Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 21st Century

The piece "Building the Revolution" was one of the more in-depth articles of its length laying out a practical vision for a new revolutionary workers' movement strategy in popular anti-authoritarian and anarchist writing today. We are linking to it from our site to make it available to workers who are or want to be involved in the Solidarity Network.

The TC Solidarity Network developed largely out of the former Twin Cities IWW General Defense Committee, whose work helps inform some of the positions taken in this article, especially around the crucial issues of bridging workplace and community struggles. We appreciate the vision this article lays out of "two pillars" of modern anarcho-syndicalism (that is, anarchist unionism). The Solidarity Network hopes to help plant the seeds not only of workplace councils, but also of neighborhood-level councils as described in this piece.

There are two main avenues through which we do this. The first is by organizing tenants, both by company (all the tenants across the city with the same landlord), and by neighborhood. The second is by supporting community self defense and mutual aid projects. We are allied with many of these projects through the Workers Defense Alliance, a network of aid, defense, and organizing projects with an anti-authoritarian working class politics. We also cooperate with groups that are autonomous and outside of the Alliance. By cooperating and cross-pollinating with groups that do copwatch, survivor justice and transformative justice, houseless camp support, legal defense, and more, we are able to build up these programs which are crucial to the long-term success of a militant labor movement. We hope to see them, as well as tenant councils, form the core of neighborhood level councils.

We suggest this article for those looking at other resources, such as the Solidarity Federation's "Fighting For Ourselves", and wondering how to apply them to the Twin Cities.