Anarkismo Network

The long project of the Zionist settler colonialist transfer of Palestinians accelerate in war times but continue between wars too. Sometimes faster, some time slower. Some time it is focused on one area some times on another... But it never stop. The struggle against it is not even but the Palestinian resistance to transfer: Tsumud - persistence continue all the time. Last 11 years, and more so following the suppression of the second (the armed) Intifada, the third (non armed) Intifada is collecting momentum. It started mainly around the joint struggle with Israelis of the anarchists against the wall initiative which supplied a relative immunity from a prompt bloody suppression. It is now too wide spread for a focal bloody suppression to stop it. Though it is spreading widely last year or so, the joint struggle with Israelis is still a significant part in it. [http://www.anarkismo.net/article/25384]

One of the final acts of the last Fianna Fail government was to award licences to a number of companies to explore for commercial gas in the Northwest Carboniferous Basin (more commonly known as the Lough Allen basin). The Lough Allen Basin is a huge area that covers parts of counties Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh, Leitrim, Mayo, Monaghan, Roscommon, Sligo and Tyrone. It is an area of 8000 square kilometres in total.

read more

The Movement for Justice in El Barrio was founded by immigrants and low-income people of color of East Harlem to fight for dignity and against neoliberal displacement.

Movement operates on a commitment to self-determination, autonomy, and participatory democracy.

Driven by multi-national corporations and profit-seeking landlords,and facilitated by city officials, gentrification has swept New York City, causing the wholesale displacement of low-income people of color and immigrants from their communities. East Harlem is experiencing a wave of harassment, abuse, and intimidation as greedy landlords attempt to evict the community from their homes in order to raise rents and increase profits. With over 750 members, Movement has gone door-to-door, building-to-building, and block-to-block to organize with their fellow neighbors to build a neighborhood-wide movement for dignity and justice.

read more

Below I reproduce excerpts from a recent report at Truthout by Joshua Stephens on the constructive efforts by Greek anarchists to create alternatives to capitalism and the nation-state. The approaches they have been developing since the uprising in 2008 are similar to those proposed by Alexander Berkman based on his experiences during the Russian Revolution. Directly democratic popular assemblies formed the basis of the anarchist collectives during the Spanish Revolution, and were later championed by Murray Bookchin. Stephens refers to Colin Ward, whose ground breaking article on anarchism as a theory of organization is included in Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Anarchist alternatives to capitalism and hierarchical organization are well documented in all three volumes of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, now on sale at AK Press.

The Dublin anarchist bookfair returns to Liberty Hall on the 6th of April for our 8th annual edition, and the theme 1913-2013 - Rebuilding a Movement from Below.  There will be a social in Seomra Spraoi on the 5th and a radical walking tour around Dublin on the 7th.

That theme couldn’t be more appropriate.  Following on from the general spin being flahed about the media on the ‘good’ news that we’ve just accepted the debts of the casino speculating capitalist banks and firmly saddled them onto the Irish people for generations, we need to build a movement to put an end to such cosy practices where they take the profits, but we take the losses.

 

PDF of the Programme for the 2013 bookfair

Help with promotion by signing up for the Bookfair event on Facebook

 

read more

In Honduras, Reagan-era atrocities are back as the Obama administration funds a state implicated in murdering opponents.

The weekly joint actions continue at Bil'in, Al Masara, Nabi Saleh, Ni'ilin,Qaddum, Sabatia, South Hebron Hills, Beit Ommar, Sheikh Jarakh, Jaffa continue in addition to the less persistent locations of joint struggle and the expanding popular struggles Israeli activist or internationals are not involved. Spring time bring more and more internationals to the joint struggle its focus on the separation fence shift to other aspects of the occupation. [http://www.anarkismo.net/article/25279]

An analysis of the voting results on the first Croke Park Agreement shows that the votes of a few hundred union members in a couple of unions could decide the fate of the ‘Croke Park Extension’ deal currently being voted on by union members. Because of the bizarre - and rather anti-democratic - system of voting at the public services committee of the ICTU, a small margin in favour or against the deal in any particular union swings all the votes of that union either for or against. 

read more

Yes No Don't know

“On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.”

— Capital, Karl Marx.

The joint struggle continue persistently with growing popular Palestinian struggle as a new environment. The Obama visit was focused on with another tent camp as a repetition of the Bab El-Shams action. Protesting Obama visit was focused on in other actions. The regular Bil'in, Ni'ilin, Nabi Saleh, Qaddum, Maasara, South West and Southern Hebron Hills, and Sheikh Jarah, there were the Hebron action, the Jaffa vigil in solidarity with the hunger strikers Palestinian administrative prisoners, and a demo in Tel Aviv. As usual, activities of solidarity with and support for Palestinian and international detainees/prisoners of the joint struggles continued.

