Shortly after this book was completed, the first corona lockdown descended on the country. For the first few weeks, we followed social events through the distorting glass of social media, snuggled into the glass wool of our new social isolation. In ‘Class Power on Zero-Hours’, we describe our experiences during six years of political experimentation in food factories and logistics centres in west London, highlighting the central role of workers in the industries that will be essential to social upheaval. Before Corona, despite years of groundwork in our part of the city, we felt like ultra-left outsiders. Now, we made ourselves comfortable on stacks of our freshly printed but unread books, and watched the news as the general public asked the questions that had occupied us: how does food get on supermarket shelves, and why are they empty now? Who actually does ‘essential work’ and why are the conditions of that work so bad? This was at once frustrating and exciting.

In this sense, the lockdown was another push of social consciousness-raising. After the 2008 financial crisis, it was possible for the first time to talk broadly with colleagues about the weaknesses of a ‘system’ that they had experienced primarily as the ‘natural process of globalisation’ in previous years. With Brexit, many colleagues had to confront the question of which consumer goods and foodstuffs are actually produced in the UK and which are imported. As with the crisis of the monetary system and trade relations, the corona crisis deepened and broadened the perspective, and the central question of labour itself came into focus: who works in what, how and why?

Colleagues at the Tesco supermarket chain, whom you will get to know better in the course of this book, wondered more than ever why they should risk their health to supply millionaire apartments or financial offices – while supplying kindergartens or care homes seemed all the more important to them. Colleagues at Bakkavor, a complex of food factories that was a central site of our experience, took the national media stage during the first weeks of the lockdown. A colleague had filmed the manager of the ready-meal factory during a speech in the canteen, in which he threatened the assembled workers with redundancies if they stayed home on virus-related grounds in the coming weeks. This caused the usual one-day scandal in the bourgeois press – scandals that allow society a short emotional reaction of outrage which in turn makes it easier to forget about it all and go back to business as usual. The area around the factory, which had become our political home in recent years, topped the national charts for corona case numbers a little later. The predominantly migrant and female workers who live and work there face poor healthcare, overcrowded housing, packed assembly lines, and no sick pay – a fatal combination.

But we did not write this book to lament the fate of workers. Even during the first wave of corona, we tried to understand how we, as workers, determine the conditions at work. We interviewed dozens of colleagues in different industries about how the power relationship between workers and management changed. London Underground drivers told us about how they pushed for shorter shifts against the will of management. Midwives shared how they used internet forums across the country to make decisions about which home visits should still be made and which should not. We supported Pizza Hut workers in fighting for their wages after their boss fired them without registering with the government’s furlough scheme. During this dispute, brief but interesting connections were made with local neighbourhood helpers who had come together in the first corona wave. On a small scale, this confirmed the importance of the interplay between solidarity networks and worker collectives in workplaces, which we discuss in this book.

The lockdown had paralysed us initially, as it did many of our colleagues. We had many discussions with comrades in other countries, but it was the attacks on wages and working conditions as a result of the wave of ‘fire and rehire’ cases that brought us out of our winter torpor and made us active again. It became apparent that it had been useful for us to have both put down practical roots in a particular working class place and to continue political and strategic discussions and research. In the Spring of 2020, British Airways and Heathrow Airport in west London announced that thousands of workers would be laid off and rehired on worse terms. The union (UNITE) only had a theatrical patriotic campaign to counter this attack, complaining to politicians that British Airways had “betrayed Britain”. At the airport itself, UNITE disgraced its name by, for example, signing contracts that gave benefits to an (older) section of the workforce, while leaving the mass of workers out. We had gotten to know workers and comrades at Heathrow Airport thanks to our work over the last six years, which helped us intervene in the weak strike that followed. We knew workers who were working overtime in the airport’s cargo department during the lockdown to unload masks and other pandemic equipment from Chinese cargo planes. The union could have taken advantage of this boom situation in cargo operations to compensate for the structural weakness of the passenger strikes – but chose to sign a separate, and barely any better deal, for the cargo workers. It was not only because of the lockdown that it was difficult to build alternative or at least cross-union and cross-departmental networking during the short strike.

Our rootedness and contacts at Heathrow allowed us to look behind the official union press statements. British Airways and Heathrow were just the first stone in a domino chain of conflicts over wages and jobs. As a collective, we sought to understand whether the current social and global situation might give these defensive struggles a new quality, or at least the potential for radicalisation. We had the following questions for the new struggles:

*What tension is created when entrepreneurs in some industries try to use the crisis to attack our working conditions, while at the same time there is an acute labor shortage in many industries that the ruling class cannot simply fill through mass migration for political and Brexit-related reasons?

* Can struggling workers use their experience of rudimentary autonomy during the first weeks of the lockdown, when they had to provide ‘health protection’ at work themselves?

* How does this experience relate to the unions’ attempts to control the strikes and patronise the workers?

* How can mass layoffs and worse conditions be imposed in the current situation, when the ruling class has just opened the state purse to crisis measures, leaving aside ‘market forces’ and the debt fetish?

* Why do struggles remain defensive despite current public discussion that ‘essential labour’ is not only unequally distributed within society, but also relatively marginal, while most people are engaged in meaningless activities?

* Do workers continue to be fobbed off with the alternative of ‘unemployment or low-paid work’ when we are at the end of a decade of the ‘automation debate’ that promised a rosy future for humanity and its newly created artificial intelligence?

* Are we going to continue to be blackmailed so easily when thousands of workers saw during the ‘national vacation’ of the lockdown that the world isn’t about to end if all people aren’t at work?

* Given the apparent inability of both corporate management and the political class to organise social (re)production – currently expressed in both the lack of pandemic protection or supply crises, faltering global supply chains, and, not least, the dramatic consequences of climate change – is the self-confidence of workers growing?

This is the political field of tension in which we placed the current disputes. This was about much more than just defending the ‘poor workers’. Added to this was the global framework, as workers in the UK could see and compare how workers in other countries were dealing with the attacks, for example, during the threats of closure by the industrial company GKN. While unions in the UK begged for the site to be kept open, GKN workers in Italy were constantly holding meetings in their factories and allying with other workers. In Italy, this made it more possible to discuss factory closures as a general problem of our class, while in England it was about maintaining a “skilled workforce” and “British quality”. We had the hope that through more offensive forms of struggle a determined group of workers could have turned a defensive situation into an offensive one and become the focus and magnet of an organic communist program of struggle: we do not accept layoffs and wage cuts! We all work and work less! We do only what seems socially useful to us! We take what we need and support other workers who do the same!

This is not what happens as a result of big speeches, but through workers’ daily and unglamorous search for effective forms of struggle (a process they are forced to do), while discussing the worsening social crisis. We can only be revolutionary if we follow both processes closely. The left is of little help in this. In Britain, they had barely recovered from the shock of the change of leadership in the Labour Party (Jeremy Corbyn, the Party’s left wing hope, was voted out as party leader in January 2020) when the Tories’ new state interventionism during the corona crisis left them speechless. The left followed the official union line in defensive struggles and thus contributed little to the learning process within the class. There was no strategic discussion of what radical tendencies might lie dormant in the struggles and in their interrelationship with the social crisis. The left lacked both a social anchoring in everyday life and, thus, connections to workers, and a strategy.

