Late October round-up of UK work and social struggles and international repression news

Cautiously pessimistic

In UK workplace-related news, the 30th of October saw simultaneous precarious workers’ demos in London and Glasgow, while security guards at the Ministry of Justice, organising through the grassroots UVW union, have just voted to strike for a living wage.

There was a massive strike for equal pay by council workers in Glasgow on the 23rd and 24th, although it’s surprisingly hard to find much in the way of radical analysis of the situation – there’s a write-up on the IWW Scotland site looking at the SNP’s attempts to shift blame onto past Labour councils, and the Morning Star have an article on the council’s attempts to use legal threats against strikers, but I haven’t seen much beyond that.

Post workers in Maidstone apparently followed in the steps of those in Wigan by staging a wildcat strike in defence of a victimised colleague, but again…

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Trans/intersex Solidarity Gathering in Bournemouth.

Industrial Workers of the World Dorset

On Sunday 28th October four Dorset branch members attended a rally in Bournemouth square to show solidarity with trans/intersex comrades in the USA, who are now threatened with highly repressive legislation, that if passed would set them back half a century at least. The category of gender would be replaced by a legal definition of ‘sex’ to be determined by a physical examination of external genitalia at the moment of birth, disputes to be settled by ‘genetic testing’.

This is not only bad politics it’s crank science, promoted by ignorant fundamentalists who don’t even believe in evolution or climate change. Nevertheless it’s already drawn approval from the far-right and TERFs on this side of the Atlantic. It’s got to be worth a fight, hasn’t it?

The event was hastily arranged on face book. We were glad to be part of a good-natured gathering of Working Class trans-,cis-, non-binary and gender-nonconforming…

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Questions without Answers: Reginald House and Old Tidemill Garden

Architects for Social Housing (ASH)

On 19 October I wrote the following on the Save Reginald Save Tidemill Facebook page. My comment was written in response to a shared statement by Lewisham Labour Councillor Joe Dromey, the Cabinet Member for Finance, Skills and Jobs, that he had originally made on the I Love Deptford page about the regeneration scheme. The son of Harriet Harman MP, the former Acting Leader of the Labour Party, and Jack Dromey MP, the Shadow Labour Minister for Work and Pensions, Joe Dromey is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Policy Research, the think tank that did much to create and form the current programme of estate demolition and redevelopment with the publication in 2015 of ‘City Villages: More homes, better communities’. I asked to join the I Love Deptford page in order to respond directly to Councillor Dromey, but my request to do so was…

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Brazil: The Alternative to Fascism Is not Democracy–From Democracy to Freedom in Portuguese, Greek, and German

CrimethInc.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, fascist proponent of dictatorship and mass killings, has won the election. Who needs a military coup when you use voting to accomplish exactly the same thing? We’ve already explored in detail how the left and centrist parties paved the way for this. From Brazil to France, parties across the political spectrum have lost all pretense of offering any solution to social problems other than escalating state violence. In this context, it’s not surprising that politicians who explicitly represent the police and military are coming to power, as they have become the linchpin of the state itself.

Our hearts go out to our comrades in Brazil, who have already experienced a tremendous amount of state repression and capitalist violence—and will now face far worse. Perhaps the immediate resistance that greeted the election of Donald Trump can serve as a useful reference point. Yet because of the…

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Bigger than a hexadecimal: some notes on the gender binary

Cautiously pessimistic

One of the arguments made by trans-exclusionary feminists that can sound convincing, at least at first, concerns the question of gender essentialism: after all, if the categories of “man” and “woman” as we understand them are social constructs imposed by patriarchy, then how can we say that trans women are women or trans men are men, when really no one is “naturally” a woman or a man?

Once we start paying attention to things that trans people actually say, rather than just the things that trans-exclusionary feminists attribute to them, the picture becomes more complicated, as it turns out that it’s totally possible for people to advocate for trans acceptance while also arguing against gender essentialism. Still, the question of how we can make life more comfortable for people having to navigate the categories imposed by patriarchy, while also critiquing those categories themselves and fighting against any attempt to…

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Fuel Poverty Action – An Open Letter to the Secretary of State

Grenfell Action Group

Sixteen months after the Grenfell fire, on Wednesday 17 October, 50 people stood together in the the rain, outside of the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, to deliver an Open Letter that demanded safe and warm tower block homes. The demonstration was organised by Fuel Poverty Action. Many of those who came, spoke out.

Speakers included residents living with Grenfell-style cladding, people from the Grenfell community, and supporters. The speeches covered a wide range of issues, including the plight of children at Grenfell, the needs of disabled people in high rise blocks, and the threat of climate change and associated extreme cold weather to residents whose insulation has been removed. The common thread of safe and warm homes tied it all together, and many, including the Fire Brigades Union, Unite Housing Workers and other major trade union bodies, pledged their support to the campaign for Safe Cladding and…

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Red And Black Telly: WORKING CLASS ANARCHISM