Conversations on Anarchism

As part of a series of informal sessions on anarchism, held by the Workers Solidarity Movement in Derry.

This forthcoming conversation will focus on those fairly new to anarchism and or interested in taking part in locally. It will be a chance to ask, hear and discuss basic questions on Anarchism.

As ever, there will also be an anarchist book stall and publications available.

Conversations on Anarchism takes place on Wednesday 8th July, Sandino's Cafe Bar (Upstairs), Water St. Derry @ 7.30pm

Derry Solidarity Bus: March for Equality!

To get a ticket and reserve your seat, call into Sandinos any day this week between 4:30-6pm. Someone from People Before Profit will be there to give you a bus ticket. You will need to put some money down in order to save your seat.
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Rally for Equal Marriage in Belfast on Saturday, June 13th
2:30PM

Celebrate Equal Marriage in the South and demand it now in the North!

People Before Profit is organising a bus to go from the Guildhall Square to Belfast for the rally. All Welcome!!

We'll be gathering in the Guildhall Square at 11:30AM. The rally starts in Belfast at 2:30PM.

The bus will be leaving Belfast at 5PM to be back in Derry by 6:30PM.

Seats are:
£10-employed
£5-unemployed, low-income or student
£20-solidarity

To get a ticket and reserve your seat, call into Sandinos any day this week between 4:30-6pm. Someone from People Before Profit will be there to give you a bus ticket. You will need to put some money down in order to save your seat.

Text or call 07960404159 with any questions or if you cannot make it to Sandinos.

More details here: Derry Equality Bus

Day Of International Solidarity With Anarchists Imprisoned by the Spanish State!

The last few years have seen an increasing wave of repression against Anarchists and other radicals right across the Spanish State, best characterized by the police operations Pandora and Piñata. 

Acting in response to movements, uprisings and upheavals across the country, particularly in Catalonia, the state has arrested dozens of comrades, often under the pretext of anti-terrorism. The result has been to foster a climate of fear and in-action.

While most of those held in pre-trial detention have been released, all still have pending charges. Now is our moment to show that their attempts to silence us will not work.

On June 13th is a day of international solidarity in support of all those facing charges, in relation to these police operations and others. On this day, across the Spanish State there will be widespread demonstrations to mark the beginning of an international campaign of solidarity and support. 

Anarchists across Ireland will be expressing our support and solidarity by holding several protest events. In Belfast on Saturday 13th June, we will be gathering at the Anti-Fascist monument in Writers Square at 2pm (sharp).

Please join with us in solidarity with our imprisoned anarchist comrades.

Flags and banners welcome!

Protest Facebook events page:

May Day: Remembering the past - fighting for tomorrow!

On the original May Day it was declared that from that day “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labour from and after May 1st, 1886”.

This declaration came from the anarchist-led labour movement which was organised on a bottom-up system based on the type of society that the anarchists involved aspired to.

On the 3rd of May, 1886, police opened fire on the striking workers of the McCormick Harvester Company, killing one and wounding several more. This was followed by a protest meeting at the Haymarket the next day.

What ensued at the Haymarket was nothing short of a police riot. The police opened fire after a bomb was thrown into the ranks of the policemen, there is no evidence to suggest that the bomb was thrown by a protestor and it is often suggest that an agent provocateur working for the police threw the bomb. Many innocent people were killed and wounded.

Eight anarchists stood trial for murder after the Haymarket affair although there was no evidence to suggest that they were involved or that they had used inflammatory language. Like the case of Sacco and Vanzetti which would follow some 40 years later it is quite clear that they were on trial for being anarchists.

Neebe was sentenced to 15 years in prison, Fielden's and Schwab’s sentence to death was commuted to life imprisonment. Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies were all hanged at the gallows and Lingg committed suicide as a final protest to the state’s unjust claim of authority.

The radical and revolutionary roots of May Day, including the radical trade union organising that made it possible is not to be found today in the lead up to the 1st of May.

Many anarchists in 1886 felt that the demand for an “eight hour workday” did not go far enough and among anarchists the story remains unchanged. Today we have a demand for “job creation”, “fair pay”, “proper work conditions” coming from mainstream trade unions and socialists. They could talk about these things all day long, trade unionists especially believing them to be some sort of panacea; they will talk about everything except for what work really is.

Work, including working hours, dress code/uniform, behaviour, routine, is a way of instilling a capitalist discipline on the working class. Employment and unemployment are tools of this capitalist discipline with a culture of consumerism being used to fuel society.

Unemployment and the unemployed is used as a threat constantly hanging over the heads of the workers, it is a vital component of capitalism because if you don’t do your job properly there are a bunch of people down at the job office who will do it.

Employment is a nice way of saying that you sell your labour to your boss who can turn your labour into a profit and sell you a percentage of it back in the form of a wage.

You spend your day performing tasks that oftentimes have no relevancy to your life and do not contribute to your happiness. Our lives are spent making money that we are never going to see – yet we are told that this is right, “you’ve got to pay your way”. Those who do not work are demonized and hated by the rest of society, branded leeches and sponges, not realising that their existence is a capitalist creation to keep the working class divided.

Through representations in the [political economy of the] mass media, we are made to admire and idolize the rich – those who have never “paid their way” and whose wealth is only made possible through exploitation. They are never subjected to the demonization that they deserve the same demonization that is directed to the unemployed.

Let’s name names; work is a misnomer. When we are talking about work we are talking about forced labour.

So what should work be then? Something that you enjoy and take pride in? Something whose end has a meaning – that you can see will make a good and positive impact on someone / a group of people / a community?

