librarypunk - 156 - The American Worker feat. Kevin Van Meter

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

We’re talking with Kevin again about workers inquiry as an organizing tool and the example of the pamphlet The American Worker from 1947.   Twitter: https://x.com/AmericanWork47  readingstruggles.info notesfrombelow.org    Media mentioned The American Worker on COVER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikphd5bNza4&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Ff9eaa73e-0b64-4316-a994-c97369b4e555.usrfiles.com%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY “Searching for the American Worker” https://newpol.org/issue_post/searching-for-the-american-worker/ Culbertson, Anna W. “Our Labor, Our Terms: Workers’ Inquiry in Libraries,” in “Assemblage, Inquiry, and Common Work in Library and Information Studies,” eds. Melissa Adler and Andrew Lau. Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 4; https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/175 (CC BY-NC) In and against the state: discussion notes for socialists. https://libcom.org/book/export/html/31378  Reading Struggles: Working-Class Self-Activity from Detroit to Turin and Back Again. https://www.readingstruggles.info/ Guerillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible. https://www.akpress.org/guerrillas-of-desire.html  Transcript: https://pastecode.io/s/bgobg2t9  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zzEpV9QEAG

I'm Justin. I'm academic librarian and my pronouns are he and they. I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian and my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Kevin Van Meter. I am an author, a labor educator and union organizer, and I use he and him. Welcome back. Welcome back. We had you on not too long ago to talk about Blue Bottle Independent Union. And from what I understand, you wanted to do a quick tie in from workers inquiry in the cafe sector, which we're going to talk about workers' inquiry in general today. So yeah, how did you want to transition from that episode to this one? That's great. Thank you for the prom. So the last episode I was on with Alex Pine from the Blue Bottle Independent Union and Anastasia Wilson, who's a

colleague and economist. And that was episode 153. We were speaking, of course, about the work in organizing that Blue Bottle has done in Boston and then just recently also in the Bay Area. They're currently negotiating their first contract with Nestle. I'm sure it's going similar directions that we see the Starbucks workers who are already doing practice pickets and signing strike pledges and taking action against these multinational corporations that are really just unwilling to engage in decent and substantive conversations about wages, hours, and working conditions. So I wanted to make sure to kind of highlight that because since last time we were on, there's actually quite a bit of organizing taking place in the cafe sector. I believe we'll be seeing more action

from Blue Bottle, but also from the St. World Workers United and other cafe folks around the country. Since publishing our class composition in the cafe sector article, and was actually split into two, so two-part article, and appearing on your podcast and others, we've heard from cafe workers that are organizing in the UK and elsewhere. So part and parcel of doing the work that we do in the inquiry that we did in the cafe sector was it was an area in the United States and internationally where the class is moving. It's taking action. You're seeing forms of self-organization and self-expression take more organized forms,

sometimes in unions, sometimes strike action, petitions, buttoned up campaigns, all kinds of working class. Self-activity and organizing is taking. place in the sector. And part of the reason we do, the inquiry is actually just circulate those struggles, circulate those stories and allow workers to see themselves as part of a struggle that's larger than just them and their boss or them and their co-workers and their shop or bargaining unit and see themselves and their common cause with other folks in the service century. So really, as a follow-up, this kind of work continues, right? We've conducted seven interviews

with cafe worker organizers from Starbucks Workers United. Pete's Coffee, which is an IWW campaign out of the West Coast, a blue bottle, of course, a couple other small coffee chains that are either independent unions and some represented by Unite Here or UFCW and others. And we'll be circulating and publishing those hopefully by the end of the year. Because not only do we want to talk about the conditions of work and the conditions of cafe workers, especially as they're starting to take major industrial action and organize.

But we also want to circulate those detailed accounts of organizing because it also de-isolates folks and allows them to see themselves as part of a larger struggle. So I appreciate the prompt because I wanted to make sure, one, to really highlight the action and activities that have developed since our last conversation, but also note that the method of workers' inquiry is not just clearly for cafe sectors, but for libraries, for grocery store workers and others. And we've been speaking now with grocery workers about launching an inquiry into that sector since clearly a lot of organizing has taken place there as well since the pandemic and even recent. Yeah, and I think a lot of what we're going to talk about today is a publication called American Worker. And when we talk about the history of Workers' Inquiry, we're kind of talking about Marx's original survey and then the American Worker. And there's this quote I pulled from your write-up about the American Worker pamphlet. Workers' Inquiry cleaves into two different approaches, that of the questionnaire and that of first-person narratives in the style of the American worker. and I made a note for people who are like historians,

this is sort of the separation between the analysis school, which became the social sciences. We can only understand things if we can quantify them or if we can get standardized answers versus the more modern practice of oral narrative history and then synthesizing a qualitative story out of that. So the American worker is doing more of that narrative style. I think that's quite interesting.

It certainly is, and I think there's actually quite a bit of thought about why they chose the format they did for the American worker. So let me take a few steps back. Marks published A. Worker's Inquiry in a French Socialist Journal in 1880. He had a short preface. He actually solicited responses by saying, please send these into the appropriate journal, and then we will summarize them and serialize them

and then publish them as a book. And then in addition to the preface, of course, he has 101 question, many of which still are relevant today. So, for instance, his first few questions are, question one, what is your trade, right? Clearly a relevant question. Does the shop in which you work belong to a capitalist or limited company state the names of the capitalist owners and directors of the company, right? These are just graphic things that folks would be asking, who actually owns the company? Well, I work for Blue Bottle. Is it owned by Blue Bottle? How does Blue Bottle operate? Is it part of this international conglomerate and Nestle? Who are actually the owners who own the stock and various other elements? of these companies, right? Like, union organizers are always engaged in strategic corporate research, because very often you might encounter a nonprofit, a for-profit corporation, a state agency, and you really want to understand how those power relationship work and where those decision sometimes they're not made at the Blue Bottle Cafe. Sometimes they are made at Nestle Headers,

right? In addition to that, state, and this is number three, state the number of persons employed, state their age and sex, right? And he continues on this demographic section. And then, he'll continue in section two with question 30, state the number of hours you work daily and the number of working days during the week, right? How many hours are we engaged in work? And in addition to Marxist questions, we'd want to bring a autonomous or Marxist feminist analysis in. Not only how many hours are we working for wage work, but how much unwage work in addition to that is being performed by different kinds of populations that are racialized and gendered, of course, in the course of a work week. Is there actually, in fact, any time of which we are not engaged in that kind of work?

And at a later question is an excellent worker's inquiry done on libraries that actually gets specifically to this question of wage work in these spaces. And then just I'll give a few more highlights here in section three in question 46. He says, what agreements have you with your employer? Are you engaged by the day, week, month? What is your pay period? Do you have a contract? Is it a work contract?

Do you have a job description? Does the union contract affect your wages, hours, and working conditions? What does that look? Right? So he asked these series of questions in 1880 in order to really understand what we'd call the working class perspective. Now, of course, his major work is that of capital. And in volume one, what he's doing, in fact, is providing an abstract ideal of how capitalism

function, right? In particular series of chapters, he'll look at. relative surplus value, how much technology is being used and the relationship between technology and the means of production and labor powers exploitation and the process of producing. Then it'll look at absolute surplus value, which is how long the workday. And then he'll actually hold both those things constant and then look at how intense work is what that intensity of work looks like as well, which I think is a really underutilized category marks his capital. But that's an abstract idea of how capitalism operates, right? That's from capitalism in a lot of ways.

call that a reading from capitalist perspective of how capitalism operates, right, or should operate or could operate in Marx's analysis. Now, we can invert that perspective and say, what is the experience of workers in the course of the workday, right? What are the relationships that develop? How does the production process work? What does your work day look like? How does it function? How many hours you're working? Who else works there? Who owns this? These are all vital questions. And it's actually, in fact, a different set of questions than you would ask about what is capitalism and how does it operate? How does it function? How does it exploit our labor power and destroy the environment and various other things? Which is fundamentally different than

asking the question of how workers experience. Because we can talk about the abstract nature of capitalism or the abstract ideal that he writes about in Capital Volume 1. And that gets us ever so far, but actually, especially when we're talking about organizing, amplifying forms of informal and formal organizing the workplace, amplifying and circulating struggles and informal practices of time theft or insubordination, all those things can only be understood from the perspective of the workers themselves, right? Interesting enough, when that first appears in English, and this is going to connect to the larger story of the American worker, and I hope an interesting way. In 1938, the New International, which was a Trotskyist journal, American Trotskyist paper,

