Today's Topics:
1. [Greece] Intervention outside the Petrou Ralli Detention
Center in Athens By ANA (pt) [machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. [Spain] Manifesto of the CNT for Villalar 2019 - In the
countryside and in the city, stand, working people! By ANA (pt)
[machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. Australia, MACG Anzac Day Statement 2019 (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
4. Pamphlet Review from Rebel Worker Vol.37 No.1 (224) April -
May 2019 -- Paper of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Network
www.rebelworker.org (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
5. Greece, Implementation of the 13th Pan-Hellenic Conference
of the ESE [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
On Friday, April 19, we organized an unannounced intervention outside the Petrou Ralli
Detention Center in Athens. Approximately 50 comrades were gathered outside the building
supporting the campaign to highlight Petrou Ralli not only as a detention center but as a
central decision-making body in relation to the repression of migrants. We shouted chants
for the closure of all prisons and the release of the detainees and received a lively
response on behalf of the detained migrants, who shouted back demanding (their) freedom.
Talking to them through a megaphone, they told us all about the living conditions within
Petrou Ralli, as well as the deportations that have occurred recently. Finally, we covered
the walls with slogans and distributed informative texts to the passing cars and buses.
After the intervention,
Coordination of Collectives and Individuals against Detention Centers (SSAEKK), Anarchist
and Anti-Authoritarian Collectives, Comrades
Source: https://ssaekk.espivblogs.net/2019/04/22/19-4-paremvasi-exo-apo-tin-p-ralli/
Translation> Remembrance of the Oppressed!
anarchist-ana news agency
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Message: 2
Leaving aside the processes of nationalist confrontation that dominate much of the media,
we can discern other struggles that have broken reason and dignity, filling with hope and
illusion the long road that leads, in a clear and clean way, to the development of this
new world that the great majority of human beings yearns for. ---- The example of women:
summoning together the combative unionism the second General Feminist Strike of March 8,
filling the streets with social and economic shouts of equality and breaking the chains
and the patriarchal yoke, inheritance of the most obscure Franco. ---- The example of
pensioners: who, against all odds, especially in the province of Vizcaya, denounce the
maneuver with which they try to end the public pension system, instigating its
privatization and the exclusion of a large part of the working class as a whole.
Selfishness to the end and the end disguised as modernity.
The example of inner Iberia: full of culture and resistance, but also depopulated,
abandoned by institutions, drowning in an agony that should shame the entire political
class for decades and decades of starvation of real policies that lead to the necessary
turnaround of the situation.
In political moments where tension is the bread of every day, where the discourse of
hatred and fear is placed on the political agenda, it is more necessary than ever to look
back. It's 100 years since the Canadian strike. This union and the whole working class of
Barcelona had the eight-hour journey. This victory was not exempt of violence against the
labor movement and of criminalization since the economic power. The obtaining of the
present day, therefore, was not the work of any government, nor even a process of justice
or humanity supported by the Catalan employers. It was, undoubtedly, an achievement waged
by the strike as a tool of transformation .This victory can not be tainted, or even
concealed, because it survives in the retina of each of the people who, in addition to
memory, are class conscious.
And as we speak from the heart of this ancient peninsula, it is worth remembering that
those who are attacking the regime of 78 - though not lacking in motives - are the same
ones who lived in it for four decades. Those who want to overthrow this regime, all they
want is to build a similar. Those who manipulate history to adapt it to their respective
interests are the first to forget that there is a "working people", who truly endured each
and every one of the aggressions of the state or capital. Definitely, the transversality
that girds the left that will never point to the capitalist economic system as the real
engine of exploitation against the working masses - regardless of the form of state it
adopts.
The result of a transition that imposed an anachronistic monarchy and, above all, an
economic organization based on the total delegation of our decisions is not trivial. This
model has a negative impact on jobs, which suffer from an appalling lack of freedoms,
turning them into a place where our most elementary rights are literally murdered.
To turn all this is no longer worth casting a vote for the party or union that seems less
bad, this is not the brawl of the far right they want to sell us. Strengthening the
workers' movement so that it has the capacity to respond to the aggressions that are to
come, will be fundamental to, as the old Castilians said, to " turn the table ." -
Valladolid, spring 2019.
We look forward to welcoming you in Villalar!
