Workers Solidarity Movement

Dublin saw a day of protests in solidarity with the Kurdish Freedom struggle today. The video shows the protest at the GPO, site of the 1916 rebellion against British colonialism 100 years ago. During that rebellion British forces destroyed much of the center of Dublin and murdered civilians much as the Turkish state has been doing in Bakur (SE Turkey) over the last months.

One hundred years after the vigorous labour organising of Jim Larkin, James Connolly, Rosie Hackett, and Louis Bennett in Ireland, we still remember the old labour slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all”.

But in their present structure, are trade unions nothing more than an arm of the state and of the bosses? Do unions function more to control workers rather than advance their interests? Can the major unions be reformed from within, or should we start building new ones? Are militant trade unionists ‘wreckers’, or the future of the labour movement?

The environmental crisis represents ‘one of the gravest and most severe existential threats to our species survival’. International agreements aimed at curbing fossil fuel emissions have largely been a failure, with the most recent Paris CoP21 conference labelled ‘a fraud and a fake’ by leading climatologist and activist James Hansen. Capitalism’s unrelenting assault on the natural environment has pushed us past the point of continuing any pretence of ‘safe carbon mitigation’. It is becoming more widely accepted that we now need a global restructuring of the economic mode of production; capitalism must be dissolved.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Basic Income. Basic Income is a payment from the state to every resident on an individual basis, without any means test or work requirement. Is Basic Income a progressive proposal or does it sound too good to be true?

This panel on Feminist struggles was recorded at the 2016 Dublin Anarchist Bookfair.
 

“Communal Luxury” takes as its subject matter the Paris Commune of 1871, one of the single greatest advances toward a free society ever attempted in human history. The Commune arose in the course of a devastating war between France and Prussia (Germany), with the French army’s defeat prompting the collapse of the imperialist, authoritarian French regime. The people of Paris organised their own defence, bought their own cannons, and refused to hand said cannons over to the new French Republic. Instead, staging a worker-led insurrection, they declared Paris to be liberated from both the French and Prussian forces and set about constructing a free society, one in which all comers participated in decision-making and all wealth was shared in common. The Commune lasted some 72 days in the spring of 1871 before being brutally crushed by the reactionary forces of Nation, Church, State and Capital. Some 25,000 men, women, and children were executed.

We awake to news that more towns in Ireland are under water due to storm flooding. And that perhaps the sea ice at the north pole might melt due to temperatures rising above zero. The first story is given a lot more prominence in Irish media than the second but strangely at the same time another story is being celebrated. The start of yet more greenhouse gases being pumped out of their safe place far below the sea off the Irish shore to be processed and then released into the atmosphere via the Corrib refinery.

You've probably heard the slogan "Pro-Life that's a lie, you don't care if women die!" at pro-choice rallies or protests. Today the reality of that slogan is once again ringing true.

At around about noon yesterday a 57-year-old white man, known as Robert Lewis Dear, attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado in the U.S. Three are dead and nine are injured as a result of the terrorist shooting.