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July 24, 2012 - 1:12pm -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Work

The Factory of an Urban District
FelS AG Soziale Kämpfe

A “Militant Investigation” at the Jobcenter in Berlin-Neukoelln

The “Jobcenter” is the largest provider of income in the Neukoelln district of Berlin. It is here where people from the district come together – the young and the old, those with a Ph.D. and those without a school leaving certificate, those who have been around forever and the newest district residents. For this reason, the Jobcenter as an institution has not only a great influence on the district – it is also a (potential) place for intervention against disfranchisement and exploitation.

Since their inception in 2005, Jobcenters have been in constant crisis. This is evident in the long waiting times, late payments, a much too high mentoring ratio (the number of “customers” to be mentored per caseworker), as well as in the appeals and legal actions filed against Hartz IV decisions. In Berlin-Neukoelln, there are around 1,500 appeals each month. The ground is shaking, yet each struggle remains individualized and invisible. How to overcome individualization?

July 18, 2012 - 9:50am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Work

The Meaning of Mondragon
Bernard Marszalek

A picturesque town in the Basque region of Spain has become a Mecca for progressive pilgrims, videographers and journalists. And every few months a glowing report announces that this town, nestled in a lush valley encircled by wooded mountains, holds the future. A future of responsible capitalism, or future socialism, or future, whatever. The tag line depends on the visitor’s agenda.

What’s so special about this town? Something extraordinary for a town with fewer than 25,000 inhabitants, it happens to be headquarters for a complex of modern manufacturing enterprises, a bank – one of the largest in Spain, a university, and more. All these enterprises are tied together to form the Mondragon Corporation, which ranks in the top ten of industrial conglomerates in all of Spain, and it’s a cooperative enterprise.

July 11, 2012 - 1:11pm -- stevphen
Announcements
Work

The Metropolitan Factory: Worker’s Inquiry & Creative Labor Today

Minor Compositions is launching a workers’ inquiry into the shaping of creative, cultural, and artistic labor in the metropolis. We are currently searching for accomplices and comrades to take part and further develop this investigation. Description and more information below.

The Metropolitan Factory: making a living as a creative worker
Short survey on creative labor here

Surviving as a cultural or artistic worker in the city has never been easy. Creative workers find themselves celebrated as engines of economic growth, economic recovery and urban revitalization even as the conditions for our continued survival becomes more precarious. How can you make a living today in such a situation? That is, how to hold together the demands of paying the rent and bills while managing all the tasks necessary to support one’s practice? How to manage the tensions between creating spaces for creativity and imagination while working through the constraints posed by economic conditions?

June 17, 2012 - 3:12am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Work

Worker Co-operatives and Ownership
Bernard Marszalek

The popular slogan “People before Profit” adopted by worker co-operatives begs the question how people, in this case members of worker co-operatives, can trump profit in a profit-driven economy. The predictable response is that the democratic organization of co-operatives, where decisions are guided by the interests of the members and not exclusively by the imperatives of capital, amply validates the truth of the slogan. But is this so? If the members of a worker co-operative democratically vote to cut their wages during an economic downturn, are they demonstrating their supremacy over capital? How does this decision, albeit arrived at democratically, significantly differ from a boss telling his staff that he regretfully needs to cut their salaries due to a lack of sales? Does collective decision-making become farcical because it is unable to challenge the ultimate power of capital?

May 23, 2012 - 7:37am -- stevphen
News
Work

Towards a Workers' Organisation
Gurgaon Workers News

In this and the following issue of GurgaonWorkersNews we debate the question of 'workers' organisations': how do workers' bodies formed in the daily struggle relate to 'political' coordinations of workers, in continuity with the struggle against the existing social system?

This debate has to be firmly based on an analysis of a) the actual current workers' experiences of struggle and the problematic and promising tendencies within; b) the relation between particular struggle and general conditions of the capitalist cycle; c) the changing composition of work-force and the relation of workers to the immediate and social production process - as material basis for self-organisation.

This first part consists of general political theses concerning the question of workers' organisations and, in relation to this, we present six longer reports on recent struggles in Delhi-Faridabad-Gurgaon industrial areas. The second part will focus on current developments at Maruti Suzuki and its supply chain regarding the re-composition of workers' collectivity after the struggle in 2011. On this background we will raise general questions on the relation between workers' organisations and workers' inquiry. Please contribute to the debate.

