Workers' Inquiry

Struggle at FIAT (1964)

Struggle at FIAT (1964)

This arti­cle ana­lyzes schemat­i­cally sev­eral aspects of the so-called “wild­cat” mode of strug­gle recently adopted by the FIAT work­ers; it does not the­o­rize it as the “only” one pos­si­ble. It’s a “par­tic­u­lar” analy­sis, not because the events described are excep­tional or exclu­sive to that “core mass” of work­ers that are FIAT, but because the gen­eral dimen­sion, within which only the move­ment is “polit­i­cal,” is impli­cated here as the deter­mi­nant pre­sup­po­si­tion but isn’t directly analyzed.

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Invisible Organization: Reading Romano Alquati

Invisible Organization: Reading Romano Alquati

At the end of his 1975 introduction to his seminal 1964 Classe Operaia article, “Struggle at FIAT,” Romano Alquati concludes his reflection with a compressed glance back toward one of the impasses that faced him and the other “classical” workerists as they tried to articulate the early days of what would become two decades of social war, from the 1960 magliette a righe (the “striped shirt”) rebellions of Genoa on to a Hot Autumn, a Creeping May, and a range of other seasons, months, and years irrevocably marked by bitter struggle against capital and its stewards.

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The Problem of the Workers’ Paper (1955)

The Problem of the Workers’ Paper (1955)

This text opens a discussion on the problem of the workers’ journal, which will be carried on in the following issues of Socialisme ou Barbarie. It draws on the experience of Tribune Ouvrière, published for over a year by a group of workers from Regie Renault, from which we have published extracts in the preceding issue of this Review, and from which one will find new extracts in the current one.

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Smile Down the Phone: An Attempt at a Workers’ Inquiry in a Call Center

Smile Down the Phone: An Attempt at a Workers’ Inquiry in a Call Center

I chose the site for my workers’ inquiry the way most people find casual employment: by responding to a generic internet advertisement. The advert for the job that I eventually got directed applicants to ring a voicemail number that instructed them to leave a message with their name, number, and why they would be good at the job. I received a call the following day and was invited to come in after the weekend for an interview.

The Intolerable-Inquiry: The Documents of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons

The Intolerable-Inquiry: The Documents of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons

We are fortunate to now have in a French edition a collection of the five booklets produced by the GIP between February 1971 and January 1973 – Intolérable, numbers 1 through 4, and a collection of prisoners’ demands – combining questionnaires and inquiries on prison conditions, texts and declarations from prison uprisings, reports by prison psychiatrists, a dossier on the killing of George Jackson and the black prison movement in the US, and correspondence and information about the wave of suicides in French prisons.

Notes for Political Investigation in the Heart of the Paradoxes of Post-Neoliberalism

Notes for Political Investigation in the Heart of the Paradoxes of Post-Neoliberalism

Translator’s Introduction: Diego Sztulwark’s text, originally published on the blog Lobo Suelto in April 2013, speaks to a number of contemporary debates in Argentina: the “end of neoliberalism” and the “return of the state,” the neo-extractivist economy, and the role of social movements today. Specifically, it comes out of a series of meetings and encounters between different movements and organizations… Read more →