There are maps, plans, diagrams, lists of articles and books, buildings to photograph, streets to explore, biographies to read and historical timelines. And yet sometimes the occasion is just to drift, pulled by the hidden psychic energy of what lies beneath the city streets.
And unplanned, into Amsterdam East.
It feels more anarchic than the allegedly liberated zone of the tourist centre. The atmosphere is different; more brash but also with an underlying seriousness. In a side street someone is playing a guitar and singing Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.
This feels more like the Amsterdam of dock worker and Jewish anti-Nazi resistance, the Provos, Joni Mitchell in the 1960s, maybe I’ll go to Amsterdam, maybe I’ll go to Rome, an alternative scene which isn’t the sterility of mass tourism.
A black guy drives a van up on to the pavement and leaves the engine running while he delivers parcels. He has an air of exhaustion about him although it’s only noon. He started at 5am; he’ll work until the sun has set over the Waterland.
I am pulled into the Entrepôt Dock by some ancient mystery and ask a question of a man who has just arrived on a bicycle. I think he’s in a hurry, perhaps late for a meeting, but he graciously gives me a line or two. I want to know if these were once dock buildings, which he confirms.
‘Although expensive’, he says, and adds that because it’s opposite the zoo there are views of the lions and tigers.
‘I wish I could live here’, he says and then his phone rings and the meeting is about to start.
As well as housing there are offices in the building. Professional services of architects and designers and that sector known as TMT, ‘telecommunications, media and technology’.
Little of this seems to register with certain layers of the left who struggle with understanding what the economy of an advanced industrial country consists of.
They might refer to ‘delivery drivers’ and ‘people who work in warehouses’ and nurses and teachers but beyond that it’s all a bit vague.
TMT is a huge sector and predicated on immense construction and industrial production. Office blocks, data centres, factories for making fibre optic cables, factories to make microchips and computers and monitors and keyboards and peripherals. Factories to make office desks and chairs and carpet tiles and post-it notes and frames for photographs of loved ones that people use to personalise their working space.
Design? How do all those commodity-image-objects get their shape and pretty packaging? Surely it cannot all be ‘form follows function’.
Design is everywhere. Packets of sweets, cars, computers, mobile phones, clothing, office interiors, train carriages, portable barbecues (and the boxes they are sold in), books, sofas, office desks, television screens. And design is only one part of TMT.
The expert Marxists can argue until the end of the production-line time as to what constitutes productive and unproductive labour (a dead-end argument in my view) but it is estimated that the annual global revenues generated by TMT are in excess of $ 7 tn.
I sit on a bench and make sketches of the former port buildings and become aware of the human noises coming out of the open windows and doors. Rounds of laughter, people talking to each other, people coming outside to make phone calls.
There are fewer dockers now. It was an early sphere of production to automate with the introduction of containerisation in the 1960s (a little earlier, but it was in the mid-1960s that containerisation really began to dominate).
It was in part a way of port employers, shipping companies, stevedore companies to break the power of mass dock unions; and to speed up cargo flows, reduce waste and become ‘efficient’.
Port after port changed from being labour intensive to capital intensive. The intensification of capital investment took the form of machinery, gantries, containers and computer systems; or if you will, dead labour replacing living labour.
There is a complexity to this which cannot be resolved within capitalist relations of production.
No one should be nostalgic for manual dock work. It was dangerous, dirty, low paid and arduous. Dockers ended up with broken bodies and crippling back pain. For decades the conditions in ports were dreadful for the workers. No contracts of employment, no regular hours (and therefore no regular pay), no toilets or washing facilities, no first aid provision, no canteens. The only thing that made it bearable was the camaraderie, basic class solidarity and the unions.
Let machines and robots and artificial intelligence do all this stuff; and all the other work like it. Full automation of the dirty, boring and dangerous labour processes. The world already has the technical capacity to do this.
But here is another contradiction.
The world of capital is a world of money and workers need money. That means they need jobs. And in those jobs they create the very technologies and processes that put them out of work or make them work faster and harder.
It is the labour of Sisyphus and it will only ever stop when enough workers strike together and put an end to the whole terrible circus of the circulation of commodities and the domination of capital.
Let’s turn the former warehouses into housing but let’s open up that housing to the people who made it all possible in the first place.
And should this be simply a reformist demand then good quality housing for the workers may need to be subsidised. And if money is needed then take it from the rich. They have plenty of the stuff, so much they could never spend one percent of it, if that.
A woman on a bike, a man on a bike, two kids on bikes. The woman stops and says in an American accent, ‘look, you can see the lions in the zoo’.
I stand on the bridge to get a closer look (not too close). A few yards away a social media influencer is being filmed on the theme of ‘what sort of animal are you’? Apparently she is a flamingo and does half a cartwheel to make the point. I wasn’t aware that flamingos did cartwheels, but what do I know.
I ask myself what sort of animal I might be and conclude a human one. With the characteristics of creatureliness that Sebastiano Timpanaro discusses.
Kurt Tulcholsky wrote a newspaper article about a lion that escapes from the zoo in Berlin. The lion walks about Berlin (it’s in the late 1920s), creates a panic, has a look around, doesn’t think much of what he sees and so goes back to the zoo. There is at least one metaphor in this but I’m not sure what it is.
And wonder what a lion might think of Amsterdam, should it escape.
