No one and nothing works until everyone and everything works: Toward an Unlimited Wild General Strike

Yesterday I received some flack from a friend and comrade about my position on Occupy Wall Street's demands working group, specifically a demand for full employment called “Jobs for ALL – A Massive Public Works and Public Service Program" that they intend to bring to the general assembly where hopefully it will get shot down.  More of a state-run socialist program than a demand (i.e. a program that strengthens both domination of the state and capital over our lives), the program calls for" massive public works and public service programs with direct government employment at prevailing (union) wages, paid for by taxing the rich and corporations, by immediately ending all of America’s wars, and by ending all aid to authoritarian regimes to create 25 million new jobs to":
-Expand education: cut class sizes and provide free university for all;


-Expand healthcare and provide free healthcare for all (single payer system);


-Build housing, guarantee decent housing for all;


-Expand mass transit, provided for free;


-Rebuild the infrastructure—bridges, flood control, roads;


-Research and implement clean energy alternatives; and


-Clean up the environment.




These jobs are to be open to all, regardless of documentation/immigration status or criminal record.”


My initial response to this program was this:
"no full employment. employment=exploitation. since the systems that exploit us don't work for us, we shouldn't have to work for them either. Fuck capital/ Fuck labor. #strikeoccupytakeover. "


In response, a friend and former union organizer with the TWU local 100 in NYC chided me and questioned my supposed distance from reality: 


"I (think) understand the sentiment behind your statement, but I feel likes it's far removed from reality for a majority of people. Are you saying that people who are unemployed shouldn't demand jobs because they're opening themselves up to exploitation? What happens when unemployment checks run out? Do you really think that people will look at their families and advocate that they not eat or have housing or have the ability to get to school for this idea that ALL work is exploitation and as such we must boycott it?"


My response follows in two parts. First, I address the assumptions and underlying logics of my friend's critique. Second, I respond to the terms of his critique and elaborate on my position by way of a tactical outline.


 First, the coded language here is not difficult to deconstruct, but it is important to deconstruct it, not for the purpose of defending myself, but for foregrounding its problematic and paternalistic logics. The charge of "being far removed from reality for a majority of people" is commonly thrown at anarchists, anti-authoritarians, autonomists, and insurrectionists. It serves two functions. One, to marginalize anarchists and other ultra-leftists as being out of touch with some objective and uniform social reality that union organizers, socialists, liberals, non-profits/ NGO hacks and others seem to grasp. Second, it rests on an unspoken claim that anarchists generally posses forms of privilege (gender, race, class, ability, citizenship status, sex etc.) that blind them to this supposed objective social reality; a reality that everyone else seems to get. Finally, such a claim rests on a more insidious and paternalistic assumption, one that speaks for rather than listens to marginalized and precarious populations. In speaking for "a majority of people" (an interestingly homogenous and universal phrase to use considering that the author seems to be chiding me for my white racial framing and lack of attention to difference), my friend erases both the political desires and histories of struggle of marginalized and precarious populations who choose to act against and outside a state that has historically abandoned, incarcerated, killed, enslaved, occupied, exploited, and raped them. So I have a question of my own, how do you know what the majority of these low-income working people want? Interestingly, I never claimed to speak for this silenced majority when I stated my desire for the collective withdrawal of labor from a system of exploitation beyond domination. 
II.
 If we take a look at the language of "jobs for ALL- a Massive Public Works and Public Service Program", it sounds like nothing more than a new New Deal. And just as a reminder, the New Deal excluded both farmworkers (who were predominately immigrant and migrant workers of color) and domestic workers (who were predominately women of color). In this respect, the language of "jobs for ALL'" sounds intentionally vague and universal. From my perspective, like most socialist programs, this particular demand sounds toothless and passive. Additionally, it is profound ahistorical, it rests on some lethal liberal combination of fantasy and nostalgia- that a return to Keynesian is the return to the good life (a vision of the good life that "a majority of people", i.e. everyone who wasn't white, male, straight and middle class, did not have access too).

