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Title: For starters (WS43)
Author: Workers Solidarity Movement
Date: 1994
Language: en
Topics: Workers Solidarity, Workers Solidarity Movement
Source: Retrieved on 18th November 2021 from http://struggle.ws/ws94/tenyears43.html
Notes: Published in Workers Solidarity No. 43 — Autumn 1994.

Workers Solidarity Movement

For starters (WS43)

IN LATE September 1984 five anarchists, three from Dublin and two from

Cork decided to launch the Workers Solidarity Movement. This was

certainly a major undertaking for such a small number of people. Workers

Solidarity began publication five weeks later. The first editorial

introduced the new organisation: “Are there not enough organisations

trying to change society? What makes the Workers Solidarity Society so

different?

“We are different, very different. Unlike so many others we do not

believe the end justifies the means. We say the means you use will shape

the society you create. We want a free and socialist society, and we

have to organise in a like manner.

“We are anarchists. We are socialists. You can’t have one without the

other because they are one and the same thing. Socialism is not a

collection of reforms and minor changes. It means a lot more than that.

It means building something completely new. And you build everything

from the bottom up — socialism is no exception.

“We won’t be trying to take over the state structures. Government, the

existing civil service, police, army and so on are there to meet the

needs of a capitalist society. They cannot be turned round to serve

socialism, they were not designed for that. The state is only necessary

when a minority wants to rule.

“Workers will create their own structures to bring a new society into

being. Structures that are efficient and geared towards mass involvement

and democratic decision making. All of this is not just around the

corner. But unless we know what we want and how to get it we will be

stuck with the chaos and inequality of the present system with its

continual series of crises.”

Over the last decade the WSM has grown and developed policies based on

its anti-authoritarian and socialist views. A lot of time went into

discussing and debating the sort of society we want and how to achieve

it. We certainly did not want to copy the “shepherd & sheep” model used

by so many Leninist groups. We were determined that there would be no

reliance of one or two leaders for ideas, that every member would be

genuinely able to influence the course of the WSM. Our goal was to to

popularise anarchism and fight for the creation of a society based on

its principles: individual freedom, collective management of society by

its workers, participatory democracy.

Those aims remains the same. Producing Workers Solidarity, publishing

pamphlets and hosting public meetings is part of our activity. But we

are not mere advocates of a better world, we are involved in the

struggles to make things better right now. That is why WSM members have

supported strikers at Pat the Baker, UCD, Dunnes Stores, the ESB and

many others. That is why we helped to form the Dublin Abortion

Information Campaign which brought enough people onto the streets in

1992 to defeat the government’s injunction against “X” and led to the

successful referenda against restrictions on abortion information and

womens right to travel. We have been involved in many struggles, many

more than there is_space to list here.

Anarchism is the only realistic alternative to capitalism. What passed

for alternatives in the past have lost most of their appeal. Stalinism

is terminally ill, only hanging on by its finger nails in North Korea

and Cuba. It is finished as a movement. Leninism and Trotskyism are

being swept along with it into the dustbin of history. Social democracy

and its Labour Parties are disgraced throughout much of the world.

Within Ireland republicanism has retreated from the verbal ‘socialism’

it adopted in the 1980s.

While opposing the presence of the British Army and the continuing

partition of the country, we have always said that the politics and

methods of nationalism are wrong. We have to oppose imperialism and, at

the same time, oppose the clerical nationalist laws in the South which

ban divorce and abortion. We have to oppose Orange bigotry while at the

same time campaigning for the complete separation of Church and State.

We do not fight for a united capitalist Ireland, neither as a ‘step in

the right direction’ or as an end in itself. Joining the six to the

twenty six counties offers nothing to working class people in either

state. We have no interest in re-dividing poverty on a more ‘equitable’

basis. The only Ireland worth fighting for is a Workers Republic where

every working class person stands to gain. The way towards such a new

Ireland is the way of class struggle and mass action, taking control of

our own struggles and doing it in our own class interests. This is the

road to freedom. Liberty, workers control, anti-authoritarianism... if

these are the sort of aims you have, then you should find out more about

anarchism and the Workers Solidarity Movement.