TŘÍDNÍ VÁLKA # CLASS WAR # GUERRE DE CLASSE

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Everyone, whatever he says, whatever he does, takes part in the class struggle… Either in an active or a passive way… While developing and deepening it or while denying it… As a subject of his own existence or as an object of his survival under the dictatorship of value… In the camp of the proletariat or that of the bourgeoisie… As a human being or as a useful idiot of capital… “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (Karl Marx)

In this short text on the present struggles in Egypt, we want to emphasize the important affirmations of the age-old struggle of our class against the tyranny of value, against exploitation. Our goal is obviously not to analyze these events in order to merely understand them, but rather to transform them, to disrupt the historical everyday nature of our proletarians’ life of misery gripping us, so that we should definitely eradicate the capitalist social relation from the surface of our planet. We don’t want to spend our time describing all pages long the horrors of this society of death and suffering. We obviously don’t want to lock ourselves into a passive and academic role. We are not interested in the biology of capital either, and we don’t have any intention to describe it in an objective way. On the contrary our purpose is to directly take part in its final destruction and to act in the movement of its necrology… And this means to stand firmly in the heart of the events that have been taking place in front of our eyes, to be a determined part of them as an active and decisive force…

Since more than two years, an important wave of struggles has been flowing across Maghreb and Mashrek. One after another, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and Syria… burst into flames of revolt… Some “dictators” fell, others hang on to the remnants of their power, the repression is fierce everywhere, because the proletarian are determined not to croak on the altar of value without at least selling their life dearly. Struggles against hunger, against misery, against the increase of prices of “basic” foodstuffs, against unemployment, against the impunity of torturers, against the arrogance of masters entrenched in their less and less inaccessible fortresses…

And when “dictators” are ousted under the pressure of “the street” (soft journalistic euphemism for not referring to the genuine subject of these movements: i.e. the proletariat in struggle!), or better said, when the world bourgeoisie and its central apparatuses remove such or such administrator who is not able to control the situation anymore, then “new” faces appear, more credible political “alternatives” appear in order to restore social peace and business law and order. But very quickly, the struggle recovers its dynamics as we can see since two years…

Continue reading ‘EGYPT: Nothing has changed, but everything begins…’ »

When the capitalists’ profits fall, they respond to proletarian resistance with bloodbath!

No killing can put an end to proletarian defiance in South Africa!

When miners from the mine of Marikana (which extracts 12% of platinum produced in the country and which is in the same time the richest platinum mine in the world), together with local inhabitants scraping along in miserable slums, demonstrated 15th August 2012 for improvement of their living conditions, the police – protective body of capital – responded with slaughter.
45 shot dead in 5 days committed by the state in order to repress the protests!

But the unbearable living conditions cannot be washed away by shed blood.

The time bomb continues to tick… And it will blow up all the system of exploitation!

Continue reading ‘When the capitalists’ profits fall, they respond to proletarian resistance with bloodbath!’ »

Again and again more Blood-Baath in Syria
Solidarity with proletariat in struggle

Early February 2012 we published a leaflet in several languages to send our internationalist greetings to proletarians in struggle in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia… and all over the world! This leaflet was a part of the movement in Syria commemorating the thirtieth “anniversary” of the uprising in the city of Hama and its terrible repression.

But just when proletarians continued to massively take to the streets and to occupy squares of different cities and villages in Syria against the deterioration of their living conditions, against exploitation and against repression, while they also remembered this terrible massacre of 1982 and organized processions to honour the memory of their then murdered struggling brothers and sisters, the Syrian state was planning a new murderous offensive and an implacable answer in order to try to suppress the rebellion that has been currently developing. Exactly thirty years after the uprising in the city of Hama the Syrian army brutally bombed the city of Homs with heavy artillery, a city that symbolizes the proletarian rebellion today, making more than 260 deaths in only one day. The Syrian army and the state militias laid siege to the city during nearly one month, they starved its inhabitants, and ended up crushing the last insurgents in action in the district of Bab Amr.

Continue reading ‘Again and again more Blood-Baath in Syria’ »

Blood-Baath in Syria… and proletarian direct action

It was thirty years ago, in the city of Hama in Syria… On February 2nd, 1982, the population responded to calls for insurrection against the government, against misery and repression. The insurgents were joined by 150 officers of the army and seized control of the city; they destroyed centres of repression, they executed more than 300 mercenaries of the regime, as well as a first unit of paratroops sent to subdue the revolt. The state retaliated while besieging the city and bombing it with heavy artillery during 27 days; even cyanide gas was used. The final assault reminds us of the “bloody week” during the Commune of Paris when the last bursts of proletarian resistance were equal to the state terror: young “kamikaze” women exploded their bombs amidst tanks and soldiers sweeping district, house by house. The repression was terrible, a sheer bloodbath: between 25,000 and 50,000 are estimated to have died. Media didn’t relay the information about these events, or not much, no indignation rose abroad, especially as the thesis of Islamite plot was put forward everywhere to better hide the social nature of these struggles, like any struggle of our class.

