Lukashenko has released Ihar Alinevich, Mikalai Dziadok and Artsiom Prakapenko.

Statement from the Anarchist Black Cross Belarus:

“Today Alexander Lukashenko has signed papers to release all official political prisoners in the country. This includes anarchists Ihar Alinevich, Mikalai Dziadok and Artsiom Prakapenko.

We would like to congratulate our comrades and thank everyone for the solidarity with them!”

And from Manchester AF, we wish to thank all those who have campaigned and acted in solidarity with our comrades detained in Belarus. All those who have donated and attended speaking tours, your support has made a difference. Finally, they may smell the air beyond prison walls, openly see their loved ones, eat their own meals cooked by their own hands and share with friends. They have sacrificed so much already.
We wish our comrades the best of health and a joyous life beyond a cage. You rebel, therefore we are.

National Front = Bus Wankers

Manchester

national front bus wankers

IWW Manchester Workers’ Rights Drop-In

IWW, Manchester

Problems at work or with your boss? Low pay, unpaid wages or being harassed? Manchester IWW is here to help! We’re a union for all workers, focused on winning fights that other unions would avoid.

We’ll be hosting workers’ rights drop-ins at the TARA office, 26a Humberstone Ave, Hulme, on Sunday 16^th August, 20^th September, 18^th October from 3 to 6pm.

If you can’t make that, then contact us at manchester (at) iww.org.uk, or ring us on 08009989149.

Who is the IWW for?

We are for ALL workers who do not have the power to hire or fire. This also includes workers who are retired, students, unemployed, part-time, temporary or those working at home. Workers who are members of other unions are also welcome.

An Evening with the Anarchist Federation of Belarus & Belarus Anarchist Black Cross

Belarus, International, News

TUESDAY
23RD JUNE
8PM

Upstairs at
THE DUCIE BRIDGE
152 Corporation Street
Manchester, M4 4DU
*3 Minute Walk from Victoria Station*

Facebook Event Page

As a stable initiative, ABC-Belarus was started in August 2009 and is pretty active since then. Before this there was just a few people who collected money from time to time only if they were needed; this was not very effective, as we were not able to get much money urgently, that’s why the regular initiative was established.

Our group provides support for anarchist, anti-authoritarian, antifascist, FNB and other social activists, when the problems are connected with their activity, though each case is taken into consideration individually.

We provide legal assistance, financial support for legal procedures and help with the information spread.

We raise money from the people concerned in the concerts, during general meetings or from organised solidarity tours.

Our first and the most difficult campaign is connected with the case of the attack on the Russian embassy, carried out in solidarity with the prisoners in Russia. The attack was followed by a huge wave of repression, that left about 50 people interrogated, 17 detained on suspicion and 8 people found guilty of several episodes. Now 3 of them are acknowledged political prisoners by rights watch organisation, 3 more are awaiting the decision concerning them.

Event hosted by Manchester Anarchist Federation
Please note that unfortunately this event is upstairs.

Angry Not Apathetic

Electoralism, News, Publications, Resistance

‘Angry Not Apathetic’ Resistance Bulletin Issue #158

What anarchists do instead of voting

The general election is here, and once again the parties are all over us like a rash, promising that they will fix things. But you don’t have to be an anarchist to know that nothing changes, whoever gets in. This is why politicians are keen on new methods such as postal voting. Labour, Tory, Liberal Democrat, nationalist (Plaid Cymru, SNP, Sinn Fein), ‘principled’ or ‘radical’ (Green Party, or leftists in some alliance), or nationalist-racist (UKIP etc), the fundamentals of the system are the same.

Whether we have the present electoral system or proportional representation, or however many people vote or don’t vote in an election or referendum, as we have just seen in Scotland, capitalism is at the driving wheel globally. As working class people, we are exploited whether we can take part in ‘free’ elections or live under an authoritarian regime. Capitalists and property owners continue to control the wealth that we create, and they protect it through the police, legal system, and military.

You can’t complain

Non-voters are told that, “If you don’t vote you can’t complain”. But voting under these circumstances is just pretending that the system we have is basically alright. It lets the winning party off the hook. The fact is, we have next to no say in the decisions that get taken by the people we elect. This is called ‘representative democracy’. Anarchists organise by ‘direct democracy’, where we can have a say in every decision, if we want to. We don’t put our power in someone else’s hands, so no one can betray us and abuse it. This really could work globally! Ask us how…

Campaigning against voting

A “don’t vote” campaign on its own is just as much a waste of time. The same goes for a protest vote for a leftist or novelty candidate. The time and money spent campaigning could be better used fixing some of the problems we face in our lives. Protesting, whether it is spoiling a ballot paper or marching in the street, fails to offer any real challenge. So, anarchists say, vote, or don’t vote. It won’t make any difference. What is more important, is to realise that elections prop up a corrupt system and divert us from winning real change.

