THE KAMIKAZE BOMBINGS:

DON’T TAKE SIDES – MAKE SIDES!

“Mr.Blunkett admitted that some of the measures, including wider powers for the police to detain terrorist suspects, will directly clash with civil rights legislation but claimed the new powers were needed to prevent Britain becoming a police state.” - Guardian report, 24/9/01.

“In order to save the village we had to destroy it” – U.S.General, during Vietnam war.

    The mad self-contradictions of capitalist ideology and practice are intensifying by the day. Soon, in the name of  economic “realism” reality for the vast majority could be destroyed, not just by war but by ecological collapse.

    Although this will also be a war to serve the interests of American (and to a lesser extent British) capital against their rivals, the war being unleashed is primarily a war against the poor, the dispossessed, the marginalised, those living precariously, those who sell their labour  - what some of us intransigents still call “the working class”. Already the GMB Union has shown their clear policing function by saying that now is not the time to push the struggle against privatisation, (although pressure from the base seems to have made them backtrack on this, verbally at least). Osama Bin Liner, trained by the SAS and the CIA, has provided capital, on the eve of a very predictable recession, with a perfect alibi. Apart from all the other consequences, the consequences for the anti-globalisation movement, as with all opposition, could also be disastrous unless people start to make sense of what’s happening and start to oppose the terror of all sides, which some have begun to do. A new European Union anti-terrorist law defines terrorist offences as criminal acts, including damaging property and urban violence, committed with the aim of “intimidating and seriously altering or destroying the political economic or social structures of countries”. Gordon Brown has said that with the mass murder in New York, it’s the power of “the world economic system that’s under attack” (13/9/01). More clearly, Burlesquoni has said that there is a “strange unanimity” between Islamist terrorism and the anti-globalisation movement. Which is why, in the name of “the supremacy of our civilsation…which has brought us democratic institutions, civil, religious and political rights of our citizens, openness to diversity and tolerance of everything”, he’s ordered his cops to raid 60 autonomous social centres in Italy. The same is happening in Germany, as well. Everywhere foreigners are being deported, in the name of “diversity” and democracy. On the internet, security blocks are being put up against such websites as “Rage Against The Machine” and Cornell and Columbia University chatrooms. In the land of the free, campus demonstrations at 150 or more U.S. universities are not mentioned in the media. Vigils in New York, including by the courageous families and friends of some of the victims, go unreported. As for ‘free speech’ - what about the cleaners at a Land Rover factory in Solihull who were sacked for exercising this ‘freedom’ when, during a 2 minute silence for the victims of the attack, they shouted out slogans (what they were wasn’t reported)? Freedom of speech is nothing more than the freedom to repeat the monologues of the various factions of the ruling class, and the duty to remain silent when your bosses tell you.

 Everyone with a minimum of anxiety about what all this means knows that the instability that wreaks horror that wreaks the sense of utter helplessness has to be opposed. But of course ‘how’ is the central question. But sometimes anything’s better than petrified watching the events unfold. That’s why people go on demos. It’s not enough, of course – but it has, occasionally, led to more vital challenges to capitalist social relations (e.g. Genoa, or, even better, Poll Tax 1990).

   People who hate this mad world are going to have to be brave enough to speak out and demonstrate and clearly oppose all sides in this mad battle of the terrorist multi-millionaires. As Israel’s initial immediate actions showed, and as the intensification of State security measures (such as the right to intercept and read e-mails – oh so very very useful in the fight against terrorism) are also showing this atrocity is being used as a cover for the massive reinforcement of the causes of such atrocities – the commodity economy. Let’s talk about what we can do before the State, under the cover of “security” brands all the attacks on “the world economic system” as being the same.

ONLY A MASS SOCIAL MOVEMENT COULD BEGIN  TO OPPOSE THIS WAR.

ONLY A MASS SOCIAL MOVEMENT COULD BEGIN  TO OPPOSE THE TOTALITARIAN TERROR OF ALL ‘SIDES’

BECAUSE ONLY A MASS SOCIAL MOVEMENT COULD ENCOURAGE THE POOR IN EVERY PART OF THE WORLD TO SEE WHAT THEY HAVE IN COMMON.

