For me, the ultimate core of the workers’ inquiry is the conviction that whoever wants to change the world must learn with the working class and its struggles, rather than preaching to it.
- Paulo Galo, interview in this issue.

Every single working person has a unique understanding of capitalism constantly growing inside their head. This understanding is generated by our daily experiences of work, life, and conflict. The collective knowledge of the working class is a vast subterranean intellect: billions of different perspectives on everyday processes that, taken together, tell the story of the material base of society. But this knowledge is repressed. The ruling class can’t cope with the reality it reveals. They can’t handle the ways it helps us understand the nature of exploitation and the possibility of liberation. And so, working-class voices are silenced, both through the direct control of media platforms, and the indirect control of ideology and narrative. We end up thinking our stories don’t matter, and that nobody is interested in what we know.

When we do hear from the workplace, the stories are often not our own: we might get a press release from a union staffer, an article written by a journalist, or the outcomes of academic research. Rather than us talking to each other about how we can organise ourselves, we hear reports produced by others, directed towards other objectives. But what would happen if we used this underground knowledge for our own ends? This is the question that sparked Marx’s project of workers’ inquiry, and it is one we still ask today.

The task of turning this knowledge into a weapon begins with sharing worker writing, because it’s only by thinking through and sharing our specific experiences that we can start to undo the repression of our perspective. The actual content of this writing is vitally important because it is the material detail of how our class is composed in capitalism right now. It gives us the kind of concrete understanding of what’s going on in our workplaces and neighbourhoods that is necessary to build a mass working class movement. But it’s not just about the content: the actual process of writing itself also changes us. When we take our own experiences seriously and generate ideas through the hard graft of trying to understand and change the world, we come out the other end a changed person.

The effects of inquiry on the individual are multiplied at the collective level. A movement that conducts and shares inquiries learns more, faster, and produces new forms of subjectivity in the process. Notes From Below tries to be an infrastructure that supports this class-wide process of circulating struggles, developing alternative leaderships, and bridging the gaps between different parts of our class. We want to be a conveyor belt that takes messages back and forth between different points of class struggle, and in the process, to help prepare the ground for a subjective political recomposition of the working class as a force for revolution.

Inquiry and Revolution

Our emphasis on workers’ inquiry as a political method also relates to our theory of revolution. Unlike those who push electoralist, bureaucratic, or elitist theories of revolution, we do not see communist revolution as a process that can be carried out by a small, privileged group from the top down. It is only working class mass self-organisation that can carry out the kind of revolutionary transformation that we need. No one can act on our behalf or in our name. We must be able to fight and transform society ourselves, otherwise, the prospects of any revolutionary period are doomed.

Collectively, under capitalism, workers perform vital functions at different points of production, reproduction, and circulation. Conversely, to build a communist economy, it would be necessary to find ways to collectively hold and analyse the mass of technical knowledge currently atomised across individual workers and workplaces. Think, for example, of just one object we will likely still need in a new, communist society: a bus. Just one part of that bus, the wheel, is made up of dozens of components: spokes, bearings, ball joints, a tyre, rotors, valves and more. Each of these components must be made correctly, or the wheel as a whole will be jeopardised. Many of these components will likely be produced using machines that themselves are made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of other components. The thousands of productive processes to make these parts also depend on whole other chains of other activity: logistics work that can transport the various material and components for construction; the engineers and tradespeople that repair the various parts of these factories, trucks and ships as they are worn down; the schools that take care of these workers’ children so that they can engage in these processes; the agricultural labour that keeps the masses of people involved in these processes fed and energised each day. In this vein, issues #18 and #23 of Notes From Below platformed workers across our food economies and infrastructural sectors, respectively, documenting how they have begun to envision and organise for the transformation of their collective labour processes in the midst of declining state provision and accelerating logistical collapse that is reshaping the basic conditions of their work.

The wealth of knowledge required to understand and undertake these activities is already held by the working class. However, it is fragmented among billions of individual workers and millions of workplaces. Bringing workers together to collectively record and share their knowledge of how the current capitalist economy works and the problems it contains will be key to constructing a new, transformed economy during a revolutionary period. Workers’ inquiry is therefore the method that can begin to lay the foundations for that practice: beginning with the actual experience of capitalist exploitation in the workplace, but also with the technical knowledge needed to transform society.

