Recovery of Universal Health: strategies to unlink economic benefits from social benefits
What is the path from healthcare as we’ve known it to a society where everyone has the resources necessary for their full development? The mire of healthcare reform in the United States and the constant vigilance necessary to develop public health systems in other countries can obscure the need for a longer term strategy. Today we are sharing the translation of an article from Spain that describes how capitalism corrupts health care, and a strategy to move from our defensive stance today towards a decentralized collective system of healthcare owned and organized by workers and the community. Read More
The movement for safe staffing rations for all nurses: an interview
Labor movements have always tried to find ways to wrestle control over working conditions away from the boss. Workplace injuries and deaths are still at epidemic levels which in some industries in particular can mean life and death. Health care still suffers from disproportionately high levels of injury in in-patient settings such as hospitals, rehab centers, and nursing homes. Led by nurses, the movement for safe staffing has sought to create hard limits on the amount of patients that can be assigned to health providers for both the safety of the patients and their care givers. Following decades of militant action California nurses and nurses in provinces in Australia achieved safe staffing legislation which research has vindicated in improving care, reducing mortality, and avoiding provider burnout. We interviewed Jenny, a Maryland nurse involved in the movement to spread these measures about her experiences as a nurse and the movement. Was there a moment or event at work convinced … Read More
What’s at stake in the health care debate?
Our #healthseries was conceived and collected throughout 2016 at time when the Obama administration was winding down, and before the ascent of Trump or the more recent rumblings of the right in Europe. For workers in the health industries the changing political winds are part and parcel of the day to day conditions as funding and regulation changes continually intrude on the work, caring for other human beings who often have no other options. The debate in the United States over how to provide health care to a nation increasingly burdened by the costs and dissatisfied with the status quo has returned with a vengeance. One of our editors and contributors, S Nicholas Nappalos, comes at these issues as a nurse and organizer, and tries to unpack the implications of the growing health crisis, what alternatives we really have, and what health for-and-by workers and the community could look like. What’s at Stake in the Health Care Debate? S Nicholas Nappalos The 2016 election cycle has show… Read More
Health and Patriarchy
Medicine is draped in the language of commerce and science that hide the social forces that sustain and shape health in society. Gender is particularly central both to the experience of health industries and in the sustenance and production of health. Our contribution today comes from Melissa Sepúlveda Alvarado, a Chilean medical student and anarchist organizer. Her argument shows not only how patriarchy shapes health, but also how medicine reproduces patriarchy itself. Read More
Interview with the Health Sector Workers Network (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Health is about life, and health work makes business of our basic human functions. It should be no surprise then that health care is under attack globally where the decay of the neoliberal order has incited conflicts over who will control health resources. Over the next few months Recomposition will explore the health care perspectives and proposals for alternatives. We are proud to present the first installment in our Health Series with an interview that comes to us from members of the Health Sector Workers Network located in Aotearoa/New Zealand. They discuss attempting to build cross-workplace and cross-trade solidarity, the recent series of Junior Doctor’s strikes (the equivalent of residents in the US), and building workers resistance to health austerity. 1. Tell us a bit about yourself. What kind of work do you do, and how did you get involved in the health workers movement? My name is Al. I’ve worked in the public health sector, off and on, for most of my adult life,… Read More
Labor under Trump series
In case you missed it, over the past month or so we have run a series about the possible implications of the Republican majorities in every branch of government with President Trump at it’s helm. The first piece from Brandon Sowers explored the calls for a general strike against Trump. Mark Brenner wrote a piece for Labor Notes which we republished sketching the threats and some potential response from the perspective of the main stream labor movement. S Nicholas Nappalos explores the low point that labor has found itself in, and called for a politicized revolutionary unionism as key in responding to the looming threats. For our last piece we shared David Fernandez-Barriel’s argument that the untapped potential of a radical labor movement could prove key in resisting Trump’s agenda. We hope you enjoy them, discuss them with your comrades and coworkers, and keep Recomposition in your thoughts and actions. Read More
Labor under Trump part 4: Time to wake up
The mood and discussions of late have largely been doom and gloom. Our series has tried to shine a light on some hope for workers resistance to counter the demobilize barrage of social and anti-social media. Our final piece in the Labor under Trump series comes from Ideas and Action the online publication of the Workers Solidarity Alliance. David Fernández-Barrial argues that there is an untapped potential within workplaces to defeat the threats looming, and take us closer to a just and equitable society. Read More
Labor under Trump part 3: death of the labor movement?
For years now commentators have predicted the collapse of the unions. This has not happened. There has been a long slow decline with areas of victories as well. Following the Trump victory speculation has been rampant and has led to various proclamations yet again of the death of labor. It is clear that Republican domination of all branches of government poses a real threat to the Democratic-party aligned unions, particularly public sector unions, and that we are entering a new era both for the working class and the vestiges of their historic organizations. Our third piece exploring the potentials for labor under trump comes from one of our editors S Nicholas Nappalos. He argues that while these dangers are real, they also come with new possibilities for a militant participatory workers movement. Moreover it is not apolitical unions that can address the weaknesses of the labor movement heading into a collision with this government, but an active politicized union movement marking its opposition to both capital and the state. Read More
Labor under Trump part 2: This is not a drill
In our second installment in our Labor under Trump mini-series, Mark Brenner from Labor Notes explores what union members can do in the face of anticipated threats. At this point most of the debate is speculation, but the labor notes piece is worth discussing because they explore concrete experiences in areas where anti-labor policies have been implemented such as organizing in right-to-work states and solidarity with coworkers independent of their immigration status. Brenner paints a picture of a labor movement at a crossroads, a theme we will return to next week. Read More
Happy New Years from Recomposition
We’re starting the new year off with three series coming. The first is about what we can expect for workers movements under Trump, and what we should do about it. Look forward to seeing a series about health care in the United States, and the international debate over the direction of the revolutionary union movements. Think about keeping us on your resolutions to contribute artwork, recordings or writings, help us share our content, and discuss with your coworkers and comrades. To a better year for the working class! Read More
Labor under Trump: general strike again?
This week we bring you a piece discussing how labor can respond to working under Trump. The context for the piece comes on the heels of national calls for a general strike on January 20th when Trump will be inaugurated. The author himself was a participant in the Wisconsin General Strike attempt and wrote about it prior. Having been around for the 2006 Immigration general strike attempt, the events in Wisconsin, 2012 Occupy General Strike, and explored general strikes here on Recomposition. We haven’t collectively taken a position on this most general strike proposal, but we hope that some continuity and discussion can inform whatever happens on January 20th and after. What is crucial is that we attempt to understand the changes happening, and the potentials and challenges for a revolutionary union movement. With unionization rates at 100 year lows and the doors seemingly closing on passive legalistic approaches to workplace organizing, the author argues that we will find a new envi… Read More
Visions of hope amongst the despondent: lessons of the Abolitionists in the age of Trump
Mobs in northern cities attacked abolitionist publishing houses and burned their pamphlets and materials. We live in a time of challenges that can seem so great that they lead many to despair. Climate change, global instability, rising misery and inequity, racism and misogyny are on the march; the barrage of dangers is a heavy load to carry. Today’s article comes from S Nicholas Nappalos and takes us back to an even darker time, slavery-era America, where small groups of radicals defied the odds and dealt the ruling class a blow that has resonated through our history ever since. Read More
No Glory in Glorified Babysitting
Image contribution by Monica Kostas Today’s piece comes to us from Daniel Cole who lives and works in Australia as a early childhood educator. His perspective shines light on what it’s like to do strenuous childcare work, and how managers and disconnected executives worsen the load by making ridiculous guidelines and demands, while pinning providers on a scale that doesn’t truly measure their experience and value. He aims to get other educators on board with imagining what it would be like to autonomously run childhood centers, and what can be done to organize in that direction. Read More
Thoughts for International Working Women’s Day
Today marks International Women’s Day, a day which began after a key strike of women textile workers in New York. The lead up to the strike that would build the ILGWU into a fighting force was a tenants strike led by socialist women. Revolutionary unionism likewise has its own history of struggles of women workers, a history which took the emancipation of women deeper in its time and today as well. During the same time period, the Buenos Aires Tenant’s Strike of 1907 was led by some of the women’s Resistance Societies and women leadership within the FORA. Read More
Militancy and the Beautiful Game: An interview with Gabriel Kuhn
Gabriel Kuhn is an anarchist activist living in Sweden and author of an impressive array of histories, translations, and collections published on anarchism, history of the left, and sports. His energy for writing is matched by a passion for soccer as a longtime fan and once professional athlete. We interviewed him about his experiences playing for a living, radical history, and controversies today. Read More
No Pain No Gain
Track / Image by Monica Kostas Today our 5th installment in Politics on the Field comes to us from Chicago where Kingsley Clarke discusses his love of track and field, a view into youth coaching of the sport, and the class and racial dynamics that exist today. Read More
He’s a Mendocino and I’m from Bogota
Cleats / Image by Monica Kostas Last week we focused on history and professional political athletes. Our contribution today comes from South Florida where Marcos Restrepo brings us to the world of youth sports in our fourth installment of Politics on the Field. With the Super Bowl past us and all the attention the world plays to sports industries and media, it’s important to remember that where sports grows from in the innumerable fields and arenas where children learn and play. Restrepo presents a picture of these games a father and someone critical of what capitalism has done to a game that continues to capture the passion and imagination of millions. Read More
A Portrait of IWW Athletes
MMA Fighter Jeff Monson In the third installment of our series “Politics on the Field” we bring the story of three IWW athletes. This piece of history is written by IWW Neil Parthun, a sports show host, who offers a glimpse into the lives and trajectories of the IWW members who played sports as a career, and ends with his reflections on labor in professional sports. Read More
Primero Chaca
A Goal / Image by Monica Kostas Last week we began our series Politics on the Field featuring pieces about where sports, life, and politics intersect. The second contribution comes to us from Monica Kostas, who also has done the artwork for our series as well many Recomposition works. She describes soccer in the life of her hometown while giving background on the sport’s history and radical roots, and reflections on playing in a militant life. In an era of unprecedented money driving the clubs and leagues, soccer gets lost in the ruckus of what capitalism does to it. With her piece, Monica reminds us of the beauty and joy that’s at stake to fight for a match worth playing. Read More
Hat Trick
Hat Trick / Image by Monica Kostas We are proud to present the first installment of our newest series Politics on the Field. Each week Recomposition will bring you an article for the next month and a half focusing on the connections between sports, politics, and our daily lives. The series will feature some history, an interview, narratives, and a little bit of theory. Our first work comes to us from John O’Reilly in Minnesota and is about his experiences working at a liquor store. Sports is often there in the background shaping our interactions, defining relationships, and reflecting the struggles and aspirations of workers. In Hat Trick O’Reilly reminds us of the role of sports setting out the divisions and unity in our lives. Read More
Package Handler’s Report and Analysis
There is a common notion in the United States and other powerful Western nation that the process of deindustrialization is complete and total. According to many, this process has left the workplaces of American merely small hubs of service work, totally unorganizable and not worth our time. However, along many industrial lines there remain a number of mass workplaces, especially along the supply chain. These circuits of capital flow every day and night and create huge logistical challenges – the permeation of warehouses has been one way for companies to cope with the difficulties of logistics. With the creation of these hubs, capital creates a dangerous situation for itself, because if these chokepoints are organized they can severely cripple the flow of goods. The recognition of this fact has spurred many revolutionaries to organize in these sectors. In this essay, IWW organizer Coeur de Bord analyses the first year of organizing at a United Parcel Service hub in Minneapolis outside of the preexisting trade union structure. They show how even a small core of organizers can engage large numbers of workers and mobilize them around concrete demands. Read More
Teaser for our upcoming series
Later this month we launch a new series of pieces called Politics on the Field which will feature narratives of sports in work and daily life, an interview, some history, and a little of everything. Our last series were about How I was Radicalized and how work invades our sleep. In the meantime we present a video about efforts in Rojava to rebuild sports facilities and leagues in the midst of the brutal war raging there. Read More
Free Parking
In this piece Phineas Gage recalls the challenges of organizing under punitive back to work legislation and the effect it had on shop floor organising. As tensions grow over a dispute about the safety of various parking arrangements around renovated facilities the shop again begins to mobilise. Then tragedy strikes and the workers are reminded that sometimes the cost of a partial victory can be as great as any defeat. Read More
Collapsing the levels, Consolidating Our efforts
Approximately 5 years ago work began on something called the intermediate analysis. A few members of the Recomposition editorial group contributed pieces, worked in groups, and tried to shape their work around the issues raised in the analysis. Between 2010 and today stand a lot of changes and a different landscape for radical action. The maturing of the world financial crisis, series of popular protest movements, and conservative responses have shifted the field from where we stood just a short time ago. Today we present a piece by Scott Nicholas Nappalos exploring what was useful and harmful in the intermediate analysis, and what lessons can be drawn for revolutionary unionists in North America specifically and for the libertarian left more generally. Read More
Clarissa, Who Explained It All
Seamstresses at work The fourth installment in our ‘How I was radicalized’ series comes from Romina Akemi. She describes working at a garment factory in the American South, where she was mentored by an older co-worker. Romina recently moved back to Chile from Los Angeles, where she was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Black Rose Anarchist Federation. For the previous posts on this series: Part I / Part II / Part III Read More
What’s Your 5 Year Plan?
What’s Your 5 Year Plan? Today we post “What’s Your 5 Year Plan?” by Lifelong Wobbly which first appeared on his blog on December 3rd, 2014. The piece presents important challenges for the potential growth of the IWW over the next few years, and proposes a model for putting ideas to work. Regardless of whether the suggestions are ambitious or not, they’re specific milestones that can allow us to track progress. We think it’s important to visualize our desires for the union, but even more important to put them down in writing, and start working through measured goals to materialize that vision. We hope that you join the discussion not only with us but also with your branch members and people you know in the union to emphasize how we can direct our efforts toward improving the OBU. Read More
Concrete Examples of Non Labour Relations Board Unions – Part III
Organizing at Jimmy Johns This is the third part of a series of concrete examples (Part I – Part II) and very brief summaries of organizations that have some component of direct action and a form of collective bargaining that operate outside the labour relations framework. The following examples are from the IWWs organising efforts in food service. This includes fast food as well as grocery stores in a lot of the examples the IWW actually engaged in innovative organising that broke ground in more high profile campaigns like the well known “Fight for Fifteen” campaigns around raising the minimum wage in the USA. Read More
That Time of the Year…
Sweet! “Half our waking hours are spent on the job, consuming the lion’s share of our time. Our years are woven with stories of work told around the dinner table, breakroom, and bars. Yet these stories are rarely put into print, investigated, or seen as they should be; as part of workers’ activity to understand and change their lot under capitalism. Lines of Work offers a rare look at life and social relationships viewed from the cubicle, cash register, hospital, factory, and job site. Drawn from the writings of Recomposition, an online project of worker radicals, the text brings together organizers from a handful of countries sharing their experiences with the trouble of working and fighting back. Rather than professional writers or activists, the authors are workers reflecting on their experiences, aspirations, and how to improve our situation. Through storytelling, they draw out the lessons of workplace woes, offering new paths and perspectives for social change and a new world.” … Read More
Militant Reformism and the Prospects for Reforming Capitalism
To continue the dialogue on militant reformism, this week we post an expansive piece on the viability of reforming capitalism written by Nate Hawthorne. This week’s post dovetails with the piece from last month on the Argentinian crisis of the early 2000’s and S. N. Nappalos’ piece called Responding to the growing importance of the state in the workers’ movement. Nate’s article first appeared in the book The End of the World as We Know It? which was edited by Deric Shannon. Read More
Concrete Examples of Non Labour Relations Board Unions – Part II
This is the second part of a series of concrete examples and very brief summaries of organizations that have some component of direct action and a form of collective bargaining that operate outside the labour relations framework. The following are IWW projects that had aspects of Labour Relations Board campaigns to them but were essentially not oriented towards the LRB. You will also notice that these examples are American. One key difference in the American context is the presence of a longer and richer history of what is called “minority unionism” that is unions that seek to build majorities from minorities but are capable of acting as a part of the workforce that doesn’t always represent a majority pro-union group as verified by card check or a board election. Read More
Excerpts on the Argentinian Crisis of the Early 2000’s
Cacerolazo in Plaza de Mayo. Banner reads “ALL OF THEM MUST GO – Government of workers and neighborhood assemblies” The Argentinian crisis at the opening of the 21st century and the aftermath of those events up to the present day are an important experience. For some of us here at Recomposition, these events relate to what we’ve discussed in terms of militant reformism, the idea of mobilizing a population to fight for reforms that would yield to an improved form of capitalism. We think we’re likely to see more of this, and with that in mind, we hope to stir up dialogue by presenting some excerpts from Sebastian Touza’s introduction to an article by Colectivo Situaciones, and then excerpts from the article “Crisis, Governmentality and New Social Conflict: Argentina as a laboratory” by the Colectivo Situaciones. Lastly we link to a piece about militant reformism by S. N. Nappalos. From Sebastian Touza’s intro: “Chanting ‘All of them must go!’, on December 19th and 20th, 2001, massive… Read More
Happy Birthday to Us!
