Short-term campaigns versus building the beloved community: what are the real costs and benefits of pre-figurative politics?

Mark and Paul Engler explore the tensions – and joys – of prefigurative politics. Originally published in Waging Nonviolence.

Mark Engler and Paul Engler: It is an old question in social movements: Should we fight the system or “be the change we wish to see”? Should we push for transformation within existing institutions, or should we model in our own lives a different set of political relationships that might someday form the basis of a new society?

Over the past 50 years — and arguably going back much further — social movements in the United States have incorporated elements of each approach, sometimes in harmonious ways and other times with significant tension between different groups of activists.

In the recent past, a clash between “strategic” and “prefigurative” politics could be seen in the Occupy movement. While some participants pushed for concrete political reforms — greater regulation of Wall Street, bans on corporate money in politics, a tax on millionaires, or elimination of debt for students and underwater homeowners — other occupiers focused on the encampments themselves. They saw the liberated spaces in Zuccotti Park and beyond — with their open general assemblies and communities of mutual support — as the movement’s most important contribution to social change. These spaces, they believed, had the power foreshadow, or “prefigure,” a more radical and participatory democracy.

Once an obscure term, prefigurative politics is increasingly gaining currency, with many contemporary anarchists embracing as a core tenet the idea that, as a slogan from the Industrial Workers of the World put it, we must “build the new world in the shell of the old.” Because of this, it is useful to understand its history and dynamics. While prefigurative politics has much to offer social movements, it also contains pitfalls. If the project of building alternative community totally eclipses attempts to communicate with the wider public and win broad support, it risks becoming a very limiting type of self-isolation.

For those who wish to both live their values and impact the world as it now exists, the question is: How can we use the desire to “be the change” in the service of strategic action?

Naming the conflict

Coined by political theorist Carl Boggs and popularized by sociologist Wini Breines, the term “prefigurative politics” emerged out of analysis of New Left movements in the United States. Rejecting both the Leninist cadre organization of the Old Left and conventional political parties, members of the New Left attempted to create activist communities that embodied the concept of participatory democracy, an idea famously championed in the 1962 Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. In a 1980 essay, Breines argues that the central imperative of prefigurative politics was to “create and sustain within the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that ‘prefigured’ and embodied the desired society.” Instead of waiting for revolution in the future, the New Left sought to experience it in the present through the movements it created.

Current discussion of prefigurative politics has been rooted in the experience of U.S. movements in the 1960s. However, the tension between waging campaigns to produce instrumental gains within the existing political system, on the one hand, and creating alternative institutions and communities that more immediately put radical values into practice, on the other, has existed for centuries. Unfortunately, there is no universal agreement on the vocabulary used to describe this split. Various academic and political traditions discuss the two differing approaches using overlapping concepts including “cultural revolution,” “dual power,” and theories of “collective identity.” Max Weber distinguished between the “ethic of ultimate ends” (which roots action in heartfelt and principled conviction) and an “ethic of responsibility” (which more pragmatically considers how action impacts the world). Most controversially, some scholars have discussed aspects of prefigurative action as forms of “lifestyle politics.”

Used as an umbrella category, the term prefigurative politics is useful in highlighting a divide that has appeared in countless social movements throughout the world. In the 1800s, Marx debated utopian socialists about the need for revolutionary strategy that went beyond the formation of communes and model societies. Throughout his life, Gandhi wavered back and forth between leading campaigns of civil disobedience to exact concessions from state powers and advocating for a distinctive vision of self-reliant village life, through which he believed Indians could experience true independence and communal unity. (Gandhi’s successors split on this issue, with Jawaharlal Nehru pursing the strategic control of state power and Vinoba Bhave taking up the prefigurative “constructive program.”) Advocates of strategic nonviolence, who push for the calculated use of unarmed uprising, have counter-posed their efforts against long-standing lineages of “principled nonviolence” — represented by religious organizations that espouse a lifestyle of pacifism (such as the Mennonites) or groups that undertake symbolic acts of “bearing moral witness” (such as the Catholic Workers).

