![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/27/what-we-want-for-may-day-2026-2up-preview.png\")
Click the image to download and print the PDF.
\nWhat do we want for May Day? In short, to take another step towards freedom from all forms of oppression—towards what we call anarchy, by which we mean egalitarian relationships based in self-determination, solidarity, and mutual aid. Anarchists have been central to May Day since its origins as a labor holiday in 1886, when police in Chicago attempted to suppress anarchist labor organizers who were fighting for right to the eight-hour workday. Today, as intensifying authoritarianism propels more and more people into action, we have a window of opportunity to make real change. Towards that end, we present some starting points and a handbill to promote them.
\n\n Click the image to download and print the PDF.
\nThis year, inspired in part by the massive general strike in the Twin Cities on January 23 in response to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement terror campaign, many people around the country are calling for a general strike on May Day. Fully one in four adults in Minnesota participated in the January 23 general strike in some way. We probably won’t see anything approaching that scale in most of the country on May Day, but nonetheless, it is a step towards building the collective capacity to use economic leverage against capitalists and despots.
\n\nVarious liberal organizations are calling for strikes and boycotts. To carry off a real general strike, however, will take more than a voluntary pause in working and consuming. Much has changed in the economy since the powerful strikes of the early 20th century that won the rights workers are now losing. The shift of the majority of workers from industrial production jobs into the service industry and the introduction of automation have made it much more difficult to paralyze the economy simply by walking out of our workplaces.
\n\nA few years ago, we published a detailed analysis of the last two general strikes that occurred in Oakland, California (in 1946 and 2011), exploring how labor and labor struggles have changed over the past century and how this ought to inform our efforts to update the strike and other forms of resistance for the 21st century.
\n\nWe summarized our findings thus:
\n\n\n\n\nWhat would a modern-day general strike look like? It would involve a broad range of precarious workers, unemployed people, and other rebels taking disruptive action to shut down the economy from outside. However the strike might begin, it would have to proliferate horizontally, spreading beyond any single demographic as a contagious rebellion exceeding the control of any organization. It would entail targeting the choke points of the economy—physical locations like ports, highways, and distribution centers as well as online venues and other forms of infrastructure, not to mention the workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, and prisons in which most of us spend most of our lives. It would necessitate defying politicians, union representatives, community leaders, and everyone who defends their legitimacy. It would be controversial. To persist, it would require seizing and redistributing resources. Many of these actions would take place within workplaces, but to center the agency of official unions or other organizations that have legal standing under capitalism would be to ensure defeat in advance.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/27/1.jpg\")
Demonstrators in Chicago display a banner during the “No Kings” protest on March 28, 2026.
\nTemporarily shutting down the economy is only one step on the road towards a better world. We also have to identify the changes that we want to make and move towards them proactively.
\n\nAt a time when “Abolish ICE” has become a viable political proposal, there is now a risk that people will be drawn into passive electoral programs, mistaking them for radical social change. Why is this dangerous?
\n\nThe uprising of 2020—the most powerful social movement in living memory—began when people took direct action to impose consequences on the Minneapolis police for murdering George Floyd. In response to the burning of the Third Precinct, millions of people around the country leaped into action. The movement only reached a plateau when reformists regained control, proposing to defund the police through municipal initiatives rather than grassroots action. By the time it became clear that local and state governments were never going to do any such thing, the movement had lost its momentum.
\n\nThe lesson is clear: we have to become capable of making the changes we desire directly. Governments will only grant us what they know we can accomplish for ourselves.
\n\nThe best way to distinguish our proposals from those of electoral reformists is to organize actions via which people can immediately achieve concrete effects. These actions should transform the participants’ relationship to their own agency, enabling them to develop a stronger sense of their power and a clearer understanding of the advantages of grassroots horizontal organizing.
\n\nEngineering consists of breaking down a big goal into a series of achievable concrete tasks. We would do well to work out what the steps are to doing away with autocracy once and for all, and propose things that people can do right now to take a step towards this. At the same time, we should also spell out the subsequent steps in the process, the ones that we are aiming to build capacity to undertake, so that reformists are not able to usurp momentum for social change.
\n\nThe movement against ICE in the Twin Cities demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach. Once a large number of people understood that they could make a difference by forming rapid response networks and engaging in other forms of direct action, the power dynamics in the Twin Cities shifted and the Trump regime was forced to dial down its assault. Once again, the movement went no further only because it was not clear to enough people what the next step in the process might be. We need to promote a wide array of reproducible grassroots tactics that can be taken up far outside radical circles—ideally, tactics that aren’t especially difficult or costly to try out in relation to what one can achieve by using them—and popularize a clear roadmap to social change that does not rely on parties or politicians.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/27/6.jpg\")
Anarchists march through downtown Seattle on May Day 2012, en route to smash up the same Niketown outlet famously damaged by demonstrators against the 1999 World Trade Organization summit.
\nA few starting points.
\n\nEnd the targeting of immigrants. All who have been imprisoned or deported must be free to rejoin their loved ones. Block ICE everywhere they try to terrorize communities.
\n\nVolunteers in Chicago and the Twin Cities have demonstrated how to organize rapid response networks to resist ICE operations. The next step is to discuss what kind of collective action could serve to shut down the detention centers and free those held captive there.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/27/2.jpg\")
Demonstrators participate in a protest initiated by Jewish groups against ICE detention camps in Boston on July 2, 2019.
\nEveryone imprisoned for resisting the Trump regime must go free. That includes the brave fighters from the Twin Cities and Los Angeles, the Prairieland defendants, and those captured for resisting the rise of fascism before Trump took office.
\n\nTo support defendants and prisoners today, you can host a fundraiser event or a noise demonstration outside a jail or prison. To bring them home tomorrow, look for means of pressure via which to put politicians and capitalists in a position in which it is better for them to call for amnesty for all.
\n\nGet US troops and weapons out of the Middle East and Latin America. End military support to the Israeli government. Find leverage points to respond to threats to murder civilians, seize Greenland, or use nuclear weapons. Take direct action to shut down the arms companies responsible for the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
\n\nHow can ordinary people exert leverage on the foreign policy of an authoritarian government? The blockades and university occupations with which demonstrators have pressured Boeing, Raytheon, and other pillars of the military-industrial complex offer one starting point.
\n\nAbolish ICE and DHS. These institutions exist to oppress us. Those who have joined or remained in these agencies under Trump have shown their true colors. Any politician who continues to support them is paving the way for totalitarianism.
\n\nDisrupt ICE and Department of Homeland Security recruiting events. Stigmatize serving federal agencies as a mercenary inflicting violence on communities. Organize demonstrations exerting pressure on vulnerable Democrat politicians not to fund DHS under any conditions, regardless of whether Republicans agree to reforms.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/27/4.jpg\")
A sign displayed during protests against the Portland ICE facility at the end of January 2026. Photograph by Alissa Azar.
\nOligarchs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg want to use AI to eliminate jobs, carry out mass surveillance, and massacre entire populations. Block Flock cameras, data centers, and data harvesting.
\n\nPeople around the country are mapping and disabling Flock surveillance cameras and mobilizing to oppose the construction of data centers. Above all, we should spread the understanding that tech moguls are fundamentally aligned with an autocratic political agenda.
\n\nWages have flattened while inflation skyrockets. People can barely afford food, rent, and healthcare while billionaires rack up record profits. Fight back through strikes and acts of mass refusal.
\n\nThe political crisis in the United States today is the consequence of economic processes that have been underway for generations. The rise of fascism is not a fluke brought about by the demagoguery of a single individual, but the logical outcome of profit-driven capitalism. We must develop the capacity to strike, blockade, and shut down the economy as a step towards completely reinventing our economic relationships and redistributing resources on an egalitarian basis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/27/5.jpg\")
Demonstrators in New York City march in solidarity with those in the Twin Cities resisting ICE on January 23, 2026.
\nCultivate mutual aid projects, community education projects, and other social infrastructure outside the state that cannot be gutted by government cuts or threatened by crackdowns on schools and non-profit organizations.
\n\nEvery community can organize regular Really Really Free Markets and other forms of mutual aid infrastructure through which people can interchange resources and meet their needs collectively. These should be a step towards creating communities that are able to take action together on a massive scale.
\n\nNo political party will do these things for us. We have become able to accomplish them ourselves. We can’t win the lives we deserve through elections, neither the midterms nor in 2028. We reject the false promises of a return to the Biden years—the very years that brought Trump back to power. We are fighting for dignity, freedom, and well-being for all. A life worth living!
\n\nDemocrats’ attempts to preserve an unbearable status quo were what got us into this mess in the first place. Nothing less than profound change will get us out of it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/27/3.jpg\")
Demonstrators employ a parade float to protect demonstrators from police violence in Paris on May Day 2019.
\nIn France, a new surge of protest activity has erupted against the government of Emmanuel Macron in response to an unpopular pension reform. This promises to be the most powerful unrest in France since the Yellow Vest movement. In the following introduction and translation, we explore the roots, forms, and prospects of this movement.
\n\n\n\n\nThe bastards know it well: what they feared in the quasi-insurrection of 2018 is not so much a social subject—whatever the worst leftist sociology says—nor even a set of practices. It was an ungovernability, determined and diffuse. A wave of hatred of the neoliberal universe.
\n\n \n
After two months of traditional protests and occasional strikes stage-managed by the intersyndicale (the coordination of the eight biggest national unions in France), the movement against Macron’s government pension reform came to a head when Elizabeth Borne (Macron’s prime minister and the head of the government) announced that she was going to use article 49.3 of the Constitution to implement the pension reform without a vote in the National Assembly.
\n\nDuring those first two months, large numbers of people took to the streets, but despite public support, the protests and strikes were not combative. However, the deputies in the National Assembly were divided; it was possible that a majority would oppose the pension reform, so Borne sidestepped them. The law still has to be approved by the Senate, but for now, that is beside the point. French deputies opposed to Macron and Borne filed for a vote of confidence, which would have pushed Borne’s government out of office.
\n\nOn the night of Thursday, March 16, people spontaneously assembled in symbolic locations in Paris and other cities to protest the use of article 49.3. As the night wore on, they refused to leave, despite police becoming more and more violent. In the end, police arrested a large number of people across France—almost 300 in Paris alone—almost all of whom were released without charges the next day.
\n\nOver the weekend, spontaneous street protests (les “manifs sauvages”) broke out, taking advantage of a garbage collection strike to fill the streets of Paris with flaming garbage bins. As police violence intensifies, the “spontaneous” aspect of these protests plays an important technical role. Most mass protests in France, such as the ones that took place before Thursday, are “déclarées”—groups register them with the police beforehand. Spontaneous protests are legal, but the framework for repression is less clear than it is for the authorized demonstrations. This is a big issue: courts still have to rule on whether you can be arrested simply for being in the vicinity of a spontaneous protest, what the consequences should be for leading a spontaneous protest, whether the French constitutional right to demonstrate includes spontaneous protests, and what the police can legally do to target people at these protests.
\n\nMoreover, all the authorized protests have a set location or route, whereas the current spontaneous protests are unpredictable. They do not converge on a strategic location, nor do they have a particular goal aside from harassing the cops. Groups ranging from 100 to 1000 move in different directions all around a given area, barricading the streets, painting, and setting things on fire. Just as occurred during the 2020 George Floyd uprising in the United States, the police can’t contain and control several groups at once.
\n\n\n\n\n“We can handle one 10,000-person protest, but ten 1000-person protests throughout the city will overwhelm us.”
\n\n-Los Angeles police officer, summer 2020
\n
The more fatigued they get, the more violent the cops become. People are being very brave, but they are also sustaining serious injuries and trauma.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/jdicajdisrien/status/1637190033361739778\n\n\n
These spontaneous street protests are occurring at night, while early in the morning and during the day, the strike has been intensifying, with people organizing more and more blockades. The strike began before the application of article 49.3 last Thursday; the chief sectors that are participating include garbage processing (collection and incineration), fuel distribution (refineries and transportation), and public transportation (city transit, trains, and airports).
\n\nThe unions have called for a nationwide strike this Thursday, March 23. When the leadership announced this last week, it came across as an effort at pacification, to get people out of the streets; but because people did not cease to take to the streets, instead, it now represents an opportunity to escalate. We expect the country to be blocked, and for the unions to be outflanked by spontaneous direct actions all over the country, involving both autonomous groups and local union branches. This has already begun to occur—in Fos-sur-Mer or in Rennes, for example.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ColeStangler/status/1638130426366533632\n\n\n
In Paris, the people leading the strike are the garbage collectors, working from three different locations. They have been on strike since March 7, and have maintained picket lines since then. Only one picket line has been breached by police, and it has reformed since then. They need money to keep the strike going. They have become the stars of the movement, in some way, because the garbage accumulating in the streets of Paris has provided the ideal material for the nighttime crowds to set on fire—an endlessly replenishing resource for as long as the garbage trucks remain inoperable.
\n\nGenerally speaking, the people on the picket lines are workers and leftists of various stripes, while those running the streets at night are younger and rowdier. These groups are not antagonistic to one another, which has not always been the case in the French political landscape. People seem to enjoy meeting each other when and where they can; there are no general assemblies bringing all the generations together, but neither the unions nor the older leftists are condemning the nighttime riots.
\n\nOver the preceding months, a conversation had developed about how COVID-19 caused a break in the transmission of techniques, stories, and cultures of struggle in French activist circles, and how that led to the propagation of centralized (and frankly, boring) politics in many universities. In this movement, we are seeing new political formations emerge along with decentralized and autonomous experiments in direct action and resistance, revealing the limitations of the traditional means of control and repression. The events of the past week show that we can put to rest any fears about the passivity of the younger generation.
\n\nLast Monday, the National Assembly voted not reject the government, further outraging people. The fact that the government of Macron and Borne remains in power will keep the precarious balance between nationalist and leftist agendas stable, for now. But for how long?
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Lebienpublic/status/1636414213244567563\n\n\n
As in the Yellow Vest movement of 2018, nationalism is a driving force in these protests. No one has really pulled out the French flags yet, but they could make their appearance soon. For good or for ill, since the Yellow Vests, the mainstream French political imagination has been almost entirely focused on the French Revolution. People are calling for Macron to be beheaded, to protect the sacred honor of French democracy, and so on. All this comes with a broad and—thus far—diffuse nationalism. Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party is waiting in the wings to capitalize on the situation.
\n\nTo continue growing, the movement will have to surpass its current limits. So far, the riots and the blockades have been majority white; most working-class people of color won’t benefit from the current pension system anyway. Unless it becomes clear what they might have to gain from this movement, they probably will not take to the streets, and that will limit the possibility of an insurrection. Likewise, while dramatic images have indeed circulated from Paris and other cities, unlike the Yellow Vests, this movement started in the big cities, and it remains unclear how far it will spread to the more rural areas of the country.
\n\nLikewise, it remains to be seen how a new round of unrest in France would influence movements elsewhere around the world. The rhythm of unrest in France is generally out of sync with political events elsewhere. The Occupy movement and its equivalents took place in Spain, Greece, the United States, and even Germany in 2011, but the French equivalent, Nuit Debout, occurred a full five years later; the Yellow Vest movement began a year ahead of most of the global revolts of 2019. But with movements picking up steam again in Greece and elsewhere, events in France could contribute to shaping the popular imagination around the world. None of the tensions that catalyzed the global revolts of 2019 and the George Floyd uprising of 2020 have been resolved. From the United States and France to Russia and Iran, governments have simply attempted to suppress dissent with brute force, as people slowly, steadily become more desperate and angry.
\n\nIn the short term, comrades in France are hoping to build power to resist the upcoming repressive laws targeting migrants, undocumented people, houseless people, and squatters that are in the works from the government of Macron and Borne. In Paris and the neighboring areas specifically, the struggle against the city’s preparation for the Olympic Games in summer 2024 is also on many people’s minds. Reclaiming the streets is urgent when evictions, destruction of parks and public spaces, and the construction of massive and unnecessary infrastructure in the northern suburbs of Paris is being weaponized as a means to control and cleanse traditionally working-class neighborhoods.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/22/2.jpg\")
The Nuit Debout movement of 2016, a part of the resistance to the labor law that was introduced that year using article 49.3, is one of the precedents for the movement emerging today.
\nThis is a translation of “La macronie, bientôt finie?”
\n\nThe announcement on Thursday, March 16 that the government would use article 49.3 of the Constitution to impose its pension reform without a National Assembly vote propelled the protest movement into a new dimension. Despite fierce repression, a strange mixture of anger and joy is spreading throughout the country: spontaneous demonstrations, surprise blockades of main roads, invasions of shopping centers or railway tracks, dumping garbage in the offices of deputies, nighttime garbage fires, targeted power outages, and more. The situation has become uncontrollable and the president has no plan other than to promise that he will hold out at all costs and sink into a headlong rush of violence. The days to come will therefore be decisive: either the movement will wear out its energy—though everything indicates the opposite—or Macron’s rule will collapse. In this text, we’ll try to present a progress report, analyzing the forces involved as well as their strategies and objectives in the short and medium terms.
\n\nIf we consider the two forces officially present, the situation is unique in that neither can permit themselves to lose. On the one hand, we have the “social movement,” which we often think has disappeared but which always returns for lack of anything better. The most optimistic see in this the necessary prelude to building a rapport de force that could pave the way for an uprising or even revolution. The most pessimistic believe that, on the contrary, it is compromised from the outset—that the channeling and ritualization of popular discontent contributes to the good management of the prevailing order and therefore to maintaining and reinforcing it.
\n\nBe that as it may—on paper, this “social movement” has everything to win: the unions are united, the demonstrations are numerous, public opinion is largely favorable to it, and although the government was elected democratically, it is very much in the minority. The stars are therefore aligned, all the lights are green; in such objectively favorable conditions, if the “social movement” loses, that means that it will never again be able to imagine or claim to win anything.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/03/22/1.jpg\")
Strikes and blockades have broken out across France.
\nOn the other side, there is Emmanuel Macron, his government, and some fanatics who believe in him. They know they are in the minority, but that is where they draw their strength from. Macron is not a president who was elected to be liked or even appreciated. He embodies the terminus of politics: his pure and perfect adherence to the economy, to efficiency, to performance. He does not see the people, life, human beings, only atoms from which to extract value. Macron is a kind of evil droid who wants the best for those he governs against their will. His idea of politics is an Excel spreadsheet: as long as the calculations are correct and the numbers come out right, he will continue to move forward at a steady pace. On the other hand, he knows that if he hesitates, trembles, or gives up, he will not be able to claim to govern anything or anyone.
\n\nA face-off is not a symmetry, however. What threatens the “social movement” is fatigue and resignation. The only thing that could make the president give up is the concrete risk of an uprising. Since the use of article 49.3 on Thursday, March 16, we see that the situation is changing. Now that negotiation with the authorities has become obsolete, the “social movement” is boiling over and surpassing itself. Its contours are becoming pre-insurrectional.
\n\nThere remains a third, unofficial force, inertia: those who, for the moment, refuse to join the battle out of laziness, happenstance, or fear. At present, they are effectively playing for the government, but the more unstable the situation, the more they will have to take sides, whether for the movement or for the government. The great achievement of the Yellow Vests was to bring frustration and dissatisfaction out from behind the screens, getting people offline and into the streets.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/TaoualitAmar/status/1633161674696847366\n\n\n
But what is really behind this confrontation and its staging? What is it that grips the heart, inspiring courage or rage? What is at stake is the rejection of work.
\n\nObviously, no one dares to formulate the issue this way, because as soon as we talk about work, an old trap closes on us. Its mechanism is, however, rudimentary and well known: behind the very concept of work, one has voluntarily confused two quite distinct realities. On the one hand, work as singular participation in collective life, in its richness and creativity. On the other hand, work as a particular form of individual labor in the capitalist organization of life—that is, work as pain and exploitation. If one ventures to criticize work, or even to wish for its abolition, that will usually be understood as a petit-bourgeois whim or gutter punk nihilism. If we want to eat bread, we need bakers; if we want bakers, we need bakeries; if we want bakeries, we need masons; and for the dough we put in the oven, we need farmers who sow, harvest, and so on. No one, of course, is in a position to dispute such evidence.
\n\nThe problem, our problem, is that if we reject work to such an extent, if we are millions in the streets pounding the pavement to avoid being subjected to two more years of work, it is not because we are lazy or dream of joining a bridge club, but because the form that the common and collective effort has taken in this society is unbearable, humiliating, often meaningless and mutilating. If you think about it, we have never fought for retirement—always against work.
\n\nFor people to recognize collectively on a grand scale that for the great majority of us, work is pain: the authorities cannot permit that idea to take hold, for it would imply the destruction of the whole social edifice, without which they would be nothing. If our common condition is that we have no power over our lives and know it, then paradoxically, everything becomes possible again. Let us note that revolutions do not necessarily need great theories and complex analyses; it is sometimes enough simply to make a tiny demand that one holds onto until the end. It would be enough, for example, to refuse to be humiliated: by a schedule, by a salary, by a manager or a task. It would be enough to have a collective movement that suspends the anguish of the calendar, the to-do-list, the agenda. It would suffice to claim the most minimal dignity for oneself, one’s family and others, and the whole system would collapse. Capitalism has never been anything other than the objective and economic organization of humiliation and pain.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/CerveauxNon/status/1637045941986263042\n\n\n
Having said that, we must recognize that in the immediate future, the social organization that we are contesting is not only held together by the blackmail for survival that it imposes on everyone. It is also held together by the violence of the police. We won’t get into the social role of the police and the reasons they behave so detestably; those have already been synthesized well enough in the text “Why All Cops Are Bastards.” What seems urgent to us is to think strategically about their violence, what it represses and stifles via terror and intimidation.
\n\nIn the last few days, researchers and commentators have denounced the lack of professionalism of the police—their excesses, their arbitrariness, sometimes even their violence. Even on BFMTV [the most-watched conservative news channel in France], they were surprised that out of the 292 people arrested on Thursday, March 16 at Place de la Concorde, 283 were released from police custody without prosecution and the remaining 9 were given a simple reprimand. The problem with this kind of indignation is that, in focusing on a perceived dysfunction of the system, they prevent themselves from seeing what can only be an intentional strategy. If hundreds of BRAV-M [the Brigades de répression des actions violentes motorisées, police motorcycle units established during the Yellow Vest protests] are roaming the streets of Paris to chase down and beat up protesters, if on Friday a prefectural decree forbade any gathering anywhere in an area comprising about a quarter of the entire capital, that is because [Emmanuel] Macron, [Minister of the Interior Gérald] Darmanin, and [Paris Police Prefect Laurent] Nuñez have agreed on the method: empty the streets, shock the bodies, terrify the hearts… while waiting for it to pass.
\n\nLet’s repeat, one never wins “militarily” against the police. Police represent an obstacle that must be kept in check, dodged, exhausted, disorganized, or demoralized. To do away with the police is not to naïvely hope that one day they will lay down their arms and join the movement, but on the contrary, to make sure that each of their attempts to reimpose order through violence produces more disorder. Let’s remember that on the first Saturday of the Yellow Vests movement, on the Champs Elysees [a famous avenue in Paris], the crowd that felt particularly legitimate chanted “the police with us.” A few police charges and tear gas later, the most beautiful avenue in the world was transformed into a battlefield.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BFMTV/status/1066352998396436480\n\n\n
That said, our strategic decision-making capacities for the street are very limited. We have no general staff, only our common sense, our numbers, and a certain inclination towards improvising. In the current configuration, we can nevertheless draw some lessons from these last weeks:
\n\nThe policing of demonstrations, which is to say, the task of keeping them within the bounds of harmlessness, is a task shared between the union leaders and the police force. A demonstration that goes as planned is a victory for the government. A demonstration that overflows the bounds prepared for it spreads anxiety to the top of the government, demoralizes the police, and brings us closer to the abolition of work. A crowd that no longer accepts the police-led route, that damages the symbols of the economy and expresses its anger joyously, is a disruption and therefore a threat.
\nUntil now, with the exception of March 7, all mass demonstrations have been contained by the police. The trade union processions have remained perfectly orderly and the most determined demonstrators were systematically isolated and brutally repressed. In some circumstances, a little audacity releases the energy necessary to escape from the frame; in others, it can enable the police to violently close down any possibility. It happens that when you want to break a window, you first break your nose on the edge of the frame.
