Morning Comrades.
Despite every effort being undertaken by all of our countries mainstream media to silence the fact that large parts of the Western World are on strike, as expected, I am sure that most of you have heard of the massive strike waves rolling across Europe and those brewing in North America. Following, is a brief, Marxist, historical arch to give context to why we strike and why striking matters. In short, strikes symbolize, both materially and metaphysically the union on the working classes against the capital classes from which we can start the necessary revolutions.
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I firmly believe in strikes as a, if not one of he most useful and important tools that we working bees have at our disposal. An organized working class has every potential, and right, to demand what is theirs. Sure, opinions, even within the vast working classes around the world differ on what is fair, and yes, my opinion certainly would be categorized as radically “left” - that being, we, the workers by the sheer nature of the production, own and deserve everything but that should be clear by now. Generally, speaking we associate organized strikes as a reality of the modern(ish) world, going back to the 1800s but hardly surprisingly, the history and subsequent Marxist thought go back far further.
Non-class societies provide us with evidence of what might be called general strikes. Chris Knight, the radical anthropologist, argues in his book, Blood Relations, that tens of thousands of years ago there was a female sex strike. A revolutionary act, supported by brothers and sons, which he says ended alpha-male domination and allowed for the transition to an egalitarian original communism that was maintained by locking human society into the phases of the moon and an on/off cycle of celebration, sex strike and hunting. Original communism, along with the lunar-synchronised cycle of celebration, sex strike and hunting, still existing today in Africa with the Hadza, Mbuti, Mbendjele, Yaka and other such peoples.
And, although it is completely non-historic (maybe pacifist invention?), Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata speaks for itself. It has a storyline centred on similar collective action by the wives of the Athenian citizenry during the Peloponnesian war with Sparta. Surely this was more than a farcical invention designed to get belly laughs from the all-male audiences at the Theatre of Dionysus; for sexual gratification they were free to use force on their wives and slaves; besides that, they had ready access to prostitutes or, for the more wealthy, hetairai courtesans. Every fiction has a grain of truth. Perhaps, in this case, a common folk memory of the gyneocracy, the time when women were supposed to have ruled society - a “traditional theme” in Greek myth and art.
Engels, it will be recalled, put forward the idea that original communism involved not the rule of women, but the equality of men and women - something which came to an end through the emergence of classes and the “world historical defeat of the female sex”. In other words, the Neolithic counterrevolution.
When it comes to pre-capitalist class society, there are all manner of references to strike action. The pyramid builders in ancient Egypt repeatedly struck to secure improved rations and living conditions in the necropolis. Scraps of papyrus dating from the New Kingdom, circa 1550-1080 BCE, provide the “first known fully documented evidence of collective action by a workforce”. 1 Exhausted state slaves of Athens also struck and occupied the silver mines of Laurium in 135-33 BCE. The cradle of western civilisation had them walled in and left to starve.
In the ancient Roman world there appear to have been frequent strikes by well organised workers, such as bakers, shippers and quarrymen - though, admittedly, the textual evidence is frustratingly thin. Apprentices and journeymen - with the coordination provided by their well-established societies - struck and won real advances in the towns of feudal Europe, that is for sure. Nevertheless their strikes were little more than small acts of rebellion within a highly fragmented, workshop-based, patriarchal system of craft production. Other guild masters regarded them as not much more than family squabbles - irritating examples that others might follow. Writing about pre-industrial-revolution England, Edward Thompson makes the telling point that such “insubordination of the poor was an inconvenience; it was not a menace”.2
The most powerful weapon employed by those below during ancient and feudal times was not the strike. From Spartacus to Wat Tyler, from Jesus of Nazareth to Thomas Müntzer, the popular classes punctured the supposedly seamless fabric of official society with utopian and sometimes despairing revolt - riot in the city, jacquerie in the countryside. Such uprisings could on occasion force upon the upper classes conditions which they regarded as onerous - not the least of which was democracy. However, for all their rights, the male Athenian peasant-citizen, the male Roman plebeian and the male Icelandic yeoman farmer existed in a subordinate position within an oligarchical, slave-owning system.
There was the constant danger of aristocrats by birth or wealth regaining their unrestricted rule. Certainly because of economic geography the peasantry is constantly dispersed. So, even when united revolt overcomes the tyranny of distance, the moment of collective triumph over the manor or town often proves fleeting. Peasants are pulled back to helpless separation by the irresistible need to plough, sow and harvest - that or starve. The rulers deserved to fail. But, even when the ruled successfully revolted, they could not provide a viable economic alternative which abolished the reproduction of class relations.