December of 1938, published a translation of Marx's A Workers' Inquiry. And they said in their introduction to this text, as it's appearing first time in English, and certainly in the United States, to my knowledge, we see from this series of question how Marx's decisive point of reference was not a set of abstract category, with a concrete incident. in the daily lives of workers, exploitation, surplus value, rate of profit, are here traced to the living source, right, the actual experiences of workers themselves. And then he goes on on another point in his third point here, this anonymous author who summarized Marx's text for the American audience says, the indirect effect of the question indicates that Marx meant when he said that the

emancipation of the workers must come from the workers themselves. And hence, if the emancipation of the working class is going to come from the workings itself, or in parcel of that is developing consciousness and understanding the production process of which we are fighting in our everyday lives and organizing against when we're taking industrial action or wildcats or organizing. So this appears in 1930, right? Maybe I'll stop there and before transitioning off to the American worker and how this relates to the American worker, see if there's another kind of question or prompt or anything you wanted to kind of share in reflection back about Marx's question. At least for the, I can

already see how this is like for library workers or people who work in libraries who may not even be doing like quote unquote like library and ship related work. There's all sorts of different types of workers in a library, right? But this sort of like I feel like so many librarians had this idea of like, oh, well, if I work at a public library, then it's like it's a city thing or a county thing or something. But I mean, I didn't know until like a month ago that the New York public library and the Queens Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library, that whole system, that's a nonprofit. They have a CEO. They are not a city organization. They get city funding, but they're a nonprofit technically with a CEO. And like, that's weird for a library, I feel. And so like, how does

that complicate like any kind of work that they're doing, the fact that they have a CEO instead of being, quote unquote, like a government body, right? Or how does this work at academic? academic libraries, are you public or are you like a state school or are you private or a state school? Like, like there's not just like a type of library. There's a lot of different types of libraries and then how they get their funding and who you report to and what that looks like. I can already see how like this might make people realize things about where they work that they didn't know before. So yeah. I was also just thinking like there's the joke of well, Mark's never accounted for XYZ and then someone will pull some obscure quote where marks, you know, exactly that. And I feel like this sort of style of workers' inquiry, capital is like fixed, right?

Like, you can't go back and he can't go back and rewrite capital. He's dead. Like, capital is this theoretical thing. But workers' inquiry allows it to rewrite itself. Kind of, it allows it to stay fresh and modern and to like adapt and change and do like synthesis as history and time and capitalism change. which is very cool. And I think it's a good mechanism because the perennial question is always,

how do we get the workers to self-organize and to become self-conscious and to become educated because you spend all day working really hard and then you don't have the time to do intellectual labor. You don't have time to go to the reading group. You don't have time to do all this stuff. But when you have an ability to sit down, ask some questions, summarize it back together, and then reproduce that for people to see. Finally, one, representation matters, and I'm not saying that in a glibway,

but people get to see, this is my work, this is what I go through, this is what front of the house is like, this is what back of the house is like. This is what it's like to have to put up with the boss in this situation. This is what it's like when this kind of customer comes in,

and they can see like, oh, you know, that's not a story I see on TV, right? That's not what I see in the chef movie, right? And that is a moment of class consciousness and the building class consciousness. Interesting enough, the feminist consciousness raising groups that emerge in the 60s and 70s, where, you know, women would meet around a circle and share the stories of their lives and discover that very often their relationships with the husbands felt subservient, that they were intellectual, political, civic, cultural, artistic, and other experiences that they wanted to explore. And very often, because of the care for children, care for elders, of course, without a wage, limited that experience. They discovered that they preferred to be with women and not with men, right?

All kinds of things. And actually, in fact, what the feminist consciousness is raising us we're doing is de-isolating women to allow them to see that common experience. Also, through that process, common solutions and organizing solutions are addressed. And actually, in fact, those feminist-consciousness raising groups pull from not just, you know, this, but a huge tradition of this kind of worker education. That included and important for the story of the American. worker in the traditions that it comes out of, many of the members, and I suspect the anonymous

author of, or somewhat on this author, of the first section of the pamphlet that looks at factory work in a General Motors plant in Linden, New Jersey, came out of the young people's socialists. But the young people socialists league was doing with its various circles, and I know there was one in Newark, near the plant, those in Brooklyn, that Marty Glaberman, who is a labor organizer and educator spent most of his life in Detroit and is very important the fact that he republished his pamphlet in 1972 and has influenced generations of labor organizers and those involved in class struggle here in the States.

So I believe I know Glaverman was part of the Young People Socialists. You guys suspect anonymous author was too. And we'll get back to some of that and those details and those stories in a moment. But Young People Socialist League, as well as also the Workers' Education Movement, which was 70 labor colleges, around the United States, were intimately involved in developing what Grace Lee Boggs would call

the natural and acquired powers of work, right? They'd train folks in debate. They'd do study groups together. They'd reflect on their own experiences, right? They were engaged in all kinds of processes of self-education. Then a lot of ways dwarf what is taking place even in study groups or in DSA chapters, wobbly, general membership branches, of course, the formal labor movement, or even in left labor, they saw that a socialist society was on the horizon and that it would require workers to develop their full capacities in order to bring that society into it. And this pamphlet, the American Worker Pamphlet in 1947, the kind of work that it's being done in 1938 when Marxist Workers' Acquire appears in this American Trotsky's publication is part of a large constellation of

socialist, secular Jewish, other ethnic group organizations, forms of mutual aid. But at the center of it was a really important educational and consciousness building process, right? I just want to turn back to something that Jay had commented upon in regards to library work. I had referenced to both of you previously a really interesting inquiry and proposal for further inquiry into library work. It's written by Anna Culbertsinson. it's called Our Labor, Our Terms, Workers' Inquiry, and Library.

And they begin in their introduction with the varied experience of library workers during the COVID-19 pandemic brought into relief the disconnect between how we perceive the conditions and outcomes of our lives and the actual power we do or do not have over them. The disarray of our workplaces, the knee-jerk opening, closing of buildings, and the confusion of rapid policy changes led many of us to integrate the very essence and value of our work, as well as where, how, why, and for whom it's performed, then they continue. Their wonder when work ended and non-work began,

and whenever it did at all, is there actually a division of work? And part of the reason I point this out is that I think as this inquire continues to bring up a lot of the issues you've addressed on the podcast, we talked about today and also in our previous episode. But what is really key here is

it allows library workers to understand other forms of work that are taking place, different it is to work at a public or private or a public library or in this author's instance in a academic library. They will continue to go on and look at that. And an example from my own organizing experience is I was a health care worker organizer during the pandemic, mostly for low-age health care workers in rural Oregon. And there were over 120 different job classifications and jobs, right? Did those in food service understand what certified nursing assistants did? the certified nursing assistants understand what different kinds of text did. I certainly did, and I

came out of higher education and higher education organizing somewhat was thrown into the deep end in trying to figure out all these different kinds of work and jobs that are being done by health care workers in the midst of a pandemic under that immense stress. And actually, in fact, part of the organizing and unionization process, and we were in the midst of a contract campaign during most of my years doing that work, define common cause. Like, so, for instance, the lack of child care, right? Or lack of PPE, something that's spread across these different kinds. But it's actually interesting for workers then to understand very different forms of work

they're taking place on their floor, passing them every day in the hallway, or even in the same hospital rooms with their patients, right? Those different kind of job classifications because, as both of you have been previously, we're so engaged in the work process. It's so stressful and overwhelming at times. And then we're exhausted at the end of the day that we don't have time to have these kind of refusations, much less learn a very, very different kind of work and job that's taking place in our own workplace. But those kind of things are vitally important if we are going to understand and address inequalities in the works, right? Who does different kinds of work and why, both historically and today.

A hospital is a hierarchy. It is a racial and gender hierarchy. The administrators, the doctors, are more often than not, upper class, middle class, and come from that background, more often than not, especially in rural Oregon white. And as you go down the pyramid, you see those with nursing degrees, very often white and women. And then, of course, those with, you know,

two weeks or two years of education in order to get their certifications more often than not, poor white, folks of color, immigrant folks, and others, right? So understanding how that hierarchy actually operates and describing that is vitally important to develop solidarity and understanding between, say, the nurses and other healthcare workers or even the doctors who are organizing in other health care. We see that in higher education too, where it is a

hierarchy, a class and gender and race hierarchy, even with some real challenges brought to bear on higher education, which is important. But professors, how often are they in solidarity with the low-wage healthcare workers that actually keep those running? Or with academic librarian workers who we need for our interlibrary loans to arrive, for our research, to get posted for all kinds of things. And part in parcel, what I think is really vital about workers' inquiry is, in our cafe example, the separate spheres of front of house and back a house, if you're not doing that work and you're engaged in that eight hours a day, and you don't understand that it makes actually organizing class consciousness development. So I'll kick it back to you all.

