A-Infos (en) Britain, anarchist magazine, Touch of Class #1 - THE STATE, WAR AND,RESISTANCE by Darren Redstar & Richard McKenna,

At the core of the state is violence. --- From the warrior circle of the 
meanest barbarian chieftain to the Oval Office of the White House, the state 
has sought to concentrate all violence into its hands - sanitising and 
legitimising it into `law and order' and `national security' whilst 
simultaneously demonising, isolating and criminalising any resistance. War is 
the highest expression of the violence at the heart of the state. To imagine a 
state without a war machine is an impossibility. Class society cannot give up 
war just as a limpet cannot give up its rock. Before the advent of capitalism 
War was a limited affair. The aim of kings and emperors was defend `their' 
property against the depredations of their `brother' princes whilst seeking to 
steal as much of their weaker neighbours as they could get away with.
The aim was theft - land, cities, slaves. The destruction
that accompanied war was an unwanted but necessary
waste: it was in the interests of the rulers that warfare
should be as limited as possible so as to increase their
spoils.
Capitalism however with its capacity to reduce
everything to the `cash nexus' has made even the
destruction caused by war into a profit-making
opportunity. Whether it is in the reopening of markets
previously supplied by industries blown to pieces
by aerial bombardment to using war as giant shop
window for the arms industry (Lockheed-Martin
and Carlyle group executives were embedded in US
military units during Desert Storm in 1991) capitalism
ensures that every bang is worth its buck!
It is not surprising that the working class- those who
are expected to die and to kill in these wars have been
at the front of the fight against the state war machine.
At the very birth of Capitalism, during the Napoleonic
wars, in 18th century Portsmouth (and in dozens of
other port towns) working class crowds fought the
press gang and drove them out of the dockside,
and, in many towns inland, as soon as the recruiting
sergeant arrived crowds of women would start
haranguing the troopers and attempted to snatch back
any youths stupid enough to have taken the `King's
shilling'.
Within the war machine itself the resistance of the
working class continued. The most concentrated (and
most wretched) were the sailors aboard the wooden
death traps that made up `Nelson's Navy'. They
mutinied in 1797 whilst at anchor at Spithead and the
Nore.
When the vast human abbatoir that was the First World
War opened in 1914, it was working class militants
on all sides who picketed recruitment halls, formed
anti-conscription leagues agitated against jingoism
and nationalist fervour even in the face of murderous
patriotic mobs and abandonment by the leaderships
of the `socialist' parties and trades unions who busied
themselves in supporting their own ruling classes in
their respective `wars for civilization'.
It was the workers dragooned into uniform and herded
off to die who finally put a stop to the slaughter
by refusing to fight any more, revolts mutinies and
rebellions that caused the fall of half the crowned
heads of Europe and brought the fear of revolution
into the salons and corridors of power of the ruling
classes of the world.

If historically the working class has been at the
forefront of struggles against war, why then are
modern anti-war movements so dominated by the
middle classes? Why is that a struggle which to
be successful must result in the overthrow of both
capitalism and the destruction of the state has become
consumed by politics committed to maintaining `a
nicer, peaceful, capitalism' and where any attempt to
class solutions are condemned as `divisive'?
Much of the problem was caused, not surprisingly,
by the domination, throughout so much of the last
century, of the Leninists; their cynical use of anti-war
movements throughout the 1920s and `30s, first
supporting and then, without warning, opposing
peace movements as dictated by the whims of Russian
foreign policy, disorientated many working class
people, as did the mass of propaganda which one
moment called for a popular front with `progressive'
tories against the threat of fascism and the next
condemned these same tories as imperialists for
declaring war on the self same fascists! (Stalin had
signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler). As the
Leninists swapped and changed their tactics on
receipt of orders from Moscow they finally ended
up with the `Popular Front', in which these erstwhile
`revolutionaries' finally gave up any pretence that they
were actually interested in the transforming of society
and instead opted for an alliance with anybody or
anything that promised a mite more influence within
the corridors of power, and having sunk so low that
there was no going back; official communism never
did, and thus peddled the popular front for the
remainder of its inglorious existence.
In post-war Britain, there have been two major anti-
war movements, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(CND) and the Stop The War Coalition (STWC). For
most of CND's existence it has been dominated by the
communist party and its popular frontism.*

