In Place of Compromise: Why we need a Rank and File Movement

In Place of Compromise: Why we need a Rank and File Movement - AWGAuthor: Anarchist Workers Group

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The most striking feature of recent industrial struggles has been the way in which the ruling class has attempted, and largely succeeded, in using the power of the bureaucracies within the trade unions to its own advantage. The militant Syndicalist miners in their pamphlet ‘The Miners Next step’ urged that:

“The old policy of identity of interests between employers and ourselves be abolished and a policy of open hostility be installed”.

But the trade union leadership will not do this for us. We must do it for ourselves. This pamphlet outlines how.

First published by the
Anarchist Workers Group
October 1988, Huddersfield, England

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Direct Action in Industry

Direct Action in Industry: A Direct Action Movement PublicationAuthor: Direct Action Movement

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To improve one’s working conditions one does not immediately have to resort to strike action. There are ways to achieve what one wants quite simply and effectively by taking ‘direct action on the job’, which also has the advantage of not losing one’s wages while airing one’s grievances!

This pamphlet then, lists several of these direct action methods. To make the most of these methods one needs good job organisation and a general consensus among the workers, that there is something to take action about. Even then, it could be possible that the chosen method does not work. In that case a prolonged strike might be the only answer.

A DAM Publication
The Direct Action Movement (United Kingdom) has since become the Solidarity Federation
www.solfed.org.uk
This pamphlet is undated but appears to be from the early 1970’s

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[Leaflet] The Importance of a Liberatory Process: a Critique of Fetishized Militancy

[Leaflet] The Importance of a Liberatory Process: a Critique of Fetishized MilitancyAuthor: Scott Nappalos

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Militancy is revered on the left. Whether insurrectionary violence or mass militancy of social movements, the form and level of militancy serves as a marker of the relative power and progressive nature of a movement. Insurrectionists fetishize either mere acts alone (independently of who does them, groups or individuals) or fetishize violent acts as signs of collective will. Some social movement organizers take militancy to indicate a progressive or revolutionary nature of a movement. Looking at militancy and militant acts alone however is bound to be distorting and lead us down garden paths. A militant event occurs in a social context and through a social process, and these facts bare on the meaning of militancy as a historical phenomenon….

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The Fundamental Requirement for Organised Safer Space

The Fundamental Requirement for Organised Safer SpaceAuthor: Anarchist Federation

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This article will be a very basic introduction to the foundations of safer spaces, community accountability and transformational justice that arise from elements present from the very inception of anarchism as a political philosophy. These concepts are responses to verbal, physical and sexual abuse that have always been present within radical communities and continue to present a challenge to this day. As such this article will touch on all forms of abuse from problematic language through to rape and physical violence. An example of one such policy can be seen at http://bit.ly/1207uq8

This article was first published in the Anarchist Federation’s Organise! magazine #80, Summer 2013.

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[Leaflet] Do you really want to overthrow capitalism?

Do you really want to overthrow capitalism?Author: Nate Hawthorne

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Some of us struggle to articulate our core values and our main ideas in a non-specialist vocabulary. There’s a place for specialized vocabulary, but we need to challenge ourselves to be able to make our points in other vocabularies as well. The following two documents attempt this. They were written shortly after the Jimmy John’s Workers Union campaign went public in Minneapolis. The first appeared in the newsletter of the Twin Cities branch of the IWW.

From: RECOMPOSITION: Notes for a New Workerism
http://recompositionblog.wordpress.com  |   http://recomposition.info/

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Short Circuit: Towards an Anarchist Approach to Gentrification

Short Circuit: Towards an Anarchist Approach to GentrificationAuthor: Two Toronto Members of Common Cause

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Gentrification, etymologically speaking, is a relatively new word, coined in 1964 by the English Marxist sociologist Ruth Glass. Conceptually, some would claim that it has been a feature of urban life for hundreds of years. Between 1853 and 1870, for instance, the Haussmannization of Paris forced thousands of poor people from the centre of the city, where rents had traditionally been cheaper, to the urban periphery; these migrations were the forced results of structural changes Baron Haussmann had proposed to the city’s urban geography, and rapidly increasing rents. We might anachronistically consider displacements such as these an example of gentrification, but, as we will explore below, the term has some specificity and nuance that such comparisons fail to capture.

From the first volume of Mortar, the theoretical journal of Common Cause
http://linchpin.ca/?q=mortar-volume-1

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Principles of Syndicalism

Principles of Syndicalism by Tom BrownAuthor: Tom Brown

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Written by the well-known activist and propagandist Tom Brown, this text explains clearly the principles according to which syndicalist unions organise, and the new society they aim to create “within the shell of the old”.

This simple introduction to syndicalism, workers control and libertarian communism originally appeared as a series of articles in War Commentary for Anarchism in 1943.
Excerpted from Tom Brown’s Syndicalism, Phoenix Press, London, July 1990.
This text from: Anarcho-Syndicalism 101

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