Yeah. I was watching your appearance on one of the other podcasts that you sent me, and you really dive into the story of the American worker. And so I thought for this episode, you could give a teaser. You could sort of tell people, okay, go read this thing, because they should. They should go read the new poll.org. But tell them why they should go read the story of this pamphlet and like how it came to be, like pitch it to them of why they should go read it. My elevator pitch. It's funny. I'm so obsessed with this pamphlet for years now and trying to uncover the quote, anonymous author of the first section. I know the author of the second section that she's important American revolutionary. But yeah, let me take your question on directly. Why should people

read this pamphlet? So I'm sitting in the breakrooms and cafeteria in the midst of the pandemic as a union organized. And obviously, there are shifts and there are times where people take their lunch, right? And that means there would be periods of time where I'm sitting there and just waiting for members, for workers to come up and have conversations with me about the campaign that we're running, the bargaining platform that we're developing, the issues they want to address in their next contract negotiation. And I'm sitting there and preparing and working on writing this book

called Reading Struggles, which I'm still writing. We'll talk about in a few minutes. And as part of that, I wanted to read this pamphlet, The American Worker. It was published in 1947 by Anonymous Auto Worker, running under the name of Paul Romano. And their first part in section is really a deep, in-depth reflection on life in the fact. And in this case, it's life in the General Motors auto plant in Linden, New Jersey. And what were the racial and gender division? Why were black workers getting the most dangerous and difficult jobs that were very often lower weight? Why were women

being relegated to the upholstery division, right? How did production operate? What was, the union system, was there informal methods of informal work groups and organizing, taking place outside beyond and even in defiance of the youth, right? And as I'm reading this, it's allowing me to think through the structures, the production processes, the divisions, and the issues that I just mentioned a few moments ago in the hospital where I was a staff member for a local, right? It really allowed me through this pamphlet from 1947 to think about how the production process was organized. And then, of course, I reflected on the various jobs I've had over the years. I worked from 19, I am that old.

I worked from 2008 to 2012 and a metal fabricator in Portland, Oregon, out on the dry dock, right? 10 hours a day, six days a week. And it allowed me to think through that process differently than I had experienced early. So in my opinion, since we are going to spend more time working than any other life activity, work is still the central problem. You'll spend more time working between this moment, the day that you die, than any other life activity besides sleep. How often do we talk about how that work is structured and organized? How could it be counterplanned and organized better, right? So when I worked in this metal fabricator, we get plans from Intel, where we're building a particular table, basically, for them.

for their chipmaking processes. And they'd say, okay, this is how you need to ship in a shipping. And then I would take those plans and I and the other folks on the factory floor would go out to the shipping crate and go out to the table and be like, this ain't going to fit the way

that some engineer in an office and Intel thinks it's going. We need to do it this way, right? And we could spend maybe, say, 10 hours loading this shipping container where the pedestal their way or do it our way, which will be safer, better, easier,

and more practical in four ways. So we'd counterplanned the dictator that we're getting from from the boss themselves, right? Or in this case, the client and the imposed by the boss, by the supervisors and other. So it allowed me by reading this pamphos to really think deeply about how the hospital I was a union staffer stationed at, functioned, it allowed me to reflect back on how my own work function. And being that work is our dominant life activity, as long as we live in societies where the capitalist motor product prevails to the opening line of Marx's capital there. Then we should think we should talk about, think about that and envision

new ways of organizing that production or just simply not produce things like fast food or nuclear weapons or shitty media, right, or advertised. And the American worker allow me to do that in a way that I was pretty shocked for a pamphlet produced in 1970s. So my pitch for those who are interested in these kind of topics, these kind of subjects, or been reflecting on their own work experience is to turn to the original American Worker Pamphlet 7. Now, the second part of the pamphlet also is, I would say, a philosophical reflection on the first part. And I'm going to touch on that in a moment, but I want to mention just a couple of quick thing. I wrote about both sections of this pamphlet, and then, of course, the life of the pamphlet, how it was produced

in the like, in an article called searching for the American worker in new politics. I published that in summer of 2023. It's certainly available. online, and I know you all will link to it in the show notes. But my elevator pitch for this particular article is, how can a pamphlet produced by anonymous auto worker and a Chinese American luminary at the time, a unknown intellectual who was, who graduated with a degree in philosophy, but as a Chinese American woman, cannot find a job in any American university. No one would have her. and started engaging in these various worker struggles, first with the movement march on Washington movement,

early civil rights movements, and then, of course, with these various work. And that particular individual is Grace Lee Baugh, right? A vitally important figure in the last hundred years of American Left and Revolutionary Republic. So take a peek at the article, and really my argument for that is it will, I hope, help you reflect your own work experiences,

but also tells a story of why a pamphlet produced in 1947 still resonated with me sitting in a hospital break room or cafeteria in the midst of the pandemic, or why it reflected on the own experience of cafe workers, so much so that we produced this cafe workers' inquiry. In the immediate aftermath of the publication of this pamphlet in the United States, it was translated and then serialized in France, So it was published in English in 1947 by a small group of dissident Trotskis here in the United States called the Johnson Forest Tendency. It's translated by the socialism and barbarism group and then serialized in the first couple issues of their similar publication to the Johnson Forest efforts here in France.

And as a result of that serialized pamphlet, it gets into the hands of French auto work who see their similar experience because artwork as caught in. under slavery or IT and tech today or even finance capital today is a dominant central industry that affects very often all other production in undercapital. So these American workers in the London New Jersey plant, their experiences are reflected in the Ford General Motors and other plants in Detroit. They're reflected in the auto plans of France after it was trans. And then of course, actually, those workers start asking their own questions and start reflecting on their own questions. And in 1954, it's translated into Italian in a similar fashion to the American auto plants where you had a great migration of African Americans from the south to the north, very often

to take auto worker jobs and then work in the most dangerous elements of the plant. In Turin, Italy, in the north of Italy, in those auto plants, the racialized other of, quote, browner Italians, or those with Mediterranean roots or Morris roots in the southern part of the country, were treated as a racial other as they migrated from the south to the north, right? The pamphlet is translated in 1954. It circulates throughout Italy, as well as also the material from socialism and barbarism influences a whole new generation of Italian militants who are trying to understand how do we understand work and capitalism and class struggle from the workers' perspective. And clearly, this is a lot of grist for that male. This is a story that is still relevant. This is a

a story that has circulated, influenced class struggle and workers way beyond the initial intent of probably about a thousand copies of this pamphlet that was produced, right? It's been translated into Greek, it's been translated into Italian twice, just recently again. It's been translated into French, actually just this last year, even after the 1947 translation with a new preface. The fact that this auto worker and Chinese American philosopher in 1947 wrote this pamphlet that's still reflecting on our experience today, I think is profound. Let me say one other thing about the other two pamphlets, actually, in fact, the three pamphlets that come immediately after this one, but the same group of associated people. And then I'll go back and speak a little bit more about

Grace Lee Boggs in her section, which ties into my earlier comments about the translation of Marx's Workers' Inquiry. Almost immediately after the American worker, they published three other pamphets. A woman's place already cuts out, and then an additional pamphlet, looking at the experience of a black man in the South, who then moves to the North and seeks employment, right? So we're seeing the very much of the emergence of an understanding of the Great Migration, of the shift from the experience of the South and experiencing the racism of the North. The development of early Black liberation, so right struggles. When a women's place appears, it is the first time that at least in this milieu and at least in this kind of conversational and inquiry guise, a pamphlet appears about housework from the woman's perspective,

from the house, quote, housewife's perspective. Artie cuts out is also an interesting pamphlet. It looks at truancy from the perspective and the experience of school from the perspective of a truant student, right? In some way, looking at the emergence of the black liberation struggle, looking at the emergence of the feminist movement, looking at the emergence of a youth and student move. And then, of course, understanding what workers think and do while at work in 1947 is

really profound. In a lot of ways, these four pamphlets predict the next 75 years of social movement development. One, because the claim, and this claim comes from CLR James and his debates with Trotsky in 1939, is that the Black Liberation struggle is autonomous from the larger class struggle. The feminist, queer, student, youth, and other struggles are autonomous from other struggles, right, from the larger class struggle, from the party, from the union. Because there needs to be a process of self-discovery, of consciousness building, of consciousness raising, the development of a class, race, or gender consciousness in order to further the needs and desires of that particular population. It can't be dictated from the party. It can't be dictated from the

