Nearly one year after OLSX set up camp outside St Paul’s, we are preparing for a hot autumn, with strikes, a Trade Union Congress and student demonstrations. Inasmuch as the situation is pregnant with new opportunities, we must not forget where we came from. We have come a long way from the anti-capitalist […]
Occupy, like many preceding social movements, features the battle of the ‘radical’ versus the ‘liberal’. The debate tends to go in one direction with ‘radicals’ proclaiming in blogs and independent media that ‘liberals’ gut the movement of radical thought, inspiration, and the militancy that will eventually smash capitalism and the […]
Our movement is, they say, an ecosystem. There is no central committee. There is no vanguard. There is no Politburo. There are thousands of people involved in hundreds of mutually beneficial projects, running in roughly the same direction. At the recent Netroots gathering, former communist organiser and current Newsnight Economics […]
This is the perspective of one Alarm member. Just some pointers to consider when organising 1. As anarchists we believe a self-organised collective process is the key to organising, one that does away with hierarchical structures and egos. Meetings should always either have a concise action plan or take the […]
In August 1985 my late partner went to the dentist. They told him they were concerned by how swollen his glands were. It was at the height of the initial AIDS panic in the UK and there was quite a lot of alarm among gay men, so we feared that […]
I didn’t get my first job until I was part-way through my degree. My impaired mobility meant I couldn’t do the kinds of work young people traditionally do, like bar work or stacking supermarket shelves. So I claimed benefits until I was educated enough for people to be willing to […]
The millionaire wreckers now in government are determined to continue with the wholesale destruction of our National Health Service and welfare state, both of which most disabled people rely on. The NHS and the welfare state were fought for through generations of poverty and misery by working class people. Likewise, […]
Amid a mass of measures by which a government’s performance can be evaluated – unemployment statistics, credit ratings, borrowing figures – one test in particular stands out. English philosopher T.H. Green proposed that for each government action, one should ask: “Does it liberate individuals by increasing their self-reliance or their ability […]
Karen Sherlock was just an ordinary woman. She didn’t have a great deal of money, her health meant she didn’t get many opportunities to go out, particularly not anywhere you might have seen her, and even if you did you wouldn’t have given her another thought. Just another woman in middle […]
Despite claims that welfare spending is ‘out of control’, the Government is handing out billions of pounds to a private sector actively involved in demolishing the welfare state. One example: Atos, the global IT company, currently receives around £100m a year to carry out the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) on […]