Tag: organizing
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Canvassing Is Not Organizing
A common refrain in some quarters of the left states that elections help build capacity, but Organizing Work contributor Ray Valentine argues that the skills built in canvassing for an electoral candidate do not translate to organizing workplaces or tenants. By Ray Valentine If, like me, you have decided to spend a lot of time…
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Building and Claiming Power Under Trump
We are living during a very scary and important moment in history. The U.S. is witnessing the rise of the sleeping giant of fascism. As a result, folks that were content with the status quo and critical of any type of grassroots militancy are now taking to the streets and opening themselves to new and…
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Solidarity Network or Solidarity Service?: on the challenges of building a solidarity network
The following originally appears in September 2013 issue of the IWW newspaper, the Industrial Worker, with the title “Building a solidarity network is harder than it seems.” Written by WRC member R. Spourgitis, it is a review of the pamphlet Build Your Own Solidarity Network, by two Seattle Solidarity Network members, and is based on…
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Building Power and Advancing: For Reforms, Not Reformism
By Thomas (Miami Autonomy & Solidarity) “We shall carry out all possible reforms in the spirit in which an army advances ever forwards by snatching the enemy-occupied territory in its path.” – Errico Malatesta[i] As anarchist communists, we are against reformism. However, we are for reforms. We believe that fundamentally the entire system of capitalism,…
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A View from the Plains: on organizing in smaller areas of the Midwest
What would it look like to develop strategies in apolitical areas and smaller areas far from more active and developed places of leftist activity? This is obviously an open-ended question with many implications and courses of action. Since our experiences in Occupy here in Iowa, this question has increasingly become, for me, an important one…
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Options and limitations in workplace organizing
“We have met with management and the commissioners, and nothing changed. We have taken action and held demonstrations, and got nothing. Now we try the lawyers to see if we can win”. Another driver speaks up “That’s not true, when we had a strike they had to listen to us” The speaker replies “maybe for…
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Why Working People are The Solution to Our Economic Crisis
Power gets what it wants. This is the reason that Wall Street – the cause of the crisis- is booming; but working people are facing double-digit unemployment, hour cuts, increased work load on the job, less resources to work with, raising costs on benefits, cuts to public services and an all-around increase of vulnerability to…