     “This war is not so much a war as a struggle”, said one bourgeois. That goes for us as well.

  A workers demonstration erupted in a city in Iran (Sabzehvar) just after the terrorist attack with slogans and banners proclaiming “Death to God!” (an improvement on “God is dead!”), This city has been in an insurrectionary mood for some months, though with virtually no publicity in the media. Independent self-organised strikes, General Strikes, road blockades etc. have been going on for a couple of years now. At the end of August, demonstrations about having the city designated the regional capital erupted into big battles with the police, barricades and the blocking of the equivalent of the M1 – the highway to Mashad. 2 were shot dead, but there were instant demonstrations at police stations for the immediate release of those arrested, resulting in attacks on police stations. At the same time there have been big movements against the non-payment of wages amongst key industrial workers. Nothing of this has got reported in the rulers’ media. Likewise, the uprising in Algeria, involving millions of people, which was as much against the Islamic fundamentalists as against the State, and which started in the Kabyllie in April and continued up till fairly recently, went unreported. It is these kinds of movements, which have at their centre the practical critique of everyday life, which get repressed and forgotten about in any war, including amongst those who oppose the war. War becomes an opportunity to campaign separate from daily life, whilst often the same people campaigning have to submit even further to the miseries of work/ home/ leisure/ the street.

  Much of the present gearing up for war is co-opting the superficial critique of this build-up by emphasising that it is not innocent people who will get killed, but just the armies. This doesn’t just mean that when ‘ordinary’ people get killed we’ll hear little about it, that, as in the Gulf war, when well over 100,000 civilians were killed by the Alliance, all we’ll be shown is videos of pinpoint attacks on precise targets. Nor does it just mean that the media will avoid pointing out that the press-ganged conscripts who’ll get blown to bits, are as innocent as the vast majority of Afghans. It could also mean that, after the inevitable mass starvation etc., Afghanistan’s cities will be heavily invested in (whilst a safe proxy guerrilla warfare will probably be confined to the mountains), like some equivalent of the Marshall Plan, a kind of military Keynsianism, (with the NGOs and Greens becoming official cops). This, to show how great the values of democracy etc are, like some 21^st century equivalent of West Berlin. Meanwhile, parts of the rest of the world will be economically disinvested to make up for the loss of immediate profit. The daily toll of 20,000 kids dying from starvation and easily curable disease will increase but it won’t specifically be America which is to blame but the world economic system, whose subversion will be defined as ‘terrorist’.

From: B.M.Combustion, London WC1N 3XX

No War But The Class War – discussion document from N.

Suggestions for beefing up these meetings:

1.      It seems pointless to think in terms of winning over more people. Our first

task is for ourselves – what are we going to win people over to? A class analysis? a fascinating meeting? a block on a demo? Really we need to focus on the content of our group – how to develop a theoretical and practical opposition to the war as part of developing ourselves, educating ourselves first. Personally I feel very ignorant about Afghanistan politics and life, and not much more knowledgeable about Middle East politics – Saudi Arabia especially. I suspect many people who come to these meetings feel the same. Are we going to win people over to our ignorance? Equally, I have no clear idea of how to develop a practical opposition to the repression that’s coming down and to the war here. It’s an arrogant, and even Leninist – semi-vanguardist position to assume we have something to win people over to: it’s our own practical consciousness we have to develop first, and this has to develop in tandem with our communication outside these little get-togethers.

2        Given this, I suggest the following topics of discussion as part of other

practical initiatives:

What the real function of the war is: how precisely does it help repress class resistance; how does it intensify various capitals competitiveness; is it partly to use Afghanistan as a base for repressing possible uprisings in the area – Saudi Arabia etc.; is it as a base for intensifying competitiveness with China, with a view to a future possible war or what?

How does the official opposition to the war repress possible autonomous opposition (e.g. by serving as a model of ‘correct’ critique, by ignoring the repression of independent movements, by seducing people into hope in various external authorities –the Middle Class specialists). Why the desire for peace is an understandable emotional response which nevertheless really means remaining passive in the face of a frighteningly decomposing world which drives people into madness, suicide, psychosis etc. when it doesn’t starve them to death or blow them apart. What are the contradictions of Islam for the Muslim youth trying to break out of the repressive constraints of this religion (e.g. in Bradford) and doesn’t the war serve to attract some youth into an idea of Islam as rebellious in some way.

