The Recouperation of the General Strike

The great wave of general strikes that swept through Europe towards the end of last year were an inspiration to a great many, myself included. They fed constructive impetus into the popular fury aroused by the state assassination of Renee Good–a political adversary–in Minneapolis, and then Alex Pretti rest in power both). The general strike movement in Minnesota generated solidarity actions in over 300 states. The next question was, when are US unions having a nationwide general strike? The energy is unmistakable, it’s obviously time.

It was obviously time, and the union bureaucracy fairly obviously failed to swing into action. As the New Labor Press piece reveals pointedly, the historic defeat of US unions is reflected in things like the standardisation of the no-strike clause. The unions tie their fortunes to the Democratic Party like a battered spouse clinging to an abuser; while both are supposed to reflect and represent the people, the tail wags the dog. Out of power, the DNC court the unions, in power, the DNC discipline the unions, and the unions discipline the peasants either way. Failure to recover from historic defeats and reconstruct strategy leaves the struggle for class autonomy at the mercy of politics.

If Mussolini was integrating the unions into a corporate state, it would correctly be called fascism. Tail wags the dog, the state wags the people. If Lenin was smashing the factory committees and integrating the unions into NEP state capitalism, it would correctly be called red fascism. Revolutionary state wags the working class. It’s the turn of the anglosphere to go full bootlicker: our neoliberal political power structure wags the union in service to corporate interests, and the union wag their members in turn. It’s fascism when it’s our system though.

The DNC, like respectable middle-class politics in the late capitalist west, is a property of corporate power; corporate capture of national governments is as complete as their zeal to make causality reverse itself so endless growth can operate on a finite planet. The capitalist order cannot reverse causality any more than it can function without endless free subsidies from the natural world from which it freely plunders at will. The petrodollar recycling system, and so the maintenance by means of state intervention of the value of the US dollar artificially, depends on endless flows of oil. Respectable middle-class liberalism has nothing to say, nothing to offer.

All it can do is the same thing it has always done: co-opt ideas and steal energy from anyone who does. All respectable middle-class liberalism can do is attack the left wing it takes so much from in service to the capitalist class hierarchies ambitions social climbers are anxious to ascend. Apparently this is because individual class privilege and egalitarianism are the same thing now if it means anyone other than cisgender white men are permitted to join the neoliberal technocratic secular priesthood and service the transnational corporate oligarchy as it accumulates mad quarterly dividends amidst encircling ecocide.

The DNC, like the Australian Labor Party, also turn politics to the right via the infamous “ratchet effect,” whereby liberals block movement to the left out of loyalty to the class hierarchies they occupy favourable positions within, or hope to, while compromising principle in the name of keeping a seat at the same table as the corporate oligarchy. Gilles Dauve noted much the same as the “ratchet effect” in his commentary on 20th century revolutions; liberals essentialise structural violence and oppression down into individual attitudes, and then wonder A why dumb workers don’t appreciate their benevolent paternalism, and B why there are so many fascists running around.

It completely figures that Democrats would be trying to steal thunder from not only the autonomous Minnesota working class, but that of another 300 cities as well. The way forward is all about the midterms, peasants! Don’t believe in yourselves, don’t believe in your capacity to be your own master, don’t know your own worth the way people looking to exploit and take advantage of you do, believe in a power structure that abandoned you decades ago! Believe in a liberal power structure that fucks people so hard, and makes people so mad, they want to vote for a Donald Trump just to piss off preppie rich fucks living in sheltered bubbles.

As the union movement has always shown, though, it has always been popular struggle and pressure from below that has forced political change–even to, in Chomsky’s terms, “expand the floor of the cage.” Revolutionary syndicalism is predicated on using “expanding the floor of the cage” fighting for improved conditions and enhanced rights as “revolutionary gymnastics” and a “practical school of socialism”, ie. to prepare the fighting culture of solidarity and mutual aid necessary for revolutionary strikes and factory occupations (or indeed potenially, at this late stage, disaster syndicalism).

Middle-class liberals, like all authoritarians, are confused about the source of their personal power. The working class no more needs middle-class liberalism than it does political marxist microcults or tech billionaire neckbeard edgelord white supremacists, than it does the approval of other clique-slaves, or the need to be constantly competing, or the need to feed people to alienation monsters when we run short of disposable income, or the need to throw a fascism tantrum when the wheels fall off the bandwagon of endless upward mobility. They need us, we don’t need them! The liberal aristocracy demonstrates its dependency on all that still retains an ethical core and is culturally and intellectually alive in the world by its need to constantly bleed the left, which is to say the autonomous working class.

What better point to start on kicking the ruling class up the fucking grill than in its middle-class liberal recouperation? Anarchism is all of that liberals, you betcha. As soon as you stop trying to roll extractivist imperialist class hierarchy turds in egalitarianism glitter, you can become anarchist yourselves. Wouldn’t that be more fulfilling and rewarding than being a leech, a clique-slave, a corporate property and a hopeless addict chasing the dragon of mad power for its own sake?