Posted by: John Phoenix
If organised collectively, workers can harness their immense economic power to halt and obstruct the machinery of war at every stage.
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On this International Workers’ Day 2026, we must organise against the drive to war and reject efforts by our ruling class and its manipulative media to stifle our dissent.
The war drive and repression
The ruling class has carefully cultivated a climate of fear in which speaking out carries grave risks: the wrong phrase can now bring online doxxing, financial sanctions, professional dismissal, arrest, prosecution and even jail time.
Independent journalists exposing war crimes are being debanked and sanctioned, stripped of rights and sent into exile – not merely in isolated acts of reprisal, but as a warning to us all. Legislation is increasingly limiting our supposedly ‘democratic rights’ to assemble and protest, and it’s narrowing the limits of ‘permissible’ speech.
It is clear that those who rule Britain are seeking by all these means to turn us into passive, compliant drones who will do nothing to interfere with their drive into deepening austerity and inevitable global war.
Every middle-eastern resistance movement has been banned in Britain under terrorism laws. Even the mildest acts of solidarity with those waging principled struggles against genocide, colonialism and imperialism now carry extremely heavy penalties.
Where direct repression is proving difficult, indirect mechanisms are being employed. The wide introduction of the IHRA ‘definition of antisemitism’ has been deployed across public institutions to prevent criticism of the genocidal Israeli state by labelling it as ‘antisemitic’.
Policing of this edict is being carried out by supposedly ‘community-based’ organisations like the Community Support Trust (CST) and others, which pretend to be ‘independent’ but which receive state funding and are thoroughly integrated into the British police and other state bodies.
Antiwar dissent is thus being attacked via this ‘unofficial’ monitoring, which in many cases leads to threats of employment tribunals and police action.
Where attempts to criminalise justified antiwar actions have been kicked out by the courts, the state is adapting. Since juries are unwilling to convict defendants who have acted to prevent state crimes, legal processes are being re-engineered to secure the desired outcome. Once more, the British ruling class is looking to introduce fast-track, single judge, non-jury trials – as it notoriously did with the ‘Diplock courts’ of northern Ireland.
The introduction of judge-only courts and fast-track legal procedures are being presented as simple administrative measures to ‘reduce the (artificially created) courts backlog’. But the real aim is to silence antiwar expression and thus prevent the development of meaningful antiwar action.
This creeping repression is the British ruling class’s latest weapon against an ever-rising tide of dissent. Fascism doesn’t need jackboots and funny salutes; its frameworks can be implemented in a terribly British way by polite agents trained to ignore their complicity, normalised by the corporate media, and accepted by a public that has been intimidated and propagandised into silence.
Paralysis of leadership
The workers’ weapon in response to this rising tide of repression is unity of action. This requires strong, decisive leadership from our trade unions and antiwar organisations. So where is it?
Despite widespread public opposition to British imperialism’s involvement in criminal aggressive wars, the antiwar movement remains toothless and directionless. Tame weekend marches have no purpose beyond letting off a bit of steam, and their ‘leaders’ mouth speeches that contain no coherent plan for how we use our collective power to actually stop a war.
The profound failure of the trade union leadership to act as the backbone of the antiwar movement has blocked the development of meaningful resistance to the war drive. Instead of mobilising members to obstruct the criminal war machine, union leaders like Unite’s Sharon Graham have been marching in defence of arms industry jobs!
Such traitorous actions only confuse and demoralise workers and bind them to the system that destroys nations abroad and profits from their labour at home – as exploitation fodder in the factories or as cannon fodder on the battlefields.
We have the power
With so much resource being diverted into militarism, and every new war front forcing another fall in living standards, we need a serious, coordinated effort to get Britain off the war path and out of Nato.
Workers produce everything that sustains the war machine, including the propaganda narratives that normalise these crimes. It is workers who manufacture the arms, load the ships, transport the munitions, and stock the shelves with goods.
And it’s overwhelmingly workers who are sent to fight and die in these wars for profit and domination. If organised collectively, workers can harness their immense economic power to halt and obstruct the machinery of war at every stage.
With the state’s actions becoming so openly corrupt and war-driven that people are risking arrest to oppose them, the ruling class is working hard to contain workers through repression, criminalisation and misdirection. Its media is doing everything possible to divert workers away from genuine, working-class opposition and towards parties and personalities that are falsely presented as ‘new’ and ‘anti-establishment’.
In fact, figures like the Greens’ Zack Polanski and Reform’s Nigel Farage, who are presented by corporate media as ‘radical’ or ‘rebellious’ alternatives, have been thoroughly vetted and pose no threat to the exploiters or their war drive.
Their real role is to keep workers’ hopes pinned on elections as the only means of expressing their dissent, and away from those who encourage them to organise seriously.
It’s time we woke up. We don’t need ‘new’ faces managing the same corrupt, criminal and exploitative system, we need a new system led by and for the working class.
Another world is possible
British workers must organise themselves to bring about change and make sure it comes sooner rather than later. Every day imperialism continues to exist, more people die unnecessarily from war and poverty. The rich keep getting richer from the impoverishment of the rest of us.
Workers have nothing to gain from this system. Our struggle for a decent life at home must be joined with the struggles of those resisting our own imperialist exploiters abroad, to finally bring an end to the bloodstained era of capitalist-imperialist superexploitation and arrive at the dawn of a workers’ state.
Capitalism isn’t working.
Fight for socialism!
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Urgent measures needed to stop war and rebuild working-class power
- Leaving Nato, bringing all troops and military contractors home, and ending all aspects of British involvement in aggressive wars abroad, from south Korea to Iran and Palestine, and from Venezuela to the Donbass.
- A mass campaign of non-cooperation with imperialist war and trade union struggle against the state repression.
- Nationalisation of ALL utilities (without compensation) along with monopoly producers, manufacturers and distributors of food, so as to ensure a secure supply of all necessaries at affordable prices, free from the vacillations and disruptions of the world market.
- Requisition and building of social housing and introduction of a rent cap to address the housing crisis.
- The complete renationalisation of every part of the NHS, including all its buildings and the pharmaceutical industry.
- Lifting the minimum wage to a level providing a decent family existence.
- A mass campaign to overturn the terrorism legislation that is being used to criminalise opposition to the Gaza genocide and the imperialist war machine.
- A mass campaign to reinstate our democratic rights to free speech and freedom of assembly.
- Reclaiming and democratising our trade unions and mass movements to transform them into fighting organisations of the working class.
- Breaking all links with Labour and Labour-lite parliamentarism.