#don't pay

[radicalgraff]

Solidarity Federation & Dont Pay Campaign posters spotted in Salford, UK

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

At a time when demonstrators in Chile can learn to extinguish tear gas by watching TikToks from Hong Kong, it’s clear that developments in communication technology have created unprecedented means for movements to share perspectives and tactics. At the same time as the credibility of traditional workers’ organisations collapsed, these new technologies have enabled protesters to coordinate and extend disruptive activity without relying on formal organisations. But it is one thing to share a tactic, and another thing entirely for people to have the confidence and means to follow through on it in practice. Beyond this, there is a crucial difference between spreading disruptive activity and building the durable forms of social coordination that would be needed to thoroughly transform social life. Don’t Pay successfully spread the idea of a tactic (non-payment), but without a firm organisational grounding we were unable to really root that ‘tactic’ in practice far beyond those of us who had already lost any other choice.

Angry Workers, Reflections on Don’t Pay

[fuckyeahanarchistposters]

“Cancel Rent! Cancel Mortgages!”

[suga-kookiemonster]

oh my god if they dont want to pay the author they can just NOT buy it, im sure the author isnt forcing anyone to buy it. let it go, anon, you have a million other fics on this site available for free.

💯💯💯💯

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

On a rank and file level workers on pickets almost always received the campaign positively, but at no point was this level of verbal support ever transcended into concrete, coordinated action. The workplace strikes and the payment strike ran alongside each other but without ever overcoming their mutual separation. If we ever want to move beyond asking our class enemies to fulfil our needs on our behalf and actually enforce our needs for ourselves, our basic physical needs as much as fun and rest and creativity, we have to smash the glass floor separating struggles inside and outside the workplace. Politicians and executives don’t heat and power our homes, workers do, and if these workers had the confidence and determination to carry through the struggle against energy price inflation there’d no longer be any question of begging for scraps. These workers run the gas and electricity network, manage accounts, process arrears, manufacture and install prepayment meters. No one is better positioned to make the price increases completely unworkable. And in the slightly longer term we stand exactly no chance of stopping climate catastrophe if the energy system remains in private hands and bound by the laws of profitability. In spite of all the obstacles thrown up by the social, technical and political recomposition of the working class, there remains no other way out: building links between social and workplace struggles, seizing control of the means of production, and repurposing them for direct social use.

Angry Workers, Reflections on Don’t Pay

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

Over the last 30 years the working class in the UK has been politically ‘decomposed’. Its organisations have been incapacitated or destroyed, tactics and experiences lost, and its political outlook narrowly delimited. Struggles can only mature to the extent that experience can be preserved and transmitted through sustained cycles of struggle, and in the UK that process has been violently interrupted. For all their faults, the trade unions and welfare state of the post-war period served to institutionalise the aspirations of the working class and maintain a baseline of not only basic social provision, but also the expectation that living standards should improve. The almost total destruction of these institutions has not freed proletarians to engage in wild and spontaneous struggles but instead broken our collective confidence and brutally contained our most basic expectations. For most people, the denial of their needs does not provoke outrage and militancy but reflects one more dismal confirmation that they can expect nothing else from this life. This has occurred alongside fundamental changes in how we live and work that have left many of us more socially isolated than at any time before. It is exactly this condition which Don’t Pay has aimed to confront, and in a sense its greatest strengths have also reflected its most fundamental limits.

Angry Workers, Reflections on Don’t Pay

[radicalgraff]

"Can't Pay? Don't Pay! #RentStrikeNow"

[mitietoni]

La mediocrità non paga.

Mi