The trial of the Colombia 3 has produced a frenzy of speculation in the Irish media about whether they are guilty or not, and how this might effect the ‘peace process’. What is all too lacking, however, is any background to Colombia itself. This is not too surprising. Andrew looks at the situation there and argues that it is the Colombian state that should be in the dock.
Writer: Andrew Flood
Articles by Andrew N Flood
Part of a debate on the Russian revolution from 1994. The revolution was one of the most important events of the 20th century until the 1990’s the most important debate on the left was whether or not it had failed. Now with the collapse of the USSR a far more important debate is uncovered, why did it fail.
We have been insisting on the need for the far left to re-appraise the tradition of the Russian revolution and in particular the role the Bolsheviks played in destroying that revolution. One of the most detailed responses to the anarchists critique of Bolshevism was published in the winter issue of International Socialism the journal of the Socialist Workers Party (the largest Leninist group in England).
This Open Letter was written for indymedia.ie in answer to an open letter from one of the main leninist parties in Ireland that had been published in their newspaper. I’d recently had some bad experiences of their methodology in other struggles which inspired me to write this reply to explain why such a letter was not going to get a positive response. Later in that year and across the following two we were going to have a lot of problems with this party in the anti-war movment and then the European Union summit protests of 2004.
In 1998 building workers struggled against the replacement of directly employed workers with contractors through ‘Building Workers against the Black Economy’ an extra union group that was in reality quite close to the unions and set up to avoid the Industrial Relations Act being used against the unions. In the course of the struggle David McMahon and William Rodgers were jailed, this text is an Anarchist News produced by WSM around the protests at this jailing.
The An Post (post office) dispute of June 1992 should be seen in the context of a fight against casualisation by a well organised workforce. The origins of the dispute go back to March 1990 when the Communication Workers Union (CWU) National Executive agreed with An Post’s plan to introduce to casual workers. An emergency motion at the CWU conference in May however instructed the Executive to oppose the introduction of casuals.
Categories
One law for the rich
At the end of October (2006), Denis Vranich, a millionaire night club owner and property speculator was convicted of a sexual assault on a 22 year old his employee working at his club. The Hamilton Spectator reported that "Vranich grabbed the woman, pulled down her bodice, groped her breasts and penetrated her with his finger", in her Victim Impact Statement the employee reported "The thought of him makes me absolutely nauseous and brings on panic attacks".
As anarchists we hope to help build communication between people engaged in struggle and inform a growing proportion of the real facts of such struggles. The other related aspect of an anarchist newspaper will be articles that sketch out what anarchism aims to achieve and what the history and current reality of that struggle
Normally the settlement of claims to property are something the court system takes very seriously. The very foundation of capitalism after all is that some person can claim ownership of a piece of land, and through that ownership charge others rent to use it.
This article looks at how direct action had forced one military airline out of Shannon in the context of how dependent modern wars are on long supply chains. This is used to argue that similar actions across Europe and the US could prevent the war from taking place. "In this war our rulers do not need us to fight as soldiers, they would like but do not require our support for the war. They do however need us to remain passive, for if we turn our disgust at this war into action against it then their war machine will grind to a halt."