Women Workers’ Day 1921

At 18:45 on 7th March 1921, the government batteries at Sestroretsk and Lissy Noss fired the first shots against the Rebel City of Kronstadt. It was the eve of the Women Workers’ Day and the fourth anniversary of the start of the Russian Revolution (February Revolution, old calendar).

Radio Kronstadt broadcast this message from the free Soviet:

Today is a universal holiday — Women Workers’ Day. We of Kronstadt send, amid the thunder of cannon, our fraternal greetings to workingwomen of the world. May you soon accomplish your liberation from every form of violence and oppression. Long live the free revolutionary workingwomen! Long live the Social Revolution throughout the world!

J.K. Rowling and The Chamber of Terfdom: by Paul Haw.

Paul Haw is Dorset IWW Branch Secretary, a volunteer youth worker and campaigner on LGBTQ+ and disability rights.

J.K. Rowling and The Chamber of Terfdom.

I’m going to be 27 by the time 2020 comes to a close and as someone who is firmly in the millennial category, the whole universe of Harry Potter has been a fixture in both my childhood and my adult life. As a kid I remember my dad taking time out from his taxi driving job on a Friday night so he could join the queues at my hometown’s sole bookshop to be one of the first to obtain the new Harry Potter book.

The first time I remember going to the cinema was in 2001 to see the first Harry Potter film and I remember my excitement to see the story on the big screen as a seven year old boy shivering outside the tiny, two screen cinema that was in the big town about a half hour’s drive from our house. I remember how magical it was to escape into that world and I remember the messages of overcoming adversity resonating with my young self, being the only boy in the class with cerebral palsy and having to wear brightly coloured leg splints and having daily sessions of physiotherapy.

In my teenage years, I retreated away from this world and dove full throttle into the worlds of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P Lovecraft, B-movies, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and 1980s slasher horror films. I believe these campy, macabre worlds were probably linked to the love my childhood self had for the kitchy, campy, creepy world of Harry Potter. As I approached my twenties and got diagnosed with a bipolar spectrum disorder, the world of my childhood provided much needed comfort at a time where I was experiencing frequent episodes of depression and psychosis whilst trying to complete a degree in English and live on my own for the very first time. Even during the current COVID-19 pandemic, one of my coping mechanisms at the beginning of lockdown was to watch a Harry Potter film on Saturday night by candlelight whilst eating Chinese takeaway.

All of this means that I was deeply disappointed by Rowling’s recent tweets that parroted the TERF talking points about “sex-based rights” and her absolute revulsion against the term “people who menstruate”. The damaging implications of sex essentialism have been documented on this blog and many others and I shall not repeat those same points. However, it says a lot that the world’s first billionaire author decides to use her time during a global pandemic and an uprising against state-sanctioned racism to further marginalise and vilify one of the most oppressed groups of people on this planet.

As a response to the criticism and fury she received on Twitter from trans people, queer people and their allies, she decided to write a 3,600 word essay on her blog. I’m not going to link it here because I do not wish to befoul this blog with transphobic rhetoric but it’s very easy to find if you want to read it; although, I would advise that it is very intense and it will probably be quite an upsetting read. I cried tears of rage reading it and I cried for the trans youth that I work with as a youth worker for a local LGBTQ+ charity.

In the essay, Rowling provides a narrative of her life in the early 1990s before Harry Potter exploded into our cultural consciousness. She frankly and openly talks about being a survivor of severe domestic and sexual abuse. As a sexual abuse survivor, I empathise with her and I do hope that she has been able to access the support needed to be able to process the trauma she has experienced.

The question that remains, however, is why did she choose this moment to speak about it? It plays into the unfounded, deeply bigoted caricature of trans women being men who just want to pose as women so they can sexually assault women in public bathrooms. When we look at the reality, we see that in the 21 countries which have introduced self-ID for trans people to change their birth certificates, none have reported an increase in sex crimes as a result. We can also look at several US States, the most notable being North Carolina, where bathroom bills were introduced and we see an increase in assaults being perpetrated against trans people in bathrooms and an increase in those same assaults against cisgender people who present in a gender nonconforming manner.

It is also important to consider that one of the “leaders” of the TERF movement, the increasingly irrelevant and deplorable former Labour Party hack that is Linda Bellos is actually on film saying that she would beat up a trans woman if she happened to be in the same bathroom as her. Approximately every 72 hours, a trans person is murdered somewhere in the world because of their gender identity and by playing into myths and caricatures, JK Rowling has put those people at increased risk.

