For two months Spain’s coal miners have been on strike; they famously marched on Madrid to take their protest directly to the conservative government; more recently they have been subjected to brutal police repression, fighting back with home-made rockets and dynamite. Their dispute hinges, as do all politics at the moment, on austerity measures. The [...]
In the last two posts (1,2) we briefly considered what happened in the run-up to, and during Britain’s mass public sector strikes a little over a week ago on 30th November 2011 (so-called N30). We fitted it into a longer running series of agitations, beginning with the student movements this time last year, the major [...]
On 29th November I spoke to an ambulance driver (who wished not to be named) at a major urban hospital. “What are you lot on about?” He approached me, pointing to the copies of the newspaper which I was distributing. “The public sector strike tomorrow, and the pensions the politicians are pulling in” I [...]
There are two newspapers in the UK to read if you’re after the grubby materiality of what’s going on in the country: Fleet Street and the City of London’s mainstay, the Financial Times, and the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Morning Star. The Economist is no longer “where the ruling classes chat amongst themselves” as [...]
As the unofficial Occupy-franchise establishes branches around the Western world, it is never too early to start addressing the nearly unbearable features of the inflections of peacefulness outside the places where it is proper not to “harass” anyone, the United States. My colleague A. Staley Groves has already ventured into an analysis of the movement [...]