The march to barbarism

No bombs have fallen yet on England. But the so-called political leadership of the Conservatives and Labour rush to take sides. An unwritten agreement as to who is right, and who is wrong, where death is always one sided, where only the children on one side of the conflict are ever killed. These are pre-crises times; the world situation will only worsen. It is now only a question of how deep and wide the violences will grow. Full steam ahead for the Third World War.

It is almost impossible to absorb the news from a variety of outlets. The usual screeching bile is expected from the right wing quarters. The word hypocrisy cannot be written in large enough type to describe them. The liberal press does its usual hand ringing and hides its own agendas behind a pretence of objectivity.

It is clear that, to use some management speak, parliamentary democracy is no longer fit for purpose. Not one MP in Britain has an ounce of a clue as to how the world can be moved from one minute to midnight on the nuclear clock to a world of peace.

Not one so-called ‘world leader’ has any notion of the strategy and tactics needed to resolve any of the military or social problems that are twisting the necks and breaking the limbs of so many of the world’s population. When bourgeois liberal democracy is finally boiled down to its core ingredients the hard, gnarled substance that remains is war.

Capitalism has been built through violence. Capital expands through the flowing of blood and the crushing of life. Extinctions of people in North and South America and Australia and a hundred other places. Widespread massacres in India and China. Brutal slavery and more extinctions and great slaughter in Africa. Devastating wars in Europe, people rounded up into cattle trucks and gassed in concentration camps. And on and on it goes.

And yet a whole industry of head-fixing works day and night to try to convince us otherwise. The American dream, the better life tomorrow, the endless developments of media, advertising and gadgets. Politicians waving flags, shouting empty slogans, celebrities and television experts, working hard to keep us all in hand.

On the surface of the channel, the ships increase their speed; carrying chemicals to make explosives, steel for tanks and guns, oil to fuel the long lines of trucks taking weapons and munitions to the front. They drive forward with cheers and military songs. They drive back full of dead bodies in plastic body bags; silent, morbid and morose. The bodies are dropped off in towns and villages where officials grow fat on profiteering and corruption. The elderly and the children are the only ones left at home. They look among the bodies piled up in front of the local school trying to identify friends and family members.

Below the channel, sub-sea infrastructure cables, fibre optic technologies. Messages of hate and war, instructions for the moving of ammunition, secret orders for surprise attacks. The setting up of traps. The number of enemies is increasing. They are everywhere. On the underground trains, in the skies, walking through busy streets. Everyone is under surveillance but who is really watching who and what is any body really seeing?

War mongers, war mongers, war mongers in positions of power everywhere. The further from the front lines and the mutilated faces and limbless torsos the greater their military passion roars. In the deafening sound of the newspaper presses and the television and the radio, here and there a voice; ‘Palestinian children are children too’.

But they won’t be at school today, nor tomorrow nor the weeks or months after that. Many are going to die in the coming days. A chronicle of mass murder foretold. The leader of the opposition checks himself in the mirror, adjust his tie. Is he saying what he imagines the echo chamber wants to hear?

There is a global ruling class and its representatives and a global working class. The lines are often blurred and difficult to see. On one side, Biden, Putin, Assad, Mohammed bin Salman (he has an estimated personal wealth of $25 bn), Macron, Netenyahu, Sunak, Orban, and many others. They wear necklaces of bullets and fill their pockets with blood soaked rags. They are building the infrastructure of war that will lead us all to hell. They are helped along by the billionaires who own and control the dominant means of communication.

Hold fast my friends. The fiercer the storm the greater the need for steady hands and cool thinking. Our hearts remain on fire and that too can become a force.

It seems impossible, outlandish, a disturbed dream. But there is a way out of this. The global ruling class thinks it can contain ‘local wars’ (this may or may not be true) but it cares for profits more than human lives. There is a power that can stop all of this; the workers in the oil industry across the Middle East, the port workers who make it possible for that oil to reach the tankers, the seafarers, the software developers, the network engineers, the construction workers. A day or two of their hands becoming idle would change the picture.

I looked carefully at the registration plates of the lorries driving to and from the ferry port. Bulgaria, France, Turkey, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, Rumania, Ukraine. Occasionally there’s even one or two from Belarus. But I don’t see any from Palestine. And I don’t see a convoy being put together to deliver food, medicines, surgical equipment for emergency operations and amputations, blood supplies, plasma, penicillin, bandages. Basic foodstuffs, clean water, baby milk; perhaps some toys to replace the ones that have been blown to pieces.

In the ghetto of Gaza, sealed off, a powerful army waits. It is a 60,000 foot high corridor of destruction. At the top, satellites and reconnaissance craft. Then jet fighters and missile systems and at ground level, tanks, troops, machine guns, dogs, bespoke weapons for street fighting and the obliteration of a people. In the hinterland the factories that make flags are working overtime. Which flag will you fly?

The speed of history is not constant over time. There are accelerations when immense numbers of people and objects are hurled at each other with great velocity. The world is currently within an acceleration of violence, and therefore fear, paranoia, the destruction of the truth, the simple wiping out of life. There is no equality of outrage; some outrages are of greater weight than others. In these junctures, the particular interests of individual blocks of capital are revealed.

It’s a common view in England. A service station, busy road, dual carriage way, motorway. A node of capital investment and a centre for distribution of the oil commodity and therefore a point of capital accumulation. It’s by the roundabout. It is dressed up to look benign but it is one of the myriad points of class tensions, an expression of the rule of a certain class upon another. Everywhere we are compromised by the ubiquitousness of capital. Infrastructure, urban environments, food production, exploitative social relations in the workplace, oppressive political relations in what should be the realm of democracy.

In these dark days we must hold fast to the ideas of socialism; that a better world is possible. That capitalism offers nothing but further war, immiseration (relative or otherwise), the alienation of our very souls. Capital is building the road to hell. It’s already begun. The starting points are all in place. And now the bridges, underpasses, viaducts and tunnels are being constructed. The capitalists lean over us, pushing us harder towards the assembly points.

The roadside signs are newly painted with large arrows pointing in only one direction: Barbarism.

But the people who want the world to go in that direction are no better than us; much worse in fact. Separated from their armies and secret police and lackeys and spies they would appear feeble and pathetic. We cannot, must not allow such people to dominate the scene.

We hold a banner with the slogan, ‘Workers of the World Unite’.

It’s struggling in the winds of reaction but that banner must fly.