Join us at the first Weymouth Fringe with Nobody’s Heroes; Attila the Stockbroker and guests. Saturday 30th November 2013 – tickets online or at the door.

AFN solidarity with Revolutionära Fronten!

Anti Fascist Network express solidarity with Revolutionära Fronten. On November 19th the Swedish police raided several homes of suspected anti-fascists across the country. In total, around 10 people that are suspected of being active in the socialist organisation Revolutionary Front.

Support Chilean anarchist publication “Solidaridad”

“She took our flag!”: The far-right standing up for women?

Portsmouth Anti-Fascists

(Trigger Warning: Links to articles mentioning rape, Female Genital Mutilation, sexual assault and featuring misogyny and transphobic comments).

Since the EDL’s foundation in 2009 they have been keen to win some liberals over with their ‘support’ for women’s rights within Islam, highlighting Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), the burqa and cases of stoning and murder in dictatorships that  seek to use Sharia Law as justification.

Alongside proclaiming to have an LGBT division as well as Sikh and Jewish Divisions, the EDL also heavily promoted their division for women, the EDL Angels. In some respects the Angels have been the most successful of the EDL ‘Liberation’ divisions. Members of the LGBT division were attacked by other EDL members, the Sikh Division has diminished after Sikhs against the EDL’s work in the community and the Jewish Division has never featured more than a group of ultra-zionists (Most Jews are uncomfortable around people whose members…

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SYRIA: The life and work of anarchist Omar Aziz, and his impact on self-organization in the Syrian revolution

Tahrir-ICN

By Leila Al Shami for Tahrir-ICN

Omar Aziz (fondly known by friends as Abu Kamel) was born in Damascus. He returned to Syria from exile in Saudi Arabia and the United States in the early days of the Syrian revolution. An intellectual, economist, anarchist, husband and father, at the age of 63, he committed himself to the revolutionary struggle. He worked together with local activists to collect humanitarian aid and distribute it to suburbs of Damascus that were under attack by the regime. Through his writing and activity he promoted local self-governance, horizontal organization, cooperation, solidarity and mutual aid as the means by which people could emancipate themselves from the tyranny of the state. Together with comrades, Aziz founded the first local committee in Barzeh, Damascus.The example spread across Syria and with it some of the most promising and lasting examples of non-hierarchical self organization to have emerged from the…

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AFN go wild in the West Country: Exeter demo report

Anti-Fascist Network

Report from Brighton Anti-Fascists

Around forty comrades made the trip from around the country to Exeter to check out the last EDL national demo of the year (don’t worry folks, there’s still a few regionals to counter).

Perhaps ignorantly we’d considered Exeter to be a bit of a void politically speaking so we were pleasantly surprised by the size of the turn-out of the Exeter Together effort. Around a thousand locals marched into town from Belmont Park (accompanied by a slow funereal soundtrack of the kind more usually associated with a witch-burning).

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Starbucks union Chile Press release.

9th November 2013 3:14am

To our workers, our friends and citizens.

Today 8th November we voluntarily end our legal strike after accomplishing, during the 11 days of mobilisation, every political objective we had set ourselves as a collective at the outset. It was not merely a matter of gaining benefits -we knew Starbucks was going to stick to its anti-union philosophy- it was not about resources either: it was about a fight for our collective rights and a political message charged with solidarity we wanted to send to Chile and the rest of the world.

In just 11 days our organisation grew in unity and political development. Those non-unionised workers who throughout history have been -for obvious reasons-afraid of taking part in the organisation have started to see the justice of our cause and came closer to us each day. It has become evident that Starbucks is a contradictory and stubborn business. There is no social responsibility here, but instead social irresponsibility. “There is no budget for negotiations”, “we cannot grant privileges to collectives”, “unions are unnecessary in Starbucks” were some of the reasons Starbucks gave for not fulfilling its unionised workers’ demands – at the moment when Starbucks had reported more than a 34% increase in profits, reaching US$1,245.7m.

We reached civil society, collecting over 5,000 signatures of support in Chile and 7,000 signatures from the rest of the world in order to pressure Starbucks to modify its anti-union behaviour. Candidates for the Chilean Presidency like Marcel Claude, Roxana Miranda and Marco Enríquez-Ominami expressed their support; Tucapel Jiménez, Cut, Labour Front, CTC and CNT -among many other organisations- also voiced their support. Outside our frontiers, CSA and CSI presented our case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on 25th October, also to IWW, workers in Belgium, England, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Bulgaria, New Zealand, Spain and Argentina in order to show the world Starbucks’ hidden face. Besides this, Starbucks unions in the US carried out activities in support of our cause.