Admittedly, there exists a large gap between our daily organising attempts and current defensive struggles on the one hand, and on the other, the scenarios of insurrection and self-determined production that we sketch out in the book’s concluding chapter. This chapter is an attempt to discuss revolution as a pragmatic measure of class, not primarily in relation to 1917, 1936, or 1968, but against the background of current class composition. Since the publication of ‘Class Power on Zero-Hours’, the three main class segments that could be vehicles for such a transformation have become more prominent, and with them the lines of division between them. We observed this especially in the example of the US, where mass protests and riots against police violence after the murder of George Floyd, smaller industrial strike waves during the 2021 lockdown and the so-called ‘Striketober’, and unrest among so-called tech or knowledge workers at Google, Amazon, and other companies succeeded each other in quick succession.

In this sequence we see the three essential elements of the revolutionary process: mass proletarian violence against state power and the blowing up of the private frame by coming together in streets and squares; the collective productive power of workers as a cooperating class; the resistant producer knowledge at the most developed level of the productive forces. This tripartite division is also reflected on a global level as a geographical tension. Mike Davis has already written that revolutionary initiatives today have to focus on three places that can be considered as the symbols of a certain class composition: the factories of Shenzhen, the IT offices of Silicon Valley and the proletarian neighbourhoods of Lagos.

But we also see how these essential elements are socially separated from one another, and how the left often helps to reproduce these divisions. Discussing the issue of police violence primarily as an issue of racism, and understanding the ‘black community’ in the U.S. not as a complex social group divided by class lines, but as stylised victims, only reproduces the actual ghettoisation of a significant portion of the black proletariat in the U.S. Treating the question of strikes as a union one, rather than as a productive form of violence and collective class self-discovery, contributes to limiting struggles to workplaces and industries. A left that conceives of society primarily as the accumulation of more or less privileged minorities, but is relatively blind to one of the historically deepest divisions within class, the division between manual and mental labour, can do little to overcome the isolation and paternalistic humanism of knowledge workers.

We have seen critical tech workers protesting the militaristic or environmentally destructive results of their work. We have listened to medical professionals rail against their government’s disastrous corona policies. But what we need is a direct exchange between marginalised proletarians, mass workers, and knowledge workers who, as part of a class movement, recognise their task of social transformation, overcoming material divisions and knowledge hierarchies within the class. Without such a project of taking over the means of production and social power, there is no reason why proletarians of diverse backgrounds should relate positively to each other. Here we lack a communist organisation in the original sense. Not a party project that tries to unify the class formally or through well-meaning demands, but an organisation that seeks out the unifying and disintegrating tendencies within the existing struggles. An organisation both of direct economic and political self-defence and of critical proletarian science.

Such an organisation does not come into being through programmatic recognition. We honestly do not know how such an organisation comes into being. Six years ago, we only knew that we had to dig outside the existing framework of the left and the revolutionary milieu. So this book is primarily about experimentation and trial: what can we do as a small group within the current class situation to support self-organisation and discuss the need for communism within the daily struggle? You won’t find blueprints for successful ‘organising’ necessarily, but plenty of useful experiences. Write to us and let us know if you can do anything with it.

For communism, and in memory of Dan Georgakas – comrade and author of ‘Detroit: I do mind dying’.

AngryWorkers, November 2021

In January 2014 we chose to move to a working class neighbourhood on the fringes of west London. We felt an urgent need to break out of the cosmopolitan bubble and root our politics in working class jobs and lives. We wanted to pay more than just lip service to the classic slogan, ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’ Over the next six years, comrades joined us and we worked in a dozen different warehouses and factories. We organised slowdowns on shop floors, rocked up on bosses’ and landlords’ doors with our solidarity network, and banged our heads against brick walls as shop stewards in the bigger unions. We wrote up all our successes, as well as the dead-ends, in our publication, WorkersWildWest, which we gave out to 2,000 local workers at warehouse gates at dawn. We tried to rebuild class power and create a small cell of a revolutionary organisation. This book documents our experiences. It is material for getting rooted. It is a call for an independent working class organisation.

At the time, we didn’t have to leave ‘careers’ to do this. We were either already doing blue collar jobs or floating about in Berlin, not really sure what to do next. 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.

We weren’t part of a bigger group at the time, so our only option was to lead by example. Get cracking and fingers crossed, people would hear about our efforts and join us. This was going to be a hard sell. Nobody on the London left had even heard of Greenford, not surprising due to its status as a cultural desert, in zone four on the Central line. But it’s where we chose to go, having done a few walkabouts beforehand to check out the scene. First impressions are that it’s a totally nondescript place where people are simply getting on with their humdrum lives. However, we quickly came to realise that this was a place that epitomised the daily realities behind the sensational headlines of the times: ‘the flood of Polish immigration’; ‘the scourge of zero-hours contracts’; the phenomenon of low wage growth and high employment; migrants in low-skilled work; the growth in warehousing and logistics; the low-waged sector boom after the financial crash in 2008; the hype of automation and robots taking over our jobs. Many left-wing commentators weigh in on these topics, but do they really have a clue what they’re talking about? By getting rooted in areas like this, we would be in a much better position to find out.

The endz

When you leave the tube station, the first thing you see is the Polish shop over the road. Next to that is a barbers, an estate agent and a chicken shop. You turn left, go under the railway bridge and Railway pub, past the bus stop that gets very overcrowded at certain times of the day with workers wearing high-vis jackets, another fifty metres further along and you hit the industrial estates and logistics parks. These include Tesco and Sainsbury’s distribution centres, a massive Royal Mail depot and a globally connected vegetable packing factory. The area is a mix of warehouses surrounded by overcrowded suburban residences. Greenford is small enough that people work and live locally, but big enough for us to not be blacklisted too soon once we started agitating with our co-workers. It was also a convenient bus ride from the Park Royal industrial area, one of the biggest in Europe and where one of us would later get a job at a food processing plant, as well as Heathrow Airport, probably London’s biggest workplace. It is locally concentrated and, at the same time, internationally connected. We were on a stretch called the ‘western corridor’, the main artery into London from the west, dotted with workplaces that made use of the global and national transport links. 60% of the food consumed in London is processed, packaged and circulated along this ‘western corridor.’ This area typified one of capitalism’s main contradictions: that workers have enormous potential power as a group, especially if they could affect food supplies into London, at the same time that they are individually weak. This is due to the fact that they have to scrape a living in the government-led ‘hostile environment’, with few social safety nets and effective organs to fight back against deteriorating working conditions in the modern low-waged sector. As revolutionaries, we wanted to support some self-organisation amongst these workers who have largely been ignored and neglected by the left.

So we packed our bags and headed from east to west London – a real culture shock! From inner city housing estates and vibrant food markets to rows of suburban terraces and golf courses. We got a £450 a month room in a shared house advertised in a local newsagent’s window, paid the deposit and moved in. It was easy to get jobs. You just needed to sign up with a local temp agency, of which there were several, and they would send you somewhere the next day. We knocked up a CV and typed up our own reference letters (they weren’t checked anyway). Initially it was just the two of us, but over the years we were joined by other comrades from Hackney and Essex, as well as further afield: Poland, Spain, Slovenia, Australia, India, and France.

