A wave of dissent and protests has swept over the country to challenge the power of capital. As flags red with blood and wet with sweat have risen, workers of all trades have begun to leave their workplaces and organise in the face of rising living costs and the energy crisis, with an enthusiasm not seen in decades. Their strikes have proven the very fact that without the presence of working hands, labouring and toiling away, the functioning of society as a whole would not be possible. The workforce has the power to reinstate this claim each time it decides to withdraw its labour and disrupt the flow of social life: but what is the value of strike in a world that encourages competition over cooperation, harsh individualism over caring alliance, laxness over resistance? Is protest useful today, when algorithms govern and control our lives?
In Strike Strategy, the radical union organizer John Streuben defines the strike as ‘’an organized cessation from work. It is the collective halting of production or services in a plant, industry, or area for the purpose of obtaining concessions from employers. A strike is labour’s weapon to enforce labour’s demands” (1950). The first recorded strike action in history dates back to around 1170 BCE, when tomb workers’ in Deir el-Medina, Egypt refused to work due to a lack of wheat rations. Since then an immense number of workers have employed strikes as a strategy for achieving basic needs and rights denied by their hostile environment. The history of Scotland’s strikes goes back a long way, and is distinguished by its radical nature. In 1787, the first major industrial action of the county saw the Calton weavers as its first working class martyrs. Since then, a number of both national and imperial strikes led by coal miners, ship builders, engineers, transport and heavy industry workers and many others have spread and risen to this day. One of the most notable in the history of the Red Clydeside being the Battle of George Square, in 1919, causing 34,969,000 working days lost in the year before the workers returned to work with a guaranteed 47-hour week. As the ‘hot strike summer’ keeps getting hotter due to increasing industrial action, it seems that teachers, nurses, civil servants and firefighters may soon join the ranks as the cost of living crisis becomes incumbent. Conveniently, the government has stopped sharing strike data through the Office for National Statistics (ONS) website for the last three years. As mountains of waste begin to occupy the streets, the signs of changing times become all the more pressing. Under capitalism, the value of humanity is reduced to that of economic advantage, of money. Socially, hierarchies structure our relationships and perpetuate injustice as strata that sediment beneath layers of resentment and angst. James Connolly once wrote, in his 1915 The Re-Conquest of Ireland, that “the worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female is the slave of that slave”. Immorality on an individual scale breeds injustice on a social scale. By eradicating this from our very spirit, thus also striking from the industry of discrimination and exclusion, our choices can prefigure what our society ought to become. The worker movement towards fairness and equality and welfare, and against the supremacy of private property rights, must find its completion in the practices of the everyday, in the hope of liberating not only the direct slaves of the market economy but all of those subjected to its normalisation in the form of consumerism, individualism and commodification. We cannot commodify our political struggle in exchange for the petty comforts of convention and consumption: these come at the cost of our very rights, beings and liberties. Indeed, the strike is the sharpest tool workers have to fight against the logic of profit and for a future that is more fair, collective and solidary. Freedom shall come only when, in the words of James Connolly, the people will own ‘’everything from the plough to the stars.’’ Ye wouldnae hae your telly the noo, if it wasnae for the union!
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THE ANTI-NEWS.
TO CARE IS A POLITICAL ACT! Archives
November 2023
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