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Last Update: 13/01/2024
- Class War’s presentation
- Israel and Anti-Militarism
- On The Eve of Invasion
- Did we forget a war or something?
- International Statement against War and State Violence
- “Neither one State nor two States! No ‘State’ will end the slaughter of our Class!”
- Why is being against war so hard?
Class War’s presentation
We publish here several articles from the AnarCom Network, a network of Revolutionary Anarchist Communists based in Great Britain.
These contributions demonstrate once again that the so-called “anarchist milieu” does not align itself uniformly, and fingers on trouser seams, in defence of one bourgeois camp against another. These contributions clearly affirm the revolutionary militants’ long-standing opposition to all capitalist wars, and their corollary “peace”, whether in “Ukraine” or “Israel/Palestine” or elsewhere. They emphasize our one and only response to wars between capitalist nations and/or entities: the refusal of nationalism, the defence of proletarian internationalism, the development of revolutionary defeatism on both the military and production fronts, support for deserters, mutineers and refuseniks from all sides…
Against the “defensists” who take a stand for one bourgeois camp against another (Ukraine against Russia and vice versa, Palestine against Israel or the contrary, etc.), we are once again highlighting the need for revolutionaries to get organized, to join forces, to meet and clarify, to strengthen our world proletarian community of struggle so that together we can forge a pole of reference in our class struggle to transform capitalist war (and peace) into global social revolution.
Class War
Israel and Anti-Militarism
Source: https://anarcomuk.uk/2024/01/07/israel-and-anti-militarism/
Murderous conflicts occurring through the system of capital and state continue, intensify and now threaten to engulf entire regions. Both the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East drag on into another year and become increasingly barbarous. Starvation, mass killings, ethnic cleansing, kidnappings, humiliation and torture are clearly encouraged by the powers that be. The war in the Middle East, as well as in Eastern Europe, increasingly involves power and imperial blocs taking up their battle positions. This, despite the war focused on Gaza supposedly being “over by Christmas” (how many times have we heard that before?)!
As such, effective resistance often demands great bravery on the part of members of our class, their companions, supporters and friends. In this context, a number of us now know the names, Tal Mitnick and Yuval Dag.
Tal Mitnick is an 18-year-old vocal member of ‘Mesarvot’ (‘We Refuse’), which numbers a few hundred. Tal became the first open objector to serving in the IDF since the start of the current conflict and cited his opposition to the attacks upon the collective population of Gaza as a reason. For Tal considers the attacks, a “murderous revenge”, that does nothing to address the root cause of the conflict.
Meanwhile, Yuval Dag is a 21-year-old who served 64 days in Neve Tzedek military prison in Tel Aviv last Spring. He was supported as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and has if anything, become increasing vocal in his criticism of the situation throughout the Middle East and in Gaza and the West Bank, in particular, since then.
In Israel, military conscription is mandatory and is seen as, “defining you as a somebody in Israeli society”. There is also a saying that, “a nation building an army is a nation building itself”. This lays bare the shared roots of nationalism and militarism, as part of the cancerous ethos of state and capital.
Dissent in Israel does have quite a lengthy tradition. However, outside of the ruling class, nationalist religious zealots, and their supporters (who often get a pass on risking their necks), people there trying to avoid military service lately face massive obstacles and are at the least pressurised to keep quiet – or else! For in the wake of the attacks of 7th October last year, the state in Israel and unfortunately among a substantial part of the wider society, has been engaging in a bitter offensive against any who dare to even think about resisting the cry to take up the fight for nation, religion, and the exploitative and oppressive current system. This reflects a call by the master class that increasingly imperils our class and humanity itself.
It is likely then that for such reasons, reports of actual open opposition to the draft in Israel during the Gaza war have not been noted or publicised until very recently. However, in the last month, pieces on Mitnick, Dag, their friends and supporters have appeared. Of note too, these reports describe their increasingly determined stance, where they have made comments strongly alluding to the importance of internationalism among our class. Mitnick has appeared in embracing both radical anti-authoritarian and anti-militarist perspectives.
The bravery of these people in doing this is laid bare by the fact that Mitnick faces at least 30 days (and likely substantially longer) in jail after being sentenced in late December 2023, and will no doubt be bitterly ostracised when is freed. Meanwhile, Dag, though being imprisoned last year and from a nationalist family, has not kept quiet, and vocally supports Mitnick and fellow conscious workers for their anti-militarism. There are others starting to do the same.
