Over the last few days the mainstream media in Ireland has finally woken up to the way money from far right US evangelicals is being used to buy the No vote in the referendum campaign. Here we show you how to see how you are being targeted and discuss what this means for the referendum and any conception of democracy not based on the ‘one dollar, one vote’ favoured by the elite.
Anarchism is generally not associated with economics. There is no “Anarchist” school of economics as there are “Marxist,” “Keynesian” and so on ones. This does not mean there are no anarchist texts on economics.
Over the course of the referendum I wrote several long pieces analysing opinion polls as they appeared in the newspapers to glean useful information about how the campaign for a Yes vote was doing, where we were stong, what weakenesses existed and what tactics this information suggested. I’ve gathered all these pieces together below in reverse order, the first has a lot of details on methodology and context that is not repeated in the later pieces.
The polls appear to have been very accurate in particular those carried out by Red C and also Behaviours and Attitude. Both companies showed likely results very close to the final outcome (66.4% Yes) if you presume the Yes campaign won most of the Don’t Knows over the 3 months between the start of serious campaigning around March 8th and the referendum in June.
This is a collection of four pieces we wrote during the Turkish invasion of Afrin and the two month defence of the tiny canton against NATOs second biggest army. A desperate struggle in which almost 900 SDF fighters were killed by Turkish airpower and military trying to defend the Rojava revolution. These reports were originally published on our Facebook page and are presented here as published.
We’ve seen a number of Irish journalists wondering if Cambridge Analytica style tactics could be part of repeal referendum. In fact they already are and have been for over a year – we are going to demonstrate this in what follows.
This book is a collection of new translations of articles by Victor Serge (1890-1947). Born of Russian anti-Tsarist exiles in Belgium, Serge is of note for his odyssey from anarchism to Bolshevism, then from Trotskyism to some kind of libertarian Marxism.
Saturday March 10th saw an anti-choice march pass through Dublin, part of their campaign to try to maintain the status quo where pregnant people and doctors can be jailed for 14 years for taking abortion pills in this country while others are denied control of their own maternity care. Polls show that few people support this position and its ‘let women die’ implications so the anti-choice campaign is trying to create the fiction of mass support in the hope that people will be more inclined to vote No.
Aware of this, WSM decided to put together a team to go out and document the march for ourselves including physically counting everyone who marched and using other techniques that give a good estimate of the numbers marching. Below we will bring you through the results of each of these counts and estimates but the headline item is that when the organisers claimed 100k had marched this was a blatant lie that we will show is even physically impossible. We counted 8930 marchers. All of the other methods we used also limited the maximum size of the march to less than 15,000.
A large anti-choice march will pass through Dublin today and the organisers will attempt to massively exagerate the number taking part as part of their campaign to keep the hated anti-women 8th amendment. WSM will be there providing a count of the real numbers of people marching and we would strongly encourage our supporters to retweet and share the results as well as challenging any false exaggerated reporting of the numbers you may see. Along with the rest of the pro-choice movement we are not mounting a counter-protest this year, we will simply be there to observe and to count. From 14.00 track @wsmireland on twitter and keep an eye on our Facebook pages, in particular Solidarity Times which will carry a livestream from around 2.15.
Graphic – how many people can be crammed in at rock concert density on Merrion square.
It is with great sadness that I write this for one of my favourite writers, Ursula Le Guin, had died. The New York Times called her “America’s greatest living science fiction writers” in 2016 but that does not really do her work justice: she was one of the world’s greatest writers. It is just that she worked mostly in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre. And like a few others – Michael Moorcock and Alan Moore spring to mind – also contributed to popularising anarchism outside political circles. Her SF novel The Dispossessed (1974) is still by far the best account of an anarchist society, warts and all!