Workers Solidarity Movement

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This is a detailed guide on how to make a political banner for a demonstration or banner drop. It uses 3 real examples to illustrate. [Download as PDF]

These 3 banners are:

1. The May Day banner. Made for the anarchist bloc called by the WSM for Dublin's May Day march 2017.
2. The Pride banner. Made for the Working Class Queeroes "Fucking Dregs" bloc on Dublin LGBTQ Pride 2017.
3. The Drop banner. Made for a banner drop by the Working Class Queeroes in the morning of the same Pride.

Being a good political organiser involves quite a large set of skills which take years of practical experience to hone. The manual on how to be a good organiser - if one could even be written - would be a book large enough to be covered by the Offensive Weapons Act. This is a basic primer on what makes a good organiser rather than a shoddy one, focusing on the kind of traits you should be trying to develop over time. None of us lives up to these all of the time, but it's what we should aspire to and move closer towards continuously. [Download as PDF]

The 8 traits are:

1. Reliable
2. Co-operative
3. Independent
4. Communicates Clearly
5. Realistic
6. Ambitious
7. Secure
8. Growing

The WSM’s politics are fundamentally intersectional. ‘Intersectionality’ is a fancy word for some rather basic ideas. You can think of it as ‘overlap-ism’ instead. There are three main points, 1) that each person needs to be seen as a whole, 2) that no power system exists in isolation, and 3) that all forms of oppression and exploitation should be uprooted at the same time.

The first point refers to the fact that real people aren’t cartoons. We are each complicated and multi-dimensional. For instance, a person is not just ‘working class’. They also have a gender. In general, life for a working class woman will be significantly different than for a working class man, not only because a woman is oppressed by sexism but because class itself is experienced differently.

The packed in nature of the #Strike4Repeal on O'Connell bridge made it impossible to do an actual count. So we've done the next best thing, used the area occupied to calculate how many people could have fitted into the space photos show was occupied.  We also did the same thing for the later #March4Repeal

With Martin McGuinness resigning as Deputy First Minister and Sinn Fein declining to nominate a deputy first miniter an election is almost certainly going to be called and the electoral circus will once again come to town.  

Please excuse this writer's election fatigue - with this being the third election in 12 months on this island - as I begin this short post off with a well used phrase: "Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth".

The Green and Orange politics of the north almost guarantees us that we will be returned with a Sinn Féin - DUP government, meaning that, yep you guessed it(!), if voting changed anything here it would be illegal.

A 'shocking' report which was revealed yesterday confirmed to us what we already knew: the IRA still exists.

Lots of people think anarchism is a far-out thing, but really most of it is just common sense and there are surely far more anarchists out there than consciously identify as such. Read this (non-exhaustive) check list and see what you think.
 

Bertie's 'testimony' to the banking enquiry could hardly have provided a better example of the way politicians in this country understand they are protected from any consequences of their wrongdoing. Apparently we are to believe that he hardly knew any developers. Even the Mail is outraged, but what will be done about it?

The images show two examples where the Media in Greece has been caught lying ahead of Sunday's referendum. One of our readers tell us that what the media are saying is "If you vote No, zombies will rise, nuttella will turn bitter, a comet will strike Greece, etc etc etc etc. That's how ALL Greek TV channels are these days! They all make FOX NEWS look like a kindergarden.

A couple of our Greek readers had commented asking us to highlight the outrageous abuse of press freedom going on in the Greek media ahead of Sunday's referendum vote.