Organisation, strategies, tactics, solidarity, communication and knowing your enemy's strengths and weaknesses, all necessary for success in our struggle for that better world. One tactic that seems to have fired up the attention of the mainstream media is the "black bloc". Not a new video, but never the less interesting.
Who's Afraid of the Black Blocs? Anarchy in Action Around the World [Book Trailer] from Josh Lyon on Vimeo.
The Americans right to bear arms is a very one sided right according to the state. U$A does pass gun control laws, but they are usually in response to "non-whites" following that 2nd amendment, the right to bear arms.
The following from It's Going Down:
On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with two members of the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), about the organization and more broadly, about what it means to create an anti-racist current both within (and against) the current mainstream gun culture which largely has been occupied by the far-Right. The SRA currently has about 10,000 members and is a pan-Left organization, made up of anarchists, Marxists, and socialists. For a history of the group and a look at where they are coming from, we encourage people to read this interview several members conducted with the Anti-Fascist Network in the so-called UK.
From the interview:
It is important to understand that gun rights were enshrined in the US 2nd Amendment partly because of a need for armed violence at the frontier to continue the genocide of Native peoples, as well as Southern fears of slave uprisings. Gun rights were largely reserved for white people for most of US history, and during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, Black people who armed themselves for community defense were often massacred and disarmed by white mobs and police. Attempts by Black people and other marginalized groups to arm themselves have often led to increased gun control; the National Firearms Act of 1934 was partly justified by crime committed by Italian and Irish immigrants; the Gun Control Act of 1968 was partly put in place due to Civil Rights riots; the Mulford Act was passed in California and signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1967 in response to the Black Panthers; ‘Saturday Night Special’ laws banning inexpensive small caliber handguns were passed in the ‘70s in response to Black people in cities preferring those firearms. The history of gun control in America is the history of white people owning guns to oppress marginalized people; Black people and other marginalized folks acquiring guns to defend themselves; and white people then passing laws to disarm the marginalized.
Italy: In memory of anarchist comrade Marilù Maschietto
The following are the words with which two comrades wanted to remember Maria Ludovica Maschietto, known as Marilù (February 14, 1932 – December 29, 2020).
Farewell Marilù, with you another piece of my anarchy dies. Thank you for always being a safe haven for me and the people I loved.
Thank you for snatching me away from apathy and disillusionment when I was 18 years old and the anarchists seemed to me a bunch of wordsmiths and idiots.
And thank you above all for teaching me the critical spirit and that anarchists need no leaders, that contempt and superiority towards the naive and clueless must not find room in our hearts.
I wanted to tell you looking into your eyes but I didn’t have time… forgive me.
I owe you a lot, I love you, I will not forget you.
Alfredo, prison of Ferrara
Forgive me if I take the floor reading a text and not by improvising a speech as it would deserve a comrade who has lived an entire life giving all he could – in terms of forces, means, ideas – to the anarchist movement with the same naturalness with which she spoke in the living room at home.
Marilù knew she was leaving us. The last words she said to me a few days ago were: «Always remember me». But despite this awareness she continued to make plans, to try to give until the last moment her contribution to the fight for anarchy.
Remembering Marilù is difficult, indeed very difficult, because her is not just a personal story, but is part of the historical heritage of the revolutionaries. It is made of links, intertwining of stories, especially collective, but also clashes. She left us testimony of the experience of Azione Rivoluzionaria, including through books, contributed to the birth of the “Gianfranco Faina” Committee Against Prison and Repression, standing by the prisoners throughout her life.
I knew the history of the anarchist movement from her lips, even before books. Some might say that it is biased history. Yes, it is. This is because it is the story told by those who have always supported the anarchist action without being a mere spectator, between the pleasure of an achieved hit and the pain of seeing the comrades die with weapons in hand or in jail or, even worse, distance themselves from the revolutionary practices.
So, thanks to her stories, I tried to live with the same passion, I learned to defend the same principles, as well as to hold the same grudge.
Remembering Marilù, as she asked us to do, is therefore to defend the revolutionary hypothesis, to put it into practice knowing that it is full of choices to be made. A certain partisanship is not only inevitable, it is a must. Because if there must be a passing of the baton – as is customary to say on such occasions –, then we must make the history of the revolutionaries our own, with all that this entails. We must have the courage to choose, to know how to be on the side. On the side of the exploited, but even more so on the side of those who, among the exploited, have abandoned all hesitation, embracing the fight for freedom, without compromise and especially without denying anything.
