Antiwar Home

SABOTAGE THE WAR EFFORT!

BY anthony hayes (antyphayes@yahoo.com.au)

A war waged upon the people in Iraq is a war waged upon all of humanity. A war against Iraqis is directly opposed to the interests of the majority of the world's population: the working multitude. War will kill, maim, and make refugees of thousands of Iraqi working people - dreams and life brought to a brutal end. As well as the millions of Iraqi workers immediately affected the war is also an attack on the entire global working class. We will all suffer.

Bush has stated that the so-called “war on terrorism” could last for 50 years. Tony Blair has foreshadowed the continuation of this permanent war in North Korea. Military spending is up. Border's are being tightened and brutally enforced. Internal surveillance and curtailment of civil liberties is manifest - Howard and the Attorney-General Daryl Williams push for a further escalation of ASIO's powers - and the increased official harassment of people of Arab and Islamic cultural backgrounds. For the global rulers fear is the key. A world of mistrust and loathing to distract us from the commonality of our chains - that the global working class will be made to pay for this world through more work, increasing state repression, and continuing cuts to public services such as the freeze on Medicare, the closing of public hospitals and the continuing decrease to funding of education.

Capitalism is falling back on mass slaughter as a way out of its intensifying & deepening crisis. Crisis is the indispensable condition of capitalism. The irreconcilable contradiction between the needs of people for life opposed to the needs of capital to hoard and accumulate things and profits, results in a world of constant upheaval and permanent crisis. War is the ultimate destructive expression of this contradiction.

September 11 2001 opened a space for the global ruling class. That day has become the reason par excellence for everything that they have tried to enforce upon us since then. On television the Australian government blares out its justification for joining all of us to the U.S. war: “the way of life we all value so highly must go on.” But what is this way of life that our rulers are prepared to wage war for? A life of more work, more stress and less pay. A life of labyrinthine borders and detention camps. A life of fast food, junk food – anorexia and obesity. A life of loneliness, suicide and despair. A life of emotional impotence and patented cures. A life of credit cards, lifelong mortgages and internet porn. A life spent in front of a box. This is the rapidly escalating and intensifying world of things and their prices. For capital the value of values is found in harnessing our time for the production of a world of things. The capitalist world needs us to reproduce our own chains. And our time is the one thing that once sold can never be bought back.

The last decade has seen some impressive working class revolts against this world of pointless and monotonous work. The ongoing Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico; The country wide strikes in France in 1995; The growth of the anti-summit “movement of movements”; Suharto and Milosevic chased out of office by mass strikes, demonstrations and riots; General strikes in Nigeria, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal. In December 2001 four successive Argentine presidents were toppled by open mass rebellion against the government in a movement that continues to this day.

On the capitalist side the crisis expresses itself in anti-human terms: a crisis of money flows, capital flows, budget deficits and the need to tighten fiscal “responsibility” - the usual mantra of leaders and other little men and women. From the bailout of the Mexican economy in 1994, the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, the Russian financial crisis of 1999, the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000 and the Enron collapse in 2001, capitalism has staggered from crisis to crisis with things likely to get worse. As part of capital's response to the current crisis the U.S. state has cobbled together a small coalition of mostly reluctant allies to seize Iraq's oilfields with the hope that a new cycle of accumulation can be launched based on energy. “Rather than the now-uncertain computer- and bio-technology sectors, the more traditional oil-driven sectors [of the global economy] will be given primacy in re-launching profitability… The combination of the restoration of oil-driven accumulation with the imposition of the Bush doctrine[1] on global industrial development ensures that the "suburban-petroleum" mode of life we are living in the U.S. (and increasingly in Western Europe) will lead to endless war.” [2]

Capitalism is faced with the interrelated problems of economic crisis and explosions of struggle and resistance. Their solution is war. For those opposed to capitalism stopping the war should be the highest priority.

Historically mutinies, strikes and revolution have contributed to the ending and cessation of wars. Revolutionary mutinies in the Russian and German armies ended World War 1. In the 1991 Gulf War Iraqi troops deserted en masse in the face of overwhelming U.S. firepower and went home to turn their guns on Saddam's state. In the Vietnam war the dogged resistance of the Vietnamese people and the massive global anti-war and anti-capitalist insurgencies, wildcat strikes and urban rebellion, as well as the growing mutinous mood in the U.S. army in Vietnam brought the U.S. war to an end. Recently Serbia's surrender in the Kosovo war was caused by the mass desertion of reserve units.

We are faced with the problem that modern military forces, such as those of the U.S. and Australia, are professional operations that rely largely on a small number of Special Forces troops and Airforce personnel. The direct participation of a large proportion of national populations in a war machine, like in the Second World War, seems to be no longer required. To successfully prosecute its war, ruling classes across the world need us to stay passive in our daily lives far from the battlefields.

To stop war in these times means sabotaging the smooth running of the basis of the war machine at home. The well functioning shopping mall, factory, office and school are just as much a part of the war machine as the recruiting office, barracks or ADFA. We must go beyond the spectacle of rallies and demonstrations - they are a good beginning but a poor end. Howard and Bush count on opposition to the war to otherwise not affect their ability to wage war. This is risky for their side as it depends upon the anti-war movement not growing into rebellion against the world of work and war.

As capitalism is everywhere, and this war is an expression of the current capitalist crisis, then our opposition and subversion of the war must find a home everywhere. Strikes & occupations of workplaces, schools & universities; The widest possible dissemination of anti-war & anti-capitalist propaganda; Graffiti where ever a hand can reach; Disruption & occupations of military recruitment centres & other military facilities. These and other direct actions are the only way to bring this war to an end.

Already recruitment centres have been destroyed in Bristol in the U.K., and Indianapolis and San Jose in the U.S. Air bases have been invaded in Ireland and England. Train drivers in Scotland recently refused to transport war materiel. At the January demo in San Fransisco where 100,000 marched against the war, 2000 people broke away and went on a rampage against the symbols of a world order that has most to benefit from this war - Starbucks, McDonald's, Nike, the British Consulate and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service were the targets of a fury that won't stop at bringing just this war to an end, but the entire system of degradation, humiliation and exploitation of the human spirit.

THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM IS A WAR AGAINST HUMANITY

canberratreason@yahoo.com.au

Notes

1. “The Bush administration has put forward a doctrine with respect to Iraq that, if generalized, would look something like this:

“(1) Almost any advanced technological production process can be used to create "weapons of mass destruction."

“(2) Any such production process not directly controlled by a multinational corporation (MNC) headquartered in the US (or Japan or Western Europe) can be used by a government to create weapons of mass destruction.

“(3) No government outside a list agreed upon by the US government ought to have the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction.

“Therefore, no government (whether democratically elected or not) outside of the agreed list can be allowed to exist unless its advanced technology is controlled by an acceptable MNC.

“This argument means that the US government has taken on the role of overseeing and vetoing all forms of industrial development throughout the world in perpetuum. Autonomous industrial development not controlled by an approved MNC by any government is out of order. Hence this "war on terrorism" doctrine becomes a basis for the military control of the economic development policies of any government on the planet.” from ‘Respect Your Enemies--The First Rule of Peace: An Essay Addressed to the U. S. Anti-war Movement' by Midnight Notes at
http://www.commoner.org.uk/02-7groundzero.htm

2. from ‘Respect Your Enemies--The First Rule of Peace: An Essay Addressed to the U. S. Anti-war Movement' by Midnight Notes at
http://www.commoner.org.uk/02-7groundzero.htm