Hammer and Cycle

Social imperialism and its corollary, territorial expansion has been a feature of human life for thousands of years. Imperialism favours specific classes and functional groups and can at times bring a degree of stability and consensus that has helped to form nation states, albeit at the expense of subdued classes and oppressed ethnic groups. In the nineteenth century both anarchists and marxists conceived of an end or withering away of state power. At that time the organisation of labour was less complex than today and there were far fewer products, which were already however termed ‘junk’ by Tolstoy. At the present time capitalist imperialism relies on providing ever more junk through which it constantly re-invents itself. The P.C. and mobile phone along with the latest model or style provides the capitalist system with profit accumulations despite periodic downturns in national economics. Products are based on limited resources/commodities whose control is the motive of imperialist power. From slaves to diamonds the fight for the resources has cost and its costing millions upon millions of lives. It can no longer be said that the means of production, once liberated from capitalist control, will provide everyone with desirable consumer items. There were no cars, P.C.s or mobile phones when Marx wrote ‘Das Kapital’ and Kropotkin, ‘ Fields, Workshops and Factories’. To provide every family on earth with such commodities is impossible and to curb the capitalist led expansion is equally difficult and yet this is the road anarchists and marxists must follow. Our commitment to labour and its products must be a living example to the masses. We are able to point to autonomous activities both at home and abroad where organisation resists imperialism in collective struggles. Examples are co-operative organic farming, free information exchange, white bicycle collectives, occupations, strikes, alternative medicines distribution, volunteer labour etc. In Britain and Europe most action is non-violent. Mass armed resistance usually only develops where oppression becomes so brutal that it is unbearable, e.g. Palestine, Columbia, pre-revolutionary Cuba. Today we can offer the hand of comradeship to the bourgeois and its managerial class, in a program of collective worker control, and some will join the movement proving that class is no barrier to commitment.

Yours sincerely, a libertarian communist manifesto

Edinburgh 2003