Workers Solidarity Movement

On August 23rd 1927, two Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were judicially murdered by the State of Massachusetts in the USA, having been framed for two murders they didn't commit. 

Le meurtre de Mark Duggan par la police a engendré quatre nuits d’émeutes dans toute l’Angleterre. Le déclencheur immédiat en a été le meurtre lui-même, mais aussi la goujaterie de la police envers la famille et les amis de Mark. Cependant, les émeutes ont rapidement pris une dimension plus large, exprimant une colère et une aliénation plus générales, colère qui trop souvent a été mal ciblée, frappant les cibles les plus proches et à portée de main. Il y eut par conséquent de grandes destructions de biens, dans des quartiers déjà déshérités, et des attaques anti-sociales contre des riverains. Malgré ces aspects, les racines des émeutes résident dans les conditions économiques et politiques qui régissent ces zones, non pas dans la “piètre éducation” des parents ou dans la “criminalité aveugle”. Ces conditions ont été créées par cette même élite de politiciens et d’hommes d’affaire qui en appellent maintenant à un retour à la normalité et à la répression. [Thanks to liberationirlande for the translation of this article, you can read the orignal in English]

(Image: By SkyFireXII via Flickr Creative Commons 2.0)

Workers Solidarity interviewed Hackney local and education worker, Alex Carver, about the roots of the London riots. Alex is a long standing activist in the IWW union, housing struggles in the East End, and the big left events since the start of the recession, most recently the M26 Militant Workers Block and the J30 Strike project. He was a direct witness to the rioting on Monday. Here he tells Workers Solidarity why he thinks that the riots are best understood by loooking at class rather than race.

It was with great sadness that the WSM learned of the news of the passing of Bob Miller on June 17. Bob was a member of the Anarchist Federation and a comrade from Manchester, England. Many of us got to know Bob since after he visited Mayo in 2006 spending a week in Rossport supporting the Shell to Sea campaign. Since then Bob and his partner Sally have attended several Anarchist Bookfairs in Dublin and many members of the WSM had the priveldge to get to know Bob as a friend. 

More than 20,000 people demonstrated for electoral reforms across Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, on Saturday in a rare protest that was declared illegal by police.

Very few progressives will mourn the passing of the ‘News Of  The World’.  When Rupert Murdoch’s son, James, announced that the paper was to cease publication many cheered.  Revelations over the past few days about the extent to which private investigators and some journalists and executives completely disregarded common human decency in their scramble for profits had exposed the tabloid as scurrilous and without shame.

In a previous article, I said that the events shaking the Arab world today are as relevant as those that shook the world in 1989 [1]. Not only can parallels be made on the extent and depth of discontent over a vast geographical area, but also because this whirlwind of popular fury places a question mark over a particular geopolitical architecture that was hitherto believed to be as strong as steel. In this case, these long-standing dictatorships were fed, promoted and installed by the geo-strategic interests of the USA (and its junior partner, the EU) in an area of critical concern as far as oil is concerned. In 1989 the political consequences of the demonstrations were deep and long-lasting - the fall of "real socialist" regimes not only meant the fall of a few unpleasant bureaucratic dictatorships, but because of the relative weakness of a truly libertarian and revolutionary Left, represented the fall of a set of political values and horizons that were incorrectly associated with the Soviet bloc, and the overwhelming rise of neo-liberalism as the unquestioned system in the economic, political, values and ideological field.

July - August 2011 Edition of the Workers Solidarity freesheet.

PDF of Workers Solidarity 122 Web Edition 3.55 Mb

Household & Water Tax Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay

The Coming Attacks

Minister for Education Backs Down in Face of Threatened Protest

The Gardai & “Facilitating Protest”

The Spanish Revolution: A New World in their Hearts

Review: Dublin Anarchist Bookfair 2011

Thinking About Anarchism: Anarchism & Internationalism

WSM activity May - June 2011

PDF of Workers Solidarity 122 Web Edition 3.55 Mb

In this article, I look at how a nobel prize winning author's, José Saramago's ideas are reflected in the Real Democracy Movements goals.

When the old man picked up the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, he referred to himself in the third person as ‘The apprentice’.   

“The apprentice thought, 'we are blind', and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.”

Attempts by the Israeli government to sabotage the International ‘Stay Human’ Freedom Flotilla to Gaza have resulted in 2 ships – the Greek-Swedish Juliano and the Irish-owned MV Saoirse – having to withdraw from the Flotilla following damage to both. An emergency demonstration was held at the Spire in Dublin last night to protest the sabotage, see the pictures below.