roachboy

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.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Derwood

you have used the term "neo-liberal" in practically every post you've made in the past 2 weeks. can you define it for those of us who don't understand how you're using it?

roachboy

free markets exist and are rational. the state is a source of irrationality. regulation impedes the heroic advances of capital. social justice, to the extent that it matters, results from the circulation of wealth accumulated by the holders of capital. advocates of monetarism--"fiscal conservatism" in american-speak. capital and not labor creates wealth. redistribution of wealth results in perverse effects like a "culture of dependency"---social welfare programs are therefore irrational. fear of the public, of public space, of organizations that are not controlled by capital--whence opposition to union activity for example. cult of the isolated individual, rejection of the entire idea of the social.

you know the ideology because it's the "washington consensus" or "free-market capitalism" or "fiscal conservatism".
neoliberalism is the name for this ideology that's used most everywhere in the world except for in the united states, where even now it has no name.

hope that helps.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Derwood

it does help, because everything you listed is very conservative in America. the term "neo-liberal" was throwing me for a loop.

roachboy

it's an awkward name here---but it refers to 18th-early 19th century political economy--stuff like adam smith and ricardo---processed through later economists on the order of von mises and hayek---which is the "liberal" economic tradition. that's where the name comes from anyway. it's not a consistent liberalism, though--for example social darwinism replaces john stuart mill. but anyway, that's the idea.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

tisonlyi

Strikes spread across Britain as oil refinery protest escalates | Business | guardian.co.uk

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7859968.stm

From a dispute in one area over the awarding of a 200m GBP contract to an Italian firm who will bring in 300 of their own workers from abroad, sympathy strikes and pickets are popping up all over the UK.

This is noteworthy as, at least as far as I know, sympathy strikes and picketing are illegal in the UK, and haven't been seen on any scale since the mid-eighties and the miner's strikes.

__________________
"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--

Baraka_Guru

This alone is what makes a farce of the "Land of the Free" within the context of the American capitalistic order.

I would say that the inability for Americans to do so--vis-à-vis the culture of union busting and neutralization--is the biggest threat to personal freedom and works against an environment where power is accountable to the people it governs. So I agree.

I think it's past due.
Advantage: the powers that govern would be more accountable to the people. It would stop doing things based on what they sell as "for the greater good," meanwhile they might be doing it for ulterior motives. Disadvantage: More disruptions. This can hinder economic growth and other functions of the state. It could also lead to another kind of tyranny of the majority--populism has its drawbacks. There needs to be a system in place that permits power amongst minority groups as well.

Holders of capital and property rights. It's difficult to know where to draw the line between property rights and individual (human) rights. How does the legal system handle this sort of thing, and what is the current precedent, and how does that need to change?

I can't say. I have problems wrapping my head around the American two-party political system. At least in Canada, there are enough minority parties who could push for such a position. I don't know how this could work in the U.S. socio-political environment.

What vehicles would you suggest are possible?

What I've posted here are my initial thoughts. I haven't spent much time thinking of this yet, but I wanted to get the ball rolling here, as I think this is a crucial topic in light of the shift we're seeing away from neoliberalism to something more democratic and socially responsible.

roachboy, if you could use what I've said as talking points to expand on what you've already said, I'm sure I could engage this in more detail.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

guyy

The capitalists and conservatives should be thanking their gods for Obama, whose election has given the system a big boost in legitimacy. Protest has been legitimated in a way, because w/o the civil rights movement, there would be no Obama. Of course, it's Rev. King's methods, not the Black Panthers' being legitimated. I think there's a wait-and-see attitude out there.


The capitalists are parking their money until conditions are better, which works for them because they have loads of cash. The Republic Window action was encouraging, but things have been very quiet since. I also don't know how general an action like that could be, given the decline in manufacturing in the US. People need windows, but how much do we really need FIRE functionaries?

ASU2003

There is no easy way to protest in the US. We are spread out too far, and most people don't care enough to leave their homes to do anything. I can't miss Survivor or American Idol, no way



Then again, maybe you should read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged to see what happens when all the successful, productive strikers go on strike/leave and stop paying taxes.

guyy

Apparently the intelligent writers were on strike in 1957.

So we'd all be in a big fix if the likes of John Thain were to go pout in his boudoir for the rest of his days? May the gods spare us! Why we might end up with a seriously fucked up economy. And those wacked-out people at Republic Windows? Sheesh, without the wise counsel of their superiors, they might have done something that would have run the company into the ground. Completely insane.

When capital goes on strike, so long as people can overcome abstractions such as "Property", they show up for work and life goes on.

roachboy

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

Can someone explain why this is? I'm guessing that the US is somehow just immune to strikes, so most don't even try? I can't explain how frustrating that is. I've been protesting for over 10 years now, over various things that I happen to believe are important. When I tell people this most of the time, they look at me as though I were lighting up a bong in front of them. It's insane. Has "the man" simply won the battle over the definition and status of protesting here?