3.      The following practical-theoretical activity could be developed by us:

On one of the anti-war demos (the next one?) we could temporarily occupy a building en route to provide some focus of independent opposition and to publicise aspects of our critique – by leaflets, banners and discussion.

We could picket, or better – invade, the BBC with a critique of the function of the media in this war and a direct appeal to media workers.

We could leaflet schoolkids about the precarious future that this war throws into sharp relief, showing them various  possibilities that may be open to them (there have been some schoolkids’ strikes in Berlin over this war). After all, if capital continues they really won’t have any future.

Leaflet the Palestinians on these demos with a critique of their situation (Aufheben’s latest article would be an excellent springboard).

We could do some graffiti after this meeting, round Islington Town Hall, say.

At the next demo, we could try to storm the stage or just use loudhailers to heckle or to put over a class analysis.

We could squat a building in a working class area as a centre for discussing the war and the repression.

All the various suggestions made at the public meeting the other Sunday should be discussed and if people feel positive about them, elaborated on and put into effect.

Everyone who comes to these meetings regularly should say what they want out of this group.

They Think It’s All Over!   (sleeping through the apocalypse)

 If one can say one thing about this war, most people have so got used to it that they think it’s all over.  That is, until the war is brought home – either by some seemingly crazy terrorist atrocity or by you reading this doing something different to oppose the false choices this war throws up. What are these false choices?

   Support the State, British, American or whatever and their temporary allies is one false choice. This is the unthinking “something must be done” brigade who feel the State offers some protection against a psychotic enemy. Great – they’ve ‘liberated’ the Afghanis from the Taliban, with John Simpson substituting for John Wayne. But Kabul was taken by the Russians in two days. The war in the mountains will continue but be largely ignored, a little side show, whilst the worlds’ cameras will focus their lenses on Kabul, which may well be turned into a 21^st century West Berlin (well, at least, a section of capital dreams of that, but whether it’s feasible in such an economic climate is fairly unlikely: the West will probably think it’s enough to allow a few modern freedoms to give the world an image of its progressive nature, whilst the mass poverty will continue).

   Rightly, but all too obviously, the discourse of those who criticise the war is to point out that bombing has probably made the situation more dangerous – though in Afghanistan itself most spectators probably think they’re used to all that death, a bit more won’t matter much if it means less people die in the long run. But danger lurks far more in Palestine, or Kashmir and here in London. “We can’t just do nothing” is kind of true but it begs the question, “Who is this ‘we’?”, and it’s this that the left avoid answering. People give to their enemy – the protection racket of the British State, defender of the most horrendous market economy in West Europe[1] – an initiative in inverse proportion to their own initiative. Killing some of the poorest people in the world is justified because it’s done unintentionally (rather like an alcoholic driver who persistently mows down scores of people can fairly claim he didn’t mean to). Judgement of people on their explicit intentions is no judgement at all: it divorces intentions from the practical manifestations of these ‘intentions’, a way of accepting everything at an abstract level. This abstraction is there when Blair talks of Bin Laden not knowing the value of human beings - he of course means exchange value. The destruction of a very small section of the worlds’ working class is fine if it helps ‘liberate’ people so as to get rid of an archaic localised manifestation of the economy, which, despite endless flirtations from a modern capitalism, has always played hard to get[2].

