A major strike wave in France last December forced the government to withdraw many of their attacks on living standards. Now in Germany similar attacks are meeting a mass response. On June 15th some 350,000 German workers gathered in Bonn. The demonstration had been originally organised by an umbrella group which included the anarcho-syndicalist FAU-IWA. It was taken over by the German Trade Union federation, the DGB, which then excluded the original organisers from the platform for being too radical.
The government’s plans included attacks on sick pay, pensions, unfair dismissal laws and the unemployed as part of an international pattern that many have termed “neo-liberalism”. The DGB chartered 77 special trains and 5,400 coaches to transport workers to Bonn for the day. DGB chairman Schulte was poorly received by the crowd, being booed at several points in his speech in particular when he said the DGB intended to remain in the ‘Alliance for Work’ (a national plan similar to the PCW). Members of the IG Medien union from Berlin, carried a banner which declared “social partnership — there are other ways: general strike, occupy, expropriate”.
Iberia Airlines got more then it bargained for recently when it suspended a delegate of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT-AIT union in Madrid in April. The 21 day suspension was harassment intended to curtail union activity but Iberia were forced to back down after less then a week when anarchists in at least a dozen countries targeted local Iberian offices for occupations, pickets and leafleting.
Anarchists in Belorussia have been targeted by the state in the aftermath of protests in Minsk commemorating the Chernobyl incident which were attacked by police and ‘special forces’. Several have been arrested and all protests in the city have been banned.
On June 4th, the Polish Anarchist Federation organised a demonstration in Warsaw in remembrance of the massacre on Tiananmen Square in Peking in 1989. People marched to the Chinese embassy to protest against the regime and other world governments which are co-operating with them. The demonstration included a symbolic tank killing protesting students while diplomats from Poland, USA, Russia and other countries were signing trade deals with the Chinese government.