There's an awful lot of people living in the world today, and it is true that many of them revealed a compassionate nature in the distress they felt for the victims in New York. By contrast, in other, far-flung corners, people in strange costumes danced strange dances in celebration of the deaths, like it was some kind of victory for their cause. However, it has to be said, that for most of the world's population the explosions in America must have seemed very distant and not significant enough to distract them from the roaring troubles and tragedies of their own lives.
bad things happen everywhere
That so many people did hear about what happened, and were moved enough to care, is due to America's rubbernecking media and its worldwide distribution; unfortunately the suffering inflicted by most of the world's catastrophes is not so thoroughly communicated.
Bad things happen. Some disasters are unfortunate and 'nobody's fault'. Some disasters are unforeseen but could have been avoided, they involve some structural culpability. But most disasters are made worse because of wilful neglect and outright maliciousness.
When houses collapse like paper during an earthquake it is because they were built for sale and rent, not shelter. When floods wash thousands from their homes it is because industrial agriculturalism requires the removal of all trees. When people are malnourished it is because food is produced to make money and not to feed people. When people live in slums it is because they have been forced off their land by people more rich and powerful than themselves; peasants are brought to the city to be used like raw materials in the factories. When a fire makes a holocaust of a disco, someone has decided not to provide adequate exits, someone has decided to pack the punters in. There is exploitation, profiteering, ripoffs, piracy, theft, enclosure, slavery and then there is war.
ten year war on terrorism
We are against the Ten Year War on terrorism. But we are against all wars. We think that all wars end as wars on humanity itself.
We are against the Ten Year War on terrorism whether it is fought militarily, economically or legally. We are against it because it is not a war on terrorism but the continuation of the generalised war on humanity. The new phase in the war has been caused by economic recession and provoked in this instance by a fearful ruling class protecting its self-interest with a military comfort blanket.
Everybody tips the wink at how wars make money and most of us prefer not to consider how national ruling classes do nicely whether their nation wins or loses. Both Japanese and German capitalists went on to work economic miracles out of humiliating defeat, and all they had to do was sign on the dotted line for democratic legitimacy. Political adaptability and willingness to learn new habits earns great rewards - the ruling elites of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran are awaiting the cash benefits of joining the free world's crusade on fundamentalism
we are not against america we are not for islam
The Ten Year War is not a war of ideas or moral values, it is not for freedom, it is not against terrorism. As the war is set up by the leaders of the World and its supposed enemies we find that we are not for one side or another. We do not intend to judge the horror value of one instance of atrocity against any other. We are not against America, we are not for Islam. We are not in the business of promoting any cultural specificity or national self-determination, we are not hung up on Palestine for the Palestinians any more than we think England belongs to the English (we reject equally the Israeli and Palestinian ruling elites). We are not in favour of the interest of some or other 'people' or ethnicity in the Third World as it is presented and interpreted by their wannabe rulers. We are interested in people only so far as they are human beings, human bodies, eyes that weep, mouths that tremble. We do not prefer the tribal, pirate capitalism of the post-Soviet East anymore than that of the synchronised, smooth and nasty domination of the West.
We are not anti-imperialists, we do not believe nation oppresses nation. We do not view the localised tyrannies of the Third World (their use of outright terror; their oppressive cultures of sexism, racism, homophobia; their use of slave and child labour; their corruption, their Caligula-like caprice) as any kind of alternative to Western democracy. We are against all nations and national identities. We are against all religions and cultural oppressions.
We are against this war because we are against all war. We are against war because wars are fought to improve the strategic situation (and thus increase the wealth and power) of the ruling elites that declare them. We are against the ruling elites who declare war. We are against all ruling elites.
capitalism is a machine
War does not stop, it has been going on for centuries. And every few years a new one is declared. And, by process of war, the ownership of the world is secured by an ever smaller number of the competing elites.
The structure and process of ownership is capitalism, its purpose is the creation of capital out of the exploitation of humanity. Capitalism is a machine, a machine that operates separately from and opposed to the interests of humanity. T1000s stalk through the chaos. Capitalism makes money from exploitation, it is prepared to use any means, including annihilation, to make money because money is both its only goal and its sole value. Capitalism seeks a world where people exist as economic units. The Ten Year War is a war to kill those who live outside of capitalism, and it is a war to further reduce the free moments of life of those who already live within it.
Capitalism is a machine that operates against the interests of humanity. The Ten Year War is the name capitalism has given itself. Capitalism is indistinguishable from the Ten Year War and The Ten Year War is indistinguishable from capitalism.
The Ten Year War is a ten year plan, a ten year phase in the ongoing discounting of the value of human life as life, and its usurping by the value of life as labour, life as money. It is a ten year war in which the capitalist machine will secure to its interest a further capacity to dominate human existence, it will use the war as justification to reduce wages and living conditions, it will seize any locally accumulated wealth, it will pass laws against resistance to it, it will legitimate local tyrannies that endorse it, it will seek the control of all information about its acts, it will seek to monopolise the deployment of terror.
The Ten Year War has been declared by capitalism to protect the interest of the capitalist ruling elite, it has been declared on terrorism but is in truth a war against the interest of humanity.
the ruling class has declared class war
The ruling class has declared class war and the world leaders say that the world is never going to be the same again., it is certain that the suffering already present in the world is going to intensify and spread as a consequence of this war.
We, who are against the war, are not going to stop it, just as we are powerless to stop the recession for which the war is an ideological veil. We cannot stop the war because the war is to be waged against the interest of humanity itself. We have no grounds from which we could appeal to the leaders of the world to stop the war because the war is to be waged in the interest of the ruling elite and is against us. The only way we could make them stop it is to offer the interests behind them more treasures than they would make in its execution. We cannot stop the war. We can only demonstrate our opposition to it. In opposing this war we are demonstrating our opposition to all wars, we are demonstrating our opposition to those who declare war, we are demonstrating our opposition to those whose interest is served by war. In opposing this war we continue to demonstrate our opposition to capitalism.
The anti-war movement has now existed for a hundred years. The anti-war movement has never stopped a war but at least it now sees clearly the link between capitalism and war, and that to be anti-war is to be anti-capitalist. It falls to the anti-capitalist movement to speak the first words of resistance to the Ten Year War, we hope this responsibility will help to mature those who trivialise the struggle by their paramilitary-style, we-rebels-against-the-world, posturing.
Political movements will not free humanity
We now see that the last war, the war to end all wars, is the war of capitalism against humanity. The resistance to this war fulfils its role only if it argues for the interest of a humanity that has not yet been allowed to come into existence: a humanity without war, oppression or exploitation; a humanity without religion or nation states; a humanity of free individuals, free to live where and how they decide. The objective of the anti-war movement, an objective not remotely within its grasp, is the removing of social power from the interests of capital and relocating it directly into the hands of humanity itself, without mediation or representation.
Political movements will not free humanity from capitalism, that is the task of humanity itself.
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