\nBecause of their speed of movement and their extreme brutality, the BRAV-M cops are the most formidable obstacle. The confidence that they have built up over the past few years and especially in recent weeks must be undermined. If we cannot rule out the possibility that small groups will occasionally outwit them and reduce their audacity, the most effective option would be for the peaceful crowd of union members and demonstrators to no longer tolerate their presence, to stand with their hands up whenever these cops attempt to break through the demonstration, to shout at them and push them away. If their appearance in the demonstrations starts causing disorder instead of restoring order, Mr. Nunez will be forced to exile them to the Ile de la Cité [the island in the center of Paris], to cloister them in their garage on rue Chanoinesse.
\nOn Thursday, March 16, following the announcement of the use of article 49.3, a union demonstration announced ahead of time and more scattered calls converged on the other side of the Concorde bridge in front of the National Assembly. The primary objective of the police being to protect the representatives of the nation, theys pushed the crowd back to the south. Thanks to this maneuver, the demonstrators found themselves propelled into and dispersed throughout the tourist streets of the city center. The piles of garbage left by the garbage collectors’ strike spontaneously became bonfires, slowing down and preventing police responses. Spontaneously, in many cities around the country, burning garbage cans became the signature of the movement.
\nOn Friday March 17, a new call to go to the Place de la Concorde was contained. Though the demonstrators were courageous and determined, they found themselves caught in a trap, a vice, unable to regain their mobility. The prefecture did not make the same mistake as the day before. On Saturday, a third call to gather in the same square convinced the authorities to ban all gatherings in an area stretching from the Champs Élysées to the Louvre, from the Grands Boulevards to the rue de Sèvres—in other words, across about a quarter of Paris around the Presidential Palace of the Elysée and the National Assembly. Thousands of police officers stationed in the area were able to prevent the beginning of any gathering by harassing passersby. On the other side of the city, a gathering at Place d’Italie took the police deployment in stride and started a spontaneous demonstration in the opposite direction. Mobile groups were able to block the streets for several hours, setting fire to garbage cans and temporarily escaping the BRAV-M.
\nThe ABCs of strategy are that tactics should not clash, but should compose. The Paris prefecture has already presented its battle narrative: responsible but harmless mass demonstrations on one side, nightly riots led by radical and illegitimate fringes on the other. Anyone who has been in the streets this past week knows how much this caricature is a lie and how important it is to keep it that way. For this is their ultimate weapon: to divide the revolt into good and bad, responsible and uncontrollable. Solidarity is their worst nightmare. If the movement gains intensity, the trade union processions will end up being attacked and, consequently, defending themselves. The surprise blockades of the beltways by CGT groups [Confédération Générale du Travail, a national trade union] indicate that a part of the base is already determined to go beyond the rituals. When the police intervened in Fos-sur-Mer on Monday to enforce the prefect’s orders, the unionized workers escalated to confrontation. The more that the actions multiply, the more that the grip of the police will loosen. Gérald Darmanin mentioned that there have been more than 1200 spontaneous demonstrations over the past few days.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/illwilleditions/status/1638342765669937153\n \n
Beyond its own violence, the effectiveness of the police also lies in its power of diversion. By determining the place, the form, and the time of confrontation, it saps the energy of the movement. If we bet on disorder and the threat it poses to the government to compel Macron to give up on extending working hours, the blockade is crucial. Indeed, no one will wait indefinitely for the general strike of a working class and a labor movement eroded by 30 years of neoliberalism; the most obvious, spontaneous, and effective political gesture is now the blocking of economic flows, the interruption of the normal flow of goods and humans.
\n\nWhat has been organized in Rennes for two weeks can serve as an example. Rather than confronting the police as their primary objective, the people of Rennes have set up semi-public assemblies in which blocking actions are conceived. This Monday at dawn, a call for “dead cities” saw hundreds of people spread over several points of the city come to block the main roads and the Rennes ring road. Two weeks earlier, 300 people set fire to garbage cans in the middle of the night, blocking the street of Lorient until the early morning. The challenge is never to confront the police but to take them by surprise, to become stealthy. Even from the point of view of those who only swear by numbers and are still waiting for the general strike, this multiplication of blocking points and disorder is obvious. If, after the explosion in response to use of article 49.3 last Thursday, there had only been the call [from official union leadership] to demonstrate the following Thursday, everyone would have resigned themselves to a last stand and defeat. The blockades and the diffuse disorder have inspired the courage, confidence, and impetus the movement needed to project itself beyond the deadlines determined behind the doors of the union leaders.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AnonymeCitoyen/status/1638439834694873089\n\n\n
The collapse of classical politics along with its parties and its disillusionment has opened the way to innovative autonomous experiments. The movement against the labor law, Nuit Debout [a movement in 2016], the Yellow Vests, les Soulèvements de la Terre [the uprisings of the earth, a recent series of environmental mobilizations using mass direct action], and many others have confirmed in recent years that not only was there nothing left to expect from representation, but that nobody wanted it anymore.
\n\nEach of these sequences would deserve a thorough analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, but we will stick to one basic fact: undoing power implies inventing new forms, and for that, in the atomization of the metropolis, we need places to meet, think, and act from. For decades, the occupation of buildings, university campuses, or other places has been part of the obvious practices of any movement. A university president who accepted the intervention of the police on his campus was immediately condemned, as it was taken for granted that the collective and participatory reappropriation of space was the minimum response to the privatization of all spaces and the policing of public space.
\n\nIt is clear that today, no occupation is tolerated. If, as people have done in Rennes, one takes over an abandoned cinema to transform it into a Maison du Peuple [“house of the people”] where trade unionists, activists, and locals meet, the socialist mayor of the city evicts it within 48 hours, sending hundreds of police officers. As for the universities, their authorities shamelessly invoke the risks of disorder and the possibility of distance learning to close them administratively or send the police against their own students. On the other hand, all this underscores how important it is to have places where we can meet and organize ourselves, how much they can increase what we are capable of. In Paris, an occupation of the Bourse du Travail [labor union hall] was attempted after a boisterous assembly and a spontaneous banquet beneath the glass roof of the workers’ movement. However, it withered away in the night, due to the indecision or incomprehension of the unions and autonomous rebels. We need places to build connection and solidarity and we need connection and solidarity to hold places. The story of the chicken and the egg.
\n\nIn Rennes, the movement temporarily overcame the problem: once evacuated, the participants in the Maison du Peuple met in broad daylight and continued to organize blockades as well as meetings—presumably while waiting to be sufficiently united and strong to take back a place with roof, running water, and heating. In Paris, the limits that the Nuit Debout experiment reached seem to have foreclosed the possibility of meeting outdoors. The caricature that lingers would have it that open-air discussions only produce monologues without beginning or end. However, we remember the aperitif at Valls’2 and the possibility, even from our self-centered metropolitan solitude, to make the decision at the drop of a hat to rush to the Prime Minister’s house with several thousand people. The fact that the government is so intent on leaving us without meeting points shows how urgent it is to establish them.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/JulesRavel1/status/1638320128914776067\n\n\n
As we have said, the contours of the movement are becoming pre-insurrectional. Every day, the blockades multiply, the actions intensify. Thursday will therefore be decisive. From the point of view of the reform, if the demonstrations on Thursday get out of control, Macron will be cornered. Either he will take the risk of a black Saturday3 everywhere in the country—that is to say, the Yellow-Vestification that he fears above all—or he will back down on Friday, invoking the risk of significant uncontrollable outbursts.
\n\nEverything is at stake now, and more. The left is waiting in ambush, ready to sell an electoral loophole, the illusion of a referendum, or even the construction of the 4th International—whatever it takes to call for patience and a return to normal. For the movement to endure and avoid cooptation as well as repression, it will have to confront as soon as possible the question that is central to any uprising: how to organize itself. And undoubtedly, some people are already thinking and talking about how to live communism and spread anarchy.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/illwilleditions/status/1638276868192325652\n\n\n
We present here a hasty translation of a statement from comrades in France whose friend was severely injured by police in Sainte-Soline.
\n\nOn Saturday, March 25, in Sainte-Soline, our comrade S. was hit in the head by an explosive grenade during the demonstration against the basins [a project of large water reservoirs for industrial farm irrigation]. In spite of his critical condition, the prefecture first intentionally prevented emergency services from intervening, then prevented them from transporting him to an appropriate care unit a second time. He is currently in neurosurgical intensive care. At this time, his life hangs by a thread.
\n\nThe outburst of violence that the demonstrators suffered inflicted hundreds of injuries, including several serious physical injuries, as announced in the various reports available. The 30,000 demonstrators had come with the objective of blocking the construction of the mega-basins of Sainte-Soline, a project of water monopolization carried out by a small number of people for the benefit of a capitalist model that has nothing left to defend but death. The violence of the armed arm of the democratic state is the most striking expression of this.
\n\nIn response to the window of possibility that the movement against the pension reform has opened, the police are mutilating people and even trying to assassinate people in order to prevent an uprising, to defend the bourgeoisie and its world. Nothing will weaken our determination to put an end to their reign. On Tuesday, March 28 and the following days, let’s strengthen the strikes and blockades, let’s take the streets, for S. and all those from our movements who have been wounded and locked up.
\n\nLong live the revolution.
\n\nComrades of S.
\n\nPS: If you have any information about the circumstances of the injuries inflicted on S., please contact us at:
\n\n\n\nWe want this communiqué to be spread as widely as possible.
\n\nA reference to “the best form of defense is attack,” the original text puns on the similarity between the French words for “retreat” and “retirement.” ↩
\nOn April 9, 2016, during a general assembly, participants in the Nuit Debout movement decided to invite themselves to the home of Prime Minister Manuel Valls for an aperitif. A month later, on May 10, 2016, facing an unruly social movement, Valls announced that he had decided to invoke article 49:3 of the Constitution in order to implement the unpopular Loi Travail [labor law] without a vote in the National Assembly—a precedent for the current crisis. ↩
\nStarting on December 1, 2018, the Yellow Vest movement repeatedly mobilized on Saturdays, disrupting urban areas. ↩
\nWhat would a general strike look like today? The last two localized general strikes in the United States occurred in the same city—Oakland, California—in 1946 and 2011.1 This makes it easy to compare them in order to see what we can learn from the ways that labor struggles have changed over the past century.
\n\nLooking at the strikes of the 1940s, we can see that any combative labor resistance that breaks out today will likely emerge in defiance of union leadership rather than because of it. Looking at the general strike of 2011, we can see that to succeed, combative organizing must begin outside the workplace as well as within it, connecting the struggles of the unemployed and precarious with those of the employed. Exploring how the strategies that people experimented with in 2011 have fared in the decade since, we can draw up new proposals about what to bring to tomorrow’s uprisings.
\n\nAs it has become increasingly difficult for workers to exert leverage on employers on a workplace-by-workplace basis, the general strike might represent a more ambitious way to wield power against the capitalist class as a whole.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/8.jpg\")
“General strike—occupy everything—death to capitalism.” A banner in downtown Oakland on the night of November 2, 2011.
\nThe general strike of December 1946 in Oakland was arguably the last general strike of the 20th century in the United States. As Jeremy Brecher details in Strike!, it occurred on the heels of the Second World War, during which the union bureaucracy renounced strikes.
\n\n\n\n\nWhen the United States entered the war, the leaders of both the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations pledged that there should be no strikes or walkouts for the duration of the war. Thus, at a time when profits were “high by any standard” and a great demand for labor meant “higher wages could be secured… and a short stoppage could secure immediate results,” the unions renounced the principal method by which workers could have gained from the situation.
\n\nInterestingly, the unions with Communist leadership carried this policy furthest.
\n
Defying the united front of government and labor bureaucrats, rank-and-file workers shifted to wildcat strikes as a way to exert leverage. As Brecher recounts:
\n\n\n\n\nAt first, the power of the government and the unions, combined with general support for the war, virtually put an end to strikes. The chairman of the War Labor Board called labor’s no-strike policy an “outstanding success.” Five months after Pearl Harbor was bombed, he reported that there had not been a single authorized strike and that every time a wildcat walkout had occurred, union officials had done all they could to end it.
\n\nFaced with this united front of government, employers, and their own unions, workers developed the technique of quick, unofficial strikes independent of and even against the union structure on a far larger scale than ever before. The number of such strikes began to rise in the summer of 1942, and by 1944, the last full year of the war, more strikes took place than in any previous year in American history.
\n
When the war ended, capitalists were determined to regain control of the production process by suppressing wildcat strikes, while workers hoped to win wage increases to offset inflation. As a result, a new wave of wildcat strikes broke out.
\n\nMany of these wildcat strikes ultimately forced the union bureaucracy to declare official strikes. For example, immediately after the conclusion of the war, United Auto Workers requested a 30% wage increase from General Motors—but the union president declared that he hoped to reach an agreement with the management without any work stoppages. It was only after the workers at 90 plants in the Detroit area went on strike that the union ordered a strike vote, which eventually resulted in 225,000 workers walking out.
\n\nThe United States Bureau of Labor Statistics called the first half of 1946 “the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in the country’s history.” Stan Weir described it as “the largest strike wave that ever occurred in the United States.”
\n\nAccording to Brecher,
\n\n\n\n\nTrade unions played an essential role in forestalling what might otherwise have been a general confrontation between the workers of a great many industries and the government, supporting the employers. The unions were unable to prevent the post-war strike wave, but by leading it they managed to keep it under control.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/23.jpg\")
A scene from the Russian film Forgotten Melody for a Flute.
\nAltogether, 1946 saw general strikes in six cities: Rochester, Houston, Hartford, Lancaster, Camden, and—last of all—in Oakland, California.
\n\nBrecher notes that by 1946, 69 percent of production workers in manufacturing were covered by collective bargaining agreements. But unionizing efforts in the service industry had not been as successful—and after the war ended, women who had been employed in well-paid unionized production jobs were forced back into precarious service industry employment.
\n\nIn the Bay Area, storeowners had their own Retail Merchants’ Association, which fought viciously to prevent the Oakland Retail Clerks’ union from organizing department store workers. Nonetheless, the momentum of the strike wave bolstered the union drive at Kahn’s Department Store, the largest store in Oakland—located downtown at the intersection of Broadway and 16th—and Hastings, the men’s store beside Kahn’s. At the same time, a nationwide maritime strike dragged on into late November in the Bay Area, creating an atmosphere of tension.
\n\nWorkers at Hastings went on strike on October 21, and workers at Kahn’s joined them on October 31. In “The Oakland General Strike,” Richard Boyden describes how these strikes became a flashpoint for labor unrest:
\n\n\n\n\nThere was strong sympathy for the strikers, most of whom were women. Not only did they receive crucial support from the Teamsters who honored the picket lines, but from the other unions, many of whose members volunteered their free time to join the strikers at the store entrances. Even before the general strike, therefore, activists—both rank-and-filers and officials—of a broad cross section of the labor movement were meeting each other on the strike scene. This contributed to a growing sense of common purpose and struggle and sentiment, as the strike dragged on, for a general strike.
\n
According to census records, Oakland was predominantly white in 1946. It was also plagued by racial tension: the Zoot Suit Riots that had broken out in Los Angeles in 1943 had spread to Oakland as well. Nonetheless, photographs from November 1946 show an array of workers picketing in front of Kahn’s, including both Black and white workers of various genders.
\n\nAccording to Boyden, the local leadership of the Teamsters union “covertly opposed the Kahn’s-Hastings strike, but was prevented from acting on this opposition by its own membership.” As Boyden puts it,
\n\n\n\n\nThe Retail Clerks’ union had always relied on Teamster support in strikes because retail workers are relatively unskilled and easily replaced. The stopping of deliveries, therefore, often is the key to success.
\n
Blocking deliveries remains a crucial element of today’s strikes.
\n\nOn Sunday, December 1, starting before dawn, 400 Oakland police officers shut down the pickets around Kahn’s and Hastings, attacking the picketers with billy clubs and cordoning off the area. As thousands watched, the police accompanied a professional strike-breaking team from Los Angeles in delivering merchandise to the two department stores. The cops towed away the cars belonging to picketers and set up machine guns in the middle of the square facing Kahn’s.
\n\nIn response, streetcar operators and bus drivers abandoned their vehicles downtown, removing the steering mechanisms, effectively blockading traffic. Union organizers gathered at the Labor Temple to discuss the situation. The president of the Teamsters’ local demanded that the assembly announce a general strike immediately, declaring that his union would strike the next day regardless. A larger meeting was planned for Monday.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/24.jpg\")
Oakland police stand guard as strikebreakers’ trucks deliver goods to Kahn’s department store on December 1, 1946; a line of Key System streetcars abandoned on Telegraph Avenue by their operators.
\nThe next day, thousands of people gathered to reinforce the pickets around the stores. Union officials gathered at 10 am for what must have been a contentious meeting, judging by the fact that the call for a strike did not come out until 10 pm that night. According to Boyden, union leaders were propelled forward against their will by popular outrage: “They were frightened—first by the specter of anarchy, which seemed to grow every minute, and by the possibility of repression and reprisals.”
\n\nOn Tuesday morning, Boyden writes,
\n\n\n\n\nThe industrial and residential districts of Oakland, Alameda, San Leandro, and Hayward were silent, the streets empty… Twenty-thousand people came downtown to join the pickets. Some workers joined the strike in organized contingents, marching from their union halls.
\n
Police attempted to establish a line in front of Hastings again, but Teamsters ran them off. Picketers also intervened when reporters attempted to take photographs in the streets (an important precedent to recall today in the age of livestreaming).
\n\nAccording to participant Stan Weir,
\n\n\n\n\nA mass of couples danced in the streets. The participants were making history, knew it, and were having fun. By Tuesday morning, they had cordoned off the central city and were directing traffic. Anyone could leave, but only those with passports (union cards) could get in. The comment made by a prominent national network newscaster, that “Oakland is a ghost town tonight,” was a contribution to ignorance. Never before or since had Oakland been so alive and happy for the majority of the population…
\n\nIn all general strikes the participants are very soon forced by the very nature of events to themselves run the society they have just stopped. The process in the Oakland experiment was beginning to deepen. There was as yet little evidence of official union leadership in the streets.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/21.jpg\")
Massive crowds gather in front of Kahn’s department store on December 3, 1946.
\nRestaurants opened as usual that morning, but the Teamsters shut down all of the unionized ones by 8 am. Some people set up a soup kitchen downtown, but it was not able to feed the tremendous number of people who had gathered. In 1946 as today, sufficient infrastructure is fundamental to any mass mobilization.
\n\nWell over 10,000 people convened at the Oakland Auditorium that night for a meeting; an overflow crowd of thousands stood outside in the rain, listening to the proceedings over loudspeakers. The prize for rhetoric goes to Norwegian-born American Federation of Labor organizer Harry Lundeberg:
\n\n\n\n\n“This,” said Lundeberg of the police action, “is fascism in America.” The Los Angeles strike breakers were “…just the average finks,” he shouted: “…the super finks are the city administration… These finky gazoonies who call themselves city fathers have been taking lessons from Hitler and Stalin.”
\n
Lundeberg had spent the earlier part of 1946 engaging in red-baiting attacks on the rival Congress of Industrial Organizations during the maritime strike, but in the heat of the moment, all was forgotten. The next day, there were 35,000 people downtown for the pickets.
\n\nIn response to the strike, the head of the Retail Merchants’ Association reached out to the leadership of the Teamsters. The upper echelons of the union leadership, it turned out, were more sympathetic to the employers than they were to rank-and-file workers. Dan Tobin, President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, announced that “The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is bitterly opposed to any general strike for any cause. I am therefore ordering you and all those associated with you who are members of our International Union to return to work as soon as possible.”
\n\nWest Coast Teamster boss Dave Beck complained that “This damn general strike is nothing but a revolution. It isn’t labor tactics. It’s revolutionary tactics.”
\n\nStan Weir attributes the failure of the strike to spread beyond predominantly white demographics to the fact that the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the only organized labor contingent in the Bay Area headed by leaders sympathetic to the Communist Party, effectively stood aside throughout the events. (This didn’t prevent reactionaries from attempting to associate the general strike with the Communist Party afterwards.) If we accept Weir’s account, racial divisions played a role in limiting how far the strike could spread, but chiefly as a consequence of the concentration of power in the hands of leaders who had different goals from the ordinary workers under them.
\n\nOn the evening of Wednesday, December 4, the American Federation of Labor committee met with the department store owners until 4 am. At 10:30 am the next morning, the AFL representatives voted to end the strike.
\n\nRank-and-file workers were outraged. Some continued picketing and convened local union meetings to try to keep the strike going. According to Stan Weir,
\n\n\n\n\nThe people on the street learned of the decision from a sound truck put on the street by the AFL Central Labor Council. It was the officials’ first really decisive act of leadership. They had consulted among themselves and decided to end the strike on the basis of the Oakland City Manager’s promise that police would not again be used to bring in scabs. No concessions were gained for the women retail clerks at Kahn’s and Hastings Department Stores whose strikes had triggered the General Strike; they were left free to negotiate any settlement they could get on their own. Those women and many other strikers heard the sound truck’s message with the form of anger that was close to heartbreak. Numbers of truckers and other workers continued to picket with the women, yelling protests at the truck and appealing to all who could hear that they should stay out. But all strikers other than the clerks had been ordered back to work and no longer had any protection against the disciplinary actions that might be brought against them for strike-caused absences.
\n
By Friday, the general strike was over, sabotaged from above. At noon that day, 25 strike-breakers were brought into Kahn’s. Picketers responded angrily, but the union leadership once again deescalated the situation by calling for a mass meeting at the Labor Temple, enabling the strike-breakers to get into the department store without a confrontation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/25.jpg\")
The Oakland Tribune announces the end of the strike on Thursday, December 5; the Oakland Auditorium on the afternoon of Friday, December 6, 1946, as 1200 employers met to discuss the strike.
\nSix months later, the workers at Kahn’s and Hastings were still out on strike.
\n\nAccording to Boyden, Teamster bosses like Dave Beck exemplified the sort of profiteers who professionalized the union bureaucracy, transforming it into a junior partner of the capitalist class:
\n\n\n\n\n[Beck] rightly viewed the general strike as a revolutionary tactic, and opposed its use no matter what the situation. He was a business unionist par excellence and a professional anti-communist. He sought to build and consolidate his organization by “selling” the conservative Teamsters union to the employers as a “responsible” alternative to militant and/or radical unions…
\n\nBeck viewed the union as a business, not a cause. He wanted to “Taylorize” the labor movement, apply to it the business methods developed by the corporations and create in the person of the union official a new professional, whose position and power rested in expertise and efficiency, not on the democratic participation of the union members. And Beck treated his union like his own company. He used his profits from the Teamsters to become a millionaire, investing extensively in Seattle real estate and other business ventures. There was no place in this scheme for militant trade unionism.
\n
The tensions that lingered in Oakland after the general strike were channeled into electoral politics. The rival American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations united to form a Political Action Committee to run candidates for the Oakland City Council. The strikes at Kahn’s and Hastings ended with a compromise the day before the elections. Four of the labor candidates were elected, though they were always outvoted by the other five City Council members. In any case, according to Stan Weir, “The four winners were by no means outspoken champions of labor. They did not utilize their offices as a tribune for a progressive labor-civic program.” Looking back, Weir realized that Harry Lundeberg, in his “finky gazoonies” speech, had begun to shift workers’ attention away from a direct struggle against employers to a focus on City Council.
\n\nAfter the general strike in Oakland, it was all downhill for labor struggles in the United States. Workers never again regained the leverage they had wielded during the general strikes of 1946.
\n\nPresident Harry Truman’s Executive Order of March 21, 1947 required that all federal civil-service employees be screened for “loyalty.” That June, Congress introduced the Taft–Hartley Act, prohibiting wildcat strikes, solidarity strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, and closed shops. Union leaders were required to file with the United States Department of Labor declaring that they did not support the Communist Party and had no relationship with any organization seeking the “overthrow of the United States government by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means.” The years that followed saw the second Red Scare, including the rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover and the imprisonment, firing, blacklisting, interrogation, and persecution of countless thousands of workers and organizers. All of these served to hamstring the labor movement while contributing to the ascendancy of its most reactionary elements. This occurred long before globalization enabled capitalists to sidestep unionized labor forces entirely, though the taming of the labor movement helped to pave the way for that. By the end of the twentieth century, subsequent waves of white flight, deindustrialization, gentrification, and the shift of the majority of wage earners into non-unionized service industry jobs had utterly transformed Oakland and other cities like it.
