a letter from ireland

(picture by michael gallagher myspace.com/libertypix)
This weekend saw 120,000 workers march through the streets of Dublin calling for the withdrawal of the Fianna Fail governments 'pension levy'. The levy means that a public sector worker who earns 35,000 euro a year will lose 50 euro a week from their pay packet, so a couple who both work in the public sector are losing 400 euro a month, which is the cost of a mortgage and is an amount that most just cannot afford to pay.
This levy comes with a string of other vicious cuts against both private and public workers, the young, old and the unemployed. The right wing parties spouting pathetic justifications to, unsuccessfully, convince the irish working class to pay for the crisis. They have cut aid to children from Ireland's 'Traveller' community to assist them in school, they have cut aid to all children once they hit 5 years of age, creches, community drugs schemes, teachers and they want to slash our bus routes.
But people have reacted and reacted with anger. When the cuts were first announced there was a general meeting of the union IMPACT, which is a public services union, at which the leadership of the union called for an 'email campaign' and valentines day protests outside ministers constituency offices. There was fury from the members, the meeting erupted into calls for ballots for immediate strike action. The evening news on ireland's state TV reported the union leaders resolutions but ignored the call for strike action, there is a real fear in the Irish ruling class of a fight back from any sector inspiring others, but they cant hold back the anger that's out there no matter how hard they try.
'Teachers United' a grassroots movement of rank and file teachers picketed Anglo Irish Bank, a bank which has just been nationalised and its estimated that this manouvere has cost each household here 20,000 euro, the director of the bank, parasite Sean Fitzpatrick, it was revealed, gave himself loans of 80 million. Then it emerged that Anglo Irish had loaned 10 people secretly 400 million euro to buy shares in the bank just before nationalisation, if the shares went up they made huge profits, if they went down well the irish taxpayer was paying for the loan anyway.
The teachers protest got a lot of media attention because people are well aware of the connections between the shady dealings of the banks and the right wingers in the parliament buildings.
A meeting of rank and file and various sympathetic officers of all the unions was called in Dublin at which people called for an 'iceland style situation' and general strike action across all sectors to reverse the cuts and to bring down the government. Various trade union members spoke of the fear and anger they encountered amongst fellow workers and how, despite the sabotage of the union leadership, they had managed, in some cases, to call huge meetings of workers (up to 500 in a lot of cases!) where the call for strike action and ballots to all members for such action was unananimously endorsed. The meeting was adressed by a worker from the Waterford Crystal factory which is still in occupation- he pointed out that we must resist the media onslaught which has been savagely attempting to drive a wedge between the private and the public sector workers. He recieved a standing ovation from every single person there. Everyone left the meeting determined to go back to there own unions and build for the national stoppage.
Last wednesday the CPSU, the civil service union, had a walkout attended by thousands of members, at which we did a stall calling for further action and across all sectors, workers were coming up to the table saying 'we completely agree with you but why sign a petition? we need strike action NOW!'.
The busdrivers have been protesting constantly outside both the Department of Transport and out side the headquarters of the Green Party (who are in coalition with the Right, and despite claims to want more public transport have gone along with every cut). The drivers strike this week beginning on Friday and socialists and the People Before Profit movement organised public meetings across the city to defend our bus routes. At the meetings people from the working class communities affected spoke passionately in favour of the bus workers actions. Everywhere you look right now the phrase 'the workers united will never be defeated' is becoming a reality.

On saturday last, the 21st of February, 120,000 workers marched through Dublin city centre to the seat of Government to show their opposition to, not only these cuts, but the Fianna Fail government and their friends in the banks. People began to gather from early in the morning at the top of Dublin's O'Connell street, we were overwhelmed by the response to our stall calling for united strike action, people cheered and shook our hands, we sold hundreds and hundreds of socialist newspapers. The banners making thier way up the street showed the diversity of the opposition to this government but also the unity amongst the workers both public and private.
The Irish Travellers Rights association, Nurses, Firemen,Civil Servants, The Waterford Crystal workers (who were applauded all the way up the street by every single person standing on either side), Taxi drivers,Shell to Sea campaign,AntiWar activists, The Socialists, Students, Anarchists, Sinn Fein, Teachers, Doctors, Binmen and even the Soldiers and some sections of the police. The mood in irish society right now is so strongly turned against the government that the soldiers union have felt the strength to come out and state that not one of their members will break any strike. This has sent the government and the Army Officers into a panic, a high ranking officer this week in the papers was stated as saying that he would force the obedience of the lower ranks. Not sure exactly how they plan to force the men to break a strike, but its a sign of how much this government is losing control.