Source:
https://www.cntvalladolid.es/events/cnt-en-villalar-en-el-campo-y-en-la-ciudad-en-pie-pueblo-obrero/
Translation> Liberto
Related Items:
https://noticiasanarquistas.noblogs.org/post/2018/04/19/espanha-juntas-e-juntos-construimos-a-ideia-libertaria-em-villalar-2018/
https://noticiasanarquistas.noblogs.org/post/2017/04/29/espanha-cronica-da-cnt-em-villalar-2017-a-real-reality-and-popular/
anarchist-ana news agency
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Message: 3
Dear Comrades -- This morning, the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group distributed its
annual Anzac Day statement at the 8 Hour Monument in Melbourne: ----
https://melbacg.wordpress.com/leaflets/ ---- Anzac Day is a public holiday in Australia,
consecrated to the memory of soldiers in Australia's imperialist wars. It is the main day
for the propagation of militarist propaganda. ---- The statement is also below. ---- In
Solidarity, ---- Ablokeimet ---- for MACG ---- IMPERIALISM MEANS ENDLESS WAR ---- World
War I ---- On 25 April 1915, Australian soldiers, along with troops from New Zealand,
Britain and France, stormed beaches on the Gallipoli Peninsula close to Istanbul, the
capital of the Ottoman Empire. The campaign was badly planned and organised from the start
and was a military disaster. It ended in defeat less than a year later, at the cost of
over 300,000 dead and wounded. It was a minor episode of the larger disaster that was
World War I, a clash between two great imperial alliances to see who could steal whose
colonies, resources and markets.
War Today
A hundred years ago, war was mostly soldiers killing other soldiers while the civil
societies behind them supplied guns and ammunition. Things don't work like that any more.
War is now waged directly on civilian societies themselves, so as to destroy their ability
to put military forces in the field and supply them. Even when the opposing army is
beaten, the war has hardly begun, because the victor intends to refashion the country in
its own interests. Occupations drag on for years, generating opposition which is met by
further violence. Drones wage a coward's war, raining death from the skies while the
pilots sit in safety far away. Some even go home to their families after "a day at the
office".
Australia's Wars
Australia today wages war in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the Gulf of Aden and in the
Philippines. All deployments are part of the US-led "War on Terror" and designed to defend
a world order dominated by US imperialism. No longer strong enough economically to impose
order through the market, the US needs to use its military to do a job that has no end.
Australia's junior imperialism helps out to ensure continued recognition of its own sphere
of interest in East Timor and the South Pacific. On the battlefield the Australian
military, armed to the teeth, deals out death to irregular forces and civilians, and only
occasionally takes casualties in return. The "War on Terror" started in 2001 and
governments no longer even talk about it ending. It is now permanent.
Peace
There will be no peace while imperialism dominates the globe. Imperialism, though, is not
a policy but the set of international relationships under global capitalism. Powerful
countries compete with each other for influence and markets and seek to impose a world
order in their favour. To end imperialism and its endless wars, we need to end capitalism.
The only road to peace is a revolution where the working class unites across national
boundaries and overthrows the competing capitalist powers. We can then build a new society
where we can be one humanity, sharing the earth and its fruit together. We can relegate
war to the history books.
END AUSTRALIAN IMPERIALISM
END CAPITALISM
Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group
https://melbacg.files.wordpress.com
macg1984 @ yahoo . com . au
PO Box 5108 Brunswick North 3056
25 April 2019
https://melbacg.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/anzac-day-2019.pdf
------------------------------
Message: 4
A quick review of 'Privatisation is THEFT - The looting of NSW public assets' by Jim
McIlroy. Socialist Alliance booklet, October 2018. ---- This is a collection of 35
articles published during 2017 and 2018 by Green Left Weekly and written by their
industrial correspondent in Sydney covering the period of the Baird-Berejiklian State
Liberal Party Government in N.S.W. ---- It is a comprehensive run down of the major
privatisation con-jobs pulled off or attempted by the Liberals in the current era. It
covers key public sector areas like hospitals, electricity and energy power plants, public
transport, prisons, public housing, etc. focusing on major campaigns where public
resistance was involved. In doing so it tends to avoid how previous ALP Governments and
their compliant Trade Unions leadership conducted similar policies or laid the ground work
for the subsequent Liberal Party public sector cutting knives.
The booklet also covers asset sell-offs of individual sections of the bureaucracy like the
Land Title Registry and significant public land marks like the Powerhouse Museum and the
Bondi Pavilion. A flash back to the corrupt Obeid era covering key coal mines sell-offs,
poles and wires issues, heritage buildings like Dept. of Lands and Dept. of Education,
both in Bridge St CBD, the N.S.W. ferries, railway cleaning jobs, etc. would have provided
a broader view on the history of the issue in N.S.W. even if it was outside this 2017-8
compilation.
The booklet also covers similar moves by the Liberals in the Federal sphere such as the
outsourcing of Centrelink jobs and moves to abolish the A.B.C. broadcasters.
In the more general articles opposing privatisation, McIlroy is prepared to concede that
neo-liberalist ideology is structurally a disease that affects both major parties of
governance under Australian capitalism. But in his nitty-gritty, slip-shod coverage of the
bus privatisation issue, he reveals a hidden agenda whereby Left mainstream party
publications cover for the trade union bureaucrats, usually with key ALP links, to hide
their role of treachery. When questioned personally on the issue he calls it "building the
united front".
