Workers Solidarity Movement

Over the past five months, the Labour/Fine Gael coalition has rolled out its JobBridge internship scheme. This scheme sees thousands of unemployed people taking 6-9 month “work experience placements” in various jobs in exchange for €50 per week in addition to their social welfare payment.

Another budget looms. The Irish public again find themselves with their head under a guillotine looking up at this budget wondering about the weight behind the blade.  We are subjected to daily media leaks of what they are going to do to us in this:  Less dole, more job losses for those who have them, stopping medical cards for a few months, all the wild and fearful possibilities of a worse life for many people are being floated.    What is different this time when you compare it to the previous three or is it four austerity budgets?  We’ve been in crisis for some time now but this time the government is different.

Yesterday in Oakland, California the Occupy X Movement took a major step when Occupy Oakland called a general strike which shut down the port of Oakland (5th busiest in the US ). The call for the General Strike emerged from the Oakland General Assembly in the aftermath of the police shooting of Scott Olsen on 25th October. The strike could not (for legal reasons) have the formal support of the Oakland unions but we understand that in particular the radical ILWU which organizes the docks had given a 'nod and a wink' that if a large protest was at the port gates work would be halted for 'health & safety' reasons as had happened during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

We are making the text of our popular analysis 'London burns - causes & consequences of the riots - an anarchist perspective' available online as a PDF file.  A limited number were produced for the WSM stall at the London anarchist bookfair but rapidly sold out.  By making the PDF available we are inviting you to print out and distribute copies where you are.

The pamphlet is 28 pages in length and can be printed on the popular A4 (Europe) or US Letter (North America paper sizes).  The text has already been translated into French, if you are aware of additional translations use the contact form above to let us know about them.  

Download the PDF

The poppy is used as a fundraising appeal by the British Royal Legion and can be traced back to American ex-service men returning home from world war one. It was particularly associated with a poem written by a Canadian doctor, John McCrae (he died of pneumonia in January 1918). His poem begins:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below....

Don’t visit Greece this summer, boycott it. This is not an order by the invisible hand of the markets, but a mere suggestion from someone who was born in the so-called Greek territory.

There’s a lot of folks taking to the streets (and a Park) in the capitol of capital right now—Wall Street—and all over the world in response. The general sentiment seems to be that folks are fed up with a tiny elite controlling the lives of the rest of us—now on an unprecedented scale. This is made possible, in part, by a system of economics and government designed to enrich a few folks at the expense of the majority of us. That is, the social systems we’ve collectively built, and that we collectively maintain and reproduce, allow for this state of affairs.

As temperatures drop and household energy bills soar again this autumn, the PR battle to privatise our energy infrastructure is just heating up. The IMF/EU claim that competition, the favourite euphemism for privatisation, will lower costs for consumers. The Government claims, as usual, that it has no choice but to do what its overlords instruct. So now seems like a good time to observe how that privatisation has been working out for our nearest neighbours in the UK.

Months of intense resistance by ordinary people in Greece appear to have resulted in a partial victory. The EU crisis summit conceded that bond holders be forced to shoulder 50% of their losses. This did not come easy, Greek workers have staged several general strikes and Athens has seen day after day of large scale rioting.

The contrast with Ireland is clear. Here the union leadership called off token resistance in the first months of the crisis and workers passively marched, shrugged their shoulders and went home. As a result the ordinary Irish worker alone, the majority of 'the 99%', have shouldered all the costs. Bond holders will scontinue to have their failed gambles covered. Next week alone another 700 million will be handed over to the Irish & global 1% to cover their losses in Anglo. This is our ‘thanks’ for being the poster boys for austerity across Europe.

This statement from 'Comrades from Cairo' expresses solidarity and a sense of common struggle with the Occupy movement that has sprung up across the globe. It explains that the movement in Cairo was not non-violent but rather when police tried to evict Tahir square "Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on 28 January they retreated, and we had won our cities."