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Here’s the whole thing.
You can all now pick holes in it, not that Mal would give a shit.
The Anarchist Communist Group.
The following is a statement agreed by the ACG and the Union Communiste Libertaire (UCL) in France.
The recent twenty-seven deaths of refugees in the English Channel follow another ten deaths this year of desperate refugees attempting to cross to the UK. There does not appear to be official figures for the number of deaths in similar circumstances over the last twenty years, but last October a figure of 296 was given of those attempting to cross by boat or tunnel. These latest figures raise the number of deaths to over 330, to say nothing of the thousands who have met their deaths in the Mediterranean. Our thoughts are with the relatives and friends of those who have died.
Both the British and French governments have attempted to place the blame for these deaths on people traffickers. But it wasn’t the traffickers who supplied the arms to vicious authoritarian regimes and who intervened in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, with bombings and occupations, destabilising the region, it was the Western powers, and that includes France and Britain. In addition, the French state has carried out a war against the refugees, dismantling their camps and pulling down their tents in the middle of winter, running out rolls of barbed wire around a camp at Lille and along the railway tracks to Calais, rounding up migrants, subjecting them to harassment, gassings, and strip searches. On the day of the tragedy that resulted in the 27 deaths, the sub-prefect of Boulogne-sur-Mer sent the police to stop the survivors being supplied with dry clothes.
There have been 1,281 recorded attempts to cross the Channel since the beginning of the year, involving a total of 33,083 people, according to the French maritime prefecture of the Channel and the North Sea. The British Home Office recognises that 25,792 refugees managed to reach Kent, and the Maritime Prefecture says that it has brought back 8,200 during rescue operations.
The refugees don’t come to the West just to annoy people in Calais and in Kent. They are fleeing mass murders, bombings, oppressive regimes and political and religious persecution. Many are Kurds who have been forced to flee from Iraq, Iran and Syria. They are not coming to the UK to “scrounge” as has been stated by Priti Patel and other Conservative MPs in parliament, but because there are already existing migrant communities who can support them and provide work, often off the record. Indeed, in early November, Patel stated that 70% of refugees were ‘economic migrants’ and she has not substantiated this spurious allegation. Tory MPs like Edward Leigh and Julian Lewis have gloated in Parliament over the deaths, saying that it would act as a lesson for those attempting to cross the Channel into Britain.
Both the French and British governments have expressed hypocritical sympathy for those who have died, Macron saying that he would not let the Channel become a cemetery. His actions say otherwise. Meanwhile Boris Johnson allocated £54 million last summer to stop crossings. Both are cynically using the crossings to exacerbate the tension between the British and French governments.
It is precisely because of the militarised and heavily fortified crossing points, particularly at the entrances to the tunnel at Coquelles, that have forced refugees to take to sea, often on improvised rafts.
Johnson came to power because of Brexit and one of the aims of Brexit was to end the influx of migrants, especially from the Middle East. This is failing significantly, as around 25% of refugees manage to cross to Britain. In France there is the run-up to the presidential elections, and candidates are keen to show how zealous they are to combat migration.
The Johnson government has closed down any legal paths into the UK and ways of setting up safer routes, such as allowing asylum applications at British embassies, which it virulently opposes. The resettlement scheme he promised for those fleeing from the Taliban in Afghanistan three months ago has still not been implemented, forcing many to take dangerous routes to escape. As for Priti Patel, the Home Office minister, she continues to blame the French government and her own legal advisers and officials for a failure to deliver on Brexit promises. She has raised the idea of a “push-back” policy, with the coastguard and the Navy forcing refugees back to France mid-Channel. No seafarer relishes condemning anyone to drowning, and even the staff union of Border Force, the frontiers law enforcement agency, has rejected the “push-back”. Other crazy schemes mooted have been the sub-contracting of processing asylum seekers to distant countries, for example Albania. The Albanian government has dismissed this as “totally fake”.
For us, libertarian communists, the world is not divided between East and West, North and South, but between the classes, between those who rule and exploit and profit, and those who work and produce the wealth, and are used as cannon fodder by the boss class. Solidarity between French and British workers and with the migrants. Don’t let the nasty, sordid aim of restructuring capitalism on a global scale by those who rule and exploit fool you. The workers of the world have no country. It is time to resurrect a class consciousness that does not recognise borders and states. In the meantime, we must fight to stop any further deaths in the Channel.
Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement
La Plume Noire, a UCL bookstore in Lyon, was attacked on Saturday March 20 by a fascist commando. It is an attack against the entire UCL, but, beyond that, against all the forces of progress and against our social camp. An attack that takes place in a nauseating climate where racist controversies are linked in the media, driven by the highest summit of the State.
The UCL took the initiative of a national appeal for support, broad and united, which received numerous signatures from unions, political organizations and parties, associations and collectives. A national event is planned in Lyon on Saturday April 3.
