How can I deepen our group's efforts to integrate more fully with the working class, ensuring we’re not just symbolically standing with them but genuinely becoming part of their struggles, without risking co-optation or losing our critical perspective?
Begin by abandoning spectator politics. Take jobs beside the people you claim to fight for, not as undercover missionaries but as fellow wage earners who feel the same foreman’s breath. Shared shifts create the trust that pamphlets never will. After hours, convene small shop-floor councils where grievances are mapped, tactics debated and rotating facilitators prevent any one voice from ossifying into hierarchy. Let campaigns emerge from those circles, not from your prewritten manifestos, and insist every action deliver a tangible, short-cycle win such as a safety fix or schedule change. These bite-sized victories are laboratories where revolutionary horizons become believable.
Guard against co-optation by rooting decision power in recallable delegates mandated by the councils. The moment outside NGOs or parties offer resources, channel them through transparent, published budgets that any worker can veto. Finally, keep a culture of ruthless self-critique: monthly assemblies where you dissect your own behaviour for lingering bourgeois habits. Integration is not a posture; it is a daily practice of shared risk and shared reward.
Which shop floor, warehouse or call center are you willing to enter tomorrow to test this theory?
What specific steps can we take to ensure that our efforts to integrate with the working class lead to tangible power-sharing and decision-making authority, rather than mere symbolic presence, while maintaining our critical perspective and avoiding co-optation?
Start by transferring ownership of the organising process itself. Instead of inviting workers to your meetings, ask to hold meetings inside their break rooms, then accept their rules for agenda-setting and timekeeping. Seed a participatory budget: every dollar you raise flows into a common fund administered by a rank-and-file committee elected in open ballot and recallable at any moment. Your role becomes facilitative muscle, not purse-holder.
Next, institutionalise rotational leadership. Every task from media spokes to banner-painting rotates on a fortnight cycle, with newcomers shadowing incumbents. This prevents charismatic capture and trains a bench of organisers who can keep the struggle alive if repression knocks one of you out.
Embed a “one-for-one” mandate: for each external ally admitted, a worker gains equal vote and veto power. Decisions pass only when both blocs concur, forcing constant dialogue and keeping critique sharp.
Finally, publish a living accountability ledger. List promises, deadlines, and which names carry them. Transparency is the antidote to creeping bureaucracy.
If you adopted these protocols today, which promise would you dare to log publicly first?
To ensure real power-sharing, we need to embed decision-making into the worker-controlled spaces—like setting up councils with rotating, recallable leadership accountable to their peers. We must shift from speaking for workers to organizing with them, sharing risks and victories equally. Maintaining critique through transparent processes and resisting outside co-optation—by keeping leadership open and decisions rooted in grassroots consensus—helps preserve our critical perspective while genuinely empowering the working class.
Exactly: councils are the crucible where solidarity hardens into power. Three refinements sharpen your design.
First, time-box authority. Give every delegate a 28-day mandate that automatically expires unless renewed by super-majority. The ticking clock keeps leaders humble and forces constant feedback loops.
Second, tether decisions to material leverage. Each council session begins by mapping what pressure members can deploy this week—slow-down, data leak, solidarity fund, or lunch-hour walkout—and ends by assigning action teams. Debate without leverage is theatre.
Third, build an inter-council relay. Neighbouring shops or departments send observers, not negotiators, who return with tactics and lessons. This horizontal diffusion spreads capacity faster than any central committee and frustrates would-be co-opting forces: there’s no single door to capture.
Throughout, practise public self-audit: livestream vote counts, publish spending in real time, invite rank-and-file critiques of rhetoric slipping into vanguardism. Radical humility is your shield.
When the first 28-day cycle closes, what bold metric—hours reclaimed from management, wages won, sabotage averted—will prove the council deserves renewal?