North London Solidarity Federation

New Flyer – We Should Run Our Communities

We have another new flyer ready to share with the world! We Should Run Our Workplaces lays out an argument that people should take the infrastructure they rely on to live out of the hands of governments and capitalists and run it from the bottom up. It is designed to be easy to print on a work or home printer, being a single sheet of folded A4, so feel free to print your own. It is available along with all our flyers in more versions, like block black and white and booklet, in our Materials and Flyers page. Full text below

We Should Run Our Communities Colour A5 Download

MEANS OF SURVIVAL

The majority of people are reliant on a web of different organisations and infrastructure in order to live full and happy lives. We need access to hospitals, transport, waste disposal, water, electricity, and many other municipal services in order to live. Many of us do not own our own homes, but rent them from a landlord or local council. Even those who own a home or small business are reliant on the financial system that provides mortgages and other loans.

The organisations that run this infrastructure can be corrupt, cruel, and uncaring. Landlords, businesses, and government departments often treat us with contempt, providing poor services and using them to control us. In the face of these problems, people look to politicians for help. This pamphlet will argue that politicians can never live up to their promises, and that we need to follow a more radical path if we want services and infrastructure that serve our desires instead of the whims of the rich and powerful.

COGS IN THE MACHINE

Many of the organisations that provide us with services are private businesses which exist to make money for their capitalist owners, and any business that fails to make a profit can expect to be shut down by its owners or go bankrupt. This profit motive often conflicts with what we want and need as service users. Using cheap materials or lowering wages saves money, while charging as much as they can get away with brings more money in. This means businesses often provide shoddy infrastructure and services in order to make more profit; overpriced, built cheaply, and run by overworked and underpaid staff. Our needs are met only so long as they make rich people even richer.

Right now, housing is the most obvious example of this exploitation. Much of our housing stock does not exist to provide people with a safe and comfortable place to live, but instead to make money for landlords. Many of us are expected to live in poverty and squalor in order to maintain the profits of those who exploit us. This capitalist logic applies to any service run by private business, from price gouging train companies to water companies that spew sewage into our waterways.

The common reaction to capitalist profiteering is to demand that the government better regulate capitalism or directly run a service or piece of infrastructure. However, the state is designed to enable politicians to manage society as they see fit and this requires that governments be able to ignore or overrule the desires of their subjects. The state might provide a working transport network or high quality social housing if doing so serves the objectives of the ruling political party, but it does not have to provide those things. Even elected politicians can ignore most of the promises they made to get elected and rule however they want until the next election.

While the state is not directly motivated by profit, governments also have reasons to run services as cheaply as possible and charge as much as they can through direct service fees or taxation. Resources saved from underpaying their workers or using cheap materials can be used by governments to pursue other political ends. The drive for state “efficiency” often involves making the lives of workers or service users worse.

THE DEATH OF COMMUNITY

The current situation in which large impersonal organisations such as corporations or government departments run most key services and infrastructure also leads to a hollowing out of our society. Social bonds between individuals and groups are weak; people no longer really talk to or understand the people who live next to them, and we are all generally isolated and disempowered. Since human beings are inherently social animals, failing social bonds can be just as damaging to us as failing services. Our society is suffering an epidemic of loneliness, depression, paranoia, and meaninglessness.

For most of human history, the people who relied on shared services and infrastructure also took an active role in organising and maintaining them. From bands of hunter-gatherers sharing food and tools, to village communes collectively managing the land they relied on for their survival, to citizen assemblies coming together to discuss problems in their city and organise the running of civic infrastructure. In such circumstances community was something that arose naturally out of the fact that people had to talk to each other and cooperate to maintain shared resources.

In a society in which everyone is an isolated consumer or service user that relies on a distant business owner or politician, there is no reason for us to build strong social bonds with our neighbours. If anything, we all become competitors for the attention of our rulers, and the people around us are not people we can cooperate with for our mutual benefit but potential threats. This toxic situation undermines the very basis of human society.