Between us we worked at a lot of local workplaces. One of us worked at the Jack Wills fashion warehouse, eyeing up the hundred pound bags that were unceremoniously wrapped in plastic and gathering dust on a bottom shelf. We were made to run around with trolleys made of cardboard, picking items and putting back returns, having to meet high targets, your speed being measured with a scanning device – all in boiling hot temperatures and under the brutal surveillance of a petite Nazi woman from Poland. One of us worked in a garden furniture warehouse, three of us worked at the Sainsbury’s chilled distribution centre, and one of us spent six months stealing samples from a Neal’s Yard cosmetics warehouse – where they certainly weren’t treating their workers more ethically than their botanical ingredients. One of us drove around on an electric cart, lugging drinks around to be sent to Waitrose supermarkets. One of us worked at a 3D printer assembly plant, getting an insight into what’s behind all this talk about ‘liberating technology.’ One of us did a hectic unpaid trial at the Charlie Bigham’s food factory, another at a factory that makes Indian fried snacks and samosas on piece-rate. One of us was a Bendi forklift driver, filling up on fry-ups in the free canteen at Alpha LSG, an airline caterer. We waited on business twats at a Premier Inn hotel, swept leaves and collected bins with Amey, outsourced to do the street cleansing for Ealing Council. But we spent the most blood, sweat and tears at two places: as a delivery driver for supermarket giant Tesco, and as a forklift driver at a food manufacturing factory, Bakkavor, which supplies all the major supermarkets with houmous and ready-meals. Our work and organising reports from these employers make up the biggest section of this book, in chapters 7-10.

Where we’re coming from

A lot of stuff has been written over the last few years about the conditions of modern workplaces. From the journalist ‘going undercover’ to work at Amazon, to the whistleblowing headlines from Sports Direct where “a woman gives birth in toilet because she was afraid of missing her shift”. These ‘exposés’ reveal a few things. Firstly, they all subscribe to the idea of workers as ‘victims’. They are downtrodden and nobody is fighting for them. Secondly, they usually reveal a migrant workforce, and as such, they are indirectly blamed for a worsening of conditions because they are putting up with what ‘British’ workers wouldn’t. Rarely are their voices even heard above the liberal-lefty outrage at the ‘Dickensian’ conditions. Thirdly, unions are either absent, or using media coverage to promote themselves as the ‘saviours’ who will represent the interests of these voiceless worker victims. Lastly, they give zero indication of workers’ own recourse to action in these situations. Apart from ‘joining a union’, which, in our experience, often jointly presides over such misery with management, there are no hints that workers can, and are, fighting back.

One aim is to do the opposite of all that. Firstly, this isn’t a book about ‘journalistic impressions’, where we fly in and out of crap jobs, merely describing and complaining about the ‘terrible’ conditions. We intervene in the class struggle. This doesn’t mean going in and telling our workmates what to do. Like everyone else, we spend time finding our feet and working out what’s what. We learn from each other, but we’re not shy about providing support where we can to encourage some roots of wider self-awareness, self-confidence and collective action. This book attempts to document this effort. A revolutionary organisation should exist and act within the class, not in its place, or as outsiders. The program doesn’t exist on paper.

Secondly, we put a spotlight on what workers are doing themselves, what we have tried to do with our workmates, what worked, what didn’t, and why. Only by basing our politics on direct experiences like this, where we are putting down roots in working class areas, rather than just knocking on their door when election time swings around, can we build a real, grassroots counter-power – one that actually involves working class people! It’s definitely not as glamorous as a young and hip Corbynista party. It’s a hard slog, what with the dawn rises and monotonous work. But it’s a relief to not have to pretend you love your job. And there’s a real pleasure in getting to know people that many on the left just read about or claim to speak for.

We are publishing this book at a time when many on the left are licking their wounds, despondent at their missed opportunity to implement a socialist program through the Labour Party. The calls for a ‘period of self-reflection’ about how to ‘reconnect with working class voters’, however, have been largely sucked back towards the navel, as commentators and leftist groups at the start of 2020 now obsess over the Labour leadership race. We’re not sure when ‘voting’ and ‘elections’ became the only fodder for far-left debate, although Brexit certainly gave parliamentary ‘democracy’ the equivalent of a defibrillator shock.

The main stumbling block to pushing past electoralism though is the fact that there seems to be no other viable alternative or strategy from how we get from where we are now to where we want to go. We can all agree that we want a society free from exploitation and oppression, where we’re not killing the planet, where emancipation means real freedom, not just the freedom to vote for someone every four years. But when we watch the news and look around us, we seem to be getting further rather than nearer to this goal. The news is full of BoJo’s drivel and Labour’s infights, but they tell us little about the massive uprisings in Chile, Sudan, Iraq or even the strikes in France. The UK left is firmly focused on internal politics, and even that is often detached from working class realities. We tried to keep the focus on the advanced movements of our class across the globe, while planting our feet into the local working class conditions at the same time. This book deals with the field of tension inbetween.

We are only a small group. For those who like to categorise, we put ourselves on the communist left. That might not mean much to many, and it isn’t really important, other than to say that our approach to revolutionary politics lies firmly in workers’ self-organisation. Everything we do centres around this perspective: that in order to really change society, working class people have to take matters into their own hands. We don’t think the state is a neutral force that we can bend to our will by just getting the right political party elected. States always have been, and always will be, the main arbiters in maintaining class relations (for more on this see chapter 12). History has shown us that all governments are self-interested, even if they think they’ll be different. From Syriza in Greece to Podemos in Spain to Chavez in Venezuela to Allende in Chile – global capitalism is no match for perhaps well-meaning, but nonetheless nationalist socialist policies.

We suggest a different kind of class politics, one that is embedded in the daily lives of working class people. It may sound simple, but the fact that many on the left have no concrete relationship to working class areas or working class people is a big problem. You end up either lamenting their status as victims of capitalism’s deindustrialised past (as much of the Brexit voters are); as robots (as Amazon’s tech-savvy warehouse workers are); slaves (as many low-waged workers in modern workplaces are); or destitute (as the rising numbers of homeless and those affected by benefit cuts are). How are robots, slaves, the destitute and victims supposed to be a force worth reckoning with? This totally disenfranchised notion of the working class will not allow us to unearth its revolutionary potential. This is exactly what the ruling class wants.

We’re not denying that things have gotten relatively worse for a lot of people. But what these victim narratives perpetuate is a surface level analysis. In order to scratch the surface we have to get back to basics and engage in a process of discovery, together with our co-workers, in order to see where our power versus the bosses actually lies. The first step to take with our fellow workers in an inquiry to understand the objective conditions: how is production and our co-operation organised? Is it done by management alone or does it rely on us? Is our co-operation limited to the four walls of our workplace or does it reach beyond borders? Does IT technology reduce workers to mere puppets of the central control room? Within the framework of these objective conditions, we then need to analyse the subjective ones: what kind of ways workers have already found to resist.

This ‘workers’ inquiry’ takes its starting point from the immediate workplace, but cannot be limited to it. We have to understand the wider global changes of the working class. There is no static or homogenous ‘working class’. It isn’t an identity, like the white miner in a flat cap. Rather, as capitalist social production changes, the regional centres and dominating industrial sectors are also transformed. We can see this in west London, where the workers used to be ex-miners from Wales working in the construction industries, and how this changed to light industry and factories with a majority of workers from the Indian subcontinent. Within this process of changing industries, ‘the working class’ changes too, so we have to talk about specific ‘class compositions’ during specific cycles of history or stages of capitalist development.

These changes in the production process transform the way workers struggle and to what ends. For example, whereas the tendency since the 80s has been to break up units of production into smaller units, as well as relocate production overseas or across wider geographical areas, newer tendencies in how production is organised are bringing larger numbers of workers back together again.

The dispersal of production from the 80s onwards was a political response to workers’ power in the 60s and 70s. It is dangerous when you get high numbers of workers working together under one roof or in close proximity to each other. They tend to start talking to each other, comparing their situations, making common demands, and questioning why we even need bosses. This was why these strongholds had to be broken up, even if this made the production process more complicated. That complication requires a growth in logistics to plan supply-chains. In turn, this has led to a reformation of bigger logistics hubs and warehouse complexes, bringing larger groups of workers together. This makes it easier to harness a potential collective power. In the last few years, we have seen this lead to strikes and actions in many warehouses across Europe.

