A podcast about the world Amazon is building and the writers, workers and communities fighting for different futures

The Workers' Speculative Society

How has writing been part of the coming-to-consciousness of the working class and our ability to imagine and fight for different futures? We speak with Jamie Woodcock, senior lecturer of management at the University of Essex about the history of Workers' Inquiry, a method where intellectuals and workers collaborate to learn about the changing nature of capitalism and his own project, Notes From Below, which supports workers to write about their experiences. We also discuss his initiative Red Futures, a magazine of Marxist and radical science fiction.

https://www.jamiewoodcock.net/
https://notesfrombelow.org/
https://www.redfuturesmag.com/

The Workers' Speculative Society is a research podcast about the world Amazon is building and the workers, writers and communities that are demanding a different future. It is part of the Worker as Futurist Project, which supports rank-and-file Amazon workers to write speculative fiction about "The World After Amazon. It is hosted by Xenia Benivolski, Max Haiven, Sarah Olutola, and Graeme Webb and is an initiative of RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, with support from the Social Sciences a Humanities Research Council of Canada. Editing and theme music by Robert Steenkamer.

* soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/sets/the-workers-speculative
* workersspeculativesociety.org
* reimaginingvalue.ca

Workers' Writing as Revolutionary Praxis - Jamie Woodcock on Workers' Inquiry and SF (WSS09)

Since 2011, the poet Mark Nowak has been facilitating rank-and-file workers' writing through the Workers Writers School. In collaboration with PEN, trade unions and other organizations, the WSS's workshops "create a space for participants to re-imagine their working lives, nurture new literary voices directly from the global working class, and produce new tactics and imagine new futures for working class social change." On this episode, Mark joins us along with long-time participant Lorraine Garnett, who reads several of her poems and discusses the School's impact on her life. 

https://www.workerwriters.org/
https://pen.org/worker-writers-school/

The Workers' Speculative Society is a research podcast about the world Amazon is building and the workers, writers and communities that are demanding a different future. It is part of the Worker as Futurist Project, which supports rank-and-file Amazon workers to write speculative fiction about "The World After Amazon. It is hosted by Xenia Benivolski, Max Haiven, Sarah Olutola, and Graeme Webb and is an initiative of RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, with support from the Social Sciences a Humanities Research Council of Canada. Editing and theme music by Robert Steenkamer.

* soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/sets/the-workers-speculative
* workersspeculativesociety.org
* reimaginingvalue.ca

Poetry By and For Workers - The Worker Writers School (WSS010)

Heike Geissler is a prominent German novelist and writer who lives and works in Leipzig, once a major city in communist  former "East Germany." Today, it is a major logistics hub for Amazon and site of the "reunified" country's first strike against the American corporation in 2013.

In her 2014 memoir Saisonarbeit (published in English in 2018 as Seasonal Associate), Geissler meditates on the months she spent working at an Amazon fulfillment centre in 2010 and what it tells us about work under capitalism today.

* https://www.heikegeissler.de/
* https://spectorbooks.com/de/buch/saisonarbeit
* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781635900439/seasonal-associate/

The Workers' Speculative Society is a research podcast about the world Amazon is building and the workers, writers and communities that are demanding a different future. It is part of the Worker as Futurist Project, which supports rank-and-file Amazon workers to write speculative fiction about "The World After Amazon. It is hosted by Xenia Benivolski, Max Haiven, Sarah Olutola, and Graeme Webb and is an initiative of RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, with support from the Social Sciences a Humanities Research Council of Canada. Editing and theme music by Robert Steenkamer.

* soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/sets/the-workers-speculative
* workersspeculativesociety.org
* reimaginingvalue.ca

Portrait of the Author as Amazon Worker​ - Heike Geissler on work and writing (WSS011)

Steven Shaviro is a cultural critic and leading theorist of the social roles of science fiction and author of many books, including The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (2014) and Discognition (2016). His book on science fiction, Fluid Futures, will be published in 2024. In this interview, he helps us understand the history of science fiction and its potentials to critique dominant power relations.

