No, no, no, no, that's not going to be the case...

When elections for the President of Iceland are held next month, it would be great if that person was someone who remembered what it is like to live as an ordinary person in Iceland, paying taxes, saving for holidays, not being married to a multi, multi millionaire - that sort of thing. The current President, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who is standing again is still the favourite by a long way but then he assured CNN News that his family would not be found anywhere near the tax haven scandals that have engulfed leading politicians in the ruling coalition. He had to do a very sharp u-turn when the news about his rich wife's super-rich family and their money in the tax haven got out.

Here's a little mashup from Sveinbjorn Palsson of Ólafur Ragnar impressing on us just how much he will never be found in any such scandal. It won't be long til we know what the voters think.

Farewell Sigmundur Davið

Iceland's Prime Minister, Sigmundur Davið Gunnlaugsson from the poorly named Progressive Party, Framsóknarflokkurinn, has graciously admitted this evening that he has actually resigned and not just asked a colleague to stand in for him for a bit. This only happened because of the enormous demo this week against Sigmundur Davið by tens of thousands of ordinary people sick of the corruption that appears to be endemic to Iceland's elite. Here's an article I wrote yesterday about the situation. And here's hoping the Icelandic left are working on a coherent strategy now that they have a new opportunity to fight austerity and get rid of everyone in the government who has got richer from the financial crisis.

Two books that swim against the tide

I have written an article reviewing two books in the latest issue of International Socialism Journal which deal with the crises of modern fisheries and the lives of fishers around the world. These are Fishers and Plunderers: Theft, Slavery and Violence at Sea by Alistair Couper, Hance D Smith and Bruno Ciceri, (Pluto Press 2015), and Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries and Aquaculture by Stefano B Longo, Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

Human activity has pushed the world’s oceans into crisis from overfishing, pollution and warming water linked to climate change—and if nothing is done about it the results will be catastrophic for marine systems and the billions of humans who rely on them. The World Wildlife Fund’s 2015 Living Blue Planet Report: Species, Habitats and Human Wellbeing clearly shows that in just over 40 years, marine vertebrate populations have declined by 49 percent. These vertebrates include all our favourite dinner fish such as cod, haddock, salmon and tuna while a quarter of shark, ray and skate species are now threatened by extinction, mostly due to overfishing and environmental degradation. 

At the same time fishing remains one of the most dangerous occupations. Even in advanced capitalist countries such as the United States, with theoretically stringent safety rules and equipment, fishers are 25 times more likely to die at work than the national all-worker fatal injury rate.

Fishers and Plunderers and The Tragedy of the Commodity are part of the contested solutions offered to this crisis and they complement each other in that they centre on powerful, fragile marine ecosystems and the ordinary people who live by working them. Both books recognise capitalism’s drive for profit and the commodification of every aspect of fishing as part of the problem and argue that the solutions arrived at have only exacerbated the problems of overfishing and environmental degradation.

Find the rest of the article at here or at isj.org.uk

Iceland's crisis and the power of its working class

It is good to see the article in Jacobin magazine online, Iceland’s Revolution by Viðar Þorsteinsson this month that summarises the political situation in Iceland since the 2008 crash. It points out that the lack of a clear left alternative with a coherent strategy for tackling the cuts in living standards and the debt burden, has wasted the enormous angry protests that surged as the crisis unfolded. As we know a lot of nonsense has been written and repeated about the Icelandic establishment putting people before the banks. As Viðar puts it, the story goes; 

“The Icelanders put the bankers in jail. The Icelanders crowdsourced a new constitution. The Icelanders refused to bail out the banks. The Icelanders held a national referendum on sovereign debt.”

The reality, Marxist economist Michael Roberts reiterated on his blog earlier this month is,

“Iceland did not renege on the huge debts that its corrupt banks ran up with foreign institutions (mainly the UK and the Netherlands). It eventually renegotiated them and is now paying them back like Greece.