Don’t vote, organise!

We should organise with our neighbours, workmates, other people we have shared interests with, and others who don’t have the privileges that some people have. We are the experts on what we need, and on the best way to run things for the common good. We need to use direct action to achieve this. Direct action is where we solve a problem without someone else representing us. By this we mean, not just protesting and asking for change, but things like occupying, sabotaging, working to rule, refusing to pay their prices or their rent, and striking (but not waiting for union leaders to tell us when we can and can’t!).

For example, when workers aren’t paid the wages owed them, rather than asking the government to give us better legal protection, we take action to force employers to pay. The Department for Work & Pensions has even named the Anarchist Federation and the Solidarity Federation among groups that are a serious threat to workfare, because we have shut down programmes. This was achieved with only a few hundred people. Imagine what could be done with thousands!

Taking it back

In reality, people are understandably afraid of taking the state on. But direct action doesn’t have to mean an all-out fight to defeat capitalism in one go. Anarchists do think that ultimately, there has to be a full revolution. But by confronting the system directly at any point we can start to take control. In fact, all the good things we think of as having been created by the state – free health care, free education, health & safety laws to protect us at work, housing regulations, sick pay, unemployment benefits, pensions – came about historically to put an end to organised campaigns of collective direct action that threatened their power. And where we would fail as individuals, together we can win.

—

Labour and the Unions

The infatuation of the trade unions with the Labour party should be nothing other than mystifying for ordinary workers. Whether it is ‘Unions Together’ or TUC voter registration drives, trade union members amongst us should feel deeply insulted at being asked to prop-up the Labour party as the best available solution.

The Labour Party was set up in the early twentieth century as a political wing of the trade union movement. Despite the rose-tinted view of history, it has continually regulated workers under capitalism. It is not a case of Labour having ‘lost its way’ and needing recapturing. To echo the anarchist Rudolf Rocker, political parties and elections haven’t brought workers “a hair’s breadth closer to socialism.”

The ‘Special Relationship’

The TUC and parts of the left continually present us with a picture of Labour which has nothing in common with its actual actions. They tell us that we still have a ‘special relationship’, and that despite its failings, the Labour Party stands-up best for ordinary working people. So we should support it ‘without illusions’, because it is better than the Tories. Not that you would notice! All the major parties support austerity against the working class. This is irrefutable, and Labour even says as much.

What remains of the dwindling trade union movement is essentially shackled by harsh restrictive anti-union laws and a totally compliant TUC leadership. These laws tell us how to manage our affairs, seriously restrict our ability to withdraw labour, and tell us who we can and can’t expel, which means that we have to accept scabbing in our own unions. They restrict free association in a way that no other organisation can under British law and are regularly condemned by the International Labour Organisation, which is hardly a hotbed of radicalism. The only time Labour repealed anti-union laws was when its hand was forced by a mass grassroots workers movement in the 1970s.

Overturning these present laws and rebuilding a militant culture around the workplace is going to require not the politics of the ballot box, but sheer will and the determination to oppose so-called ‘representatives’ in both the Labour Party and the TUC. Their class interests under capitalism are intimately linked; our interests begin and end with us.

—

Free Education and the Liberal Democrats: A Student’s Perspective

Living in Sheffield at the time of the last election, I saw that there was massive voter turn-out and support for the Lib Dems amongst students. A tangible optimism and excitement existed in Nick Clegg’s constituency. Personally, I spoiled my ballot paper with, ‘If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal’. However, I did wonder whether a Lib-Dem rise could contest the New Labour/Conservative stalemate of neoliberal similarity.

Clegg now sports a satisfaction rating of minus-40 (Mori survey). This is well deserved. Instead of capping tuition fees he has overseen them triple to £9,000. Young people among many others who voted Lib-Dem have been left disillusioned by this, becoming disengaged from politics. What has been proven is not that young people are not interested in politics, but that politicians are not interested in young people.

