Workers Solidarity Movement

Privilege and the theory around it is a significant topic of debate at the moment among those interested in radical social change. Touching on many issues dear to the hearts of anarchists, it is hard to avoid.(i) Yet, the two are not fitting together as well as they should and there is a sense of unease about this. (ii) Much of this is because privilege theory has emerged from US academic circles rather than anarchist ones and, ironically, has been co-opted to protect middle- class privileges. (iii) This is a situation in need of repair if we are to maintain our links with feminist, anti- racist and other struggles against oppression. If we are to create a mass movement capable of social change then it has to be able to engage with everyone in the first place.

Guest writer, Dónal O’Driscoll, contributes to the ongoing discussion on intersectionality and privilege theory.

A talk from the 2013 Anarchist Bookfair which will discuss emergent radical queer politics which resist assimilation and question the foundations of gender and sexual identity

For the third year in succession the Cork branch of the Workers Solidarity Movement participated in the Cork Pride Parade. Anarchists have been involved in Pride organising in Cork since its beginnings in the mid-noughties and have long seen Pride as both an important civic festival and an opportunity to connect with Cork's burgeoning LGBT community. Cork WSM also distributed a leaflet on Pride and its politics at the parade (see below). The parade was the culmination of a week of hectic activity and celebration by Cork's LGBT community across a number of venues and across a range of activities.

The WSM took part in Pride in Dublin over the weekend as part of the PINC! bloc. Below are a selection of images of the day captured by our photographers.

We've made a much larger collection available via the Pride 2012 album on the WSM Facebook page.  The slideshow above is a smaller selection of these images pulled from our photographers Flickr account. Images made available under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.

Trans (or transgender) is a term for people whose gender identity and gender expression are different from the sex assigned to them at birth. Trans people have a history of receiving bigoted responses from some sections of the left, of the lesbian and gay community and some strands of feminism. One attack on transgender people has been based on the idea that trans people, by “changing gender”, reinforce existing rigid gender roles. Moving across borders of perceived gender does not reinforce existing gender-roles, any more than migration across borders of nation states reinforces the system of nation states. Many trans people are actively involved in fighting current, sexist gender stereotypes.

Workers Solidarity Movement position paper on Queer Liberation as re-written at the October 2011 National Conference. This position paper sits under the Sex, Gender, and Sexuality paper and does not repeat that material here.

June last saw another massive Pride in Dublin with approximately 25,000 people taking part. While Pride has very much become more of a social and commercial event since its early years in Dublin it also remains a strong political expression of the ongoing struggles against Queer oppression. There was also a thousands strong “March for Marriage” through Dublin on August 14th, organised by LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) Noise, which opposes civil partnership on the grounds that it does not provide similar rights to those of married heterosexual couples.

This weekend witnessed the shameful discrimination against a same sex couple when they attempted to use a travel pass at Hueston station in Dublin. The incident occured ironically enough as the couple concerned returned from a march demanding same sex marraige equality in Ireland. The scandal has been passed off by the hierarchy of Iarnroid Eireann as something of a one off incident and that the company has changed their ways.  In fact this policy has been in place since at least 2008.

Saturday June 25th saw another massive Pride in Dublin with the Garda estimating that as many as 26,000 took part in the parade and another 100,000 spectated.  While Pride has very much become more of a social and commercial event since its early years in Dublin it also remains a strong political expression of the ongoing struggles against Queer oppression.