Introduction

This conversation seeks to present, in a not-too-systematic way, some reflections on the workers’ inquiry we have accumulated from incorporating these ideas in our militancy. Over the past few years, we have been experimenting and trying to understand how to adapt it to the struggles of today’s world. Far from presenting a new or improved ‘model’, these are simply adaptations born out of our own experiences. Or, as we like to joke, from our new ways of creating new mistakes.

We can summarise these reflections around four main issues. First, in the current “gasified” world of labour, the workers’ inquiry has been politically more effective for us as a “radar” for workers’ struggles than as systematic research about a particular workplace. While the latter proved quite challenging, the former allowed us to build many processes of struggle and deep relationships with independent grassroots movements around us.

One could argue this would put us closer to an inquiry “from above”, more focused on mapping (or “sniffing out”), building initial relations, and still looking to get access to particular workplaces. However, at the same time, our inquiries have been fully led and carried out by workers for workers, focused on producing knowledge about these different scenarios and connected to real processes of struggles and direct actions — aspects usually associated with inquiries “from below”. In Brazil, where the labour market is marked by informality, multiple jobs, high turnover, and a strong tradition of territorial organising by workers, this flexibility has its benefits.

Second, historically, the workers’ inquiry has been centred around written texts — pamphlets, magazines, journals, blogs, etc. We have consciously moved away from written outputs and focused on audiovisual media productions by workers, about workers, and for workers. In tune with the digital world we live in, our inquiry has produced mostly short videos for social media and has trained workers in camera operation, video editing, graphic design, social media posting, etc. This has opened many opportunities to connect with workers, professionally benefit the members of Jornal Correria, and significantly support the struggles we took up.

Third, for us, a workers’ inquiry must primarily be carried out through the lived experiences of workers with one another, in their everyday lives, workplaces, and struggles. We understand that the political success of the workers’ inquiry depends on this premise. Finally, more than a systematic tool or method, the workers’ inquiry became for us a political compass, an attitude. It is a political project related to the goal of creating new forms of workers’ political organisation, focused on a two-way exchange of learning and the patient building of relationships of trust among movements, rather than the eagerness to recruit.

MMMateus Mendonça

PGPaulo Galo

MMWhen did you first come across workers’ inquiry in your journey? And why did it make sense to you at that moment?

PGAfter I got out of prison, I felt the need for something like that. I started appearing on podcasts. The left got more and more eager to pull me in, and once again, I felt that it wasn’t the crowd I wanted to be with. I didn’t think they were doing anything I found interesting. I thought it was time to return to thinking about delivery riders’ struggles. Back during the Antifascist Riders movement period, we had a lot of conflicts with the group Treta no Trampo. They were very influenced by this idea of the workers’ inquiry. They constantly brought it up in our conversations. Despite my many criticisms of them at that time, I thought they were one of the groups actually trying to do something interesting. And my interest in workers’ inquiry was later confirmed with my trip with you to London in 2024.

What interested me was its obsession with getting workers to fight, in direct action, a belief in the popular revolt. And that was always my goal too — getting the riders out on the streets. And Treta had been very effective at that, you know? Both in the Breque dos Apps and in the “June 2013 protests”. So I started studying them, becoming a sort of spy among them. Something like, let me listen to these people, let me try and learn from them. So I started asking my questions, doing my own inquiry with them, got it? They had a good nose for interesting struggles, and I wanted to learn that. I wanted to develop a good nose for this too.

MMWas it in this context that Jornal Correria emerged? As a project to put a workers’ inquiry into practice?

PGJornal Correria started out as an attempt to make funny social media content for delivery riders. To try to grab their attention and, from there, bring them into conversations in WhatsApp groups. But we failed at being funny, you know? It just didn’t work as good media content. At the same time, in May 2024, the opportunity came up to go with you to London. There, we exchanged more ideas about the workers’ inquiries. The Treta no Trampo already looked to European groups as a reference. There, we had many conversations with the IWGB. And we both came back to Brazil aligned and eager to do our own inquiries. We transformed Jornal Correria into something that would go out and ask workers on the street what they were feeling. It was a format that was already emerging on social media. The idea was to take political issues and labour news of the moment and put them to workers to comment. It was our first attempt at an inquiry. Also, letting ourselves be confronted by those workers, unfiltered. Above all, we wanted to open a dialogue with them.