FOR OUR OWN GOOD

Our disempowerment, isolation, and lack of control over key parts of our own lives is often justified on the basis that normal people are too ignorant to run our own services and infrastructure, and that it needs to be run by experts. It is claimed that it would be a disaster if the average person got a real say on these topics.

However, our society has not been subordinated to the knowledge of experts. Instead, both our society and our experts have been subordinated to the politicians and capitalists who actually make the final decisions on how infrastructure and services are run. They do not necessarily know any more about how to run key infrastructure than you or I. While they may have better access to formal knowledge on these topics, they are still detached from both the experiences of the people and communities that rely on them and the knowledge of the front line workers who actually build and maintain services and infrastructure.

This has not only meant that key infrastructure has been managed based on the need for the rich to get richer and for politicians to keep their grip on power instead of serving the desires of those who rely on it, but it has also often left experts frustrated and burnt out as their advice is ignored or manipulated in favour of a quick profit or political expediency.

A SOCIETY IMPOSED

These problems go back to the very founding of the state and capitalism. The state likes to pretend it is the result of a social agreement between its subjects, and capitalism likes to pretend that it is the natural result of people working and trading outside the state, but both of these claims are false. The state was built on conquest, and the states that exist today, their borders, and their powers have nothing to do with any agreement between their subjects and everything to do with the ability of the state to violently impose itself on the territory and people it claims to own.

Likewise, capitalism was imposed from the top down upon us, often with the use of state violence to break up previous forms of organisation. Even today many big businesses rely on state subsidies and state regulation for much of their profit, funded by taxation and enforced by the police. Capitalists have always been the main beneficiaries of state welfare, and in exchange capitalism has helped fund the state. State and capital form a unified alliance over their subjects and workers.

Such violent imposition can not lead to a society that serves the desires of all its members, as the very use of imposition requires the suppression of those desires. Within our current society, the vast majority of us are nothing but tools to be used by state and capital to empower political and economic rulers. The services and infrastructure they offer are based on what they need from us, not what we desire for ourselves, and state and capital will leave us in poverty and despair if that is what suits their own interests.

BUILDING OUR OWN POWER

The core of the problem with our current society is that people are not in direct control of the services and infrastructure that they need in order to live dignified and fulfilling lives. Those who use a service have both the most direct interest in ensuring that it runs well and the most direct knowledge of how well it serves them, whereas politicians and capitalists are detached from these concerns and motivated by power and profit. Since we also rely on those services to live, whoever controls those services can use them to control us. When we have no control over the necessities of life, we are left dependent and voiceless and can be exploited and oppressed.

Democracy is often raised as the solution to this problem, but even a perfect democracy would still leave minorities at the mercy of the majority, and no government has ever come close to a perfect democracy. We do not have a say in the day to day running of either the government or the businesses that we rely on; at best, we get to vote every few years or take our custom to a different business. We get to choose our masters, but we do not get to be free.

True empowerment can only come from direct control; people collectively running the services and infrastructure we rely on. Preferably getting as close to consensus as possible on all decisions instead of allowing majorities to overrule minorities. Instead of being imposed from the top down, this needs to be agreed from the bottom up, with individual neighbourhoods collectively running what they can at a local level and entering into agreements and federations with each other in order to run larger projects that serve cities, regions, countries, and international communities. Such organisation can still make use of expert advice, just as state and capital do today, but instead of answering to power and profit, experts will answer to the desires of the people.

Any movement to create a free society in which services and infrastructure serve their users instead of being tools of control will have to give up on the idea of obedience and rulership as acceptable methods of organisation. If we only replace one set of top down rulers with another, we will recreate the problems that we suffer today. This mistake has been the death of many previous attempts at change, from political parties to charities to mainstream trade unions. We must build organisations in which no one, not even elected officials or majorities, have the ability to rule over other people. We must organise on the basis of free association and mutual agreement and avoid recreating systems of control and exploitation.

ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

A movement to put everyday people in direct control of society can not use the state or capitalism to achieve its aims. The power and wealth of politicians and capitalists comes from the disempowerment and poverty of their subjects and workers, so the state and capitalists can be expected to oppose any project that tries to change that balance of power. We need to build an egalitarian and bottom up organisation outside of state and capital.

This can not be done all at once. In the current situation of widespread isolation, disempowerment, and social fragmentation, we must start small. Organising a rent strike in a single block of flats to force landlords to lower rents or perform needed repairs, or organising a consumer cooperative in a single neighbourhood to supply food and other necessities at low prices, are two examples of the kind of small scale organising that is both possible right now and can bring immediate improvements to the lives of their members.

However, the ultimate objective of any tenants’ union should not only be to fight for better treatment from landlords, but to abolish landlords and put occupants in control of their homes. Likewise, the ultimate objective of any consumer cooperative should not just be to help people survive poverty, but to replace the current unjust system of distribution and end poverty. In order to do this, local groups need to grow, multiply, and form alliances, networks, and federations with other groups fighting for the exploited and oppressed, such as workplace unions and migrants’ rights groups. Such groups often also have legitimate claims to a say in the running of services and infrastructure. Working together, such an alliance could grow to functionally control the entire economy and defend itself from any attempt to suppress it. This would render our current ruling class powerless and irrelevant, and would be a real revolution.

This approach to politics has a name. Because it is critical of all forms of rulership and seeks to organise without resorting to that rulership, it is anarchist, which literally means without (an) rulers (archy). Because it rejects the use of the state for political change and seeks to build working class power though organisations in the workplace and the community, it is syndicalist, which comes from the French word for a workers’ union. Together, these two ideas form Anarcho-Syndicalism.

Workplace Organiser Training in July

In coordination with the Solidarity Federation Hospitality Workers Union we will be running a workplace organiser training on Sunday the 26th of July. The training will run from 11am to 6pm, and will be at the London Action Resource Centre (LARC), 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, London, E1 1ES.

The training will include case studies of past workplace organisation and actions, how to map out your own workplace, role playing through a first meeting with your co-workers, and general tactics and techniques for organising and resisting.

Please pass on the above flyer to anyone who might be interested. The training is free, but if you have spare cash please bring a donation for LARC, which is run entirely on donations from its users.

Reading Group 22 – Essays on Organisation

For our twenty second reading group we will be reading a selection of four short essays on different ideas about organisation. Each one comes from a different perspective, from left communist to insurrectionary anarchist.

The first essay is a left communist view, Centralised Party, Yes – Centralism over the Party, No! by Onorato Damen.
The second essay is a classical organisationalist anarchist view, Anarchist Organisation not Leninist Vanguardism by Wayne Price.
The third essay is a more sythesist take of organisation, A Diversity of Anarchisms by The Eclipse Committee.
The last essay is an inurrectionary anti-organisationalist view, Organisation vs Getting Shit Done by William Gillis.

Our friends at Freedom Press here host the reading group for free, so please support them by using them for your supply of radical books and zines.

The reading group will be meeting on Tuesday the 30th of June, 19:00, at Freedom Bookshop, 84b Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX. You are welcome to come and join in the discussion even if you have not finished the reading.

June Drop in Session

Need advice about an issue with your boss or landlord? Want support organising in your workplace or community? Want to talk about anarchism or syndicalism? Want to meet members of the group and find out how SolFed works? Just want to say hi? Then come see us at one of these drop in sessions.

The next session will be on Thursday, June 18th, 19:00 – 20:00, at the London Action Resource Centre (LARC), 62 Fieldgate Street, E1 1ES. We will be in the upstairs rooms. If you can, please bring a donation for the space.