Happy Birthday Recomp! We turned 5! We’ve been working hard to look good for our birthday, so we’re launching a new site that looks all caught up with the times! There’s still a lot of work to be done but we couldn’t wait to share and celebrate with all of you, our readers, contributors, and our own fellow editors. Below you’ll find a piece written by John O’Reilly, and Monica Kostas that looks back on the past 5 years, and looks forward to another great 5 years for Recomposition. Check it out! Read More
Concrete Examples of Non Labour Relations Board Unions – Part I
Port of Metro Vancouver Workers Protest This is the first part of a series of concrete examples and very brief summaries of organizations that have some component of direct action and a form of collective bargaining that operate outside the labour relations framework. The first series are entirely owner operator associations in Transportation. There is a conventional argument, bolstered by employers, that these folks are not workers but rather small business people. Of course that’s nonsense, being a worker is not determined by the form of wage you take and being paid piece rate is as old as payment itself. Owning your own tools does not make someone a business owner, if that were the case many tradesmen wouldn’t be workers. These workers have responded to a unique situation that opens up positive examples for organisers all over and should be watched. Read More
Garage Collective Reviews Lines of Work
Lines of Work Today we share a review of Lines of Work, a collection of stories on organizing and life on the job, put together by fellow Recomposition editor Scott Nappalos, and which you can find here. This review is by Garage Collective and it first appeared on their blog. An introduction to Lines of Work by Scott Nappalos is also provided below. Lines of Work: Stories of Jobs and Resistance By Scott Nikolas Nappalos, ed. (Alberta, Canada: Black Cat Press, 2013) Review by Jared Davidson, first published in LHP Bulletin 64. Lines of Work is a fascinating, at times bleak and emotive volume of stories about work and its effect on our lives. How fitting then, that my review copy was waiting for me after my usual 20-minute trip home from work had stretched to four hours, thanks to the flooding in Wellington of 14 May 2015. Work (with a little help from the weather) had kept me away from my loved ones even more than it already does on a day-to-day basis. That period after clocking out was clearly not my own time, but that of capital. Read More
Against the IWW Series Part 5: Means of Struggle
Emilio Lopez Arango What is the role of unions in a future free society? How does the structure of capitalism and unions today reflect that? The difficulty of the end of the 1920s (fascism and repression, changes in demographics and industries) gave an opportunity for reflection on strategy and vision of the revolutionary movement. This happened mainly within the International Workers Association (IWA-AIT) which at the time likely involved millions of workers across the world, but also within the IWW. The subject is poorly studied with minimal resources in English, most of what is publicly available about the IWA can be reduced to a few articles. The debate was wide ranging covering union structure, future society, revolutionary methods, amongst other subjects. Part of the discussion focused on whether revolutionary unions should adopt craft or industrial unions as their primary structure. What follows is a translation of Medios de Lucha, Means of Struggle, by Emilio Lopez Arango, a working class autodidact and baker; the main thinker of Argentina’s powerful Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA). The FORA dominated the Argentine labor movement for decades in the turn of the century and its model spread across Latin America, in some cases like Chile and Mexico displacing the IWW affiliates. In the piece Arango grapples with the question of industrial organization and industrial unionism and critiques the IWW’s idea that unions within capitalism should form the basis for a future society especially centered on using capitalist industries as the model. He was not alone in this as some IWWs also critiqued it. We also recommend reading the recent piece by S Nicholas Nappalos that looks at the debate more in depth. The piece today is also part 5 of our Against the IWW series, which, to be clear we’re not anti-IWW, we’re very pro-IWW and we’re running this series because we think IWW members should read criticisms of the IWW, discuss them with each other, and be able to respond to those criticisms. In our organizing we inoculate our co-workers to the criticisms employers make of the IWW. Similarly IWW members should be inoculated against political criticisms of the IWW. We invite people to write full rebuttals to this and all of the other criticisms of the IWW and submit them to us and to other web sites and publications. You can find our previous posts in the series here: Against the IWW Series Part I: The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement Against the IWW Series Part 2: The IWW (1955) by James P Cannon Against the IWW Series Part 3: An Infantile Disorder Against the IWW Series Part 4: The Legacy of the IWW Read More
Necessary Steps in Tough Economic Times
Today we share an article that first appeared in Deric Shannon’s book The End of the World As We Know It? published by AK Press. “Necessary Steps in Tough Economic Times” by Marianne LeNabat, one of our editors at Recomposition, takes us through an overview of how students in recent decades have become saddled with debt, how a student movement rose up in NY during the height of OWS, some of the lessons we can draw from organized resistance, and the ripples that student fights caused spreading solidarity throughout various sectors of society. Read More
News from Houston
USW strikers on picket duty. Today’s post comes to us from fellow IWW’s in Houston giving us a brief overview on their recent work around the USW strikes on the oil refineries. Click here and you can also listen to an interview with two of the Houston wobs talking about the work their branch is doing, and also their perspectives on the IWW’s projects at large. A Houston Wobb’s Reflection on the USW Strike by Adelita Unions’ power is in decay and lately have been resorting to more creative methods in order to remain relevant. We’ve seen the Democrats putting their money behind the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) Fight For $15 in Houston at the same time attempting to “turn Texas blue.” But this dependency of unions like SEIU and the United Steel Workers (USW) on the Democratic Party means they are severely limited in what they are willing to do in the realm of tactics. This along with union density being sharply in decline, as well as union power being undermined by Right-to-Work spreading to states like Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, means the unions are not up for waging anything close to a class struggle. Instead unions like the USW maintain their position as representing only certain interests and timidly bargaining around them. Read More
I Am Not a Marxist
Image from Libcom.org Those of us who work on Recomposition differ about how important we think Marx’s writings about capitalism are and about which marxist writers we draw from, if any. For those of us who are more interested in and who identify with the marxist tradition (or maybe we should say traditions), our interests are largely despite some major reservations we have about much within marxism. This article by Michael Heinrich speaks to those reservations. (We have previously run an excerpt from his book, an excerpt on the role of the state in capitalist society, here.) The article argues that there is no coherent thing called marxism. The article criticizes people who rewrite history in order to present such a coherent thing. Furthermore, too many marxists overstate the unity and coherence of Marx’s own writings. Among other things we think this is worth reading because there are some relics of the bad old marxisms still lingering on in the present, both in organizations and habits of thought. Read More
The Making Of A Politicized Prisoner
The third installment in our ‘How I was radicalized’ series comes from Okwute Ekwensu. His powerful account describes the experience of leading a criminal life that led to incarceration, followed by his radicalization in prison. Okwute lives in the Twin Cities and is involved in the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC). Part 1|Part 2|Part 3 Read More
Growing up during the ‘War on Terror’
The second part of our ‘How were you radicalized?’ series brings us to the 2000s. Starting with his family roots in the South African anti-apartheid and American civil rights movements, the author takes us through the post-9/11 and Iraq War era, a time when many of us found the radical left. This piece was written by our friend, Dee, who is in First of May Anarchist Alliance as well as the IWW. Although a lifelong Midwesterner, he is currently living in South Africa. Read More
From the right-wing to the revolutionary left
For May Day, we are presenting the start of a new multipart series around the question ‘How were you radicalized?’ On the radical left, many people often speak of their protest or organizing experiences, almost like old war veterans. But one of the more interesting stories…people’s personal path to radical politics, aren’t always told. The first part in our series takes us briefly though the ’60s and ’70s and is from Tom Wetzel. Tom’s other writings can be found on his personal website, as well as on ideas & action, a publication by Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA). Read More
A new society must be built
Equilibrium & Disequilibrium The 2008 financial crisis in the US led to a flurry of ink and predictions of world collapse of capitalism. None of that has come to be as of yet, but the significance of the crisis is still unsettled. This week’s piece comes to us from Scott Nicholas Nappalos, and argues that more than crisis we need to create the pre-conditions for collective struggles and to actively construct a new society beyond waiting for conditions to do it for us. Read More
Is life worth living or should I blast myself?
Is Life Worth Living or Should I Blast Myself? This week’s piece Is Life Worth Living or Should I Blast Myself?, first appeared in the blog Poe Man’s Dreams which narrates some of the miseries and experiences of everyday life for people with few resources. This particular story is an account of being a juvenile delinquent and having to live with a family who had a multitude of issues. Check it out below. (In case you’ve missed it, we also posted Exhibit A from the same author a few weeks ago.) Trigger warning: Accounts or discussion of suicide, sexual assault, self-harm, drug abuse and physical abuse Read More
Podcast Interview with Luigi Rinaldi
Symptomatic Redness Podcast with L. Rinaldi This week we present an interview by Symptomatic Redness with one of our fellow editors Luigi Rinaldi who discusses the Recomposition blog, the IWW, unions, among other subjects. Symptomatic Redness is a show on political economy and historical analysis and you can check them out here. Check out the podcast with Luigi here. Read More
Beating Back the Bureaucrats
Bloque Sindical de Base We are happy to present Beating Back the Bureaucrats from a comrade writing in South Africa. The piece focuses mostly on a recent initiative called Bloque Sindical de Base in Argentina. Argentina’s labor movement and its many divisions are not well known or understood by english-speakers in the workers movement. Having a history of revolutionary unionism that pre-dates the IWW by some decades and has continued through multiple dictatorships, union labor laws modeled after Mussolini’s Italy, and more recently a severe crisis in 2001 that led to 75% unemployment and a broad uprising, Argentina’s history contains a lot organizers can learn from about building the IWW and more broadly militant workplace organization. How do we deal with government control over the labor movement? With efforts that push organizers into bureaucracies? With reform efforts within unions? Beating Back the Bureaucrats is a welcome addition to bring some of the perspectives and debates to our audience. The author gives a general history of the development of Argentina’s two largest trade union federations today, the CGT and CTA, starting at the birth of the CGT, its unification with the Peronist movement, and the fights and splits that have followed in the past 50 years since. Much of the work focuses on a recent initiative by union militants within the rival federation CTA which split from CGT. These militants formed a current called Bloque Sindical de Base aimed at increasing rank and file participation and combating bureaucracy within the unions it organizes. Bloque Sindical de Base uses union assemblies to mobilize worker participation on the one hand and on the other runs slates in union elections. Drawing from his analysis of Bloque Sindical de Base, the author argues for positions about the development of more combative and libertarian workers movements, and how new unions initiatives could help or hinder that situation. We have some reservations about the strategy presented at least where we live in the US and Canada, but the article raises important questions for anyone that wishes to develop revolutionary unionism, and we hope it can inspire constructive debates over these issues. Read More
Exhibit A
Exhibit A This week’s piece Exhibit A, first appeared in the relatively new blog called Poe Man’s Dreams which narrates the miseries and experiences of everyday life for people with few resources. Check out the story below. Introduction to Poe Man’s Dreams, a blog about experiencing ‘the struggle‘ in the American Midwest. It’s like I’m trapped in a maze walk around in a daze I won’t rest ’til I’m paid or I’m down in my grave I wanna look tough, but my sneakers is scuffed Everyday pants in the week is enough I had a little money, but it came and it went Now its either pay the rent or stay in a tent And it don’t make sense how the shit is intense And all you got up in your pocket is lint, you get the hint? I had a cigarette for breakfast, just for beginners Pride for my lunch and sleep for dinner I tried to go to church, priest called me a sinner He called me everything, except for a winner I’m walking in the rain wishing things would change It ain’t a game, man I pawned all the rings and chains Emotionally scarred from losing my job Pass the nod nigga, times is hard –G. Dep “Everyday” (featuring Faith Evans & Meelah) Read More
Against the IWW Series Part 4: The Legacy of the IWW
This week we present part 4 of our Against the IWW series which we started back in late 2013. The Legacy of the IWW: To Break Their Haughty Power by Joe Richard can be found in the International Socialist Review site. You can find our previous posts in the series here: Against the IWW Series Part I: The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement Against the IWW Series Part 2: The IWW (1955) by James P Cannon Against the IWW Series Part 3: An Infantile Disorder Just to be clear, we’ve run anti IWW stuff before though last time around we accidentally confused people. People thought we had become anti-IWW. We’re not, we’re pro-IWW. Very much so. We ran those pieces and are running this piece because we think IWW members should read criticisms of the IWW, discuss them with each other, and be able to respond to those criticisms. In our organizing we inoculate our co-workers to the criticisms employers make of the IWW. Similarly IWW members should be inoculated against political criticisms of the IWW. We invite people to write full rebuttals to this and all of the other criticisms of the IWW and submit them to us and to other web sites and publications. IWW Charter The Legacy of the IWW: To Break Their Haughty Power by Joe Richard You men and women should be imbued with the spirit that is now displayed in far-off Russia and far-off Siberia where we thought the spark of manhood and womanhood had been crushed…. Let us take example from them. We see the capitalist class fortifying themselves today behind their Citizens’ Associations and Employers’ Associations in order that they may crush the American labor movement. Let us cast our eyes over to far-off Russia and take heart and courage from those who are fighting the battle there. —Lucy Parsons, at the founding convention of the IWW, 1905 Read More
Snake March
Workers gather over one thousand strong to protest back to work legislation. Concluding Phineas Gage’s three-part series on struggles at the Canada Post during 2011, we present ‘Snake march’. In this final installment, he describes the moral as the lockout drags on. Parliamentary filibusters and symbolic occupations fail to turn the tide on contract negotiations. The postal workers return to work, determined to not let management bulldoze them in the shopfloor. Check out here Part 1 of the series and also Part 2. Snake March A truck pulled up to the parking lot in front of the main downtown Post Office. Christine and I jumped up and started unloading signs from the back. Camera people were setting up all around the truck and The Local President was going over the notes her people helped her prep for the interviews. Slowly the crowd swelled as people walked in from the bus stops, then a big bus from the Nurses union pulled up and people filed out. Half an hour later the crowd was huge spilling out of the parking lot. Around 1,000 people showed up. Gil McGowan, the President of the Provincial Labour Federation, took the microphone from a local executive member who was managing the speakers list. The shopfloor committees huddled on the other side of the crowd, largely ignoring the people who had their faces in the television cameras. Sheila was chairing the committee meeting. “Okay so what’s the plan?” Read More
Buffalo Jump
Last week we brought you the first in a series of articles by Phineas Gage about a strike at Canada Post. This week as the strike rolled on the workers faced a common challenge of workplace battles. The government, employers, and national union began making moves to diffuse the situation and try to control the actions of the workers. Viewed from inside the strike at one local we see the decisions workers were wrestling with to try and combat the cut backs, austerity, and attacks being leveled against them on the job, and at the same time responding to the real possibilities of further losses, repression, and possible sabotage from above. Buffalo Jump I had only slept a few hours when I returned to the Mail Processing Plant the morning after they locked us out. As I parked my car I watched a crowd of Postal Workers gathered around a Lexus with the doors open, the trunk open and a bunch of chanting. I saw Sheila hauling a tire out of the trunk of the Lexus and bounce it a few times on the ground. I guess a few workers had this done to their vehicles when they took road trips across the border to the USA, the guards were seeing if there were drugs inside it, and thought that was how a proper search was done. The man in the suit got into his car and Sheila slammed the door hard behind him. He pulled out of the crowd safely but when at the edge of the mob he squealed his tires. The mob covered their ears and a few plastic bottles were thrown at the car as he sped away. Read More
Turning up the Heat
Postal Workers rally around the plant after being locked out. This week we proudly present you the first of a three part series that detail a set of organizing actions by postal workers in Canada during 2011. It is written by fellow Recomposition editor Phineas Gage who expounds on the actions that led up to the CUPW strike, the predicaments that workers faced challenging management, and the indelible memory of seeing management flee an angry mob of strikers. Enjoy, and check back next week for Part 2! Turning up the Heat by Phineas Gage Craig stood inside the Mail Processing Plant doors, just about to punch in. His phone rang – the number for National. The voice on his cell phone spoke excitedly. Craig nodded slowly. “Almost ready, we have a couple depots that are slacking but this will light a fire under their ass,” he said. The voice from the National Office spoke again. “Okay, I’ll pass that on. So the strike could start tomorrow, it could be in a few weeks, you will keep us posted but we probably won’t hear much until you tell us to go”. Craig talked into the phone loudly enough that the other people standing near him could hear. Grand standing while no one is supposed to be paying attention is the oldest trick in the book. “For all their talk about ‘direct action’ Depot 2 sure seems to not be interested in the big job action we have planned for a few weeks from now. You remember that one, right? The strike? That’s a pretty big job action, right?” Read More
As We See It / As We Don’t See It
The twentieth century went back and forth between two extremes. On one side, individualism would reign supreme in the ambitions of ‘great men’, in the excesses of Wall Street and in the quest for meaning in art and literature. On the other hand, the glorification of a caricature of the human community in the phony communism of nationalized industry under a party dictatorship. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, a battle raged between the need for social action on the parts of large groups of people and the debasement of humanity that happened in the name of this action. A simultaneous perversion of humanity and the individual occurred. As We See It/As We Don’t See it stand out as one of the best attempts at expressing a politics that both reflects the battle between these poles and cuts to the nature of this tension. No doubt like anything that old, parts of it are now a bit dated, but the basic sentiment and approach are as relevant now as they ever were. These texts were taken from the on-line Solidarity and Subversion archive at af-north.org As we see it / Don’t see it by Solidarity I. As We See It Read More
The Bell Tolls for Thee, Motherfucker
Sketch contribution by Monica Kostas Get ready to never see bus drivers the same way again. This week we feature a story by John O’Reilly who takes us through the route of his daily tribulations as a city bus driver in Minneapolis. Ding. You’re just driving along, keeping your eyes open, checking side streets and blind alleys, and it happens. No warning. It jolts you, and you instinctively look down the road for the next blue reflective bus stop sign. If you know the route well, you can visualize exactly where the sign is. If it’s a route you don’t drive often, you push your eyes as far as you can see to find the next one in the thicket of poles on the side of the road. It’s not until you’re a bus driver that you realize exactly how many signs crowd the boulevards of our cities. Only one among them is the one that your passenger has signaled for you to stop at, and you have the short time between registering the sound in your brain and where the sign sits to apply the full weight of your brakes, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of air pressure, to slow a half a million dollar vehicle to a stop without taking out a side mirror, hitting a biker or crushing a car, and maneuver it smoothly to the side of the road at exactly the spot where the passenger intends to alight. Every time, hundreds of times a day, it takes all your concentration to accomplish this simple, single task. Read More
A Worthless Piece of Plastic
Surprise – by Monica Kostas This week’s piece comes to us by a regular Recomposition contributor, Invisible Man. In the face of fierce debates on racism, profiling, protests, and riots, his anecdote detailing an altercation with cops in Alberta feels painfully relevant. A Worthless Piece of Plastic by Invisible Man There’s nothing to do on a Saturday night in Lacombe. We want to see a movie. In the fall of 1999, the nearest theatre is half an hour’s drive away in Red Deer, Alberta. So, as usual, we drive into town with a borrowed ride – Terry at the wheel. (He’s white, you have to think of these things.) We turn into the theatre parking lot to read the lighted billboard on the north side of the building. As usual, there is nothing worth seeing. “Let’s go to the cheap theatre. At least we won’t be wasting our money on a crappy movie.” “You wanna walk?” “Yeah, let’s walk.” Read More
We Carry Our Failures
Vicious Care – sketch by Monica Kostas This week’s piece comes to us from fellow editor Scott Nappalos, a healthcare worker in Miami. He writes about the challenges of salvaging human interactions and compassion while working in a profiteering healthcare system that renders impotent patients and healthcare workers alike. We Carry Our Failures: Working With People in a Dehumanizing System My patient would come back to the hospital just as soon as he left. We’ll call him Mr. Jones. His arm was mangled by a rare cancer that took his digit and much of his sensation and movement. He wore a hat over his thinning hair that read ‘Vietnam Veteran’. Rare cancer, God only knows what he was exposed to there. He took to me and would greet me and discuss his condition even when I wasn’t assigned to him, “it’s miserable” looking to his hand “living like this”. Everyone took him to be a problem. They accused him of being a drug addict and using the hospital like a hotel for room and board, as he would sneak off the unit to smoke, talk to vets, buy junk food, and tool around outside in his wheelchair. Doctors would discharge him and he’d come right back. No one believed the stories he gave that were enough to get him readmitted, essentially living in the hospital for months despite discharges. Read More
On Bluffing
Rage – contribution by M. Kostas This week’s piece comes to us by fellow editor at Recomposition, Phineas Gage. In it, he analyzes three instances in different organizing scenarios where bluffing, whether premeditated or spontaneous, helped leverage reactions that would not have otherwise happened. A running theme through these experiences is the desire to struggle, but to struggle together, paired with the glaring fear that people won’t have each other’s backs when push comes to shove. His insight not only lets us in on the small details that can make or break actions, but also shines a light on how every step we take in our organizing, as in our life, is a gamble. Read More
The Intermediate Moment
This week we bring you a piece from our friends at Unity and Struggle. They’ve written a longer assessment of trying to navigate a revolutionary path in our time. Engaging ideas of some of us in Recomp and others around the country, this strikes us as important conversations to have as things are still up in the air from the events of 2008, 2012, and continuing. The intermediate moment is the first part of a two part series, the second of which is likely to be about their experiences organizing a solidarity network that has worked on housing issues in largely immigrant neighborhoods in Houston. We’re looking forward to it. – by Adelita Kahlo and Tyler Zee *The perspectives advanced below are those of the authors and do not represent an official “line” of U&S. U&S, as will be seen below, does not have formal positions. While many of the ideas will be common starting points for U&S, there will be nuanced differences and perhaps some disagreements according to individuals and locales. Read More
The Truth About The Million Dollar Coffee Company
This week we bring you a second piece from a Starbucks worker about a firing, following Work to Rule. Part of struggle is not only the lessons and strategies, but also the experiences and the real life costs that occur when we start to take action. This submission succinctly takes us though one woman’s experience that ended too soon. By: Lyssa I think back to the last I worked at Starbucks on 80th and York, and recall what a beautiful day it was outside, that day was a nice break from the harsh winter we had this past year. As I walked into the store that day, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that something was not right. However I still clocked in for my shift at 2:15 pm to close the store with one of new supervisors, put on the “happy barista persona” required of me, and went on the floor to work. About 15 minutes after I had clocked in I watched my supervisor Margret waltz in (15 minutes late and out of dress code) with her sister (another Starbucks partner) in tow, she had the most confused look on her face at the site of me. She said to me “Lyssa are you closing?” I looked at her with an even more confused face and responded to her. “Yeah I am. Why?” To which she replied, “So why did Jennifer have me bring my sister in to close?” Read More
Work to Rule
This week’s piece comes to us from a Starbucks worker and member of the IWW. She describes what happened when an incompetent bosses crossed the line, and the workers came together to assert themselves. The author describes the tactic of working-to-rule, or following all of managements often incoherent rules that inevitably slows work to a crawl without disobeying any directives. Key to this experience was not only the grievances or tactics which are worth discussing in their own right, but also the perception of power and inspiration that the workers expressed. This is a common theme in worker organizing and often passed over when it remains at the center of the hearts and minds of people standing up against perceived injustices. Read More
May 1st 630pm EST Lines of Work Book Launch Live in Miami!
