Revolutionary Strategy Today with the Angry Workers Collective

The working class is everywhere now. So why does it keep slipping out of view the moment we try to talk about power, strategy, and organization? We sit down with Marco from the Angry Workers Collective to dig into a question that quietly haunts modern labor politics: wage work has been universalized across the globe, yet movements get described with vague labels instead of clear class segments and material interests. 

We work through two tools that sharpen the picture: uneven and combined development and class composition. That means looking at how global capitalism links regions through credit, supply chains, migration, and war, while also tracking how cooperation, technology, and workplace discipline produce different working class experiences. From warehouses to factories to schools and hospitals, the episode pushes beyond nostalgia for 20th century union templates and asks what kinds of “advanced points” can actually radiate outward today, and how political bridges get built across fragmented sectors. 

The conversation gets especially concrete in the health sector. We talk about workplace political committees, the Vital Science project, and why hospitals are not just “care work” but complex social production tied to pharma, equipment, data, and community life. From there we connect anti-war sentiment to material questions of worker control, planning, and who decides what our labor is used for as militarization creeps into civilian institutions. If you care about working class strategy, global supply chains, migrant labor, and what “revolution” could practically mean in the 21st century, this is for you. 

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Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

Welcome And Strategy Document Setup

C. Derick Varn 0:02

Hello, and welcome to Bar Vlog. And today I'm with Marco from the Angry Workers Collective. For those of you who don't follow British left, ultra-left adjacent uh groupings, the Angry Workers Collective is primarily based in the UK, really came to the fore about six years ago, as far as our knowledge of you here in America, Wig Class Power at Zero Hours, which was a very interesting book, which got me into looking at the class composition and logistics challenges of organizing West London, which is both very different and yet also structurally similar to things that happen here in the States. And it was interesting to have that contrast. We are primarily talking about a document you released the first part of here in April. People can find it on your website, and I will leak in in the show notes. Called Revolutionary Working Class Strategy for the 21st Century. And part one. So I wanted to really kind of focus in on some key points in this document, but also because it brings up some very big issues in trying to organize today. And one thing I really like about Angry Workers' work as opposed to, I don't know, what can you get put out by uh here the workerist like Jacobin magazine workerists in quotations where there's not an acknowledgement of the deep divides that have been created in labor by production capacity, by immigration, by all kinds of things. So you start in your well, I shouldn't say you, the Angry Workers Collective starts in their strategy document here by calling for us to revise the concept of combined and uneven development and even the concept of class composition. Why do you think we need to start there?

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Yeah, first of all, yeah, thanks for having me, Derek. Yeah, I think we started with like a contradiction that compared to, let's say, 1848 or 1917, the general condition of being a wage worker has been so universalized across the globe. So we can for the first time actually talk about a global working class, which was very difficult to talk about like in 1848 or even in 17. So while the condition has been universalized, actually the somehow the working class disappeared as a subject. So that's like you know, something that everyone has to grapple with when they look at, you know, current movements. People say, okay, they're populist movements or anti-corruption.

A Global Working Class Vanishes

SPEAKER_01 3:04

That's often a very superficial description of these movements. Sometimes the global situation is described as, you know, it's a multiverse or a multitude. So people are not talking actually about different class segments. They're not really trying to understand whether there is something like a global working class emerging and what the main divisions are, but they try to give it like fancy names. Or they they use like geographical descriptions, say, you know, global south, global north, or the Arab Spring when they talk about movements. So our question was like, how what are the theoretical concepts that the revolutionary movement gave us, you know, the movement from the past. And we came across two main concepts that really enable us to develop strategies from within the class. So there have been a lot of revolutionary strategies, let's say from Maoist strategies to encircle the towns, or you know, guerrilla strategies, or let's build big one big union, but to really kind of try to understand it from within the class, for us, these two concepts are you know quite like yeah, the most significant, let's put it like that. And if we look at the concept of yeah, combined and development-permanent revolution that was developed in about 1905-1917, so during a revolutionary cycle and class composition, yeah, end of the mid-end of the 60s. So again, it was like you know, it came out of the moment, so to speak. And yeah, that's what we you know decided to look more into these two concepts, which surprisingly have never really been discussed together, because I think the two segments of the left that refer to them are quite, you know, somehow separated in their debates. So for us, it was interesting to look at these concepts, and I can go into them in a bit if you if you want.

C. Derick Varn 5:08

Oh, I would love you to, although I'm I'm I am interested in the the statement you made there. Which sections of the left are focused on each of these concepts? Like, you know, because I I also agree with you that that you rarely see them tied together other than the angry workers. Maybe Viewpoint magazine kind of tried a little bit, but in general it hasn't really been attempted. But but knowing which sections of the left you see as championing each concept might give us clarity about why they're not combining them together.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

Yeah, I mean, because let's say the concept of uneven combined development was developed around Trotsky, not just by Trotsky. You could say Marx started with it, you know, by looking at how potentially the Optschina, meaning the Russian village commune, could combine with the Western industrial power of you know workers in the more developed West. That was like maybe the foundation of something like a concept of uneven development and how it could combine in a revolutionary moment. But yeah, it was mainly like developed by Trotsky, and therefore I think it's somehow, if at all, discussed then within the Trotsky's left. And class composition came out of a Marxist Italian debate that then, let's say in the English world, has been fairly academic. So it was it became more you know a cultural sociological concept rather than really like a working class concept of working class politics. So I think that might be one of the reasons why, you know, they're separate words, but you're right, like Viewpoint magazine, probably the yeah, the only kind of uh project that came maybe close to you trying to see these concepts together.

