Who’s Afraid of a General Strike?

Cover: Minnesotans rocking the red and black

---

Hayden Daniel over at The Federalist is having conniptions over the Minnesota general strike; considering the way the general strike movement is spreading across the US, he has good reason to be nervous. With mask off, the unspoken assumptions of his latest screed reveal the actually-existing libertarianism of the moneyed aristocracy: freedom for capital and slavery for anyone without it.

Following the standard script, the arch-conservative writes:

The American people have witnessed the anarchy on the streets of Minneapolis for weeks now. Radical leftists have swarmed the city, looking to impede and even assault federal law enforcement officers who attempt to carry out their lawful and just duties. Such reckless tactics have already resulted in the death of one agitator, Renee Good, and all the while only serve to protect some of the most vile criminals in our society.

We all know how the demonisation of anarchy works: the ruling class are responsible leaders while the class system appears to be working and they can claim credit for order. As soon as the class system becomes enveloped in crisis, e.g. because you can’t have endless growth on a finite planet, or because you can’t sustain permanent high returns in a system that depends on infinite planet to expand into, it’s the fault of its critics for noticing.

The mentality that dissent and opposition to autocracy is the root cause of chaos is of course standard deflection amongst authoritarians, much the same way that acknowledging and opposing racism is derided as divisive by racists. In either case, the status quo of inequality and power imbalance is assumed to be natural, and nonconformity with privilege and injustice a revolt against nature, per Aristotle.

This is pure authoritarian identity politics: say the scare word ‘anarchy’ like you represent order and justice, while monopolising wealth associating doubt with treason, and whoever doubts your judgement or dares to contradict you is a useful idiot of chaos. It’s the doubters and independent thinkers who are acting out, not aggressive moralists associating ideological nonconformity with a conspiracy against society. Daniel is no doubt a stalwart of anti-wokeism; hotlines to the Almighty are only bad when we don’t have the monopoly.

This is no doubt why, to the authoritarian mind, the lawless chaos on the stress of Minneapolis, culminating in the murder of Renee Good, must be laid at the feet of its victims. By projecting the lawlessness of ICE onto anyone who gets in their way, Daniel tries to reconstruct the harms of authoritarianism as beneficial to their victims using the same coercive control narratives favoured by domestic abusers: shooting people in cold blood when they get in your way is lawful and just because you’ve decided to problematise reactions to abuse as a way of deflecting responsibility from the abuses of authoritarianism.

Renee Good then brought murder on herself by being an agitator, so decreeth the summary show-trial-by-media of the self-appointed moral elect. The only recklessness on display in Minnesota is people noticing the punitive aggression and abject lawlessness of ICE (maybe you have a totalitarianism problem if anarchists are taking issue with your lawlessness). At the same moment, agitating people to protest and collective action is fine when it’s inciting fascists to try to overturn an election whose outcome they didn’t happen to like by storming Congress.

In light of the Epstein Files, need we even enter into debate on protecting ‘some of the most vile criminals in our society? In his projecting, naming inadmissible features of the self and attributing their consequences to someone else (usually the victim), what is Hayden Daniel doing besides offering tawdry apologism for the biggest and most vile criminal of them all? Is this perchance reckless behaviour on his part? The function of his moralism on this count is again standard for statists: conflict within a society set against itself is the fault of individual attitude and character flaws: the personal choices of a Renee Good, not the structural violence of an increasingly overtly fascist police state.

In having to acknowledge any of the issues involved, Daniel reverts to middle-class incredulity:

These radicals are being aided and abetted by Minnesota’s Democrat leadership. They have tried to gin up even more resistance by claiming the operation represents tyrannical “state violence.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey demanded that ICE “get the f– out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here,” and has made it clear that he has no intention of enforcing the law. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz took it a step further, mobilizing the state National Guard after threatening to use it to “protect Minnesotans” from “rogue” ICE agents.

State violence is surely tyrannical when it’s the Soviet Union, or Iran, or North Korea, or any state who won’t pay tribute to the imperial core. Just as in any of these states, however, dissent is wrong because it’s dissent. How could anyone in their right mind not conform to the habitual conflation of individual freedom and property rights, or the vested interests of corporate elites and the common welfare of society? One can only wonder how Daniel differentiates himself in his own mind from Marxist-Leninists who associate their own dictatorship with society, and dissent from society against their dictatorship with a conspiracy against, you know, society.

In reality, there is arguably precious little difference. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that, whether laissez-faire market capitalist or Leninist state capitalist, the state exists to defend ‘the minority of the opulent from the majority,’ per James Madison, the ‘Father of the Constitution.’ In any event, he tries to paper over the obvious with an examination of states’ rights; states are horribly oppressed whenever, say, workers need federal protections to organise unions, or black people need federal protection against discrimination, but need to toe the line when it comes to keeping the rabble in line.

A selective reading of history is par for the course in this respect, for as one historian notes, “After generations of pro-Jackson historians left out Jackson’s role in American Indian removal — the forced, bloody transfer of tens of thousands of Native Americans from the South — a recent reevaluation has rightfully put that crime at the core of his legacy.”

But Jackson is even worse than his horrifyingly brutal record with regard to Native Americans indicates. Indian removal was not just a crime against humanity, it was a crime against humanity intended to abet another crime against humanity: By clearing the Cherokee from the American South, Jackson hoped to open up more land for cultivation by slave plantations. He owned hundreds of slaves, and in 1835 worked with his postmaster general to censor anti-slavery mailings from northern abolitionists. The historian Daniel Walker Howe writes that Jackson, “expressed his loathing for the abolitionists vehemently, both in public and in private.”

Andrew Jackson was a tireless defender of the individual and the natural reference point for the ongoing campaign to abolish constraint? Never let the facts get in the way of a good story I always say.

It’s argubly instructive that the single-mindedness of Heyden Daniels forgets that everyone is ‘created equal’ and that we all have inherent rights as humans that can’t be alienated by any government as soon as the moneyed class needs to protect its class monopoly over resources from economic democracy. Like the rest of his class, Daniels’ concern with Federalism, limiting state power and protecting the freedom of the individual from encroachment flies out the window as soon as he senses any threat to the private property in which he invests all his identity and self-worth as a capitalist. Rebellions must be ruthlessly crushed except when it’s MAGA on January 6.

It is almost as though what in more honest times used to be called the ‘corrupt aristocracy of wealth’ looks to hoard freedom as readily as it hoards wealth–if not, for that matter, virtue, and that virtue-hoarding and projecting is what we degenerate into when we run out of ideas. Shooting people you don’t like because they won’t conform to your rigid authoritarianism is a standard feature of authoritarian police states; it makes complete sense, on the same count, that an authoritarian should see in the collective action of Minneapolis general strikers a threat to . . . wait for it . . . Minneapolis. It is to be expected that apologia should be as ludicrous as it is riven by double standards and cravenly servile.

---