I don’t know if we were effective at “understanding the worker”, but it ended up transforming into something interesting. More than an inquiry, it became a radar. A radar for finding where struggles were happening, or their latency. Over time, it also became a lightning rod for struggles and a tool to catalyse them. That was quite powerful. First, every week we kept an eye on the news, researching stories from the world of work — what are the stories of struggle? And we’d take those to workers on the street. Stories that the mainstream media wouldn’t let reach the workers. So Jornal Correria was every week uncovering a different strike or struggle happening somewhere — in a weapons factory in Brazil, among public servants somewhere, at Samsung in Korea. This stuff the media would never let get to us. So we were very much chasing that. Strikes, stoppages, individual revolts against bosses, crazy stories, demonstrations, and so on. Then, giving visibility to what people were saying, and we heard very interesting things. Some quite distant from the progressive bubbles. That’s when we started running into news of various struggles happening close to us, in São Paulo. We started making content about them, always centred on the workers. This aesthetic of workers for workers is very important. So, for us, it was much more about the development of a radar, or even a lightning rod, than a survey or a particular workplace research. That was a stage we never quite reached. It just didn’t really work for us in that sense. If something blips on the radar and we think, “there’s something here”, we would go hard, fighting like hell. And it worked. It connected us to people on different frontlines, and we brought more people in. The first time, we thought nothing would come out of it. Then, there were a thousand people on Avenida Paulista fighting against the criminal wildfires. One protest unfolded into three, and that led to a strong connection with another active struggle group in São Paulo, the Guarani indigenous people of Pico do Jaraguá. And from that, we got closer to many other struggles and built many relationships. Other struggles started coming to us. People send us messages, tell us what’s happening in their neighbourhoods, in occupations, in workplaces.

MMTraditionally, and even today, the workers’ inquiry has been conceived in the form of written texts. In the case of Jornal Correria, we chose videos for social media, which circulate, sometimes go viral. Why do you think this update was important?

PGBecause I think the internet is our historical place. The Breque dos Apps started on the internet, through WhatsApp groups. And later, when Revolução Periférica carried out the Barba Gato direct action, it was also built around the image of Barba Gato going up in flames to circulate on the internet, on television, everywhere, among people. What we wanted with that was to grab attention and say, “look bro, we want to have a conversation with you about this.” Our historical place is not that of the printed newspaper. My generation didn’t have much intimacy with the printed press. The information that reaches us comes through the internet. In my own journey, for example, hip-hop, information, political consciousness, all arrived through audiovisual media, a CD, an MP3, a music video. And then that unfolded into maybe getting a book. The rappers talked about Malcolm X in a song, and then I could go and read Malcolm X’s books. But what grabs your attention first is audiovisual media. So I think our historical place on this is audiovisual media, digital media.

The two national delivery riders’ strikes in Brazil were very effective. The first Breque dos Apps, in 2020, pushed the minimum rate up from R$5.00 to R$6.50, and last year’s from R$6.50 to R$7.50. But neither of them significantly stopped production. Both were an image. A load of riders in the streets causing a ruckus, and that moves society. Even to connect with more riders. It pushed the strikes further, too. It works as pressure on companies that don’t want to lose customers or damage their image, their marketing. Because the people who are moved by that are also customers. The image is very powerful for moving people. That’s the world we live in today.

MMHow do you understand the role of digital communications and social media in the struggles today?

PGI think it helps, and it undermines it. At first, it helps things gain traction and go further. But then it starts to get in the way, because it draws attention to things that aren’t necessarily the workers’ movement itself. It creates characters, like “Galos”, “JRs”, “Gringos”, that the movement itself doesn’t necessarily identify with. So, for building initial traction, it’s very interesting. But then it seems like things start going in another direction, influencers, competition. In that sense, it seems to get in the way. The first step helps a lot. Second step, it seems like it gets in the way, you know?