The nascent bourgeoisie - economically a powerful element within the nexus of dissolving feudalism - introduced a dynamic element into the never-ending cycle of primitive revolt. When money did not serve them better, when there seemed no other way, the bourgeoisie was quite prepared to smash, terrorise and overturn. To perform such a political act the bourgeoisie needed a universal philosophy of emancipation. To remove kingly, aristocratic and church barriers to their developing economic order the bourgeoisie formed itself into a class of liberators. It not only put men of action - Oldenbarnevelt, Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre, Garibaldi - at the head of the popular movement. It used preachers, poets and pamphleteers - Calvin, Voltaire, Milton, Paine - as the “enchanter’s wand” to inspire the masses with promises of heaven on earth.
Hence the classic form of the bourgeois revolution was the barricade behind which stood the people who had been won to believe that they were fighting for liberté, fraternité and égalité or - given different times and countries - something equivalent to it. Yet, whatever the dreams in their heads, objectively, while they remained under bourgeois hegemony, the participants fought for not the rights of man, but public debt, a home market and a system of unrestricted exploitation.
Haunting the rise of the bourgeoisie and the consolidation of the capitalist state -whether monarchical or plutocratic - was the ever-present threat of popular democracy. Levellers and sans culottes wanted a political system that would have greatly curbed the power of capital. However, the biggest threat to capitalism was its own creation - the modern proletariat. Sucked into factories, mines and mills by the never-ending and most elementary needs of capital, the ‘formless multitude’ was transformed not only by a new common relationship to capital, but into a class because of a common struggle against capital.
Marx explains that “separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors”.3 For workers then, it was not only material conditions of everyday life - housing, education, leisure and work - which pulled them into becoming a class: it was the war against capital, beginning with combinations to limit competition between themselves as otherwise atomised sellers of labour-power. EP Thompson reckons that the working class was formed through self-making economic, political and cultural struggles between 1780 and 1832; by which time “most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against their rulers and employers”.
Marx and Engels were among the first to grasp the universal nature of this new class. Uniquely, because of its place in history and relationship, not only to other classes, but to the means of production, it had an inescapable interest beyond improving its own immediate lot. Precisely because of its own condition, the working class tends towards collective organisation and collective long-term solutions. Certainly to end its position as a class of wage-slaves, workers are compelled to form themselves into a revolutionary party which has the aim of abolishing all classes and therefore liberating all of humanity, regardless of nationality or sex.
Those who own no means of production, only their ability to work, have a ready (and for them a self-evident) weapon at hand to achieve their ends: the collective withdrawal of labour-power. That does not mean that, once a strike begins, there exists a pre-set mechanism which operates to take workers up an inexorable series of organisational, political and ideological steps, which culminates in the socialist order.
In and of itself, what Marx called, in his pamphlet Wages, price and profit, the “incessant struggle” in the workplace, can only be a matter of to-and-fro struggles with capital. No different, in essence, to the to-and-fro struggles of slaves, peasants and artisans of previous ages. That explains why during the early stages of capitalism, communistic philosophers - eg, Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon - limited themselves to utopian dreams about what society ought to be like. The working class had yet to constitute itself as a militant class in its own right. But, once it had, the real movement began to develop a capability for qualitative self-development.
When it came to this real movement, both Marx and Engels stressed the relationship and yet at the same time the difference between economic and political struggles. The strike to compel a particular employer, or group of employers, to increase wages or reduce hours is, and will remain, a purely economic struggle, and therefore be a containable movement of the underclass. On the other hand, the strike to achieve a lower legal limit on the working day for everyone is political, because it has as its aim the enforcement of interests “in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially binding force”. Not that there is an ‘either-or’ situation.
The political movement of the working class only comes about because there has already been a certain degree of previous economic organisation. Through the training provided by separate economic struggles, the conditions are provided for building a political movement which allows the working class to take on the state apparatus.
Capitalism in part does this spontaneously. With the concentration and centralisation of production workers come to possess a huge, latent economic and therefore political power. One point, one area, one branch of production relies and is connected with another in a mosaic of national and global interdependence. Strikes affect the immediate employers. They also, if generalised, threaten not only the profits of other individual capitalists, but the “collective power: ie, the political power of the ruling classes”.
Having been cleaved into separate categories by the rise of capitalism, economics and politics come together once again in the working class (the class that can become both the subject and object of history). After even the first few steps the generalised economic struggle takes on new dimensions. Met by the collective power of the employers, where anti-trade union laws can be invoked, the police brought in, fighting in an integrated economy which allows for production to be transferred and scabbing, workers are more than predisposed to develop their own class politics.
Let’s start today.
Yours, ragingly red,
Steven
R David The pyramid builders of ancient Egypt: a modern investigation of pharaoh’s workforce London 2003, p74
EP Thompson Customs in common London 1991, p42
K Marx and F Engels The German ideology London 1989, p83