union. You can't learn it by reading Marx or philosophy. It needs to develop organic, and those struggles need to be directed by those who are most affected, right? These are arguments that have been taking place in the American left and arguably across the planet in Marxian revolutionary movements for over 100 years and they're really starting to be articulated in these early years in these pamph in profound ways. Yeah, it reminds me of, oh, sorry, go ahead, Kevin. I was just going to say, it reminds me a lot of, so the, like, the work of like the Combeahee River collective, you know, like black lesbian socialists, right? And are the ones who came up with identity politics. And I know as like, leftist and socialist, we usually like, it's identity politics. That's for,

that's some lib shit, right? But like, actually, like, if you have, actually look, if you fucking read what like identity politics is or look at a lot of other like black feminist thought and like black political economy, it's not necessarily, it's like, because I feel like what you're saying is like people think like, oh, these struggles are separate because you like the people of this specific identity or race or gender, et cetera, like have to do this sort of self-reflection and focus on their own issues. That doesn't mean they're still not relation to other things. And this is something that's talked a lot about black political economy and black feminism. And that's like what identity politics is. It's not that it's not related to other things and that it's not also a class

struggle. But if you don't actually focus on the people most marginalized, like if you don't focus on black women, for example, they will just be forgotten as well as any unique struggles that they have. I feel like people sometimes get this idea. It's like, oh, one or the other, you're only doing all of us together and it's all the working class and that includes everything. or we're all spread off into our four corners of our own identities and that these things don't touch each other at all? I don't know. So, yeah, if that was coherent at all. Very much so. And I think also it is profound in rereading the Khamachi where a reflective statement recently in the last few years was how a good portion of it addresses issues and

socialism, right? Like that is the part of the thrust of the pamphlet. And of course, It's a brilliant conclusion that when black queer women are free, all of us are free. Yes. Is profound in the context of understanding all these other class and related smuggle. And in a lot of ways, the American worker could also be blamed in some maybe small fashion for articulating an anti-union ultra-left position, right? So it's very critical of the unions for, I think, a lot of really good reason. So it's published in 1947.

In 1946, there's a massive strike wave across the auto sects. So we have to think that we're now converting back from the war production years to domestic production. The factories are being reorganized. The unions in some ways are becoming more bureaucratic. We'd see a few years later, five, six years later, what we'd call the Treaty of Detroit, which was a productivity deal by, in between the, you know, a peace treaty in ways between the unions and capital and the auto manufacturers, which said if you increase productivity, you'll get more wages,

It's a quote-unquote productivity deal. That's already starting to be formulated in 1946 and 1947. Also, the union then become because of the contract, because of the post-war error, because of this productivity deal, in order to keep the deal needs to discipline certain kinds of workers to make sure that they're not, you know, I presume I can curse. Boss makes a dime. That's why I shit on company time. Yeah.

To gain those moments back or to counterplan on the shop floor or to engage in wildcat strikes or sabotage in order to slow production. All those things are vitally important, and then the union becomes, in some ways, a disciplinary apparatus in the self-activity of workers themselves, and then a bureaucratic process of requiring a grievance rather than a group of workers on hearing that their co-worker has been fired for bullshit reasons. It's one thing to file a grievance, and another thing to march on the boss and say, we're not leaving and not working until you hire them, right? One of them removes power from the shop floor and puts it through more legalistic in the channels. Another maintains the development of working class capacities and power

on the American worker is criticizing. And I think in a really prophetic way as well, interesting enough, I was able to find some correspondence by this Paul Romano. We know because of Grace Lee Boggs and others' comments that his actual name was Phil Singer. I believe he left the group and the orbit of these Marxian organizations before the pamphlet came out. But about the time the pamphlets going to appear for the first time in 1947. He writes a letter to their bullet that's circulating as a way of, you know, we have the internet now with its good bag and the guises. The Johnson Forest Ending had this internal discussion bill and defer their conversations among

and Phil Singer is basically writing, criticizing this, I would say, intellectual, who's suggesting we should throw the baby out with a bathwater that like, we should actually take this ultra left position against the unions. And he's like, you don't work in a fucking auto factory, man. Like, yes, we should criticize and fight against the unions in their bureaucratic processes and the grievance process rather than the shop floor strategy. We should fight in our unions in order for racial or general equality. He doesn't say that particularly on what being Plemic there as well. But actually, in fact, the unions create a base of which we can then operate, right? It gives us a contract, gives us wages, hours, and work conditions, some say over our job. So it might be fine

for you as intellectual, we'll throw out the union, but actually in the auto factory itself, we need it. And I think that's an important point because there are ultra-left elements in the pamphlet when read a particular way. And in a lot of ways, what's interesting about the American worker is that it incorporates a number of different Marxian and political concept. It also is innovative in a number of ways, right, is this first appearance of a form of proletarian literature. So unlike the class composition in the cafe sector that we just published, it didn't use a survey. It didn't then kind of summarize and look at that sector or that industry and workers' experiences in that in order to reflect that back to workers themselves and circulate those lessons and struggles and understanding

in order to build class struggle and class consciousness. Instead, it took kind of this first-person narrative approach. And I've asked myself, and I was starting to say this a few minutes ago, I've asked myself many times, why did they choose that? And I say that because cited in Grace Lee Boggs as part two are two really important pieces of Mark. The first is that she cites the 1930th translation of a workers' inquiry. Clearly, Grace read this, the group discussed it. Presumption is that Paul Romano and Marty Glauberman, C.L.R. James and others as part of this group discussed and looked at Marx's Workers' Inquiry. So there's really a different way of producing or developing knowledge.

And then separate from that is the question of how do you present? So in a lot of ways, this new form of proletarian literature of a experience of work from the workers' perspective of 1947 is, is brilliant because after the war, you see the development of a popular culture, of a quote-unquote pop novelization, right, detective novels and superhero comics and various other things. And by telling this kind of story in this way, rather than maybe a quasi-sociological report or an analysis of the class composition, or an analysis of the sector and the major corporations and players operating within it, by telling that first-person narrative, it really allows the reader to see themselves in, right?

And my conclusion is they chose this form because we start to see the emergence of that kind of popular and working class culture in the United States. In addition, there's similarities between this and I have somewhere, a stack, endless stack, it seems of zines, written in the last 10, 20 years by substitutes, by those who worked on fishing boats, by cafe workers,

by service industry workers, all kinds of workers, because actually telling that first-person narrative work is an immensely powerful mechanism for sharing those kind of work stories, right? So, Grace Lee Boggs read, and those involved in producing this pamphlet read, A Merker's Inquiry.

And rather than, to Marx's prompt, providing a summary and report, Act, they actually decide to produce this first in a person. Now, and I know this is one of the questions that both of you wanted to ask, actually, in fact, CLR James, the author of the Black Jacobins on the Haitian Revolution and many, many, many other vitally important political treaties prompts this autoworker, Phil Singer, to keep a diary of his day-to-day experience. Now, Phil talks about that in his section of the pamphlet, and we know that CLR prompted him to do that because of Grace Lee Boggs' reflections in her later life. So, he's,

He basically kept a diary of his day-to-day reflections in the auto plan. And that was the source material for producing this pamph. So rather than a survey, he used a diary. Ria Diozcava, another member of the group, would call this a similar method, the full fountain pen. My friend Anastasia Wilson, my comrade Anastasia Wilson, and I are labor educators, economists, academics. And as a result, sometimes we have time and resources to actually put toward telling worker stories. Alex and other folks involved in cafe work and cafe worker organizing and Alex bargaining with Bluebottle and organizing new cafes out in the Bay Area, right, or supporting that organizing

at least, gave us so much to work from. So we have the time to take these stories and present it back to workers themselves. We have the resources. We have access to translation software and Zoom and various other things. So we used a full fountain pen network where workers would share their experiences of organizing. And then we do the work as militant intellectuals to produce the surveys, right, or produce those narratives and those stories, share them back with the workers. So we produced an interview. We transcribed it. We edited it. We sent it back to one of the worker organizers. They made comments. We're like, oh, no, this isn't clear. That isn't clear. I said this. I meant this. And like, we go back and forth until they are happy with the interview. And then we can

present that to the world, right? So that process was also taking place within the Johnson Forestancy, where the full fountain pen would be the militant intellectual writing down the narrative of stories or information they're providing. In order to circulate that and give workers an opportunity very often when they didn't have the time on top of the workday, on top of union organizing, top of engaging in community and class struggles, to circulate their stories and narrative. Now, it's interesting because Grace Lee Boggs in the second part of the pamphlet, the quote-unquote, reconstruction of society. She also draws on Marx and Alienate. And I think this point is important for a number of reasons. The same year, the American Worker pamphlet is published, Grace Lee Boggs

