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i'm not really talking about protests per se, seaver. i'm talking about strike actions that would in all probability have protests as an aspect, but would be considerably more than, and different in principle from, simple protest actions. the difference lay, as i've been saying, in the fact that a strike is an exercise in power, where i protest is the theater of discontent. they converge in a way, but they're basically different. and i'm talking about multi-sector *political* strikes as over against the american model of sector-specific limited actions that's been *the* main avenue for industrial actions since world war 2---the c.i.o got it's start via sit-down strikes during the 30s which were political in nature--but once it merged with the afl, all that was finished. the reason for it was primarily anti-communist hysteria, but the fact is that more was given away in the restriction of such actions than was gained.
we collectively only have power if the option exists that it can be used. in the present system, we have no such power. that means that a basic claim about democracy has been undercut--that sovereignty resides with the people. so i would submit that americans are less free politically than are the french, than are most other systems in which there is a tradition and potential for political actions on this order...we are less free than the greek student movement of a few weeks ago was even, because while they were in a position to organize and act, we watch television.
it doesn't matter what stereotypes folk have about such actions, really--what matters more is the argument that this is a Problem, that we collectively gave something fundamental away during the late 1940s, when the republican congress passed shit on the order of taft-hartley and overrode truman's veto of it---that it happened a while ago means that it is part of a particular history, not that it is a fact of nature--and in the present situation, in the context of which like it or not the post-1945 order is coming unraveled--has come unraveled--that we are in a position to undo more of that history than we think. so for example, while i am encouraged by the speed with which obama is undoing much of the legacy of the bush period--and so i agree with the other rb above on this--i think it'd be interesting and important for obama to go further.
i think it's time to end the national security state. take it apart. it is a legal creation of the immediate post-1945 period and it;s only rationale was the cold war. that's over, so there's no need for it. no need for the kind of orientation of military procurement that's geared around nuclear weapons, no need for the assumption that a conflict would happen between vertically organized militaries in a context of total war---and if the conservatives really thought that was still relevant, they wouldn't have stood around cheering as the basic industries that were presupposed by that understanding of war fragmented and exported their basic manufacturing capabilities--for example---so it's not the case that anyone actually thinks the national security state remains functional EXCEPT as a patronage network. so take it apart. the same logic applies to legislation like taft-hartley, which was predicated on limiting strike actions in any area that was judged to be important for "national security" as defined by the same context that enabled the national-security state itself.
the basic argument i'm making is that it is important to think in these terms because one of the main consequences of that period, of the national-security state (as emblematic of broader changes in the socio-poltiical organization of the united states since world war 2) was a basic undermining of such democracy as there is in the us---and even if you accepted the arguments of the late 40s that were used to justify these moves, those arguments no longer obtain. so there's no reason to keep these structures in place beyond inertia. and the consequences of keeping them are deeply problematic.
now i understand that there are folk who like authoritarian systems--there always are--the cliche is that the trains run on time and that sort of thing. and there are folk who support them for political reasons, because in some ways they like them. and that's fine, i suppose---but it'd be better if the terrain of argument were shifted so they'd have to argue *that* point rather than another one about "the american way of life"--which has nothing really to do with what's at issue here.
so the question of political strikes is really a wedge--it was inspired as the topic of the op by the actions in france on wednesday, and that's why they're linked together and that's why the thread has this kind of anarchist vibe to it. but the underlying questions are not really linked to that tradition. they're bigger than that.
unless you like having no power.
but what exactly is a democracy if the polity has no power?
it think the word is charade.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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