03.27.2012

Tuesday — 03.27.12 – General Strike in Central Park

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CONTENTS:
1. Invitation / Introduction
2. Some Background
3. Online Resources
4. Readings
5. Local Links
6. Precarious & Service Worker Assembly

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1. Invitation / Introduction
What: Drifting Assembly on General Strike
When: Tuesday — 03.27.12
Where: Central Park, meet up at the steps of Metropolitan Museum
When: 6:00 pm
Who: Everyone (dress warm)

During the winter, we participated in a molecular seminar entitled ‘Welcome to the New Paradigm; The Crisis of Everything Everywhere.’ A few hundred people attended over the course of 9 days, some staying for a session, others for a day, and yet others for the entire duration. Together we organized, disorganized, ate, spoke, disagreed, speculated, walked, mapped, manifested, felt, listened, played, and even mic checked Diego Rivera. ‘Welcome to the New Paradigm’ was an allusion to a banner we had seen in Washington Square Park at the conclusion of a day of actions globally on October 15. That same night, after Gayatri Spivak addressed everyone, we discovered that along with a lot of friends, she had been thinking about the potentials for a General Strike.

At the time, the occupations at Liberty and across the globe were so powerful; it was still unclear whether the idea of a General Strike was a nostalgic regression or potential mode of amplification and generalization of refusal. After all, the occupations were themselves a new paradigm of a strike, not just striking against a work place or work but taking everything, everywhere.
As the coordinated and violent attacks by police started in late Fall on the encampments, there was an even greater urgency placed upon everyone to consider how this refusal of austerity, of faux solutions, of legalized robbery, of new forms of enclosure, of an increasing surveillance / security state, of ever greater ecological ruin, of continued structural racism and sexism, of endless war, could be expressed, embodied, uttered, collectively; and how could this be done in a forceful manner, without further empowering or placing all of our collective attention into a reactionary game with and on the police force. In January, we returned to the question of the General Strike and we asked one another:

What it could mean a General Strike today given the global dimension of financial capital, given the shifting qualities of the workplace and work-time (namely its increased itinerancy, placelessness, instability, meaninglessness), given the ever more invasive forms of extracting productivity and value from the basic reproduction of our life and social relations?

The winter provided to hundreds of people a season to formally and informally meet, consider, propose plans and create possibilities for the General Strike that has been called on May 1st. In examining the shifted terrain of work, productivity, and thus strike, the critical questions which emerge are:

How can this complex arrangement …
– of placed and non-placed labor (i.e., labor that occurs in a
recognizable workplace as well as Starbucks or the neighborhood boutique cafe or the street or in the home)
– of recognized and unrecognized productivity (i.e., a waged job, albeit badly paid, contracted labor or just using Google, Facebook, YouTube, indirectly producing immense data, content, value, profits) - of remunerated and unremunerated life (i.e., the time which is paid for a specific work and the time spent between any specific work just making oneself available, preparing, learning new skills which could be reapplied back into work)
– of visible and invisible, of legal and not legalized, of union and non-unionized workers
… redefine the strategies for a General Strike?

Where could be the sites of blockage? Where could be the site of flow stoppage? Where could be the sites of non-cooperation? How to activate other fields of non-cooperation such a debt strike under the heading general strike? And where could be the sites of cooperation, of communization, of convergence?

Seen in the light of occupation, how might the general strike also question the ideals sovereignty, autonomy, or freedom that presume an individual political subject? How has occupation allowed us to reconceive the strike not just as total refusal, blockage, or stoppage, but as a public gathering that demonstrates the practices and principles of socialization, communization, and mutual aid and care? What would it mean to rethink the social intransitivity of the strike—its lack of instrumentality, of work, of means-ends relations—as neither undoing or negativity nor direct action, but as opening onto the potentiality of being-in-common?

What does it mean to strike if you are unemployed? Or “your own boss”? Or a freelance worker? How to also take account of those whose time is not so flexible, and who face greater threats and risks in walking off the job or joining a public demonstration?

