VISION

PROVIDENCE WORKERS DEFENSE

VISION

A SHORT PAMPHLET ON REVOLUTION, OBSTACLES, GOVERNMENT.

Rope A Dope

( from struggle to revolution)

The conditions we face in this system are an all out war against the working class. This is intolerable and the war must be fought on our terms, not the ruling class’s. If this society fails to produce what is needed for us to survive, for us to be able to face our children and build respect, we must fight back. In these times we really have no choice but to fight back against the vicious. We have been pushed to the brink; we have no choice. This is when we see “progressive” politicians emerge trying to divert our righteous anger into pointless personality election campaigns. And as long as we get misdirected into these energy sucking efforts, the ruling class will be safe.

What Is There To Win

The choices offered to us are stark, even through the media noises and hustle of our lives. We see poverty, insecurity, war, prisons, and insecurity; there is no rational way that this can go on. It can, though, unless we the working class intervene aggressively. So what do we want? Easy! Land, Bread, and Peace! The way we get there is by building the road together. We are not offering pat solutions or glib slogans. There is a reason behind this. Applying theory and analysis, centering on the most pressing needs affecting the most marginalized members of the working class, we organize around the slogan Land, Bread, and Peace as intentional and revolutionary demands that touch every aspect of working class life, and demand that which the ruling class withhold from us.

Land

Good housing for all. Housing with enough space for a life of fulfillment and joy. A place of one’s own in community. Clean air and water, and soil to grow our own food, a bay where we can fish without fear of poisoning. Our ponds, rivers, and lakes polluted by centuries of capitalist greed, fully restored to health. We demand full unfettered access to the whole coastline and a restoration of full rights to land for the original inhabitants.

Bread

There is a lot of work to be done to undo the damage of the capitalists. Our roads, bridges, schools, and buildings need repair. We demand full employment for all workers. We demand full autonomy for all workers. There is more than enough on this good Earth for all. We demand that it be accepted as a human right to all the things that sustain the working class. Food, medicine, education, and art. Turning our human rights into a commodity is a crime, and those who commit that crime (the capitalists) will be held to account.

Peace

We deserve and have a right to happiness, peace, and joy, secure in our persons and minds from the intrusions of the working class. We demand a literal end to the class war on the working class, and that end means total victory of the working class. We demand the full disarming of all police forces, and all class war prisoners be freed and returned to their families. We demand that those with trouble of the heart and mind be restored, through communities of care. We have full freedom of movement. The working class have suffered without peace for long and enough is enough.

The Ruling Class Hate This One Little Trick

Here, our hyper militarized and fearful pigs will kill and imprison us without remorse, and particularly so for the super-exploited communities. So, state violence is not rare here. However if the capitalists and the state were to be lethal with say strikers or a large protest, things would be different. Capitalists know that they need a portion of the working class to fully adopt their twisted values, and that kind of mess would upset that. The capitalists know that this is a very delicate balance and if they go too far, lines will be drawn.

To avoid this, they will use an escalating level of punishments for working class organizations that start to assert power. The history of the Black Panther Party and Earth First is a road map for what the capitalists will do. Economic pressure, isolation, and police aggression are used to tamp down revolt. For this to have a chance to work, the ruling class have to persuade the working class they have something in common with their rulers. Nationalism, religion, gender, racism, history, and even environmentalism are used against us as wedges. Central to tying all this together is respect for the legal power of the state. So though the ruling class can and will use violence, they will always first use division, economic pressure, social pressure, and police to prevent a violent conflict with the working class.

At The Starting Line

Now is the time to think seriously about what liberation can look like. This is using imagination, our analysis, our hearts to build our future. We have spent the last bunch of pages on a lot of really bad stuff, capitalism, how it is just a completely cruel system, the state how it is a vicious attack dog in service to the ruling class. We looked at the unnatural and demoralizing features of the class system. The nazi scum, bad tactics. Now is the time to really bring it together with a vision of a world where the dominant system is led by the working class. Let’s take a look at what needs to go and why it’s good for it to go, and look at what a working class world can bring in! Yes this part is fun, but also totally incomplete because we need your vision to fill it out. Hopefully this part can inspire your imagination and desire to lose its chains.

WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND – WHAT WE GET

Fake Divisions

What we leave behind. Racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia and the other isms that the ruling class use to divide us. During our liberation this parade of grotesques will be rooted out and hunted down. As workers we can see the new world and work to smash the fake divisions without mercy! This is America after all and we know that these things are deeply part of our working class culture. But as we wrote before these divisions are not real and forced on us by the ruling class, the state and its servants. Workers know best how to change their minds, we are practical and contain real wisdom in our ranks. We will draw on these strengths. There is a place for every worker in revolution no matter the identity we carry with us, that is our super power. We will keep repeating this until it takes!

What we get. Forced gender roles go, racist stereotypes go. No more phony “role models”, no macho posing. No more assigning an individual with the burdens imposed by their identity. No more pecking order!

In Our Living Rooms

What we leave behind. Right now there is a wall between our homelife, community, and our work life. GONE!

We intend to take control of our workplaces and communities. As the working class we know best how to do all the things necessary to maintain the things we need to survive. We recognize that in a revolutionary time new ways of organizing and putting things in order will emerge. We embrace this.

What we get. We won’t need to work for a capitalist to survive, we will work for each other in cooperation. The things we need, food, medicine, art will be for all to share. No more grinding hours taking us away from our families. We will recognize that the cleaner and plumber do as much(maybe more) for our health than a doctor. So equality!

Borders

What we leave behind. The phony lines on maps are just there to divide workers. This includes the borders that make empty houses unavailable, and lands and water we don’t get to share. BYE FELICIA!

What we get. We believe that freedom of movement is our right as workers. Homes for those who need it, land back to the original peoples.

Class

What we leave behind. No more class system. Instead of the ruling class and middle class dominating our lives we will organize ourselves. No more politicians trying to divide us with fear or greed. No more snobs closing off schools to only the rich.

What we get. We see a society where everyone is fully valued in the whole of humanity. Where everyone shares in doing what is needed. We believe that a council and federal structure (more on this later). Where each worker has a full voice and vote in the management of society. We see this happen all the time in small ways when workers come together to solve problems. We are good at it.

Money

What we leave behind. “Money is the root of all evil” of course we don’t believe that completely, but we do believe that after the revolution we can thrive without it. Through strikes, workers taking over their workplaces distribution will be easier and more efficient. And we can get all that we need .

Karl Marx identified the “cash nexus” which points out that all social and economic relations have a monetary foundation under this system. The worth of a human being is decided by how much they make, this leads to division in the working class. Money becomes the measure of the failure of the individual in society. It has to go!

What we get. An end to fees, taxes, rents, parking meter, mortgages, phone bills, electric bills, insurance premiums, and that is just the start. So much of our effort is spent performing bullshit tasks for the ruling class and the state, we want work to be meaningful and in service and benefit for all.

Pie In The Sky

“But but human nature”, “but you use a phone” Blah blah blah. We’ve all heard it before. At work and at home we share, show regular generosity. The idea that human beings are just this ruthless animal is projection by the ruling class. They act like heartless predators and they resent anyone who is not. Providence Worker Defense rejects this outright. We are workers who reject the “law of the jungle” that the bosses love so much. We say fuck the the grind-set, the hustle, the dog eat dog. We are better than that. We make the world, we can take the world.

It’s not just a dream, there are moments throughout history of workers and farmers forcing a new world to be born. We grow on this, we thrive on this. “Hope” our state’s motto is today a cruel irony, we will make it real. It’s not a dream though. Through building up our fellow workers to working class consciousness and from that to liberation is laying the foundation for a new world. This will take work, discipline, set backs, and picking up. Most importantly it will take us deeply into our imagination and desire to imagine the world we want and make it happen. Yes we listed what goes, what we get, those are ideas and we left them short because it’s your vision needed to fill it out. LET’S GOOOO!

Are We Good Enough For You

Nope, but we want to be. Providence Worker Defense believes we have to earn your participation every day. We want you to participate to the level you can and stretch yourself and test yourself. We don’t have a formal leadership structure. Like a pirate ship, leaders emerge, and leaders grow together. We celebrate our members taking seriously the ideas of everyone at our in person weekly meetings. It’s your words and your vision that will make the revolution happen. So we will try with all our heart to be good enough for you. It’s a quiet oath that old timers make to newcomers, that we will build each other up brick by brick till we all are the fearless revolutionaries that we are in our dreams.

