Workers Solidarity Movement

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.
 

What ideas inspired the men and women who rose up in 1916? How did those ideas fare in the Irish Free State founded in 1922?

With historic working class centenaries occurring in recent years we have heard a lot about Unfinished Business. This message was strong in 2013 in reference to the 1913 Lockout and the inequality that still prevails in Ireland. Cries of Unfinished Business are once again being proclaimed in this centenary year of the 1916 Rising and it is true, we do have unfinished business.

We still have bosses and businessmen who could give William Martin Murphy a run for his money. The Republic that the rebels envisioned and enshrined in the proclamation has not been achieved and despite the rhetoric of the YES campaign we do not “cherish the children of the nation equally”, and we have a long way to go to get there, with particular work needed on Ireland’s hatred of women.

Huge numbers of people are now effectively homeless as they are unable to find somewhere stable to rent. Fortunately only a minority have been forced onto the streets so far, Dublin's hotels are full of families on 3 day rotation emergency accommodation. In some hotels such families are not allowed to use the front entrance. Thousands of others are forced to move into already overcrowded accommodation, perhaps with parents or friends. Yet more are coach surfing, moving around as they exhaust the charity of friends. And a growing number are sleeping on the streets or in tents, van and cars in park and industrial estates.

“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.

Five years ago we all scratched bits of paper, and a new government was formed. Today, in 2016, with we are five years down the road, and here we are scratching more paper, and another new government will be formed. It may be different from the last one or it might be the same, but ultimately the policies will appear to be remarkably similar. To serve the economy above all others appears to be the top priority for all governments.

Here Labour come again, back on our doorsteps to test the waters, to see if we're still mad about the past 5 years of their governance, to find out if we can remember every attack they made against us, probably in the hope that there have been so many that maybe, just maybe, we'll only remember a few.  A party riddled with so much contempt and disdain for us that they genuinely believe they can convince us that things will be different this time. They bombard us with sentences along the lines of "You will get X, Y and Z with Labour in government".

Crudely, they tell us that one of the things we can expect from them is a referendum on the 8th amendment, with top-notch propaganda to go along with that promise, propaganda painting them as pro-woman and pro-choice. There is no propaganda effective enough to cover up the war that they have waged on women for the past 5 years.

An investigation is currently under way at University College Dublin following reports that up to 200 male students allegedly shared explicit images of women they had sexual relations with. The incident not only highlights a culture of misogyny in Irish universities, it also calls attention to the absence of material supports for effectively responding to sexual assault on campus. But what kinds of supports should students demand from Irish universities?

Trigger Warning: Discusses rape and ‘revenge porn’ image sharing