In 2012 workers in Toronto face a large coordinated attack on jobs and services. We must resist, again, as workers have resisted throughout history. In order to develop creative, innovative resistant strategies as we fight to win, we can look to our own history - and pres
ent - of class struggle to see what others have done and how we can learn from them.
Friday, January 13, 2012
6:00pm
Steelworkers Hall Toronto. 25 Cecil Street. ( East side of Spadina south of College). Parking at rear of building. Closest TTC station is Spadina. The Hall is wheelchair accessible.
Immanuel Ness is the author of several books on workers' organising and resistance. He is a trade union organiser and labour activist and co-founded with Keith Brooks the New York Unemployed Committee (1990–1993), which successfully organised jobless workers at New York State unemployment centers.
Ness has done extensive research on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy and migrant worker resistance, and class struggles. And has published recent books on new worker organizations. He recently co-edited a collection called Ours to Master and to Own which details 22 cases of workers' councils, assemblies and occupations from the Paris Commune to the present.
His political focus has been on mobilizing the working class through rank and file self-activity, including through workers' assemblies, workers' councils, and cooperatives. He calls for working class democracy rooted in new forms of worker organizing that he has called the "parallel unions" of democratic organisation.
On Friday, January 13th come meet with Immanuel Ness for an evening of conversation wherein we learn of militant worker histories - and of militant worker organising in the present! - and begin to develop our own class struggle in Toronto today.
This Friday evening discussion will provide an excellent way to prepare for Sunday January 15th GTWA winter Assembly where we will work on developing a coherent fightback strategy for Toronto in 2012.
