Resistance Anywhere is Resistance Everywhere

Don't stop talking about capitalism.

I opened Substack to write usual Friday column, but the words wouldn’t come. When you’re watching a genocide play out in real time, it becomes difficult to focus on anything else. There’s the ever-present temptation to see the organised slaughter as so catastrophic that it cannot be understood using the traditional language of political analysis. With it, comes the tendency to see the violence as the chaotic expression of the hatred of one group of people for another.

It’s easy to forget that capitalism is a system based on violence; hierarchy; the domination of some groups over others. That to understand what we’re witnessing in Gaza, we have to understand everything else.

It's easy to forget that entire economies have been built on the manufacture of weapons and technologies designed to support the power of imperialist states. That those states developed such technologies to fight wars ‘over there’, before deploying them against their own citizens ‘over here’. That ‘military Keynesianism’, as it is euphemistically termed, has greased the wheels of capitalist production for centuries. That the ‘state of exception’ created by constant conflict creates a powerful justification for the maintenance of the status quo. Or, as Orwell put it in 1984:

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

It’s easy to forget that the lethal technologies used in these conflicts are built using raw materials scratched of the ground in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where another grotesque war is being fought for control over conflict minerals. That arms manufacturers now being charged with rearmament on behalf of European governments have been selling tools of extermination to corrupt, authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, used to slaughter civilians in Yemen.

It's easy to forget that the violence, the extreme wealth, the exploitation, the political corruption – they are interwoven into a tapestry of injustice.

The world’s elites are inextricably linked. Their fates are tied. A defeat for one is a defeat for all. If resistance can work somewhere, it can work everywhere. Knowing this, ruling classes across much of the world are committed to crushing and delegitimising the movement for Palestinian liberation. If the corrupt, authoritarian regimes that govern us permit our protest to move them, we might start to realise that organising works. They need us to believe that resistance is futile.

The tech billionaires, the finance bros, the oligarchs, the corrupt bureaucrats – each of their positions rests on our obedience. That’s what capitalism is: a system of entrenched, institutionalised hierarchy, based on the unflinching obedience of each rung to those above. Workers obey bosses. Citizens obey governments. Debtors obey creditors. Colonies obey empires. The strength of the ruling class anywhere rests on the strength of obedience everywhere.

But this observation also implies that resistance anywhere supports resistance everywhere. The system we fight may be pervasive, but that means injustice touches all of us. Anyone who fights back – from those protesting genocide, to those fighting for labour rights, to those shielding their communities from state violence, to those protecting the natural world from exploitation – they’re each cleaving chinks in the armour of the capitalist class.

That’s why we can’t stop talking about everything else. We can’t stop talking about inequality and exploitation. About monopoly power and workers rights. About the nature and direction of technological change. About climate breakdown and ecocide. About imperialism and colonial violence. The moment we stop seeing these issues as separate is the moment we begin to understand the beast we’re really fighting.