The workers’ movement and the political left have lagged badly behind our enemies in the use of technology. If our class refuses to contest digital terrain, others will occupy it, writes Neel Sengupta.
Literacy was once understood as a weapon. In the nineteenth-century British labour movement, access to reading and writing was central to self-organisation. Chartism did not simply demand the vote; it built reading rooms, circulated newspapers like the Northern Star, and treated political education as essential to mass participation. The ability to read contracts, follow parliamentary debates and write correspondence was part of the struggle for citizenship. Similarly, the Workers’ Educational Association and labour colleges emerged from a recognition that workers required systematic education in economics, history and law if they were to challenge ruling-class expertise. Access to education was not a luxury. It was a demand for power. To change the world you had to understand how it worked.
Today the terrain of literacy has shifted. Reading and writing remain fundamental, but digital literacy has become just as crucial. Workers navigate algorithmic feeds, online booking systems, digital scheduling platforms and data-driven management tools. Political arguments circulate in formats and rhythms shaped by corporate platforms. To organise effectively in this environment requires not only traditional shop-floor skills but an understanding of how digital systems structure attention and influence.
It is important to be clear about what this argument is not. We are not simply reproducing the slander against those workers who resist the control and pressure of technological ‘innovation’ on the bosses’ terms. The original Luddites were not fools smashing machines because they feared progress. They were skilled textile workers defending their wages and community against employers who used new machinery to degrade labour and undercut bargaining power. Their resistance came from a position of class consciousness and collective organisation. They targeted the social relations embodied in particular machines. There is a lesson in that history. Opposition to technology can be rational when technology is deployed to intensify exploitation. We need more critical resistance to coercive and exploitative technology, not less. But passive withdrawal and a refusal to understand and use the tools that structure contemporary politics will not build the power our class needs.
For the better part of fifteen years the workers’ movement and the political left have lagged badly behind our enemies in the use of technology. The ruling class and reactionaries have invested in data science, behavioural analytics, targeted messaging, and platform capture. Major institutions of the left have, by contrast, treated technology as peripheral, distasteful or vaguely corrupting. Too often in an attempt to prefigure the kind of society we want we have substituted moralism for strategy, denunciation for building infrastructure, and grandstanding for organisation. Prefigurative attitudes to technology ignore the current configuration of political life and leave us unequipped to fight in our material reality. We must fight with the same weapons if we aim to win.
Part of the issue is generational and structural. Large sections of the trade union and political party leadership of all stripes are bureaucratised and ageing; they rose to prominence in a different communications environment and have little incentive to disrupt habits that once worked. Inertia is then dressed up as principle and thus we are outpaced, outflanked and outmanoeuvred in any attempts to organise our class. We need to adapt and use modern technological tools, and engage in professional training in how to use them, or we will continue to have rings run around us by the servants of capital.
At Jarrow Insights we take the opposite approach. We are a worker cooperative with a simple aim: to use data and technology to build the collective power of our class. Our starting assumption is that working-class organisations require the same level of strategic and analytical infrastructure that corporations take for granted. That means understanding digital systems, learning how they function, and applying that knowledge directly to organising in trade unions, political parties, and social movements.
We work in the tradition of the Workers’ Inquiry, the method of systematically investigating the concrete conditions of working-class life in order to identify leverage points for collective action. A grievance, in this sense, is not simply a complaint. It is any structured pressure that impinges on a worker’s life: pace of work, wage loss, arbitrary discipline, injury risk, insecure hours, impossible scheduling, degraded housing, punitive welfare rules. Grievances are patterned. They can be collected, analysed and organised around.
We collect worker grievances scientifically and we treat them as material political data: evidence of how capitalism organises work and extracts value. We build tools to gather that information systematically, analyse it rigorously and return it in forms that strengthen organisation. The point is not to accumulate stories for moral effect. It is to produce clarity — about structure, about commonality, about where power lies and what it reveals.
