Anarchist Worker – May/June 1978

Anarchist Worker, published by the Anarchist Workers Alliance in the late 1970s/early 1980s, can be regarded as one of the forerunners of the Workers Solidarity Movement. The AWA existed in Belfast and Dublin but was always more of an idea than a reality, with membership never going into double figures. The print run was about 750 (ranging from 500 to 1,500).

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As befits a first issue, we get a page about the Anarchist Workers Alliance and why it was formed. Other articles look at the McDonalds strike for union recognition, the PAYE tax protests, the post office strike, the H-Block & Armagh prison protests, and the six county Payment for Debt Act. Longer pieces look at why the CIE craft workers committee collapsed, and the law that legalised contraceptives in the 26 counties. That was Haughey’s ‘Irish solution to an Irish problem’ which required a doctor’s prescription to buy a condom.

The centre pages are given over to an explanation of how the Spanish anarchist CNT union structures itself, with the conclusion that it “tries to abolish the bureaucracy that comes with centralisation by making sure that decisions effecting workers are taken by, and only by, those workers effected.”

Black Star – February 1984

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This second (and final) issue of Black Star appeared two and a half years after the first! Four pages are given over to graphics illustrating Proudhon’s ‘What is government?’. Other articles deal with workers councils as enabling both the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a new society, an anti-militarist piece by Jack London, Spanish anarchism, and a biographical note about local anarchist and atheist Ida White, whose husband was the founder of the Ballymena Observer newspaper.

On the back page we see “Anarchists are now having regular discussion meetings throughout Ireland in Belfast, Cork, Ballymena and Dublin. The possibility of forming a national anarchist organisation has been discussed…” This process did see the foundation of the Workers Solidarity Movement later that year but the Ballymena Anarchist Group did not join. Instead they moved towards syndicalism. Organise!, an explicitly anarcho-syndicalist group and paper was the result.