To you Marilù, to the comrades who died but lived fully, to those who still pay the price for their choices.
You do not deserve our tears, but those of fear of the oppressors.
Marco
“They ask the union for almost 600,000 euros and jail sentences for the complainant worker and union members, a total of 8 people,”
Prison sentences for unionism
It all started with different labor irregularities and an alleged sexual harassment at work, a complaint currently filed. A worker went to the union at the beginning of 2017 to comment on what was happening to her at Pastelerías La Suiza, in Gijón. ” ..The union requested additional information to support the version of the worker, after which, it met with the company to discuss the issue, unsuccessfully which led to the beginning of a union mobilization campaign and several concentrations of complaint were held, “nothing that is not usual in union action,” the unionists declare.
However, “the attacked women became aggressors from one day to the next, when denounced by the businessman on numerous occasions,” the CNT denounces. “They ask the union for almost 600,000 euros and jail sentences for the complainant worker and union members, a total of 8 people,” they detail from the anarcho-syndicalist central, “some penalties that are beyond all logic.”
Behind the claim that asks for years in jail for unionism allegedly could be the Gijón hotel trade union, people with a clear conservative orientation, who “have accused the CNT of extorting, of being ETA, and have tried to outlaw the union for a crime of illicit association ”.
In fact, they have hired, as a lawyer to exercise the private accusation against the union, the former magistrate of the National Court, Mr. Javier Gómez Bermúdez, “star judge and now Jaime Botín’s lawyer”, highlights the anarcho-syndicalist organization.
“This case is another step in the outlawing of trade unionism, either directly or by putting trade unionists in jail and financially condemning them,” denounces the CNT. For this reason, they appeal to class solidarity and the fraternal support of all the trade union centrals, in order to try to stop this aggression and to disseminate as much as possible what is going to be judged as of Monday 18.
So much could be said about the spectacle recently witnessed at Washington, DC’s federal capitol building, however we will write a quick statement, hoping to further understand the situation as well as to assert a need on behalf of comrades in the States who face both imminent and ongoing grassroots violence and parallel state repression. Essentially, what we saw was not an insurrection or revolt; what the world witnessed was a permitted fascist temper tantrum.
On January 6th, 2021, the American government gathered for its ritual of certifying the Electoral College results, signifying the transfer of power to a new president. It is an archaic ritual that—because it began prior to modern travel, and faraway states needed the months after the election to travel across the country by horse and carriage to participate—is held in January rather than immediately following the election’s outcome in November. This event was seen by both Trump and his followers as the last ‘hoorah’ to disrupt the transfer of power from the far-right Republican Party to the moderate right-wing Democratic Party.
The US security state’s very different approach to the MAGA mob versus an antifascist, anarchist, or abolitionist demonstration was made quite overt on the 6th. It was so obvious, in fact, that mainstream media outlets have seized upon it, in their embarrassing public displays of trying to grasp just why the police put on their kid-gloves with these self-indulgent cowards seeking to reinforce the very worst of what already exists in the US, storming a building that has its very own police force (with an annual budget of more than $500 million).
The police tolerance exhibited for Trump’s supporters was purposefully obvious. It has been public information that the extreme Right in the US have chosen to infiltrate law enforcement and political positions of power (even cited in a report by the FBI) ever since the fall of the guerrilla neo-Nazi group The Order in the mid-1980s and white supremacist Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 that killed 168 people. Both were inspired by the white supremacist bible at the time, the fictional novel The Turner Diaries (1978), which featured a similar assembling of fascists identifying as ‘Patriots.’ Apart from formally rampant white supremacy throughout the American police force, every single police union had endorsed Trump in the US in the run-up to the 2020 election. While police tend to be more diverse in the US compared to many countries around the world, the original purpose of the police in the US was to catch slaves and crush unions, so it is inevitable that regardless of race, there is an element of fascism in such a uniform.
If Black Lives Matter, anarchist, or anti-fascist banners were raised on this day, there would have been mass arrests, far more intense brutality, and a likely massacre. While five people have died due to the events of the 6th, one being a police officer who died due to being beaten to death with a fire extinguisher*, and only one demonstrator due to police violence; the other three literally died due to their own stupidity and maintained their white privilege even in their humiliating deaths. If this was not a white supremacist event—or an ostensibly fascist event—dozens would have been killed by the police.
Apart from the daily mass murder of people of color and poor people in the US by police, the fates of Kyle Rittenhouse and Michael Reinoehl, for some very recent examples, help to explain the behavior of the police on that day, how they acted in parallel to their grassroots fascist counterparts.
Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two people during a demonstration against the shooting of Jacob Blake—a Black man shot seven times in the back in front of his children by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The event left Blake paralyzed, but the officer who shot him will face no charges despite video evidence. Rittenhouse is currently on trial for his murders, and was allowed to move freely past the police line just shortly after killing people. Michael Reinoehl, on the other hand, was a self-proclaimed antifascist from Oregon, who in self-defense shot a fascist during a Trump protest. Reinoehl went on Vice News shortly after the event to proclaim the action was in self-defense, and one day later, he was shot over 50 times by federal police. Trump openly bragged about Reinhoel’s assassination. With few exceptions, his fate was rarely discussed in the media, but shows the obstacles and struggle revolutionaries face versus the permitted ‘rebellious’ behavior of fascists and other fanatics for the misery of the world today. The courts are no different. The sentencing and investigations that inevitably follow the actions of the right are managed in a way resembling obligation, rather then the passionate and brutal judicial attacks by the state on revolutionary movements seeking liberation.
The Urge to Self-Destructis Not a Creative Act
It is no accident that two-thirds of drug deaths were born in the period 1966 to 1985.De--industrialization and a decline in the typical job opportunities for school-leavers without qualifications drove many to seek escape and construct a new harsh self-destructive culture. 1979 witnessed the Tory Government that brought Thatcher and her cronies to power. The Blair Government acted to accelerate globalisation and market forces. 'Lame Duck' industries were obliterated, some like the Miners through confrontation, but more usually by jobs being exported to countries by Multinationals with lower wage costs and social security. It is also no coincidence that after urban riots in the early to mid-80s, when collective resistance was a possibility that supplies of street heroin increased at affordable prices. Throughout history, people have been drawn to experience substances and out of body experiences. The Late 60s glamourised recreational drugs like LSD and Marijuana as pathways to self-exploration & enhanced consciousness. From a communal experience it has become an individualised or sub-group expression of alienation. Males are brought up to act ‘tough' not share feelings, and drugs and alcohol are escapes from hurt and confusion. It is a challenge that those with radical politics are not meeting. This is especially true in housing schemes where anonymity is more difficult with sectarian or drug dealers attacks more likely. There are exceptions, as with the motorway protests in Pollok in the 90s, the Independence referendum five years back, but it can quickly dissipate. A culture of education, resistance and local agitation is largely absent. Living Rent is a cause of hope, such as in The Wyndford in Maryhill
They say music makes the worlds go round, it certainly can be inspiring, and it certainly can bring people together, a weapon to energise a group, a community, a city or perhaps raise an idea to popular acceptance, like Love Music-Hate Racism.
New album form Love Music-Hate Racism, worth a wee listen, It is available as digital download or LP, from £10.
Surprise, surprise, the world's largest workers strike doesn't get much media coverage. The Indian farmers' strike where somewhere in the region of 200,000 took strike action against the implementation of new government legislation opening up India's agriculture to the free market. This strike has been ongoing since November 26th 2020, and farmers are still camped outside the capital Delhi demanding a complete withdrawal of this legislation. All rounds of talks with the government have so far failed to reach any agreement.
So far they managed to get the court to implement a stay of the legislation "until further notice" and the court has set up a committee to attempt a deal between the farmers and the government. Meanwhile the government has ruled out any roll back of this legislation, while the farmers have repeatedly stated that they will settle for nothing less than the complete withdrawal of this free market legislation. The court has also agree to hear a multitude of petitions against this legislation.
Agriculture should be for sustainability and self sufficiency, not about mass markets for export to enhance corporate coffers. The "free market" in agriculture has nothing to do with sustainability and self sufficiency, it's all about large corporations dominating the production of food for profit.
The determination of the farmers is borne out by the period over which the strike has persisted and the hardship the strikers have endured. At least four farmers involved in the strike camp outside Delhi have committed suicide, many others have died from various illnesses and from the bitter cold winter conditions. This legislation would be the death knell for thousands of Indian farmers.
This strike should be receiving world wide solidarity and support, of course a world wide strike would be one answer. The free market is an enemy of the ordinary people and puts more of the world's resources in the hands of the ever greedy and powerful corporations. They already control vast swaths of our resources and wield tremendous power over our lives, for the benefit of all humanity, we have to reverse this march of the corporate world.
My rant form 10 January 2016.
