Workers Solidarity Movement

The Workers Solidarity Movement recently held its Spring 2006 conference in Dublin. The conference was comparatively low key with debates on a number of details of position papers in comparison to recent conferences that spent much of the time on major redrafts of position papers. Around two thirds of the membership attended.

Conference opens with questioning the reports given by various office holders, editorial committees etc. A summary of these reports follows - quite a lot of details and indeed areas involving relationships with other groups have been removed, as these were not written for public consumption.

Around thirty people attended an Anarchist meeting, in Cork, on war and the ongoing use of Shannon Airport for US military purposes.

The Workers Solidarity Movement has been running a national speaking tour since the start of the year.

The 3rd conference of the Indepedent Workers Union took place in Dublin Saturday April 9. The Workers Solidarity Movement extended our solidarity and ongoing support for the work of the IWU.

The first Dublin anarchist bookfair is being held by the WSM in St Nicholas of Myra Hall in the heart of the Liberties, just off Francis Street on March 3rd and 4th. We interviewed Dermot, one of the organisers of the bookfair.

The first Dublin anarchist bookfair was held in the Nicholas Myra community hall in the Liberties.  Much of the information below was retrieved from the blogspot used to promote that bookfair.

The last year or so has seen a hectic period for activists in Ireland. From the May 6th Gardai attack on Reclaim the Streets in Dublin, through the anti-war campaigns, people have been coming into conflict with the state. In Dublin, we are now in the middle of a struggle with local anti-bin tax groups across the city taking action to defeat the councils refusal to collect rubbish.

Anarchism is a very simple idea -basically society should be organised in a non-hierarchical way, it should not be divided into order-givers and order-takers. We don't need bosses, politicians, bishops or anybody else to tell us how to live our lives. Anarchists look to a society which will be based on the idea of "from each according to ability, to each according to need".

If you were anywhere in Ireland in the last week of February you can't have missed the hype ahead of the March 1st direct action called at Shannon by the Grassroots Network Against the War (GNAW). Suddenly every politician, reporter and even bishop in the country was joining the queue to denounce the planned 'violent' protest. The morning before the protest irony died on its feet when Sinn Fein announce it was pulling out of the unrelated Irish Anti War Movement protest at the airport for fear of violence.

'Liberty without socialism is poverty and injustice. Socialism without liberty is tyranny and brutality'
(Bakunin)
Bakunin had a vision of an alternative way to run society and it is a vision that we share today. I want the replacement of the current economic system, a system based on profit and hierarchy, with a system based on need and freedom. I don't believe the current system can be reformed to make it more human. In different ways, and on various levels, the political work I do is aimed at creating the possibility of revolution. Revolutionary change is not as unusual as is often thought; in 1974 we had the Portuguese revolution, in 1979 Iranian Revolution, in 1979 Nicaragua, in the eighties we saw the collapse of the Soviet Union.