Workers Solidarity Movement

“The police are not concerned about protecting me or any of the working class, because they are put here by the ruling class to protect the interests of the rich from the poor. To enforce their laws that keep together their system, that keeps them at the top and the majority at the bottom”.

This is an extraordinarily detailed exposition of how the modern media functions. The author, veteran Guardian journalist Nick Davies, along with a team of researchers from Cardiff University, spent several years monitoring the British media and tracing the sources of the stories that they carried. The results were pretty shocking, even for somebody who already has a very low opinion of the corporate and state media.

There are the notes about six locations in central Dublin of historical importance to the left.  You would walk the route between them in about 30 minutes.

“Pacifism simply does not resonate in people’s lives everyday realities, unless those people live in some extravagant bubble of tranquillity from which all forms of civilization’s pandemic reactive violence have been pushed out by the systemic and less violence of police and military forces.”

“Ultimately, nonviolence is created and encouraged by the State, and antithetical to anarchist revolution”

Over the weekend of November 24-25, protesters clashed with police in Sucre, Bolivia - they were demanding that the capital of the country be moved to Sucre. Three people died and over some 100 were wounded in the clashes. Yesterday Morales announced plans for a nationwide referendum to resolve a deepening political crisis in the country. A few months ago, two recent works on Bolivia were given a look over for the WSM's Red and Black Revoltuion 13. The review now appears on line for the first time.

The book is about the circulation of revolutionary ideas around the Atlantic. The authors don't set out to prove their thesis of circulation and improvement of revolutionary ideas systematically with tables of figures and statistics. Instead the book is a series of case studies, interesting in themselves, but each showing common features.

La huelga que iba a precipitar la formación del Soviet de Limerick fue convocada por la muerte de Robert Byrne un republicano y Trade Unionista.

This article in English

Byrne había trabajado como telefonista en la Oficina de Correos de Limerick. En enero de 1919 perdió su trabajo. Fue expulsado por asistir al funeral de un volutario de Limerick (John Daly). Algunos días más tarde la casa de sus padres fue tomada por la policía. Byrne fue arrestado y sentenciado a 12 meses de prisión con trabajos forzados por posesión ilegal de un revolver y munición.

En 1871 Francia fue a la guerra con Prusia y fue derrotada. La cabeza del gobierno nacional era Adolphe Thiers, él tuvo que negociar los detalles de la paz con Prusia. Después de hacer esto tuvo que afrontar el problema de volver a controlar Paris, de convencer a la ciudad de que la guerra con Prusia había terminado y del desarme de la Guardia Nacional. A Thiers sólo se le permitían 12.000 soldados después de la tregua, y con ellos tuvo que hacer frente a varios cientos de miles de guardias nacionales.

In English: http://www.wsm.ie/content/paris-commune

At this point in time it is a rare and welcome event when a book by an Irish activist is published and rarer still when a book by an Irish anti-capitalist writer receives widespread praise and acclaim. "Clandestines: the Pirate journals of an Irish Exile", which has received a slew of positive reviews following it's publication in the US by AK Press, is just such a rarity, and as it is being launched in Ireland this week means readers here will soon be able to make their own appraisal of the book.

The Cork branch of the Workers’ Solidarity Movement Thuesday 28 Feb held a public meeting in the Quality Hotel, Shandon, Cork, which was attended by about twenty people. There was a high number of familiar faces from the Shell to Sea campaign, and a couple of new (well, not-quite-so-new) faces, all of whom came to hear comrade Fin Dwyer give a loosely-structured talk covering his observations as an anarchist active in the Mayo end of the campaign.