Problems, Hypotheses, and Innovations of Workers’ Self-Organization
In a conversation with militant researchers Manuela Zechner and Bue Rübner Hansen, we discuss experiments in workers’ self-organization that have taken shape in Europe over and against the process of neoliberalization and the resulting condition of precaritzation. Throughout the conversation, we talk about the constantly changing composition of the working class and what this technical composition entails in terms of the class’s political organization and the practices and strategies it requires. We come to understand inquiry and co-research to be central to this process of organization. Where the former regards the specific practices of asking workers about their conditions and the relations that maintain them, the latter regards the broader organizational process of political experimentation to transform those relations. In this regard, our conversation homes in feminist practices developed in Spain over the past decades – particularly the “drift” and the “log-in” techniques – that women have developed to untangle the relations their labor maintains and ways to upend or disrupt these relations. This makes clear the ways in which feminist practices of consciousness raising developed in the 70s share no small similarity with practices of inquiry developed in the post-war. The question of political effect – or power – becomes central in our discussion, as it becomes revealed to be something conjunctural, situated, dependent on specific factors that are not always given but contingent – a constant hypothesis that must be tested through the fulcrum of practice or political experimentation. Something that depends once again on innovation, something that Manu points to across the unfolding wave of feminist and climate struggles the world over. In this way, we arrive at the necessity of abandoning the notion of “centrality versus marginality,” in order to turn to an ecologically interdependent and entangled conception of working-class self-organization that is fundamentally a project of inventing new modes and possibilities of care and interdependence, without capitalist relations of exploitation. Manu is a researcher, facilitator, and situated organizer working across feminism, ecology and migration related struggles. Her research deals with collective care, micropolitics, processes of organization, and subjectivity formation in social movements, currently working with Bue in a research project on translocal social movements across agroecology, climate and feminist struggles. Bue is a reseacher and theorist working on ideas and practices of social reproduction, class composition, and political ecology. He is an editor at Viewpoint Magazine. Both have been involved politically in student, migrant, feminist, municiaplist and ecological struggles, as their lives and search for work have taken them from city to city across Europe. To join a workshop on building power in pandemic times facilitated by Bue and Manu, please click here. It’s based on Bue and Manu’s ROAR article available here. Follow these links for more on the “log in” technique developed in Madrid (available only in Spanish), the “drift” technique by Precarias de la Deriva, or on Manu’s reflections on care and organization, click here.