The STWC was formed to fight the build up toward
war, first in Afghanistan after 9/11, and then - most
famously - in opposing the war against Iraq (with
Britain's largest demonstration, 2 million claimed on
the streets of London). Unlike CND, the STWC was
created long after the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the implosion of the world's communist parties.
Instead the driving force behind its formation was
the trotskyist group the SWP who had been trenchant
                              ,
critics of the accommodationist policies of the CP
and CND, but, who now they found themselves thrust
into the position of leadership, switched wholesale
over to the exact same popular frontism which had
been the hallmark of CND and the CP and reached
its nadir in the formation of the Respect ­ the Unity
Coalition (RUC) with the Muslim Association of Britain
and `pussy' George Galloway. This foul cabal have
lied and lied and lied about the war, to the same
extent as, though less blatantly than, Tony Blair. They
have dressed the struggle up as a war against Islam
­ which anyone can see Tony Blair, if not George Bush,
desperately wants to avoid. To spell it out in a word
even the SWP and STWC can understand, the war
is about OIL. After all, radical Islam was far weaker
with Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq than it is now.
Whimpering that the war's a clash of civilizations
echoes the neo-con arguments of Samuel Huntingdon
and shows the SWP's utter abdication of any pretence
to be described as a revolutionary party. Rather, they
are now a group of apologists for a vicious, anti-
working class ideology, Islamism, which any socialist
worth their salt would revile with every atom of their
being.
Militant working class anti-militarism must be
reclaimed. This means no more of the sterile `A
to B' marches in order to be preached at 3 times
a year by the great and the good and constant
repetition that every march `is the best ever'... `one
more push!'...'Tony Bliar are you listening?' etc.
etc. The ineffectual liberal parading has achieved
absolutely nothing positive, leaving many thousands
of people instead wholly disillusioned with the inept
movement the STWC have led to embarrassing
defeat. Instead of carrying out effective action to
build on the immense turnout in February 2003, the
STWC rather concentrated on the same tired party-
building antics we saw from Militant in the poll tax
­ attempts to enlarge the `mother' organization in a
parasitical drive to capitalise on people's anger. And
more than three years after the toppling of Saddam
Hussein, the STWC have learned nothing, choosing
to hold another pointless march in Manchester when
larger forces to unseat Tony Blair are at work. When
he goes, whatever the STWC might say, they will
have had nothing to do with his departure. The way
forwards for the anti-war movement is to ditch the
deadweight lefties and replace their failed politics
with hardnosed class politics, and it means direct
action explicitly linked to the day to day lives of those
affected by the war. Working alongside the families of
service men and women in the war zones and those
who have died or been maimed, providing support
for the growing numbers of those deciding to `vote
with their feet' and go awol. It means that when we
organise actions against arms fairs and recruitment
shows we do so alongside agitation to fight for
alternative employment and housing for those young
people who might be otherwise persuaded to join
up. It means that recognising that opposition to the
imperialistic adventures of our ruling class does not
mean automatic support for those fighting against
them. My enemy's enemy is not my friend; our friends
are the working classes of the world. Gaining vicariou
pleasure at the sight of working class children being
shipped home in body bags does not make one a
revolutionary - it makes one a ghoul! The sorry state
of the British anti-war movement after five years of
`leadership' from the STWC and MAB now sees the
grieving parents of dead soldiers called upon to speak
from the same platform as apologists for the very
people who killed them. As many of the insurgent
groups in Iraq are explicitly anti-working class, and
these are often the groups killing US and UK soldiers,
why are they so strongly supported by the SWP/STWC
We at Class War believe that the trot left has taken
leave of its senses, beguiled by their new `friends' in
the Islamist movement who are doubtless overjoyed
by the utter idiocy of their new allies. The SWP often
say that you learn from other people as you struggle
alongside them. The Islamists must have learnt just
how gullible and credulous the sections of the white
middle class in the STWC are. The Islamists must
recall the alliance their Iranian brethren forged with
the Iranian left in the late 1970s, which ended in the
complete destruction of the left-wingers by 1981.
Doubtless the Islamists here will dispense with the
lefties' services when they are no longer useful. The
best the SWP/SWTC can hope for is that it will be less
bloody.
By personalising the anti-war campaign against
Bush and Blair, the STWC are missing a major
point: the state, not just Blair, is at war with Iraq and
Afghanistan. No credible alternative leader exists who
opposes the war. The most a change of Prime Minister
would do would be to change the way the war is
waged. And any change of leadership will take place
over different issues, not solely over the legality of the
war or the conduct of the war. Like it or not, the world
has moved on since 2003 and the sooner the anti-war
movement in this country realises that, so much the
better. This leaves the non-trot anti-war movement in
this country with a mountain to climb and a bunch of
trot and superstitious to overcome. If we, the working
class, are to reclaim the agenda from the lefties and
Islamists who've monopolised the movement for so
long, and if we're then to stand any chance of success,
we must link the war into the other issues which follow
from it. Anarchists often say that war is the health of
the state, so often that it is a cliché. Instead of hiding
behind that slogan and using it to avoid any deeper
political analysis, we as a movement, an anarchist
movement, need to reclaim the initiative from the
boring lefties ­ which shouldn't be hard ­ and by a
mixture of street activities and polemical propaganda
push our politics.
The struggle against the state here is the struggle
against war everywhere.
No war but the class war!
Darren Redstar & Richard McKenna,
September 2006
============================================
* At the birth of CND the CPGB was committed to supporting
  Russia's bomb which meant condemning CND's unilateralism,
  when the `comrades' saw however how large the potential
  audience was, and the inroads that trots and anarchists were
  making the line was hastily altered.

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http://www.londonclasswar.org/A_Touch_of_Class.pdf
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