translates Marx on alienation for the first time, right? This comes from the economic and philosophical manuscript. The concept of alienation, of course, is vitally important for many Marxian anarchists and other political traditions since. But its first translation and first citation, and first citation is done by Grace Lee Boggs in 1940. Now, what Grace does is she brings the concept of alienation, that that you're alienated from the production process, your fellow workers, the product that you're producing. And of course, your quote unquote, as Marx's phrase would say, species being, right, the human essence of collaborative, cooperative, and work that will provide goods and services that human be, right? Instead of that becoming the sharp edge of the

wedge are the only or the main concept that she thinks will unlock the rest of human understanding and class struggle. She incorporates that in a really substantive and meaningful way in understanding all the other phenomenon in the fact itself. So her purpose in this second part of the essay, the second part of the pamphlet in the essay, it's amazing in the way that she brings in the reflections of auto workers, but also then proposes that we need to organize for a fundamentally new society and understand how alienation needs to be overcome in that process

of developing a new system. So Grace is using that concept, arguably for the first time. She is translating that for the first time. That pamphlet appears as three essays by Karl Marx, selected from the economic and philosophical manuscripts, and that actually appears

by the Johnson Forest tendency at the same, around the same time as the American. I think that's an important political lesson that they're bringing in a new concept and it doesn't become this new shiny object, it doesn't become the sharp edge of the wedge, it doesn't become the most important thing, but rather it allows them to expand upon

their understanding of auto work and work under capitalism, and then, of course, what a reconstruction of society and a new society would look like, which would not include alienated later. Right. I did know, for the first time,

I hadn't heard of the term party names, which is just pseudonyms, I guess that comrades use. Exactly. And I like the idea of party names. So I was going to ask what everyone's party name would be. I have one I can do. That's helpful.

I think you've got one written down. Someone brought one down. That was me. So my party name would be Helmand Rigby. And I'll explain what that means in a second. But Grace Lee Boggs chose the party name. It was actually given the party name of Ria Stone because it would be easier to write about revolutionary politics and the like and not then be caught up in the,

the surveillance state and repression and other issues that militants were facing. And auto worker Phil Singer chose the name of Paul Oman. So I think for me at least, I always like to go with literary references. And Helman Rigby, in fact, comes from B. Traven's book, The Death Ship. So he's basically a person without citizenship, a person without papers. He's joining the crew of a quote unquote death ship into the interwar error, just to find employment. And rather than writing his own name in the ledger of the ship that he is boarding, he then says, I wrote with clear letters that until the last trumpets of the last day are calling, someone then will be confused on how to call me, Helmand Rigby, right?

So pulling a literary reference from what I say favorite books, I would choose Helmut Rigby as my party name. What about you all? It's like trying to come up with a good drag name. Like, yeah, I usually also go literary reference. for most things. Or like, I'm really into opera, so maybe like a cool opera character.

I don't know. I know that like the beginning of Moby Dick has stuff from a librarian in it. So maybe like a Moby Dick reference or something. I don't know. Or like something from Billy Budd. Maybe Billy Budd. Who knows?

I don't know. I do love Billy Budd. But yeah, I don't know. I have to think about it. Come back to me. I did, I actually went to a thesaurus earlier to find names that begin with N. so I've got just in

Justin raptured Justin Chanted I don't know Justin Martyr is a good historical one which I think would be fun because I you know kind of it's kind of what I was thinking of of like my actual pseudonym online like because I usually just go by Justin from Library Punk

because it's it's a pseudonym and it kind of promotes the podcast but I don't know maybe Justin the librarian or the library Maybe I would do something from like from Oscar Wild actually because like my my like handle online is wild at heart but wild is spelled like Oscar Wild but it's my favorite David Lynch movie. So and like wild is my favorite like queer anarcho socialist person who ever lived. So I don't know. Maybe yeah maybe I do a wild reference. It's changed my answer. Wild's better and fits me better I think. I think what's interesting too as the pamphlet is a new form of prolet. In a lot of ways, it predicts the emergence of an entire working class culture talking about this, entire zine culture talking about people's lives and experiences.

And, of course, their experiences at work as one subset of zes. In the same way that these auto workers and revolutionaries were choosing party names, we see the development of punk names, our forest names, right? When folks were doing forest defense work, they would choose some ecological reference, right, to go by in case the state came calling, or especially during times of repression, people will choose those kind of party names. But these kind of developments in working class culture

very often will think as new and innovative and cool and actually, in fact, have long, rich histories of working class people choosing party names or forest names or punk names in order to avoid the threats that are coming from the state and capital. Yeah, this would happen quite a bit, partially because the police were corrupt, by an ebor when the cigar manufacturing plants were in West Tampa and Ebor in Florida, they would go on strike once in a while.

They were quite militant. They had a lot of mutual aid societies because it's in 1920s, 1930s. 1910 to 1930s is like the heyday. And the cops had to arrest someone, so they had arrest people and they'd be like, all right, write your name there. And they would just make up a name on the spot. And the cops knew they were doing it. Everyone knew it was a fake name.

And so everyone's like, oh, you know, they've, and they would publish the name of all the people they arrested and the people up in Tallahassee would be none the wiser, but they think the police are still doing their job, but the police didn't really care because they were corrupt. They would either get paid off or they would get bribed or they would get threatened. So, yeah, there's, that's, just reminded me of that story. But you have a question for us. I have a question for you. So I was reading this really wonderful article on workers inquiries in libraries today. I was speaking with a library worker yesterday, in fact, and they work with teenagers and one of the things that they were sharing in the details of their job,

it basically sounded like a social work, right? There are a lot of elements of library work, and I was a former college professor and I'm a labor educator, and a lot of elements of my job are outside of quote-unquote education, right, or reproductive labor or effective labor, forms of support, and thinking about this library worker's experiences, working with teenagers, in a lot of ways it's beyond providing reading recommendations or finding a reference source for them, things along those lines. And all contradictory nature of so many of these kind of service work,

I want to point out a book from the late 1970s that was republished a few years ago. It's called In and Against the State, Discussion Notes for Socialists. And this was published in the United Kingdom. It was a group of militants from Edinburgh in London, all of which worked as teachers, social workers, in, you know, housing offices and the like, and they found that their experiences were contradictory, right? They were the only way that folk could access many services they needed to survive,

but also very often were expected to discipline, right? Like, a teacher is expected to provide educational opportunities, but also discipline students in certain ways that could be, and should in a lot of ways, be questioned in order. So I was really interested in hearing about your own experiences in work in light of some of the other shows that you've been having recently on AI and how that's going to think about work and what's going to change that, but also thinking about the pandemic and post-pandemic and how many other kinds of services are provided by libraries. So my question is actually pretty simple. It comes from our cafe workers inquiry as well. We asked this of our 35 cafe workers that spoke to us and wondering how this relates to you all.

I'm heading over to Europe next week for a month to do workshops in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Belfast on Workers' Inquiry, sharing this workers' inquiry, but also prompting people to ask each other and themselves this. And it is, can you tell us a little about your work? What do you do all day? How is the work divided up? What are the working additions like? And what is going to work like every day? Justin, you want to go first? You want me to go first? You go first. Okay. This is actually similar so a couple of years ago we did. some day in the life episodes where we just ask each other questions about our jobs because this was a thing we realized that like even if you work in an academic library, I don't necessarily know

what another, you know, a person who does collection development does, right? So just what do we all do? And it's also, so kind of, okay, a little bit about my work. So I do cataloging, which for those who aren't librarians or catalogers is where you get a book and all of the information about it, like it's title and its author, how many pages it has, stuff like that, you transcribe those in a record according to a specific standard, as well as doing like intellectual labor to analyze it, to classify it and give subject headings and stuff. And this is when you go on a library website, like search the catalog, that's like the record that you see. I'm one of the people that like makes those, right? So that's like the basic of what a cataloger does.

I, however, am mainly in spreadsheets all day. I do a lot of like developing, like working with special projects. Like I develop batch routines. How do, if we have over 11,000 things, how can we, this backlog of years, how can we actually get at least data about that into the catalog so that it is discoverable? And, you know, I work very closely with my supervisor manager to sort of develop these workflows. and stuff. So that's what the majority of my work is, is in spreadsheets, kind of doing in batch or doing the sort of like high concept thinking and figuring out for workflows around like other

types of cataloging. So then that's what I do all day. Work and then how was the work divided up? I don't know. According to what my manager says. This is the first time of my life I've had a job where I didn't have to set the priorities. And I'm lucky I have a really. good manager. He's in the, he's in the union. So then there's like, so, you know, he's spicy supervisor, right? He's like the head of a department. I, I love working with him and we get along really well and I respect him a lot. And so, but he sets my priorities for me. And that's the first time my life I've not had to do that in a job. And it's actually really nice. Working conditions, I think a lot of librarians who work in public libraries will relate to this statement or understand what I mean by this.

