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WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery,
and wield it for its own purposes. Karl Marx, The Paris Commune (1871)

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Posted on March 12, 2024March 12, 2024


CONSTRUCTION WORKERS UNITED NO.1 2024

Here is a rank and file newsletter that aims to increase the coordination and
militancy in the construction industry in Brisbane. It is being handed out to
interested comrades and union members in the construction industry. Through such
publications, we can conduct workers inquiries into the state of the industry
and workers perspectives of their own situation. This will help increase workers
power and self-organisation towards class struggle.

Editorial:

The current moment in our industry in Queensland looks good. We are making
significant gains in unionisation, many new EBAs have been signed and we look
forward to the buoyant market in construction in the coming years. With the
current rate of success, we are facing good times ahead.

The present moment outside our industry and its more unionised sections looks
less bright. The working class of Australia in most industries is still in
retreat, highly precarious and under constant surveillance at work. Even in our
industry, labourers and traffic controllers face both the builders and our
mostly labour hire employers.

With the limitations of the current environment and the heavy toll that work
takes on all of us, what can we do more broadly, and, particularly in our
industry, to change this?

We can engage in resistance to the rule of capital on our lives through
understanding our current conditions and, in doing this, we can find a way
forward through workers inquiry and the study of class composition.

What is workers inquiry? It is the use of what Romano Alquati called
co-research, where rank and file workers and socialist/communist militants work
together to understand the conditions we face through surveys and interviews
with ordinary workers to come to conclusions about what to do in the current
moment.

Class composition studies, as used by Notes From Below and Angry Workers, use
this information to look at the technical composition of work, how work is
organised, the social composition of workers lives, how we are housed, relate to
each other in terms of race, gender, sexuality and immigration status and,
through looking into this, we come to understand the political composition of
the class or how we can fight against the grinding world of work.

This relates to our industry in the sense that we are an advanced section of our
class. We have a greater power to use our strength to cause an increased rupture
in Australian society among the working class in Australia and, hopefully, this
will spread to neighbouring countries. We can begin to ask questions that have
relevance for our industry and, more broadly, to other less organised sections
of the Australian working class.

The time for such work is now. We must use this moment of strength to raise up
the weaker sections of our class. In doing this, we can increase the power of
workers on the shopfloor not just in our industry but across the board. This can
lead us to a new cycle of struggles like those of the 1960s and 1970s.

The current moment is one of precariousness for our class, as inflation related
to the two wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the supply chain disruptions of Covid 19
and the general stalling of productivity now and over the last 40 years in
Australia and globally is biting working class budgets.

This economic decline and the threat of ecological collapse from climate change
and nuclear war are heavy burdens to bear for our collective future. The time is
rapidly approaching when the costs of this crisis will have to continue to be
borne by workers or by the capitalist class instead. In the coming decades this
will be an immense struggle which, most unions and social democratic parties are
not prepared for. They are a part of this system and are governed on the other
hand by industrial relations laws and the control of concentrated capital on the
other.

This is especially true of the ALP. Without capital from wealthy donors, the ALP
cannot win re-election. The power of international capital has always controlled
the destiny of Australia from the British Empire, to the American Empire and to
the Empire of global capital as described by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.
With these challenges, we must take our lives into our own hands and fight back
against the violence of capitalism and the rule of the factory over every aspect
of our lives.

The current moment also requires us to engage in rank-and-file organisation
based on our industries and our local areas. By creating industrial
rank-and-file net-works in a localised way, we can engage in this important work
and come to solutions to the problems in our industry and more broadly. We could
call this rank and file network of all the unions and militants in our industry
Construction Workers Unit-ed, and this network would start to work towards
conducting workers inquiries, the study of class composition and to the
increased effectiveness of union coordination in our industry on a rank and file
level.

We must seize this opportunity to recompose all that has been lost since the
1970s and the Accord of the 1980s and to make workers struggles relevant and to
defeat the current onslaught of capital against workers. Our goals could be that
Construction Workers Unit-ed aims to create more coordination, greater democracy
and a more radical approach to unionism with this present opportunity.

