January 12, 2023 • 48 mins
Part One: The Class War Explodes
Calls for a general strike go viral all the time - but what would it take for one to actually get organized? It's Going Down takes over It Could Happen Here in a special two-episode dive into the history of general strikes in the United States - from the Civil War to modern day. This episode includes an interview with labor historian and author, Robert Ovetz.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
We live in a period of increasing class conflict. During
the Trump years, strike action reached the seventeen year high.
Strikes surged, increasing almost as workers fought back against rising
inflation and the cost of living. Fights over unionization hit
sectors previously thought to be un organizable, as workers declared
(00:27):
victory across fast food chains, Starbucks, and Amazon. And this
increased strike activity is taking place against the rising course
of revolt. Tenants are forming unions and launching rent strikes.
Riots kick off in the face of police murdering on
average over three people per day, and kids walk out
of school demanding everything from access to ppe to an
(00:48):
end to attacks on queer and trans youth. It's not
just that strikes are increasing, but the logic of the
strike to strike a blow against one's class enemies, to
enact a cost and generalize collective refusal, is spreading. As
comes to a close, the largest strike by education workers
across the University of California system has seen barricades, occupied buildings,
(01:12):
and strikers even liberating dining halls to feed themselves. Members
of the United Mine Workers have been on the picket
lines for almost two years, and this holiday season, over
one thousand rail workers stunned the brink of crippling the
US economy and an effort to win sickly as the
government rushed to enforce a contract and break the strike.
(01:32):
With so many people on the verge of striking, it's
easy to wonder what would happen if a strike across
industries could be organized, a general strike. It's this very
subject that we tackle in today's show. And speaking of strikes,
the producers of it could happen here have walked off
the job that it's going down. It's taken over, that's right.
(01:55):
I g D will be occupying the means of this
production for five shows throughout the month of January as
we address some of the major issues of today while
looking back at recent examples in history about how the
exploiting excluded have attempted to meet the conditions which miserate
our lives head on. Each episode, of course, is going
to have special guests and a deep die from us.
(02:15):
Launching the summer of two thousands fifteen, It's Going Down
as a media platform, radio show and podcast. It covers
a ton of a social movements from an anarchist perspective.
As a group we represent folks from across the US.
Tom and myself have been involved in covering and participating
in social struggles for over twenty years. Sophie's a long
(02:36):
time educator and community organizer across multiple continents. Marcella is
a writer and comedian. This is Mike Andrews. Happy to
be here. I'm Sophie Marcella and I'm Tom. Yeah, this
is really cool. Thanks to all that it can happen
here people. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm excited to be here
and talk about strikes. It's gonna be a fun time. Yeah,
(02:56):
I'm excited about today's topic very much. So, just art off.
It's interesting. It seems like every few weeks on social media,
every couple of months, whenever there's like a big issue
that comes up or something's going on in the news cycle,
the idea of a general strike will trend or sort
of kind of get out in the ether as this
zeit guys that becomes really popular, and you know, we
(03:17):
live in this time and increasing protests and strikes and riots.
But it also seems like the possibility of a general
strike seems like very far off, or the idea of
it even being this like trending thing on social media
is sort of like passe or silly. And also it
happens so often and we don't see it materialized, it
(03:38):
can be easy to sort of write it off. Or
on the other hand, a lot of people will say, well,
if you want that to happen instead of just like
wishing it to be on social media, you should just
join a union and get involved that way. It seems
that this drive to constantly declared general strikes, though ambitious,
(03:59):
sometimes to the point of, you know, people being able
to sort of make fun of it, the reality is
is that the repeated sort of call for that has
normalized that idea. And what we're seeing a lot in
specifically in the US, but we're seeing a lot of
people at their workplaces recognized that the business unions have failed, right,
It's how we got here. You know, I live in
(04:19):
the rest belt. I live in the midst of the
failure of business unions every single day in my life.
And that they've also come to understand something that the
autonomous in Italy were talking about the seventies, which is
that workers already control the means of production. They're already there.
They already run the coffee shop, run the restaurant, run
the warehouse, run the tech company, whatever, and if they
just stop, nobody makes any money. And you don't need
(04:40):
a union in a formal sense to do that. And
so I think a lot of workers that traditionally fell
outside of unions are starting to understand their powers workers
outside of that structure, and that is incredibly important for
us going forward. Yeah, I mean, I think you're totally right.
I mean, I don't think quiet quitting came out of nowhere.
And I know it's just like an idea. I like
loud quating more like I prefer that. But I do
(05:03):
think this culture, we're creating a culture where it is
okay to be anti work. It is okay for you
to say I hate my job and I actually don't
do anything and I steal for my boss, and we
should normalize that, right, Like, I don't think striking is
just this whole thing, and I do want to say
this before I move into that. Every single time I
posted TikTok video, somebody's always like general strike July. So
it's like, yeah, it's definitely on the internet a lot.
(05:25):
But I do think even people saying that I'm not
doing it has an impact because it's like, what is
that Martin Soustri said, you have to fight the culture,
and the culture that we live in now is a
culture that's like obsessed with work for work sake, and
so like maybe part of it is like, yeah, workers
already owns the means of production. Yeah, just don't work
as hard on your job, you know, and if your
work steal from your boss. It doesn't have to be
(05:45):
like this organizational thing. Because one thing is that, like
you have to realize is that sometimes union work unions
work with management. So it's like even if you're like, yeah,
like I want to wait for my union, it's like
what if your union is like the fertila union that
will go behind your back and like make this. Um.
I guess all this to say is that I think
changing the culture is important. Um, And I think that's
(06:06):
happening now. I think yeah, like you said at the
end of that, just like how something that I think
we'll get into a lot more in this episode is
looking at how this life claims to join the union
being the practical thing to do towards a general strike
just isn't accurate at all, and that when you look
back in history at kind of any of the exciting
moments of UM general strikes are uprising and stuff. It
(06:26):
doesn't come from those official channels UM, and so I'm
excited to get into that more. And I think, Yeah,
I like we're saying like this thing where it's just
become this thing that people will like say and talk about,
even if there's not that cultural memory of like exactly
what a general strike means or what what what's going
to happen. There's this idea of like refusal and of
solidarity that is captured just in the world and just
(06:46):
in saying it. But I think it's really like showing
that energy up and speaking of cultural memory. Fact, you're
dynamite in your pitchforks because it's time for a trip
down memory lane. In the early ninety hundreds of the
United States, groups like the Industrial Workers of the World
of the IWW, which advocated for the abolition of the
wage system and capitalism, rejected racist exclusions of non white
(07:10):
workers in the labor movement and even engaged in shootouts
with the k KK, popularized the idea of the general
strike in the United States on a large scale, with
the idea itself and its application in US history it's
much older. Throughout the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, anarchists, socialists,
and everyday members of the working class all promoted and
carried out multiple general strikes as a means to win
(07:32):
political and economic concessions. For some, the general strike was
also a launchpad for revolution, in which workers could, in theory,
seize the means of existence out of the hands of
the capitalist class and run society on its own terms.
And it's this battle that thrust millions of everyday working
class people directly into conflict with the American state and
its military. In US history, the first large scale example
(07:54):
of a general strike occurred in the midst of the
American Civil War and W. E. B. Du Bois famous
book Black Reconstruction, he explains how it was the general
strike of the enslaved black proletariat that brought down the
plantation system, not President Lincoln er union bullets. The boys
argues that just like the black lead insurrections of today
and ferguson him Minneapolis, this strike took bourgeois white society
(08:16):
by total surprise, he writes it. In the South, newspapers
denied the very idea that slaves could ever free themselves
and even claim that they quote did not want to
be free. He writes of white society in the North.
The North shrank at the very thought of encouraging servile
insurrection against the whites. Above all, it did not propose
to interfere with property. Black people on the whole were
(08:36):
considered cowards, inferior beings whose very presence in America was unfortunate.
Only John Brown knew that revolt would come, and he
was dead. So the boys really painted this picture of
this mass care and society in which slavery is seen
as very sad. More terrifying is the idea of mass
black insurrection, which of course and mirrors today's situation. I
(08:57):
mean the suburbs are, I mean right like that someburbs are.
It's like for you to like pretend like all the
things that you have are not built on blood. It's
for you to like segment yourself away from the people
in society that give you everything you have, yet you
deny them everything. See you going you a little home
(09:18):
and like drinking a little tea and like watch a
little movies and just like ignore the fact that you're
an apphle. You know what I mean? Like just like
and even not even more more than an apple. I
was going as far as saying, I used to say
that they're not good or bad people, but like you're
acting like a bad person, like you don't care about
other people because you've been tricked to think that, like
you're getting a good deal. And it's an interesting point
that the Boys makes about just like. It was only
(09:40):
kind of the radical wing of the abolishness movement that
was talking about open revolt. There's this early anarchist A
lot of people don't reference a lot but why is
under Spooner. He conspired with John Brown various plots, and
he later became a member of the First International and
a contributor to early anarchist publications like Liberty. He produced
this really early text which is just fantastic. It's called
(10:01):
A Plan for the Abolish of Slavery, published in eighteen
fifty eight. It's a couple of years before the Civil War.
He writes, our plan then is to make our war
openly or secretly. A circumstances may dictate upon the property
of the slaveholders, burn the master's buildings, kill their cattle
and horses, conceal or destroy farming utensils, abandoned labor and
(10:22):
seed time and harvest and let the crops perish, make
slavery unprofitable. I love the line conceal or destroys. Like
you can destroy them, you can also hide them. This
is like a parallel that we can drawn out to.
Like if you want to like have solidarity with like
like other wage slaves, is that like do accommodate them
and help them steal from their I mean from their jobs.
(10:43):
I mean it's like these things happened in the past,
but these are tactics that we can still use in
the present. There's echoes of this quote later with Lucy Parsons, Right,
you see this during the Structure in our work at
Chicago where she gives a speech where she's talking about
grabbing knives and going to the doors of the rent
as a way to make it very very very clear
that they weren't going to be able to live off
(11:04):
the backs of the working class anymore. Right, Um. And
it's the sort of idea of direct action, which now,
I mean, if we think about now, what are politicians doing.