Inquiry as a route to political recomposition

At their most effective, inquiries go beyond producing knowledge and changing participants: they can produce a whole new political subject. At the workplace level, this might mean creating a new WhatsApp group that brings together militant reps and members within a union branch. On the level of the industry, this might mean a rank-and-file organising group trying to coordinate independent activity across the sector. And at the societal level, it might mean a new kind of party or force in class struggle. Inquiry does this by creating a shared understanding of the class composition we face, which acts as the basis for the emergence of new political forms that correspond to the prevailing material conditions. Only by making questions of organisation extremely concrete can we start to answer them. Political forms that lose their connection to inquiry or similar grounding processes tend to drift, and eventually degenerate into sectarianism.

By comparison, the dominant method for achieving recomposition in Britain tends to consist of supporting aligned candidates for election to internal positions in trade unions and political parties. There is the hope that they can achieve their goals through a combination of willpower and tactical manoeuvring. New people are then recruited to the party or group to increase the power of these internal campaigns and reproduce the organisation overall. The progress towards recomposition is measured by the number of votes or members, rather than qualitative long-term shifts. “Politics” is reconfigured into an endless cycle of internal and external elections, with the point of victory constantly suspended after the next electoral horizon. For those groups and networks embedded in parties with parliamentary representation, the critical analysis of the state is increasingly abandoned to sustain hopes of a possible social democratic transition, without serious consideration of the structural limits of such a project amid profound stagnation and crisis. Even when this model of electoral method plus social democratic politics is rhetorically recognised as insufficient, the reality that wins out is one of insular factionalism over programmes and institutional structure, with rooted activity disappearing to the margins.

Projects of inquiry are one means of breaking out of these repetitive cycles by building genuinely mass forms of organisation across workplaces and neighbourhoods. A considerable network of social movements exists across Britain, approaching injustices of migration and housing through varying degrees of rooted activity, with the place of collective inquiry into the specific conditions of production and reproduction often serving as a measure for their capacity to meaningfully relate to the environment around them. In this issue, Lotte and Dan of the Yarmouth Workers’ Project demonstrate how this dialectic has begun to unfold on a local level, as they think through the place local political militants might have in mediating and supporting working class political activity. There, a new class composition is emerging: state welfare has retreated, replaced by both increasing voluntary sector provision and an emergent far-right movement based in the exurbs. But at the same time, the town has also become economically defined by its position as a centre for migrant labour, turning out much of the processed meat that now fills Britain’s bellies, whilst also acting as a thoroughfare for global capital. A precise understanding of the class composition of workers and the political forms around them is therefore particularly necessary here for sustained political activity that moves beyond detached sloganeering or the long-term depoliticising effects of deferring political articulation to our supposed representatives.

Inquiry and political forms

We began Notes From Below in 2018 because, after years of organising in different movements and struggles, we found ourselves coming up against two problems over and over again. First, we faced the reality of a disorganised working class, fractured and disconnected from both the rest of the class and the revolutionary movement that tried to coordinate its most advanced elements. Second, that revolutionary movement was itself divided into political sects and micro parties, and had adopted various methods that ranged from seeing the working class as irrelevant to treating it as a recruitment pool or an inanimate object that needed external leadership. These two problems are related, of course. While the ruling class is always engaged in an attempt to break working class power, the response of much of the organised left has exacerbated these problems. As most of us know from experience, left-wing sects and parties are extremely effective at carving up national and local trade unions, as well as social movement activity. By extension, these sects are extremely effective at carving up, and thereby disorganising, the working class.

While we could wish away either of these problems, we have to build from where we currently are. We see the project of Notes from Below as a way to try to answer the existing question of organisation (or disorganisation) and to find new solutions to old problems. As Hal Draper argued,

A political center has an enormous advantage over the sect’s National Committee or Central Committee which issues directives, theses, disciplinary cases, etc. to its micro-empire of mini-branches. That is: the former’s relations with local clubs, socialist groups, trade-union groups, workers’ groups, and individual activists can be infinitely varied and flexible. But the latter’s relations are dichotomized into two types: with members, the relation rigified by the by-laws; with non-members, a relation hampered by an organizational barrier. After a first period during which a big job of preparation will have to be accomplished, we look forward to far more involvement with local cadres, not less – but in a quite different relationship, which offers new possibilities.¹

One of the main criticisms levelled at revolutionary sects by Hal Draper is that the structure of their organisation inevitably leads to substitutionism (that is, the substitution of a small elite’s ideas for the revolutionary agency of the working classes). This concerns the way these organisations relate organisational structure, revolutionary ideas, and political practice. Firstly, these organisations have a formal hierarchy, meaning they “democratically” allocate positions, remits, and levels of decision-making powers. The central committee is normally the centre of all decisions and directives, but also, in a more nebulous way, where the sect forms its ideologies. Generally, these organisations assume that clear and coherent ideas concerning revolutionary strategy and political principles ought to be established outside of any given workplace situation or demographic constituency. The revolutionary sect, therefore, assumes that effective and coherent revolutionary ideas:

• Must be generated, regulated and expressed from a single centre.
• Must be in a final state, purified of residual markers of uncertainty or contestation.