This uprising was not a bolt from the blue: strikes, demonstrations, sabotages, riots, bomb attacks, executions of army officers and VIPs of the Baath regime, mutinies in jails, various massacres, it was since months and years that important clashes had been setting Syria ablaze. Moreover the country was situated in a region that was laid waste by many problems–the struggles of our class were mixed with conflicts between various bourgeois factions: let’s remind the Lebanon war in 1982, as well as the bloody repression in “Palestinian” refugees camps where proletarians were slaughtered once by the Israeli army, once by various militias, if not directly by the PLO cops and their “national liberation” let’s remind the “Iranian revolution” from 1977 to 1979 and its transformation into an inter-bourgeois war between Iran and Iraq that will make about a million of dead in eight years; let’s also remind the struggles against this war, sabotages, revolutionary defeatism, army regiments of both belligerent countries that deserted their respective camps and got united to take actions against their own bourgeoisie, against both states; let’s remind the wave of proletarian struggle that swept through Egypt in 1977; let’s remind… Continue reading ‘Greetings to proletarians in struggle in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia… and all over the world!’ »

Introduction and brief critique of the text

We are bringing here a text “Spain: Anarchists and the May 15 movement—reflections and proposals” which was written by anarchists from Madrid and translated recently by Class War Group to Czech. We consider it to be a very interesting contribution to the question of revolutionary minorities’s activity inside of social movements such as is the May 15 movement. It deals with the activity within movements that are full of contradictions, confusions, false ideas, manipulators and politicians, but which nevertheless still represent some demands and pose questions whose content has, behind all clear or less clear veil of the bourgeois ideology, necessarily classist aspect—express demands to satisfy human needs or they defend them against the bourgeois attack, demands whose aspiration to be fulfilled necessarily puts the human needs in opposition to economy, i.e. interests of capital.

This text provoked a discussion in which we have obviously tried to detect strong and weak aspects of this contribution. Let’s mention in advance that we don’t intend here to reproduce the false dichotomy between anarchism and Marxism (some say communism).To follow this dichotomy in practice results in nothing but another separation inside our class, where this internal fragmentation plays into the hands of the bourgeoisie in its common interest to turn all struggles of the proletariat against capital into the fights inside the proletarian class itself. Continue reading ‘Spain: Anarchists and the May 15 movement: reflections and proposals’ »

Since weeks and months a strong movement is taking place in the so-called “Arab world”, which is nothing but a part of the whole world of capital. Countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, etc., cities like Tunis, Gafsa, Sfax, Kasserine, Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, Sanaa, Aden, Tripoli, Benghazi, Misrata, Tobruk, Damas, Deraa, Lattakia, Homs, etc. are in fire and burning from our social anger. Protests and demonstrations, clashes with police and special units, mass and violent strikes, lootings, burnings down of banks and state institutions, actions of solidarity and agitation, setting up committees and “shoras”… all that and many others are expressions of the proletarian movement that has been spreading across these regions. It is our class perspective what emerges from these “popular revolts” – in organising structures for distribution of food and medical help outside and against exchange relations like in Misrata e.g., as in workers destroying headquarters of Egyptian official trade union or in revolutionary defeatist demonstrations in Saudi Arabia against their “own” troops being sent to crush the rebellion in Bahrain. Continue reading ‘Class struggle in Maghreb and Mashrek¹… Class struggle worldwide…’ »

Proletarian Autonomy – Communist Revolution – Proletarian Dictatorship

CLASS WAR

Every day the same, again and again:
ALARM CLOCK – COMMUTING – WORK – SHOPPING – COMMUTING – DINNER – TV – SLEEP – ALARM CLOCK – COMMUTING – WORK – SHOPPING – COMMUTING – DINNER – TV – SLEEP – ALARM CLOCK – COMMUTING – WORK… HOW LONG CAN WE STAND THAT??!

