Workers Solidarity Movement

WSM member Gregor Kerr took part in the Grassroots Mobilisation in Ireland: Opportunities and Challenges panel at Bloom’s First Activist Forum Saturday 8th November in the Teachers Club in Dublin. This is a recording of the session.

AS we continue to bear the brunt of the recession and our politicians stabilise the interests of the rich and fat cats, the 1960s provides us with an example in the necessity for struggle and social revolution. Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, pillars of the establishment continue to squabble over the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement they all share one thing in common when it comes to defending the status-quo and attacks on workers rights and conditions.

The world seems about to end. The markets are convulsing, the banks are tumbling, the entire island is about to become some sort of black hole off the coast of Europe.

Never fear though, we’ve got a brilliant political establishment to shepherd us through the economic wilderness, and in the Budget on Tuesday 14th they revealed their master-plan, carefully crafted, as Mary Hanafin said, to ‘protect the vulnerable’. Unfortunately, it seems like they’ve got a different understanding of who exactly ‘the vulnerable’ in Irish society are.

The recent bitter collapse of the Doha round of World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks has put the WTO back in the news around the world. The latest talks failed in large part because rich countries refuse to reduce subsidies to their own farmers, while insisting that the poor countries should reduce theirs. But what is the WTO, and how is it relevant to our everyday lives here in Ireland?

When the Irish constitution was unveiled in 1937 it set out a special place for women within the home. In Ireland as elsewhere ‘women’s life within the home’ has to a large extent been characterized by long hours of thankless drudgery. While the struggles of Irish women for greater liberties during the last century have improved our lives in many ways, the drudgery of housework remains thankless and the workplace has not brought the liberation that certain feminists promised. As anarchists see it, this is because as long as we live in a capitalist society women (or men) can never be meaningfully liberated.

In a period of mass unemployment in 1920's Germany fascism came to power despite not only the presence of mass Communist and Social Democratic parties but also of significant anti-fascist street fighting. Why did the left fail and what was the attraction of fascism. What about fascist movements today, do they represent a similar threat? Can we even agree a single definition of what fascism is?

A 60 minute recording of a talk and discussion on the Chinese revolution and the Chinese anarchist movement. It's available here as google video, mp4 and mp3 formats, the first two are preferred as the viewer will then be able to see the images referenced during the talk. The talk covers the period from the 1840's to the victory of the CCP in 1949.

An mp3 talk on the Kibbutz movement in Palestine / Israel focusing on the radical and anarchist elements of it.

At this stage its unsurprising in the least to read Royal Dutch Shell propoganda being presented as "journalism" by the Irish Independent and its stable mate, the Sunday Indo. Most readers of this site will be only too aware that the paper's owner 'Sir' Tony O Reilly has a very practical and profitable interest in the vast amounts of oil and gas of the West coast of Ireland.

However even by the hack standards of journalism, and right wing opinions, that grace the paper, yesterdays piece by Maeve Sheehan suggest not just the usual biased and unnuaced 'presentation of facts' but has an almost willful ignorance of the facts on the ground. Combined with a willingness to present Shell and Police PR without any simple background checks or colloratory evidence over such an 'extensive' (read: its got a big word count) this article would be most useful for any who sought a practical example of what Noam Chomsky describes as the 'manufacturing of consent'