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What this Class & Exploitation paper does...
The left talks about class in ways that are often contradictory and confusing. This paper represented our collective use of class and how we understand exploitation. The scope of what we cover means that it necessarily makes sweeping generalisations but the goal is to sketch what our collective perspective is around these, not to be an educational resource in itself.
How We Talk About Class
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Emergency Call out for donations needed to transport 6 large size wood burners for the people freezing in Dunkirk!! If anyone has a few spare euros please donate below !! The burners cant be transported without the cash!! Please share!! Many thanks!!!
Emergency Call out for donations needed to transport 6 large size wood burners for the people freezing in Dunkirk!! If anyone has a few spare euros please donate below !! The burners cant be transported with the cash!! Please share!! Many thanks!!! https://fundrazr.com/d1Buw4?ref=ab_56L5Ec
The Workers Solidarity Movement had our Autumn national conference in Dublin on the 22nd October. What follows is a brief report on the days proceedings.
What is WSM National Conference?
National Conference is the ultimate decision-making body for WSM members. It happens every six months and takes place over a day or two. We discuss motions on collective policy, reflect on the past six months of activity and map prospects for the next period.
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There has been a lot of online speculation with those most inclined to put a silver lining on the Trump vote arguing that a lot of his working class voters were really voting against trade deals or the establishment. One measure of people voting for Trump despite what he has said and done is people who voted for him even though his treatment of women bothered them. The exit poll tells us almost half, 27 million, of Trumps 62 million voters were bothered by his treatment of... women but still voted for him. So if we were just talking of misogyny there’d be an argument to entertain that half the working class Trump voted had done a bad thing against their better instincts.
Is this also true of his racism - did a lot of the ‘white working class’ who voted for Trump did so despite his racism? Or did they vote for him because they agreed with it, as an assertion of a need to ‘Make America great Again’ by enhancing the privileges expected from white supremacy?
Latest edition of Derry Anarchists news sheet Barricade Bulletin is out now, hard copies available locally however for those in other parts of the country a PDF version is now online: http://derryanarchists.blogspot.co.uk/…/barricade-bulletin-…
Next week sees an exciting speaking tour around Ireland when author Ercan Ayboga who spoke at the Dublin anarchist bookfair will be launching “Revolution in Rojava.” Dublin WSM has been running a reading group* on this book over the last month and we highly recommend it as an account of the nuts & bolts of the Rojava revolution essential to anyone who wants to transform the world.
Cork: O’Rahilly Building (ORB 132), UCC, 12th December, 6pm
Dublin: Connolly Book (43 East Ess...ex Street, Dublin 2), 13th December, 6pm
Cavan: Bridge Street Centre, Bridge Street, 14th December, 6,30pm
Dungannon: Éalú Centre, Shamble Lane, 15th December @ 6:30pm
Belfast: Just Books (22 Berry Street, Belfast, BT1 1FJ), 19th December @ 6:30pm
Our latest audio - this time on the 10 filters that make elections ineffective for real change
Working in retail? Well unless its security Amazon is automating those jobs away from early 2017. Security will probably stick around as you can't have people walking out without actually paying in the brave new wage less economy. Well until they get those military robots up & running.
This is the reason we've been talking about the threat of automation in any economy that is not #fullanarchism where goods are free for all.
http://www.wsm.ie/c/robots-automation-urban-farming-aboliti…
Overnight Trump - who lives in a Gold palace in the sky in New a York - took to Twitter to smear the local union leader of Carrier, the company where it was claimed Trump had saved 1100 jobs. Chucks crime? To have pointed out the number of jobs saved had been exaggerated, that the company was still laying off 700 and that it was getting millions in subsidies over the next decade.
Chuck told the Washington post what happened next "Half an hour after Trump tweeted about Jones... on Wednesday, the union leader's phone began to ring and kept ringing, he said. One voice asked: What kind of car do you drive? Another said: We’re coming for you."
The vast majority of US workers refused to vote for Trump ( see http://www.wsm.ie/c/trump-white-working-class-and-left ) but the few million who ignored his racism because they believed his saving jobs rhetoric are finding out that he's also also coming for them.