Capital, however, finds new ways of managing the fact that you have workers coming together in bigger numbers by developing techniques that divide us and keep us isolated from each other. We have to know what those are, and think creatively about how to overcome them. This is part of the workers’ inquiry too, which is why we dedicate some pages in each of our workplace reports to this wider look at the food industry and the production process – from global supply-chains all the way down to the shop floor and relationships amongst the workforce.

These two things – more workers coming together, what we call a ‘concentration process’, and daily co-operation between workers – are the actual bases for the revolutionary potential of the working class. At work, we are in the position to discover that we ourselves produce this world, and that connecting our struggles beyond our individual workplace can give us the political and economic clout to seize power. The fundamental question is: how do we turn this ‘working together’ and co-operation into a weapon against the system? How can we use this knowledge as the starting point for organising ourselves for our own goals, rather than the goals of capitalism?

Our organisational proposals have to refer to these actual conditions, rather than some airy-fairy notions of the ‘precariat’ or ‘the multitude’ and their assumed needs. It’s all very well to sketch out a vision of what we want the classless utopia to look like, but if we can’t even decide when we go to the toilet, or how we manage our own work, this will continue to be an unrealistic pipe dream, totally detached from our daily lives. Together with our fellow workers we have to create a culture of collective analysis: depending on our own capacity, what kind of steps can we take to put pressure on the bosses, and how can we increase our numbers and strength?

Our workplace reports are an attempt to answer these kinds of questions. They also deal with our experiences within the trade unions – as members, and also as shop stewards with GMB and USDAW. Although we knew about the limitations of trade unions as institutions, but hoped to be able to create some space for workers’ self-organisation within the company union structure. We produced union newsletters, organised workers’ meetings, pushed for strike and work to rule. Unsurprisingly we found that the modern union framework is built to stifle initiatives on a rank and file level. Even when small windows of opportunity arose, for example with a more militant union official, it became clear that the larger union apparatus would not support this for long.

Levels of organisation

Let’s be more specific about our thoughts on what an organisation should be doing. Our idea for a local organisation works on four levels. We’ve already mentioned workplaces and why we think our ability as producers is crucial in our aim to create another society.

At the same time, people are obviously struggling outside of work: with shoddy landlords, visa agents, the job centre and welfare regime. So we set up a solidarity network, which supported dozens of local working class people. The solidarity network addresses the fact that the current system individualises us and, at the same time, creates a dog-eat-dog atmosphere. To say out loud that we are here to support each other as workers, not as experts, is itself a political act. It is an ear to the ground of the class, we can hear and learn about its’ conditions, and make friends.

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. It had another potential function: to provide a local mob that could support workers’ minoritarian actions from inside the bigger workplaces.

The third level is our newspaper, WorkersWildWest. We distributed 2,000 copies of each issue in front of two dozen factories, warehouses, as well as Heathrow airport, job centres and industrial areas. A workers’ publication is necessary to be able to share experiences from the solidarity network and from workplaces and to reflect upon them. The distribution of the newspaper gets us in physical contact with other workers. It can create new bonds, which is more than an anonymously written blog-piece can do. We can use the newspaper to spread information about relevant struggles around the globe. But the newspaper is more just than a mirror of the class. It is a medium to discuss our positions on the wider social situation, for example why nationalism does not offer the working class a route to emancipation. We can look into the history of our class and put forward ideas about a future social transformation. In the longer run, newspapers and other forms of self-education will be an additional tool to undermine the separation of manual and ‘intellectual’ workers. Finally, the newspaper is a focus for ourselves, as it forces us to be organised in practice and precise in our thoughts and language.

All this needs organisation. Organisation is not a label, a party name, a holy grail. ‘Organisation’ is us thinking and acting together and reaching out to others. It is a process of learning together independently and to undermine individual careerism. We need organisation to hold together the solidarity network, the activities in workplaces and the newspaper, and to give it all a direction. We need organisation to reflect on our activities and to present them to comrades in other regions. As an organisation we take on a responsibility. The responsibility to help turn the global co-operation of workers, which is mediated through corporations and markets, into their own tool of international struggle. Our organisation has to be of practical use for the class and at the same time provide a compass: these are the conditions for our class to act independently from the parliamentary and state system, and these are steps the movement can take to capture and defend the means of production.

In our neck of the woods, we tried to create a tiny example of such an organisation. We wanted to take on a territorial responsibility for that small part of the world. This meant, for example, visiting the local Amazon warehouses and telling workers there about the struggles of our sisters and brothers at Amazon in Poland. It meant organising film nights about warehouse workers in Italy in local community centres for workers here. It meant passing on French comrades’ reflections on the Yellow Vest protests to local workers through WorkersWildWest. It meant picketing a restaurant during the Deliveroo strike to spread the actions from central London.

We hoped to be able to create a fruitful dynamic between the different levels of class organisation, which would allow for a qualitative leap. For example, we met some truck drivers from Punjab through the solidarity network. They were employed in a small tin-pot company, being ripped off by a boss of ‘their community’. We helped them and, in return, they supported us in our organising drive with the rank and file union, IWW, at a local sandwich factory where there were many Punjabi workers. They could talk to workers in Punjabi and increased the level of trust between us and workers there.

Later, they got us in touch with another truck driver at Alpha LSG, one of the world’s largest airline caterers where we had been distributing the newspaper for some time and workers knew us but hadn’t contacted us independently. The solidarity network and the close personal links within the local class had helped us to advance from a contact in a minor enterprise to a contact with a group of workers at a multinational corporation and their concrete grievances. At this stage, when we told them there would be no easy legal fix, they decided to not go further.

But what if they had? With the support of a class union, we could have embarked on a dispute. Alpha LSG is a crucial workplace in this area: not only do hundreds of local people work there, they also have links to many thousands more in other local workplaces, many contending with deteriorating conditions in outsourced companies. Alpha LSG workers keep the operation at Heathrow airport going – and they can therefore disrupt it. The fact that a local dispute could kick off under conditions many low-paid workers in this area could relate to would have a ripple effect amongst the entire local labour force. The newspaper could spread the news of the strike from the point of view of the workers themselves to other local workplaces, forging new links and offering practical solidarity.

This doesn’t sound too far-fetched. While we didn’t manage to get that far this time, who knows what could happen in similar situations, especially if you had more comrades on the ground? We maintain the organisational framework is a good one. It certainly beats going to the usual lefty meetings where you’ve got five old men and a dog talking about Durruti. Or going on a demonstration, waving placards from an SWP front organisation and being roundly ignored by those who make the decisions. The main problem is that these four levels (workplaces, solidarity network, newspaper and organisation) have to all be done at the same time in order to create something bigger than the sum of their parts. The solidarity network can help people take initiatives at work; struggles at work in turn can give local campaigns more power versus the local authorities. These practical experiences give people more impetus to discuss the bigger picture and to get organised politically.

To create a dynamic between these levels is not easy. Comrades might manage to get a good local solidarity initiative or a workplace group in gear, but they remain isolated experiences. Other comrades produce beautiful analyses and programmatic declarations, but drift in space without roots. Their thoughts are not tested by the class. This is why we insist that we have to see the levels as a cohesive, complementary organism that lives and breathes within the class. We see organisations in the revolutionary milieu, in particular amongst our anarcho-syndicalist comrades, who formally address all these levels. The problem is that, more often than not, they substitute their own organisation for the class. While we think that the organisation should act through the class and its ever-changing movements, they suggest that the class acts through the organisation. These are not dialectical games. These differences have practical consequences, which we will address in the chapter on revolutionary strategy at the end of this book.