On Saturday March 20 at 2 p.m., the La Plume Noire bookstore located at 8 rue Diderot on the slopes of Croix-Rousse, was attacked by around fifty
You may have heard of the controversy over the teacher suspended at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire. There are conflicting reports, but we are told that a teacher showed an image of Muhammad as part of a religious education lesson. Some claim it was a cartoon, some claim it was specifically a Charlie Hebdo cartoon, others that it was the Danish cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Children at the school have started a petition to reinstate the teacher, stating that the image was shown in the context of a lesson about racism and blasphemy, and that the intent was to counter discrimination and intolerance.
The liberal impulse has been to worry about offence given to “the Muslim community”. But there is not one, homogenous “Muslim community”, there are many communities and there are debates within those communities.
Stuart Christie was born in Glasgow 
in 1946, too late to enlist in the International Brigades and go off and fight alongside the Spanish republicans in the 1936-39 war. As a child, though, he befriended some Scottish miners who had fought with the International Brigades in that faraway war that he was to take so closely to his heart. A war for ideals that were and are universal. He used to listen in wonder to the tales they used to tell. Taking a pride in them. Such conversations moulded his sensibility to life and struggle.
He did not know it yet, but Stuart would later be ready to carry on with their fight. He would try to complete his friends’ task in Spain. From then on, that was to be his mission and his life. A commitment to the struggle that would be deployed across many fronts. Internationalist, revolutionary antifascist activism, direct action and history, publishing and investigative journalism. Stuart Christie was the real thing, a free man.
As he was to put it in the first volume of his memoirs The Christie File: Part 1, 1946-1964: My Granny Made Me An Anarchist (2002), his granny
Received from CNT-AIT-Fr
To date, unlike what happened with H1N1 in 2009, many of us healthcare workers have not received our endowment of FFP2 masks needed to treat patients. While the state had two months to build up reserves of these much-needed protections, it seems it has done nothing.
A practitioner explains: “Not shaking hands with our patients is insufficient, will not protect us from contamination by air, it should be understood that the shortage of FFP2 masks can quickly lead to the shortage of caregivers, by their quarantine, with the consequences that this implies. “.
Obviously, the budgetary choices have been made, on the one hand, the State have enough budget for organising summits, meetings and even a State National Security Council, intended to entertain and deceive the people, on the other, the State leaves health workers unprotected.
SHORTAGE OF FFP2 MASKS and PHASE 3 OF THE #CORONAVIRUS EPIDEMIC
As we indicated last Saturday, the stocks essential for the protection of workers do not exist, Health Ministers Buzyn and Veran lied to us and are still lying to us. The few million masks that will be distributed are surgical masks that do not protect against contamination.
The transition to Phase 3 is the referral of coronavirus patients out of the hospital that will be overwhelmed towards the city. Doctors and nurses will have to work unprotected with hypercontagious patients, the right to opt-out is ethically impossible for them.
To the politicians who run the administrations, who lay down standards that are as absurd as they are useless, we have only one word to say: Bastards ! On the other hand, the stocks of rubber bullets and grenades, that have been used by thousands against the Yellow vests, are full …. On June 16, 2019, the French government was able to anticipate with sufficient time to order 25 million assault rifle cartridges and 40,000 anti-riots grenades, to be delivered for early 2020. Obviously, the State does not have the same priorities as the population.
Other workers in public transport, hypermarkets, etc. must ask their employers for fully-paid hourly breaks to wash their hands, hydroalcoholic gel if necessary, and adequate masks or otherwise exercise their right to optout.
RIGHT TO OPT-OUT
The absence of collective or individual protective equipment legitimizes the recourse to the right of employees to opt-out : Article L4131-1 of the French labor code stipulates that “The worker immediately alerts the employer to any work situation which he has reasonable grounds to believe presents a serious and imminent danger to his life or health and to any defect which he finds in the protection systems. He can withdraw from such a situation.
The employer may not ask the worker, who has made use of his right of withdrawal, to resume his activity in a work situation where a serious and imminent danger persists, resulting in particular from a defective protection system. “
CNT-AIT Health care workers
CNT-AIT (International Workers Association)
contact@cnt-ait.info
http://cnt-ait.info
http://cntaittoulouse.lautre.net
FB: @ chats.noirs.turbulents / @cnt.ait.toulouse
In the past week or so, two statements about Iran have been circulated – one essentially supporting the Iranian regime by framing the whole issue as being about “US imperialism”, and another initiated by Iranian socialists and revolutionaries living in exile, which puts the movement in Iran into its proper context, as one more moment of our class fighting back, just as it is in Chile, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Haiti, France, Lebanon and so on. The latter is reproduced below. If you would like to add your name to the list of signatories, please send an email to azadi_subversion@riseup.net, stating your full name and affiliation/self-description.
