General Strike

[Iamwhomiam]

As grotesque as it might seem, I feel sure there are at least a few Scots and more than a few New Yorker's who would applaud her comment.

[MacCruiskeen]

In no particular order:

1) End War. 2) Redistribute Wealth.

Any "left" that fails to make these demands primary and central is self-marginalising and hopelessly ineffective. QED. And it is not as if the world has all the time in the world.

Granted, that is the right strategy. But the use of a general strike as a tactic is designed to force Capital into acknowledgment that the aims of the existing government in a general sense are at extreme odds with those of the people. And the tactic itself only has impact if it marshals a wide enough economic participation group. So by it's very nature, such a strike must offer a multi-purposed rationale, be largely decentralized, and have at its focus a very general discontent in which there exists room for any number of grievances.

A general strike is one battle, not the war.

That's why the demands have to be very big, very few, very simple. and very appealing to a LOT of people.

I believe that very many people in the USA are sick of war, and also sick of poverty, debt, insecurity, overwork or no work. No one speaks for them, though Trump pretended to. Call a General Strike demanding Peace and Economic Justice Now or something equally obvious and equally right. It might actually give people, at home and abroad, a serious reason to start believing (again) in something called America, rather than just hating and fearing it and not believing a word it says anymore.

[MacCruiskeen]

1) End War. 2) Redistribute Wealth.

For 2), may I suggest something more along the lines of: "Recover Stolen Wealth"

I cringe when I hear the phrase "redistribution of income"; it sounds like arbitrary confiscation, as it only tells half the story.

Oh yeah. But let's not confuse people, Elvis. Baby steps first, or else you'll spend half your time on that march explaining to the bewildered that you are not just proposing tougher penalties for embezzlement.

Also, talking of cringeworthiness: Can we pleeeease stop it with those "creative", "personalised", oh-so-cute handwritten signs. The Empire doesn't give a damn and the stormtroopers are not the teeniest bit amused. So, into the dustbin with anything containing the words "I", "me", or "mine". Better to get 20 people holding a single giant banner with the uningratiating message WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU BASTARDS NOW, and then multiply that by a million.

[Iamwhomiam]

Peace and Economic Justice are rather vague terms, actually, but "I believe that very many people in the USA are sick of war, and also sick of poverty, debt, insecurity, overwork or no work" is certainly true. A great many people in the states have for decades been involved in seeking "Peace and Economic Justice." Perhaps centuries, even. In fact, I believe our Constitution guaranteed such 'unpopular' activism.

Instead of putting coal miners back to work mining coal, put them to work working for peace, disarming and disassembling weapons of war.

Strikes must ultimately have a positive goal beyond bringing to the bargaining table those whose interests the strike impacts. Concessions must be planned, but with the goal kept firmly in focus.

[MacCruiskeen]

I agree that "Peace and Economic Justice" is a vague and rather boring demand. I would suggest "Socialism or Barbarism" but I don't want to frighten the children. How about "FULL COMMUNISM OR SPECIES EXTINCTION"? It's looking more and more accurate to me, frankly.

[Luther Blissett]

Fully automated luxury gay space communism or species extinction.

[km artlu]

I hadn't delved into this thread until today. So someone please correct me if I've missed something within it by a hurried perusal, one which gives me a sense of unreality about the proposed strike. (with the possible exception of "Plan C" on page 4)

There's a difference between a strike and a demonstration, right? A strike has heft because the concerted will of labor has consequences; it halts or hobbles some essential function(s) of societal order,

For example, a nationwide strike of the majority of truckers, if sustained, would soon have dire impact on food supply. Same with cops, firemen, (firepersons?), EMTs, trash collectors and so on. That is to say - in large part the portions of the populace who mostly voted for Trump.

Who would join the strike on the 17th? Students and professors? Baristas? Bloggers? Uber? What am I missing here? Would such a strike shut down any essential services or product distributions, thereby exerting leverage within the balance of power? How would it be a "strike" and not a "demonstration"?