“And devaluation did not mean that Icelanders escaped from a huge loss in living standards. They have done little better than the Greeks on that score – although of course, Icelanders started from a much higher standard of living than the Greeks. In euro terms, Icelandic employee real incomes fell 50% and are still 25% below pre-crisis levels.”

Viðar Þorsteinsson adds that government responses to the crash, “were only modestly progressive...In some cases, debt-relief policies have been outright reactionary in their upward redistribution of wealth.” And that's without mentioning the immediate raid on pensions as the crash unfolded.

Viðar goes on, “Remarkably, popular sentiment against banking and indebtedness has not been channelled into building any long-term prospects for the Icelandic left. Rather, the country's establishment parties have successfully promoted their own weak measures against mortgage plight to recover from the loss of trust they suffered following the crash.” The left will have to address missed opportunities and he concludes;

“Above all the Icelandic experience reveals the urgency of finding an egalitarian and redistributive approach to debt politics; one which can relay popular sentiment without falling into nationalism, limiting itself to superficial reform or making the finance sector a scapegoat for the systemic failures of capitalism.”

This is fine as far as it goes - though I don’t care whether bankers are made scapegoats—theses parasites caused this global financial crisis, but the point here is the systemic failures of capitalism. and Iceland's Revolution does not mention the force in Iceland with the economic muscle to challenge capital. Last summer Iceland's workers went on strike against the cuts they have been made to endure.

Last year opened with doctors in Iceland striking for 11 weeks and winning better terms and conditions. Over April and May some 10,000 workers struck for an increased minimum wage in food processing plants such as slaughterhouses and fish factories, the tourist industry and cleaning services. A general strike began on 26 May at midnight and there were huge protests of angry workers.

The government used legislation to end and ban further strikes while discussions with the unions continued. This affected thousands of workers including striking vets, radiologists, nurses, midwives and lawyers. While unions considered legal action against the government, nurses and radiologists resigned on mass arguing that if the government wouldn’t pay them the same as in other Scandinavian countries then they would work in those countries instead.

Then last October the large unions, the Icelandic Professional Trade Association (SGS) and Flóabandalagið—the Bay Alliance, which includes the unions Efling, Hlíf and the Labour and Seamen’s Association of Keflavík, agreed a deal with the government negotiator. The deal, backdated to 1 May, means an extra 25.000 krónur (kr) a month, then another 5.5 percent raise from 1 June 2016 with at least 15.000 kr extra a month. Wages will then rise another 4.5 percent in June 2017 with a further 3 percent in June 2018. In February 2019 fulltime workers will then get an extra 45.000 kr, with part time workers getting the rate according to their hours. All of this means that the basic wage rate should rise to 300.000 kr for everyone over 18 years old.

It’s a substantial improvement, and would never have happened without the strikes—but it could have been achieved much faster than 2018 if the strikes had continued. This would mean workers organising so that they could overcome vacillating union leaders who tend to fold in the face of underhand new laws. That is how the working class and the left in Iceland could work together to create a serious challenge to capital.

This is not an abstract debate. Like everywhere else in Europe there is a polarisation and rise in racism and a new party has recently been founded, the Icelandic National Front  - Íslenska þjóðfylkingin. This is a nasty chauvinist, Islamophobic party that is feeding off anger at continuing austerity and scapegoating minorities. It can be stopped and capital can be challenged but it will take a coherent strategy and workers' social and economic muscle to do it.

Solidarity at sea - update

Since I posted my last piece, Solidarity at sea on the Hull trawler sinkings and heroic rescue in the great storm off Iceland in 1968, Brian W Lavery has sold the film rights to his book The Headscarf Revolutionaries: Lillian Bilocca and the Hull triple trawler disaster.

Brian W Lavery with The Headscarf Revolutionaries

Everyone involved in the campaign for safety which forced the trawler owners to put men's lives before profit deserves this to be a really good film.In the meantime, here is footage from British Pathé news which briefly covered the story at the time.