I work, because I work in a public library, I work in the sort of central main location, right? My working conditions are going to be vastly different than someone who works in a branch. Unless something goes wrong with the age vac, there is like a zero percent chance that it being too hot or too cold, like that the weather is going to affect

whether or not my workplace is open. Whereas like branches close all the time. Or like that, like I always know that there will be enough people opening up my location, whereas two is the minimum to open up a branch. What happens if you have a program? What happens if there's more than one floor? That's just not safe. So my working conditions, like I'm in a non-public area. I'm non-public facing. I'm in a nice big open room that I face windows. I get to see the sunlight all day. Like, I have like kind of no complaints about my working conditions outside of the usual, like, administrative, bureaucratic

bullshit. But, like, my work conditions are good, but I know that, like, branch librarians, it's, like, night and fucking day, or even people who work with the public night and day. And what is going to work every day like for me is great. This is a job I like, it's like the kind of labor where this is the kind of labor I would want to be doing outside of capitalism. because I understand that like, you know, we all have to do some kind of labor and help everybody out and this is what I'm good at and this is what I like doing and it helps people. I know it's my job. I leave that shit at work once I'm home, but like it's still labor I enjoy doing. And it's, again, because I'm not most of my jobs in the past, I've had to like set my own priorities or come up with things to do or even supervised people. or like be in charge of things.

And that takes a lot of brain energy for me to do. And I would get like paralysis a lot that then would affect everything else like in my non-work life. And now because I all of a sudden like that's not a cognitive task I have to hold in my head and be able to do. It like makes actually enjoying my labor to the extent that one can. like it's nice and then like I can like

kind of leave it at home and right now the thing that's making me not be able to fucking do shit at home is because I overcommit and organizing outside of work but you know it's a but for once it's not work's fault that I am all burnt out which is a weird feeling but

I will say I am I'm continuing the tradition of all of my jobs of being the only person with my job title at a place and so there's no one else who does what I do at the library. And that's been true in every single job I've had, which is a kind of weird position to be in. I love that.

Yeah. I have had a job like Jays when I was graduate assistant where I was assigned things and I would just go attack this range of things and process them. And then when you're done, I'll give you the next thing. And that's great because you can like get down to the hour. Like I know I'll be done in this many hours. So it's always really fun. I actually, I was bringing in a new librarian who had had a very similar job. And I was like, okay, I have to warn you. This job is nothing like that. You are going to be working to other people's schedules forever in this specialty. So that specialty was scholarly communications.

I quit that job earlier this year. And now I am in a generalist academic librarian position at a private university where I'm a faculty member. The second time I've been in a position like that, I didn't want to ever be in a private, small private university ever again, but things happened. So, because I don't think they're good for students, but honestly. I think if you're not a prestigious private institution, you shouldn't exist. You should just give up. You should ask the state to turn you into a community college. So about my work, I have, I have to make my own priorities because my job description is incoherent.

So I'm a generalist academic librarian. But the one thing I have is I have technical services requirements. So I have to manage the catalog, the e-resources, digital projects that come up. I'm the tech boy. That's my job. I'm the tech librarian. All the other librarians are 20 years older than me and they don't want to deal with this. So I'm the computer boy.

I have to deal with all that stuff. Kind of the same thing is that the last time I was in this position. How is work? So what do I do all day? Usually I'm in my office all day unless I have a class. I need to go teach. I do sometimes look around campus to see opportunities for like external events because we're a very highly commuter campus.

So it's hard to figure out where I can do events and where I can like, I'm really into zines this year. And I really want to do zine making and get students into zines. But they're not on campus all that much. So it's tough. And there's just not that many students. Like at my old university, you know, students were there all day because there was six times as many students.

So we're just not going to see the kind of foot traffic. And so I how is work divided up? Looking from like a larger scale, something I wanted to talk about. As a librarian, I have certain tasks. I am very rarely asked to open or close the building. I am very rarely asked to watch the main desk. And I am very rarely asked to do anything like go get the mail. I do that once a week.

So I have chat. I have to cover our virtual chat. I have to do instruction. and I have to do my technical services work and I have to guide the work of a student employee who works with me on that stuff and I'm training a full-time, basically a library assistant level person

to do the tech services stuff as well with me. And I'm very comfortable doing that. I'm very comfortable setting my schedule to other people's. You know, I put stuff out there and then I wait for it to come back to me. In the meantime, I have other things I work on. I learned how to do that. It didn't come naturally,

but I learned how to do it over the last seven years at my last job. up. You're way better at it than I am. Yeah. I'm lazier in a lot of ways too. Like I work really, really hard and then I am okay with not having to work hard for a while. And it's fine because like I have a huge amount of autonomy. I have a huge amount of skills that I can, like no one else in the building has. So you get a lot of leeway. It's really nice. Like I like that feeling. But the way that the work is divided up. So there's me, there's my director, the other librarians, there's the full-time staff members, there's two of them.

There's about seven or eight student workers, three GAs, and housekeepers. And I wanted to bring up facilities. And they're specifically called housekeepers. Housekeeping is racialized. They're all Latina. And facilities is also mostly Latina. There's one Anglo guy. So something I wanted to mention about, like, how work is divided up.

Everywhere I worked, no one has ever invited the facilities people to the all-staff meeting because they're a different department, right? They don't report to anyone in the building. They don't report to the library dean. They report to facilities. They're just assigned to our building so they don't understand really how the library works. Where I am now, we have the same housekeeper, but she doesn't come to the all staff meetings. Now, when we have all staff meetings, but the president facilities is there.

And that's good. And I'm glad they're there so that they understand the whole track of the thing. But, you know, I have been at staff meetings at Jay's workplace. And I don't think facilities people were in those meetings. They were they were. Okay. Yeah. I couldn't tell. It was very practical room. It's our security that is not even like a, they're a separate contracted company. And same like with our cafe. It's like a separate company. But facilities is like like, in the unions. So they're like library employees. Yeah. So the thing is like how can they build

consciousness of the connection to their industry and my my IWW model of syndicalism is peering through there? What are working conditions like? Very easy, sedentary. I set my own kind of priorities and what is going to work every day like for you. It's good. It gives me the freedom that I want. The only limitations are, you know, budget, bureaucracy, the regular stuff. You know, my supervisor's good.

My coworkers are good. No real problems there. But, you know, we'll see how the new administration goes. Maybe there'll be layoffs. Who knows, you know, I don't want to get targeted in that. But as far as I know, everything is stable and good for now. I want to also add one other thing for mine for like how is the work divided up.

My workplace is unionized. Yeah, union librarians, but we're silly and have two unions. We sort of have, like, I'm not going to say the unions. I'm trying not to say, people know where I fucking work, but I'm trying not to like say where I work. But we basically have like the professional union that's like real old and only became affiliated like less than a decade ago, maybe.

Like it was an independent union before them. And then there's this sort of like library. assistant like union. So basically does your position like require a master's degree or like professional expertise or not? Now, I think that's a horseshit distinction because the people doing the library assistants don't work do have expertise and are professionals. Sometimes they have more experience than I do. Why do I get paid more than them? You know, like that, you know, I don't like that distinction, but there are certain rules about who can do what kind of work based on our CBAs. And especially this shows up in cataloging because in my department there's like some like are our catalogers

and those are like my union and then there's like the people who do like the processing work so like the way public libraries work you get most of them when you're ordering books they already come with a barcode on they usually already come with like a spine label on maybe they're already pre-wrapped they usually maybe even have a record already like that kind of thing except the one of the companies that does that just went out of business. So we're about to have more work. But like the LA's will do that processing work. They'll like put like get the book physically ready and then they know how to search for records that might already exist. They might even be able to be like, oh, hey, this record doesn't have a page number, but I know how to read and can get the page number and put it in our version of the record.

what they aren't allowed to do is the like subject analysis and classification work. So basically if you're just transcribing things according to a standard, like info that exists, then LA's can do that. But people in my union, it's like if you're coming up like if analysis and intellectual labor comes up, then that is crossing over the other union. And we've been thinking a lot about this recently because we're arguing, we're bargaining, We're doing shared work bargaining right now. So what is work that can be done by people in either union

and what is exclusive work to our union? And we're having, like, we wrote it up for each department. And then we're having people in those departments review it right now. And it's like, oh, how does the work that we do in cataloging, that's metadata work? Are the people in digital doing metadata? Are they doing it and thinking about it the same way that we are? What about in archives?

