Chapter 2 Freedom and Organisation

SOCIETY IS THE aggregate of individuals, united for their common good. Society exists for the benefit of individuals and not individuals for the benefit of society. These statements are axiomatic, but they are also so important that they must be repeated. The highest common good of individuals is freedom. Freedom is both social and economic. Social freedom consists of the liberty of each man to live as he wishes provided he does not injure his fellows. But this liberty is dependent on the economic freedom conferred by a form of society that provides for each man a sufficiency of material goods to satisfy all his needs. To provide this sufficiency with as little labour as possible, it is necessary that men should co-operate in their work. Society in its pure form consists precisely in this working together for the common welfare.

Thus, men, like many other animals, find it convenient to live in society. Indeed, they have become so conditioned by social activity that it would be difficult for them to live apart from it, and this material helplessness of men outside the social group has given rise to ideas of the social unit as an organic body existing in its own right, to which the relationship of individual men is similar to that of members or cells to the human body. A little examination reveals the absurdity of this notion. A limb cannot live cut off from its body. But if a man of average resourcefulness were put on a desert island provided with a moderate plenty of natural resources, he would without doubt have a very hard time, but it would be possible for him to fill his belly and to evolve a life that might eventually provide certain mental satisfactions.

Nevertheless, despite its manifest absurdity, this idea of the community as an entity in its own right, above the individuals it comprises, has existed at all times in the history of civilisation. In modem times it is tacitly admitted in almost every country. In Germany the super-individual becomes the German Folk, in Russia the Socialist Fatherland, in England King and Country. In every land at war the conscript is incited to fight for his country - by which is meant the state in which he lives, or for some personification thereof, such as Adolf Hitler or the Mikado. He may be asked to fight for other things, according to the estimate his rulers have of his intelligence, but always the dominant idea behind a country at war is that of the state deified. This idea exists in peace, but it is in war that the subordination of the individual to the mass, to the artificial machinery of the impersonal and abstract state, reaches its most complete manifestation. In peacetime a man is ordered to curtail his freedom of action, to give up his money in taxes, to beget children so that the armies of the embattled state may be rich in cannon fodder. But in war he is ordered to give up his very existence that the state may live.

This state for which men are asked to die is a cruel abstraction of those who need a myth to enable them to maintain their rule over the majority of men. It is a lie - or a folly - to say that the state is above individual men. It is equally untrue - or foolish - to claim, that the state can exist apart from the men within it.
Men have arranged themselves into groups from the earliest days of human evolution, but solely for their own convenience - firstly, as animals do, for the protection of numbers and the reproduction of the species, secondly, because they found that social life made possible, by the differentiation of function within the group, a higher standard of comfort and living. It is from these beginnings that the modern and gigantic centralised social aggregates have arisen. Still the fundamental function of the social unit - and the only function that can be justified with any degree of reason, remains that of the well-being of the men and women within it.
But the modern state has acquired other functions, which are anti-social in nature - insofar as one regards as social what is beneficial to all men within a society. It has become an instrument for the protection of the interests of certain classes in the community against those of the remainder, and its forces are used for such objects as the protection of private property, the restriction of personal liberties that may be detrimental to the interests of the ruling class, the conducting of wars of conquest to obtain new markets and sources of raw materials, and the waging of imperialist wars against other state communities whose ruling classes are pursuing similar objectives. In such circumstances the state becomes an organisation for the maintenance of class rule and class interests, and not a group organised for the benefit of its members - except in the limited degree to which the ruling class find it necessary or advisable to satisfy the needs or wishes of the remainder of the community (and it is surprising how far they contrive to regulate such needs or wishes through their instruments of suggestion). In order to maintain the state as conceived by them and as necessary for the preservation of their interests, the ruling class must resort to means which would be regarded as criminal and anti-social if practised between the individual members of the social unit. For instance, although its own law forbids the settlement of disputes between individuals by brute force, the state, embodying and acting on behalf of and through the ruling class, uses brute force in a dispute between one set of individuals and another, e.g. uses both police and soldiers to break strikes and political demonstrations. And the use of lies and deceptions which would be regarded as immoral between men in the same class, is conducted without shame by the ruling classes against the ruled.

These evils cannot be dissociated from the state. Where there is a centralised state, the conduct of communal affairs must, if the organisation is to work at all, devolve on a minority obeyed by the majority. Government, therefore, is inevitable in the state system, and government cannot exist without coercion and its means. And where government exists, with the power and the means to force the people to its will, history shows that the governing class will use its position to establish privilege and its power over the people to follow ends other than the common good.

