From Strike Everywhere
The Situation
The lines of a ferocious struggle are crystallizing. In fact, it has been ongoing for decades, even centuries, but in the United States and elsewhere it has been strangely one-sided for some time. A class war from above has been assaulting us, with little visible response, outside of occasional outbursts from those most victimized and excluded by the system of domination and exploitation.
The global economic system has sustained itself, since the early 1970s, through the expansion of debt—corporate, household and state debt. The US has gone through an orgy of overconsumption; other countries exporting to the US market, an orgy of overproduction. Added to this already volatile situation was a massive amount of fraud and speculation, torrents of blood money for a repressive security-surveillance-industrial complex and imperial wars, the unprecedented acceleration of giant financial transactions, and, fundamentally, all the limits the capitalist delirium of eternal economic expansion and profit accumulation is bound to run into.
The inevitable disaster arrived in 2008. State and central bank bailouts saved the financial system, but the rest of us have to live through the consequences: tremendous unemployment, home foreclosures, “austerity”—i.e. decimation of wages and benefits in the public sector, elimination of social services, etc. An enormous upwards transfer of wealth has been engineered. What was already a vicious neoliberal attack on ordinary people beginning in the Reagan-Thatcher years—depressed wages; spurs to new levels of productivity; a prison-industrial complex to exacerbate racial divisions, confine and torture those “superfluous” to the work-system, and send a warning to the rest of us—has blossomed into open destruction of our lives. Passivity and conformism were once the norm, but it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the social and political problems weighing down on us.
Capitalism has always meant exploitation by the bosses and oppression by state bureaucracies and police forces. Even during the Golden Age for the OECD zone (the richer countries) after World War II, there were of course strata of the population who suffered miserably, while the middle classes entertained and distracted themselves with their newfound ability to consume. The fact that we are in world crisis does not change our basic perspective one bit; perhaps it only adds to our determination to find ways to prevent capital from restructuring (or prevent elites from exiting capitalism into an even more barbaric system!). We know, at least since the revolts of 1968, that the rhythms of the “class struggle” do not necessarily follow those of the economy. But it is important to map the landscape, to orient ourselves and decide the best means of attack. The one given is that the national and world situations are ones of chaos and uncertainty, giving no reason to hold back or bide our time, in the hope that “better days” (or the “moment of collapse”) will arrive of their own accord. Every moment lost is a moment the ruling elites will use to their own advantage, to impose order and consolidate their position.
Many of the mainstream perspectives of “opposition” that have emerged recently have a nostalgic tinge; the defensive, backwards-looking idea that it is still possible to return to the “good old days” of Keynesian class compromise, “full employment” and consumerism for (almost) all is implicit or explicit in all the arguments of liberal or “socialist” writers like Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Doug Henwood, Dean Baker. . . . their endless cries for more regulation, stimulus packages and jobs programs are falling on mostly deaf ears, however. The strategies of exploitation encapsulated by the word “austerity” (and the militarization of society that comes under the heading of the “War on Terror”) indicate that the capitalists’ stance has hardened. Today it has to be recognized that our masters are in no mood to deal. This should have been obvious decades ago, when neoliberalism was introduced into France and Spain by “socialist” parties; today, it’s a party of social democrats that is imposing the severest austerity measures on the Greek people.
It’s a mystery why anyone would want to influence the politicians and policy-makers, anyway: to save the system from itself, producing the reforms that might insure its smoother functioning and place it on a more equilibrated path of development? Even if this were possible, it is something that must be rejected. Our task, our responsibility is not to rescue capitalism by advising its leaders, by demanding the concessions that, in the long run and on the whole, could in fact benefit the capitalist classes. If we are to do something other than help “manage” the crisis, we must refuse to be bought off with baubles and crumbs from the table. In our view, there has already been far too widespread a complicity, in the geopolitical “center” of the system, with its destructive nature. Liberal hegemony and what political philosopher Étienne Balibar has called “extremism of the center” are no longer really tenable options. Were the ruling classes to again offer an integrating project like that of Keynesianism, which at any rate seems unlikely, we would only find it detestable. Behind every concession is the structural necessity for capital and the state—and all the related institutions and everyday practices that form us and tend to compel our obedience—to devour our lives.
What is required is a vast upheaval in social values and political imaginaries, instrumented in the material force of a broad movement, and the complete destruction of all institutions of arbitrary authority and mechanisms by which a few monopolize the means of existence, compelling the rest of us to sell our lives for their profit. Social wealth is precisely that—social. Against a long, strict training that we’ve all received, we have to accustom ourselves to the idea that the exploiters have no special right to use and control what all of us need. In fact, this idea is rapidly spreading, as the popular slogan “Everything for everyone!” makes clear.