What about in special collections? what about in like the fine arts, like all of these other places that are doing metadata work, but are they dividing it up and thinking about it the same way? It's really interesting to hear you all speak about that work because I have a good friend in Portland who's a reference librarian, and Zine librarian, Matt librarian. I've heard their work for years.

My mother was a librarian for most of her working life. My grandmother, my mother's mother, worked in a library. My mother was a children's librarian where my grandmother worked shoveling books, doing adult programming, all kinds of different things, right? And when I think about library work, I think about that. Yeah. I don't think about, I even work for the friends of the library in Portland, Oregon for quite some time. And that was cataloging, choosing, you know, then selling books.

And then hearing about what you all do is so different than my perceptions and assumptions and understanding about how library work operates. And then, of course, those divisions you're talking about have an important to your, you know, earlier comment about the Kabachi River Collective, how that work and those divisions of work take place. Doing higher education organizing with faculty and graduate students always was a challenge for me because faculty and graduate students think that they are in those programs because they're the smartest people. And those who do their jobs in the university are in those jobs because they were not the smart. And actually, it's because of class

durations in our society. How do people access to education? What opportunities do they have? Are they part of a, they come out of a, you know, working class community. Do they have the relationships? To be able to participate fully as, even if they entered a PhD program with the kind of language and assumptions and resources and cultural processes that acclimated middle class and upper class folks to academia, right? So there's all of these challenges that we really need to think about. And in higher education and healthcare organizing, seeing the real fundamental class differences between faculty and nurses and those who worked to keep the universities and hospitals running. And actually how if we could create ladders and other opportunities,

so folks that were working in certain kinds of higher education or hospital work, then had the opportunity to choose or not to choose to go on to get degrees and become faculty or, you know, RNs could take place and break down and distrable. and address some of that class striation and that that pyramid scheme, that hierarchy that so many of these institutions reinforce and are based upon. Like I when I, because I used to be in academic libraries as well, I was like the majority of my career. I remember like when I would do instruction, I actually love doing instruction, but I would have professors sometimes not want me to do it because how dare I a person without a PhD teach their precious students? How dare I teach a class? their class, not just they class, but their class, right? Like how dare, why am I qualified? They

like didn't, you know, I've heard about faculty being like, I care more about my journal than your salary. Like, you know, if the journal costs are going up, like, why we have the internet, why do we need you? Like this real antagonism and like belittling of the expertise of librarians in higher ed, because faculty, really entitled faculty, just like don't understand what we. do. Let's also be honest. And I say this is a former higher education organizer and former faculty member. Faculty and PhDs are not trained to do. They're fucking just right. Your job is scheduling things. Your job is running committees. Your jobs is addressing budgets. When you're fortunate or unfortunate enough to become the chair, then it's making other kinds of hiring decisions.

PhDs do not train PhDs to actually do their jobs. And actually, I think it reinforces some of the real problems, class variations that we're seeing these universities. And I won't say what university was, but I can't even tell you how many times I've consulted with higher education unions where faculty did the exact same thing that you have mentioned. So at a university, the faculty basically turfed the health care plan because even though it would cost absolutely zero more dollars, faculty are like, yeah, providing gender affirming care is not really an issue for our message. And it's like, well, actually, all the fucking employees in this institution are on the health plan. So I'm glad that you have the power to decide who gets and who doesn't get care,

but you're actually really stepping on the necks of those who are doing other kinds of work. And of course, then, you know, trans and gen forming faculty as well. But the faculty aren't trans and genital form. That's for the students. That's for children, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. I hated that bullshit when I was in higher ed. I was having a conversation with my supervisor today, and she was kind of catching me up on the, because I started the summer. right? And she's catching me up on the lore. And this email had gone out about like, you know, how we're going to, like, our new interim provost to the new president brought along with him to like, you know, tag team, yeah, his agenda sent out this thing about like AI.

And it was very like humanistically focused. It's like, okay, well, AI do the things AI can do. We'll refocus on the classical education, the liberal arts. So like, okay, good, sounds good. The person he's citing was a history professor at like UT Austin. Okay, fine. So great. Sure. But then part of it was we need to have like this sort of course redesign so that everything is like, you know, built around seminar, speaking, presenting, and ethical use of AI. And that, to me, went, that's a big, big, big curriculum review committee coming up. Yeah. And what that can mean for the library is we could have an opportunity to help faculty members redesign their courses using openly licensed materials. So we can sneak it.

So that's how my job for the past, like 10, my entire career has always worked. I started doing open educational stuff in my first librarian position. You wait for an opening and then you're ready. You are ready with the elevator pitch. You are ready at any moment. I attended meetings of the faculty senate where they would go, Justin, could you explain that resolution again? Hadn't read the resolution in like six months.

And I was like, absolutely, I can, how much time do I have? It goes two minutes, got it. Boom, did it. Because that was my job. My job is to be able to do that and push stuff through that I needed and to wait for those openings and then throw it in. And so I was talking to my boss about that. And she says, well, unfortunately, there was an old instructional designer who was very territorial, kept trying to take control of the courses away from the faculty members.

And she only left a year ago. So they are still very sore about this. So they're probably not going to want the library to be like meddling in their courses for a little while. And I'm like, that's understandable. That's totally understandable. all we got to do is just wait for the right opening. That's all we got to do. We don't know what it will be, but we're waiting for it. But she's like, oh, you need know, faculty sometimes. They're like, oh, the library is just a repository for books. I'm like, that happens. That happens. Sometimes faculty members think librarians only have a high school education. It happens. You know, and she was just saying these things to me about sometimes they think this. I know they think that it happens. It happens. We're in a support role. It doesn't matter that we're faculty. It doesn't matter we're tenure track. They don't care. They don't think about that. They think we're like special faculty. even though on their faculty form, on their tenure form, it says the first one is the university library. The first school is the library.

Yeah. And then they have to click at the library to then choose their school because we're the first one on the drop down. So they know we're tenure track. But yeah, it's a feminized profession. It's, and that does a lot. And it's a terminal master's profession. Yeah. So, you know, we don't get doctor and we don't need doctor. No. If you get a library and information science PhD, it's because you have a research project you want to do or you want to teach and be like a core faculty at a library school. Yeah. Doing like research. But you do not need a for a job at all, at all. Yeah, you never do. I only need the master's degree. Yeah. It's like I, yeah. Probably do it. But it's good. It's a good, it's a good degree. It's a good degree. It's a good degree. It's a good degree. You get out of it what you put into it is what I always help you. people because I sing the praises of my program and the classes I took and what I got out of it. But I know a lot of people are like, I didn't learn dog shit in library school. I'm like, the thing you have to do is work in a library while you're doing it. Whatever else you're doing, don't go into a library school if you cannot also get a library job

or not work and volunteer in a library. If you're not doing the coursework and real work at the same time, it's not going to work for you. Just put it off till next year. So if you have time, do you want to tell us about your books, like reading struggles? Yeah, I can give you a short synopsis, especially because it's basically what it keeps me up at night and haunts. George O'all basically stated writing a book is being haunted and being... That's a very gothic Marxist of him. Yes.