The South Florida IWW and Recomposition present a live online launch of the new book Lines of Work on 630pm EST May 1st. Two authors will present the book at a Miami bookstore, Books & Books, with readings from the text and discussion. For those outside South Florida, you can tune in by checking the Live stream address the day of the event. The text brings together stories of work and workers from the US, Canada, and the Uk reflecting on their experiences grappling with what they do to earn a living, and struggling for something better. “Half our waking hours are spent on the job, consuming the lion’s share of our time. Our years are woven with stories of work told around the dinner table, breakroom, and bars. Yet these stories are rarely put into print, investigated, or seen as they should be; as part of workers’ activity to understand and change their lot under capitalism. LINES OF WORK offers a rare look at life and social relationships viewed from the cubicle, cash register, hospital, factory, and job site. Drawn from the writings of Recomposition, an online project of worker radicals, the text brings together organizers from a handful of countries sharing their experiences with the trouble of working and fighting back. Rather than professional writers or activists, the authors are workers reflecting on their experiences, aspirations, and how to improve our situation. Through storytelling, they draw out the lessons of workplace woes, offering new paths and perspectives for social change and a new world.” Read More
Beyond “F*ck You”: An organizer’s approach to confronting hateful language at work
The people we work with usually reflect what the dominant culture of our society is like. This includes some of its worst aspects, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and heterosexism. For worker-organizer’s, these present their own difficulties. They impede our short term goals such as being able to withstand the drudgery of a job, as well as exist as obstacles to uniting our coworkers against management. In addition to these problems, they stand in stark contrast with our long-term goals of creating a new world free of oppression and exploitation. But how do we deal with this? Here is an account from Coeur de Bord about their response to hateful language at their workplace. Read More
Being a Woman Organizer Isn’t Easy
A mural image showing (left) A member of the IWW or “Wobblies” trying to organize the Maine woodsmen and The Textile Workers and a mural image depicting (right) Young women were often sent to the mills by their families, who could not, or would not support them. REUTERS/Judy Taylor/Handout March was International Women’s Day and the IWW celebrated it with a special issue of the Industrial Worker. It’s worth reading the whole thing via the Industrial Worker here and you can get a subscription via this link if you want to support it and see more writings like that. Much of the time discussions around organizing center on what keeps us from winning or building the union up to those fights. There’s less discussion around things that prevent workers from becoming their own radical agents, particularly in gendered terms. The article we’re running today comes from Miami, Florida and was published in the Industrial Worker. It’s a personal account of one organizer’s journey to becoming a committed IWW, and how she has seen race and gender play a role in her life. Though only one snapshot of these big issues, contributions like this give us a window into deep forces at play in our work and neighborhood lives, and are things we hope IWWs can continue thinking around and fighting for an alternative. from Luz Sierra This past year I became politically active. I went from being completely unaware of the existence of radical politics to doing organizing work in Miami with an anarchist perspective. It has been both a rewarding and difficult journey, yet gender seems to haunt me wherever I go. I am probably not the first woman to experience this, but I believe that I should demonstrate how this is a real issue and provide my personal insight for other women to have a reference point for their own struggles. Read More
Industrial Unity: A Response to “Locality & Shop”
We received a number of replies and great discussion from the piece by S Nappalos on the IWW’s locality versus industrial structures. E.A. Martinez has sent a lengthy response raising points of criticism and agreement that is worth engaging. While the discussion centers around structures of the IWW, bigger issues are at hand. In reality the debate centers around the role of the workplace organizer, how they relate to their job and neighborhood, and where we situate their struggles. We’re glad to see this thoughtful reply, and hope it generates some reflection and responses. E.A. Martinez The division between local organization and industrial organization – and which should prevail over the other – has been a hot topic of debate within revolutionary unions for decades, and the IWW is no exception. Locality and Shop Inside Revolutionary Unions provides one perspective on whether the local form (the General Membership Branch, or GMB) or the industrial form (the Industrial Union Branch, or IUB) is superior. After examining attempts by the Portland IWW to build a patchwork of IUBs in the early 2000s, the author concludes that industrial organization is not suited for the present socio-economic conditions in which we find ourselves, or for the present state of the IWW. Rather, we should look to build the IWW as local groups of militants and political radicals who “take [their militancy] with them through their jobs.” The author points to many Wobblies’ opposition to activism as one of the chief causes for the preference of industrial units over local units, which is not untrue. Many Wobblies have argued that locality-based IWW branches are often mistaken for merely another acronym in a city’s alphabet soup of revolutionary groups, book clubs, NGOs, and non-profits. To combat the perception of the IWW as anything but an industrial union, Wobblies have pushed for more workplace- and industry-based organization, as this will demonstrate to activists that we are in fact a union, and not one of many political clubs. Read More
Joe Burn’s Review of Lines of Work
Joe Burns, author of the influential book Reviving the Strike put up a review of our new book Lines of Work on his blog. We want to direct to the discussion to the Reviving the Strike blog where he posted it. His comments are flattering and we aspire towards and contribute to the sort of revival he advocates. “Although written in terms of stories and experiences, the book’s approach offers a different approach to union revival, one deeply rooted in the workplace and rooted in the daily experience of workers.” This Saturday we remind our readers near Miami, Florida that there will be a Lines of Work worker story workshop. Read More
Review of Lines of Work
Our friends at Unity and Struggle reviewed our new book Lines of Work. We want to direct to the discussion on their site linked above. The review makes us proud of our work and thankful for all the great people who engage with this project, contribute, read, and make Recomposition what it is. At the same time there’s some seeds for us to think about as we keep moving forward with organizing, writing, creating, and reflecting. The friendly critical thoughts at the end are worth thinking about and could help improve all of our work “a more robust theory of the moment is needed in order to inform these struggles and prepare them for the next level. And not just for the theoretically inclined of the volume, who work tirelessly to this effect — for every would-be workplace organizer. This means a vision of what society is and what it needs be, beyond bosses and workers, justice and injustice, freedom and unfreedom, coupled with an analysis of the conditions under which we can reasonably st… Read More
Locality and Shop Inside Revolutionary Unions
There’s been a long debate within the revolutionary union movement about structure and specifically about the relationship between locality-based units and workplace/trade/industrial based units. Though not well known, the IWW also had battles with these concepts with different factions trying to abolish the General Recruiting Unions, the predecessor of the General Membership branch uniting all workers based on a local who lacked a Industrial Union Branch, and other trying to support it. The recruiting unions were banned at some periods of IWW history and had to be brought back though not without controversy. Other revolutionary unions such as the CNT of Spain and FORA of Argentina maintained both locality based grouping and workplace based ones. This piece explores the debate around these issues within the IWW and experiences both with locality-units and workplace-units from recent activities, and attempts to get at the issues of our tasks and objectives beyond only looking at structures. Area, Shop, and Revolution: a case for both locality and workplace unitary organization Scott Nikolas Nappalos In the early 2000s a series of experiments were carried out in the IWW that led to the formation of Industrial Union Branches (IUBs). Alongside the handful of IUBs emerged ideas around why IUBs should be prioritized and their superiority to other structures. The IUBs primarily were initiated in the Portland IWW after a series of struggles that produced the largest and most dynamic area for IWW workplace organizing in the union for decades. The Portland IWW ballooned to its peak with membership in the hundreds in the early 2000s after a decade of organizing attempts in the 1990s, and some high profile contract campaigns, strikes, and actions at the turn of the century. As membership grew, Portland moved from a General Membership Branch (GMB) towards IUBs in areas where there were a concentration of members: social service, construction, education, restaurants, grocery/retail, and transportation. Read More
Lines of Work Event: 5pm April 5th Miami, Florida
Events around the release of our new book,Lines of Work by Black Cat Press, are coming together. 5pm April 5th the South Florida General Membership Branch of the IWW will be hosting a Lines of Work event at Sweat Records, 5505 NE 2nd Ave, Miami, FL 33137. In coordination with Lines of Work launches, this event will be exploring workers stories and their lessons with readings of pieces worker narratives and collective discussions. The official Miami book launch will happen on May 1st, with details to follow. Contacts us if you’re interested in hosting a book launch or event with workers stories in your town. “Half our waking hours are spent on the job, consuming the lion’s share of our time. Our years are woven with stories of work told around the dinner table, breakroom, and bars. Yet these stories are rarely put into print, investigated, or seen as they should be; as part of workers’ activity to understand and change their lot under capitalism. LINES OF WORK offers a rare look at lif… Read More
Actions and Objectives of the Workers Movement
What is the relationship between the objectives of the revolutionary union movement and its actions? Ever since unions were first integrated into the State and its legal framework for collaborative industrial relations, the revolutionary union movement has had hard questioned pressed upon it. At crucial moments revolutionary unions defected to back policies destructive to the working class such as the CGT in France supporting WWI, the leadership of the CNT joining the government during the war, and Mexico’s Casa del Obrera Mundial taking up arms for the state against the rural Zapatista movement in its revolution. The post-war labor movement has been defined by trying to navigate the integration of unions within the State and often management, and the subsequent dismantling of those relationships. Today we still grapple with these issues as we try to find ways to fight around daily issues while building a powerful movement of working class people towards a new revolutionary horizon. This piece comes to us from our brothers and sisters in the Confederation of Revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists CRAS-AIT in Russia. Vadim Damier, historian of the seminal work Anarcho-syndicalism in the 20th Century (published and translated by Black Cat Press) writes about the experiences of the spanish anarchosyndicalist union the CNT from a critical perspective, and gives an alternative followed by CRAS-AIT today inspired by experiences in anarchosyndicalists in Argentina. Whichever position you take, this discussion is crucial now as the basis for unions is being transformed, and uncertain possibilities and challenges are unfolding. Read More
Scabs! Part II: The St. Albert Wildcat
This entry is the second part in a two-part story from contributor Phineas Gage about a wildcat strike by contractors at the Canadian postal service, and continues our coverage of struggles within Canada Post. The phone rang irritatingly early, early enough I ignored it the first time. Apparently Lise-Anne called several other executive members after she left a message for me. I later found out the message she left me said: “they’re cutting our pay by 30%, we had a coffee break meeting and we vote unanimously to walk out in response, what do we do now?” The phone rang again, this time I picked up. “We just walked out, we’re sitting across the street in the Tim Horton’s”. Eight months prior I had talked to the workers at this depot about racial discrimination and harassment one co-worker was facing. They marched on the boss with eight people that sent a strong enough message it put an end to that issue. Even if the racist supervisor was still around he was a lot quieter. The workers became more assertive, and very strong on the floor. A series of small actions built the solidarity among the rural workers to the point where they felt strong enough to fight a change to the work measurement system that was going to cut their pay by almost a third. “Did you make any demands?” I asked groggily, sometimes folks are so angry they forget to say what they want. “Yeah, we wanted a repeal of the policy and he told us that the union was going to be upset we did this”. “What did you say to that?” “I said we didn’t need their permission to do this, but the local President and Sharon are coming down to talk to us and see what they can do to help”. Read More
Scabs: Part I
This entry is a two-part story from contributor Phineas Gage about a wildcat strike by contractors at the Canadian postal service, and continues our coverage of struggles within Canada Post. In the course of the strike, union workers had to figure out how to relate to contractors and where scabbing starts and solidarity ends. The experience of life under capitalism can reveal both the potential divisions that destroy struggles and the commonalities that can overcome them. These next two pieces can help us understand and try to go beyond the barriers class throws at us. Abraham looked down the row at everyone else sorting mail. Their heads were bowed, occasionally rubbing their eyes they worked slowly but steadily- the only way you can when you work fourteen hours every day. He reached over to the letter that was left on his desk for him by a Canada Post Supervisor, he was in late because his daughter was up all night with a cough. The letterhead was from Reynolds Diaz, the private contractor that hired him on behalf of Canada Post. Read More
Lines of Work Book Launch Tour Starts Tomorrow Sunday 1/26
Our new book,Lines of Work, has been released by Black Cat Press. To celebrate the launch of the text, we’re having our first event in Minneapolis tomorrow 3pm Sunday 1/26 at Boneshaker Books located at 2002 23rd Ave. S., Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404. Three authors will be speaking about the text, our project, and reading from their contributions. Tour dates are to be announced in other cities with tentative events planned in Miami and Toronto confirmed shortly. Stay tuned for more information. Below we’ve included the back cover description of the text. Read More
How I Got Fired And Won My Job Back
This submission comes to us from an IWW organizer about his organizing that led to his being fired and returned to work. Given that firings are the greatest fear we often encounter in organizing, a detailed account like this is valuable for workers learning to organize. Emmett was organizing in a typical environment we find ourselves in; without a union, organizing only semi-publicly, and trying to move forward without reproducing the errors of business unions. Working without contracts, elections, or the typical management union relation, Emmett’s piece helps show the tensions that come out of our work, and how they were able to turn things around. By Emmett J. Nolan Originally Published in the Industrial Worker Issue 1761 December 2013. The Termination Arriving to work, I entered through the break room as usual. There, awaiting me was my manager who immediately said that we needed to talk. He told me not to put away my bag; I couldn’t get ready for my shift like I usually did. I asked him if this was a disciplinary meeting but he did not respond directly to the question. He just said, “We need to talk. This will just take a minute.” While walking through the production floor I greeted co-workers as I usually do and I followed my manager into his office. Seeing that no one else was in the office, I asked, “Is someone from HR [Human Resources] going to be here?” He barked back at me, “This is coming straight from HR.” I then asked him if I could have a co-worker in the meeting with me. He denied this request, responding, “Hmmm, no.” Read More
State and Capital