The Need for Job Committees Today:

The current system of joint safety committees has been useful in defending
conditions so far in the construction industry. However, to develop further job
control, we need a different form if organisation. From the 1930s to the 1970s,
job committees existed in the construction industry along with, eventually after
1962, safety committees.

We need job committees today. We need job compittees based on every trade, union
and section to be elected and to sit on the committee as existing HSRs from each
trade on union jobs. With a structure such as this, we can more effectively push
for better wages, hours and conditions on job sites.

This idea comes from the shop committee movement in Australia from the 1920s to
the 1970s and the construction industry equivalent, the job committees. The shop
committee movement was a creation of the highly unionised and complex workplaces
like the railway workshops in NSW in the 1920s with many different shops,
departments and unions being involved. These shop committees spread to the metal
working industry, the electricity industry, the Naval Dockyards, the Meatworks
and the construction industries. They existed until the 1950s and went into a
temporary decline.

In the 1960s, these industries were exceeded in economic importance by the metal
engineering, construction, car manufacturing, electricity generation, oil
refining and chemical production industries. In many places area committees
existed from the 1940s to the 1970s which coordinated the shop committees in a
given local area.

The construction industry was no different to these other industries and had its
own equivalent, the job committees. These committees were formed in the 1930s
and became active, along with many other industries, in the Second World War.
The defence projects were a key part of this struggle for the job committees in
this period.

The post war period and the rise of the Building Workers Industrial Union, led
to struggles to improve conditions from 1945-1950 with the builders through job
committees and the holding of lunch hour job meetings at job after job in the
industry to win better conditions and to win union campaigns.

This was challenged by the ALP groups from the right wing of the Labor Party.
However, the BWIU and the industry withheld their assault on militant unionism,
though they began to become more defensive. The mid to late 1950s was
concentrated on the struggle against the penal provisions of the Arbitration Act
which gave huge fines to unionists who conducted direct action.

The growing radical-ism of union opposition to the Vietnam War, conscription and
the growing opposition of young people to the alienation of capitalist society
led to a new wave of radicalism through the workers control movement. The BWIU,
having been threatened with deregistration in the late 1950s began to become
more conservative. However, since the 1950s in Victoria the BLF had been growing
in militancy and by the late 1950s in NSW the leadership was won by Communist
Party of Australia militants.

The Builders Labourers Federation was becoming increasingly radical and
dedicated to the struggle to improve conditions on the new and dangerous high
rise construction projects. The NSW BLF in particular had cast off the corrupt
leadership of the branch which was highly undemocratic.

Over the 1960s, these new leaders rebuilt the branch so that in the late 1960s
and early 1970s the radical rank-and-file and leadership of the BLF would engage
in militant strikes and radical environmental action as a part of the broader
workers control movement. The militant strikes, direct democracy in the union
and term limits on officials and organisers challenged the existing trade union
officials and threatened the old communist union leaders.

The Green Bans of the early 1970s were an example of bans on environmentally and
socially irresponsible building projects, backed by mass meetings from local
resident action groups. The leadership in NSW was then sacked in 1974 and
black-listed by the rival Victorian BLF branch leader, Norm Gallagher.

Throughout this radical period of rank and file action, the job committees and
safety committees were a key part of this structure on the job in the industry.
These job committees were backed up by regular site meetings where workers would
increase the degree of workers’ control on construction jobs by forcing the
election of leading hands and foremen on the builders.

The safety committees were formed after 1962 and worked closely with the job
committees to achieve shopfloor control. Without job control being established
and continued by the job committees, safety committees and site meetings, the
militancy of this period would not have been possible.

We need to re-organise job committees in the industry to increase coordination
between the different unions and to reinvigorate the rank and file militancy
from this period. This current moment of opportunity requires that we increase
our organisation on the shop-floor and create job committees on every
construction project with a union presence. This is essential to increase our
power on the job to push for dominance over the builders and 100 percent
unionism in the industry.

We must also build these job committees as independent struggle and political
committees. These committees must begin to make workers decrees like the Magneti
Marelli Workers Committee and the Senza Tregua movement in Italy in the 1970s.
They will build workers’ power through independent struggle and political action
with the broader working class movement. Without doing this, we risk missing
this opportunity to increase our ability to win better conditions for
construction workers and building a mass movement for workers’ power among the
broader working class.

