Who we are
We come from all walks of life. We are builders, teachers, students, care workers, and the unemployed. We are those who believe that the current state of affairs cannot continue. We do not look to some outside force to create the conditions for our independence. No politician, Democrat or Republican, can represent our cause.
What we believe
The working class is the only agent capable of saving humanity. While the profit system connects us all in life and labor, it has also separated us from each other as social and community-oriented beings. The great civil associations built to combat this separation – temperance societies, community churches, and autonomous trade unions among them – have disappeared, leaving a uniquely 21st century vacuum of social discontent.
The ground has been cleared. We believe that this great loss is also a great opportunity for the working class to tackle growing atomization, political dysfunction, social disorder, and economic chaos on its own terms. We will therefore build a working class civil-social association that reflects the real needs and interests of the American worker.
What we do
Everywhere that bosses and politicians build divisions among us, we build unity. We fight the idea that the American working class is a cultural identity or party affiliation. We protest the subordination of our class to the progressive administrative state. We protest, too, the puerile, nationalistic, middle-class politics of MAGA.
Political imagination has been captured by reactionary forces of the right and left alike. We see our role, therefore, as fundamentally pre-political. We care for each other and work for each other outside the voting booths, where we have seen repeatedly that our actions make no difference and our needs will never be met. Instead, we meet each other in the terrain of our daily lives, building our capacity to act together.
Most of all, we join in fellowship with workers who are tired of being used and lied to by a media and political class that has no plan to get us out of the mess they have made.
The rich have their country clubs and smoky parlors. The middle classes have their professional associations and civic clubs. The working class has the Independent Labor Club.
What our goals are
To strengthen the working class across industries with bonds of friendship and community, beyond the scope of the labor unions that have lost so much of their power, beyond the capabilities of the politicians who promise everything while delivering nothing.
When workers ask how to get what they’re missing — whether that’s wages lost to an illness, a job lost to a disagreement with the boss, or merely time lost to the tedious shifts and hideous commutes of 21st century working life — we want to be the answer.
Where workers are too exhausted to seek out fellowship within their communities, we will bring the fellowship and community we have established to them.
Where workers are trapped in endless cycles of overwork and underemployment, incapable of finding stability, we will bring the stability we can offer to them.
Where workers are forced to sell their lifetimes so their bosses can make more money, we will bring the life we are building to them.