With the CPSU walking out of work this Thursday and the Buses out on Friday it looks like Fianna Fail are going to fail in their attempt to make the working class of Ireland pay for their criminal friends in the banks and the anarchy of the system they benefit from.
With a National One Day strike coming in the near future it seems the Irish Gulliver has woken on the beach and is starting to realise that he's tied down by nothing but tiny Lilliputians.

The workers are united. And although this movement will have it's peaks and valleys nothing can ever be the same again. Come visit Ireland...we're about to bring down a government!

Revolution in the 21st Century...

R is for Revolution is the 21st century
(transcript of talk i gave)

When socialists talk about the possibility of revolution happening in the 21st century it’s not about a mere desire for revolution on our part, an ’ideal’ that popped into someone’s ’enlightened’ head which then inspires them to go off and one by one recruit people to change the world, or about trying to impose some such view that revolution will occur, its about deducing from reality itself those trends that inevitably push towards revolutionary situations whether we choose them or not.

In other words, to ask what is the nature of the capitalist economy? What kind of contradictions does it engender, does it create? And what kinds of actions does an anarchic economy of this sort constantly push people towards whatever they subjectively believe?
The Capitalist system as a whole is now in the midst of a severe crisis. In 2009 banks worldwide collapsed, the Irish government nationalised Anglo Irish Bank lumbering every household in the country with an extra 20,000 euro in debt.They raided the National Pensions Reserve Fund’s 17 or so Billion and handed half over to the banks.
The crash had been overdue for a long time, with rates of profit over the last two decades never recovering to their levels during the postwar ’golden age’ of capitalism which ended in the mid 70’s. This low rate of profit leading inevitably to Capitalists chasing profitable ventures, from dot com bubbles to the over inflated housing market. Neoliberalism since the mid to late 70’s has been a 30 year assault on the conditions of the international working class with the share of societies product going to profits constantly increasing at the expense of wages. Workers produce far more yet, in relation to their product, see returned far less.
So constant cuts were declared from the seat of every government while, at the same time political generalisation has been taking place on a massive scale in the last few years, in response, not only to the economic crisis, but has been developing since the mass mobilisations against the War on Iraq in 2003, and now, the protests against the slaughter in Gaza and the threat of economic collapse.

The threat of war looms constantly on the international horizon as capitalist states are ever more tempted to open up markets or solve economic problems militarily. We see U.S. ships parked in the Black Sea after the Georgian conflict pushing close to Russia and we see the Russian navy placing ships off the coast of Venezuela. The US army is positioned right across the Middle East. As recessions deepen war becomes an attractive way to grab another country’s resources and to stifle opposition to policy at home.
How will people respond? We can make the answer more concrete by lookin at how they have responded time and time again in periods of crisis in the past.


Worker’s democracy

In Paris in 1871, Russia 1905 and again in 1917, Hungary and Germany in1918,Limerick in 1919, Italy in1920 Spain in 1936, Hungary in 1956, Chile in 73, Portugal in 1974, Iran in 79 and Poland in 1980 we saw a form of self organisation emerge amongst the working class in response to various crisis - the workers circle,called a ’soviet’ in Russia, or ’condone’ in Chile, a ’Shora’ in Iran, a form of organic direct democracy.
At a certain point in every severe crisis the coordination of working class strikes and protests and the absolute necessity of self regulation of working class communities sees these community and workplace circles emerge as a direct outgrowth and natural continuation of the struggle. These forms of self organisation weren’t the creation of any marxist brain but time and time again are formed by the working class’s instinctive need for unity and for organisation in a time of massive crisis.

For example -The Commune of Paris in 1871 was a response to the betrayal of the Parisian workers into the hands of the Prussian army under Bismarck by the cowardly French Ruling class under the infamous Theirs. If the french ruling classes weren’t prepared to defend the city the workers decided that they would. They elected delegates from each area of Paris instantly recallable and mandated to follow the instructions of their electors, placed on the average wage to prevent corruption, they seperated the church and state declaring religion to be a private matter, they elected their judges, armed the population for self defence, food distribution was organised. They eventually suffered defeat as they couldnt spread the revolt to other towns. But those 2 months demonstrated the capability of the working class to self organise and it was from this that Marx generalised and worked out the developed form of his theory of the state.