Debt

I was lucky and only had to pay £3,000/year in fees. But I now owe the Students Loan Company £23,000. This increases by at least £30 a month due to interest, which started whilst I was still at university! I am persistently being hassled by them checking if I’m earning enough yet to start paying it back.

Neo-liberalisation

When I finished university I wanted to continue studying. However, funding for a social science Master’s degree is rare and most students are self-funded. I couldn’t stand the thought of incurring more debt by taking out a loan, so I gave up on the idea. I moved home and worked in a café trying to get out of my overdraft. I found out that there are no tuition fees in Sweden for EU citizens. I applied to Stockholm University and got in, paying living costs with money I’d earned in the café. I then found out I could return to the UK on an Erasmus exchange, avoiding tuition fees and even getting an EU grant!

This illustrates the lengths that you have to go to if you come from a background where higher education is unaffordable. Furthermore, it has taught me that a free education is feasible, but cannot be accomplished by relying on political parties and the establishment. The neo-liberalisation of higher education has proliferated under the Coalition. Education is becoming the preserve of the upper-middle-class. Research too must now be ‘competitive’, not expressing critical, independent thought.

To contest this, to strive for free education, the only way is to self-organise! The demise of the Lib-Dems has shown we cannot rely on any political party to deliver this. This is why we argue ‘Don’t Vote – Organise!’

—

“Tories on bikes”: the Green Party in power

“F***ing Tories on bikes” – that’s how one Brighton bin worker describes the Green Party. As the largest party on the local council, with 23 seats at the 2011 election, Brighton is the only place in the UK where the Greens have had so much as a sniff of power. And look what they’ve done with it.

Despite trumpeting a commitment to the living wage (£7.85 an hour outside London, compared to a National Minimum Wage of £6.50), they tried to impose a “pay modernisation” scheme on low-paid council workers with the support of the Conservative group on the council. It meant that refuse and recycling staff at Hollingdean depot faced a paycut of up to £4,000 a year.

Acting like the worst kind of union-busting boss, the council threatened the workers that if they refused to accept the new terms, they would sack them and re-employ them ‘on a worse contract, without compensation’. Binworkers responded with a wildcat occupation of their depot, and there have been numerous strikes and wildcat stoppages since. And the attacks on the binworkers’ terms and conditions of employment continue.

Litter picking

Green MP, Caroline Lucas claims to have made her opposition to the proposals clear, and even said that she would “join the picket line if the Council forces a pay cut on low paid staff.” Well, we haven’t seen her on any picket lines. We did see her picking up litter during the strike of June 2013, despite a statement from the bin-workers asking people not to, because as they say, “any attempts to lessen the impact of a strike [by picking up litter] completely undermines our action.”

No doubt the Greens in Brighton have made “tough choices,” with their “hands tied” by central government. So is that all there is to politics – “tough choices” and a world of perpetual disappointment when your elected representatives betray you? As anarchists, we say that the problem is not with who is in power, and how they exercise that power. The problem is political power itself. As anarchist Noam Chomsky points out, “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” The Greens might be on the fringes of that spectrum, but they’re still part of the party political system, established to keep us quiet.

—

Anarchists have occupied Syriza’s headquarters in Athens as an act of solidarity with an ongoing hunger strike.

The end of a grassroots movement in Greece

Many leftists have been overjoyed that an anti-austerity party won the general election in Greece. For the left, including those in the UK, Syriza’s victory is seen as a turning point in Europe against economic policies based on harsh cuts.

SYRIZA (‘Coalition of the Radical Left’) started off as an alliance of various reformist left-wing currents. Its programme was very similar to Pasok, a socialist coalition of the 1980s. In fact, a large part of the old Pasok leadership is now in Syriza. Alexis Tsipras took over as Syriza leader in 2008, as the party was moving away from reformist ‘Eurocommunism’ to build a relationship with the grassroots social movements that had grown in Greece against austerity. As it was developing a presence on the streets and joining the large ‘square protests’, the party also increased its influence in trade unions, especially the public sector, and organised among university students. It quickly positioned itself as a last hope for change for the social movement.

Syriza will now be the political wing of a repressive State apparatus – the police, the army, the judiciary – that is historically riddled with right-wingers and fascists. It has already formed a coalition with a right-wing anti-immigration party and will continue to make compromises to stay in power. As the party is quite small with 35,000 members, around 10,000 will be moved into government positions in an attempt to counter the right-wing, well away from the grassroots initiatives that carried them into office.