This society offers us only a struggle for bare survival, in which we are nothing but labour force and consumers. Of course, it’s all wrapped in beautiful speeches about decent citizen’s values and needs of the country and economy, in fashion trends and spiritless lifestyles daily churned out to us by media, politicians, scientists, celebrities… Are branded clothes, new mobile phones and plasma TV sets, leased cars and mortgaged housing, Friday parties, TV shows and family idylls in shopping centres a sufficient substitute for a truly human life? Is it all what we really desire and what we really need?

NOT FOR US!

We have no grandiose properties and companies, which would make living for us, therefore we have to go to work. We sell our time and energy, our labour power, to the class of bourgeois, who own means of production. We exchange our labour for a wage, which allows us to buy what we need to survive and what was produced elsewhere by the same working people as we are. However much we earn, as soon as we have spent our pay, we have to rush back to work again. It’s our labour what drives all the society and economy: factories, supermarkets, offices, hospitals, construction sites… We are the class of proletarians and we rebel!

AGAINST WAGE LABOUR

Labour is alienated from us, because the time, during which we are working, doesn’t belong to us, it’s not a complete part of us – above all it’s a means how to obtain money. As we sell our labour as a commodity to individual bosses and also to the whole bourgeoisie, it’s them, who controls it, who owns it and who really benefits from it. We just have to work as long and as fast as it’s demanded from us. Thus, we struggle against wage labour, which is the basis of our exploitation and of the whole capitalist system.

AGAINST LEISURE-TIME FACTORY

We don’t work in order to directly satisfy our needs as well as needs of other people. Needs of life are mediated to us through wages – money, because products of our labour, which belongs to the bourgeoisie, is alienated from us too. All the society is alienated from us: relations, which it is based on, its structures, institutions, wealth and even knowledge. Therefore, the dictatorship of Capital reigns also outside of work. Leisure, which we are looking for, is its part. It’s Capital, not us, that determines, how we eat, make love, dwell, travel, enjoy ourselves… Therefore, we struggle against the whole of capitalist social relations, which traps us in a gigantic factory, where we are like milch cows in every moment of our lives.

AGAINST CAPITALISM

Our labour is a commodity like no other: it’s the only one able to create new value, bigger than its own. Bosses exploit all of us, as they pay us only for our labour power and the whole surplus, that we have produced, is their surplus value and profit. Profit is re-invested in means of production, in production of new Capital, which is all the property controlled, owned and sold by bourgeois. Capital is our dead labour embodied in things. It’s our time and energy that we have killed at work. The only aim of the capitalist mode of production is to achieve profit and multiply Capital. Human needs are totally secondary and they are “satisfied” through production only in the extent and in the way, which serve Capital’s expansion. From these reasons, even the last regime (“real socialism”) was capitalist and there is Capitalism in North Korea, China or Cuba. Where there’s wage labour, there’s also Capital and it can’t be otherwise just because there’s also a “Marxist” ideology’s garb, re-organisation of the bourgeoisie through a political party and state and its efforts (with no lasting chance to succeed) to deform capitalist laws of market, competition and value.

AGAINST DEMOCRACY, STATE AND BOURGEOIS POLITICS

Democracy is the capitalist society’s own essence and not just one of its political forms. Atomised citizens, who achieve an artificial unity through a separated area of national politics, are a common characteristic of parliamentary, Stalinist, Fascist or for instance Islamist states. These are organisations of the bourgeoisie as a class, growing from social relations of the class society. That’s why the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat is anti-democratic and anti-state and has nothing in common with bourgeois politics, political parties (whether they are Left-wing or Right-wing, parliamentary or extra-parliamentary, legal or banned), elections and political coups.

AGAINST TRADE UNIONS AND LEFTISM

It’s a long time, since trade unions ceased to be working class organisations. They became a part of the capitalist State, an institution for an organised selling of labour power and keeping social peace. As such, they have to be destroyed, not reformed. Weaknesses and defeats of our class gave and still give rise to many currents of Leftism, which play the role of Social Democracy: they don’t strive for destruction of Capitalism, but for its radical reform. In times of revolutions they have always been the Capital’s last resort and bastion. Therefore, communist proletarians struggle against all forms of Leftism: Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, many varieties of Anarchism, Anti-Globalism, “Third-Worldist” Anti-Imperialist movements…

AGAINST UNITED FRONTS

We are opposed to all united fronts with “progressive” political factions of the bourgeoisie and to all counter-revolutionary ideologies emerging around such fronts: Anti-Fascism or for example National Liberation… All of them lead to the defence of one form of the capitalist dictatorship against another one, “lesser evil” against “bigger” one, or they lead to a struggle for Capitalism with a human face, but always they undermine and defeat the revolutionary proletariat. We are for a direct class action against racists and fascists and for the Communist Revolution as the only alternative to all forms of Capitalism.

