The Imaginary “General Strike” on May 1

A mountain had gone into labor and was groaning terribly. Such rumors excited great expectations all over the country. In the end, however, the mountain gave birth to a mouse. As has been the pattern for several years, in the build-up to May Day this year, a call was put out for a general strike in observance of International Workers’ Day. Many on the left called for solidarity with workers at various establishments, such as Target and Amazon, they believed would betaking action. To cross the picket line would indeed be a grave sin. And yet, when the day came, few, if any, workers took action.

What happened? Why did no action occur? Who could be responsible? Were the workers unworthy of our support, or is the bourgeois media concealing the truth? The answer is, as usual, much more prosaic: The so-called“general strike” was nothing more than an attempt by bourgeois NGOs and regime unions to use the increasing state of labor unrest to their own advantage by increasing their profile and thus attracting more donations. This sort of grift not only gains the working class nothing, it retards the development of the necessary organization to effectively combat the increasingly desperate maneuvers on the partof the bourgeoisie to increase the rate of exploitation.

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the weakness of the US economy, which never truly recovered from the economic crisis of 2008. On paper, the free fall of the economy was retarded via the assumption of a crushing debt burden and other financial chicanery, which, as the Republicans have repeatedly harshly reprimanded the Democrats, the US government must now service, resulting in increasingly draconian labor discipline measures and cuts to vital services, including public health, that have served to soften the burden of exploitation, including public health, causing what might have been a somewhat more serious version of the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak to turn into a full-blown global pandemic. In a pattern that has been going since the economic crisis of the 1970s, the Democrats and their allied NGOs, as well as the regime unions, continue to legitimate these measures. However, the outbreak of the Covid-19 disrupted the already listless progress toward restoration of profitability.

Seeking to take advantage of workers’ anxieties during this crisis, regime unions like SEIU and NGOs like Nation of Change, joined by the opportunist left that seeks to gain influence via capture of these groups, both openly and through proxies, have adapted the utopian slogans they have employed for years to the present situation, but neither they nor the opportunist, so-called “revolutionary left” have at no point ever adapted their tactics to encompass the one tactic that would actually produce results, namely the difficult task of building the class union. And thus, on May 1st, 2020, despite all of the hype, they gave a strike, and nobody came. None of the targets of this action reported any significant drop in attendance on that date, and business went on as usual.

None of this is to say that a general strike, demanding fewer hours for the same pay, access to protective equipment at the employer’s expense, or what-have-you, is necessarily a bad idea: just the opposite.However, even had these organizations devoted the money and effort that went into designing the nice websites and carefully-crafted press releases been put into developing relationships with people on the shop floor, they would only serve to draw these efforts into the same futile struggle within the narrow range of options presented to the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. What the proletariat needs is to organize itself and to lead itself, not to accept the patronage of, not to say patronizing by, bourgeois NGOs. regime unions, and opportunistic leftists whose purpose is to contain, not expand, the struggle and to cause any benefits from that struggle to accrue to them rather than the class itself. Only by organizing itself into a class union will the proletariat successfully defeat capitalism.