MMWhat do you think the workers’ inquiry brought that was most powerful to Jornal Correria?

PGEven though we focused on identifying workplace struggles, we found far more territorial ones. So it was much more effective there. Or maybe it was we who lost focus, since the territorial struggles came first. Recently, I heard that UP, up in Pará, put a sound car in front of a factory and started a strike from there. Even against the local union. They found out something was going wrong inside the factory and had the nerve to park a sound car there. The workers came out of the factory and started a strike. In that sense, a “workers’ inquiry” led them to a good inquiry, and they went hard, right? Maybe we got distracted and drifted away from the workplace focus. Or maybe not. Maybe that was always the point, to take the struggle into the territory.

The times we did that, it was effective. It worked. My conclusion is that a good workers’ inquiry serves to well position you at a place to go hard. Because you can’t just go hard out of nowhere. With the transformations in the world of labour in the 21st century, it’s very hard to know in advance where that place is. What’s the specific postcode of this “factory”? I’m not speaking in abstract terms. Not every workplace is ripe or at the right moment for struggle. Sometimes, it turns out to be very different places from what we imagined initially, which is a good sign that we learned something with inquiry. The delivery riders’ struggle is a good example that nobody expected it until it exploded. The indigenous struggle wasn’t on our radar when we started either. Who would have thought that today, one of Jornal Correria’s main partners, a bunch of working-class people from the favela, would be the indigenous movement? They became brothers to us. Another example, Jornal Correria crossed paths with the “movement against the 6-on-1 labour regime” long before everyone else. We had a meeting with Rick Azevedo way before anyone knew who he was. That’s quite something. And that struggle ended up slipping out of Jornal Correria’s hands because there was no way it wouldn’t, you know? It took an electoral turn, and Jornal Correria has a strong aversion to that electoral trap. So when the movement started showing it was heading that way, Jornal Correria stepped back. But even so, we still keep a very close relationship with some of the leaders who also stepped back due to the direction the movement took. The relationships remain.

MMAfter all these experiences, how do you understand your relationship today with the workers’ inquiry?

PGI think this tool has become automated within me. My antenna is naturally switched on. Collectively, we had various struggles that hit the crossbar of the goal, and that we can’t put down to the workers’ inquiry. It was our own lack of organisation, situations that made it hard for Jornal Correria to hold steady. We’re still in the process of adapting this thing, of understanding what this inquiry is for us. But I use it almost every day. Recently, a left militant came to my place for a conversation, and I was doing an “inquiry” with him. These days, together with the indigenous movement, we called a struggle against the executive order nº 12.600/2025 in São Paulo. And in the middle of the action, I was doing that inquiry too, exchanging ideas with people there, picking up on what they were feeling. When I’m in the indigenous village, that inquiry is happening too. For me, the ultimate core of the workers’ inquiry is the conviction that whoever wants to change the world must learn with the working class and its struggles, rather than preaching to it. Whatever we have to teach must be done through relationships, through the collective experiences of struggle, not through a discourse or a ready-made programme.

The inquiry that seems most effective to me is a silent one, you know? It’s an inquiry through lived experiences, not a questionnaire. It’s an inquiry that you’re living. You’re observing. You’re exchanging ideas. You’re not asking questions or doing the work of a journalist or researcher. When it feels like you’re questioning, it feels like it’s coming from the outside. But when you’re living in the village, in the favela, helping people build houses, helping people with the everyday stuff, that’s also an inquiry. That seems more effective to me than, I don’t know, sitting down with people and firing a load of questions at them to write them up. For example, when we travelled together again to Europe last year, think about how it was when we were in Quarticciolo, in Rome. Jornal Correria was in a group of four people there - me, you, Priscila and Lucas. Think about how we discovered the relevance of organised crime to the dynamics of that place and their struggle. That only came out after days of living with those people. If we’d done a questionnaire and walked into Quarticciolo, we wouldn’t have got that. We had to live those experiences with them, play football, eat together at the bar, earn trust, be there day to day to be able to understand that information. It came naturally from trust, you know? A questionnaire would have made people feel like snitches. They’d have said, “Are you mad? Me snitching on the crime to these sort-of journalist types? I’m out!” Got it? What are these people going to do with this document? So, in other words, it’s not about producing a document. And that document could become incriminating evidence against someone. So it’s much more about lived experience, about earning trust.