It has been the error of almost every revolution in history to establish a coercive government in place of the government it overthrew, and to take over the machinery of the state in the hope of using it to establish a new form of society that will supersede the state. Instead of performing the liberation for which it was designed, each revolutionary government has found it necessary to apply measures even more coercive than those of the deposed government, has drowned its newly proclaimed liberties in the blood of the guillotines, and ended, if it survived so long, in the establishment of a privileged ruling class, a military organisation, and all the appendages of the embattled state, while the idealism of the original revolutionary leaders has given place to the selfish tyranny of a new exploiting class. So the civil war in England ended in the Cromwellian rule of the generals under which the true libertarian movements of the Diggers and Levellers were destroyed and the liberties of the individual circumscribed far more narrowly and efficiently than under the Stuarts. The French Revolution led, through the Convention and the dictatorships of Marat, Danton, Robespierre, to the eventual triumph under Napoleon of the state and government in forms even more tyrannical and evil than they had assumed before. Imperialism and war were invoked in the name of that glorious revolution whose liberty, equality and fraternity had vanished in the rise of nationalist France and her emperor of murderers.
The Russian revolution was turned astray by the same illusion of a government, even a revolutionary government, being able to achieve a society in which freedom and justice would prevail. The specious doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat was applied in a country where the entire proletariat was a relatively small minority among the peasant masses. And in practice this dictatorship was not by the proletariat but over the proletariat by the Communist Party, itself a minority of between two and three millions in a population of nearly two hundred millions. Even within the Communist Party the vital decisions were taken by minorities in inverse proportion to the importance of the issue. So a pyramid was formed at the summit of which stood a handful of the Bolshevik leaders or, at a later stage of this ‘revolutionary government’, one man, who had displaced all his rivals for the tip of the pyramid. This man, Stalin, stands in the same relationship to the October Revolution with its demands for ‘All Power to the Soviets’(i.e. the assembled people) as Napoleon did to the real French Revolution with its slogans of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Indeed, the study of revolutions confirms everywhere the melancholy conclusion of the nineteenth century historian, Acton, that “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In practice, any government, however good the intentions of its founders, becomes counter-revolutionary - if we assume revolution to mean the profound changes in social structure towards political and economic freedom, which in reality can only spring from the deep, spontaneous movements of individuals acting with a common will towards some goal they all desire passionately. Any government, because its existence demands the establishment and defence of some kind of order at the expense of individual action and initiative, is by its very nature conservative and socially destructive.

But if we reject government and the state, we have to find some other pattern of social organisation which, while granting the individual liberty of action and expression, will yet ensure the smooth and effectual working of society to give men those material and intellectual benefits which can be obtained only from a life of association and co-operation.

This was a problem whose existence was realised by many of the Victorian individualists, and the most famous of them, John Stuart Mill, declared, “the social problem of the future, we consider to be how to unite the greatest possible individual liberty of action with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe and an equal participation in all the benefits of combined labour.”

But Mill, although he realised the failings of democracy and representative government, as they existed in his time, did not go far towards a solution of this problem, nor did most of the other Victorian radical thinkers, who realised the necessity of individual freedom and the evils of state power but could not pass beyond these realisations towards a social method and organisation which would give maximum liberty to the individual and at the same time prove more efficient than capitalist “democracy” in satisfying material needs.

Herbert Spencer, for instance, was led by his evolutionary beliefs to the view that humanity was advancing to a society “in which government will be reduced to the smallest amount possible, and freedom increased to the greatest amount possible.” But he did not attempt to envisage the nature of such a society and, although he disagreed with the state as he saw it developing in his day, still clung to the idea of government. “Not only do I contend that the restraining power of the State over individuals and bodies, or classes of individuals, is requisite, but I have contended that it should be exercised much more effectively and carried much further than at present”. It is true that Spencer favoured only the negative functions of government, but, in practice, the very nature of the state forces it to make positive demands on the individual, such as demands for military service, etc. In government, as in the Church, Thou Shalt Not cannot be divided from Thou Shalt.

The answer to the liberal problem is that society must be organised, not on a political basis, but on an economic and functional basis. If we administer the production and distribution of worldly goods, to ensure to each man a share commensurate with his requirements, we shall have found a solution to our main social problem. With freedom of the individual man and an organisation of his functional life and economic satisfaction on a basis that will provide for all his needs, we can well leave society to find its own form, which can never be fixed and stagnant. If we establish the principle of “to each according to his needs”, we shall be half way to obtaining acceptance of the principle of mutual aid, “from each according to his ability”.
The social philosophy that has given the only satisfactory answer to this problem is anarchism.