Our efforts in west London were not about ‘organising’ as such. Our aim is to build a political organisation of the class. Not just a formal organisation people can say they’re a member of and then sit back and not do anything. We want to build an organisation that consists of many local collectives like ours, that are rooted in working class organising and discussions about fundamental social change. Through the organisation, these local collectives could debate their experiences centrally and contrast them with wider developments of class struggle in order to decide on common practical strategies. We hope the book will inspire small groups of you to make common plans together and perhaps set up similar organisations in your areas. We will talk more about concrete proposals in the last part of this book but for now, we would just say that you don’t need a lot of resources to get going. You don’t need external funding, or fancy publications and logos. You can do a lot more than you think when your ‘political life’ and ‘normal life’ isn’t so divided.

Our reader

This book is for anyone thinking, ‘what next?’ You might be in a big town, or a small town. Chances are, you’re near some larger workplaces of strategic importance. Maybe you don’t even know it, you’ve gone past these areas on the bus and didn’t think much about what was going on there. Why don’t you do a walk-around and find out? If you’re not near anything potentially interesting, why don’t you move somewhere else? You don’t necessarily have to get a shit job. But if you’re doing a shit job anyway, why not start writing a work report about how the work is organised, how the workforce is composed, where the pressure points are and your and your co-workers’ experiences? If there’s a group of you, you can set up a solidarity network and a small publication at the same time. Document your experiences, and get in touch if you want to discuss things through in more detail. We hope this book can inspire you. You can dip in and out of it, depending on your specific interests.

Chapter summary

In the first chapter, we start by taking a closer look at this area of west London, and its recent history in particular. We want you to get a sense of the area we’re in and important struggles that have shaped the class formation here. The following three chapters go into more detail about our experiences: the second chapter talks about our solidarity network and the local campaigns we were involved with. The third chapter is about a workplace action we were involved in at the Waitrose and Sainsbury’s chill warehouses in Greenford. In the fourth chapter, we talk more about the role of our newspaper in our organising efforts, as well as sharing some snapshots from our interactions during the newspaper distributions.

The fifth chapter focuses on working class family life, as well as the stories of women workers we’ve met here over the last few years. The sixth chapter shares our experiences of the organising drive we did with the London branch of the Industrial Workers of the World union (IWW), as well as our general thoughts on the upsurge in syndicalism and syndicalist-style organising.

The next section contains our workers’ inquiries from three local workplaces: Bakkavor (a food processing factory), Tesco (as a delivery driver in a customer fulfilment centre), and a 3D printer/ink cartridge refilling plant. The seventh chapter is an introduction to the food sector in capitalism, looking at ‘Food production from the field to the processing plants’. We recount how class struggle for a better life pushed capital into the Third Agrarian Revolution and the industrialisation of food processing, as well as examining the position of workers in the global food supply-chain. Chapter eight is a detailed account of ‘Working and organising at the Bakkavor ready-meal factory’: it includes an overview of the company so we know who exactly we’re dealing with; a detailed look at the workforce composition; how the production process was organised; the main issues we were facing as workers in a repressive assembly line regime; the barriers to building workers’ power; as well as the workings of the GMB union that had recognition at the factory, particularly during a pay campaign to get £1 more an hour for everyone.

We start the ninth chapter by analysing, ‘Food distribution in capitalism’, in order to provide context for the workplace experience in one of Tesco’s warehouses. In order to understand the background of our organising attempts and how Tesco has managed to restructure the company without major disputes we have to analyse ‘The union and struggles’. The three years of employment at Tesco were confined to a specific and probably most modern segment of the company, online shopping and ‘Grocery home deliveries’. We check out if this form of work is just a modern and temporary fashion or whether it’s part of a deeper and long-lasting transformation of how food will be distributed in the future. In order to get to grips with this we give more attention to ‘Ocado – the highest point of development’. This is also important to get a better understanding of the automation hype and new forms of capitalist enterprises. Ocado defies the leftist presumption that companies which rely a lot on their share market value tend to shy away from long-term investments. Things then become more subjective and immediate, as we talk about ‘Work and organising experience at Tesco’ in chapter ten. You’ll get to know the workmates, the daily grind and management’s nightmares. We look at informal resistance and the contradictions of being a union rep. There will be many union delegate tears flowing, and even Jeremy Corbyn will make a guest appearance.

Chapter eleven is a work report from our time working in the 3D printer assembly department of a local enterprise that also refilled printer ink cartridges. The company fits much of the Labour left’s criteria when they speak about alliances with the entrepreneurial sector against finance capital: it is a start-up company, it has an ecological ethos, it produces products for the dreamworld of ‘luxury communism’. If you want a sobering account of the automation hype, this is essential reading.

We end the book, between chapters twelve and fifteen, on AngryWorkers’ thoughts on revolutionary strategy. We look at the division within current protest movements between square occupations and street protests on one side and strikes on the other. We raise the question of how a takeover of the means of production can be imagined once these means are scattered around the globe. We try to talk about the process of revolution as a process of basic tasks for the working class, rather than a mystical moment. We end this section with our organisational proposals to you!

We conclude with some personal remarks and critical self-reflection about our six years in the western badlands.

We wrote this book in six months while working manual, low paid jobs and while continuing our work around the solidarity network and workers’ newspaper. We don’t want a medal for it, but it’s relevant in two regards: we use it as an excuse for the fact that the book is rough and raw; but we also want to make the point that writing something relatively substantial doesn’t mean you have to become an academic or journalist or take on any another form of intellectual profession. The more we can write for the collective and international debate, as workers in struggle, the better. We look forward to hearing from you!

In solidarity,
Some (still) AngryWorkers

From: https://classpowernet.wordpress.com/intro/

We want to thank the comrades of the CWO for their detailed review and use the opportunity to clarify our thoughts on the relation between day-to-day struggles, class consciousness and revolutionary rupture - and our role within this process. Their review can be found here:

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2020-08-12/class-power-on-zero-hours-learning-the-hard-way

It wasn’t surprising that after we got a bashing from our syndicalist comrades from 'Organizing.Work' for being 'bad organizers' due to our political trajectory, we now get a lecture from our left-communist comrades that we’re rubbish in giving political leadership due to our syndicalist outlook! You can’t win! If you haven't seen our response to 'Organizing.Work' you might want to read it as complementary to this response. In a way, this debate is as old as the revolutionary workers' movement, but we will try and go beyond re-enacting the debate between Durruti or Malatesta and the syndicalists or the KAPD and the AAUD. You can find our response to 'Organizing.Work' here:

https://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/2020/06/19/a-response-to-the-organizing-work-review-of-class-power-on-zero-hours/

In our response to the CWO, we start with the basics, which is their understanding of the relationship between work, struggle and class consciousness. We will locate their understanding in the historical roots of their political tendency. We will then examine whether their portrayal of our efforts inside and outside of the union structure is primarily meant to confirm their own preconceived ideas, or whether they are courageous enough to follow us into the contradictory nature of everyday working class lives. We will try to clarify our own understanding of day-to-day struggle and political organisation. We continue with the question of revolutionary rupture and the accusation of the CWO that in our 'syndicalist manner' we ignore the necessity of dismantling the capitalist state. We finally reflect on the question of whether we 'failed', or what 'failure' means for communists who want to organise within the class.

