general strikes. a few weeks ago, a strike brought down the government of iceland. yesterday, approxiamtely 1.5-2 million people turned out on the streets in every major french city to protest the way in which sarkosy's government has chosen to not quite respond coherently to the current crisis that neoliberalism has brought down on us all.
A million on strike as France feels pinch | World news | The Guardian
check out the breadth of activities that were affected by this action---working people effectively shut the country down by using their main weapon--the ability to refuse to serve capital. the main demands that were advanced involved a wholesale rejection of sarkosy's government, which is still neoliberal--and the strike was the headline in all the major press outlets in france.
tradtionally, a general strike has been understood as a powerful political weapon. some theorists understood it as a first step toward revolution because it involved a wholesale withdrawing of consent for the existing order. and in a sense, they are at the very least the threat of that---and in a system that claims to rest on popular sovereignty, this threat seems to me a fundamental aspect of a functioning democratic system. think about it: how can there be a democracy if people cannot register their at the least problems with and at the most rejection of the existing order?
in the united states, there is no way to register such dissent.
for example, if people wanted to use the electoral system to do so, they cannot--blank ballots are not counted, results are calculated on the basis of those who do vote and the electoral system is set up so that the percentages within that number are understood as representing the people as a whole--so abstention is meaningless.
there is no culture of popular demonstration to speak of. even during the last period of intensive street protest, actions were discrete in terms of organization and duration and were organized outside the system of production so that they posed no particular threat by having no ability to affect the operations of the system as a whole.
we are moving through the unravelling of the post-world war 2 socio-economic and political orders. we have no collective voice in the process--in the united states, we are spectators. spectators are not free--and the demonstration of that is simply the fact that, as with shopping, the range of options presented you is the range of options period. we have no way of advancing fundamental critiques. we have no way of withdrawing consent. popular sovereignty is therefore meaningless. it is meaningless because there is no way to exercise it. it is a fiction.
i think the capacity to shut down the existing order is healthy for a democratic polity...more than that---i think it is a condition of possibility for there to be a democracy at all. such actions can operate within the existing order by providing a feedback loop relative to which the options arrayed before a government largely structured around the interest of capital can be assessed.
at this point, in the context of american soft authoritarian rule, polls function in this way.
how on earth is this desirable?
the reasons for this situation have much to do with the history of the left and hysteria generated by it in the united states from the late 19th century forward. the fear of the political, framed by fear of communism, shaped the american union model. it enabled the undermining of the right to strike through law on the order of taft hartley. taft-hartley is of a piece with the formation of the national-security state in the period immediately after worl war 2. if that entire system is coming unravelled, perhaps it's time to think more broadly about what that system was rooted in, what it has meant, and what should be rethought.
in principle, i think that it is time to consider taking back the right to strike, to refuse to participate, to bring the existing order to it's knees, to make popular sovereignty operational.
what do you think?
what do you think would be the advantages of this? what would the disadvantages be?
what stands in the way? what practical problems do you see?
if you're inclined to agree with the position i outlined here, who would do this?
one major difference between the french situation and the american is the nature of the union movement, the weakness of that movement and the consequences of sector-monopoly for the language of political dissent.
so in the states, such an organization would have to come from outside it.