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

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.

Reading all that budget analysis you'd be forgiven for thinking that the unemployed were unaffected by the budget by and large; and you'd be wrong.  None of our news commentators in the mainstream media made much of the dramatic cut to the circumstances of the unemployed. A single person on the dole in rented accomodation is going to be €432 worse off this coming year.

This year as every year I went back to the place of my birth, Greece. I go back to Greece once, sometimes twice a year if I can. The experience of my last and recent visit to the place was a different experience all together that has me sick to my stomach and feeling extremely upset. 

Here in Ireland I read about Greece on a daily bases on the web, in the liberal mainstream and radical press and as well as I keep regular contact with people though phone calls and the internet. This gives me the false impression that I understand the current situation in Greece even though I'm living 2500 miles away from the place for a good 11 years now. Primarily I went back  to meet good friends and family but also because I have that odd habit to travel around the place try to figure out things for myself.

There’s a lot to be angry about. On the one hand mass unemployment, cut backs and pay cuts, we have death and destruction on a grand scale. On the other, the crushing bore­dom and alienation of everyday life. All of these various horrors are tied together, different faces of a single system. It exploits and exaggerates every tiny little difference between us from sexism to racism and nationalism, making us compete for scraps and hate each other as we fight while a tiny minority enjoy all the benefits. This system is global capitalism backed by the armed force of the state, a pattern of economic and political exploitation that reaches into every aspect of our lives. Class oppression is not simply a small cabal of the ultra-rich in Wall Street or Washington or London it's in every workplace, every police station, every dole queue, every courtroom, every prison and every territory occupied by Western militaries, and can only be sensibly understood as such.

Issue 124 of Ireland's anarchist paper Workers Solidarity  November / December 2011.