* Day-to-day struggle and consciousness

As we will see later on, the CWO makes a sharp distinction between 'everyday struggle' and political consciousness. Without wanting to go too deep into history, we can locate this in their Leninist origins. Lenin's understanding of political organisation was a product of its time. He saw the necessity of forming a tightly knit, clandestine organisation to survive the surveillance of the Czarist police state. This meant that the 'political organisation' tended to be relatively sealed off from day-to-day struggles of the class. 'Workers develop trade union consciousness, political consciousness comes from without'. The necessity of a sealed off political organisation fused with his rather mechanistic view of 'materialist philosophy', which failed to grasp the 'practical' interrelationship between the material world and our representation and reflection on it.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/intro.htm

Again, a sharp distinction between 'the real world' and 'consciousness'. The Leninist 'survival mode' was exacerbated by the experience of the Italian communist left, which had to survive the political onslaught of both Stalinism and fascism. Their main antidote during these times was a retreat into theoretical programmatism. Bordiga was very involved in trade union struggles during the 1910s and 1920s, while maintaining the necessity of political leadership by a communist organisation. He rejected a united front with bourgeois political parties, but spoke in favour of a ‘trade union united front’. “The party must participate in every action to which the proletariat is driven by its economic condition”.

Only during the leaden years of the 1930s and 1940s did the left-communist position introduce an ideological washer between 'economic' and 'political struggle'. The CWO carries this baggage. It prevents them from seriously engaging with, for example, the rediscovery of Marx and the analysis of the political nature of the production process in the 1950s and 1960s by groups such as the Johnson-Forest tendency in the US or Quaderni Rossi in Italy. We see ourselves in historical proximity to the (left) communist tendencies that broke with the nationalism and reformism of the Second International and who emphasised the need for an independent political organisation of the working class outside of electoralism and trade union institutions - and we see that these tendencies are products of their time.

We excuse ourselves for this perhaps boring historical interlude, but it might help to explain why the CWO gets trapped in tautologies when it comes to 'struggle' and 'consciousness'. Below are some quotes from the review of our book. We learn that "workers fight when they are ready", but that they need class consciousness to do so, because to try to support organising struggles, e.g. through a rank-and-file union is "substitutionism for class consciousness". The CWO has a miracle to solve, namely the question of where the necessary consciousness comes from. Their answer to this is that "some workers, who are more class conscious than others take the lead". Perhaps realising that this is not the most intelligent way to get out of the tautological trap, they have to revert to the old Leninist conception of 'spontaneous struggle' which lacks political direction and 'political leadership'.

"There are many contradictions in the AWW’s approach to organising workers, one of the chief of which is that they want to try to urge workers to take militant action before they are ready for it. The only way to do this is to resort to the union organising model and this not only pre-empts class-consciousness but ends up stifling it."

"But these three “material foundations” for a “class union” bespeak a kind of substitutionism for class-consciousness."

"Workers ready for a fight don’t need a union to organise it for them. And the most class-conscious workers will give a lead to less class-conscious workers but this will only happen in the right conditions."

"It shows that where the AWW are in a position to give a political lead to the working class by agitating for an extension to the strike and moving the struggle beyond the limits of the occupation, they prefer to prevaricate and wait for the workers to achieve that perspective spontaneously. This kind of workerism, as well as failing to provide political leadership, can also lead to workers’ confusion."

To be fair to the comrades, they see the main problem in the union or legal framework of day-to-day struggles. Any form of collective action that takes place within this framework is automatically limited to it. According to the CWO, comrades have to wait until workers are ready to take wildcat action and can only relate to them, meaning, give them 'leadership' in that moment. We agree with the comrades that the trade unions, due to their sectorial, hierarchical and legal nature, limit class struggle. We also agree that revolutionaries should intervene in struggle and contribute with their experience and historical lessons. So why did we bother to get engaged in workplace activity even if there are no apparent struggles, including the rank-and-file union structure?

* Union struggle

We did so because we think that political consciousness is more of a continuum, developing as collective practice and reflection. Necessity forces workers to think together and act. As soon as a group of workers come together and discuss what to do as workers under their specific conditions, the political process starts. By analysing the way the work process is organised, within and beyond the company boundary, and the legal framework, including the trade union structure, workers develop political consciousness. The problem is that this does not happen as a neatly distinguished process before the action happens. Without workers being together and acting, this process does not proceed. This process is not linear, workers face difficulties and contradictions, which either make them question their path or lead to defeat. A strike might start within the confines of the trade union and surpass it. Most of the 'wildcat strikes' that the CWO refer to didn't have 'pure' origins. To expect workers to only take action when they are strong enough to stage an illegal strike is voluntaristic - something the CWO comrades accuse us of.

In their review, the CWO comrade cherry picked only those of our documented experiences which confirm their view that any action taken within the legal framework is doomed from the start and that trying to organise collective actions at a time when 'nothing is happening' is voluntaristic. This is fine, but it means that no one learns anything. It also means that by avoiding looking into the more contradictory nature of struggles, the CWO hardly ever produces an interesting or insightful article about current struggles. This might sound mean, but the interesting articles tend to be about 'the inter-imperialist constellation of China's new silk road project' and similar 'bird's view' topics. The example of the Bakkavor wage campaign exemplifies what we mean - by the way this central chapter of the book was largely ignored in the review.

We speak of four factories of the company, located in close vicinity, with around 4,000 workers. The union is dominated by a group of corrupt reps, women workers earn just above the minimum after 20 years on the assembly lines. The union agreed to percentage increases which increase the pay difference between 'unskilled' (women) and 'skilled' workers. As a group we denounce this divisive practice and propose various meetings and actions, related to actual experiences and issues. We propose 'self-organisation', but only very few workers get in touch and at work our influence is limited to our departments. We doubt that the CWO comrades would bother working on assembly lines for the minimum wage for two years and distribute factory newsletters, but according to their political line this is where they would have stopped. Workers are not ready, they lack class consciousness. We decided to be voluntaristic instead when we saw that the regional GMB organiser changed and he seemed more open for rank-and-file organisation, e.g. by proposing new union rep elections. One of us became a union rep. This allowed meetings of women workers to be organised and promoted inside the factories, in order to discuss the current situation, together with Asian women strikers from the 1970s. We also called for meetings of all cleaning workers in the four factories to discuss their issues. These were not mass meetings, but such meetings had never happened before. During the meetings we encouraged workers to analyse their workplace in order to be able to take informal actions, e.g. work to rule. We then defeated the corrupted union rep clique and proposed a wage dispute with the demand of £1 more for all, disregarding their 'qualification'. Workers voted against management's puny wage offer three times, despite the fact that the main union reps told them to vote in favour. Voluntaristically, one comrade with support of the political group, opened the door for a strike, even though it would have been a 'legal strike'. At the same time we continued with our independent factory newsletter. Our main line was that workers should tell the union what to do (call for department meetings, call for work-to-rule) and that we had to organise these ourselves in case the union was not up for it. We also continued distributing WorkersWildWest with articles of a more programmatic nature. During the strike campaign, further meetings took place (cricket, family picnic, gate meetings) where we encouraged workers to discuss the situation. A wildcat action of 50 workers in favour of the demand can be taken as evidence that some workers were discussing collective steps. Would the union leadership have pulled the plug? Perhaps, but not necessarily so. The GMB at Ealing hospital led a strike for a similar demand three years earlier. To conclude: we opened the door for a legal collective action, but workers were not confident and organised enough to see it through. A failure? Perhaps. At the same time workers were actually discussing things: what will management do? will they shift production to other sites? will the agency workers take up overtime and scab? why are some union reps for and some against the strike? For us this is the life-blood of working class political action. It happened in a contradictory fashion - and we would have tried to prepare workers for a confrontation with the union - but it happened.

