Global General Strike - May 1st 2012
X-Pollin8 | 26.03.2012 17:09 | Globalisation | Social Struggles | Workers' Movements | World
This is a call for a 5 day weekend beginning Friday April 27th, culminating in global General Strike on Tuesday May 1st. We propose using this mobilization as a tool for realizing more global solidarity and mutual aid while creating and strengthening the necessary relations and conditions for revolutionary potential – here and now. We will strike, assemble, block and shut down the circuits of capital!
The Call:
At work, under constant surveillance, we struggle for a daily wage, simply to increase the profit margins for our bosses. Previously, the ruling classes had slaves and indentured servants, forcing labor relations through brute force. Today they still have us as slaves and servants through wage labor contracts and fraudulent notions of debt. As we have all seen, debt can be forgiven, in the trillions, to those who own society; but for the rest of us debt is inexcusable, and our lives, our time, our futures, are always negotiable.
May Day is known the world over as International Workers Day, a day commemorating violence by police and strike-breakers against workers engaged in a general strike to bring about the 8 hour work day. This struggle was not the end goal for those who put their lives on the line in Chicago in 1886, but it was part of a broader aim of destroying the very means of our oppression— capital and the state. This war continues. So too the general strikes of 2012 will establish a decisive drive towards the materialization of a social force to be feared by bosses and politicians the world over.
It’s time to multiply – to become a global social force capable of attacking our enemies when and where it hurts and sustaining and defending each other in this transformative global moment; a force able to fight and win, a force able to collectively end these indignities and give us the necessary leverage to overcome mediation and to determine our own futures.
This is a call for a 5 day weekend beginning Friday April 27th, culminating in global General Strike on Tuesday May 1st. We propose using this mobilization as a tool for realizing more global solidarity and mutual aid while creating and strengthening the necessary relations and conditions for revolutionary potential – here and now. We will strike, assemble, block and shut down the city!
From the struggle that brought the 8 hour work day, to the people who want it all –
EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE!
About Strike Everywhere (the grouping in NY that is working on this)
We are New York City Anarchists, Anti-Capitalists and Autonomists; we are joining the call for global revolt. In the coming weeks local groups and collectives, along with regional and global allies will help develop and facilitate an open framework to organize, coordinate and propagate our activities. This will include local and regional organizing bodies, websites and information hubs, resource and skill sharing, and various actions, events, and outreach efforts in the lead up to the Global General Strike of May Day 2012.
Some Background written by a different NYC based group (edited):
During the winter, we participated in a molecular seminar entitled ‘Welcome to the New Paradigm; The Crisis of Everything Everywhere.’ A few hundred people attended over the course of 9 days, some staying for a session, others for a day, and yet others for the entire duration. Together we organized, disorganized, ate, spoke, disagreed, speculated, walked, mapped, manifested, felt, listened, played.
At the time, the occupations at Liberty (Zuccotti Park/Wall Street) and across the globe were so powerful; it was still unclear whether the idea of a General Strike was a nostalgic regression or potential mode of amplification and generalization of refusal. After all, the occupations were themselves a new paradigm of a strike, not just striking against a work place or work but taking everything, everywhere.
As the coordinated and violent attacks by police started in late Fall on the encampments, there was an even greater urgency placed upon everyone to consider how this refusal of austerity, of faux solutions, of legalized robbery, of new forms of enclosure, of an increasing surveillance /security state, of ever greater ecological ruin, of continued structural racism, could be expressed, embodied, uttered, collectively; and how could this be done in a forceful manner, without further empowering or placing all of our collective attention into a reactionary game with and on the police force.
In January, we returned to the question of the General Strike and we asked one another:
What it could mean a General Strike today given the global dimension of financial capital, given the shifting qualities of the workplace and work-time (namely its increased itinerancy, placelessness, instability, meaninglessness), given the ever more invasive forms of extracting productivity and value from the basic reproduction of our life and social relations?