Listening to Morning Ireland on regime radio on the 7th of November we were surprised to hear the word lock out used only in the context of pupils being locked out of schools. The term has been carefully avoided when it comes to the teachers locked out by their employers.
Thousands of teachers are locked out of their place of work that morning despite turning up as normal. The ASTI twitter account has sent many photos of teachers standing outside closed schools around the cou...ntry, some 60% of secondary schools are closed.
But the teachers are not striking, they turned up for work. All that has happened is that they withdrew from supervision duties. Their employer has retaliated by closing down the schools and RTE has been unquestionably repeating the PR line that this is on ‘health and safety’ grounds. It’s the withdrawal of pay designed to force teachers to work an extra unpaid hour.
At the core of the dispute is the governments ongoing program of forcing public sector workers to work additional unpaid hours. At this point almost every public sector worker is working the equivalent of 3-4 unpaid weeks a year due to increases in the length of the working week and decreases in holidays. And depending on age most will know also have to work 3 more years before retirement, retirement age having been raised from 65 to 68.
Apart from making additional workers work longer hours the main impact this has on society as a whole is to increase unemployment. If you force 10 teachers to work an extra 4 hours (unpaid) each a week then that’s an 11th teacher who is not going to get a job. Thousands of workers not retiring at 65 is thousands of college leavers not filling jobs that would have been opened by such retirements. And because the public sector is almost the last strongly unionised sector in the country anything forced on public sector workers lowers the minimum that unorganised private sector workers have to accept.
It’s all part of the ongoing pattern that has seen the richest sliver of Irish society become very much richer over the last 20 years when conditions for the rest of us stagnated and then worsened with the crisis. There has been a huge wealth grab in which almost all of us have lost out and part of that wealth gap is forcing some of us to work extra unpaid hours and there forcing others of us to remain unemployed.
It’s quite telling that the one sector the government caved in on was the Garda. As anyone who was involved in water charge protests or the earlier protests at Rossport already knows there is a reason they want to keep the Garda onside. If the rest of us get organised and stand together the thin blue line is all that stands between us and the richest 1% off speculators and landlords living off our labour.
It was reported 27th October that yet another woman has been arrested and charged for having an illegal abortion through use of pills obtained online in northern Ireland. It is believed that the woman sought medical help after taking the pills and so we can only assume that she was reported to the police by staff at the hospital.
The scapegoating of women and the scaremongering surrounding the very safe abortion pills continues however. In this report the BBC - who are obviou...sly acting as the henchman of the misogynist state - took the opportunity to spread dangerous misinformation about the so-called Abortion Pill (which in reality is two pills, namely mifepristone and misoprostol).
Among the lies aired out was the shocking statement by a Doctor at QUB’s School of Pharmacy that “a number of women will actually require a blood transfusion" after taking the pills.
In contrast to his opinion, studies conducted by international organisations such as the World Health Organisation and Gynuity have found that the use of misoprostol for abortion is very safe, especially when taken early on in the pregnancy. According to the WHO taking the pills is safer than taking aspirin or viagra.
Of all the statements heard tonight the most insulting was that Stormont’s top priority is the care of women.
Caring for women doesn’t mean arresting someone for making a decision over their body; it doesn’t mean putting them through the torment of interviews over their very personal choices and circumstances and then charging them with a potential sentence of life imprisonment.
What kind of “care” means that we export 2 women from the north everyday to receive a care that they are denied at home – despite paying for the NHS.
One woman being targeted by the state over an abortion is one too many.
Our bodies are not democracies - or even faux democracies such as Stormont - where old men get to make all of our decisions for us because we’re too irrational to hold that capacity. Our bodies are dictatorships and we’re the ones in charge.
The thing about banning abortion is that it doesn’t stop them from taking place; they just make them unsafe. Through mifepristone and misoprostol we have a way to ensure that every single person the state fails is able to have a safe abortion and what we have seen here is an attempt to endanger women’s lives even further.
The state does not care about us, and it never will.
Solidarity and sisterhood are indispensable; we must look after one and other because if we don’t no one else will.
If you need an abortion please visit www.womenhelp.org for an online consultation. If you are nervous and would like advice please get in touch with the Abortion Support Network on www.asn.org.uk. Don’t forget you can always get in touch with the lovely folks over at Need Abortion Ireland – their textline is 0894902517 (00353 894 902 517 from the North).