Chapter 1 the Nature of Modern Society

THIS IS ABOOK concerning Freedom. It attempts to expound in clear terms a social philosophy and a social method by which a practicable liberty can be obtained. It is based on the assumption that the most desirable human good is the social and economic freedom of the individual human being, and its theme is a society in which men will have liberty and space to develop their personalities and to advance, in a world where there exist no longer the bonds of poverty and coercion, towards the complete man of the visionaries.

From the birth of civilisation this ideal of freedom has led poets and philosophers, social theorists and thinking men. In ancient China and ancient Greece men talked and struggled for freedom and the fact that these ideals of personal liberty and of the man who fulfils himself in freedom have been perennial through history shows that the concept of freedom is natural to man and must strengthen as he becomes increasingly aware of his own inner potentiality.

If we survey human society today, engaged in the most evil war of history, we cannot fail to be impressed by the power of this concept of freedom. It is so powerful in the minds of men that its most ruthless enemies find themselves compelled to exploit it in order to hold the continued support of their followers. Thus the leaders of every country at war claim to be fighting for the freedom of their own people - often also for the freedom of others. In the same way there have been rulers in every age who have committed atrocious crimes against humanity and created slavery in the name of its antithesis, liberty.

Before we can discuss the nature of a free society in the future, and indeed, in order that we may determine the nature of that society, we must consider society as it exists today.

Politically, modern society is based on the system of government; economically, on the system of property concentrated is the hands of the few. Its political manifestation is the state; its economic manifestation is the capitalist system of production. Its tendency is centrifugal, so that political power becomes more and more concentrated in the state and economic power progresses from the system of many small capitalists to monopoly capitalism, which in its turn becomes state capitalism. So the totalitarian state is achieved by the coalescence of political and economic power in the same body. But this identity of the state and capitalism is no new thing.

For the state is in reality the translation into social terms of the economic form of society. It serves, in fact, as the executive instrument of those who, by virtue of the economic power conferred by property, are the effective ruling class of the country. And as property comes, through the growth and amalgamation of large scale business trusts, under the effective control of a class which grows progressively smaller and smaller, so the state itself becomes more and more concentrated until the apparent parallels of political and economic life meet in the totalitarian state.

Every major country has become, during if not before the present war, in some measure totalitarian. The circumstances of the war have tended to hasten the concentration of control of property in the hands of the few, and military necessity has enabled the ruling class to concentrate and make more and more intense the power of the state. Organisations, such as trade unions, which functioned before the war on an independent and voluntary basis and whose purpose was, indeed, to some extent in opposition to that of the state, have now become virtually part of its structure, and serve the state rather than the people for whose protection they were formed. Similarly, small proprietors have either been liquidated by conscription or bombing or are subjected to a mass of regulations which limit their independence to such an extent that they are in effect minor distributive or productive bureaucrats who receive a guaranteed price instead of a salary and are preserved from extinction only insofar as they are willing to serve the state.

If the business unity of capitalism has become merged in this manner into the body of the state, the lives of individual men and women have become hardly less dominated by the totalitarian form of war society. Workers in many industries have returned to a state of virtual serfdom, being bound to their work under pain of imprisonment if they leave - or even if they are late. Conditions of labour have reverted to those of pre-Tolpuddle days. Long hours are again compulsory, and many people are forced to work seven days a week under the threat of being drafted into the army. The factory laws have been abrogated, and the safeguards won by the workers in a century of bitter struggle have vanished almost overnight.

The hours after work, which before the war were counted as the citizen’s own time, in which to spend in leisure activities the meagre surplus of his income, are likewise at the command of the state, and the man who has worked sixty hours at some monotonous and tiring employment, may still find himself obliged to spend a further portion of his week in fire-watching or Home Guard duty.

The activities in which he can engage during the small leisure that remains are likewise limited, and almost all of them are used in some way for the transmission of propaganda that will induce him to accept totalitarian conditions. The cinema, music hall, radio, newspapers and periodicals combine to emphasise upon his mind the necessity of supporting the total war and by implication, the total state.

