#angry workers

[ultroid2068]

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

Then there are the usual problems of worker leaders becoming sucked into the union, turning them into activists and elevating their status to reproduce internal hierarchies within the class. These visible leaders can be bought or broken... Once these leaders are inevitably victimized by the state (or even the mafia) we need to be sure that everything doesn’t just fall apart, that workers have the confidence, resources, relationships and structures to keep things running.

-Angry Workers, Class Power on Zero Hours

[xonethousandcriesx]

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

Angry Workers of the World: Class Power on Zero-Hours, Intro

[ultroid2068]

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

Workers’ Initiative in Poland also agreed to put forward a demand for seniority pay for Amazon workers, knowing that in the long-run, it would divide the workforce. Workers’ autonomy in these instances can become a fetish at the expense of a strict class line. Here we see the difference between ‘syndicalism’, which mainly deals with workers’ immediate demands, and ‘class unionism’, which ties the economic demands to political considerations about how to create class unity.

-Angry Workers, Class Power on Zero Hours

[cosmologicalhedgehogephemera]

This is a subjective summary of discussions that we’ve been having amongst AngryWorkers on the war in Ukraine. The discussions have been quite emotional and personal at various points. I will try and trace some of the controversial bits as best I can and invite other comrades to comment. Before looking at the open and...

[xonethousandcriesx]

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

Angry Workers of the World: Class Power on Zero-Hours, Intro

[xonethousandcriesx]

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

Angry Workers of the World, Revolutionary working class strategy for the 21st century – Part 1, Reflections on ‘uneven and combined development’ and ‘class composition’, April 7, 2020

[opificem]

AngryWorkers Basics…

We updated our ‘About’ page with some basic stuff – ain’t the holy grail or invariant manifesto, just some nuts and bolts… 1. The current system is based on cla…

Angry Workers latest article is a neat and very well worded positions/principles list for contemporary communist and imho well worth a read - as both a reminder of what should be expected of consistent modern communists and also to show that these types of writings don't have to worded like a thesis or poetry to be good.

[dhdingo]

My aesthetic is basically angry people being exploited at their jobs. This is always a main plot point in my writing.