MMIt’s very interesting to think of the workers’ inquiry as more than a tool or method to be applied, but as a broader political compass, an attitude embodied by workers towards other workers and life. Is this ethnographic understanding of the workers’ inquiry, more concerned with building relationships, also connected to your critique of the issue of the aesthetic of the left?

PGYes, the first issue is that the left itself has become an aesthetic, a colour, a symbol, and above all, a discourse, a vocabulary (and a very limited one). And the working class is more than that. Wherever the left arrives, it arrives imposing, steamrolling with that aesthetic. In this issue, I even think the anarchists are doing better than the communists. And beyond that, which is more directly related to the workers’ inquiry, the aesthetic affects this relationship and the communication. A left-wing academic or a traditional militant will often get stuck in their aesthetic, which sometimes arrives even before they do. The aesthetic is also part of the communication in the inquiry, or noise in the communication. For example, in our experience in Quarticciolo, would you agree that the information we got was because we had an aesthetic that worked in our favour? And that aesthetic built trust, you know? It was worker to worker. Young workers from a ghetto in Italy to other young workers from a favela in Brazil. And in that, we understood each other. “Oh, these are some Black kids from Brazil”, “No man, these guys are sound”, we started exchanging ideas. A football, some boxing, funk, rap, and boom — “Look, this is what is actually happening here, and this here, and so on.” You know? Maybe with the aesthetic of an academic or a journalist, who could sometimes even be mistaken for a police officer, right? Government? That becomes something quite alien, you know? So I think there’s an aesthetic block there too. For this ethnography to work well… See, if you put an “old academic” in a delivery riders’ hub, people would say, “Bro, what is this old man doing here? Something’s off.” Got it? And it would go cold anyway, same as if it were a questionnaire. That also needs to be taken into account for this workers’ inquiry as lived experience to work well. You wouldn’t put a Swiss person to do fieldwork in Angola and expect that experience to be complete. It’s possible that, with a lot of persistence, patience, time, and skills, it could happen. I can even think of some examples of that, but it’s hard. It’s interesting to think that here social media can help. In the Breque dos Apps, Treta no Trampo used WhatsApp groups a lot to overcome this aesthetic barrier. In a message text box, you can just be another rider hyping things up.

So who better than the riders themselves to do an inquiry with other riders, got it? They’re there watching, observing, living, working, understanding, listening, you know? But then another issue comes up, the material problem. Who has the time and material conditions for doing that? So what do you do to solve it? “Professionalise” their militancy? Then other contradictions emerge: clientelism, bureaucratisation, and so on. No easy solutions.

MMBeyond understanding that there is a way to approach struggles, there is another fundamental dimension: the timing. For that, having a sharp radar, a good workers’ inquiry is key.

PGExactly. We also learned that there’s a right time to arrive at a struggle. You can’t only show up when the “beans are already cooked”, when the struggle is already set up and exploding. You have to arrive when it’s time to “soak the beans”. Or even better, you have to arrive when it’s time to “harvest the beans” with people, so you don’t come across as an opportunist. That’s why a good workers’ inquiry can sniff out the workers’ disposition to make the beans, not just sniff out when the beans are ready. That is too easy. Many times, by positioning ourselves in this place on social media, the radar also becomes a lightning rod. Whoever is ready to fight can call on us. They know we’ll take up the fight without asking for anything in return, without imposing a flag or demanding membership or a card. Without wanting to push for growing our movement. But rather to spread the struggle. And what we gain are the relationships being built. It’s very easy to come across as an opportunist, you know? Whether by arriving late, or by imposing an aesthetic, a flag, a badge, a vocabulary. So it is not just the way you arrive, but also when you arrive. If you end up arriving late, then you need a whole different strategy. And every single time we arrived late, we got burned.