C. Derick Varn 7:03

So what is your collective's take on on to use a unfortunate term, but on the relationship between class composition and an even development? Like what's what what are some specific trends that you've seen, etc. etc. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Maybe if you go a step back and try to summarize the concept of uneven and combined development, it might help to see the differences. So, I mean, it was a concept that came out of 1905, you know, the the fact that Russia got beaten by Japan in the uh Russian-Japanese War, and then also out of the you know, first, let's say, Council Revolution. And at the time, large parts of the left saw Russia

Uneven Development Meets Class Composition

SPEAKER_01 7:50

as a in a kind of an in an isolated national kind of framework, and uh mainly seeing it as a you know, anachronistic uh dictatorship that was basically in the way of a democratic progress that could then maybe create a workers' movement. So everyone, like you know, the the German social democracy, but but even Lenin himself saw it mainly like, yeah, it will be maybe capable for you know democratic revolution, but not like, you know, we let's not talk about international or socialist revolution. I think Trotsky tried to understand how the situation in Russia is actually interlinked with the you know a social dimension. And he said, like, under the under these conditions also of national strife of war, even a country like Russia is forced to develop a modern industry, a modern war industry. And Russia can only do that if it engages in in a credit, in a financial relation with the West. So a lot of the credits came via France or you know, Western world, also for grain export. So we've got like an economic interlinking where the engagement with the with the Western economies basically bolstered an anachronistic regime, which at the same time is forced into a development that then it can't contain. And there I think the interesting big starts because if you look, what kind of industries emerged, these were very large, I mean, concentrated in very large scale. So the the average size of an industrial unit in Russia was way bigger than, for example, in compared to England or Germany. So the immediately it was a large-scale industry where there were workers who didn't go through an artisan kind of a trade kind of uh stage, but came from the countryside into these big industries, and there were hardly any kind of sources of or um strata of mediation. So no big trade unions, no bourgeois labor laws. So that could explain why there was an you know a quite a fundamental radicalization taking place that the regime couldn't contain. And I think that was then the basis to think that, okay, if this combination can happen on the political economic level, it could also happen on the on the level of revolutionary politics. So the fact that yeah, a an international relation can bring about an industrial process in a regime that is you know antiquated in many senses and can't contain it, that can also be the material base to have a revolutionary strategy that is international. And I think Trotsky was the only one who somehow maintained that. And I think, yeah, it it was not like out of a an ideology, I think it was based on on a very kind of insightful analysis. Yeah. And if we come to the term or concept of class composition, I think it starts more from the from the actual relation within the within capital, so to speak, whereas like uneven combined development looks at capitalist regions and differences in development. Class composition looks more at how is the class composed within a social production process, and where are the let's say central center points, where are the points where the relation between machinery, technology, cooperation of workers is sharpened to a point where a collective subject emerges that can then become a point of attraction for the wider class. I mean, that's basically what happened in Italy. Yeah, and I think the in that sense we we operate on two different levels in the sense of uneven development, can explain maybe why movements in certain regions of the world can only go so far. In the sense that, you know, in Egypt, if you look at the economy in Egypt where 70% of the food is imported, where you've got a fairly small industrial working class, we can somehow maybe not predict, but we can probably anticipate that it will be very difficult for such a movement to go beyond a certain stage just because of its base. Similar to, I don't know, deindustrialized service economy regions. So what I'm saying is I think we need a concept to understand regional compositions, and but these are not like just how do you say geographically confined, these are crisscrossed by something like global supply chains, by extraction economies, by yeah, currently we see it uh by war, which is like a logistical effort. So I think what we need in order to develop some kind of uh strategy are yeah, say a communist or a working class understanding of development, you know, based on what kind of stage of development for each region and also for you know internal class divisions in these regions, what are the main challenges for movement that occur in these regions? And how how are these regions but still connected to other stages of development through, for example, labor migration, through supply chains, through yeah, uh in current currently war situations. And I think this is just the let's say the basis was what we have to operate, and then the question is how can we organizationally relate to that, you know.

C. Derick Varn 14:02

One thing this brings to mind is the way you're using development is very different than the way a lot of leftists use development, which is very much out of either liberal developmentalism or out of Marxist Leninists used developmentalism, which are weirdly kind of similar as one of the things that I've, you know, there's ways in which Jeffrey Sachs can sound like a Leninist depending on the day. So when we talk about developmental stages here, how would we come up with that? And how would it be different than the way we kind of typically talk about development now?

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Yeah, I guess I mean, with class composition, you could say, like, okay, development of the relation between workers on capital in the sense

Development As Power Inside Production

SPEAKER_01 14:50

do we have a collective workforce? Do we have a workforce that you know cooperates on a mass level that is connected somehow to also the productive knowledge of the production process that they are situated in? Kind of what is the role of uh unemployment? How prevalent is unemployment? What about an informal sector? Not in the sense of, you know, is is there still development to do, but like from a let's say class point of view, it's the the question is always what can different segments of the class bring to a movement? Let's say uh the the experience of capitalist productivity, if you know that you know you you you shape the world through your labor, you feel the let's say the contradiction between what capitalist technology and knowledge would be enable us to and what the reality is. I mean, this kind of contradiction is I would say it's the main revolutionary contradiction between the reality of the application of technology and knowledge now and the potential that it had to make a good life for everyone. But this contradiction is experienced differently according to what your class position is, even within the working class. So if you work in a big warehouse, you have an idea of how many goods are circulated in the economy, but you don't necessarily have a good understanding of how they are produced. Maybe if you are in a fairly high-paying job in a car factory, you you roughly understand how despotic capitalist productivity is and how it could be organized differently without major, let's say, major problems, let's say. But you might not understand the you know a condition of being excluded, of having to deal with the state power in a very direct sense, or even with you know, like with the question of yeah, of of yeah, exclusion and and and oppression. So these kind of segments would somehow have to combine within the movement in order to make it revolutionary. You know, it's not like necessarily, oh, we all need class consciousness and we all have to kind of understand that we are part of a class, but these different segments have to come and combine in a movement where the question of you know fighting against the oppression of being poor and marginalized, and the collective power that you have by being in a in a production process together with others, well, this comes somehow together and forms the basis for an alternative. And yeah, I think for this the problem, how can these segments come together? The the organizational question has to be answered out of that. That's the main challenge, you know. The organization is not like a big vehicle where you can recruit people too, and then these kind of class differences are somehow dissolved. I mean, think organization always exists. Like, how can advanced points of the class, not because of you know their consciousness, but because they are in a material position, maybe to influence struggles in a different way than other parts of the class? How can how can you build political bridges? How can you somehow create a mirror and say, like, okay, these are our conditions as a class, and they are they exist in a certain separation? How can we how can we uh relate to that politically?