Key union bureaucrats from the R.T.B.U. in N.S.W., in the opinion of many workers on the
job, undermined any real initiatives to halt the process by any united rank and file
direct action. Similarly the officials by default and hidden connivance prevented any real
on-the-job campaign to defeat Transit Systems takeover of the four inner-West Sydney bus
depots which officially started July 1st 2018 and Keolis-Downer's takeover in Newcastle in
late 2016.
Missing from this booklet is the December 12th 2016 announcement in The Newcastle Herald
by Liberal Minister Constance that Newcastle's two public bus depots and new light rail
line would be run from July 1st 2017 by a private infrastructure company Keolis-Downer.
The same article quoted the NSW Bus Division Secretary of the RTBU Chris Preston
supporting bus privatisation in Newcastle. Not a word from him about how it would set a
dangerous precedent for the 12 Sydney public bus depots. Not a word about mobilising the
Sydney depots to oppose the privatisation of their fellow union members' Newcastle jobs.
Twelve months later another Socialist Alliance member wrote an article that appeared in
Green Left Weekly about a massive public meeting of 1,000 people in Newcastle against the
complete disaster that the sell-off of buses had been in Newcastle.
The six articles on inner-West bus privatisation that appeared in this booklet from the
Green Left Weekly compilation were as follows 'NSW bus drivers strike against
privatisation' (GLW 20/05/17), 'Sydney bus drivers hold 'Free Fare Day',' (GLW 03/06/17),
''Don't sell our buses',' (GLW 30/06/17), 'Sydney bus drivers protest privatisation plan'
(GLW28/07/17), 'Union warns Ryde buses next in line for sell-off', (GLW 20/1017) and 'We
can fix the public transport crisis' (GLW 09/02/18). The coverage of the inner-West
privatisation in the McIlroy booklet on page 9 begins thus (from his 20/05/17 GLW article):
"Sydney bus drivers walked out on May 18 in a 24-hour strike against plans by the NSW
Coalition govt. To privatise public bus services in the city's inner-west. The action,
which defied the NSW Industrial Relations Commission (IRC), affected four bus depots:
Leichhardt, Burwood, Kingsgrove and Tempe."
The rest of this article quoted RTBU bus division secretary Preston. Preston's militant
press release suggested on-going industrial action was likely and complained about "no
consultation with bus drivers or the community about the (privatisation) May 17th
announcement." The article concluded with motherhood anti-Liberal statements from the ALP
and Greens spokespeople. What McIlroy never mentioned here, nor in any subsequent article
over the 18 month period before eventual defeat on the issue, was that RTBU officials Alex
Claassens and Chris Preston had months of notice before the State Liberals public
announcement in the media on May 17th to "Open tenders for Area 6 buses". Claassens (RTBU
State Secretary) does not deny he had these "top secret" regular weekly meetings with
Gladys Berejiklian during her period as Transport Minister under Premier Baird. Once she
was elevated to Premier. New Transport Minister Constance kept these meetings going. A
staffer of Federal ALP member Albanese said it was an example of "good governance practice".
Thus Preston was correct in saying the public and ordinary bus drivers were kept in the
dark on the privatisation announcement day. But the RTBU union leadership and that of the
fellow right-wing TWU union leadership (whose Secretary at least had to notify and then
authorise his membership being brought in as 'scab labour' from as far afield as Gosford
and beyond for the strike) knew full well. Hence it is not unfair to speculate that the
Union bosses and State Liberal Minister combined in a carefully-planned manoeuvre to
minimise the impact of the so-called "walking off the job" by bus drivers the day after
the Libs privatisation claim.
Two weeks before this announcement Preston, at the monthly RTBU bus division job delegates
meeting, was confronted by all 12 depot reps vote for a 24 hour all depots Sydney wide
stoppage. Unions NSW Head Mark Moray was worried. He called another meeting a week later
and forced the 12 delegates to back down to confining any stoppage to the four affected
inner-West depots. When challenged on this influence over the RTBU delegates months later,
at a Politics in the Pub address, Moray claimed he only "warned the 12 delegates they
would have to suffer the consequences" if it was a Sydney wide stoppage. Yes but were the
"consequences" being froze out of union solidarity or isolation of bus drivers after legal
action from the State Government, or both?
Now what about the 24 hour strike and walk-off on May 18th? The RTBU leaked to the media a
fake story that it had called a delegates meeting the night before at Leichhardt Depot. On
the morning of the strike the mainstream media announced it was over all 12 depots. But
there was no strike bulletins up at depots, even in the four inner-West depots. Only word
of mouth the day before the so-called "walk-off"?Maybe text messages to drivers? The Union
Executive kept their distance. It could be interpreted by them as a legal tactic to avoid
prosecution at the top? They were fined $10,000 by Fair Work anyway.