WE MUST SEIZE THIS MOMENT! FORM JOB COMMITTEES!

Recent Local Actions:

Rally Against the Fairwork Ombudsman 5th April 2023:

The rally was well attended with 20, 000 members present. The subject of the
rally was that the ABCC commissioners had mostly been given new jobs at the
Fair-work Ombudsman. Three quarters of the commissioners got jobs at the new
organisation two levels up in the same building. The Building Trades Group were
all present and sent representatives or their state secretaries.

These unions were mostly from the CFMEU and with lesser numbers the ETU,
Plumbers Union and the AMWU. The AMWU was more moderate than the other unions
but was still supportive of the rally and its objective. Most of the members
from the EBA jobs walked off the job from all over Brisbane, the Gold Coast and
Ipswich, attending the rally by walking from their jobs’ smaller rallies or by
bus. The rally was held in every state in the country.

The workers walked with police escort from Queen’s Park to Felix Street with
chants and plenty of spirit. The workers got to the building with the Senators
from the Federal Albanese ALP government.

When the workers got to the glass facade and doors, they began to bang on the
glass in high spirits. The glass on the door shattered probably by accident. Not
long after this, the organisers helped move the workers away from the doors and
the police moved in to the front of the doors. Apart from this minor damage, the
rally was spirited and fun.

The ABC and other media outlets framed the protest about the glass door being
broken and mostly ignored the message of the rally which was then picked up by
various other news outlets. The rally was a positive experience for the workers
present and allowed many comrades who haven’t seen each other for some time to
catch up in the park, during and after the rally.

Despite the negative media attention, the rally was a fun and positive
experience for the vast majority of those who attended. The fact that the media
immediately went into attack mode shows the fear that mass industrial action and
worker protest has on the middle classes and the intelligentsia in particular
who framed the rally as in Brisbane being down to union thugs and not an
important protest from the workers movement.

The rally showed the pent up anger and resentment that the Coalition governments
have spent 10 years trying to destroy. The fear of media and political reprisal
of the construction unions as a result of the minor damage reduced the
effectiveness of the rally. If struggle was at a higher level, then this event
could not have been so easily forgotten by the middle classes and ignored by the
political class. Nevertheless, the protest sent a message to the bourgeois and
the political class that, along with the NSW strike wave, workers protests and
mass strikes are back.

Struggles Abroad:

SOUTH KOREAN CONSTRUCTION WORKERS PROTEST HEAT-RELATED DEATHS

4 August 2023

The following are sourced from wsws.org

A group of Korean Construction Workers Union members protested outside the
Yongsan Presidential Office in Seoul on Wednesday demanding safety measures for
construction workers during the ongoing heatwave. The protest was in response to
the high number of heat-related deaths in the construction industry.

Government data collected between 2016 and 2021 shows that 20 out of 29
heat-related deaths occurred in the construction industry. There were five
deaths in July last year alone.

A recent union survey of 3,200 construction workers resulted in 81 percent
saying they were working without breaks during the recent heat wave and more
than half replied they had seen a co-worker faint or have had symptoms of
heat-related illness.

On Tuesday, the government raised the heat wave warning level to “severe,” the
highest in its four-tier system. According to the Korea Disease Control and
Prevention Agency, at least 17 people across the nation died in connection with
the heat wave over the weekend.

The union has allowed this crisis to continue for years. The Occupational Safety
and Health Act, which requires employers to implement safety measures for people
who work at high temperature sites, does not include construction workers.

INDIA: TAMIL NADU CONSTRUCTION WORKERS HOLD STATE-WIDE PROTEST FOR IMPROVED
BENEFITS

23 June 2023

CWFI is demanding an increased role for the trade union within the Construction
Workers’ Welfare Board. It wants a system where trade union representatives
approve all petitions for welfare benefits and for the union to be given the
right to sanction membership certificates of construction workers to the Board.
Two million workers are registered in the welfare board which has an accumulated
fund of 41.5 billion rupees.

What should we do now?

