liberatory

Labor, Work, and Organizing: Liberatory

What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.

The central question of this lens is who should run work, and how. The traditions gathered here do not agree. Some want workers to take over the workplaces they have through unions or councils. Some want to abolish the wage relation and the market entirely. Some want less work, or the end of “work” as compulsion altogether. Placed side by side, these positions stage the argument the room should have.

Anchor questions

• Who should decide what gets produced, how, and by whom? The market, the state, the workers, someone else?
• Should workers aim to run the workplaces they have, or to abolish the wage relation entirely?
• Are unions a vehicle for transforming society, or a way of managing workers within capitalism? Can they be both?
• What is the difference between a workers’ council, a union, and a cooperative? What can each do that the others cannot?
• What would it mean for work to be free? Less work, better work, or no “work” at all?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. This lens deliberately gathers positions that disagree with each other.

Programmatic and strategic writings

• Anton Pannekoek (1873 to 1960), Workers’ Councils (1947). The major statement of council communism, arguing that workers should run production directly through councils rather than through trade unions or a party-state. The foundational alternative to the union form. Free: marxists.org
• Antonio Gramsci (1891 to 1937), The Turin Factory Council Movement (1921). Gramsci’s reflection on the 1919 to 1920 factory councils of Turin, treating the council as the germ of a workers’ state and contrasting it with reformist union bureaucracy. Free: marxists.org
• Kim Moody (b. 1940), The Rank and File Strategy (2000). Argues that socialists should root themselves in the organized rank and file to rebuild militant unionism from below against the labor bureaucracy. The reference point for the rank-and-file debate. Free PDF: solidarity-us.org
• Jane McAlevey (1964 to 2024), Jane McAlevey on How to Organize for Power (interview, 2019). McAlevey’s central distinction between deep organizing that builds durable worker power and shallow mobilizing of the already convinced, with her insistence on structure tests and whole-worker organizing. Her book No Shortcuts is not free, but this interview covers the core argument. Free interview: currentaffairs.org

The anarchist and post-work alternatives

• Rudolf Rocker (1873 to 1958), Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (1938). The standard introduction to revolutionary syndicalism, presenting the union as a tool to abolish the state and capital together through direct action and the general strike. Shared with the capitalism theme. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• Peter Kropotkin (1842 to 1921), The Conquest of Bread (1892). The foundational anarchist-communist argument against retaining any wage system, including under state socialism, sketching a society that organizes production and need in common. The deep counterpoint on abolishing the wage. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• André Gorz (1923 to 2007), Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (1980). Questions whether the industrial working class is still the agent of liberation and opens the post-work argument for reducing labor time and freeing life beyond work. A deliberately contested position. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Bob Black (b. 1951), The Abolition of Work (1985). A provocation arguing that work as compulsory production should be abolished and replaced by freely chosen play. The sharpest anti-work voice for the post-work debate. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org

Accounts and models of alternatives

• Richard D. Wolff (b. 1942), Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (2012). Makes the case for worker self-directed enterprises, where workers themselves are the collective owners and managers, as a concrete transformation of who runs work. A bridge to Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration. Free to borrow: archive.org

Debates and disagreements

The school holds the disagreements among traditions open. Placed side by side, these texts stage the argument the room should have.

• Pannekoek and Gramsci (workers’ councils), Rocker (anarcho-syndicalism), Moody and McAlevey (rebuilding militant unions from the rank and file), Wolff (cooperatives), and Kropotkin, Gorz, and Black (abolishing the wage or work itself) do not agree. The union that Moody and McAlevey want to rebuild is the very form Pannekoek argues workers should move beyond, and the work that McAlevey organizes to defend is the work Black wants to abolish. Set these against each other rather than harmonizing them.

Video

• “How Unions CRUSH Capitalists” (Adam Conover, 2023). Roughly 28 minutes, about 782,000 views. Argues that collective action beats individual hustle and lays out what unions can win. A good “why bother organizing” opener. youtube.com/watch?v=mcgC-kuPEuo
• “Worker Cooperatives: Movements for Social Change and Personal Empowerment” (Democracy At Work, Richard Wolff, 2016). Roughly 30 minutes, about 26,000 views, a niche pick kept because it directly serves this lens. Wolff makes the case for democratizing the workplace through cooperatives. youtube.com/watch?v=urCy3UOGgx8
• “Jane McAlevey on Deep Organizing” (Jacobin, 2018). Roughly 12 minutes, about 22,000 views, a niche pick. McAlevey uses a Philadelphia nurses campaign to distinguish deep organizing from mobilizing. A short companion to the interview above. youtube.com/watch?v=bl6P_2jt_Vs

Status

This lens has a developed first pass for this theme. Resources continue to be added as the project grows. Contributions welcome, especially accounts of cooperative and council experiments that have been tried and what they taught, and post-work arguments from feminist and ecological traditions.