community
The great Olympic rip-off
Rob Ray reveals the double standards being applied as the sporting juggernaught tears up London
While businesses in the designated Olympic village are being given a custom-built new home, local groups are being fobbed off with derisory amounts while being moved to poor locations.
1993-1996: The Dublin fight against water charges
A short history of the successful direct action campaign of non-payment which prevented the imposition of charges for water in Dublin, Ireland.
Winning the water war
1971: Via Tibaldi occupation
A short history of an occupation of empty housing in Italy by workers who had inadequate accomodation. Their direct action and solidarity forced the council to house hundreds of people.
The occupation at Via Tibaldi was a great step forward for the tenants’ and homeless movement in Italy. A whole neighbourhood was involved in it : factories, schools, housing projects took part in the organising of the struggle. There was a victory at Via Tibaldi because everyone there was fully aware
1971: The Quarto Oggiaro occupation
A short history of a militant mass occupation of empty housing in Milan, Italy, 1971 which pressured the government to give in and provide the participating families with housing.
Quarto Oggiaro is a working class quarter of Milan in northern Italy. Many Italians had been forced to leave the poverty of the south to try to find work in the industrialised north, and there found pay low. Housing was scarce, and where it did exist much was wretchedly sub-standard.
1987: Puerto Real shipyard strike
The history of a large strike of shipyard workers in Spain against closure. An important feature of this strike was not just the high level of militance but the active involvement of the local community and the directly democratic way the struggle was organised.
In
1987, the shipyards in Puerto Real were to be shut down by the governing Thatcherite
"Socialist" Party, PSOE. However, a militant strike and solidarity
of local people saved the yards and won huge gains for the staff. In this
not only did the great determination and ingenuity on the part of the workers
1971-1974: Green bans by builders in Australia
A history of the massive campaign of industrial action by building workers which protected the environment and local communities by enacting green bans - refusals to work on harmful construction projects.
1971: The Kelly's Bush green ban
A short account of how construction workers saved the Kelly's Bush area of park land in Australia from development by refusing to work, and kick-started a movement of environmentally-minded industrial action.
Dealing with the nightmare; Dublin Anti-Drugs Campaigns
A review of "Pushers Out: The inside story of Dublin’s anti-drugs movement" by Andre Lyder.
Walk five minutes from O’Connell St, Dublin’s main thoroughfare, or five minutes from Christ Church Cathedral, an important tourist attraction, and you will find yourself in a very different world from that depicted in the tourist brochures...
University of the Third Age: the unlikely Bakuninists
A massive, unsung, but very anarchistic educational network is spanning the UK. Martyn Everett investigates.
Asked to give examples of how anarchist ideas work in practice most anarchists would probably suggest the collectivisation of industry during the Spanish Revolution. If pressed to give more recent examples then some of the surviving small-scale worker co-operatives set up since the late 1960s, or free schools such as Summerhill might be suggested.
Toxteth no better 25 years on
A report by a regional newspaper into the Toxteth area of Liverpool, 25 years on from a popular uprising in the area that shook the city, has found that promises to invest heavily from the government
The Liverpool Echo, which investigated official records at both local and national level to obtain an overall view of how the socially deprived area has fared, said: “Toxteth is still being crushed under the weight of socio-economic inequality. When it comes to unemployment, deprivation, health and education the area is always towards the bottom of the pile.
