Workplace organizing remains indispensable despite everyday-life alternatives

Evidence

Yet the spheres of production and distribution can hardly be written off that easily. The world of work remains the site where surplus value is produced and economic interests directly clash, whereas parents and tenants can only appeal to the fiscal state, which in turn depends on the willingness of capitalist elites to redistribute. It may be that, at a time when talk of reshoring, Green New Deals, and industrial policy is ubiquitous across the OECD zone, occasions conducive to longer-term mobilization will present themselves. Confronted with the continuing decline in unionization rates, rising precarity, and the increasingly divergent interests among different categories of workers, such a thought may seem naive. It cruelly recalls the old joke about the tourist couple who ask an Irish farmer how to get to Dublin; the farmer replies: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.” Still, the journey will have to begin somewhere. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 255

Categorization

• XREF: Core to evaluating the ‘Escape Routes’ chapter: Jäger weighs workplace-based vs. everyday-life-based strategy, the axis the reader wants to judge. — connects to: Practical workers’ organizations embraced study as a path to effective action — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 303