Without our labour, nothing works. That is capitalism’s dirty secret. Every day, we work to reproduce a system based on our exploitation. It happens in many different ways. We could be producing commodities that the capitalist sells for a profit, or providing services on behalf of the state, like healthcare or education. We could be raising the next generation of workers or caring for the last. It can be hard to recognise that basic fact, given all the bullshit we are surrounded by. But no matter how much they try to obscure the basic reality, we know it: without our brain and muscle not a single wheel would turn.

Some sections of the class, however, have a particular role to play. They work in the infrastructure of society, doing the jobs that enable everyone else to do their jobs. The systems that industries and state services rely on (energy, water, transport, communication, and so on) could be points of incredible leverage for our class. In this issue, we hear from miners, water workers, shipbuilders, tube drivers, energy workers, and militants who have supported workers’ inquiries in supermarkets. This issue should be read in dialogue with pieces from our previous issues, in which workers have documented how their labour keeps society alive, from healthcare to care work. In a capitalist society, the reproduction of the working class and the reproduction of capital are two sides of the same process. There are many differences between hospitals and mines, as well as between water treatment facilities and care homes. What they all have in common is that workers can shut things down. The threat of this haunts bosses and politicians like a recurring nightmare.

We have not asked the contributors to this issue to write just because we want to understand their potential power. There are two more key reasons. First, we want to understand the strain these deep systems are under from the workers’ point of view. Second, thinking about how we might reorganise these systems under workers’ control is an essential task for any serious revolutionary politics.

We know, to put it simply, that shit is about to get bumpy. As we write this editorial, Los Angeles is on fire. The houses that multimillionaires sell to those other multimillionaires are burning. If they can’t keep each others’ mansions safe, what does that mean for the rest of us? However, this destabilisation is evident not only in spectacular disasters. It also has a more boring, everyday form. A comrade who works on the railway recently told the editors how high-speed electric trains have to turn off non-essential power use on long stretches of track to avoid overburdening the local power grid. In South East London, every few months, the water company tells people in a new area to boil their water because of a threat of contamination. Our friends who are admitted to the hospital spend 24+ hours on beds lined up in corridors. By now, we are pretty used to the idea that the ruling class has abandoned a social contract based on rising living standards. What is new is that we are now supposed to accept that the infrastructure we rely on daily, is starting to fall apart. As we argue below, the suggestion of a ‘just transition’ led by the state and in collaboration with capital as one way out of this perpetual decline appears all the more unworkable in these conditions.

But what does this process of deterioration look like from the inside? Is it as bad as it looks, and what are we missing about the process? How can infrastructure workers organise, and what might come next? In this issue, we hear from workers themselves so that we can learn from their privileged insights into the nuts and bolts of the infrastructures of modern capitalism.

From economic to political

As they describe in their inquiries, workers in different sectors and workplaces within infrastructure differ in their militancy. Workers are starting to find their feet in areas such as the British water industry or the Slovenian supermarket sector. On the railways, there is a tradition of workplace organisation paired with a mixed level of militancy. In practice, this has meant strike action that is strong in numbers but often limited in frequency. In some workplaces, such as the Harland and Wolff shipyards or the Soma coal mines, we have seen remarkable bursts of militancy from self-organised workforces.

Militant tactics, however, do not necessarily transfer into revolutionary politics. For example, in When Workers Take Control, Joe Passmore describes how the militant workforce of Harland and Wolff occupied their shipyard, demanding nationalisation by the British government and expressing aspirations of transitioning to green production. However, this action ultimately ended with a new takeover of the Belfast shipyard by another private company. Whilst undoubtedly a serious and impressive action, it did not end in a lasting experiment in workers’ control. Instead, the dominant mode of production remained, and ultimately, the shipyard faced crisis again just five years later.

Like with the work-in of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in Scotland in 1971-72, historic moments of working-class struggle, led by shop stewards with mostly overtly socialist politics, often continue to operate within the broader logic of capital. This is not the fault of workplace militants, whose impressive feats of organisation should be applauded.

Instead, it points to the fundamental difficulty of exiting an economic system whose relations have dominated for hundreds of years. As history shows, this cannot be abolished in one country, let alone one workplace. In Portugal, during the Carnation Revolution, two hundred industrial enterprises in many major industries came under workers’ control, yet this failed to materialise into a serious challenge to capitalism. Existing within a broader world market, their access to the resources needed to continue production was limited unless they continued to engage in commodity production.¹ The social division in many workplaces under workers’ control remained largely untouched. Where it was challenged, the state intervened with violence to restore it.