  However, the other false choice is the traditional Left, which also take at face value many of the explicit intentions of “the war against terrorism”. Whilst they might criticise the ideology that “The ends justify the means” that still doesn’t lead them to try to understand what’s behind the explicit ends – except to reduce it all to a pretext for ensuring the security of the oil in the Caspian Sea (this simplistic reductionism is, above all, a way of playing the specialist, finding a One Answer ‘explanation’ for it all which conveniently ignores the essential pretext for this war: to repress the class struggle in the Middle and Far east (especially in Iran and Algeria, both of which have recently seen some great and exciting social movements.) It just leads them to attack the irrationality of this particular policy, as if capitalism isn’t inherently irrational for the vast majority (but ‘rational’, in the short term at least, for the powers-that-be). Ends and means are invariably intertwined: the real ends of this war – having a base to make sure there’s no threatening uprising in Saudi Arabia, Iran or Algeria, the oil/gas pipeline, a long-term militarised intensification of competition with China, and general battles over resources (human & natural) – are perfectly compatible with the means – the terrorisation of the Afghani poor, coupled with the carrot  of modernisation,  and the propaganda and legal war at home used to quash all opposition, especially towards the recession.  But the Left wants to simplify everything by just reducing everything to foreign policy. But war is the continuation of the commodity economy by other means. As workers are discovering through the mass sackings, the war has become a pretext for yet another restructuring of the economy hit by recession. Meanwhile, those sacked and humiliated in other ways under the cover of this war, are meant to be consoled by the fact that unlike, the victims in New York and Afghanistan, we’re alive.  Merely surviving is meant to compensate us for our lack of anger and life.

   The Left wing of capital – CND etc.- demand some legal or diplomatic alternative to war, which is like pleading that one bunch of terrorists should try and judge another bunch of terrorists. Just to show how ‘reasonable’ they are. The Masters of War are inevitably hypocritical: they don’t care whether you passively ‘criticise’ their hypocrisy or go along with it, just so long as you continue to look for the solution to the situation as being through changes in the policy of the State, and just so long as you don’t initiate something different yourselves. Lefty intellectual gurus like Monbiot, Paul Foot, Tariq Ali and Tony Benn want you to rely on the fact that they appear to be different from the mainstream media and the fact that they appear to have alternative policies for the State. But let’s just remember that it was CND which called, in 1991, for sanctions against Iraq as an alternative to war. Some alternative! (Benn can even dare to propose that the United Nations should intervene in this war - the poor of Iraq might have a slightly different take on it). Of course, in this epoch, the endless parade of false choices, rarely challenged by a concrete social movement, makes the fantasy of possible stability through a change in the persona and direction of the State seem realistic, regardless of the real history of this ‘realism’. And above all, these wordsmiths give you some hierarchical illusion of hope coming from experts, a cop-out for not challenging these intellectual father figures.

   The British State, contrary to Leftist myth, is not the poodle of America (which just comes over as some moralist critique) but shares a common interest in the protection and development of finance capital, albeit at a lower level in the heirarchy than the supreme superpower. Those who superficiallly denounce Britain as the slave of America would probably support those sections of European capital which recognise that one of the US/UK Axis’ war aims is to heat up the competition with Europe, to fight, through proxy wars, for their supremacy during the permanent the permanent crisis which is our only future.. Most people don’t know that France has been closely connected to the massacres in Rwanda and Zaire, and its history in Algeria has been no better than Americas’ in Vietnam. War is the health of all States.

   Jack Straw’s caricature of bin Laden as “psychotic” and “paranoid” is symptomatic of the general use psychology plays in repressing consciousness – ignore the real social contradictions in order to isolate individuals from their history, history generally and social relations. But obviously Straw has an interest in hiding this history (e.g. don’t talk about how the SAS helped train Bin Laden).

 “Since September 11^th we haven’t heard from the [anti-globalisation] protestors. I’m sure they are reflecting on what their demands were because their demands turned out to be very similar to those of Bin Laden’s network…They say world trade is evil, we want to stop it. If he says that too, do they still want to say that? There is a sort of anarchist’s chaos”- Claire Short, 5/11/01

   Demagogic manipulation is not confined to bin Laden, obviously. Here, Short is echoing the semi-fascist Berlusconi, who said in September that there is a “strange unanimity” between Islamic terrorism and the anti-globalisation movement, under which pretext he proceeded to raid at least 60 autonomous centres, shutting most of them down. With the FBI categorising Reclaim The Streets[3] as ‘terrorist’ we’re in for a long long winter of repression, a creeping totalitarianism far more insidious than fascism.

