Among Us can singlehandedly cause the rise of the proletarian revolution, here’s why: It provokes contradictions within the syndicalist left.

Thesis 1: The Statement We Are Disowning Is Inspired by the What We Believe Is the Will of the Proletariat The first thesis is that the Statement is an extract from our intention to give a role to workers in the reconstruction of a new society, while also being an exposé of the class struggle we have to live through in the short term. But there’s also an important fact that allows the statement to be effective, even without it ever being mentioned: we believe that what we call the “workers’ struggle” is more than a theoretical category of autonomous, self-managed workers’ organizations. We are also saying that it has a concrete, material character, and that’s where the “Thesis I” part of the thesis comes in: it allows for an analysis of the relationship between what we want and the reality of workers in this century. We realize that this is a very simple and naive analysis. Although we argue that the workers’ struggle is at the base of what we call the “workers’ movement” and that our “soul and its interests” are linked to the actual material conditions of workers, we can’t deny that the workers’ struggle itself is a result of the complete estrangement of workers from what we call our “class project” and the need to alter it. So the first problem with the statement is the simple fact that it leaves out the perspective on the actual material needs of workers, and we have to add a more detailed and realistic version of that from below that actually responds to our conditions of development.

And since we believe that “what we are”, as communists, is being communists (which implies an analysis of the present and a strategic program for the future) and that we cannot see that workers are actually communists until we take a long hard look at the conditions of our work and how we react to them, we have to see that the workers’ movement, as it currently exists, is the worst possible situation. For a long time, the workers’ movement had no objective, social or economic goals. It has become the only weapon of the rulers. Thus it is no longer a union that represents workers but the instrument of the state, serving the needs of the bourgeoisie. As a movement, the workers’ movement became marginal and radicalized. As a result, the workers are alienated from their revolutionary and class interests. Over the last 50 years, the nature of work has changed, with production divided into two camps: permanent and temporary. While production has moved away from making a profit to making a living, the logic of the system depends on putting every worker as an individual in a position that the boss decides as being profitable. The bosses are legally in control of these factories, while the workers are seen as “unskilled”, although they may have many years of experience, education, skill and knowledge that is extremely valuable for an economy which places a high value on human and social capital. The movement has created neither a pro-worker leadership nor a mass base among workers who have a vision of the future other than what the bosses present them with. The reality is that the workers’ movement has come to see workers as separate from each other. And that is why there has been a loss of radicalization among workers, and an acceptance of inequality and a rampant inflation of the cost of living. The

The new concept of “labor-power” as “a commodity” exists to this day in a system of distribution based on the needs of the bosses, whose interests are based on the value of a commodity and the market. The statement and subsequent activities also show this. It draws from the relation to production, rather than from the alienation of workers as individuals. The fact that the statement calls for workers’ control and the workers’ organization, and proposes new forms of working-class self-management, is also a result of the fact that we believe workers have a role to play in producing the society that is emerging. This is an important distinction because at the core of all the ideas put forward by the self-management movements in the United States is the idea that a system built on top of this principle of alienation could be built. We believe that this is the fundamental challenge facing any new workers’ movement, and one that is still unfulfilled. The statement also refers to the “feeling of resignation” by the workers involved in struggles with government and big business bosses. We would say that feeling of resignation is in itself a form of alienation. We believe that the presence of workers in struggle, when it is based on a sense of joint-ownership and shared responsibility, or when it involves the idea of self-management, is the only way to avoid being relegated to a state of permanent submission and confusion that is the inevitable result of the system. With the increased domination of the profit-seeking system in the last half-century, the number of factories that are owned by workers has fallen sharply, from 14,000 in 1953 to less than 5,000 today. In addition to the struggle in Zapatista communities, this expression of self-management has been made in other parts of Mexico as well as in the state of Chiapas.