Movement and counter-culture

With regard to the 1960s, Breines notes that the form of prefigurative politics that emerged in the New Left was “hostile to bureaucracy, hierarchy and leadership, and it took form as a revulsion against large-scale centralized and inhuman institutions.” Perhaps even more than advancing traditional political demands, the prefigurative concept of social change was about prompting a cultural shift.

Indeed, those who embraced a most extreme version of prefigurative practice in that period did not identify with the social movement “politicos” who organized rallies against the Vietnam War and were interested in directly challenging the system. Instead, they saw themselves as part of a youth counter-culture that was undermining establishment values and providing a vigorous, living example of an alternative.

This split between “movement” and “counter-culture” is vividly illustrated in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties. There, Barry Melton, lead singer for the psychedelic rock band Country Joe and the Fish, tells of his debates with his Marxist parents. “We had big arguments about this stuff,” Melton explains. “I tried to convince them to sell all their furniture and go to India. And they weren’t going for it. And I realized that no matter how far out their political views were, because they were mighty unpopular — my parents were pretty left wing — that really they were [still] materialists. They were concerned about how the wealth was divided up.”

Melton’s passion was for something different, a “politics of hip,” in which “we were setting up a new world that was going to run parallel to the old world, but have as little to do with it as possible.” He explains, “We just weren’t going to deal with straight people. To us, the politicos — a lot of the leaders of the anti-war movement — were straight people because they were still concerned with the government. They were going to march on Washington. We didn’t even want to know that Washington was there. We thought that eventually the whole world was just going to stop all this nonsense and start loving each other, as soon as they all got turned on.”

The boundary between a subculture and a prefigurative political movement can sometimes be blurry. “It’s amazing that these two movements coexisted at the same time,” Melton argues. “[They] were in stark contrast in certain aspects — but as the 1960s progressed grew closer together and began taking on aspects of the other.”

The power of the beloved community

The 1960s counter-culture — with its flower children, free love and LSD trips into new dimensions of consciousness — is easy to parody. To the extent that it interacted with political movements, it was profoundly disconnected from any practical sense of how to leverage change. In Berkeley in the Sixties, Jack Weinberg, a prominent anti-war organizer and New Left “politico” described a 1966 meeting where counter-cultural activists were promoting a new type of event. “They wanted to have the first be-in,” Weinberg explains. “One fellow in particular, trying to get us really excited about the plan… said, ‘We’re going to have so much music — and so much love, and so much energy — that we are going to stop the war in Vietnam!’”

Yet prefigurative impulses did not merely produce the flights of utopian fantasy seen at the counter-cultural fringes. This approach to politics also made some tremendously positive contributions to social movements. The drive to live out a vibrant and participatory democracy gave the New Left much of its vitality, and it produced groups of dedicated activists willing to make great sacrifices for the cause of social justice.

As one example, within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, participants spoke of the desire to create the “beloved community” — a society that rejected bigotry and prejudice in all forms and instead embraced peace and brotherliness. This new world would be based on an “understanding, redeeming goodwill for all,” as Martin Luther King (an allied promoter of the concept) described it.

This was not merely an external goal; rather, SNCC militants saw themselves as creating the beloved community within their organization — an interracial group which, in the words of one historian, “based itself on radical egalitarianism, mutual respect and unconditional support for every person’s unique gifts and contributions. Meetings lasted until everyone had their say, in the belief that every voice counted.” The strong ties fostered by this prefigurative community encouraged participants to undertake bold and dangerous acts of civil disobedience — such as SNCC’s famous sit-ins at lunch counters in the segregated South. In this case, the aspiration to a beloved community both facilitated strategic action and had a significant impact on mainstream politics.