Greek radicals with longer memories will remember that after Pasok was elected it rapidly dropped the radical programme that helped it to power. In any case, it was all but wiped out in later elections. Now here we are again with more leftist promises from Syriza. As one Greek anarchist Spyros Dapergolas remarked about the importance of people sticking to grassroots organising, “Everything else is a recipe for failure, disappointment, loss of time, and, of course, political and individual corruption … what power and state always create.”

—

What the Suffragettes Did For Us

It’s election time again, and anarchist women are once more being lectured on doing our duty to those who died for our vote.

For the record, the suffragettes’ demand was that women should be balloted wherever men were. They weren’t fighting for every woman in perpetuity to be guilt-tripped into supporting any political system that used the ballot box to legitimise itself. They trusted future women to make their own decisions. Sylvia Pankhurst, for one, lived to reject parliamentary democracy as an “out of date machine” and refused to cast a vote or stand for election herself. This election, she’d be angry with every party’s participation in cuts to essential women’s services, not the women who spoil their ballots or stay away.

More than the vote

There was a lot more to the suffragettes than just the vote. They were about women’s solidarity, our ability to work and fight together, to write and speak from our own experience, not just on the vote but on sexual, social and vocational freedoms, like fair pay and reproductive rights. Being denied the vote was an insult to women as intelligent, rational human beings, regardless of how much use the vote itself was. Using the vote was almost beside the point compared to what it would mean for women to have the vote, to not be seen as mere extensions of their husbands.

Getting the vote was a victory largely because of what women achieved through the process of fighting for it. The speeches, publications, smashed windows, battles with police, martial arts training, imprisonments, hunger strikes, resistance to force-feeding and refusal to give in: these did more to raise the status and confidence of women, as public and political people, than the vote itself ever has. Much more than having women MPs or careerists who have cynically used women’s struggles to promote themselves.

Telling us that we have to vote because votes for women were hard won, is condescending, paternalistic shit. Working class men also fought for the right to vote, but are much less criticised if they suggest that there are more effective means of change than the ballot box. For women, voting is turned into an issue of conformity rather than conscience, in direct opposition to who suffragettes were and what they fought for. The suffragettes never intended their campaigning to stop with getting the vote. Many continued fighting when their leaders were co-opted. They weren’t satisfied, and they didn’t intend us to be.

Co-option

The suffragettes achieved their aims because they were a radical, inspirational and effective direct action movement. They achieved incredible things for themselves and for future generations of women. Yes, they deserve our respect and our gratitude. But more than that, they deserve our study and our effort to comprehend the full enormity and complexity of their struggle. They deserve better than to be reduced to a single-issue sound-bite.

So this polling day, whether you vote or organise or both, consider honouring the suffragettes’ memory by not using them as a stick to beat women with when they treat their vote exactly as the suffragettes did: as their own, to use or not, on their own terms.

—

So, is Russell Brand right then?

Celebrity sexist Russell Brand has recently added ‘revolutionary’ to his CV, and he’s written a book about it. He has also turned out in person to support things like the successful housing struggle of the New Era Estate residents in London. If you can stomach the man himself, he seems to offer something to people sick of inequality, war-mongering and political hypocrisy. Brand agrees with anarchists on many things and refers to himself as an anarchist in his new book ‘Revolution’. He won’t be voting in the election for pretty much the same reasons that anarchists won’t be. The Spanish revolution inspires him as the best social experiment in history, as it does us. So, we should say what we think about him.

Money, money, money

Brand genuinely does see political parties as all the same, and electoral politics as a sham which serves the rich and powerful. But he seems unaware of what lies behind inequality. This is how he has come to the conclusion that society should be run by small, decentralised ‘groups’, which don’t act against anyone else’s interests, and which help each other out when needed. Great! But they would apparently still use money.

You can’t have both equality and money! The whole point of money is to have more of it than someone else. And no, we wouldn’t all be trading turnips for sheep in an anarchist society. We’d give and receive freely. So, although Brand has face-palmed Marx’s ‘From each according to (their) ability, to each according to (their) need’, he doesn’t understand what Marx meant. Money doesn’t enter into it.

Talking about a revolution

So how does he think this ‘revolution’ will happen? Unfortunately, Gandhi is explicitly his model. It isn’t so much that Brand is a pacifist, but that he glosses over violence by thinking that if enough of us rise up, the state won’t be able to do anything about it. Aside from talking to the prominent anarchist David Graeber, he doesn’t seem to have thought about this stuff seriously. So where he agrees with Graeber that we should take-over the functions of the state and make it redundant, he disagrees that we will need to defend the revolution. In fact, he says he has no ill will towards the police or army. Well that’s OK for this white, male revolutionary, who these days is rich and healthy too. In fact, when it comes to political freedoms in general, he is a little vague and places his faith in human nature and ‘Love’, as opposed to properly thought-out social structures.