[MacCruiskeen]

Fully automated luxury gay space communism or species extinction.

Ah no, you're diluting the message now, excluding the hets, the ascetics, the primitivists, and the agoraphobics. (A large potential constituency, all told.)

[MacCruiskeen]

km artlu, good questions. I think what we are doing here is shooting the breeze, or whistling in the dark.

The General Strike should coincide with a truly gigantic demonstration and end with the levitation of the Pentagon, which is long overdue.

[barracuda]

Would such a strike shut down any essential services or product distributions, thereby exerting leverage within the balance of power?

It must, and government workers are equally as important as truckers for even a small success. A strike is not a march, no signs or 'gina hats required.

[American Dream]

Anyone who thinks Hegel came to Earth because reptoids wanted to help George Soros weaponize the Frankfurt School and that Karl Marx was sent into the world by a group of satanic rabbis, should probably just ignore this.

Beyond strike and riot: the commune as a form-of-life

The riot, the blockade, the barricade, the occupation. The commune. These are what we will see in the next decades, argues Joshua Clover in his latest book.


Riots are coming. They are already here, more are on the way, no one doubts it. They deserve an adequate theory. A theory of riot is a theory of crisis. This is true at a vernacular and local level, in moments of shattered glass and fire, wherein riot is taken to be the irruption of a desperate situation, immiseration at its limit, the crisis of a given community or city, of a few hours or days.

Regardless of perspective, riots have achieved an intransigent social centrality. Labor struggles have in the main been diminished to ragged defensive actions, while the riot features increasingly as the central figure of political antagonism, a specter leaping from insurrectionary debates to anxious governmental studies to glossy magazine covers. The names have become ordinal points of our time. The new era of riots has roots in Watts, Newark, Detroit; it passes through Tiananmen Square in 1989 and Los Angeles in 1992, arriving in the global present of São Paulo, Gezi Park, San Lázaro. The proto-revolutionary riot of Tahrir Square, the nearly permanent riot of Exarcheia, the reactionary turn of Euromaidan. In the twilit core: Clichy-sous-Bois, Tottenham, Oakland, Ferguson, Baltimore. Too many to count.

The riot, the blockade, the barricade, the occupation. The commune. These are what we will see in the next five, fifteen, forty years.

The list is not new. It has become a kind of common sense among a few groups that identify themselves with the end of the Program. In my new book, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso, 2016), I have tried to set forth the theoretical and historical bases for why further struggles in the sphere of circulation are inevitable in the present circumstances, and how a fuller understanding of this conceptual framework and material history will require grappling with the limits to the most recent wave of struggles, while at the same time trying to draw forth the practical kernel, as it were, from which forthcoming struggles are certain to bloom.

If the square and the street have been the two places of the latest cycle of struggles and the contemporary riot, they both open onto the commune. The commune, however, is not a place in that sense, not a “territorial agglomeration,” as Kropotkin expressed it. Its history has been to escape that designation, even while specific instances take on the names of their sites. One might say it is instead a social relation, a political form, an event. It has been called all of these. We could also suggest that it is a tactic.

Within the transformations of the present, the form of the commune is unthinkable without the modulation from traditional working class to an expanded proletariat. That is to say, it is not oriented by productive laborers, but rather by the heterogeneous population of those without reserves. Like the riot, the commune may feature workers but not necessarily as workers. Kristin Ross argues that the commune is defined in part by the fullness of its relation.

What the commune as political and social medium offered that the factory did not was a broader social scope—one that included women, children, the peasantry, the aged, the unemployed. It comprised not merely the realm of production but both production and consumption.

The commune, then, has a continuity with the riot. It presupposes the impossibility of wage-setting as a means to secure any manner of emancipation. It is likely to be inaugurated, like many struggles in the first era of riots, by those for whom the question of reproduction beyond the wage has long been posed—those who have been socially forged as the bearers of that crisis. “The women were the first to act,” we are reminded by Lissagaray about the Paris Commune, “hardened by the siege—they had had a double ration of misery.” That siege which is gender has never ended.

