Members of Common Cause Ottawa have come up with a booklet entitled 'Organized Anarchism in the Anti-Capitalist Struggle: Why we need organization - and principles to follow'

It is based on a presentation given by two CCO members at a conference in March 2010 ('Capitalism and Confrontation')

There are two versions of this booklet in pdf form. Both are on 8.5x11 letter-sized paper, 3 double-sided pages (or 6 single-sided).

One is for straightforward printing ('not folded' version): can be printed single- or double-sided

The other is to create a booklet ('folded' version): needs to be printed double-sided

Elio Petri's The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La Classe Operaia Va In Paradiso) is a grim look at the psychological wounds imposed by the factory regime on its chief character, Ludovico Massa. Cruelly nicknamed Lulù the Tool by his pissed off and contrary co-workers, in a factory where he operates a lathe, his obsessive output making him the measure management use to gauge everyone else's work rate.

Whatever about those that hoot for the progress of history as if some grand design were at work, the working class of the nineteenth century were more than aware of what had been lost with the onset of the industrial revolution. As someone who had lived through some of the rougher years of hunger in 1840's Manchester - albeit removed from discomfort - Mary Gaskell produced her novel Mary Barton as a reaction, capturing a world with direct memories of the "pleasant mysteries" of a romanticised rural life abandoned for the urban where, as Engel's had it "the rapid extension of manufacture demanded hands."

I'm doing a course called US! A Course On Working Class Fictions at the Toronto Anarchist U this fall....

INTRO

Class is a constant process of formation, it is how they eye us up and how we eye them up in an endless unfolding of power balances, institutional forms, desires, fears and fantasies. Hence this course runs from Charterism and socialism to the mass worker, then beyond to class displacement and what may be germs of wholly new class experiences in the slums of the south and the knowledge industries of the North.

Tearing down the fourth wall of the home, dramatists and novelists like John Osbourne documented the confusion of class identiy in the "pretty dreary...American age," with nothing to do but wait bored for the great bang of the H-bomb. In re-forging the nation's social contract, post war Britain and the "craddle to grave" schema of the welfare state saw political narratives rocket from traditional community relations of solidarity and struggle to an individuated relationship to the state, and then state blocs against state blocs, literature spilled into the micro cultures of the kitchen and family, and characters left with only new interior comforts in the artificial desires of consumerism and the rat race of social mobility.