The WISE-RA (Wales, Ireland, Scotland, England Regional Administration) Literature Committee has worked with the Left Book Club to create our own Online Book Group.
For our first meeting we will be discussing the collection Direct Action and Sabotage: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s, edited and introduced by Salvatore Salerno. The collection features three short pamphlets by Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, Walker C. Smith and William E. Trautmann. The pamphlets introduce tactics and philosophies of workplace resistance that should resonate with a new generation who instinctively “quiet quit”.
Everyone is welcome to attend. We will use the book as a jumping off point for discussion.
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 8TH AT 4PM (GMT)
Please email literature [at] iww [dot] org [dot] uk to be added to the mailing list.
About the Industrial Workers of the World: The Industrial Workers of the World are a radical labour union that has been engaged in anti-capitalist struggle since 1905. Wobblies continually develop bottom-up forms of unionism and community organisation by drawing on multiple revolutionary traditions. This radical pluralism incorporates aspects of anarchism, syndicalism, general unionism, Marxism and ecology – to mention a few. The IWW’s central theories and practices expand as its members engage in workplace struggle and learn from fellow workers and comrades around the world. Literature, music and art are also central to what the IWW is about. Wobbly humour and flair is found at all levels of its organising. Their prefigurative attempt to “build a new world within the shell of the old” is focused on a joyful and democratic transformation of production.
About the Book Group: This book group discusses works from the IWWs long history as well as from the Left Book Club’s catalogue. Run by all the book group members themselves, the book group is an opportunity to foster mutual understanding and build co-operation. The future is unwritten. The coming struggles – and what it will take to win them – can’t be foreseen with certainty. We will need to draw on a wide range of radical ideas, with joy and good humour, if we want to get out of capitalism with a life worth living.