They're trying to pass laws to make it a felony
to have home demonstrations, right, to like do exactly these
kinds of things, but in much more passive ways. So
if we can really think back, I mean, this is
a tried and true technique that people used in the
(11:25):
United States for a very very long time, and we
can see still how much that terrifies people with power.
There's another awesome quote from Spooner I just want to
read as well, and this I find this one really
interesting because he's speaking actually to white people in the South,
especially people that work in the slave patrols. He says,
white rascals of the South, willing tools of the slaveholders.
You who drive slaves to do their labor, hunt them
(11:47):
with dogs, and flog them for pay without asking any questions.
You are the main pillars of the slave system. That
is the most eloquent way to say exactly, yeah, that's
exactly what I was thinking. I think it's interesting to
point out, as do boys Rights. And as Frederick Douglas
said of the Civil War, it was started quote in
(12:08):
the interests of slavery on both sides. The South was
fighting to take slavery out of the Union and the
North was fighting to keep it in. And the mass
black exodus did not kick off at the start of
the war. He makes the really important point that union
leaders made it clear that they did not want to
disrupt the plantation system. At times, generals even offered to
(12:29):
put down slave rebellions, and he says that they even forbade,
at least in some instances, union soldiers from singing the
song John Brown's Body. But as the North pushed into
the South, the flood of former slaves escaping into Union
hands grew and grew. By eighteen sixty two, is the
Boys rights, This was the beginning of the swarming of
increasing numbers no longer to work on Confederate plantations, a
(12:53):
movement that became a general strike against the slave system.
This was not merely the desire to stop work. It
was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions
of work. It was a general strike that evolved directly
in the end, perhaps half a million people. They wanted
to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to
do that they left the plantations. It's interesting too, and
(13:14):
The Boys makes this point the general strike also encouraged
and took place alongside many poor whites deserting the Confederate army.
One thing that's interesting about the Confederate side of the
Civil War, you could get out of fighting if you
own slaves, And a lot of poor whites deserted the
Confederate army, which further crippled it. As the Boys noted,
the poor white not only began to desert and run away,
(13:36):
but thousands followed black people into the northern camps. And
just some key takeaways to like launching the discussion side
of this, It's interesting that the wider society, as the
Boys notes, before the Civil War disparaged the possibility of
mass collective action. And I think this really mirrors contemporary
conspiracy theories and narratives around black rebellion today that happened
(13:58):
often either in the midst of the George Floyd Uprising
or afterwards. And also the mass strike and refusal that
happened during the Civil War, which disrupted the economy and
made things like the slave patrols, the policing of the
plantation system impossible. That helped bring down the Confederacy, obviously,
(14:18):
and I think it's important to ask, as our contemporary
society remains structured around racial capitalism, what might be done
in the current system in terms of mass refusal and
desertion that would cause a similar effect. The idea of
the wider society and disparaging mass collective action is because
that the fear is letting us know that we do
(14:40):
have mass power, you know what I mean. It's like
it's not a surprise that people always say that Lincoln
freed the slaves, and Lincoln literally said, if I had
to end slavery to save the Union, I would have
ended slavery. And if I have to keep slavery to
save the Union, I would have kept a slavery you
know what I mean. So just like this whole idea
of like letting black people know you can't do shi it,
don't even bother is the they know that we can't
(15:01):
do ship, and we are doing ship because black people
are always rebelling. Um, if you come to flop push,
you see it in full color. They realize the government
isn't give a funk about them, and they've created their
own institutions to support themselves. Um. Yeah, So it's like
this whole idea to let us tell us don't even
bother and and and like criminalizing like the informal sector
(15:21):
because it's like that's a way for us like gain
power outside of like the formal sector, you know what
I mean, and things like that. So I just think
it's like it's like when they tell us, don't bother
trying to fight back, like everybody has to suffer, Like
that's what they always think. Everybody suffered, and we all
just suffer and it's like, no, we don't want to suffer,
and we're actually doing things to ease our suffering. And um,
(15:41):
I think this is just like all this is to
say that people who are out there doing stuff keep
doing stuff, and like, if you want to do stuff,
do it. You don't have to be brought of reunion.
You don't have to put your job and be an activist.
By the way, paid activists not really activists. You can
do regular ship and you hold that. You can do
a free stool in the corner on the street so
people can have clothes. It's like you could striking from
(16:03):
the economy means like divesting your time and resources, and
you can do it. We can all do it in
some shape or form well, And I think it becomes
a lot more possible today to think about that than
it did, say before. Right, So we had this kind
of collapse of the legitimacy of the American political projects,
sort of with the Iraq War, right, we all kind
(16:25):
of saw how badly that can turn out. But what
was left in America to uphold the entire edifice was
the idea that even though things politically were kind of
screwed up, at least there's economic success. And then that
failed to right. And so this sort of idea that
built up after World War Two, this kind of concept
(16:46):
of you know, the labor corpor compromise, the loyal worker
that's going to get provided for for the rest of
their life. Not only did our parents generation find out
that that was a lie, but younger generations don't really
buy it at all. And so what you're really seeing is,
I think this kind of breakdown socially of the legitimacy
of the idea of the American dream because of all
(17:08):
of its problematic elements and it's impossibility and its absurdity,
and kind of this revival of an idea which existed
prior to World War Two, which was an idea of
social revolt, right, and it was something we saw manifest
during the Great Depression, and it's part of the reason
why the New Deal exists. Was a way to put
that down was a way to prevent workers from feeling
(17:31):
like the only thing that they had in front of
them was to take over their factories and show up
at the doors of the rich and so on, so
and so on. Right. But that whole idea of the
New Deal, that concept that the government was going to
take care of you and the company was going to
take care of you, collapsed in the nineties seventies, but
the idea that it existed still holds on in some
(17:53):
sectors of the of America today. I mean, you see
this with the magacrat out really heavily, the idea that
like nothing systematically needs change, really we just need better outcomes,
and we just need, you know, in their case, Donald Trump,
to pay attention to us and give us the things
that we want. But really, outside of that almost comical patriotism, um,
you don't really see a lot of adherence to that
(18:15):
vision any further. And that makes the idea of mass
refusal not only a lot more possible, but something that's
actively happening currently. Yeah, And the other parts who I
want to bring in is that when the New Deal
is caused, it excluded like black people, right, And so
that's one way It's like it's like this constants, like
how white people are like tricked into like submitting to
the system, and it happens so many times, and they
(18:35):
still keep saying, took us again, took us again. It's like, yeah,
they're gonna give you ship so you're not upset, and
then they're going to exclude black people because at the
end of the day, black people do all the work
that we need to survive as a society. Do we
not remember who the essential workers were? Like who does
the jobs that we need to like live, like, you
know what I mean? So yeah, you could like be
out of work and get your little thing, But as
(18:56):
long as we keep inslating and treating the people who
make this aciet any run, it's fine. Um. And now
that's happening to white people too, and they're like, oh no,
this is not cute, like it's not fun and quiet quitting,
you know what I mean, Because like there we are,
like the way black people have been treated is certing
to happen to white people. And it's just like I
hope this is what I was going to ask you.
How do we prevent another New Deal situation from happening
(19:18):
where white workers are tricked again, Like because I feel
it's coming. I feel like they're going to find a
way out of this, and like how do we know
what if it's like bullshit? And like how do we
call it out? And how do we call it out?
That's what student unforgiveness was, right. I mean, like, if
we really think about it, the Democratic parties been built
recently since the Obama era on this idea of reinstituting
(19:38):
elements of the New Deal without threatening the existence of capitalism. Um,
very intentionally right. We saw that the Affordable Care Act
as version of that. Right. So, I mean they are
doing this and I think what's fascinating about this, And
this is something that radicals in the late sixties pointed
out often about Lyndon Johnson is they said, you know,
liberals voted for Lyndon Johnson and they put all their
(20:01):
hopes in him, so when he failed them, it didn't
have anything left to do except hit the streets, right,
Like there was no other option. And I think what
we've really seen since the Obama era is the collapse
of the idea that the way that the Democrats do
social assistances in any way going to solve anything. Um,
that's just going to continue to perpetuate the situation of
which we need social assistance, right, as opposed to fundamentally
(20:23):
ending that, which is you know, the language that they
put forward when they talked about things like justice, which
we all know that they don't really have much adherence to. Right.
But I think until the until the Democratic Party gains
legitimacy again, if they ever do, which hopefully they don't,
but if they ever do, yeah, we might be able
to see this kind of use of reformedism, this counterinsurgency again, right,
(20:43):
which is really what the New Deal was. But really
until that, I mean we saw in twenty you know,
when the legitimacy of the group of people who often
relies on that technique falls apart, you get uprisings in
the streets, right. And so we're at kind of a
different point, I think than than maybe just before the
new kind of came into effect. Something I want to
go back to too, that I think it's relevant to
this is the piece where the quote um is talking
(21:07):
about concealing or like in secret or in public or whatever.
How there's like a lot of power in terms of
like things like general strikes in that sort of like
invisibility or whatever in the unpredictability in like not going
for like building movements based on like visibility or public
perception or like the media or whatever, but actually building
(21:27):
them in these ways that can't be seen as much
and might be concealed. Um. And also this thing where
people are underestimated, Like it makes me think about the
revolution in Haiti in the late seventeen hundreds, which is
you know, a long time ago but still very relevant, um.