\n\nTo those who have participated in the social upheavals of the early twenty-first century, many aspects of the story of the general strike of 1946 will be familiar: police brutality as the spark that catalyzes a contagious uprising, the ingenuity and initiative of the participants (Stan Weir described striking workers as “people who have been released from the necessity to hide their feelings”), the challenges of coordinating to meet the needs of a revolt that interrupts capitalist logistics without replacing them, the retreat into electoral politics during the waning phase.
\n\nThe part that may be surprising for those who grew up after the heyday of the old labor movement is the extent to which the union leadership worked directly with the capitalist class to suppress the strike. The decades of labor organizing that had created these unions built the shared consciousness and commitments that made the strike possible, but the union hierarchies were among the chief threats to the movement itself. Today, as a new generation seeks tools with which to stand up to the capitalist class, we should not forget the lessons of 1946. Formal unions do not suffice to enable workers to stand up for themselves. The important things are organizing, solidarity, and audacity, outside of the workplace as well as inside it. The official recognition of a union—however hard won—will not automatically deliver those things, and is no substitute for them.
\n\nIn 1946—as today—the power of a strike did not derive simply from the fact that workers stopped working in a given workplace. The power of the strike derived from their determination to shut down that workplace, to defend themselves against strike-breakers and police, and to interrupt business as usual on all fronts—and from the fact that when they did these things successfully, it was contagious, drawing in the participation of many people who did not share their workplace or their immediate concerns.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/26.jpg\")
Strikers gather in front of Hastings department store on December 3, 1946; graffiti on the smashed window of a Bank of America on November 2, 2011.
\nAfter 1946, decades passed before anything like a general strike took place again in the United States. Besides the “Day without an Immigrant” protests of May 1, 2006—a subject for another study—the closest thing to a successful general strike in the United States thus far in the 21st century arguably took place in Oakland on November 2, 2011, at the high point of the Occupy movement.
\n\nThe strike of November 2, 2011 differed from the general strike of 1946 in several instructive ways. Rather than mobilizing card-carrying union members to shut down their own workplaces, a motley assemblage of students, precarious workers, unemployed people, radicals, and other rebels set out to shut down the city from outside the economy proper.
\n\nThree years into the recession, the year 2011 opened with the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, followed by the plaza occupation movements in Spain and Greece—setting the stage for sluggish social movements in the United States to finally kick into gear.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/3.jpg\")
The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt inspired people around the world in 2011. In this photograph, demonstrators wave an Egyptian flag during the port blockade in Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nThough rapidly gentrifying, Oakland had not entirely lost its character as a longtime hotbed of radical activity. If few recalled the strikes of 1946, the legacy of the Black Panther Party and other radical groups from the 1960s and ’70s lingered in the popular imagination. At the same time, the local government was comprised in part of alumni of the previous generation of activists, who were experts at co-opting and pacifying social movements.
\n\nRiots had broken out in Oakland at the beginning of 2009 in response to the murder of Oscar Grant by Bay Area Rapid Transit police. Afterwards, a combative student movement took off in the Bay Area with a series of building occupations; it peaked on March 4, 2010 in a mass march from Berkeley to Oakland that ended with a breakaway march blocking the freeway. Anarchists carried a reinforced banner in that march reading “Occupy Everything”—an image from the future. In the buildup to March 4, some people had talked about calling for a general strike, but no one had a clear idea of what that could look like.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/7.jpg\")
Anarchists participating in the March from the University of California at Berkeley to downtown Oakland on March 4, 2010.
\nIn February 2011, in response to a bill stripping public-sector unions of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, demonstrators in Madison occupied the capitol. Again, there was some talk about calling for a general strike. On April 4, longshore workers from Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down the ports of San Francisco and Oakland in solidarity with workers in Wisconsin.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/5.jpg\")
A poster promoting the idea of a general strike during the protests in Madison, Wisconsin in early 2011: “General strike means nobody and nothing works.”
\nIn summer 2011, seeking to revitalize local networks and experiment with new tactics, a small number of anarchists and anti-state communists organized a series of anti-austerity demonstrations dubbed Anticuts. As participants later recounted,
\n\n\n\n\nThe third and final Anticut action—organized in solidarity with a hunger strike in California prisons—marched from the future home of Occupy Oakland in Frank Ogawa Plaza down Broadway past the police headquarters, courthouse, and jail, holding a noise demo there before circling back towards the plaza to disperse. This small demonstration marked the first time this loop was tried. Months later, during the high-tension moments of Occupy Oakland, that march route became intimately familiar to thousands of people, sometimes repeated multiple times per day.
\n
In following this march route, the Anticuts demonstrators started by City Hall—from which the police had attacked the pickets on the morning of December 1, 1946—then passed by the site where Kahn’s department store had been, and then, a block later, crossed the intersection where the first streetcar driver had abandoned his vehicle in protest that morning sixty-four and a half years earlier.
\n\nWhile the strikers of 1946 focused on asserting their interests in their workplaces, the Anticuts demonstrators focused on the control of public space, the defunding of libraries and other public resources, and the prison-industrial complex. Work itself had become more precarious and diffuse in the intervening decades to such an extent that it had become easier to take on other aspects of capitalism. The demonstrators confronted the conditions of their survival rather than seeking to negotiate better rewards for participating in production.
\n\nOn September 17, a thousand people responded to a call to occupy Zuccotti Park in New York City. The original proposal was to gather in imitation of the Tahrir Square demonstrators in Cairo and agree on a single demand to present to the government; the editor of Adbusters, the magazine that first published the call, said “We’re hoping it’s something specific and doable, like asking Obama to set up a committee to look into the fall of US banking.” Occupy Wall Street began as form without content, a calculated attempt to create a memetic imitation of overseas movements. Owing to the involvement of anarchists like David Graeber, however, the movement adopted a horizontal, participatory structure that enabled it to surpass the vision of those who had founded it.
\n\nAcross the United States, activists with a wide range of agendas and ideologies established copycat occupations. One of the first of these appeared in San Francisco. Occupy Oakland began weeks later; this gave the participants time to discuss the character of the other occupations around the country and identify what they wanted to do differently. “If this movement is to bring any fundamental change in the quality of our lives,” argued one participant ahead of the first gathering, “it must be drastically different than any of the other Occupations [sic] around the country.”
\n\nDespite rain, a thousand people gathered on October 10 in front of Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza, rechristened Oscar Grant Plaza—one block from the site of Kahn’s Department Store. The camp drew together participants in many earlier struggles in the Bay Area, augmenting their commitments and experience by connecting them with a broader social body.
\n\n“From the start, Occupy Oakland immediately rejected cooperation with city government officials,” the authors of “Who Is Oakland?” noted. In contrast to Occupy groups elsewhere around the United States, Occupy Oakland involved large numbers of people who were uncompromisingly opposed to the police and to reformist strategies; many participants defended the legitimacy of autonomous action, rejecting the idea that the assemblies should exert centralized control over the movement through formal consensus process.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/2.jpg\")
“Worker solidarity: no compromise with bosses or politicians.” Banners at Oscar Grant Plaza during Occupy Oakland.
\nAccording to an early report from participants,
\n\n\n\n\nOn the very first day, the camp had a fully functional kitchen, an info-tent, and a supply tent. By the end of this week there was a medic tent, art supply tent, an insurrectionary library, a free store, the Raheim Brown Free School, a media tent, a POC tent, a Sukkah, a DJ booth, and not to mention hundreds of sleeping-space tents. In addition, the rotating kitchen crew has been feeding everyone consistently from 8 am until midnight and throwing spontaneous BBQs.
\n
The two dozen tents that had appeared the first night increased to one hundred and fifty tents by the end of the first week. Participants described the occupation as a liberated zone, while rival elements of the power structure sought to co-opt or suppress it. According to the authors of “Who Is Oakland?”,
\n\n\n\n\nThe press releases of the city government, Oakland Police Department, and business associations like the Oakland Chamber of Commerce continually repeat[ed] that the Occupy Oakland encampment, feeding nearly a thousand mostly desperately poor people a day, was composed primarily of non-Oakland resident “white outsiders” intent on destroying the city. For anyone who spent any length of time at the encampment, Occupy Oakland was clearly one of the most racially and ethnically diverse Occupy encampments in the country—composed of people of color from all walks of life, from local business owners to fired Oakland school teachers, from college students to the homeless and seriously mentally ill. Unfortunately, social justice activists, clergy, and community groups mimicked the city’s erasure of people of color in their analysis of Occupy, when they were not negotiating with the mayor’s office behind closed doors to dismantle the encampment “peacefully.”
\n\nFrom the beginning, the Occupy Oakland encampment existed in a tightening vise between two faces of the state: nonprofits and the police. An array of community organizations immediately began negotiating with city bureaucracies and pushing for the encampment to adopt nonviolence pledges and move to Snow Park (itself later cleared by OPD despite total compliance of individuals who settled there). At the same time, police departments across the Bay Area [were] readying one of the largest and most expensive paramilitary operations in recent history.
\n
In the early hours of October 25, Occupy Oakland became the first Occupy encampment in the United States to be raided in a full-scale police operation. According to the authors of “The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Commune,”
\n\n\n\n\nAfter the Commune repeatedly resisted attempts by the city administration to assert control over the camp—staging public burnings of warning letters during general assemblies in the amphitheater on the steps of city hall—Mayor Jean Quan authorized the militarized police operation that left the camp in ruins and over 100 in jail.
\n\nLater that same day, thousands of enraged people poured back into downtown, charging police barricades around the plaza and braving countless barrages of tear gas and projectiles until the early hours of the morning. Partly because of the near murder of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen by a police projectile that night, and the dramatic footage of the entire downtown area covered in gas, the next day the police withdrew in a storm of controversy. Exultant crowds reoccupied the plaza, holding an assembly of 2000 people—the largest of the whole sequence—and agreed to go on the offensive with the November 2 strike. The fact that it seemed possible to organize a general strike in a single week indicates the degree to which normal calendar time warped and stretched in those first three weeks.
\n
According to “Insurrection, Oakland Style: A History”:
\n\n\n\n\nA general assembly was called for 6 pm on October 26. The police were nowhere in sight, but some reported that they were massing at a nearby parking garage. They were never to mobilize in any show of force. Bike patrols were passing back information, and a general feeling of safety permeated the camp. The metal fence that had been set up by the city was taken down, and once again the plaza was in the hands of #OccupyOakland. A proposal was submitted for a general strike in Oakland on November 2. The proposal passed by 96.9%; 1484 votes for to 77 against, with 47 abstentions, more than enough in Oakland’s modified consensus of 90% for the proposal to pass.
\n
96.9% was a considerable majority out of one of the largest assemblies to take place. But the population of Oakland totaled almost 400,000, and the participants in Occupy were arguably among the less steadily employed residents of Oakland: many of them were unemployed, while others were employed in the gig economy or other precarious labor. The general strike of 1946 had involved more than 100,000 workers. How could a couple thousand people pull off the same thing?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/14.jpg\")
A pumpkin at Oscar Grant Plaza announcing the forthcoming general strike.
\nIn 1946, a significant part of the population of Oakland had been unionized; in 2011, something like 89% of workers had no unions, and most of the unions that remained had been thoroughly integrated into the smooth functioning of the economy. The general strike of 1946 drew its force from the fact that, without workers, the Oakland economy ground to a halt; in 2011, in the midst of a continuing recession, most workers were employed in sectors of the economy that were hardly essential to its functioning. How do baristas, dishwashers, dog-walkers, sex workers, medical study lab rats, self-employed graphic designers, grad students, and those who seek employment on Craiglist make an impact by not working for a day?
\n\nBy shutting down the economy from outside.
\n\nBut how?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/22.jpg\")
The announcement of the November 2 general strike.
\nOf course, not everyone involved in Occupy Oakland was a precarious worker. Some were connected to the same ILWU local that had shut down the ports on April 4. Elements in the nurses’ and teachers’ unions were also sympathetic to the movement. Negotiations ensued with and within Bay Area unions ahead of November 2.
\n\nBy Friday, October 28, fault lines were emerging. Representatives of the ILWU and other unions announced that they would not call on their members to strike. “However energetic we are about the cause, we also are law-abiding organizations that are very cautious,” Matthew Goldstein, president of the union representing faculty at four East Bay schools in the Peralta Community College District, told reporters. “A general strike on the order of the 1946 general strike in Oakland is an ambitious goal, especially in just a few days.” (As we have seen, the 1946 general strike broke out in two days, whereas Occupy Oakland had given themselves a week to organize.)
\n\n“Only a few unions, such as the SEIU (public sector) gave an official call-out for their members to take a day off in order to participate,” the Rust Bunny collective recounted afterwards, noting that the Service Employees International Union struck a tacit agreement with City Hall to that purpose. Many unions informally encouraged their members to participate in the day of action without calling for a strike, neither wishing to risk losing credibility nor to face the legal consequences of an illegal strike.
\n\n“It’s virtually impossible for any union to endorse a work-stoppage because all contracts have no-strike clauses, which unions are bound to honor,” ILWU communications director Craig Merrilees told reporters.
\n\nThat same day, Jack Heyman, a retired Oakland longshoreman and chairman of the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, speaking at Zuccotti Park to Occupy Wall Street, declared, “Longshore workers are attempting to shut down the ports in the Bay Area. We will be calling on other workers in other ports to join us.”
\n\nAt Occupy Wall Street on Friday, October 28, 2011, Jack Heyman announces the solidarity of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union with the Occupy Oakland’s call for a General Strike on November 2 in response to police violence against protesters in Oakland.
\nThe ILWU had a longstanding clause in their contract permitting them to refuse to cross a picket line and cancel a shift if the situation was deemed unsafe. Radicals within the ILWU encouraged participants in Occupy Oakland to set up picket lines at the Port of Oakland in order to enable them to activate that clause. This approach relied upon the precarious and unemployed to enable unionized workers to walk off the job without suffering the consequences of breaching their contracts. It represented an ambitious effort to integrate the unionized working class and the precarious underclass into a single unified strategy. As we shall see, this strategy had drawbacks of its own.
\n\nYears earlier, in Washington, DC, anarchists mobilizing against the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank had called for a “People’s Strike” on September 27, 2002 to shut down the nation’s capital. Though only a few thousand protesters turned out for the day’s action, their militant messaging achieved the goal in advance: the government advised people not to ride the metro or come downtown to work, and the police themselves surrounded and effectively shut down many of the targets in their efforts to secure them. In Oakland in 2011, the call for a general strike had similar effects. A spokesman for the University of California Office of the President in downtown Oakland announced the office would be closed on November 2 and that the 1300 employees who worked in the building would work from home, for fear that the Bay Area Rapid Transit system might be impacted. The mayor gave city employees permission to take November 2 off—with the exception of police.
\n\nOn November 1, the Oakland Police Officer’s Association took the unusual step of publishing an open letter criticizing the mayor and hinting at a strike of their own:
\n\n\n\n\nWe represent the 645 police officers who work hard every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families. We are severely understaffed with many City beats remaining unprotected by police…
\n\nOn Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence, and destruction of property.
\n\nThen, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in—to camp out at the very place they were evacuated [sic] from the day before.
\n\nTo add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the “Stop Work” strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.
\n\nMeanwhile, a message has been sent to all police officers: Everyone, including those who have the day off, must show up for work on Wednesday.
\n
Conflicts within the halls of power are often a crucial element in successful revolutionary mobilizations. The police carried out a sort of strike of their own on November 2, almost completely withdrawing until midnight.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/17.jpg\")
Oakland police prepared by boarding up their windows—from the inside.
\nMeanwhile, energized by the proposed general strike, countless new participants were flowing into Occupy Oakland. Many of them had not previously been exposed to the radical politics of those who had been involved in it since the beginning. Nonetheless, according to one member of the Industrial Workers of the World,
\n\n\n\n\nThe General Assembly passed several key motions leading up to the General Strike—a motion supporting autonomous actions that occupied buildings for the purpose of expropriating them, a motion that reprisal pickets would be sent out where requested against schools and businesses that disciplined their students or workers for participating in the general strike, and that health and safety pickets would be sent out early where requested, so that workers would have a picket line to refuse to cross…
\n\nBy Tuesday, the community colleges had large, public walkouts planned, most instructors had cancelled classes, and it all just seemed to arise out of the air.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/images/atc/atc-oak-6b.jpg\")
Oscar Grant plaza on November 2, 2011.
\nOn November 2, many longshore workers called out of work in the morning, leaving the port running at a diminished capacity. Students and teachers from Berkeley and Laney College marched downtown to join the strike after serving a symbolic eviction notice at Oakland Unified School District headquarters. The Men’s Wearhouse beside the plaza displayed a sign in its window saying “We stand with the 99%. Closed Wednesday, Nov. 2.” The marquee of the Grand Lake Theater read “We proudly support the Occupy Wall Street movement—closed Wednesday in support of the strike.”
\n\nMassive numbers of people gathered at Oscar Grant Plaza. According to the authors of “The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Commune,”
\n\n\n\n\nPeople gathered in the early morning under a giant banner, stretched across the central intersection in downtown, reading “Death to Capitalism.” From there, the crowds quickly fanned out across the center of the city, shutting down businesses that had refused to close for the day. The camp at the plaza became a crowded anti-capitalist carnival offering music and speeches from three different stages.
\n
A participant in one of the flying pickets described their experience shutting down a café that had refused to close:
\n\n\n\n\nWe began loudly shouting slogans like “Shut it down!” “General Strike!” and “Let them strike, it’s their right!” After we noisily created havoc and prevented the café from operating, someone negotiated with the boss and he agreed to close, let the workers leave, and pay them for a full day’s wages—even though they had not even been there half a shift. There were about 15 people working there, with about five Latino guys baking and cooking in the visible kitchen and the rest were young Black and white women and men working the counter and serving food.
\n\nMost of the workers were excited at our action, especially the ones who knew some of the Wobblies, but they had to be discrete in front of management. There was some confusion, at least until management disappeared from the windows, but once that happened the workers were all smiles and talked to us through the glass doors. We asked if we should stay or leave, and the enthusiastic response was “Stay!” …The same worker who told us to stay later said through the glass “You did it! You shut it down!” and gave one of the Wobblies a fist bump through the glass door. We stayed until all the workers had left the café, hoping that some of them would make it to the area around Oscar Grant Plaza to join the strike.
\n\nWhile we were waiting for the workers to leave, a couple of potential customers complained that we were “attacking a small local business.”
\n
This narrative, like the events at the port, illustrates the extent to which this kind of “strike from outside the workplace” could be misunderstood or misrepresented as anti-worker. In fact, in 1946, it had been the Teamsters who had shut down restaurants in downtown Oakland, also acting from outside the workplace.
\n\nAt 2 pm, at the intersection of Broadway and Telegraph beside the former site of Kahn’s, an anti-capitalist march that had been announced autonomously outside the consensus process of the Occupy assemblies gathered behind banners proclaiming “If we cannot live, we will not work—general strike!” and “This is class war.” Many participants sported black flags, motorcycle helmets, masks, matching black clothing, and shields painted to resemble the covers of books. These shields had first appeared during the Anticuts marches of the preceding summer, inspired by similar shields in Italy.
\n\nLed by a black bloc of hundreds, the march visited Chase Bank, the Bank of America at the Kaiser Center, the Wells Fargo at 12th and Broadway, Whole Foods—the management of which had refused to give workers the day off—and the University of California Office of the President, leaving a trail of graffiti and broken windows in its wake. One participant spray-painted “1946” across a cracked Bank of America window. This was a return to the tactics that anarchists and others had employed in the riots responding to the murder of Oscar Grant—and before that, most famously, during the mobilization against the summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. In addition to forcibly shutting down the targets, these tactics expressed uncompromising opposition to capitalism itself—establishing a confrontational pole in the distinctly heterogeneous Occupy movement. In effect, the participants were counterposing a rival memetic gesture to the assembly and occupation that had characterized Occupy up to that point.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/20.jpg\")
“A large canister of paint was used to write the word “STRIKE” across the front windows. As the painters ran back toward the crowd some of those in the crowd decided these people needed to be tackled and knocked to the ground. Eventually, the scuffle grew to include the painters, the tacklers and the people who broke the painters free and allowed them to run into the crowd for safety.” –Bruce Valde in the December 2011 issue of the Industrial Worker.
\nSome witnesses disapproved; others charged that vandalism would discredit the movement. Debates about “violence” were rampant in the United States at that time, including in the Bay Area, peaking with Chris Hedges’ notorious text “The Cancer in Occupy.” It was only later, between the rebellion in Ferguson in 2014 and the first year of Trump’s presidency, that large numbers of people began to accept the need—at least in certain circumstances—for tactics that many had previously delegitimized as “violent.”
\n\nAt 4 pm, thousands began to gather at 14th and Broadway to march to the Port of Oakland. According to one eyewitness,
\n\n\n\n\nTwo marches would leave for the port, at 4 and 5 pm, the first, from reliable estimates, consisting of at least 10,000 people, the second consisting of 15,000-20,000 people. Plus many more people went to the port from elsewhere. The best estimates I have seen for the numbers at the port were 35,000-50,000, which I can easily believe.
\n
According to another eyewitness,
\n\n\n\n\nAs we got to the intersection at the Port where there is a traffic signal at the entrance to the APL terminal, I marveled at the trucks idled six abreast in the midst of the human swarm. I wondered what the troqueros thought about the shutdown, so I asked the first two I saw standing next to their trucks. I began by apologizing for preventing them from working. They immediately responded by rejecting my apology, saying “We’re part of this and we’re happy it’s happening.” Their only disappointment was that they thought the strike would happen in the morning.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/19.jpg\")
According to Stephen Coles, “After 8 pm, there was some confusion among our crowd picketing the APL Gate about whether we had successfully blocked the full shift. Amid the arguing, this man stepped forward and said he was with the Longshore Union. He confirmed that the strike was successful and workers were not able to cross the lines. Some in the skeptical crowd demanded his ID as we were getting mixed messages from Twitter and other sources. He supplied it: Craig Merrilees, Communications Director for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. He went on to say the workers were grateful to Occupy marchers for facilitating the picket line and then answered questions about arbitration from folks in the crowd around him.” This testimony is interesting because the following month, Craig Merrilees took an outspoken role in denouncing Occupy in the corporate media.
\nFinally, after night fell, hundreds of people occupied the Traveler’s Aid building a few blocks from Oscar Grant Plaza. Long empty, it had previously housed a nonprofit serving the homeless. In anticipation of a police raid, defenders built a barricade at 16th and Broadway to defend the area—though when they lit it ablaze, conflicts about “violence” broke out with renewed vigor. Finally, at midnight, the police, who had been absent all day, appeared in considerable force and attacked, recapturing the Traveler’s Aid building and provoking a night of rioting during which many of the businesses and city offices around the plaza were damaged, including a police substation.
\n\nScenes from Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nAnd then it was over. Having called for a big day of action, the movement went into a refractory period. It took some participants months to realize that November 2 had been the high point of Occupy.
\n\nDebates followed about the legitimacy of some of the tactics that anarchists had employed. Although the general assembly had passed a motion supporting autonomous building occupations, some still objected to the occupation of the Traveler’s Aid building; others were angry about the anti-capitalist march that had visited Whole Foods. As one participant observed, however, “Far more people participated in the Oakland General Strike than have ever attended a General Assembly.” Discussions about direct democracy, consensus process, and self-determination continued for years after Occupy.
\n\nOn November 10, a man was fatally shot beside the encampment in Oscar Grant Plaza, underscoring the severity of the challenges that Occupy Oakland had taken on in attempting to create a commons in the midst of poverty and desperation. Early on November 14, the police evicted the camp again, this time permanently.