Also, although Brand talks of ‘social recalibration’, his is a purely economic revolution, not one which would change other aspects of our damaged society. For example – and Brand, who claims to be challenging his own sexism, should take note – it would mean a believing stance towards rape survivors, instead of towards Julian Assange, such as he takes in ‘Revolution.’

So, genuinely angry at Capitalism as he is, Brand is not qualified to be a spokesperson of the revolution. He will be using the royalties from ‘Revolution’ to set up a self-managed business for recovering addicts. But revolution has to be made by people oppressed by class, race, gender, sexuality, ability and lack of opportunity, all acting together. We should use as little violence as possible, but we have to defend the gains we make, which the people on the New Era Estate can do with or without Russell Brand.

Download RESISTANCE bulletin issue #158 Spring 2015 ANGRY NOT APATHETIC, GENERAL ELECTION SPECIAL ISSUE [PDF]: http://www.afed.org.uk/res/resist158.pdf

Down With The Terrorist State: Nous Sommes Le Pouvoir!

France, History, International, News

Terror is the generalised weapon of the state, whether that state is an old established European power such as France, or an exiled ‘aspiring’ caliphate . It’s goal is simple, power. For one faction or another, governing or trying to govern, the target is always us.

The ‘War on Terror’ is a war on which we take without hesitation, an internationalist position of revolutionary defeatism – a ‘plague on both your murderous houses’.

Of course we are outraged at murder for satire, as we are at the slaughter of a wedding party in Pakistan or assassination of Afghan farmers. It is always a war on us, the people we love, work with, trust. The ‘citizen’, the ‘subject’, the governed.

Whatever the claimed or attributed motives for the Paris murders the intent was to cash in on the fear and isolation capitalism imposes on us daily, to terrorise us into being the blank canvas for the politics of power rather than the agents of our own lives. In this, the Caliph has learned well from the past masters including the French State. Calling for our unity behind democratic values and free speech we are drowned in obfuscation and lies. Far from being the worst terrorist outrage since the Republics collaboration with Nazism, it pales into insignificance along side the 2 million killed in the decolonisation of Indo-China and Algeria in which France excelled in the art of slaughter.

It would have been in the living memory of the Paris assassins, most of Algerian descent, that in October 1961, just a mile from the Charlie Hebdo offices, 600 Algerians were tortured and beaten to death in police custody and dumped in the Seine following a banned Independence Day march by 30 000 Algerian slum dwellers.

And the terror of the French state has long arms too for atrocities on the soil of distant lands, in our living memory is the murder by the DGSE, the Republics security service of Green Peace activist Fernando Pereira when they used 2 bombs to blow up Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in ’85 to defend their nuclear weapons tests.

Calls for unity are calls to defend capitalism hiding behind a liberal façade while limiting free speech and imposing the cost of its crisis on us through austerity.

Anarchists oppose terrorism not because we reject violence, – it is an inevitable option in defending our lives, our struggles and resisting oppression, but only in the context of international class struggle against capitalist barbarism. We oppose it because you can’t blow up capitalist social relationships. You can however blow up a political one, and as such all states and their rivals will continue to use it against us – atomising and belittling us further.

Many of the murdered journalists were inspired by or veterans of the revolutionary awakening of the the 60’s. Some had contributed to anarchist publications and the movement in general. Not for them the Republic’s slogan of Nous Sommes Charlie but the ‘Nous Sommes Le Pouvoir’ (We Are The Power) of Paris ’68.

We can only uproot terrorism and all that accompanies it through working class unity in our fight against the state in all it’s forms. This means rejecting calls for unity with one faction of capitalism against another and organising our struggles autonomously around our needs, not theirs.

As part of that struggle and as working class revolutionists we reject those who seek prophet and profit from our submission or annihilation.

-Dreyfus

Kobane and the Kurds

International, Kurdistan, Turkey, War

Even the most ardent revolutionist might struggle with a concept of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ and ‘a plague on both your houses’ in this war. Especially when contrasted with the indefatigable struggle of the Kurdish Peshmerga (Peoples Protection Units or YPG) in Kobane.