We went into detail, not in order to blow our own trumpet, but to exemplify political differences amongst comrades. The CWO doesn't see much need to analyse the different potentials for collective action between the previous situation (old union rep circle, top-down wage agreements) and the efforts to create workers' meetings as part of a legal wage campaign - as it all happens under the umbrella of 'the union'. The CWO’s approach is not helping workers to learn lessons from day-to-day struggles. We can also see this when looking at the way they analyse the contradictory nature of the rank-and-file unions, such as SI Cobas. In our book we try to explain why SI Cobas was able to organise dozens of offensive strikes with migrant logistics workers and how the union form at the same time runs into dead-ends. The CWO is not able to ignore the successes of SI Cobas, but instead of looking deeper into the contradictions of rank-and-file unions, something which might have practical value and consequences, they chose to retreat into the political moral high ground. A quote from the review:

"An internationalist communist intervention must, necessarily, try to do what SiCobas, and other movements like it, do not and cannot do because of their nature as trade unions, that is movements which operate entirely within the system. This means we have to link immediate demands directly with the perspective of class struggle against capitalism. In short, it must be said that the dispute [...] is an immediate struggle that must be supported by the whole class, beyond the boundaries of sector or this or that trade union acronym — up to this point some of the speeches we heard would agree — but since the cause of workers’ exploitation is capitalism itself, and since the crisis of capital — the crisis, a great theme totally absent from any of the interventions we witnessed — is a structural crisis, then it is necessary, while fighting for the immediate demand, to emphasise that we cannot stop there at any struggle. Never."

This is correct, but it also useless. Of course unions are not political organisations. But does that exempt us from analysing concretely how each and every union struggle is led? We also think that workers can make use of 'legal vehicles' for their strikes. Organising 'legal strikes' is not a question of lack of consciousness, but a question of power. In this sense we see the use of a 'class union' - but unlike CWO claims, to build a 'class union' is not our primary focus or aim:

"To embed themselves in the workplace and “fight the bosses” using what they would term a “class union” as a “vehicle” for organising the workers. We will go on to examine what they mean by “class unionism.”"

"The solidarity network will assist in building the “class union"."

As described above, for us the main aim is that workers analyse all means of class war that are at their disposal critically. This analysis doesn't happen in a vacuum, it happens as part of day-to-day contradictory processes. We, as a political collective, want to contribute to this debate practically and theoretically. This includes first of all that workers become aware of how they can use the production process as their main weapon. It also means analysing the legal framework and the balance of power. In some specific situations, it seemed right to us to propose the IWW as a vehicle to mobilise for a wage dispute - one vehicle amongst other things that workers can do informally to put pressure on the boss.

"It is this need to act within the bourgeoisie’s legal framework that constrains and delimits organising. It is inevitable that you will be trapped in this legal framework as you attempt to negotiate the minimum wage (an arbitrary sum determined by the bourgeoisie) on behalf of workers."

"The negotiators of the price of wage labour will always emerge as the leaders. A permanent organisation such as a union will inevitably become bureaucratic."

Unlike the CWO we don't fetishise the 'pacifying' or 'derailing' power of the law vis-a-vis a collective process of workers in struggle - something that reminds us more of anarchism than communist analysis. We think that if workers are aware of the pitfalls, a legal strike can be part of their arsenal. We also don't think that workers' permanent organisations necessarily have to become bureaucratic. Again, the IWW campaign brought 70 workers of different companies into one room in order to analyse and discuss their conditions. We never emphasised that the IWW is the only vehicle, we never said the organisation itself is powerful. We always said it is up to workers' themselves and about their power as a workforce. And here we understand the confusion about our idea of a 'class union': out of a clearly political decision the 'class union' should be an unpolitical vehicle for all workers to use as a formal weapon of (legal) association. As communists we should make sure that the 'class union' remains this specific legal weapon in the arsenal and is not used for this or that political purpose. We think that with this 'political consciousness', communists can avoid 'class unions' signing contracts that curb the ability of workers to struggle united in future or prevent the establishment of a bureaucracy. As communists, we should contribute to the political debate as a political organisation, not by trying to takeover the union. Within the overall picture of class struggle - in terms of all possible ways to fight and in terms of political organisation - the 'class union' is a minor form in a defensive phase and was never central to our efforts in west London.

* Revolutionary transition

In order to be able to pigeon-hole us as syndicalists, the CWO review has to portray our understanding of revolutionary transformation as 'gradual' and as avoiding a confrontation with the capitalist state. This is when the review becomes most knee-jerk.

"At the same time the process of removing the control of the law of value over our lives has to be begun though it cannot be completed until the capitalist state has been destroyed everywhere. Yet we read in chapter 13 that, “the two main strategies of the ‘radical’ left – the violent attack on the state and its armed forces, and the peaceful electoral taking over of government, which seem to be the two extreme ends of the political spectrum – are both misjudging where the power of the system lies.” We would suggest that it is the writer who has completely misjudged where the power of the system lies. Incredibly, they go on to write, “violent insurrection or electoral politics don’t help to undo the power of capital, as they don’t actually question its power to determine how we produce and therefore how we live our lives.” Obviously, a change of government will not undo the power of capital. This is the goal of the capitalist left who think state capitalism is socialism. But does the writer really think the capitalist state will stand idly by while the workers are busy in the workplace reorganising production along socialist lines?"

The review takes these quotes out of context. They refer to the assumptions of insurrectionist and some anarchist comrades who see riots and looting and the confrontation with the state forces as the main element of revolutionary struggle. We emphasise that the capturing and transformation of the means of production is at the centre of any revolution - the change of a mode of production. Of course we see that the capitalist state will try to prevent this and has to be dismantled, but we don't think that the working class will win this battle primarily through military means - perhaps differently from the comrades of the CWO, as we will see. In the final part of our book we try to sketch out a revolutionary process, some basic steps of 'insurrection and production'. Here we define the different class segments and their role and limitations (mass workers in the essential industries, technical or intellectual workers, marginalised parts of the class, productive workers in the state apparatus) which have to be overcome in a revolutionary process. This is something groups like the CWO never have to undertake, as they see the 'working class' as a mass of people who either have consciousness or not. We clearly relate to the problem of the state, in terms of necessary violence to defend the means of production and defeat the class enemy, and the necessity for a political organisation of the class:

"We know that the revolution will not happen everywhere at the same time but we also now that a regionally isolated revolution can only survive for a certain period of time, before it is either starved out, militarily beaten or degenerates. We know that under modern conditions the revolution will not spread militarily, through conquest of territory and populations. There will be violence in order to defend taken productive assets and infrastructure, but the revolution will primarily be spread by strikes and occupations. The main weapons of the revolution won't be tanks. The main promise will be the promise to not only help topple local despots and to cut the supply of cruise missiles to military governments, but to share and transfer the means to work less and have a better life from the centres to the periphery." (p.352)

"Large sections of the working class have to be prepared for an organised response to a sponateous crisis: this will largely depend on the collaboration of workers employed in the essential industries wih the organised violence of the wider working class to takeover, defend and transform the essential industries." (p.354)

"Within the state apparatus we find socially productive functions, for example, administration of certain social services, although much of this work is basically poverty management and therefore superfluous in a revolutionary transition. Working class struggle will have to win over the workers within the state apparatus by demonstrating that the socially useful activity can be organised in a more efficient and emancipated way once cut off from budget constrains and bureaucratic office command." (p.357)

