Workers Solidarity Movement

Mutual Aid is the fuel an anarchist society will run on. It is also what keeps capitalist society going in spite of all the hardship, greed, and exploitation that exists. Like all good ideas it's simple to understand. In order to get by in a tough world, it's necessary to get a bit of help from others. And as well as receiving help you also give it, not simply because it's nice to be nice, but because you know that sometime in the future you'll need a bit of it yourself.

The NEFAC web page is to be found at http://nefac.northernhacking.org/ This would be my first and only major problem - well niggle really. Basically its not the most obvious or intuitive address. On the other hand it's the first thing that comes up when you put "North East Federation of Anarchist Communists" into google. (They are located in the US and Canada).

Every so often the newspapers fill with stories of a crisis in some third world country. We see pictures on our screens of gunmen, starvation and suffering; inevitably we hear calls for humanitarian intervention. Over the summer, we were told of a crisis in Liberia. A brutal civil war, a corrupt leader, child soldiers, starving civilians: it seemed that the whole world was crying out for intervention by the US or UN.

Rudolf Rocker is recommended by Chomsky, whose own anarchist thinking is strongly influenced by him, as one of the best writers on anarchism and this is probably his finest work - a brilliant libertarian analysis of the development of power, the cult of the state and their relationship with human liberty and culture.

The service charges that are being brought in north and south of the border are part of a process of further increasing the proportion of tax paid by workers. The trend in global capitalism is to replace 'progressive' taxes (like income tax) with flat-rate taxes (like VAT, service charges, etc) to further shift the taxation burden from rich to poor. This is the policy advocated by the world bank, IMF, WTO and virtually all of the institutions of global capitalism.

This October some 400 industrialists and assorted hangers on will descend on Dublin for the European summit of the World Economic Forum. The city centre will be brought to a halt as the sort of globalisation demonstration we have seen in Seattle and Prague occurs in Dublin. So what is the World Economic Forum? In its own words "The Forum provides a collaborative framework for the world's leaders to address global issues, engaging particularly its corporate members in global citizenship.i" That is from the WEF web page and despite the careful spin should be worrying to anyone reading it carefully.

Anarchism is a very simple idea -basically society should be organised in a non-hierarchical way, it should not be divided into order-givers and order-takers. We don't need bosses, politicians, bishops or anybody else to tell us how to live our lives. Anarchists look to a society which will be based on the idea of "from each according to ability, to each according to need".

On Sunday 13th July activists of Autonomous Community Spaces (ACS) entered 42 Parnell Square in central Dublin, a building which had been vacant for 11 years. They were violently evicted the following day. The extracts below from one of their press releases details what happened.

Every day nearly US$2 trillion changes hands on the money markets (i.e. is gambled by speculators). It can be hard to get a handle on just how much a trillion is. If you stacked a million dollar notes on top of one another it would reach about six foot high. If you stacked a trillion dollars the same way it would reach to over 40 times the height of Mount Everest! Yet the rich tell us there is no money for health care, affordable housing and modern school buildings.

The Grassroots Gathering is a weekend series of meetings and social events which brings together anti-authoritarian left wing activists. This summer saw the fifth one in two years and with over 165 people registering for this one (27th-29th June, Dublin) we can finally say that there is a movement of libertarian activists, a movement that has rejected hierarchical ways of organising. The previous Gathering had happened in Limerick in the middle of the fight against the war and suffered as a consequence.