This means the sect then tends to think of practice as a field of application for ideas, as a site that should basically conform to the ideas developed by an elite minority. If they don’t conform to the ideas, there are always other ideas which explain the anomaly.

In opposition to this approach, we want Notes from Below to be part of these wider debates on revolutionary tactics and strategy today. We do not have the right “line”, nor are we trying to prescribe one. Instead, we are trying to cultivate a new political culture in which workers write about their struggles, share advice, and develop political principles from their own experience of specific workplace struggles. These, of course, need to be taken back to workplaces. The contribution we hope Notes from Below makes to this is providing the space for concrete examples of what is happening today. Articles often focus on specific workplace relationships, technical conditions, and emerging political compositions. Through this, we can try to link the generation of a new political common sense to the real world, rather than just ideas about the real world drawn from the classics.

We start with the recognition that actual revolutions require many millions of people, many discrete centres of activity, working things out, in practice, for themselves. This is also a recognition, based on practical experience, that workplace struggles have a life and logic of their own, almost always exceeding given models. Our aim in doing inquiry today is to try to support the emergence of new centres of rank-and-file activity and link these up into a larger movement. We need many centres that draw on lessons we learn in the class struggle to produce new, broader, more effective, and autonomous modes of workplace organising, as well as points of articulation and coordination. We want to disseminate agency, inventiveness, creativity, confidence, and ownership outward, rather than concentrating these qualities within a single central node. Only a political form that achieves these goals will be a suitable vehicle for long term political recomposition.

Inquiry today

Things continue to fall apart. The period in which Notes from Below has operated is one in which social democracy has increasingly broken down. There was a promise that working hard, studying, or making the right choices would lead to a better future. Many unions adopted a partnership approach, hoping that negotiations from above could improve employment conditions by collaborating with capital. These promises are dead. In their place, conflict is back, with rising unemployment and plummeting quality of life. In the midst of this unravelling, a new class composition is emerging.

It is in moments like these that new theories and new political forms are developed: the general strike, the commune, and the soviet were all produced internally to the class struggle, at a moment when an ongoing destabilisation was met by a wave of working class self-organisation. No publication acting alone can bring developments like this about, of course, but a growing number of projects today place the politics of inquiry at their heart, whether as stand-alone publications or as elements within wider political formations, and expanded international correspondence on our evolving methods and revelations is an exciting prospect for mapping the uneven terrains of global capitalism. What we can do, then, is try to support the conditions where such developments would take place. We do this by publishing worker writing produced from struggles, putting it in dialogue with writing from high points elsewhere, and so creating the conditions under which a political subject in the process of recomposition can recognise itself. The pieces that follow in this issue intend to theorise this method through their own experiences and histories.

In How to Start a Workers’ Inquiry, we share a simple guide to inquiry, covering the basics of what an inquiry is, why you would want to do one, the kind of questions you might ask, how to start it, what methods you can use, and how to share it.

In Why Class Composition? Jamie Woodcock discusses class composition theory, introducing how the framework operates and how it can be applied in practice.

The issue then turns to examples of inquiry in the real world. Workers’ Inquiry in a Digital World of Labour is an interview with Paulo Galo, a Brazilian labour organiser. He discusses his new project, Jornal Correria, and how it uses video content to renew workers’ inquiry for contemporary conditions.

In Yarmouth Workers’ Project: A Territorial Inquiry, Lotte and Dan discuss how they have used a space in Great Yarmouth as a base to conduct an inquiry in a town that is politically dominated by the far right.

The issue moves on to excavating the history of the workers’ inquiry method. In “Little Scraps and Memory”: Lineages of Workers’ Inquiry in the US, Patrick King explores how feminist historians and anthropologists developed their own forms of inquiry across the 1970s and 80s.

In A History of Workers’ Inquiry in England, Matthew, George Briley and Dante Philp explore how anti-racist, women’s liberation, and rank-and-file movements drew upon inquiry to make sense of capitalism in England in the second half of the 20th century.
We end with a theoretical development that expands the ideas behind inquiry. In Workers’ Inquiry and Ideology, Roberto Mozzachiodi interrogates how an account of ideology stretches and challenges class composition theory, and how workers’ inquiry can dissolve previously solid ideological elements.