How do we change our current situation? We must revive the tradition of rank and
file organisation that was common in highly unionised industries from the 1920s
to the 1970s. We must form job committees. What are job committees? These
committees can be formed involving every union, section or trade in our
industry.

They are elected annually, subject to recall and are responsible to regular site
mass meetings. These should be formed within existing union HSRs and meet
independently of management. They must undertake direct action on the shopfloor
to achieve better union conditions for the whole job. This can be done through
lunch hour meetings, stoppages or go slow actions to improve our committees’
bargaining power.

How do we do this?

 * Form a core group of five trusted workers at your site
 * Create a bulletin to push for a job committee
 * Call and fight for a lunch hour meeting to discuss this with your fellow
   workers
 * Elect a job committee based on every section, shift and trade
 * Take direct action to improve the job committees bargaining power

FORM THOSE JOB COMMITTEES!

Contact:

Email: wkpr1969@proton.me

Website: https://whichsideareyouon.link

Posted on May 20, 2023May 31, 2023


RALLY AGAINST THE FAIR WORK OMBUDSMAN 5TH OF APRIL 2023

The rally was well attended with 10, 000 members present. The subject of the
rally was that the ABCC commissioners had mostly been given new jobs at the Fair
Work Ombudsman. Three quarters of the commissioners got jobs at the new
organisation two levels up in the same building. The Building Trades Group were
all present and sent representatives or their state secretaries. These unions
were mostly from the CFMEU and with lesser numbers the ETU, Plumbers Union and
the AMWU. The AMWU was more moderate than the other unions but was still
supportive of the rally and its objective. Most of the members from the EBA jobs
walked off the job from all over Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Ipswich attended
the rally by walking from their jobs in smaller rallies or by bus. The rally was
held in every state in the country.

The workers walked down the street with the police being forced to shut down the
streets due to the numbers marching from Queen’s Park to Felix Street. There
were many chants and plenty of spirit. The workers got to the building with the
Senators from the Federal Albanese ALP government. When the workers got to the
glass facade and doors they began to bang on the glass in high spirits, the
glass on the door shattered by accident. Not long after this the organisers
helped move the workers away from the doors and the police moved into the front
of the doors. Apart from this minor damage the rally was spirited and fun. The
ABC and other media outlets framed the protest about the glass door being broken
and mostly ignored the message of the rally which was then picked up by various
other news outlets. The rally was a positive experience for the workers present
and allowed many comrades who haven’t seen each other for some time to catch up
in the park, during and after the rally.

Despite the negative media attention, the rally was a fun and positive
experience for the vast majority of those who attended. The fact that the media
immediately went into attack mode shows the fear that mass industrial action and
worker protest has on the middle class and the intelligentsia in particular who
framed the rally in Brisbane being down to the old trope of union thugs and not
an important protest from the workers movement. The rally showed the pent-up
anger and resentment that the Coalition governments have spent 10 years trying
to destroy. If the conditions of the Construction unions regarding the fear of
media and political reprisal as a result of the minor damage been less feared
then they are at present and workers felt empowered to go further, perhaps more
pressure could have been applied. If struggle was at a higher level, then this
event could not have been so easily forgotten by the middle classes and ignored
by the political class. Nevertheless, the protest sent a message to the
bourgeois and the political class that, along with the NSW strike wave, workers
protests and mass strikes are back.

Joseph S.

Posted on November 29, 2021November 29, 2021


ROSA LUXEMBURG ON CAPITALISM AND REVOLUTION

The economic, political and revolutionary theorist Rosa Luxemburg is essential
to understanding modern capitalism. Her life as a Polish/German left-wing Social
Democrat gives key insights in the struggle for freedom against capital. She was
born in Poland in 1871 and was murdered by the the far right Friekorps militias
in 1919 along with fellow revolutionary Karl Liebknecht. Her life and works are
essential to understanding the development of Left Communism as a movement and
tradition.  The Council Communists after World War I were heavily influenced by
her ideas. This tradition lead to the Autonomist Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s
and has great relevance for today’s revolutionaries.