Russia in 1905 and again during the revolution of 1917 saw Soviets arise. The first Soviet arose as a vehicle through which the workers could negotiate with the tsarist goverment but took on more and more the running of the daily lives of working class people until there arose a situation of dual power. The self governing working class alongside the institutions of the old power. The movement of 1905 was ultimately defeated but the Russian working class had taken on board lessons they would re-apply in 1917. Alongside parliament organs of working class self government superior in every way to the old power emerged once again after the February Revolution 1917. Lenin, in april, called for a challenge for power. ’All power to the soviets’ was his cry and it wasn’t until October that this slogan was fulfilled, with even Menshevik rivals of Lenin’s Bolsheviks declaring- ”what we have before us is nothing other than a rising of the working class”.


Dual Power

Two societies sit side by side during a crisis, one of slave owners the other of those who refuse to be slaves, the working class develops an urgent need, a need for a society of it’s own. When things reach this state, of Dual Power, then the choice has never been between the continuation of the movement from below and the old system, it becomes a choice between the fight to defend the organs of working class and community democracy against the rage and fury of the ruling class who will not accept any challenge to their economic dictatorship over the workers and society at large. So in 1917, for example, it was never a choice between Soviets and the official Constituent Assembly but between Soviets and reaction, the Assembly a cover for the forces of General Kornilov and others of his ilk to organise behind until they felt strong enough to destroy and root out all traces of worker’s democracy.
Trotsky once remarked that if the Russian Revolution hadn’t moved towards the seizure of power by the workers in October 1917 then fascism would have had a Russian name as opposed to an Italian. Fascism would have been born in Russia 1917 as opposed to Italy in the 20’s.

The same dynamic has developed again and again - in Chile in 1973, where the election of Salvador Allende backed by a strong workers movement in the workplaces was too much to bear for the likes of General Pinochet, the Chilean ruling class and their rotten friends in Washington. Here though workers never challenged for power to be transferred to their own organs, the cordones, but put their faith in the capitalist state. Time and time again a movement that puts it’s trust in the state has been crushed, the state is a weapon of the ruling class – judges, the civil service, the police, prisons etc are tools of oppression and Allende and the Chilean working people paid a terrible price to gain this knowledge with over 30,000 deaths. The defeat of the movement in Germany many years before saw humanity pay an even dearer price for failure to challenge the state, which ultimately, unleashed Nazi barbarism, first upon the worker’s movement and then, upon the Jews.


The 21st century

Can 21st century workers overthrow capitalism though? ’People have too much stuff’ is one of the arguments thrown back at socialists, but the question of the need for socialism isn’t just a quantitative question, that is a question of higher wages or a question of more things, its about the quality of life people have under capitalism, no matter how many TV sets a working class family acquire they still, as individuals when they go to work every single day, have absolutely no control over their lives. The 5 biggest corporations in the world are run by about 40 people employ hundreds of thousands of workers and have an output greater than the Middle East and Africa combined. Working class people have absolutely no say in the running of these or any enterprise that their labour builds. These giant corporations, which grow from the soil of competition as during every recession some firms go bankrupt and others buy them up thereby growing bigger, are completely unaccountable to the concerns of the thousands of lives they shape. Work is a dictatorship with a heirarchy of foots soldiers, managers and, at the top, the handful of ’generals’(who themselves are nothing but slaves to the blind forces of the market).

Anyway you can have two TVs in your house and still weep with fear when the bills arrive and fret over your children. You can have an iPod and still be so filled with hopelessness instilled in you by an absolute lack of prospects that you go out and commit acts of vandalism. Or you can internalise all this pressure and alienation and get stress related cancer when you hit middle age. This is the reality of working class life under capitalism in the ’best’ of times. Their booms never last though and all they seem to bring in hindsight are higher rents, higher food prices and stress from overwork.
But even from the point of view of standard of living we can see right now that the once common expectation that every working family could own a home is being stripped away with repossesions in Ireland (and the U.S. and U.K.) reaching record highs. There are 53,000 families on the housing waiting lists while 300,000 properties lie empty. The minimum expectations of most working class people can not now be fulfilled. Can they be sure that their children will have a better standard of living than they acquired? Not anymore.