The names of those openly resisting is now increasing. Sofia Orr (18 years old) and Iddo Elam (17 and also from the ‘Mesarvot’ group) have gone public in stating their opposition to being drafted (the former in the face of being ‘called up’ next month). All have described the importance of having a network of friends and supporters around them, now more than ever.
Iddo has stated that “one massacre doesn’t justify another” and then gone on to say that they are now steadfast in their “rejection of the entire current system”. Iddo and Sofia fear both for their friend Tal in prison and of the same fate whilst receiving death threats awaiting themselves. However, being members of a group showing solidarity with each other has galvanised their collective determination.
Their numbers may appear still relatively few as yet, but they could increase notably further as the murderous battles continue, the reality of the current system perhaps becomes transparent to many more and if the internationalist word spreads. Importantly, as noted above, some appear to be starting to embrace a class struggle, emancipatory position, as opposed to a liberal pacifist one. It is greatly encouraging to see that revolutionary No War But the Class War graffiti has now been spotted in the local urban streets around Tel Aviv.
All is vital to stop the nightmare of war, famine, poverty, nationalism, ethnic cleansing, barbarity, torture, the growing threat of theocrats, as well as the daily dose of oppression, alienation and exploitation. The anti-militarist class war is the only war which will unite us as an international working class to prevent a death spiral, to liberate ourselves and to finally live in harmony with this planet. Total respect to those resisting and to those who share the struggle in solidarity!
On The Eve of Invasion
Source: https://anarcomuk.uk/2023/10/23/on-the-eve-of-invasion/
Soldiers! Fighters! Workers all!
Turn the guns they gave you away from each other and on those who command you to kill your fellow workers for THEIR ambition and THEIR profit!
This, the long-held dream of internationalist resistance against capitalist war, is as urgent now as ever before. Refuse the recurring and relentless bloodletting of our class who own nothing but our labour and gain nothing from our slaughter!
Such a dream is no less fantastical than the idea that this war will bring peace! Blood does not wash blood and dying does not bring back the dead.
The history is so old that it no longer informs the present. Whatever date it starts from, there is always the day before it. Only our experience of what the exploitation of our class means and the price we pay for that ‘privilege’ must inform us now.
Every platitude pushed out by the West on the Gaza war is the opposite of what they say about the war in Ukraine. Destruction and genocide are no longer ‘war crimes’ but legitimised self-defence. The defence of who by whom?
The obscenity of the hypocrisy of Hamas and the Israeli State and their respective power bloc backers, hidden behind their opportunism, is exposed in their words.
On the 19th October the Hamas (‘Zeal’) leader, Khaled Mashaal, said in an interview with the Saudi ‘Al-Arabiya’ network: “We know very well the consequences of our operation on October 7th.”, adding “No nation is liberated without sacrifices.”
When asked how many Palestinian lives Hamas was prepared to sacrifice to meet its aims, he referred to the loss of 30,000,000 Russians to defeat Germany in the Second World War. That would be more than twice the number of the world’s Palestinian diaspora.
In March 2019, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told his ruling political party, Likud (‘the Consolidation’): “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas… This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Hamas has the blood of Israelis and Palestinians on its hands; Israel has the blood of Palestinians and Israelis on its hands. These bloody hands, so intertwined for decades, are the ones handing you the guns!
The death of 1500 Israelis is a tragedy, the mounting death toll of 5,000 Palestinians is increasingly treated as a statistic. The State in Power, Israel, and the ‘State in waiting’, Hamas, are equal in their indifference to our suffering and the outcomes.
In this war, as in Ukraine and Russia, our class are the fish in the barrel being killed whatever direction we swim in. The dead are our dead, the gain is theirs!
As our losses mount, other exploiters are entering the fray as Hezbollah, Iran and even Iraq are joining or being threatened by one side or the other. As if Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi workers have not suffered enough.
Workers have no oil, have not ports, have no geo-strategic assets – we just build them and die for them. We ultimately have the power to refuse dying and rebuild again, for our own needs not theirs.
All war is against our class whichever side of a fence or border we are on. To refuse to fight and die in a war for power, profit and greed is not the dream of our class, but an historical necessity!
Every front is the Class War front. Class war solidarity is our only hope to survive! ‘No War but the Class War’ is not an appeal but a manifesto!
Did we forget a war or something?
Source: https://anarcomuk.uk/2023/10/19/did-we-forget-a-war-or-something/
The horror of the (largely one sided) slaughter in the Israeli-Gaza war has seized the attention of the world opinion, funneled into this channel by politicians and a salacious media machine.