Without Rosa Luxemburg’s inspiration these movements would have looked quite
different in comparison. Her piercing insights into the theory and method of
revolutionary thought, her critique of Lenin’s Democratic Centralism and the
bureaucracy created by the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution of 1917 are key
to an understanding of the way forward today. Also, her inspirational writings,
for example ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions,’ help
provide insights into both the problems and potential of revolutionary struggle
under capitalism today.

Reading List:

Rosa Luxemburg – Social Reform Or Revolution?

Rosa Luxemburg – Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy

Rosa Luxemburg – The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions

Rosa Luxemburg – The Russian Revolution

Rosa Luxemburg – The Accumulation of Capital

Rosa Luxemburg – Socialism or Barbarism?: The Selected Writings of Rosa
Luxemburg   

Posted on August 23, 2018November 21, 2021


PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON’S WRITINGS

Here are the writings of Pierre Joseph-Proudhon, the first person in modern
history to proclaim themselves an anarchist. He was a firm advocate of the
traditions of revolutionary France. Being born into poverty in rural France, he
achieved a scholarship and became a brilliant student of philosophy and a
socialist theorist. He was deeply involved in the movements of the revolution in
1848, writing for radical newspapers. Proudhon was at one point elected to the
National Assembly, using these experiences of parliament and its failure, to
practically theorise his anarchist ideas. He suffered repression and exile after
the coup of Napoleon III in 1851.

His early anarchist ideas and experiences, provide the foundation stone, on
which the anarchist movement is built, influencing deeply the development of
Bakunin and Kropotkin, as well as Marx and Engels early on. His mutualist
theories were superseded in development by Bakunin’s collectivism and
Kropotkin’s libertarian communism. Proudhon became opposed to the developing
strategy of political parties by communists like Marx and Engels, which is one
reason why he came out so strongly against communism.

His writings on the critique of social institutions – capitalism, church and
state – are crucial to the pursuit and understanding of freedom. His discussion
of the revolution, organisation and federation are also essential. His main
political work was ‘General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century’ and
also important for organisational theory, ‘The Principle of Federation.’ All are
worth reading. ‘The Philosophy of Misery’ and ‘The Principle of Federation’ are
in the second parts only partially translated. Also important are ‘Confessions
of a Revolutionary’, about his experience of 1848 and ‘The Political Capacity of
the Working Classes’, both of which can be found in the Ak Press edition of
‘Property is Theft’,
(https://libcom.org/library/property-theft-pierre-joseph-proudhon-anthology).

Reading List:

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth
Century

Pierre Joseph-Proudhon – The  Principle of Federation

Pierre Joseph-Proudhon – What is Property?

Pierre Joseph-Proudhon – The Philosophy of Misery

 

Posted on May 23, 2018August 24, 2022


THE ZAPATISTA’S, ARGENTINA AND GREECE

The struggle against modern oppressors is a living, breathing process, full of
challenges and difficulty. However, more recent historical events give valuable
insight into the struggle, such as the 1994 Zapatista uprising, the movement
against world bank austerity in Argentina and the revolt of 2008 in Greece.
These show us possibilities for action to achieve liberty, equality and
fraternity. Greece is the most recent example:

Reading List:

Subcomandante Marcos – Beyond Resistance

Subcomandante Marcos – Our Word is Our Weapon

Subcomandante Marcos – The Speed of Dreams

Marina Sitrin – Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina

A. G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, Void Network – We Are an Image From the Future: The
Greek Revolt of December 2008

Posted on February 18, 2018January 24, 2024


THE ITALIAN AUTONOMIST MOVEMENT

The Italian revolutionary movement is another important moment to study. From
the early 1960s, to the hot autumn of 1969, to the ‘Autonomia‘ of the 1970s the
struggle raged in Italy. This was part of the larger wave of working class
revolt sweeping across Europe in Paris 1968, leading to the breakup of the
Keynesian economic consensus.
For the Italian ‘Workerists‘ and later ‘Autonomia‘, this was a time of great
experimentation and lively working class social movements. These movements
rocked the foundations of Italian society. The theoretical and practical
experiments provide a framework for some of the challenges we face, in a time of
class recomposition and ruling class attack. The insights they provide are
deeply valuable to all Libertarian Communists:

Reading List –
Robert Lumley – States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to
1978