Rowling also moves onto the topic of incels. Incels, for the record, are men who believe that they are owed the right to sex just because they happen to be male. They are angry that women choose not to sleep with them and several incels have gone on to commit murders of those women. They also harbour a hatred for the men that they see as stealing their opportunities to pursue the women that they wish to sleep with. Elliot Rodger murdered six people in California back in 2014 as “retribution” for his lack of sexual experience and activity.

In 2018, Alek Minassian murdered 10 people in a vehicle-ramming attack in downtown Toronto to instigate an “incel rebellion” and had written several internet posts praising Elliot Rodger. Many incels look at the Ecole Polytechnique massacre of 1989 as a positive thing and something to be inspired by. In this massacre, Marc Lepine burst into an engineering class, forced the men and women in the room to stand on opposite sides and shoot all six women there. He then rampaged for a further twenty minutes, killing eight more women before killing himself. His motive was to “fight feminism”.

Rowling will be acutely aware of how horrific these events are and how the state does not take violence against women seriously enough. Again, we have to question her motives around bringing up these issues in this particular moment. It is morally abhorrent and repugnant of her and her supporters to link trans people and their allies to incels. I’m a cisgender man but I stand with trans people who are just trying to live their lives as their authentic selves and be recognised as such. We are not murdering women to further this cause and we are not terrorists. We simply believe in human rights and in bodily autonomy. She should be ashamed of herself for insinuating that there is anything linking us to the incels and it proves that her interpretation of feminism is fundamentally and objectively wrong.

The final part of her essay I wish to address is where she talks about “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD). ROGD is a pseudoscientific term used by the TERFs and their allies to try and explain away the large increase of young people seeking help and support with their gender identity. They like to blame a plethora of things for this which include but are not limited to; Japanese anime, tumblr, YouTube and autism. There is a link between being autistic and being transgender but that link is being actively researched by experts in the fields of neuroscience, neuropsychology and cognitive psychology and will probably take a long time to come to any semblance of a conclusion. On the other hand, ROGD has seemingly been invented in a chat room on Mumsnet.

As a youth worker who is directly working with these young people, I can confidently say that ROGD is baseless and unfounded. Young people have access to the internet and they are able to learn about gender outside of a Eurocentric viewpoint. Young people have always explored their gender identity but it is only now that they have the tools and the vocabulary to be able to do so fully. Do I think that every single one of my young people who identify as transgender is going to end up transitioning as an adult? Possibly, possibly not. In spite of that, it is important that young people are able to access the support and guidance that they need whilst exploring their gender identity.

They need compassionate and empathic people around them especially as 80% of trans young people will self harm and about half will attempt suicide. These young people are very vulnerable in a world where transgender people are treated as though they are the lowest class of citizen and by using ROGD as an excuse to explain all this away, Rowling and her allies are creating moral panic reminiscent of the moral panic around gay men in the 1980s and 1990s. It is this kind of language that causes governments to enact legislation like Section 28 that will damage a whole generation of young people.

I do not believe that JK Rowling is an inherently hateful person because a hateful person could not have written the Harry Potter series which is essentially an antifascist parable; despite its use of questionable antisemitic and racial stereotypes. What I believe is, like many women who grew up in second wave feminism, JK Rowling is using her platform to try and stay relevant in a culture that has long since moved on. I also believe that she has possibly been radicalised by the likes of Linda Bellos and Graham Lineham on Twitter. Rowling does not need to indulge in this desperate attempt to remain culturally relevant as Harry Potter has become a permanent and ubiquitous fixture of popular culture. People come from around the world just to have their pictures taken at Kings Cross Station where they’ve set up the entrance to Platform nine and three-quarters.

Rowling has often tried to pander to us LGBTQ+ folks, wildly announcing that certain characters in the series are LGBTQ+ when no hint of that was given in the original stories. It is this that makes her latest outbursts beyond offensive. She has used our community to make money and royalties for herself whilst throwing the most vulnerable people in our community under the Hogwarts Express.

I still love those stories of my childhood and I am taking relative comfort in Barthes’ The Death of the Author to take some sort of ownership of those stories and to separate them from a woman I once admired. Her following is large but the loudest voices in that following are the minority and many of the actors who brought those stories to life have expressed their unequivocal support for transgender people. We will win this fight and we must stand in solidarity with our trans siblings, always.

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities”

– Albus Dumbeldore

Paul Haw

E-mail gal-dem: Stop using kickstarter.

