Workers Solidarity Movement

In Britain the 'Effects of Taxes and Benefits on Household Income' report revealed that, under Thatcher, 1979-90, the fifth of the population with the lowest incomes had their share of post-tax national income cut from 10% to just 6%. The richest fifth increased their share of post-tax national income from 37% to 45%.

The NEFAC web page is to be found at http://nefac.northernhacking.org/ This would be my first and only major problem - well niggle really. Basically its not the most obvious or intuitive address. On the other hand it's the first thing that comes up when you put "North East Federation of Anarchist Communists" into google. (They are located in the US and Canada).

Every so often the newspapers fill with stories of a crisis in some third world country. We see pictures on our screens of gunmen, starvation and suffering; inevitably we hear calls for humanitarian intervention. Over the summer, we were told of a crisis in Liberia. A brutal civil war, a corrupt leader, child soldiers, starving civilians: it seemed that the whole world was crying out for intervention by the US or UN.

Rudolf Rocker is recommended by Chomsky, whose own anarchist thinking is strongly influenced by him, as one of the best writers on anarchism and this is probably his finest work - a brilliant libertarian analysis of the development of power, the cult of the state and their relationship with human liberty and culture.

This October some 400 industrialists and assorted hangers on will descend on Dublin for the European summit of the World Economic Forum. The city centre will be brought to a halt as the sort of globalisation demonstration we have seen in Seattle and Prague occurs in Dublin. So what is the World Economic Forum? In its own words "The Forum provides a collaborative framework for the world's leaders to address global issues, engaging particularly its corporate members in global citizenship.i" That is from the WEF web page and despite the careful spin should be worrying to anyone reading it carefully.

Every day nearly US$2 trillion changes hands on the money markets (i.e. is gambled by speculators). It can be hard to get a handle on just how much a trillion is. If you stacked a million dollar notes on top of one another it would reach about six foot high. If you stacked a trillion dollars the same way it would reach to over 40 times the height of Mount Everest! Yet the rich tell us there is no money for health care, affordable housing and modern school buildings.

On Sunday May 18th Argentineans went to the polls and elected Nestor Kirchner - widely considered a puppet of the former populist president Eduado Duhalde. Yet on December 19/20th 2001 Argentineans "churned through 3 presidents in a row" as thousands poured into the streets. Their slogan: "que se vayan todos" (everyone must go). Yet quite clearly "everyone", in the shape of an old school populist president, is back. This begs two questions. Firstly how did such a formidable protest/popular movement evolve, and secondly where is it now?

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist with intimidation and murders being committed almost daily. Coca Cola is currently being sued by the Colombian food and drinks union Sinaltrainal for its (alleged) use of right wing paramilitary death squads at its plants in Colombia. The company has denied the allegations and predictably claims that it has no responsibility for the actions of the bottling plants.

Facing the Enemy kicks into gear with a look at Bakunin's ideas on the necessity of anarchist organisation and thereafter studies individualist anarchism, syndicalism, the Organisational Platform of Russian exiles, a quick chapter on the Spanish movement and a somewhat bizarrely detailed account of post war French anarchism. Also, included are almost one hundred pages of original documentation mostly relating to the Organisational Platform.

While most people understand the word democracy to mean that the people hold power, there is another meaning. According to the second meaning of the word, democracy means that the super-rich make all of the decisions while the people's job is to do what they're told, and to put a piece of paper in a box every few years. This 'democracy' is extremely hostile to any notions of popular involvement in politics. The US/UK war against Iraq, trumpeted as a war for 'democracy', illustrates what this 'democracy' means in practice.