Red Notes – Italy 1977-8: Living with an earthquake

Prole.info – Class Struggle in Italy: 1960s and 1970s

Sylvere Lotringer, Christian Marazzi – Autonomia: Post-political Politics

Emilio Mentasti – The Magneti Marelli Workers Committee – The Red Guard Tells
Its Story

Porto Marghera – The Last Firebrands Pamphlet

Steve Wright – Storming Heaven – Class Composition and Struggle in Italian
Autonomist Marxism

Steve Wright – The Weight of the Printed Word

Panzieri, Sohn-Rethel, Palloix, Bologna, Tronti- The Labour Process & Class
Strategies

Mario Tronti – Workers and Capital

Mario Tronti – The Weapon of Organization

Antionio Negri – Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s
Italy

Antonio Negri – Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

Antonio Negri – Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons On The Grundrisse

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt – Empire

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt – Multitude

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt – Commonwealth

Romano Alquati – Organic Composition of Capital and Labor-Power at Olivetti

Romano Alquati – Struggle at Fiat

Romano Alquati – Outline of a Pamphlet on FIAT

Romano Alquati – Capital And The Working Class At FIAT: A Midpoint In The
International Cycle

Romano Alquati – The Network of Struggles in Italy

Romano Alquati – Co-research and Worker’s Inquiry

Sergio Bologna – Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origins of
the Workers’ Council Movement

Sergio Bologna – Money and Crisis: Marx as Correspondent of the New York Daily
Tribune 1856-57

Sergio Bologna – The Tribe of Moles

Sergio Bologna – The theory and history of the mass worker in Italy

Mariarosa Dalla Costa – Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa
Dalla Costa Reader

George Caffentzis – In Letters of Blood and Fire

Silvia Federici – Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist
Struggle

Midnight Notes Collective – Midnight Oil : Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992

Midnight Notes Collective – Promissory Notes

Noel Ignatiev – Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity

The Sojourner Truth Organization’s Pamphlets

Sojourner Truth Organization – Workplace Papers

Sojourner Truth Organization – Shop Leaflets

Big Flame – Workplace Commission – Organising To Win

Big Flame – Paul Thompson & Guy Lewis – The Revolution Unfinished? A Critique of
Trotskyism

John Holloway – Change the world without taking power

John Holloway – Crack Capitalism

Harry Cleaver – Reading Capital Politically

Harry Cleaver – 33 Lessons on Capital : Reading Marx Politically

Franco ”Bifo” Berardi – The Soul at Work From Alienation to Autonomy

Franco “Bifo” Berardi – The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance

Werner Bonefeld and Sergio Tischler ed. – What is to be Done? Leninism,
anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution Today

Posted on February 12, 2018January 21, 2024


MAY 1968 IN FRANCE, COUNCIL COMMUNISM AND THE JOHNSON-FOREST TENDENCY

The Uprising of Paris, May 1968 developed from chain of struggles, in Europe and
the world against bourgeois institutions. Started by students, it spread to the
mass of workers, and culminated in at least 10 million workers going on wildcat
general strike across France, against the will of trade unions, the communist
party and the Gaullist state. The crisis of the refusal of work and discipline,
was part of a major breakdown of capitalism known as Keynesianism, the welfare
state and post-war social democracy. The mass rebellions, once defeated, paved
the way for the eventual defeat of the working class in the first world and the
new system of neoliberalism.

Paris 1968 was influenced by a rejuvenated libertarian Marxism and anarchism. It
was influenced partly by Council Communists, critical theorists and the left
Communists. The revolution in Hungary in 1956, which created workers councils,
was a big influence on the emergence of the movement. The movement was pushed
forward by the renewed Libertarian Socialism from in the USA the ‘Johnson-Forest
Tendency‘ of C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, the French journal
‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, the Situationist movement in France, the growing
‘Workerist‘ current of the ‘Quaderni Rossi’ journal in Italy and Solidarity in
the UK. This was part of a new rethinking of Socialism. The movements of 1968
afterwards influenced the autonomist movements in Italy, Germany, the USA and
globally. The modern Greek anti-capitalist movement is heavily influenced by
these movements. Here are some important writings from this era:

Reading List:

