#angry workers

The tactic to give workers hope by making them believe in the strength of a (rank and file) organisation quickly backfires as the organisation itself comes to be seen as the embodiment of power, not workers’ actions. It matters less how many members a union has or how swanky their offices are. Rather, workers’ power depends on being able to interrupt production and to avoid their struggles becoming isolated within a single department or workplace. Organizations have to be glorified and defended and ‘leaders’ become symbols of organizations...

The solidarity network addresses the fact that the current system individualises us and, at the same time, creates a dog-eat-dog atmosphere. ... The solidarity network acknowledges a historic fact: middle class leaders, be they religious or political, were able to mobilise the more isolated and impoverished parts of the class against the organised sections of the class. They do this by offering a material and ideological community to people who feel like outcasts. This is what the fascists did, and this is what the Muslim Brotherhood and mafia gangs do. We have to drive a wedge between the middle class and the lower ranks of the working class, through direct mutual aid, action and solidarity.

While it is generally a good thing if workers’ organisations take the lead from workers themselves, this is not without its contradictions. Sometimes, immediate demands of an individual group of workers who want to organise with syndicalist unions go against the unification of the wider class. For example, IWW in Brighton and Liverpool, who were supporting Deliveroo drivers, supported drivers’ demands for a recruitment stop as a way to maintain their workload and subsequent wages. At a time when hostility towards ‘immigrants taking our jobs’ was rising, this protectionist approach and anti-newcomers attitude went unchallenged by the union.

One of us had worked in NGOs for ten years, leaving the sector with a sense that ‘everything is corrupt’ and trying to ‘change government policy’ was a waste of time. It therefore wasn’t a massive leap to decide to move to a working class area where there were larger, more ‘strategic’ workplaces to get jobs in. It didn’t feel like ‘dropping out’ as much as getting ‘plugged in’. A lot of people we knew were either doing boring office jobs, lonely PhDs, or burning out in their pursuit of a high-flying career. So we didn’t have too much FOMO.

In order to make these various conditions more debatable for the development of some kind of global strategy, perhaps we have to be more schematic. Decades of neoliberalism has led to postmodern thinking within the left intelligentsia, which can only focus on difference. Perhaps now is the time for guts and brains for some universal and strategical thinking.