You're not to get that demon out until the book is done. And I very much feel like that is the case. This book has been, in a lot of ways, in the works for most of my adult life. I was very lucky as a young organizer to come in contact with movement and political and intellectual elders that were engaged in all kinds of different organizing experiences. I was lucky enough to, in my late teens, early 20s, walk into the office of feminist scholar and Marxist Sylvia Fiterici. I was introduced that first day to a collective called the Midnight Notes Collective, which includes philosopher George Confensis, historian Peter Limbao, educator Monti Neal, and many, many other really interesting and engaging militants here in the United States. And because that is the political tradition, which I

identify with and the political tradition that I draw from for all of my work, even as an organizer, I wanted to go back and write the intellectual history of this trajectory, this tradition. In a lot of ways, it begins, I referenced earlier in CLR. James's debate on the autonomy of the black liberation struggle or the quote-unquote black question with Trotsky in Mexico in 1930. CLR had already been engaged in anti-colonial struggles, for instance, fighting the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopian. Turns out that he traveled to Scotland and Ireland, even spent time with the daughter, Nora Connolly of the great Irish Lenin and Irish revolutionary figure, James Connolly. He introduced her to Trotsky, recruited her for the struggle against that early

fascist intervention in an assault on Ethiopian sovereignty, in a lot of ways, you know, predates the struggle against fascism in Spain, and socialists who rose up as Franco. So he's involved intimately in those activities. At the same time, he's writing about the Black Jacobins and Haitian Revolution and how important of a struggle that is against the slaveocracy and the slave society and arguably one most important revolutions, if not the most important revolution in the Western hemisphere, being that not only did it show that former slaves could liberate themselves, but also develop their own post-revolutionary society, defining their own full humanity as humans. And that was something that he was certainly. So he's thinking about all these kind

of questions and then comes on a tour after he publishes the Black Jackabins in 1938 to the United States, meets with sharecroppers, meets with other militants, gets involved in the Harblin Renaissance, actually is a figure at the Calypso Club in the Lower East Side, where jazz greats are playing on the stage. Turns out the waiter is James Baldwin, and he sits court there talking with great cultural figures of Harlem Renaissance. Then, of course, after that tour, he goes to Mexico to debate, the black question with Trotsky,

arguing that black folks themselves need to develop not even a revolutionary organization. It might be a civil rights group. it might be, you know, a political party or a political formulation that demand, instead of demanding, you know, a full revolutionary upheaval, simply demand equality in the society. But that needs to be determined by black folks themselves and not by an external force. And in a lot of ways, the reason that I begin with that conversation is it's very often assumed that the quote, permanent revolution in Marx and Engels usage, that the working class is autonomous from the larger bourgeois revolutions and revolutionary movements and shift toward republic and and and and democratic

societies. The working on is actually a third factor, a third revolution, an independent factor from those bourgeois revolutions that resulted in the American French and obviously English revolutions, less so the Haitian, of course, because of the vital class elements of slaves freeing themselves therein that CLR talks about. But actually, in fact, my presumption, at least initially was that the James is using the autonomy of the working class to understand the the autonomy of the black liberation struggle and actually in fact it's reversed. James is understanding the autonomy of the black liberation struggle from the larger revolutionary movements and political parties and unions then in fact allows the development of the pamphlet of the American worker and other

reflections that the working class actually is in fact autonomous from the official organizations of the left from churches, foundations, unions, political parties, etc., etc., etc. actually, in fact, the reflection of the autonomy of the working class, which then becomes that inversion of the class perspective, not looking at capitalism, the experience of workers from capital's perspective, but actually workers' perspectives themselves, as they develop their own consciousness, forms of revolutionary self-activity and organization to overthrow the divisions in the capitalist society and, of course, itself. So I was kind of like tugging on these threads, and I began with that kind of unfolding. And actually, in fact, where the book begins in that

seen the first chapter is that debate, but also the considerations and thoughts and reflections that CLR had before and then after the debate on that quote unquote question. And then I utilize that as a moment to then look at and try to understand how CLR was understanding the anti-colonial, the diasphoric and the black struggle in the state. So the book is titled Reading Struggles. It comes from a quip and reflection by philosopher George Kofensis, where he basically states we need to be reading the struggles that are emerging in the working class. And if we're not doing that, we actually lose the opportunity to really understand where the class is going, what forms a struggle in organization might be emerging, what struggles like, so for instance, writing a path of housework

in the early 1950s then predates by almost two decades, the emergence of the wages for housework movement and feminist struggles in the United States and course. So by reading those struggles, then we can actually intervene and further amplify and circulate through workers' inquiry and other methods, the struggles of working people that are emerging out of their everyday lives and forms of survival. So that is the focus of the book. And then I'm taking a couple of different moments throughout this tradition and revolutionary history of heterodox Marxist and how they understood those struggles. So I begin with CLR James' debate on the black question. I then moved to Ria Dioascavas.

understanding of Russia as a capitalist society. And her conclusion of that, that it is, in fact, not a democratic society, it is not a worker state. It is not a, you know, the Soviets are an authoritarian and top-down structure that they need to challenge. And actually, all the mechanism, capitalism are still functioning in that society. And the way she comes to that conclusion is that she comes from the perspective of the workers in the enterprises and Soviet. What is their experience?

What is their everyday experience? And it's through tugging on that, that thread that then unravels the actual operations of state capitalism under the Soviet Union. And actually, in fact, state capitalism as it's emerging in Western societies as well, in addition to the Soviet Union. Then I move on to Grace Lee Boggs, who's looking at Marx and alienation, her initial struggles and involvement in the early civil. Rights Movement with the March on Washington Movement. She's living in Chicago at the time, up through, and then, of course, the American worker that I'm talking about. And then I'll actually go to a number of other figures in these initial chapter. First three chapters will cover these kind of American workers and American revolutionaries. Then I have two short,

subsequent chapters looking at how those kind of ideas and traditions circulate through France and Italy. And then, of course, part of the title of the book is back again. How then they recirculate through the United States, Canada, England, and elsewhere to influence a new generation of revolutionaries and militants and worker intellectuals in the 1970s, 90s, with a development for housework movement in the United States, a collectives like the zero work collective and the Midnight Oates Collective, and then I'll conclude by looking at the Process World Project and Magazine at a San Francisco that really was identifying circulating workers' stories and understandings with the emergence of temporary precarious office work, right? Are you being processed or

are you doing the processing, right, is part of their formulation? So reading struggles looks at about 75 years of revolutionary movements and traditions and the context they're operating in so that militants who are reading the struggles in their day hopefully will illuminate and assist us in reading our struggles and our own conflict and still a work in progress. I think one of your questions was how is the writing going? I actually, in fact, wrote 90,000 words of kind of like the structure of the intellectual histories of these various groups and the publications they did, the disagreements and arguments they had. And then I took a step back and said, how is this going to really be engaging in port into the reader? And I want the reader to understand how CLR or Grace Lee Bobbs, Silvie Federici, Peter

Leimbao, George Coffensis, Harry Cleaver, and others. looked at the struggles and context of which they're operating in and how they can amplify, circulate, and further those class struggles toward a, you know, reconstructive vision of a new society. And my hope in presenting that context and their stories and their own thought processes in writing during those time periods

will aid folks in thinking through that process today because we cannot go back to the debate of 1939. We cannot return to the kind of, you know, zine-style interventions of process world in the late 70s, early 80s, looking at temporary office work. We can't well go back to those months. We need to look at our own contact and hopefully learn some of the lessons of the past. And I don't just look at this as a positive development.

I also look at the moment of which there's a split between Grace Lee Boggs and Grace and then her partner, the Autodiac Autoworker and Great Intellectual himself, James Jimmy Boggs. They split away from CLR because they're seeing the emergence of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement, where CLR is obsessed with workers' councils and the Hungarian Revolution of Knights, right? So actually, in fact, there's a moment of which

CLR continues on his political line and political trajectory, but isn't reading and understanding the struggles that are emerging here in the United States. Part of that's due to his exile in England. Part of that is to do to his own theoretical commitments. But I hope that it's a lesson for folks that we don't get bogged down and limited

in our own theoretical perspectives, that they're constantly being renewed and rethought and re-addressed and reformulated in relation to the struggles that are emerging and the struggles we like to see emerge. Great. I think that covered everything we wanted to. Is there anything you would like to plug in terms of people going and finding you, social media, websites, anything like that? Sure. I do a public history project on Twitter somewhat, I would say, lately since my focus has been doing workshops and trainings, it's a little less so. But you can find me on Twitter. at American Work 47, which is obviously a reference to the American Worker Pamphlet of 1947. I can be reached in other materials on labor history, labor education, class struggle, social movements, and, of course, the things we talked about today, can be found in my website at readingstruggles.info. I'm writing reading struggles right now for AK Press,

and we'll be out in the subsequent years. In addition, I'm working on the American Worker Project and a reprint, and that will appear. on a press in the next couple of years as well. In addition to the Cafe Workers' Inquiry, our little collective group of folks who produced that inquiry are engaging in another right now. Our intent is to do that on grocery workers, of course, if we have the engagement in support of grocery workers,

to do such an inquiry, folks can read about that at Notes from Below.org. And if you're so interested in you're listening from England, Ireland, or Scotland, I'll be spending all of November there, doing talks on CLR James, on the American Worker pamphlet, on the search for the American worker, on their workers inquiry we just conducted in the cafe sector. And also, I'm panel discussions with folks who are doing workers inquiry in England, Ireland, Germany, and elsewhere for various different conferences and among comrades. So if you happen to be listening from there,

come join us for those workshops and training. Yeah, we've got some listeners over there, I think, right? At least a couple. Yeah. I'm sure. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on again. Thank you. I really appreciate your time and your great questions and prompts and also being willing to answer one of mine. Sure.

Good night.