CONTENTS:

> STATEMENT ON SECTARIANISM
> BELFAST GRASSROOTS GATHERING
> ANARCHY A PERSONAL VIEW
> IN PLACE OF THE STATE
> WHO REMEMBERS THE WORKERS?

STATEMENT ON SECTARIANISM

The Anarchist Federation and the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation oppose the communal and sectarian politics of Northern Ireland. The communal politics of the north, which identifies the advance of one community as being at the expense of the other, continues to destroy working class communities.

Belfast Agreement

The agreement was supposed to remove the gun from Northern Irish politics. But has this happened? The murder this year of postal worker, Danny McColgan, and the increasing threat paramilitaries pose to the workforce in the north would seem to suggest otherwise. While the days of the sectarian one party Unionist state may well have ended with the imposition of the equally oppressive period of direct rule, a new form of sectarian ‘agreement’ has been worked out by our supposed ‘representatives’ in Stormont. With direct rule now reestablished nothing much will change here.It was always the case that this agreement was about copper fastening sectarianism -it could be about nothing else. Sectarianism, in fact, has not been eroded. It’s enjoying a profile now that it hasn’t enjoyed since the early 70’s, and to which the Holy Cross dispute is only one of the more extreme examples. We are opposed to all forms of sectarianism, institutional and otherwise.

Working class communities

Those which are worst affected by sectarianism have more in common across the sectarian divide than they have division. The politicians and the Catholic and Protestant middle classes may have benefited from some sort of ‘peace dividend’ but working class communities, particularly those on interfaces, have not. We only need to look at the ongoing violence in North and East Belfast to understand how the working class is as polarised as ever, preyed upon by paramilitary gangsters on both sides.

Nationalism

We need to engage in common struggle based on class interests and solidarity. Nationalism, be it the British nationalism of Loyalism and Unionism, Irish nationalism or the Ulster nationalist current evident within Loyalism, divides workers and is based on the myth that people in an arbitrarily drawn up nation (be it based on an island, region, language,’culture’, or religion, or any combination of these and other elements), have common interests which can be represented by the nation state.

Nationalism is a regressive and divisive force which separates humanity on the basis of arbitrary national boundaries. These boundaries are nothing more than the ‘barbed wire’ which divides us, according to particular loyalties and commitments which obscure the domination of all oppressed classes by the ruling elites. The nation state is in effect the government over the majority -the working class, by the wealthy few. Let us not forget - the working class and those who hold power, the bosses and their lackeys, have no common interests. We are not, however, opposed to genuine cultural expression which when given expression can add to the rich tapestry of life. But we are opposed, to those manifestations of sectarianism which masquerade as culture.

Class

The facts speak for themselves.
Government, no matter in whose name, no matter what jurisdiction it acts within, whether United Kingdom, the Irish Republic or Northern Ireland, offers no alternative for our class. Our class exists economically as a class. We have nothing in common with the wealthy and powerful of the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom or for that matter the rest of the world.
We must organise economically as a class to pursue our interests as only we can. The only unity we aspire towards is class unity in opposition to all bosses and states.

What we say

The Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation and the Anarchist Federation are united in our commitment to the struggle against sectarianism and for a better world. We believe that a united working class can build a world, in opposition to global capitalism, the state and our sectarian politicians, which is based on need not profit, on workers control of their workplaces and communities. A world where we have adequate housing, public transport, health care, public services and food because workers themselves will be responsible for the running of society.
To find out more about our position on the north, contact us at;
AFI_ASF@yahoocom
ASF; anarcho_syndicalist_federation@hotmail.com
PO Box 505, Belfast BT12 6BQ
AF-www.afireland.cjb.net
afi_asf@yahoo.com

BELFAST GRASSROOTS GATHERING

FOLLOWING THE SUCCESS of two previous gatherings, one in Dublin (last autumn) and one in Cork (last spring) there is a new grassroots gathering about to happen and you are invited.
So far ‘grassroots’ has aimed towards a network which would:
-Be based on the principle that people should control their own lives and work together as equals, as part of how we work as well as what we are working towards.
-Within the network this means rejecting top-down and state-centred forms of organisation (hierarchical, authoritarian, expert-based, Leninist etc.). We need a network that’s open,
decentralised, and really democratic.
-Call for solutions that involve ordinary people controlling their own lives and having the
resources to do so: the abolition, not reform, of global bodies like the World Bank and WTO, and a challenge to underlying structures of power and inequality.
- Organise for the control of the workplace by those who work there.
- Call for the control of communities by the people who live there.
- Argue for a sustainable environmental, economic and social system, agreed by the people of the planet.
- Working together in ways which are accessible to ordinary people, particularly women and
working-class people, rather than reproducing feelings of disempowerment and alienation
within our own network.
Fun begins on Oct 26-27 2002 @ Giros, 1/5 Donegal Lane, Belfast, just across the road from the ‘Front Page’ bar.

NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH to be my master. This is the central tenet of anarchism. We spend half our adult lives at work, or getting there in jammed trains or traffic lanes. There we spend, or are supposed to spend, every moment subject to the authority of others. Following orders, and only ever seeing a fraction of the wealth we create.

Who makes the rules?

Who takes the decisions that shape our society? Who decided to prioritise the ecologically
harmful car over public transport? Who decided to litter the Irish Sea with the debris of
the nuclear industry? Who decided that PAYE workers would pay a disproportionate amount of tax, while we have the lowest corporate tax in the whole of the E.U.? Who decided that foodstuffs would be stockpiled or destroyed or farmers paid not to produce while millions face malnutrition and starvation? Who decided that house prices and rents would spiral?

These, and a hundred other things, show just how much say we have in our lives. In one sense, the decisions are made by powerful minorities in the corporate boardrooms and big business lobby groups. In another sense by nobody at all but are formed by market competition.

The Anarchist Alternative

Against this anarchists propose a participatory, direct democracy, the cardinal principle of which is that everyone who is affected by a decision has the right to participate in the making
of it. At it’s base, assemblies of everyone in a particular workplace or community making decisions collectively for that workplace or community, then in a federation with other communities and workplaces through a system of mandated delegates. ‘Mandated’ meaning people given a specific task - that is to have the role of carrying out decisions made by assemblies (not with the right to make major decisions as is the case with a representative). ‘Delegate’ meaning recallable at any time - that is to say in between elections they can be re-placed should they fail to act in accordance with their mandate. Furthermore, use of electronic referenda could make decision making far more democratic and efficient. We cannot set out a grand master plan, for as is obvious, such a society could only be created through mass participation, and only put into practice on a local level in whatever way the people doing so see fit. Ultimately, we cannot know what is possible, and what isn’t, until we can experiment and try out different forms and structures of a participatory democracy. For instance it may be the case that communities would have to break society up into more manageable units, as self-sufficient as is possible, for direct democracy to be feasible. It may be possible that such a society would still have to incorporate some representation within a very wide mandate. What is certain to me is that we could have a way of life far more democratic than we do now.

IN PLACE OF THE STATE

ANARCHISTS DEMAND the abolition of all States. Questions about what we would replace the State with have sometimes been answered, apparently glibly, with responses such as;
"Would you replace a tumour?"
We do not believe that a State should be ‘replaced’ by any system of organisation based on the principles of authority, centralisation, unaccountability or the continued division of society
into leaders and led, order givers and order takers. This is simply the swapping of one State for another.

This does not mean we are opposed to organisation, nor that we wish to promote the sort of chaos, social disintegration and violence which the mainstream media so often reports as ‘Anarchy’ or ‘Anarchism’. Anarchism is not a synonym for disorganisation, nor is it utopian. It offers a far more constructive approach in theory and in practice to the problems which face humanity and our planet than its ignorant, or deliberately misleading, detractors care to acknowledge.

Anarchists reject the very idea of the need for a State. We oppose the formation of new nation states just as we are opposed to all existing States. The State is a physical expression of political and social coercion. We do not regard it as something which can be ‘conquered’ to be used against Capitalism in the interests of humanity and the planet.

Government has always rested on domination and exploitation by the ruling elite of the vast majority over whom they claim sovereignty. The State is an inherently repressive institution and as such is beyond reform. The basic function of the State, the courts and prisons, army and police, civil service and other State institutions, is to defend the interests of the bosses.
Anarchists struggle towards and act to promote the abolition of government, the State, and the principle of authority that is central to contemporary social forms, and to replace it with a social organisation based on self help, voluntary cooperation and freedom. We are social revolutionaries who seek a stateless, classless, voluntary, cooperative federation of
decentralised communes based upon social ownership, individual liberty and autonomous selfmanagement of social and economic life.

We recognise that, worldwide, we are all ultimately one community of human beings, and that we can and must break down the artificial and imposed barriers that undermine our commitment to mutual recognition and care for each other and the planet. Anarchists look to a world and
a society in which real decision making involves everyone who lives in it, direct democracy as opposed to the sham of ‘representational democracy’. The working class of the world have no country. We have only our international solidarity to sustain us in the face of a global capitalist onslaught, aided and abetted by ‘our leaders’ in government in States all over the world. Effective organisation, now and for the future must therefore be international.
In place of capitalism we promote workers’ control of industry with production for need not profit, satisfying the needs of every member of society. In opposition to the State we advance the fundamental notion of confederation, in which communities in various regions can freely unite by means of recallable delegates. We desire a federation of free communities which shall be bound to one another by their common economic and social interests and shall arrange their own affairs by mutual agreement. We can, on the basis of organisation from the bottom upwards, ensure that the needs of society will be met:
"From each according to their means to each according to their needs".
This will assure all will be fed, clothed and housed as normal social practice. It gives practical realisation to our desire for a society free from all coercive institutions which stand in the way of the development of a free humanity. The late Albert Meltzer summed it up as;
"Workers’ control of production, community control from below, no government from above."