Solidarity at Sea

Iceland is an island surrounded by some of the richest fishing grounds anywhere in the world and its history and the development of its working class is inextricably linked to fishing. Crews from Britain have been fishing off the coasts of Iceland for at least 600 years [1]. By the 15^th century Iceland was already famous for its stockfish, [Icelandic, harðfiskur]—the wind-dried haddock and cod [2] that stayed edible for months, was light, portable and could feed travelers crossing oceans and continents.

However dangerous winter fishing was—and every coastal town in Britain and Iceland has memories of disasters and heroic rescues—the fish was too valuable to leave alone. Brian W. Lavery’s book, The Headscarf Revolutionaries: Lillian Bilocca and the Hull Triple trawler disaster, published last year tells the story of the 58 men who died and one who survived when three Hull trawlers—the St Romanus, the Kingston Peridot and the Ross Cleveland—were lost within a few days in the winter of 1968 off Iceland. 

Winter deep-sea trawling was notoriously dangerous at the time when British ships often didn’t have the latest safety equipment because owners wouldn’t pay for it. A ton of ice could form on a deck in minutes in foul weather and less than 20 tonnes could turn over a 657-tonne ship like the Kingston Peridot. It had to be chipped off by hand in storms when the men didn’t even have safety cables to clip themselves onto. Often crews were without a radio operator and particularly over holidays, crew shortages would be made up by teenagers or older men without much experience of fishing or these conditions.

Headscarf Revolutionaries

When news of the second trawler sinking reached Hull, Lililian Bilocca, a fish worker whose husband and son worked on trawlers, began a campaign that became international news and completely overhauled safety standards on British trawlers. I wrote a short review of the book in the British magazine Socialist Review and there is an excellent and much longer article about the book in Socialist Worker by Annette Makin.  

With better safety equipment, training and cold weather gear some of these men could have been saved but the storm that sank the Ross Cleveland in the great bay of Ísafjörður of North West Iceland was the worst anyone there—Icelanders or foreigners had ever seen.

Icelandic journalist Óttar Sveinsson wrote a book about the same disaster in Icelandic Útkall I Djúpinu, published in English as Doom in the Deep. It’s a pity that this is currently out of print because Óttar interviewed the Icelanders who rescued the men off the Grimsby trawler, Notts County that ran aground at the height of the storm in Ísafjörður. His book is a tribute to the ingenuity and courage of the volunteers from the Icelandic coastguard vessel, Oðinn who rescued the freezing terror-stricken men who had heard the final words of Phil Gay, the captain of the Ross Cleveland as it sank and expected to be next.

Ísafjörður bay was full of British trawlers that night because in most storms it was safe. Harry Eddom, the only man to survive the sinking of the Ross Cleveland, made the point,

“We were only two or three miles from the 3,000-foot walls of the fjord. We should have been safe as houses.”

Map of Ísafjörður from Útkall I Djúpinu

Dick Moore described the storm as the Notts County ran aground, the engine room flooded and he and the other men scrambled to get out on deck,

“A howling, screeching, shattering din. The ship was vibrating with the wind. I thought it was like being out on a runway with ten jet planes taking off at once. The air seemed to be tearing apart. And the sound didn’t die down. It went on and on without pause. I put my hands over my ears; I felt thousands of ice-needles pricking my face, held my head down and tried to keep my balance on the ice. It was hard to breathe. How could this be happening?..It was as if the mountains themselves were shrieking and roaring.”[3]

The Icelandic coastguard ship Oðinn was in Ísafjörður searching for a smaller Icelandic fishing vessel Heiðrun II, missing with its six man crew—Rögnvaldur  Sigurjónsson, his two sons Ragnar and Sigurjón, Páll Ísleifur Vilhjálmsson, Kjartan Halldór Halldórsson and Sigurður Sigurðsson. The boat and the crew were never found.