The same pattern existed within the Clamshell Alliance, Abalone Alliance, and other radical anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s, which historian Barbara Epstein chronicles in her 1991 book, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution. Drawing from a lineage of Quaker nonviolence, these groups established an influential organizing tradition for direct action in the United States. They pioneered many of the techniques — such as affinity groups, spokes councils, and general assemblies — that became fixtures in the global justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and which were also important to Occupy Wall Street. In their time, the anti-nuclear groups combined consensus decision-making, feminist consciousness, close interpersonal bonds, and a commitment to strategic nonviolence to create defining protests. Epstein writes, “What was new about the Clamshell and the Abalone was that for each organization, at its moment of greatest mass participation, the opportunity to act out a vision and build community was at least as important as the immediate objective of stopping nuclear power.”

The strategic tension

Wini Breines defends prefigurative politics as the lifeblood of the 1960s New Left and argues that, despite its failures to produce lasting organization, this movement represented a “brave and significant experiment” with lasting implications. At the same time, she distinguishes prefigurative action from a different type of politics — strategic politics — that are “committed to building organization in order to achieve power so that structural changes in the political, economic and social orders might be achieved.” Breines further notes, “The unresolved tension, between the spontaneous grassroots social movement committed to participatory democracy, and the intention (necessitating organization) of achieving power or radical structural change in the United States, was a structuring theme” of the New Left.

Tension between prefigurative and strategic politics persists today for a simple reason: Although they are not always mutually exclusive, the two approaches have very distinct emphases and present sometimes contradictory notions of how activists should behave at any a given time.

Where strategic politics favors the creation of organizations that can marshal collective resources and gain influence in conventional politics, prefigurative groups lean toward the creation of liberated public spaces, community centers and alternative institutions — such as squats, co-ops and radical bookstores. Both strategic and prefigurative strategies may involve direct action or civil disobedience. However, they approach such protest differently. Strategic practitioners tend to be very concerned with media strategy and how their demonstrations will be perceived by the wider public; they design their actions to sway public opinion. In contrast, prefigurative activists are often indifferent, or even antagonistic, to the attitudes of the media and of mainstream society. They tend to emphasize the expressive qualities of protest — how actions express the values and beliefs of participants, rather than how they might impact a target.

Strategic politics seeks to build pragmatic coalitions as a way of more effectively pushing forward demands around a given issue. During the course of a campaign, grassroots activists might reach out to more established unions, non-profit organizations or politicians in order to make common cause. Prefigurative politics, however, is far more wary of joining forces with those coming from outside the distinctive culture a movement has created, especially if prospective allies are part of hierarchical organizations or have ties with established political parties.

Countercultural clothing and distinctive appearance — whether it involves long hair, piercings, punk stylings, thrift-store clothing, keffiyehs or any number of other variations — helps prefigurative communities create a sense of group cohesion. It reinforces the idea of an alternative culture that rejects conventional norms. Yet strategic politics looks at the issue of personal appearance very differently. Saul Alinsky, in his book Rules for Radicals, takes the strategic position when he argues, “If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.” Some of the politicos of the New Left did just that in 1968, when Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the Democratic presidential primary as an anti-war challenger to Lyndon Johnson. Opting to “Get Clean for Gene,” they shaved beards, cut hair and sometimes donned suits in order to help the campaign reach out to middle-of-the-road voters.

Taking stock of prefiguration

For those who wish to integrate strategic and prefigurative approaches to social change, the task is to appreciate the strengths of prefigurative communities while avoiding their weaknesses.

The impulse to “be the change we wish to see” has a strong moral appeal, and the strengths of prefigurative action are significant. Alternative communities developed “within the shell of the old” create spaces that can support radicals who chose to live outside the norms of workaday society and to make deep commitments to a cause. When they do take part in wider campaigns to change the political and economic system, these individuals can serve as a dedicated core of participants for a movement. In the case of Occupy, those most invested in prefigurative community were the people who kept the encampments running. Even if they were not those most involved in planning strategic demonstrations that brought in new allies and drew larger crowds; they played a pivotal role.