South Africa is an extremely unequal society. The post-apartheid dispensation has seen the situation of the majority poor black working class worsening. On the other side of the coin, a few elites have ‘made it’ in capitalism and through the state, often through the elitist forms of ‘Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment and corruption. Inequality in South Africa is easily illustrated when one observes the massive disparities in development, service delivery and wealth between townships and rural areas on the one hand, and suburban areas on the other. Should massive disparities in service delivery between wealthy and poor neighbourhoods be put down to corruption, mismanagement, administrative incapacity and a lack of consultation? Or is there something in how the state is structured and the way in which it rules which means that it can never give the majority of people what they need?

Key points from the conversation between Radio 98FM (Greek alternative radio) and Syspirosi Atakton (Anarchist group in Cyprus). [http://www.anarkismo.net/article/25271]

A video looking back at an Occupy Rochester and Occupy Together protest focusing on the private prison industry.

The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has prompted the international left to acknowledge two key features about him and Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution. The first is Chávez's commitment to fighting for the poor and oppressed. Plenty of statistics demonstrate this. Literally millions have been lifted out of poverty and given new opportunities to improve their lives. Examples from daily life abound. I remember speaking to an upper class anti-Chavista once who was complaining about how, since Chávez came to power, it had become difficult to find maids. Many of the poor women she used to hire, she explained, had enrolled in a free education program provided by the government, one of the highly successful ‘missions.’ Another time, an empanada maker who lived with his son in the same 10-foot by six-foot stand he cooked out of told me how, since Chávez arrived, his community became emboldened to organize themselves into a cooperative with the mission of fighting the hotel and restaurant chains in the area, and create a community controlled tourist zone.

The development of modern society and what has happened to the working-class movement over the last 100 years (and in particular since 1917) have compelled us to make a radical revision of the ideas on which that movement has been based.
Forty years have elapsed since the proletarian revolution seized power in Russia. From that revolution it is not socialism that ultimately emerged but a new and monstrous form of exploiting society and totalitarian oppression that differed from the worst forms of capitalism only in that the bureaucracy replaced the private owners of capital and “the plan” took the place of the “free market.” Ten years ago, only a few people like us defended these ideas. Since then, the Hungarian workers have brought them to the world’s attention.
Among the raw materials for such a revision are the vast experience of the Russian Revolution and of its degeneration, the Hungarian workers’ councils, their actions, and their program. But these are far from being the only elements useful for making such a revision. A look at modern capitalism and at the type of conflict it breeds shows that throughout the world working people are faced with the same fundamental problems, often posed in surprisingly similar terms. These problems call everywhere for the same response. This answer is socialism, a social system that is the very opposite of the bureaucratic capitalism now installed in Russia, China, and elsewhere.
The experience of bureaucratic capitalism allows us clearly to perceive what socialism is not and cannot be. A close look both at past proletarian uprisings and at the everyday life and struggles of the proletariat enables us to say what socialism could and should be. Basing ourselves on a century of experience we can and must now define the positive content of socialism in a much fuller and more accurate way than was possible for previous revolutionaries. In today’s vast ideological morass, people who call themselves socialists may be heard to say that they “are no longer quite sure what the word means.” We hope to show that the very opposite is the case. Today, for the first time, one can begin to spell out in concrete and specific terms what socialism really could be like.

Cornelius Castoriadis, aka Paul Cardan, was the most prominent member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group in France in the late 1940s-1960s, which advocated workers’ self-management in workplaces and society as opposed to capitalism in its private and state-run forms. Here we present Maurice Brinton’s translation of Castoriadis’ classic On the content of socialism. The work is subtitled ‘From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Idea of the Proletariat’s Autonomy’

An interview for theRealnews about Cyprus crisis with proffesor of economics in University of London

I SALUTE THE FREEDOM NEWROZ OF THE OPPRESSED

It is quite incredible that the majority of the union leadership had the nerve to stay in the Croke Park talks and return to us, the members, asking us to vote for such a terrible deal.  All of the unions should have had a ballot before entering into negotiations and we should have voted to refuse to enter discussions at all as long as a billion euro of cuts was a precondition of talks.  Once we entered on that basis, nothing good could come out of talks.  And after making the mistake of entering on that condition, all the unions should have had a change of heart and walked out once the reality of what would have to be accepted became clear.

We have to ask ourselves how we have found ourselves in unions where the leadership was allowed take such an approach.  And we have to work out how we create unions that we control and which will help us organise together to defend our common interests.

read more