Icelandic coastguard vessel Oðinn[4]

Apart from search and rescue, the captain and crew of the Oðinn spent much of their time enforcing the exclusive 12 mile Icelandic fisheries zone won by the first “Cod War” from 1958-1961. This “war” had been a series of sometimes violent confrontations between Icelandic trawlers backed by their few coastguard vessels and British trawlers backed by the Royal Navy. Oðinn had used trawl cutting machinery to strip the offending British trawlers of their fishing gear which cost thousands of pounds at the time. Harry Eddom had been part of British crews fighting the Icelanders for fish.

While the storm raged and it was too dangerous to do anything about rescuing the men from the Notts County, the men on Oðinn fought the ice. Seventeen year old Torfi Geirmundsson later said, 

“Several of us lads had tried to go forward when the ship was keeling over sharply. But as soon as we got out on the foredeck the gale slung us up against the rail. We couldn’t stay on our feet. The ice built up so fast you couldn’t let up for a minute.”

The next morning when the wind had dropped to gale force 8 or 9, the Oðinn planned to rescue the Notts County crew by getting as close to shore as possible without running itself aground. It got within 200 metres of the trawler. The engine of the smaller covered boat that the Icelanders meant to use wouldn’t start, so 14 hours after the trawler had run aground Pálmi Hlöðversson and Sigurjón Hannesson set out in a small rubber Zodiac dingy from Oðinn with two uninflated rubber life rafts as ballast against the wind threatening to flip the dingy over at any minute. The Oðinn had radioed ahead so the Notts County crew were on deck waving and clutching bottles when Pálmi and Sigurjón reached them. The Icelanders assumed they were drunk and yelled that if they didn’t get rid of the booze and do exactly as they were told they would leave them where they were. The trawlermen weren’t drunk but in their cold traumatised state, the Notts County crew thought they could thank their rescuers with what they had to hand, rum.

The 18 survivors—one of the crew, Robert Bowie had died trying to launch a life raft—had to climb and jump down into the zodiac then crawl into the two life rafts, nine men in each. Pálmi and Sigurjón then towed the life rafts back through the gale force winds to the Oðinn. These men got home because a boat load of Icelanders usually hell bent on chasing British fisherman out of their territorial waters, volunteered to rescue them at the risk of their own lives. The next day when the wind had eased, they went back to rescue the body of Robert Bowie.

Thanks to the campaign led by Lillian Bilocca, safety on British trawlers got overhauled and that spring British fishermen finally got a mothership, the Orsino launched with a crew of 20 including a doctor, a meteorologist and medical equipment.

Lillian was shamefully treated, sacked and blacklisted by the Hull fish industry and not properly supported by the trade unions. But Lillian was with the dock workers and trade unionists at the launch of the Orsino[5] and said, “Never mind them calling us silly women. This is what we have fought for.”

Health and safety at work has never been achieved without a fight but the safety equipment and training on trawlers was wrenched from the employers and ship owners on the back of immense suffering and human cost. Climate change means that mega storms such as the one over Ísafjörður that night will become more common and the right not to die at work will have to be fought for again[6].

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[1] “The first documentary evidence in Icelandic sources of Englishmen fishing off Iceland comes from the contemporary Nýi annáll (New Annals) for 1412; ‘A ship came from England to the east coast of Dyrhólaey; men rowed out to them, they were fishermen from England.’ Iceland’s ‘English Century’ and East Anglia’s North Sea World, Anna Agnarsdóttir in East Anglia and its North Sea World in the Middle Ages, edited by David Bates and Robert Liddiard

[2] In Iceland, harðfiskur remains a popular snack eaten with butter or on its own.

[3] Doom in the Deep, Óttar Sveinsson pg 50

[4] Image by Kjallakr at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, $3

[5] http://www.hulltrawler.net/Stern/ORSINO%20H410.htm

[6] I have a forthcoming piece on fishing, fish stocks, safety and the struggle to organise which I will link here when it is published.

