Small efforts to contribute to working class resistance in today's United States

north america / mexico | workplace struggles | other libertarian press Monday January 18, 2010 08:14 by Kevin Keating proletaire2003 at yahoo dot com

An examination of a series of new kinds of efforts relevant to the times we live in...

Small efforts to contribute to the rise of working class resistance in today's United States

Since the early 1990's, actions in the San Francisco Bay Area around mass transit, described here,

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/love2.html

the initial impetus behind this,

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/muni_social_strikeout.html

and the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/myep_criticism.html

have been part of an ongoing effort to establish a new kind of anti-state/anti-market, autonomous class struggle praxis relevant to the times we live in.

Each of these action was initiated and pursued based on an understanding that --

1. These efforts take place "on the terrain of everyday life" of the wage-earning class, where contemporary working people confront what market relations do to our lives, and where the market system's antagonism to human needs gives rise to some possibility of an organized, conscious, mass collective response. These efforts haven't been directed towards the left-liberal protest ghetto, or toward academic, anarchist or Marxist subcultures.

2. Mass collective class struggle includes the fight against the boss in the workplace, but is not limited to the workplace.

3. In both form and substance the methods used to help catalyze a new politics of working class resistance to capitalism and it's political apparatus have to be qualitatively different from the politics of failure, the politics of the left -- the left-wing of capital.

4. Authentic enemies of capitalism in the 21st century cannot use the strategies, tactics or communication methods used by pro-wage labor leftists in the 20th century.

5. With the virtual disappearance of the conventional left, and the accelerating decline of the United States as a world power, the way is now open for the creation of a new type of autonomous working class oppositional praxis. This praxis freely takes from the best insights that grew out of the old revolutionary movement of the past two hundred years and uses these insights as a point of departure, and not as an end-point. Anarcho-syndicalism and council communism were both useful in their day. That day has passed.

The efforts around mass transit described in the articles above have a much greater future subversive potential than the Mission District anti-gentrification effort; they have the potential to directly involve a larger number of working people over an entire city or urban area. Under the right circumstances actions like these can also have a "bleed-through" effect that spreads resistance into other areas of contemporary life. But the communications methods used in the yuppie eradication project were more effective at getting an extremist message out in a big way than what happened with the mass transit efforts.

What's being examined here is mostly a method of communication. These methods can be a template for similar anti-state/anti-capitalist prole actions elsewhere, including but not limited to fights around housing, social space and against austerity measures that target employees and passengers of mass transit systems.

Kevin Keating
San Francisco
proletaire2003@yahoo.com

(More analysis of the failed transit system fare strike in San Francisco in 2005 can also be found here:

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/muni_farestrike.html)