*http://www.shaviro.com/

The Workers' Speculative Society is a research podcast about the world Amazon is building and the workers, writers and communities that are demanding a different future. It is part of the Worker as Futurist Project, which supports rank-and-file Amazon workers to write speculative fiction about "The World After Amazon. It is hosted by Xenia Benivolski, Max Haiven, Sarah Olutola, and Graeme Webb and is an initiative of RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, with support from the Social Sciences a Humanities Research Council of Canada. Editing and theme music by Robert Steenkamer.

* soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/sets/the-workers-speculative
* workersspeculativesociety.org
* reimaginingvalue.ca

Extrapolation, Speculation, Fabulation - Steven Shaviro on the work of science fiction (WSS013)

In the thick of the pandemic, Montreal-based writer and organizer Mostafa Henaway worked at an Amazon fulfillment centre to learn how "essential" workers were made disposable in the name of corporate profits. In this episode, he shares stories and critical reflections on the sci-fi nature of Amazon's brand of capitalism, and the implications for workers' organizing and resistance. He concludes with vital thoughts on how this is connected to a broader story of imperialism that also encompasses the ongoing nightmare in Gaza.

Mostafa Henaway, a Canadian-born Egyptian, is a long-time community organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, where he has been organizing for justice for immigrant/migrant workers for over two decades. He is also a researcher and PhD candidate at Concordia University. His book Essential Work, Disposable Workers: Migration, Capitalism and Class was published in 2023.

* https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/essential-work-disposable-workers

The Workers' Speculative Society is a research podcast about the world Amazon is building and the workers, writers and communities that are demanding a different future. It is part of the Worker as Futurist Project, which supports rank-and-file Amazon workers to write speculative fiction about "The World After Amazon. It is hosted by Xenia Benivolski, Max Haiven, Sarah Olutola, and Graeme Webb and is an initiative of RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, with support from the Social Sciences a Humanities Research Council of Canada. Editing and theme music by Robert Steenkamer.

* http://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/sets/the-workers-speculative
* http://workersspeculativesociety.org
* http://reimaginingvalue.ca

No Worker is Disposable, from Amazon to Gaza - with Mostafa Henaway (WSS012)

Amazon, a corporation that is by some estimates the world's largest private employer, has succeeded in part because of a kind of sci-fi storytelling that places the firm at the forefront of capitalism, technology and human achievement. But if it presents a utopian narrative of itself, its workers pay the price, many of them toiling in dystopian conditions to create a profit-driven future that will exclude or exploit them.
The Worker as Futurist Project supports rank-and-file Amazon workers to write and publish short, speculative fiction about "the world after Amazon." It is undertaken in solidarity with workers' and communities' struggles around the world against a corporation whose wealth and power, today, rivals or exceeds that of many states. But beyond just fighting back, the Worker as Futurist project aims to reclaim the imagination of what the world might yet be if workers, rather than bosses, got to decide.
In this presentation, the project's initiator, Dr. Max Haiven (Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University) speaks at the 2023 Historical Materialism Conference (London) about the origins, inspirations, goals and progress of the project.
In particular, Haiven focuses on the project in the context of methodologies of "workers' inquiry" and militant inquiry more broadly, in which researchers play the role of facilitators creating space and time for an analysis of the changing nature of capitalism to emerge from those who experience its cutting edge directly: workers at firms like Amazon.
For more information about the project, visit: https://reimaginingvalue.ca/waf/

Writing SF with Amazon Workers: Introducing the Worker as Futurist Project (Max Haiven)

In this inaugural episode of The Order of Unmanagable Risks we talk with artist and writer James Bridle, about the politics of algorithmic opacity, populist technologies, and new ways of seeing through capitalism’s darkness.

James' artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Observer. "New Dark Age", their book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018, and they wrote and presented "New Ways of Seeing" for BBC Radio 4 in 2019 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000458m). Their work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.

The Order of Unmanagable Risks is an occasional podcast hosted by Dr. Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and Max Haiven about capitalism, anxiety and points inbetween. It is produce by the Common Anxieties Research Project (http://anxious.community) and supported by the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) and UCL's Institute for Advanced Study.

"The gifts of darkness?" with James Bridle (OUR001)

The ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) is a research and creativity workshop for the radical imagination active around the world and locally in Thunder Bay, Canada.

Writing SF with Amazon Workers: Introducing the Worker as Futurist Project (Max Haiven)

The ReImagining Value Action Lab

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