At the same time, the commune also ruptures from the riot’s basis in price-setting, because provisioning toward subsistence is no longer to be found in such action. It is beyond strike and riot both. In such a situation, the commune emerges not as an “event” but as a tactic of social reproduction. It is critical to understand the commune first as a tactic, as a practice to which theory is adequate. Beyond strike and riot, what distinguishes the problems and possibilities of reproduction from those of production and consumption is this: the commune is a tactic that is also a form of life.

The coming communes will develop where both production and circulation struggles have exhausted themselves. The coming communes are likely to emerge first not in walled cities or in communities of retreat, but in open cities where those excluded from the formal economy and left adrift in circulation now stand watch over the failure of the market to provide their needs. Theglacis around Thiers’ Wall is now the Boulevard Periphérique; surplus population gathers now on the ring roads around Lima, Dhaka, and Dar es Salaam. But not just there.

Things fall apart, core and periphery cannot hold. We turn round and round in the night and are consumed by fire. Perhaps the long crisis of capital may reverse; it is a dangerous wager on either side. Within the persistence of crisis, however, the reproduction of capital through the circuit of production and circulation—wage and market—appears increasingly not as possibility for, but limit to, proletarian reproduction. A dead and burning circuit.

Here riot returns late and appears early, both too much and too little. The commune is nothing but the name for the attempt to overcome this limit, a peculiar catastrophe still to come.

https://roarmag.org/essays/riot-strike- ... r-excerpt/

[OP ED]

Fully automated luxury gay space communism or species extinction.

Ah no, you're diluting the message now, excluding the hets, the ascetics, the primitivists, and the agoraphobics. (A large potential constituency, all told.)

Luxurious but not ostentatious (yet spacious) space communism with optional full automation and safe spaces upon request, (a)sexuality appreciative intergalactic accommodation (and/)or near total biosphere extinction.

[Iamwhomiam]

"There's a difference between a strike and a demonstration, right?"

Yes, sorta. A strike is a demonstration but a demonstration does not need to be a strike.

A truckers strike would be very effective. I can't remember if the last took place in the 80s, 70s or 60's. But what's the goal? Trump being ousted and replaced with Spence? That would be in the courts for some time, anyway, I would think, and the outcome inevitably unsure. So it's a terrible goal. Things might end up being even more regressive, rather than progressive.

I encourage dissent by those who are dissatisfied with Trump's appointments, but imho it would be best to wait for clearly indictable evidence to surface to effect his impeachment and removal from office, which ironically, he will most likely reveal himself.

I can think of more than a few environmentally protective actions that could be taken as a goal for a national strike. A national Jobs program rebuilding our decaying infrastructure. Nationalizing our natural resources for the betterment of our people. If you don't have, but want a recycling program, dump a truckload of recyclables in front of City Hall; you'll get attention and ultimately, a positive reaction.

(Take Abu Dhabi for example, in 1958, when oil was first discovered there [the first well, offshore, was built in 1966] was pretty much a primitive fishing village and look at it now. Yes, they have what we would call their 'problems'. I'd trade my standard of living for theirs in a heartbeat!) We need the wealth from our natural resources put to better use, for our use and our good fortune.

A few goals to consider.

[Elvis]

Would such a strike shut down any essential services or product distributions, thereby exerting leverage within the balance of power?

A strike is not a march, no signs or 'gina hats required.

I like this. No signs. "What do we demand? If you have to ask..."



On edit: a succinct, defining slogan might be helpful or necessary to motivate millions to strike. How about "PEOPLE FIRST"? eh...

[km artlu]

We need the wealth from our natural resources put to better use, for our use and our good fortune.

Gaddafi did that for Libyans. Woe unto those who set a good example.