The kickstarter US internet funding company is notorious for its anti-union attitude and open hostility to Working Class self-organisation, so we are dismayed to find that the gal-dem media outlet has gone into partnership with it.

With its magazine format, gal-dem combines popular culture and other ephemera with some incisive political, social and historical content.

The Kickstarter United union was initially formed not just to haggle over wages but to hold the company to account over its politics, in particular failure to support an anti-Nazi publication and poor handling of sexual harassment.

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/kickstarter-votes-to-form-union-will-other-tech-employees-follow-suit

The management’s response has been patronising and arrogant, they call themselves “the leadership” and claim to know better than their Workers! They fired union organisers Taylor Moore and Clarissa Redwine and tried to bribe them into signing non-disclosure agreements – which they refused, other sackings followed.

www.currentaffairs.org/2019/09/we-stand-with-the-kickstarter-union

In a leaked memo they bleat:

“The effort to unionize Kickstarter hasn’t felt transparent or fair.” and: “Furthermore, we feel we’re owed more detail from the union organizers as to what their specific demands are and how a union will address them.”

Bosses are not leaders, they are a class who purchase our time and a pretence of deference, as cheaply as possible and use it to increase their capital, an abstract quantity that represents their power over us and their ability to restrict our access to the things we produce. They trade our needs and abilities on the market and reward us with a fraction of the social product they expropriated from us and our Fellow Workers the day before. This isn’t “transparent or fair” and the Working Class owes them nothing.

It’s been the experience of the IWW that some charitable and ‘third sector’ enterprises make the worst employers. They are often extremely hierarchical, run by unaccountable self-important cliques who expect their employees to work for love. In fact every Worker needs a union and has an absolute right to organise on the job, this is not negotiable.

Most radical and progressive causes have disengaged with kickstarter and will boycott their clients. This is from the facebook page of the musician and activist Robb Johnson:

“I have just cancelled – I hope – the current Kickstarter. In response to questions about union membership Kickstarter support responded:

Currently no employees at Kickstarter are unionized. We’re not in a position to speak to this at length, but we can tell you that Aziz Hasan, Kickstarter’s CEO, spoke with the staff earlier this year and shared the leadership team’s position, which is that the company is better set up to achieve its mission without the framework of a union. He also said that leadership would not voluntarily recognize the union if asked.

I don’t want to work with or make money for a “leadership” that is anti-union.“

– Robb Johnson.

If like us, you have enjoyed gal-dem in the past, please e-mail them at info@gal-dem.com and urge them to make up their minds which side they’re on in the Class War. Or comment on their Facebook page

Anarchy in the Sticks 2020!

Dorset Radical Bookfair

Dorset’s fourth Radical Bookfair will take place on the 8th August 2020 at Dorchester Corn Exchange. Invitations will go out soon, if you’d like to be involved please get in touch:

dorsetbookfair@riseup.net

World Resistance Day for Rojava: 2nd November 2019

Internationalist Commune

The revolution in Northeast Syria will prevail, fascism will be smashed!

At 4pm on October 9th, the Turkish occupation army and its Islamist allies began their long-prepared war of aggression against the liberated areas of northern Syria.

At four o’clock sharp in the afternoon, bombs rained down on people in towns and villages on the border. Jihadist militias began their advance under the leadership of the Turkish army and tried to penetrate into the border area. Turkey is talking about a “military operation” aimed at “securing the border” and establishing a so-called “peace corridor”, but the fact is that the Turkish army and the Islamist mercenaries under its command are concerned with nothing less than the occupation of the mostly Kurdish populated entire area along the Turkish-Syrian border. The regime in Ankara speaks of the “fight against terrorism” and emphasizes that their war of aggression is not about the war on the civilian population, but indiscriminate bombing of civilian settlements, looting and mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of people, arbitrary executions and the brutal abduction of hundreds of civilians speak a different language. The further the war against northern Syria progresses, the more it becomes clear, what Erdogan is really about, namely ethnic cleansing through the violent expulsion of millions of people and the long-term demographic change of the entire region.

In the north of Syria, in the shadow of the Syrian civil war, a revolutionary and democratic social project has thrived in the past seven years

Full post

A Class War Against State War – IWW Istanbul’s Statement on the Turkish Invasion of Syria

From Industrial Worker
The following statement was originally published on Yeryüzü Postası

We call on all workers — workers who are exploited under this system, workers who have become increasingly impoverished and who are being sent to die — not to join this war, but to unite against it.

