Over 30 years of anarchist writing from Ireland listed under hundreds of topics
WSM recently held our first Facilitation and 'Conversations about Anarchism' training day in Dublin. The photo shows the problems attendees had already encountered in meetings they had participated in. How many of them have you come across?
The purpose of the training was to give people the basics of facilitation that can avoid or at least minimise these problems.
At the end of the training all the 11 people who had taken part were very positive about it. One said “It was good to meet new people, I learned a lot about facilitation and would now be more confident now, I also learned about anarchist process” while another said “It was very comprehensive with detailed techniques about how to facilitate.” Everyone said they would be interested in future trainings.
There is massive opposition across the country to the government’s attempt to impose water charges on us. Not least because we already pay for water through our taxes. This is simply yet another austerity tax. We have put up with years of austerity, cutbacks and extra taxes – all imposed on us to pay off the gambling debts of bankers and financial speculators. Hundreds of thousands of people are now saying ‘No More!’.
People also realise that this is an attempt to prepare our water service for privatisation, which will ultimately end in multinational companies owning it, charging us exorbitant prices and making super profits.
But we don’t have to accept this new charge. We CAN defeat it. To achieve that, there are a few things which we will all have to do:
The topic of this talk (audio link below) was on organising unions in non-unionised workplaces, and possibly re-invigorating places where unions are ostensibly still organised. Our labour market locally is increasingly casualised, de-skilled, and less well paid. “Flexible” arrangements between employer and employee are the current code word for the slashing of security of contract and the threat of relocation of capital. Unions have historically been the only means of lower paid workers countering trends like these, so the question as to how workers organise and fight back is coming back into focus more and more. This talk intended to address just that, and the speakers put forward arguments for an alternative to the top-down trade unionism that evidently isn’t working today.
Since the foundation of the Campaign Against Household & Water Taxes, WSM members have been pushing for a strengthening of grassroots democracy in the campaign, and we believe that the more democratic the campaign is the more likely it is to succeed. In this article, Brian A., a WSM member involved in the campaign in Kildare, outlines his experience of being involved in building the campaign in his local area.
At a public meeting of the Campaign Against Home and Water Taxes (CAHWT) in Kildare last month, a query was raised from a woman anxious about the upcoming local elections. She explained her complete frustration with the austerity policies of the Fine Gael-Labour Government, and described her despair at not having the power to challenge policies that were ravaging her community, stating there “really is no one legitimate left to vote for.”
Having spent the early part of this week at the annual conference of my union – the Irish National Teachers Organisation – I’m struck by the view that unions today appear to be a different world entirely from that of 100 years ago. My talk will focus less on 1913 and more on where the trade union movement finds itself today
Recent changes Facebook has made to Pages & Events have greatly reduced its usefulness for radical political organising. Here I reject the idea that the reason for these changes is political censorship and examine what the actual reasons & effects are. In doing this I'm building on my article of last week that argues that Facebook should be a collectively owned public utility and not a private company - in part because of the way it has sabotaged its own usefulness in the search for advertising revenue.
This session of the 2012 Dublin Anarchist Bookfair looked at the value of paper and ink when the net is usually declared the real frontier. We asked our panel to track some of the connections between todays underground radical press, and what went before.
To what extent do the revolutions and revolts of 2011 reflect a new world born from the shell of the old? Were these revolts of the internet generation -- networked individuals? Are people not only using new technology but becoming transformed by it? For anarchists, what lessons can we learn and to what extent must we transform our organisational methods and structures?
Because of the length of this review
its been made available as a 15 page
PDF file to download and read off line.
In September last year, we held an interview with a comrade from the OCL, a Chilean anarcho-communist (platformist) organisation with a presence in the biggest cities of that country - Santiago, Valpara’so and Concepcion. This organisation has a policy of building up the movement amongst the popular rank and file, organising Frentes (Fronts or Networks) among the traditional popular factors in revolutionary struggle in Chile: workers, students and neighbours from the slums of the cities.