libcom.org

Tea Break July 2008

First issue of an irregular workers' bulletin put together by users of the website, libcom.org. This issue focuses on the 2008 pay dispute over sub-inflation pay offers.

A brief account of Unison's national conference, 2008

Bournemouth International Centre, where the conference was held.

A critical account of the 2008 Unison national delegate conference by libcom group member John Stevens, analysing how the union's bureaucracy systematically attempts to remove control of the union from its rank and file and also looking at the response to the from the union's left-wing.

I recently attended Unison's national delegate conference in Bournemouth as a delegate from a London local government branch. It was an eye opening experience with respect to the machinations of political groupings within the union.

In particular some of the ways in which the new Labour-linked bureaucracy maintained control over the supposedly lay lead organisation became clear.

April 24 – hundreds of thousands to walk out

On Thursday April 24 thousands of civil servants, coastguards, council workers, FE lecturers and charity workers will join a national teachers strike of 200,000.

Employer attacks on workers' pay is the main issue at stake.

Teachers in the NUT are walking out over their pay deal which was supposed to be revised when inflation rose, but the government refused: effectively cutting their wages.

Libcom posters

Libcom posters, taken from publications by prole.info. Not for flyposting.

Agency staff: Don't scab on your fellow workers! - Pracownicy agencji: Nie bądźcie łamistrajkami!

A bilingual English-Polish leaflet produced to counter Royal Mail using casual labour against the 2007 national postal strike. As text in English and Polish and a bilingual pdf laid-out for printing as a double-sided A5 leaflet.

12/10/07 - Reports suggest that the Manpower agency is recruiting casuals during this strike, you may want to print out this pdf and distribute it at your local Manpower branch, or any other agency hiring for Royal Mail.

Notes on working at a sixth form college library, London 2005-2007

Between 2005-2007 a member of the libcom group worked term-time in the library at a Sixth Form College in London. This article/interview documents his attempts to organise his workplace and touches on some wider issues around working in education in the UK.

So where did you work? What was it like?
Since some of my friends are still working there, and I hope there is still some organising going on, I won't identify the college directly, but some background information would be useful.

Dispatch: Public sector pay dispute, # 1 August 2007

First issue of a bulletin about the public sector pay struggles of summer 2007 by a group of workers around libcom.org. This issue focusses on postal workers.

Available here in TIF and here in PDF format. The text follows:

Dispatch

Public sector pay dispute — information for action

Issue 1 - August 2007

Royal Mail workers: Fighting to win

Doing the job as it’s meant to be done

Interview with a member of libcom.org, 2007

A critical interview by Wayne Foster of John Stevens from the libcom group, about the libcom.org project and the general state of things.

Libcom.org is a constantly expanding online resource that seeks to promote working class self-organisation through publishing news, theoretical texts and historical articles. Site traffic has risen from 25-35,000 visits per month in 2005 to 110-170,000 now and there are now 2,600 active users.

Libcom's Eye-Spy at the Anarchist Bookfair

Libcom's own version of the popular in-car children's game involving regular sights at the annual Anarchist Bookfair in London.

1pt
A hippie
A nutter
A punk, British
A group of punks drinking, British
An SWP member coming to check out genuine socialism
An anarchist who used to be in the SWP
An old man with a beard. Possibly old enough to lead you to ponder whether or not he fought in Spain…

2pts

Libcom interview with former UPS workers group Uprise! member, 2007

An interview with a former member of revolutionary UPS workers group Uprise! by libcom, based on a libcom questionnaire. Uprise! was active in 2002 and 2003.

news

London: thousands of bus drivers strike
5000 bus workers with Metroline and First Group walked out at 3 a.m. this morning in a row over equal pay causing massive disruption across the capital.

articles

The Medicalisation of Everyday Life
NHS doctor and science writer Ben Goldacre writes about bullshit medical research, bogus science reporting, the placebo effect, and everything else from postmodernism to evolutionary psychology, at his Bad Science blog. His critiques of the health system, pharmaceutical industry, and consumer health fads are extremely relevant - his focus on social factors, economic inequalities, and rejection of reductionist medicalising and/or individualising of what are essentially social/collective issues is pretty consistent with any critique class-struggle anarchists could produce. This is an edited extract from his book Bad Science.

1968

Review: Whatever happened to the Situationists?
A steady trickle of publications about the situationists testifies to the market value of their ideas, but it also reminds us of the continued requirement for revolutionaries to engage with them. In this review we look at two recent books. Ken Knabb's Public Secrets illustrates the self-obsessed nature of the situationist milieu after the heady days of 1968. What is Situationism? A Reader includes Barrot's important critique of the Situationist International for their one-sided emphasis on circulation rather then production.

Tea Break

Tea Break July 2008
First issue of an irregular workers' bulletin put together by users of the website, libcom.org. This issue focuses on the 2008 pay dispute over sub-inflation pay offers.

libcom.org

1968

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