Today society in all countries assumes this totalitarian form, which negates the individual and deifies the aggregate. The difference between the so-called democracies and the open dictatorships is superficial and, for the most part, of degree. War or economic crisis has merely forced the dictatorships to become more open in their suppression of the individual. In the democracies coercion is incomplete, and while the people can be fooled into a course of action beneficial to the state their rulers refrain from forcing them. But even the democracies are forced more and more to use coercion to maintain the stability of the state, and in this way progress towards identity with the dictatorships. Thus the contention is virtually true, that this is a war between two kinds of Fascism and that the victory of neither can bring freedom to the peoples of the world.
It must be remembered that the present suppression of the individual could not have been achieved had it not been for the tacit agreement of the individuals themselves. One reason why the government is less ruthless in this country is that the mass of the English people have become peculiarly amenable to the persuasion of the ruling class, and can easily be convinced, without the terror that serves as persuasion in the openly Fascist states, that the dictates of authority represent their own desires.

For the last hundred years the English industrial workers have been subjected to a progressive conditioning administered by the most capable ruling class in history. By a clever application of a series minor concessions the activities of the workers were turned away from the revolutionary trends of the 1830’s to the reformism of the New Model Trade Unions. Workers’ organisations were, by the corruption of their leaders, turned into instruments for assisting class rule, until, today, the trades unions have been incorporated in the totalitarian state machine and the leaders of the Labour party, built on the workers’ efforts and cash, act the most brutal parts in a reactionary government. By means of universal state education; the press, the radio, the cinema, the workers have been doped into an ignorance of social truths and a general mental unawareness far greater than that of their ‘illiterate’ ancestors of Owen’s day.

By the granting, in easy stages and over a number of years, of universal suffrage, the workers have been encouraged in the illusion of political equality, the illusion that the possession of the vote gives them a say in the government of the country. The Jacob’s ladder of social and economic advancement has been hung continually before them, manifested in a graded caste system among workers. Every worker can become a foreman if he is sufficiently servile. Every clerk can become a manager if he is sufficiently officious and unscrupulous. In their higher-paid ranks, skilled craftsmen, foremen, engine drivers, etc., the workers tend to become dovetailed into the petty bourgeoisie, imitating their manner of life and acquiring their social prejudices. Avery high proportion of the proletariat has been completely demoralised by these golden apples of capitalism, and is devoid of any revolutionary consciousness. Not the least appalling result of this corruption of the workers of Britain is the fact that they have lost any real sense of self-respect, any desire to develop their personalities for something better than the social and economic scrum of would-be go-getters.
While it would be ridiculous to contend that capitalism has given out its prizes to a majority of the workers, many have benefited from the exploitation of the empire, and their good fortune has given a hope to many more of their fellows. But they should keep no illusion of continued good fortune. Capitalism will not, cannot continue to offer such baits to the proletariat. English capitalism, if it survives, will have a poor time after the war. Then the English workers will begin to experience something nearer the life of their Indian comrades, on whose misery their comparative (if slight) well-being has been based. As the contradictions of capitalism drive it to act for its own eventual destruction, it will turn the screw ever more and more severely on the proletariat. Then, if not before, we can hope to see a revolutionary consciousness among the English proletariat.

This revolutionary consciousness is to be found more in countries with small industries and large peasant populations than in countries preponderantly industrial.

In the great western European industrial nations, revolutionary movements have failed on every occasion. Great organisations have been built by the political socialists among the industrial proletariat. Governments of social democrats have held power in England, Germany and France. And yet, not only have these socialist movements failed to achieve the social revolution, but also, when faced by a definite offensive by the forces of reaction they have, in Germany, England and France alike, failed to make effective resistance and have lost the social improvements gained over years of struggle.

On the other hand, it is among those countries where capitalism has been least developed that there have during these years been the few hopes of the social revolution.

In such countries men have not been subjected to the intensive conditioning imposed by efficient capitalism. The state, though perhaps more ruthless in theory, is, in practice, less efficient and subtle in its oppression. The workers have not been subjected to the demoralisation of bourgeois standards, of social and economic advancement. For them there have been no Jacob’s ladders, no golden apples of the Hesperides. Having escaped the regimentation of great factories, of universal state education, of the giant press, they have retained their natural perceptions, their human individuality and integrity, of which the workers of Britain have lost so much. In these countries the revolution has not retreated through the ineptitude of corrupt political parties that gulled the workers into giving their support to a fatal programme of reformism and appeasement.
Quite apart from the demoralisation induced by the policy of rulers, it seems that there is an inner, fundamental demoralisation in the factory system itself, with its usual accompaniment of a life divorced from any close or lasting contact with rural life. It takes considerable strength to withstand the spiritually destructive elements in a mass life, a life of regimentation and uniformity, of division of labour carried down to the absurdities of the Ford and Bedaux systems. Such a system is in itself a prime cause of the intellectual sterility that falls like a blight over the lives of the great majority of the urban proletariat.