This winter may have been mild, but it is Scotland, and it is winter, cold and damp, not the sort of conditions anyone should find themselves homeless. While our parasitical politicians tell how well everything is doing, spouting, everything is on the up and up, some facts contradict that propaganda. The number of homeless people is rising, rising homelessness can never equate with an improving society. Glasgow City Mission, a charity that helps provide temporary shelter for homeless people, claims to have had a 60%+ increase in the number of rough-sleepers seeking a bed for the night. The charity claimed that, December 2015, saw 711 individuals came to them seeking a bed, compared with 437 December 2014. The quietest night this December saw 14 individuals seek a bed for the night, last December that figure was 4. While the busiest December night this year the figure was 31, compared with last December when there were 21.
Not a very flattering picture of Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, and an indictment of the system we live under. Glasgow has an abundance of glossy, glitzy, shopping malls, lots of fancy expensive restaurants, car parks littered with luxury cars, yet hunger and homelessness stalks its streets. Under the neon lights a doorway can be a shelter from the cold and damp, a dark lane, a bed for the night. There is an invisible army of enforced hungry, lurking in the shadows of abundance. It is totally unacceptable that hunger's vicious claws tear at an individual a hands throw away from a warehouse of food. It is totally unacceptable that someone should lay their head on cold wet stone for a bed, when the city abounds in empty accommodation.
This cruel injustice is the law of capitalism, no matter your needs, you will have to do without, if you can't pay. You can't be provided for if there is no profit in it for somebody. In this insane system, you can die from hypothermia and/or hunger, while shelter lies empty, and food rots next door. Why do we tolerate this?The figures may be different today but the injustice and inhumane callous cruelty persists, ah, that's capitalism for you. With the present pandemic creating a whirlwind of unemployment and austerity, we can expect the usual result from capitalism, more child poverty, and more homelessness to help to "balance the books".
The Homeless
Tenebrous spectres, they exist, out there,
on the crumbling edge of chaos.
A father, a son, a brother,
a daughter, a sister, a mother.
Fragments of some shattered family structure;
waste products
from a society being driven to destruction
by a hurricane of greed,
living a life that wears out life,
dying,
the devious death of exhaustion from existence.
http://radicalglasgowblog.blogspot.co.uk/.../wealth-and...
Living Rent have been battling to stop this site in Marhill which was once the site of council houses to stop its sale to private housing. We need our land to build council houses, not sold to rip-off landlords. We need reasonable rent council houses if not for our selves, for our young folk who have little enough to look forward to without just working to pay the rent. Wages going down rent going up! Time to stop the give away! It would be zero cost to the council to postpone the sale and listen to us.
Townhall Meeting For Maryhill
Invited speakers:
Bob Doris MSP, Cllr John Letford, Patrick Harvie MSP and candidate Keiran O'Neill are all confirmed as coming. Now is the time to make the community's view heard. Are you coming?
The Council spoke to just 69 people over 13 years to come up with their sell off plans for bought housing. Now is the time to show the community's real view and decide the site's future. Try to be there. 6:30pm, Tues 12th, meeting link at www.livingrent.org/collinastreet
Sign the petition:
https://www.livingrent.org/halt_the_sale_of_collina_street?fbclid=IwAR2Jc-fNLYznYA3a_J8AbenhXsvOIUIjLMsf1e4vS5-UCQeRJmQZ_Xz1wAQ
The UK holds many accolades, not many of them for worthy causes.
The UK has the largest Immigration Detention estate in Europe. UK policy results in asylum seekers facing detention at any time, even if they have committed no crime whatsoever. Detention has no time limit and is not automatically subject to Judicial Review. Many endure months and some endure years of indefinite detention.
There are no safeguards in place to prevent the detention of vulnerable persons, including those who have faced imprisonment, torture and /or sexual violence in the countries from which they have fled. This harmful and expensive practice is unnecessary and deprives people of their freedom, their dignity and is damaging to their mental health.
Detention Action Frequently Asked Questions about Detention and reports including Detained Lives. They also have a freephone number 0800 587 2096 for advice.
Some detainees are being held for too long and in insect-ridden rooms at Europe’s largest immigration centre in west London, inspectors say. Conditions at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre were “desolate”, with bare rooms, broken equipment, bed bugs and cockroaches, the report by Chief Inspector of Prisons Peter Clarke said. Some detainees were held for over a year, with one man held for five years.
The outbreak has led to renewed calls for all detainees to be immediately released. “The outbreak of COVID-19 at #BrookHouse detention centre was completely predictable - and utterly preventable. Nobody should be detained for immigration purposes during a global pandemic,” tweeted Freedom From Torture. Celia Clark, the director of Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID), similarly argued: “The government should now recognise that the use of detention and deportation in the current climate helps to spread coronavirus and puts lives at risk.
