It Could Happen Here - A General Strike Might Be Closer Than You Think Pt. 1

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. We live in a period of increasing class conflict. During the Trump years, strike action reached a 17-year high, and in 2022, strikes surged, increasing almost 40% over 2021, as workers fought back against rising inflation and the cost of living. Fights over unionization hit sectors previously thought to be unorganizable, as workers declared victory across fast food chains, Starbucks, and Amazon.

And this increased strike activity is taking place against a rising chorus 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 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 generalized collective refusal, is spreading. As 2022 comes to a close, the largest strike by education workers across the University of California system has seen barricades, occupied buildings, 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. In this holiday season, over 100,000 rail workers stunned the brink of crippling the U.S. economy in an effort to win sick leave, as the government rushed to enforce the contract and break the

strike. 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, but it's going down as taking over. We're so excited to be here to talk shit.

That's right. IGD 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 exploited and excluded have attempted to meet the conditions which immiserate our lives head on. Each episode, of course, is going to have special guests and a deep dive from us. Launched in the summer of 2015, It's Going Down is a media platform, radio show, and podcast that covers autonomous social movements from an anarchist perspective. As a group, we represent folks from across the U.S. Tom and myself have been involved in covering and participating in

social struggles for over 20 years. Sophie is a longtime 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 the It Can Happen Here people. This is awesome. Yeah, I'm excited to be here and talk about strikes. It's going to be a fun time. Yeah, I'm excited about today's topic very much so. So just to start 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 that'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 zeitgeist that becomes really popular. And, you know, we live in this time of 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 materialize. It 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. union and get involved that way. It seems that this drive to constantly declare general strikes, though ambitious, 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

recognize that the business unions have failed, right? It's how we got here. I live in the Rust Belt. I live in the midst of the failure of business unions every single day of my life. And that they've also come to understand something that the autonomous in Italy, we're talking about the 70s, 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 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 power as 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 quitting more. Like I prefer that. But I do 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 from 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 post a TikTok video, somebody is always like, general strike, July 30th. So it's like, yeah, it's definitely on the internet a lot. But I do think even people saying that and not doing it has an impact because it's like, what is that Martin Sostry 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's 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 you're at work, steal from your boss. It doesn't have to be like this organizational thing. Because one thing is that like, you have to realize that sometimes union work unions work with management. So it's like, even if you're like, yeah, I want to wait for my union, it's like what if your union is like the Frito-Lay union that'll go behind your back and make decisions? I guess all this to say

is that I think changing the culture is important, and I think that's 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 claim to join a 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 or uprising and stuff it doesn't come from those official channels um and so i'm excited to get into that more and i think yeah 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's going to happen. There's this idea of like refusal and of solidarity that is captured just in the word

and just in saying it. But I think it's really like stirring that energy up. And speaking of cultural memory, pack your dynamite and your pitchforks because it's time for a trip down memory lane. In the early 1900s of the United States, groups like the Industrial Workers of the World or the IWW, which advocated for the abolishing of the wage system and capitalism, rejected racist exclusions of non-white workers in the labor movement, and even engaged in shootouts with the KKK, popularized the idea of the General Strike in the United States on a large scale.

But the idea itself and its application in US history is much older. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, anarchists, socialists, and everyday members of the working class all promoted and carried out multiple General Strikes as a means to win political and economic concessions. For some, the general strike was also a launchpad for a 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 U.S US history, the first large-scale example of a general strike occurred in the midst

of the American Civil War. In 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 or Union bullets. Du Bois argues that just like the black-led insurrections of today in Ferguson and Minneapolis, this strike took bourgeois white society by total surprise. He writes that in the South, newspapers denied the very idea that slaves could ever free themselves and even claimed 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 considered cowards and inferior beings whose very presence in America was unfortunate. Only John Brown knew that revolt would come and he was dead. So Du Bois really paints this picture of this mass Karen society in which slavery is seen as very sad. More terrifying is the idea of mass Black insurrection, which of course mirrors today's situation. I mean, that's what the suburbs are.

I mean, right? Like, that's what the suburbs 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. So you can go in your little home and like drink a little tea and like watch your little movies and just like ignore the fact that you're an asshole. You know what I mean? Like just like, and even not even more than an asshole.