#TrustWomen #NotACriminal
(originalyy publihsed October 27th)
Last year the bakery Ashers was found guilty of discrimination when they refused to bake a cake that had an image of Bert and Ernie on it with the words “Support Gay Marriage”.
23rd October they lost their appeal against that verdict, with the judge ruling that the bakers were not allowed to provide a service only to people who agreed with their religious beliefs.
At the time of the original case claims were being made of religious persecution; that the McArthur family who ow...n the bakery were being persecuted against because of their religion. We can guess though that Ashers wouldn’t have a problem with baking a cake for a child's baptism or christening that was born out of wedlock; not to mention they sell pork sausage rolls in their bakeries and their uniforms are (more than likely) made from more than one material (all things the Bible forbids).
This has got very little to do with their so-called sincerely held religious beliefs and more to do with bigotry. This is a case of Ashers picking and choosing what they like from church and dressing it up as some kind of moral principal.
When a business opens their door they're open to all. Their objection for baking the cake was that they would be promoting marriage equality - but if a postperson delivers a letter from a credit card company are they promoting a credit card company or providing a service? It's quite clear they're simply providing a service and the same is true for Ashers.
While we shouldn’t spend too much time focusing on this case considering that as a community we have bigger fish to fry it is nice for once for the homophobes to be the group of people left fuming.
This coming January in Derry, activists will be holding its first evert Radical Bookfair. In a statement on their web page organisers said:
On Saturday 28th January 2017 the first ever Derry Radical Bookfair will take place in Pilots Row Community Centre, Rossville Street, Derry, BT48 6LP.
The event takes place on one of the busiest days of the political calendar in the city which is during the Bloody Sunday week of events. Each year the same venue itself hosts the annual B...loody Sunday events such as talks, films and discussions around contemporary social justice issues.
At the moment the Derry Radical Bookfair organising collective are finalising details. Click on link below for more information:
www.derryradicalbookfair.wordpress.com
If you are an independent bookseller, distributor or publisher and would like to sell and distribute books, pamphlets, publications and other merchandise then please get in touch. Likewise If you would like to have your social justice group or campaign to have a stall at this event to highlight an issue or campaign then please make contact.
The Derry Radical Bookfair will help promote and display books of local, national and international interest including social and labour history as well as themes covering radical feminism, queer liberation, anarchism, marxism, republicanism and environmentalism.
On the same day this year the venue will also play host to an International Food Fair as well as the Derry Radical Bookfair.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Email. radicalbookfair@gmail.com
Online. www.derryradicalbookfair.wordpress.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/derryradicalbookfair/
"Take Trump’s plan to build a wall along the entire Mexican border, it would be very hard to see anyone who supported such a scheme as being progressive. They clearly would be hard people to win over to a socialist view of the world. In fact 41% of those voting said they supported the wall and a massive 86% of these voters voted for Trump."
Once it became clear that Trump was going to become the president of the USA, my Facebook feed became cluttered with attempts to understand how that could possibly happen. How could a white supremacist, misogynist and utterly transparent snake oil salesman accumulate so many votes? Those on the left both inside and outside the borders of the USA struggled to understand what had happened.
A common conclusion in too many of these pieces is that the left needs to reach out, an...d listen to the concerns of, those who voted for him as a priority. In a similar fashion to how sections of the left evaluated Brexit, they see a working class anti-establishment rebellion in the Trump vote from what they term the ‘white working class’. They believe that component was won by Trump because it has been neglected by the left - often, they will assert, because the rest of the left was distracted by what they call identity politics.
This is a simple explanatory story that is particularly attractive to those sections of the left that have a nostalgic yearning for an imagined past of pure class struggle, shorn of internal concerns around oppression. But the concept of masses of otherwise progressive working class voters opting for Trump on economic grounds is a myth. The attractiveness of that myth and its promotion has more to do with the hostility of that section of the left towards the influence of intersectional feminism than anything more substantive. That hostility has caused them to seek out anecdotes and exceptional regions and present them as the typical story that defines the election just as liberal Hillary Clinton campaigners have focused in on Facebook false news stories as the cause of her defeat.
It’s this simple story that is being examined at length in this piece
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