As we prepare for the next strike action in the north we must keep in mind that it is the, the lowly worker, the worst paid, the nobodies, who run this society and we can shut it down as easily as we run it.

The powerful and the wealthy know the power that we have and they tremble at the thought of us discovering it. We need a general strike, the sleeping giant must wake. They think that they can treat us like vermin but they forget that they are the rats.

Solidarity and direct action are our best bet and we must continue to organise on this basis.

The most fitting way to commemorate the Haymarket martyrs is to remember the dead and fight like hell for the living.

Assimilatoin = Liberation

This year it feels as if there has been a revamping of homophobia in the north which has had, unsurprisingly, significant support from the church and those in political and therefore institutional power.

We have witnessed the DUP quash the third attempt to legalise queer marriage, bigoted ‘Christian’ bakers refusing to follow through with a service they advertised because it went against their “deeply held beliefs” (not to mention all the other services they provide that do go against their beliefs). This was followed by the the DUP attempting to bring in a 'Conscience Clause' to legalize and institutionalize homophobia; to make it legal to refuse service to someone because of their sexuality. The above examples are only a few of the homophobic incidents that have taken place recently.

The resistance and the fightback from these incidents must be queer-led and supported by our straight allies. Moreover, it should be noted that incidents like the above push us into a defensive stance; as opposed to an offensive one.

In times of relative quietness you would think that homophobia would be minimal here, but that’s not the case. Society views us as “other”, “abnormal” and ultimately as a group of people less-deserving. These views are cultural norms, and if they did not exist we would not have attacks such as those from bigoted bakers, and the DUP would not dare to utter a word about any 'conscience clause'.

In our society we are fed certain narratives by the media and given ideas of what “normal” is. Normal is a family with a married mother and father, a man in a position of power, white people in a higher class than non-white people, able-bodied people, straight people etc., the list is non-exhaustive. What we have as a result, is a society that genuinely believes these things that are perceived to be normal are “right” and “just” and therefore will not tolerate any deviation from the norm.

There is a comfort (for some, perhaps even most people) in “being normal”, and what we have in mainstream queer politics is LGBTQ+ people wanting to “normalise” their own circumstances and to assimilate into this oppressive society. This is done through a movement for marriage equality, and the calling to sweep homophobic attacks under the rug and make them illegal (rather than tackling the issue of attacks – physical or other – head on)

Marriage is a reinforcement of the nuclear family. Anarcha-feminism (or queer anarcha-feminism as it is often labelled) views the nuclear family as the basis of all oppressive authoritarian systems. The message that the child learns from their father (who is generally seen as the disciplinarian), from their teacher, to their boss, is to obey and not to question.

Many rightly view marriage as a bourgeois and patriarchal tradition designed to trap women and to concentrate wealth, power and privilege through family lines and therefore through inheritance. While marriage has gotten better for the wife in the sense that the husband is less seen as her master and she his slave who can be raped by him with impunity, the fundamental character of marriage remains nonetheless unchanged. It is a tool of regulation; regulation of labour supply, maintaining a class society, and its boundaries (as most people marry within their socio-economic class).

As opposed to fundamentally changing marriage and what it stands for, gay marriage will merely reinforce it, and concentrate more wealth into the family ties of the already privileged queer couples who simply wish to be like their hetero counter-parts.

The Third World Gay Liberation Manifesto says it best however when it says that:

“We want the abolition of the institution of the bourgeois nuclear family. We believe that the bourgeois nuclear family perpetuates the false categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality by creating sex roles, sex definitions and sexual exploitation. The bourgeois nuclear family as the basic unit of capitalism creates oppressive roles of homosexuality and heterosexuality ... It is every child’s right to develop in a non-sexist, non-racist, non-possessive atmosphere which is the responsibility of all people, including gays, to create.”

While the fight for queer marriage is on, however, many activists will fight for it and not vote against it, because its absence hurts members of our community and their families. Some of us resent doing this as we feel our energy should be spent tackling the problems and injustices that our society propagates against the oppressed instead of fighting for the right to enter into an oppressive institution.

Let’s return to the case of Ashers and the problems with equality legislation. Laws are ineffective at preventing crime by jailing people and letting the root of the problem fester. In the case of Ashers specifically, the equality legislation did not make an appearance until after the damage was done, and by that point it was too late, and its existence has not caused the McArthurs (the family who own Ashers) to change their stance; they still remain unrepentant bigots.

Whether or not Ashers get away with picking and choosing who can avail of their services (which are advertised to all with no restrictions or conditions attached) and deciding which parts of the Bible they would like to adhere to we have got to stop depending on their laws to protect us. We should not want their laws – which can turn on us at a drop of a hat – to include us in their flawed code of ethics, the same code of ethics that allows for countless injustices to take place every day.

Participation by those who do not fit the criteria of straight, white, able-bodied, wealthy, male, etc, in the same old and rotten institutions that have worked against us and to our detriment, will not lead to true liberation or equality but will actually ensure further oppression and exploitation - despite any benefits for some.

However in the south we find ourselves facing a imminent referendum on marriage equality, which the hardline religious right are opposing as part of their program of maintaining multiple oppressions. A no vote in that context would be disastrous, serving only to entrench homophobia. Therefore despite the profound reservations expressed here we are campaigning for a Yes to Marrage Equality vote.

Assimilation is boring and it is not liberating. We should not be begging for crumbs at the table - we should tear the table apart, and use it for kindling while we fight for a better world; a world in which all are free, not simply those who can pay for it.

Words: Fionnghuala Nic Roibeaird