Fighting the cuts: The Slaughterhouse strike, Akureyri 1932

When the slaughter season began in Akureyri in 1932, women and men signed on to work for Kaupfélag Eyfirðinga (KEA), the Cooperative that owned the slaughterhouse, without knowing what they were to be paid.[1] They knew women would be paid much less than men and the men from the town would be undercut by the crofters—the poor tenant farmers who came to town every autumn to make the only cash many of them would see all year. The crofters worked for wages that were too little for the town’s workers to survive on—some 40 percent less than the Verkamannafélags Akureyrar—Akureyri Workers Union rate. The boss of KEA cynically insisted that these farmers were self-employed and chose to work for less. So it is not surprising that a Communist worker and trade union activist in Akureyri, Tryggvi Emilsson could describe in his memoirs how,

 “For a long time the town workers considered them tools in the hands of the employers who used them to keep wages down.”[2]

The original logo of Kaupfélag Eyfirðinga 

Paying the crofters starvation wages was only part of the town employers’ wider plan to lengthen the working day and cut wages. It had begun the previous year when some people in the slaughterhouse had been paid less than the union rate but the leadership of the unions had done nothing to challenge it, according to the local Communist paper Verkamaðurinn.[3]  

The paper set out the three main ways in which the union’s terms and conditions were being broken—although none of this had been announced officially by the KEA Coop but the paper had heard that;

• Skinners—who had some of the heaviest work would only get 1.10 króna (kr)an hour, other men—0.90 kr an hour and women would get 0.55-0.60 kr an hour
• The usual work day would run from 6am to 6pm with two hours of unpaid breaks. No food or coffee would be provided and any overtime or night work would be paid at the flat rate
• Worst of all—until the slaughter season finished the Coop would not tell workers what they could expect to get for their work.[4]

If KEA got away with using unemployment and the worker’s poverty like this—when wages should be rising and the working day getting shorter, Verkamaðurinn said, it would pave the way for all of Akureyri’s employers to do the same. So this year some workers were determined to defend their hard earned wages and conditions.

The front page article of Verkamaðurinn dated 17 September said,

“Every worker, whether in the slaughterhouse or not, must unite to stop the wage cuts and fight to keep union rates. In each workplace workers must elect a fighting committee to work with similar committees outside. The fear of being locked out must not get the upper hand—everyone must remember that they are not just fighting for their own rights, but for all their class. If unity holds fast then no employer will be able to lock this or that worker out because he fought harder than others for the rights of his class. Men and Women workers! Unite and fight for your demands and first and foremost that your wages won’t be cut.”

Verkamaðurinn, The Worker 17 September 1932

A preparatory group had already been formed of five people, four of whom were Communists, to arrange a meeting in the union house on Sunday 18 September, write a leaflet and get people to the meeting. The meeting elected a ten person committee in addition to the leadership of the union, to focus on the coming fight with the Coop. The Social Democrats had also had a meeting that day and announced that they would, “take no part in the dispute because the Communists had control of the union.”[5] 

The crofters were already in town getting ready to do the heavy and dangerous slaughter work. Tryggvi Emilsson wrote, 

“I don’t know whether these “independent people” followed the union’s campaign against the wages and conditions in the slaughterhouse. But that summer a union meeting had decided to try to make a deal with the Coop and if that didn’t work, to use harder means to stop farmers working for lower wages than workers”.

Tryggvi called these crofters independent people—sjálfstætt fólk —after the title of the great Icelandic writer, Halldor Laxness’ 1930s novel.[6] In it, the crofter Bjartur Jónsson spends 18 years as a farmhand before he saves enough money to rent a small, poor farm and set up his own home and get married. Bjartur is drawn as a hard, single-minded man incapable of taking his wife’s feelings, or anyone else into account as he clings desperately to his dream of independence. But Laxness understood that as a farmhand Bjartur would have been hardly been allowed to be an adult. He would have had no personal freedom or privacy, very few possessions and even would have had to share his bed with another farmhand. For Bjartur, independence rested on his few sheep and a patch of boggy land that could be snatched away by bad weather and disease.

