Beginning Saturday September the 28th at noon with colorful gatherings of local comrades and supporters from afar including Turkey, U.S. and Australia. Once the march got under way between 8,000 and 10,000 class warriors chanted, sang and danced their way through Liverpool City center down to the pier head situated at the top of the river Mersey which the sacked Liverpool dockers and their forefathers before them had serviced. Anarchist groups from all over the U.K. hoisted banners high and proud into the wind, among them prominent London ACF, Leeds Anarchist Group, Tyneside Anarchist Group, Sheffield Red and Black Anarchists and the indigenous Merseyside ACF Group and Merseyside Solidarity Federation. Remnants of Class War London were also... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Since last reporting on the Job Seekers Allowance in Organize! issue 40 and the realities of signing on under the current legislation, much has happened both inside and outside the dole office.
Inside
The new computer system known as Labor Market System (LMS), is up and running in the majority of offices, but remains to be connected nation-wide. LMS not only holds personal information about all claimants, such as interview history, it is the direct link to low paid jobs. The aim being to ensure that as many claimants as possible are forced into low paid jobs and off the register. LMS cuts out the middle-man, that being the job center. It is a direct line to employers. That’s all well and good if you choose to look for a job when y... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) For generations the Provident Financial company has been providing Britain’s poorest with loans to buy vital items such as furniture. The Provident however, far from being a benevolent body is actually a vampire, extorting a huge rate of interest from those in society least able to pay it, the low-paid and unemployed.
The Provident redistributes wealth from the very poorest to the very rich. Typically banks charge interest at around 16%. The Provident, in contrast, takes a massive 164% on loans. This business is paying so well that its share price has rocketed by two thirds in the space of a year. And profits have grown by 15% to £136.5 million. It’s lending sector made an enormous £127 million profits on loans to t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Seventy years ago the Communist government led by Lenin and Trotsky introduced their New Economic Policy, a measure which started the free market in agriculture and sections of industry. Today, Gorbachev and his supporters are once again trying to establish a latter day variant: the free market is celebrated after decades of the command economy. Always anxious to base new moves on the basis of Marxist-Leninist precedence, we can expect the Kremlin to highlight the anniversary of the NEP with banquets and other celebrations.
What will not be celebrated, we can be sure, is the single event that made Lenin’s NEP so urgent: the uprising by soldiers, sailors and civilians at the Soviet naval base at Kronstadt. 1991 is also the anniversary... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Since Organize! 48 a considerable amount of troubled water has gone under the bridge in Ireland. Contrary to our expectations (see ‘Is the ‘peace process’ collapsing’ Spring 1998) the ‘Agreement’ was made, the ‘people consulted’ and the ‘Yes’ vote achieved according to schedule.
The ‘Yes’ vote was emphatic, over 71% in an 80.9% turn-out. The strength of the ‘Yes’ vote must have been a sickening blow for the ‘No’ camp of United Unionists (sic) and intransigent Republicans. The ‘Yes’ victory was no surprise however, as it had the support of the main players of Irish and British realpolitik, whose support and whose propaganda machines d... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) February and March in Armenia saw a disputed presidential election (19/2/2008) followed by eleven days of demonstrations in the capital Yerevan, broken up by tanks, police attacks and the imposition of a State of Emergency (1/3/2008).
Eight people, including a child, were killed by police and around 100 were injured including 33 police. An apparently unrelated border fire-fight on 4/3/08 in the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, disputed with neighboring state of Azerbaijan with whom Armenia is still technically at war, broke a ceasefire agreed in 1994, killing 12 Armenian conscripts.
But everything will be fine now because the great peace-maker John ‘Are you looking at me?’ Prescott is on his way to sort everything out. Prezza is... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In my critique of parecon, The Sad Conceit of Participatory Economics (NEA #8),I posed four questions for parecon. Tom Wetzel in his reply, Debating Economic Vision for a Society without Classes (NEA #9), has managed to answer none of them satisfactorily while taking a fairly ham-fisted swipe at anarcho-communist economics in return. So what are these questions?
1. Could a system of exchange relations like parecon ever prevent the reemergence of capitalist social relations?
I argued that the parecon system could not prevent people working harder or longer, earning more consumption shares, delaying consumption in order to build up “capital” and then using this capital to subvert the parecon system in their own interests. All ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) THE GOVERNMENT HAS renewed its attack on the welfare system. These attacks in the form of the introduction of Incapacity Benefit in April this year, the phasing in of the Job Seekers Allowance and a renewed “debate” on such things as pensions, “scroungers” and single parents.