And just thinking about how the kind of like colonizes
in Paris, like couldn't believe the reports that were coming
out of uprising in Haiti at the time because they
(21:50):
were so racist basically that they didn't believe that black
people there who were they could rise up and could
have that like no awareness gump or whatever. Um. And
that gave them a lot of room, you know, that
was like a position of power for them that like, um,
they were being underestimated like that much. And I think
that's something we see with like even though like the
(22:11):
idea that's gone on from that time really of like
outside agitator and stuff like in any uprising that we
see um involved. Yeah, that both part people is that
there's something in that that is also powerful and it
gives possibility. Well, speaking of outside agitators, we're going to
take a break and hear from some of our sponsors
right now. In eighteen sixty five, on paper, the Civil
(22:44):
War ended and the Union was saved. A decade later,
the North began pointing out of the cell, marking me
into reconstruction efforts in the beginning of both jem Crow
and a reign of terror and white vigilaneism in the
form of the ku Klux Klan. The eighteen seventies was
also a period of increasing poverty, declaiming wages, rising homelessness,
(23:07):
economic depression, and exploding class conflict, as the stage was
said for the Great Upheaval of eighteen seventy seven, a
general strike that rocked multiple states as workers across lines
of color, gender, profession, and age threatened the very core
of the capitalist state. As the decades were on, multiple
general strikes followed, as did a heavy handed government response
(23:29):
that evolved to police and repressed the broader population. Wanting
to know more about this history of these general strikes
in their importance, we caught up with labor historian and
author Robert Ovett's, author of one workers shot back, and
we the elites. Ovetts argues that the often violent general
strikes of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds
showcase the ability of working people. It's not only confront
(23:51):
the state and capitalism, but also organized society on their
own terms. Well. General strikes have been a rare occurrence,
but a very powerful example of the way that organized
workers and communities can transform society and hopefully transcend capitalism.
(24:12):
I think we have in the examples of general strikes
in US history an example of the potential for getting
beyond capitalism, and so that's what makes them really exciting
to to study and to write about. At A general
strike doesn't just happen, and we don't actually know exactly
why general strikes happen, but we know that they don't
(24:32):
just happen. They're not spontaneous. There has to be a
groundwork of organizing and engaged activists and organizers who are
working quietly, sometimes for months or years, to to work
and organizing their fellow workers and to build community connections
(24:53):
to support their strike actions. And there also has to
be a good communication of what what the strike is about,
what their demands are, and the ability to communicate and
spread information about that strike. Probably the two most important
general strikes in US history were the one in eighteen
(25:14):
seventy seven and the one in nine in Seattle. And
the one in eighteen seventy seven was a general strike
throughout the railroad industry, but it also had extraordinary um microcosmic,
if you will, a general strike that was happening in St.
Louis and East St. Louis. But what was fascinating about
(25:34):
that was that the groundwork had been laid in eighteen
seventy seven, not by a union actually, because the workers
had tried to form a union, but it was sabotaged,
it was infiltrated, and they tried to the the organizers
tried to call off the set date to start the
general strike and the railroad industry, but the workers went
on strike anyways, and they built their own organization across
(25:58):
dozens of different railroad come panies on their own. In St. Louis, however,
there was a new left wing party called the Working
Men's Party that was formed by various socialists and communists
and anarchists who had taken over the city and for
a few days tried to run it and that was.
That was probably closer to what happened in Seattle in
(26:19):
nineteen nineteen, where over a hundred local unions actually pressured
the Labor Council to call a general strike, and so
that was kind of built up from below through formal unions.
But then it went far beyond anything that those AFL
affiliated unions were willing to really do. The St. Louis
(26:39):
General Strike in eighteen seventy seven that I was just mentioning. Uh,
there was a multi racial coalition of worker organizers who
literally took charge of the strike. There had been a
strike committee form and those that strike committee was dominated
by the Working Men's Party activists, but the workers themselves
(27:00):
started to organize outside the confines of the strike coordinating committee,
and it was very multiracial. They started marching on one
workplace and another. Uh. There was some evidence that there
were some women that were involved in it. So there
were strong ties to the community and various households and neighborhoods.
But they marched on one workplace to another and spread
(27:22):
the strike, and within a couple of days much of
the city had been shut down. And the irony of
this was that the strike coordinating council actually freaked out
about how multi racial of the crowds were that were
shutting down these workplaces and leaving and leaving work um
and internally they became very divided based on their their racism,
(27:46):
and there were some members of the coordinating committee that
were extreme racial supremacists and didn't want the strike to continue,
and they debated how to stop the strike, how to
call it off, and but the reality was that they
had lost control of it to the workers outside of
the committee. And when it became clear that the militias
(28:08):
were being called into St. Louis to attack the city,
the workers marched on the Medium Hall where the strike
coordinating council was and demanded that they appropriate money to
acquire arms to defend the city. But they refused to
do that, and they eventually tried to call off the strike.
(28:28):
Uh So that lasted a few days, and race was
a huge factor in why the strikes spread and how
the workers took over the city, But it was also
a factor and how it was actually killed by those
who were supposedly quote unquote running the actual general strike.
In the case of Seattle, we don't know as much
about the racial composition of the workers. UM. But we
(28:49):
do know that it was very generalized throughout the entire city. UM.
And the reason we know this is because the the
General Strike Committee, which was formed by the Labor count
soul I, had representatives of every union and they took
care of many of the reproductive needs of the population.
For example, they kept the hospital running. UH. They set
(29:10):
up free kitchens where people could eat UM. They as
well as setting up and publishing a newspaper that came
out every day during the five days of the strike,
so they took care of also of public safety. UM.
So what was extraordinary about the Seattle General Strike is
how it incorporated many of these issues that we would
(29:32):
say is about gender and reproductive needs of the population.
They didn't just shut down the workplace. They actually took
over the city and reorganized society to meet the needs
of humanity. The seven strike actually resulted in what I
show in a lot of detail in my first book,
when workers shot back, how the state and capital reorganized
(29:57):
themselves in order to u be able to respond a
lot quicker to self organized workers and strikes and especially
general strikes. For example, the modern police came into being
in many cities as a result of the eighteen seventy
seven strike because up until that point, the police were um,
(30:18):
if you will, they were kind of like gig workers.
They worked on quote unquote tips or bribes. UH. There
were very few cities that had any municipal police, and
if they did, they had very small forces. And so
that was one reason why the strikes spread so quickly
around the country over that that ten day or so
period in July of eighteen seventy seven. UH, So modern
(30:40):
policing really came into being. Also, as you mentioned, the
militias were transformed into what became the National Guard. The
militias also proved to be undependable because they were mostly
composed of working men, and if they were called out locally,
they knew the strikers, and in fact, some of them
were strikers and didn't even show up for their militia duty.
(31:02):
So militias were essentially de emphasized and they were replaced
by a state controlled National Guard. UM. As a result
of the passage of a new federal law. UH, the
military was also funded on a permanent basis. One reason
why the military was so slow to be UH to
be deployed to put down the strike in eighteen seventy
(31:24):
seven was most of the soldiers were out in the
West fighting essentially a genocidal war against the Plans native peoples,
and so there weren't enough military around. And also Congress
hadn't funded the military that year, believe it or not,
and so the military was unfunded and undersized. Another consequence
of this was that many corporations started to work together
(31:47):
to create their own you could say, mutual aid to
protect one another. They started forming employer groups in order
to be able to respond to a more coordinated method.
Um So you started to see corporations cooperated result of this.
In fact, many of the technologies that we take for
granted today were a result of the eighteen seventy seven
railroad strike. For example, UH, the telegraph was installed in
(32:10):
many rich people's homes as a way to be able
to contact the police directly. Those lines went directly to
the police. UH. The so called pattiwagon was also invented
as a result of the eighteen seventy seven strike as
a weapon against large crowds. Um So, there were a
number of m of new technologies that were implemented UH
(32:31):
and became more widespread as a results of that strike
in Seattle. Also, the workers were prepared, they had known
their history, and they formed a self defense group UH
composed primarily of World War One veterans who had just
come back from more or one UM and they patrolled
the city and they did things like shut down bars
(32:53):
because they didn't want UH people to get drawnk and
start fighting and that would be a justification for the
the National Guard to be called in. But the police
started to essentially line up outside the boundaries of the
city and they waited for reinforcements threatenings essentially to invade
Seattle before the general strike was called off. But the
(33:14):
workers were prepared. They did carry out and organized self
defense against that eventuality. The Oakland general strike was part
of an extraordinary wave of post War two strikes that
were happening just like after Word one and actually during
Worldar one there was a wave of strikes UH. The
(33:35):
same thing happened when a lot of soldiers started coming
back from War two. Unemployment shot up, women were sent
as sent packing. UH prices exploded, there was a shortage
of housing UH and workers started to organize and UH.
During that few year period, UH there was a general
(33:57):
strike in the steel sector, and Truman threatened to take
over some of the larger companies, and he was repelled
by the Supreme Court. But as a consequence of this
uh this upsurge of class struggle, the Congress paths to
Taff Hardly Act, which still governs US today. For workers
(34:19):
who try to organize in the private sector where they're
under the National Labor Relations Act, the Taff Hardley Act
was an amendment to that law. One of the most
important things it did was a banned so called secondary strikes,
which means that if workers go on strike somewhere, workers
can't strike in solidarity um and particularly if they have
(34:44):
a union contract with their employer, it would be illegal. Now,
there are some workers that are exempted from that, for
example transport workers because they're under a different federal law.
They're under the Railway Labor Act, which is part of
the reason why we almost just saw rail railroad general
strike before the Democrats killed it a few weeks ago.
But the tapped Hartley Act continues to serve as a
(35:07):
means of suppressing and repressing the ability not only of
workers but organized unions in their local workplaces, but to
actually engage in a general strike. So again we've been
listening to Robert Ovette's author of One Workers Shot Back
and We the Elites. Just a few key takeaways from
that discussion. We see various examples in these general strikes
(35:28):
of tensions developing between more radical elements and reformist ones
that want to contain revolutionary expressions and also stop workers
from really taking over society. We also see positive examples
of these strikes spilling out across lines of race, gender,
and age and profession. One thing we see, of course,
again and again is the state responding to these strikes
(35:51):
with the combination of militia's police and of course the
National Guard. And finally, many of these strikes lead to
the passing of legislation, which is interesting because far are
from this sort of progressive arc towards justice. Instead, we
see constantly, again and again the state either reforming itself
to become more oppressive, engage in surveillance, reconstitute the police
(36:12):
in a certain way, reconstitute the military, or sometimes bring
the workers into the superstructure of the state and roorge
to better manage them. Yeah, I totally agree. It's not
getting better. They're just being smart about it. They're like
like little like slimy balls. They're just like reshaping as
they need to shape and form to like get workers.