At a time when war is taking place in Syria, war which has no purpose other than death, destruction, and poverty, the AKP government launched a mission of occupation that will only further increase chaos. Like the previous occupation of Afrin, this operation shows that neither Russia, the US, nor other imperialist powers care about the Kurdish people.

This operation is a continuation of the extermination and denial of the Kurdish state based on the rejection of a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question and is also part of the AKP’s imperial fantasies that will only complicate the Syrian problem. The provocation by Turkey, with the help of other countries, caused more Syrian people to leave their country and triggered a new wave of migration that made it impossible to build housing for refugees who were evacuated from the border region. It is madness.

To eliminate Kurds from the border zone eliminates the possibility of a peaceful solution to the problem. It makes the war even worse and only increases the chances of further chaos spreading in the Middle East.

Worker’s pay has already started to be cut back with the increased cost of operations in Turkey. The meaning of this operation is “do you know the price of one bullet?”

The increasing nationalism and militarization of Turkey only strengthens the capitalist system and the bosses who run it. This operation and the crisis it creates weakens our struggle against capitalism.

We are completely against this operation because it means more death and poverty for our class. We condemn all wars between nations, as a part of our historical heritage. We believe that it is the historic duty of the working class to fight against this war and the lie of national unity that is intended to be promoted in the name of this war. We have no common interests with the bosses and the governments in their service!

Furthermore, Turkish workers and thousands of other people have lost their lives, are getting poorer every minute, and live terrorized because of the Syrian war. To end this war, the workers of the world have to organize and move. We must strongly oppose the policy of states that provoke, deepen and make even more destructive the war for the interests of the ruling classes.

We call on all workers—workers who are exploited under this system, workers who have become increasingly impoverished and who are being sent to die—not to join this war, but to unite against it.

It is time to talk about what we can do against this war from our shopfloors, how to silence the chauvinists, how to defeat the smell of nationalist blood in the air, and how to stop the war and mitigate its effects. We are organizing workers against the war. Immediately! Now!

IWW Istanbul

Transphobia and the Bookfair – a clarification.

Anarchy in the Sticks!

It should be blindingly obvious to everyone by now that we are a trans-inclusive event. The collective has many transgender and non-binary comrades and they are welcome at the Bookfair.

We are mostly class-struggle anarchists and libertarian socialists, therefore anyone campaigning for the state to constrain transgender – or any other – people against their will, or to coerce them into prescribed paths and patterns of behaviour, would not be welcome.

We don’t see any need of exclusive facilities for cis-people, precisely because cis-people are the hegemonic group. For the same reason we don’t need white history month, straight pride month, international men’s day or exclusive clubs for gentiles. If attendees advocated for such things you would expect us to show them the door.

We should all beware of imposing our pet theories on other people’s lived experiences. You’re welcome to your ‘nuances’ (whatever that means) but don’t come around telling anyone they’re deluded or faking it. Please do not bring ‘gender-critical’ or ‘sex-essentialist’ propaganda to the Bookfair.

Enjoy the Bookfair, we’re going to!

Trans/intersex Solidarity Gathering Bournemouth 28th October.

Fellow Workers! Stand by our trans and intersex comrades in the U.S.A. An injury to one is an injury to all. 13:00 hrs Bournemouth Square (remember to put your clock back).

Donald Trump really doesn’t want you to do this, he’s counting on you not giving a shit.

From the organisers: “This is a gathering in solidarity with our trans and intersex family in the States dealing with the potential disgusting changes to the US definition of gender and sex.

The Trump administration wants to remove the word ‘gender’ from two key laws and replace it with ‘sex’, specifically they want to ‘define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with’, which goes against scientific and medical evidence from the AMA and APA.

This would remove protection from discrimination in the workplace, in schools, housing and healthcare to name a few.

Combine this with the recent changes to passport gender markers (to ‘sex marker’) and the resulting difficulty trans people have faced in accessing a passport, and you can form your own conclusions.

We gather in solidarity with our trans family, and our intersex family, to show that we #WontBeErased and #weseeyou“

Statement from Bristol Solidarity Federation regarding ‘norwich SF’ facebook page.

Please share widely, especially if you are an anarchist and/or revolutionary unionist.