C. Derick Varn 18:49

One thing this leads me to to think a lot about is the relationship of this development patterns. I mean, globally, I lived in Egypt actually for a little while, believe it or not, and remember the the sugar riots that were led by working class people when they floated the currency and everything went to went from bad to a lot worse for a little while, which was then used by the LCC government in response to Islamist attacks during that period to invoke the national security law, et cetera, et cetera. And I remember thinking about the way things like the Arab Spring and the reaction to the Arab Spring are reported, and like the class dynamics of the Arab Spring were completely missed, right? But I also started

Why Old Union Models Fail

C. Derick Varn 19:36

thinking about the interconnectedness of it all because, you know, for example, just because you brought a huge example I know a lot about, you're right, it imports most of its food now, and that's actually historical anomaly. It used to be the breadbasket for southern Europe and North Africa, but that's not the case anymore. And mismanagement of land, a whole bunch of reasons. But there is a way in which you know the Egyptian worker is like completely outside of what the European worker is experiencing, and yet also completely dependent on what the European worker is experiencing because of exports and everything else. I think here in the States, to kind of tie to maybe drive this point a little bit more home, the economy here is you know way different than Egypt's, and yet the service sector looks a lot like the Egyptian worker because there's very little relationship to production, it's mostly been automated. I mean, it exists, but it's been automated. There is uh factory jobs which are people focus on, or like mining jobs, another historical focus, are in the United States fairly high-paid jobs. They're rare. You don't that many meet that many people with them. I mean, if you were to manufacturing and mining together, I think, and not separate management and non-management job here, that's that's between 11 and 15 percent of the economy, of the of the jobs in the economy, excuse me, not of economic output. And yet when we talk about organizing labor and unions, people will speak of repeating unionization patterns from these this time period where that percentage of the of the working class was like closer to 40, maybe 45 percent in those fields, and you had very little automation and massive shops. So when you you you when you unionize a shop, you're unionizing, I don't know, one, two, three. 3,000 people, as opposed to when you use an ISA shop, I don't know, Starbucks is 15 people, and at a factory it's 300. How do you get people to look at these relations? And I mean that's what we're talking about, but to get like workers to look at these relations, to get people to actually think about how these things are related, but they have to change how we organize. Because I am very frustrated with a lot of the, you know, I'm glad to see a labor left in the United States again, but it talks like it's in the 1950s.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Yeah, I think I mean quantity is always difficult. Of course, you know, the let's say the relative number of industrial workers is shrinking. But if you compare it to, let's say, Russia 1917, where let's say the political quality of, you know, a very, very small part of the of the whole population were working in, you know, in bigger factories then, but they were able to produce a form of organization, the council, out of their condition as workers that somehow could become a social form. I mean, it could become a form that also, let's say, unites either workers or back in the day when there were still some peasants to you know develop that social form of the council into you know hegemonic form. And I think even with Egypt during the uprising, somehow, I mean, there were centers like Mahala, so like big textile towns basically that had a political radiation to the rest of the country. There were, you know, I was in Iskandria in Alexandria, and they had like workers from Pirelli for a big tire factory. Obviously, quantitatively a small part, but they they played a certain role of forming what they called an you know an assembly of workers of Iskandria where other workers could kind of relate to you. And that happened when a lot of them also went to Tahir Square and formed some kind of a social space where, let's say, people from even smaller companies, factories who were not paid went to Tahir Square and presented their their experience to the wider urban, let's say, masses that were present. I think again, I think we have to ask ourselves what are the the potentials and limits of each class segment in such a moment, and how can we, let's say, develop a plan of yeah, I mean the it's it's it's an old plan, but like what is what does it mean the the taking over the means of production? You know, what what what is a what is revolution nowadays in the 21st century? And I think there's still like this there's a kind of dichotomy between either thinking about it in terms of uh you know civil war or general strike, and both seem like difficult, you're right, you know, in the in the current situation, either seems either to you know being pulled into the enemies kind of strategy in terms of civil war, or kind of thinking that we can solve the problem gradually, you know, build to the general strike and we just flip it over and we've got a new society. Um yeah, I would I would think um yeah, with to kind of analyze what could be, let's say I don't know so much about the US kind of condition, but if you have kind of you know a segment like the tech workers who become politically, let's say, uncomfortable with the the type of work that they're doing, you know, I mean it's mainly like a political unease of workers at Google or wherever that their labor is used for military or surveillance purposes. We've got like, you know, a large health workers and teachers kind of sector that has got close links to, let's say, impoverished communities in their areas. So they express their own like interest as workers, as you know, more or less professional workers, but they they reflect also the situation of the people that they you know deal with as patients or or students? And I think you know there are still some industrial areas that that can create like points of attraction. The question is like within these let's say expressions of different segments, do we think that's enough to create one big organization for all of them, or do we really have to think of a what could a process look like of organization that somehow dissolves a material separation between the segments but also expresses something like an alternative plan in terms of economy? And there I could talk maybe a bit more about what we're doing in the health sector later on, because I mean that's somehow related. It's somehow the political political proposal that we have, and yeah, it's related to the question how how you can combine the idea of let's say social power, which we need as workers to defend ourselves, with the question of control, who actually controls the workplace and what what our work is used for, and development of uh an alternative plan, uh you know, an idea of transformation. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 27:45

