Over on the Feminist SF blog, labour organisor Ariel Wetzel reviews Cory Doctorow’s For the Win:
Doctorow imagines how workers in a global economy might resist contemporary manifestations of divide and conquer. Many of the characters in For the Win, who have worked in sweatshops and stood up against unjust working conditions both as individuals or collectively, have seen how bosses and owners utilize this tactic in contemporary transnational business models: a worker resist as an individual, and she is fired and replaced by someone desperate for a job. Workers resist collectively, and their factory is shut down and moved to a country with even worse labor laws. The Webblies, our clever heroes, adapt the Wobbly philosophy for “an injury to one is an injury to all†and organize across borders through the virtual worlds in which they work.
In short, Doctorow captures some of the key philosophies of the Wobblies through his fictional Webblies revival: solidarity across race, and gender. This tactic is an especially smart response to the challenges organizers face in the 2010s–and I’m going to recommend this book to activist friends who know little of virtual worlds because their is fertile ground here for organizing. I also hope that this novel will inspire young people, gamers and virtual workers, to form their own Webbly locals in real life; since the nineteenth century utopian novel Looking Backward science fiction has a tradition of informing real world practices, and For the Win is an awesome candidate to continue this tradition.
It’s been interesting to see Cory Doctorow’s slow radicalisation over the past decade or so. His earliest novels sounded like bog standard late nineties techno optimism, libertarianism lite to me, but with a bit more social awareness than usual. But look away for a decade and he was writing young adult novels like Little Brother and now this, a proper socialist young adult science fiction novel. Doctorow is not the first to fictionally revive the Wobblies however; Ken MacLeod had done so as well in one of his Fall Revolution novels if I remember correctly, as the International Internet Workers of the World.
Lenny’s look at what somebody I unfortunately can’t remember called the grownup version of For the Win, Adam Roberts New Model Army might also be of interest.