Where next for socialism in Britain? - Green Anti-Capitalist Media

On Friday we woke up to news that the Conservative Party, spearheaded by their new far-right vanguard, had won the election. The “FPTP” voting system and most media – stitched to the Tories – all working as intended, the Tories won a huge majority of seats without even half the votes of those who voted. We all know who will benefit from this continued slide into inequality and it’s not the majority, and definitely not the most vulnerable. On Saturday we awoke to the announcement that the island’s most infamous fascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon had apparently joined the Conservative Party. There is no beating around the bush now: Britain has been captured by far-right nationalists who are waging an ecocidal class war.

The future might feel bleak – things would have undoubtedly been better under a Labour government – and understandably a lot of people will need some time to come to terms with the outcome, lick wounds and recoup. An amazing amount of energy and activist hours have been put into campaigning for a Corbyn government and a unprecedented number of young and new people have become engaged in politics for the first time and dared to hope for a better future. We need to harness all this energy and this hope, and start working from today towards the society and the future we want. We can’t afford to wait another five years until the next elections and hope that next time things turn out better.

People are already dying in streets. Children are already going hungry. The temperature is already rising. No politician, no matter how left wing, is going to stop this now. This Tory government will follow the playbook of the Shock Doctrine, rapidly pushing through all their worst policies so that nobody (least of all the parliamentary opposition) can react feasibly to it. The time for words, for campaigning and playing by their rules has passed. Now is the time to take back the power and create the society we want to live in by ourselves. A politics controlled by the wealthy few is not inevitable, and an alternative – with socialist values – for the benefit of the many, is possible, and desired by millions. But it is up to us to create it.

We are calling for the formation of an organized, co-ordinated autonomous left, made up of anyone united by a desire for social change and rejection of corrupt and increasingly out-dated parliamentary politics. We are calling for the transfer of food and clothing from overflowing shelves to the hands of food banks and other mutual aid networks, the occupation of empty property for the use of the homeless, the formation of new community self-defense initiatives and the strengthening of existing ones, the democratization of health care and the creation of new supply lines to ensure people get the medicine they need, the planting of trees & community gardens and the sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure. We call for the workers to join existing, and form new grassroots, revolutionary trade unions, the citizens to organize themselves into directly democratic popular assemblies, and the support of our co-operative solidarity economy.

We follow the examples set at home by Eigg, Ffestiniog & Frome, abroad by Rojava, Chiapas & Exarcheia, and the countless other revolutionary resistance movements around the world, to create a better world here and now, within the shell of the old one.

There are already a large number of groups taking actions all over the country that you can join and support.

(List is incomplete – please send us a message using our contact form to add more)

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