Anton Pannekoek – Workers Councils

Anton Pannekoek – The Essential Pannekoek

C. L. R. James – A History Of Pan-african Revolt

C. L. R. James – State Capitalism and World Revolution

C. L. R. James – A New Notion: Two Works By C. L. R. James, Every Cook Can
Govern and The Invading Socialist Society

C. L. R. James – Modern Politics

C. L. R. James – Facing Reality

Paul Romano and Grace Lee Boggs – The American Worker

James Boggs – Pages From A Black Radical’s Notebook

Martin Glaberman and Staughton Lynd – Punching Out and other Writings

Stan Weir – Singlejack Solidarity

Andy Anderson – Hungary ‘56

Socialisme ou Barbarie: An Anthology

Cornelius Castoriadis – Workers’ councils and the economics of self-managed
society

Guy Debord – The Society of the Spectacle

Ken Knabb – Situationist International Anthology

Maurice Brinton – For Workers’ Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton

Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit – Obsolete Communism: The Left-wing alternative

Posted on January 31, 2018September 22, 2022


MARX’S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

The contribution of Marx and Engels is essential to an understanding of a
libertarian communist politics. It is a tool for the working class to critique
capitalism, and to analyse class composition for future struggles. Here is a
reading List of his major works, (Michael Heinrich’s introduction is a good
place to start):

Reading List:

Michael Heinrich – An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital

Michael Heinrich – How to Read Marx’s Capital : Commentary and Explanations on
the Beginning Chapters

Harry Cleaver – Reading  Capital Politically

Harry Cleaver – 33 Lessons on Capital : Reading Marx Politically

Karl Marx – Early Writings

Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels – The German Ideology

Karl Marx – Wage Labour and Capital and Value Price and Profit

Karl Marx – The Civil War in France

Karl Marx – Later Political Writings

Karl Marx – The Political Writings

Karl Marx- Dispatches For the New York Tribune

Karl Marx – Capital Volume I, II and III

Karl Marx – A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Karl Marx – The Grundrisse

Karl Marx – The Theories of Surplus Value

Tom Bottomore – A Dictionary of Marxist Thought

Posted on December 19, 2017January 24, 2024


ANTI-COLONIALISM AND BLACK LIBERATION

In the struggle against Capitalism, church and state, colonialism and racism are
essential in maintaining class hierarchies. Racism is used by these bourgeois
institutions as a social control mechanism. This divides the working class and
proletariat along lines of skin colour, with the supposed civilisational
hierarchies of the European elites. Today, people of colour and Indigenous
people remain largely margininalised and poor in the Global North and the Global
South. The concept of whiteness, itself, is based on false cultural and class
unity of European people. Here are some useful books on this struggle:

Reading List:

Franz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth

Lorenzo Komboa Ervin – Anarchism and the Black Revolution

C. L.  R.  James – A History Of Pan-african Revolt

Subcomandante Marcos – Beyond Resistance

W E Dubois – Black Reconstruction

W E Dubois – The Souls of Black Folk

Dan Georgakas  and Marvin Surkin – Detroit, I do mind dying

Walter Rodney – How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Posted on December 19, 2017November 21, 2021


WOMEN, FEMINISM AND SEXUALITY

In the struggle against the bourgeoisie, it is essential to address the power
relations and imbalances between genders and sexualities. Under Capitalism, the
Patriarchal family serves an important role in reproducing wage labour and
providing emotional labour. This is essential to the reproduction of the nuclear
family and the maintenance of the workers’ ability to perform paid labour. Here
are some good texts on socialist feminism and sexuality, from both Marxist and
Anarchist perspectives:

Reading List:

Martha A. Ackelsberg – Free Women of Spain – Anarchism and the Struggle for the
Emancipation of Women

Silvia Federici – Caliban and the Witch

Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James – The Power of Women and the Subversion of
the Community

Mariarosa Dalla Costa – Women And The Subversion Of The Community: A Mariarosa
Dalla Costa Reader

Silvia Federici – Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and
Feminist Struggle

Selma James – Sex, Race and Class: The Perspective of Winning

Nina Power – One Dimensional Woman

Michel Foucault – A History Of Sexuality


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