Striketober is on and poppin’
Covid + Capitalism , the straw that broke the workers’ backs, bosses in shambles.
The specter of strikes have been haunting the American economic system since March 2020, when Covid-19 wreaked havoc across a country, totaling at conservative estimates 700,000 deaths, and by more accurate estimates deaths in excess of 1,000,000.
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With the push to stay open, cloaked in the guise of “muh freedums” and “authoritarian tyranny” on the one side (though they see no problem with the tyranny of the state and its monopoly on violence—in fact, they lick the boot hard on police violence toward minorities). But a piece of cloth over the face, and not being able to go get a beer at a restaurant, is enough to try to, ineffectively, overturn a presidential election through insurrection.
This was all Prompted by a Cheeto Mussolini, who is now suing to keep documents about Jan 6th sealed. Which has become the partisan refrain from corporate media. Call it Trump Derangement Syndrome, a symptom of which is to blame everything on the bogey man that’s no longer even in power, as an excuse to not report on things the average American worker is interested in or would care about.
On that note, it’s telling what’s conspicuously missing from the spectacle of corporate whore media, is the coverage of the strikes in the US. Or globally for that matter.
In November 2020, 250 Million, nearly the population of the United States, went on strike, a general strike, in India shutting down the country for weeks. From CNN, NBC, Fox—not a word of it. Wouldn’t want the American workers to get any ideas, of course.
Unfortunately for the owning class, those poor, poor bosses and land owners, the media blackout didn’t work. Social media at its finest made sure the news broke through the State Ideological Apparatuses (Althusser), and made cracks in the superstructural cultural hegemony.
Corporate Media on current conditions for the working class in America:
The reality is worker’s are seeing it’s not “fine” and rising up; piss on fake narrative made for the well off, the professional managerial class, aka the labor aristocracy of the US. The majority of us are seeing the country burn, and are no longer willing to take it.
In a very Billy Joel-sequel moment, we need an updated “We Didn’t Start the Fire” post-covid (Calling all revolutionary musicians).
Addendum: South Korean workers join in on the Striketober festivities, with a national general strike of their own. Proletarian rising indeed!
Support for pinkwug comics for this fantastic piece.
With the country burning, it’s come to a boil so hot even some corporate news can’t ignore the waves of strikes going on across the country despite massive suppression efforts, so much so Time magazine was forced to acknowledge the rising power of the US labour movement.
Marxists like myself couldn’t be happier.
Cornell University now has a strike tracker that launched on May Day of 2021 you can find here.
https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu
And the data keeps growing. Look at the strikes across the nation as of Oct 20th, 2021.
Nurses, teachers, autoworkers, gig-workers, SEIU, Fight for 15 movement, and many others have had enough and the collective riseup—dubbed Striketober, has begun.
As workers, we’re starting to wake up the growing, rampant inequality between those of us who make society go, and those who leech off of our labor.
So here we are, workers striking for better pay, better working conditions, fairer, transparent wages on racial and gender lines, and overall generally more democratic workplaces.
Brings up a good question, why is it, that the people that manage and do all the labor of the company, get paid hundreds of times less than the corporate governance (what a gross word, governance, but it fits the mini-despotic nature of corporate hierarchy)—so why is it that wages between the labor and the parasite owner are so polarized?
From 1978 to 2020, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,322%, far outstripping S&P stock market growth (817%) and top 0.1% earnings growth (which was 341% between 1978 and 2019, the latest data available). In contrast, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 18.0% from 1978 to 2020.
Welcome to neoliberal hyper privatization. May Reagan and Thatcher rest in piss. Along with the war criminal, the now late Colin Powell.
🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀
Back to the neoliberal order.
Wages, and the requisite disparity thereof on non-class lines always, have been a cornerstone tactic used to divide workers amongst themselves by capitalists, from the Irish immigrants pitted against the Italians in New York during the mass immigration years, to the Jim Crow south, where poor whites and poor blacks were pitted against each other due to wage disparity causing division and resentment, to the transcontinental railroad, where workers were so divided by the bosses, they would intentionally place workers who spoke different languages into groups to prevent unity and solidarity. So much so it led to the strike of 20,000 Chinese-American workers in the 1800s. Could it be because:
In January 1865, convinced that Chinese workers were capable, the railroad hired 50 Chinese workers and then 50 more,” the Project notes. “But the demand for labor increased, and white workers were reluctant to do such backbreaking, hazardous work.”
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Chinese received 30-50 percent lower wages thanwhites for the same job and they had to pay for their own food stuffs,” Chang says. “They also had the most difficult and dangerous work, including tunneling and the use of explosive.
Speaking of China, one can’t neglect to mention Huawei, which is an employee owned company, where the essence of Professor Richard Wolff’s democracy at work (pdf in link) is put into action. Despite the article’s liberal critical bent toward the complicated nature of the corporate structure of Huawei, to date, Huawei has been the most successful example of a co-operative structure in business that keeps pay much more fair than the hierarchical trickle-down structure of traditional multi-national corporations.
There’s a reason the US has banned Huawei to be sold openly as part of it’s trade sanctions on China, which Michael Hudson— renowned economist and author of Superimperalism—describes as the reason for the technological stagnation in the US and its client states. Meanwhile the with BRI and China’s technology competitiveness, the PRC is overtaking the US, and by design of the imperialist economic policy on incremental tech progress coupled with embargo economic war and lawfare, will push the Chinese tech sector to develop resilience to exist in its own stand alone, self-sufficient tech ecosystem…even if Western companies completely remove themselves from the Chinese market. The Grayzone contributors Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton, lay out the specifics here.
Trade Union Committee is the (Shareholding Employee) Representatives' Commission. [11] The Commission currently consists of 115 employee representatives who exercise their rights on behalf of all shareholding employees (more than 96,000 as of the end of 2018). The representatives are elected by active shareholding employees for a five-year term. [12]
When you keep the employees happy, give them democratic control of the work processs, eliminate some of the alienation from their labor, and keep pay disparity (something the CPC has on it’s top three targets of late) closer together, and cap market prices on necessities, you get workers who are much happier to contribute to society.
The ability to enjoy the commodities and luxuries produced by the labor of social reproduction, is a huge part of socialism; society produces immense, incomprehensible amounts of wealth. In our neoliberal capitalist order, in the empire run by oligarchs, who have lost their popular consent to rule, but maintain order by force alone, the disparity has widened to such a degree the workers and the rulers live in two different worlds. It’s time to tear down the walls.
If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e., is no longer “leading” but only “dominant,” exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc.
Our ideologies in the West are slowly shifting. Labor is rising. Socialist ideas are rising. What we’re seeing with these strikes, is the beginning of a revolutionary social change and it’s about time.
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