These attacks are not isolated to the “Evil Tories”. There has been hardly a bleat from the Labor Party and Tony Blair supports similar attacks on the working class. Welfare reform has also been occurring in France, USA, Italy and even Sweden. So it is not just some mad idea dreamed up by a few right wingers in the Tory party; it is seen as part of the ongoing development of capitalism. The attack is not just confined to those who c... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) We have analyzed in detail the situation in ex-Yugoslavia over the last few years in previous issues of Organize! It’s time now to take a look at the “peace” engineered by the West, above all the influence of the US, the various manouevres of the different nationalist leaders, whether they be Croat, Serb or Bosnian Muslim, as well as the attitude of the left and extreme left in Britain.
The peace agreement has been imposed under great pressure from the US. Three and a half years of civil war in Bosnia ,have left at least 200,000 dead, many others maimed and mutilated and mentally scarred, mass rapes of women and girls, the devastation of many towns and villages, and millions of refugees scattered all over ex-Yugoslavia. T... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Anarchism is a set of revolutionary ideas that are, at root, very simple. Anarchists believe that we are all quite capable of looking after ourselves. No leader can know what you need better than you do. No government can represent the interests of a community better than the community itself. We believe that everyone should have the option to take part in decisions that affect them, wherever they take place. Only in this way can we have a fair and just society in which everyone has the chance to fulfill themselves. Everything in anarchist ways of thinking follows from this basic principle.
For anarchists, taking back control over our own lives is the revolution. We see two ways of working as being key to being able to do this: direct acti... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In the anarcho-primitivist film Fight Club, its central character, Tyler Durden, has a message for those who think they run society and that we exist to meet their needs:
The people you’re after are everyone you depend on. We do your laundry, cook your food and serve you dinner. We guard you while you sleep. We drive your ambulances. DO NOT FUCK WITH US!
Although the work of many hands and minds, we would particularly like to thank Dave Graham, a long-time activist influenced by autonomist-inspired readings of Marx who contributed to the early part of the pamphlet (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Wage Slavery: Making Profit for Others
‘When the highwayman holds his gun to your head, you turn your valuables over to him. You ‘consent’ alright, but you do so because you cannot help yourself, because you are compelled by his gun. Are you not compelled to work for an employer? Your need compels you, just as the highwayman’s gun.’
– Alexander Berkman, ‘What is Anarchism?’
When we go to work our activity, our labor, is used to create a service or product that our employers make money from. In return we are given a wage. The amount of money in our wage is unrelated to the usefulness of our job or the amount of money we make for the employer. Instead we get paid just e... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Preface by the Anarchist Federation
We found this text on the web whilst engaged in a debate within the AF on SHAC and the ALF. We remembered reading it shortly after it was published, sometime in the early 80s. We hope that by republishing it on our site that it will become more accessible to readers familiar with the AF’s politics. The Text we found was at the following site: Radio4All
We like this pamphlet becasue of it’s cogent arguments against terrorism and urban guerrilla strategies, whilst still recognizing that a revolution will involve force and ultimately will probably require revolutionary violence against the repressive forces of capitalism.
On the other hand we have disagreements with aspects of the author&rsq... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) An 11-mile dual carriageway of the A36 trunk road around Salisbury, costing at least £150m to build by private finance, is proposed. This will cut off and wreck the landscape setting of this medieval city, cross three our of five rivers in Britain’s best chalk stream system, carve through chalk hills in cuttings as deep as 60ft and bury one corner of one of the country’s rarest grass meadows. Yet, for all this waste and destruction, this ‘bypass’ would do nothing to reduce traffic and pollution in the city itself.
“It would be wrong to give the public the impression that the bypass will take traffic out of the city center”
— Dept. of Transport evidence to public inquiry, 2 Dec. 1993 &mda... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) At several decisive moments over the summer months the ‘peace process’ in the north of Ireland stood on the verge of total collapse — pushed to the very brink by acts of paramilitary violence, and street confrontations with the police and army, instigated by both loyalist and republican militants opposed to the terms of the Good Friday deal.
But Northern Ireland’s political landscape has been dramatically reshaped in the past few years, and violent ‘outrages’ no longer seal the fate of delicate negotiations between unionist and nationalist politicians, now agreed on the need to reform the Orange state. It was soon apparent that the same acts that threatened to destroy the ‘peace process’, had... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)