Another strength of prefigurative politics is that it is attentive to the social and emotional needs of participants. It provides processes for individuals’ voices to be heard and creates networks of mutual support to sustain people in the here and now. Strategic politics often downplays these considerations, putting aside care for activists in order to focus on winning instrumental goals that will result in future improvements for society. Groups that incorporate prefigurative elements in their organizing, and thus have a greater focus on group process, have often been superior at intensive consciousness-raising, as well as at addressing issues such as sexism and racism within movements themselves.

But what works well for small groups can sometimes become a liability when a movement tries to scale up and gain mass support. Jo Freeman’s landmark essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” makes this point in the context of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Freeman argued that a prefigurative rejection of formal leadership and rigid organizational structure served second-wave feminists well early on when the movement “defined its main goal, and its main method, as consciousness-raising.” However, she contends, when the movement aspired to go beyond meetings that raised awareness of common oppression and began to undertake broader political activity, the same anti-organizational predisposition became limiting. The consequence of structurelessness, Freeman argues, was a tendency for the movement to generate “much motion and few results.”

Perhaps the greatest danger inherent in prefigurative groups is a tendency toward self-isolation. Writer, organizer and Occupy activist Jonathan Matthew Smucker describes what he calls the “political identity paradox,” a contradiction that afflicts groups based on a strong sense of alternative community. “Any serious social movement needs a correspondingly serious group identity that encourages a core of members to contribute an exceptional level of commitment, sacrifice and heroics over the course of prolonged struggle,” Smucker writes. “Strong group identity, however, is a double-edged sword. The stronger the identity and cohesion of the group, the more likely people are to become alienated from other groups, and from society. This is the political identity paradox.”

Those focused on prefiguring a new society in their movements — and preoccupied with meeting the needs of an alternative community — can become cut off from the goal of building bridges to other constituencies and winning public support. Instead of looking for ways to effectively communicate their vision to the outside world, they are prone to adopt slogans and tactics that appeal to hardcore activists but alienate the majority. Moreover, they grow ever more averse to entering into popular coalitions. (The extreme fear of “co-optation” among some Occupiers was indicative of this tendency.) All these things become self-defeating. As Smucker writes, “Isolated groups are hard-pressed to achieve political goals.”

Smucker cites the notorious 1969 implosion of SDS as an extreme example of the political identity paradox left unchecked. In that instance, “Key leaders had become encapsulated in their oppositional identity and grown more and more out of touch.” Those most intensely invested in SDS at the national level lost interest in building chapters of students that were just beginning to be radicalized — and they became entirely disenchanted with the mainstream American public. Given what was happening in Vietnam, they grew convinced that they needed to “bring the war home,” in the words of one 1969 slogan. As a result, Smucker writes, “Some of the most committed would-be leaders of that generation came to see more value in holing up with a few comrades to make bombs than in organizing masses of students to take coordinated action.”

The self-destructive isolation of the Weathermen is a far cry from SNCC’s beloved community. Yet the fact that both are examples of prefigurative politics shows that the approach is not something that can simply be embraced or rejected wholesale by social movements. Rather, all movements operate on a spectrum in which different public activities and internal processes have both strategic and prefigurative dimensions. The challenge for those who wish to produce social change is to balance the competing impulses of the two approaches in creative and effective ways — so that we might experience the power of a community that is committed to living in radical solidarity, as well as the joy of transforming the world around us.

Photo by Planetgordon.com

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Deliveroo, Foodora, Giovo. The success of these companies depends on the exploitation of an invisible precariat. Now, against all expectations these workers are mobilizing across borders to claim their rights.

Callum Cant, writing for politicalcritique.org, examines recent development in worker-led action in gig economy settings.

A strike by Deliveroo workers London in the summer of 2016 was the first sign that food delivery platform workers were capable of mass collective action. The strike spread from Deliveroo to UberEats, and then around the UK. A year on, that struggle has spread transnationally. Food delivery platform workers have now been on strike in over ten cities across the UK, Italy, France, Spain and Germany.