So like when you were reading that, it felt like
(36:32):
a writer's were It felt like a movie of like
how do we control these people? You know what I mean?
It felt like it was like this like checker but
they're like, oh, they make their move, we make their move.
And it's like it's like the state as a tool
and like you see that because it's like it's a
tool of the elite, and you see that through the
laws that are passed, and like when they're passed, like
because when black and white people form them, this violence
like a lot of state violence, like extreme state violence,
(36:55):
because it's like they want to remind us like that's bad,
you don't do that, and then they'll do stuff to
play get worker like white workers too, like with a
Wagoner Act, like with unionization, like a lot of black
people were excluded from that. Maybe just maybe things aren't
getting better like they're telling you they are. Things are
just reshaving. That's something else I'm thinking about as you're talking.
And just like from from that history that it is
like we hear that like the creativity of the state
(37:17):
with their oppression or whatever that's going on, but also
how people keep coming back with like new and different things,
you know, like it actually takes a lot of repression
to stop these things. Like if you look at what
happened Stubben or whatever, it's like they killed quite a
lot of people to stop that strike wave and stuff,
you know, like it's really heavy handed. And then but
still a lot of strikes happen after that, and it
(37:37):
leads up to Haymarket in age six or whatever. And
I just think, again, again, we seem like repression, but
then we see it flowering again. And I think that
what we're seeing like right now maybe is like a
sort of creative non union. And when we're talking at
the beginning about people just saying general strike, general strike,
it's like whatever happens next will be something different. What
(37:58):
we're seeing is we're seeing over this time the mechanism
of counterinsurgency get a lot more complex. Right, So in
the eighteen seventies, it's let's get some guns and force
everyone to come back to work. But now it's why
don't we get nonprofits to fund these you know, public programs.
Why don't we have community policing and coffee with cops,
and and so you saw during the George Floyd uprising,
(38:20):
as he saw a lot of this like, well, I
know that y'all want to cut funding from police departments,
but really what you should do is you should come
to our budget meeting and we could put it in
the city budget and we should talk about it that way.
And that was the way to force there in the
streets back into a mechanism that's able to be more
easily controlled. Um. But we see in like rust belt
cities Pittsburgh, Cleveland, places like this, the way that the
(38:42):
wealthy at this period of time, the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, we're already talking about trying to change
entire environments, right, So like surveillance, nonprofit activity like that
changes the whole environments. It's not just about a single
individual objective, but it shapes an entire reality. In these
rust belt cities during that period of time, I mean,
you have a lot of like free art museums and
(39:03):
stuff like this that are world class institutions, but if
you look at their charters and actually look at them closely,
the reason those institutions exist was, to quote inculturate the
working class, and it was all about like Rockefeller very
specifically Cleveland money to these institutions so the working class
wouldn't kill them, like wouldn't murder them. And it was
in the middle of really intense anti capitalist activity in
(39:27):
those cities, right and so we can watch the development
of those techniques right now. It takes the form of
defunding the police campaigns and things like that as opposed
to abolitionism. Um It takes the form of trying to
find softer means of policing, like surveillance as opposed to
just happen clubs and guns and stuff um. Or, in
the case of the Democratic Party, of the smart Border,
(39:48):
when they talk about the smart Border, which is essentially
putting a bunch of sensors and cameras in the desert
to try and catch people crossing the border, that somehow
less repressive by shaping the entire space around surveillance, that
somehow less repressive than just having police. And they use
that idea that if they're not in a uniform, and
they don't have a weapon right in front of them,
(40:08):
or aren't human, that somehow there's some benefit that emerges
and somehow the state is retreating a little bit when
in actuality thinks like body cameras, stuff like that just
increase the ability of the state to have visibility, just
increases the number of cameras on the street and increases
the ability of the state to control information and decide
what information gets out. Um. These are all things which
(40:28):
have reinforced the power of the state, but they get
portrayed as you know, forms of as reforms that are
supposed to solve these huge social problems that people keep
raising up. Well, speaking of things rich people give us
so we won't kill them, We're going to know here
for some from some of our sponsors. So far, we've
(40:56):
talked about general strikes that are largely over a hundred
years old. But now we're going to turn and look
at two examples of general strikes that took place within
the last twenty years. In December of two thousand five,
Republicans passed in the House of Representatives Hr four four
three seven, also known as the Border Protection, Anti Terrorism
(41:17):
and a Legal Immigration Control Act of two thousand five,
a proposed piece of legislation that's as jaconian as it sounds.
The bill as the A C. L You wrote, pushed
to quote militarize the border, give extraordinary powers to low
level immigration officials, allowing law enforcement to expel without hearing
anyone believed to be undocumented and detained non citizens and
(41:41):
definitely without meaningful review. The bill also sought to levy
criminal penalties against anyone that engage in assisting someone that
was undocumented, which threatened both employers of undocumented workers, as
well as union organizers, teachers, clergy, and beyond, foreshadowing the
Trump presidency. It also called for hundreds of miles of
(42:01):
border fence and authorized state and local law enforcement to
enforce federal immigration law. As George Kemphas wrote in the
See Say Poity Insurrection, the bill would transform almost every
person in the United States into either undocumented violators, police enforcers,
or classify them as criminally complicit. The authoritarian nature of
(42:23):
the legislation in the existential threat it represented, pushed many
a document of workers to take action and organize on
a mass scale. As Kemphis wrote, starting in March of
two thousand, six marches and more than half a million
people overwhelmed the centers of major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago,
New York, and Dallas halteen business, while there were literally
(42:45):
hundreds of smaller gatherings and many other smaller cities. There
were dozens of student walkouts and high schools around the country,
as well as a nationwide immigrant general strike called for
on Maybia that was heated by hundreds of tho perhaps
millions of workers, including truck drivers, who shut down the
port of Los Angeles. Despite a series of large scale
(43:07):
immigration raids aimed at derailing the movement, millions took the
streets and carried out strikes, all outside of the direction
of union in Democratic Party leadership. The mass protests and
strikes helped revive May Day as a day of labor
and worker action in the United States. Installed for over
a decade. Right wing attacks on immigrants HR four fourth
three seven failed to pass, in large part due to
(43:29):
the mass opposition it faced on the streets in the
spring of two thousand six. Direct action, as they say,
gets the goods. And what's fascinating about the two thousand
six strike is that it was organized outside of established
unions and political parties, especially the Democratic Party, had a
key youth wing to it. We saw lots of student walkouts.
(43:49):
It was able to seriously push back against this draconian
wave of anti immigrant legislation, and that worked for around
ten years. And it seems like we don't reference this
strike enough and talk about how important it was. I
was in a junior in high school when kids were
walking out, but this is how I sleep. I was.
I didn't walk out, and I just remember thinking, Oh
(44:10):
my god, those kids are so courageous and they're such badasses,
and it's so cool that they're doing that, and I
wish that I could well. That law was like Fugitive
Slave Law Act, Like straight up, they were just trying
to like re install slavery among people who were not
here documented like you know what I mean. They were
trying to create a situation where people were still working despread,
they were going to work for slave wages. And I'll
(44:31):
say this about New York City, there's a huge like
immigrant population, a huge undocumented work of population that we
didn't even I mean, I didn't know about until COVID hit.
Like there's a lot of people who were keeping the
economy alive that are not even counted, and they pay
for our existence. As we're talking about those two things
that always come up for me when talking about these strikes.
First is, you know, the entire concept of quote immigration
(44:54):
reform as it was being talked about by Republicans at
the time and then later accelerated under Trump. This idea
of order walls started with the American Nazi Party, right, Like,
this was an American Nazi Party policy proposal in the
nineteen fifties and sixties that got picked up through white
supremacist movements, through people like George Wallace and sort of
imported into the Republican Party. Yeah, because it's Nazis. I
(45:19):
think the other thing that was really inspiring about that movement.
I was, you know, out of college at that point
watching this happen. It was one of the first times
I saw mass decentralized action happened across the entire country
at that scale that sort of hit and apex like
during these days, right, the sort of period of time
(45:40):
in which people kind of took it upon themselves to
shut the whole country down. And it just shows what
can happen when community is organized as communities of people
and not as spectators in some sort of removed symbolic
political action, but actually become immediate protagonists and what's going
on in front of them. And the other thing I
think is like really interesting about this is that it
was such a massive response and the of what the
(46:01):
Act was saying was that you could be like prosecutor
for assisting someone who's undocumented. That I think it goes
back to what we've been talking about with the other
strikes stuff, is like the government is very aware that
like solidarity between people is dangerous basically and tries to
letistate it. And we see, you know, after that strike
in you know, the Strikebay in event seven, you start
to get all those anti conspiracy laws and stuff because
(46:23):
that's a threat. And I love that in this sense.
It's like they put that out and it gets like, um,
such a massive response against it that people really like
win basically and that last for like a decade. Yeah.
I think that goes back to the idea of white
supremacy historically in the United States, being this system of
how people described it, of carrots and sticks, of offering
(46:45):
incentives to be included in this bracket of whiteness. That
also saying if you help that kid at school, we're
gonna throw you in jail along with them, which again
is a good reason to celebrate these strikes because they
were effective and beating back this legislation, but also pointing
out that everyone should have been taking part in these actions. Well, hey,
(47:07):
thanks for tuning in. That's gonna wrap up the first episode.
We encourage you to follow us going down on masses
on at I g D Underscore News and we hope
you enjoyed us taking over It could Happen here. We're
gonna be back tomorrow. We're going to continue to look
at general strikes. We're gonna do a deep dive into
Occupy Oakland that kicked off in two thousand eleven, and
(47:30):
we're gonna look at how a citywide general strike grew
out of the Oakland Commune after the police nearly murdered
in Iraq War veteran and thanks for tuning in. It
could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
(47:51):
cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could
Happen Here. Updated month Lee at cool zone Media dot
com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
We live in a period of increasing class conflict. During
the Trump years, strike action reached the seventeen year high.
