations and reflections on anti-war resistance. Write your own contribution.
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