Against Islamic State one can imagine an alliance with the devil himself. Taking sides is hard NOT to do.

It defies imagination that young men, many well educated, believe that god has ordained the rape of women prisoners as a holy reward; that domestic enslavement and forcible conversion of children to their orthodoxy is a duty and that beheadings and mutilations are for the purification of faith.

That motivation might not be earthly enrichment but the promise of 72 eternal virgin angels on your martyrdom takes it to the realm of horror fiction that would only be passable to the trashiest fantasy publisher. But this is a case of fact being worse than fiction on a grand scale.

The month long siege is replete with historical parallels – the spectre of Srebrenica in the Balkans haunts our collective conscience. The Turks stand idly by, apparently onside and armed to the teeth, yet seemingly waiting, as Stalinist Russia did outside Warsaw during its rising against the Nazis in 1944. An apparent moral imperative undermines an internationalist conviction.

For Turkey it is a butchery between two equally despicable terrorist groups, both opposed to its own state terrorist agenda of regional hegemony – now being reinforced with air strikes on its own Kurds. To outsiders it’s seems a one sided moral question of an evil Goliath versus a noble David, but who are the defenders of Kobane?

The militia fighting IS are Syrian Kurds, part it the worlds largest stateless minority spanning northern Syria, south eastern Turkey, western Iran and
northern Iraq. Neither a diaspora nor a homogeneous entity, they, for hundreds of years, have been a thorn in the sides of the ‘ethnic giants’ that surround them – Turks, Arabs and Persians. They themselves are divided by a multitude of clans, faiths and at least three indigenous languages.

Strategically located in the mountain ranges that divide Anatolia from the Arabian peninsula, their geography contains the source of around 70% of the whole regions fresh water supply. This has been a key factor against allowing a united state that would strategically control the life blood of its neighbours.

Wherever they are located there have been attempts to convert, annihilate or assimilate them leading to near endless conflict and a struggle for independence or autonomy.

The struggles in Turkey and Syria have taken different paths to those in neighbouring Iraq over the last 30 years centred chiefly around the personality of Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). This is the crux of Turkish hostility as the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) is the PKK’s sister organisation.

The PKK launched its insurgency in 1984 with considerable success combing both military skill and an ideological unity previously absent among the Kurds. Creating ‘liberated’ zones and talking socialist rhetoric they became popular on the left not just as a national liberation struggle, but as alleged international socialists.

In fact their key ideology in the 80’s was Maoist, that is to say hard line and ruthless Stalinists. At their hight they were the stars of a Maoist international called the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (Marxist-Leninist), or RIM, which also boasted Peru’s Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrillas.

Wherever their forces took control their political security followed setting up detention or concentration camps for their political opponents both left and right, Kurd and non Kurd.

Their brutal Stalinist terror camouflaged in the libertarian veneer of Maoism did not confine itself to the Turkish state or it’s political opponents at home, but also to its critics in the revolutionary movement abroad. This led to the murder of activist members of factions external to the PKK and of the Belgian based Internationalist Communist Group (GCI) in Spain, Italy and Algeria for criticising their militarised dictatorship and repression.

Öcalan has been in a Turkish prison since 1999 and the PYD founded in 2003 modelled itself on the PKK and his ideas and the de facto ‘socialist state’ defended by the YPG militias
retains Ocalan’s ideology. (Despite his declared abandonment of Marxist-Leninism since his arrest, the Party is still accused of murdering its dissidents at home and abroad, including the leadership of a rival party set up by his brother Osman in 2005)

With around 50,000 members (out of a 2.5 million population) it continues to assert it place over its rivals. Currently in coalition as part of the Kurdish Supreme Committee under a truce negotiated by the Iraqi Kurds, the YPG continue not just to fight IS but to occupy and intimidate their allies under the banner of the PKK. A lesser of two evils for now perhaps but a would be ‘evil Goliath’ of its own

Romantic idealisation of the Peshmerga is proving seductive at the moment
because the moral argument seems an open and shut case to many – that needs acknowledging of the difficulty not taking sides.

This war however. as with all wars is a mass of contradictions, rival claims and principles pale in the face of human suffering and the slaughter of workers beguiled and forced on all sides.

As anarchists Revolutionary Defeatism means not choosing one repressive state in preference to another, we have only one side, that of the class struggle against power and the state concept that perpetuate this slaughter.

