Workers Solidarity Movement

THE CHANGE from a magazine to newspaper format reflects the increased readership Workers Solidarity is building up. It will take a few issues before we iron out all problems involved in changing our printing process but we hope you will bear with us. None of us is a professional journalist or designer. This issue was produced by a gardener, a couple of office workers, a teacher, a researcher, three unemployed people and a student.

IN LATE September 1984 five anarchists, three from Dublin and two from Cork decided to launch the Workers Solidarity Movement. This was certainly a major undertaking for such a small number of people. Workers Solidarity began publication five weeks later. The first editorial introduced the new organisation: "Are there not enough organisations trying to change society? What makes the Workers Solidarity Society so different?

Issue 34 of Ireland's anarchist paper Workers Solidarity 34 from 1992

Anarchism today
Anarchism to-day is growing in all of the Eastern European countries. As it was isolated for some 70 years in the soviet union and 40 years in Eastern Europe it will be a slow and painful process. In the west the anarchist movement grew slowly throughout the 80's and is now in the process of re-examining the anarchist tradition.

The articles from issue no 35 of the Irish anarchist paper Workers Solidarity, originally published in the Summer of 1992.

Issues of the Irish anarchist paper Workers Solidarity published in 1991

A statement issued in 1988 after internal disagreements within the WSM had led to its partial collapse.  Those whom remained and rebuilt the organisation in the following years offered this analysis of what had been acheived and what had gone wrong.

WE ARE BACK. It is almost a year since the last issue of Workers Solidarity and you want to know what happened. Ireland has little or no anarchist tradition so rather than just learning from those who went before us we had to make a fair few mistakes while we were developing our politics and building the Workers Solidarity Movement. The biggest mistake we made was putting too much emphasis on day-to-day activities at the expense of achieving a deeper and clearer understanding of the anarchist idea; it's libertarian values as well as its socialist goal.

Articles from the three issues of Workers Solidarity published from the Summer of 1988 to the Spring of 1989.  In this period it was a 20A4 page magazine in format.  This is a selection of the articles, once we scan the remaining ones we will add them to the site.