May 23, 2023
This is an audio recording of a reading of the book Class Power on Zero-Hours. The Angry Education Workers, a collective directly inspired by the book, is undertaking this effort. We are a political art collective of radical education workers who want to make and distribute art that can help counter the capitalist drive to destroy public education.
In this chapter, the AngryWorkers describe their critique on trade unionism, followed by an exploration of syndicalism's revival in the last 15 years. Consistent with their reflective, analytical mindset, the collective also offers critiques of currently existing syndicalist unions while acknowledging and praising the path these unions are creating for workers. After a brief discussion of their idea of "class unions", they delve into a recollection of an organizing drive in partnership with the IWW in west London in 2017.
Find everything we do with Angry Education Workers at https://linktr.ee/angryedworkers or contact us directly at angryeducationworkers@gmail.com
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From the introduction: "In January 2014 some AngryWorkers 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 experiences in our newspaper, 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."