In this connection it is significant to note that among the workers of Britain the most emotionally alive, culturally sensitive and socially conscious, are those whose circumstances of work and life bring them in some close contact with nature, or provide some form of work that allows a certain individual initiative or creativeness. Thus the miners, most of whom still live in fairly close contact with rural surroundings, are the most militant of the British workers.

The present condition of the petty bourgeoisie is more complex than that of the industrial workers, in that they are in transition from being servants of individualist capitalism to being more or less direct agents of the total state. Symptomatic of this is the increase of the civil service establishment since the commencement of the war from half a million to nearly a million bureaucrats. In addition to this we must consider the large number of typical members of the bourgeoisie who have obtained commissions in the army and in various civil defence services. In this way the petty bourgeoisie is rapidly changing into a new class of state parasites similar to the great middle-class bastions of authority that form the bureaucracy and ruling party in both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. As we have already seen even that section of the petty bourgeoisie that continues in private business becomes gradually transformed into agents of the various state ministries, in fact into an unofficial bureaucracy supporting the bureaucracy proper.

This rise of the bureaucracy as a class in itself, rather than as the section of a class is the logical end of the development of industrial capitalism, running parallel with the gradual subjugation and robotisation of the industrial working class and the metamorphosis of individual capitalism into trust and finally state monopoly capitalism. It is a component of the development of the apiary society of totalitarianism, in which a graded and rigid authoritarian hierarchy replaces the partial individual freedom of liberal capitalist society.
These statements have, of course, only a general application. Workers and bureaucrats are first and foremost individuals, men with their own personalities and characteristics. They only become classes and masses when and in so far as they undergo a common reaction to common circumstances. And just as there are events or conditions which make a universal appeal transcending all class reactions, so there are special circumstances which impel the individual to diverge from the common way, and there are also men who remain isolated, to a very great degree, from the mass direction, and direct their lives and opinions as individuals.

Such individually minded men are found in all classes, but they are most frequent among the intelligentsia, and if we study the various trends of thought among intellectuals during recent years we can gain some idea of the tendencies among independently minded men. For individualists, even, form a class in a negative manner through their common reaction against the domination of authority.

The most significant of developments of the attitude among English intellectuals since the war is the swing from cut-and-dried systems, from dogmas, from that very totalitarian tendency which characterises modern society, towards a reintegration of the individual, towards a negation of political dogma and a general opposition to political movements and political action, in fact, towards a personal if not yet a social anarchism.
For the intellectual world the period up to September 1939 was an age of confidence in abstractions, of adoration for the restless, sterile intellect. Political and psychological systems laid out the world’s needs and our own with encouraging simplicity. Demagogues and well meaning scientists prophesied our future with astrological self-assurance. Literary lackeys mirrored the accepted visions of party and politician. And the serious artists were likewise influenced by the prevailing feeling of sureness. But their sureness was pessimistic, of the inevitability of war, for instance, which characterised almost every significant poet.
The accepted systems had their counterparts in the extremes of literature and art. Communism was reflected in social realism, Freudian psychoanalysis in surrealism. The tendency to elevate intellect above emotions dominated various trends towards the intellectualisation and abstraction of poetry and art into conventionalised games with set codes of refined and obscure symbolism. In the representative poetry of the period, the work of Spender, Auden and their followers, we find elements of all three extreme approaches. Almost every poet had a determinist attitude of some kind that gave poetic conceptions a certain mechanistic flavour. The age in its pessimism showed the paradoxical culmination of the nineteenth century materialism with its optimistic belief in progress.

War came, and its complicated and unforeseen events broke the faith in systems. There was a retreat from communism, and surrealism, never robust in England, waned to a game of outdated cranks and phoneys. Above all, there was a general weakening of belief in the omnipotence of the intellect. Most of the near-communists of immediate pre-war years realised the essential identity of communism and fascism, the ineptitude of political parties and the futility of political action. Thus, not only did the younger poets after the early sterile months of the war express an individualistic attitude which in many cases combined with a hostile attitude to the state and war; but many of the older poets, such as Spender and Auden, dissociated themselves from the political movements they had embraced in the past and began to proclaim the necessity for recognising the fundamental importance of the individual.

This movement among the more acutely developed minds of our present society across and not with the contemporary social current is of great importance in demonstrating the awakening of a discontent with modern society more real than that expressed by the political malcontents who really desired an intensification in one direction or another of the attack on the individual by the total society. For the writers are expressing a feeling of hostility towards authoritarianism of which many individuals in all classes are gradually becoming aware.