The General Strike
One of the most important weapons in our arsenal at the moment is the general strike—the mass withdrawal of labor. In the past, the general strike was seen, especially by anarchists and syndicalists (revolutionary trade unionists), as the overture to social revolution, the definitive denial that our lives are commodities to be bought and sold, and the abolition of wage labor. Today, of course, the general strike does not necessarily carry such potency, and can even be a routine event strictly managed by union leaderships and politicians, although it can also still have the immense advantage of representing a rupture with the daily grind, a stopping of the system, even if only for a moment. It sends a warning to the powers that be, and by clearing a space for further action, can lead to a contagion of refusal and autonomous initiatives that can inflict uncertainty on the powerful and point up their real weaknesses. By disrupting business as usual, the general strike can also effect real economic damage and hit our opponent where it hurts.
There are some who will argue that striking can hurt the strikers as much as the bourgeoisie. Besides the risk of being fired, many forms of striking are technically illegal in the US!—in other words, the law openly declares us to be slaves who have no choice but to prostitute ourselves for the bosses. In the first place, however, “striking” today can mean a whole variety of things, and totalitarianism hasn’t yet reached the point where calling out sick is a violation of federal law. Yes, that could mean losing a day’s pay (or more, if the strike spreads and prolongs itself, as it should). Let us not deceive ourselves: there’s no reason to make martyrs of ourselves, but fighting back will mean sacrifice. The courage that has already been shown by protestors recently in the US should inspire us. The one way to guarantee that nothing changes, that we live and die as humiliated tools in conditions that will almost certainly worsen, is to do nothing and take no chances. The best way to minimize the hardships that accompany striking is to demonstrate unwavering solidarity with each other, practicing mutual aid, denouncing all scabbery, and encouraging everyone to participate in the struggle. The more of us strike, the less capable the bosses will be of finding ways to punish us.
In some ways we can carry out the general strike today without the illusions of the past, when a strong labor movement meant that striking centered things around the “worker” identity, and trade unions were the main, if not the only, actors on the stage. Today, most of us have an ambiguous relationship to work, at best. Capitalism itself has shown that it considers the labor of many of us to be “redundant,” and manipulates levels of unemployment to heights that would have been inconceivable a few decades ago. In Germany, the state subsidizes employers to reduce working hours, as another means of managing unemployment. When the authorities are even in favor of less work, how much further must we go with our revolutionary desires? Much of what we do to make a living is hardly vital from any reasonable standpoint—it’s just another way for someone somewhere to make money. Because unions have come under neoliberal attack, and in any case have hardly shown themselves to be the determined defenders of workers’ interests, their membership has plunged. It’s more difficult than ever to be truly invested in one’s work.
This means that perhaps for the first time, a “general” strike can be truly general, and take in wide swathes of the population, all who are dispossessed, disenfranchised, dissatisfied and ready to do combat. The precarious, the “unorganized,” the unemployed, immigrants, women, queers, students, youth, prisoners, the homeless—it’s up to each one of us to determine how best to define our struggle, which can no longer be a narrow “workers’” struggle, without getting trapped in any closed, rigid identities.
If more and more people are alienated from work, this is because it is experienced as one more form of social control. Often without any real social utility, usually rendering “services” with little intrinsic interest, performed in conditions over which we have little to no influence (unless we are one of the lucky stratum of semi-professionals and “creative types” who have the skills to manage and exploit their own “immaterial labor” without any direct supervision), work is simply a means to tranquilize and stupefy. Like the school or the prison, the workplace is now clearly just another site for Power to mold us and keep the machine running. Since capital and the state have sought to impinge on every area of daily life, antagonism has spread to all fields of social control, and the opportunities for resisting are that much wider.
Nearly every one of us now has cause for some serious grievances against the system. In New York City, the scene is grim. New York State and New York City have the highest income inequality of any state or metropolitan area in the country, which is itself one of the most unequal in the world. While not all of Bloomberg’s threatened 2012 budget cuts to jobs, child care, care for the elderly, fire companies, schools, libraries, Medicaid, etc. passed, it’s of course absurd for the City Council to congratulate itself on merely mitigating somewhat the suffering implied by cuts. Unemployment is high and growing, and benefits are running out. Tens of thousands of people are living without a home. We must begin creating non-state, non-market ways of meeting our essential needs, now. The NYPD, as usual, continues to wallow in corruption, crack down on political dissent, and spy on Muslims, while its officers rape women, harass and murder young men, and lock people in steel cages.
The general strike and the spirit it incarnates should provide an impetus for working New Yorkers, waged and non-waged, to overcome their isolation and atomization. We must immediately begin building international connections as well, strengthening a worldwide revolutionary movement that can sustain itself with the resources reclaimed by millions of people. What exactly the May Day strike entails can only be answered by self-organization; i.e. it’s up to each of us to reach out and find ways to struggle with others. It is time we took responsibility for our own lives, acting directly in our own names, and for putting an end to the atrocities inflicted on us, and on others by our government. A period of fierce resistance, but also experimentation, is about to open. Blockades to end an economy that doesn’t serve our needs will be only the beginning. As Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James has observed, “The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”
May Day should mark a new beginning, a Spring that releases massive creative energies. It would be foolish to try to predict from what exact direction those energies will come. All we can do is act. The social theorist Castoriadis once remarked that “The sole criterion of differentiation within the mass of wage earners that remains relevant for us is their attitude toward the established system.” That is, will you fight or not? The future depends on the answer.