April 13, 2012 - 9:47am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Work

Our Operaismo
Mario Tronti

The italian operaismo of the 1960s starts with the birth of Quaderni rossi and stops with the death of Classe operaia. End of story. Thus goes the argument. Or alternatively—si le grain ne meurt—operaismo is reproduced in other ways, reincarnated, transformed, corrupted and . . . lost. This text originally sprang from the urge to clarify the intellectual distinction between operaismo—‘workerism’ the inadequate but unavoidable English translation—and post-operaismo, or the autonomia movements of the late 70s and after. Then the sweet pleasures of remembrance did the rest. Whether this ‘rest’ is in good taste or of any use today will be for its readers to judge. This is my truth, based on what I believed back then and which I only see more clearly today. I don’t want to provide a canonical interpretation of that project; but this is one of the possible readings, one-sided enough to support the good old idea of partisan research, that indigestible theoretical practice of ‘point of view’ that formed us.

March 18, 2012 - 11:16am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Work

Worker Co-operatives and Democracy
Bernard Marszalek

Members of worker co-operatives necessarily live schizophrenic lives. On one hand, we must function as owners of small businesses and contend with all the insidious forces of capitalism – the anti-ethic of profits before people. At the same time we are members of an egalitarian corporate entity that most people can’t imagine existing, much less thriving. Here we are, a diverse group – some friends, some OK folks and some who we don’t socialize with after hours – working together day-in-and-day-out dealing with all the tensions arising from individual personality quirks, the aforementioned forces of the marketplace, unexpected emergencies, and, when everything else is under control, the boredom of daily tedium.

A collective life like this for those who have drunk the Kool-Aid of individualism – also called the Great Ape theory of human nature – think that it must be hell. Of course, when we face “challenges” in our co-operatives, especially during contentious meetings, the thought crosses our minds that, in fact, hell is other people. We all have doubts and wonder, at times, if we have taken the wrong fork on the path of life and have foolishly placed ourselves on a trajectory heading towards a nervous breakdown. Luckily for most of us, this fear passes and we realize that we wouldn’t want to trade our bizarre lives for confinement in a cubicle of some “friendly fascist” enterprise – even if it paid more.

January 14, 2012 - 9:33am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Work

All Eyes on Longview:
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
Insurgent Notes

Dear friend(s) and comrade(s):

We are writing to inform you about a very serious class confrontation developing on the northwest coast of the U.S., in Longview (Washington state).

In that small city, an international grain company, EGT, owned jointly by three firms (U.S.-based Bunge North America, Japan-based Itochu and Korea-based STX Pan Ocean), spent $200 million constructing a new state- of- the-art grain terminal.

While the construction was underway, EGT indicated that it would continue to employ the 225 members of ILWU Local 21 in Longview, in keeping with the solid unionization of west coast American ports since the 1930’s by the ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union).

Instead, when the construction was completed, EGT turned to a “rogue” union, General Construction and Operating Engineers Local 701, with the intention of displacing the ILWU with a “sweetheart” contract saving the company (according to its estimates) $1 million a year in labor costs.

January 10, 2012 - 12:04pm -- stevphen
Announcements
Work

CFP For the global emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work, workers and precarity
Interface

Once, the labour movement was seen as the international social movement for the left (and it was the spectre haunting capitalism). Over the last century, however, labour movements have been transformed. In most of the world membership rates have dwindled, and many act in defence of, or simply provide services to, their members in the spirit of interest or lobbying groups. Labour was once a broad social movement including cooperatives, socialist parties, women’s and youth wings, press and publications, cultural production and sporting clubs. Often it was at the core of movements for democracy or national independence, even of social revolution. Despite the rhetoric of ‘socialism’, ‘class and mass trade unionism’ or, alternatively, technocratic ‘organising strategies’, most union movements internationally operate strictly within the parameters of capitalism and the ideology of ‘social partnership’ (i.e. with and under capital and state).

December 29, 2011 - 9:14am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Work

New Guragon Workers Newsletter
GurgaonWorkersNews

Gurgaon in the industrial belt of Delhi is presented as the shining India, a symbol of capitalist success promising a better life for everyone behind the gateway of development. At a first glance the office towers and shopping malls reflect this chimera and even the facades of the garment factories look like three star hotels. Behind the facade, behind the factory walls and in the side streets of the industrial areas thousands of workers keep the rat-race going, producing cars and scooters for the middle-classes which end up in the traffic jam on the new highway between Delhi and Gurgaon. Thousands of young proletarianised middle class people lose time, energy and academic aspirations on night-shifts in call centres, selling loan schemes to working-class people in the US or pre-paid electricity schemes to the poor in the UK. Next door, thousands of rural-migrant workers up-rooted by the rural crisis stitch and sew for export, competing with their angry brothers and sisters in Bangladesh, China or Vietnam. And the rat-race will not stop; on the outskirts of Gurgaon, new industrial zones turn soil into over-capacities.

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