Yeah, I uh there's a lot to think about there. I I want to come, I'm gonna put a bullet point in uh stuff about specific tactics with healthcare workers. I deal a lot with teachers, and I I agree with your observation that teachers are in this weird, you know, teachers and healthcare workers both are in this weird proletarianized professional worker category. And we have a lot of pressures on us. When we compare ourselves to other professionals, we don't look so good. But if you compare us to the general proletariat, we're still kind of on the higher end of things. And yet also we are exposed to, you know, the even if we're not in the impoverished parts of the community, unless you're in a very, very particular kind of in America kind of school district, you're you see massive poverty, etc. etc. And I feel like it gives us a little bit of a of a double consciousness because we have the concerns of a proletarianized white-collar worker, but we also like see these communities which we see ourselves serving, and we don't see ourselves as exploiting, and you know, we're also kind of not really exploiting them. So we we do have investment there. It's not always clear, like I think in a lot of teachers, it also leads to places where we have conflicting interests within ourselves due to what we see. But I do think that is why teachers and nurses tend to be more radical rank and file union people, they're not so much in our bureaucracy that we can talk about that later, too. And I think that's an interesting thing that to take on because there's been a section of the left here. I don't know if this discourse is going on in the UK or in Europe, about about teachers being part of professional managerial class and casting the professional managerial class as completely apart from the workers. The issue that I have with that is that there that that discourse became popular at the very moment that these institutions, even some of the higher level ones like doctors, are being proletarianized. We might call them labor aristocrat proles, but they are being proletarized, they're moving from technically being small business owners to being wage holders. You know, that's just an objective fact. And they are also being labor disciplined in ways they have not been historically. And so it's an interesting place to be. And I liked you, I liked reading your work here and Angry Workers in General back when I read Class Power, because it acknowledged that this is messy, and it's not just messy in these sectors, it's also messy in logistics and production. Like that there are major tensions. I mean, one of the things you you write about, and maybe we can talk about this because it affects this is something that clearly affects Europe and the United States, is the way migrant workers and immigrants are used, and what they're used for, and how and how they're even stratified amongst themselves, etc. etc. etc. You kind of mention this and allude to it in this piece. It's a major part of other works I've read by the Angry Workers Collective. So, how do you incorporate like the tensions of migration and unstable populations into this analysis?

SPEAKER_01 31:13

Yeah, but as you said, like migrant labor, that's a you know, what what kind of labor are we talking about, you know? Right. So that's a big question. You've got like agriculture labor now in the UK, they wouldn't even find like people from Romania or even probably Ukraine to work on the fields here anymore. They have to go to Indonesia or Nepal nowadays to get a very like seasonal workforce. That's obviously very different from, let's say, uh the tech sector, you know, software programmers, uh, engineers who come. Even in our hospital, I would say, where you've got

Migrant Labor As Division And Spark

SPEAKER_01 31:49

a lot of migrant workers. You you who would are we talking about? About the Sudanese cleaner? I mean, are we talking about the nurse from India or the Philippines who have be has been recruited and you know her flight was paid for, and obviously she has to sign contract for two years to work in the trust, otherwise she has to pay the money back. But that's quite different again from let's say the you know the cleaning workforce. And again, it's different from the consultants. I mean, there are a lot of uh you know, migrant doctors who come from Myanmar or from other areas of the world. So the fact that they're all migrants, I mean, there is something about the fact that they all bring their own experiences from other countries, and we've seen that that can be you know very decisive for workers' struggles. For example, in Italian logistics strikes, it was mainly workers from northern Africa who were somehow influenced by the Arab Spring and then brought this kind of spirit and courage into the strikes of the logistics industry. So that is always like the let's say the the hope that we have that the fact that migrants come from from areas where they had exposure or actual experience to social struggles, that they can kind of somehow import that into our class struggle, which historically is, you know, it's yeah, there are many examples of that historically. Otherwise, yeah, I mean the the state, let's say in the UK, like in the US, deals with the fact that on one hand they're very dependent on on migrant labor, but at the same time they want to, let's say, create a political pressure that these these workers are not supposed to raise any claims. So that's what's happening in our hospital as well. Like the state changed the visa regulation and the the general, let's say, regulation for residency rights. So that that creates an atmosphere of yeah, first of all, of division and fear, but also yeah, of of anger of a lot of colleagues who say, like, you know, we we take care of this kind of aging population here, and they want us to work 10 years before our kids can, you know, go to university like everyone else. What the fuck? So obviously, we hope that that somehow can radicalize the struggle at the moment, and in the last years, it's somehow made it more difficult because people have to get to know each other. People feel replaced, you know, that they can be replaced. So, at least in the UK, this potential of migrant, migrant labor, the kind of radicalizing potential you see only in some sectors. For example, cleaning in London, which was you know for a while dominated by workers from Latin America who had you know a high level of political exposure and experience, they brought that into an organizing effort amongst migrant cleaners in in London or partly also outside of that. But yeah, I think I mean in the current political landscape in the UK, which has got the revival of this idea we we build the left party outside and our left of labor. I think our our proposal is more like let's start political committees in in sectors that are relevant for social production and reproduction, and see politics not as something that is somehow outside of that. You know, there's a very harsh division in the UK between so-called political and economic struggle. It's a very kind of a trade union consciousness of what it means to do workplace politics. So for us, the first step in that sense would be to uh politicize work again in the sense ask why is the work that we're doing organized in the way that it is organized? Who decides about that? Why is it often irrational? Is that just mismanagement or is there something systemic about it? And that's what we're trying to do with in our current project, Vital Science in the Health Sector. And yeah, if you're interested, I can talk about that later on a bit.

