ABSTRACT
This chapter describes author's view on Workers Power. His study of mass strikes gave him his first rough answers to how people come together in response to shared problems, how by doing so they increase their power to affect their conditions, and how their movements can come to be a new source of oppression. He learned from studying workers power helped provide a starting point for understanding the broader problems of common preservation. He immersed himself in the intellectual traditions of working-class radicalism. He read Lenin and Mao, but he was repelled by the whole idea of a vanguard party as a transmission belt inculcating socialist consciousness in the masses. He discovered an alternative Marxist tradition that included Rosa Luxemburg and such lesser-known figures as Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick, who advocated a participatory democracy-like system of workers councils as an alternative to the Leninist idea of a vanguard party creating a revolutionary state.