Harmondsworth IRC currently has a capacity of 676, which makes it the largest detention centre in Europe. It holds only men and the security in several of the wings is comparable to a Category B (high security) prison. Harmondsworth is run by private security company Mitie, under contract to the UK Border Agency.
The last inspection by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons was released in March 2018. The report found that there were considerable and persistent failings in the safety and respect afforded to detainees.
The following article is from crimethinc:
Meanwhile, as the Republicans Fracture, a New Political Center Emerges—Further to the Right
As a consequence of Donald Trump’s supporters occupying the Capitol building in Washington, DC after a rally promoting his baseless claims of election fraud, the Republican Party is fracturing, setting the stage for the consolidation of a new bipartisan political center—albeit much further to the right than before. Yet this also paves the way for massive sections of Trump’s base to break away from representative democracy altogether, embracing an explicitly fascist alternative. The events of January 6 offer them martyrs and a revanchist narrative that will serve them for years to come, providing an internal mythos for recruitment and a justification whenever they need to use force.
The events of January 6 will discredit Trump supporters in the eyes of centrists and force some Republicans to shift their allegiances to the center, but they will also push the envelope regarding what is acceptable. This may help the far right recruit locally countrywide and could normalize similar actions in the future.
But this is not the only danger ahead. In the name of a war against extremism, centrists are going to demand to expand the same machinery of state repression that the next Trump will inevitably use against us. This is essentially what happened in Weimar Germany, setting the stage for the rise of the Third Reich. Likewise, Trump’s chief weapon throughout 2020 has been the Department of Homeland Security, created under Bush in response to the September 11 attacks, and he has also benefitted from further centralization under Obama. Centrist appeals to fight “chaos” will serve to draw many of our former allies out of the streets, while justifying new crackdowns that will target us as well as the far right.
The state clampdown after this will suppress freedoms across the board, targeting all forms of dissent. In Turkey, when Erdoğan put down a right-wing military coup, that paved the way for him to repress every form of protest. State repression of the right will follow the playbook they use against our movements—incorporating reformist elements while isolating and destroying “extreme” elements. If the only pressure on the government is from the far right, the state will make concessions to them.
We are already seeing our former allies withdrawal from the streets in the events of January 6. Liberals urged people not to go to DC, counting on the authorities to deal with Trump supporters. This was a miscalculation. Security forces are not particularly inclined to stand up to the part of the population they sympathize with most—and even when they choose to do so, their hands are effectively tied by the deeply engrained institutional habits of treating conservative white people much more respectfully than they treat people of color, poor people, and anti-capitalists.
IndustriALL Global Union’s Korean affiliate the KMWU believes that POSCO workplaces will only become safer when union representatives are able to participate fully in safety structures. Instead, POSCO recently dismissed three union activists for exposing union busting, and failed to reinstate them after the National Labor Relations Commission ruled that the dismissal was unfair.
The KMWU argues that large-scale industrial disasters happen at POSCO due to management decisions to not upgrade aging facilities and equipment, to downsize subcontracted workers, and to outsource risks instead of eliminating them.
POSCO blocks the KMWU from accessing accident sites and refuses to allow union safety experts to participate in accident investigation. The company fails to disclose the true cause of an accident after an investigation is concluded, leaving workers to face the same risks that killed their colleagues.
South Korea has the highest occupational fatality rate among OECD countries and every year 2,400 workers die in industrial fatalities. In 2018, trade unions and civil society launched a campaign for a Corporate Manslaughter Bill after a young worker in his twenties was found dead in a power plant after the company violated standard operating procedures.
The signatures of 100,000 citizens placed this bill before the Korean National Assembly. The intent of the bill is to impose heavy penalties on employers who cause the death of workers, and to ensure that they adopt comprehensive preventative measures.
The KMWU believes that if the bill becomes law, POSCO CEO Jeong-Woo Choi should the first person to be held accountable.
Accidents in November and December at POSCO’s Gwangyang steelworks in Korea resulted in the deaths of five workers. On 24 November, an explosion near a blast furnace lead to the deaths of three workers. In further incidents on 9 and 23 December, another two POSCO workers lost their lives.
The lastest is the 18th accident in the past three years at the company’s Pohang and Gwangyang plants. POSCO workers have been killed by asphyxiation, explosions, fires, physical crush injuries, fatal falls, and overwork. The accidents have continued despite the plants being subject to an inspection conducted by the labour ministry.