Then an elderly man falls off his bike in front of me. He is small but surprisingly heavy and his leg is tangled up on the cross bar and he won’t let go of the handle bars. I try to pick him up but he clings to the bike more tightly. Does he think I am trying to rob him?
Two workers who are tarmacing the road leave their machinery and come over to help. He doesn’t cooperate with them either. All three of us eventually manage to get him to his feet. He cycles off without so much as a by-your-leave. One of the road workers holds his hands out as an expression of what-the-f*** and shrugs his shoulders and returns to bitumen and tar.
I continue to walk and then I’m into a working class market around Dapperplien. It’s as if the city has thrown a switch. There is a harder outer edge to the atmosphere. It is defensive. Working class people take a lot of blows and as my dad once said, ‘no-one comes round at the end of the day to make sure you’ve had enough to eat, to see if you’re safe, to check you have a nice warm bed to sleep in’.
I am more cautious and become inconspicuous and only then can I merge and only then do the colours and sounds open up to me.
The whole world is here; as it is many working class street markets.
Dutch merchants and capitalists went around the world in search of gold and silver capital and now the world comes to Amsterdam as it does to all the other capitals of European colonialism.
Those European empires killed millions of people, destroyed whole cultures, languages, traditions and customs and drew straight lines on maps that divided peoples and places into arbitrary divisions that continue to cause immense geo-political problems.
Nothing can be understood by looking at one facet of a crystal, the whole totality must be considered.
An Indian man is speaking Arabic to a group of Muslim women who all wear headscarves and long dresses. They are talking to him in turns, and then all at once, in a good natured way. One smiles as he pulls a garment wide so she can see the quantity of the cloth and then he shouts out in English, playing to the gallery of the shoppers, requesting their approval, ‘Quality! Quality!’.
I’m making notes and a large man on a mobility scooter stops. He speaks good English, I speak a few words of Dutch. He could well be from that docker class world in the Entrepôt Dock. He asks me what I’m doing. I tell him I’m writing a book. He doesn’t believe that, and I don’t think I do either.
“Paperback writer?’ he enquires. Could be, I say to myself.
I explain that I’m finding it difficult to learn Dutch. He gives me some examples of the complexities. I tell him that I used to say ‘Amsterdam’ like a public school teacher but now I say….I make a noise as if I have a whole stroopwafel in my mouth and hardly move my jaw.
He shakes his head. I’ve got the pronunciation wrong again. He sounds as if he has two stroopwafels in his mouth and takes the tone down an octave lower. He doesn’t move his jaw or lips at all and says the word “Amsterdam’ as I imagine the peasants in Breughel’s paintings did.
A woman from Nigeria walks past. She is wearing golden lipstick.
Two women walk past, both using strollers. One is wearing a white t-shirt with the slogan, “I’m just visiting this planet’.
The clothes here are colourful and bold and cheap. Manufactured in India, China, Vietnam, Turkey, Malaysia and elsewhere.
I bet you could take anyone from this market and drop them into a market in any of those countries and they would immediately know where they were.
Or take any of the factory workers who make these commodities and drop them here in this market and they would know exactly where they were.
This is an international but it must be organised.
That’s the basic working class experience. There is an awful lot of ideological barriers that must be destroyed before we get to this basic street level solidarity at a global level. Commodity fetishism indeed.
It is an open-theatre, the play is showing at all street markets right now around the world. I’m a walk-on extra, as are we all.
It wasn’t quite an aimless perambulation. I did have one thing I wanted to do and that was to go and see the former offices and headquarters of the Diamond Workers Union. It was designed by HP Berlage and constructed between 1899 – 1900.
The Diamond Workers were a powerful force in Amsterdam with a large Jewish workforce.
It was in this building that the Sixth Congress of the Second International met in June 1904. Rosa Luxemburg attended.
For a moment a historical flash; Rosa on the steps with a bundle of conference papers under her arm. She stops to share words with Plekhanov. She is thinking about Reform and Revolution. How to fine tune the contribution she plans to make later in the day.
No one can guess that the mass strike and the Russian Revolution of 1905 are only months away. From seemingly nowhere.
I have given up on the Guardian and the BBC for news. But I still follow the news. Two articles have caught my attention in the past couple of days.
In April, a wave of strikes swept through the National Capital Region around Delhi. They began in the town of Manesar in Haryana state, spread to Noida, a city in Uttar Pradesh about 100km away, and soon had widened to cities further afield: Bhiwadi, Faridabad, Neemrana, Rudrapur and beyond. Within a month, ground reports counted walkouts at over 150 sites across five states.
The NCR is one of the most densely industrialized areas in the world, a constellation of planned manufacturing hubs, expanding rapidly after the economic liberalization of the 1990s. The region now stretches from Delhi, at its core, across several adjoining states – Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, all BJP-ruled – employing several million workers in producing automobiles, electronics, garments and consumer goods.
Manufacturing Revolt, New Left Review, July 2026
And thousands of students have marched in Delhi as part of the cockroach rebellion.
Police in New Delhi repeatedly fired tear gas and beat protesters with sticks and plastic batons as Indian authorities tried to disperse thousands of supporters of the youth-led “Cockroach” movement who were protesting near parliament over problems in the education system.
The demonstration, the biggest seen in the capital in years, threatened to spill over into a broader challenge to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, despite its recent regional election victories.
Rosa, we need you now more than ever.
She turns on the steps;
”We created it, let’s take it over’.’
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