What qualities could a strike take to address the multiplicity of sites of and modes of production? And if our consumption, obedience, and everyday participation is part of our productivity, if our everyday social
reproduction is the lubricant of the economic machinery that increasingly surveys and oppresses the multitudes and our shared habitats, how could May 1st become the turning point to intensify a process not only of withdrawal or a symbolic act but a call for the infinite strike, the closest we can get of doing nothing, how actively we envision and realize our lives without capitalism.

We are interested in continuing this discussion not only on theoretical grounds but through proposals for specific actions online and in the city. We would like to propose meeting at Central Park on Tuesday early evening for a walk and informal assembly.

The walking assembly will be unfacilitated by the Central Park Exploratory Committee, an ungroup attempting to reassert the park as a commons, and as potential site of convergence on the day of the General Strike, resulting in a meshwork of refusal, food, music, pleasure, sensuality, resistance, communization. The group is interested in weaving together with others great fictions and believes strongly that such visions or horizons will resonate with multitudes not only on May Day but also for the days after.

Come join us and bring things to share: proposals, food, drink.
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2. Background

A general strike has been called for May Day, first by Occupy Los Angeles on November 15th, and locally by Occupy Wall Street on February 14th. In the time between and since many other city and neighborhood assemblies have taken up the call, and a number of other coalitions, collectives, and committees have started to agitate and organize for a general strike in 2012.

These recent calls for a May Day general strike have taken inspiration from Occupy Oakland’s wildcat general strike of November 2nd, 2011, and the struggles in Wisconsin last Spring which first reignited interest in the concept. In the months since the Occupy movement began we have seen general strikes called in Belgium, Egypt, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, Nigeria, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom.

The general assembly of Occupy Los Angeles committed to the general strike on December 19th; Occupy Boston on January 7th; Occupy Tampa on January 7th; Occupy Pasadena on January 8th; Occupy Phoenix on January 10th; Occupy Williamsburg and Occupy Long Beach on January 17th; Occupy Brooklyn on January 19th; Occupy Oakland on January 29th; Occupy Ventura on February 7th; New York City on February 14th; Occupy Sydney on February 18th; Occupy Detroit on February 21st; Occupy Seattle on February 26th; and Occupy Bushwick on March 1st. In the weeks between and since many other cities, assemblies, and organizations have also called for the May Day General Strike, and we expect more to follow suit in the next five weeks.

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3. Some Online Resources
NEW YORK CITY LINKS
http://da.nycga.net/mayday/
http://da.nycga.net/category/subgroups/may-day/
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/strikeeverywhere
http://maydaynyc.org/
http://www.nycga.net/
http://occuprint.org/Category/MayDay
http://occupybk.org/
http://occupybk.org/groups/organize-bushwick-1128840377/
http://occupywilliamsburg.org/
http://strikeeverywhere.net/
http://university.nycga.net/our-courses/studying-may-day/
http://university.nycga.net/our-courses/studying-may-day/recommended-readings
http://wiki.occupy.net/wiki/May_Day