\n\nNonetheless, some elements of Occupy Oakland were determined to continue developing a model for a 21st-century strike. In “Blockading the Port Is Only the First of Many Last Resorts,” published on December 7, some participants argued that it was essential to understand how the economy had changed since 1946:
\n\n\n\n\nThis is why the general strike on November 2 appeared as it did, not as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from large factories and the like (where so few of us work), but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow. Where workers in large workplaces—the ports, for instance—did withdraw their labor, this occurred after the fact of an intervention by an extrinsic proletariat. In such a situation, the flying picket, originally developed as a secondary instrument of solidarity, becomes the primary mechanism of the strike. If postindustrial capital focuses on the seaways and highways, the streets and the mall, focuses on accelerating and volatilizing its networked flows, then its antagonists will also need to be mobile and multiple… mobile blockades are the technique for an age and place in which production has been offshored, an age in which most of us work, if we work at all, in small and unorganized workplaces devoted to the transport, distribution, administration, and sale of goods produced elsewhere.
\n
As participants in Occupy Oakland began to organize towards another port shutdown, scheduled for December 12 and intended to encompass the entire West Coast, union bureaucrats and capitalist media outlets took advantage of the vulnerabilities of the model of strike as “intervention by an extrinsic proletariat” to sow dissension. The fact that ILWU members had to claim to be endangered in order to stop work—and had to claim to oppose the strike in order to avoid legal consequences—offered a convenient wedge.
\n\n“Occupy Oakland plans West Coast port shutdown, but port workers don’t support it,” proclaimed the Washington Post on December 5.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/13.jpg\")
One’s perspective on the general strike of 2011 depended considerably on whether one was positioned within it…
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/9.jpg\")
…or outside of it.
\n“The ILWU International officers in San Francisco are claiming to have nothing to do with the December 12 action and even oppose it,” wrote the former Communications Director of the ILWU on December 8. “Officially, they must distance themselves from the action call to protect themselves from being sued by the PMA [Pacific Maritime Association] for the damages of the action. But they are going beyond the legally required disclaimers.”
\n\nAfter the blockades of December 12, which were more or less successful in the Bay but drew considerably fewer participants than the November 2 general strike, the New York Times accused Occupy Oakland of “co-opting the unions’ cause instead of working with them.” ILWU communications director Craig Merrilees denied that the ILWU tacitly approved of the strike, charging that Occupy organizers had been “very disrespectful of the democratic decision-making process in the union and deliberately went around that process to call their own action without consulting workers.”
\n\n“Their actions further alienate the movement from average American workers,” Forbes crowed.
\n\nHostile press like this was inevitable. Even if the entire conflict had played out within the ILWU without any “outside agitators” to blame, corporate media would have published negative coverage of any faction promoting tactics that could exert significant leverage on employers. But bad press was not the chief obstacle facing those who sought to continue developing this model for a 21st-century strike.
\n\nThe real problem was that a strategy based on precarious activists shutting down unionized workplaces from outside failed to bridge the gap between the divergent needs of the unionized employees and the precarious blockaders. If the goal was to shut down the economy as a generalized pressure tactic on behalf of the unemployed and precarious, it was not clear what the union members might stand to gain from this; many ILWU members earned comfortable salaries and had job security that was not worth risking for the sake of what some considered utopian or nihilistic adventurism. (“We have jobs and families,” said a random truck driver the Associated Press found to condemn the Occupy protesters; “Most of them don’t.”) If the goal was only to defend the bargaining rights of the ILWU, it was not clear what the precarious blockaders might stand to gain from taking considerable risks to preserve the security of workers who occupied a stabler position in the economy.
\n\nThe ILWU leadership had no intention of being associated with blockades that could result in fines and other penalties, and they were determined not to cede control of the ports to a grassroots movement. In this context, even when rank-and-file union organizers attempted to organize a work stoppage—the chief form of leverage a union can exert—they had to do so from outside the workplace, defying the representatives of the union, as if they were themselves nihilistic adventurists. Calls from all sides to center the unions in actions at the ports only intensified this paradox.
\n\nEven in the best case, centering the unions—whether that was understood as the official leadership or as radical currents within the rank and file—meant deferring to people who were not necessarily invested in the fortunes of the Occupy movement or attuned to the strategic needs of the blockaders. It bogged down the organizing in internal debates within the group that had the most to lose from escalation, and shifted the objectives towards defending the jurisdiction of the official union structures rather than building new fighting formations to defend everyone impacted by capitalism. This produced diminishing returns as the movement itself melted away from one mobilization to the next.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/12.jpg\")
A repurposed street sign in Oakland on the evening of November 2, 2011: “No work ahead.”
\nJack Heyman and others did their best to legitimize the port blockades. Longtime radical labor organizers grappled with the questions that had come up in the blockades. And there was an opportunity to try again: some Occupy organizers were coordinating with an ILWU local in Longview, Washington, where the multinational corporation EGT was maneuvering to break the union. Hoping to show that Occupy could be real allies to unionized workers, they called for a regional convergence to block a ship that was scheduled to dock at the EGT facilities in that port.
\n\nOccupy Portland and Occupy Seattle organized planning meetings on January 5 and 6. At the first one, in Portland, the ILWU leadership made it clear that they would do everything in their power to hamstring the mobilization. According to a subsequent account, the president of one ILWU local seized the platform to read a letter from the president of the ILWU “calling on ILWU members who might participate in the convergence to be sure to keep their actions within the confines set by Taft-Hartley and to avoid working with Occupy.”
\n\nOn January 6, 2012, over 200 people gathered at a labor solidarity forum called by Occupy Seattle to support Longview ILWU Local 21 in its battle against EGT. Supporters of the ILWU leadership from the Seattle, Tacoma and Portland ILWU locals disrupted the meeting—first verbally, then physically.
\n\nJanuary 6: a meeting called for by Occupy Seattle to support ILWU strikers descends into chaos. Fighting unions means fighting within the unions. It always has.
\nIn the end, according to one account,
\n\n\n\n\nThe bureaucrats at the top of the ILWU outmaneuvered the planned blockade of the scab ship in Longview, and all plans for the convergence imploded. Occupy caravans had been organized from Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere, while the federal government announced it would defend the scab ship with a Coast Guard cutter. Comrades from across the West Coast were just waiting for word from those working directly with the Longview Longshoremen to initiate a confrontational showdown. But in their determination to reorient Occupy towards labor activism, the tendency that had coalesced during the November 2 port blockade constructed a framework that was completely disconnected from the streets and plazas from which they had emerged. With every step from the November 2 strike through the December West Coast port blockade and towards Longview, these actions ceased to be participatory disruptions in the international flows of capital as a projection of the occupation’s power beyond the plaza. Instead, they became solidarity actions, organized only with supporting the union in mind. There was naïve talk about the actions sparking a wildcat strike in the ports, or prying the union away from the bureaucrats who were eager to defuse the conflict and cooperate with EGT. But none of this came close to materializing.
\n\nIn the end, the labor solidarity tendency within Occupy Oakland and the handful of radical Longshoremen allies were no match for the political machinations of those at the top of the ILWU, who coerced the rank and file of Longview to accept a compromise with EGT that kept them on the job while stripping them of many benefits and their job security.
\n
Radical elements of the ILWU described these events differently in a press release crediting the Occupy movement as a crucial element in the settlement with EGT. “It wasn’t until rank and file and Occupy planned a mass convergence to blockade the ship that EGT suddenly had the impetus to negotiate,” stated a sympathetic officer of ILWU local in the Bay Area. “Labor can no longer win victories against the employers without the community. It must include a broad-based movement. The strategy and tactics employed by the Occupy movement in conjunction with rank-and-file ILWU members confirm that the past militant traditions of the ILWU are still effective against the employers today.”
\n\nEven if this was a victory for the ILWU—which others denied—it did not help the Occupy movement to maintain momentum. They never repeated the port blockades of November and December. Efforts to coordinate with workers to blockade the Golden Gate Bridge for May Day 2012 fell through when, once again, the unions called off the action at the last minute. Though the blockaders’ risk tolerance may have given organized labor a small advantage at the negotiating table, putting union leadership in the driver’s seat of the entire movement drove it into the ground. In the end, the most vibrant events of May Day 2012 in the Bay as well as Los Angeles and Seattle drew more from the anti-capitalist march of November 2 than they did from the blockading of the port. Interrupting the economy from outside—without coordinating with union representatives or making demands—had proved more viable.
\n\nLooking back a year later, participants in the blockades argued that Occupy protesters should have shut down the ports themselves through direct action rather than focusing on loopholes in the ILWU contract. One organizer suggested that participants in Occupy were only able to offer meaningful solidarity to rank-and-file workers because they defied the union leadership and organized autonomously from it. Even Jacobin magazine, the executive director of which had willfully sought to discredit participants in Occupy who were skeptical of unions (disingenuously alleging that they believed that “‘building “communes,’ rather than confronting capital, should be the movement’s main mission”), detailed how the ILWU leadership had played a fundamentally reactionary role throughout the events.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/16.jpg\")
Diversity of tactics? A demonstrator meditates while others set up burning barricades in the background: downtown Oakland on the evening of November 2, 2011.
\nBack in December 2011, the authors of “Blockading the Port Is Only the First of Many Last Resorts” had already concluded that it was blockaders and rioters, not unions, who represented the future of labor resistance:
\n\n\n\n\nIn the present instance, the initiative is coming from outside the port and from outside the workers’ movement as such, even though it involves workers and unions. For the most part, the initiative here has come from a motley band of people who work in non-unionized workplaces, or (for good reason) hate their unions, or work part-time or have no jobs at all…
\n\nThe coming intensification of struggles both inside and outside the workplace will find no success in attempting to revitalize the moribund unions. Workers will need to participate in the same kinds of direct actions—occupations, blockades, sabotage—that have proven the highlights of the Occupy movement in the Bay Area. When tens of thousands of people marched to the port of Oakland on November 2nd in order to shut it down, by and large they did not do it to defend the jurisdiction of the ILWU, or to take a stand against union-busting (most people were, it appears, ignorant of these contexts). They did it because they hate the present-day economy, because they hate capitalism, and because the ports are one of the most obvious linkages in the web of misery in which we are all caught.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/1.jpg\")
The port blockade in Oakland: sunset on November 2, 2011.
\nTo repeat the words of the ILWU officer: “Labor can no longer win victories against the employers without the community. It must include a broad-based movement.” Even if you wish to focus on labor organizing alone, the only way to give it teeth is to organize with people outside of specific workplaces, without relying on union bureaucracy. Those who attempt to reenact a sanitized version of the strikes of 1946 without understanding what made the general strike of 2011 effective will not get far.
\n\nWhat would a modern-day general strike look like? It would involve a broad range of precarious workers, unemployed people, and other rebels taking disruptive action to shut down the economy from outside. However the strike might begin, it would have to proliferate horizontally, spreading beyond any single demographic as a contagious rebellion exceeding the control of any organization. It would entail targeting the choke points of the economy—physical locations like ports, highways, and distribution centers as well as online venues and other forms of infrastructure, not to mention the workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, and prisons in which most of us spend most of our lives. It would necessitate defying politicians, union representatives, community leaders, and everyone who defends their legitimacy. It would be controversial. To persist, it would require seizing and redistributing resources. Many of these actions would take place within workplaces, but to center the agency of official unions or other organizations that have legal standing under capitalism would be to ensure defeat in advance.
\n\n\n\n\nAs capitalism renders more and more people precarious or redundant, it will be harder and harder to fight from recognized positions of legitimacy within the system such as “workers” or “students.” Last year’s students fighting tuition hikes are this year’s dropouts; last year’s workers fighting job cuts are this year’s unemployed. We have to legitimize fighting from outside, establishing a new narrative of struggle.
\n\n-Nightmares of Capitalism, Pipe Dreams of Democracy: The World Struggles to Wake, 2010-2011
\n
\n\n\nWho is more entitled to occupy a school than those who can’t afford to attend it? Who is more entitled to sabotage the economy than those for whom there are no jobs?
\n\n \n
But the general strike of 2011 also hit a wall. There hasn’t been another since. How could we get past that impasse? To answer that question, we have to look at what happened after the general strike of 2011.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/4.jpg\")
A demonstrator paints “Strike” on the façade of the Whole Foods in downtown Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nThe assembly; the occupation; the blockade; the riot. Confronting the declining leverage of unions and labor organizing in a changing economy, Occupy Oakland experimented with all four of these, in turn.
\n\nIn 2012, at the conclusion of the Occupy movement, if you had chosen participants at random and asked them which of those four models would be most widely adopted a decade later, they probably would have guessed that assemblies would become the most widespread, whereas rioting would remain the most marginal and extreme.
\n\nWhat actually happened is surprising.
\n\nOverseas, in Spain, where the immediate predecessor of the Occupy movement had appeared in the plazas of Madrid and Barcelona, people confronted the same questions in 2012 and arrived at some of the same answers. In Barcelona, during the nationwide general strike of March 29, 2012, many of the participants set out to shut down the economy from outside, using an array of tactics including roving pickets, blockading, and rioting fiercer than anything seen in the Bay Area in 2011. Striking students in Québec arrived at more or less the same strategy that same spring—crucially, with the assistance of non-student supporters. We can trace the circulation of these tactics around the world over the following years—from Turkey to Brazil, from France to Hong Kong, from Ecuador to Chile and Colombia. All of these upheavals offer useful reference points about how to disrupt the economy from outside the workplace.
\n\nIn the United States, the breakaway march in Oakland on March 4, 2010 and the port blockades during the general strike of 2011 foreshadowed the highway blockades that spread around the country in 2014, inspired by the revolt in Ferguson. This movement improved on Occupy in many ways, centering the agency of those most impacted by white supremacy and police violence. Later, at the opening of the Trump era, thousands of people blockaded airports, fulfilling a proposal that had seemed outlandish in 2012.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/15.jpg\")
“It’s a man’s world: let’s fuck it up.” A banner at the blockade of the port in Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nAs the intensity of these confrontations picked up, however, horizontal, open assemblies largely fell by the wayside. People overcorrected for the most maddening aspects of the Occupy assemblies (the centrality of white and male voices, the tendency for proposals to bog down in consensus process, the lack of meaningful affinity) by shifting to entirely decentralized and informal frameworks or else by adopting a cadre organizing model tying legitimacy to identity. Anarchists withdrew to affinity groups and collectives, other activists to organizations and parties. The social body that had gathered at the occupations fractured into invite-only Signal threads, socialist groupuscules, and the Bernie Sanders campaign.
\n\nAfterwards, while social movements picked up steam around the world, efforts to connect workplace organizing with confrontational street activity did not gain much momentum.2 The tactics that some activists in Oakland had experimented with in order to update the labor movement for the 21st century became associated almost exclusively with efforts to grapple with the capitalist landscape outside the workplace: fighting fascists, opposing deportations, imposing consequences for police murders.
\n\nThis culminated in the generalized uprising that broke out in May 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd, facilitated by the fact that the first wave of COVID-19 had already imposed an almost total work stoppage on society. (Talk about a general strike introduced from outside the workplace!) The confrontational tactics that were essential to catalyzing this uprising were precisely the same tactics that had been most controversial during Occupy.
\n\nIn the wake of a high point of activity like the George Floyd uprising, activists often become disoriented and dispirited. Because the bar for what counts as a victory has been raised so high, projects or goals that felt worthwhile before the uprising can seem meaningless. Looking for a new way forward, some people who participated in defeating police departments and shutting down cities in 2020 have turned their attention to labor organizing without thinking about how the experiences of summer 2020 might inform it—and without any inkling that the tactics they employed that summer were descended, in part, from an effort to reimagine labor resistance for the 21st century.
\n\nIf blockading, rioting, black bloc tactics, the establishment of “cop-free zones,” and other tactics from 2011 have spread far and wide while labor organizing models have remained at an impasse, this should inform our strategizing. Of course, just because a particular tactic thrives in our current context does not mean that it will suffice to solve the problems we face. After the 2020 revolt, it’s a good idea to seek an even broader basis for collective struggle—and in theory, labor organizing could offer this.
\n\nSo what is missing from the toolset that reaches us, indirectly and incompletely, from the experiments of Occupy Oakland?
\n\nA decade ago, many anarchists considered it their top priority to escalate social conflict. In retrospect, those who fantasized about “social rupture” in 2009 were like the Futurists of 1909 who published a manifesto demanding more aggression, speed, and war immediately before the outbreak of World War I. Today, we have conflicts and ruptures aplenty; increasing atomization and polarization are the only things we can count on. What is not guaranteed is that we will be able to build long-term connections on a large enough scale to collectively produce a shared vision of how to improve our lives.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/18.jpg\")
Demonstrators at the port blockade in Oakland on November 2, 2011.
\nDespite the role that their leadership played in suppressing the general strike, the unions of the 1940s also offered an indispensable venue for rank-and-file workers to connect with each other in order to build a culture of solidarity. Without those unions, the general strike of 1946 would never have occurred in the first place. Likewise, in place of the unions of the 1940s, Occupy Oakland had the encampment and the assembly: these served as spaces of encounter, enabling a broad range of people from many different walks of life to rapidly build new social ties and shared visions. The “Oakland Commune” emerged in this space, a semi-mythological collectivity representing the dream of sharing and fighting together. In reality, the Occupy Oakland encampment was often a very challenging environment, to say the least; afterwards, some participants suggested that, like the unions of 1946, it was both essential to the movement and ultimately implicated in its demise. But this is an argument to improve on the model it offered, rather than trying to do without a space of broad connection.
\n\nAs our relations become ever more atomized, disposable, volatile, and fraught, mirroring the society we live in and the economy that drives it, the absence of spaces for meaningful ongoing connection is one of the greatest challenges facing us. If we are to apply the lessons of 2011 to today’s labor struggles—bringing together the employed, the precariously employed, and the unemployed in a common struggle that challenges capitalism as a whole, rather than seeking to defend the status of small segments of the working class—we will need new spaces of encounter in which to build collectivity.
\n\nWhat model could connect us today the way that the unions connected people in 1946 and the Occupy assemblies connected people in 2011?
\n\nFriends, we leave you with this question.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/11.jpg\")
“Revolt—for a life worth living.” A banner in downtown Oakland on the night of November 2, 2011.
\n\n\n\nForget about going back to the old days—there can be no more peace treaties between classes when even governments are scrambling to keep up with the accelerating effects of capitalism. Forget about fighting to preserve your economic role and privileges—the only hope is to legitimize common resistance from outside them, against them. Forget about strategies based on incremental victories, radicalizing our demands as people build up a taste for winning—today it’s easier to topple governments than to reform them. We have to popularize new ways of fighting that create social bodies outside all capitalist roles, that can one day put an end to capitalism itself.
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/10.jpg\")
\nA few points of departure to learn more about the two general strikes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/07/6.jpg\")
\nFor the sake of brevity, in this analysis, we pass over over the nationwide “Day without an Immigrant” strike of May 1, 2006, one of few other contenders in the category of 21st-century general strike. It’s worth noting that the “Day without an Immigrant” strike was initiated by one of the most precarious demographics in the United States—and that the chief objective was not to negotiate their salaries or workplace conditions, but to press the government not to render them even more precarious. ↩
\nThe popularity of “anti-work” politics today is the logical consequence of seventy-five years of reversals in the labor movement. It represents a sober (if chiefly instinctive) assessment of the prospects for old-fashioned labor organizing. ↩
\nRoughly a quarter of workers in the United States quit their jobs in 2021. There has been a lot of talk about a supposed “labor shortage.” In theory, these conditions should be conducive to labor organizing—yet a real strike wave has not emerged. How have employment conditions changed, and what new strategies are likely to succeed in enabling people to stand up for themselves and each other against the capitalist economy? In a forthcoming series of articles, we will explore these questions.
\n\nThis week, workers at Kellogg’s concluded a strike, accepting a new contract that their union declared to be a victory. A notorious anti-work Reddit page played a role in preventing the company from replacing the strikers, pointing the way to a symbiosis between workplace organizing and anti-work subversion. Here, we present a narrative about the working conditions that laborers face in another industry served by the same union.
\n\nCongratulations to the Kellogg’s workers at the end of their 77 day strike! Their struggle is especially close to my heart, because I too was a member in good standing of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM) for nearly ten years during the 2000s, during which time I worked seasonally at a beet sugar factory in Minnesota. As a small show of solidarity, I’d like to share an account that I wrote about the job back in 2005, which was printed in the first issue of Rolling Thunder.
\n\nNeedless to say, much has changed since then—in the factory, the town, the union, and the world at large. My account is perhaps most interesting as a snapshot of industrial work at a particular time and place, and of a few of the frozen exploited maniacs who could be found laboring there at the point of production. What has not changed is that life under capitalism is nothing sweet, and that nothing is gained without struggle. Victory to the Kellogg’s workers!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/8.jpg\")
Supporters of the striking Kellogg’s workers made these silent agitators to affix to grocery store shelf labels and cereal boxes. For use with Avery brand 8160 Address Labels or the equivalent. Click on the image to download a pdf for printing.
\nSo here’s the deal. Every fall I work in this beet sugar factory in western Minnesota. A whole lot of the sugar that goes into all kinds of processed food comes from sugar beets, and a whole lot of those sugar beets come from western Minnesota. The county where the factory is located is dead flat, except for the Minnesota River valley, and it contains precisely three things: corn, soybeans, and sugar beets as far as the eye can see. It’s completely rural, but at the same time, it’s every bit as unnatural as Los Angeles or Disneyland.
\n\nEvery year in September, the beet farmers start pulling their crops. They pull them out of the ground with a combine, load them onto a semi truck, and drive them down to the plant. It takes the plant until spring to process the whole harvest, so they have to store the beets outside in seven gigantic piles, and they have to hire seasonal workers to run the machines that unload the trucks. By the end of the harvest season each one of the piles is bigger than a football field, and up to thirty feet tall. It’s one whole hell of a lot of beets.
\n\nIt’s good money. The farmers pull beets all day and night, unless it’s too hot, or too cold, or too wet. Seasonal workers—beet pilers—work twelve hours a day, every day, as long as the farmers are pulling. This amounts to eighty-four hours a week if the weather cooperates, and the overtime adds up quick. Anything over eight hours a day or forty a week is time and a half, and Sunday is double time. If I live extremely frugally, I can make enough money there to fund my activities for the better part of the rest of the year.
\n\nThe town is exactly like every other agricultural town of its size. There is a bar, a diner, a hardware store, two gas stations, a post office, a library, and a police station. The faces behind the counters almost never change from year to year. The tallest building is the grain silo, and the town ends abruptly where the beet fields begin at the edge of the last family’s yard. If you walk the railroad tracks two miles east you’ll get to the factory. The whole place is ordinary in every way, except that once a year it is crawling with beet pilers.
\n\nThere are three kinds of people that pile beets: the Locals, the Latin@s, and the Kids. Western Minnesota was stolen from its original inhabitants in the nineteenth century, and has been populated almost exclusively by white people of Scandinavian heritage ever since. Recently, however, a lot of Hispanic folks have moved up there looking for work. There is a sizable Latino/Latina minority in both the town and the factory.
\n\nAnd then there are the kids. It’s a strange phenomenon, but every fall the town is overrun with wild looking young people from Somewhere Else with dogs and facial tattoos who work beets because the money’s good and they don’t ask many questions. I am one of them.
\n\nThere really isn’t anywhere in town to accommodate all of us in any conventional sense, so almost every year we end up staying somewhere different. There used to be a fleabag motel down the road that would rent to beet pilers, but they got shut down for copious code violations. Last year about forty of us occupied an abandoned farm just past the outskirts of town. It was sort of like a band of vagabonds descending on a medieval village. I was a little bit worried that babies were going to start turning up missing and that the townspeople were going to come after us with pitchforks.
\n\nOne year, the weather was terrible. Nobody was working or getting paid, and nearly everyone was camped out at the bar for days on end, getting ferociously drunk and terrorizing the town. Eventually the law got involved. But the hell-raising proved to be a surprisingly effective strategy. The next year the company tried really hard to work us no matter how bad the weather got, presumably just to keep us off the streets.
