Three days after Christmas, on one of those clear winter days during which the dark clouds are pierced by a sunlight that turns the water to silver, a group of friends gathered at Bull Island in the heart of Dublin city to say goodbye to Sue Richardson. Sue died in October in 2011, aged seventy, sitting at her kitchen table, waiting for the kettle to boil.  At her funeral a former housemate said, ‘Sue had an uncanny knack of turning the conversation away from herself’. She had an extraordinary life, yet spoke very little about it. The story here cannot be anything but incomplete.

Image: Sue on a pro-Choice picket of
a Rogue agency in Dublin in 2007

SOPA & ACTA are the latest attempts by traditional capitalism to reverse a transformation in the exchange of goods that has been escalating over the last couple of decades. In a widely discussed interview in 2005, Bill Gates called the free culture/open source movement "new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and movie-makers and software makers under various guises." This outraged many in the movement who were more inclined to identify with the Ayn Randite ultra-free market right than the traditional left, but in fact he had a point. Many failed to see it because 'communism' for almost everyone has come to mean something like the old Soviet Union. But the word means a lot more than that failed top down experiment. Why was Gates right and why is this to be welcomed?

Pic: Act Up-Paris and La Quadrature's ACTAivists in Luzern, in front of the negotiation site.

The recent World Economic Forum (WEF), the one where Enda Kenny reminded us of how ‘we’ went mad borrowing, is, in fact, an appropriate reminder of global corporate power and the costs it imposes on the global working class. In a recent libcom article, Steven Colatrella has suggested that the remarkable consistency of approach to crisis resolution adopted by governments the world over, notably their pursuit of austerity at any social cost, indicates the increasing commonality of ruling class interests, a convergence owing in part to shared experiences at institutions such as the IMF, WTO, G20 and EU. The WEF meeting at the Swiss ski resort of Davos must be understood in this context of the ongoing elaboration of global governance networks.

Hello! In Spain there is a very bad situation with the Free Radios in Asturias. We need your support !! ;) Can you send this Comunicado to the Jefatura Provincial de Telecomunicaciones de Asturias and help to make international presion? Please speak about this in the Assembly. And if you can send this Manifiesto to other people much better. Thank you!

Achi

This is the address

Over the last year, from Tahrir Square in Cairo to New York, a new movement sprung from the discontent of millions. It brought down a dictatorship in Egypt, re-awakened the libertarian spirit in Spain and affected a sea change in American politics. The Occupy movement, as it has become popularly known in English speaking countries, shook the world in 2011.

If the recent budget highlighted anything, it was the fact that the working class in Ireland is under severe attack.  Services, too numerous to mention here, are being cut or removed entirely, while the real living standards of many of us are being driven down and down.  Meanwhile the banker-thieves and investment-gamblers still live the highlife. 

Issue 125 of Ireland's anarchist paper Workers Solidarity  January / February 2012.

The idea of direct action is sometimes misunderstood as meaning anything violent, anything from a brick through a window to a full-scale guerrilla war. Our political opponents go out of their way to spread confusion because they know that in a “battle of ideas” they would lose. That is why they portray anarchism as a ludicrous system of chaos and disorganiation.

Last month, a Red-C opinion poll in the Irish Examiner stated that some 48% of the 1,010 adults surveyed believe that Ireland should continue complying with the terms and conditions of the EU/IMF bailout. Somehow this translated into the headline “Majority of public want us to obey bailout”. On the poll’s own premises, this statement is untrue, unless 48 is now greater than 52 per cent. To be sure, opinion polls aren’t necessarily false. In terms of straight-forward questions about people’s intended behaviour - like “how will you vote in the next referendum?” - their accuracy tends to be borne out in subsequent voting patterns. However, when more complicated questions come into play, like those concerning Ireland’s compliance with an EU/IMF bailout, opinion polling, as a mode of honest inquiry, starts to encounter serious limitations.

“Nobody’s Unpredictable”
- Orwellian tagline for marketing research company, Ipsos

Two leaders died over this weekend. Kim-il Jong, the isolated “dear leader” Stalinist North Korea, and Vaclav Havel a playwright, and former dissident, an ex prisoner who become the leader of his country out of the dark times of totalitarianism and into the light of the free markets. The story in the west will be spun in this way as people understand simple stories of good guys and bad guys.