I won't go 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 interesting point uh the dubois makes about just like it was only kind of the radical wing of the abolitionist movement that was talking about open revolt there's this early anarchist a lot of people don't reference a lot but lies under spooner he conspired with john brown to various plots and he later became a member of the first international and it contributed to early anarchist publications like Liberty. He produced this really early text, which is just fantastic. It's called A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, published in 1858, so this is a couple years before the Civil War.

He writes, I love the line, conceal or destroy. It's like, you can destroy them. You can also hide them. This is a parallel that we can draw now too 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 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 uh with lucy parsons right you see this during the strike here in the eight hour workday in Chicago, where she gives

a speech where she's talking about grabbing knives and going to the doors of the rich as a way to make it very, very, very clear that they weren't going to be able to live off the backs of the working class anymore, right? And it's this 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 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 were 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 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 ACAB. Exactly, yeah. That's exactly what I was thinking. I think it's interesting to point out, as Du Bois writes,

and as Frederick Douglass said of the Civil War, it was started, quote, in the interests of slavery on both sides. The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union, and the North 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 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 1862 as dubois writes this was the beginning of the swarming of increasing numbers no longer to work on confederate plantations a 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 involved 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 Du Bois 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 owned slaves, and a lot of poor whites deserted the Confederate army, which further crippled it. As Du Bois noted, the poor white not only began to desert and run away 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 du bois 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 happen 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. 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 disparaging mass collective action is because that, the fear,

is letting us know that we do 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 had to keep slavery to save the Union,

I would have kept slavery. You know what I mean? So just like this whole idea of letting Black people know you can't do shit, don't even bother, is because they know that we can do shit. And we are doing shit, because Black people are always rebelling. If you come to Flatbush, you see it in full color.

They realize the government doesn't give a fuck about them, and they've created their own institutions to support themselves. So it's like this whole idea to let us tell us don't even bother and and like criminalizing like the informal sector because it's like that's a way for us gain power outside of like the 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 say 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 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 part of a union you don't have to quit your job and be an activist by the way paid activists are not really activists you can do regular shit in your whole day you can do a free store on the corner of your street so people can have clothes it's like you could striking from the economy means like divesting your time and resources and you could do it we could 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 2008 right so we had this kind of collapse of the legitimacy of the american political project sort of with the iraq war right we all kind of saw how badly that can turn out

and but what was left in america to uphold that 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, too. Right. And so this sort of idea that built up after World War Two, this kind of concept of, you know, the labor corporate 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 of its problematic elements, and its impossibility, and its absurdity,

elements and its impossibility and its absurdity and kind of this revival of an idea which existed prior to world war ii which was an idea of social revolt right 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 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 on, 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 1970s. But the idea that it existed still holds on in some sectors of America today. I mean, you see this with the MAGA crowd really heavily. The idea that nothing systematically needs to change. Really, we just

need better outcomes. And we just need, 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. You don't really see a lot of adherence to that vision any further. And that makes the idea of mass refusal not only a lot more possible, but something that's actively happening currently. And the other part, too, I want to bring in is that when the New Deal was passed, it excluded black people,

right? And so that's one way. It's like this constant how white people are tricked into submitting to the system, and it happens so many times, and they still keep saying, trick us again! Trick us again! It's like this constant, like, how white people are, like, tricked into, like, submitting to the system. And it happens so many times. And they still keep saying, trick us again! Trick us again! It's like, yeah, they're going to give you shit 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 can you can like be out of work and get your little thing. But as long as we keep enslaving and treating the people who make the society run, it's fine. And now that's happening to white people too.

And they're like, oh no, this is not cute. Like, it's not fun. I'm quiet quitting. You know what I mean? Because like the way black people have been treated is starting 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 where white workers are tricked again? Because I feel it's coming. I feel like they're going to find a way out of this. And how do we know if it's bullshit? And do we call it out? And how do we call it out? That's what student loan forgiveness was, right? I mean, like, if we really think about it, the Democratic Party has been built recently since the Obama era on this idea of reinstituting elements of the New Deal without threatening the existence of capitalism. Very intentionally, right? We saw that the