The winter provided to hundreds of people a season to formally and informally meet, consider, propose plans and create possibilities for the General Strike that has been called on May 1st.
In examining the shifted terrain of work, productivity, and thus strike, the critical questions which emerge are:
How can this complex arrangement…
- of placed and non-placed labor (i.e., labor that occurs in a
recognizable workplace as well as Starbucks or the neighborhood boutique
cafe or the street or in the home)
- of recognized and unrecognized productivity (i.e., a waged job, albeit
badly paid and using Google, Facebook, YouTube) of remunerated and
unremunerated life (i.e., the time which is paid for a specific work and
the time spent between any specific work just making oneself available,
preparing, learning new skills which could be reapplied back into work)
- of visible and invisible, of legal and not legalized, of union and
non-unionized workers
…redefine the strategies for a General Strike?
Where could be the sites of blockage? Where could be the site of flow stoppage? Where could be the sites of non-cooperation? How to activate other fields of non-cooperation such a debt strike under the heading general strike? And where could be the sites of cooperation, of communization, of convergence?;
What qualities could a strike take to address the multiplicity of sites of production? And if our consumption, obedience, and everyday participation is part of our productivity, if our everyday social reproduction is the lubricant of the economic machinery that increasingly surveys and oppresses the multitudes and our shared habitats, how could May 1st become the turning point to intensify a process not only of withdrawal or a symbolic act but a call for the infinite strike, the closest we can get of doing nothing, how actively we envision and realize our lives without
capitalism.
The general assembly of Occupy Los Angeles called for a general strike on
December 19th; Occupy Boston on January 7th; Occupy Tampa on January 7th; Occupy Pasadena on January 8th; Occupy Phoenix on January 10th; Occupy Williamsburg and Occupy Long Beach on January 17th; Occupy Brooklyn on January 19th; Occupy Oakland on January 29th; Occupy Ventura on February 7th; New York City on February 14th; Occupy Sydney on February 18th; Occupy Detroit on February 21st; Occupy Seattle on February 26th; and Occupy Bushwick on March 1st. In the weeks between and since we know many other cities, assemblies, and organizations have also called for the May Day General Strike, and we expect more to follow suit in the next weeks.
At work, under constant surveillance, we struggle for a daily wage, simply to increase the profit margins for our bosses. Previously, the ruling classes had slaves and indentured servants, forcing labor relations through brute force. Today they still have us as slaves and servants through wage labor contracts and fraudulent notions of debt. As we have all seen, debt can be forgiven, in the trillions, to those who own society; but for the rest of us debt is inexcusable, and our lives, our time, our futures, are always negotiable.
May Day is known the world over as International Workers Day, a day commemorating violence by police and strike-breakers against workers engaged in a general strike to bring about the 8 hour work day. This struggle was not the end goal for those who put their lives on the line in Chicago in 1886, but it was part of a broader aim of destroying the very means of our oppression— capital and the state. This war continues. So too the general strikes of 2012 will establish a decisive drive towards the materialization of a social force to be feared by bosses and politicians the world over.
It’s time to multiply – to become a global social force capable of attacking our enemies when and where it hurts and sustaining and defending each other in this transformative global moment; a force able to fight and win, a force able to collectively end these indignities and give us the necessary leverage to overcome mediation and to determine our own futures.
This is a call for a 5 day weekend beginning Friday April 27th, culminating in global General Strike on Tuesday May 1st. We propose using this mobilization as a tool for realizing more global solidarity and mutual aid while creating and strengthening the necessary relations and conditions for revolutionary potential – here and now. We will strike, assemble, block and shut down the city!
From the struggle that brought the 8 hour work day, to the people who want it all –
EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE!
About Strike Everywhere (the grouping in NY that is working on this)
We are New York City Anarchists, Anti-Capitalists and Autonomists; we are joining the call for global revolt. In the coming weeks local groups and collectives, along with regional and global allies will help develop and facilitate an open framework to organize, coordinate and propagate our activities. This will include local and regional organizing bodies, websites and information hubs, resource and skill sharing, and various actions, events, and outreach efforts in the lead up to the Global General Strike of May Day 2012.