The scary thing is that, in a system where protesting doesn't exist, there's no real step between inactive dissatisfaction and terrorism. That's why protest and free speech are so important. Does anyone else remember the LA riots? Protesting didn't work, so it turned into violence and vandalism.

RB, you're a bright man who's been around a bit more than I. What if anything can be done to repair the void between dissatisfaction and rioting? How can we make protesting something functional, as it should be?

Plan9

All your base are belong to U.S.

...

As Roachboy posted elsewhere: "The revolution is for display purposes only."

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

powerclown

Intelligent people interested in applying their energies for the purposes of effectively engaging political issues in 21st century America (or anywhere else for that matter) start by going to law school and becoming a lawyer. Thats where the culture is, thats where the seats of true power operate, thats where the relevant social networks are.

Willravel

Strange Famous

There have been wild cat strikes in the UK this week

The really disturbing thing is that the strikes are against foreign workers being employed in the UK.

This is a very dangerous path we are heading down... as things get worse and more and more companies go to the wall - the media of course will scapegoat immigrants, the Unions should be working very hard to prevent this kind of thing.

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

Seaver

Or maybe the average American realizes they have it pretty good and doesn't feel the need to protest?

Seriously.... there's little protests so terrorism is the next step? I'm amazed everyone's ignored the 6month riot which gripped France causing millions of cars to be burned, entire neighborhoods to become police-free, and entire business sectors to become empty because of violence. If your theory was correct these riots would follow the mass protests, not preceed them.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

powerclown

What, so the Gonzalez's of the world are your rationalization for remaining outside of the system? He is the universal representation of a lawyer for you, crooked and dishonest? You obviously haven't met (m)any lawyers.

Perhaps protesting is your speed after all. Here's to another productive 10 years.

ratbastid

This may be met with howls of derision from some, but I have to say, my fatalism about real change is much relieved by the early actions of the Obama administration. He came out VERY strong for transparency and openness of government this week, and it was the first time in my generation (probably longer, but I wouldn't know) that the government has made such a bold declaration that it is FOR and OF the people. The thing that shocked me most was how resigned I'd become about ever hearing a president say something like that.

roachboy

i'm moving this weekend, so won't be around much--but powerclown's right in that entering the guild of lawyers is the easiest way to get into the political class---but why should it be the case that this guild monopolizes governance? eve read plato's "the statesman" or "the laws"--especially the latter, which is about a society run by secret committee...it's an authoritarian situation---a class monopoly on power is a problem for a democratic society, even one that is democracy-lite as the american is.

i have more to say, and i'll try to wedge it between putting stuff in boxes.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Plan9

Trash bags are faster and you can fit more in the back of your car.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

Willravel

They did.
He's an example of shit rising to the top, and an example of how successful the corrupt can be in a small amount of time. How much damage did he do in the short amount of time he was Attorney General? How much effort did it take to remove him from power? And how much did it and will it take to simply undo what he did? Now, compare that to leaps forward in civil rights and justice over the past few years. Can you think of any? I can't either. Just incredible defeat after incredible defeat. That tells me that real change most easily comes from the current administration. Even US attorney's couldn't stand up to that.

roachboy

my basic argument is about the highly restricted nature of the political in the states.
i've been thinking about this for a long time---it's one of the places that resonates with my more anarchist side i suppose---but the ability to strike, to organize and carry out an explicitly political strike action, seems to me a necessary and desirable extension of the notion of popular sovereignty in itself, and what's more it can function as a material feedback loop for the existing order (if you like) by enabling basic criticisms of it to be articulated and acted upon. and it gives the actions a weight that demonstrations alone do not have because a political strike action is an exercise of power, where a demonstration is a theater of discontent. a political strike demonstrates that power does not reside in the existing state apparatus alone, that it also, and in a meaningful way, rests with all of us--and it can only rest with us if we are in a position to use it--and so being able to act in this kind of way seems to me fundamental.

without it, popular sovereignty is just a sequence of words that we use from time to time to persuade ourselves to feel better about living within a basically top-down authoritarian system that churns itself ritually every four years.

this is not to say that demos and other such actions are worthless, but the effects that they can have is a direct function of the extent to which the theater of a demonstration exists, so is a function, in the present context, of press coverage. so power resides with the press in that it chooses what to cover and how to cover it. the civil rights movement is a good example of what is possible, under the correct circumstances, and given intelligent organization, for such actions. the actions against the war in vietnam, though more explicitly political, did not stop the war, registered little in the way of effects on the conduct of the war---despite the impact they had in other areas (in enabling transformations at the level of official popular culture, say)---and what's more were effectively erased from history by the right revisionism that was of a piece with the ascendancy of ronald reagan. short term unintended win, long term complete failure.