Affordable Care Act is a 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 60s pointed out often about Lyndon Johnson, is they said, you know, liberals voted for Lyndon Johnson, and they put all their 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 assistance is in any way going to solve anything. That's just going to continue to perpetuate the situation in which we need social assistance, right? As opposed to fundamentally ending that, which is, you know, the language that they put forward when they talk about things like justice, which we all know that

they don't really have much adherence to, right? But I think 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 reformism as counterinsurgency again, right? Which is really what the New Deal was. But really, until that, I mean, we saw in 2020, 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 deal kind of came into effect something i want to go back to too that i think is relevant to this is the piece where the quote um from spoon is talking about uh concealing or like uh 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 them in these ways that can't be seen as much and might be concealed. And also this thing where people are underestimated, like it makes me think about the revolution revolution in haiti in the late 1700s which is you know a long time

ago but still very relevant um and just thinking about how the kind of like colonizers in paris like couldn't believe the reports that were coming out of um uprising in haiti at the time because they were so racist basically that they didn't believe that black people there who were enslaved could rise up and could have that like I don't know awareness gumption 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 um even though like the idea that's gone on from that time really of like outside agitator and stuff like in any uprising that we see that involves, yeah, that involves black people is that there's something in that that is also

powerful and gives possibility. Well, speaking of outside agitators, we're going to take a break and hear from some of our sponsors right now. sponsors right now. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Check out betteroffline.com. In 1865, on paper, the Civil War ended, and the Union was saved. A decade later, the North began pulling out of the South, marking the end to Reconstruction efforts, and the beginning of both Jim Crow and a reign of terror and white vigilantism in the form of the Ku Klux Klan. The 1870s was also a period of increasing poverty, declining wages, rising homelessness, economic depression, and exploding class conflict, as the stage was set for the Great Upheaval

of 1877, 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 wore on, multiple general strikes followed, as did a heavy-handed government response that evolved to police and repress the broader population. Wanting to know more about this history of these general strikes and their importance, we caught up with labor historian and author Robert Ovets, author of When Workers Shot Back and We the Elites. Ovets argues that the often violent general strikes of the late 1800s and early 1900s showcased the ability of working people to not only confront the state and capitalism, but also organize society on their own terms.

capitalism, but also organize 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. I think we have in the examples of general strikes in U.S. history an example of the potential for getting beyond capitalism. And so that's what makes them really exciting to study and to write about. 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 just happen. They're not spontaneous. don't 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 work and

organizing their fellow workers and to build community connections to support their strike actions. And there also has to be a good communication of 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 U.S. history were the one in 1877 and the one in 1919 in Seattle and the one in 1877 was a general strike throughout the railroad industry, but it also had this extraordinary microcosmic, if you will, general strike that was happening in St. Louis and East St. Louis. But what was fascinating about that was that the groundwork had been laid in 1877, 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 organizers tried to call off the set date to start the general strike in the railroad industry.

But the workers went on strike anyways. And they built their own organization across dozens of different railroad companies on their own. In St. Louis, however, there was a new left-wing party called the Workingmen'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 probably closer to what happened in Seattle in 1919, where over 100 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 general strike in 1877 that I was just mentioning, there was a multiracial coalition of worker organizers who literally took charge of the strike. There had been a strike committee formed, and that strike committee was dominated by the Workingmen's Party activists. But the workers themselves started to organize outside the confines of the strike coordinating committee. And it was very multiracial. They started marching

on one workplace and another. 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 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 multiracial the crowds were that were shutting down these workplaces and leaving work. And internally, they became very divided based on their racism. 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. 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 were being called into St. Louis to attack the city, the workers marched on the meeting 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. So that lasted a few days. And race was a huge factor in why the strike spread and how the workers took over the city. why the strike spread and how the workers took over the city, but it was also a factor in 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,

but we do know that it was very generalized throughout the entire city. And the reason we know this is because the General Strike Committee, which was formed by the Labor Council, had representatives of every 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. So what was extraordinary about the Seattle general strike is how it incorporated many of these issues that we would 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 1877 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 themselves in order to 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 1877 strike because up until that point, the police were, if you will, they were kind of like gig workers. They worked on quote unquote tips or bribes. There were very few cities that had any municipal police and if they did, they had very small forces. So that was one reason why the strike spread so quickly around the country over that 10-day

or so period in July of 1877. So modern 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. So militias were essentially de-emphasized and they were replaced by a state-controlled National Guard as a result of the passage of a new federal law. The military was also funded on a permanent basis.

