Read part one here.
Understanding power
“Power flows from the barrel of a gun” said Mao, and whilst in a time of warfare and insurrection this is certainly true, for socialist organisations functioning within western democracies our understanding needs to be a little more nuanced. At its most simple, power, the ability to direct or influence the course of events, flows from several key interrelated resources: time, money, relationships and legitimacy. Time and money are often interchangeable, an individual who is wealthy or has at their command the wealth of an organisation can hire underlings who’s time can be used to their own ends.
Saturday saw the 6th Anarchist Bookfair in Dublin, once more in Liberty Hall, the HQ of the largest Irish union. It’s always a hectic time as a huge amount of work has to be done in terms of promotion and organisation, not helped this year by the removal of 70% of the posters we put up, we presume by the Garda. This has some impact on numbers, I noticed that I at least vaguely recognised a much bigger proportion of the people who attended then at last years’s bookfair and we think the numbers were down by a couple of hundred. I’ve no time to say a lot about the bookfair but here are some photos I took during the day along with the advance publicity material we produced.
Given that I wrote four articles, edited two bits of audio, shot one video and published 60 or so pictures online it seems odd to see the Garda rape tape controversy as an example of not having the time to write something up. Yet that is the reality. Outside of what was written I could probably write four times that amount on aspects of the story, the way it was covered and the way we and others dealt with it. I’ll probably never get around to it but here at least I’m linking to some of the pictures and video I shot at the protest on Friday.
30 years ago a 27 year old elected member of the British House of Parliament starved to death in a prison run by the British state in Northern Ireland. Bobby Sands was the first of ten men to die, all of them jailed members of Irish republican organizations, 7 from the IRA and 3 from the INLA. The 1981 Hunger Strike in which they were engaged was the culmination of five years of struggle in the prisons of Northern Ireland for the return of Special Category Status. The death of Sands after 66 days on hunger strike was a transformative moment in Irish history although it would take over a decade for the full reality of that transformation to play out, and in a way that would almost certainly not have been to his liking.