To recapitulate, the typical form of modern society is the totalitarian state, and the totalitarian state is hostile both to freedom and to the individual. If we regard freedom as necessary, if we regard the free development of the individual as the greatest human good, then we must search for some form of social organisation which will give that freedom instead of the greater or lesser slavery offered by the various totalitarian states.

Socialism from Below - George Woodcock

A short history of Anarchism both as a philosophy and as a movement, written during World War II.

I read a PDF scanned by Zabalaza books, but found the scan format very difficult to follow, so I transcribed it into a plain text version. 

And the group Audible Anarchist has made an audiobook of the text. 

1. The Nature of Modern Society
2. Freedom and Organisation
3. What is Anarchism?
4. Precursors of Anarchism
5. Michael Bakunin and the First International
6. Peter Kropotkin and Anarchist Communism
7. The Growth of the Anarchist Movement
8. Anarcho-Syndicalism
9. Anarchism in America
10. The Russian Revolution and the Makhnovist Movement
11. The Spanish Revolution
12. Epilogue
Appendix

Canvassers Organising in the "Non-Profit" Sector

 

Overview of recent organising efforts by canvassers with the support of the Industrial Workers of the World, and the resistance by their employer. 

Over the past several months workers relying on what's often called the "non-profit" sector, have been organising to tackle systematic workplace grievances and management withholding pay, benefits and pushing through extreme employment dependent performance goals.
Despite the name many companies involved in the charity or non profit sector are actually very profitable, some companies like the Grassroots Campaigns Inc (GCI) which has some very high profile and well funded clients like the AFL-CIO. A number of its workers in several areas, Seattle, Portland, New Orleans etc have started working with the Industrial Workers of the World to establish branches of the United Campaign Workers Union.

The campaigns are passing up recognition from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and are instead consciously pushing a Solidarity Unionism strategy.

Quote:

Last week, the United Campaign Workers union, an affiliate of the Portland Industrial Workers of the World, announced its second organized workplace in its less than two months of existence. (The first was the Campaign for the Restoration and Regulation of Hemp.) Canvassers working for Grassroots Campaigns Inc. (GCI), a third-party contractor that does street canvassing and fundraising for progressive nonprofit organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center, informed management of their unionization drive two weeks ago. The union drive began in response to what workers say were unsustainable turnover rates from firings and overly complicated pay scales.

From Street Canvassing for Good Causes: The Worst Job in Town? by Shane Burley of In These Times
The article is worth reading in full as it gives a lot of detail to working conditions at GCI and the early campaigns of the United Canvassers Union.

The response from management side has been less than welcoming, workers suspected of being organisers have been fired in New Orleans

Quote:

Four workers organizing at Grassroots Campaigns (GCI) in New Orleans were fired for organizing a union. GCI specializes in fundraising for progressive nonprofits, but when it comes to their workers they fail to live up to their progressive image. About a month ago GCI workers in New Orleans filed for a union election to be represented by the IWW. Just prior to the union filing and in the time since workers in the shop have faced severe backlash from management. Four organizers have been fired in the lead up to the union election. Another was using their car for work purposes when it was towed, only to find that the company refused to cover the costs.
These firings and other acts of retaliation have caused severe hardship for GCI workers. The IWW Group in New Orleans is raising funds to help the workers through this tough situation.
We firmly believe that an injury to one is an injury to all. When those on the frontlines of the union struggle face retaliation for their actions, we need to have their backs.

Taken from the relief fund set up to support workers in New Orleans.
And elsewhere in June GCI resorted to lock outs to try and break the resistance from canvassers.

Quote:

On June 9, Grassroots Campaigns, Inc, locked out their unionized employees in response to protected union activity requesting better training for new employees. While the lockout has since been ended through direct action, pickets all over the country, and call-in campaigns, employees were still out of work for two weeks and many will have difficulty making their rent. Solidarity from you can make a big difference in these worker's lives.

This is from the support fund for workers in Seattle.
I've been told that lockouts by GCI are still ongoing in other areas that the company operates in, because the campaign has grown on a more national scale with canvassers and Wobblie branches getting involved in the campaign. Its been growing over several months.

However despite the increased intensity of this workplace struggle it doesn't appear to have affected GCI's more high profile clients. There hasn't been any major response or removal of business ties from GCI by any of the major "progressive" clients, which is quite the extensive list of charities and liberal orgs.