New Flyer – We Should Run Our Workplaces

We have another new flyer ready to share with the world! We Should Run Our Workplaces lays out an argument that capitalism and the state should be abolished and the economy should be run from the bottom up, by workers and for workers. It is designed to be easy to print on a work or home printer, being a single sheet of folded A4, so feel free to print your own. It is available along with all our flyers in more versions, like block black and white and booklet, in our Materials and Flyers page. Full text below.

We Should Run Our Workplaces Colour A5 Download

OWNERS AND WORKERS

Today the economy is divided into two broad classes of people. One is a small elite who control the vast majority of the wealth, organisation, and productive capacity of society; private business owners. The other is the majority of workers who have little independent access to the means of survival and must work for one of these private owners in order to make the money we need to live. This structure has put workers in a position in which we must accept mistreatment by our employers or risk the insecurity and poverty of unemployment, and as such it is called “capitalism” as it is a system in which those who own the means of production, or capital, run the economy.

Many workers trapped in this economic structure hate their jobs. Even many workers who enjoy their work and the more farsighted owners can see that capitalism is often harmful. However, capitalism is treated as either a fact of nature or the best of all available options. This pamphlet challenges the idea that our current economic system is natural or optimal, suggests an alternative way of managing the economy, and lays out how we can get there.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

Much of our acceptance of capitalism rests on a myth that it developed out of the free choices of everyone. In this myth, people were liberated from the previous medieval system based on peasants paying compulsory tithes to lords and priests, and everyone was free to associate, work, and trade on an open market. Some people became richer through their superior vision or work ethic and came to own much of society’s wealth. Having risen to their position based on their abilities, this new ruling class of capitalists were the best people to run the economy. Their position is a result of the free choices of people on the market and any attempt to restrict them will involve restricting freedom for everyone.

However, capitalism is not the result of freedom but the result of violence and oppression. In many places, including Britain, the creation of capitalism involved vast amounts of violent theft from common people by the ruling class, with the medieval peasantry being kicked off their own land by the aristocracy, who turned that stolen land into their private property and turned themselves into capitalists. The exact methods of this theft change from place to place, but nowhere has there ever been a free market out of which a capitalist ruling class naturally developed on the basis of their own merits.

From these origins, capitalism has continued to require violence to maintain itself. From governments directly aiding capitalists with police or military violence, to more subtle forms of support such as favourable regulatory frameworks or subsidies ultimately enforced by a police baton or soldier’s bullet. Likewise, large corporations are always heavily involved in politics; funding politicians in exchange for favours, running government services, supplying goods, and hiring from government bureaucracies.

WORKPLACE DICTATORSHIP

Capitalism is also incompatible with the values it claims to be based on. While it appeals to the liberal ideals of freedom and democracy, capitalist workplaces are strict hierarchies that answer to the dictatorship of the owner and workers exist as resources to be controlled without any real say in how the organisations we rely on for work are run.

This lack of freedom has a real impact on the lives of workers. We end up living a significant part of our lives not for ourselves, but for our employers. What we learn, who we know, where we live, and when we are free are all set by the demands of our jobs. Our employers get the best hours of our day for most of our lives and we retire only once we are worn out and no longer of any use to capitalism. This is the case even in “good” jobs. In bad jobs, where pay is bad, and the bosses are abusive or negligent, we can suffer all kinds of mistreatment which we often accept because we can not afford to quit.

Capitalist owners also have competing interests with their workers. Workers want a decent wage that we can live on, and we want working conditions that allow us to work and live with dignity. However, high wages and good working conditions are costs that eat into the profits for the owner, and any business that does not produce profit is not worth running. Since the owner has the power in this relationship, workers end up not being treated like people, but tools to make the rich ever richer, and we only get to live insofar as we can be good tools to that end.