C. Derick Varn 36:20

I'm very interested. We'll circle back to that in a minute. I wanted to ask you there's I think I'm gonna pick the talk about surprised population first. You this piece critiques the idea of suppressed population, which in the United States gets, I feel like it comes like you'll see it a lot in an economic down cycle, then it'll go away, and you see it again in an economic down cycle, and then it'll go away. Right now, because of fears of AI and because of increasing youth unemployment and long-term structural unemployment, you you I even see non-Marxists using surplus population again. So I wanted to go to the critique of surplus population and the challenge that that idea poses for organization.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Yeah, I mean, uh, I think even since 2008 crisis, I mean, they they are a bit scared of

Rethinking Surplus Population For Organizing

SPEAKER_01 37:12

like creating this type of mass unemployment that you saw in the 20s. So and at the same time, yeah, there is uh also because of you know COVID and certain kind of particular conditions, there's a still a kind of labor shortage in in many areas. At the same time, yeah, you've got thousands of bullshit jobs where you can easily imagine that you know that's the first thing that goes in a crash. It's kind of you know, they won't bring your McDonald's straight to your bedroom anymore. They, you know, that won't be something that I don't know, companies can make money with. But I don't know, yeah. I think I don't know. I'd like experience in India where I lived for three years, where people often talk about the slums as a kind of major sign of surplus population. And now you can say, okay, maybe the slums that were are around Delhi are not the slums that are meant. But there you don't have even the informal economy is very tied to either running the city or and therefore reproducing wider labor force, or are very tied to the wider industrial process, textile industry, car industry. I mean, that's all happening in the in the slums. So I'm not yeah, I'm not sure about surplus population as a stable subject. I think there's there's always there will always be like parts of the working class that are you know underemployed or that are put in a position of yeah, of exclusion. But I think this is this is a kind of a temporary thing, you know. Even like when we look at the refuge so-called refugee crisis in in Germany, where where I'm from, yeah, you had an enormous influx of uh people from war areas like Syria or or elsewhere. And it was like you know, in you know, hundreds of thousands. But now like uh all Amazon warehouses in in Germany are basically run by, you know, the main language there is Arabic. So it's like the the economy kind of integrated these kind of refugees who were seen as, you know, this is a surplus population now entering Germany. And it's kind of you know, they managed fairly well to integrate it into the lower wage segment, and yeah, all you know, from Amazon to other, yeah, also you know, less agriculture, but like uh some of the manufacturing, you've got you know refugees from the from the civil wars. So, in that sense, for me the question is like how how can you see that relation between, let's say, productive centers and and areas of underemployment. Now, I think workers always found answers to that, in the sense of I don't know, unemployed workers putting pressure on on workers in in factories to stop working overtime. You know, in times of, let's say, high unemployment, whoever works overtime should be stopped. And there, you know, there were in the 70s in Italy a lot of efforts to, you know, any kind of weekend shift that were running, and they would just you know go in bigger groups of you know, so-called proletarian rounds and just shut down the the factory, you know, and uh say, you know, this is not this is not on in time of you know, after 73 after increasing unemployment. So for me the question is more like how do you how do you make use of both the experience of you know immiseration and collective anger that comes from that and the remaining productive force that you know the class has.

C. Derick Varn 41:10

Hmm. I guess this gives gives a this gives us a way to talk about your specific efforts in nursing before I go into revolutionary cycles. You know, what have the Angry Workers collectively been doing with with healthcare workers, and what have you seen from that interaction?

SPEAKER_01 41:30

Yeah, I mean, I think with COVID, we could see that there's something like an international, maybe not a wave, but some kind of new dynamic within the health sector. Because, first of all, there was for the first time like a mass acceptance that uh health workers and other so-called relevant or existential workers keep the keep our society

Building Political Committees In Hospitals

SPEAKER_01 41:58

going. So there was a certain confidence. On the other hand, it overstretched a lot of you know hospital workforces to say, like, you know, this is not sustainable anymore, but also we've got the somehow you know more public confidence. So we saw like more kind of strikes in Germany, in the US, also in the UK, the first strike of nurses in 30 years. So we felt that was kind of interesting. I started working in the hospital about five years ago, and I think the first thing that yeah, that interested us was to say this is not necessarily because we think the health sector is the next big, I don't know what, sector where you know we can develop a lot of power or where the new kind of class subject comes from. But it was more like to create one example of trying to create what we say is like political committees in a specific workplace or or industry, and what what is the role of such kind of political committee? And if we look at the health sector, we said, okay, you know, health is generally discussed as care, you know, caring work, emotional work, emotional labor, which it is. I mean, I worked on a respiratory war during COVID, and obviously there were a lot of, let's say, tragedies, personal tragedies, and a lot of emotional work around that. But it is also very complex labor. If you if you look at a hospital, it's connected to university science production, knowledge production, you know, it's connected to international global pharmaceutical and equipment manufacturers, it's connected to the community. I mean, uh, hospitals range. I mean, when we, let's say, discharge our patients from the surgical ward where I'm working now, we do very detailed surveys of their living conditions. You know, do they own the house or not? Are there tenants? Do they live alone? Uh What do they have at home? What does their nutrition look like? So it's like a it's like a sensor into the wider class. And I think for us the question is how can we politicize this as a laboratory of a potential social alternative? I mean the NHS, that's 1.4 million workers with the most complex supply chain, if you look at all the stuff that we're using, with very, very complex, let's say, circulation of information and decisions. I mean, it's the just the amount of information that the health sector creates in terms of new types of treatments, how, you know, best practice, you know, all the information about individual patients, you know, it's kind of mind-boggling basically. And the question is like this is happening in the capitalist, you know, although the NHS is public, but still like the inner hierarchies, this kind of the inner internal structure, the dependency on the on the wider, you know, both financial budget, but also like the corporations that are necessary, from software to pharma to whatever. How is it running now? And how could it be done differently? I think you know, this is somehow the the role that we see, have a have a debate about from the very various perspectives of different workers in this very complex, let's say, organism, how they experience the systemic contradictions in their daily work, and how how they think that, you know, let's say, in a in a moment where we expand the worker control within the sector, uh, what would what would be the first task in a in the hundred days of taking over this this kind of organism? What would be uh you know the first hundred days of a health sector under worker control? What what are the, you know, what are the main things that we can do in a short period of time and you know what are the things that have to be done? And that, yeah, turn that into a discussion that is, let's say, closely related to the day-to-day struggles, because all that makes very little sense or is becomes very abstract if it's not connected to the daily question of you know who controls the way that we work on the ward, who controls what kind of implants we are using, and if the let's say the cobalt that is used in the hip implant is coming from a mine in Congo, and these kind of questions, you know, what is what is the power relation in the day-to-day work? And for that, we you know, we try to use things like the magazine, where we've got different, you know, interviews from pharmaceutical workers to you know, hospital to community workers, and where we discuss like, yeah, what's the role of the health sector in a revolutionary transition or whatever you want to call it?