"Historically no revolution has been successful without a split in the army, in most cases as a result of previous war or civil war situations. The main chance for a communist revolution to split the army along class lines is therefore determined by objective conditions [...] and its subjective capacity to attract working class soldiers: the organised working class movement can free us from hierarchical relationships and knows how to feed, clothe, care for everyone. Nevertheless, a revolution has to create its own material threat by weakening the military apparatus (non-cooperation, meaning stopping the suppply of essential goods and services for the army) and by armed defence of essential productive units. This includes curbing and sabotage by the middle class and lumpen elements." (p.358)

"The essential industries and domestic units will be the main centres of decision making. We won't speculate about whether there will be additional regional councils or neighbourhood assemblies etc. We think that the main decisions should be taken not as 'citizens' or 'members of assemblies', but as members of a new social (re-)production process. Debates and decisions concerning issues beyond the immediate reach of the essential industries [...] should evolve from the new relationships created through day-to-day co-operation - not in a separate sphere of representation." (p.358)

"An organisation of workers will also have to play a role in putting forward a 'class perspective' against the tendency of 'workers' control' after takeover of individual companies. The workforce of bigger industries might try to use their position for their own privilege. [...] In the moment of uprising a workers' organisation should encourage the use of excess machinery/production [...] for support of workers' struggle 'abroad'. This might mean encouraging extra labour above the locally required levels if necessary. It would mean defending this position against 'localist' tendencies within the working class." (p.367)

The latter point brought us the badge of honour of being called 'Leninists' by some, while the CWO review tries to press us into their 'syndicalism' box by all means necessary:

"In fact, the whole approach of the AWW to formenting working class struggle with its emphasis on building a “solidarity network” is more like Gramsci’s gradualist perspective which focussed only on the factory and ignored the power of the capitalist state."

"As Bordiga put it at the time, revolution is not simply a process of building up workplace democracy and proving that the working class could “responsibly and efficiently manage production”. Rather it is a conscious political movement to overthrow the existing state that has to be centralised and coordinated by an organisation with a clear revolutionary programme."

We think the quotes from our book above refute these allegations. Without wanting to boast, we think the last chapters in our book, including the criticism of democratic socialism are probably the most elaborate - and therefore perhaps embarrassing - 'revolutionary programme' that currently exists in the radical milieu. We are interested in reading about a 21st century revolutionary strategy from our comrades of the CWO. In the review they limit themselves to generalisations such as:

"The priority must be, as soon as proletarian forces are powerful enough, to completely dismantle the capitalist state wherever the revolution occurs first and then concentrate efforts on extending the revolution to every other country."

Well done! An indicator for their view on revolutionary rupture might be that they recently called Trotsky the 'heroic founder of the Red Army'. Our problem with that is not primarily that the army was used against rebellious workers in Kronstadt. Our main problem is that the CWO seems to think that the establishment of a standing army not only was a good way to 'smash the state', but that it still is. In line with their general understanding of 'consciousness' they might actually see no problem with a 'standing army', as long as it is led by the right 'political leadership'. They seem to think that 'consciousness' can act independently from structural material constraints - if it is only political enough. Here we differ, as we see a clear material link between having to sustain a standing army and authoritarian rule over the productive workers to supply the army - which led to the dismantling of the soviets and their social power. Here 'the state' was not smashed, but it reinforced itself in Russia. By trying to defend the revolution by a non-working class form of struggle - through a standing army - the 'revolutionary state' ended up killing it. Fatal voluntarism.

As a last side note, in order to maintain their monopoly, the CWO review quotes an exchange about a factory occupation in India in order to prove that we suck at 'political leadership':

"To quote Fredo Corvo from the dialogue with the AWW, “In the present situation in Manesar this implies agitation by these minority organisations for extension to other workers. I’m sorry to say that I have no indication that you are doing this now, and that you seem to wait until workers will do this ‘spontaneously’. This is a point to clarify because this doesn’t only concern Manesar or India but workers all over the world, a tiny minority is trying to follow what you are doing.” They then ask the AWW the question, “Is it possible that your efforts in creating a permanent organisation for larger numbers of workers, have made you reluctant to bring forward what you as a smaller minority see as necessary in struggle?” This is a very pertinent question. We think the AWW’s obsession with their industrial “strategy” is blinding them to the need for revolutionaries to give political leadership."

This exchange is partly symbolic for our relationship with the CWO. While a lonely council communist in Holland can easily question tactics from the safe distance of his keyboard, some of our comrades spent two and a half years in the dusty heat of the industrial areas of Manesar and together with local comrades visited every strike they could in order to listen to workers and to tell them: go to workers of other companies; company xyz is currently on strike; set up an independent committee for the whole industrial area; don't follow the union leaders. Most of it is documented here:

www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com

* Failure

With the assumption that our main aim was the establishment of a 'class union' in west London, the CWO finds it easy to discard our efforts as a failure.

"The book is a fairly honest account of all this and shows how they failed to achieve their objectives."

"They now have decided to leave Greenford for reasons which are not absolutely clear but between the lines it looks like individual militants have drifted away burnt out with their efforts. What is ironic is that the book ends with a call to build a grass roots organisation urging others to follow precisely the strategy which the book documents as having failed."

First of all we think it is encouraging that our efforts can be read as failures, as this means that we indeed documented our experiences self-critically. The question is of course what the assumed goal was, which we supposedly failed or didn't fail to achieve. When two of us moved to west London six years ago we wanted to 'get rooted' as communists in a specific industrial area. This meant first of all to understand the conditions, primarily the problems that our class faces to turn our individual weakness into collective power. We think that the book helps us all to understand these material challenges.

Of course it's not all about documenting, but about engaging other working class people in collective processes: what are our conditions locally and globally? what can we do where we are and what can we learn from workers elsewhere? what is 'systemic' about our conditions, how did the system develop and how can it be overcome? Finally we think that given the often 'spontaneous' development of class struggles, 'getting rooted' means primarily 'getting prepared': creating contacts in workplaces and working class communities in the area and becoming known as people who fight with and for the class.

As a process that started with two people, we think that we achieved quite a lot. In our workplaces, we were trusted as 'uncorruptable militants' who workers would go to for support and advice and whose opinion on 'political matters' they valued. That's not a mean feat for communists in workplaces of over 1,000 people. As a collective, we built contacts in dozens of large local workplaces - if something will start brewing, we will get to know about it. The solidarity network involved 30 - 40 working class people in its orbit, who somehow learnt that direct action and solidarity pays. We involved some of our workmates and people from the solidarity network in reading groups, discussions, international meetings - people who were not organised politically before. Finally, as a local communist group we created contacts with dozens of revolutionaries around the globe - not primarily because of our theoretical contributions, but because of our effort to develop a new working class strategy and to be honest and open about our experiences. Whether each of our 'organising efforts' was a failure or success, as a small collective we managed to create a new focus for the debate about working class political organisation. As a result of our efforts comrades in Croydon, east London, north London, Heathrow, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Derry started to engage in a process of setting up local collectives.
In terms of individuals dropping out: a few of our comrades had to go back to their countries of origin (Poland Spain, Slovenia), two of us have to move within the UK due to family reasons, some comrades intend to keep the solidarity network in Greenford running, some comrades started similar initiatives elsewhere. Burn-outs tended to happen when young comrades thought that they could organise a wildcat strike within a few weeks of getting a job. Class struggle is a series of failures till we win. Better luck next time.

For comrades who want to get involved: www.letsgetrooted.wordpress.com
For comrades who want to read other reviews of our book or want to get hold of a copy: www.classpower.net