Strikes surged, increasing almost as workers fought back against rising
inflation and the cost of living. Fights over unionization hit
sectors previously thought to be un organizable, as workers declared
(00:27):
victory across fast food chains, Starbucks, and Amazon. And this
increased strike activity is taking place against the rising course
of revolt. Tenants are forming unions and launching rent strikes.
Riots kick off in the face of police murdering on
average over three people per day, and kids walk out
of school demanding everything from access to ppe to an
(00:48):
end to attacks on queer and trans youth. It's not
just that strikes are increasing, but the logic of the
strike to strike a blow against one's class enemies, to
enact a cost and generalize collective refusal, is spreading. As
comes to a close, the largest strike by education workers
across the University of California system has seen barricades, occupied buildings,
(01:12):
and strikers even liberating dining halls to feed themselves. Members
of the United Mine Workers have been on the picket
lines for almost two years, and this holiday season, over
one thousand rail workers stunned the brink of crippling the
US economy and an effort to win sickly as the
government rushed to enforce a contract and break the strike.
(01:32):
With so many people on the verge of striking, it's
easy to wonder what would happen if a strike across
industries could be organized, a general strike. It's this very
subject that we tackle in today's show. And speaking of strikes,
the producers of it could happen here have walked off
the job that it's going down. It's taken over, that's right.
(01:55):
I g D will be occupying the means of this
production for five shows throughout the month of January as
we address some of the major issues of today while
looking back at recent examples in history about how the
exploiting excluded have attempted to meet the conditions which miserate
our lives head on. Each episode, of course, is going
to have special guests and a deep die from us.
(02:15):
Launching the summer of two thousands fifteen, It's Going Down
as a media platform, radio show and podcast. It covers
a ton of a social movements from an anarchist perspective.
As a group we represent folks from across the US.
Tom and myself have been involved in covering and participating
in social struggles for over twenty years. Sophie's a long
(02:36):
time educator and community organizer across multiple continents. Marcella is
a writer and comedian. This is Mike Andrews. Happy to
be here. I'm Sophie Marcella and I'm Tom. Yeah, this
is really cool. Thanks to all that it can happen
here people. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm excited to be here
and talk about strikes. It's gonna be a fun time. Yeah,
(02:56):
I'm excited about today's topic very much. So, just art off.
It's interesting. It seems like every few weeks on social media,
every couple of months, whenever there's like a big issue
that comes up or something's going on in the news cycle,
the idea of a general strike will trend or sort
of kind of get out in the ether as this
zeit guys that becomes really popular, and you know, we
(03:17):
live in this time and increasing protests and strikes and riots.
But it also seems like the possibility of a general
strike seems like very far off, or the idea of
it even being this like trending thing on social media
is sort of like passe or silly. And also it
happens so often and we don't see it materialized, it
(03:38):
can be easy to sort of write it off. Or
on the other hand, a lot of people will say, well,
if you want that to happen instead of just like
wishing it to be on social media, you should just
join a union and get involved that way. It seems
that this drive to constantly declared general strikes, though ambitious,
(03:59):
sometimes to the point of, you know, people being able
to sort of make fun of it, the reality is
is that the repeated sort of call for that has
normalized that idea. And what we're seeing a lot in
specifically in the US, but we're seeing a lot of
people at their workplaces recognized that the business unions have failed, right,
It's how we got here. You know, I live in
(04:19):
the rest belt. I live in the midst of the
failure of business unions every single day in my life.
And that they've also come to understand something that the
autonomous in Italy were talking about the seventies, which is
that workers already control the means of production. They're already there.
They already run the coffee shop, run the restaurant, run
the warehouse, run the tech company, whatever, and if they
just stop, nobody makes any money. And you don't need
(04:40):
a union in a formal sense to do that. And
so I think a lot of workers that traditionally fell
outside of unions are starting to understand their powers workers
outside of that structure, and that is incredibly important for
us going forward. Yeah, I mean, I think you're totally right.
I mean, I don't think quiet quitting came out of nowhere.
And I know it's just like an idea. I like
loud quating more like I prefer that. But I do
(05:03):
think this culture, we're creating a culture where it is
okay to be anti work. It is okay for you
to say I hate my job and I actually don't
do anything and I steal for my boss, and we
should normalize that, right, Like, I don't think striking is
just this whole thing, and I do want to say
this before I move into that. Every single time I
posted TikTok video, somebody's always like general strike July. So
it's like, yeah, it's definitely on the internet a lot.
(05:25):
But I do think even people saying that I'm not
doing it has an impact because it's like, what is
that Martin Soustri said, you have to fight the culture,
and the culture that we live in now is a
culture that's like obsessed with work for work sake, and
so like maybe part of it is like, yeah, workers
already owns the means of production. Yeah, just don't work
as hard on your job, you know, and if your
work steal from your boss. It doesn't have to be
(05:45):
like this organizational thing. Because one thing is that, like
you have to realize is that sometimes union work unions
work with management. So it's like even if you're like, yeah,
like I want to wait for my union, it's like
what if your union is like the fertila union that
will go behind your back and like make this. Um.
I guess all this to say is that I think
changing the culture is important. Um, And I think that's
(06:06):
happening now. I think yeah, like you said at the
end of that, just like how something that I think
we'll get into a lot more in this episode is
looking at how this life claims to join the union
being the practical thing to do towards a general strike
just isn't accurate at all, and that when you look
back in history at kind of any of the exciting
moments of UM general strikes are uprising and stuff. It
(06:26):
doesn't come from those official channels UM, and so I'm
excited to get into that more. And I think, Yeah,
I like we're saying like this thing where it's just
become this thing that people will like say and talk about,
even if there's not that cultural memory of like exactly
what a general strike means or what what what's going
to happen. There's this idea of like refusal and of
solidarity that is captured just in the world and just
(06:46):
in saying it. But I think it's really like showing
that energy up and speaking of cultural memory. Fact, you're
dynamite in your pitchforks because it's time for a trip
down memory lane. In the early ninety hundreds of the
United States, groups like the Industrial Workers of the World
of the IWW, which advocated for the abolition of the
wage system and capitalism, rejected racist exclusions of non white
(07:10):
workers in the labor movement and even engaged in shootouts
with the k KK, popularized the idea of the general
strike in the United States on a large scale, with
the idea itself and its application in US history it's
much older. Throughout the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, anarchists, socialists,
and everyday members of the working class all promoted and
carried out multiple general strikes as a means to win
(07:32):
political and economic concessions. For some, the general strike was
also a launchpad for revolution, in which workers could, in theory,
seize the means of existence out of the hands of
the capitalist class and run society on its own terms.
And it's this battle that thrust millions of everyday working
class people directly into conflict with the American state and
its military. In US history, the first large scale example
(07:54):
of a general strike occurred in the midst of the
American Civil War and W. E. B. Du Bois famous
book Black Reconstruction, he explains how it was the general
strike of the enslaved black proletariat that brought down the
plantation system, not President Lincoln er union bullets. The boys
argues that just like the black lead insurrections of today
and ferguson him Minneapolis, this strike took bourgeois white society
(08:16):
by total surprise, he writes it. In the South, newspapers
denied the very idea that slaves could ever free themselves
and even claim that they quote did not want to
be free. He writes of white society in the North.
The North shrank at the very thought of encouraging servile
insurrection against the whites. Above all, it did not propose
to interfere with property. Black people on the whole were
(08:36):
considered cowards, inferior beings whose very presence in America was unfortunate.
Only John Brown knew that revolt would come, and he
was dead. So the boys really painted this picture of
this mass care and society in which slavery is seen
as very sad. More terrifying is the idea of mass
black insurrection, which of course and mirrors today's situation. I
(08:57):
mean the suburbs are, I mean right like that someburbs are.
It's like for you to like pretend like all the
things that you have are not built on blood. It's
for you to like segment yourself away from the people
in society that give you everything you have, yet you
deny them everything. See you going you a little home
(09:18):
and like drinking a little tea and like watch a
little movies and just like ignore the fact that you're
an apphle. You know what I mean? Like just like
and even not even more more than an apple. I
was going as far as saying, I used to say
that they're not good or bad people, but like you're
acting like a bad person, like you don't care about
other people because you've been tricked to think that, like
you're getting a good deal. And it's an interesting point
that the Boys makes about just like. It was only
(09:40):
kind of the radical wing of the abolishness movement that
was talking about open revolt. There's this early anarchist A
lot of people don't reference a lot but why is
under Spooner. He conspired with John Brown various plots, and
he later became a member of the First International and
a contributor to early anarchist publications like Liberty. He produced
this really early text which is just fantastic. It's called
(10:01):
A Plan for the Abolish of Slavery, published in eighteen
fifty eight. It's a couple of years before the Civil War.
He writes, our plan then is to make our war
openly or secretly. A circumstances may dictate upon the property
of the slaveholders, burn the master's buildings, kill their cattle
and horses, conceal or destroy farming utensils, abandoned labor and
(10:22):
seed time and harvest and let the crops perish, make
slavery unprofitable. I love the line conceal or destroys. Like
you can destroy them, you can also hide them. This
is like a parallel that we can drawn out to.
Like if you want to like have solidarity with like
like other wage slaves, is that like do accommodate them
and help them steal from their I mean from their jobs.
(10:43):
I mean it's like these things happened in the past,
but these are tactics that we can still use in
the present. There's echoes of this quote later with Lucy Parsons, Right,
you see this during the Structure in our work at
Chicago where she gives a speech where she's talking about
grabbing knives and going to the doors of the rent
as a way to make it very very very clear
that they weren't going to be able to live off
(11:04):
the backs of the working class anymore. Right, Um. And
it's the sort of idea of direct action, which now,
I mean, if we think about now, what are politicians doing.
