Below is the founding statement of the Network of Anarchist Internationalists, of which the Anarchist Communist Group is a member. Groups, organisations and individuals are invited to affilate, both here in the UK and worldwide.
The Network of Anarchist Internationalists is: For revolutionary defeatism in every warring state!
Will: Support war resisters, draft dodgers, deserters, and conscientious objectors!
Calls for: A major libertarian internationalist initiative to counter militaristic propaganda! Nuclear catastrophe approaches! The ruling classes ‘East’ and ‘West’ are charlatans whose lust for power and profit is increasingly based on the war industry.
The self-styled West is articulating scenarios of a new world war. For them, the ‘free world’ is fighting an existential battle against ‘autocracies’ increasingly identified with orientalist stereotypes threatening to destroy our alleged ‘civilisation’.
Nations in this ‘democratic’ camp such as Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, are lauded as fighting the same global battle of the ‘good guys’ against the ‘evil’. This logic even enlists Syria’s Islamists on the side of the ‘good guys’.
On the other side, Russia, China and Iran, totalitarian states ruled by secret police, party enforcers and clerics. Each violently suppresses our class’s struggle against austerity and the march to war.
For a libertarian internationalist initiative against the militaristic propaganda disseminated daily, which presents our supposedly “good” armed states as if they were a humanitarian enterprise!
We need to offer practical and moral support to war resisters, draft dodgers, deserters, and groups taking internationalist positions, especially in the war zones.
Supporting refusal, conscience, desertion, and draft evasion on all sides of the war fronts, for revolutionary defeatism, is fundamental. Russia and Ukraine themselves recognise desertion as a major obstacle to their death programmes.
This support within the framework of our internationalism, promotes initiatives to challenge nationalism and borders, territorial sovereignty, the nation-state or its proto-state rivals, building new mechanisms of international solidarity and siblinghood.
The front lines are closer than you think, no further than the nearest arms or components factory, than the nearest logistics depot, transport hub or communications centre.
The war is where the ports and airports are, the military bases and their reserve barracks. It’s the rail networks and motorways, the towns, estates, cities and factories where we as workers pay the price of war in poverty from worsening austerity. And now the threat of conscription.
We cannot move without being at war and when we notice it, the rhetorical guns blaze “disrupter, extremist, traitor!” We must be all these things.
It’s time to distinguish our movement clearly from those who support “some wars before the class war”.
We are clear that revolutionaries not only oppose their wars but call for the transformation of war resistance into a social revolution! We do not call for a return to the situation before the war, their “capitalist peace”, which is just their repression of us in preparation for their next bloody enterprise.
What can we do practically, individually and collectively, home and abroad? On the most basic level, thinking globally, acting locally. Refuse their consensus and call out the hypocrisy, advocating for ourselves and our class across frontiers. Collectively, reject their ‘national interest’.
Link our struggles to austerity and their war profiteering. Everything we do for ourselves and our class, hinders their ‘warfare-state’. Join in solidarity across locality and trade – victory on the home front is a victory and example abroad.
From the Arctic rivers to the Red Sea, from Taiwan to the Congo basin, continental frontiers are aflame, or bristling in preparation. The changing faces of the superpower masquerades change nothing. They want us to fight – one capitalism, one war! The danger is real, the danger is now.“
Signatories so far (alphabetically by country and by name):
Czechia:
Antimilitarist Initiative (AMI)
The Czechoslovak Anarchist Association (CAS)
France:
Initiative Olga Taratuta
Germany:
Astendenz (AST)- Antipoltitisch-Sozialrevolutionäre Tendenz-Berlin
Greece
Deserters of Capitalist Peace
Hungary
Anarcho-Kommunista Szociális Alap – AXA Social Centre.
Gondolkodó Autonomous Bookshop, Budapest
Ireland
Organise! Ireland
UK:
Alex Alder (in personal capacity)
Anarchist Communist Group
Anarcom Network
Birmingham Revolutionary Anarchist Group
The Stirrer (Keynsham