\n\nAnother time, the bartender went down to the farm to hang out with us after work. She rolled up on a grim horde of beet pilers, solemnly skinning and eating a puppy around the camp fire1. She was understandably horrified by this, even after someone explained that the puppy had not been murdered. It had been killed accidentally by one of the larger dogs, and the person who was responsible for it had decided that this was the most respectful way to deal with its death. She always seemed a little wary of us after that.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/2.jpg\")
\nWorking beets can be a positive experience in many ways. There is a real camaraderie and a kind of solidarity that can develop out of living and working and eating and sleeping collectively with a group of people under trying conditions. There are people who make a kind of circuit together throughout the year, piling beets in Minnesota, raking blueberries in Maine, canning fish in Alaska, and doing a variety of other things. It’s one way to make work, and life, a little less alienating and isolating.
\n\nIt can also be terrible. The extreme drunkenness and perpetual drug abuse can get to be a bit much, and working eighty-four hours a week in the freezing cold while sleeping on a pile of straw in a barn for a month and a half without any running water or electricity will really put you in the mood to not take any shit from anyone.
\n\nThe work is really easy. A well-trained orangutan could run a beet piler. You press the same buttons and pull the same levers over and over and over. It’s mostly just really loud and monotonous and cold.
\n\nIt’s also fairly dangerous. You have to keep an eye on all the tweaked out truckers so they don’t run you over. You have to make sure not to fall into the machine. Somebody gets killed on a beet pile somewhere in Minnesota or North Dakota almost every year.
\n\nThe inside of the factory is even crazier. There are unfathomable mazes of incomprehensible machines, catwalks and conveyor belts to nowhere, and ancient engines caked in a foot of beet pulp. There is the deafening racket of a thousand endlessly grinding gears, an entire floor of the factory that is always about a hundred and thirty degrees, and a place called The Pit where no supervisor will ever go. The whole place is completely inhuman. There is no shortage of opportunities to hide—or to get maimed or killed.
\n\nI work outside on the pilers unless the weather is bad, but sometimes I work inside the factory. Here’s a story. One day, I clock in and the bossman gives me a great big squeegee. He takes me to a particular pipe deep in the bowels of the factory which has sprung an enormous leak and is spraying massive amounts of half-processed syrup everywhere. “Mop up this juice,” he says, and then leaves, never to be seen again. So for twelve hours, the pipe runneth over, and I push the lake of juice—which never gets any smaller—down a drain. The drain feeds into a sump pump, which then pumps right back into the pipe!
\n\nAfterwards, while meditating on the absurdity of that task, I watched a couple of guys with a backhoe spend half the day digging a big hole in the ground, take lunch, and spend the rest of the day filling it back in. I started to imagine that everyone there was doing the same thing on some level. The welders cut slabs of steel in half, take lunch, and weld them back together; the mechanics disassemble engines, take lunch, and put them back together; and the whole place is actually a giant meth lab or loss leader for the Mafia. There’s the method to the madness of production for you.
\n\nThe factory is supposed to be owned cooperatively by the farmers, but the evil agribusiness giant Cargill has its hands in the management of it. There was a month-long lockout last summer, when the union overwhelmingly rejected a contract that would have left workers with fewer benefits and higher health insurance costs. The lockout was wildly unpopular, and was eventually resolved, but the town and the factory are behind the times in a lot of ways. I have no doubt that the next few years will see more attempts to bust the union, and more of the downsizing, automation, and outsourcing that have already decimated most of the decent paying industrial jobs in the rest of the country. The beet plant will be an interesting arena of struggle when this does inevitably happen. There is certainly the possibility there for profound alliances to be born out of necessity amongst workers of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds.
\n\nThe beet harvest works pretty well for me, and I keep going back, but I sure am glad to get the hell gone the minute I’m done. As soon as I get there, it feels like I never left, and it only ever takes about a week or so before I start having dreams about beets again. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to stomach working there every day for years on end. I do know that the company had to start making full-time workers clock in by scanning their retinas because so many people were scamming the timecards.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/3.jpg\")
\nLast year, someone started writing “BDTF!” everywhere. Burn Down the Factory! Remember that song by Fifteen? It started turning up on the pilers, in the factory, in town, scrawled in the dust on the sides of cars in all manner of different handwriting styles. Maybe it was just the kids who were doing it, but maybe not.
\n\nMake no mistake about it: sugar is evil. It’s addictive, it rots your teeth, and it’s largely responsible for an epidemic of diabetes among poor people in this country. The process by which it is produced wastes a staggering amount of water, is horrifically destructive to the environment, and is viscerally just plain gross.
\n\nYou can’t have your cake and eat it, too. If you want that sugar, you have to accept that huge amounts of land will be used to grow the beets, that enormous quantities of pesticides and fertilizers will be used on that land, that there will be a sacrifice zone somewhere on a totally denuded moonscape where the factory will go, that some folks will spend the best years of their lives inside that factory, and that a mountain of fossil fuels will be burned to power it. You also have to accept that some doped up crust punk is probably going to poop in the beet pile. In my opinion, it’s just not worth it.
\n\nWhen I first started working at the plant, I swore I would never eat anything with beet sugar in it again. Later, I started thinking about where cane sugar must come from, or corn syrup, or any kind of processed food, period. It all comes from some factory, somewhere. It’s sobering to realize that the whole way that food is produced and distributed in our civilization is so deranged and destructive. The problem is a whole lot bigger than almost anyone cares to admit.
\n\nThere are a lot of good people—including myself—whose livelihoods are dependent on that factory, or on others like it, or on all sorts of other messed up jobs. I wholeheartedly support workers’ efforts to better their lot within the confines of industrial capitalism, but I’ll be honest—ultimately, I’d like to see the beet plant wiped off the face of the fucking earth. I want to give the land a chance to recover, and I want to be part of a society where that would be possible. I know that’s not going to happen without some truly revolutionary change.
\n\nSometimes I will be sitting up in the booth running the piler, looking through the clouds of dust at the pillars of smoke and steam rising out of the factory, and it will hit me right in the chest: two hundred years ago, this was a tallgrass prairie teeming with buffalo, and now here I am like every other white person, trying to make a buck off of this land. I don’t exactly feel guilty about it; I am trapped in this heartless economy just like so many others, and I have to make some compromises if I am going to have any resources to fight it with. If I am going to make those kinds of compromises, though, I do feel a very grave responsibility to follow through on that commitment to fight. I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one who feels that way.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/12/22/1.jpg\")
Burn down the factory.
\nDedicated to the memories of Oakle, Justin, Mosca, Jared, Steph, and Flee—fellow beet pilers who have passed away since this article was first published. You are missed, all of you.
\n\nAuthor’s note: Please let me take this opportunity to assure the gentle reader that I played no part in the puppy skinning. Thank you very much. ↩
\nAnarchists have observed May Day as a holiday celebrating revolutionary labor movements since 1886. Last year, anarchists around the world honored May Day despite the combined challenges of the pandemic and state-enforced lockdowns. Ahead of tomorrow’s May Day, we are publishing an analysis of what happened to the powerful labor unions of the mid-20th century, written from within one of them. This text first appeared fifteen years ago in the second issue of Rolling Thunder, our anarchist journal of dangerous living.
\n\nSince those days, the circumstances this text describes have only become worse, as one economic crisis has followed another while labor unions have struggled to respond. The combative unemployment that some young dropout anarchists chose as a strategy at the turn of the century has become, at some points, almost a generalized condition. At the same time, the political polarization of the white working class has rendered untenable some of the optimism with which the following text concludes—showing the cost of what happens when we miss opportunities to present revolutionary solutions to the problems engendered by capitalism. The reduction of the political spectrum to different flavors of centrist neoliberalism paved the way for nationalists like Trump to falsely represent themselves as “rebels” fighting “the elites” on behalf of the common people.
\n\nToday, when the working class has been divided into the remote, the precarious, and the unemployed, rather than focusing on a rearguard struggle to preserve the rapidly eroding economic positions and infrastructure of the previous century, we have to find new, dynamic ways to interrupt and overturn the capitalism economy as a whole. The price for not doing so will be a reaction even worse than the Trump regime.
\n\nFor more on this subject, we recommend Work, our analysis of how capitalism has changed over the past century—and what it means to fight it today, especially in post-industrial areas.
\n\nRE: Report from the Shopfloor How Unions Lost Their Teeth
\nMEMO: How I spent my summer in the Midwest
\nTO: CRIMETHINC. HEADQUARTERS
\nFROM: AGENT 356592
The summer of the big AFL split, I infiltrated the federation by interning as an organizer for a certain dissident janitors union. The legends of past labor struggles were my introduction to anarchism as a youth, and I wanted to bring back some labor organizing skills to my southeastern town, which had been forgotten by virtually all unions. Today’s business unions generally follow a strategy of density: they focus on organizing areas where there is already a sizable Union presence, leaving historically un-unionized communities like my own to fend for themselves.
\n\nThanks to this strategy, my internship took me to a Midwestern railroad town with a vibrant history of class struggle—though it seemed that much of that militant energy had been tamed by the time I arrived. The local I worked for had been established thirty years earlier, when some uppity janitors realized they didn’t have to be treated like dirt. Although the activity of the union had declined, the stories and pictures of picket lines, office occupations, and sabotage by janitors touched a soft spot in my heart, and I had high hopes.
\n\nAlong with several other interns, I was part of one of two “surveying teams,” responsible for initiating contact with janitors and creating a database with information on possible union targets. The work itself was pretty simple, though in the course of gathering intelligence I quickly accrued enough counts of trespassing and breaking and entering to make even a seasoned CrimethInc. agent jealous. All this, and officially sanctioned dumpster diving! Imagine my delight at being knee deep in employee lists, invoices, and office memos instead of rotten produce and dumpster juice. A kid could get used to this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/30/1.jpg\")
\nThe wealthy side of the city had seen the appearance of a lot of office buildings and corporate parks, most of which had not been documented by the union. These were not unionized buildings, yet obviously people were cleaning them. Who were they? It was up to us to solve this mystery.
\n\nI haven’t spent much time in office buildings, and seeing them from the outside I used to assume they were basically impenetrable catacombs of cubicles staffed by security guards and video cameras. Most of the ones I entered were not, as it turned out, and the ones that were were that much more fun. A couple of us would roll up to the security desk and start talking, making up some excuse or just chatting, trying to get information from the guard. While he was distracted, someone else would sneak into the building and try to find the janitors’ closets.
\n\nIt’s one thing to distract a retail employee while your buddy slides something into her purse. It’s another to try to sneak by a fully-armed guard who hasn’t seen an exciting day on the job since that bag of popcorn caught fire in the microwave and set off all the sprinklers on the fourth floor. They take their jobs very seriously.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/30/2.jpg\")
\nYet it turns out it’s possible. I button my shirt, hold my breath, and go. Look straight ahead and just get on the elevator.
\n\nI only had a problem once, when the security guard saw me and told me to wait in the lobby. I disappeared up the stairs when he was distracted and had a heyday in the office, but when I came back down he was looking around for me and I had to hide behind a column. When I heard him talking to another guard, I bolted and didn’t look back.
\n\nAt a fortress-like building, I pretended to smoke until an employee walked out the locked back door. She politely held it open for me and I got to work rummaging through the basement closets and pocketing some nice pens.
\n\nExcept for my lack of a tie, I fit in fairly well at the offices. I got into character and became an up-and-coming intern for some insurance or telecommunications company. No one really minded when I asked questions or poked my head into the wrong door. No one could have recognized anyone outside of their immediate office anyway—capitalist alienation was on my side for once. To them, I was just another faceless drone aiming for the American Dream.
\n\nJanitors’ closets tend to be next to bathrooms or in other out-of-the-way places. In each building, I was looking for the name of the janitorial corporation that held sway there; I usually found these written on a trash can or on a container of cleaning chemical. There were about eight national or international cleaning companies operating in the area.
\n\nThis worked for about half of the sites, but at the others we had to wait until nightfall to try to meet with the janitors themselves. The buildings were usually locked after 6 pm, but at corporate parks janitors might be found walking between buildings or taking out trash. In our expeditions, we discovered a trend that should not have been surprising: all the non-unionized janitors were Spanish-speaking Latinos. The local union staff didn’t have a single Spanish speaker—can you believe that?—so I attempted to speak using the very few Spanish words I knew (trabajo, durruti, syndicato, nada).
\n\nWe had two Spanish-knowledgeable comrades on the intern staff, and they organized a meeting for Latino janitors in the area. Only a dozen or so came, and they reported being threatened by bosses if they attempted to work with the union. The communication barrier was embarrassing on the part of the union, as several of the work problems they raised could have been easily solved by a Spanish-speaking staffer. The local is working on the problem, and I hope they get things rolling soon.
\n\nThe movement as a whole has been slow in responding to immigrants’ needs, especially as it has become entangled with nationalism and legalism and the drudgery that comes with being a mediating part of the status quo.
\n\nBut it wasn’t always like this.
\n\nThe labor movement was born and bred on sabotage as an illegal underground conspiracy of workers fighting to raise wages and improve working conditions by any means necessary. In the nineteenth century, disgruntled employees met by night and destroyed the wool and cotton mills threatening their livelihoods—to such an extent that “machine breaking” was made a capital offense in England. Early US labor agitators had to fear for their lives, as they were often chased out of town or lynched. Strikes crippled railroads and factories, cops and soldiers attacked picketing workers and families. It seemed the whole world might erupt in a global class war between the haves and have-nots.
\n\nFearing industrial chaos, governments forced employers to yield to some of the workers’ demands. Workers’ movements were integral to the implementation of the eight hour day, safety and health regulations, and the National Labor Relations Act. The day had been won for the workers, and many on both sides of the class divide felt unions were on their way to redistributing wealth and power once and for all.
\n\nBut in the course of all this, a funny thing happened. Unions themselves became legitimate players on the political playing field—with clout, bargaining power, and, most of all, healthy bank accounts. The struggles continued, but they began to have less heart. More money, but less heart. Business agents, grievance procedures, lobbyists, closed shops, dues check-off and “labor-friendly” politicians helped integrate—or entangle—unions into the smooth functioning of governments and economies, and it wasn’t much longer before they had become pale shadows of their former selves. Were unions still a tool for class war, or just glorified human resources departments?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/30/3.jpg\")
\nTo return to my summer—the stranglehold of legalization had choked the town’s labor movement years before, though many in the movement still showed a radical spirit. The president of my local, a jovial and warm-hearted long-time labor leader, reminisced over the occupation of a prominent downtown office tower and confided that one could seriously disrupt plumbing by flushing tied tampons down a toilet. This indicated not only willingness to be arrested, but also willingness to act without being arrested—an even more desirable trait—and his eyes lit up when I whispered to him some of my own adventures.
\n\nHowever, any direct action was relegated to war stories or video “action footage,” thanks to those bank accounts and laws making unions accountable for member action. The bosses can actually sue unions for illegal job actions. The unions are tamed; there is little discussion as to whether promoting a little sabotage is worth de-certification and bankruptcy.
\n\nThe local had for a time cancelled union meetings because it seemed there simply was nothing to talk about—but with contract negotiations looming on the horizon, it was time to get into gear. At one of the first meetings I attended, a woman spoke up, saying that she had read the contract and that the union wasn’t for the worker, it was a tool for the bosses. The officers quickly countered that no, the union is for the workers and she needed to re-read the contract. The union is the workers, they said. The union is the workers, and the staff is just employed by the workers.
\n\nBut over the course of the summer there was a subtle shift from the intern orientation, at which it was hammered into us that “the Union is the Workers,” to the confession on-site that the union is a business. Unions need money to run, and to get it, they are in the business of representing workers and handling grievances, and occasionally getting better wages and improving job conditions. The unions’ “strategic planning” can also be read as a business strategy: unions have to find areas where there is already a market for their product (the union); job sites with few employees won’t be able to repay in dues the cost of establishing the union, so those sites are ignored. On the other hand, organizing a factory of 200+ can get an agitator a position as a sort of business agent—then you’re “set for life,” I was told.
\n\nThe local I worked for was well-established and had “union shop” contracts, according to which workers hired by certain employers were forced to join the union after a certain number of days of employment. In fact, the union didn’t even have to meet with the workers for them to sign up; their bosses gave them the union card and made them fill it out. This contributed to the union’s disconnection from its membership. Often, members didn’t even know they were in a union, or didn’t know what it did; and for that matter, the union didn’t keep track of its membership. The member lists we were supposed to use to call folks out for rallies were horribly out of date. But what did it matter? The dues were decided at the international level, not the local. The employers deducted dues from paychecks and sent a monthly lump sum.
\n\nCollaborating with the boss is good for business, and unions have gotten into the business of collaboration. I had a chance to look at the contract the woman was complaining about. The most disappointing aspect, as always, is the “No Strike/No Lockout” paragraph, which explains that the union cannot strike as long as the terms of the contract are followed. Even better, when there is a legal strike, the union pledges that it will send a “minimal staff” into the striking offices in order to keep them functioning—yes, the union will scab itself!
\n\nThe union encountered some difficulties reining in its membership in preparation for the upcoming contract negotiations. The union wanted its members to want full-time status, but most of the part-time workers weren’t especially interested in changing. This was an example of a complaint I’ve heard often in my small southern town: the unions, people say, disregard their individual situations and force them to accept what the union says is “better for the whole.”
\n\nThough this critique tends to come from conservatives and is disregarded by leftists who think they can figure out what’s best for everyone, it has a certain radical undercurrent to it. Most unions have become large and bureaucratic, and their political and economic legitimacy is based on their ability to keep their members in line. The union knows what’s best; in order for negotiations to go well, your desires have to fit into a certain box so that the negotiators can squeeze them into an even smaller contract. The union has to be able to give the bosses a promise of stability, a guarantee of the security of the status quo and the smooth running of production. Otherwise, it’s out a customer.
\n\nAs these unions are inextricably entrenched in the functioning of the economy, of course they’re more interested in the right to employment than the right to enjoyment. Business unions are about making sure that everyone wants the same thing, rather than the workers uniting and standing up together for their individual desires.
\n\nThere were pockets of dissatisfaction within the local, and at moments there seemed to be hope for change within the membership. But the members themselves had been beaten, both by the employers and by the union. One young man explained that the bosses had threatened to deal harshly with disrupters, and he was unwilling to stick his neck out on the job without the support of his co-workers—which was non-existent. Defeat, yet again.
\n\nBeyond the institutionalized constraints, the biggest roadblock to a vibrant union was the basic lack of a culture of solidarity. Folks didn’t stick up for one another against the boss. “Union” was just another deduction from wages, not something that existed in the relationships between workers on the job. What good was a union card if it sat idle in your back pocket? Credit cards, discount cards, membership cards. Unionism became just one more thing to consume in order to get a better job, participation optional.
\n\nThis isn’t to say that legalized unions bring no benefits to the workers themselves. US unions pride themselves on raising the standard of living and creating a large middle class. Many unions have helped to bring at least some fragment of the American Dream™ to US families. But this has altogether neutralized these workers’ opposition to capitalism, and removed them from participation in social struggle. Middle class workers, thanks to and along with their unions, have been effectively domesticated.
\n\nWhy struggle against capitalism, one might ask, if one has a working garbage disposal of one’s very own? It’s a question of values. The workers movement has always struggled for two things:
\n\n1) Autonomy, freedom, and power over the workplace and daily life; and
\n\n2) Wealth.
\n\nThe bosses and politicians have ceded a fraction of their wealth but have not given up any power. Workers who might want to fight for more autonomy or power are held hostage by the middle-class lifestyle they already have; to strive for freedom would mean to risk their little hard-won comfort. Indignity at work is the price you have to pay to live the dream of two cars and a pile of debts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/30/4.jpg\")
\nHere, amid all this co-option and concession, I see opportunities for anarchist intervention and participation in the labor struggles of today. My home town, for example, as a place most unions have ignored, is a prime site for a renaissance of labor organizing without money, limitations, or institutions.
\n\nAnd outside our punk and activist ghettos, we dropout anarchists have a lot to offer. We’re used to living on next to nothing, so bosses can’t threaten us; if we can link up with others fed up with their power, we can threaten them. Our lust for freedom and autonomy, and our willingness to go without the consolation prizes of convenience, could help us develop new methods of cooperation and workplace action that no union today can even consider. We’ve acted outside formal structures for so many years that we take all the benefits of being able to do so for granted; in league with our fellow work-haters, we could open new avenues for genuine revolt. We’ve dumpstered meals for hundreds for our own conferences; let’s make sure there’s never a hungry belly at a picket line. Our infoshops and Food Not Bombs groups have given us good practice building community organs; let’s offer working parents daycare and free breakfast for their kids. And fun—fun is almost an ideology for most of us; let’s share our games and schemes and optimism with workers and co-workers, so that no one ever has to go home and waste away in front of the TV again. The togetherness that comes from those is exactly the foundation that makes collective resistance possible.
\n\nUs dropouts have a lot going for us that today’s union organizers don’t. Unlike most of them, we have no overhead. We can steal or scam what we need to fight with, squat or dumpster what we need to get by, and travel by rail or by thumb just as the I.W.W. union faithfuls used to. The money we raise for labor organizing can be put to better use than staff salaries or rental cars. As an intern with the established union, I still had to compute everything according to the scarcity logic of capitalism—from the pizza we ate to turning on the lights in the office, we were always reminded that we were spending or wasting our members’ hard-earned money. Organizers who don’t depend on dues for their livelihoods, on the other hand, can look at workers as real people and not just potential sources of income. Such union representatives could be collaborators against the bosses, not agents for them.
\n\nThis isn’t to say we revolutionaries should spend all our time doing grunt work for the “real” labor movement. If we’re serious about this, we can make our own connections with grassroots labor militants and act on our own terms outside the bureaucratic institutions that have been holding the movement back. The formal labor movement still has plenty of organizers and members with radical visions and vibrant spirits, but perhaps we can do some things they want to but can’t: wheatpasting, visiting houses, smashing offices…
\n\nAnd this participation can go both ways: if we get involved in labor struggles, other labor activists will be more likely to join in ours. In the middle of the summer, I invited my fellow interns and the local staff to join in an anti-G8 solidarity rally organized by the regional Anarchist Action group. The union staff was excited to meet other potential allies, and the anarchist group was very interested in labor involvement, though the two hadn’t worked together before. After work, wearing our bright red union shirts and bearing dumpstered buckets for festive drumming, we joined in a parade that ended at the local Board of Trade. In the course of this unpermitted march, we were corralled, pepper sprayed, and beaten, but I was surprised and impressed by the willingness of the interns to stick through the action and not back down. Though short-lived, it was an exciting and inspiring few blocks in the streets, chanting class war slogans alongside the folks with whom I had taken my first meaningful steps into the class war.
\n\nIronically enough, as I finish this report a strike has struck, of all places, right outside my home town. The company wants to cut pensions and jack up healthcare costs. The cement plants employ most of the people in the area, and only one of them is unionized. The other plants are watching—the bosses nervously, the workers excitedly. If the strikers get their demands, there’s a good chance there will be inspiration for the union to move into the other sites. And so, after all my ranting and raving against unions and their contracts and compromises, a few of us went down to hang out with the workers and bring lots and lots of dumpstered food. The picket is strong—every worker in this 100+ employee plant is off the job in this right-to-work1 state. Scabs are having trouble keeping up output: after a week, four customers have already stopped ordering. I got a chance to talk to the folks down there with their drawls, John Deere caps, Harley t-shirts, and, of course, sweet tea. They are sticking together and they all support the union. It’s inspiring to find another bastion of resistance in this once-hopeless humid town. I got some numbers, and we are going to keep in touch. They enjoyed the d.i.y. mashed potatoes and I promised to bring more. I didn’t talk anarchism on the picket line—I didn’t need to. They know what’s up. Every southern working class redneck knows she’s been abandoned by the politicians and that their bosses don’t care about them. The question is what we can do about this, together.
\n\n“Right to Work” is a euphemism for scab-friendly. ↩
\nMay Day 2020 confronted us with a difficult challenge: it has never been more necessary to take action for change, and it has never been more difficult. In some parts of the world—including Ljubljana, Vienna, and Chicago—anarchists achieved inspiring breakthroughs; elsewhere, where people remained indoors out of despair or attempted to repeat familiar traditions, the results were disheartening. Here, we offer an overview of all the different experiments people engaged in, ranging across a dozen countries, in hopes of offering inspiration and useful models for the next round of organizing.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1255887921925763074\n\n\n
Our enemies in the ruling class want to resume the functioning of the economy without permitting us any of the freedoms we need to defend ourselves from their impositions. All around the world, we saw police without any sort of protective gear harassing and attacking properly masked demonstrators, blithely risking spreading the pandemic in the name of halting it. This underscores the foolishness of counting on state violence to protect us from a virus. Police have surely been one of the chief vectors via which the virus has spread around the world and penetrated into our communities. We won’t be safe until we are neither forced to engage in risky economic activities to survive nor forced to remain confined and subservient to our rulers by mercenaries who don’t care if we live or die.
