Workers Solidarity Movement

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.

Globalise This! is one of the more important and informative books to come out of the Battle of Seattle. Published by Common Courage Press ("Our Goal is to turn pens into swords") the thrust of the book from the very beginning is towards the activist and 'the citizen' interested in doing something about what is wrong on this planet. As the blurb says "The WTO, World Bank and IMF must - and can - be stopped. This book tells us how."

Globalise This! - The Battle Against The WTO and Corporate Rule by Kevin Danaher and Roger Burback (Common Courage Press )

The publication of No Logo was perfectly, if unintentionally, timed. Just as the N30 demonstrations in Seattle made headlines around the world, No Logo arrived to explain some of the reasons for that movement. So although Naomi Klein has made it clear that she is not an 'official' spokesperson for the movement - that this movement has no official spokespeople - at a time when observers (and even some participants) wondered what was going on, No Logo provided some answers.

No Logo - by Naomi Klein (Flamingo Press, ~ €14/stg£8.99)

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.

Amsterdam, Geneva, Cologne, Seattle, London, Washington, LA, Prague. What do these cities have in common? In the last four years they have been the site of a new phenomenon, the Global Protest. For decades, the organisations that manage capitalism have met to divvy up the world among themselves. For the first time, their role as dealers of poverty and misery has been exposed by thousands of angry protesters. The symbolic value of these protests cannot be under estimated. If only for a brief period of time, a few days here and there, people have come together to say 'Enough!'.

The Czech anarchist organisation Solidarita/Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists is working as part of INPEG, the Czech alliance organising the protests in Prague this September. In October one of their members will be speaking in Ireland about these protests. Vadim Barek, Solidarita's international secretary explains what the IMF means to workers in the Czech republic and why they are organising against the summit.

The world's 225 richest people have a combined wealth equal to the combined annual income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest people.