This second meeting will include a training from the Housing & Homelessness Committee about how to talk to your neighbors about tenant organizing as well as an opportunity for comrades to discuss Socialist Struggle at the Workplace.

This and all future Neighborhood Meetings will be organized to engage all comrades in the Neighborhood Solidarity Program in tangible ways that build solidarity with our neighbors by building organizing around rent, habitability, and housing justice issues; addressing immediate needs through mutual aid work (e.g. shared child watch, accessing government benefits, maintaining power-up and hand-washing stations in coordination with Street Watch, etc.); and engaging in regular political study and consciousness-raising.

Totaling ~23 pages, the following set of recommended excerpts and articles provide a foundation for discussion on social strategy in workplace organizing:

Recommended readings:

• 6- page excerpt from The Marxist View of the Labor Unions: Complex & Critical (La Botz, 2013): A brief overview of Marxist socialists’ “relationship to the unions of which they are members, in that they are loyal to the union only insofar as it fights for workers, critical of the unions when they fail to do so.”

• The Necessity of Organization: The League of Revolutionary Struggle and the Watsonville Canning Strike (Shapiro in Viewpoint, 2018 – 17 pages). The story of Mexicana workers (many undocumented and majority women) who — “in the face of the most difficult odds imaginable” — pulled off a successful wildcat strike when their affiliated Teamster union ceased to function in the mid 1980s. Through their struggle they not only won a new contract, but also forced the business owner to sell the company. The piece commends the worker’s self activity, the unity of forces as key to the strike’s success, and the importance of insurgent institutions and long-lasting formations.