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A Sex Worker’s Guide To Capitalism By Mrs. Severity Pleasant, Providence IU 690 So, we live under an economic system called capitalism, which you probably knew already, but what exactly is capitali…

Hello, and welcome to the official IWW Chicago GMB Tumblr page!

The Social Media Committee is excited to announce that this page is live as of today, Friday the 13th, 2014.

We hope you’ll check our page regularly for exciting news regarding the Chicago IWW, actions, and events, as well as union-wide news, updates about specific campaigns, and workplace organizing tips.

If you are unfamiliar with the IWW, please check our “About the IWW” section to learn more.

Feel free to ask us any questions you may have  we look forward to chatting with you in the future!

Summary

Black Rose Press is opening a screen printing shop/storefront in South Minneapolis. Please help us make this project a success.

We are a worker-owned, cooperative print shop, as well as an IWW union shop. The building was purchased this winter, and since then we have been working with the city, architects, and contractors to get ready for a big summer of renovations.

The building will serve as our printing studio, with multiple presses and various pre-press processes. The front room will also have space for retail. The building also has a seperate unit that will be rented out to generate income for the cooperative.

Our hope is to see this sturdy, yet neglected building become a permanent space for a cooperative business, specifically our small union print shop.

blackrosepress.org

What We Need

We are looking for a little extra help to finish the renovations. Any support you can give us goes a long way.

“Discussing the activities and role of the Anarchists in the Revolution, Kropotkin said: ‘We Anarchists have talked much of revolutions, but few of us have been prepared for the actual work ,to be done during, the process. I have indicated some things in this relation in my Conquest of Bread. Pouget and Pataud have also sketched a line of action in their work on Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth.

Kropotkin thought that the Anarchists had not given sufficient to the fundamental elements of the social revolution. The real facts in a revolutionary process do not consist so much in actual fighting — that is, merely the destructive phase necessary to clear the way for constructive effort. The basic factor in a revolution is the organisation of the economic life of the country. The Russian Revolution had proved conclusively that we must prepare thoroughly for that. Everything else is of minor importance. He had come to think that, Syndicalism was likely to furnish what Russia most lacked: the channel through which the industrial and economic reconctruction of the country may flow. He referred to Anarcho-Syndicalism. That and the co-operatives would save other countries some of the blunders and suffering Russia was going though.”

-Emma Goldman, ‘My Disillusionment in Russia’, on a visit to Peter Kropotkin at Dimitrov, July 1920.

Anarchist-communism has been regarded by other anarchist currents as a poor and despised relation, an ideological trophy to be exhibited according to the needs of hagiography or polemic before moving on to “serious things” (the collectivisations of Spain, anarcho-syndicalism, federalism or self-management), and as an “infantile utopia” more concerned with dogmatic abstractions than with “economic realities”. Yet, anarchist communism has been the only current within the anarchist movement that has explicitly aimed not only at ending exchange value but, among its most coherent partisans, at making this the immediate content of the revolutionary process. We are speaking here, of course, only of the current that explicitly described itself as “anarchist-communist”, whereas in fact the tendency in the nineteenth century to draw up a stateless communism “utopia” extended beyond anarchism properly so-called.

Anarchist-communism must be distinguished from collectivism, which was both a diffuse movement (see, for example, the different components of the International Working Men’s Association, the Guesdists, and so on) and a specific anarchist current. As far as the latter was concerned, it was Proudhon who supplied its theoretical features: an open opponent of communism (which, for him, was Etienne Cabet’s “communism”), he favoured instead a society in which exchange value would flourish — a society in which workers would be directly and mutually linked to each other by money and the market. The Proudhonist collectivists of the 1860’s and 1870’s (of whom Bakunin was one), who were resolute partisans of the collective ownership of the instruments of work and, unlike Proudhon, of land, maintained an essence of this commercial structure in the form of groups of producers, organised either on a territorial basis (communes) or on an enterprise basis (co-operatives, craft groupings) and linked to each other by the circulation of value. Collectivism was thus defined — and still is — as an exchange economy where the legal ownership of the instruments of production is held by a network of “collectivities” which are sorts of workers’ jointstock companies. Most contemporary anarchists (standing, as they do, for a self-managed exchange economy) are collectivists in this nineteenth-century sense of the term, even though the term has now come to have a somewhat different meaning (state ownership, i.e. “state capitalism”, rather than ownership by any collectivity).