Their struggles have both won victories and faced serious setbacks, but the fact remains that a transnational movement of precarious labour has emerged from what appeared to be the most unlikely of circumstances. Workers who were supposed to be weak and powerless have spread their antagonism with capital across borders in militant, unmediated action. This transnational circulation of struggle provides an example of how the changing composition of the working class can provide new opportunities, even as it demolishes old certainties.

It all kicks off in the UK

The UK movement began when Deliveroo workers in London were told that their contracts would be shifting from an hourly wage (£7) with a bonus per delivery (£1) to a piece work system (£3.75 per drop). Informal networks in seven different areas quickly mobilised to respond. Hundreds of riders went on strike over the course of a week. This action forced the company to allow striking riders a choice of pay structure, and set the tone for the disputes to come.

After the initial wave of action in London had subsided, two unions got involved in organising with Deliveroo riders. The Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), a small breakaway union formed in 2013, began to organise with workers in Camden in London, the epicentre of the summer strikes, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) engaged with workers nationally and in Bristol and Leeds particularly. The Rebel Roo, a self-organised Deliveroo workers bulletin, also began to be produced with support from the political group Plan C.

Precarious Mayday.

Month by month, the level of organisation and action outside London developed. Workers running  training shifts for Deliveroo went on strike and won in Bristol, followed by unionisation and strike action in Brighton over low pay and the beginning of a concerted organising effort in Leeds. By February the circulation of Rebel Roo had grown to 1500 a month (about 10% of the national workforce) and there were the beginnings of organisation in cities as socially and politically diverse as Bath, Middlesbrough, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Manchester and Glasgow. Key parts of the movement converged for discussions at the Transnational Social Strike Platform’s assembly in London in late February, and the movement seemed to be approaching a critical point.

Struggles in Leeds and Brighton achieved significant victories but failed to scale up nationally.

When seven workers from Leeds were victimised, the IWW were keen to push for national strike action, but there was hesitation elsewhere about the possibility of such an escalation. This hesitation coincided with a fall off in momentum nationally. Struggles in Leeds and Brighton achieved significant victories but failed to scale up nationally. The victimised workers in Leeds were reinstated and the manager who had victimised them sacked, and workers in Brighton won a recruitment freeze, but the movement at large faltered. In Brighton, riders pushed forwards with forming a coalition with other precarious workers, culminating in a ‘Precarious Mayday’ demonstration. But despite these positive steps, the moment had gone.

Precarious Mayday Brighton. Image Courtesy of the author.

The counter-offensive by Deliveroo involved significant concessions in certain local zones which drove up average wages, but, significantly, these were mediated through the app’s obscure distribution of work rather than contractual changes. Gradually, the most organised zones in the UK began to fall into inactivity. In the context of this retreat of worker action, the IWGB union fell back on the legal avenue it had been pursuing to challenge Deliveroo’s use of ‘independent contractor’ status to avoid legal obligations to its workers. This challenge is ongoing, and has been supported by the left-wing leadership of the Labour party.

The Movement Spreads

After the London strike, organization became contagious. Suddenly, workers across Europe began to take action. The struggle in Italy saw the first mobilisations of Foodora riders begin in Turin in October 2016. About half of the 100-strong Foodora workforce went on strike when the company attempted to change their pay from hourly (€5.40 an hour) to piecework (€2.70 a delivery). They formed a critical-mass strike demonstration alongside social movement groups and circled the city. The demands of the movement centred on costs (data, bikes), on hourly wage parity with Milan, and on employment rights like sick pay and holiday pay. The overall demand on employment status was to be covered by national collective labour contract and so to get the minimum wage.

The riders organised with the combative syndicalist union Si Cobas and managed to win a contractual €1.10 increase in the delivery fee to €3.60.  However, this significant victory was followed by the 15 most prominent organised workers being disconnected and a mass recruitment drive that diluted the organisation of the workforce. Combined with app changes designed to placate riders, the Foodora counter-offensive successfully interrupted the movement.