III.


My critique of a program like "jobs for ALL"is  primarily tactical not ideological. If anyone is out of touch with reality it is this unfortunate assemblage of liberals, Trots, and other socialists who assume that the State will some how concede this socialist paradise of "full employment" freely and easily. I agree with the concept of "full employment" (how could I not?) but I think that we should actually work to make it happen rather than merely demand it from the State. We need to actually think through the premises and foundations of such a demand. The problem with a demand like "Jobs for ALL" is that it rests on the same universal claims as the 99%. Additionally, it neutralizes the promise of open conflict and antagonism between Capital and Labor. What exactly would full employment look like and for whom? How can we achieve it without attacking capital and its agents, the police- without actively withdrawing our current or potential labor power?  


In short, full employment without strong labor is a complete sham and it allows capital to dictate its terms and conditions. Labor, in the form of Big labor, is too weak and ineffectual at this time to actually achieve anything like full employment or a new New Deal. The decline of unions, the weakening of labor laws and the NLRB, as well as the recent assault on unions in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, demonstrate the general impossibility of full employment, especially in the public sector, without real occupations, sitdown strikes, wildcats, and sick-outs. In an age of austerity our labor power is one of the few weapons that we have left in the war against capital. Why should we continue to use our labor power to produce and maintain our own exploitation? Why not provide for each other? Why not, occupy our jobs?


Thus a negation of this demand, is an offensive tactic rather than merely a reformist desire that keeps capital in its current position. The refusal to work goes beyond an understanding that all wage labor is exploitation. That is, it is not merely a negation of work which then leaves marginalized, precarious, and vulnerable populations even more vulnerable and precarious to an austerity state that doesn't for them or about them. The strategy of refusal keeps in the spirit of the demand for full employment but goes one step further to actualizing it. It operates under the logic that no one and nothing works until everyone and everything works: an unlimited wild general strike . No partial concessions and limited demands.


 It calls for both a large-scale resurgence of old-school militant labor tactics such as strikes, sabotage, and attacks, but also what the Italian autonomists called "autoreduction": "the act by which consumers, in the area of consumption, and workers, in the area of production take it upon themselves to reduce at a collectively determined level, the price of public services, housing, electricity; or in the factory, the rate of productivity." Imagine paying 50 cents for a subway ride because the MTA conductor agreed that it was too expensive? 


So to answer some of my friend's questions: No, I'm not out touch with reality; whatever that means. These very rhetorical questions themselves speak to a profound poverty of the radical (and tactical) imagination in an area of endless austerity-- where everything and everyone has been cut, furloughed, incarcerated, and laid off. The recent global struggles against austerity, from the California student-worker movements of 2009 to the London riots have already demonstrated that another world is possible without demanding it.  No, I'm not advocating that families starve their children so we can all be hella radical. What I am saying is that the unemployed shouldn't just demand jobs because we should be and already are working to build a society free of the necessity of wage exploitation. Most of the current wage jobs that youth, vulnerable, and precaious populations have access to don't even provide the basic conditions of survival anyway, but the forms of mutual aid practiced in the communized spaces of the occupations do. What happens when unemployment checks run out? Go to the commune and the neighborhood assembly. What happens when there is no money for rent? Occupy vacant homes, condos, office buildings, and  churches?  What happens when there is no money for food? Go to the commune. ALL work is exploitation and we shouldn't return to it  unless we have some control over our lives and working conditions. We want more than jobs, my friend. We want freedom! We want dignity! We want to build a world together that we can actually live in! And demanding "full employment" without building and defending informal structures of aid, support and care- without sabotaging and attacking capital, without taking over and running community spaces such as medical clinics and daycare centers, is an insult to the work we have already started doing in the communes we have built from Oakland to Santiago. 


In solidarity


Fuck capital/ fuck labor! We should no longer work to maintain a system that has never for worked us! No one and and nothing works until everyone and everything works! 

And then Jameson puts my foot in my mouth....