Capitalism touches every moment of our lives, and always for the worse. That’s why capitalism must be replaced with a new and better society. The state is everywhere too. But how do the two relate? What is the role of the state in maintaining capitalism? And what is the role of the state in creating a new society? Like many people, those of us who edit Recomposition want capitalism to end. We want a society where all people get what they want and need: everything for everyone. We believe that the state will not help us create this new society, and that the new society won’t have a state. Criticism of the state has been a thread in the Industrial Workers of the World for a long time. Since the beginning of the organization in 1905, IWW members have debated over how to understand the state and how to relate to the state practically, including the rejection of the political use of elections and the state system of mediating class conflict. The organization today is culturally anti-state and most members hold these kinds of views. In my view as an IWW member, we should discuss these views more explicitly in the organization today. We should add to our Preamble that we do not see the state as a means for working class revolution nor do we see the state as having a role in the good society created by revolution. With that in mind, this post is about the relationship between the state and capitalism, excerpted from Michael Heinrich’s excellent recent book, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital with the permission of the publishers. The core points of this excerpt are that the state is central to the life of capitalism, and that the state is not simply a tool which can be picked up and used politically. The state is not an object; it is a social relationship. These points are particularly relevant today. Today there is debate about what the state should do and how we should relate to the state among the labor movement and the left as well as both the capitalists and their governments. Among those of us seeking a better society, these debates should be informed by analysis of the relationship between the state and capitalism. – Nate Hawthorne Read More
Solidarity Networks: Innovations, recomposition, and questions
-editorial by SN Nappalos. The development of Solidarity Networks, based largely to our knowledge on the example of Seattle Solidarity Network, has led to experiments and debate not only in the US, but internationally as well. At its simplest, a solidarity network is a grouping that uses direct action to sway fights of individuals and groups typically of workers and tenants. Different from traditional union organizing, Seattle Solidarity Network (also known as Seasol) began by bringing together a milieu willing to mobilize to support issues working class people have independent of where they work or live. This includes fighting in situations where a union is already there (as was the case with an SEIU shop), where it is a lone individual, or more recently amongst groups of tenants and workers. A thorough discussion of these experiences would be long indeed. Here we provide some of the main points of discussion and pieces looking at solidarity networks to keep those in circulation, and for us to learn as we carry forward. Read More
Lessons from small shop organizing
A significant amount of organizing experience in the IWW comes from working in relatively small workplaces such as stand-alone single shops or franchises of multiple smaller shops. These places present their own set of difficulties and opportunities. Lou Rinaldi talks about what happened at a former job of his in this piece. Lessons from small shop organizing by Lou Rinaldi From May 2012 to August of 2013 I was involved with organizing my workplace, a local small business in Providence, Rhode Island. My experience with that organizing, which lasted about a year before the campaign ended, has given me a lot of perspective that I plan on taking with me for the next time I’m organizing. I wanted to take the time to write down my thoughts and turn them into coherent lessons for my fellow workers, to aid in the creation of better organizers and better organizing campaigns. Read More
Voting for Socialism: A Debate
The campaigns of Kshama Sawant and Ty Moore have generated a lot of debate around the role of elections in overcoming capitalism. Both candidates came from Socialist Alternative, a party with roots in the broader social democratic and trotskyist traditions that moved to electoral activity relatively recently. Sawant won her election to Seattle’s city council, and Moore lost by a hair. A changing social and political landscape is shifting the boundaries of electoral action and the relationships of radicals both to candidates and their own activity. Narrowing in on one aspect of the debate, today we will look at the contributions of three short pieces coming from Minneapolis, where Ty Moore ran his unsuccessful campaign. The authors were responding to the discussion and activity locally as people active in struggles opposed to State power all together, including efforts to capture and reform the existing capitalist State. Though we lack the space, we strongly encourage going through a fourth piece by the Black Orchid Collective in Seattle that explores similar themes in response to their own situation with the candidacy of Sawant. Also the commentary to the pieces that follow and Black Orchid contain replies both from the authors and other people active in the relevant cities, and is worth reading. The articles are listed in chronological order as they reply to one and another. There are a few themes to focus in on. The authors debate whether or not it matters to oppose attempts to move towards socialism through elections. Within this there is a deeper debate about how close and how likely attempts to make reforms are to impede more radical alternatives. Given that a presidential election season is approaching rapidly, and militant reformism is increasingly becoming a mobile social force, these questions are likely to face us again. Read More
Fast Food Unionism: The Unionization of McDonald’s and/or the McDonaldization of Unions
This week’s piece comes to us Erik Forman, a contributor to Recomposition. Forman cut his teeth organizing as an IWW in different fast food establishments before the recent push by SEIU and other unions. The text is a repost from from Counterpunch’s Monthly Digital Exclusive. In Fast Food Unionism, he gives a broad background of the industry, business union tactics, and draws out some directions that an autonomous movement of fast food workers could take to remedy the issues he identifies. Drawing from his experience both as a worker and a direct organizer in the field, the piece brings a closeness that is often missing in many discussions. Read More
Against the IWW Series Part 3: An Infantile Disorder
The root for many critiques of the IWW came from the thinkers of the Bolsheviks, and the positions of the bureaucracies of the Soviet State via the Comintern. The positions laid out in Lenin’s text Left-Wing Communism: An infantile disorder, remain the references point for many such arguments. At the time, Lenin was engaged in purges and assaults on political opposition both within the Bolshevik party and across the territories of the former Russian Empire. The IWW is clearly in view here and Lenin specifically critiques IWW tactics, though he saves his ire primarily for his more immediate opponents: the opposition of left communists, syndicalists, and anarchists within Russia and in Europe. The chapter we’ve selected presents his position, that revolutionaries should abandon groups like the IWW and enter into the largest unions. These words were not merely idle debates. In line with Lenin’s opinions, the Comintern attempted to sway the IWW to join the communist party and disband into the unions of the AFL. A protracted struggle within the IWW and outside of it unfolded in the 1920s-30s as the Communist Party and the IWW clashed in their projects organizing the North American working class.As the dust has settled and the crimes and tragedies of that era have come to light, while Lenin may have been displaced from his position within labor thought, his arguments live on. This posting is an attempt to evaluate and dissect them. Read More
What Happened in Edmonton this Week
What Happened in Edmonton this Week An Appeal for Solidarity from a Letter Carrier in Edmonton This week we have seen hundreds of letter carriers in Edmonton take a stand. They took a stand for health and safety, they took a stand for their ability to provide for those who depend on their income, and they took a stand in defense of a public institution that is under attack. Background: For over three years now Canada Post Corporation has embarked on a project that they call “Postal Transformation”, or the “The Modern Post”. This experiment has taken a public institution that made hundreds of millions in profits for the Canadian public and driven to the point of ruin. There were countless minor confrontations over this issue, with some stewards taking a courageous stand and refusing, countless carriers sneaking the mail into their cases and many, many management staff choosing to turn a blind eye to the sortation methods. Read More
Communication is a Revolutionary Act: Thoughts on communication and media for liberation
This week we’re including a piece by Scott Nikolas Nappalos on media and communication where he argues that we need to view them as part of our political process rather than just tools. The IWW has a unique history when it comes to culture, media, and communication in the history of North America. In particular, the IWW experimented with different forms of communication and media as part of its organizing including the famous cartoons, songs, the Industrial Worker newspaper, and the One Big Union Monthly. IWWs used forms of communication as political acts in ways that were innovative for their time such as silent agitators (mass visual propaganda), song and soapboxing tactics, and publications that sustained a working class culture of writers, artists, poets, and working intellectuals. Though good history of this is absent (and indeed of the IWW in general), Salvatore Salerno’s book Red November, Black November explores how culture and community formed a backbone of the IWW. The union went so far as to create a workers university run by IWWs, the Work Peoples College, that addressed a broad range of life under capitalism including basic skills, jobs and home life, as well as training for participating in the IWW, and of course political, artistic, and scientific education. This tradition was picked up by IWWs who started an annual educational and cultural retreat in Minnesota for IWWs by the same name. While focusing on the North American context and the IWW specifically, his points also apply more generally. Nappalos ideas open up a different take on communication that moves away from all the hype and technofetishism of our age, and tries to shift the focus towards understanding our role in sustaining and nurturing political relationships in struggle. — SN Nappalos Traditionally many radicals have looked at communication and media as tools for implementing their ideas, programs, and lines on populations. Adopting the same model from capitalist marketing theory and propaganda models, communication is thought of as transmitting information from sender to receiver, with most of the thinking centered around how we can best transmit the information to our receivers, how to achieve the greatest numbers, etc. Different media are debated, and today fascination with the emergence of social media and internet culture has captivated political actors of all stripes. After the development of mass industrialized media around a century ago, the model of media and communication as a megaphone still is dominant in the actions and thinking of our time. Read More
Against the IWW Series Part 2: The IWW (1955) by James P Cannon
In this series, we want to present some of the arguments against the IWW (present and historical). The debates around the strategy of the IWW have a way of repeating themselves both in practice and in the labor movement. How should dissident unions relate to existing unions? What role do ideas play in labor organizations? What is the best use of our energy at work? The second offering is from James P Cannon. Cannon was a socialist early in his life, and joined the IWW in 1911. Later, he became of the founding Trotskyists in the US and went on to help create the trotskyist political party the Socialist Workers Party. In this piece, Cannon reflects on the legacy of the IWW and advances an argument against the union that the Russian revolution made the IWW’s approach irrelevant and ineffective. Note that even in the early days of the IWW, its positions were understood not only as neutral to elections and political power, but overtly against electoral activity and anti-political. These topics continue to be live with workers in unions like the IWW. What is the role of politics, political organizations, and existing political institutions? How does workplace organizing and networks of workplace militants like the IWW relate to changing political climates of action? Below is Cannon’s critiques. Read More
Against the IWW Series Part I: The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement
In this series, we want to present some of the arguments against the IWW (present and historical). The debates around the strategy of the IWW have a way of repeating themselves both in practice and in the labor movement. How should dissident unions relate to existing unions? What role do ideas play in labor organizations? What is the best use of our energy at work? The first offering is from William Z. Foster. Foster was an IWW early in his political career before turning to one of it’s harshest critics. His trajectory took him from anarchosyndicalism to hardline Stalinism, and was one of the few Americans to be buried in the Kremlin (ironically next to Big Bill Haywood of the IWW). Foster’s arguments against the IWW are used by many unionists today against the creation of new competing organizations. Despite his Stalinism, his ideas around “dual unionism” (creating secondary left unions to compete with existing unions) have currency in a wider pool, even occasionally with some anarchists. Included is an excerpt from a larger work. The chapters we’ve chosen deal most closely with the IWW and dual unionism, but reading the complete text will give a better sense of Foster’s Trade Union Education League and their perspective. Read More
On being shit-canned
Workers often say that the fear of firings is one of the main reasons it’s so hard to get people to fight back. The power that bosses hold over workers through firings can put them on the curb for standing up. This fear is often unspoken, but present everyday in our workplaces. This piece we share explores how truly arbitrary that power is and its effects. When bosses can hurt us and sometimes ruin lives without any reason at all, it also reminds us why we need to organize. Read More
A View from the Plains: on organizing in smaller areas of the Midwest
A couple of us in Recomposition are from the Midwestern United States. Unfortunately besides some of the more major metro areas such as Chicago, Minneapolis or Detroit, you don’t hear about the efforts of radicals in the numerous small and medium sized towns and cities in the region. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything happening there. R. Spourgitis of Wild Rose Collective wrote the following article about the differences and challenges of organizing in smaller areas, focusing on his experience in Iowa City, a college town with a population of 70,000 or so in Eastern Iowa. Read More
Upcoming book from Recomposition and Black Cat Press
Lines of Work: Stories of Jobs and Resistance Half our waking hours are spent on the job, consuming the lion’s share of our time. Our years are woven with stories of work told around the dinner table, breakroom, and bars. Yet these stories are rarely put into print, investigated, or seen as they should be; as part of workers activity to understand and change their lot under capitalism. Lines of Work offers a rare look at life and social relationships viewed from the cubicle, cash register, hospital, factory, and job site. Drawn from the writings of Recomposition, an online project of worker radicals, the text brings together organizers from a handful of countries sharing their experiences with the trouble of working and fighting back. Rather than professional writers or activists, the authors are workers reflecting on their experiences, aspirations, and how to improve our situation. Through storytelling, they draw out the lessons of workplace woes, offering new paths and perspectives… Read More
What kind of leadership? A view from the contemporary CNT of Spain
Today we are reposting an article from Beltran Roca Martinez about the Spanish anarchosyndicalist union the CNT. In the article he explores recent experiences in the CNT and tries to extract some of the difficulties, successes, and potential advances that the CNT have and can make. Drawing from organizing in Seville at the turn of the Millennium, the author shows a rare look at Spanish anarchosyndicalist organizing before the crisis. Zeroing in on debates in the CNT, he picks out something that resonates beyond Spain; the way conflicts unfold within workplace organizing and how our approach can shape that. Without committing to his interpretation of the conflicts, the idea that different approaches to organizing and organizations produces different leadership and conflicts is extremely useful. The author sees this as dividing into an activist political tendency (anarchist) and an organizing tendency (syndicalist), each with different excesses. The political tendency he sees grouping people around personalities, charisma, and ideology which can devolve into sectarianism, cliques, and fundamentalism. On the otherside the action tendency tends to create bureaucratic leadership, process orientation, and a technical approach which can lead to reformism. What is the definition of success in organizing workers when we want more than a bump in pay? How should our values and ideas relate to our direct action and grievances? In what sense are we held back by the situation or by our own ideas and methods? These conflicts and their responses can be seen to reflect the challenges of building a revolutionary workplace alternative today. Read More
Attractive hardcopy!
