Workers Solidarity Movement

INSIDE MODERN MEXICO the name of Ricardo Flores Magon is well known, and is regarded in a somewhat similar way to that of James Connolly in Ireland. But outside Mexico few have heard of him. Born to a poor family in 1873, he became a journalist on the opposition paper 'El Demócrata' after finishing school. In 1900, along with his brother Jesús, he founded "Regeneración', a radical paper opposed to the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

Educate, agitate, organise. The phrase has been around for years but the ideas it encapsulates are still radical. We live in a world where we are encouraged to be passive. We are all consumers. We watch, we read, we observe, and some of us wait, hope and dream. These words go against the grain. You can't build a revolution by watching from a distance. There comes a point where many decide that they are tired of sitting on the sidelines.

Liverpool dockers refuse to sell jobs
International solidarity actions continue

BY 1993, as Shell's spin-doctors were teaching budding executives that "ignorance gets corporations into trouble, arrogance keeps them there", 300,000 Ogoni peacefully protested against Shell's operations (i.e. massive pollution and employment of paramilitary gangs as 'security'), only for 2,000 to be butchered, and countless others raped and tortured by the Nigerian military.

Dear comrades,

In your review of "Where There's Brass there's Muck" in Workers Solidarity no.52, you mention the successful "Green Bans" of the Builders Labourers Federation of New South Wales. The BLF was a remarkable union (it no longer exists having been destroyed in NSW by Maoist intrigues) not just for its Green Bans, but for its policies on sexism, the Aborigines, involving migrant workers, and more.

Comment piece from R&BR 3

The internet - viewed by some as the highway to the future, dismissed by others as an over - hyped toy with little practical value. Conor Mc Loughlin reviews a new book on the internet and its use by the labour movement.

Despite its relevance, The Organisation Platform of the Libertarian Communists is as controversial as ever. Kevin Doyle reviews Constructive Anarchism, a new pamphlet from Monty Miller Press in Australia that has collected The Platform and some of the early responses to its proposals into one useful edition.

Here I am going to look at four myths, widly accepted by the left and right alike on the October revolution and its aftermath. In 1922 Emma Goldman complained Soviet Russia, had become "the modern socialist Lourdes, to which the blind and the lame, the deaf and the dumb were flocking for miraculous cures". And like most religious events that claim a historical valadity many of the myths of the October revolution rather then being historical accounts are written instead to create a blind faith in the leadership of the party.

It was originally my intention to give a history lesson on the modern revolutions, with the aim of extracting what they had in common. Actually this is too big of a project, these events can not be dealt with adequately on their own in the space of 20 minutes, lump them together and you would lose everything.

What are these modern revolutions? Well in the 80's it became popular on a large part of the left to proclaim the death of the working class. Not so much from the obviously flawed position of saying nobody worked anymore, or even that modern society was no longer based around the division between wage labour and capital. No rather on the basis that the working class no longer existed as a class, ie a group of people with common interests.