Tips for Radicals

Aiming to be a "blog of the gaps" to cover things that other radical blogs oftem miss — what we want, our journey there, and issues along the way.

To help you searching the blog, I use the following tags to categorise posts:

theory - ways of structuring the world
strategy - plans to achieve the theories
tools - specific ways to (help) achieve the strategy
tips - advice that could help you in your life and action
examples and analysis of existing campaigns

For more info, see the about this blog page.

Please send in your own blog posts, links, comments, or article ideas either as a submission or an ask - always welcome.

"if you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy."
– a. toffler

"What can we do today, so that tomorrow we can do what we are unable to do today?"
– Paulo Freire

I also run a more scatter-shot blog full of incoherent rants and tumblr arguments. Sorry about that.

Featured Posts

Posts tagged "labour"

Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint (by Silvia Federici) →

The concept of “affective labor” strips the feminist analysis of housework of all its demystifying power. In fact, it brings reproductive work back into the world of mystification, suggesting that reproducing people is just a matter of making producing “emotions,” “feelings,”.

The feminist analysis of the function of the sexual division of labor, the function of gender hierarchies, the analysis of the way capitalism has used the wage to mobilize women’s work in the reproduction of the labor force–all of this is lost under the label of “affective labor.”

Really love this piece by Federici - succint description of immaterial labour, and supports the need for focusing on “precarious labour” whilst also giving it a feminist injection.

Legend.

If one machine can cut necessary human labour by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to 10, with each diminishing block of labour time counting as a full time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead.

This is basically a call for anarcho-communism if ever I heard one.

from Rise of the robots: what will the future of work look like?

As wages bear less and less relation to the cost of living, it seems as good a time as any to ask if the underlying fantasy is that employers will one day be able to pay their workers nothing at all.

From a really good article (in a mainstream rag) about the nature of work, and how we can start to challenge it/live without it…

…with a bit of Tory-hashing for good measure.

Office worker's survival guide →

Love this! Some of my favourite suggestions:

Take sickies when you need them. If you can find out what the average sickness absences at your workplace, make sure you get at least the average. Aside from giving you a break, it can help prevent discrimination against any disabled workers who have to take time off. If colleagues get annoyed about people being off sick, encourage them to take time off as well to level the playing field.
If you are someone who management doesn’t like, or if your employer is going to be making redundancies, it can be advisable to be on best behaviour with respect to internet use, because some employers can use workers’ web use to sack people they don’t like, or to make redundancies on the cheap. Pointing out others being worse than you won’t help you
Wherever you go, take files with you. If you walk briskly with files, you can go chat to colleagues, go for a walk, etc but it will look like you are going to do something important.

godlesscommiequeer:

When someone tells you that they got rich through hard work, ask them, ‘whose?’

(via philosophy-of-praxis)

So poweful has the ideology of political economy been, that this diversion of human energies still echoes in the pitiful rhetoric of our time: the necessity for an education system that will prepare a new generation for an unknown labour market of tomorrow, the urgency of getting consumers into the shops to ‘rescue’ falling sales, the anthropomorphising of ‘the economy’, the ‘health’ of which takes priority over the health of the people; the desire by government to rebalance the economy, no matter what other loss of equilibrium may be incurred.

Deindustrialising humanity, by Jeremy Seabrook

Valve is not averse to all organizational structure—it crops up in many forms all the time, temporarily. But problems show up when hierarchy or codified divisions of labor either haven’t been created by the group’s members or when those structures persist for long periods of time.

We believe those structures inevitably begin to serve their own needs rather than those of Valve’s customers. The hierarchy will begin to reinforce its own structure by hiring people who fit its shape, adding people to fill subordinate support roles.

Valve handbook for new employees: a fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do (pdf)

Valve is famous for making some uber-popular computer games (Half-Life, Counterstrike, Left for Dead) but is less famously non-hierarchically run, and this is their handbook. A really interesting read.

Obviously they’re a for-profit company, but I’m trying to take the Gabriel Kuhn approach of seeing radical joy in non-radical endeavours.

With section titles like:

“Why do I need to pick my own projects?”
“But how do I decide which things to work on?”
“Short-term vs. long-term goals”
“What about all the things that I’m not getting done?”
“What if I screw up?, But what if we ALL screw up?”
“What Is Valve Not Good At?”
“What Happens When All This Stuff Doesn’t Work?”

this is a seriously useful (a) primer for anyone involved in a longer-term non-hierarchical projects (b) ‘fuck you’ resource for anyone that says non-hierarchical operations never get anything good done.

Social radicals - and many indigenous communities - have been organising like this for ages, so it’s sorta sad that it takes non-hierarchy making it as an efficient business model for people to take it seriously… but maybe whatever gets the job done?