\n\nYou can read strategic reflections about the possibilities and disadvantages of automobile demonstrations based on experiences in Atlanta, Durham and Raleigh, and Austin. We hope a wider array of tactics will emerge over the months of struggle to come.
\n\nAs usual, these reports are arranged by country to show the regimes that the participants are fighting against, not because we affirm the legitimacy of any state or colonial legacy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/2.jpg\")
\nMay Day celebrations and demonstrations took place across Austria. The lockdown measures restricting individual movement ended at midnight, and several of the day’s demonstrations were officially registered and permitted. Besides the usual marches and gatherings of the Social Democrats and various communist groups, which took place in altered form with social distancing measures, there were also several demonstrations from radical left groups.
\n\nA large march met at noon under the motto, “Transnational Solidarity—against Racism and War.” About 850 people attended the march, wearing masks, maintaining distance, and carrying banners and signs. The march ended in front of city hall around 3 pm.
\n\nAs the protest ended, a critical mass (bike demonstration) with the motto “Solidarity instead of the ‘New Normal’” rode by and many people from the march joined in. The bike demo included almost 600 participants. The demo wound around the Ring, a wide boulevard circling the city center. The demo had not been registered with the authorities; larger and larger numbers of police started following the demo and a police helicopter could even be heard overhead.
\n\nAfter trying to block the road, the cyclists regrouped and made their way to the Prater, a large park where the demonstration was planned to end. The police attacked protesters in the Prater, knocking cyclists over, kicking a person who was sitting on the ground, searching people, and arresting three people, who were brought to the police detention center at the Rossauer Laende.
\n\nThe Plattform Radikal Linke, one of the groups who supported the call for the bike protest, summarized, “Despite the police repression, we were able to show a clear sign of solidarity: with refugees in camps and detention centers, against forcing those dependent on wages to carry the burden of the crisis and its effects, for another form of societal (re)production, outside of capitalist and patriarchal forces. For a stateless and classless global society! This is also what the 1st of May, as the day of struggle of wage workers and oppressed, stands for.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/18.jpg\")
\nAsparagus for everyone! In Salzburg, anarchists “liberated” some asparagus and gave it away in a pre-May Day direct action. Asparagus is expensive at the grocery store, but Austrian (and German) farmers rely on Eastern European laborers to harvest it for minimal wages. Asparagus producers have rejected the idea of using Austrian laborers who have offered to work the harvest, arguing that they want higher wages and would not work as hard. Eastern European laborers are being flown into Austria, despite Covid-19 restrictions, even though Austria has thus far refused to evacuate a single person from the detention camps at the EU’s outer borders (such as Moria). The conditions there are inhumane, as they already were before the Covid-19 outbreak. We see borders open for the profits of corporations, but not to save the lives of human beings.
\n\nHealth care for all! Open the borders, evacuate the camps! With the closing words, “Luxury for everyone” and “Bon appetit,” the Salzburg anarchists included some asparagus recipes. The full article with pictures is available here.
\n\nA new rent strike initiative got off the ground in Belgium ahead of May Day. A list of rent strike organizing efforts now includes groups in the US, Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, Brazil, and Greece, as well.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/16.jpg\")
A poster for the rent strike mobilization in Belgium.
\nOn May Day, people held a demonstration in Brussels in front of the prison of St-Gilles. Nine people were arrested but released in the evening. Banners read “Rasons toutes les prisons, les mauvais jours finiront!” (“Destroy all prisons, the bad days will end!”) and “Liberté pour tous.tes” (“Freedom for all”). People chanted “Brique par brique, mur par mur, détruisons toutes les prisons” (“Brick by brick, wall by wall, destroy all prisons”).
\n\nThere was also a demo in front of a supermarket in Forest, where a worker had been killed by COVID-19 a couple of weeks ago after being denied the right to wear a mask while working.
\n\nA call for a feminist balcony demonstration circulated ahead of May Day. There was also a demonstration in front of the Turkish embassy in solidarity with Rojava. More information on the day’s events is available here.
\n\nIn Brazil, only a few anarchist actions took place for May Day, such as this banner drop in Bahia in the north.
\n\nIn Brasilia, the nation’s capital, a supporter of Brazil’s fascist president Jair Bolsonaro made the news by attacking a group of nurses who were demonstrating to bring attention to the plight of healthcare workers.
\n\nMeanwhile, Brazilian anarchists mourn the passing of a comrade who has just been killed by COVID-19.
\n\nIn Hamilton, a “Keep Your Rent” vehicle convoy drove through the Central, Durand, Corktown, Stinson, Gibson, Landsdale, and Beasley neighborhoods, stopping at high-rise buildings owned by some of the biggest landlords in Hamilton, to promote the rent strike and offer solidarity to those struggling to pay their rent..
\n\nIn Montréal, banners and graffiti appeared all over the city expressing anti-authoritarian messages.
\n\nIn Toronto, in response to pandemic profiteering, some anarchists glued the locks of several banks, decorating the buildings with graffiti and publishing a communiqué explaining their motivations in detail.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/13.jpg\")
A demonstration in Hamilton.
\nIn Chile, the pandemic halted a massive ongoing uprising that had been about to enter an exciting new phase.
\n\nIn many places, people called for cacerolazos (noise demonstrations) for May 1; one assembly had a day for making masks and face shields.
\n\nIn Santiago, there was a small demonstration in Plaza de la Dignidad (formerly, Plaza Italia), one of the chief flashpoints of recurring confrontations with police last fall, where a small number of people gathered to commemorate international workers’ day and to demand the release of all political prisoners. This began around 11 am; there was already a heavy police presence. Around noon, the police started violently arresting people and shooting water at them with the water cannon. Police were playing a recording over a loudspeaker warning of the dangers of violent protest and declaring that the police “would take proper action against illegal gatherings” and so on. The recording said something about violent protest—which, by any standard, is not what was taking place in the plaza. People were just standing, holding banners, sometimes throwing fliers in the air.
\n\nThe first demonstrations of the day in Santiago, Chile.
\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
“We will live, we will return, we will triumph.” Concepción, Chile.
\nThe police arrested almost 60 people; the official news says 57. They arrested a lot of journalists, including a reporter from a national TV channel, who continued to broadcast live from inside the holding vehicle for a few minutes until the cops came to take the camera away.
\n\nAt the police station, they released members of the press first. Then they took arrestees to another police station, supposedly because this one had too many people inside and there were rumors that someone infected was inside. The news reports claim that this is confirmed; we don’t know for sure. Besides moving prisoners to another station for processing, they did not take preventative measures or release the detainees with any special instructions to quarantine or that they would be provided with testing,\nfor example.
\n\n\n \n\n \n
After some people left the first police station, the cops there tear-gassed everyone waiting and showing solidarity outside.
\n\nAlthough the police took advantage of the situation to spread the news that one of the arrestees allegedly tested positive for COVID-19, we note that they did not even request that the arrestees engage in any sort of self-quarantine after release. This calls their narrative into question. It is certain that from here on, the authorities will use the specter of COVID-19 to terrorize people out of demonstrating, even as they try to force us to resume dangerous work without any protection.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/6.jpg\")
Chile.
\nConfrontations continued in the plaza through out the day. There was also a demonstration outside of the government palace, where a union leader was arrested for trying to put up a banner. Demonstrations also took place in other cities, including Valparaiso and Concepcion, where there is also video evidence of the particular\nbrutality of police repression that day.
\n\nLater on, police attacked the residents of various neighborhoods of Santiago with tear gas, specifically Villa Olimpica and Lo Hermida, two places that are usually politically active and confrontational towards the police.
\n\nThe Chilean government—almost universally regarded as illegitimate before the pandemic—keeps doing things to antagonize people. Over the past several days, they have reopened some malls, yet continue to forbid public gatherings. They had originally wanted to send schools back to class this week, but faced a lot of backlash from different sectors, including mayors of municipalities and other politicians, so they decided to not do it just yet. The truth is that the school system here doesn’t have the capacity to hold classes following health regulations limiting the number of students per classroom and so on.
\n\nMany people have lost their jobs and the government has offered practically no help with that, either.
\n\nIn general, people are trying their hardest to keep the memory of struggle strong, to remind each other why the revolt of last fall happened and to hold on to the idea that when things quiet down a little bit with the pandemic, we will return to streets.
\n\nDue to the COVID-19 pandemic and the authoritarian and liberticidal political measures taken by the French government in order to stop it, there were a lot of uncertainties approaching May Day 2020. For almost two months now, the population has been asked—or rather, forced—to comply with the unilateral decision taken by the government to implement a drastic confinement strategy. To make sure that people follow these new sanitary measures, the government has deployed a massive number of police forces in the streets in order to control people’s movements and attack any gatherings. As we already mentioned in a previous article, the fact that police squads are among the only groups of people allowed to be in the streets at any time has caused an escalation of police harassment and brutality on the pretext that those targeted were not respecting confinement. In this strange and alarming time, we knew that we would not be able to gather freely in the streets to celebrate May Day the way we did in 2018 or 2019.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/12.jpg\")
“The virus, capitalism, [state] power—let’s destroy what destroys us.”
\nNevertheless, despite all this, several calls to demonstrate on May Day all over France spread online. One of them, entitled “1er mai : pour des cortèges sans cortèges” (“May Day: for processions without processions”), had the merit of explaining why demonstrating during May Day 2020 was important, but also, why we should take the opportunity of the current pandemic situation—embodied by social distancing behavior—to reinvent offensive strategies against the state and capitalism outside of classic, ritualized, mass marches.
\n\nHere are two excerpts from the call:
\n\n\n\n\n“May Day is a good test to find out if we have the virus of fear, an indicator to find out where we are in terms of street confrontation, a thermometer to take the temperature of the insurrectional fever and the state of our antibodies against repression.”
\n
\n\n\n“Well, maybe if the social distancing measures not only prevent us from organizing massive demonstrations, but also stop us from taking advantage of what is usually reassuring and effective, that is to say: to feel the strength of numbers, the heat of the crowd… therefore, these questionable, unpleasant hygienic measures force us to develop another type of demonstration. Isn’t this the historic occasion for developing offensive demonstrations (of any level and embracing any kind of tactic, from simply making noise to actively participating in property destruction) that are multiple, decentralized, mobile, never static, and the less often repressed? As we are more and more into micropolitics—this resistance to biopower—could we not make micro-demonstrations a new strategy? By recalling that the Hong Kong slogan “be water” didn’t mean “be like a river,” but rather “be like a drop,” I hope for May 1, 2020, a rain of micro-demonstrations to avoid the drought of the struggles to come.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/11.jpg\")
“A first of May without confinement.”
\nDue to the difficulty of gathering in the streets this year, we can’t provide an exhaustive list of all the actions taken throughout France. Here, we’ll present some of the initiatives in the Paris region. Other demonstrations and actions took place in Lyons, Saint-Étienne, Grenoble, Gap, Poitiers, Toulouse, and Rennes.
\n\nIn Paris, a call was made to gather at 10 am at Place de la République. A small group of people showed up with several banners and spread across the square while respecting social distancing. Unfortunately, the action didn’t last very long, as a large number of law enforcement units were already on site and started controlling and arresting people.
\n\nOther calls were made to gather in the 18th and 20th districts of Paris. Again, police forces were already on site to prevent any gatherings, and some units were even patrolling the streets to control and dissuade potential demonstrators. The police strategy of occupying the streets and harassing pedestrians ended up succeeding, insofar as the call to gather in the 20th district was finally cancelled.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/7.jpg\")
Attempting to demonstrate in France.
\nOn a more positive note, some hospital workers and demonstrators succeeded in demonstrating around the Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris and took this opportunity to denounce the financial cuts imposed on public hospitals for decades.
\n\nIn Montreuil, people gathered and started a wildcat demonstration in the streets while respecting social distancing. Unfortunately, a large number of police forces ended up blocking their progression at some point and started checking IDs and distributing fines. However, another group of people who organized their own demonstration succeeded walking freely and happily in the city streets during an hour and a half. Also in Montreuil, the Brigades de Solidarité Populaire (Popular Solidarity Brigades)—an initiative inspired by the Brigate Volontarie per l’Emergenza created in Milan, Italy—had organized the distribution of food to people in need, showing once more that solidarity and mutual aid is one of our best weapons. However, authorities decided to send police forces to attack them in the name of public safety and confinement. As a result, dozens of members of the BRAV (Brigades for the Suppression of Violent Action) surrounded the market, stopped the food distribution, and gave fines both to activists and to people in need.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/10.jpg\")
French police destroying a mutual aid program.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/9.jpg\")
Despicable mercenaries preventing people from providing resources to the needy in France.
\nAs we already explained, the current pandemic gives governments worldwide the opportunity to develop and implement new policies in order to increase control and surveillance of targeted groups of people and communities, tactics which will later be extended to the entire society. In France, it’s becoming harder and harder for authorities to hide the fact that people are treated very differently in terms of confinement enforcement according to which community they are part of. On one hand we see people constantly harassed, injured, or killed by cops because they are considered as not respecting the confinement rules—while, on the other hand, traditional homophobic and xenophobic bigots can gather freely in a church with the authorization of the police prefect.
\n\nMay Day 2020 wasn’t an exception to this rule. While on one hand, the authorities decided to repress any form of gathering or action during May Day, at the same time, the officials of the Rassemblement National—a xenophobic far-right political party—were able to carry out their traditional ceremony in front of the Joan of Arc statue without any police presence, surrounded by journalists aiming to capture this moment.
\n\nTo top it all, during his May Day address—in which he glorified “work” as one of the chief pillars that “unifies” a “nation”—president Emmanuel Macron explained that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this May Day was special and “unlike any other,” adding that we should all keep the hope “to rediscover as soon as possible the joyful, and sometimes squabbling, May Day that make our nation.” A classic condescending statement from a president who considers May Day riots, confrontations, and demands simple child’s play, and who legitimizes the use of brutal force by police forces, considering the permanent mutilations that the police inflict in these clashes a net gain for his side in the class war.
\n\nOn May 2, 2020, after a special meeting between all its ministers, the French government announced that they want to extend the “sanitary” state of emergency to July 24. This decision gives gendarmes and security guards in stores and public transportation the power to issue a ticket if they allege that the target is not respecting some sanitary rule during the transition towards the end of confinement. This means that we will have to deal with even more police aggression in our daily lives.
\n\nAll these elements highlight once more that in France, as everywhere around the world, we all have to fight several viral pandemics at once. Not only are we fighting against the COVID-19, we are also fighting the virus of control and surveillance that is rapidly spreading in our streets—as shown in this video. We are also fighting against the virus of xenophobia, against the virus of the state and capitalism.
\n\nMore than ever, we must not go back to normal!
\n\nGermany saw a lot of banner drops, symbolic occupations, music from the neighbors, and the like. Some of the most interesting events took place in smaller cities like Greifswald and Wuppertal.
\n\nIn Leipzig, people carried out two symbolic occupations:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/leipzigbesetzen/status/1256099895322214400\n\n\n
In the morning, there were decentralized actions in Berlin:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/LeftstyleMag/status/1256244532909420545\n\n\n
3000 people participated in the traditional radical demonstration in Berlin; basically, this meant running from one meeting point to another without anything really happening. In the end, it was almost the way Berlin May Day always is these days, but less people.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/pm_cheung/status/1256393105240186883\n\n\n
The night before, there had been fireworks for Walprugis Night and some very small confrontations in Friedrichshain:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/antifastnd/status/1255938400907153409\n\n\n
There was also a serious attempt to carry out a new occupation in Berlin:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/besetzenberlin/status/1256146783530553344\n\n\n
In Hamburg, during the day, a lot of people went around looking for Nazis who eventually didn’t show up. In the evening, there were some attempts at demonstrations, little confrontations:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/jannisgrosse/status/1256304409291755522\n\n\n
In Dresden, anarchists held an illegal demonstration involving 40 people, without facing any police repression (so far). Photos are available via the Anarchist Network Dresden.
\n\nIn Greifswald, there was a legal demonstration involving 250 people and legal fireworks and legal masks. This was the only demonstration of its kind:
\n\n\n \n\n \n
In Wuppertal, there was a demonstration on the night of May 1:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/autonomer1mai1/status/1256137597702885376\n\n\n
Some spontaneous demonstrations took place during the day, another demonstration including fireworks at night. Three houses were squatted; one remains occupied as of this writing.
\n\nIn Freiburg, 500 people joined an anarchist bicycle demonstration.
\n\nIn Dortmund, people carried out banner drops and symbolic occupations:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/LassMalRedenDo/status/1256199925920120832\n\n\n
In Hannover, the “Alliance for a Combative May 1st” experimented with radio demonstrations, a potential new model for protest and outreach. People used free radio to stream a specific audio program, making it public through radios on their balconies and in the streets.
\n\nAt the same time, fascists and conspiracy theorists were on the streets, causing some problems. They beat up the camera team of a liberal mainstream media satire show.
\n\nThis list is hardly complete, but it gives a sense of the events of the day.
\n\nWith what the press described as “military” discipline, the notoriously authoritarian Greek Communist Party (KKE) held its May Day demonstration with a specific location marked for each protester to stand apart from the others.
\n\nUp to 600 anarchists gathered for a march involving perhaps 1000 leftists; police did not engage. A motorbike demonstration called by a grassroots labor union drew 200 participants, who drove through many neighborhoods around the city, followed by a large number of police. Smaller anarchist demonstrations of several dozen people apiece happened in neighborhoods throughout Athens.
\n\nThe anarchist group Rovikanos (“Rubicon”) also carried out a daring attack on a corporate office.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/23.jpg\")
A motorbike demonstration called by a grassroots labor union in Athens.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/22.jpg\")
A motorbike demonstration called by a grassroots labor union in Athens.
\nMany public meetings were held online by groups all around Italy. May Day celebrations took place in many cities in the form of flash mobs, strikes, and demonstrations. Several of these focused on denouncing the hypocrisy of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and on attacking Confindustria (the Italian employers’ federation and national chamber of commerce) on account of all the workplace deaths and infections caused by the disinterest of the government regarding the lives and health of workers. Many strikes were held at the logistic warehouses in Milan, Padua, Florence, Rome, Naples, and elsewhere.
\n\nMost of gatherings were organized by Potere al Popolo, a radical left-wing party. In Naples, for example, there was a surprise action at Confindustria headquarters; demonstrators held banners reading: “It will be all right if we defend the workers.”
\n\nIn Genoa, the group Non Una Di Meno demonstrated outside the headquarters of the Region for women’s rights, emphasizing that “Health is a common good, care cannot be profit!” and demanding an end to cuts and privatization. The flash mob was stopped by law enforcement after a few minutes.
\n\nIn Trieste, a peaceful demonstration took place at 11 am. After 30 minutes, police approached some people holding a banner and riots began. Protesters were claiming their right to protest, while respecting all the social distancing measures. The banners displayed slogans including “Produce, consume, die—the real virus is the state” and “We don’t obey, Covindustria go away.” Demonstrators will be fined because of gatherings and resisting the police.
\n\nIn Lebanon, where powerful protests broke out last October, we see a grim vision of the future. With the economy in free fall, the army has been set loose on the streets to crack down on a new, more confrontational wave of protests against banks and the government. Social distancing and other protective measures are unthinkable as unmasked soldiers brutalize civilians.
\n\nOur hearts go out to those fighting for survival in Lebanon today.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/JadChaaban/status/1256289094080102401\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/LunaSafwan/status/1256303858118283272\n\n\n
As of April 26, nearly 800,000 people in Spain (nearly 2% of the total population) had been fined and 7000 arrested for violating lockdown. The fine comes close to the median monthly income.
\n\nWith all public gatherings prohibited and the police empowered to arrest groups of two or more adults as well as any individuals outside without a “valid” purpose, comrades found novel ways to celebrate May Day. The CNT and anarchist publishing collectives in dozens of cities organized online speeches and presentations. In Barcelona, people sacked a supermarket, graffiti appeared overnight in countless locales, and organizing continues apace for the rent strike that began on April 1, with tens of thousands of people participating and dozens of strike committees popping up across the country alongside the hundreds of mutual aid networks that already existed. The rent strike is expected to grow this month.
\n\nThere is also a hunger strike spreading in some prisons.
\n\nIn Slovenia, this year’s May Day coincided with the fifth week of anarchist and anti-authoritarian mobilizations against repressive governmental policies under the pretense of fighting COVID-19. After weeks of massive graffiti actions, noise demonstrations from balconies, and the first bicycle mobilizations a week ago, yesterday more than 5000 people hit the streets of the capital city Ljubljana on bicycles, blocking all major roads and intersections in the city center along with all governmental institutions under the slogan “A May Day of solidarity, not fear-mongering and austerity.” For the second week in a row, anti-authoritarian protests on bikes occurred in several other cities and villages as well, accompanied with “protest rowing” on 11 rivers by 160 activists fighting against the devastation of the environment in Slovenia.
\n\nIn the beginning of March, when the pandemic was acknowledged in Slovenia, the far-right government took the power. It is led by the same prime minister who was overthrown by a popular six-month uprising in Slovenia in 2012-2013.
\n\nThe government’s measures were similar to those in other European countries: complete lockdown of people, total disregard for those who cannot afford to stay at home, and free rein for capitalists. While most industries and factories kept their workers at work with mostly insufficient health prevention measures, the government prohibited all public gatherings, including protests, and embarked on a path of changing the laws in order to give itself more executive power—increasing the authority of the military (they tried to call them in to police the streets), increasing the power of police to track citizens via cell phones, enter our apartments, and surveil us more efficiently, and, of course at the same time, they got involved in several corruption scandals. Meanwhile, they are leading a hate campaign against migrants and people who express any sort of dissent, be that independent journalists, whistle-blowers, or, especially, protesters.
\n\nFor anarchists and anti-authoritarians in Slovenia, the question since the beginning of pandemic has been simple: how do we organize collectivity in a time of complete governmentally imposed isolation? How do we create mutual aid and safe spaces in our communities while at the same time initiating conflict with the government and capital? How do we create new forms of togetherness, conflict, and disobedience while at the same time taking care to protect each other against both the police and the virus?
\n\nThe stakes are higher than ever in terms of the forms of control that governments are trying to impose on us, the threatening rise of the far right, and the challenges of finding new ways of relating as we face the virus in adverse circumstances, seeing how neoliberalism has destroyed the public health system and health care is simply not available for everyone that needs it. We knew from the beginning that this is a moment for a wide mobilization of all anarchist and anti-authoritarian initiatives.
\n\nDuring the first few weeks, we were focused on creating situations in the city that would spread disobedient messages and create wider mobilization. These included slogans against the military policing the streets, solidarity with homeless people, against rent collection and evictions, authoritarianism, and the like; graffiti appeared all over the walls of the city, not just in Ljubljana, but also elsewhere in Slovenia. Many people took creative actions—for example, placing 800 black duct-tape crosses on the square opposite to the parliament at 1.5-meter “social distance” regulations in order to demonstrate a safe way of protesting. There were numerous solo actions carried out across the city, including car protests around governmental buildings, placing candles and symbolic drawings on the ground in the streets, jogging around the city with banners, and hanging banners on windows and balconies. Most of the actions “went viral.” Police were helpless, chasing people one by one, issuing citations, but failing to stop more and more people from all walks of life from participating in dissent.
\n\nThe message was clear: people are angry and there is something boiling in the city, an unstoppable spirit of revolt.
\n\nEvery Friday since April 2, people have gathered on their balconies, in parks, and on the rooftops of buildings for noise demonstrations with pots and pans. Each week, this highlighted a different topic—from the class dimension of the #stayathome message that failed to address the homeless or people working in industries, to a mobilization around the global rent strike, opposition to the militarization of society, capitalism, precarious conditions of labor, and so on. More and more, anti-authoritarian initiatives were joining the call: from anarchist groups, squatting communities, do-it-yourself cultural collectives, environmental activists, and feminist initiatives to groups organizing mutual aid in response to the pandemic.