Have we forgotten the other war in Europe? Did we ever remember the dozen other wars raging from the Sahel through to Sudan; the (DRC)Congo to Yemen, Nagorno-Karabakh to Myanmar?
The slaughterhouse is worldwide. Where our attention is led is as political as the conflicts themselves. The Ukraine is the West’s new bastion on Europe’s eastern frontier, Israel, it historic one in the Middle East.
That the Islamist jihadis of Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities can only be denied by fellow Islamist fanatics, fascists and anti-Semites. The more important question than how did they get out from the Gaza siege is how they ended up controlling Gaza in the first place? The answer paradoxically is Israel.
For 30 years from the 1970s onwards, Israel’s Palestine policy backed by the West, was the eradication of the secular resistance to the occupation. National Liberation and Pan-Arabism was seen at the height of the Cold War as a military arm of Soviet foreign policy.
Their war against the Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) factions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), included mass detentions without trial, assassinations at home and abroad and the bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Their successful expulsion of the PLO cost 30,000 lives, including 3.000 civilians massacred by their Christian militia allies at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut.
It suited this policy to encourage the emerging Islamist opposition to sow division to further undermine the PLO and force them into negotiations. The Oslo Accords from 1993 turned fighters into civil administrators of what became the Palestinian Authority.
30 years of peace withering on the vine followed with broken promises, continuing evictions and illegal settlement, backed by brute force and discrimination. A de facto two tier one state system rather than the two state ‘solution’.
The analogy of the South African ‘Apartheid’ regime is often drawn. Racism is as rife in Israel as anywhere else. It also has a hierarchy of European Jews, East European Jews, airlifted East African Jews, and ‘other’ Jews. The relations inside it are torn by racism even within the Jewish communities. Racism is even more focused on the 20% of Israelis who are Arabs, against whom the far right – with representatives in the government – is calling for attacks on, regardless of age.
The occupied Palestinian diaspora doesn’t even register enough for categorisation for a ‘separate development’ plan as under apartheid. Analogy serves less well than the reality of occupation, racism and discrimination. Whatever words one searches for to describe it are less relevant than the impact – pain, dislocation and despair. Hopelessness defies analogy.
Against this background emerged a largely compliant Palestinian administration and the rebellious zealots of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Occupation, periodic rebellion, terrorism and repression have ruled ever since.
Israel’s decade long march to the populist right has added fuel to the tinder and October 7th saw the ignition. The Israeli Right’s hubristic sense of superiority through provocation left it blind to this barbaric assault.
“This is the battle of civilisation” Netanyahu announced on the eve of invasion that will hugely add to the 16,000 existing casualties, including 4,000 dead in Gaza and 75 on the West Bank.
The assault is already relentless. While the culprit of the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing may be disputed, that Israel has continued to bomb southern Gaza despite forcing 1 million people to move down there for safety, is not.
Hamas has said it is not holding hostages, just “prisoners of war”, including children, babies, the elderly and disabled. Both sides see everyone as a combatant. The workers of the ‘Palestinian Street’ are as vulnerable (if more numerous) as the youths slaughtered by Hamas at a peace festival to the warmongers of the Israeli state and the Hamas Islamic Statelet.
The ruthless hypocrisy of capitalist power and their wars is demonstrated in the Wests response. While suspiciously quiet about their war in Ukraine – perhaps grateful for the diversion from Ukraine’s failing offensive – they line up as Gaza is flattened to praise Israel for what they denounced war crimes in Ukraine.
That two nuclear armed states are invading their neighbours should terrify us all. Especially as this conflict risks drawing Iran in, Russia’s principle ally in its invasion and an aspiring nuclear power itself. Such a situation could tempt the US, through its proxy Israel, to kill two birds with one stone while protecting Israeli skies and quietening Russian forces in Syria with its carrier fleet off the Israeli coast.
They want us to see only one war. We might start joining the dots if we linked the totality of what’s going on. Their drive to war is real and growing, the casualties on all sides of those conflicts will be the same. People like us, workers and producers with no stake in the system and everything to lose.
At home we pay through austerity, our will fight against it is also the fight against their wars, their capacity to fight war, our refusal to fight it for them. No war but the class war must be our response!
