Libcom Study Group - Strike! Discussion

Chapter 2 but I just finished reading about the Minneapolis General Strike.

I'm boring myself as a one trick pony in this conversation but... yes I wasn't talking about the book 'Black Reconstuction', per se, but rather the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction... the massive refusal to work of slaves, especially as it was generalized during the Civil War, their desertion of the fields, and their enlistment in the Union Army, could be (and has been) construed as a prefiguration of a "Mass Strike" ...

Also beyond (yet historically intrinsic to) questions of racialized class composition ...people have mentioned the 'nature of our period' viz a viz the nature of 'that' period ... I think the victory of struggle over chattel slavery or the victory of struggles against peonage or serfdom (arguably qualitatively different forms of value accumulation than 'capitalism as we know it' - in "real" or "formal" terms) would have different expressions in peoples consciousness (and I think this relates to what people are discussing re: the immigrant experience)

i've been thinking about this, and i think there's several issues. on the one hand, rapidly expanding capitalism (like in the US in the late 19th century) can more easily bite the bullet and concede big reforms, but as it matures, profit rates stabilise somewhat creating less wriggle room for all concerned. a lot of this is that workers were starting from a very low base, so big % gains were easier to grant. the obvious place today to look is china/vietnam etc, where i think similar struggles have been winning big concessions.*

the second thing, on the balance of class forces. it's easy to look back and say 'well it's easy for them, they had the balance of forces on their side', but these movements faced harsh repression and very hostile organising conditions. it's true that there wasn't a developed labour relations/social democratic machinery to recuperate struggles either, which tended to mean polarisation, but in many ways the conditions for organising and agitating where far harsher than today. certainly very different, and not necessarily in a way more favourable to struggle.

* i don't equate maturity with 'decline', if anyone's wondering, except perhaps as a geographic centre of industrial production.

These struggles that are winning concessions in East Asia do they have mass strike character like we see in Strike!? Some of the strikes I've read about happening in Bangladesh seem comparable to what is going on in Strike!; such as strikers going from factory to factory shutting them down and building the strike. It is easy to see how mass strikes can force concessions from capitalists in a way that we don't see today (in the US, Canada, the West in general) while strikes remain isolated and unconnected.

Throughout Strike! content seems to precede form. The spontaneous self-directed activity of the working class in struggle appears to give rise to the seeds of something much bigger and more revolutionary than the individual struggle in many cases.

How about the attempts to break public sector unions that seem to be moving nationwide? I mean, obviously there are huge differences, but it does seem like it could play a similar, albeit more limited, defensive role.

I am not sure if negotiation is the right word, but the Workingmen's party in 1830's New York State would work towards endorsing candidates for State and Federal offices who seemed to lean towards them. The Workingmen party basically cashed in the achievements of fledgling wildcats for the 10-hour day in order to start playing the electoral game between Tammany and the Whigs (precursors to today's State Democrats and Republicans, respectively), with most of the prominent leaders vehemently opposed to strikes. Also, the actual trade union movement eventually became more radical and encouraged strikes, but then collapsed with the 1837 financial panic and subsequent Depression.

When I have the time, I'll have to reread a text I have about the era to be more specific. That may be a while.

what is the target date for chapters 3 & 4? i don't have any problem throwing the other chapters up, it's just easier for me if i have a time table.

Resurrecting this thread, I'm now about to finish Chapter 4: 1919, and it seems that in two situations, the Seattle General Strike, as well as the Boston police strike, students offered to act as strike-breakers. This seems to show the students as a highly reactionary population. When did it transform into the radical student cliche of the mid-20th Century?

Anyone else interested in continuing to discuss the book?

I am, even if nobody else is. I've found another mention of students as scabs in Chapter 5: Depression Decade, in the section about the 1934 West Coast strike, where employers brought in scabs for the longshoremen, "many of them recruited from the University of California."

