libcom.org
Articles by the group which runs libcom.org, and its members. Check out the website, yeah? It's well fuckin' futile.
Tea Break 2 - local government strike, July 2008
New issue of the irregular workers' bulletin put together by users of the website, libcom.org focusing on the 2008 pay dispute over sub-inflation pay offers.
A brief account of Unison's national conference, 2008
A critical account of the 2008 Unison national delegate conference by libcom group member John Stevens, analysing how the union's bureaucracy systematically attempts to remove control of the union from its rank and file and also looking at the response to the from the union's left-wing.
I recently attended Unison's national delegate conference in Bournemouth as a delegate from a London local government branch. It was an eye opening experience with respect to the machinations of political groupings within the union.
In particular some of the ways in which the new Labour-linked bureaucracy maintained control over the supposedly lay lead organisation became clear.
April 24 – hundreds of thousands to walk out
On Thursday April 24 thousands of civil servants, coastguards, council workers, FE lecturers and charity workers will join a national teachers strike of 200,000.
Employer attacks on workers' pay is the main issue at stake.
Teachers in the NUT are walking out over their pay deal which was supposed to be revised when inflation rose, but the government refused: effectively cutting their wages.
Libcom posters
Libcom posters, taken from publications by prole.info. Not for flyposting.
Agency staff: Don't scab on your fellow workers! - Pracownicy agencji: Nie bądźcie łamistrajkami!
A bilingual English-Polish leaflet produced to counter Royal Mail using casual labour against the 2007 national postal strike. As text in English and Polish and a bilingual pdf laid-out for printing as a double-sided A5 leaflet.
12/10/07 - Reports suggest that the Manpower agency is recruiting casuals during this strike, you may want to print out this pdf and distribute it at your local Manpower branch, or any other agency hiring for Royal Mail.
Notes on working at a sixth form college library, London 2005-2007
Between 2005-2007 a member of the libcom group worked term-time in the library at a Sixth Form College in London. This article/interview documents his attempts to organise his workplace and touches on some wider issues around working in education in the UK.
So where did you work? What was it like?
Since some of my friends are still working there, and I hope there is still some organising going on, I won't identify the college directly, but some background information would be useful.
1918: Rice riots and strikes in Japan
From July-September 1918, Japan was swept with a wave of riots from rural fishing villages to major industrial centres and coal fields, in what was the largest upheaval in Japan to date, and the widest ranging popular disturbances since the unrest during the Meiji restoration of 1868.
1905-1918 in Japan was called the Era of Popular Violence (民衆騒擾期, minshû sôjô ki). This began with the Hibiya Incendiary Incident (日比谷焼討事件, Hibiya Yakiuchi Jiken) - a citywide riot in Tokyo that started with a banned protest in Hibiya park; against the terms of the Portsmouth Treaty which ended the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905.
Dispatch 1 - Royal Mail strikes, August 2007
First issue of a bulletin about the public sector pay struggles of summer 2007 by a group of workers around libcom.org. This issue focusses on postal workers.
Available here in TIF and here in PDF format. The text follows:
Dispatch
Public sector pay dispute — information for action
Issue 1 - August 2007
Royal Mail workers: Fighting to win
Doing the job as it’s meant to be done
Interview with a member of libcom.org, 2007
A critical interview by Wayne Foster of Steven Johns from the libcom group, about the libcom.org project and the general state of things.
Libcom.org is a constantly expanding online resource that seeks to promote working class self-organisation through publishing news, theoretical texts and historical articles. Site traffic has risen from 25-35,000 visits per month in 2005 to 110-170,000 now and there are now 2,600 active users.
1932: The Vichuga uprising
In April 1932 at Vichuga, Ivanovo Industrial Region (IPO), USSR, 16,000 textile workers struck at several factories and temporarily took control of the town until the uprising was crushed by both heavy repression and promises of reform from central Soviet command.
Part of a wave of unrest which hit the USSR in the IPO, Lower Volga region, the Urals, Western Siberia, Ukraine and Belorussia, the strike was one of the most significant of the 1930s, winning reforms nationally as a result of the threat it posed to the Soviet authority.