Our friends at Thoughtcrime Ink made a pamphlet of three pieces of ours. It’s called “From the Ashes.” You can order it here: http://thoughtcrimeink.com/books/detail/from_the_ashes They also put the “direct unionism” discussion paper into paper form and have published the Solidarity Federation book Fighting For Ourselves, both of which we also recommend: http://thoughtcrimeink.com/books/detail/fighting_for_ourselves http://thoughtcrimeink.com/books/detail/direct_unionism We know this stuff is available free online, but if you want good looking paper versions, or you want to give copies to people, order them there. Your money will go to supporting a cool project. They sell other good stuff too, which you’ll find if you poke around their website. Read More
Going Green at the Cost of Workers’ Safety
by Emmett J. Nolan The issue I’m writing about may seem rather trivial to some readers. To be honest, I too was shocked that my co-workers and I had to fight so hard to be heard on such a small and seemingly obvious issue. The issue which management picked to draw a line in the sand over was providing a trash can in the dining area of the café I work at. Yes, a trash can. Something most customers and workers take for granted. Rightfully so, because who could imagine a counter service café with a bus your own table practice operating without a trash can? In an effort to make the company more green, a composting service was hired and new compostable packaging materials were chosen. Now, compostable items were separated from recycling and garbage. A part of this change included removing all four of the trash cans within the dining and patio area of the café. The cans weren’t replaced with a sorting station like many other businesses had done. Instead the company replaced them with a sign that read: Read More
No Need to Wait till Tomorrow, When Safety Concerns Can Be Fixed Today
by Emmett J. Nolan When we encounter challenges and worsening conditions at work, if we don’t respond immediately to those negative changes we risk having those degraded conditions becoming standard procedure. Whether it’s a reduction of staffing, an increased speed of work or anything else that makes our day-to-day lives on the job more complicated or less valuable, we must act quickly or run the risk of these lower standards becoming firmly established into precedent. The longer we wait to respond to these issues, the more challenging it becomes for us and our co-workers to change them. One such example my co-workers and I encountered involved a safety concern. If we did not respond to it immediately, the result would have been a permanent risk to our well-being. One day I arrived to work and nothing seemed to be different; a day that was starting off just like the rest. Fifteen minutes into my shift, I needed to slice a loaf of bread for a customer. Our slicer is automatic, just push a button and a weight pushes the bread against a dozen or so jostling blades, neatly slicing a full-size loaf of bread. For years we’ve used this machine with no issue. I trained and seen countless co-workers trained on this machine. Each time, the optical sensor –if triggered– will stop the blades. This feature is pointed out and demonstrated often by one passing their hand by the sensor. The safety feature came in handy in the past when errand objects fell into the slicer and we needed to fetch them out by hand. Read More
We’re Not Horses, We Can’t Rest on Our Feet
by Emmett J. Nolan On my first day of work, my manager explained to me the three options regarding breaks: clock out for 30 minutes, take two 10-minute breaks on the clock, or take a 20-minute break on the clock. Additionally, an hour and a half “black-out” period existed for breaks during the busy middle of the day. The actual state law is a 30-minute meal break and two 10-minute rest breaks for a work period over six hours. Not only was this buffet option of breaks illegal, but it was also a strain on the body during a 7 to 9 hour shift. This situation continued on for two years and I discovered that this system was not just limited to my department or workplace, but existed within other departments and at other locations in the company. Read More
Pushing Back on Discipline
by Emmett J. Nolan Chances are we all will inevitably have a run-in with the disciplinary procedure at work. In these moments, it’s natural to feel targeted personally. Often times the warnings are sprung on you by surprise, there may be multiple managers in the meeting with you, and the process doesn’t resemble how you thought the progressive disciplinary procedure worked. Mistakes are inevitable; we’re not robots. Since our livelihood is at risk in these moments, when we have to encounter discipline it’s important that it’s carried out in a manner that is transparent and equitable. Additionally, we should all have the ability to state our defense to the accusations that are brought forward in a disciplinary action. Too often management plays the role of judge, jury, prosecution, and jailor without our side of the story ever considered. In fact, while my company’s manager’s handbook states that during any disciplinary meeting with a worker, a manager is required to have a supervisor or another manager present; alternatively when workers request a witness or an advocate within our disciplinary meetings, our requests are routinely denied. Read More
Playing for keeps
by Madaline Dreyfus There were a couple of years where I didn’t do any organising at work. I had fair reasons, too. Good reasons, even. As a temporary employee, I had no job security. Most of my coworkers are white-collar conservative teachers with few reasons to feel invested in direct action. It’s hard to trust people in a workplace like that, and I didn’t think my odds of staying around were good either. It’s true that things aren’t perfect but there is rarely a reason to get too excited about problems – anyway, everyone is too busy getting through the day to make life harder than it is. Every day feels like an avalanche of little dilemmas that need attention. Lots of good reasons not to get wrapped up in something risky and complicated. Read More
Rethinking class: from recomposition to counterpower
by Paul Bowman We’re reposting this article from the Workers Solidarity Movement of Ireland: http://www.wsm.ie/c/class-recomposition-counterpower. In Paul Bowman’s article ‘Rethinking Class: From Recomposition to Counter-Power’, he poses the question “Is class still a useful idea?” or “should we instead just dispense with it and go with the raw econometrics of inequality?” He draws a line between revolutionary class analysis and universalist utopianism and goes on to explore the history of different ideas of class and the elusive revolutionary subject. After exploring the intersecting lines of class and identity, he poses the challenge that we as libertarians face as we strive to create “cultural and organisational forms of class power [that] do not unconsciously recreate the… hierarchies of identity and exclusion” that are the hallmark of the present society. If we were to strip the anarchist programme of the early 21st century down to its irreducible components, they would have to include at least these four – direct democracy, direct action, recomposition and full communism. Most readers will have at least have heard of the first two and the last one – even if the latter passes nowadays, albeit undeservedly, more as a humorous internet meme, than a viable goal. However this article is about the less familiar third term, recomposition, and particularly around the category that gives it life – class. Against universalism, against utopianism The term class divides people into two camps. One which seems to uphold its validity with an almost cult-like intensity, and a much larger camp that is at best undecided, but mostly turned off entirely by it – and especially so by the apparently religious fervour of the small minority in the first camp. Read More
Building the One Big Union: The Organizing Campaign
An article by Alex Erickson on IWW organizing campaigns on how they are what will build the IWW. Building the One Big Union: The Organizing Campaign by Alex Erikson In “Building the One Big Union: A Strategy for a Strategy,” I laid out a roadmap for building a union of 10,000 Wobblies- 100 branches of 100 members. We have several branches of 100 members currently, so it should be possible to reverse-engineer and replicate these successes in all of our local groups. Sounds great, right? With thousands of members, we would theoretically be able to take on more ambitious campaigns, deploy more powerful tactics, and add more strength to the workers’ movement. But of course, quality is more important and quantity when it comes to building workers power. 10,000 paper members who don’t show up to meetings aren’t a threat to the bosses. The promise of growth of our union is only meaningful if we build the union in a particular kind of way, in a way that organizes workers to engage concretely and directly in the class struggle. In the IWW, we do this primarily in what we call “organizing campaigns.” Organizing campaigns are the focus of our organization. Other unions also run organizing campaigns. IWW organizing campaigns are unique. Our organizing campaigns have specific short-term goals, each tied to a specific long-term goal of our union: Read More
The Chicago Teachers’ Strike and Beyond: deepening struggles in the schools
Here we’re re-posting an article originally published on the Black Orchid Collective’s website, blackorchidcollective.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/the-chicago-teachers-strike-and-beyond-deepening-struggles-in-the-schools “This aint about money! That’s far from the truth, they want better work conditions to teach the youth. Politicians, I don’t trust em, its all in the name the president, the mayor all want political gain. Theyd rather put the kids in jail, shackle em wit chains, then provide an education that challenges the brain.”- Rebel Diaz, “Chicago Teacher” music video Intro: I am a teacher in Seattle, and I’ve been following the Chicago teachers’ strike closely. I’m inspired to see any group of workers and oppressed people fighting back. If I were in Chicago, I’d be on the picket lines. At the same time, I’d like to pose some challenges about how struggles around the school system can go further, to more directly confront the rampant race and gender oppression reproduced daily in our schools. The quote above by Rebel Diaz speaks to what’s really going on. I think the teachers’ strike begins to address some of the problems in public education, but I don’t think we can defeat this oppression simply by supporting or relying on the teacher’s union. Read More
Working at Artistry Bakery and Cafe
In this article, Madaline tells the story of how she fell into organizing and the IWW – pushed both by terrible bosses and by amazing solidarity among her coworkers. Working at Artistry By Madaline Dreyfus If the first week of work at Artistry Bakery and Cafe was any indication, there was no way this four-month experience should ever have resulted in two of the strongest friendships in my life. I was introduced on the first day to a group of men and women, mostly about University age, who were also going to be working with me at the restaurant. Before our new manager arrived to start the training, I started talking to a tall, tattooed woman, and the conversation turned to things which embarrassed us. I said that I was embarrassed by my one of my middle names, Ruth, and continued for several minutes to tell her how much I disliked this name. Confidently, I ended with “God, I mean, what a horrible thing to do to your daughter. What’s your name?” Stone-faced she stared and me and said “Ruth”. I was fairly sure she wouldn’t ever want to speak to me again. Read More
Building Power and Advancing: For Reforms, Not Reformism
Here we’re sharing an article from Miami Autonomy and Solidarity, http://miamiautonomyandsolidarity.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/building-power-and-advancing-for-reforms-not-reformism/. Building Power and Advancing: For Reforms, Not Reformism By Thomas (Miami Autonomy & Solidarity) “We shall carry out all possible reforms in the spirit in which an army advances ever forwards by snatching the enemy-occupied territory in its path.” – Errico Malatesta[i] As anarchist communists, we are against reformism. However, we are for reforms. We believe that fundamentally the entire system of capitalism, the state and all systems of hierarchy, domination, oppression and exploitation of humans over humans must be abolished and replaced with a direct democracy, egalitarian social relations and a classless economy that bases contribution according to ability and distribution according to need. However, such a social revolution can only occur through the power of the popular classes themselves from the bottom-up. In advancing towards such a social revolution and a free and equal society, we must build our power in preparation for this fundamental transformation of the world, building on struggles along the way. Ultimately our demands will be too threatening to the elite classes for them to bear; and their resistance to our drive for freedom will be too much for us to tolerate any longer. Against Reformism We are against reformism. Reformism is the belief that the system as it currently exists can remain, but just needs to be slightly improved. For reformists, reform is the end goal. They are not against the system; they are against what they see as the “excesses” of the system. We don’t see the harm that the system does asexcesses of the system, but expressions of the fundamental nature of the system. We see the reformists trying to hold down the lid of a boiling pot of water, or letting steam go from that boiling pot now and then; but they do not address the fundamental problem. Read More
Developing the IWW’s Direct Unionism Politics
This post by Juan Conatz rekindles a discussion sparked by the discussion paper on Direct Unionism, which you can find here. Cleaning out my numerous Google Doc drafts, I found this, which continues the direct unionism debate by taking on most of the responses to the original discussion paper. So I decided to finish it, as most of the written discussion has dropped off. First off to clear something up, I did not write (not even one word!) the original discussion paper. There seems to sometimes be confusion over that, probably due to the fact I wrote 2 reviews in the Industrial Worker newspaper. Honestly, outside of a few people who later became involved in Recomposition, a former American Wobbly who is now in Solidarity Federation and some folks I associate with the Workers Power column, I don’t know who all wrote the thing. It was a collaborative effort involving a group of Wobblies over a couple year’s time. Looking back on the discussion paper, I think (the authors would probably agree) it should be seen as an unfinished draft. Further along than a rough draft but not quite a final draft. I don’t view it as a complete program conceived in full agreement. Speaking of ‘direct unionists’ or a ‘direct unionist tendency’, which sometimes happens, is sort of misdirected because it talks of differences and perspectives in terms of factions. This is convenient when speaking in generalizations or to identify commonality, but can also be unnecessarily divisive or destructive. Part of how I interpret direct unionism is not as a sexy self-identifier, but as building a culture of seriously talking about IWW organizing in a way that advances our practice. To put it a bit more clearly, it’s not about being part of a formalized tendency that ‘wins’ out, but about pushing debate in a way where it has organizational ramifications that are discussed and decided upon by membership. Also, another problem of the sexy self-identifier is that it can be more about the term and not about the ideas. I’ve come across a few Wobs that identify with the term, but then advocate ideas that are basically the opposite of what the paper advocates. Those ideas the paper advocates, in my opinion are: Read More
Beyond the Martyr Complex: Confessions of a “Pink Collar” Militant
By: Dave Stannton This article is an account of my experiences as a “pink collar” militant working at an immigrant-serving non-profit organization (NPO)[1] organized by a large public-sector union in Northern Alberta. We successfully resisted attacks on wages, pensions, and benefits in our most recent round of collective bargaining in large part because we employed the A-E-I-O-U (Agitate-Educate-Inoculate-Organize-Unionize) model of organizing pioneered by the IWW. Read More
Credit, Wages and Occupy: What System Are We Fighting?
By John O’Reilly “Those who make revolution halfway only dig their own graves” – Jacobin leader in the French Revolution, eventually put to death by Robespierre After the political darkness of the Bush years and the unmet promises of the first Obama administration, Occupy Wall Street and its local spinoffs felt, for those of us who were a part of it, like a breath of fresh air. Here were people, everywhere, talking about a better world beyond Hope and Change rhetoric, beyond bumper sticker platitudes. And beyond talking, they acted! Marches around the business districts of all major U.S. cities, fights over access to public space, intense discussions over democracy, practice, politics, and vision. The cobwebs were dusted out and a thousand flowers did indeed bloom. Hardened, experienced activists and organizers found themselves facing an army of fresh idealistic faces, intent on remaking the country and the world and fundamentally shaking up the political Left in most places where Occupy took root. It was, in short, a beautiful and powerful moment. Read More
Requiem for a Campaign
by Grace Parker Oftentimes as workplace organizers, we have a difficult time admitting our mistakes. We are driven and strong-willed, and though these attributes often aid us in the struggle, they can also hold us back from self-reflection and acknowledgment of our flaws. As Wobblies, how do we cope with the realization that our entire campaign was perhaps a mistake from the start? For one, we view the situation as a learning opportunity. There is no such thing as a failed campaign, for although we may pull ourselves out of a workplace without making clear, concrete gains on the shop floor, we also take away many valuable lessons regarding ourselves, our branches, and the IWW as a whole. These lessons must be passed on to fellow organizers in the union in order to facilitate a culture of skill sharing, and hopefully, if done correctly, the union will not make the same mistakes twice. Secondly, ending a campaign is not just a union issue; it is a matter of great personal importance for the organizers involved. We put our blood, sweat and tears into an organizing drive, and if we fail to sort out our feelings as we disengage from a campaign, we are setting ourselves up for failure in our proceeding endeavors. In order to succeed in the struggle long-term, it is just as important for us to face our personal issues as it is to reflect on our organizing. In this piece, I will attempt to address both of these aspects in relation to the recently halted grocery store campaign in the Twin Cities branch. Read More
Towards A Wobbly Methodology: Establishing Yourself as an Organizer in a New Workplace
By X370559 This essay is the second in a series articulating a methodological framework for developing Wobbly organizers and identifying key features of workplace committee building at the micro level. Much of the content of the Industrial Worker, as well as the Organizer Training 101, discuss the nuts and bolts of workplace struggle including how to conduct a successful 1-on-1 and form a workplace committee. What is often left unspoken is the path by which Wobblies go from the unemployment line to worker-organizers fully engaged in the social fabric of their job site. As Wobblies, like the rest of the working-class, we must sell our labor-power in order to survive. Depending on the period and place, and the nature of the work and culture of the firm, obtaining certain jobs will require more research, training, skills, and overall effort. Taking the time to reflect on these challenges is important, and as Wobblies we should think strategically when considering where to seek employment. In the meantime, we can identify some basic components that will place us in a better position to establish ourselves as organizers in a new workplace. Read More
“We will fuck your shit up if we don’t get what we want.”
In this post a friend of ours writes about a disruptive picket at a university in Spain and reflects on some of the larger issues involved. Read More
Fair wages and the wage system
A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work By Matt Kelly and Nate Hawthorne Last year in Lansing, Mich., the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union leadership fought a pitched battle with the Lansing City Council to push capitalist real estate developers to use union labor. When discussing the fight, Joe Davis, the union representative, proclaimed, “It’s important to have individuals work and get paid a fair wage. We have to make sure labor is valued.” Read More
Pissing Blood
Pissing Blood: Work Sucks by Abbey Volcano This is a story about anger, “non-profits,” and pissing blood. I was in my fifth year working at an independent health food store run by religious fanatics in a suburb outside of the city and I needed more money. I started off part-time at a cultural center, working the events. I would mainly be there at night, during performances and exhibits—taking people’s tickets, helping the artists set up, serving hors d’oeuvres, cleaning the toilets, etc. I was paid $12/hr to do this work and it was the most I had ever made in my life and it was the only job that wasn’t in the service industry, so I was pretty excited. Pretty soon after I started they asked me if I could take over the secretarial position. This was a full-time desk job. I really needed the money, especially because the health food store was closing down since a Whole Foods had moved into town. I took the job since I couldn’t have really done much better as far as pay went. Read More
A moving story
A friend sent us this story about organizing at a small hip business in New York earlier this year. Earlier we ran another story about organizing in places with a leftist or counterculture veneer. If you’ve got similar experiences, please post them as a comment here, or send us an email. As this piece notes, the organizing at this company in New York continues. We hope to hear more about it and wish them good luck. Read More
Another Review of Fighting for Ourselves
Review of Fighting for Ourselves By Nate Hawthorne In October you should get a copy of a new pamphlet called Fighting for ourselves: anarcho-syndicalism and the class struggle by the UK revolutionary organization Solidarity Federation or SolFed for short. SolFed gave us permission to post some excerpts of the pamphlet and reviews. All radicals should read it, particularly IWW members and people in anarchist political organizations. Read More
Building Relationships and Community in an IWW Workplace Committee
A fellow IWW members sent us this article about the importance of relationship building in our organizing, and the importance of not limiting our relationships to being narrowly about work. Read More
Review of Fighting For Ourselves
Juan Conatz reviews a new pamphlet by Solidarity Federation. We’re excited about the new pamphlet. Read More
Who’s In Charge Here?
In this post, John O’Reilly discusses the ways that organizing campaigns make themselves and others see them as legitimate. Who’s In Charge Here? Seizing the Means of Legitimacy Production in IWW Campaigns by John O’Reilly I’m terrible with high pressure situations. My hands were shaking and my stomach was twisted up, ready to get punched. Standing around in an abandoned Hooter’s restaurant in a mall in downtown Minneapolis, several dozen sandwich shop workers dressed in their black work t-shirts, IWW members crossing their fingers, and management types wearing ball caps and pursed lips crowded together expectantly as representatives from the National Labor Relations Board counted out the votes from the election that had just been conducted. I was in the back of the room and could just see pieces of paper being passed from one suit to another, considered, and a note taken. Read More
My first job – what was yours?
