Workers Solidarity Movement

This is the first of a series of interviews with Egyptians speaking directly of their experiences within the revolution and ongoing struggles.  I hope to cover some themes not covered by the traditonal/mainstream press, and allow space for Eygptians themselves to talk about aspects of the recent uprising they feel is important. The bias toward experiential knowledge is a conscious choice, simply because it is often the most neglected form of knowledge in political story telling. Ordinary voices are held as a poor sibling to powerful deterministic political forces and quickly subsumed into an unbending tide of formal history, which cannot speak to the lived experience of people themselves as agents of change and shapers of their own destiny.
 

Budget day 2011 saw vicious cuts being imposed on ordinary working people across Ireland to pay the massive costs of the bailout of Ireland’s banking system. A deeply unpopular government, in the service of the richest 1% of the population imposed cuts and tax hikes totalling 6 billion euro, cuts which will be supervised by the ECB and IMF. Around two thousands peopled gathered at at the Dáil that evening with the first protest taking place early that morning, when Gardai hastily tore the slogans off a cherry picker that had been placed outside the Dáil.

With the IMF in Ireland, a WSM member has written a song of 'welcome', a recording of which and the lyrics of which are below.  For international readers "céad míle fáilte" means "A Hundred Thousand Welcomes" and is a traditional greeting now strongly associated with the tourist industry.  You can read WSM articles about the IMF intervention and the economic crash that led to it in our Capitalist Crisis article listing.

Céad míle fáilte - To the IMF 
We hope we meet you on the streets - To fight you to the death. 
And we know how you got here - Back room deal and open arms 
As you try to suck the life from us - With your structural reforms

Radio Solidarity - Prog. 6 - "How I came to be involved" is now available to listen to on the Near FM podcast site.

In this show, we at Radio Solidarity went out and spoke to people who are actively engaged in struggle and have a definitive idea of how to change the world for the better.

Listen in to Radio Solidarity Program no. 5  available on the Near FM podcast site where we concentrate on the recent events around Palestine and the ongoing blockade of Gaza by Israel.

Over the June bank holiday weekend the 5th successive annual Rossport Solidarity camp took place. Over the decade that this campaign as been running, this weekend has become a focal point for activists and the community to get together, have workshops and share in some activities.  Radio Solidarity took along a recorder and tried to capture a flavor of the events, and we asked people how come they'd become invovled in this struggle against one of the biggest conglomerates in the World.

The audio is from the Dublin anarchist bookfair and has two speakers talking about the reform movement and feminism in Iran in general and the million signatures campaign in particular.

Recorded at the Dublin anarchist bookfair, three speakers look at the economy, what the real situation of the resistance is and what needs to be built and examples of what has been achieved in the unions to date. This is followed by contributions from the floor from a wide range of perspectives.

An IPSC meeting on Saturday saw some of the Irish participants on the Freedom Flotilla talk of their experiences, and discuss what practical steps Irish people can help take to bring about the end of the siege of Gaza and Israeli apartheid as a whole and secure self determination for the people of Palestine. This is the audio from the meeting.

Connor Kostick author of Revolution in Ireland: Popular militancy 1917 to 1923 spoke at the 2010 Dublin anarchist bookfair about the wave of workplace occupations and 'soviets' as well as the general strikes that are forgotten by conventional nationalist histories of this period.

The audio is about one hour in length and was first published on indymedia.ie.