International Statement against War and State Violence
Source: https://anarcomuk.uk/2023/10/15/international-statement-against-war-and-state-violence/
This statement was produced following the Varna International gathering of anti-authoritarian groups in September. It has been cosigned by our comrades in France [ASAP] and Bulgaria [FCAB] and was in response to the war in Ukraine. Its release was delayed as recent events took precedence, but is relevant to any war, conflict or state violence.
Internationalist Solidarity against the slaughter of capitalist war!
Comrades from around the world recently attended an assembly of revolutionary anti-war Internationalists on the Black Sea coast, to coordinate our focus and attention on the crisis of war in Ukraine and the intensification of the attacks on our class at home.
Around 70 comrades from 14 countries across 5 continents were in unison in refusing to take sides in capitalist wars, re-asserting No War but the Class War!
Anarcho-Communists like us, Anarchists, Left Communists, Syndicalists and Autonomists agreed on the need for reasserting the fundamental principle of revolutionary defeatism – a plague on both their houses!
Russian capitalism is forcing its workers to slaughter, in order to steal the assets of Ukrainian workers’ labour. Ukrainian capitalists are militarising Ukrainian workers towards the same meat grinder to sell those same assets themselves for a profit.
Those who are confused by the moral challenge of aggressor violence v self-defence should reflect on this false identification of Russia and Ukraine as if they were individuals, they are not! They are rival capitalist entities with their class interests at heart.
Hundreds of thousands of individuals from both sides of their proprietorial national state boundaries have been killed, maimed or displaced. Workers without mutual animosity before this marshalling to war from which our class only loses.
Internationalist work against the rival imperialist blocs continues on the home front where disrupting their ‘Social Peace’ here, slows down their drive to war. The class war at home is the peace movement!
We continue to develop our international work with like-minded revolutionists across their artificial frontiers.
“Neither one State nor two States! No ‘State’ will end the slaughter of our Class!”
1,500 dead in the first day alone – not Ukraine this time but again in the Middle East.
“If war begets war, it feels like it’s spawning at an alarmingly bloody rate across the globe” was a UK journalists introduction to the outbreak of the Israel/Gaza war.
As if war were a contagiousness natural phenomenon independent of cause and effect. War does not beget war, capitalism does.
As French Socialist Jean Jaurès said just before WW1: “Capitalism carries war within it, just like clouds carry rain”.
The hypocrisy of those claiming to offer solutions is demonstrated in Turkey’s president Erdogan’s statement inviting “… all parties to act reasonably and to stay away from impulsive steps that raise tensions” just days after bombing Kurdish communities in Rojava, northern Syria.
‘Honest Broker’ the USA promises Israel “We will always have your back”, effectively issuing a blank cheque for a license to kill.
Whole families wiped out in their homes in Gaza; hundreds of kids hunted down on bikes and butchered at a music festival. The slaughter has become immediately vast and merciless. We know who is doing the killing, we must ask, who is doing the dying?
People like us, workers, Jew and Arab alike. Without ownership and control, our class, without power killed by those fighting for it.
The suffering of the Palestinians is an open sore of the West’s stronghold in the Levant. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has been the West’s ‘boots on the ground’ since the ’50’s, playing pivotal roles in such imperialist ventures as the Suez Crisis of ’56. Armed to the teeth, it wants for nothing.
Despite the Israeli state’s West leaning Democratic credentials, it de facto maintains an apartheid system over the Palestinians, enabling their movement to work when it suits them and locking them in when not. It’s slow march to the theocratic Right has generated a massive resistance from its own working class.
The tragedy of Gaza is that it rests in the horns of a dilemma. Because of the blockade by the Israeli state, it has been described as the “largest open prison in the world”. Its further misfortune is to be guarded by the Hamas Islamic Statelet.
‘Hamas’, meaning ‘Zeal’ is a vicious theocratic dictatorship worse than that which the world has been protesting against in Iran. As liberals and leftists chant ‘we are all Hamas now’, they might do well to reflect on how long they would survive there.
Hamas even butchers its own, like Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a former Hamas commander who was, according to the New York Times, “… accused of moral turpitude, by which Hamas meant homosexuality” then was tortured and shot in 2016.
As with the Vietnam Têt Offensive of ’68, this brutal ‘David’ assault on a brutal ‘Goliath’ is an attempt at a paradigm shift.
It is as much aimed at the Fatah faction of the West Banks Palestinian Authority to usurp its leadership as to scupper Israel’s attempts to freeze the conflict through rapprochement with its Arab neighbours.