Recomposition started at the end of August, 2010. We’re pleased with what’s happened in the last two years, and we hope you are as well. It seems appropriate to celebrate the two year mark with a work story and by getting more more interactive for a change. Below, Siobhan writes about her first job. In the comments, please tell us what your first job was, how old you were when you got it, and what that job was it like. Read More
Fighting for ourselves – Preview
In this post we are excited to present some excerpts from Fighting for ourselves: anarcho-syndicalism and the class struggle, by the Solidarity Federation (‘SolFed’). The pamphlet will be officially released in full in October and SolFed will distribute paper copies at the London Anarchist Bookfair on October 27th. SolFed is a revolutionary union initiative based in the UK. They’re affiliated with the International Workers Association, an anarcho-syndicalist federation of unions and organizations of which the CNT in Spain and the FAU in Germany are members. Some of us in Recomposition know members of SolFed through posting on libcom.org or visits to the UK and we take what they have to say seriously. This feeling is also mutual for SolFed when it comes to the IWW, as they have adopted the Organizer Training we use here in North America and tailored it to their needs. In February of 2009, Brighton SolFed wrote a pamphlet called Strategy & Struggle: anarcho-syndicalism in the 21st century. It provoked quite a bit of discussion within SolFed, as well as the wider English speaking anarchist/communist movement. Taking internal criticisms on, the pamphlet was withdrawn and work began on an improved and more extensive piece. Fighting for ourselves: anarcho-syndicalism and the class struggle is that document. Fairly extensive for a pamphlet, Fighting for ourselves includes a broad history of the workers movement, from the first proto-union groups started to the German councilists, to the CNT and FORA, to the historical IWW and ‘workers parties’. It identifies these groups and currents in relation to what they’ve learned from and how this is incorporated into their world view and action. We think the new pamphlet is very good. We’re eventually going to write up and post a review of the entire pamphlet, but before we do that, we’ve gotten permission to post some excerpts from it that we think readers of our blog will find interesting. We post these here because we think these excerpts are interesting in themselves, and even more so because we want to encourage people to read the whole pamphlet once it comes out. The first excerpt is about the historical IWW. To be clear, we don’t think this section is worth reproducing merely because we’re members and love the ‘old timey’ stuff, but because it mentions things of some significance today. Also the way the old IWW is portrayed has ramifications on what happens in the IWW of 2012, similarly probably to how the way the CNT of the 1930s is portrayed has effects on the CNT of today. One of these things is, instead of parroting the line that the union was ‘apolitical’, it sees that the ‘direct actionist’ members seeing politics expressed better through economic or direct action. Another aspect that’s briefly acknowledged is the One Big Union concept and that there has been nuance and variations on how this was interpreted and viewed. Finally, unlike many other historical accounts, it confirms, yes, the IWW still exists, and it is still organizing. Along with the One Big Union concept (which referenced recent articles in the Industrial Worker) and the direct unionism debate, it’s a reminder that what the IWW does and says has importance, and that people many thousands of miles away pay attention. We in the IWW, should, in turn, pay attention to them. One reason we should pay attention to SolFed is that their vision of a union is directly relevant to current discussions that IWW members are having about organizing, as the second excerpt demonstrates. Many people in the IWW have advocated against the IWW signing contracts with no strike clauses and have tried to develop noncontractual approaches to organization. In the second excerpt, SolFed lay out two categories for understanding unions, “the associational function” of unions and “the representative function” of unions. Elsewhere in the pamphlet, they describe most unions today as demonstrating the “domination of the representative function over the associational one.” We think contractual organizing creates or encourages this domination of representation over association, which is part of why we’re against contractualism in the IWW. Rejecting a representative approach to organizing, SolFed call for building unions that embody “the associational function of a union, stripped of any representative functions.” This is what we think IWW unionism should aspire to be. Read More
At War With Calendula
Small businesses are widely believed to be better places to work or better for the planet or both. They’re not. Small businesses are just smaller, less successful versions of large businesses, and they’re often as bad or worse to work for, as this story illustrates. Read More
Winning the War of Position
This article makes a number of arguments about the direction the IWW should take in its organizing, including taking a longer-term perspective than the next few years. Read More
“Just and peaceful labor relations”: Why the U.S. government supported collective bargaining
This post gives a brief account of some of the history of the capitalist state’s sponsorship of contracts for unions in the United States, with an emphasis on the reasoning that politicians and judges gave for their support of collective bargaining. The piece argues that what the U.S. government wanted out of introducing state support for collective bargaining was, in the words of the National Labor Relations Act, to ‘Promote the flow of commerce’ through ‘friendly adjustment of industrial disputes.’ Read More
Dear Comrades: A Call for Solidarity with the Student Struggles in Quebec
Several of us in the Recomposition editorial group have been very interested in recent events in Quebec, and found the students’ struggles inspirational. We now share a letter from a comrade calling for support and mobilisation to further support and spread these struggles. Read More
Mottoes and Watchwords
This is a discussion paper about the relationship between organizing around fights for change now and a radical vision of social change. Read More
Developing Workers Autonomy: An Anarchist Look At Flying Squads
This post reprints an article that first appeared in issue 8 of The Northeastern Anarchist, which featured several articles on the theme “Anarchists in the Workplace. The Northeastern Anarchist is a publication of Common Struggle, formerly known as the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC). This article describes organizations of mutual support and struggle built by Canadian workers. Read More
The Teamsters Raid on the UTU
This article is based on several interviews with workers that IWW members spoke with while supporting a couple strikes at Canada National Rail. The piece deals with the politics of the several unions who were all vying to become the One Big Union on the railways. It’s also worth looking at the rhetoric and practice of current contemporary Industrial Unionism and the revolutionary vision of the early 20th Century. There’s a lot of talk about mergers and consolidation right now in the labour movement. This is something pay attention to over the next few years. Read More
Printable PDFs of posts
Some of you asked about getting printable PDFs of posts at Recomp. You can now get one for any post by clicking the gray “print” button in the lower left corner of the post. Read More
Direct Action Begins at Home
Our friend Amédée Garneau sends along this story about tenant organizing in New York. Read More
C.L.C. sells out students!
C.L.C. sells out students! Recent correspondence from Ken Georgetti (President of the Canada Labour Congress) and Michel Arsenault of the FTQ (Provincial Labour Central of Quebec) and various officers in the broader Anglophone Labour Movement sends a clear message: labour jurisdiction trumps labour solidarity. Arsenault, and through his endorsement, Georgetti believe that this is the time to “facilitate a settlement instead of fueling fires”. Read More
What we’re changing
In this post M. Jones talk abouts how organizing on the job changes the job. What We’re Changing By M. Jones In our organizing we are trying to establish power on the job. This power can be seen and felt in different ways depending on the job. But what we want from our organizing is control over our day to day lives on the job, this control will come from the power we can establish through collective action. Read More
Pinchpoint Target
This article argues against the view that the IWW should pick its organizing targets based on a view of the potential power of some part of the working class within the economy. Read More
Snapshots of the Student Movement in Montreal
At the bottom of this article are links for how your trade union or community group can support the students’ struggle. That will help tremendously, but spreading the struggle to your own job or school will do even more. This article is meant to help explain how, by showing how students in Quebec were able to organize their general strike. Read More
An owie to one is an owie to all: A six-step plan for helping your parent-friends remain activists
An owie to one is an owie to all: A six-step plan for helping your parent-friends remain activists by Lily Schapira Eight days after my daughter was born, I sent this message to the organizing committee members of the Seattle Solidarity Network: “I wanted to let you all know that I need to take a few week hiatus from coming to SeaSol meetings…. Baby is doing well, we just need to clear the decks while I recover and while we figure out this whole nursing thing. Thanks for understanding, and we’ll see you in a few weeks! (I’d estimate three.)” Read More
Direct Action Makes History
A central part of our organising practice at Recomposition is direct action. In this piece our comrade Marianne addresses criticisms of Occupy Wall Street and the importance placed in that movement on a direct action strategy. Direct Action Makes History: A Response to Andrew Kliman’s “The Make-Believe World of David Graeber” by Marianne Garneau The following is not a commentary on, much less a defense of, David Graeber – with whom I disagree. It is a critique of key facets of the ideology of Andrew Kliman. In a recent article, Andrew Kliman attempted to critique “the ideology” of David Graeber, in particular its emphasis on direct action, without condemning the Occupy Wall Street movement in which Graeber’s ideas and strategy have found so much resonance. All that Kliman accomplished, however, was revealing his profound misunderstanding of the significance of both OWS and of direct action – a misunderstanding that can be traced to his deeply apolitical take on Marxism. Read More
Debate about industrial strategy
This post reprints a short exchange about organizing strategies that originally ran in the pages of the Industrial Worker newspaper. Forget About Industrial Power The old wobbly song “There Is Power In A Union” goes “There is power there is power in a band of working folks, When they stand hand in hand.” This is the basic idea of a union, strength in numbers. We’re lacking in the numbers department in the IWW today. So our power is small, at least in one important sense. We need to recognize this if we’re going to grow quickly and efficiently, without cutting any corners in terms of member education and development. Read More
Informal Workgroups
A brief look at informal work groups, which the author sees “as the seeds, and the tiny cells within a larger muscle of organization.” Informal Workgroups By M. Jones In every workplace throughout all of history, workers have come together and worked together for their common interests. This takes many forms. Sometimes its at the level of two workers next to each other in cubicles who support each other and make work less miserable by being able to laugh with one another; other times it forms into a group that encompasses enough people that they can informally control the speed of production and the work conditions that surround them; and sometimes it grows into a union a group of workers within a shop, ideally across and industry who can directly exercise power in relation to the boss. In whichever form it takes it is significant. In each form it challenges the isolation that exists in other aspects of our lives as workers. In these relationships we begin to see the possibilities of what it means to take collective action and what it means to control the means of production. We are empowered by these relationships, and where we can build on them we can have success and begin to make changes. Read More
‘Bout to explode
This is the last piece in our series on sleep. Juan writes about sleeplessness, stress, poverty, and work. ‘Bout to explode: a day in the life of a precarious worker by Juan Conatz “Damn it, where’s this pinche thing?” Sometimes when I get real frustrated, a few Spanish curse words enter my vocabulary. My mom would probably be both amused and disappointed. “Jesus Christ, there ain’t nowhere in here for anything to get lost!” It’s 4:30 AM, and I’m frantically looking for both my house keys and bus pass. It was another all-nighter. I’ve been up for almost 2 days now. Read More
Who Dismisses the Teacher
Our series on sleep and dreams continues with a post about stress and lack of sleep in the education industry. Who Dismisses the Teacher: On The Work that Follows You Home and Steals your Sleep by Barbanegra I stare up at the computer’s clock on the right hand side of the screen, the numbers blaring at me, “10:45 pm.” I’ve finished the PowerPoint presentation for one class, but have nothing prepared for my other class. Luckily for me, tomorrow I have a planning period between 2nd period and 6th period (where I teach we have 90 min block classes, 4 blocks a day), so I can use that time to put something together for the class I wasn’t able to plan for the night before. The “even days” afford me such a luxury, the “odd days” don’t. On the “odd days”, my reaction to this nightly routine is much more irate. Immediately the panic and anxiety sets in. I feel a pain in the side of my stomach, sometimes accompanied by nausea. My girlfriend asks me from the couch if I’m calling it a night, to which I respond with an annoyed, “No!” followed by grumbles about how I’m probably only going to get 3 or 4 hours of sleep that night. Read More
Bathrooms
Our series on sleep continues with a piece by Gayge discussing divisions and oppression within the working class. Bathrooms by Gayge Operaista I wake up with a start, and do my usual “where the hell am I?” look around. When you’ve been couch and guest room surfing for months, because you moved back across the country and still haven’t found steady work, it’s a reasonable “why am I awake?” question, especially when there’s no urgency to get up out of bed. Read More
Let me sleep on it
Our series on work, sleep and dreams continues with a story about a sleepwalking postal worker. Let me sleep on it By Phinneas Gage I woke up and rubbed my eyes, Saturday was a long time coming this week. My aching body stumbled towards the fridge. I swung the door open and my eyes focused on the first clear object of the morning, a bottle of Catsup. I grabbed the bottle and stood up, straightening my aching back. I opened the freezer and my eyes focused again on a frozen bag of breakfast sausage. Read More
Alarm Clock
Our series on work, sleep, and dreams continues with a story by our friend Invisible Man, about race, stress, and family. Alarm Clock by Invisible Man The belt sander was screeching. The high whine tore through his eardrums. It began to drown out the clatter of the polishing drum and the pulsating whirr of the milling machines. Time to replace the sandpaper. Read More
Good Morning Sweetheart
This post continues our series on work and sleep with a post about stress and dreams in the education industry. Good Morning Sweetheart By Nate Hawthorne I’m just… furious. Like so angry I’m sputtering and stuttering, as in “I – I – how could you – why would you ever think that … I just – you need to knock it off!” I’m standing in front of a room full of my students, and I’m spitting out these chunks of sentences and I’m doing it loud. I’m full-on shouting. I’ve definitely lost my composure. I’m yelling at them because they’ve been sleeping in class, and they’ve been turning in their homework late and doing it really poorly, and that makes my workload even higher because late work means more stuff I need to keep track of, and poorly written assignments take a lot longer to grade. And class size went up ten percent this year so I’ve got more students than last year’s maximum. So part of what I’m really shouting at them about is the fact that I can’t handle the workload. Read More
Even My Dreams These Days Have Work-Related Scenes
More from our series on work, sleep and dreams. This one features Lou Rinaldi describing a nightmare and how it’s his subconscious taking the very real alienation he feels at work and running with it. Even My Dreams These Days Have Work-Related Scenes by Lou Rinaldi I I’m stuck there in a chair in my kitchen. It’s like I can’t move, I guess I really can’t explain it, but I’m looking up at the clock (wait, I don’t have a clock!) and the time changes nearly every minute to something completely different. I’m starting to feel nauseous and disoriented. And then – there it is! The right minute. I’m allowed to go now. I can get up and I leave my apartment and hop onto the bus. It’s strange to me because I don’t remember the bus going right to my apartment before. Oh well, I don’t really have think of how absurd this is because of the overwhelming feeling of dread and nervousness I have looming over me. You see, I’m three hours late for work! Read More
Reflections on Dream Baking and Sleep Deprivation
The series on work, sleep, and dreams continues with this account of working without much sleep and the dreams associated with this. Reflections on Dream Baking and Sleep Deprivation by besherelle et la lutte It is raining out side, but not too hard that I can’t ride my bike. I turn away from the front door and walk towards my room to find my rain gear. Of course this extra 5 minutes of getting all these extra layers on, means I will be 5 minutes late for work. I am tired, I have a sleep headache and the idea of being late for work, makes it worse. This always happens when the middle of the week comes around. Getting more than 4 or 5 hours a night’s sleep isn’t feasible working these early hours. There is a tension that exists when you work early, a fear of sleeping in, or not opening the store on time. It turns into a resentment, an anger that sleeps inside of you. These feelings are present and accessible at all times and they are created out of fear and powerlessness. You are vulnerable and disposable and any day now, this reality will be confirmed. It’s dark outside and I fumble around trying to find the buttons on my bike lights, both are blinking and I carry my bike down the stairs to the street. Read More
Work Dreams
Scott Nappalos writes about the problems of working in a hospital and how conditions seep into his dreams. Work Dreams by Scott Nappalos Within a few months of being on my own, the dreams started. I won’t say nightmares, because nightmares have a distinct sense of terror and harm; my dreams weren’t always like that. I was working as a nurse on an medical-surgical floor for oncology patients in a major urban hospital. Just out of school, I managed to fall into one of the most hostile units in one of the worst hospitals in Miami. Read More
Off the Clock
Jen Rogue writes about how our work life infiltrates itself into our dreams and technically amounts to unpaid labor. Off the Clock by Jen Rogue “…. Peaches …. 4401 …. Lemons …. 4033 …. Carrots …. 4560 ….” A blaring alarm clock interupts my restless slumber. Damn it! Time to go to work. And do what I’ve been doing in my sleep for the last few hours, unpaid. In the shower, I wonder about how much space in my brain are taken up by produce codes. Are bananas (4011) edging out my memory of the first time I rode a bicycle? I can’t even remember the last time I ate a clementine but 4450 might as well be tattooed on the insides of my eyelids. I chug coffee and try not to think about how awful it is to wake up feeling like you already put in your eight hours only to realize they haven’t even begun. Read More
And I am still sleepy
As part of our series on sleep, work and dreams, Al Tucker dreams about temporary warehouse work. And I am still sleepy. By Al Tucker I am pulling into the old parking lot. It looks like it should look. Large tumble weeds growing up from decade old cracks in the asphalt. The painted lines faded away to almost nothing in afternoon sun. I should be off by 2:30 AM, unless there is forced overtime and I have to stay until 6:30 AM. Either way I am still sleepy right now. Why did I answer the phone? Why did I agree to come in? Why did they even call me? Read More
Coping with Clopening: Retail Worker’s Most Dreaded Shift
Our friend Liberté Locke writes about what it’s like to work a ‘clopen’ in retail, to close the store late at night and get up early the next morning to open the store. Read More
You say you want to build a solidarity network?
This is a how-to guide to building a successful solidarity network along the lines of the Seattle Solidarity Network, written by two SeaSol organizers. Interested readers should also check out “Why you should start a solidarity network.“ Read More
Interviews with organizers: Canada’s postal struggles & the New School occupation
Beginning with the crisis of 2008, a series of community, labor, and education struggles have unfolded across the world, in the US, and Canada. As experienced organizers face new challenges, and new people are brought into the movement, the challenges and problems posed by building powerful radical movements confronts us. Today we present two interviews with organizers that helped build struggles against problems they faced in the crisis, and reflect on those experiences and lessons for radicals in these movements. First, we share an interview with Phinneas a Canadian postal worker. Last year, a series of direct actions exploded across Canada in response to attempts to rationalize and mechanize production, and around the labor contract in negotiation. Phinneas’ article Waves of Struggle, is his account of the actions and problems they faced. Next, we share an interview with Marianne a student organizer active in Occupy and the New School occupation that happened during the most active… Read More
Response to Direct Unionism
This post is by our friend and fellow IWW member John O’Reilly. John writes in reply to the Direct Unionism discussion paper which has been the subject of some discussion in IWW circles. For people who haven’t already read the discussion paper, John’s reply is a good starting point for entering the conversation. Read More
Longview, Occupy, and Beyond: Rank and File and the 89% Unite!
