Workers Solidarity Movement

The large demonstrations in Britain (300,000) Italy (1,000,000) and the US (200,000 DC, 150,000 San Francisco) against the war have got some media attention. Alongside these is a spreading wave of direct action. These protests are far, far smaller, in part because the mainstream anti-war movements have failed to promote (or even opposed) them. But they are significant because as the politicians continue to ignore the popular anti-war sentiments direct action is a way we can bypass them and start to bring this war to a halt.

One of the favourite arguments of the pro-war crowd in Ireland is that anyone who opposes the war is 'anti-American'. Leaving aside the fact that they are reducing the one billion population of the Americas to the 250 million resident in the US is there anything to this claim? The hundreds of thousands who have already demonstrated against the war in the US obviously don't think so. Anarchists in the US are part of the anti-war movements there. Below we reproduce the text of a leaflet produced by one anarchist group there for the January 18th anti-war demonstration in Washington DC.

In July 2001 after the Genoa G8 summit protests during which Carlo Giuliani was shot dead by police a WSM member and Irish protester Joe Moffat was arrested.  He was held for 16 days during which he was beaten and imprisoned.  On his release and return to Ireland he released the following statement detailing what happened to him during those days of arrest and prison.  For details of what happened in Genoa before these events see Eyewitness account of the Genoa G8 protest written by another WSM member who was there.

Republished to mark the 10th anniversary of the Genoa G8 summit protest these are the recollections of a WSM member about the days running up to the protest and the main event itself.  Ho took part in one of the Genoa Black Bloc's.  It includes about 50 photos taken in Genoa.

This page contains information on the design of Workers Solidarity from late 2001 - 2005

Any honest account of the September 26 (S26) demonstrations in Prague would start off by saying that the numbers that took part in the demonstrations, some 12,000 people, were a little disappointing. But it should go on to say that those 12,000 people succeeded in not only completely disrupting the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (WB-IMF) congress but in causing it to be abandoned by the majority of delegates on the second day and the last day was then cancelled. In short we closed it down. It says a lot that you would be hard pushed to find any media, mainstream or 'left' that makes these two points.

At the October general meeting of my union branch, Dublin City North INTO (Irish National Teachers Organisation), the district representative on the CEC (Central Executive Committee) told the members that the union leadership was in the process of lodging a claim for a pay increase to compensate for inflation. However, he said, he couldn't possibly tell us what the amount of that claim was, as this was confidential. The members were effectively being told 'don't worry your heads, your leaders will decide what's best for you.'

The Workers Solidarity Movement is an anarchist organisation. Anarchism is the idea that we should organise society in a non-hierarchical way without bosses. We don't want to live in a society that is divided into order-givers and order-takers. We stand for a real socialism based on freedom and democracy.

Media coverage of the murderous pogroms unleashed by the Israeli state against Palestinians leaves out some of the story. The so-called 'peace process' like that of Northern Ireland is based on institutionalising sectarianism rather than overcoming it. There are citizens of Palestine and Israel, from both Jewish and Muslim backgrounds, who seek something other then two rival sectarian states. Ironically the ideology behind the pogroms is Zionism - the belief that Jews will only be safe from pogroms in a country run by Jews.

It may come as a surprise, but the mystery around aeroplane crashes isn't what it used to be. In the mid- 1980s, research by the US navy on its fighter aircraft picked up on a problem with the electric wiring that was used, known as Kaptan. Kaptan was once thought to be safe but US Navy investigations discovered otherwise.

In certain circumstances - not uncommon in aircraft flying conditions - Kaptan can actually explode in a ball of fire. So what did the US Navy do?