One reason why the military was so slow to be deployed to put down the strike in 1877 was most of the soldiers were out in the West fighting essentially a genocidal war against the Plains 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 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 in a more coordinated method. So you started to see corporations cooperate as a result of this. In fact, many of the technologies that we take for granted today were a result of the 1877 railroad strike. For example,

the telegraph was installed in many rich people's homes as a way to be able to contact the police directly. Those lines went directly to the police. The so-called paddy wagon was also invented as a result of the 1877 strike as a weapon against large crowds. So there were a number of new technologies that were implemented and became more widespread as a result of that strike. In Seattle also, the workers were prepared. They had known their history, and they formed a self-defense group composed primarily of World War I veterans who had just come back from World War I.

And they patrolled the city, and they did things like shut down bars because they didn't want people to get drunk and start fighting, and that would be a justification for 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 workers were prepared. They did carry out an organized self-defense against that eventuality.

The 1946 Oakland general strike was part of an extraordinary wave of post-World War II strikes that were happening, just like after World War I. And actually during World War I, there was a wave of strikes. The same thing happened when a lot of soldiers started coming back from World War II. Unemployment shot up. Women were sent packing. Prices exploded. There was a shortage of housing.

And workers started to organize. And during that few-year period, there was a general 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 upsurge of class struggle, the Congress passed the Taft-Hardley Act, which still governs us today. For workers who try to organize in the private sector where they're under the National Labor Relations Act, the Taft-Hardley Act was an amendment to that law. secondary strikes, which means that if workers go on strike somewhere, workers can't strike in solidarity. And particularly if they have a union contract with their employer, it'd 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

Railroad General Strike before the Democrats killed it a few weeks ago. But the Taft-Hartley Act continues to serve as a means of suppressing and repressing the ability not only of workers to organize unions in their local workplaces, but to actually engage in a general strike. in their local workplaces, but to actually engage in a general strike. So again, we've been listening to Robert Ovets, author of When Workers Shot Back and We the Elites. Just a few key takeaways from that discussion. We see various examples in these general strikes 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 with a combination of militias, police, and of course the National Guard. And finally, many of these strikes lead to the passing of legislation, which is interesting because far 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 in a certain way, reconstitute the

military, or sometimes bring the workers into the superstructure of the state in order 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 to like the when you were reading that it felt like a writer's 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 where they're like oh they make their move we make their move and it's like it's like the state is 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 then there's violence like a lot of state violence like extreme state violence because it's like they they want to remind us like that's bad you don't do that and then they'll do stuff to placate workers, like white workers to like with the Wagner Act, like with unionization, like a lot of black people were excluded from that. Maybe just maybe things we hear that um like the creativity of the state with their oppression or whatever just going on but also how people keep coming back with like new and different things you know yeah like it actually takes a lot of repression to stop these things like if you look at what happened in 1877 or whatever it's like they kill 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 leads up to haymarket in 86 or whatever and i just think again and again

we see um like repression but then we see a flowering again and i think that what we're seeing like right now maybe is like a sort of creative non-union 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 we're seeing is we're seeing over this time the mechanism of counterinsurgency get a lot more complex. So in the 1870s, it's let's get some guns and force everyone to go back to work. But now it's why don't we get nonprofits to fund these public programs? Why don't we have community policing and coffee with cops? And so what you saw during the George Floyd uprising

was you saw a lot of this like, well, I know 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 can put it in the city budget and we should talk about it that way. And that was a way to force the resistance

in the streets back into a mechanism that's able to be more easily controlled. But we see in like Rust Belt cities, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, places like this, the way that the wealthy at this period of time, the late 19th and early 20th century, were already talking about trying to change entire environments, right? So like surveillance, nonprofit activity, like that changes a whole environment. 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 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. 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 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. It takes the form of trying to find softer 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 having clubs and guns and stuff um or in the case of the democratic party of the smart border 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's somehow less repressive by shaping the entire space around surveillance.

