Cover of the first issue of “Workers Solidarity”
The Workers Solidarity Movement is one of the more impressive anarchist organisations of modern times. While always a small organisation it has been active on the radical left in Ireland for close to thirty years and at the same time it has exerted considerable influence on Anarchism internationally, particularly in the early years of the Internet.
The organisation has gone through a number of different periods and has seen its fortunes rise and fall repeatedly in that time. Not that the ride has been a roller-coaster of ups and downs; the highs were, in the grand scheme of things, modest enough, the lows correspondingly tolerable. The WSM, in other words, is no Workers’ Party.1
Founded in 1984, the WSM was oriented towards socialism at a time when radical liberalism was particularly influential in British Anarchism, which was as culturally influential then as tendencies from the United States are today. Given the historical weakness of Irish socialism, let alone anarchism, the few precursors of which came out of the Official Republican Movement, this explicitly left ideological foundation served to ground the WSM throughout its history. The avowedly socialist orientation served to inoculate for a long-time against too great a penetration of the more individualist strains that have bedevilled Anarchism since the 1880s.
In recent years, and particularly in reaction to the latest wave of austerity measures, we have seen an upswing in the size and importance of parties that are to the left of social democracy, a development that is greeted with joy within the radical left.
This was a book that meets my interests almost perfectly – I’m fascinated both by the study of empathy and cultural representations of sociopathy. And I love watching TV. But 