Some Background written by a different NYC based group (edited):
During the winter, we participated in a molecular seminar entitled ‘Welcome to the New Paradigm; The Crisis of Everything Everywhere.’ A few hundred people attended over the course of 9 days, some staying for a session, others for a day, and yet others for the entire duration. Together we organized, disorganized, ate, spoke, disagreed, speculated, walked, mapped, manifested, felt, listened, played.
At the time, the occupations at Liberty (Zuccotti Park/Wall Street) and across the globe were so powerful; it was still unclear whether the idea of a General Strike was a nostalgic regression or potential mode of amplification and generalization of refusal. After all, the occupations were themselves a new paradigm of a strike, not just striking against a work place or work but taking everything, everywhere.
As the coordinated and violent attacks by police started in late Fall on the encampments, there was an even greater urgency placed upon everyone to consider how this refusal of austerity, of faux solutions, of legalized robbery, of new forms of enclosure, of an increasing surveillance /security state, of ever greater ecological ruin, of continued structural racism, could be expressed, embodied, uttered, collectively; and how could this be done in a forceful manner, without further empowering or placing all of our collective attention into a reactionary game with and on the police force.
In January, we returned to the question of the General Strike and we asked one another:
What it could mean a General Strike today given the global dimension of financial capital, given the shifting qualities of the workplace and work-time (namely its increased itinerancy, placelessness, instability, meaninglessness), given the ever more invasive forms of extracting productivity and value from the basic reproduction of our life and social relations?
The winter provided to hundreds of people a season to formally and informally meet, consider, propose plans and create possibilities for the General Strike that has been called on May 1st.
In examining the shifted terrain of work, productivity, and thus strike, the critical questions which emerge are:
How can this complex arrangement…
- of placed and non-placed labor (i.e., labor that occurs in a
recognizable workplace as well as Starbucks or the neighborhood boutique
cafe or the street or in the home)
- of recognized and unrecognized productivity (i.e., a waged job, albeit
badly paid and using Google, Facebook, YouTube) of remunerated and
unremunerated life (i.e., the time which is paid for a specific work and
the time spent between any specific work just making oneself available,
preparing, learning new skills which could be reapplied back into work)
- of visible and invisible, of legal and not legalized, of union and
non-unionized workers
…redefine the strategies for a General Strike?
Where could be the sites of blockage? Where could be the site of flow stoppage? Where could be the sites of non-cooperation? How to activate other fields of non-cooperation such a debt strike under the heading general strike? And where could be the sites of cooperation, of communization, of convergence?;
What qualities could a strike take to address the multiplicity of sites of production? And if our consumption, obedience, and everyday participation is part of our productivity, if our everyday social reproduction is the lubricant of the economic machinery that increasingly surveys and oppresses the multitudes and our shared habitats, how could May 1st become the turning point to intensify a process not only of withdrawal or a symbolic act but a call for the infinite strike, the closest we can get of doing nothing, how actively we envision and realize our lives without
capitalism.
The general assembly of Occupy Los Angeles called for a general strike on
December 19th; Occupy Boston on January 7th; Occupy Tampa on January 7th; Occupy Pasadena on January 8th; Occupy Phoenix on January 10th; Occupy Williamsburg and Occupy Long Beach on January 17th; Occupy Brooklyn on January 19th; Occupy Oakland on January 29th; Occupy Ventura on February 7th; New York City on February 14th; Occupy Sydney on February 18th; Occupy Detroit on February 21st; Occupy Seattle on February 26th; and Occupy Bushwick on March 1st. In the weeks between and since we know many other cities, assemblies, and organizations have also called for the May Day General Strike, and we expect more to follow suit in the next weeks.
X-Pollin8