Comrades in the Seattle-based Black Orchid Collective sent us this piece which we’re reposting here. Black Orchid describe the piece this way: This piece is written by the Black Orchid Collective in Seattle, with contributions from members of Advance the Struggle in the Bay area, members of Hella 503 in Portland, as well as friends in various cities. We have all been deeply involved in Decolonize/ Occupy Seattle, Occupy Portland, Occupy Oakland, and Occupy Wall St., including the Dec. 12th West Coast Port Shutdown. We have worked to build solidarity between the Occupy movement and the rank and file workers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). This piece presents our critical reflections on these struggles so far. We welcome criticism and discussion. Read More
Some basics of capitalism
We in Recomposition are part of a larger anti-capitalist milieu. What people mean by “capitalism” isn’t always clear. This post is made up of excerpts from Value, Price and Profit, a pamphlet by Karl Marx. These excerpts help in thinking about how capitalism operates in general. Read More
Direct Unionism in Practice: Undermining Service Industry Barriers to Worker Solidarity
This essay by fellow workers in Vancouver is part of an ongoing conversation on ‘direct unionism’ within the IWW. There have been several pieces written as part of this conversation but people can read this essay without reading the other pieces it is in dialog with. The authors describe the essay this way: “Our intentions for posting this response to the conversations on Direct Unionism vary greatly in terms of purpose. In crafting this reflection and response, we have also considered where we could put it to the most relevant use, and so have prepared it for many different readers. This response is primarily written with the intention of facilitating an introduction to Direct Unionism for service workers who are very new to labour. Many sections of our essay may seem redundant to many labour activists and we apologize, but hope to encourage other locally contextualized struggles through Direct Unionism. We hope to participate in the DU discussion, and share with those interested how we have been affected by these conversations and also how we are practicing and implementing these ideas. We would like to thank all participants in the Direct Unionism conversation and, also, offer our analysis based on our work in Vancouver, BC.” Read More
Fighting and Firings
In this post, Phinneas Gage tells a story about action on the job, management retaliation, and workers’ responses. Read More
Understanding events in Wisconsin
Juan Conatz spent a long time in Madison at the height of the protests there in 2011. In light of events since, in Wisconsin and across North America, these events take on even greater importance. Below are two articles Juan wrote about these events. Read More
The Committee in Action
In this article Phinneas Gage describes how workers at Canada Post have organized themselves, and the ups and downs and risks of organizing. Read More
Annotated IWW Preamble
All of us in the Recomposition editorial group are IWW members. The IWW’s constitution begins with a preamble, which reads The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all. Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.” It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old. We sometimes struggle to express the concepts in the IWW Preamble in our own words. The article below, by IWW member Tim Acott, can help people to do so. Read More
Anti-SOPA blackout
Following the lead of our comrades at libcom, Recomposition will be participating in the blackout against SOPA. We are not as tech-savvy as libcom and so will be using the plugin that our blog hosting service has provided. We welcome discussion on these matters. For more information, see http://sopastrike.com/ Read More
Credit crunched – working in financial services during the 2008-2009 crash
This article comes from a comrade who is a member of the Solidarity Federation in the UK. He describes the article as “An account of working for a credit company during the financial crisis, as well as workers’ attempts to resist speed-ups and workload increases.” Read More
Stories from the CUPW Lock Out: or how to create a story that can reshape who we are and how we act
This story by our friend Bruce is reprinted from Linchpin, the publication of our comrades at Common Cause, about the CUPW lock out. Read More
Class War on the Work Floor – Audio Recording
We’re pleased to repost this from our comrades at Common Cause. Between October 22 and October 25, Common Cause organized a speaking tour entitled “Class War On The Workfloor” in four Ontario cities (Hamilton, Toronto, Kitchener & London). The speaker was postal worker, anarchist and rank-and-file trouble maker, Rachael Stafford, from Edmonton. Below is the audio recording from the Hamilton stop of the tour, held on October 22, 2011. The talk outlines a perspective on workplace organizing not dependent on union executives, but rather on empowering workers to fight their own battles. In the audio recording Stafford explains why it’s important to deal with issues as they arise on the floor through direct action, worker education, and participatory decision making in order to build the kind of struggle that can aim for the whole pie — not just a bigger piece. The talk also offers first-hand context to the recent CUPW struggle, which saw postal workers go from being on strike to b… Read More
Reasonable Accommodation
Our friend and comrade Invisible Man has contributed stories before about life on the job. In this piece he provides an analysis of race and policy and movements in Quebec. In a time of crisis and with a potential for rising right-wing movements, his points are relevant to people around the world. Read More
Holding the line: informal pace setting in the workplace
Holding the line: informal pace setting in the workplace by Juan Conatz Often when talking to people about their frustrations at work and the prospects for organizing, a common response is one of negativity and desperation. “I could never get anything goin’ where I work!” “Other people don’t care.” “It would be too hard.” Read More
Diary of an anarchist hospitality worker
This story about life on the job comes from a comrade in New Zealand, a member of the Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement. Read More
On Contracts and Agreements
In this post we print an article by Phinneas Gage and an article first printed in 1920 in a newspaper called The Forge. Both articles deal with collective bargaining agreements. Read More
Another response to direct unionism, and a counterpoint
This is a piece that Juan Conatz wrote in response to the “direct unionism” discussion paper that some other members of the Recomp editorial group helped write. This piece appeared in the October 2011 issue of the Industrial Worker newspaper along with a reply from another IWW member, Sean G. That reply is below Juan’s article here. Read More
Where do capitalists get their wealth?
Below is a presentation that visually depicts some basic aspects of capitalist society. Read More
The Shoe Nazi
This is a story about race, class, and poverty, from a friend who writes a blog anonymously as Invisible Man. We’ve run his writing before and are excited to do so again. Read More
General Strikes, by William Trautmann
In this post we reprint an article from William Trautmann, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World. Trautmann’s discussion of general strikes is relevant to the current conversations happening about occupations and calls for general strikes. For Trautmann, a successful general strike will be a lockout of the capitalist class, which is to say, occupations of workplaces which prevent capitalist economic activity from happening. Read More
The General Strike: The Strike of the Future, by Lucy Parsons
This is a speech given by the famous anarchist Lucy Parsons. This excerpt in particular is particularly relevant to recent discussions of a general strike: “Nature has (…) placed in this earth all the material of wealth that is necessary to make men and women happy. (…) We simply lack the intelligence to take possession of that which we have produced. (…) My conception of the future method of taking possession of this is that of the general strike: that is my conception of it. The trouble with all the strikes in the past has been this: the workingmen like the teamsters in our cities, these hard-working teamsters, strike and go out and starve. Their children starve. Their wives get discouraged. (…) That is the way with the strikes in the past. My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production.” For Parsons, a general strike and an occupation are synonyms. The rest of the speech is below. Other elements resonate greatly with the present moment. Parsons discusses her experiences with the police and state murder of her husband, sadly relevant to recent police violence. Parsons talks about how U.S. residents drew inspiration from struggles around the world, another parallel to the present where protests around the world look to each other for ideas and motivation. Parsons also discusses gender divisions within movements of her day, issues which we still need to address today. Read More
A response to ‘Direct Unionism’
This is the first part of a two part piece by Juan Conatz, in response to a discussion paper called “Direct Unionism.” This piece originally appeared in the Industrial Worker newspaper, which has had featured an ongoing conversation about the “Direct Unionism” discussion paper. Read More
We Are the 99% – A Flyer
Below is a flyer one of us wrote and a friend laid out. Read More
Direct Unionism: A Discussion Paper
This is a discussion paper advocating a vision of workplace organizing that the paper calls “direct unionism.” Several of us in the Recomposition editorial group had a hand in this document, along with some friends of ours who, like us, are members of the Industrial Workers of the World. The paper was never fully finished. The early parts are finished but as the paper goes on it gets rougher and toward the end is more like notes. We’re pleased that there has been some discussion of this paper recently in the Industrial Worker newspaper. Read More
Caring: A Labor of Stolen Time
Our friend Jennifer Ng wrote this about her job and her organizing at a nursing home. It deals with a lot of issues about the commodification of life and of death under capitalism as well as issues of race on the job, and the specifics of caring work. Read More
Building the One Big Union
In this article Alex Erikson suggests some points for IWW members to emphasize as we continue to build our organization. A version of this piece appeared recently in the Industrial Worker newspaper. Read More
Think It Over
All of us in the Recomposition editorial group are members of the Industrial Workers of the World. This is a good introduction to the IWW, written by Tim Acott, a long-time IWW member from Portland. Think It Over: An introduction to the Industrial Workers of the World by Tim Acott Solidarity Working people have only one real option in today’s economy. We have to resist, with all our might, the big business program of further and deeper poverty for working people. For the first time in modern history profits are going up while wages and benefits are going down. In the past the two have always been tied, however unequally. Now the game has changed. Worse impoverishment and more of it is the wave of the future if we don’t stand against the tide. The working conditions we see today in Asia and Central America are a good indication of the future of our own working lives in the “Western Democracies.” We have only one hope of fending off this tidal wave of misery. That hope, that tool, is solidarity. Every working stiff must stand up for every other working stiff, no matter where you live or where you come from, no matter if you are male or female, young or old, we must stand together. Every loss to any worker is a loss to us all, and every gain by any part of the working class is a victory for us all. Read More
Swept Under The Rug and Left for Dead
Our friend Lou send us this article. All of us in the Recomp editorial group are strongly feminist, though you wouldn’t always know that because we don’t talk much about it here. One of the things we sometimes struggle to articulate is that our focus on the waged workplace is part of our feminism. A lot of workplace struggles are feminist struggles. Lou’s account of an incident in the food service industry shows this. Swept Under The Rug and Left for Dead; How, According to the Boss, Swearing is Worse than Harassment by Lou Rinaldi At the beginning of the summer some trouble came to my little restaurant. Our store has a history of going through assistant managers like water, they’re in and they’re out. Read More
The Work and the Job
This essay by a comrade in the Wild Rose Collective speaks to something we talk about a lot here at Recomposition – the ways our jobs limit our lives. As the piece says, different people’s lives are limited in different ways and some people really do have it worse than others. Work still sucks, though, even if some people have it worse. The Work and the Job “I don’t think I’m cut out to be an employee.” It was a bitter joke. My friend had just finished venting about one of her two jobs. She was typing to me just after getting bossed around on the smallest details of her job at a small nonprofit. After that, she had an evening as a temp to look forward to, grading middle-school standardized tests. She had said that working so much was starting to mess with her head. She hadn’t played music in too long. Too much of her life went to satisfying somebody else. Read More
A New Workerism: Capitalist Crisis, Proletarianization, and the Future of the Left
Recomposition is subtitled “notes for a new workerism.” We take the phrase “new workerism” from this piece written by Alex Erikson before we started Recomp. This piece was originally circulated at the US Social Forum. We’re glad to put it up here. Alex advocates an emphasis on workplace organizing and an orientation toward some historical experiences that he believes contain resources for us in the present, including the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and various groups who have practiced what they called industrial concentration. A New Workerism: Capitalist Crisis, Proletarianization, and the Future of the Left by Alex Erikson I. The Crisis In fall of 2008, capitalism underwent its worst market crash since 1929, leading to the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Nearly two years and over $11 trillion in bailout funds later, financial capitalism has stabilized. But while the worst of the crisis for our capitalist masters seems to have passed, it is clear that the crash of 2008 was only the beginning of the worst for the North American working class. Since the onset of the crisis, over 1 million homes have been foreclosed, 8.7 million workers have been thrown out of work, leading to a real unemployment rate hovering around 20% which translates into at least 30 million people in the US without jobs, with many more without sufficient employment. While corporations have seized on the recession to demand bailouts from the federal government, they have used the crisis as a pretext to slash benefits, freeze wages, and reduce staffing. In the last two years, despite the decline in consumer spending, productivity increased by over 7% in the last quarter of 2009 due to management’s ability to intensify exploitation of workers who are held hostage by the threat of layoff. US elites seized on the economic crisis as a pretext to impose a “Shock Doctrine” acceleration of trends that began in the 1970s with the rise of capitalist globalization. Since the late 1970s, multinational corporations have battered the North American working class with union-busting, outsourcing of jobs, deindustrialization and automation, stagnant wages, and cuts to social services. The result of these trends is the fundamental remaking of the global capitalist production system, resulting in the destruction of working class communities in much of the United States and the disappearance of what once was the US middle class. The economic crisis has now given the green light to corporate elites to launch an even more aggressive offensive against workers. Read More
Proletarian management: Informal workplace organization
We recently posted Stan Weir’s classic article on informal work groups. This recent piece by the Swedish group Kämpa tillsammans (Struggle Together) talks about similar workplace dynamics. The article talks about how management sometimes tries to make use of informal organization in the workplace, and how radicals can do so as well. Proletarian management: Informal workplace organization by Kämpa Tillsammans The emancipation of the working class can not only be conquered by the working class themselves but the emancipating practices of the working class are its own making too. So the question about workers autonomy isn’t primarily a political question but a question about organization and this article deals with concrete and actual workers autonomy and how it exist in Sweden today in the 21st century. Read More
The Nature of Our Period: looking to an autonomous working class alternative
In this article Scott Nappalos argues for an account of the present historical moment and our tasks within it. The Nature of Our Period: looking to an autonomous working class alternative by Scott Nappalos The end of the twentieth century was a time of transition. The regime of low-intensity warfare, the dismantling of the welfare state, and neo-liberal privatization schemes ultimately was running its course[1]. The final defeats were to be dolled out across the world in the eventual collapse of finance bubbles, widespread resistance to austerity, and the implosive of the economies of Latin America[2]. Before this was all but said and done, there was the gradual and later meteoric rise and fall of social movements against neo-liberal reforms and the militarism leading to the afghan and Iraq wars. Revolutionaries played an active and disproportionate role in mobilizing the social actors in what would become the largest mobilizations of their kind. Read More
Update on translation of Waves of Struggle
As mentioned in the last post, we recently found a translation of Phinneas’s Waves of Struggle article. With some help we’ve gotten more info about this. Farideh S. did the translation, thanks very much Farideh! Farideh also wrote a good introduction to the piece. That introduction in English is pasted below. The people who posted the article describe themselves as “anti-wage-labour activists,” they also maintain this web site in English – www.againstwage.com. Check it out. Thanks again comrades, and great to meet you. Farideh’s interoduction to the translation of Waves of Struggle: CUPW writes, “Canada post is planning to invest two and a half billion dollars in the modernization of postal delivery”. The union believes that these investments will have a negative effect on the workers. These changes will decrease safety for mail carriers by forcing them to carry more letters. Less time will be spent on sorting mail and a larger burden will be put on workers involved in mail delivery… Read More
در بارۀ مبارزات کارگران پست کانادا
We just found this, a translation of Phinneas’s Waves of Struggle article. We’re pasting the translation below. Since we don’t speak the language we’re not entirely sure what to make of this but we’re flattered and pleasantly surprised. If the translator(s) read this, thank you for translating this article! Regretfully, we mostly just speak English so it is hard for us to read your web site. We would like to know more about you, if there are any English-language writings of yours, and if you want to correspond with us please email us at recomposition.blog@gmail.com. If anyone who can tell us more, please do so, we appreciate it. مقدمۀ مترجم اتحادیه کارگران پست کانادا می نویسد: “پست کانادا مبلغ دو ونیم بیلیارد دلار برای مدرنیزه کردن پست، قصد سرمایه گذاری دارد“. اتحادیه معتقد است که برخی از این سرمایه گذاری ها اثر منفی دارد. مجموعه این تغییرات سبب می شود که نامه رسانان زمان بیشتری صرف حمل و نقل، و زمان کمتری صرف طبقه بندی کردن نامه ها، خواهند کرد. با تغییرات جدید کار تحویل خیلی مشکل خواهد شد، زیرا کارگران باید، ضمن راه رفتن، کار خواندن آدرس ها را هم، انجام دهند. نیاز به نیروی کار، بدلیل ماشینی شدن، بخش هائی از کار، کمتر خواهد شد. شیفت های شب کاری نسبت به روزکاری افزایش خواهد یافت، زیرا محموله نامه ها، اغلب در شب به اداره پست می رسد. شدت کار، بالا خواهد رفت، زیرا ماشین های جدید، سریع تر کار می کنند. اتحادیه می گوید که سود این کارها فقط به جیب شرکت پست می رود، و می خواهد که شرکت پست، کارگران را هم، در سود سهیم کند. در هیچ سطری از این تحلیل، نشانی از مبارزه جوئی دیده نمی شود. حتی حرفی از مقابله با عواقبی که در انتظار کارگران پست است، دیده نمی شود، بلکه فقط پیشنهاد می کند، که پست، کارگران را هم در سود حاصله سهیم کند. حرفی از این که این سود چیست، چگونه سود حاصل می شود، در میان نیست. حتی “سعدی” وار در پند و نصیحت به ملوک، از مثال هایی که تقابل با آن ها بود حرفی نمی زند، یعنی از مبارزات کارگران حرفی بمیان نمی آورد. به همین سبب است که، وقتی کارگران، خواه عضو اتحادیه، خواه غیر عضو، تصمیم به تقابل با کارفرما می گیرند، و آماده اعتصاب عمومی و سراسری، هستند، این مبارزه جوئی عمومی، را به مبارزه گردشی، یا دوره ای در شهر و ادارات، تقلیل می دهد. با این حرکت، از اتحاد کارگران، که قدرت آن ها را، بالا می برد، جلوگیری می کند. با این حرکت ضعیف، کارفرما، قوت قلب می گیرد، و به معلق کردن کارگران، ابتدا جزئی و سپس کل حدود ۵۰ هزار کارگر پست، اقدام می کند. کارگران برای دفاع از منافع خود تصمیم به عمل مستقل از اتحادیه و با مدیریت و هماهنگی خودشان می گیرند. و در نهایت موفق می شوند جلوی اخراج کلی کارگران را بگیرند. اما سایر موارد از جمله بیکار شدن کارگران با طرح ماشینی کردن، کاهش انواع بیمه ها، جانشین ساختن تدریجی، کارگران قراردادی موقت، با کارگران رسمی، و پرداخت دستمزدها و مزایای کمتر، به آینده، و به مذاکرات سه جانبه بین اتحادیه، کارفرما و دولت سپرده می شود. یعنی، دستاورد مبارزه مستقل و جمعی کارگران، در تقابل با کارفرما، تجربه دخالت پایه ای کارگران، در چگونگی حرکت، و دفاع مستقیم از منافع شان، به چیزی در گذشته، نه راهی برای آینده، تبدیل می شود. به همین سبب می بینیم که در مطلبی که کانون مدافعان حقوق کارگر با عنوان؛ ” اعتصاب کارگران پست و درس های آن” می نویسد، “رد پایی از کارگران نیست“. از آغاز تا پایان، در مناقب اتحادیه کارگران پست کاناداست. تنها در جائی به این بسنده می کند که ” کمتر دیده شده که اعضای سندیکا، علیه سیاست های اجرائی سندیکا، معترض هستند“. اما هیچ از نوع اعتراضی که این بار وجود داشت، و به شیوه ای که کارگران، در مقابل شیوه مرسوم اتحادیه، بکار بردند، اشاره ای هم نشده است. برای نشان آن چه که کارگران به شخصه انجام دادند، و تصمیماتی که گرفتند و نظراتشان، به ترجمه مقاله زیر اقدام کردم. اما ترجمه این مقاله بمعنی توافق با نقطه نظرات نویسنده در کل نیست. اما معتقدم هر مبارزه کارگری در هر کجای دنیا که انجام گیرد به ویژه اگر به موفقیت هائی مخصوصاً در زمینه خود سازمان دهی، خود تصمیم گیری، ارتباطات کارگر به کارگر و حذف واسطه های تقلیل دهنده، دست یابد، باید، دستاوردهای آن؛ برای اطلاع و درس آموزی، برای تجزیه وتحلیل و نقد، جهت ادامه مبارزه ، در اختیار سایر کارگران قرار گیرد. بنظر می آید نویسنده از زمره چپ اتحادیه ای است و اشکال اتحادیه را در بورکراسی آن و دوربودن آن از پایه های کارگری می بیند. این مقاله در حقیقت می تواند به عنوان دنباله مقاله ” اتحادیه از توهم تا واقعیت” به همین قلم، به حساب آید. کلمات داخل پرانتز و تاکید ها از من است. Read More
The Informal Work Group, by Stan Weir
Stan Weir is a big influence on some of us in the Recomposition editorial group. This piece talks about some workplace dynamics that we think radicals on the job ought to think about. The article begins with an introduction by Staughton Lynd, which appeared in a book he edited called Rank and File: Personal Histories of Working-Class Organizers. During more than twenty years as an industrial worker, unionist, and organizer among seamen, auto workers, teamsters and construction workers, Stan Weir became impressed by the importance of informal work groups. The informal or primary work group is: “that team which works together daily in face-to-face communication with one another, placed by technology and pushed into socialization by the needs of production. It is literally a family at work torn by hate and love, conflict and common interest. It disciplines its members most commonly by social isolation and ridicule, it has a naturally selected leadership, makes decisions in the immediate work area, and can affect the flow of production.” Read More
C’est pas un pays, c’est un hiver
A friend of ours who blogs anonymously as Invisible Man sent us this three part story about his experiences at work and beyond. It’s powerful stuff about work, class, race, and the struggle to keep on keeping on. C’est pas un pays, c’est un hiver The Suit Shop It was late in the afternoon and the sweaty, noisy, humid factory day was almost finished. It was bitterly cold outside, but you wouldn’t know it from the inside of the suit factory. And you could easily forget that it was winter, because at Men’s Clothiers International where I worked, there were no windows to the outside. But 2003, my first winter in Montreal, was one of the coldest winters on record. Read More
Sometimes We Don’t Even Get to the Point of Losing
In this piece, Juan Conatz talks about some of his experiences on the job. Sometimes We Don’t Even Get to the Point of Losing… by Juan Conatz Reading The American Worker and old Italian operaismo surveys of auto workers, it occurred to me that it would be worth documenting some of my own experiences in wage labor. We often forget how powerful and important first person accounts of what happens to us are. Read More
Waves of Struggle, The Winter Campaign at the Post Office in Edmonton
We’ve posted a lot of articles about struggles at Canada Post. In this article Phinneas Gage lays out a detailed analysis of what went on in Edmonton. Waves of Struggle, The Winter Campaign at the Post Office in Edmonton by Phinneas Gage Christine braced herself, took a deep breath and then jumped up on to a mail tub and began to shout “help! help! I am being robbed.” Read More
“What do you do for a living?”