These problems are the core cause of many of the other problems we face today. The capitalist need for profit results in a constant drive for lower wages, higher prices, and generally worse living conditions. The vast amounts of wealth that capitalists hoard and their key role in running the economy mean that they also have significant political power and are able to bribe or intimidate governments into serving their needs. Because these profits are often guaranteed by state violence, individual workers have very little power to push back against these worsening conditions. Capitalism means that modern society, despite being many times richer than any previous society, does not provide a basic level of human dignity for all of its members.

MORE MONEY THAN SENSE

Capitalism is also justified as being economically efficient. It may suck for many workers but this is the price we pay for the wonders of modern society. But this is also a myth, as many supposedly “efficient” businesses are bureaucratic nightmares, run by people who have no idea what is happening below them.

Part of the reason for this is the sheer size of many businesses. Past a certain point, a corporation becomes too large for anyone to know how it functions regardless of their level of business genius or technical expertise. The power imbalance between owners, their managers, and workers also means that people lie to their superiors to protect themselves, worsening this ignorance at the top. Anyone who has worked for a large organisation at its lower levels will know that day-to-day operations are often more reliant on front-line staff ignoring orders to get things done than on visionary leadership from above.

However, the conflict of interest between workers and owners is also a massive cause of inefficiency. Workers who think and act for themselves will always tend towards working towards their own interests and do as little as possible for their pay. On the other hand, workers who have been crushed down into obedient tools will lack drive, initiative, and the will to push back against, or work around, counterproductive commands from above. Capitalist organisations will always tend towards being run by people out of touch with reality and staffed by workers who are either in a state of rebellion or a state of apathy.

WORKER CONTROL

The solution to these problems can’t be found within capitalism as they arise from the very structure of ownership at the core of capitalism. Instead, they can only be solved by changing that structure of ownership and putting control of the means of production into the hands of workers. Only when workers control the day-to-day running of the organisations we rely on for our livelihood can that reliance not be used to exploit and oppress us.

Worker control would also remove the internal conflicts that cause problems in capitalist businesses. When workers are the collective managers and owners of our workplaces, there is no conflict of interest between worker, manager, and owner. Without this conflict, there is no reason for workers not to cooperate and share information for our own mutual benefit, and no need for a management hierarchy to keep people in line. Likewise, without the ability of individuals to make ever more money from ever larger businesses, there is no reason for organisations to grow larger than is economically efficient from the perspective of serving their workers and consumers.

The first response to this is often that such a change in ownership would be theft from the capitalists. But as already discussed, the current ownership structure is itself based on historic theft from peasants, workers, and other lower classes. Returning the ownership of the means of production to the descendants of those dispossessed people would be an act of justice, not theft. The second response is that workers do not know how to run businesses. But in most businesses, neither the management nor the owners really know how to run the business and it is the workers who actually keep the business functioning.

Such a change in ownership would change the very foundations of our society and would abolish capitalism in the sense that capitalists, as a class of people who own most of the capital, would not exist. Likewise, the working class, as defined by having to rely on capitalists to employ us in order to survive, would also cease to exist, as we would collectively own and run our workplaces. Society would not be run by a privileged class, but by its members in general as free equals; everyone would have a say on the running of the means of production and infrastructure that we rely on in order to survive.

SOCIALISM AND THE STATE

Worker control of our workplaces and society is not a new idea; it was the core demand of the old socialist movements. But these movements relied on the state to control the means of production for workers and so the government, not workers, ended up as the real owner of our workplaces and society. This put workers in the same position of disempowerment as we face under capitalism; someone else controls access to what we need to work and live, and so can control, oppress, and exploit us.

While the state does not have the same profit motive as private businesses, its structure still encourages oppression and exploitation. All states are built on the obedience of their subjects without which the rulers of the state have no power. A working class that is too wealthy and too free-thinking to be easily controlled is a threat to that obedience. Likewise, the politicians and technocrats who seek power within the state must gather resources to battle each other for power and those resources must be extracted from the working class. Workers who have worked for government departments will know that they can be just as abusive and incompetent as private businesses. Even the most democratic states suffer from these problems, with a theoretically perfect democracy only empowering the majority to exploit and abuse minorities.