We know Starbucks will continue to state cynically that, “it has always recognised and respected all partners’ rights to join the union.” Starbucks, however, has paid more than 50m in four fines for having made union freedom vulnerable in the most grotesque ways. Starbucks will say we are a minority and that 95% of its workers “recognise and value the good working environment and the facilities Starbucks offers, and that they therefore do not share the union’s demands”, despite the fact that surveys show that more than 80% of the company supports our organization’s actions but is scared of organising and raising its voice because of the historic repressive actions. Anti-union practices made the unionisation index fall from 55% to almost 6% in two years, but we strongly believe that today a scenario has been put forward which will favour the unity of the workers against Starbucks’ anti-unionism. “Starbucks is proud to be (supposedly) an enterprise whose politics are open and meritocratic.” What disgusts us is that Starbucks is also proud to be an anti-union business. This is why it is our duty to take all necessary national and international measures to guarantee that Starbucks stops making vulnerable its workers’ inalienable collective rights. Starbucks persists in these actions and for this reason we will present our case to los Employment Tribunals of Justice, and also to the OCDE for violation of the procedures stated for multinationals. Moreover, we will complain to the Chilean State in front of OIT for having neglected its duty to the Rule of Law, thus allowing violations to our law and to the international agreements Chile subscribes to. During this process, all the organisations which have stood by us throughout this battle will give their support and solidarity. We Starbucks workers do not return defeated to our posts, because we have created the space that will allow us to democratise the company. We were always conscious that this was the beginning of a long-term battle against a corporate work model which intends to impose itself with violence. We will meet again in 18 months’
time, more united than ever.

Thank you all.

Starbucks Coffee Union

Insomnia Cookies Brings Police Assault Down on Legal Picket

Re-blogged from Industrial Workers of the World – Boston GMB

Last night the Cambridge Police swarmed a totally legal picket of Insomnia Cookies, demanded we shut down our PA (which we did), then attacked, punched, bloodied, threw on the trunk of a car, threw on the ground and dragged away IWW member Jason Freedman who has been charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and assaulting a cop. Jason sustained injuries to his back and arm. This was a completely unjustified attack on Jason, on civil liberties, labor rights and free speech. It was provoked (and lent legitimacy in the eyes of the cops) by a false report from the company that picketers were obstructing the sidewalk in front of the store. Feel free to register protests with Henrietta Davis, Mayor of Cambridge, at mayor@cambridgema.gov

Launch of IWW Cardiff branch and social 23rd November 2013

The story of Riseup dot net

Dear Riseup Users:

Here’s the story of how we got to be the Riseup that we are. Please donate if you can!

Once upon a time, way back at the end of 1999 when the internet was still young and the millennium loomed, a couple of geeks got fired up at the WTO protests in Seattle. After a week of teargas, jail, cardboard butterfly wings, and way too much chanting, they sat in their living room and talked about what the movement needed for the next decade. They came up with Riseup.net as an independent provider of lists and email. They created Riseup on a couple of servers in their house, and soon attracted a couple more geeks to the cause.

Every year Riseup grew and grew, and it became more of a headache in that way where it was more work and had more people relying upon it. Some people came and went from the collective, and there were some hard, lean years where it was unclear if this was the right thing to pour time and money into, but stubbornly, Riseup kept going.

People’s skills increased around providing stable and secure services. More people joined the collective, and they were activist gold: the kind of people who worked hard on all the irritating day-to-day minutiae, the kind who showed up for meetings and cared deeply about this quixotic project, and the kind of people who stay up all night at crisis moments to wield their mighty hacker skills that looked like magic to those of us in the collective (like me) who are writers not geeks.

So somewhere around 2007, the collective became stable member-wise, and we became a group of about ten people who are mostly the same people we have today. Over the last eight years we have become a true collective in a rare way. We’ve worked together on Riseup for a long time, and slowly, that has become a big deal in most of our lives. We celebrate — those of us who live near each other — our celebrations together and care about each other in a true and real way. One of the greatest secret successes of Riseup was when Gadfly and Arara met at one of our retreats and fell in love. We have at times been annoyed, in conflict, and angry with each other (since we are humans not robots), and this has even led to some people leaving the collective, but overall we’ve been surprisingly stable as all but one of us has transitioned from being fiery, dreamy, young radicals into cranky, dreamy middle-aged radicals.

And also, sometime during the last eight years, Riseup has become a force to be reckoned with. We are the largest nonprofit email provider in the world, outside of a university system. We run one of the world’s most used TOR nodes. We are frequently cited and sourced as one of the few ethical, autonomous, and secure internet providers. We legally duked it out with the far right over not turning over our user’s information and won. We use and develop cool-ass secure software. We scheme with other tech collectives across the globe on what we are going to do about all this spying and how we can carry this work on into the next decade. We have big hearts and minds, and we plan to win.

So, that’s us. Or one of the stories about us. Support us if you can! Love, The Riseup Birds