While it might seem counter-intuitive for Hamas to have united a divided Israeli entity, it may prove a timely exploitation of the West’s focus on the European war to widen the conflict by dragging in an unwilling Iran.
With US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, talking up the potential of Iran’s role, this could go anywhere. Sending their western Mediterranean Carrier strike force eastwards ‘to deter Iran’ would certainly free up Israel to take on a wider military venture against Iran’s nuclear program that it has been itching to do.
Whatever the truth, this is not Arab versus Jew, this is workers on both sides slaughtered and manipulated by capitalisms Power Bloc rivalry carried out through their bloody proxies. Capitalist war, red in tooth and claw!
Neither one state nor two states can end this cycle, no agent of capitalism is able or willing too. All their wars are against our class. Class War is our only response which is why there, as in the Ukraine we say resist their drive to war – No War But The Class War!
Why is being against war so hard?
Source: https://anarcomuk.uk/2023/09/23/why-is-being-against-war-so-hard/
Winter is coming. Not a line from Game of Thrones but a meteorological reality in the Northern Hemisphere.
Before the rains stagnate the battle lines for another 6 months, a new victim falls in this conflict of rival capitalist blocs. Azerbaijan’s barely reported attack on its besieged Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has led to Armenia’s complete surrender.
Despite being a member of Putin’s ‘near abroad’ Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). Russian peacekeepers have only been able to negotiate the terms of Armenian surrender.
Putin’s humiliation has been orchestrated by Azerbaijan’s key ally, NATO’s Turkish president Erdogan. The Special Military Operation in Ukraine has made Russia impotent in its own backyard.
This lightning war did not last long enough to present those who claim to oppose war to agonise over which belligerent to support.
In Ukraine, despite the bloodiest three months of carnage in a NATO resourced offensive, frontlines that have barely changed will once again be frozen.
The war’s second anniversary on February 24th will be energetically marked by a reconstruction and strengthening of the unbreachable frontiers of conflict.
A conflict that has an echo in dividing lines between pro (supporters of one or other belligerent) and anti-war (against all belligerents) in what was once the revolutionary milieu.
Why is opposing war so controversial amongst some of those who lay claim to revolutionary tradition? It is an unmitigated catastrophe. 10 million displaced, an estimated 500,000 casualties with 150,000 dead. $1 trillion cost and half the world hungry or paying the price of austerity driven by war profiteers.
In part this is explained by our natural reaction of horror and sympathy at the scale of suffering and injustice – laudable instincts that are then manipulated to support one side or the other on the basis of just or unjust, legal or illegal war. This is the fog which leads us do a distorted narrative of good versus evil.
Rather than seeing the Ukraine and Russia conflict as corporate corrupt capitalist states fronting international capitalism’s global rivalry at the expense of workers on both sides, the false narratives direct us to moral platitudes.
A David versus Goliath. An innocent victim against a violent aggressor, leading us to a simple binary outcome of supporting the goodie against the baddy. This is the logic of the pantomime not the analysis of revolutionary internationalists.
The individuals here are not Russia and Ukraine, but their thousands of workers with everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Those who can’t see the fault of this logic should ask themselves why and whom did they choose to support when Ethiopia attacked Tigre? Or when Eritrea attacked Ethiopia, or Rwanda attacked DRC? Indeed, where was their moral outrage over Nagorno-Karabakh?
Some argue it’s not for revolutionists in the capitalist heartlands to form a perspective on conflicts elsewhere. This they say, in the contemporary language of culture wars, is “West-splaining”. An uncomfortable resonance with Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 comment that we have no business in a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”. That was at the abyss of WW2.
Internationalists then knew how to respond. Freedom Press’s ‘War Commentary’ and the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation’s ‘Solidarity’ opposed the war throughout, culminating in a prosecution in 1945 for their categorisation of Britain as a ‘Warfare State’.
Their efforts included contributions from such luminaries has Guy Aldred; Paul Mattick; Anton Pannekoek and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Communist Workers Party.
This failure, through confusion or design, to unite on an Internationalist position of Revolutionary Defeatism has necessarily caused rifts with former comrades. It has also forged new links with others. An historical if familiar realignment of revolutionary forces is taking place, as it did after previous betrayals of principle in 1914 and 1939.
We are again at an abyss and the chaff of liberalism and left social democracy is sorting itself out from Revolutionary Internationalism.
We continue to fight for the escalation of class war on the Home Front. Undermining Capitalism’s ‘Social Peace’ here frustrates their drive to war, all war. That is what we mean by ‘No War But The Class War!’