Strikes in France were considerably less formalized than in the UK and Italy, with riders calling and enforcing strikes with little notice or overt coordination. This chaotic situation created a sense of panic amongst platform management, with Deliveroo even threatening call the police on striking riders in Marseilles, who had set up a picket outside a popular restaurant.

 The first protest brought 80+ Deliveroo and Foodora riders together for a joint demonstration.

In Germany, organization began in April 2017 when the Free Workers Union (FAU) launched their food delivery platform organising campaignin Berlin. Their demands were: transparency about hours worked, enough guaranteed hours to live on, €1 more per drop and one hour a week paid time for shift planning. For the first time, the campaign had a large base in multiple food delivery platforms. The first protest was held in May and brought 80+ Deliveroo and Foodora riders together for a joint demonstration, calling for negotiations. A second demonstration held at Deliveroo and Foodora head offices in June attracted similar numbers. This continual pressure has forced Foodora to enter into negotiations with the FAU in Berlin, although Deliveroo are still holding out.

Spain saw some of the largest strike action yet. When Deliveroo responded to a campaign of worker-led demonstrations with victimisation, by disconnecting 13 prominent workers. However, the struggle continued and developed into a national three hour strike (between 8-11pm) of Deliveroo workers in Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid on the 2nd of July. Participation was high: in Barcelona, 150 out of the workforce of 230 were on strike. They demanded a minimum of two deliveries per hour, 20 guaranteed hrs of work per week and an end to the victimisation of unionised workers.

Mass strike of precarious couriers, Milan 2017. Credit: Deliveroo Strike Raiders.

Back in Italy, workers were pursuing the legal route to a different employment and collective bargaining status, and have been supported by the left wing party Sinistra Italiana. Mobilisation also began in Milan, with another critical mass strike on the 15th July bringing together workers from Foodora, Deliveroo, and Giovo to demand sick pay and insurance in case of accident. There is now evidence of organization spreading even further across Europe – workers from countries like the Netherlands, Austria and Greece have joined international organizing meetings led by German, Italian, and Spanish riders.

Working for the Black Box

Wherever they operate in Europe, food delivery platforms rely on the same fundamental business model. They use a platform to mediate between food providers, delivery workers and customers. Each party uses an app to interact with the others, and the labour process is controlled through algorithmic management. This means that most of the time workers respond to commands generated by an automated system contained within what labour scholar Trebor Scholz calls a ‘black box’. The platform itself owns very little fixed capital, outsourcing all delivery costs to the riders who have to provide their own bikes, data and so on. To all intents and purposes, the workers already own all the means of production required for the delivery process – with the vital exception of the coordinating platform and its algorithms, which remain firmly in the hands of the boss.

Image Courtesy of Taylor Herring on Flickr.com.

These workers are engaged through a non-standard employment relation, the precise nature of which varies from country to country. Universally, however, these non-standard statuses work on the principle that you can be a worker for less of a wage than a worker. This is an attempt to reduce the cost of labour-power, the price of which was set through historical processes of class struggle, and it is mostly successful in undermining the old victories of the workers movement and the social democratic settlement. These non-standard statuses are the product of a capital-state relation which is also producing wider structural reforms of the labour market with the same goal; Renzi’s Jobs Act in Italy, changes to trade union law, apprenticeships and welfare in the UK, the Loi Travail in France, long term wage suppression in Germany, the Spanish 2012 labour law and so on. These two processes are very directly linked: platforms like Uber often use money raised from venture capitalists to aggressively lobby for changes to legal and regulatory frameworks, in the process creating the conditions their business model needs in order to thrive.

This transnational similarity in the organisation of labour is what has allowed for the very rapid spread of food delivery platforms in an attempt to monopolise and gain network effects. But as well as allowing the rapid spread of food delivery platforms, this similarity has created the conditions for the rapid circulation of a common form of workers struggle within those platforms.

