Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group: Eastern Australia on Fire

from a-infos

This article first appeared in The Anvil, [different The Anvil - ed.] vol.8 no.6, published on 22nd December 2019. Since then the fires have spread even further and the death toll has risen markedly. ---- For the last six weeks, the eastern States of Australia have been suffering an unprecedented wave of bushfires. There have also been a number of bushfires in Western Australia. One of the driest winters on record has been followed by a warm and dry spring. This has led to huge areas of the continent being tinder dry and ready to catch fire far earlier than for a normal fire season. What we are seeing is unprecedented in its breadth, intensity and timing. ---- Sydney has been shrouded in smoke for over a month. The Gospers Mountain mega-fire has burnt out 450,000 so far. The Commissioner of the NSW Rural Fire Service says they have dealt with 8,500 fires this season already - and it's only the start of summer. This is climate change in action.
In recent years, firefighting in rural areas in Australia has been put on a much more scientific basis than previously. More thorough and intensive organisation has meant that fewer people die and fewer houses are lost. The firefighting effort in this fire season has been massive, with overwhelming community support for the volunteers and professional firefighters working day and night to protect lives, homes and livelihoods. Nevertheless, even this has been insufficient to prevent deaths in this unnatural disaster.
The political situation is spinning out of the control of the denialists in the Government and the media. The initial statements pointing out the connection between the unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the unprecedented severity and earliness of the fire season were met by a storm of Right wing propaganda criticising them for "politicising the tragedy of the bushfires". As the fires have continued, though, this position has become unsustainable. Volunteer firefighters, the United Firefighters Union and the chiefs of emergency services bodies have pointed out the connection. Some people who have lost their homes to bushfire have taken the burnt wreckage of their houses to Canberra and placed it outside Parliament House. The denialists have been reduced to muttering rather than shouting everybody down.
The forces of climate change denial were cocky after the Liberals won "the climate election", with some even claiming the issue was dead. This was delusional thinking. A single hot summer was always going to pull the rug out from under them and hammer home the fact that climate change is real and happening. Before summer had even started climate change was back and big. The question of the moment is: what should we be doing?
The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group believes that the School Strike for Climate movement has great potential and that it should be joined wholeheartedly by the unions. School strikes should be turned into workers' strikes. In Australia, the next global school strike day should be the occasion for mass co-ordinated strikes by workers from as many industries as possible. They should build towards a general strike. The power of capital arises in the workplace and it is only by organising there that workers can wrench power away from the capitalists and wield it themselves.
To achieve this objective, Anarchists need to be active in their unions, pushing for rank and file groups to work with communities in planning for a Just Transition. They should also be forming rank and file groups to press their unions to join the strike movement. These groups also need to be ready to bypass the officials if they won't act. The capitalists won't save us - the workers have to do it themselves.

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I'm pretty sure that the Melbourne Anarchist Communist 'Group' is basically just the grandiose rantings of one person.

Therefore, we want to be categorical in pointing out that not everything that smells of rantings necessarily comes from friendly fire. The rich and powerful have used ranting since time immemorial to keep us at bay. They know it and we should know it too. Their privileges are sustained not only on the basis of the violently unequal ranting system that keeps very few above and far below, but - and above all - for the disproportionate control in the use of ranting.

Therefore, our call is clear: Let us not let our own desires be reflected in rants that we understand are part of the military strategy of the State. History shows us that it is not always easy to interpret the complex rants of the enemy, but that with dedication and a little patience, it is possible to notice their possible future rantings.

Knowing where the enemy is ranting and where it is going can really mean small strategic victories for the future.

What we say, we understand it very well because as a revolutionary organization we have set short, medium and long term rants to achieve certain objectives that, in strictly technical terms, could mean advanced positions on the road to generalized ranting. We move forward without stopping in that trajectory, so analyzing this ranting is of vital importance if you really want to win some future and hypothetical rebellion.

-Antagonistic Nuclei of the New Urban Guerrilla

Well I guess we should be thankful for the fact that the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group guy generally keeps it to one page rants, so let's not give him any ideas!

but he is on a mailing list with dozens of other revolutionaries. dozens!

Look forward to seeing more of this dynamic elsewhere in the world! As the angry old gods awaken and begin to stomp around outside the door, their thunderous footsteps finally drown out the noise of bickering from social media!

May the flames (literal or otherwise) find those who pretended ignorance first! But I know they won't … unfortunately the old gods don't differentiate much? oh well …

I would really have rather read something anticolonial, comparing the situation to the fascist arson of the Amazon of last year... the answer is workers should join unions, wtf? How much more national socialist can we get? The very obvious answer is colonial empires and their settler peons have not cared how indigenous people tend the land and the result is disaster

If global climate chaos has played any role whatsoever in the fires of Australia, we get this ugly conclusion:
Burn capitalism and its fossil fuel barons out of our lives now, or be burned by them later, our choice.

I think the Western agricultural practices have caused more environmental destruction than fire, which really gets highlighted because private property is destroyed, as well as capitalist infrastructure.
Any nihilist would welcome the unleashing of natural forces in any context, it is after all the omnipresent iconoclast along with earth, wind and water. These catastrophes merely remind us of the primeval forces which forged our species, and should infact be celebrated humbly and heeded for what they imbue.

"Any nihilist would welcome the unleashing of natural forces in any context, it is after all the omnipresent iconoclast along with earth, wind and water." ... Any moralistic or ideological nihilist ... An amoral, nonideological nihilist woulf neither welcome nor reject anything, because it would all equally mean nothing. Only their personal aesthetic tastes would be involved in determining what they welcomed or did not ... and even there they would gladly admit that on the large scale, those also don't matter, but only for them personally ... So I, as a nihilist who finds pleasure in the interesting varieties of wild beings threatened by the fires in Australia, tak no pleasure, and most certainly do not "welcome" those fires, as they are threatening (and on the individual level, killing) much of the beauty that I, personally enjoy.

Amoral epicuria, you must be one of these new aesthetically fashioned snowflake nihilists one sees dressed deliberately in tattered clothes with false thousand yard stares, who cannot see the beauty in clean slate events and the eradication of ethics and all forms of life.
I will stand alone from atop the abyss scowling down on all existence!

Amoral epicuria is what is called absurdly, a nihilo-communist. Yes, haha, these communists come in all shapes and sizes, including anarcho-communists, libertarian communists etc. There are even yuppy communists I kid you not!!
I stand also on the brim of the abyss, welcoming the cleansing of all constructs!

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