Taken from facebook: Solidarity Federation – Bristol 19th October

We were shocked and angered to see the bitterly transphobic messages appearing on Norwich Solfed’s facebook page this week. Our last contact with Norwich SF was at a federal conference a year ago, where the Norwich delegate informed us they were now the only member of Norwich Solfed. Norwich’s facebook page hadn’t been active for several months, so we assumed that the group had disbanded. We were aware of some bad blood between the current member and ex-members of Norwich SF. We don’t honestly know who is running their facebook page at the moment; whether it’s a troll, a former member with an axe to grind or a lingering bigot who simply hasn’t understood the organisation which they are part of. We plan on looking into this and we sincerely hope that whoever posted that message is nothing to do with the Solidarity Federation.

We can say in no uncertain terms that the views expressed on the Norwich SF page are abhorrent to us and not remotely representative of the views of the Solidarity Federation. We feel ashamed to share a name with anyone who thinks and talks in those terms.

We’re not going to go into the specifics of what happened at the London Bookfair. But to be clear, our objections to the Trans-Exclusionary ‘Radical Feminism’ espoused there and elsewhere are as follows:

• Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary folks are non-binary. All of them are valid. Statements like ‘woman=adult human female’ aren’t ‘expressions of facts’, they are gross over-simplifications of complex issues that are designed to bait people and stoke transphobia. Don’t pretend you can’t see that.
• Self ID is the only true measure of a person’s gender. As anarchists, we believe that the State should have no role in defining a person’s gender.
• The claim that trans folks in women-only spaces pose a threat to the women in them has zero evidence to support it. There is a considerable amount of evidence that trans folk of any gender are at a huge risk of violence and denying them access to safe spaces, as the TERFs are campaigning for, would be massively harmful. The TERF’s claims that they are protecting women-only spaces are disingenuous and don’t stand up to scrutiny. Digging out a few token examples of trans women who are predators is a poor justification for demonising an entire social group.
• Transphobia is a real, material force for oppression. It needs to be stamped out. Claiming that transphobia is ‘very far from being of vital importance to most people’ just shows that whoever wrote that post doesn’t know any trans people. An injury to one is an injury to all. Think about what that means.
• TERFs are far-right bigots in a left-wing skin. Their tactics and rhetoric are no different to the tactics of Tommy Robinson and the rest of the alt-right, co-opting feminism and using the fear of sexual violence to persecute an already marginalised group. We can do better than buying their shit.

If anyone is unfamiliar with these issues and wants to know more, we can recommend the following organisations:

• Sister not Cister UK
• Sisters Uncut
• Action for Trans Health
• And if you can, we highly recommend checking out the excellent ‘Why we Fight the TERF War’ workshops which are running up and down the UK.
• You can also contact Solfed’s LGBT+ co-ordinator.

Finally, we want to apologise on behalf of the whole Federation for what Norwich have done. We really hope that no-one exposed to their toxicity has been negatively affected by what was said.

Our Federal conference is next month and we will be raising this issue then. In the mean time, we would welcome contact from anyone involved in Norwich SF who can shed some light on what has happened.

We will investigate what’s happened and deal with it. SF will never be a safe hiding place for bigots.

Anna Campbell – Rest in Power Fellow Worker

From Bristol IWW

It is with great sadness that we learn of the passing of Fellow Worker Anna Campbell, killed by Turkish forces while fighting alongside Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) in the defence of Afrin.

Anna was a dedicated feminist, social justice and environmental campaigner known to members for her activism around the student occupation movement, ecological and community outreach projects in Bristol and Sheffield. She was a key organiser in the IWW’s IWOC group, also being involved with the Empty Cages Collective, Smash IPP and Bristol ABC.

Anna travelled to Syria last May to participate in the grassroots feminist and socialist revolution that continues to grow in Rojava (the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Syria). Anna spent her first months in the country fighting in Deir ez-Zor, Isis’s last major stronghold. However when Turkey launched an assault on the city of Afrin in late January. Anna insisted that she be redeployed there. She gave her commanders an ultimatum, ‘Either I will go home and abandon the life as a revolutionary or you send me to Afrin. But I would never leave the revolution, so I will go to Afrin’.

A spokesperson from the YPJ said of Anna (who took the nom de guerre ‘Helîn’ in Rojava): “comrade Helîn will always be a symbol as a pioneering internationalist woman. We will live up to her hope and beliefs. We will forever pursue her aim to struggle for women, for oppressed communities.”

Our thoughts and condolences are with Anna’s family, friends and comrades at this time.

Rest in Power Fellow Worker.

–

For more information on how you can support the Kurdish struggle please see:
Kurdistan Solidarity Campaign / Bristol Kurdish Solidarity Network