Laxness described the reality of farming for these crofters crushed by capitalism and the richer farmers who used them for their own ends.[7] He wrote a note on a draft manuscript of Independent People dated 1933,

"Sharpen the contrasts between the small and the large-scale farmer. Show how the large-scale farmer exploits the small farmer in his service both politically and economically, and dubs himself a knight at his expense with promises and flattering gifts—such as roads, a telephone and building loans—until the large-scale farmer has become a bank manager in Reykjavik and a cabinet minister, while the small farmer has become completely impoverished, has to leave his farm and joins up with the crowd of unemployed in the towns.”

This would not have been news to Tryggvi and his fellow workers who saw clearly how the crofters were used.

“They took work from unemployed workers and bread from the mouths of their half-starved children in the depression years. Of course, these needy farmers didn’t intend this. On the contrary, the power of the merchants and their hangers-on saw to it that small farmers were kept on the lowest rung.”

Now the men and women in what Tryggvi called the radical wing of the unions were working in the slaughterhouse that autumn and ready to start a strike if nothing was done about the conditions. They talked to everyone—the crofters, workers and those who were lukewarm about the idea of a strike on the first day of paid work—and they were listened to. After a few days they decided to act if the union could not wring a deal from the bosses. Tryggvi wrote,

"On the evening of 18 September Sigþór Jóhannsson came to let me know that the union now felt it was time to act. He said, ‘go tell everyone in the slaughterhouse that most of the workers will be in the union house in the morning’”.

Tryggvi shot off on his bicycle to tell everyone including the people he thought were at a loose end but up for a fight, as far out of the town as Glerárþorp. Next morning he went to the union house where he met union foreman Þórsteinn Þórsteinnsson and a few others. Tryggvi says Þórsteinn was quite pessimistic because most people were already in work, but other people were much more optimistic that the workers would come. Þórsteinn asked Tryggvi to go down to the slaughterhouse and stand watch at the outer door over midday while he tried one more time to get a deal from the Coop boss. Many men had arrived at the union house by then, both the unemployed and from other workplaces and were restless to see what would happen. 

Tryggvi Emilsson

Tryggvi went down to the slaughterhouse to keep watch in case management were preparing to bring strike breakers in the back as had happened in the herring dispute the previous summer. All he saw was the usual workers going to lunch at the usual time, but there was something happening around some men who went to dinner first. There Tryggvi met Egill Tómasson his old neighbour who told him that they were ready to stop work at one o'clock and they had sent a man up to the union house to ask people to meet at the slaughterhouse when it reopened after the break. 

The fifty men then in the union house walked down to the slaughterhouse and went in uninvited. Now the workers began to gather and it was clear the mood was mutinous. People got into groups to make it impossible for anyone to begin work and almost no one moved a muscle despite grumbling from individual farmers. Time passed but the union foreman hadn't arrived to announce a strike—it turned out Þórsteinn was still trying to negotiate a deal without any success. Eventually Vilhjálmur the Coop boss turned up at the slaughterhouse and was startled to see all the preparation. Immediately he went into the office and tried to speak to everyone individually. Tryggvi wrote that this just irritated the men who pushed their way into the office where Egill Tómasson told Vilhjálmur that he would speak to all of them at once or not at all.

Vilhjálmur argued that the farmers were self-employed and chose to work for less money than the men employed by the company. Then a young man stepped forward, Tryggvi Þórsteinnsson, who was there with his father from a farm. He stood up and shouted that none of them should agree to anything, except getting the same work and the same conditions for the same pay. He got such a good response that the Coop boss took to his heels, got in his car and fled. Before the meeting broke up, everyone was asked to meet at the union house at 8pm but many of the strikers and their supporters went straight to the union house and got strike leaflets from the men's union and the women workers' union Einingar—Unity.

