AUT: SABOTAGE THE WAR EFFORT!

[anthony hayes <antyphayes@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

hi all. below is an anti-war leaflet peter and myself
have written. some context: here in canberra,
australia - the centre of the bureaucratic state
spectacle of australia - the anti-war organising group
is run by castro lovers & the ISO. peter, myself and
maybe 2 or 3 others are the only visible manifestation
of an *attempt* at organising along libertarian
communist lines. hence this leaflet perhaps attempting
to cover too much ground, though still not enough...

any constructive comments and criticisms would be
appreciated. thanks.

anthony

-------------------------------
SABOTAGE THE WAR EFFORT!

The war waged against Iraqis is a war waged against
all of humanity. The war on 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 all suffer whether it is from
increasing state repression, continuing cuts to
government services such as health and education, as
well as when the inevitable rise in the price of oil
pours through into price rises for just about every
other commodity.

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.

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 senile dementia. 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;
Suharto and Milosevic chased out of office by mass
strikes, demonstrations and riots; General strikes
shook 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. During the last decade we
have seen the deep recession of the early 1990s. 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 US 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.

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 wars have been stopped by mutinies,
strikes and revolution. 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 and the world
to the brink of revolution. 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
shopping mall, the factory, the office and the pub 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.

canberratreason@xxxxxxxxxxxx


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