“Peter, Johan and Franz worked in a factory, making tanks…”
(Lyrics from an antimilitarist song)
Little by little the urban centres of capital in the four populated continents increasingly resemble concentration camps. Police forces are becoming militarized, sweeping the prison cities, openly torturing, shooting, attacking demonstrations en masse with chemical weapons, invading spaces of resistance, imprisoning and holding hostage an ever growing part of the opressed population. At the same time, armies are getting intensively reorginised into counter-revolutionary repressive institutions. With increasing frequency they intervene in the capitalist galleys in order to ensure class tyranny, enveloped in their post cold-war bourgeois propaganda which targets anyone who willfully or not becomes a threat to the security of their regimes.
Since the 90s, european republics, having sanctified their nazi deviants (both historical and contemporary), have been waging a war at their borders against the hungry and downtrodden of the capitalist periphery. They then spread concentration camps along the geographical borderlines of class antagonism, to be incorporated into the web of everyday control. Those of us who are deemed superfluous for capitalist reproduction under conditions of brutal exploitation, impoverishment and social cannibalism, are captured en masse under administrative detention. What is reflected both in our imprisonment and in our revolts is the fear of the rulers vis a vis the unbridled social potential. The condensed concentration camp serves to protect the universal work camp. In order to safeguard their profit, the rulers unleash class genocide on a planetary scale. Anihilation constitutes the perfected form of capital’s biopolitical domination over the exploited. The concentration camps of today, by revealing the militaristic order of bourgeois civilization, also reveal its abysmal brutality.
Class and social resistance, such as current strikes and the struggle against gold mining in Chalkidiki, is met with military laws and tactics. In the capitalist galleys, the imposition of peace -in other words the utopia of the priviledged scum- means poverty and military terrorism. Because, if the market economy is to recover it will do so by trampeling over our bodies. The war is present here, everyday, in the slavery of wage labour and in the fragmentation of our class, at school, in the self-destructive onslaught of the “private interest”, in the guarded work sites, in the police occupation of our streets and in the prisons. The factories run in order to build the “tanks” that will keep us chained to the factories to our dying day.
The answer to this class genocide is and has always been social revolt, wild strikes, militant proletarian organisation in the omnipresent class war.
“Braun, Fischer and Kraft, became pretend enemies…”
Throughout human history, authority has made the opressed fight each other for the sake of the rulers’ profits. In the last two centuries the establishment of national armies and the consequent total war have intensified fighting and capitalist growth to an extreme degree. Today, the slaughterhouse of national
wars remains an available tool for applying interstate social control, for using up the non-profitable human resources and for the perverse assimilation of resistance.
The capitalist competition over hydrocarbon resources in the aegean sea presents an occasion for creating an artificial nationalistic polarisation. Capitalists have a vested interest in the proletarians killing each other during the pillaging they are planing next. As society is sucked into a whirl of the degradation that is charging on under the banner of national, european and planetary economy, a wet tomb is revealed ready to engulf both greeks and turks.
In the entire history of the nation state, the military operations of the rulers, from the french revolution to the recent intervention of france in west africa in order to control the oil reserves there, take place in the name of some “liberation”. “Self-determination against empires”, “liberation from slavery”, “revolution against othoman rule”, “reclaiming lost homelands”, “uniting against foreign conquerors”, “defending the liberal world from red totalitarianism, religious fundamentalism and terrorism”, “fighting mafia control”, “humanitarian intervention”, “subverting dictators”, “imposition of peace”, “safeguarding democracy”. The counterfeit values of bourgeois democracy coupled with some heroic fairytale, invariably lead the opressed to the triumphs of the militarists.
Armies intervene in order to secure capitalist accumulation, which is inherently expansionist. What’s more, they intervene within the urban galley in order to secure the exploitative class whenever a social revolt does away with tyrannical institutions. And then, they sometimes put on the uniform of counter-revolution, against the “insurgents”, the “terrorists” and the “foreign provocatuers” and at other times the uniform of revolution, installing new dictators for the “defence of the people” from the tyrannts whom the opressed have already overthrown. Such as the war of the republican government in insurgent spain in ’36, the intervention of the british “alliance” in greece in ’44, the replacement of the shah by an islamic dicatorship in iran with the support of the army, the tranformation of the soviet regimes or the recent international occupation of libya and today the military supression of the revolt in egypt. In syria the social revolt is clamped mutually in between the “anti-imperialist” baath regime, the “anti-regime” islamist mercanaries and the imminent “humanitarian” nato intervention.
Still, we have seen whole armies disintegrate in a day, when the wave of insurgency snaps the wired fences of the barracks, as in hungary in ’56 and in albania in ’97. We have also seen proletarians in uniform, ravaged by war, turning their guns en masse against the nation’s “enlightened” and “pureblooded”, as in russia in ’17, in germany in ’19 and in colonialist portugal in ’74.
Looking towards the social revolution we oppose class war against the war of the masters, here and now and without compromise.
“The marching tune they made him sing was fascist…”
We live in a place, the history of which is dominated by militarist movements, dictatorships, battalions of nazi collaborators, informers, police spies and torturers, paid mouthpieces of liberal nationalism and of the cutlure of subordination to eurocentricism, displacement camps and parastate paid executioners trained by the army. Militarism has set the foundations for the greek state. Fascism is rooted in the official right wing, in the political manouvering of the “democratic centre”, in the compromises of the left. Fascism is rooted in the tradition of the national army, which is there to guard the rule of the racketeers/ agents of secret services and multinational corporations. Fascism is rooted in the vision of private prosperity, which instills repression within social relations. Militarism is expressed in the deafening silence, in the self-destructive resignation, in the cannibalism of individualization.
Today fascists are returning to the political foreground, as class tension sharpens, in order to serve the nation of the rulers and the international managerial elite, by militarizing the social scenery. Fascists pave the way for the police terrorism, for the paramilitary counter-insurgency, for the military counter-revolution.
Lets not serve those who feed on our blood. Lets not serve those who bomb our fellow men and women in the nato colonies. Lets not defend the walls that keep us imprisoned. Lets not give the state and its army any allibi for hiring, training and arming executioners of refugees and antifascists.
PROLETARIAN SOLIDARITY, ANTI-NATIONAL RAGE
AND THE OLD TIN CANS HARDENING IN THE GROUND
(It was a common theme of nationalist propaganda during the greek civil war, that the communists slaughtered their enemies using rusty tin cans)
Dimitris Hatzivasiliadis (Total Objector of Military service, October 2013)