– Dreyfus, Manchester AF

Ebola – Capitalism’s War Against Humanity

History, International, News, War

The Ebola catastrophe that threatens to be the next deadly pandemic is entirely unleashed by capitalism and will be a holocaust against the poor.

It is a product of environmental destruction, overcrowding, hunger and the absence of public health infrastructure – exacerbated by years of war.

The virus is not new and has been extensively studied for nearly 40 years, not least because it’s first appearance in 1976 in Southern Sudan and then in Congo (from whose Ebola river it gets it’s name) was suspected of being a Cold War biological plot by the respective rival super powers.

It is one of a range Haemorrhagic Fever viruses to have dwelt harmlessly in their hosts in deep forest interiors that have crossed the species barrier as environmental exploitation for logging and minerals brings them into closer contact with humans.

Previous outbreaks of virulent diseases like Ebola or Marburg virus (more familiar as Green Monkey disease) have occurred in small isolated communities and have been ruthlessly quarantined to burn themselves out, often by the affected communities themselves. But war and commercial interest have rapidly increased urban migration and populations living in large shanty towns. Poor in income and food choices, many are dependent on the trade in ‘bush meats’ to eat, increasing contact with host species. In the case of this outbreak, the trade in Fruit Bat meat, a known host of the virus, is seen as the most likely cause.

Now, poverty combined with overcrowding and poor sanitation have turned what might previously have burned out into a raging firestorm – with very few people to fight the fire. Liberia had just 100 medical doctors at the beginning of the outbreak and the medical charity Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has borne the brunt, with the help of local largely unqualified volunteers. This has been the case in Guinea and Sierra Leone too.

It is the scale of this challenge versus the paucity of resources that has led to the abandonment of well established protocols for responding to an outbreak. And it has come as no surprise. In May, MSF made clear they were overwhelmed and that neither they nor the governments of the affected countries could contain or treat the epidemics. They had indicated in March that this point would soon be reached.

Seven months later we prepare for its imminent arrival in the world outside Africa, shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

The World Health Organisation and United Nations appear to have woken up – but they are not benign third parties, they are effectively the international organs of the wealthy major powers. While promises and preparations begin for an effective response, infection rates are rising exponentially, doubling every 3 weeks. Numbers in West Africa, as more countries in the region report cases ( notably Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy), are expected to rise from the current 10,000 to nearly 1,500,000 early next year.
Care currently, where it’s provided, is palliative – there is no available treatment or vaccine. If people survive long enough through feeding and hydration, their immune systems begin to fight back and may beat the virus. 50% will survive. Where this care isn’t available, mortality soars to 70-80%. The maths are not rocket science.

Comparisons of scale and proportionality are erroneously being draw with other major global killers like Malaria and HIV, but these are diversions that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Malaria kills nearly a million people a year with perhaps 200 ,000,000 cases. On the face of it, Ebola seems negligible. But malaria is a known quantity and people with malaria do not go on to infect twice their number every 3 weeks.
HIV began as a cross species infection, probably in the 1950’s. It’s asymptomatic phase is around 10 years and while it can be specifically transmitted, it is not infectious passing through ordinary human contact.

There is however one striking parallel – those who these diseases kill are overwhelming the worlds poorest people, and as with Ebola, the rich world belatedly responded when it’s own interests of commerce and profit where threatened.

It took 15 years for effective HIV treatments to emerge following the first reported cases, a luxurious timescale compared to Ebola.

Poor people, black people, cheap labour, capitalisms ‘variable capital’ is seen as expendable. But now the developed worlds trade, profit and security interests are directly affected, and capitalism belatedly responds. It’s self interest is always short term and this greedy self interest now confronts us with a potential crisis of unimaginable proportions.

Africa is portrayed as a continent in perpetual crisis – those portraying it as such seldom own up to being the cause. As the state mangers of capital prepare to pull up the drawbridge and impose their own forms of self interested quarantine, millions in Africa will be left to die.

Governments are already using this, as with the other monsters they have created (the war on terror, recession and debt) to cow and intimidate us into compliance and submission – if we let them!

Even when this slaughter has been stopped or burned out, the ruthless exploitation of the planet and it’s people for profit has more doors to catastrophe to open to enrich the few at the expense of the rest of us. Our struggle against it is literally a matter of life or death. It’s eradication or ours.

-Dreyfus

to the unknown rape survivor: Ireland, 2014

International, Ireland, News

Once again the news coming out of Ireland regarding the welfare of women and children is both appalling and yet unsurprising.