They're trying to pass laws to make it a felony
to have home demonstrations, right, to like do exactly these
kinds of things, but in much more passive ways. So
if we can really think back, I mean, this is
a tried and true technique that people used in the
(11:25):
United States for a very very long time, and we
can see still how much that terrifies people with power.
There's another awesome quote from Spooner I just want to
read as well, and this I find this one really
interesting because he's speaking actually to white people in the South,
especially people that work in the slave patrols. He says,
white rascals of the South, willing tools of the slaveholders.
You who drive slaves to do their labor, hunt them
(11:47):
with dogs, and flog them for pay without asking any questions.
You are the main pillars of the slave system. That
is the most eloquent way to say exactly, yeah, that's
exactly what I was thinking. I think it's interesting to
point out, as do boys Rights. And as Frederick Douglas
said of the Civil War, it was started quote in
(12:08):
the interests of slavery on both sides. The South was
fighting to take slavery out of the Union and the
North was fighting to keep it in. And the mass
black exodus did not kick off at the start of
the war. He makes the really important point that union
leaders made it clear that they did not want to
disrupt the plantation system. At times, generals even offered to
(12:29):
put down slave rebellions, and he says that they even forbade,
at least in some instances, union soldiers from singing the
song John Brown's Body. But as the North pushed into
the South, the flood of former slaves escaping into Union
hands grew and grew. By eighteen sixty two, is the
Boys rights, This was the beginning of the swarming of
increasing numbers no longer to work on Confederate plantations, a
(12:53):
movement that became a general strike against the slave system.
This was not merely the desire to stop work. It
was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions
of work. It was a general strike that evolved directly
in the end, perhaps half a million people. They wanted
to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to
do that they left the plantations. It's interesting too, and
(13:14):
The Boys makes this point the general strike also encouraged
and took place alongside many poor whites deserting the Confederate army.
One thing that's interesting about the Confederate side of the
Civil War, you could get out of fighting if you
own slaves, And a lot of poor whites deserted the
Confederate army, which further crippled it. As the Boys noted,
the poor white not only began to desert and run away,
(13:36):
but thousands followed black people into the northern camps. And
just some key takeaways to like launching the discussion side
of this, It's interesting that the wider society, as the
Boys notes, before the Civil War disparaged the possibility of
mass collective action. And I think this really mirrors contemporary
conspiracy theories and narratives around black rebellion today that happened
(13:58):
often either in the midst of the George Floyd Uprising
or afterwards. And also the mass strike and refusal that
happened during the Civil War, which disrupted the economy and
made things like the slave patrols, the policing of the
plantation system impossible. That helped bring down the Confederacy, obviously,
(14:18):
and I think it's important to ask, as our contemporary
society remains structured around racial capitalism, what might be done
in the current system in terms of mass refusal and
desertion that would cause a similar effect. The idea of
the wider society and disparaging mass collective action is because
that the fear is letting us know that we do
(14:40):
have mass power, you know what I mean. It's like
it's not a surprise that people always say that Lincoln
freed the slaves, and Lincoln literally said, if I had
to end slavery to save the Union, I would have
ended slavery. And if I have to keep slavery to
save the Union, I would have kept a slavery you
know what I mean. So just like this whole idea
of like letting black people know you can't do shi it,
don't even bother is the they know that we can't
(15:01):
do ship, and we are doing ship because black people
are always rebelling. Um, if you come to flop push,
you see it in full color. They realize the government
isn't give a funk about them, and they've created their
own institutions to support themselves. Um. Yeah, So it's like
this whole idea to let us tell us don't even
bother and and and like criminalizing like the informal sector
(15:21):
because it's like that's a way for us like gain
power outside of like the formal sector, you know what
I mean, and things like that. So I just think
it's like it's like when they tell us, don't bother
trying to fight back, like everybody has to suffer, Like
that's what they always think. Everybody suffered, and we all
just suffer and it's like, no, we don't want to suffer,
and we're actually doing things to ease our suffering. And um,
(15:41):
I think this is just like all this is to
say that people who are out there doing stuff keep
doing stuff, and like, if you want to do stuff,
do it. You don't have to be brought of reunion.
You don't have to put your job and be an activist.
By the way, paid activists not really activists. You can
do regular ship and you hold that. You can do
a free stool in the corner on the street so
people can have clothes. It's like you could striking from
(16:03):
the economy means like divesting your time and resources, and
you can do it. We can all do it in
some shape or form well, And I think it becomes
a lot more possible today to think about that than
it did, say before. Right, So we had this kind
of collapse of the legitimacy of the American political projects,
sort of with the Iraq War, right, we all kind
(16:25):
of saw how badly that can turn out. But what
was left in America to uphold the entire edifice was
the idea that even though things politically were kind of
screwed up, at least there's economic success. And then that
failed to right. And so this sort of idea that
built up after World War Two, this kind of concept
(16:46):
of you know, the labor corpor compromise, the loyal worker
that's going to get provided for for the rest of
their life. Not only did our parents generation find out
that that was a lie, but younger generations don't really
buy it at all. And so what you're really seeing is,
I think this kind of breakdown socially of the legitimacy
of the idea of the American dream because of all
(17:08):
of its problematic elements and it's impossibility and its absurdity,
and kind of this revival of an idea which existed
prior to World War Two, which was an idea of
social revolt, right, and it was something we saw manifest
during the Great Depression, and it's part of the reason
why the New Deal exists. Was a way to put
that down was a way to prevent workers from feeling
(17:31):
like the only thing that they had in front of
them was to take over their factories and show up
at the doors of the rich and so on, so
and so on. Right. But that whole idea of the
New Deal, that concept that the government was going to
take care of you and the company was going to
take care of you, collapsed in the nineties seventies, but
the idea that it existed still holds on in some
(17:53):
sectors of the of America today. I mean, you see
this with the magacrat out really heavily, the idea that
like nothing systematically needs change, really we just need better outcomes,
and we just need, you know, in their case, Donald Trump,
to pay attention to us and give us the things
that we want. But really, outside of that almost comical patriotism, um,
you don't really see a lot of adherence to that
(18:15):
vision any further. And that makes the idea of mass
refusal not only a lot more possible, but something that's
actively happening currently. Yeah, And the other parts who I
want to bring in is that when the New Deal
is caused, it excluded like black people, right, And so
that's one way It's like it's like this constants, like
how white people are like tricked into like submitting to
the system, and it happens so many times, and they
(18:35):
still keep saying, took us again, took us again. It's like, yeah,
they're gonna give you ship so you're not upset, and
then they're going to exclude black people because at the
end of the day, black people do all the work
that we need to survive as a society. Do we
not remember who the essential workers were? Like who does
the jobs that we need to like live, like, you
know what I mean? So yeah, you could like be
out of work and get your little thing, But as
(18:56):
long as we keep inslating and treating the people who
make this aciet any run, it's fine. Um. And now
that's happening to white people too, and they're like, oh no,
this is not cute, like it's not fun and quiet quitting,
you know what I mean, Because like there we are,
like the way black people have been treated is certing
to happen to white people. And it's just like I
hope this is what I was going to ask you.
How do we prevent another New Deal situation from happening
(19:18):
where white workers are tricked again, Like because I feel
it's coming. I feel like they're going to find a
way out of this, and like how do we know
what if it's like bullshit? And like how do we
call it out? And how do we call it out?
That's what student unforgiveness was, right. I mean, like, if
we really think about it, the Democratic parties been built
recently since the Obama era on this idea of reinstituting
(19:38):
elements of the New Deal without threatening the existence of capitalism. Um,
very intentionally right. We saw that the Affordable Care Act
as version of that. Right. So, I mean they are
doing this and I think what's fascinating about this, And
this is something that radicals in the late sixties pointed
out often about Lyndon Johnson is they said, you know,
liberals voted for Lyndon Johnson and they put all their
(20:01):
hopes in him, so when he failed them, it didn't
have anything left to do except hit the streets, right,
Like there was no other option. And I think what
we've really seen since the Obama era is the collapse
of the idea that the way that the Democrats do
social assistances in any way going to solve anything. Um,
that's just going to continue to perpetuate the situation of
which we need social assistance, right, as opposed to fundamentally
(20:23):
ending that, which is you know, the language that they
put forward when they talked about things like justice, which
we all know that they don't really have much adherence to. Right.
But I think until the until the Democratic Party gains
legitimacy again, if they ever do, which hopefully they don't,
but if they ever do, yeah, we might be able
to see this kind of use of reformedism, this counterinsurgency again, right,
(20:43):
which is really what the New Deal was. But really
until that, I mean we saw in twenty you know,
when the legitimacy of the group of people who often
relies on that technique falls apart, you get uprisings in
the streets, right. And so we're at kind of a
different point, I think than than maybe just before the
new kind of came into effect. Something I want to
go back to too, that I think it's relevant to
this is the piece where the quote um is talking
(21:07):
about concealing or like in secret or in public or whatever.
How there's like a lot of power in terms of
like things like general strikes in that sort of like
invisibility or whatever in the unpredictability in like not going
for like building movements based on like visibility or public
perception or like the media or whatever, but actually building
(21:27):
them in these ways that can't be seen as much
and might be concealed. Um. And also this thing where
people are underestimated, Like it makes me think about the
revolution in Haiti in the late seventeen hundreds, which is
you know, a long time ago but still very relevant, um.
