Workers Solidarity Movement

Vegetarianism and environmentalism often go hand in hand. This is partly because the consumption of large livestock has itself an effect on the environment. It takes seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef - if we were all to become vegetarian, so the argument goes, much less land would have to be used for agriculture. This is true to a certain extent, but the grain:meat ratio leaves out many things. For example, a cow produces not just meat, but milk, leather and dung (a fertiliser, soil stabiliser, and even fuel source). Wool, feathers and eggs are all useful 'by-products' of animal husbandry that have to taken into account.

I recently found myself on a morning flight from London to Dublin with two leaders - David Trimble and Ken Magennis. If that plane had crashed it can almost be guaranteed that there would have been some conspiracy theory surrounding it. The crash would have meant that this article would never have been written - but in the greater scheme of things it would be remembered due to the fact that these leaders' lives would have been lost.

SWEDISH FASCISTS murdered a long time trade unionist last October. Björn Söderberg was an activist of the 'libertarian socialist' Swedish Workers Central Organisation (SAC) union. He was shot three times outside his apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Satra. He was shot in the head.

Chinese construction worker Chen Xianggui was recently convicted of "gathering people to disturb the social order'', a charge based on his union activism while working in Kuwait. Chen went to Kuwait in 1996 as one of thousands of Chinese overseas labourers and joined a union of foreign workers. As a union activist he helped organise a one-week strike in Kuwait in 1997 over unpaid overtime. The strike was legal under Kuwaiti law. But Chinese authorities revoked Chen's passport in early 1998, forcing him to return to China. He was arrested and held in detention until October 28th last year, when a court in Jintang County in his native Sichuan province convicted him.1

BETWEEN 1986 AND 1999 Bill Gates, the richest man on earth, earned over 14 million dollars a day from the increasing value of his Microsoft shares alone. Yet over one billion people on this planet live on less than one dollar a day. Some put Gates' wealth down to hard work, but the reality is that some of these low earners are working far longer hours.
Women workers in the garment industries in Bangladesh earn as little as 63p a day1. The UN reports that they "spend 56 hours a week in paid employment on top of 31 hours in unpaid work - a total of 87 hours". The reality of this new millennium is that inequality is now greater than ever, and according to the UN it is getting worse.

Leninists are fond of quoting from the writing of Victor Serge, as a means of getting a libertarian rubber stamp for the actions of the Bolsheviks during the October revolution and the subsequent events. In his keynote article "In defence of October"[1] John Rees uses no less than 8 quotes from Serge's writings within the space of 70 pages. Poor old Lenin only managed to clock up 4 original quotes, while Tony Cliff's dubious interpretation of all these events manages to get more quotes in than one could possibly count. To a certain extent, what the Leninists of today are trying to tell us is that Serge was a practical man, and he knew that the only way for the revolution to succeed was to row in behind the Bolsheviks. So, with this in mind, we take a look at Serge's' autobiography "Memoirs of a Revolutionary".

Graham Purchase is one of the most prolific writers in the Australian anarchist movement, and in books such as 'Anarchist Society & its Practical Realisation', has made a serious contribution to the debate on the future of the anarchist movement, and how our ideas can best be put into practice today. Here, we review his latest book, 'Anarchism and Environmental Survival'.

Kevin Doyle talks to Vadim Barák of the Solidarita organisation in the Czech Republic about the problems and possibilities facing anarchists in the process of rebuilding a revolutionary movement.

IT HAD BEEN some time since I'd read any science fiction when my partner started buying the whole series chronologically. Once I read the first I was hooked. Banks has created a very attractive fictional society, the Culture. That it was instantly attractive and obviously anarchist is, perhaps, more interesting because the main character in Consider Phlebas, Horza, is antagonistic towards it. So, we see the first glimpse of this galactic anarchy through the eyes of one who has chosen to fight it.

• Consider Phlebas
• The Player of Games
• Use of Weapons
• The State of the Art
• Excession
• Inversions

A SURPRISING BEST SELLER last year was 'Stalingrad' by the same author. His publishers have obviously re-released this book, first published in 1982, to cash in on this. As you might expect, it is primarily a military history of the Spanish Revolution. But it is a very welcome break from the normal pattern of mainstream military histories of the Spanish Revolution. For the most part these fail to discuss the revolution within the civil war, the thousands of collectives or the role of the anarchists. If they are mentioned, they are usually portrayed as an obstruction to the efficient military pursuit of the war by the republican side.