The following was sent to those who supported the Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) strike, under the banner of Workers of the World Unite: http://www.afed.org.uk/pdfs/lindsey_support_reply_letter.pdf To…
SUMMER OF RAGE Iran, refinery walkouts, immigration prison struggles, Greece, the European elections, What is Anarchism? part 3, and more.
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Thousands of workers across Britain have shown solidarity with construction workers sacked at the Lindsey Oil Refinery (owned by Total – the petroleum and energy supplier) expansion project by taking wildcat, or spontaneous ‘unofficial’, strike action against their bosses. Some may remember the Lindsey Refinery workers from the series of wildcats that took place earlier this year, wildcats which the mainstream media misleadingly portrayed as racist and nationalist due to slogans used by a minority of the workers, despite the fact that foreign workers had come out on strike with their fellow workers, and demanded to help unionise and increase the working conditions of these foreign labourers.
* From Madrid the anarchist group Star, linked to the Iberian Federation of Anarchists Youths (Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Anarquistas-FIJA-), has raised questions whose answers will let us know today and in detail what is doing and saying the known Venezuelan anarchist spokesman.
Since the Iranian election on June 12th hundreds of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets to protest the results of the election, widely believed to have been rigged to ensure victory for the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And there is good reason to believe that the hard-line and reactionary President was not the victor – not only were there reports of missing ballots and coerced voting on behalf of the Ahmadinejad campaign but Iran also has a strong history of rigged elections. It’s all part and parcel of the single-Party dictatorship in Iran: any show of democracy is a façade.
So, how is it that the recent European elections returned two BNP candidates to “represent” the people of Yorkshire and the North-West? The most obvious explanation is quite simply that no-one wanted to vote for the mainstream parties, and it’s hard to blame them – the efforts of the most dedicated BNP activists pale in comparison to the antics of corrupt MPs like Douglas Hogg or Hazel Blears when it comes to discrediting the BNP’s rivals. As anarchists, we certainly don’t see the widespread “apathy” (contempt would be a better way of putting it) towards the big three parties as a bad thing – a turnout of around 34% means that about 66% of the electorate have seen through the hollow promises of politicians and could potentially be won over to genuinely effective methods of grassroots organising.1 But first we need a real alternative to put forward – otherwise, as we’ve seen, it’s all too easy for disillusioned voters to be persuaded by the “anti-establishment” image of the BNP.
NEW pamphlet from Past Tense: Report and reflections on the UK Ford-Visteon dispute 2009 – a post-Fordist struggle. Also available in print, published June 2009,…
A few words are necessary in advance. The AF does not have a single perspective on fascism and the way to counter it. We view this as the kind of internal disagreement within libertarian organisations as healthy. There are differences of viewpoint on the nature of fascism, where it comes from, how it comes to power, and what kind of activity should be directed towards it. We published two of these viewpoints in parallel in issue 70 of our magazine Organise!, with one article arguing for militant, direct opposition to fascism and another arguing that fascism is a form of the capitalist state, and the way to counteract state attacks on the working class and ‘undesirable’ sections of it is to build our ability to fight back as a class. Such differences inform the practical activity groups and individual members undertake on a local level.
The first issue of a new anarchist freesheet The Cambridge Leveller has recently gone to print. It includes news and views about the Stagecoach bus…
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