C. Derick Varn 46:59

Well, I you know, that this actually brings up a larger theoretical question than I've gotten from your from this piece that we're discussing, and also some other pieces of angry worker collective work. And that is you talk a lot about revolutionary cycles. I wanted to ask you what drives these revolutionary cycles? Why do they seem to come up like every like generation and a half? But although we haven't had one in a while. You know, there does seem to be some consistency to this, but there's other ways in which these revolutionary cycles, if you just take them as hyperdetermined or automatic, you're gonna be wrong too, because they don't look like each other. The the the late 60s to 70s looks very different from the 19 from 1914 to 1930. So, what do you think is driving these cycles? And then,

What Drives Revolutionary Cycles

C. Derick Varn 47:47

you know, just to pivot to where we're going, I'm probably gonna ask you like, what are we when we do these things like the organizing committees for the nurses, how does that relate to these cycles? Hmm.

SPEAKER_01 47:58

I don't know. I mean, historically you probably have like, you know, a big and either like a global situation of crisis through war or you know, other forms of crisis that forces people to face the fact that you know we're living in a situation where you know things are not just getting better by by themselves or by voting for a different government, or you know, it's kind of an impasse, but at the same time, the realization that you know we are we are able to kind of pose an alternative. So the it's not just like the immiseration, it's not like okay, this is really the crisis is really, really deep now, but it's uh the feeling that you know potentially the situation could be much different if we and we've got the means to to make it different. What is what is necessary for that? It's a good question. Uh we talked to Sergio Bologna, who's like a you know an old comrade from from Italy, who was part of the 60s, and he said there's a certain, let's say, contradiction when it comes to organizational question, also like in a in a in a revolutionary cycle, which we can say maybe the 60s, 70s in Italy were. And he said, like a lot of the workers that formed, let's say, the autonomous revolutionary organizations, collective assemblies, had some background often in the mainstream, let's say either in the Communist Party, Socialist Party, or often in trade unions. So there's there is like a a certain continuation between, let's say, the the institutions or and the organizations of the labor movement. But the contradiction is that these organizations, once the revolutionary cycle starts, become too, you know, they turned into complete like stumbling blocks, they you know, into barriers for the development. So on one hand, you've got like, you know, there seem to be a precondition, a certain kind of socialization of individuals within something like the labor movement. On the other hand, these organizations that maybe transmitted some of the that knowledge, they become a hindrance. And I don't know, I think you have to, if you want to organize, you have to keep that in mind. That organize there is a, you know, the question is like, how does organization relate to something like spontaneity, to, you know, revolutionary chaos? I think part of strategy is not so much like how can you build up your organization to a degree that it becomes like, I don't know, politically dominant, but rather how do we how do you relate to the you know advanced and not so advanced moments in a movement? And how do you you know push the let's say revolutionary content, communist content in each situation? And that's yeah, I think that's different from the understanding of most of the left who you know think okay, you have the program and then you have got the mass organization and from there you go. And I'm not saying that you know the the work, the day-to-day work that people think the mass organization should do is probably correct, and it becomes like the a fertile ground. But once you you enter like a revolutionary cycle, I think you know to to imagine that you are then the let's say the the main container of the movement or the vanguard is is often kind of rather misleading if you look at actual revolutionary moments, no.

C. Derick Varn 51:44

Well, uh that that last part of that statement gets me thinking about something I wanted to ask you about, which is where do political activists, like you know, communist quotations or non-quotations, sincere or not, organizers play a role if they don't see themselves as part of the class, which is you know often, you know, sometimes even factually true. I mean, like the number of people I know who are professional, you know, socialist activists who make their living as professional socialist activists, which means that they rely on donations. One could even see them as either, you know, depending on their relationship to the state, either a subordinate of the state or a subordinate of rent seeking.

The Problem Of Professional Activists

C. Derick Varn 52:32

How should they how should we relate to those kinds of activists and what role can they play positively or negatively?

SPEAKER_01 52:43

Well, I mean it's yeah, it's a difficult question. I think it's always the question, uh at what service are you? Are you are you you know doing this for your personal career to write your PhD or to I don't know run your particular organization, or even to is it mainly because you you know have got uh then a privileged situation and an income, or do you put it at the service of the movement? I think that should always be the question. I think I think it's a form of alienation. I don't know why people would choose to be outside of the class in the sense of, you know, I'm a professional labor journalist, or you know, I'm you know writing books about class struggle. I find it personally quite an alienating thought. I would I would like to be and experience physically and mentally the conditions that I'm writing about, and uh, you know, it allows me to also relate on a much deeper, not just kind of cognitive level, to the conditions of the people that you know I want to organize with. So why would I choose an existence where I'm outside of that? But some people do that for various reasons, and some people do it in an okay way, I think. You know, there are people who write you know research about a particular historical struggle or ongoing tendencies within the class and try to, you know, do a lot to bring that back to the class and into the debate. I mean, I think that's minoritarian, but a movement has to, I think, develop standards, you know, to these comrades and say, like, okay, if we want to organize together, you're not just coming here, uh, make a few quick interviews and then go back and write your PhD, but you know, are you either part of this and then we discuss together how your your free time and your privilege and access to, let's say, libraries or you know, the academic circus, you have to collectivize that and you make you make it part of a collective decision. How do we best utilize the fact that you might have more time at the moment to write something, or you know, it has to be, you know, has to become like a collective issue, which is yeah, it's not it's not easy because people often treat it as you know their their personal thing. I'm so and so, I'm doing, you know, I'm the labor journalist, or I'm doing this and that, you know.