Yet, working-class power does not solely express itself in explosive moments of occupation and protest. As Joe outlines, referring to the 2024-25 takeover of Harland and Wolff by Spanish company Navantia, a latent desire for workers’ control remained after:

If we’d gotten bad news recently, then we would have blockaded those gates again… We will always have a way in. And when one door closes, we will always find another one.

Once these tactics have been used, they become part of the arsenal of class struggle. For example, in Under London, James describes how workers on the London Tube push for elements of workers’ control on a daily basis. They discuss the scheduling “mafia”, a group of elected reps that write the work timetables. When workers are not happy with these elected reps, they either recall them or set up a competing mafia to overrule them. However, the most visible tactic on the Tube is the strike. Through this, they aim not only to shut down their own workplace, but other workplaces throughout the capital. This tactic has won many gains for Tube workers, although it has proven less industrially effective at achieving the RMT’s stated wider aim of “working for the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”.²

Workers’ control and the ‘Just Transition’

The issue of workers’ control comes to the fore in many of the pieces. However, a strategic bind also emerges. How can fighting for workers’ control go beyond the bounds of the capitalist organisation of work? The contradictions that play out when capital is challenged but not superseded become apparent when we look at the demand for a just transition. The demand has animated attempts to win substantial progressive reform and tangible action on climate change.

Climate breakdown is no longer a threat. It is happening in our infrastructure, workplaces, and communities. This is why the promise of a Just Transition and a Green New Deal are so attractive. On an emotional level, they offered a way out. They are premised on the idea that someone else will solve our problems “from above.” But there is no just transition. It is not happening - and as long as we live under capitalist social relations, it will never happen. That is the blunt reality that the inquiries in this issue point towards. Inquiry can help us to confront the actual material conditions that surround us - no matter how uncomfortable they may be.

In Direniş means resistance, we hear about how workers on the edges of Europe are struggling to establish elementary collective bargaining against an authoritarian state-company-yellow union ‘triangle.’ For them, a just transition would require defeating the state’s energy policy, eliminating fractions of capital that have merged with the ruling AKP party, and challenging the dominant institutions of the labour movement. This kind of victory is hard to imagine outside of a revolutionary situation. In When Workers’ Take Control , we hear that ambitions for retooling production around green projects have been raised by militant workers in Ireland, but so long as capitalists control the production process, retooling lives or dies on the whim of the market. Power Systems and the Renewables highlights how the constant tendency of capital to replace living labour with fixed capital and eject workers from production plays out in the renewable energy transition. There are not thousands of green jobs on every wind farm - there are a handful. The technical composition of renewable energy production is not suited to mass employment.

These barriers to the dream of a just transition are part of the constraints baked into the concept. First, the control of political power by the capitalist state, and second, the organisation of production through capitalist social relations. Parts of the ruling class understand well that ‘for some things to remain the same, everything must change.’ There are elements of the ruling class, particularly those with connections to the institutions of global governance, that want to integrate workers into a capitalist transition by offering crumbs of justice. But this pro-transition fraction is not at all dominant. On a general level, capital is not co-opting the pressure for green transition. Fossil capital and its allies are stonewalling.

In practice, workers’ experience of energy transition is being forced through as a failed market intervention by the state. In Port Talbot, a steel community is being decimated by the introduction of electric arc furnaces. In Luton, the electric vehicle mandate is one of the excuses bosses give for relocating production to Turkey. In Grangemouth, the closure of the oil refinery and loss of 500 jobs is blamed on the energy transition. Again and again, “action” on carbon emissions is being felt as job losses and deindustrialisation, a process that echoes the deliberate assaults of Thatcherism decades before. The danger is that this looming axe persuades workers in carbon-intensive industries that all climate action only ever amounts to a state-led attack on them and their communities. One response to this could then be to ally with fossil capital in defence of their current form of exploitation. After all, in capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited at all.

Vauxhall workers protest against a threatened plant closure in Luton. December 2024.

When we say a just transition is not and will not happen, are we suggesting that we should embrace the death drive? Not at all. Only by recognising that “Just Transition” is a utopian demand can we face up to what we really need to do. So long as capitalist states and international institutions hold political power, there will be no just transition. What “successful” decarbonisation there is will continue to take the form of anti-working class assaults experienced as deindustrialisation, casualisation, and immiseration. In the near term, we will be struggling amid the chaos of a market-led non-transition. Instead of building castles in the air, we need to build power on the shopfloor. Then, when our chance comes, we can transition more than just the energy system.