AGAINST OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND WAR

All forms of oppression older than Capitalism itself – for instance on the basis of gender, sexuality, ethnical or religious origin – have become parts of capitalist exploitation and division of labour. No form of oppression exists outside of capitalist social relations and it can be abolished only alongside with them in the process of the Communist Revolution. Ideologies foisting a positive identity of worker, woman, Roma, Czech on us, proletarians, serve making us to internally identify with the capitalist system. However, within the proletariat there’s negation of all those obedient citizens’ identities hidden. Therefore, we oppose them in the same way as Nation, Country or Nationalism. Against social peace inside of national states and against a war among them, we affirm the class war (revolutionary defeatism).

FOR PROLETARIAN AUTONOMY

Today, despite their limits real struggles of the proletariat contain seeds of the future struggle for Communism. Therefore, today we support class struggles and formation of proletarian nucleuses, circles and networks on a subversive basis – i.e. struggling and associating outside and against trade unions. Precisely from struggles of this kind a proletarian movement can be born and set on the journey of realising proletarian autonomy. A mass struggle, in which the class will make ruptures with trade unions on their workplaces, with political parties, community or religious leaders in their communities, with bourgeois ideologies in their heads and with capitalist relations in their lives, will give rise to a new organisation of proletariat as a class, new forms of territorial centralisation of struggle: workers councils, general assemblies, communes…

FOR COMMUNIST REVOLUTION

Only in the process of increasing class autonomy, a change in the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie can take place. Only then can happen a qualitative leap in class consciousness and struggle – only then the proletarian revolution can start and unless it immediately, practically and consciously sets on the journey towards Communism, it will die, for counter-revolution will instantly use weaknesses of our class against our class.

FOR PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP

For more and more proletarians the process of combative development from class autonomy to violent insurrections and class revolution imposes a conscious choice between Communism and capitalist barbarism: exploitation, crisis, wars, and environmental catastrophe. The clearer this choice gets, the more capable the proletariat is to realise in the revolution its social dictatorship against wage labour, value, exchange, money, state. This means a worldwide dictatorship of human needs against Capital and revolutionary terror against bourgeois forces.

FOR COMMUNISATION OF THE SOCIETY

The proletarian dictatorship means communisation of social relations: abolition of wage labour, abolition of useless professions and productions, elimination of exchange relations from all aspects of our lives, abolition of economy and production for profit and subordination of all productive forces to human needs and needs of the world revolution, disappearance of the difference between work and leisure, city and countryside and all other separations, violent destruction of the State and its replacing with organs of proletarian revolutionary self-organisation, which the triumph of the revolution turns into a global human community. Through dictatorial communisation of social relations the proletariat abolishes itself and the whole class society and fully develops worldwide human community.

ON REVOLUTIONARY ORGANISATION

The revolutionary organisation spontaneously grows and gains specific forms directly from class struggle, because the proletariat is historically forced to do so. The revolutionary organisation neither makes the revolution nor enlightens and educates the proletariat for the revolution. The class is able to do this on its own and, on the contrary, through its militant activity creates conditions for centralisation of revolutionary groups, which are small and insignificant today in times of social peace, and the most conscious and radical sections of the proletariat into the communist party. This is based on self-organisation from below and organic centralisation and has the same interests as the whole class. What marks communists off, is that they act in an organised manner most decisively and consistently of all and always in the historical interest of the whole proletariat and thus they give direction to the rest of the class. The global communist party is a prefiguration of the worldwide human community.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE TODAY?

To develop, defend and propagate the programme of the Communist Revolution on the basis of lessons from past proletarian struggles. Through propaganda, agitation and active involvement, to highlight, support and spur all tendencies in contemporary struggles, which could aid a development of class consciousness and militant spirit in our class, an emergence of radical proletarian associations. To reveal and critically identify limits of present-day class movements. To centralise militant proletarians, who try to organise on the basis of the revolutionary programme. Always to defend interests of the whole proletariat, to act in an internationalist way and intransigently oppose every reformism and reaction that block the way to an emergence of proletarian autonomy.