And just thinking about how the kind of like colonizes
in Paris, like couldn't believe the reports that were coming
out of uprising in Haiti at the time because they
(21:50):
were so racist basically that they didn't believe that black
people there who were they could rise up and could
have that like no awareness gump or whatever. Um. And
that gave them a lot of room, you know, that
was like a position of power for them that like, um,
they were being underestimated like that much. And I think
that's something we see with like even though like the
(22:11):
idea that's gone on from that time really of like
outside agitator and stuff like in any uprising that we
see um involved. Yeah, that both part people is that
there's something in that that is also powerful and it
gives possibility. Well, speaking of outside agitators, we're going to
take a break and hear from some of our sponsors
right now. In eighteen sixty five, on paper, the Civil
(22:44):
War ended and the Union was saved. A decade later,
the North began pointing out of the cell, marking me
into reconstruction efforts in the beginning of both jem Crow
and a reign of terror and white vigilaneism in the
form of the ku Klux Klan. The eighteen seventies was
also a period of increasing poverty, declaiming wages, rising homelessness,
(23:07):
economic depression, and exploding class conflict, as the stage was
said for the Great Upheaval of eighteen seventy seven, a
general strike that rocked multiple states as workers across lines
of color, gender, profession, and age threatened the very core
of the capitalist state. As the decades were on, multiple
general strikes followed, as did a heavy handed government response
(23:29):
that evolved to police and repressed the broader population. Wanting
to know more about this history of these general strikes
in their importance, we caught up with labor historian and
author Robert Ovett's, author of one workers shot back, and
we the elites. Ovetts argues that the often violent general
strikes of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds
showcase the ability of working people. It's not only confront
(23:51):
the state and capitalism, but also organized society on their
own terms. Well. General strikes have been a rare occurrence,
but a very powerful example of the way that organized
workers and communities can transform society and hopefully transcend capitalism.
(24:12):
I think we have in the examples of general strikes
in US history an example of the potential for getting
beyond capitalism, and so that's what makes them really exciting
to to study and to write about. At A general
strike doesn't just happen, and we don't actually know exactly
why general strikes happen, but we know that they don't
(24:32):
just happen. They're not spontaneous. There has to be a
groundwork of organizing and engaged activists and organizers who are
working quietly, sometimes for months or years, to to work
and organizing their fellow workers and to build community connections
(24:53):
to support their strike actions. And there also has to
be a good communication of what what the strike is about,
what their demands are, and the ability to communicate and
spread information about that strike. Probably the two most important
general strikes in US history were the one in eighteen
(25:14):
seventy seven and the one in nine in Seattle. And
the one in eighteen seventy seven was a general strike
throughout the railroad industry, but it also had extraordinary um microcosmic,
if you will, a general strike that was happening in St.
Louis and East St. Louis. But what was fascinating about
(25:34):
that was that the groundwork had been laid in eighteen
seventy seven, not by a union actually, because the workers
had tried to form a union, but it was sabotaged,
it was infiltrated, and they tried to the the organizers
tried to call off the set date to start the
general strike and the railroad industry, but the workers went
on strike anyways, and they built their own organization across
(25:58):
dozens of different railroad come panies on their own. In St. Louis, however,
there was a new left wing party called the Working
Men's Party that was formed by various socialists and communists
and anarchists who had taken over the city and for
a few days tried to run it and that was.
That was probably closer to what happened in Seattle in
(26:19):
nineteen nineteen, where over a hundred local unions actually pressured
the Labor Council to call a general strike, and so
that was kind of built up from below through formal unions.
But then it went far beyond anything that those AFL
affiliated unions were willing to really do. The St. Louis
(26:39):
General Strike in eighteen seventy seven that I was just mentioning. Uh,
there was a multi racial coalition of worker organizers who
literally took charge of the strike. There had been a
strike committee form and those that strike committee was dominated
by the Working Men's Party activists, but the workers themselves
(27:00):
started to organize outside the confines of the strike coordinating committee,
and it was very multiracial. They started marching on one
workplace and another. Uh. There was some evidence that there
were some women that were involved in it. So there
were strong ties to the community and various households and neighborhoods.
But they marched on one workplace to another and spread
(27:22):
the strike, and within a couple of days much of
the city had been shut down. And the irony of
this was that the strike coordinating council actually freaked out
about how multi racial of the crowds were that were
shutting down these workplaces and leaving and leaving work um
and internally they became very divided based on their their racism,
(27:46):
and there were some members of the coordinating committee that
were extreme racial supremacists and didn't want the strike to continue,
and they debated how to stop the strike, how to
call it off, and but the reality was that they
had lost control of it to the workers outside of
the committee. And when it became clear that the militias
(28:08):
were being called into St. Louis to attack the city,
the workers marched on the Medium Hall where the strike
coordinating council was and demanded that they appropriate money to
acquire arms to defend the city. But they refused to
do that, and they eventually tried to call off the strike.
(28:28):
Uh So that lasted a few days, and race was
a huge factor in why the strikes spread and how
the workers took over the city, But it was also
a factor and how it was actually killed by those
who were supposedly quote unquote running the actual general strike.
In the case of Seattle, we don't know as much
about the racial composition of the workers. UM. But we
(28:49):
do know that it was very generalized throughout the entire city. UM.
And the reason we know this is because the the
General Strike Committee, which was formed by the Labor count
soul I, had representatives of every union and they took
care of many of the reproductive needs of the population.
For example, they kept the hospital running. UH. They set
(29:10):
up free kitchens where people could eat UM. They as
well as setting up and publishing a newspaper that came
out every day during the five days of the strike,
so they took care of also of public safety. UM.
So what was extraordinary about the Seattle General Strike is
how it incorporated many of these issues that we would
(29:32):
say is about gender and reproductive needs of the population.
They didn't just shut down the workplace. They actually took
over the city and reorganized society to meet the needs
of humanity. The seven strike actually resulted in what I
show in a lot of detail in my first book,
when workers shot back, how the state and capital reorganized
(29:57):
themselves in order to u be able to respond a
lot quicker to self organized workers and strikes and especially
general strikes. For example, the modern police came into being
in many cities as a result of the eighteen seventy
seven strike because up until that point, the police were um,
(30:18):
if you will, they were kind of like gig workers.
They worked on quote unquote tips or bribes. UH. There
were very few cities that had any municipal police, and
if they did, they had very small forces. And so
that was one reason why the strikes spread so quickly
around the country over that that ten day or so
period in July of eighteen seventy seven. UH, So modern
(30:40):
policing really came into being. Also, as you mentioned, the
militias were transformed into what became the National Guard. The
militias also proved to be undependable because they were mostly
composed of working men, and if they were called out locally,
they knew the strikers, and in fact, some of them
were strikers and didn't even show up for their militia duty.
(31:02):
So militias were essentially de emphasized and they were replaced
by a state controlled National Guard. UM. As a result
of the passage of a new federal law. UH, the
military was also funded on a permanent basis. One reason
why the military was so slow to be UH to
be deployed to put down the strike in eighteen seventy
(31:24):
seven was most of the soldiers were out in the
West fighting essentially a genocidal war against the Plans native peoples,
and so there weren't enough military around. And also Congress
hadn't funded the military that year, believe it or not,
and so the military was unfunded and undersized. Another consequence
of this was that many corporations started to work together
(31:47):
to create their own you could say, mutual aid to
protect one another. They started forming employer groups in order
to be able to respond to a more coordinated method.
Um So you started to see corporations cooperated result of this.
In fact, many of the technologies that we take for
granted today were a result of the eighteen seventy seven
railroad strike. For example, UH, the telegraph was installed in
(32:10):
many rich people's homes as a way to be able
to contact the police directly. Those lines went directly to
the police. UH. The so called pattiwagon was also invented
as a result of the eighteen seventy seven strike as
a weapon against large crowds. Um So, there were a
number of m of new technologies that were implemented UH
(32:31):
and became more widespread as a results of that strike
in Seattle. Also, the workers were prepared, they had known
their history, and they formed a self defense group UH
composed primarily of World War One veterans who had just
come back from more or one UM and they patrolled
the city and they did things like shut down bars
(32:53):
because they didn't want UH people to get drawnk and
start fighting and that would be a justification for the
the National Guard to be called in. But the police
started to essentially line up outside the boundaries of the
city and they waited for reinforcements threatenings essentially to invade
Seattle before the general strike was called off. But the
(33:14):
workers were prepared. They did carry out and organized self
defense against that eventuality. The Oakland general strike was part
of an extraordinary wave of post War two strikes that
were happening just like after Word one and actually during
Worldar one there was a wave of strikes UH. The
(33:35):
same thing happened when a lot of soldiers started coming
back from War two. Unemployment shot up, women were sent
as sent packing. UH prices exploded, there was a shortage
of housing UH and workers started to organize and UH.
During that few year period, UH there was a general
(33:57):
strike in the steel sector, and Truman threatened to take
over some of the larger companies, and he was repelled
by the Supreme Court. But as a consequence of this
uh this upsurge of class struggle, the Congress paths to
Taff Hardly Act, which still governs US today. For workers
(34:19):
who try to organize in the private sector where they're
under the National Labor Relations Act, the Taff Hardley Act
was an amendment to that law. One of the most
important things it did was a banned so called secondary strikes,
which means that if workers go on strike somewhere, workers
can't strike in solidarity um and particularly if they have
(34:44):
a union contract with their employer, it would be illegal. Now,
there are some workers that are exempted from that, for
example transport workers because they're under a different federal law.
They're under the Railway Labor Act, which is part of
the reason why we almost just saw rail railroad general
strike before the Democrats killed it a few weeks ago.
But the tapped Hartley Act continues to serve as a
(35:07):
means of suppressing and repressing the ability not only of
workers but organized unions in their local workplaces, but to
actually engage in a general strike. So again we've been
listening to Robert Ovette's author of One Workers Shot Back
and We the Elites. Just a few key takeaways from
that discussion. We see various examples in these general strikes
(35:28):
of tensions developing between more radical elements and reformist ones
that want to contain revolutionary expressions and also stop workers
from really taking over society. We also see positive examples
of these strikes spilling out across lines of race, gender,
and age and profession. One thing we see, of course,
again and again is the state responding to these strikes
(35:51):
with the combination of militia's police and of course the
National Guard. And finally, many of these strikes lead to
the passing of legislation, which is interesting because far are
from this sort of progressive arc towards justice. Instead, we
see constantly, again and again the state either reforming itself
to become more oppressive, engage in surveillance, reconstitute the police
(36:12):
in a certain way, reconstitute the military, or sometimes bring
the workers into the superstructure of the state and roorge
to better manage them. Yeah, I totally agree. It's not
getting better. They're just being smart about it. They're like
like little like slimy balls. They're just like reshaping as
they need to shape and form to like get workers.