The working class has always evolved and changed but the central aspect of working class existence, the fact that we have nothing to sell except our labour power, has not changed.
Once you’ve spent the share of your wages that goes on immediate consumption i.e. food, rent, bills and then maybe saved a little (which will now be impossible!) you are forced to return to work the next week and start the whole process again. Workers are still slaves to the economic necessity of returning to work, the choice is never ’will I work for a capitalist or not’ but ’which capitalist, out of necessity, must i work for’.
White collar workers work in conditions which more and more resemble the factory of old. Inputing numbers all day long. They too have nothin to sell except labour power. In fact yesterdays ’skilled’ workers have always been ’proletarianised’, engineers in the 1800’s were strangely seen at the time as a ’priveleged’ layer amongst workers but 30 or 40 years later they were at the forefront of union activity and worker’s struggles.


Conclusion

Women have entered the workforce in huge numbers in the last few years and have transformed society in the process as they no longer could accept the hold of the church over decisions relating to control of their own bodies and sexual attitudes. More people right across the face of this planet are working class than ever before. The working class of south Korea alone is bigger than the entire working class at the time Marx wrote. Units of Capital of massive dimensions and more concentrated then ever before exist now across state lines and borders linking people into a gigantic social productive process which need not be all in the name of the blind accumulation of profit, these enormous resources, unimagined in any previous age, if harnessed for social need could liberate humanity from so much unnecessary strife.

We have means of communication never before imagined, we can web chat instantly with people on the ground in warzones, we can relate news of struggle in a second to every single corner of the globe. Never has humanity’s bright future been so close to our grasp.
’The emancipation of the working class is the act of working class’ but we have seen that in the course of every massive movement from below a dual power situation arises. Protests, mass strikes, movements in the communities, on the streets, in workplaces get to the point where the goverment will attack from fear of losing control. We have to respond by defending our own forms of popular democracy, the revolution is a defence of the organic forms of working class self organisation that emerge in the course of every struggle.
Not only is revolution objectively possible but absolutely necessary as we balance on the brink of environmental collapse, permanent war and deep crisis in the economy.
21st century revolution not a fantasy….it is daily becoming a living breathing reality.

we need a one day national stoppage!!

(people in iceland protesting daily)

Socialist Worker Leaflet

• No Pay Cuts or Pension Levies

• Bail out Jobs and Services not the Bankers

• Support the Waterford Crystal Sit In.

The pension levy on public sector workers is an outrage. Many low and middle income employees, who have taken out large mortgages, simply cannot afford to pay it.

The levy is another name for a pay cut:

• An employee on €45,000 will pay an extra €63 a week.
• An employee on €35,000, €43 a week

This pay cut is on top of a 1 percent levy on gross income and the deferment of all wage rises due under the current partnership deal.

Public sector workers did not cause the economic mess.

Nor are they the ‘bloated’ over-paid sector portrayed by the media. According to the OECD, Ireland has the third lowest rate of public expenditure compared to Gross Domestic Product, just ahead of Korea and Mexico.

Public sector workers already pay a 6.5% contribution to their pension. The real problem is not public sector workers but private sector employers who want to pay nothing to their employees’ pension funds.

While public sector workers are being attacked, the government is putting up €8 billion to ‘re-capitalise’ the banks. Despite all the talk of a ‘national effort’ to solve the crisis, no extra taxes have been imposed on the super-wealthy.

Instead of bailing out bankers, the government should put money into saving the jobs at Waterford Crystal and other areas where workers are being made redundant.

We need a massive programme of public works to help people who have been made redundant.

In this ecocomic crisis, workers are once again being asked to carry the can - while the super rich, who helped to cause the economic collapse through speculation, get off scott free.

A NATIONAL SHUT DOWN

This is entirely unacceptable. The unions need to organise serious action to resist these pay cuts. Talking and complaining is not enough when the very future of the trade union movement is at stake.

We need a one day national shut-down - and French style protests to demonstrates our opposition.

Public sector workers should initiate this one day shut down and invite private sector workers, who are facing pay cuts and redundancies, to join the action.

If such action is not organised by union leaders, it will have to come from the grassroots.

The over-70s showed how ‘people power’, how a mass movement from below could bring about some measure of social justice. Now is the time for the trade unions to do the same.

surprise surprise RTE tell lies!