\n\nLast week, noise demonstrations moved to the streets under the slogan #frombalconiestobycicles. A bicycle-based “critical mass,” a method familiar from the early 2000s anti-globalization era, was chosen because it allows for quick movement around the city, enabling people to blockade major intersections, and at the same time provides a certain amount of physical distance that many people need in order to be able to find their place in the movement.
\n\nThis first gathering of more than 400 people was already a great success. After weeks of quarantine, the fact that we were able to create a different kind of togetherness was extremely empowering. Through in their presence, our collective bodies symbolized conflict with the police, government, capital, and all the other sources of power and oppression. Police were unprepared for the boldness of the biker gangs; they were outmaneuvered and people from all walks of life took over the streets—from random delivery personnel who stepped away from their daily precarious lives to join the protest to small children. The slogans were explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-nationalist. The protest ended with slogans calling for us to meet up again in a week. Over the following days, a few smaller bike gatherings followed across the country along with graffiti and banner drops.
\n\nThe stage was set for May Day.
\n\nMay Day in Ljubljana.
\nAfter this buildup to the symbolic point of struggle for May Day, it became clear that the government was feeling threatened again. All week long, we saw attempts to intimidate people out of joining the actions, with the minister for internal affiars threatening jail sentences for everyone “endangering public health” by protesting. They failed. People showed up in greater numbers than any average self-organized protest in Slovenia usually gathers. There were more than 5000 bicyclers in Ljubljana, 200 in Maribor, 100 in the small towns of Koper and Trbovlje, and couple dozen people even gathered in the village of Brežice. People also took to their bicycles in Celje, Novo mesto, Nova Gorica, Slovenj Gradec, and Murska Sobota, and several symbolic action took place in small villages across the country. In most of these places, anarchists had a significant presence with messages and slogans. Combined environmental action was simultaneously happening on 11 rivers, protesting against dams, the building of new hydroelectric plants, and the general destruction of environment.
\n\nIn Ljubljana, we directed special attention to the Ministry of Internal Affairs with the slogan “First of May without barbed wire, military, and fences” in order to emphasize the repressive border regime against migrants crossing from Croatia. The message we were spreading was clear: we are not only fighting this far-right government, but against all governments, and we are not fighting to get back to normal, we are fighting against normality. Because this mobilization was anti-authoritarian, all attempts at nationalist interference were blocked. Due to the anti-nationalist nature of the mobilization, in Ljubljana, we did not see a single one of the state symbols (such as flags) that we usually see at such demonstrations for May Day in Eastern Europe.
\n\nThere was also an explicitly anti-capitalist bloc in the bicycle parade.
\n\nIf May Day in Eastern Europe is usually also observed by official bureaucratic unions that are completely detached from workers, it was funny that on the day of these massive protests, their leaders gathered to have a chat with the president of Slovenia. The masses self-organized on the streets, the leaders of all kinds were together in the palaces. The lines of history are clearly drawn.
\n\nPolice repression was heavy against smaller demonstrations across the country, but even in Koper, where the police showed up in the greatest force, they failed to subdue the demonstrators, who continued with their protests across the city after the conflict. In Ljubljana, the police were outmaneuvered again. Decentralization worked, just as it did during the uprising eight years ago. The more we spread out, the more unstoppable we are.
\n\nThe success of the mobilization in Slovenia, which drew much greater numbers than usually attend anti-authoritarian protests, shows that the usual suspects who aim to maintain this oppressive order are feeling helpless in the new circumstances caused by the pandemic. Before the left political parties, liberals NGOs, and civil society and bureaucratic unions manage once again to consolidate the situation to maintain the status quo, anarchists and other anti-authoritarians have a window of opportunity to set an example of what it means to fight.
\n\nThis is the time to be bold in our actions and daring in our ideas. Let’s think together about how to create new forms of social conflict and where we will find each other next.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1256306140406845440\n\n\n
Corporate media coverage of the day’s events is available in Slovenian here.
\n\nA more complete overview of events around the United States is available here. Below, we zoom in on the details of some of these actions and the reflections the participants have drawn.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/8.jpg\")
Graffiti in Bloomington, Indiana.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/17.jpg\")
\nA car demonstration:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/3.jpg\")
\nFollowing a protracted struggle by anarchists and other prison abolitionists, on Thursday US District Court Judge ordered the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to reduce the number of detainees in three Florida detention facilities from 1400 to about 350 within two weeks. Demonstrators gathered at one of these facilities again on May Day to demand the release of all the detainees.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/19.jpg\")
Demonstrators outside an ICE detention center in South Florida on May Day. The Associated Press listed their names as “E. Goldman, left, and Alex Berkman, right.”
\nOn May 1, a group of outraged neighbors, abolitionists and other rabble-rousers came together at the end of a march to storm the gates and occupy a child detention center run by nonprofit Heartland Alliance in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. This child prison is currently undergoing renovations and is temporarily unoccupied. It is the site where migrant children who attempt to escape or rebel against their captors in other detention centers are transferred to and imprisoned.
\n\nAs the demo approached its final destination, after visiting another currently occupied facility, fireworks and smoke filled the air. People danced joyously in the streets and lit mortars with abandon. As part of the chaos, a group stormed the facility, gaining access to the grounds. The rent-a-cop stationed there, after throwing a pair of bolt cutters back at a protester, walked off the property without a word. People defaced the building with slogans such as “Free Them All” and “This is a Baby Jail.” One person got on the roof, and dropped a banner proclaiming “Close The Jails—Open The Houses” and threw copies of a written\nstatement of solidarity onto the street below. As the cops closed in, protesters helped sound the alarm and assisted each other in getting to safety.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/20.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/21.jpg\")
\nHeartland Alliance masks its sinister programs of social control and isolation as altruism and non-profit do-goodery. They hail themselves as leaders at the forefront of a noble fight, and deny their role as an arm of the prison-industrial complex. This torture chamber located at 1627 W. Morse has been used to isolate and punish migrant children who attempted to escape or rebel against their captors in other facilities.
\n\nThe following communiqué was thrown across the surrounding streets and flung from the rooftop of the facility:
\n\n\n\n\n“We are occupying this building in solidarity with all of the rebellious children who have been detained here in the past, those who are still being detained elsewhere, incarcerated people everywhere, and all who continue to experience violence at the hands of the state. With each passing day of this pandemic, we realize, as some have long known, that coronavirus is not the only thing killing us—its effects are weaponized by systems we are told to trust and rely on but which are actively harming and disposing of us.
\n\nHeartland Alliance—a non-profit organization masquerading its sinister program of social control as altruistic endeavor—jails migrant children in all corners of this city, including right here at 1627 W. Morse. This detention center is currently empty, not because Heartland has started releasing kids to their families, but because the brick-and-mortar cage is being renovated and re-secured to continue detaining and traumatizing children or to transform it into another type of carceral facility to hold our houseless neighbors while thousands of CHA units remain vacant. Regardless, this building’s purpose will be to surveil, control, and\ncriminalize.
\n\nThere are currently 42 cases of COVID-19 at Heartland’s facilities. Even before these numbers were confirmed, solidarity demos have been denouncing what in cages is inevitable. As a result, Heartland has claimed that singing to the children, demanding their freedom and expressing love, both frightens and endangers them. Meanwhile, those on the outside witness smiles, waves, hands forming the shapes of hearts, signs reading “thank you” and “I love you.” At a recent demo, a written plea for “HELP” was launched towards the crowd standing below, after which Heartland covered their windows with tarps to stop children from interacting with us. Their flustered responses reflect the intensity of our connection and reveals an important truth: solidarity is powerful and our collective action is starting to create some cracks across the prison walls.
\n\nWe are destroying the illusion that Heartland’s baby jail business is anything but an insidious overlap between the non-profit and prison-industrial complexes. The pandemic has laid bare this tortured interplay, exposing an avalanche of contradictions. It is within these cracks that we begin to grow new worlds. Worlds without incarceration, without domination, in which we no longer rely on systems that seek to extinguish and exterminate our autonomy and joy, and which reject separation from our greater power: each other.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/4.jpg\")
Graffiti in New Orleans, Louisiana. The message is a little oversimplified, but it’s undeniable that the inequalities created by capitalism are responsible for a great part of the danger that the virus poses us.
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/lets_go_wild/status/1256354964403879939\n\n\n
The city government of St. Louis aims to evict a homeless encampment in downtown that has been there since the outbreak of the pandemic, seeing that homeless people cannot “shelter in place.” City government director of operations Todd Waelterman had quipped that he could get rid of the encampment quickly himself with a bulldozer. On Friday, a resident of the encampment pulled off Waelterman’s face mask, exposing him to a tiny part of the risks that he constantly imposes on others without any consideration.
\n\nWe regard this as a courageous, laudable act. If it were impossible for privileged officials like Waelterman to protect themselves from the health consequences that they ceaselessly impose on the poor and defenseless, they would change their policies soon enough.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/14.jpg\")
\nIn Austin, a car demonstration including more than 30 vehicles shut down the main arterial freeway running through the city for over an hour. Police ultimately attacked, arresting over a dozen participants and towing and impounding their vehicles.
\n\nA car demonstration:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ash_antifa/status/1256361421757198340\n\n\n
In Olympia, a rowdy caravan of rent strikers, unemployed people, and anarchists paraded through downtown in festive vehicles. Crafty cyclists held intersections and directed traffic, keeping the demonstration together. Two property management companies got a small taste of tenant power when they were visited and redecorated with banners and fliers declaring a rent strike. Property managers at each site came out and attempted to argue, only to be drowned out by the honking of dozens of car horns. We hope they know that this is only a small taste of what will happen to them if they try to evict anyone during or after this pandemic.
\n\nAfter a jubilant and chaotic parade, we convened with a caravan in solidarity with undocumented and migrant workers that had driven all the way from Seattle to demonstrate at the capital. A smattering of reactionary death-cultists huddled densely with their MAGA flags and their Q-Anon conspiracy signs, but they were largely drowned out and jeered at by the many cars of our comrades.
\n\nAfter the caravan, organizers hosted a spatially distant migrant farm worker ceremony, complete with a coffin covered in candles and offerings in memory of those whose lives are being unnecessarily sacrificed on the altar of the economy.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/olyrentstrike/status/1256401586823114752\n\n\n
Car demonstrations are a new tactic, and a strange one; around the country, everyone is learning by doing. Cyclist scouts & traffic flaggers were essential to maintaining a tight formation through small city streets with roundabouts and traffic lights. After an uncertain start, we realized that with cyclists holding cross traffic back, we could stay together in formation and ignore traffic lights. Many of the basic tactical lessons from marching in the streets together translated to the car realm quickly. Communication, however, proved more difficult; a low-power FM radio transmitter, or an internet radio station, could allow everyone to play the same soundtrack and also receive announcements and coordinate directions on the fly. The police were largely hands-off and seemed at a loss as to how to engage with a large pack of cars.
\n\nOnce we reached the capital, the dynamic changed dramatically. Right-wingers were also parading in cars; we often found ourselves stuck in traffic right next to a band of Trump cultists, trading jeers. After facing down these same reactionaries in the streets for years, it felt much more disorienting to all be in vehicles together, partially protected from one another but also potentially at greater risk. The confusion and inability to draw easy spatial lines between parties made policing essentially nonexistent, but it also reduced most of the conflicts to individual exchanges rather than the unity that arises when a bloc marches together. It’s not difficult to imagine a near future in which clashing car demos become more antagonistic, but it is difficult to imagine anything desirable emerging from such clashes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/5.jpg\")
\nWhile this caravan was largely a show of power and unity and less a material disruption of the world, the possibilities of strategic caravan demonstrations are endless. A caravan of 30 cars could easily shut down an interstate, surround distribution centers for Covid-19 profiteers, picket striking workplaces, and more.
\n\nThere is a strange inversion at play with this new tactic. While wearing a mask is finally socially acceptable in everyday life now, making anonymity easier, we also find ourselves reduced to using our vehicles in demonstrations, complete with their license plates. It seems a necessary tradeoff at the moment—better to take some risks and build an antagonism than to cede antagonism entirely to the virus-denying death cultists who can’t imagine anything better than going back to work. But it remains to be seen how we can preserve anonymity in an era where car demonstrations appear to be the safest and most effective tactic.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/02/15.jpg\")
Stay home—if you want to see totalitarianism consolidated forever. But don’t help COVID-19 spread, either. A challenging set of imperatives, but we must rise to the occasion.
\nOne hundred years ago in Russia, thousands of workers were on strike in the city of Astrakhan and at the Putilov factory in Petrograd, the capital of the revolution. Strikes at the Putilov factory had been one of the principal sparks that set off the February Revolution in 1917, ending the tsarist regime. Now, the bosses were party bureaucrats, and the workers were striking against a socialist government. How would the dictatorship of the proletariat respond?
\n\nFollowing up on our book about the Bolshevik seizure of power, The Russian Counterrevolution, we look back a hundred years to observe the anniversary of the Bolshevik slaughter of the Putilov factory workers who had helped to bring them to power. Today, when many people who did not live through actually existing socialism are propagating a sanitized version of events, it is essential to understand that the Bolsheviks meted out some of their bloodiest repression not to capitalist counterrevolutionaries, but to striking workers, anarchists, and fellow socialists. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
\n\nIf you find any of this difficult to believe, please, by all means, check our citations, consult the bibliography at the end, and investigate for yourself.
\n\nYou can read a Spanish version of this article here.
\n\nA note on the artwork: the artist, Ivan Vladimirov, was a realist painter who participated in the Russian Revolution, joining the Petrograd militia after the toppling of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a style of documentary realism to portray scenes from the Revolution and Civil War. Afterwards, he continued to work as an artist in good standing with the Soviet Union—such good standing that he lived into the 1940s and died of natural causes!—although he was compelled to shift to making fluff pieces lauding Soviet military triumphs and social harmony.
\n\nIn March 1919, the Bolsheviks had uncontested power over the Russian state, but the revolution was slipping from their grasp. As self-styled pragmatists and realists, they believed that revolution had to be dictated from above by experts. Who can better understand the needs of the peasants and the proper means for communalizing the land and sharing the harvest than a revolutionary bureaucrat in an office in the city? And who knows more about the plight of the factory workers than a party official who worked in a factory once and now spends all his time going to committee meetings and interpreting the dictates of the Fathers of the Proletariat, men like Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, and Zinoviev who never worked in a factory or toiled in the fields in their lives?1 And who better to protect the interests of the soldiers than the political commissar who stands at the back of the line during an offensive, pistol in hand, ready to shoot anyone who does not charge into enemy fire?2
\n\nBolshevik realism made it clear that the only way to execute a real revolution was to take over the state, make it even stronger, and use it to stamp out all their enemies—who were, by definition, counterrevolutionaries. But the counterrevolutionaries must have had secret schools in every town and village, because by 1919 more and more people were joining their ranks, especially peasants, workers, and soldiers.
\n\nThe “dictatorship of the proletariat” would have to kill a whole lot of proletarians. Not everyone could make it to the Promised Land.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/12/3.jpg\")
1919: Russians searching for food in the garbage during the lean times of the Civil War.
\nThe dastardly anarchists had corrupted the age-old revolutionary slogan, the liberation of the workers is the task of the political commissars—get back to work, it’s under control. They had replaced it with a dangerous revisionist lie—“the liberation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves”—and more and more people had come to believe this lie. In April 1918, the Bolsheviks unleashed a terror against the anarchists, who were becoming especially strong in Moscow. In September, they instituted a general Red Terror against all their former allies, killing over 10,000 in the first two months and implementing the gulag system.
\n\nThey also had to turn their guns against the peasants, who were in open rebellion against the policy of “war communism” by which the Red Army and party bureaucrats could steal whatever food, livestock, and supplies from the peasants they saw fit.3 Evidently, the uneducated peasants didn’t have the vocabulary to understand that this theft was a “requisitioning,” that their starvation was a form of “communism,” and that it was being supervised by incorruptible men who had their best interests at heart. In August 1918, Lenin directed the Cheka and the Red Army to carry out mass executions in Penza and Nizhniy Novgorod to put an end to the protests. But dissent only spread, and the peasants gave up on protesting in order to arm themselves and fight back. Many formed “Green Armies,” localized peasant detachments that often fought against both the White and the Red Armies.
\n\nThere was also a shortage of realism in the Red Army. Arguably, the most effective fighting units in the war against the tsarists and the capitalists of the White Army were the localized, volunteer detachments that elected and recalled their own officers; granted no special privileges to officers; defined their goals, general strategies, and organizational principles in assemblies; relied on the goodwill of local soviets to supply them; and were intimately familiar with the terrain they operated on. Such detachments included Marusya’s Free Combat Druzhina, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army, the Dvinsk Regiment, and the Anarchist Federation of the Altai. Few other detachments were able to inflict critical defeats on tsarist forces even when they were overwhelmingly outnumbered and outgunned.4 The fact that the combatants fought for a cause they believed in, were led by strategists elected on account of their abilities, and were wholeheartedly supported by the local peasants and workers enabled them to use the terrain to their advantage, fight more bravely than their opponents, innovate creative and intelligent strategies in response to developing circumstances, and transition between guerrilla and conventional warfare in a way that confounded the enemy. Such groups were instrumental in defeating General Denikin, Admiral Kolchak, and Baron Wrangel, ending the three major White offensives—not to mention capturing Moscow at the beginning of the October Revolution.
\n\nBut all of these groups suffered a fatal defect. These fighters often prioritized listening to local peasants and workers and their own common soldiers over the wise dictates of the Fathers of the Proletariat emanating from the capital. Even worse, sometimes they did hear those dictates, yet still disobeyed them. And when the Party leaders, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it was necessary to massacre peasants or workers for the sake of the revolution, the detachments led by those very peasants and workers simply weren’t up to the task.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/12/6.jpg\")
1917: Eating a dead horse.
\nIn order to increase the efficiency of the Red Army, the wise masters of the Bolshevik Party decided to take lessons from the great militarists of history, starting with the Tsarist army. By June 1918, they had abolished all the anti-realist policies that revolutionaries had wrongheadedly introduced into the Red Army: they discontinued the election of officers by the soldiers who would serve under them, reinstituted aristocratic privileges and pay grades for officers, recruited former Tsarist officers accustomed to those privileges, and brought in political commissars to spy on the soldiers and root out any incorrect thinking. After all, rebellious idealist soldiers had toppled one regime in 1917—and without a sufficient dose of realism, they might well topple another.
\n\nThe Bolsheviks had also learned from imperialist armies throughout history that sent soldiers from one end of the empire to fight rebels at the other end of the empire. This was a sentimental kindness on the part of the Bolsheviks. Psychologically, it was much easier for Korean-speaking soldiers to avoid fraternizing with Ukrainian peasants and workers near Kharkiv—and on occasion to massacre them—and for Ukrainian-speaking soldiers to avoid fraternizing with Korean peasants and workers near Vladivostok (and occasionally to massacre them, too). This strategic practice also helped keep soldiers from getting lost. A Red Army soldier from Ukraine, fighting counterrevolutionaries in Irkutsk, would be hard-pressed to obtain support from locals or find his way home without leave. That ensured that he would know to stay with his regiment rather than deserting in a fit of anti-realism. And if he did get lost, a blond, round-eyed Ukrainian would be easy to find among the locals, who could return him to the proper authorities. Good organization: this is how a successful revolution is waged!
\n\nYet the soldiers of the Red Army weren’t educated enough to understand. A million desertions took place in a single year. Many Red Army detachments took their weapons and joined the peasants who were forming independent Green Armies. Later, huge groups would join Makhno, who was naïvely defeating the Whites without installing a dictatorship of his own. So the Bolsheviks had to be cleverer than their tsarist and imperialist mentors. They shot tens of thousands of deserters, but this age-old tactic wasn’t enough. In a burst of inspired realism, they improvised a new tactic: taking the family members of soldiers hostage, and executing the family members if deserters did not turn themselves in to be shot.5
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/12/8.jpg\")
Propaganda poster: “Deserter, I extend my hand to you. You are as much a destroyer of the Worker-Peasant State as I, a Capitalist!”
\nWhile so many of the Red Army’s bullets were ending up in the bodies of Red Army soldiers or in the uneducated brains of anti-realist peasants, too few were being fired at the White Army—and the White Army was growing, threatening the revolution on every side. The Red Army was slowly pushing back the Northern Russian Expedition of British and US troops on the Northern Dvina front, but intense fighting over the winter had failed to dislodge General Denikin from the Donbass area of eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, a French expeditionary force had landed in Odessa, the White Army had cemented its hold on the Caucasus, and at the beginning of March, Admiral Kolchak had begun a general offensive on the eastern front, quickly capturing Ufa and continuing to gain ground.
\n\nThe anarchist Black Army held the line in southern Ukraine, but their clever Bolshevik allies were starving them of weapons and ammunition, hoping the White Army would finish them off. This was an effective economization of resources on the part of the Fathers of the Proletariat. They would not have to spend time debating anarchists or making propaganda against them if the anarchists were all dead, and it was much easier to present themselves as the alternative to the confused tsarists and liberals of the White Army than it was to debate the anarchists, with their insidious lies about people being capable of liberating themselves.
\n\nThe stratagem of denying resources to the Black Army was to backfire in summer 1919. After Denikin broke through the lines, he advanced so far against a helpless Trotsky that he threatened Moscow, and only a resounding success by anarchists at the Battle of Peregenovka in September 1919 cut off White supply lines, ultimately forcing Denikin to retreat. But after all, that was why the Bolsheviks had allies: it was easier not to put all the people they wanted to kill on their “enemies” list all at once, in hopes that they would first kill each other in ways that would be advantageous to the Bolsheviks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/12/5.jpg\")
1920: Bolshevik propaganda in the village.
\nLet’s rewind to early 1919, when, facing so much resistance, the Bolsheviks needed more allies. They had legalized the Mensheviks after a few months of the Terror, and gotten the various anarchist detachments to focus their energies on fighting the Whites, but they still needed more support. After half a year of killing and imprisoning members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRs), the Bolsheviks legalized the SRs; to be fair, the previous year, the SRs had tried killing and imprisoning the Bolsheviks, after the Bolsheviks had tried to monopolize all the instruments that would allow them to kill and imprison people. The Bolsheviks had won those monopolies now, but a revolution can’t defend itself if too many of the participants are dead or in prison. They still needed help getting the common people in line working for and fighting for the Bolsheviks. The SRs had been good propagandists and considerably more popular than the Bolsheviks. Besides, it was easier to keep the SRs under their thumb when they were out in the open, with public offices in Moscow, than when they were operating underground.
\n\nThe SRs decided to trust the Bolsheviks, hoping that they could regain control of the soviets or win over other revolutionary forces. But once they came out of hiding, the Cheka began periodically arresting the SR leadership, accusing them of conspiracy, and hustling them off to the gulags. The organization never regained the strength to oppose the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, the legalization of the SRs and Mensheviks had reduced the number of enemies the Communists had to fight, and set more forces to work putting out propaganda in favor of the revolution.
\n\nThe Bolsheviks still had plenty of problems. If it wasn’t bad enough that so many peasants and soldiers were rebelling, the factory workers also began to rebel. In the city of Astrakhan, the workers went on strike. Even worse, many Red Army soldiers joined them, and similar strikes began to spread in the cities of Orel, Tver, Tula, and Ivanovo. Then strikes broke out at the giant Putilov factory in Petrograd, the capital of the revolution.
\n\nThe Putilov factory had built rolling stock and other products for the railways, before branching out into artillery and armaments for the military. Later, they would also manufacture the tractors that would become essential to the industrialization of Russian agriculture, after Lenin ordained the transition from war communism to the “state capitalism” of the New Economic Policy. A strike at this factory was especially embarrassing for the Bolsheviks, because the Putilov factory had been one of the origin points of the revolution. The revolution of February 1917 had sprung from four groups: rebellious military units at the front, women protesting government food rationing, sailors stationed at Kronstadt and Petrograd, and striking workers at the Putilov factory. Strikes at the Putilov factory had also been one of the sparks that caused the 1905 Revolution.