MMThe question of building trust relationships, as a fruit of the workers’ inquiry, became central to Jornal Correria. How does your understanding of today’s labour world and this approach to the workers’ inquiry help us think about the problem of workers’ organisation?

PGWe’ve been discussing how work that was “solid” in Marx’s time, then it became “liquid” in the era of outsourcing, globalisation, services. And that was already a huge challenge for the workers’ organisations. Today, in the platform economy, in the hyper-volatile and precarious world of labour, work has become “gaseous”. And how do you organise gas? Large and heavy structures won’t do it. We concluded that what organises gas is compression. The Breque dos Apps needed compression, coming from various sides, until it generated an explosion that nobody controls. And if you try to control it, you’ll get burned, or you’ll kill its diffusion. Another conclusion we reached was that it was much more about finding micro-explosions than finding the great explosion, and building pipelines that would connect the gas accumulating in one place with the gas accumulating in another, and then another, and then back again, gradually increasing the overall pressure. That’s our utopia, so to speak. Being able to have some handle on that and send the gas here, send it there, or perhaps gradually organising that gas towards a place and building a shared understanding that it could explode as, I don’t know, popular revolt. You need an organisation that is light and agile to capture where the gas is accumulating.

And from that came the need to think about the problem of the party, of organisation. And what is today conventionally called “parties” has not been on our horizon as an organisational solution — it seems to create more obstacles than support for direct struggle. We felt that this model couldn’t handle organising this gaseous work. So what would this party be like? This party wouldn’t be a single thing. Perhaps with the situation as fragmented as it is, with micro accumulations of gas scattered everywhere, it’s very hard to create a singular programme X, a manifesto X, an identity X, a colour and flag X, to work with so much diversity all around, you know? So the party would need to be what we are calling a “patchwork-quilt”. So, for example, the movement against the 6-on-1 labour regime would be one patch, the indigenous movement another patch, the LGBT people doing something interesting another patch, the peasant people another patch. Stitching this patchwork quilt together is what we were thinking as the role of the party for this, got it? This understanding doesn’t come directly from the idea of the inquiry, but the inquiry can help. It comes as a necessity of what we are living. With these struggles and relationships around us. What do we do with that on our hands? What we do is where this patchwork-quilt idea began to take shape.

MMIf you were to say something to someone who is getting interested in the idea of the workers’ inquiry, what would you tell them?

PGThere’s nothing ready-made, develop your own. Make your own mistakes. We’re making ours. If you make your own mistakes, they will also serve as a foundation for the future. And making consistently different mistakes will help us get it right faster. Because, generally speaking, nobody on the left is getting it particularly right. And worse, the left always makes the same mistakes. Because if someone were getting it right, we’d already have the model. So if nobody’s getting it right, you can’t start using a model — or using “Jornal Correria’s model”. You can study it and say, “look, these people were effective at this.” “The people in London, from the IWGB Union, from Notes From Below, were effective at this.” “The people from Into the Black Box were effective at this.” “The people from Treta no Trampo were effective at this.” The people from wherever were effective at this. But it’s about developing your own experience.

What is mostly holding the left back today is people who keep denying other people’s experiences, you know? You deny other people’s experiences as if you had solved the problem. As if your party’s program, your group, your trajectory, were the great solution. Something new needs to emerge. So really, make mistakes. Getting it right means making a different mistake, which isn’t easy. Easy is making the same mistake. So, find a different mistake and bring your experience to the table so we can all keep putting it together.

And making mistakes is a dangerous task. Because mistakes generate frustration, and frustration is the fuel of the reformist sellout. The frustrated militant, with low revolutionary energy, accepts what’s already there. Accepts the same old mistakes being sold as victories. Thus, you gotta be careful. You have to know how to manage that frustration because it feeds on your revolutionary energy. For me, it’s about always staying close to younger folks. It’s these young people with fire in their eyes that will reignite that fire in mine. And at the same time, having older folks to go back to. There are moments when you need to choose some older people as your teachers and, sometimes, the younger crowd as your teachers too.