Workers Solidarity Movement

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. 

Over the last few months changes made by Facebook have greatly reduced the effectiveness of Events and Pages because it has become much less likely that someone following a page will see posts made by that page. According to Facebook on average only 12% of followers will see a given post. In 2011 Facebook did the same to events, multiple changes in the way events work saw response rates to event invitations decline from around 80% of those invited responding to this figure often being less than 20%.

Madrid saw significant riots on Tuesday as police attacked the tens of thousands of protesters who had surrounded the parliament building to protest the introduction of more severe austerity cuts. A WSM member from the Spanish state explains the context, what happened on Tuesday and the demands of 'En Pie', the movement which called the protest.

The platform “En Pie” (Stand up), composed of a diverse group of left-wing political party members and 15M activists, had called a protest for the Tuesday 25th September at 19.00 in Madrid. The intent was to surround the parliament buildings (Congress) in the centre of Madrid, to show that democracy had been “kidnapped” by inept Spanish politicians, and to demand that all politicians inside resign and re write the Spanish constitution. ¨En Pie, Stand Up¨ is composed by a very diverse group of members of left wing groups and 15M activists.

On Wednesday last, 19th September, the United Left Alliance held a press conference at which it announced “plans to launch a public campaign of resistance to property tax and austerity”.  For those of us who have been working alongside ULA members for over 12 months now to build the broad-based Campaign Against Household & Water Taxes (CAHWT), this announcement came as something of a surprise. CAHWT already is a ‘public campaign of resistance to property tax’ so why do the ULA (who are part of CAHWT) feel the need to ‘launch’ something that already exists?

Anti Household Tax campaigners have this week had 2 major victories against government and County Council attempts to bully people into registering for the hated tax. In Clare, following a week long campaign which culminated in a protest march to the Council offices on Friday (21st), the Council were forced to publicly back down from threats to withhold or delay third-level grants from students whose families are refusing to pay the household tax.

On the anniversary of the Wall Street occupation which sparked a global movement and captured media attention, Occupy Belfast acquired a second building.  A statement released on the groups Facebook page reads ‘members of the Occupy Belfast Movement took a step towards expanding the movement’s reach by taking control of a multi-unit residential property in an undisclosed location in Belfast.

The major job losses will affect Belfast and Larne which is already struggling with decades of under-investment and high employment.  FG Wilson has received a staggering 12 million in various state handouts via the quango Invest NI, and last year doubled its pre-tax profits to £7.8m. Caterpillar’s share price rose by 1.2% after the announcement on Thursday. According to one inside source who spoke to the Belfast Telegraph ‘That 1.2% rise would have kept the people they were going to sack in a job,” (1)

Marian Price has been detained without trial in inhumane conditions since May 2011.  Despite the fact that the charges against her – encouraging support for a paramilitary organisation – have been dismissed and her release ordered by the courts, she continues to be held on the direction of the North’s secretary of state, Owen Patterson. 58-year-old Price spent a year in solitary confinement in Maghaberry (an all-male prison) and Hydebank prisons.  During this time she was locked in her cell for 21 hours a day while kept under constant camera surveillance.  The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has said that spending anything more than 15 days in solitary confinement amounts to torture.

Loyalist rioting this week in North Belfast is a reminder that beneath the shiny new ‘normalised’ Northern Ireland is a political process that reaps what it sows.  While our local politicians continue to promote and sell the North to greedy developers, investors and tourism the reality is the majority of us, the working class have been left behind by a so-called settlement in which we are left to rot to be discarded and disposed when necessary. As increasing poverty, sectarianism, lower wages, mass unemployment, lack of affordable and social housing; including the introduction of water charges back on the agenda being as raw as ever the need to build a political alternative to the politics of green and orange is as urgent and relevant as ever.

A Civil Rights march from Coalisland to Dungannon was organised on Sunday 26 August 2012 to commemorate a similar demonstration 44 years earlier and to highlight existing abuses. The march finished in Anne Street, Dungannon with speeches from Councillor Barry Monteith, Rev Fr. Raymond Murray and IWU trade union representative Gareth Mackle.