The task for revolutionary communists is to address the real world, and to point in the direction of workers power. To reveal the hidden class struggles that occur, to educate, agitate and organize for workers to seize control of their own lives, to pose workers power in the face of capitalist and state power.

I work three nights a week for a large environmental NGO.

My task is to ring our members who, by and large, are working-class people and talk to them about some of the campaigns we are doing and to see if they would like to give the NGO more money each month in return for receiving a t-shirt.

The real world. Apathy. Disinterest. Thousands of workers whose only nod to environmentalism is by giving a small amount of their income each month to a large NGO that works to protect the environment.

The real world. Privileged wages and conditions in the call-center that I work in. Most of my co-workers seem satisfied with their lot and feel, with no small amount of justification, that the work they do is progressive.

The campaign I talk to workers about is one that my NGO has developed to address climate change. It aims to involve large numbers of people in an effort to cut drastically New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions. It is built on the presumption and an analysis that the state and corporations will not solve our problems. Only through community organising, mounting pressure on state policy from below, direct action campaigning that aims to empower, organise and connect communities and individuals can climate chaos be averted.

There are significant problems in the campaign however.

A tendency to orient itself primarily to policy changes is one. The separation (of skills, knowledge and involvement) between the elite vanguard of campaigners and the masses of members is another.

The challenge of subversion is to point members through my telephone conversations towards an analysis of corporate-state interests, of capitalism itself and an understanding of, and a hope in, worker and community power. I must always seek to illuminate to members that ending capitalism and the ecological problems it is creating won’t happen cause they give the NGO I work for a few bucks more each week.

I must struggle collectively with others, who share my beliefs, in my workplace through using our power as workers, which is the potential withdrawal of my labour for a NGO that orients itself against capital and state power and for worker power. Although I can educate and agitate amongst members I must also seek to focus my NGO into organising this discontent and to promote grassroots self-organisation.
Every time I call someone at work I have the potential to address the real world.

I can discuss how only direct action and not reliance on officials or politicians will end climate change and advocate for community action and organisation. I can talk about how the corporations make profit from pollution and how the state is nothing but a tool for capitalist interests. I can expound on the successes of struggle and education. I can help people demystify the causes of the current ecological crisis and peoples ability to create change. In short I can, at work, do my bit to create anarchy. One phone call at a time.