In this article our friend Frank walks us through his job in a way that gets at the bigger picture. “What do you do for a living?” by Frank Edgewick At a party, someone asks, “What do you do for a living?” I answer, “Get yelled at by wealthy people.” The answer is rehearsed and so automatic that I usually forget that it makes people laugh in surprise. It is a perfectly accurate response. Read More
We are not platformists, we strive to be.
In this post Scott Nappalos surveys a range of current ideas in order to offer further reflections on political organization. Nappalos aims to open a conversation about how to “transition to a a functioning cadre organization,” a topic which in his view has primarily been address merely by “merely theorizing the unity, tightness, and discipline that it would exhibit once we achieve it.” Read More
Simply Genius action in Ottawa!
With this exciting report we continue to post material about struggles at Canada Post. It was originally posted at The Worker Struggle with the Modern Post. Read More
Yesterday at the Post Office
Lately we’ve been posting items more quickly than our usual pace here at Recomposition. Right now some people in the editorial group and some of our friends work at Canada Post where they are involved in an intense and rapidly changing struggle. Read More
On Strike at Canada Post
This is the second of two pieces our comrade Mordechai just sent us on the current Canadian Union of Postal Workers strike, a topic dear to our hearts (and for some of us, our livelihoods) here at Recomposition. Read More
My Day: Others too.
This is the first of two pieces our comrade Mordechai just sent us on the current Canadian Union of Postal Workers strike, a topic dear to our hearts (and for some of us, our livelihoods) here at Recomposition. Read More
Towards Theory of Political Organization for Our Time
In this article Scott Nappalos offers the first of a multi-part reflection on organization. Read More
Sam Dolgoff, “The American Labor Movement: A New Beginning”
This post reprints excerpts from a section of Sam Dolgoff’s The American Labor Movement: A New Beginning. Read More
Do you really want to overthrow capitalism?
Some of us struggle to articulate our core values and our main ideas in a non-specialist vocabulary. There’s a place for specialized vocabulary, but we need to challenge ourselves to be able to make our points in other vocabularies as well. The following two documents attempt this. They were written shortly after the Jimmy John’s Workers Union campaign went public in Minneapolis. The first appeared in the newsletter of the Twin Cities branch of the IWW. Read More
Teacher Diary
This is a story by Madaline Dreyfus about her work as a teacher. Read More
This is how we become the heroes of our own stories.
On the heels of Rachel Stafford’s story of postal workers fighting mandatory overtime we bring you another piece from Edmonton. This is a speech by our friend and comrade Frank Edgewick. We’re reposting it because it speaks to our shared values, and because we like what it sounds like. Read More
Postal Worker Solidarity Defeats Compulsory Overtime
Recomposition is happy to post this article by Rachel Stafford about a recent victory in an ongoing struggle postal workers are having with management about compulsory overtime. Appropriately enough, our May Day post is about conflict over how long workers have to work. Read More
More social media
Twitter wasn’t enough. Recomposition is now on facebook. Read More
The Intermediate Level and Trajectories of Struggle
This lengthy post is a comment on Scott Nappalos’s article on what he calls “the intermediate level.” Read More
What Does the IWW Do?
We present another piece about the IWW, following from the last post by Phinneas Gage about the role of the IWW in revolutionary change. This piece first appeared as a Workers Power column in November 2008. Read More
How the I.W.W. can contribute to Working Class Revolution, by Phinneas Gage
How the I.W.W. can contribute to Working Class Revolution by Phinneas Gage The I.W.W. we used to have. The late 19th century and early 20th century were characterised by tremendous changes to the nature of industry. The rise of coast to coast rail lines, assembly line manufacturing, and the consolidation of Capital into monopolistic trusts came the stagnation of the conventional trade unions of the AFL and the Knights of Labour. Many unions in the late nineteenth century began groping for some kind of national organisation that could span the continent of North America and bring back the ability of workers to wage the class struggle effectively. Read More
Outline of US Labor History with a Focus on the Role of the Left
The people involved in Recomposition care a lot about history as a way to reflect on the present and our tasks. With that in mind, below is a rough outline for an introduction to US labor history. The outline attempts to periodize important organizations and broad trends by decade. A particular focus is to also look at the changing relationship of the left within the labor movement. Read More
Recomposition is now on twitter.
Recomposition is now on twitter. Read More
Ralph Chaplin on the General Strike
This post is an excerpt from a pamphlet written by Ralph Chaplin, the author of the famous anthem “Solidarity Forever” and an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World. Read More
Why You Should Start a Solidarity Network
We are reposting this article arguing for people to form groups roughly modeled on the activities of SeaSol. SeaSol has inspired several similar attempts, such as efforts in Iowa, Rhode Island, and around the world. Read More
Madison report
Readers of Recomposition will probably know about recent events in Madison, Wisconsin. The post below reposts a recently written account of a trip a friend of ours from the Wild Rose Collective took to Madison. Read More
“Workers have to deal with their own reality and that transforms them” by Martin Glaberman
“Workers have to deal with their own reality and that transforms them” by Martin Glaberman Read More
Excerpt from the IWW’s Founding Convention
This post reproduces a short speech from the convention floor at the founding convention of the IWW. The IWW was formed in the middle of a several decade long cycle of struggle and organization. The revolutionaries involved with the creation and operation of the IWW are often underemphasized in accounts of the history of the left. The proceedings of the IWW founding convention as well as other early IWW publications contain a wealth of material which is not just relevant for understanding the past but for engaging with the problems of our day. Read More
Building radical unionism: Providing services without creating service unionism
Recomposition’s newest post is “Building radical unionism: Providing services without creating service unionism,” by Adam W. This wasn’t intentional when the article was initially put in the list of material to publish on the blog, but the piece speaks to themes in the recent series of posts on leadership. In a way, this post continues that series. Read More
Stan Weir — Unions with Leaders Who Stay on the Job
In his article “Replace Yourself,” J. Pierce recommends “reveal your sources so others can think with you” and “encourage other members to read what you’ve read.” This latest post — Stan Weir’s “Unions with Leaders Who Stay on the Job” — does both at once. Weir’s piece inspired some of the ideas in all of the recent posts on leadership. Read More
Replace Yourself
Replace Yourself by J. Pierce The primary task of an organizer is to build more organizers. We need more and more working class leaders and the way to do this is to constantly replace yourself. Here’s a few easy ways to help you build up your successors: Read More
Questions about Leadership
Questions About Leadership By Nate Hawthorne What is leadership? What makes someone a leader? Why should we care who is a leader? Who should be a leader? What should leaders do? What is good leadership? Read More
On Leadership
On Leadership, by Phinneas Gage Miguel was charismatic. Middle aged yet still handsome, a principled family man, an open communist and refugee from Chile. He was part of the left, of the left, of the left, those who desperately argued that the working class had to defend themselves even as Allende their socialist President was dragged away and shot in a basement. As an entire generation was exterminated or disappeared, buried beneath soccer stadiums and dropped into Volcanoes Miguel managed to make it to Canada, like an entire generation of Chileans he vowed not to give up the fight. He was a survivor, a militant and a leader. Read More
A Golden Bridge
A Golden Bridge: a new look at William Z. Foster, the Great Steel Strike, and the “Boring-From-Within” Controversy by Noel Ignatin Read More
Malatesta: Syndicalism and Anarchism
Syndicalism and Anarchism, by Errico Malatesta The relationship between the labour movement and the progressive parties is an old and worn theme. But it is an ever topical one, and so it will remain while there are, on one hand, a mass of people plagued by urgent needs and driven by aspirations – at times passionate but always vague and indeterminate – to a better life, and on the other individuals and parties who have a specific view of the future and of the means to attain it, but whose plans and hopes are doomed to remain utopias ever out of reach unless they can win over the masses. And the subject is all the more important now that, after the catastrophes of war and of the post-war period, all are preparing, if only mentally, for a resumption of the activity which must follow upon the fall of the tyrannies that still rant and rage [across Europe] but are beginning to tremble. For this reason I shall try to clarify what, in my view, should be the anarchists’ attitude to labour organisations. Read More
Workers Power Columns
Readers of Recomposition might like a column called Workers Power in the Industrial Worker newspaper. The columns are archived online here. We’ve reprinted some of the columns on this blog and we plan to reprint some more. Read More
The Workplace Papers
The Workplace Papers, from the Sojourner Truth Organization The Workplace Papers are a collection of articles and reflection pieces assembled by members of the Sojourner Truth Organization involved in workplace struggles during the 1970′s and early 1980′s. Although coming out of the new communist milieu of the early 1970′s, the organization took up a number of unorthodox and critical positions around race, workplace organizing and revolutionary organization that have today become influential discussion points among those those on the left influenced by anarchism and by some members of the radical IWW union. Read More
The Battle of the Sandwiches: What Does the Bosses’ Offensive Look Like?
The Battle of the Sandwiches: What Does the Bosses’ Offensive Look Like? by Alex Erikson If you read stuff about the labor movement of the 1970s and 80s, there is a lot of talkabout the “bosses’ offensive,” an aggressive attack on workers movements by capital. A friend of mine from Italy told me that in 1977, the bosses and pro-boss workers (we call these people ’scissorbills,’ because their words cut you) staged a march of several thousand people in opposition to the continued wildcat strikes, sabotage, and occasional kneecapping, kidnapping, or assassination of bosses in the plants of northern Italy. This action was sufficient to change the climate and turn the cultural tide against the workers’ insurgency. In my own workplace, we have seen an ebb and flow of class struggle on a micro-level. Initially, when the union went public, the boss was so afraid of us that he would sneak in and out the back door of the store without us knowing. We actually had a hard time planning actions because we could never find the boss to make demands. Read More
New About Us page and announcement list
We set up an announcement email list for people who want to know when we post a new article. It’s low traffic, about one email every week or two. If you want to be on that list, email us at: recomposition.blog@gmail.com. We modified the “about us” page. Check it out. Read More
Strategy and struggle – anarcho-syndicalism in the 21st century
A pamphlet produced in January 2009 by Brighton Solidarity Federation as a clarification of the meaning of anarcho-syndicalism in the 21st century, and as a contribution to the debate over strategy and organisation. Read More
An orientation toward mass work
It will take time for the working class as a whole to become able to liberate ourselves from capitalism. Our class has various internal problems which limit us and help keep us in our place collectively. It takes work to move us beyond these problems. At a smaller scope – not the whole class, but smaller numbers of people within our class – and at a lower level – not the abolition of capitalism but smaller steps that move us somewhat closer to that – I think the process works similarly. We have internal problems and it takes time to move us forward. I think it’s important for anarchists to do work that fights directly against the state, capitalists, landlords and so on. I call it mass work. I’m not attached to the term, we can call it whatever. Mass work, and particularly anarchist involvement in mass work, is important for the process of changing people, at the class level and at a smaller level. Read More
My Introduction…
My Introduction… By P. Gage The first permanent job I got at Canada Post was in the early weeks of the spring of 2007. It was an ‘inside job’ processing and splitting up flyers between one hundred or so letter carriers. I had been working for Canada Post as a Term (read temp) for a year before getting a permanent position. Because of the labour shortages in Alberta I moved up in seniority quickly. Being the flyer guy in the depot made me far from the most popular person. Letter carriers like delivering flyers even less than their customers like getting them, they see them as a waste of time and not worth the $0.15 piece rate they get paid to deliver them. It did mean that I got to talk to almost everyone in the depot and hear their opinions on everything. Sometimes those opinions were not just about how much they hated seeing me every morning. Read More
Wobble the job! The Building Trades Wildcat in Alberta
The Building Trades Wildcat in Alberta Alberta labour laws are not only some of the most repressive in Canada, they may be some of the most repressive in North America. For decades the labour movement tried to change the laws in Alberta, demanding the right for all workers to strike between contracts, to collectively bargain, and anti-scab legislation. Their main weapon was lobbying a government that was hostile to their very existence, and making alliances with marginalized left-wing politicians who were shut out of the corridors of power. For a long time more and more workers were robbed of the right to strike either directly, like farm workers, university teaching assistants, and nurses, or indirectly by tying them up in so much red tape that a strike was almost impossible. Read More
A New Workers Movement in the US
A New Workers Movement in the US: A proposal for a refoundation through the intermediate level By Scott Nappalos It’s a tired truism that the workers movement in the US is floundering without a real base or path forward. A new generation of experimentation, struggle, and militants emerged from the ashes of the union’s most recent collaborationist strategy of labor-management partnership, contractualism, and labor’s historical parochialism of our-jobs-for-us. Read More
Solidarity Federation’s Industrial Strategy
Solidarity Federation’s Industrial Strategy The Solidarity Federation seeks to create a militant opposition to the bosses and the state, controlled by the workers themselves. Its strategy can apply equally to those in the official trade unions who wish to organise independently of the union bureaucracy and those who wish to set up other types of self-organisation. Read More
It Takes Two to Tango
It Takes Two to Tango by P. Gage As I pulled the gearshift into drive my cell phone was flashing telling me that I had a voicemail. When I got to my next stop I saw I had three messages on my phone now and my voicemail was full. I rubbed my hands together over the vent trying to forget about December in Edmonton. I got curious so I opened my voicemail box as I listened to each message my heart sank further. “Hello, this message is for Phinneas, my name is Steve and I’m a driver in the same department as you. I understand management has cancelled all of the Christmas overtime for the rest of the month because of the fight you had with them this morning over paying the correct overtime hours. Read More
Workers Power: Reproductive Health Clinic Workers
In this post we reprint an article which appeared in the Workers Power column of The Industrial Worker newspaper in February 2008 Workers have been organizing at a low income reproductive health clinic for the past few months. It all began when the company, which was on solid footing, had gone on a hiring spree and improved a lot of working conditions. The federal government began requiring any recipient of aid (the majority of our patients) to prove citizenship. Undocumented workers don’t actually need to strangely, all they need is to indicate that they’re permanent residents. The net effect on the industry has been to cut 30% of the funding to all low-income clinics generally. That is the real target of this federal assault, to cut social funding under the guise of racially based nationalist sentiments. Read More
Defining Practice: the intermediate level of organization and struggle
by S. Nappalos There is a left tradition of thinking about and taking action within two realms of activity: the mass level and the revolutionary political level. Read More