Workers Solidarity Movement

The Workers Solidarity Movement held a small demonstration on June 20th in solidarity with political prisoners in the Russian state, outside the embassy of Russia in Dublin. On June the 14th the FIFA World Cup commenced in Russia while it interrogated and tortured framed political dissidents in its dungeons. We in Ireland cannot halt this injustice but we can show that the wider world is watching, that the brutality of the Russian state and the hypocrisy of FIFA has been noted. We can ask 'if I was falsely imprisoned and tortured, what would I want?'. That a group of people over 3000 kilometres away would take time to demonstrate their concern is what makes the human species great what makes our freedom possible. The movement for freedom is global and our bonds of solidarity cannot be severed by national borders.

6th March the IFB announced the death of Icelandic YPG volunteer Haukur Hilmarsson at the hands of the Turkish state in Afrin. Hauker who was described as a 'dedicated anarchist militant' was a well know anti-racist and anti-austerity activist in Iceland who had been arrested at the height of the protests against the banking scandal there.

Wondering why your vote doesn’t seem to make a difference, why your wages seem to barely cover your costs, or why you feel like a second-class citizen? Then, you’re thinking about hierarchy.

Anarchists treat ‘hierarchy’ as the central issue in society, as the unifying theme in most of the problems we face. Then, the aim is to get rid of hierarchy and replace it with something better. But what is hierarchy? It’s not something which is talked about in mainstream political discourse, and even anarchists themselves can sometimes misunderstand it.

The 6th annual March for Choice takes place September 30th in Dublin and once more we are bringing together an anarchist bloc for the march - join us on the day.

It's going to be an important march as the government have promised a referendum next year but have not yet announced a date or indeed what we will actually be allowed to vote on.  There is a real danger that rather than a vote to delete the 8th Amendment they will seek to replace it with text that would still seek to deny bodily autonomy and allow abortion access in very restricted circumstances.  Some 12 people a day are forced to travel to access abortion and more use pills at home under the theoretical threat of a 14 year jail term, the danger is that many of these people would still be unable to access abortion and pregnant people would continue to find the 8th amendment denied them control in their own pregnancy.

The WSM will be at this years Belfast Anarchist Bookfair at the Catalyst Art Gallery, come along to our stall - one of over a dozen, see below - to pick up some good anarchist reads from Ireland and to say hi.

10th Belfast Anarchist Bookfair
Catalyst Arts
Ground Floor, 5 College Court, BT1 6BS Belfast
9th September 2017 1pm – 7pm

The WSM is not organising the 12th Dublin Anarchist Bookfair for the spring of 2017 as might be expected. Instead, we are organising an alternative event, the Anarchist Gathering.  

The Anarchist Gathering 2017 will take place on Sunday, 23nd April, 10am-5pm in the Teacher’s Club (36, Parnell Square West, Dublin 1). Please reply to activity@wsm.ie to register your interest in attending. We are gathering to discuss how we can better organise and fight for a free society. We would hope that everyone actively interested in building anarchism in Ireland will attend.

The following piece maps out our thinking about the bookfair at the present moment.

In solidarity, 

WSM Dublin Anarchist Bookfair Committee.

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.

It has emerged that Mike Israel, the US YPG volunteer who fell fighting ISIS in Rojava on the 24th was  a member of the IWW. Initial reports of his killing alongside a German - Anton Leschek - volunteer indicated they may have been the victims of a Turkish airstrike but said they had been killed north of Raqqa where its unlikely Turkish jets would be attacking. The Manbij Military Council has released a statement confirming they were killed in a Turkish attack near Manbij where Turkish jets have carried out dozens of attacks on the SDF.

Saturday 19 November saw a mass fascist attack on an anarchist bookstore in France in the aftermath of a fundamentalist catholics rally of the SPXX organisation which in Ireland is central to the anti-choice movement.