Notes from Below

Notes from Below, founded in 2018,^[1] is a UK-based political project that publishes online-articles, a growing book series,^[2] a podcast called Workers' Inquiry, ^[3] alongside a digital and print journal produced tri-annually.^[4] It publishes "workers' inquiries" and contemporary class analyses that uses class composition theory.^[5] The editors, including Jamie Woodcock and Callum Cant,^[6] have modeled their work after the Italian journal Quaderni Rossi, the US based Johnson–Forest Tendency, French collective Socialisme ou Barbarie, and early surveys about working conditions conducted by Karl Marx.^[7] Through the inquiries it publishes, the project promotes class composition analysis and workerism.^[8]

The inquiries featured in the journal have included workers in call centers, Amazon delivery centers, universities, tech companies,^[9] and pubs and its coverage has focused on small, militant unions like the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain.^[10] It also publishes political writing, most explicitly in Issue 19 of the journal titled The Political Leap: Communist Strategy Today.^[11]

Notes from Below had contributed to a 2018 University and College Union (UCU) pension strike by publishing bulletins and circulating an open letter in support of the strike.^[10] It also hosts the bulletin The University Worker.^[12]

In 2020, Notes from Below was awarded a grant from the Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust to produce a special issue.^[13] From April 2023, they began to publish their journal in print, with three issues being released a year.^[14]