My personal experience of the Nov. 2nd, 2011 attempted general strike in Oakland was a blast. The event was beautiful and exhilarating -- even the colors in the sky were perfect! More importantly, as the first attempt at a general strike in a U.S. city in sixty-six years, I hope Nov. 2nd in Oakland can stir a long-suffering wage-earning class in the United States to see the collective power we can have when we use a mass-scale workplace walkout as a political weapon against the owners of America. This is a gift to our future from the Occupy movement as a whole, and in particular a tribute to the outward-directed and working class focus of Occupy Oakland. Today in the Occupy movement, Oakland leads the way.
However we now need a critical examination of the problems in our efforts. We like to call the Occupy phenomenon in Oakland the "Oakland Commune," but within a few yards of the now suppressed campsite on the plaza in front of City Hall and across the rest of town work and commerce have gone uninterrupted. We like to call the big demo on Nov. 2nd a "General Strike," but the actual number of people who walked off the job that day may have been in the low single percentage points.
The word ‘strike' means "to hit with force' (Webster's dictionary.) Except for a few large windows of some deserving businesses, nothing got hit with force in Oakland on Nov. 2, 2011. It may be years until we have some accurate figure of the number of people who actually walked off the job in Oakland on Nov. 2nd, but my guess is that it was something less than 15% of the city's wage earners -- much lower than 10%, in fact.
A "strike" that the boss gives you permission to take part in isn't really a strike. In Oakland some of the forms this took were:
1. Employees represented by the California Nurses Association making use of their sick days,
2. Oakland City government employees were given permission from the city to "participate,"
3. And the occasionally leftist-jargon-slinging local of the port worker's union, the ILWU, needed to have masses of protesters block the gates to port facilities, and with this in place got an official mediator to approve of one of the port worker's shifts being cancelled.
A combattive minority of ILWU workers did walk off the job. Others went to work during an earlier shift on the day of the general strike.
A strike has to have a breaking-all-the-normal-rules, disruptive and destructive quality to be a true act of social or class rebellion. Members of the wage-earning class have to actually collectively withhold their labor power, and not meekly ask the boss for the day off. A strike has to do some damage to the economic interests of the bosses, and not enough damage was done in the Nov. 2nd event.
Before the strike, the call for a city-wide walkout was not publicized in a minimally adequate way. On the Saturday night before Wednesday's strike we had a march to the Oakland City Jail with a thousand people chanting anti-cop slogans. Two nights later I walked the length of Telegraph Avenue, one of Oakland's main streets, from the center of downtown Oakland to the Berkeley border, a distance of several miles, and saw a total of less than two dozen handbills slapped up in a desultory manners, and these mostly along a short stretch in the semi-hipsterized/gentrified Temescal District. My guess is that this paucity of propaganda applied equally to other main thoroughfares as well. A thousand people showed up for a lightweight, low calorie episode of anti-pig posturing, but not one fiftieth of that number had the authentic commitment to form crews with paint brushes and buckets of wallpaper paste, or with tape guns, and cover the length of the main streets of Oakland with posters and flyers, with visible public propaganda calling attention to an action that had to strike most mainstream contemporary U.S. working people as a wholly unusual, exotic and foreign idea.
The main routes of the bus system AC Transit, major bus stops and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) could have and should have been used as a platform for the message in the form of mass postering and flyering. This did not happen in the build-up to the general strike.
In the days leading up to Nov. 2nd, rank and file union members and low-level union bureaucrats came to meetings of the Occupy Oakland General Assembly. Many of these folks sincerely tried to get their unions involved in the build-up to the general strike. Some union locals generated pious statements devoid of any threat of action. Participation of unions in an effort like this is like asking the U.S. Department of Labor to organize a general strike. Unions are capitalist business organizations - they cannot be transformed into something other than this by combative members, or compelled to act as anything other than transmission belts from capital to labor that help adjust unionized workers to the requirements of capital. The fact that unions are sociologically made up of working class people doesn't make them an expression of the class interests of their members, much less of the working class as a whole. The U.S. Army is for the most part made up of individuals who are sociological working class in origin but that doesn't make the Army a "working class organization."
Unions do not command the loyalty of the vast majority of working people in this country, and subversives can make great use of this. Any real future general strike has to be a wildcat action. It will have to do an end-run around unions and appeal directly to all working people, unionized and non-unionized, employed and unemployed. All future efforts of this sort will have to draw many energetic individuals to get the word out in a big way, using direct action methods, appealing to immediate needs, and do this with an uncompromising anti-capitalist message. This is no small task, and unions will do absolutely nothing to help us here. This dynamic can be seen with the sharp conflict between the West Coast Occupy movement's call for a shutdown of all West Coast ports on Dec. 12, and the ILWU's adamant refusal to sanction a walkout.
The admirable and exemplary targeting by Black Bloc youth of windows of a store of the despicable market-libertarian-owned Whole Foods Market chain during the 2 p.m. "anti-capitalist" march points the way to where the Occupy movement must now go; away from amorphous left-liberal populist protest actions, and into a much deeper involvement with everyday life struggles of the mainstream wage-slave class in capitalist America, from a public, highly visible, aggressive anti-market/anti-money/anti-wage labor perspective.
Some of the specific forms this might take are:
1. Borrowing from the tool kit of rebels in Chile and Egypt, and using so-called social media to initiate some kind of autonomous, widespread, sub rosa workplace resistance among employees of the Whole Foods Market Corporation.
With its combination of a large number of non-union employees, abysmal wages, frantic working conditions, and a creepy, Scientology-like workplace management psychology, the Whole Foods Market Corporation is an easy to hate enemy, and is just dying to be targetted. The right kind of bare knuckle, collective direct action against Whole Foods can become a template for similar actions against other retail sector exploiters,
2. Using big city public transit systems as a platform for mass working class direct action linking ever-more beleaguered transit system employees and transit system riders, the vast majority of whom are wage earners and low income people,
3. Starting a long term process of fraternization between civilian rebels and enlisted people inside the United States Armed Forces.
For all its viscerally satisfying qualities, bricks through the windows of banks and other deserving capitalist enterprises aren't going to draw in the large numbers of hard-pressed mainstream working people who have so much to gain from mobilization in a new mass social movement. The bricks can come later. A few broken windows won't scare off the work-within-the-system types, either. Liberals of the MoveOn.org stripe and leftists including or akin to the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition are the deadly enemies of any liberatory potential that the Occupy movement has, but these counter-subversives have to be politically combatted and defeated in an open debate where the only weapon will be the weapon of language.
The Occupy movement is an admirably spontaneous, anti-hierarchical and tremendously positive phenomenon. Seeing Occupy emerge is like watching fifty meters of glacial ice begin to crack. But the Occupy movement is still just not enough of a mainstream working people's movement. It can still become this. The problems with the Oakland General Strike prove that this is absolutely the direction the Occupy movement must now go in.
MAINSTREAM WORKING PEOPLE, INCLUDING THE UNEMPLOYED, AND ENLISTED PEOPLE IN THE ARMED FORCES ARE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO MATTER MOST
Nestor Makhno
Mission Yuppie Eradication Project
San Francisco