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4. Readings

[unsorted]
–The Social General Strike – Stephen Naft, 1905:
http://www.mediafire.com/?t37d5nxsvshzdcr
–The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions – Rosa Luxemburg, 1906:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/index.htm
–Reflections on Violence – George Sorel, 1908
–“The General Strike” – Bill Haywood, 1911:
http://www.iww.org/en/history/library/Haywood/GeneralStrike
–“Critique of Violence” – Walter Benjamin, 1921:
http://www.mediafire.com/?ew0x25f2guv
–The General Strike – Ralph Chaplin, 1933:
http://libcom.org/library/general-strike-ralph-chaplin
–“The General Strike” – W.E.B. Du Bois, 1935:
http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu/sites/all/files/The%20General%20Strike.pdf
–Kill the Bill: The Power of a General Strike – Madison IWW, 2011:
http://libcom.org/library/iww-general-strike-pamphlet
–“To All the Working People: Call for De-Nuke General Strike”
— Committee for De-nuke General Strike, 2011
–“Wisconsin’s Lost Strike Moment” – Nicolas Lampert & Dan S. Wang, 2011: http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2011/04/wisconsins_lost_strike_moment_1.html
–“What Chance a General Strike in Manhattan?” – Nikolas Kozloff, 2011: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011107135115719238.html
–“A Message to the Partisans, in Advance of the General Strike” – Society of Enemies, 2011: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/11/01/18696540.php
–“Blockading the Port is Only the First of Many Last Resorts” – Society of Enemies, 2011:
http://www.bayofrage.com/from-the-bay/blockading-the-port-is-only-the-first-of-many-last-resorts/
–“General Strike” – Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 2011:
http://occupytheory.org/Tidal_5.html

–“What are the Origins of May Day?” – Rosa Luxemburg, 1894:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1894/02/may-day.htm
–“The Idea of May Day on the March” – Rosa Luxemburg, 1913:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/04/30.htm
–“May Day in the West and the East” – Leon Trotsky, 1923:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/04/mayday.htm
–“The First of May: Symbol of a New Era in the Life and Struggle of the Toilers” – Nestor Makhno, 1928:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/makhno-nestor/works/1928/05_01.htm
–The History of Mayday – Alexander Trachtenberg, 1932:
http://www.marxists.org/subject/mayday/articles/tracht.html
–“A General Strike” – Mariarosa Dall Costa, 1974:
http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/mariarosa-dalla-costa-a-general-strike/
–“What do we mean by… The General Strike?” – Chris Harman, 1985:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1985/01/genstrike.htm
–The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day – Peter Linebaugh, 1986
–“Birth of a Holiday: The First of May” – Eric Hobsbawm, 1994:
http://libcom.org/history/birth-holiday-first-may
–“Infinite Strike” – Anonymous, 2010:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Anonymous__Infinite_Strike.html
–“Which Way Forward for the 99%?” – Occupy May 1st, 2012:
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5. NYC Links

Brooklyn General Assembly: http://occupybk.org/
Bushwick General Assembly: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Bushwick.GA/
New York City General Assembly: http://www.nycga.net/
Strike Everywhere: http://strikeeverywhere.net/
Williamsburg General Assembly: http://occupywilliamsburg.org/

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6. Precarious & Service Worker Assembly

Start:
03/28/2012 19:30

Category:
Precarious/Service Worker Assembly

Address:
360 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11231, United States

Tired of being treated like a servant by your customers? Tired of
management demanding more and more for less and less? Feeling alone or frustrated? Come to the first Precarious and Service Worker Assembly to network with others who share your interests!

As service workers, we are often both overworked and underpaid; with Management forcing workers to work ever faster in an ever shorter amount of time. Productivity and speed-of-service requirements increase while hours per week are slashed. It’s clear: The harder we work, the less we get paid, and the richer they get!

Many of us are already in tough situations as parents, immigrants, young people, and students. Racism is blatantly apparent at many of our
workplaces, with Latino and immigrant workers confined to back-of-house positions, maintaining a racial hierarchy to keep us separated. For some, a job at a restaurant or a cafe is a 2nd or even 3rd job, a result of the declining wages for other careers. Even worse, we often find ourselves forced into student loan and credit card debt because of low pay. All the while, rent, food, and transportation costs climb through the roof.

Solidarity and support among local service workers can be empowering for all of us. Remember, they can’t run these places without us. Bosses thrive by pitting us against one another, but if not for us, Management wouldn’t make a dime. So let’s take what’s ours!

Bring some goods to share from your place of employment if you’d like, and feel free to bring a friend or two –as long as they’re not the boss! We’ll be discussing how we can make our collective situation much more
interesting and how we can engage together in upcoming actions like the May Day General Strike.

Tuesday — 03.27.12 – General Strike in Central Park

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