   HOWEVER:

   Bin Laden, under the demagogic guise of speaking for the poor Palestinians and all the other Third World proletariat suffering under the weight of globalised multinational capital, represents that section of the Saudi bourgeoisie which has lost out to the domination by foreign, mainly US, capital: a bit like Lenin almost 100 years ago, he wants to develop a purely national capital not subservient to foreign domination. Islam, and his attempt to give it a ‘radical’ image, is the ideological cohesion given to this competition with the worlds’ dominant power. It is probably not accidental that this attack on the WTC has coincided with the beginnings of a resurgence of opposition to capital, and it is really no surprise that some demagogue would try to co-opt the weak ‘critique’ of capitalism represented by the more Middle Class sections of the anti-globalisation movement, regardless of the intentions of these critics (as said earlier, its not intentions that count: if you want to reform or modify the commodity economy and its States you inevitably succumb to their contradictions, you inevitably  give fuel to those you hadn’t dared imagine would use your ideas like that).

   In the end, if we try to oppose this war it’s mainly to oppose it as a convenient cover for the repressions and vicious insecurity that millions of workers are going to be thrown into by this recession. If the war becomes just an opportunity to campaign separate from daily life, whilst we have to submit even further to the miseries of work/home/leisure/the street, then such campaigning is also a convenient cover – for us not challenging the totalitarian contradictions where we might be able to really effect something -  in our daily life. In fact, this is the fundamental false choice this war has thrown up.

Brought to you by: B.M.Combustion, London WCIN 3XX, November 15^th 2001

TONY BENN –

JUST ANOTHER ENEMY OF THE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE STUPIDITY OF THE WORLD MARKET

Every time there’s a war on the organisers of demonstrations against the war make sure that their saint – Tony Benn – is there to give a boringly respectable image to this pseudo-opposition to the war. Almost invariably he trundles out the stale irrelevant cliché that this war is illegal, that it hasn’t had the ratification of the United Nations or some other body representing capitalist mass murder: the sanctions on Iraq are legal, the mass starvation of thousands of kids every day is legal, the mass bombing of Dresden and the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War ll were legal. Bourgeois law, especially the law of value which reduces the masses of individuals to their value on the world market, is a machine for death – living or real, and he’s always been part of this machine. The following – about Benn and democracy - is an extract from a pamphlet called “You Make Plans – We Make History” about ecological collapse, science, the anti-globalisation movement and Reclaim the Streets:

   “Tony Benn is one of the more famous representatives of this dominant pro-democratic nation state tendency. After Genoa he said, with stunning originality, “In Britain, we have to channel some of the energy that now goes into protest back into the ballot box”. Doubtless he hopes that this could be the same kind of energy that he was Minister of back in the late 1970s, when he armed the Atomic Energy Authority and, like Thatcher after him, shut down loads of coal pits because they were “uneconomic” (people’s memories are so short that, just 5 years after losing his ministerial position, he was welcomed into the struggle of the miners against pit closures). However, after June 2001’s lowest election turnout in the UK ever (1918 doesn’t compare – there were loads of soldiers waiting on the Continent to be demobbed, not to mention women under 25, who couldn’t vote) one would have expected a subtler reference to bourgeois democracy (there is no automatic reason for optimism in this low turnout: the USA has, for a long time, had elections where under 50% of those entitled to vote haven’t, but this has not meant a corresponding increase in class struggle). Given the intensified conditioning being meted out to the young in the form of “citizenship” classes in schools and nauseating propaganda like that, Benn’s reflex verbiage about ballot boxes shows him to be as reactionary as Blunkett or Estelle Morris.  The ideology of spreading this kind of democracy is merely an ideology of democracy of form. Submissive to the utterly undemocratic content of the commodity economy, it’s a largely unrealisable capitalist utopia, involving voting for your own Police Authority, your own boss, your own concentration camp commander. Whilst we seek a social movement which is anti-hierarchical and inclusive as possible and which may when appropriate use such democratic forms as voting and revocable delegation subject to immediate recall by those who delegate them, yet we do not uphold what is currently called ‘democracy’ as any sacred principle or ultimate goal. That would be to fall into the same trap as the Green scene’s stifling consensus obsession that we criticise in this text. It’s the content of this struggle that will determine whether voting and  delegation extends the collective power of individuals or ties them ideologically even closer to the complexities of the commodity form. The fetishisation of organisational forms which makes a measurable  equivalence  of each persons vote, but which reduces that person to a mere number, is the mirror image of the commodity form.”.

From: B.M.Combustion, London, WC1N 3XX