Workers Solidarity Movement

A few hundred people took part in a protest last night at the Mansion house in Dublin where the Taoiseach Brian Cowen was going to dinner with the organisation of the domestic section of the capitalist class that instructs him. As various bosses and Cowen went into the venue protected by ranks of Gardai, with the riot squad on standby outside the back entrance of Anglo Irish Bank and mounted police across the road, they were jeered by the crowd with shouts of 'thieves', 'robbers' and 'scum.'

"The environmental crisis we are living through, encompassing unpredictable climate change, resource depletion, pollution and species extinction has primarily been caused by industrial capitalism. The origin of this crisis, and the ways in which the effects have been managed point to a real lack of democracy in society. False solutions to this crisis dominate debate. These include market-based cure-alls, "green" party electoralism, "power of one" style individual action and state regulation and taxation." WSM position paper on the Environment as introduced at November 2007 conference (this paper replaced our old "Environment and Animal Rights" Position Paper, last amended at the May 2010 conference.

In Issue 1 of the Irish Anarchist Review, Andrew Flood put forward a critique ('Capitalist crisis and union resistance in Ireland') of two of the other articles in the same magazine, my article on Faceless Resistance and James R's interview with Alex Foti. His critique centers around the experience of the radical left in Ireland around workplace organising since the anti-globalisation movement and the experience of workplace activism since the economic crisis. In his article he attacks what he sees as an unbalanced concern with marginal sectors of employment on the part of the radical left since the turn of the century. He argues that the experience of the crisis shows that radical efforts to organise 'precarious' workers do not pay off. Instead, radicals should focus on organising where there is a greater chance of having a serious influence - i.e. within large mainstream trade unions.

In mid-June the Irish Congress of Trade Unions Public Services Committee voted to accept the ‘Croke Park deal’. ‘Social partnership’, presumed dead and buried when the government unilaterally imposed pay cuts on public sector workers in the December ’09 budget, was revived and given a new lease of life. But this is ‘social partnership’ with a difference. Instead of the union leadership believing that ‘partnership’ gives them some input into government policy (as they have wrongly thought for the past 20 years), all they can now offer in its defence is that this is the “least worst deal” and that “it’s better to be inside the tent than outside.”