The country which imprisoned and starved women and their babies for being respectively pregnant and illegitimate and which buried them in mass graves, has committed another atrocity against a woman. She is unnamed, a non-national, who speaks little English and was, at the time the crisis pregnancy began, a minor aged 17.

This woman has suffered multiple rapes. Firstly she was raped by the penis, then by the medical instruments wielded by doctors and other practitioners who forced the equipment into her body, down her throat and into her abdomen and womb. She was forced to carry the foetus she did not want. The whole horrible, sad mess is another example of how a male-based, church-based, state based power deals with women who don’t fit and accept its structure. When we do not accept the power of a male-based religion, a capitalist patriarchal state we are assaulted by its full strength.

When Savita Haloppanovar died in Galway 2 years ago, after being refused a termination despite being in the throes of miscarriage and suffering from septicaemia, many reproductive rights activists including myself, thought, this is it. They can’t allow any more disasters like this. The law will change, people needing terminations will be able to get them where they need them and when they need them. We thought the Irish State would not want to expose itself to any further international embarrassment. In the last month the Irish State has been heavily criticised by the United Nations for its cruel abortion legislation. But, no. The wheels of legislation rumble slowly and the bodies of those pregnant are ground between the cogs of the machine.

The State does not exist for the welfare of its citizens. The State exists for the benefit of, amongst others, the powerful and the rich, the religious hierarchy and those who benefit from patriarchy. We anarchists know this well. Horror stories such as this one will continue as long as we are governed . It will only be in an anarchist revolution that all the components of this horrible story, from male violence, oppressive state legislation, medical dominance, ageism where young people’s decision making is invalidated will be removed. The organisations working in Ireland are campaigning for the repeal of the 8th amendment. Whilst this will improve the situation it will not truly free us. The power of the state will remain.

Yes to war – the Class War

International, News, War

“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act” – Orwell

The skies are darkening with the clouds of war. We all see it, feel it, know it and fear it. Millions around us have seen this before, many more didn’t survive those conflicts to remember.

Every great power is stirring as their puppets and proxies paint desert and steppe red with the blood of people like us, the workers.

As with all wars, truth falls as a casualty before an onslaught of lies and propaganda designed to get us on side, or cowe us into submission.

In Gaza, Semite slaughters Semite hurling the holocaust and accusations of anti-semitism against their critics.

In Iraq the atrocities of the Islamic State – the standard fare for 3 years in Syria by all sides – are painted as more monstrous to justify intervention over Kurdish oil.

Japan re-arms while Beijing fills the Western Pacific and South China seas with claims and warships.

Slav on Slav conflict in the balkanisation of the Ukraine raises tensions of a nuclear nature as the new Cold War thaws and threatens to flood Europe.

We are manipulated to take sides for or against the respective portrayal of ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ conflicts. Sides that killed 100 million over the last century for crises and conflict to continue unabated.

None of this is new and has served the interests of capitalism and the state for centuries. What changes is that on the back of it, the rich have got richer and their capacity to destroy us grows to the point of annihilation.

Make no mistake, we are being driven to war by capitalism’s deepening crisis. In the west a growing underclass is fed on charity while the rest of us work harder but get poorer. Elsewhere wars, tyranny and ecological disaster turns millions into migrants or refugees.

Wealth needs poverty to prosper but now seeks war as the answer to the social chaos and discontent it breeds. To recruit us or destroy us; it’s tried and tested sole solution.

Masking this truth are the sides we are asked to take, couched only in the logic of power:

In Gaza a two state rather than one state solution to injustice; in Syria the ‘democratic’ state versus dictatorship; in Iraq the post-colonial state versus the pretend state in the form of ISIS; in the east a European state against its ‘Asiatic’ neighbour. The key is the state, the basic building block of global capitalist order and repression.

The truth as we see it does not lie in two states versus one, nor one state writ large. It lies in the abolition of the state as the pawn or power base of the leaders who want us to follow.

War is on the agenda and we are asked to take sides. We say, take sides! The side that says no war is ‘just’ or ‘legal’ to perpetuate power and the global system it protects. Take sides against capitalism that makes us as expendable as their bullets. We say take sides against the oligarchs and the bankers, the tyrants and the charade of democracy.

Their war is on the agenda, take sides in the class war that is our only effective opposition to their bloody scheme, against the nation state and it’s heel on our neck. No war but the class war!

– Dreyfus for Manchester Anarchist Federation

Manchester Anarchist Federation

Organising for Resistance