Many drivers from all depots did "walk off" on the actual day. But only after they found
out via the mainstream media and passengers telling them that they were officially on
strike. Chris Preston saved face all around by being unavailable to receive a late night
last minute communique that the strike was in defiance of a last minute IRC decision. But
where was the union leadership on the day of the strike? At a smallish lame duck RTBU
protest rally outside NSW Parliament! Lack of communication and co-ordination of this and
the follow up June 1st 2017 "No fares/No Opal cards" day of action. The union claimed the
latter event was followed in "wide sections of Sydney". Thus claiming success, but
avoiding consequences?
Big divisions in the ranks developed over these two actions. Drivers on the North side and
Eastern Subs were divided over supporting the inner-West drivers even though they all knew
they were next for privatisation. The cancelling of the over-award payments for those
involved in the "illegal" strike added to the divisions with drivers losing up to $150 pw
from their pay packets for a number of months by order of the Industrial Court. The Union
Executive did nothing to undo this effective wage cut.
As their credibility wanned, the Union heavies had a new stunt and gave the Green Left
correspondent a ‘world exclusive' for his 28 July 2017 report in Green Left. It claimed
Ryde Depot was under threat of (pending?) privatisation. Yet there was no press release
from the government or even a window of opportunity for new tenders before the next
election. It was a chance for another Luke Foley ‘doorstop' interview and for the Union
leadership to appear to be acting on what was an inevitable turn by the Libs once the
inner-West job was bedded down. The Ryde distraction was to help bed down the inner-West
situation as history, a done deal even though drivers still wanted to fight, even strike,
albeit with a lame and silent leadership.
The RTBU strategy was to rely on mass petitions of commuters and a public education
campaign and a debate in parliament around the petitions. Clearly the only thing that
would have forced a back down by the State Liberals was industrial action and public
picketing of depots. Both these tactics were denied or undermined by the career orientated
trade union bureaucracy. The Greens and even the Socialist Alliance gave only a tokenistic
support to the December 2017 community pickets of bus depots which were the last window of
opportunity for action before the expected early 2018 Constance announcement of
"successful tender".
So why would the ALP and their trade union leadership collaborate with a Liberal
Government at the expense of their members and the commuting public, contrary to all their
public announcements, you ask? Firstly, note that both the RTBU and TWU NSW union
secretaries are both on the State Executive of the ALP political party machine. Secondly,
note the cooperation between the major mainstream parties is about safe-keeping the
existing system intact as part of their taking turns in dividing the spoils of
parliamentary incumbency. The secret weekly meetings between ALP Union officials and
Liberal Ministers are just one example of how this keeps the system in place.
Further, the timing of the Sydney bus privatisation in May 2017 brought the September 2017
local council elections onto the horizon where transport privatisation was "a local
issue". Deals had to be done to keep radical Greens and community Independents out of
Mayoralships with this in mind. Witness the amalgamated Inner West Council preference
swaps between the ALP's Darcy Byrne and the Lib's Julie Passos as one example. Once in
power they ignored their own Council Traffic Advisory body's report to campaign to save
the local buses and undermined the anti-West-Connex campaign of the pre-amalgamation Councils.
The RTBU strategy was to rely on mass petitions of commuters and a public education
campaign and a debate in parliament. Clearly the only thing that would have forced a back
down by the State Liberals was industrial action and public picketing of depots. This
booklet is one for the true believers. The ones that believe you'll win public campaigns
by believing in trade union bureaucrats with cushy ALP pre-selection ambitions and desires
to constantly hoodwink workers.
Contributed, by a community transport activist.
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Message: 5
Completion of the 13th Panhellenic Conference of the Liberal Trade Union (ESE) ---- On 5-6
April 2019, the 13th Panhellenic Conference of the ESE held this year in Rethymno. ----
Representatives from four local (Athens, Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Rethymno) met and
exchanged useful experiences from their work during the past year, the coordination
between local associations, information about the condition of the trade union situation
in each city, and interventions in unions and trade unions towards its radicalization.
---- Despite the assimilation policy promoted by the government left and the embankments
that bureaucratic unionism puts to a radical organization of workers and workers, the
struggles of grassroots unionism that took place in the past, and the involvement of
workers and workers in the anti-fascist - nationalist protection and mobilization against
state-sponsored nationalism and fascism, with a class sign and an internationalist
perspective. Coordination with other anarcho-syndicalist associations at international
level was also assessed. The self-critical mood was intense to become problematic at the
level of analysis and practice, as well as differences between local ones. Finally, taking
into account the forces and the conjuncture,
https://ese.espiv.net/2019/04/24/pragmatopoiisi-tis-13is-panelladikis-s/
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