UK, discussion nighter on workers inquiry, call centres and more...
From  antoniamautempo@gmx.net
Date Sun, 31 Aug 2003 09:55:27 +0200 (CEST)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
________________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
News about and of interest to anarchists
 http://ainfos.ca/  http://ainfos.ca/index24.html
________________________________________________

WE WANT TO C YOU... ...in a discussion night about the Concept of Class Composition,
Creating Chaos in Call Centres, Confusing Company Commanders and Casual Communist Collectives...
Ciao Comrades in the UK, we would like to invite ourselves to a discussion night with you.
Recently arrived from Germany where we took part in two years of
subversive activities in, around and against call centres we now want to
discuss about this experience and the general political sense of
'workers inquiry' as a non-vanguardist way to support the struggle
against exploitation. We thought of focusing on these three points:
a) Workers against Work - An individual attitude or a historical movement?
We want to talk about the concept of class composition and workers
inquiry: two political concepts which were developed within the
revolutionary movement in order to understand the possibility of the
self-emancipation of the exploited. Marx and Kropotkin were already
using questionnaires and detailed research in order to understand the
revolutionary tendencies of their times. A century later in the 50s and
60s revolutionary groups in France and Italy which were fed up with the
politics of the Communist Party, saw the daily experience within the
process of exploitation as the main battlefield of class struggle. Instead
of talking about an abstract 'working class', which would have to be
organised by parties and unions, they referred to a concrete class
composition as the relation between the objective conditions and the
subjective expression of worker's self-emancipation. How useful are
these concepts nowadays, after the carve up of the old centres of class
struggle, the crash of the New Economy and the emergence of
flashmobs? Some ideas:

 http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/wildcat/66/w66e_ope.htm
 http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/engl/e_klazu.htm

b) Militant Inquiry in Call Centres - An Experience
The 'inquiry' in call centres was mainly a search for new settings of
struggle: a new concentration of young, un-skilled, mobile workers,
subjected to a factory-like surrounding, using modern technology, all
over the world. The 'inquiry' was also expression of our own anger:
instead of toiling away isolated in our various jobs we wanted to
politicise our own (working-)life, put it in the centre of attack. We would
like to discuss the difficulties we had to face while doing a collective
inquiry: the decision to go to work somewhere in order to do 'political
activities' there, the sense and non-sense of doing interviews, the
question of writing and distributing leaflets at the workplace. Whoever
wants to read about this experience in advance can have a look on the
Kolinko web-site:

 http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/lebuk/e_lebuk.htm

c) Class Struggle Research Net - A Proposal
In the past month there have been various interesting strikes and other
proletarian struggles in the UK: the fire fighters, school kids, teachers,
some prison revolts, the Devon bus drivers, the wildcat-strike at
Heathrow Airport... but nearly all information we had was filtered by the
bourgeois media and most of the 'smaller conflicts' were not
represented. We would like to set up a network to circulate information
about proletarian struggles in Britain and to discuss them. The aim
would be to enable each other to actually go to the struggles, to get to
know more about them and also support them with useful information,
such as examples of similar situations.

You can invite us to a pint with you and your friends or we can have a
'public meeting'. Weekends are better for us. If you tell us date and
place one month in advance we could prepare a leaflet or a poster and
send it to you. Just write to:

 kolinko.uk@gmx.net

If you want copies of the 'Hotlines'-book about the call centre inquiry,
please send us an e-mail saying how many copies you want (£5 / £6
with post included).

We are planning a tour of various towns at the moment and hope to
have it all arranged by the end of September. Please get back to us by
then. Hope to hearing from you soon!

Stay Rude

Un@s Kalink@s