ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR IN LONDON
The CWO will have a stall at the Anarchist Bookfair in London.
When: Saturday, 7 October 2023
Where: four venues in East London (see link below)
Leaflet distributed by the IWG in Hopewell, New Jersey.
Short-staffing, hour cuts, demands for hour “flexibility”, denials of wage raises and benefits to unionized/unionizing stores, stone-walling of contract negotiations with unionized stores, not to mention the cuts in workers’ real wages through sky-rocketing inflation of basic goods. This comes on top of a concerted campaign by the bosses, Schultz most visibly of all, to crush the worker organizing efforts at Starbucks through firing workers leading the strike and union efforts, and sending out propaganda to the public about Starbucks’ supposedly great benefits that it offers workers. They never mention how these benefits, already crumbs off of the bosses’ table, are taken away the minute workers begin to fight for more. All of this is outrageous but not exceptional in capitalism. Instead it is a rule which has become increasingly intense in recent years. Faced with a 50-year long economic crisis worsened by the pandemic and now imperialist war in Ukraine, the bosses, aka the capitalist class, are desperate for ways to squeeze even more drops of profit out of their already squeezed workers. This is the pattern that Starbucks follows.
Unions were once largely tolerated by the capitalist class, most recently in the period after WW2 until the 1970s. This was before capitalism’s economic crisis, when capitalists could afford to give workers a few more crumbs off of the table in return for the unions keeping the class struggle under control. After the crisis struck, the system began to lose its ability to keep granting workers concessions, meaning that even the unions, the mediators in the workers’ forced sale of their labor-power, became targets of capitalism for limiting the system’s potential for worker exploitation. This is why Starbucks is so anti-union; the bosses see the unions as obstacles to further exploiting you as their collective profit rates stagnate. But this also means that unions can never be a tool for totally ending your exploitation; as permanent tools for negotiating between you and the bosses, they are trapped in the logic of wage labor (your exploitation), and will seek to continue it; only through building bodies which only last for the duration of the struggle (strike committees, mass assemblies, workers’ councils, etc.) will you have the tools for connecting with other workers in generalizing the struggle, controlling it yourselves, and winning it.
Ultimately what workers need today is their own self-organization; both in the daily economic struggles of our class like this one, where we fight for workers to form higher and higher forms of self-organization (from strike committees to workers’ councils), as well as in the long-term political struggle against the system which exploits us. To win in the class war, our class needs its own international class political organization. This organization would carry forward the historic lessons learned by the working class in its struggles as they continue, helping facilitate the ultimate seizure of power by our class and the overthrow of the system. While this organization does not currently exist, we are fighting for its construction, to win the class war once and for all.
Internationalist Workers’ Group, US affiliate of the ICTThe Internationalist Communist Tendency consists of (unsurprisingly!) not-for-profit organisations. We have no so-called “professional revolutionaries”, nor paid officials. Our sole funding comes from the subscriptions and donations of members and supporters. Anyone wishing to donate can now do so safely using the Paypal buttons below.
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ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR IN LONDON
The CWO will have a stall at the Anarchist Bookfair in London.
When: Saturday, 7 October 2023
Where: four venues in East London (see link below)
READING GROUP
This meeting's text: Theses on the Tasks of International Social-Democracy by Rosa Luxemburg
When: Saturday, 7 October 2023 at 6:00pm
Where: Hamilton, Canada (contact us through our social media for location details: linktr.ee)
Klasbatalo
NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR: WHAT OPPOSITION TO IMPERIALIST WAR REALLY MEANS
PUBLIC MEETING AND DISCUSSION
Topics of discussion:
When: Saturday, October 14, 2023 at 2:00pm
Where: 134 W 29th St, Fl. 2, Conference Room 3-4, New York, NY
Internationalist Workers’ Group
LONDON RADICAL BOOKFAIR
The CWO will have a stall at the London Radical Bookfair.
When: Saturday, 4 November 2023
Where: Great Hall and adjoinging rooms at Goldsmiths University, 8 Lewisham Way, London, SE14 6NW
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