I spent yesterday morning and the early part of the afternnon removing 6 years accumulation of grease from the kitchen wallks. But in the late afternoon I escaped amd got to the Bloom conference in the Teachers Club.
I spent yesterday morning and the early part of the afternnon removing 6 years accumulation of grease from the kitchen wallks. But in the late afternoon I escaped amd got to the Bloom conference in the Teachers Club.
‘Bloom’s First Activist Forum: Movement Building for Global Justice’ was an event put together by Comhlamh (an organization for returned development workers), Africa Centre, Debt and Development Coalition and Latin America Solidarity Centre. I’m not familiar with the thinking behind it apart from the obvious attempt to build links between those working in these areas and other activists. I arrived just after the start of a session on Palestine given by Eyad Burnat "a Palestinian grassroots activist from the West Bank village of Bil’in". Bil’in will be familiar to readers who have been following the activity reports of Anarchists against the Wall that are posted on a weekly basis to Anarkismo.net by Ilan Shalif. 
I recorded the following session ‘Grassroots Mobilisation in Ireland: Opportunities and Challenges’ session at which Gregor Kerr of the WSM was speaking http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/nov2008/bloomnov08.mp3 As you’ll hear from the audio recording its not really at all clear how much common ground there is a cross the four speakers. I think one of the problems of this sort of activist ‘movement building’ is a reluctance to deal with the fact that not all sets of strategies or tactics are compatible with each other. I think its increasingly clear we do need at least a broad collective sense of what we are fighting for and not just a list of what we are against. Unfortunately I had to miss the last session and I’m sure much discussion at the party afterwards. It will be interesting to see where this particular initiative goes. Next weekend I’m probably going to get to a somewhat more focused but similar project, the Grassroots Gathering in Cork, see http://www.wsm.ie/story/4672 And now a brief blog note. I’m a bad blogger but I promise to change. A whole lot has happened which I either haven’t blogged or only sketched. So I’ve decided its OK for me to go back and fill in the gaps either by posting entire new backdated blogs or by editing those that are already there as I have time. I’ve never managed to keep a diary so I reckon filling stuff out in this way will help me remember stuff in years to come.