The sheep waiting to be slaughtered got another day of life out on the grass, while strike wardens took up posts in the slaughterhouse itself, the various connected sheds and outside. Tryggvi Emilsson and a few others stayed there too, in case any of the "whites" the hated police-extras turned up, but there was no sign of them. These were unemployed men hired as assistant policemen to help break strikes or harass union meetings. They tended to be realistic about their position and leave whenever workers showed themselves to be organised and angry.[8]

Tryggvi stood watch until 7 o'clock when other men took over. When he got to the meeting it was already packed and, 

"Every face shone with enthusiasm for the fight because it was about much more than the wages, conditions and equality in the slaughterhouse. It was about the right of working people to have whatever work there was in town—badly paid or not—and the right to organise a union.”[9]

The meeting had just started when a messenger turned up from the Coop saying that the boss wanted the union’s foreman to meet him in his office to do a deal. Þórsteinn and some others from the union leadership left the union meeting immediately having been told to get the deal in writing. The result was a complete climb down by the head of the town's biggest employer;

·         Farmers and workers—men and women would be paid union rates—if they joined the union

·         The men would get between 1.10 and 1.25 kr an hour depending on the work and 1.9 kr for overtime and night work

·         Women would still be a long way from equality but would get the women's union rate of 0.70-0.77 kr an hour.

·         Everyone would get two paid 15 minute coffee breaks in every shift and wages would be paid weekly with hours and wages worked out daily.

·         No-one would be victimised so anyone working at the slaughterhouse when the dispute began could continue to work all of the season.

It was a great victory for unity in the face of the implicit threat of slow starvation that went with seasonal work and unemployment in Iceland.  Despite the behaviour of the Social Democrats, the working class in Akureyri showed that they were not afraid to unite with Communists to fight for their interests. The Communists proved that they were serious fighters for their class and gained a great deal of respect and influence. The victory also gave working class Akureyri confidence to fight its next battle for the right to work when just a few weeks later the town council tried to get unemployed men to work for a pittance in a profitable business. 

A post on this struggle and the boycott of the Nóvu coming soon.

The KEA Coop building in 1936 as the smart people arrive to celebrate its 50th anniversary

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[1] Akureyri was and still is the largest town on Iceland’s north coast with a population of 4,503 in 1936. Iceland 1936, a handbook published on the fiftieth anniversary of Landsbanki Íslands, the national bank of Iceland. Edited by Thorsteinn Thorsteinsson, Director of the Statistical Bureau of Iceland.

[2] Ævi Minnigar: Baráttan um Brauðið, Vol II of Tryggvi Emilsson’s memoirs, The Struggle for Bread p262

[3] Verkamaðurinn, 24 September 1932 http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?issId=176204&pageId=2303426&lang=is&q=VERKAMADURINN; Verkamannafélagsins Akureyrar was a “red union” set up by Icelandic Communists to break from the Social Democrat-led unions they considered too right wing. The problem with the strategy was that most trade unionists were not revolutionary and would not be outside of a revolutionary period. By setting up a separate union, the most political trade unionists could cut themselves off from the mass of workers that they were trying to influence and left Social Democrats unchallenged in the mainstream unions. And it was no guarantee that the leadership would fight. For more on breakaway unionism see Ralph Darlington’s article from International Socialism Journal 142 http://isj.org.uk/the-rank-and-file-and-the-trade-union-bureaucracy/   

[4] Verkamaðurinn, 17 September 1932, Verkamaðurinn was published by Verklýðssamband Norðurlands, the federation of communist led red unions http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?issId=176204&pageId=2303426&lang=is&q=VERKAMADURINN 

[5] Verkamadurinn, 24 September 1932, pg2 http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?issId=176204&pageId=2303426&lang=is&q=VERKAMADURINN

[6] Halldor Laxness was deeply influenced by socialism and communism and won the 1955 Nobel prize for Literature http://herringandclassstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-olympics-raining-on-their-parade.html

[7] One of the reactions to Independent People was Dalafólk—Valley People, by the popular romantic poet Unnur Benediktsdóttir Bjarklind, called Hulda. I shall return to Dalafólk in a future post.

[8] The Extras were also used at Guttóslagurinn in Reykjavik November 1932, http://socialistreview.org.uk/330/icelands-bosses-hot-water

[9] Tryggvi Emilsson’s memoirs, The Struggle for Bread p265