So i was watching the evening news on RTE, the irish state broadcaster, reporting from the IMPACT union's general meeting to discuss the new 'pension levy' i.e. the new pay cut. Well RTE stated that the union had decided to have a nice little 'email campaign' and some valentines day pickets of the constituency offices of Fianna Fail TDs, all very polite and ineffectual sounding.
The thing is that's NOT what happened! The union leaders sent out a pre-emptive press release declaring these shy tactics as what would come out of the general meeting but the membership's fury at the actual meeting wasn't taken into account. The members voted to mandate the union to call mass protests during working hours and to ballot the membership nationally for strike action.
They stated that if the Irish Congress of Trade Unions wouldn't support these measures that IMPACT would act anyway.
The RTE report from the actual meeting cut off before any sign of workers anger was shown.
They obviously can't go encouraging the fight back now can they?
I'm related to a lot of working class soldiers, the soldier's union has announced that they wont break any public sector strikes (as the government has used them repeatedly in the past), anyway at a meeting of soldiers the other day someone flippantly suggested shooting Sean Fitzpatrick, the director of Anglo Irish Bank, if this crisis goes on maybe those kind of remarks will become more frequent and less flippant.
And the battalion stationed under the Dail in Leinster house are only a stones throw from that bank.... and while they're at it....

the private public divide?

every petty right wing commentator, from 'questions and answers' on RTEtv, to the columnists of our daily papers, to the various members of all the mainstream parties who pop up to voice their opinions on the above and other media formats, all sing from the same unholy hymn sheet at the moment- 'the problem is overpay in the public sector'- 'we have to save money... time to slash and burn the bloated public pay bill'. so nurses and bus drivers are 'overpaid' bloated vampires sucking the lifeblood of society? it seems to me that this is as ridiculous as it sounds... the real division isnt between the private sector worker and the public sector employee, but between the top and bottom of both sectors, both the CEO's of private firms and the top civil servants in this country are the true 'parasites' carried by the working class. to distract us from this truth all manner of hysterical screeching from mainstream political life is raised at every available opportunity.
according to the latest OECD figures ireland ranks as the 7th most unequal society in the 'developed' world. the top 10% of irish society earning more than 9 times the earnings of the bottom 10%.(remember this is a comparison of salaries, so what if we add in profits?) and this situation was made worse over the last two decades, so it seems that even economic growth, although it makes claims the working class are wealthier, sees workers across the western world produce far more but recieve less of a share of the total product of society. this trend is repeated over and over right across the world. neo-liberalism has been gnawing away at the share going to the workers, wages etc, this increased rate of exploitation an attempt to restore a profit rate which has been in decline, apart from the occasional burst of growth, since the end of the post-war boom in the mid 70s.
the fianna fail govt have already raided our national pensions reserve fund of 18 billion and handed half of it over to the banks for purposes of 'liquidity'. the pensions reserve fund is to provide for social welfare and pensions from 2025 onwards but has been gambled on the stock market over the past few years, one such 'investment' was in the firm- lehman brothers which infamously collapsed last year. such stock market dealings lost the fund 600million in the last 12 months.
their bail out of their friends in anglo irish bank will cost us billions, some estimates state we are now in debt by 20,000 euro per household. the goverment will cover the bad debts of the banks to the tune of 90% (while waterford glass and other workers have NO gaurantee of pensions).
yes the economy needs credit to run...but why continue to bail out these banks without accountablity? why not nationalise the whole banking sector? why cant we open their books to public scrutiny?
instead of attacking the average public sector worker why not fire the beaureacrats and top civil servants and save us all those pointless pieces of paper they're so fond of? why not tax the top CEO's of the private sector? those who made 41billion in the closing years of the celtic tiger?
why?..well because fianna fail, fianna gael and all the other parties clamouring towards coalition with one of these gangs accept the logic of the market, they accept we need to be 'competitive'.
should the health service be 'competitive'? should you manage your household affairs 'competitively'? 'oh i'm sorry little jenny but if we treat your cancer well we're no longer competitive'...'sorry children but if i feed you then we're no longer a trim stream lined competive outfit'....they all accept this race to the bottom...this inhuman fetishised logic...
so dont let them fool you into thinking the public sector is the problem! these over bloated corpses clinging to our backs have no right to label anyone as a parasite...

citizens army....

this shot shows the flag, the starry plough, flying over Waterford Glass which was occupied by workers 3 days ago when management tried to shut up shop...workers fought their way past private security goons who had been drafted in from dublin, as locals wouldnt take the job of holding off the employees...workers show no signs of backing down, the visitors centre has slogans of struggle written on all the notice boards 'united we stand divided we fall' and
the starry plough, flag of socialist James Connolly and the Irish Citizens Army, now flies over the workers occupied factory...
this action shows the way forward, we need to resist job losses....
RESIST! OCCUPY!