Workers Solidarity Movement

The Spring 2007 issue of Ireland's anarchist magazine Red & Black Revolution. The articles in this issue include

• The politics and reality of the peak oil scare
• Rossport - A Community Fighting Back
• Anarchism, Elections and all that
• The Grassroots Gatherings - Networking a “movement of movements”
• Connolly - A life and a legacy
• Direct Action Gets The Goods – But How??
• Review of Ramor Ryan's book - "Clandestines..."
• Interview with Ana Lopez from the International Union of Sex Workers
• Download the PDF file 

Red & Black Revolution interviewed Ana Lopez, one of the founders of IUSW who as a sex worker in London when she finished her masters and wanted to start a PhD. "In supporting this kind of initiative of sex workers organizing, you don’t necessarily have to agree with my view that sex work is a legitimate type of work, and that it’s not inherently exploitative"

At this point in time it is a rare and welcome event when a book by an Irish activist is published and rarer still when a book by an Irish anti-capitalist writer receives widespread praise and acclaim. "Clandestines: the Pirate journals of an Irish Exile", which has received a slew of positive reviews following it's publication in the US by AK Press, is just such a rarity, and as it is being launched in Ireland this week means readers here will soon be able to make their own appraisal of the book.

Od lat 70’ dziewiętnastego wieku światem wstrząsnęły rewolucje, które i tak spełzły na niczym. Anarchiści zdają sobie sprawę czemu poprzednie rewolucje skończyły się porażką, ale czy wiemy jak rozpocząć rewolucje która się uda? Jakie kroki możemy podjąć już teraz aby przygotować rewolucje, a może jest to tylko kwestia oczekiwania na odpowiedni moment?

Revolutionary martyrs, being unable to speak for themselves, are liable to be claimed by all sorts of organisations with whom in real life they would have had little in common. When they are of national or international importance, like the Irish syndicalist James Connolly, this also mean that biographies often tend to be very partisan affairs, aimed at recruiting the dead to one cause or another. The story of their life becomes reduced to a morality tale whose conclusion is whatever positions the author holds dear today.

Red and Black Revolution issue 11 published October 2006

Contents include
Focus on Precarity
Anarchism, insurrections and insurrectionalism, 
The insurrection of Easter 1916, 
Review: Caliban and the Witch - women, the body and primitive accumulation

As well as reading the articles below you can download the PDF file of RBR11

Last September saw a split in the USA’s Congress of Trade Unions, the AFL-CIO. The Change to Win Federation held its founding convention in St. Louis, Missouri, where they set out their plans: cut down on bureaucracy, devote a lot more resources to organising the unorganised, and start building industry-wide super-unions.

In the UK union membership has been in steady decline for the past 25 years, not least due to how people are being employed - casualised labour, increased imposition of agency work, temporary, short term contracts & contracts of ‘self-employment’, along with the general lack of confidence in unions after years of complacency, compromises and defeats.

Over the past year there has been an emerging preoccupation among anarchists and socialists with precarity as it’s an expression of a new work discipline imposed by neo-liberalism. Already there have been several precarity forums in European cities aimed at etching out a sense of the identities formed through the shared experience of the demands of job market flexibility.

The Independent Workers Union (IWU) is a new small Irish trade union which stands outside the partnership consensus and is attempting to build a radical trade union.