Quote:

Current and Former Clients Include
America Votes
The American Civil Liberties Union
Amnesty International USA
CA League of Conservation Voters
Center for American Progress
Colorado State Democratic Party
College Matters
Common Cause
Conservation Law Foundation
D.C. Public Schools
DCCC
Democratic National Committee
Doctors Without Borders
Equality California
Equality Maine
Everytown for Gun Safety
Freedom to Marry
League of Conservation Voters
Media Matters
MoveOn.org Political Action
Nevada State Democratic Party
Obama for America
Oxfam America
Pennsylvania Coordinated Campaign
People For the American Way
Plan International USA
Planned Parenthood of NYC
Repower America
Respect ABQ Women
Sierra Club
Southern Poverty Law Center
The Media Fund
The Nature Conservancy
UNICEF
VoteVets.org Political Action
WA State Coordinated Campaign
WETA
Working America

Included on the list is the AFL-CIO through the organisation Working America. Neither Working America nor the AFL-CIO have made a public statement condemning the lockouts or supporting the Canvassers in their struggles. It was also found that the current President of the AFL-CIO Richard Trumka had met with senior GCI staff in October 2017.

Now the current campaign began in the summer of 2018 so it may seem a bit unfair to bring up an old meeting (though it isn't a good look for a Union President to be sign glad handing a Union busting company) but GCI has a reputation for Union busting that goes back years. If you go to the wikipedia page for the company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grassroots_Campaigns%2C_Inc.#Controversies it lists many other previous attempts of workers for GCI to organise, mainly through trying to get recognition by the NLRB, and its linked the NLRB receipts. Some of them go back to 2009 and 2011, and the latest was in 2017.

So with that in mind I think it is fair to ask questions of why the AFL-CIO and its President have maintained good relations with this company and have remained silent over its years of mistreatment of its employees, especially now that a national campaign is under way.

But this not unique to the GCI and AFL-CIO, in many ways its endemic to the whole sector. Many high profile Activist businesses and well funded organisations are content to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of the very workers whom do the work to raise the money for all these good causes. It is extremely hypocritical that organisations seek donations on the promise of doing good are themselves indifferent at best, and hostile at worst to exploited and vulnerable workers.
But it is a reminder of the importance of Solidarity from fellow workers.
Support Funds
New Orleans https://fundrazr.com/b1MV2b?ref=ab_5bEsN4mlsz75bEsN4mlsz7
Seattle https://www.gofundme.com/help-illegally-locked-out-workers

The Belgrade 1968 Student Revolution

An account of the student protests in Belgrade in 1968 by one of the participants.



Transcript of the above video.

Program Announcer:

We begin with another set of student protests from 50 years ago. 1968 was a turbulent year in much of Europe and the U.S, a new found sense of free expression had led to demonstrations against the old elites, against the inequalities of capitalism, and against the Vietnam war. That’s certainly what was happening in the West, but there was also unrest in the Eastern bloc and that’s where we’re going now as we take you back to June 1968 and a student revolt in Communist Yugoslavia which exposed deep discontent at the country’s unique system of market socialism. Dina Newman has been speaking to one of the leaders of that protest Sonia Licht.

[Music- Yugoslavian National Anthem Hej Sloveni]

Dina Newman:
Yugoslavia was formed after World War II as a one-party communist state, by its wartime anti-fascist leader Josip Broz Tito. But Tito soon parted company with Moscow’s brand of communism. And adopted a more flexible approach, the so-called Market Socialism. Yugoslav citizens were allowed to travel and work abroad, but Tito’s Communist Party dominated domestic politics. In 1968 many Yugoslav students still supported socialism but they wanted reform.

Sonia Licht:

Definitely, we were the last generation who believed that socialism can be reformed, can be made better according to the needs of its citizens. And what happened during 68 proved to us that that system that we are living in cannot be made better.

Dina:

Sonia Licht was a twenty-one-year-old philosophy student in the university of Belgrade. Growing up in the 1950’s she had been told that Tito’s Communist party ran the country on behalf of the working classes.

Propaganda films of the time showed enthusiastic workers and happy peasants rebuilding the country from the ruins of World War II.

[Film Narrator] Progress is being made in industry and agriculture, in health and in education, in mining and transportation.

Dina:

But by the end of the 1960’s Yugoslavia had one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe and pockets of dire poverty. Yet top Communist bureaucrats enjoyed high salaries and better housing, health care and education for their children. These officials were known as the `Red Bourgeoisie`.

Sonia:
The Red Bourgeoisie, was the leadership of the Communist party, but also directors of huge corporations such as export-import companies, they had all kinds of privileges that the working people did not have.