We believe that we should begin to build the new society now, within the shell of the old, as well as fighting to crush Capitalism and all States. Therefore Anarchists build organisations in order to build a new world, not to perpetuate our domination over the masses of people. We must build an organised, coordinated and international movement aimed at transforming the globe. This will only be successfully realised if we start to create such a social revolutionary transformation of society from the bottom up - in our communities and our workplaces.

WHO WAS IT that said a week is a short time in politics? For those of us used to the quagmire that is the ‘peace process’, recent shenanigans in the north come as no surprise. How can it be otherwise when sectarianism itself, at the heart of all this mess, is enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement itself? So the IRA has an ‘alleged’ spy ring in the Northern Ireland Office, (as if the UDA etc, were never handed the odd document now and again!) and so, by extension, Sinn Fein can no longer be trusted. As a result, the Assembly will be suspended (to save it from collapse), we’ll wait a few months, and then the merry-go-round will start again.

Men in suits

But maybe not. In the last few years, the electoral politics of the north have shifted greatly.
The anti-agreement DUP have steadily increased its share of the vote. Five MPs in the last general election to the UUP’s six, while at a local level they have narrowed the gap on their
Unionist rivals to just two percent (UUP 23%: DUP 21%). Meanwhile the pro-agreement PUP have also lost considerable ground to the DUP in recent months, and is unlikely to survive at all. Its own warped socialist rhetoric, a direct result of growing social and economic deprivation in working class protestant areas, has not found a home with the Protestant working class. Nor have therevamped Ulster Political Research Group (UDP that was) which will make as much an impact as its predecessor - strange when you consider UDA support in interface areas, but not surprising if it continues to shed its more important members - the sun finally set on John White’s career in the group in the last few weeks.
Meanwhile Sinn Fein, reinforced by increased membership in the Dail, have made, and will continue to make, headway into the SDLP’s share of the vote. After all, outside of whether or not to sit on the new PSNI commission, there’s no real difference between the two parties, and when there’s little perceived difference on a party political level, personality and flair come to the fore. Suffice to say, Mark Durkin doesn’t have much of either.
So what can we expect? - a polarisation of our communities yet again, but this time,perfectly
reflected in the extremist politics of Sinn Fein and the DUP. And what has the ‘peace process’done for us? Not a lot, but it’s been a bonanza for the Shinners and the Paisleyites.

Men in balaclavas

But enough of the men in suits. What about the men in balaclavas? The UVF have lost ground to the UDA in the territorial scramble for influence in interface areas. The UDA/UFF itself has had a busy few weeks in the news. A bout of tit-for-tat shooting with the LVF has led to a bitter division in the ranks of the inner council, with Johnny Adair being ejected from the organisation because of his close links with the mid-Ulster group.
And then you have the IRA, and ‘decommissioning’, and you begin to wonder what you would do if you actually organised things for yourself, took control of your own life.

And the workers?

Apart from anything else, you mightn’t be on the dole now. Hidden away in the media on the day the Assembly tottered was the apparently less important news of more redundancies at Harland and Wolff. But why should now be any different than before? Once again, the real problems that face us (i.e. having a wee bit of money jangling around your pocket when you go down to the local supermarket on a Saturday afternoon) are swept aside because of the ‘bigger picture’. 265 workers lost their jobs at H&W this month reducing the workforce to 121. Since being privatised in 1989, the company has been on a slippery slope. The only people not affected by the latest redundancies are the ship designers and naval architects who will no doubt find a home working their way through the new MOD contract H&W are taking on after January 2003. H&W’s troubles are a result of the same globalisation patterns that have shaped the world’s economy for decades now. Their parent company, Olsen Energy, based in Norway has no interest in what happens to one of its subsidiaries. From their own lips; "When market forces were more conducive, it will pursue marine
and offshore contracts when they are compatible with the resources of the company."
So that’s that. And this is the same economic agenda that both the DUP and Sinn Fein push. You see there are some things they do agree on.

As anarchists, the Anarchist Federation and Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation propose an anarchist alternative to Stormont, direct (London) rule or Dublin rule, one based on you, me and the woman next door having confidence in our own abilities, taking direct control over our own lives at a local level, and ridding ourselves of the parasites in power. Let’s face it. You couldn’t make a bigger hash of it than our socalled politicians.