BUT HOW DO WE DO IT?

It’s a good question and one that really can’t be answered in an honest way because we can’t see the future. What we can do by building a working class movement like PWD we can start to make structures and organization to help steer it. Working people make everything we see around us, organized with our numbers and potential power all that we have to do is fold our arms and a new world gets born. Of course it’s not that easy, there will be obstacles. What can we do? What can the future look like? Let’s start at the basics.

The working class are not in power, but have the potential for the greatest power.
The dominant system, capitalism only cares about capital not us.
The state is the tool capitalists use to oppress us.
Knowing ourselves and taking action based on our interests is central.
We organize to take power.

COUNCILS

(Yes more meetings)

PWD believes a council model is the best way to ensure that the needs of working people are met. Easily understood, really it’s something we do as workers all the time, coming up with specific solutions at work often in spite of management. We get taught early on that democracy is best left to the experts as representatives, we believe that democracy is too precious to be left in the hands of people who look to feather their own nests. We also know that reams of academic papers and endless volumes on the subject of worker councils that go a long way to say a simple thing. Basically it is workplaces should be managed by the workers who work there, communities should be managed by those who live there, etc. That’s really it. Yes there is more to it but that is the bones. PWD believes that this is scalable and the most democratic and accessible process for a revolutionary Providence. So let’s look at the words we’ll be using.

Workplace Council: A body of workers in a workplace making decisions about the operation of that workplace.
Community Council: A body of workers who live in the same community, or share common interest or identity.
School Council: A body of teachers and students making decisions about the operation and curricula of a school.
Council Delegate: A worker from a council elected as delegate not representative to deliver communication and needs to a sector council or general council. A delegate can only act in a way expressly authorized by the council that elected them. A delegate is instantly recallable.
Sector Council: A body made up of delegates from the various workplace councils.
General Council: A body made up of delegates of all the councils of Providence.
Council Chairs: A convening committee made up of single delegates from each council.

pretty simple

Imagination

Is it possible? Sure if we want it PWD makes no claim other than that the class system leads to misery and that the working class are the only ones who can liberate the working class. There is nothing here that is carved in granite, it is one proposal for our liberated future. It is easy to come up with roadblocks and allow our imaginations to catastrophize the possible, even look to examples of history on why this won’t work. Put that aside for a moment. We all work in one form or another, doing the things that make society run. From being a retiree available to babysit the grandkids so your kids can go to work. To working on a construction site and watching the work grind to halt when the GC shows up. Or a coffee shop where the owner never orders enough of the right cup. The fact is it is a greater leap of imagination to think that it is the ruling class, and their politician friends who are needed. The plain truth is things run better when the boss isn’t there. So there you go. When you run out of something at work, you tell the boss, who calls a boss to tell a worker to fill the order, four steps when two would be fine.

You pay your landlord, not talking about the carpenter with the triple decker, but the portfolio landlords with multiple properties. You pay that guy or company for them to relax and not do anything. You and the other people who live there know what improvements need to happen, know best the quirks of the place, who better to decide how the money is spent. If you have that little triple decker and rent out the space and have to find time to fix in between shifts, wouldn’t it be easier if your tenant had the same stake, and you didn’t have to chase down the rent or hand over your rent(mortgage) to the bank? Imagine that the neighborhood in council with each other makes decisions together about parks, infrastructure etc. It’s an opportunity for connection in this lonely and disconnected world.

So it’s a guess as to why it makes more sense the way things are with all the little takings, loss of dignity, fees, and instability, then a liberated way. Again there is no magic prescription, definitely no utopia, we are Rhode Islanders after all, we love to argue. But it is precisely that attitude that makes this possible. It is socialism with a cranston accent.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. If these common sense ideas appeal to you, and you are able to cut through the crap the bosses throw at you, come to a meeting, make new friends and build together a future worthy of you and your friends and families. There is a lot to do to make it work and we are running out of time. So come on and join Providence Workers Defense.

provworkerdefense@proton.me