We are protesting against problems in the whole system in general. We reached a crisis where we noticed that the system cannot handle it anymore
— a protester in Chile
Our world is on fire. Not only forests but also cities are burning all over the world. Social conflicts of all sorts are erupting, spreading their flames across the planet: Algeria, Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Hong Kong, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, you name it. Located within this global context of struggles against the social hell of neoliberal, financialized capitalism, there has been another mass uprising in Iran since November 15, 2019.
Sparked by the sudden tripling of fuel prices, tens of thousands of Iranian people have been protesting in more than 100 cities throughout the country. Of course, the fuel price per se did not generate such a huge and widespread uprising. Rather, it is 40 years rule of the privileged oligarchy on the basis of authoritarianism, systematic exclusion of opponents, dispossession and expropriation which have made millions of people unemployed, extremely precarious, depriving them from the basic conditions of life (education, healthcare, food, and housing).
Just as 30 pesos increase in subway fares turned the already raging fire into an inferno in Chile, so too, the fuel price sparked the recent uprising in Iran (the same goes for WhatsApp tax in Lebanon, the cancellation of fuel subsidies in Ecuador, and so on). “It is not about 30 pesos”, a Chilean poster proclaimed, “but 30 years of neoliberalism.”
Since Friday, the people in Iran have been courageously fighting against the heavily armed personnel of the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), as well as armed plainclothes militia thugs (known as Basij) who are economically dependent on the regime. The people had every “right” in this world to defend themselves against the systematic state-violence, build barricades on the streets, block highways and occupy local areas and roundabouts.
The forgotten and the invisible in Iran made themselves visible by starting fires. The fire to these people is the yellow vest to the French surplus population and proletarians. Both give voice to the voiceless. While the BBC Persian TV and reactionary loyalist media (Iran International, Manoto etc.) prescribe the liberal doctrine of “peaceful, civil protest,” the Iranian youth are self-conscious of the fact that “a people without hate cannot triumph,” that “material force must be overthrown by material force,” and that they have the right to legitimately defend themselves against the state violence systematically aimed at killing the citizens.
“Enough is enough” is the message of the people in the Global South and beyond. As students have chanted in one of Tehran’s universities, “the people are fed up, enough with slavery.” Like our sisters and brothers in Iraq and Lebanon, the Iranian people are absolutely fed up with the authoritarian capitalism reducing their lives to a mere vegetable existence, the systematic corruption intrinsic to mafia capitalism, and the sub-imperialism of the Islamic Republic in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Yemen and the region as a whole.
They are not only opposing the tripling of the fuel price but the Islamic Republic in its entirety. No other slogan, chanted by our comrades in Lebanon, can better express the spirit of struggles in the current conjuncture: “All means all” (كلن يعني كلن).
The ruling class has responded to this radical, practical negation of all existing powers with an iron fist. The systematic violence employed by the Islamic Republic to paralyze the uprising is unprecedented in scale and intensity. The authorities have completely shut down the internet for four successive days, transforming the country into a big black box, slaughtering the people with impunity. According to Amnesty International, hundreds have been injured, thousands arrested, and “at least 106 protesters in 21 cities have been killed,” although “the real death toll may be much higher, with some reports suggesting as many as 200.”
There are many videos showing the police shooting demonstrators in the head and chest — as we observed before in the case of Iraq. This happened mainly in the Kurdish and Arab provinces whose discriminated people are once again at the very forefront of the uprising and have paid the highest price.
The Islamic Republic has been successful so far in achieving its goals. They have seized the opportunity provided by the US sanctions to realize their neoliberal dreams in order to be able to both recover the current budget deficit and increase their military operations in the region. To do so, they have shut down the internet by virtue of which they have brutally slaughtered their opponents. Internationally speaking, there has been no specific media coverage, no international condemnation of the state repression, and very little solidarity from the global left — in other words, the bloodbath is carried out in silence. This is possible because, while the oppressed classes in Iran and the Middle East have no illusion about the “anti-imperialist” role of the Islamic Republic, many on the left still believe in the ideological self-representation of the regime as an anti-imperialist force standing against the US and its regional allies.
The left needs to learn from the oppressed classes to simultaneously oppose US imperialism (especially US sanctions) and the Islamic Republic’s interventions in the region.
We, the undersigned academics and militants, urge the global left to break its silence and express its solidarity with the people of Iran and their resistance.
It is pointless for us to demand anything from the Islamic Republic, but we will demand from our comrades and progressive forces all over the world to be — in any possible form — the voice of the oppressed people in Iran suffocated by the forced isolation. We also call on the international left to condemn the atrocities of the regime against its own people.
Finally, we stand in solidarity with the Iranian protesters who are reclaiming their dignity by refusing austerity, authoritarianism, militarization of society, as well as any other form of domination that stifles their autonomy and freedom.
LabourStart News Wire Libcom latest
Wessex Solidarity 