if you participated in any of the actions against the iraq debacle--and i did---you know that the coverage of the actions was minimal at best, that it relied on police counts as to numbers and treated them in conservative-style "objectivity" by counterpoising a paragraph about the main demo with another about the 10 people who would show up as counter-demonstrators in support of that farce as if they had the same weight. i think the movement against the war fell apart for two main reasons--the futility of the actions given the way they were not really presented in the press, and the decision on the part of move on to no longer do the organizing.

there's more, but i gave myself the duration of a cigarette to type this.
now i gotta go.

crompsin--you're right, but there's stuff that'll break.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

So until the media starts covering us again, protesting is just this side of useless. I came to the same conclusion back in 2003 when I was protesting against the invasion.

The sad part is that the only thing that would likely get attention is overt and even destructive civil disobedience, which is a line I find myself unwilling to cross. I'm stuck between something that I can do that doesn't matter, and something I'm unwilling to do that could matter.

tisonlyi

__________________
"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--

roachboy

yeah, well the problem with the cnt/ait is basically that their organizational model is still wedded to the situation of the 1920s--in their way, they're just a stuck in a romantic haze of the past as are the wobblies. so in a sense, they're relics. this varies by region, though--so for example in france the cnt is the most prolo-looking of the various anar outfits that you see in demonstrations--they usually come before or after the various haircut anarchists, who are in their own way stuck in the mid-1970s, at that period when punk seemed to matter as a political form. the cnt around barcelona is different. the cnt in the states is a tiny curiousity.

among the more complicated questions that floats around behind all this is what kind of relation to adopt relative to the history of the left--which seems to me largely irrelevant for present conditions, particularly because of the persistence of this idea that the proletariat is necessarily the revolutionary class--and so one way of thinking about this is what relation to marx should be adopted. personally, i think that tradition is cooked. even the critical apparatus is finished--even as it provides ways of orienting what a critical/political theory has to do, the kind of information it has to co-ordinate, the importance of a coherent philosophical position to orient that information, etc. conceptually, i think the way to go is a radicalized form of what was called historical materialism--but this only as a heuristic, something to call it, nothing more. castoriadis was right--the project of a revolutionary theory is to undertake something parallel to what marx undertook, but in a way that takes into account the problems of how marx went about it on the one hand (the conceptual frame) and so develops a new approach to analyzing conditions that obtain now.

but this gets ahead of the questions here, which i think are more generally interesting if detached from the old frameworks and posed again--because the problems that underpin them persist.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Seaver

The big question being debated is the attention protests bring in America. My point is the message is being ignored, in large part due to the way which it's spoken.

The protests to prevent the invasion of Iraq were ignored because the majority of America supported it. It wasn't ignored by the media, it was ignored by the people. I remember the "mass" walk-out at our University to protest the War. One person in a class of 350 walked out of my class, media was covering it all over the place. I over-looked the mall in which the protest was done, there were almost as many reporters as students protesting. It was such a spectacular failure, they re-did the walkout to take place during between-class periods. The local media counted students walking to class as part of the protesters.

The message was ignored because it did not strike a chord with those it intended to strike to. It was not ignored by a government controlled media, it was simply those viewers cared more that these punk kids were holding up traffic than what was on their banners.

The truth is protests have the potential of growing exponentially as the new-media and social networks make it increasingly easier to gather groups of like-minded people. They haven't as their potential for political influence are squandered day in and day out. For example, the millions of dollars in damage with regard to the WTO meeting in Seattle. The average person's employment is determined by the WTO, so who do you think they'll side with? Some punks who burn cars unrelated to the whole event? Or the people who provide the employment which keeps a roof over their head and their kids in college?

Protesters are the ones to blame for the lack of effect protest have in America.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

Willravel

The damage was exaggerated by the media. The protest itself was massive and it was 99.999% peaceful. How can protesting work when the media works against us? They marginalize us by claiming we're just rioters or hooligans. And when nothing destructive happens we're simply ignored.

Did you know that 30 million people protested the invasion of Iraq on February 15, 2003? 30 million. There were some blurbs about it on TV. There was no mention of our arguments, our positions, just "oh, and some people don't want us to defend ourselves from the trrists!"

Plan9

Oh, it's okay. They made your struggle into a popular Flobots song about riding a bike sans handlebars.

...

You shouldn't have protested the war. Too broad. You should have protested me. I mean, seriously. Just look at me.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

roachboy

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.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

A soldier with critical thinking skills? You're not the kind that requires the protesty kind of attention. More just a bit of looking after so that you can reenter society.

tisonlyi

My CNT image was only as a fist in the air for striking _at the right time and on the right scale_ as a method by which real change can come about.

I think we'll see a lot of it, soon.

__________________
"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--