So like when you were reading that, it felt like
(36:32):
a writer's were It felt like a movie of like
how do we control these people? You know what I mean?
It felt like it was like this like checker but
they're like, oh, they make their move, we make their move.
And it's like it's like the state as a tool
and like you see that because it's like it's a
tool of the elite, and you see that through the
laws that are passed, and like when they're passed, like
because when black and white people form them, this violence
like a lot of state violence, like extreme state violence,
(36:55):
because it's like they want to remind us like that's bad,
you don't do that, and then they'll do stuff to
play get worker like white workers too, like with a
Wagoner Act, like with unionization, like a lot of black
people were excluded from that. Maybe just maybe things aren't
getting better like they're telling you they are. Things are
just reshaving. That's something else I'm thinking about as you're talking.
And just like from from that history that it is
like we hear that like the creativity of the state
(37:17):
with their oppression or whatever that's going on, but also
how people keep coming back with like new and different things,
you know, like it actually takes a lot of repression
to stop these things. Like if you look at what
happened Stubben or whatever, it's like they killed quite a
lot of people to stop that strike wave and stuff,
you know, like it's really heavy handed. And then but
still a lot of strikes happen after that, and it
(37:37):
leads up to Haymarket in age six or whatever. And
I just think, again, again, we seem like repression, but
then we see it flowering again. And I think that
what we're seeing like right now maybe is like a
sort of creative non union. And when we're talking at
the beginning about people just saying general strike, general strike,
it's like whatever happens next will be something different. What
(37:58):
we're seeing is we're seeing over this time the mechanism
of counterinsurgency get a lot more complex. Right, So in
the eighteen seventies, it's let's get some guns and force
everyone to come back to work. But now it's why
don't we get nonprofits to fund these you know, public programs.
Why don't we have community policing and coffee with cops,
and and so you saw during the George Floyd uprising,
(38:20):
as he saw a lot of this like, well, I
know that y'all want to cut funding from police departments,
but really what you should do is you should come
to our budget meeting and we could put it in
the city budget and we should talk about it that way.
And that was the way to force there in the
streets back into a mechanism that's able to be more
easily controlled. Um. But we see in like rust belt
cities Pittsburgh, Cleveland, places like this, the way that the
(38:42):
wealthy at this period of time, the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, we're already talking about trying to change
entire environments, right, So like surveillance, nonprofit activity like that
changes the whole environments. It's not just about a single
individual objective, but it shapes an entire reality. In these
rust belt cities during that period of time, I mean,
you have a lot of like free art museums and
(39:03):
stuff like this that are world class institutions, but if
you look at their charters and actually look at them closely,
the reason those institutions exist was, to quote inculturate the
working class, and it was all about like Rockefeller very
specifically Cleveland money to these institutions so the working class
wouldn't kill them, like wouldn't murder them. And it was
in the middle of really intense anti capitalist activity in
(39:27):
those cities, right and so we can watch the development
of those techniques right now. It takes the form of
defunding the police campaigns and things like that as opposed
to abolitionism. Um It takes the form of trying to
find softer means of policing, like surveillance as opposed to
just happen clubs and guns and stuff um. Or, in
the case of the Democratic Party, of the smart Border,
(39:48):
when they talk about the smart Border, which is essentially
putting a bunch of sensors and cameras in the desert
to try and catch people crossing the border, that somehow
less repressive by shaping the entire space around surveillance, that
somehow less repressive than just having police. And they use
that idea that if they're not in a uniform, and
they don't have a weapon right in front of them,
(40:08):
or aren't human, that somehow there's some benefit that emerges
and somehow the state is retreating a little bit when
in actuality thinks like body cameras, stuff like that just
increase the ability of the state to have visibility, just
increases the number of cameras on the street and increases
the ability of the state to control information and decide
what information gets out. Um. These are all things which
(40:28):
have reinforced the power of the state, but they get
portrayed as you know, forms of as reforms that are
supposed to solve these huge social problems that people keep
raising up. Well, speaking of things rich people give us
so we won't kill them, We're going to know here
for some from some of our sponsors. So far, we've
(40:56):
talked about general strikes that are largely over a hundred
years old. But now we're going to turn and look
at two examples of general strikes that took place within
the last twenty years. In December of two thousand five,
Republicans passed in the House of Representatives Hr four four
three seven, also known as the Border Protection, Anti Terrorism
(41:17):
and a Legal Immigration Control Act of two thousand five,
a proposed piece of legislation that's as jaconian as it sounds.
The bill as the A C. L You wrote, pushed
to quote militarize the border, give extraordinary powers to low
level immigration officials, allowing law enforcement to expel without hearing
anyone believed to be undocumented and detained non citizens and
(41:41):
definitely without meaningful review. The bill also sought to levy
criminal penalties against anyone that engage in assisting someone that
was undocumented, which threatened both employers of undocumented workers, as
well as union organizers, teachers, clergy, and beyond, foreshadowing the
Trump presidency. It also called for hundreds of miles of
(42:01):
border fence and authorized state and local law enforcement to
enforce federal immigration law. As George Kemphas wrote in the
See Say Poity Insurrection, the bill would transform almost every
person in the United States into either undocumented violators, police enforcers,
or classify them as criminally complicit. The authoritarian nature of
(42:23):
the legislation in the existential threat it represented, pushed many
a document of workers to take action and organize on
a mass scale. As Kemphis wrote, starting in March of
two thousand, six marches and more than half a million
people overwhelmed the centers of major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago,
New York, and Dallas halteen business, while there were literally
(42:45):
hundreds of smaller gatherings and many other smaller cities. There
were dozens of student walkouts and high schools around the country,
as well as a nationwide immigrant general strike called for
on Maybia that was heated by hundreds of tho perhaps
millions of workers, including truck drivers, who shut down the
port of Los Angeles. Despite a series of large scale
(43:07):
immigration raids aimed at derailing the movement, millions took the
streets and carried out strikes, all outside of the direction
of union in Democratic Party leadership. The mass protests and
strikes helped revive May Day as a day of labor
and worker action in the United States. Installed for over
a decade. Right wing attacks on immigrants HR four fourth
three seven failed to pass, in large part due to
(43:29):
the mass opposition it faced on the streets in the
spring of two thousand six. Direct action, as they say,
gets the goods. And what's fascinating about the two thousand
six strike is that it was organized outside of established
unions and political parties, especially the Democratic Party, had a
key youth wing to it. We saw lots of student walkouts.
(43:49):
It was able to seriously push back against this draconian
wave of anti immigrant legislation, and that worked for around
ten years. And it seems like we don't reference this
strike enough and talk about how important it was. I
was in a junior in high school when kids were
walking out, but this is how I sleep. I was.
I didn't walk out, and I just remember thinking, Oh
(44:10):
my god, those kids are so courageous and they're such badasses,
and it's so cool that they're doing that, and I
wish that I could well. That law was like Fugitive
Slave Law Act, Like straight up, they were just trying
to like re install slavery among people who were not
here documented like you know what I mean. They were
trying to create a situation where people were still working despread,
they were going to work for slave wages. And I'll
(44:31):
say this about New York City, there's a huge like
immigrant population, a huge undocumented work of population that we
didn't even I mean, I didn't know about until COVID hit.
Like there's a lot of people who were keeping the
economy alive that are not even counted, and they pay
for our existence. As we're talking about those two things
that always come up for me when talking about these strikes.
First is, you know, the entire concept of quote immigration
(44:54):
reform as it was being talked about by Republicans at
the time and then later accelerated under Trump. This idea
of order walls started with the American Nazi Party, right, Like,
this was an American Nazi Party policy proposal in the
nineteen fifties and sixties that got picked up through white
supremacist movements, through people like George Wallace and sort of
imported into the Republican Party. Yeah, because it's Nazis. I
(45:19):
think the other thing that was really inspiring about that movement.
I was, you know, out of college at that point
watching this happen. It was one of the first times
I saw mass decentralized action happened across the entire country
at that scale that sort of hit and apex like
during these days, right, the sort of period of time
(45:40):
in which people kind of took it upon themselves to
shut the whole country down. And it just shows what
can happen when community is organized as communities of people
and not as spectators in some sort of removed symbolic
political action, but actually become immediate protagonists and what's going
on in front of them. And the other thing I
think is like really interesting about this is that it
was such a massive response and the of what the
(46:01):
Act was saying was that you could be like prosecutor
for assisting someone who's undocumented. That I think it goes
back to what we've been talking about with the other
strikes stuff, is like the government is very aware that
like solidarity between people is dangerous basically and tries to
letistate it. And we see, you know, after that strike
in you know, the Strikebay in event seven, you start
to get all those anti conspiracy laws and stuff because
(46:23):
that's a threat. And I love that in this sense.
It's like they put that out and it gets like, um,
such a massive response against it that people really like
win basically and that last for like a decade. Yeah.
I think that goes back to the idea of white
supremacy historically in the United States, being this system of
how people described it, of carrots and sticks, of offering
(46:45):
incentives to be included in this bracket of whiteness. That
also saying if you help that kid at school, we're
gonna throw you in jail along with them, which again
is a good reason to celebrate these strikes because they
were effective and beating back this legislation, but also pointing
out that everyone should have been taking part in these actions. Well, hey,
(47:07):
thanks for tuning in. That's gonna wrap up the first episode.
We encourage you to follow us going down on masses
on at I g D Underscore News and we hope
you enjoyed us taking over It could Happen here. We're
gonna be back tomorrow. We're going to continue to look
at general strikes. We're gonna do a deep dive into
Occupy Oakland that kicked off in two thousand eleven, and
(47:30):
we're gonna look at how a citywide general strike grew
out of the Oakland Commune after the police nearly murdered
in Iraq War veteran and thanks for tuning in. It
could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
(47:51):
cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could
Happen Here. Updated month Lee at cool zone Media dot
com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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