At the same time longshore militants were going to the black community in San Francisco and Oakland and promising to integrate the union if they promised to refuse to be scabs. I think it was then that the bosses turned to frat boys and jocks at UC Berkeley.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union was built out of the victory of the San Francisco General Strike -- breaking with Joe Ryan's mobbed-up ILA -- with another successful strike in 1936 to defend a totally union-controlled hiring hall. Since almost no blacks scabbed, they also lived up to their promise to desegregate and today the ILWU local 10, which works the ports of the Bay (mostly the cargo container port of Oakland), is a majority black union -- and has some of the highest industrial wages in the U.S.

I was also uber-shit about posting on this thread, but I did actually end up finishing reading the book. So keep the convo going....

This is going to sound cliché, but until the early 60s weren't almost all universities conservative bastions of the rich? (Not that they're not that today when it comes down to it...) Why that happened, and this conjecture here:

- General social upheaval
- radicalization from Vietnam draft
- a turn toward more "social" disciplines on campus
- the effect of the GI bill where you had a situation where working class people actually got into uni. Presumably some of them (not the least Howard Zinn) would have carried some degree of working class politics and an interest in radical topics into academia.

Maybe...

I think that Chilli Sauce is right about there being a large shift in the class composition of US colleges and universities after World War II. Beyond the GI Bill, there was also the Higher Education Act in 1965 which made it easier for the children of working class parents to go to college.

Although, I remember reading about some really impressive sounding student organizing in the late thirties. So maybe this is all crap.

The situation was the same in the UK pre-WW2 with students helping to break the 1926 general strike. I also seem to remember students being a large proportion of the volunteers to help put down the various uprisings in Germany post-WW1.

In Asia, students seemed to be more radical in the same time period, although that's a very vaguely remembered impression I have, so could be wrong.

Well, I was about to give up on Depression Decade, but a concerted reading effort had me triumph over it. It's amazing to see this repeated pattern: the workers radicalize, self-organize production and the strike, in opposition to the AFL and then CIO operatives trying to calm them down, until the companies end up recognizing the union, which then does the best that it can do to stop the wildcats and self-organization, with its organizers clearly seeing their mediating, industrial peacekeeping role, and the rank-and-file slowly giving up the fight now that they have "representation". What is it about having a union that demilitarizes the workers so well?

that's perfect. so i don't have to read the book now?
actually i will, in about 3 weeks, when i get my life back from the little fuckers.

What's the world coming to when a school teacher wants the Cliff Notes. Jesus wept.

Well, I'm done reading the book. It's been quite a ride. There's definitely a change of tone in the last chapter, written more recently, but he still seems to be focused on worker self-organization as the ultimate path for transformation.. how does this differ from the way it concluded originally?

I'd like to know this as well. Wasn't the last chapter taken out or replaced and some of the general analysis missing from the second edition. I never read the 1st edition (or could even find it) so I don't know. I would be surprised if someone hasn't blogged about it.

The 1st edition came out in 1972, so it was written in the midst of a wave of wildcat strikes and at a time of optimism for class struggle. The last chapter of the next edition (put out by Southend Press) is full of all the bitter defeats of the 1980s. I was just thumbing through the newer version at a bookstore yesterday and noticing how the tone had become more pessimistic.

Is the section on the wildcat strikes of the 70s still in the newer version? I thought that that section was just as intriguing as the rest of the book. It would be a bummer if it was left out.

Also, since this discussion has popped up again, I'd like to thank Devoration for conceiving the idea for this study group and making it happen. The discussion might not have taken off, but it encouraged me to start reading a book which has had a pretty big impact on my political outlook.

Agreed. Thanks to Devoration in getting some of us, like myself, to reread this excellent book.

Anyone interested in making joint, but brief, summarizations of the book, chapter-by-chapter? I just attended the IWW's Work People's College and presented a 3-part working class history of North America, much of it based on Brecher's account. So I'm ready to discuss some of the high points in class struggle. And also add some others that Strike! glosses over or fails to mention.