A <em>blog entry</em> is a single post to an online journal, or <em>blog</em>.
These images are from the 10,000 plus strong anti-household tax march on the Fine Gael Ard Fheis in Dublin. Fine Gael are one of the two governement parties and they are now in real trouble as a mass community campaign has succeded in getting about 50% or 1 million households to refuse to register for this new tax.
These are the notes for a talk given at the Occupy University sessions at Occupy Dame Street last October (2011).
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This blog contains a complete set of the photos of the guerilla art exhibition boards drilled onto the hoarding outside the half completed Anglo HQ on Patricks day 2012. Anglo was the property developers bank which crashed in 2008 and because the Irish government choose to bail it out left every person in the republic in debt to the tune of 26,000.
What follows are my slightly edited remarks on a discussion on the reform of the financial trading system and what the role of finance is under capitalism today where I reject the common left idea that it is simply parasitic. I look at whether we can expect the state (or EU) to intervene to ban the likes of Credit Defualt Swaps and short term selling. I end with a fragment on the useful (to capitalism) component of the current speculative bubble building around raw material prices. The notes flow from a discussion of the article ‘Confronting the Sovereign Debt Crisis: Beyond the Cycle of Austerity and Debt’.
…or maybe a human strike? Perhaps maybe just a coordinated series of actions?
Most people reading this blog will have participated in some form of political campaign. Indeed campaigns, whether to save the local library or earn workers a living wage, are the bread and butter of left wing activism. Sometimes these campaigns are won, sometimes lost. Sometimes, all too often in fact, we find ourselves having to fight the same campaign all over again. Clearly there are many factors that determine the fate of a campaign but crucially only some of those factors are within our power to alter.
Any campaign is made up of the same basic ingredients, popular participation, finance, activists etcetera. The degree to which a campaign is well funded, its ability to mobilise people and its shrewdness of tactics all have a concrete effect on its outcome. Most campaigns, whilst often run by seasoned campaigners, find themselves starting from scratch with regards to much of this. A bank account must be set up and funds raised to populate it. Activists must be trained in various skills or learn on the job how to manage the media, build demonstrations and negotiate with officials. Contacts lists must be built and websites must be created.
The short article below was one I put together for the WSM site to report on the co-ordinated Household tax protests that took place across Dublin on Feb 25th. The intention had been to have a report from each protest a WSM member was involved in but in the end only 1/3 of people did reports so the piece ended up being a lot shorter than imagined. The campaign against the tax has everyone very stretched at the moment so its not that surprizing that time wasn’t found to write up reports. In the text below the intro and Dublin 7 reports are mine, the rest is written by others. The photos are also mine, taken with a Canon S100.
Saturday February 18th was a busy day which started with a solidarity with the Greek people demonstration of the Greek embassy in Dublin, was followed by a demonstration against cuts in Lone Parent benfits, followed in turn by the Dublin Anti-Authoritarian Assembly. I might blog the last when I have a moment but for now here are slide shows from the Greek and Lone parent demonstrations.
“As Americans read about the flood of private money that is going into the current presidential campaign, most can’t help but shake their heads in disgust about how our democracy functions.
I’ve been an anarchist for 25 years this year. A quarter of a century. Wow. I’m not sure the exact date, but in 1987 I joined the Anarchist Communist Federation (now the Anarchist Federation) in the summer of 1987. The winter of 1986-7 saw me reading anarchist books in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow as a teenager and coming to the conclusion that the ideas in my head had a name – Anarchism.