C. Derick Varn 55:18

It it seems to be a challenge, in so much that I think I don't I also agree with you that not all these activists are bad, that they could be useful. Some of them are highly deleterious, but you the big thing is like, how do you have a standard for for sorting that out? Like you know, what what is the minimum requirement of participation? If you're going to, you know, let's say you're you're not just a student, you're not just like a grad student, let's say you, I don't know, do a podcast. Because in the United States, we have a proliferation of left-wing podcasts. I say this as a left-wing podcast, that have done about as much for the struggle as the TV news, which is to say almost nothing. They I'm not gonna say it's never anything. I mean, news is important, and sometimes getting class-oriented news out is important, but there's also the paradox that we've like created you know, minor socialist millionaires off of the off of the media, and yet the political stages here are probably worse than they were when this trend began. And so, like, I like this idea of had of like collectively coming up with like what is acceptable and not acceptable for activists to do, you know, what is acceptable and not acceptable for activists to to what do they have to give back? If if you are profiting somehow from this, what what are you what do you owe? And I think these are very important questions.

SPEAKER_01 56:46

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 56:48

I I think to come back to like specific things, and we talked a little bit about the healthcare sector. What other sectors have you have you you guys in the Anglicers Collective seen develop workers' committees and councils and and whatnot? And and where do you see them going?

SPEAKER_01 57:05

I mean, to be honest, like in the UK, there's there's not so much there's a traditional, let's say, more Trotsky's left who might organize in bigger workplaces, but it's very limited in the sense maybe the railways in London Underground and the post office. This is maybe where some of them also try to not just work and take on trade union positions, but actually maybe produce like a magazine or a workplace group or these kind of things. But it's very it's very minimal. If you look at like 100,000, 200,000 people who are in the orbit of, let's say, the the new the new left outside of labor, very I think very few of them work collectively, let's say, in a in a certain industry and go beyond, let's say, in ordinary rank and file union activity, which is okay. I'm not like saying that it's not a good thing to do. I'm a union rep myself. But to really like come up with a an internal critique of one's industry and say, okay, this is how under capitalist conditions things are organized, how can we organize it differently? What is the power question here? You know, it's not it's not just about having better ideas, but like how to enforce them. All that is a very marginal, seems a very marginal existence at the moment. If you look at you know Italy currently, I think the situation might be more interesting. Kind of the biggest movement, mainly also about you know the war question, but it has brought kind of new initial like working class initiatives together. Some old ones, for example, the dock workers, who, despite all the reduction in, you know, in terms of quantity, obviously dock workers you know have been kind of minimized by containerization, automation, and things, but there's still a lot of them around, and they still have an internationalist perspective due to the work that they're doing. And in Italy, they had a major influence. We had like the car workers of GKN who were like occupied the factory now for I don't know how long, over years, and said, okay, we we want to convert this former car factory into a let's say community-owned or worker-controlled productive capacity to produce things that are more sensible than individual passenger cars, migrant workers in in agriculture or and textile, new student movements. So we can see that somehow on the background of the anti-war movement, parts of the class are moving that again because of their particular position, be it be it like dog workers with international links, car workers with a productive collectivity, or migrant workers with like you know, very immediate understanding of how state violence and and industry works together. I think that you know that that can be a basis to reconfigure something like a class movement. But these are only like the the parts. It's the question is like how do you how do you relate to each other? How do you form like a debate about you know social alternative beyond you know an immediate reaction to the war or an immediate reaction to oh they're gonna close our factory down? But yeah, I think it's there. The question is, where are the political collectives that somehow debate that you know together? Or who you know, collectives that intervene, that take a responsibility for either a small working class area or a certain workplace and say, okay, we we contribute on on the basis that we are working in, you know, in our case, in a hospital with 18,000 people. It's an international workforce. We take on the little responsibility to try to connect that collective or not yet collective of 18,000 people with a wider debate about war, migration, you know, social change. And that's that's a very it's a kind of a basic task, but you know, it's it's not often it's not often done, or we don't find uh a lot of people who who do similar things, let's put it like that.

C. Derick Varn 1:01:40

In regards to the current war or wars, there's at least three that I know of and its effect on the working class. I I think it it is interesting how much industry, probably more so in Europe than the United States, but it'll hit in the United States eventually, has been disrupted by these wars. What has the working class response been? Because in the United States, for the first time, the general public seems to not support these wars at all, even in the beginning. This and that that the that's not supporting them in the beginning is somewhat new. It also seems like they don't benefit economically from the wars in the way that they used to in the past. Production just doesn't

War Economy And Workplace Militarization

C. Derick Varn 1:02:27

really go to workers in the same way. But how's it affecting Europe? And, you know, as implied by your last statement, how do you turn you know, legitimate and necessary anti-war sentiment? I'm not crapping on anti-war sentiment in any way, form, or fashion, but like into something more systemic than that, because you don't want it to go away if the war just happens to end.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:53

