To block the war machines! (Text of the Open Antiwar Assemby - Thessaloniki)

BLOCK THE WAR MACHINES

NEITHER WITH NATO NOR WITH RUSSIA

INTERNATIONALIST STRUGGLES AGAINST NATIONALISM AND MILITARISM

Our present world tends to include less and less of us. This statement might sound obvious and banal. However, with every new crisis erupting in the course of (Western and global) capitalism's irreversible decline, we still become more and more aware of its concreteness. Indeed, from crisis to crisis, there is a growing sense that we do not fit in this world. Economic crises, social crises, "refugee crises", health crises, ecological crises, energy and supply chain crises, war crises, altogether make up the puzzle of a world hardly reminiscent of the privileges and security that used to be an important part of life for the middle classes in the West. 

Along with the crisis, (by now so permanent and naturalized that it seems inseparable from the "normality" of our lives), after 2008, riots and revolts have been breaking out all over the world. At every corner of the globe, one spark seems to be enough for social discontent to explode in conditions that seemed impossible breeding grounds for revolt before. From the Arab Spring to the US Occupy, from Chile to Bangladesh, from the French gilets jaunes to the Kazakhstan revolt, the ghost of social uprising is haunting the world, changing forms and often acquiring different (often adverse and diverse) contents. 

When social movements and uprisings do not manage to go beyond their own limits, when their most reformist or reactionary tendencies prevail, then they surrender and they are coopted by Capital. In recent history we have watched this cooptation take on various forms, depending on the particular features of each movement and country. They are suppressed by State and inter-State security forces, by the militarized police units and the army, as happened a few months ago in Kazakhstan (and did not provoke the democratic sensitivity of Western capitalists), or social conflict is redirected towards national, social-democratic demands, or, finally, social movements have to be destroyed with a more drastic kind of violence, full-on war. Ukraine and Syria are leading examples of this latter case, but also Libya and elsewhere, where social struggles took the form of an armed civil war, that culminated in a clash of two or more rival bourgeois power camps and then developed into transnational war, proxy or other. 

The return of war to European territory, right next to the militarized European metropoles, is just the clearest expression of the constitutive relation between capitalism and war. Today, we live in a situation where war can no longer be simply exported to the “periphery” without literally returning to its “center”. 

As for the ongoing war in Ukraine, with the Russian invasion being the tragic escalation of a war that has been going on for years, it goes without saying that we do not support either side. We “stand” neither with Russia, nor with Ukraine and NATO. But simply to state this position is not enough. We refuse to speak the language of geopolitics: Geopolitics is a foreign language to us, a language that alienates us from each other, and above all, a language which describes a world lacking its unpredictable and chaotic factor, a world without movements, without revolts, without this ocean of struggle and subversion. In short, geopolitics describes a world that does not exist. We prefer to speak the language of social movements, the language of social liberation. The only sides we see, and from which we refuse to keep an "equal distance", are a global system of exploitation and domination extending to all corners of the earth on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a huge population of excluded, oppressed, proletarian, migrant women and men. 

In this war, we side with the oppressed. Against capitalist death, which spread across Africa and the "East" and is now coming back to Europe, we want life to win. In today’s capitalist wars it is impossible for one or the other bloc to prevail. The capitalist center of gravity has shifted from where it traditionally was, so now all the powers that are fighting over (and through) the broken bodies of the oppressed worldwide, can only intensify the war within their own countries. This means, of course, higher prices for basic goods, a rapid devaluation of our lives, nationalism, militarism. It ultimately means a continuous process of selection that decides which lives are worthy of being saved and which are deemed unworthy.  

Since the Russian invasion, which brought the spectacle of war back to our screens, there has been a general confusion (with the exception of the emergence of a healthy, spontaneous, albeit weak, anti-war reflex). Many political narratives tend to mystify the causes of capitalist war. Perceptions differ. 

Some view war 

(a) in a way that personifies its causes, and refer to the "paranoia" of this or that particular leader; 

(b) in the context of the struggle between "totalitarianism" and "democracy", emphasizing the value of the latter over the former, or 

c) as an act of"denazification", that Western capitalism has allegedly been doing in the name of "peace" and "democracy", or

 d) as a result of the actions of the "Western warmongering hawks" alone, that are dragging the "weak states" into one more war (in the context of a traditional anti-imperialist approach). 

All these positions invite us to identify with one or the other bloc. What all of these positions have in common is the lack of any prospect of social liberation. 

As people living and working in Greece, we are fully aware that our enemy is (also) right here. Our enemy is the Greek State, militarism, Greek nationalism. And this Greek State has been at war for at least twenty years. The war of the Greek State extends to all regions, from the Middle East through Africa to the Balkans and right to the heart of the Greek cities. From the wars in Yugoslavia to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, from the control of the airspace of the Balkans to the concentration camps for migrant women, the pushbacks and the murders at the borders, the Greek State is at war at home and abroad. It is no coincidence that on the occasion of the war in Ukraine, the think-tanks of Greek militarism immediately brought up Greek-Turkish territorial antagonisms again. This is what the Greek State has been doing for years: taking up battle positions abroad, trampling on the bodies of the oppressed at home.  

Answers can only be transnational and internationalist, they can only come from everyone: from the anti-war and feminist movements in Russia, struggling against the war under the most adverse of conditions, to the Italian dockers who refused to send war materials to Ukraine. In order to stop the ongoing capitalist wars, we must reopen the question of social emancipation, and create the transnational networks and connections that will block the war machines, the military interventions, the war preparations. We have to build struggles that will create the conditions to block the profit machines that are identical to the war machines. We have to call for anti-war strikes and internationalist solidarity. 

We will not die, we will not fight for, we will not take part in capitalist wars 

OPEN ANTIWAR ASSEMBLY