Strategizing the Resistance: A Conversation with Manny Ness

Toronto — 13 January 2012.

In 2012 workers in Toronto face a large coordinated attack on jobs and services. We must resist, again, as workers have resisted throughout history. In order to develop creative, innovative resistant strategies as we fight to win, we can look to our own history – and present – of class struggle to see what others have done and how we can learn from them.

Immanuel Ness is the author of several books on workers’ organizing and resistance. He is a trade union organizer and labour activist and co-founded with Keith Brooks of the New York Unemployed Committee (1990-1993), which successfully organized jobless workers at New York State unemployment centers.

Ness has done extensive research on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy and migrant worker resistance, and class struggles. And has published recent books on new worker organizations. He recently co-edited a collection called Ours to Master and to Own which details 22 cases of workers’ councils, assemblies and occupations from the Paris Commune to the present.

Part of the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly (GTWA) winter 2012 Assembly.