Workers Solidarity Movement

As Iarnród Éireann’s contract for operating train services is due to expire in 2019, the National Bus and Rail Union claims that it will vehemently oppose any move towards privatisation [1].

In recent months, the EU Commission has been pressing for changes which would see Irish Rail opened up to tenders from competitors [2]. The successful operation of the Luas by French company Veolia has convinced EU officials that there would be sufficient demand by other investors for the rail contract [2].

Over two years after the last major mass direct action against Shell in Erris the state continues to pursue a vindictive prosecution against some of those arrested that day. In June 2013 at the culmination of a week of action around 70 people entered the Shell compound at Aughoose where the final section of the experimental high pressure raw gas pipeline was being connected.

The local community have been resisting the pipeline and refinery for a decade. During that resistance hundreds have been arrested or injured and several have spent periods in jail. Millions was spent every year deploying hundreds of Garda and at times the airforce and navy to make effective protest impossible. Despite this the protests meant that the project has finished years late and at 3 to 4 times the original projected cost.

Alan MacSimoin explains the successful campaign of the 1970's that stopped nuclear power coming to Ireland

You can now view the video of the Defending the Amazon defending life from the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair 

Could climate change become a catalysing force for radical social transformation in Ireland? Recent struggles around public transport in Ireland prompted me to think along these lines. Last weekend, Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann workers went on strike over plans by the National Transport Authority to tender out 10% of public routes to private operators. A few days earlier, SIPTU’s banner at Liberty Hall had been unfurled to state: ‘Say No to Privatisation; privatisation results in fare increase, reduced services, a threat to free travel, a bad deal for taxpayers and job cuts’. SIPTU and NBRU members and strike organisers have emphasised the damage privatisation will do to society, primarily concentrating on the loss of community services and the race to the bottom in bus drivers’ terms and conditions [1]. The striking workers deserve our support and their claims should be taken seriously. This is definitely the case when the regime media adhere to a deeply unimaginative line, loudly declaiming traffic disruption to an imagined city of angry consumers and silently accepting the hollowing out of public services [2]. At the same time, however, we also need to think about what’s not being said, about the words that don’t make it on to the papers or the banner.
 

OLINTLA is a small village in the Sierra Norte, a remote, mountainous region to the east of Mexico City. The landscape there is dramatic, green and beautiful, mostly sunlit jungle, rivers and wildlife. The hillsides are occasionally populated by farming towns and villages, mainly indigenous communities whose way of life is constantly threatened. In recent years, the Mexican state has accelerated plans for the development of a vast hydroelectric power plant in the area, directly impacting the people in Olintla and about a dozen or so neighbouring communities. What appears on the surface to be a ‘green energy’ project is in fact closely bound up with community displacement and the aggressive extraction of local oil and gas reserves, primarily to the detriment of the region’s water resources and wider capacity to sustain life. Unfortunately, Olintla is far from an atypical case but represents how indigenous communities in Mexico, as in Latin America more generally, tend to bear the brunt of the state’s creation of opportunities for private capital accumulation, called ‘development’ by those in power and ‘projects of death’ by the communities affected.[1]

This educational discussion was based around a text that says “We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.” from Manifesto for for an Accelerationist Politics

We tended to disagree, the audio of what is a relatively informal introduction and chat covers a range of issues we have with this approach.

A chat about the Manifesto for for an Accelerationist Politics- WSM Dublin by Workers Solidarity on Mixcloud

Rather worrying news about those mysterious sink holes that have appeared in Siberia. It now appears they were giant methane releases - long forecast by climate change scientists as a likely positive feedback occurrence as permafrost in Siberia melted and released trapped methane. Worrying because methane is a 20 times more potent climate change gas than CO2 because it is more efficient at trapping radiation.

Nelly Cuadros a community activist from the central department of Tolima, Colombia shared with the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair her stories of resistance, and lessons on uniting against injustice. Women play a central role in these communities and, in spite of discrimination as both peasants and women, are emerging as important social leaders for this pivotal time.

This talk was part of Latin American Solidarity Week. As a last minute addition to the program Leah also spoke about the struggle against Fracking in Ireland