Workers do not live in a “digital world” separate from real life. They live in workplaces, homes and communities shaped by material constraints, constraints increasingly mediated, intensified or interpreted through digital systems. Work is scheduled through apps, shifts are allocated algorithmically and political arguments circulate through feeds. What was once discussed on the shop floor or in the break room is now debated in the group chat or the Facebook page.
Just as the workplace is not neutral terrain nor are technological platforms. Both are structured to extract value. The former extracts labour time and the latter extracts views, clicks, and consumer time. But our labour movement was not built in friendly conditions, it was built in mines, mills and yards designed to break our collective backs. The fact that a space is structured by capital has never been a reason to avoid it. It has always been a reason to organise within it and against it. If working class organisations cede digital space, if we treat platforms as beneath serious organising, we forfeit one of the primary sites where political common sense is now forged. If our class refuses to contest that terrain, others will occupy it.
We have been making this case for years. Our analysis of technology and class power has been introduced into unions and political parties, often pushing against scepticism. Digital strategy is still widely treated as an afterthought or a branding exercise. We argue that data collection, narrative discipline and platform literacy are now core components of class organisation. Where we have been allowed to implement our approach, which we call the Digital Mass Line, it has produced significant results. We have won recognition agreements, pay-rises, and grown unions in hostile conditions.
Our work with Uni Global Union for Amazon workers is perhaps our most well known project. Amazon operates as a data regime where productivity is measured continuously: routes and tasks are allocated algorithmically and workers are monitored, compared and ranked. No moment of a shift is unaccounted for, and the labour process is saturated with surveillance and measurement.
To organise the workers atomised by this system we began with structured inquiry. We designed surveys to collect grievances across sites and countries, asking workers to describe how algorithmic management affected their pace of work, their health, their job security and their ability to communicate. The survey did not seek controversy but to understand the structure of working life.
By the end of our survey we had collected more than 2000 responses from workers across 8 countries in 6 languages. The responses showed recurring patterns. Workers in different countries described the same pressures: escalating targets, injury risk, disciplinary systems that felt arbitrary and opaque, high turnover that weakened solidarity. The particulars of the responses were as important as the wide analysis they confirmed.
The data collected in surveys like this feed directly into organising. Patterns identified across sites can be returned to organisers and worker leaders to develop campaign demands. Talking points are sharpened and unions learn how to speak to workers in their own language. The end result is that workers can see that what felt personal was structural.
Our Amazon survey is not a one-off. We have applied the same methodology across sectors, collecting tens of thousands of responses from workers in manufacturing, care, cleaning, security, call centres and logistics. Across sectors we have taken the data gathered from our surveys and used it to help union organisers and workers build campaigns that win. In each case, the aim has been the same: convert dispersed grievance into structured knowledge, and structured knowledge into organised power.
There is a risk here. Digital methods can easily be severed from material analysis. Without a clear understanding of class structure, online activity degenerates into performance and noise. A clever video or viral post does not build durable power on its own. It must be tied to majority organisation, clear demands and a strategy for escalation.
We are not arguing that digital competence should, or even can be outsourced to consultants. There is a fundamental need for political education about technology and the digital world that goes hand in hand with traditional capacity-building organising.
That conviction underpins our Worker Academy initiative. It is an attempt to build a layer of trade union and social movement organisers who combine materialist political education with practical digital organising skills. They learn how to collect and interpret data, how to test messages, how to integrate digital work into workplace strategy. They also study the political economy of technology and the history of labour struggle. Techniques divorced from materialist analysis will not produce effective outcomes. Tools must be anchored in an understanding of how capital organises work and shapes consciousness. We’re proud to have begun our first courses with the Scottish Trades Union Congress
The historic task of our class has not changed: to build collective power capable of confronting and overcoming capitalism. The tools through which that struggle is conducted have changed. We can either master them or be mastered by them.
Neel Sengupta is Head of Research and Outreach at Jarrow Insights – a worker-cooperative political consultancy aimed at building class power.