Over 30 years of anarchist writing from Ireland listed under hundreds of topics
The WSM is one of the signatures on this international anarchist statement produced for Mayday 2014 involving 8 groups in 7 countries at time of publication. This is part of our ongoing involvement in the Anarkismo.net network involving anarchist organisations in some 30 countries.
Welcome to Issue nine of the Irish Anarchist Review, published for the 2014 Dublin Anarchist Bookfair.
EDITORIAL:
We've been hearing scare stories about the damage being done to the environment by co2 emissions for decades now. Terms like “climate change”, “greenhouse effect”, “the ozone layer” (more importantly, the holes in the ozone layer) and “global warming”, are part of everyday language. We know that the polar ice caps are melting, causing sea levels to rise and we know that the weather is doing crazy things in parts of the world that are usually temperate. And, we know that all this is being caused by the stuff we produce and how we produce it. What has our response been?
By and large, we've done nothing. In fact we've done the opposite. We've continued to create stuff. More and more stuff. We produce enough food to feed the world at least twice over and a third of it is wasted. We produce gadgets we don't really need, war machines to subjugate people, we plan obsolescence so that we have to keep producing things to replace other things so that the wheels of the global economy keep turning and profit keeps accumulating. Billions of humans, across the planet, spend a large chunk of every day, doing things they'd prefer not to to produce things they don't need in a process that is making the planet unfit for their habitation.
This is the archive page of the 9th Dublin Anarchist bookfair, you will find video and audio from the bookfair below. For details of the latest bookfair see www.wsm.ie/bookfair
DABF 2014 as at Liberty Hall Saturday 12th of April
Between Bookfairs we recommend you join the Dublin Radical Events from the WSM group so you get invitations as soon as plans are finalised
Before and during the bookfair we encouraged people to tweet to #DABF
The weekend started Friday night with a film screening before the main event in Liberty Hall on Saturday, an afters party / fundraiser in The Flowing Tide Saturday night and then rolling though to Sunday afternoon for a Cycling tour around Dublin.
Friday 11th in Seomra Spraoi at 7.30 - 'Broken Song' screening
About the film - "GI, Costello and Willa Lee are street poets, hip-hop artists, rappers and song-writers from Dublin’s Northside. Through their words and music they have found a way of expressing themselves and inspiring others to achieve the same."
The main event of the weekend saw 20-30 organisations with stalls & information stands downstairs in Liberty Hall while upstairs and in the Flowing Tide three streams of meetings & workshops will run throughout the day.
Today (Weds) was very quiet; there was no eviction attempt. We were prepared for the worst, but no cops called around, nobody claiming to be the owner, nothing.Just to recap, we are preparing ourselves to resist eviction because previously, on Friday, two people claiming to be agents acting on behalf of a company, which they claimed own two of the houses, came to illegally board them up. When we weren't letting them do so, they called the cops. The cops decided not to do anything because they did not have the paperwork or legal authorisation to evict us[1]. However, the “owners” and the cops did say that they'd be back on Wednesday (today) with “papers”.
As is the case with most of my comrades, I did not suddenly wake up to find out that I am an anarchist. It was rather a gradual process that started with a determination to fight racism, challenge patriarchy and doubt the existence of some omnipresent old man with white beard.
I was born in 1987 to a Russian mother and a Georgian father in Siberia during the last years of the USSR and spent most of my childhood travelling back and forth between Russia and Georgia, changing different cities and schools and meeting people who were very eager to prove to me how much of a better nation Georgia is in comparison to Russia and vice versa. What affected my ideology the most was my family’s decision to move to Greece where I got to meet many interesting people and during the last years of school together with friends to start reading books on atheism, feminism and anarchy.
This post- Melbourne Anarchist bookfair conversation took place in the Melbourne Anarchist Club (MAC) which has a history stretching back to the 1890s. While visiting the premises which contains a library, meeting space and infoshop I caught up with Brendan and Ben two active members of the collective and Kieran from Anarchist Affinity which is seeking to build a similar organisation to the WSM, based on theoretical and tactical unity and collective responsibility.
Topics discussed included the history of MAC, opinions on the third Melbourne bookfair, struggles engaged in by anarchists, and the potential for building a viable anarchist movement in Australia. Other areas discussed included Australia's treatment towards refugees, it's history built on the genocide and dispossession of its indigenous people and ongoing land struggles.
Conversation with Dimitris, a Greek anarchist living in Melbourne, co-founder of Anarkismo and translator of many English anarchist publications. I began by asking Dimitri, who became active in anarchism after a background in the Greek Communist Party, the nature of austerity in Greece and resistance to it. We also discussed briefly the history of Greek anarchism, its strengths and weaknesses in contrast with anarchism in Australia.
A younger comrade explained to me how he had travelled over 600 miles to be allowed into a field in Fermanagh to destroy a fence which had been specifically erected for that purpose. It was a sacrificial offering to the black block, complete with blunted razor wire so that they would not injure themselves in the thrashing. Just when you thought this scene could not get any more surreal, hear this. Beyond this field lay another barrier, and inside that fence there was a man from the security forces stating that if anyone attempted to get into this field there would be serious consequences. As per normal in these situations, the violence was always going to come from those in uniform. The stewards from the Socialist Party approached the black block and explained to them that the busses were leaving.
On a private island in the lake, far away from this absurd scene, the leaders of the G8 were meeting undisturbed.