The Nuit Debout protests 2016.

Invisible Organization

The Italian workerist Romano Alquati once made the point that no worker struggle is ‘spontaneous’: if you think it is, then you have just missed the invisible organisation that produced it.

The invisible organisation of food platform struggles seems to have come from two converging streams of experience. The first is the labour-process itself. Precarious delivery workers managed to forge community under unorthodox circumstances, mostly via groups on encrypted instant messaging apps. Sometimes, converging at ‘zone centres’ or common points in the city also led to mass meetings and assemblies which could not be controlled by the platform due to the lack of on-the-ground supervisory apparatus. The second is the networks of invisible organisation which grew from the subjective experience of the movements that followed the 2008 crash. Rather than coming from an experience of previous conflicts on the shop floor, many of the organisers and supporters of these platform struggles had been formed in that particular period of social movements in the squares, campuses and streets. Where these two streams have met, immediate rank and file organisation has been the result.

Disparate and supposedly disempowered workers find their power when they meet each other in the streets.

This rank and file organisation has generally resulted in workers using very similar means do develop leverage against their platform. Chief amongst these is the strike, which is combined with a critical mass/flying picket and reinforced by social movements. The leverage of the tactic comes from two sources. First is the mobile blockade/parade of the social movement, which makes a claim to the streets of the city and connects with the working class in situations beyond the workplace. This dynamic has often produced strong ‘public opinion’ support for riders, and given social movements a strong focus on structural questions of exploitation. When this tactic is employed, there is no potential for the struggle of food platform workers to be sidelined as purely ‘economic’. Second is the withdrawal of labour of the trade union. Flexible workers withdraw their labour en masse and picket the city, connecting with other riders, restraints and customers and drawing them into the work stoppage. Disparate and supposedly disempowered workers find their power when they meet each other in the streets. In every instance of this strike wave, all the dynamics of the demonstration are at play alongside the critical question of labour.

IMAGE: via IWGB Couriers and Logistics Branch.

The synthesis between social movement and labour movement even developed to the point that food delivery platform workers acted as scouts for militant street demonstrations during the movement against Loi Travail in France. Their mobility and knowledge of the city allowed them to outmanoeuvre the police in order to combat the very kind of labour law which created their own precarious conditions in the first place.

This dynamism was possible in part because of the direct use of the strike weapon that was made possible by non-standard employment relations. When the legal protections of employment were dropped in order to more fully exploit the worker, the legal protections of the employer against the worker vanished too. Suddenly, wildcat strikes were the only viable kind of strike. Labour militancy was unrestrained by the conventional state repression of strikes and worker organisation, resulting in the potential for the rapid development and spread of strikes without large trade union involvement.

Bloquons Tout!

The remarkable existence of a transnational strike movement across food delivery platforms is evidence that the development of what has been called ‘platform capitalism’ is not a conflict-free process. Whilst class struggle is not yet at a stage where it can shape the development of the sector, it’s no longer impossible to imagine that it could become a determining factor. If the strike wave continues and we see a growth of increasingly connected and powerful food platform strikes, there is a potential for further developments in the self-organisation of precarious platform workers under conditions of algorithmic management.

The transnational movement has developed some significant insights for the transnational movement against capital.

Both algorithmic management and platform capitalism are phenomena that go far beyond just food delivery. Supermarkets and warehouses are increasingly reorganised with algorithms determining the labour process, and platform workers range from taxi drivers working for Uber to the general labourers of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. If the militancy of the food delivery platform workers spreads towards these two other groups, then the level of conflict over exploitation in Europe would increase significantly. There are some signs that this spread might be taking place: organisers are already taking steps to prepare for a blockade of key Amazon logistics infrastructure on black Friday. The transnational movement within platforms has developed some significant insights for the transnational movement against capital.

This article has been reposted from politicalcritique.org  with permission to republish and digitally distribute, with the full support and consent of the Krytyka Polityczna team and European Alternatives.

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