Dina:

At the same time, yourself and many other students were actually members of the Communist party, so you still believed in the Communist ideology, right?

Sonia:
Well we should make a difference Dina between socialism and communism. We believed in the socialist project, we believed in social justice, we believed in the necessity to have an alternative to hardline Stalinist communism, but also to American Imperialism.

Dina:

Inspired by their vision of socialism as well as the student protests in Western Europe on the 2^nd of June around 4,000 Belgrade University students attempted a protest march. They were [pushed back by armed police and retreated to their Halls of Residence in the so-called student city on the outskirts of Belgrade.

Sonia:
I joined on the next day, the mood was, well something between the kind of euphoria and wondering what is going to be the next steps.

Dina:

Then news came through that the Faculty of Philosophy in the centre of Belgrade had been occupied. Sonia and some of her friends hurried there. They found students as well as hundreds of residents gathered around the faculty building.

Sonia:
The news started spreading, the media also started giving some reports, of course they were terribly negative against the students `class enemies` etc, etc, the usual stuff. But still the citizens of Belgrade started assembling.

Dina:

Encouraged by public support, the protestors renamed their University the Red University of Karl Marx. Day and night, they debated Marxist philosophy and political developments elsewhere in Europe. They drew up a list of demands, including freedom of speech and assembly and the end of the hated Red Bourgeoisie. Many leading intellectuals and artists joined the protest.

Sonia:

For example, I remember the most famous Yugoslav actor whom I met one morning at 4 o’clock in the morning, completely on her own, [hard to make out, best guess is Dušica Žegarac an actress who took part in the student protests, - Transcriber note] was at that time quite young, very famous. She took some gloves and water and she was cleaning the bathrooms. On her own, no one asked her to do it. For me she remained one of the symbols of the 68 movement. Cleaning the loos, which was not the most pleasant thing to do.

Dina:
Because of course you had several thousand people and those bathrooms must have been over flowing.

Sonia:
Of course they were.

Dina:

But on the fourth day of the protest a woman from a local factory approached Sonia. She said that bosses at her factory were organising `hit squads` groups of workers who were going to storm the university building that night. The protest organisers most of the students to leave the faculty building for their own safety, and only a hundred or so of the most determined protestors stayed on. Sonia was among them.

Sonia:

If I would tell you that I was not afraid that wouldn’t be true, in the same time we were relying on each other, we were trusting each other and we were really feeling, thinking there is something so much bigger than us going on that whatever happens, happens.

Dina:
And you were preparing yourself for some kind of violent confrontation?

Sonia:
Yes.

Dina:
And what happened?

Sonia:
Nothing, no one came.

Dina:
Wow, how did you feel after that?

Sonia:
People would expect that you feel happy, that is not that simple, because, you know because we were the last generation to believe in socialism. And then your illusions are being smashed. Every such situation leaves an emptiness in you. So, I remember that feeling of emptiness as well.

Dina:

Thousands of students returned to the protest the next day and the occupation in Belgrade lasted for seven days and nights in all. There were student protests in other parts of the country too, but on the 9^th of June President Tito gave a speech which came as a surprise not only to the students but also to his own advisors.

[Brief excerpt of Tito’s speech in Serbo-Croatian]

Sonia:
He said that the students are right, there are many things that went wrong in the country, he sides with the students; except a small group that are the enemies and that are working someone else’s interest. We immediately knew that the small group are we at the Faculty of Philosophy and that we will be singled out as the enemy. So he did one of his famous, famous manipulations, he was a great manipulator.

Dina:
Most students fell for Tito’s manipulative rhetoric and returned to their Halls of Residence.

[Serbian folk music plays]

Dina:
The student city on the outskirts of Belgrade shook with the sounds of `Kolo` a traditional Serbian circle dance, as the students celebrated their apparent victory.

While most students celebrated, Sonia and her colleagues at the Faculty of Philosophy braced themselves for the reprisals. Sonia and a few other activists were kicked out of the Communist Party, their passports were confiscated and they were barred from jobs in education. Eventually some student leaders were arrested and served jail terms, so on the face of it Tito won. But Sonia believes that their protest was not in vain.

Sonia:
We changed the understanding about the real nature of the regime. We understood that the right to rebel should be a basic Human Right, but it isn’t. And that this so-called socialism cannot be reformed, it has to be destroyed.

Program Announcer:
Sonia Licht, who is now the president of a think tank called the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence was speaking to Dina Newman. And there’s a photo of Sonia on our website, as ever search for BBC Witness.