Welcome to the website for Organise! friends of the International Worker’s Association, we were accepted as affiliates as a ‘friends of’ section to the IWA at its historic centenary Congress in Alcoi, Spain on Friday 9th December 2022. This website was launched on May Day 2020.
You can check out our new southern bulletin Class War and our northern bulletin Black Star, the latest copy of The Leveller which is being relaunched later this year as a magazine. From the Just Books Collective there is the Just Books online shop and of course the Just Books Review. See also news, reviews and forthcoming titles from Just Books Publishing. We are still adding copies of The Leveller to our archive here and have started to add pamphlets as well. We are working on building up a more extensive online archive over the coming months.
Get Involved and help Build an Anarchist Alternative.
Organise! is an anarcho-syndicalist propaganda group and Union initiative which organises across Ireland – north and south. We take inspiration from the self directed struggles of working-class people, particularly those organised on anarcho-syndicalist lines. Our history goes back to the original formation of Organise! by the Ballymena and Antrim Anarchist Groups in 1985. On the 9th of December 2022 we were unanimously admitted as a ‘friends of’ section of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers Association at its historic centenary Congress in Alcoi, Spain.
We are ordinary working class people who are fed up with being fucked about by the profit system, fed up with seeing our communities torn apart by racism, patriarchy, nationalism and sectarianism, and sick of a greedy few getting rich off everyone else’s backs.
We are actively working to promote solidarity in opposition to capitalism, the state, patriarchy and all other forms of oppression and hierarchy. The way we organise reflects the free society we want to create: one based on voluntary association, democratic participation and self-management.
Our members are workers: claimants, students, migrants, unemployed and other working-class people. We are all committed to building a libertarian communist Union movement actively opposed to all forms of oppression and exploitation.
We want to improve everyday conditions for ourselves and other working class people, but we also struggle for the revolutionary transformation that can create a free and equal society, one based on mutual aid and co-operation. Sound crazy? Maybe it does, but all the alternatives assume the continuation of the present system… and that’s even crazier…
The current system isn’t working – stress and overwork affect more and more people while others are flung on the dole; for increasing amounts of workers it is precarity, zero hours contracts and the stress of being unable to plan or budget our lives; we live in a world of plentiful resources yet millions starve; some people make vast fortunes just because they own companies, land, property or natural resources, but those of us who create the wealth, work the land and build the properties are left struggling to pay for the natural resources; politicians tell us there’s no money – not for wages, benefits or local amenities, but there’s always plenty for war; both locally and globally the gap between the richest and the poorest sections of society has never been so great; instead of a war on poverty they’ve got a war on ‘benefit fraud’, a war on drugs and a ‘war on terror’ and the same institutions that create war, poverty and environmental destruction stigmatise, imprison and deport the resultant refugees.
We don’t think these things are inevitable or coincidental, we think they are related to capitalism – an economic system defined by wage slavery and the accumulation of profit out of other people’s work. So we support all workers against their bosses in demanding higher wages and better conditions. We try to intervene practically to support workers engaged in disputes and are also active in our own workplaces and communities. Not only against exploitation but against the multiple oppressions faced by members of the working class in all our diversity.
But it’s not just a question of trying to struggle by in a world of exploitation and oppression; we look to a future where workers control production and society in their own interests. And unlike some people who claim to oppose capitalism, we don’t want to be a new set of leaders and we refuse to be led by anyone else. We advocate direct democracy in the workplace and through the commune in our communities – working in federation to ensure that the needs of all are met and that no-one is ever again in a position to oppress or exploit another human being.
If you are interested in these ideas, we’d encourage you to explore the website and consider getting involved.
We currently have members in Belfast, Cork, Derry, Lisburn, Newtownabbey and Portadown and are building the organisation on the basis of active involvement and participation. We aren’t interested in meaningless ‘paper’ membership so you can’t join by filling in an online form and bunging us a few quid.
To talk to us about joining get the ball rolling by sending an email to:
organiseasi@gmail.com