Riff-Raff No. 3–4: Class Composition, Militant Inquiries, The New World Order, etc.

– The relation between the organisation of labour and the forms of workers’ struggle is illustrated through specific experiences of resistance from workplaces, where focus is on the direct and hidden ‘faceless resistance’ that can be analysed with the help of the militant workplace investigation used as a method.
– The importance of Bordiga and the agrarian question for a revolutionary critique of the Soviet union and the capitalist tendencies of social democracy.
– ‘War on terrorism’ and oil as a lubricant in capitalist accumulation.
– The background to the 21st century Intifada from a double class struggle perspective.

Contents

Editorial

1. Editorial
This time we have the pleasure to present a really stuffed issue, dominated by two themes: class composition and the new world order.

Class Composition and Militant Inquiries

2. Kolinko: Class Composition
Class composition is a central notion in our search for the possibility of revolution. We are looking for a force that is able to change society from the bottom up. It is correct, however general, to say that only the exploited are able to overthrow exploitation, but how does this process of liberation actually take place?

3. Work Organisation and Workers’ Autonomy in a Warehouse: An Introduction to the Militant Inquiry as a Method - Johan Forsberg
No English translation.

4. Hamburgers vs Value
This text has two goals. The first is to try to create an interest in the daily ongoing class struggle that is waged everyday in every workplace. I will try to show that something as completely unglamorous and ordinary as working at a restaurant, or rather the small hidden struggles that are waged against wage labour there, is part of the communist movement.

Amadeo Bordiga Today

5. Loren Goldner: Preface to the Swedish edition of ‘Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today’
The core of the following text was actually written in 1988, before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and was then slightly modified for its first publication in English (1991) to briefly take note of the 1989–91 ‘events’. Over the past decade, it has been translated into seven other languages.

The 21st Century Intifada

6. Class, War and the New World Order: Part I
The world did not change on September 11, 2001, when the Twin towers in NYC fell. The only new about that terrorist attack was that what happens to millions of people all over the world every day for the first time struck the US. Behind the attack was not the poor and oppressed people of the so called Third world, but, most probably, the Islamic network Al Qaeda, trained by the US/CIA and inflated by billions of oil and speculation dollars.

7. Aufheben: Behind the 21st Century Intifada
As we go to press, the USA is making a serious effort to salvage the Oslo ‘peace process’, as a central part of their strategy to mobilize and impose a unity on the world bourgeoisie behind ‘the war on terrorism’. This follows a year in which it allowed Israel and the Palestinians to sink into a one-sided, depressing and bloody conflict.