The communist future in our current class struggles

The only realistic transition on the table is a communist transition. There is no singular programme or instruction manual for such a transition. The process itself will be shaped by the struggles taking place before and during it. The process of communist revolution will, by necessity, reshape the social masses of the world, and, in turn, will be reshaped by them.³

We can, however, learn from the historical attempts at communist transition in the context of contemporary class composition. This can provide perspectives of what has not worked, and what could be done to build the form of political organisation that can move our struggles in a revolutionary direction. The experiences of workers’ today, such as those highlighted in this issue, are vital to such an analysis. Not only must they inform abstract theories of revolution, but they must also be used to test whether they can work in practice. The tactics currently employed in working-class struggles must inform our political strategies, if we wish to influence and intensify their development towards revolutionary ends. Any potential political organisation must speak to this conveyor belt between tactics and strategy, between class struggle and political organisation.

Thinking through revolutionary strategy today has to be an intentional project that uses antagonisms at work to openly challenge capitalist control of society, while also consciously expanding outwards. It must be one that actively understands the current chains of production and reproduction in society, aiming to reproduce its forms of struggle along them. It is one in which the social hierarchies that dominate our workplaces and wider society must be subject to an active project of elimination. In James’s words, “every tube driver is a cleaner, every cleaner is a tube driver.” This abolition of social hierarchies in key industries must happen along with a move away from production governed by surplus value extraction towards that of social need.

New political structures need to be formed to coordinate between bodies of workers in free association. In placing these inquiries into different industries side by side, we thus also raise the imperative of finding a means to coordinate activity across these industries, which collectively constitute the infrastructure of our economy. The inclusion of international inquiries from Sweden, Turkey, Ireland, and Slovenia in this issue is not solely a means to discover applicable lessons for more local struggles, but also reflects that we must fight the exploitation and violence which weaves together our inescapably global systems of energy and infrastructure.

This also means confronting the ideologies which operate through workforces to uphold existing command structures. As the contribution by Gruvkvinnor demonstrates, organisational autonomy oriented around feminist and rank-and-file principles can expose how patriarchy is not only embedded in the organisation of work (and the makeup of particular workforces), but also constitutes an ideological domain where the interests of male workers and bosses converge. From this perspective, workplace struggles for equality are not secondary to workers’ efforts to control production. Instead, they are essential for dismantling the ideologies that reinforce capitalist control over the production process on a daily basis.

Through these processes, the consent which stems from disciplinary coercion and ideological segmentation, and which underpins the reproduction of capitalism, can be challenged at a broader societal level. Only on this basis is a communist transformation of production and society possible. Our day-to-day workplace organising and interventions in larger workers’ struggles need to be geared towards this wider ambition.

Today, the stakes of worker control over the organisation and function of production have planetary ramifications. But the barriers to this collective responsibility seem impossibly high, and are mounting even higher. After years of relentlessly injecting competition, flexibility, and austerity, into every crevice of the social fabric, neoliberalism has generalised dysfunction and disintegration across many areas of infrastructural and reproductive work. The consequences for worker control are often clear to see. In the NHS, for example, decades of competing and contradictory management and policy agendas have produced a behemoth. This way of running a national health service is incompatible with even the most top-down technocratic oversight, not to mention democratic control.

The capitalist organisation of work and production is not simply a less equitable way of doing things. It is also a way of doing things that damages our capacity to recover the conditions of social production and reproduction for communist horizons. Along with professions dealing directly with the maintenance of human life (care, health, domestic work, and so on), those devoted to the maintenance of natural life most starkly reveal the political implications of how work is organised (or disorganised). In Worker Based Solution to the Water Crisis and Something in the Water , we see how capital fragments land and labour. This division hinders our ability to address the systematic issues of aquatic ecologies. It is also accelerating damage that cannot be undone. However, we should not understand this as a cause for nihilistic retreat. Instead, this is the stake of viewing struggle over the organisation and function of work as an ever-present imperative in workplace politics, even while acknowledging its limits as an ultimate end.

Political organisation

The question of how we get from where we are now to where we want to be is central. This is a question of political organisation. In their contribution, the comrades in CEDRA offer important lessons about how to develop from the failures of previous organisational forms. Ana and Marja describe the frustration and limitations of being in parties that focused on winning elections over building a working class base. And so, coming out of this experience, they state that:

The initial idea behind CEDRA was thus: rather than forming a political party with a socialist program and then bringing this program to the working class in the form of the party, we should first offer help with workers’ organising in various sectors and form organic connections.

