A General Strike Won’t Do It
fromthewilderness.com
The Solution Is POWERDOWN:
Relocalization / Ecovillages / Intentional Communities
By
Jamey Hecht
© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
The only weapon of the working class that the ruling class cannot withstand is the general strike — a weapon so heavy that the entire working class has to cooperate just to lift, let alone wield it. Today’s irony is this: the economic standstill which makes a general strike such a frightening prospect has become inevitable, not through the fabled solidarity of a working class that can’t seem to organize its way out of a shoebox, but through giant energy prices.
It’s encouraging that a July 18th Harris Poll found that 64% of surveyed Americans strongly disapprove of Bush’s handling of the War in Iraq. It’s not so encouraging that a Gallup Poll of November 19, 2004 determined that “45% of Americans also believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago.” If lions and tigers and bears can simply pop into existence, with no eons of natural history required to produce them, then surely oil and cheap Chinese goods can be conjured out of thin air, too? The same poll found: “A third of Americans are biblical literalists who believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.” If sacred texts can just fall out of the sky, with no social conditions or individual people required to compose them, then surely all our other institutions — marriage, NASCAR racing, gross inequality of wealth — are just as perfect and transhistorical as the Bible. People who are so afraid of independent thought that they will happily vote for a fascist are not likely to suddenly notice that they can overthrow their bosses if they all pull together. Besides, temps don’t have bosses — and the single largest American employer after Wal-Mart is Manpower, Inc.
There’s another irony here, one which doesn’t hinge on the dubious claim that we just might identify our own class interests before the Hell of McWork freezes over. A general strike only impacts the wealthy ruling class when the working class is the source of that wealth. But as James Howard Kunstler rightly points out, “our economy these days is hopelessly tied to the creation and servicing of suburban sprawl.” Our work doesn’t produce wealth, as it did in the coal-choked London of Charles Dickens; instead, the real economy simply circulates debt-based money so that the finance economy can continue. Less and less of the labor of the working class goes into the production of real goods for export; more of it goes into the distribution and servicing of imports, the guarding of physical plant and property, and the flipping of burgers. According to a 2004 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of American private sector employment engaged in export manufactures for 2001 was 6.5%. The 2004 trade deficit in goods was a record $666.2 billion (let’s round that one down, shall we?). Whom would a general strike injure more: your friends, or their bosses? Your family, or the people who own the bank that owns your house?
Between outsourcing and automation, the American working class is about as crucial to its masters’ interests as a fly is to the sun. Are we to imagine that a general strike will somehow include the military and the police, the bailiffs and the jailers, all the people who make a living by confiscating the property of the poor when they can't pay their bills?
At the dawn of the American Revolution, Thom Paine pointed out in Common Sense that aristocrats and kings owe their station to mere violence. Substitute the term “robber baron” for “king,” and you can see how perfectly Paine’s insight still applies:
This is supposing the present race of kings in the world to have had an honorable origin; whereas it is more than probable, that could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise, that we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners of preeminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who by increasing in power, and extending his depredations, overawed the quiet and defenseless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions.
Maybe a massive walkout from the factories of a capitalist economy can bring the bosses to the bargaining table. But a walkout from the nail salons, Jiffy Lubes, 99 cent stores, cell phone franchises, Pizza Huts, and office buildings? When you walk out, be sure you have someplace to walk into; preferably someplace with good topsoil and some fresh running water.
|