If workers are to take control of society and our own lives, we need to do so from the bottom up. We need to run our workplaces, our housing, and the utilities we rely on directly, based on consensus wherever possible. To run the economy as a whole, we need these worker controlled workplaces and community controlled infrastructure projects to cooperate together in networks, alliances, and federations which are run on the basis of bottom up free agreement instead of being imposed from the top down on the basis of rulership and obedience. Only when society is organised in this way can workers claim to really own the means of production.

ANARCHO-SYNDICALSIM

In order to achieve this kind of control, workers need to build our own organisations from the bottom up, independent of the state and capitalism. We need to build radical unions in our workplaces and community organisations, like renters’ unions and mutual aid groups in our neighbourhoods. These organisations can fight for higher pay, lower rents, and better living conditions through strikes, boycotts, and protests. By being local and decentralised they can be run by workers without creating a new hierarchy of rulers over us.

However, these organisations must have aims beyond just winning a higher wage in a particular workplace or preventing an eviction in a particular community. By linking these organisations together on the basis of mutual cooperation they would have the ability to launch strikes and boycotts across entire industries or countries. Such power could be used to oppose larger problems like unjust laws or the bad behaviour of large corporations. Once sufficiently developed such an alliance of workers’ organisations would have bottom up control over the economy and society, could use that control to do away with both the state and capitalism, and truly put workers in control of society.

This approach to change has a name. Because it rejects all authority and rulership, it is anarchist, which literally means without (an) rulers (archy). Because it rejects the use of the state for political change and seeks to build working class power through organisations in the workplace and the community, it is syndicalist, which comes from the French word for a workers’ union. Together, these two ideas form Anarcho-Syndicalism.

Reading Group 21 – Social Anarchism and Organisation

For our twenty first reading group we will be reading Social Anarchism and Organisation by the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro (FARJ). We also have some additional suggested short readings about Platformism and the arguments around it to go along with the booklet. As FARJ describes the booklet:

The first Congress of the FARJ was held with the principal objective of deepening our reflections on the question of organisation and formalising them into a programme. This debate has been happening within our organisation since 2003. We have produced theoretical materials, established our thinking, learned from the successes and mistakes of our political practice it was becoming increasingly necessary to further the debate and to formalise it, spreading this knowledge both internally and externally. The document “Social Anarchism and Organisation” formalises our positions after all these reflections. More than a purely theoretical document, it reflects the conclusions realised after five years of practical application of anarchism in the social struggles of our people. The document is divided into 16 parts. It has already been published in Portuguese in a book co-published between Faísca and the FARJ.

A free version of Social Anarchism and Organisation can be found at the Anarchist Library here. While this is the main reading, the following article/essay length pieces will also be helpful in understanding some of the historical arguments within the anarchist movement that are relevant to Social Anarchism and Organisation:
Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists – Reflections on what went wrong for anarchism in the Russian Revolution and how to prevent it from happening again, which would lead to platformist anarchism
A Reply to the Platform – A response to the above, which would lead to synthesist anarchism of the kind still championed by the French anarchist federation.
A Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists – A plaftformist response to the synthesist critique.
About the Platform – An exchange between Makhno and Malatesta about the platform.

Our friends at Freedom Press here host the reading group for free, so please support them by using them for your supply of radical books and zines.

The reading group will be meeting on Tuesday the 26th of May, 19:00, at Freedom Bookshop, 84b Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX. You are welcome to come and join in the discussion even if you have not finished the reading.

May Drop in Session

The next session will be on Thursday, May 21st, 19:00 – 20:00, at the London Action Resource Centre (LARC), 62 Fieldgate Street, E1 1ES. We will be in the upstairs rooms. If you can, please bring a donation for the space.