In Ireland Majority refuse to choose flavour of austerity in referendum

With votes still being counted it has become clear that the largest block of potential voters refused to take part in the fiscal compact referendum, rejecting the arguments that they could either vote for ‘stability’ or against ‘austerity’. Quite possibly more people chose to boycott the referendum then the combined Yes and No voters. On top of this some 17% of the population who live and pay tax in Ireland were excluded from voting at all in the referendum. This means as many as 2/3 of the adult population did not vote in the referendum. [Italian translation of this article]

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Review: The London Years by Rudolf Rocker

While much attention will be directed towards London for the expensive farce which is the Olympics, 2012 should be marked for far more important events – the 100th anniversary of the two great strikes by tailors and dock workers. At the centre of the epic struggle of the tailors was Rudolf Rocker whose excellent autobiography The London Years covers these events and much more.

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Council tries to silence protest by threatening Rossport Solidarity Camp with eviction

In a new twist to the decade long struggle against Shell Rossport Solidarity Camp has revealed that Mayo County Council (MCC) has issued an eviction notice to the landowner of the field where the Rossport Solidarity Camp is located. Mayo farmer Gerry Burke has been threatened with fines of over €12,000 and two years in prison. Despite these theats the annual June Bank Holiday solidarity gathering will go ahead in a couple of weeks.

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Anarchist Studies: Syndicalism, Anarchism and Marxism

This is the published version of a reply to an article by Marxist Ralph Darlington in Anarchist Studies (vol. 17, no. 2). Darlington’s original article appeared in Volume 17, Number 1 of Anarchist Studies and discusses the anarchist origins of syndicalism and refutes attempts to include Marxism as one of its influences. It discusses Bakunin’s syndicalist ideas and shows how Marx and Engels explicitly rejected them. Ralph Darlington declined to reply

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Awakening from the nightmare that is history (fiction)

"Hey, what the hell are you doing awake?"

He was startled. His slow mind was no more expecting to see me awake than to see a temple statue from last month’s battlefield come to life. Perhaps he thought I had emerged from the empty bottle of scotch that lay on the floor at his feet.

I shot him cleanly through the head.

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Black Flag: Syndicalism, Marxist Myth and Anarchist Reality

This is a very edited version of the review article Syndicalism, Marxist Myth and Anarchist Reality and will appear in the new issue of Black Flag (235) out May 2012. This issue also has as its revolutionary reprint Kropotkin’s 1890 article The Use of the Strike and this is included at the end of this review.
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Anger flares in Galway at Labour Party after protesters attacked with pepper spray

Saturdays Household tax demonstration in Galway at the Labour Party conference saw angry scenes after Garda attempted to keep the protesters out of sight and sound from the conference venue. Students who were being kept off their own campus were particularly annoyed and led a push against the Garda barriers during which several of them were attacked with pepper spray. They did however succeed in removing the barriers with the result that around 1,000 of the 4,000 or so Household tax demonstrators were able to march to the door of the conference center to protest in full sight of the Labour party delegates inside.

A number of WSM members were present at the protest, either with their various local Household tax delegations or with FEE, the student group. One of them was among the people pepper sprayed. We asked them to give us their accounts of what happened on the day.

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Kicking off the 2011 Revolts in the age of the Networked Individual

To what extent do the revolutions and revolts of 2011 reflect a new world born from the shell of the old? Were these revolts of the internet generation — networked individuals? Are people not only using new technology but becoming transformed by it? For anarchists, what lessons can we learn and to what extent must we transform our organisational methods and structures?

 

 

Because of the length of this review
its been made available as a 15 page
PDF file to download and read off line.

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