That's 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 or aren't human, that somehow there's some benefit that emerges and somehow the state is retreating a little bit. When in actuality, things 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. It increases the ability of the state to control information and decide what information gets out. These are all things which 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 now hear for some from some of our sponsors welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

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But now we're going to turn and look at two examples of general strikes that took place within the last 20 years. In December of 2005, Republicans passed in the House of Representatives H.R. 4437, also known as the Border Protection Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, a proposed piece of legislation that's as draconian as it sounds. The bill, as the ACLU wrote, pushed to, quote, militarize the border, give extraordinary powers to low-level immigration officials, allowing law enforcement to expel without adhering anyone believed to be undocumented, and detain non-citizens indefinitely without meaningful review. The bill also sought to levy criminal penalties against anyone that engaged 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 border fence and authorized state and local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law. As George Kiempfis wrote in the Cice Puede 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 the legislation and the existential threat it represented pushed many undocumented workers to take action and organize on a mass scale. As Kempfus wrote, starting in March of 2006, marches and more than half a million people

overwhelmed the centers of major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Dallas, halting business while there were literally hundreds of smaller gatherings in many other smaller cities. There were dozens of student walkouts in high schools around the country, as well as a nationwide immigrant general strike called for on May Day that was heeded by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of workers, including truck drivers who shut down the Port of Los Angeles. Despite a series of large-scale immigration raids aimed at derailing the movement, millions

took the streets and carried out strikes, all outside of the direction of Union and 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. H.R. 4437 failed to pass in large part due to the mass opposition it faced on the streets in the spring of 2006. Direct action, as they say, gets the goods. And what's fascinating about the 2006 strike is that it was organized outside of established unions and political

parties, especially the Democratic Party. It had a key youth wing to it. We saw lots of student walkouts. It was able to seriously push back against this draconian wave of anti-immigrant legislation. And that worked for around 10 years. And it seems like we don't reference this strike enough and talk about how important it was. I was 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 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. That law was like fugitive slave law act. Like straight up. They were just trying to like reinstall slavery among people who were not here documented like you know what i mean they were trying to create a situation where people were so fucking desperate they were going to work for slave wages and i'll say this about new york city there's a huge like immigrant

population a huge undocumented worker population that we didn't even i mean i didn't know about until covid hit like there's a lot of people who are keeping the economy alive that are not even counted, and they pay for our existence. As we're talking about this, two things that always come up for me when talking about these strikes. First is, you know, the entire concept of, quote, immigration reform, as it was being talked about by Republicans at the time, and then later accelerated under Trump, this idea of border walls started with the American Nazi Party, right? Like this was an American Nazi Party policy proposal in the 1950s and 60s that got picked up through white supremacist movements, through people like George Wallace, and sort of imported

into the Republican Party. That's why it feels racist. Yeah, because it's Nazis. But I 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 people kind of took it upon themselves to shut the whole country down. And it just shows what can happen when communities are organized as communities of people, and not as spectators in some sort of removed symbolic political action, but actually become immediate protagonists in what's going on in front of them. Another thing I think is really interesting about this is that it was such a massive response, and that part of what the act was saying was that you could be like prosecuted or for assisting someone who's undocumented that i think it like goes back to what we've been talking about with the other strike stuff is like the government is

very aware that like solidarity between people is dangerous basically and tries to legislate it and we see you know after that strike in you know the strike wave in 1877 you start to get all those anti-conspiracy laws and stuff because that's a threat. And I love that in this sense, it's like they put that out and it gets like such a massive response against it that people really like win basically. And that lasts for like a decade. supremacy historically in the United States being this system of how people described it of carrots and sticks, of offering incentives to be included in this bracket of whiteness, but then also saying, oh, and if you help that kid at school, we're going to throw you in jail along with them, which again is a good reason to celebrate these strikes because they were effective in beating back this legislation, but also pointing out that everyone should have been taking part in these actions. Well, hey, thanks for tuning in. That's going to wrap up the first episode.

We encourage you to follow what's going down on Mastodon at IGD underscore news. And we hope you enjoyed us taking over. It coulden Here. We're going to be back tomorrow. We're going to continue to look at General Strikes. We're going to do a deep dive into Occupy Oakland that kicked off in 2011. And we're going to look at how a citywide General Strike grew out of the Oakland Commune after the police nearly murdered an Iraq War veteran. And thanks for tuning in. nearly murdered an Iraq war veteran.

And thanks for tuning in. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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