This process of approaching the working class not as ‘saviours sent from providence’, but as comrades in struggle gave them the first steps back towards organisation.⁴ The working class is not an identity to be represented in our organisations, but the fundamental functionary in the production and reproduction of society. Building working class bases is a strategic necessity. However, this is not to ignore the importance of identity in building working class organisation across class segmentations. As the autonomist feminist organising from Gruvkvinnor and CEDRA show, the objective conditions of production can offer a site to contest the subjective conditions of both production and reproduction, which develops a more general contestation to capitalist domination.

Political organisation is a process of composition and decomposition. It cannot be solved with a simple decision. There is no switch to turn “The Party” on or off. As the CEDRA comrades argue:

political unity of the working class is not achieved automatically, and its form is never given once and for all.

The process of inquiry is essential here. This is an approach that opens up working class experience and develops the first steps of organisation. As class composition shifts and changes, an inquiry also needs to be iterative.

CEDRA use feminist co-research to develop new organisation in the retail sector in Slovenia, particularly in supermarkets. As we learned from a supermarket worker in the UK who contributed to issue 18 Seeds Of Struggle,⁵ this work is gruelling, technologically intensified, and often involves more work for less pay. Supermarket work is very different from the labour of other contributors in this issue. It is important to include the results of CEDRA’s inquiry in this issue to highlight their approach of using inquiry to build political organisation within and beyond the immediate issues of production.

CEDRA has also developed a unique strategic analysis regarding the role of struggles over social reproduction in class political struggle more broadly. As the cost of living for the working class is tied directly to the industrial leverage of supermarket workers, building worker power at the meeting points of essential needs reveals the inherent contradictions of capitalist control over critical sites of social reproduction. In this way, workers’ lives across the class are implicated in a particular set of workplace struggles, opening to a politicisation of profit-making and exploitation at the point of production and consumption. This strategic insight holds just as much relevance for struggles within the private utilities sectors.

This is an essential reminder of the potential of workplace organising to lead to new possibilities. As Mike Davis puts it:

organising campaigns and strikes have a politico-moral momentum that necessarily exceeds the economic demands that were their first cause. ⁶

Engels described workers’ struggles as “schools of war.” He argued that we learn necessary lessons for a more complex political class war through the skirmishes of worker struggle.

Through reading the contributions from comrades organising in infrastructure in this issue, we can see how many challenges there are to building new and effective political organisations. As NfB editor Sai Englert laid out in issue 19, this should remind us of the pitfalls of:

understanding the vanguard not as a social relation, which is to say as a layer of militants that are more prepared than the average worker to fight back and get organised, but as an expression of specific political positions.⁷

The narrative of “crumbling infrastructure” in Britain is a political fact, not an inevitability. It is in the absence of a counter-political expression that this crumbling occurs. The answer here is not slogans or programmes, but the organisation of workers who are ready to fight back. Inquiry is a way to find and, more importantly, organise with that militant layer.

Building our own infrastructure

As workers, we can see the process of infrastructural decline up close. We can see who makes the decisions that create it, how exploitation accelerates it, and the effects on our class. We are all involved in struggles to defend ourselves and fight for something better in the middle of this larger process. Sometimes, we fight in the open with unions and banners. Other times, we might fight below ground with hidden means.Either way, we are fighting just the same. But these struggles do not have a simple answer to that process of decline. Workers’ control that doesn’t challenge the mode of production gets reorientated by the demands of the market and competition. Resistance and refusal that proposes no alternative gets bogged down in endless fights with no larger horizon. Social democratic visions of just transition get caught up in the utopian “realism” of progressive transformation without the need for revolution. Every halfway house has its own structural flaws.

So, we need to avoid stopping halfway. Communist transition is the only way out of this decline. This transition cannot be planned in advance. The early bourgeoisie were not working to a well-defined plan when they ground down feudalism over centuries. We are not working to a plan either. Real struggles over concrete questions will determine the course of the transition. These struggles will take place on the basis of the world that exists right now. Communist society will be built, as Marx and Engels put it, ‘from the premises now in existence.’⁸ That is to say, we will have to deal with the chaos that capitalism leaves behind. This chaos will create extreme challenges that threaten to pull us back into that mode of production, even as it begins to be overcome. The role of working class political organisation will not only be to start the transition to communism, but to defend it against counterrevolution.

Creating a political organisation is far from a simple or obvious process. An isolated minority should not just declare the new organisation or party. It has to be produced through struggle. Bit by bit, inquiry helps us to see what that process might look like. The groups of workers who are concentrated at key infrastructural points and engaged in practical militancy are likely to play a vital role in the process of organisation. Our hope is that this issue takes us one step closer to understanding how that recomposition can happen.