Yeah. I mean, let's say Germany, because it's you know probably more even involved in the sense of the planning for a future larger war than maybe even England, although England obviously is more involved in with the US Army. I think in Germany, people are aware of the let's say inflationary consequence of the war, uh, in the sense like, you know, people see a connection between austerity and rearmament, or shifting of, let's say, state money from a sector that is mainly dealing with reproduction of the local class into, you know, re-armament. That's something that I think it's people know. The question is like do people develop an idea how their particular situation might be involved? And in the health sector, for example, the German state changed the law that in in case of war, you basically conscripted as a health worker. They know that the current capacity of army hospitals and whatever, they're they're nothing. I mean, they they would fill up within like two days of intensity, like in Ukraine, with that kind of level of injuries and casualties. So they will need the civilian health sector to basically bolster that war effort and patch enough soldiers up to go back to the front line because these kind of large-scale wars wouldn't work if there wouldn't be a health sector. I mean, you would run out of soldiers basically. A lot of the injuries are you know minor in the sense that you know you can be patched up and be sent back in in a month. And wars nowadays they depend on that. So there is you know a starting debate amongst health workers and doctors to say we don't we don't want that, you know, our hospital is kind of integrated into in this in these kind of maneuvers and army strategies. So nowadays there are often, you know, from workshops to actual, you know, they it's normally done as like, oh, we we do some practice for an emergency case. But it becomes clearer and clearer that that emergency case is uh is a future war. So like health workers question, you know, with send their own means the this kind of militarization of their sector. School students, I mean, there were bigger demonstrations in in various towns in Germany against a plan to reintroduce conscription. So I think you know car workers who, you know, Germany is hit by automobile crisis like everywhere, and they they think they're thinking about converting some of the current capacities into rearmament or you know, weapon production. So there is, you know, a small small voices that question that within the sector. I think to answer the question of you know what happens if the war is Over and does it disappear? I mean, I think we have to politicize all that in the in the direction of you know worker control. Like who why why should it be the the boss who decides how we produce and what we produce? Why should in our case, in our hospital, the CEO is like an army man, ex-army, he invites the army to have recruitment stalls inside our hospital. We should have uh you know a say, we should have a say in this, you know, and basically say, like, you know, question the dominance of markets and corporate decisions over the labor of over all labor. And I think that's that's what could happen out of that, you know. Maybe initially it's a reaction to you know being drafted in things and more immediate relation to the war, but like what could come out of it is like a larger question of you know who who controls what we're doing.

C. Derick Varn 1:07:03

Yeah, and I guess is my final question. It seems like one of the major things we that you feel we need that to focus on is worker control, but worker control in the context of a global of a global proletariat that is both semi, I mean universalized is not quite true. I mean, there's still, you know, probably 20% of the population is not any sort of wage owner or peace worker, but near universalized, I mean, definitely more than any other time in the past, and but one that has a lot more divisions in terms of just raw material interests than you know we could have assumed in the beginning of the 20th century. So, so how do we push for worker control with that reality

Worker Control And The Planning Question

C. Derick Varn 1:07:50

in mind that we know there's going to be tensions between sectors and whatnot?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:55

Hmm, good question. No, I mean, like um I think a lot of the experiments that come out of, for example, factory takeovers like we saw in Argentina or even now the one in Italy with GKN, I think they remain necessarily like small, small examples where you know workers realize okay, we we don't need management to do our job. But I think the the challenge will be to say okay, we we remain part of a larger movement, and our particular factory or workplace becomes like an asset of the movement, a meeting ground, a kind of convergence place where uh different yeah, different sectors of the class can can come together. Yeah, otherwise, I mean it's a larger debate, the so-called whatever planning debate. So we had a few discussions about the old text, uh fundamental principles of communist production and circulation, I think it's called in England, English, of like council communists. And I mean, that's a debate of you know, trying to find a system, labor time accounting, and so on, that somehow guarantees or kind of facilitates that workers keep in control of the planning process and that there's not like a sharp separation between the the planners who control and the workers? So it's kind of these kind of debates I think are fruitful because yeah, they they enable us to to really think a bit deeper. What is what is a communist mode of production? Is it just that you know the the product is shared out equally and that labor is shared out equally, or is there a deeper qualitative shift actually in the process of producing what we share out? And what is you know what is possible under given conditions to create a new form of let's say social labor that you know from questioning division of intellectual manual labor or you know sharp lines between production, reproduction, what yeah, what what could it look like? And I think we are at a point where let's say the the motivation to to create a social alternative also becomes part of the struggle. I mean, it used to be, I mean, or our position used to be okay, let's not worry too much about developing social on a picture of social alternative. All this will come out of the movement itself. But I think in the current moment where you just see, like, you know, barbary, barbarism is in front of us, I think the the idea, also like a scientific idea, we can, with the given resources and all the problems that we have with our relation with nature, we can produce in a different way that doesn't keep us locked in repetitive jobs. It's a very it's a it's a basic debate that we can lead already now. And I think it it can become a motivational force of struggle rather than just the outcome of it. But yeah, that's probably uh yeah, it's a wider debate. So far, I think the discussion about you know planning, social planning are limited in that sense that they see the main problem as okay, how do we reconcile like individual needs of consumption with some kind of flexible planning system? And I think that's somehow a bit misleading. I think that won't be our major problem.

C. Derick Varn 1:11:57

Well, thank you for your time. I think I think I've gotten a good sense of where you guys are at. Where can people follow what the Angry Workers Collective is doing in writing right now?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:07

Well, we've still got our blog, it's www.angryworkers.org. Or we've got like uh a blog for the health workers experience, which is called www.vitalsciencemag.org. And if you're a health worker or you know health workers, we do a lot of interviews as well. So feel free to get in touch. We spoke to some nurses in Chicago and Minnesota and California, which was really good. So, yeah, if you if you listen to this and

Where To Follow And Closing

SPEAKER_01 1:12:45

want to speak to some health workers, that would be cool. Can um yeah, exchange some ideas. Right. So, yeah, it was not it was maybe not the most cohesive, but I worked like a 13 hour shift yesterday, and I'm still a bit muddled.

C. Derick Varn 1:13:02

I understand that healthcare workers are like that. My mom was a nurse. Um, so thank you for your time, and I will link everything you brought up in the show notes. Have a great rest of your day.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:14

Yeah, nice one. Take care. Ciao. Thank you.