Foreword

“We do not think the revolution was perfidiously wasted by those, who fell wrapped into an unfortunate flag of the defeated revolution, but by those, who, from behind their desks of wisdom or from their platforms, were subsequently unable to deduce from this sacrifice anything more than a few phrases of a demagogical admiration accompanied by defeatist comments.”
Amadeo Bordiga
(From the Commune to the Third International, 1924)

What a deep truth is contained in this quotation from a contradictory Italian leninist, Amadeo Bordiga (1), even in relation to a revolutionary working class movement in Bohemia, Silesia, Moravia, Slovakia as well as the Carpathian Ukraine since 1917 till 1921! This class movement abounding in a revolutionary desire to do away with capitalism and create a truly human society went as far as it was allowed by objective conditions and its own weaknesses. On one hand a bolshevik counter-revolution, which at the end devoured and destroyed all revolutionary potential of the movement, celebrated it and on the other robbed it of any revolutionary content. Bolsheviks elevated its weaknesses to virtues and used all this proletarian experience only as a myth supporting its own ideology. Now this movement is forgotten even by those, who consider themselves as classist revolutionaries. Frequently it is only because of a lingering burden of the bolshevik myth, but also because the then class militants did not flock under this or that flag and did not adhere to this or that single right ideology.

What you are holding in your hands, is the first from a series of texts which we intend to devote to the topic. This text deals with the first stage and context of the class movement in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s Czech Lands. That is why it starts off with the outbreak of the world war in 1914, which was accompanied by many expressions of anti-war resistance, which roughly in 1917 began acquire a revolutionary proletarian perspective, arduously striving at its own realisation in our class’ direct actions till its ultimate defeat in 1921. The movement’s first stage, however, concludes around the end of 1918 by the first temporary defeat of proletariat. And this defeat also represents the end of this pamphlet.

In general, proletarian struggles on a territory of former Czechoslovakia in years 1917-1921 are an integral part of the revolutionary wave, which at the end of the World War One began to shake the world, and they are also an important part of our class‘s history. If today we are returning to them – almost after one hundred years – we are not doing this out of a kind of need to be historians of proletariat. We are classist militants, Communists, and it is social revolution what is our goal and purpose of all our endeavor. That is why an excavation of our class brothers’ and sisters’ experience – an experience for a long time drowned and distorted by deposits of bourgeois ideology (stalinist, liberal…) – would be by itself an interesting and meritable act, nevertheless as Communists we strive to break the ideological separation between theory and practice, between a mere enumeration and description of past class struggles and drawing practical lessons for current and future struggles.

In other words, it is not our aim in this text to imitate bourgeois historiography and pile up facts, whom we will ascribe either positive or a negative sign according to an ideological key. Facts are important for us only as a source of appropriating – based on practical experience of the then proletarian movement – all points and levels, which represent a then classist militants‘ rupture with capitalism and an affirmation and development of our class’ historical programme. Of course, we do not want only to affirm strengths of the movement, but also to criticise its weaknesses.

We do not see the revolutionary proletarian movement in the Czechoslovakian Republic and before its foundation as an isolated one. It was just one of many parts, one of many moments of a worldwide proletarian movement. In the same way as Capital is a global social relation, proletariat is a global class and the communist movement arising from it and aiming at subversion of the capitalist world is global as well. The movement on the Czechoslovakian territory definitely was not one of peaks of the then revolutionary wave. Elsewhere (primarily in Germany) the proletarian revolution went further in some aspects and brought a much higher level of historical communist programme‘s clarification. In the same way as for example classist militants, who led in December 1920 an insurrection in the region of Hodonín, we are also a particular expression of a sum of experience gathered by the communist movement throughout its existence in time and space. This is why we view workers struggles from 1917 till 1921 on one hand as a source of practical lessons for the future and on the other hand while analysing them we aply to them practical lessons from all big confrontations, which our class has gone through.

To conclude this it is neccessary to add that our text is definitely not fully exhaustive, for it is out of our possibilities to excavate and study all the materials, which it has been still possible to find today. This weakness can be also seen from a disproportionate length of individual subchapters: some very important topics got lesser space than others, which is purely due to the fact that we did not obtain a bigger amount of detailed information. This is why the text needs to be discussed, develop and deepened further. That is also why we call all militants, who understand the meaning of our class history’s programmatical discovering, to involve themselves in the process of further development of this text through looking for and studying new sources that could be useful. This text is also not an academic text, thus do not expect it to match all criteria of bourgeois scientism. It is meant as a first contribution not only towards a recovery of a proletarian memory, but also towards a clarification and appropriation of its historical revolutionary programme. This is why we primarily deal with an analysis of the class movement itself in it, since it is only this movement, where the communist movement and revolution come from. We are not looking for a sort of ideological ancestors, who were sure and exclusive bearers of a communist consciousness and programme, in order to incorporate them into a genealogy of this or that “sacred” ideological family (which is typical for all possible social democratic ideologists). We are looking for lessons to be used in confrontations, which are only awaiting proletariat.

Class War
2008