Workers Solidarity Movement

Listen in to Radio Solidarity Program no. 5  available on the Near FM podcast site where we concentrate on the recent events around Palestine and the ongoing blockade of Gaza by Israel.

July - August 2010 Edition of the Workers Solidarity freesheet.

PDF of Workers Solidarity 116 Web Edition 2.92 Mb

The World Cup is over, the TV crews have departed, and the South African government must be happy. The world’s media portrayed it as the crowning achievement of sixteen years of post-apartheid development. With the African continent’s largest economy and one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, South Africa is considered by most to be a model middle-income developing country. Many in Ireland will look on with pride, happy that they helped play a part in the anti-apartheid boycott movement which helped to bring that terrible racist system to an end.

Does the system we live under, capitalism, offer enough scope for achieving lasting solutions to all the problems it causes?  Of course, some improvements are made and some problems are alleviated.  Yet new kinds of problem also arise in a society which is changing rapidly, constantly seeking new ways to make a profit.

Matt Ridley, has written a book called, "The Rational Optimist: how prosperity evolves".  In the book, the Eton and Oxford educated Ridley, argues that the world is getting better and better, it has been doing so for hundreds of years, and will continue to do so. Nothing stands in the way of his argument, not even global climate changeYou simply could not make this up. I know you could copy and paste that sentence for so much these days, but this one really makes you do a double-take.

Around 900 arrests took place at the G20 summit in Toronto as police used considerable force to break up protests. Media reports & video (below) indicate that many of the beaten were journalists covering the protest. The G20 was meeting to co-ordinate further attacks on the global working class. This is what the coded statements from the G20 about 'austerity budgets' and 'cutting deficits' will mean in practice. This despite the "risk that synchronised fiscal adjustment across several major economies could adversely impact the recovery" acknowledged in the final G20 communique.

"The environmental crisis we are living through, encompassing unpredictable climate change, resource depletion, pollution and species extinction has primarily been caused by industrial capitalism. The origin of this crisis, and the ways in which the effects have been managed point to a real lack of democracy in society. False solutions to this crisis dominate debate. These include market-based cure-alls, "green" party electoralism, "power of one" style individual action and state regulation and taxation." WSM position paper on the Environment as introduced at November 2007 conference (this paper replaced our old "Environment and Animal Rights" Position Paper, last amended at the May 2010 conference.

In Issue 1 of the Irish Anarchist Review, Andrew Flood put forward a critique ('Capitalist crisis and union resistance in Ireland') of two of the other articles in the same magazine, my article on Faceless Resistance and James R's interview with Alex Foti. His critique centers around the experience of the radical left in Ireland around workplace organising since the anti-globalisation movement and the experience of workplace activism since the economic crisis. In his article he attacks what he sees as an unbalanced concern with marginal sectors of employment on the part of the radical left since the turn of the century. He argues that the experience of the crisis shows that radical efforts to organise 'precarious' workers do not pay off. Instead, radicals should focus on organising where there is a greater chance of having a serious influence - i.e. within large mainstream trade unions.

The audio is from the Dublin anarchist bookfair and has two speakers talking about the reform movement and feminism in Iran in general and the million signatures campaign in particular.