A few quick prisoner solidarity updates: Anarchist hacker Jeremy Hammond has just been put through a punitive transfer after an incident where he opened a windowless door and bumped someone stood on the other side. His new address is: Jeremy Hammond, #18729-424 FCI Memphis P.O. Box 34550 Memphis, TN 38184 And his birthday is January […]
Following Donald Trump’s surprise announcement that he is withdrawing US troops from Syria, we’ve received the following message from an anarchist in Rojava, spelling out what this means for the region and what the stakes are on a global scale. For background, consult our earlier articles, “Understanding the Kurdish Resistance” and “The Struggle Is not for Martyrdom but for Life.”
I’m writing from Rojava. For full disclosure: I didn’t grow up here and I don’t have access to all the information I would need to tell you what is going to happen next in this part of the world with any certainty. I’m writing because it is urgent that you hear from people in northern Syria about what Trump’s “troop withdrawal” really means for us—and it’s not clear how much time we have left to discuss it. I approach this task with all the humility at…
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This article originally appeared here on It’s Going Down.
As has happened so often in the history of social movements and revolutions, actually existing history has once again outstripped the ready-made concepts and theories that we have for understanding it. The “yellow vests movement,” which was sparked earlier this fall but clearly has much deeper roots, has left many bewildered by the lack of party or union alignments on the part of the participants, the combination of extreme left and extreme right elements, its remarkable resilience and growth since November, and its ongoing creativity and dynamism in the face of massive state repression. The anonymous collective of political activists who are involved in the movement have struck out to conquer new territory, beyond the well-trodden paths of recent social movements, while also taking inspiration from or reawakening the deep history of revolutionary struggles. This has included the use of…
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It is difficult to understand how a benefit that has been so many years in development can produce such a tragedy of errors. This journal extract demonstrates how these play out in what should be a simple – because not unusual – case. Jim had been on ESA (the disability benefit), but when he went for a reassessment, he was found fit for work. He applied for a Mandatory Reconsideration of the decision, and signed onto Universal Credit. The Mandatory Reconsideration was successful, and he was put into the ‘support group’ as unfit for work or work-related activity. This should have resulted in him receiving an extra £328.32 a month, as well as not having to go to the jobcentre.
Under Universal Credit, your main method of communicating with the DWP system is through an online journal. Jim’s journal shows how long it took for the system to register this…
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Last week we illustrated a blog about reasonable causes for missing DWP appointments/actions with a picture of a hospital. This week we met someone who had actually been sanctioned for missing an appointment when he was in hospital. Turns out that although the DWP accepted this as a ‘reasonable excuse’, they were not happy that he hadn’t informed them at the time. May be other things were on his mind… He has put in for a Mandatory Reconsideration, and we encouraged him to continue to an appeal if that fails.
This last stall before Christmas was otherwise pretty uneventful, though we talked with Rick, who had been waiting a long time for his PIP claim to be processed because the DWP had lost his application for months, and with an older woman who told us that her daughter works in the buroo and is under constant stress.
A lot of…
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Kingston, Ontario: Like fascists on the German and UK territory, the far right in Canada tries to hijack the Yellow Vests movement. Originally published by… 1,384 more words
Image by Ardfern/Wikimeda Commons It has been two years since I met two of the Angola 3. The Angola 3 are three black men (one of whom sadly died after his release in 2013) who were accused of the death of a prison officer in 1972, and who maintain their innocence to the present day. A 2013…
via The Angola Three and the revolutionary power of the Black Panthers — gal-dem
This short piece celebrates the fourteen-year anniversary of Radio Ñomndaa, an Indigenous, autonomous and community radio in Xochistlahuaca, Guerrero. The original in Spanish was published by Ké Huelga Radio and can be found here. By: Palabra Indómita Suljaa’, Guerrero December 19-20th, 2018 Radio Ñomndaa, the word of water, marked its 14th anniversary of transmitting from…
via Fourteen Years of Radio Ñomndaa (Xochistlahuaca, Guerrero) — Voices in Movement
A friend works as a maintenance engineer at Heathrow airport. You can read about working conditions and organising efforts below – a shorter version will be distributed to Heathrow workers in WorkersWildWest no.9. If you want to get involved in our modest organising efforts in and around Heathrow, drop us a line:
angryworkersworld@gmail.com
The recent terrorism charges against activists who tried to stop a deportation flight at Stansted airport [1] demonstrated the highly politicised character most protests have once they take place around airports. The protests are politically charged either because airports are national borders like in the case of the Stansted 15 or because they are seen as of major national interest, which explains, for example, the heavy police repression against the wildcat strikes of airport construction workers in Turkey this year, who walked out after over 50 construction workers died on the site since works began. [2] Heathrow…
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