Workers Solidarity Alliance of Connecticut
By Matt
The Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA) of Connecticut has been busy this second year of our existence as a local of WSA, a coast-to-coast social anarchist organization. We continued some of our ongoing work with Queers Without Borders (QWB), a group that serves as a space for radicals to discuss issues in the LGBfakeT movement and build up a more working class-centric base. We also held a discussion on reproductive freedom—a social anarchist concept contrasted with the idea of reproductive "rights" as something that the state grants us.
We organized a successful International Workers' Day festival in Hartford this year, with musicians Taina y La Banda Rebelde and Broadcast Live, a puppet show about the 1912 Lawrence IWW textile strike, and a radical walking tour of downtown Hartford. It was very well attended, benefiting from group collaboration and proximity to other well-attended events that day, including an immigrant rights march. We reached a large number of regular folks and built up some local cred for our group.
Since attending the Class Struggle Anarchist Conference in October of last year, we have been looking to engage in common work with other like-minded anarchists elsewhere in North America. In Seattle, Boston, Buffalo and elsewhere, anarchists have been doing housing justice organizing and building real popular power and influence, and so we've begun talking to community activists in our area to see where we can plug in. Already, our roots here in the Hartford area have paid off, and we'll shortly begin working with a long-standing informal committee of women of color tenants in the city's North End to improve building conditions. Our aim is to become oriented toward grassroots organizing that has a direct impact on the lives of the members of our class, and to make our ideas relevant to as many working class folks as possible.
Finally, we trekked out to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, where we networked with groups similar to QWB and learned from grassroots housing justice organizations. We also participated in the New World from Below convergence center, organized by Solidarity and Defense, as a social anarchist space within this massive gathering of social movements.