\n\nThe Bolsheviks had already dealt with the Dvinsk Regiment—heroes of the revolution and a symbol of the refusal of soldiers to fight in an imperialist war—by assassinating their commander, Grachov, and disbanding the regiment. They had managed to do this quietly and out of the public eye. Later, in 1921, they would explain that in the course of the revolution, the Kronstadt sailors had somehow gone from being the staunchest defenders of revolution to become petty bourgeois individualists infiltrated by White agents. No one really believed Trotsky when he said this, but it didn’t matter.6 What was really at stake was not truth, but power; the Bolsheviks had already crushed all their other enemies, and they resolved questions about the politics of the Kronstadt sailors not by presenting facts, but by slaughtering them, as well.
\n\nBut the crushing of Kronstadt was still two years in the future. In March 1919, the Bolsheviks still had plenty of enemies, and everyone was watching. The Putilov workers had some simple demands: increased food rations, as they were starving to death; freedom of the press; an end to the Red Terror; and the elimination of privileges for Communist Party members.7 What would the Bolsheviks do? Was it possible to have a revolution without starving the workers, shutting down critical newspapers, disappearing revolutionaries of other tendencies, and elevating Party members as a new aristocracy?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/12/7.jpg\")
1920: Seeking an escaped kulak.
\nWhat a silly question! The Bolsheviks were realists, and their strategy relied on making the revolution by gaining control of the State. The State was the Revolution, as long as it was a Bolshevik State. They couldn’t make the State stronger without eliminating their rivals, squeezing the workers and peasants for every last drop of sweat and blood, and divvying up the wealth among themselves. Who in their right mind would become a Bolshevik unless that meant obtaining a bigger paycheck, guaranteed food rations, and a chance to move up in the world? The Communist Party needed realists. The idealists would starve. Those who were willing to say that the State was Revolution and obedience was freedom earned a chance to contribute their talents to building the new apparatus.
\n\nAs for the suckers who remained workers rather than becoming Party officials, the Bolsheviks knew that the role of workers was to work. Workers who did not work were like broken machines. As any realist can tell you, when a machine breaks the only thing to do is take it out back and put a bullet in its brain.
\n\nBetween March 12 and March 14, the Cheka cracked down in Astrakhan. They executed between 2000 and 4000 striking workers and Red Army deserters. Some they killed by firing squad, others by drowning them—tying stones around their necks and throwing them in the river. They had learned the latter technique from Lenin’s heroes, the Jacobins—enlightened bourgeois revolutionaries who massacred tens of thousands of peasants who weren’t educated enough to know that the commons were a thing of the past and land privatization was the way of the future.8
\n\nThe Bolsheviks also killed a smaller number of members of the bourgeoisie, between 600 and 1000. The smartest of the bourgeoisie had already joined the Communist Party, recognizing it as the best way to profit in the new situation. But the stuffier bourgeois conservatives were staunchly opposed to the Bolsheviks, the anarchists, and the aristocrats, as well, though they weren’t against allying with the aristocrats. Any political system in which they could not do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, they called “tyranny.”
\n\nThe bourgeois conservatives would also have crushed the striking workers, perhaps with hunger instead of bullets, if they had been in charge. Despite this, the Bolsheviks claimed that the striking workers had to be agents of the bourgeois order. Curiously, when anarchists had expropriated the bourgeoisie in Moscow in April, 1918, the Bolsheviks had called the anarchists “bandits” and returned the property to the bourgeois. Now, they killed bourgeois dissidents as well as striking workers—but they reserved the vast majority of the bullets for the workers.
\n\nTwo days later, on March 16, the Cheka stormed the Putilov factory. They arrested 900 workers and executed 200 of them without a trial. These were pedagogical killings meant to “teach them a lesson,” educating the workers by executing their peers. The workers did not understand yet, but they would have to learn: workers were meant to work. If they had to starve, it was for the good of the proletariat.
\n\nThe workers did not learn this lesson right away. At first, state repression only intensified worker opposition. According to intercepted Bolshevik cables, 60,000 workers were on strike in Petrograd alone in June 1919, three months after all the executions at the Putilov factory.9 The poor Bolsheviks had no choice but to kill even more workers and expand their gulag system to the point that it could reeducate not just thousands, but millions.
\n\nMany later Marxists unfairly blamed Josef Stalin for the USSR turning into a massive machinery of murder, but we can see the origins of that macabre evolution right here in the need of the Bolshevik authorities to kill workers in the name of workers. The entirety of the Party apparatus, from Lenin all the way down, dedicated itself to liquidating all opposition; and the entirety of this monstrous venture was ordained from the moment that the Communists decided that they were the conscious vanguard of the proletariat, that economic egalitarianism could be achieved through political elitism, and that liberatory ends justified authoritarian means.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/12/9.jpg\")
1921: Requisitioning.
\nOther revolutionary currents had conflicting ideas regarding the demands of workers and their instruments of self-organization. Some favored the factory councils that spontaneously arose around the February Revolution. Others favored the workers’ unions that had grown immensely in the course of 1917. Only the Bolsheviks had a realist position, changing their relationship with these structures according to which way the wind blew. As documented by Carlos Taibo,10 the Bolsheviks alternated between promoting the soviets and unions, attempting to capture them within larger bureaucratic structures controlled by the Party, eroding their powers, and suppressing them outright. Their approach varied wildly according to whether they believed that they could use these organizations to prop up their own power or feared, instead, that these organizations threatened Bolshevik supremacy. All power to the Party was their only consistent principle.
\n\nThroughout 1917, the Bolsheviks gained immense popularity by making all the right propaganda. They promised to redistribute the land directly to the peasants, to end the war without allowing imperialist Germany to annex territory, and to give the workers control of their workplaces. We have already seen how they broke the first two promises. As for their promise to the workers, they pitted different workers’ organizations against each another as they steadily strengthened their bureaucratic control.
\n\nIn 1917, factory councils had sprung up in hundreds of factories throughout Russia, while membership in trade unions grew from tens of thousands to 1.5 million. At first, the Mensheviks dominated the unions and used their influence to get the unions to support the pre-October Kerensky government. According to a Trotskyist account, “As they were preparing for the seizure of power, Lenin and his followers tried to approach the trade unions from a new angle and to define their role in the Soviet system.” Promising them greater power, the Bolsheviks hoped to win union support for their project of seizing control of the State—or at least acquiescence to it.
\n\nAccording to two other pro-Leninist scholars, Lenin “essentially abandoned the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’” when he “convinced the party that the time was right to seize state power.”11 This is a fairly literal admission of fact. If the soviets were to have all the power, the Party could have none.
\n\nIn November 1917, immediately after taking power, the Bolsheviks decreed that the factory committees must not participate in the direction of the companies, nor take on any responsibility in their functioning; instead, each committee was subordinated to a “Regional Council of Workers’ Control” which answered to the “All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control. The composition of these higher bodies was decided by the Party, with the trade unions receiving the majority of the seats.12
\n\n\n\n\n“The Revolution has been victorious. All power has passed to the Soviets… Strikes and demonstrations are harmful in Petrograd. We ask you to put an end to all strikes on economic and political issues, to resume work and to carry it out in a perfectly ordinary manner… Every man in his place. The best way to support the Soviet Government these days is to carry on with one’s job.”
\n\n-Bolshevik spokesmen at the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, October 26 [Old Style calendar], 1917 (quoted in Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921)
\n
\n\n\n“It is absolutely essential that all the authority in the factories should be concentrated in the hands of management… Under these circumstances any direct intervention by the trade unions in the management of enterprises must be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible.”
\n\n-Lenin speaking at the Eleventh Congress in 1922
\n
Referring again to the Trotskyist account, “The Bolsheviks now called upon the trade unions to render a special service to the nascent Soviet state and to discipline the factory committees. The unions came out firmly against the attempt of the factory committees to form a national organization of their own. They prevented the convocation of a planned all-Russian congress of factory committees and demanded total subordination on the part of the committees.” At the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks forced the factory committees to incorporate themselves within the trade unions, in an attempt to curtail their autonomy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/12/10.jpg\")
1918: A shooting.
\nFrom the moment they were in power, the Bolsheviks treated workers’ councils as a threat. Why? Many Leninists, as well as the aforementioned Trotskyist, claimed that the councils were only conscious of their interests at the level of individual factories; they could not take into account the interests of the entire economy or the entire working class. This is contradicted, though, by the many examples of solidarity between soviets and workers’ councils across the country beginning already in 1917, and the fact of material support by peasants and urban workers for the anarchist detachments fighting against the White Army in the anarchist zones of Ukraine and Siberia, where idealist revolutionaries allowed workers and peasants to organize themselves. The simple fact that the factory councils were trying to coordinate at a countrywide level at the end of 1917 shows that they were in the process of developing what one might reasonably call a universal, proletarian, revolutionary consciousness; it was the Bolsheviks themselves who cut that process short.
\n\nFrom the Bolshevik perspective, what was most dangerous about factory council consciousness was that it might not lead to the particular kind of working-class consciousness that the Bolsheviks desperately needed to stay in power. Self-organized factories would support revolutionary armies of workers and peasants, but they probably would not support the Red Army in suppressing workers and peasants, nor would they support Lenin’s highly unpopular cession of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltics to imperial Germany.
\n\nThe councils were dangerous for another reason as well. Not only were they an organ of workers’ autonomy and self-organization that rendered any political party obsolete, they also tended to erode party discipline. Workers within the councils who were affiliated to the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, or any other party tended to act in accord with their common interests as factory workers rather than maintaining party interests.13
\n\nAs Paul Avrich pointed out,14 the Bolsheviks made use of a nuanced distinction between two very different versions of workers’ control. Upravleniye meant direct control and self-organization by the workers themselves, but the Communist authorities refused to grant this demand. Their preferred slogan, rabochi control, did not denote anything beyond a nominal supervision of factory organization by workers. Under the system implemented by the Bolsheviks, workers participated in workplace decision-making together with the bosses, who could be the pre-Revolution capitalist owners or agents of the Party and the State, depending on Soviet policy at the moment.
\n\nAll final decisions were made by the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy (the Vesenkha), an unelected, bureaucratic body established in December 1917 by decree of the Sovnarkom and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. All of these bureaucratic bodies were controlled at all times by the Bolsheviks, meaning that no worker could have a final say in workplace decisions without becoming a full-time party operative and climbing to the very highest ranks of the bureaucracy.
\n\nAlready in March 1918, an assembly of factory councils in Petrograd denounced the autocratic nature of Bolshevik rule and the Bolshevik attempt to dissolve those factory councils not under Party control.15 Such autocracy only increased when the Bolsheviks finally went ahead with the nationalization of the economy in the summer of 1918, increasing Party control and running the factories with the help of “experts” recruited from the old regime.
\n\nThough there was initially an ambiguous continuum between the economically oriented factory councils and the politically oriented town or village councils, the Communist Party quickly homogenized and bureaucratized the territorial soviets, starting with codes governing elections to the soviets in March 1918 and finishing by the time of the Soviet Constitution of 1922. Even more quickly, they got rid of the councils comprising all workers in a factory or other workplace, replacing them with symbolic worker representatives completely subordinate to a director appointed by the Party.
\n\nThe Communists did all of this while paying lip service to their slogan and key campaign promise of 1917, “All Power to the Soviets.” They eventually got around the contradiction of simultaneously promoting and suppressing the soviets by declaring that councils of representatives of representatives, and even those of representatives of representatives of representatives, were also “soviets.” In fact, the committee furthest removed from any actual soviet of real-life peasants, workers, and soldiers was the “Supreme Soviet.” Since the Bolsheviks tightly controlled all these higher, more bureaucratic organs of government, which they had decided should also be called “soviets,” they could say “All Power to the Soviets” with a straight face—because now all they were saying was, “All Power to Us!”
\n\nThis ingenious trick was very similar to the one used by the Founding Fathers of the United States, when an assortment of wealthy merchants and slave-owners established a government “of the People, by the People, and for the People.” Slave-owners qualified as people; slaves did not.
\n\nThe Bolsheviks crushed the factory councils first, though they did not wait long to sink their teeth into the unions and drain them of their independence. It is noteworthy that they moved against the unions preemptively, preventing a possible threat to totalitarian rule even before the unions had offered any sign of resistance. At the First All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in January 1918, the Bolsheviks successfully defended their position that the trade unions should be subordinated to the Soviet government, in the face of opposition by Mensheviks and anarchists, who argued that the unions should remain independent.
\n\nThe Bolsheviks were able to dominate the unions using the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. By 1919, under the pretext of the extraordinary measures required by the Civil War, the Central Council had been fully incorporated into the bureaucracy that was now completely controlled by Party leadership.
\n\nOf course, as we have already shown, the Communist Party’s “extraordinary measures” preceded the Russian Civil War; they may have been the primary cause of the opposition and outrage that fueled the multiple and conflicting factions that fought in the Civil War.
\n\nIn 1921, with the Civil War all but over and Bolshevik dominance indisputable, Lenin and his followers could do away with “war communism.” There followed more excuses about exceptional circumstances, delaying yet again the repartition of the pie in the sky that supposedly awaited the workers in paradise. The result was the New Economic Policy (NEP), which Lenin himself described as “a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control” together with state enterprises operating “on a profit basis.”16 Anarchists may have been among the first to level the accusation of “state capitalism,” but Lenin accepted the label as an objective fact.
\n\nIn conclusion, the Bolsheviks seesawed from November 1917 to the NEP in 1921, changing their economic policy multiple times. Throughout these changes, they entrusted control over the workplace to capitalist bosses with symbolic worker oversight, to Party lackeys, to bureaucratic supreme committees, and to nepmen, the economic opportunists of the NEP era. It seems the only people the Bolsheviks were not willing to trust were the workers themselves.
\n\nAnti-colonial Marxist Walter Rodney, who was sympathetic to Stalin and wholly supportive of Lenin, nonetheless acknowledged that “The state, not the workers, effectively controlled the means of production.”17 He also showed how the Soviet Union inherited and furthered the Russian imperialism of the earlier tsarist regime—though that’s a topic for a future essay.
\n\nA realist knows that the best counterargument to all these sentimental complaints is the indisputable fact that, in the end, the Bolshevik strategy triumphed. They eliminated all their enemies. The idealists were dead—and therefore wrong. What better positive evidence can we find for the correctness of the Bolshevik position?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/12/1.jpg\")
1919: in the basements of the Cheka.
\nThings immediately got better. The workers no longer had to toil for the enrichment of the capitalist class. Now they reaped the fruit of their own labors. (Except, of course, for all the workers in the free-market enterprises permitted under the NEP, and the millions of peasants who quite literally had to give away the fruits and the grains they grew.) To make things simpler, all the social wealth they reaped was kept in a trust managed by the intellectual workers. The intellectual workers worked a lot harder and required more compensation, better food, and bigger houses—but they also made sure that most of that wealth went to fielding an army of 11 million (shy by just a million of being the largest army in world history). And a damn fine opera. And one of the most extensive secret police apparatuses ever seen, too, to make sure the people stayed safe.
\n\nDuring Stalin’s Five Year Plans, the Soviet economy grew faster than the contemporary democratic economies and steered clear of the Depression that was ravishing much of the rest of the world. Idealistic anarchist critiques of “state capitalism” have long pointed out that the Communists were able to bring capitalism to the countries where the capitalist class had largely failed—they did capitalism better than the capitalists. But this naïve complaint misses out on the fact that a strong State, and thus a strong Revolution, requires a robust economy producing huge amounts of surplus value that can be reinvested as the Fathers of the Proletariat see fit.
\n\nAlongside all these exciting developments, the workers eventually got housing and healthcare, if they worked hard and kept their mouths shut. Provided, of course, that they weren’t among the millions of victims of the systematic famines designed to break the peasantry.
\n\nAnd that’s why these are such important days to remember.
\n\nOn this, the one-hundred-year anniversary of the massacres of striking workers in Astrakhan and Petrograd, workers would do well to remember who has their best interests at heart, and keep in mind that obedience is freedom. To celebrate the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution, which continues to shine as a beacon to oppressed people everywhere, workers should obey their elected union representatives, prisoners should heed their guards, soldiers should obey the command to fire, and the people should await the directives of the government. Anything else would be anarchy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/12/4.jpg\")
1922: A lesson on communism for the Russian peasants.
\nPaul Avrich, “Russian Anarchism and the Civil War,” The Russian Review. Vol.27 No.3: 296–306. July 1968.
\nPaul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists. Oakland: AK Press, 2006.
\nMaurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921. 1970.
\nVladimir Brovkin, “Workers’ Unrest and the Bolsheviks’ Response in 1919”, Slavic Review, 49 (3): 350–73. (Autumn 1990)
\nIsaac Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour Policy. 1950. https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1950/soviet-trade-unions/ch02.htm
\nNick Heath, “Bolshevik Repression against Anarchists in Vologda,” libcom.org October 15, 2017.
\nRobin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World. London: Verso, 2018.
\nPiotr Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989.
\nNadezhda Krupskaya, “Illyich Moves to Moscow, His First Months of Work in Moscow” Reminiscences of Lenin. International Publishers, 1970.
\nGeorge Leggett. The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
\nV.I. Lenin, “Telegram to the Penza Gubernia Executive Committee of the Soviets” in J. Brooks and G. Chernyavskiy, Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State: A Brief History with Documents (2007). Bedford/St Martin’s: Boston and New York, p.77.
\nV.I. Lenin, “The Role and Functions of the Trade Unions under the New Economic Policy”, LCW, 33, p. 184., Decision Of The C.C., R.C.P.(B.), January 12, 1922. Published in Pravda No. 12, January 17, 1922. Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, first printed 1965, Volume 33, pp. 186–196. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/pdf/lenin-cw-vol-33.pdf
\nMário Machaquiero, A revolução soviética, hoje. Ensaio de releitura da revolução de 1917. Oporto: Afrontamento, 2008.
\nIgor Podshuvalov, Siberian Makhnovschina: Siberian Anarchists in the Russian Civil War (1918-1924). Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2011.
\nJames Ryan. Lenin’s Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence. London: Routledge, 2012.
\nAlexandre Skirda, trans. Paul Sharkey, Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack. Oakland: AK Press, 2003.
\nCarlos Taibo, Soviets, Consejos de Fábrica, Comunas Rurales. Calumnia: Mallorca, 2017.
\nVarious, A Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in Russia. London: HMSO, 1919.
\nVoline, The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921. New York: Free Life Editions, 1974.
\nDmitri Volkogonov, Shukman, Harold, ed., Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, London: HarperCollins, p.180. 1996.
\nNicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
\nBeryl Williams, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 1987.
\nIlyich Moves to Moscow, His First Months of Work in Moscow, from Krupskaya’s “Reminiscences of Lenin”
\nApril 2018: One Hundred Year Anniversary of the Beginning of Bolshevik Terror
\nManual for Revolutionary Leaders, Michael Velli
\nOf the seven members of the first Politburo—Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, and Bubnov—all but Zinoviev had received elite educations and become professional activists immediately after their education. Stalin was the only one of the seven who came from a less-than-middle class background. His father was a well-to-do shoemaker who owned his own workshop, though he lost his fortunes and became an abusive alcoholic. Young Stalin was able to receive an elite religious education thanks to his mother’s social connections. His first job was as a meteorologist; he later worked briefly at a storehouse in order to organize strike actions there.
\n\nLenin and Sokolnikov were from families of professional white-collar workers; Bubnov was from a mercantile family; Kamenev was the son of a relatively well-paid worker in the railroad industry. Trotsky and Zinoviev were the children of landowning peasants, or kulaks—the very people they identified as the class enemy in the countryside in order to justify the murder of millions, both actual kulaks and poor peasants who opposed Bolshevik policies.
\n\nMost anarchists do not believe that a person’s class background determines their beliefs and attitudes, nor that it grants or denies them legitimacy as a human being. We recognize that how we grow up affects our perspective, but we tend to place more importance on how someone chooses to live their life. A few anarchists, like Kropotkin, came from elite backgrounds, whereas many more, such as Emma Goldman and Nestor Makhno, came from working-class or peasant backgrounds.
\n\nIt is nonetheless significant that practically every single anarchist who was influential in the course of the Russian Revolution or who was chosen to lead a major detachment in the Civil War was a worker or a peasant. This exemplifies the slogan of the First International, “the liberation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves.” (The only exception was Volin, who came from a white-collar background.) It is also significant that, while the Bolsheviks recruited heavily among industrial workers, their entire Politburo was 0% working class.
\n\nGiven both Marx and Lenin’s systematic use of their adversaries’ class identity—real or perceived—to delegitimize them or even justify murdering them, the fact that neither Marx nor Lenin nor the rest of the Communist leadership were working class is hypocritical to say the least. ↩
\nOn the “blocking units” that did this, see Volkogonov, Dmitri (1996), Shukman, Harold, ed., Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, London: HarperCollins, p.180. ↩
\nBrovkin, Vladimir (Autumn 1990), “Workers’ Unrest and the Bolsheviks’ Response in 1919”, Slavic Review, 49 (3): 350–73 ↩
\nAlexandre Skirda, trans. Paul Sharkey, Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack. Oakland: AK Press, 2003 ↩
\nBeryl Williams, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 1987. ↩
\nEven before Stalin, the Bolsheviks spread lies not so much to convince people of them as to force them to repeat the lies. This was an effective loyalty test: anyone who insisted on speaking the truth was clearly a dangerous counterrevolutionary, whereas those who called starving peasants “kulaks” or denounced principled revolutionary sailors as “White agents” had accepted Communist realism. ↩
\n“We, the workmen of the Putilov works and the wharf, declare before the laboring classes of Russia and the world, that the Bolshevik government has betrayed the high ideals of the October revolution, and thus betrayed and deceived the workmen and peasants of Russia; that the Bolshevik government, acting in our name, is not the authority of the proletariat and peasantry, but the authority of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, self-governing with the aid of the Extraordinary Commissions [Chekas], Communists, and police.
\n\n“We protest against the compulsion of workmen to remain at factories and works, and attempts to deprive them of all elementary rights: freedom of the press, speech, meetings, and inviolability of person.
\n\n“We demand:
\n\nImmediate transfer of authority to freely elected Workers’ and Peasants’ soviets.\nImmediate re-establishment of freedom of elections at factories and plants, barracks, ships, railways, everywhere.
\nTransfer of entire management to the released workers of the trade unions.
\nTransfer of food supply to workers’ and peasants’ cooperative societies.
\nGeneral arming of workers and peasants.
\nImmediate release of members of the original revolutionary peasants’ party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries.
\nImmediate release of Maria Spiridonova [a Left SR leader].”
\nPiotr Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989. p.454-458 ↩
\nDocument no. 54, “Summary of a Report on the Internal Situation in Russia,” in A Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in Russia, abridged ed. Parliamentary Paper: Russia no. 1 [London: HMSO, 1919], p.60 ↩
\nCarlos Taibo, Soviets, Consejos de Fábrica, Comunas Rurales. Calumnia: Mallorca, 2017 ↩
\nRobin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World. London: Verso, 2018. ↩
\nMaurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921. 1970. p.65
\n\n“Once power had passed into the hands of the proletariat, the practice of the Factory Committees of acting as if they owned the factories became anti-proletarian.” -A.M. Pankratova, Fabzavkomy Rossil v borbe za sotsialisticheskuyu fabriku (Russian Factory Committees in the struggle for the socialist factory). Moscow, 1923 ↩
\nMário Machaquiero, A revolução soviética, hoje. Ensaio de releitura da revolução de 1917. Oporto: Afrontamento, 2008. p.144. ↩
\nPaul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists. Oakland: AK Press, 2006. p.147 ↩
\nCarlos Taibo, Soviets, Consejos de Fábrica, Comunas Rurales. Calumnia: Mallorca, 2017. p.58 ↩
\nV.I. Lenin, “The Role and Functions of the Trade Unions under the New Economic Policy”, LCW, 33, p. 184., Decision Of The C.C., R.C.P.(B.), January 12, 1922. Published in Pravda No. 12, January 17, 1922. Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, first printed 1965, Volume 33, pp.186–196. ↩
\nRobin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World. London: Verso, 2018. p.lvi ↩
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