Slowly, painfully, I’m studying Russian revolutionary history. I know it’s important, and I wish I could tell you I was enthralled, but the truth is I’m mostly confused by all the terminology (“defencists?”), slightly jumbled chronologically, and easily distracted by Facebook and the neighborhood kitten outside my apartment. Plus I’m sick, as evidenced by the Everest of crumpled tissues on my coffee table. (Don’t worry; I’ll clean it before you come over.)
Anyway. One of the things I’m learning in my intermittent reading bursts is the difference between economic and political strikes. Far as I can tell, economic strikes are the more common ones, where workers stop production in order to force owners to give them higher wages, or health care, safer conditions on the job, the firing of a racist or sexist manager, etc. Economic strikes generally happen within a specific company, since you’re trying to lessen the acuteness with which that company exploits you.
Political strikes, on the other hand, have to be bigger, because the target isn’t just one company, but broader policy or the government itself. Strikes for the 8-hour work day, ending child labor, or trying to force a government to end a war, change regimes, or block austerity measures must necessarily grow huge and widespread to have a chance of succeeding. Only then can “organized labor become a political actor.”
This is basically what I gather, and in Russian history they have these pretty cool charts showing the breakdown of economic and political strikes around the time of revolutions in 1905 and 1917. Moreover, the two types are related: at least according to Lenin, political strikes need a strong foundation of tangible economic gains in order to win popular backing from the working class.
In a political strike, the working class comes forward as the advanced class of the whole people. In such cases, the proletariat plays not merely the role of one of the classes of bourgeois society, but the role of guide, vanguard, leader. The political ideas manifested in the movement involve the whole people, i.e., they concern the basic, most profound conditions of the political life of the whole country. This character of the political strike, as has been noted by all scientific investigators of the period 1905–07, brought into the movement all the classes, and particularly, of course, the widest, most numerous and most democratic sections of the population, the peasantry, and so forth.
On the other hand, the mass of the working people will never agree to conceive of a general “progress” of the country without economic demands, without an immediate and direct improvement in their condition. The masses are drawn into the movement, participate vigorously in it, value it highly and display heroism, self-sacrifice, perseverance and devotion to the great cause only if it makes for improving the economic condition of those who work. Nor can it be otherwise, for the living conditions of the workers in “ordinary” times are incredibly hard. As it strives to improve its living conditions, the working class also progresses morally, intellectually and politically, becomes more capable of achieving its great emancipatory aims.
One of the perverse truths of capitalist industrialization, though, is that in striving to survive, or even improve its living conditions, the working class also becomes the mechanism (though not the cause — that’s still capitalism) of environmental destruction.
Last week, when I posted on Facebook an article about how fracking releases radioactive substances that remain hazardous to life for 16,000 years, my friend Nichola responded,
Oh crap. They have started fracking like crazy in NE Ohio, all around the area where my parents and family live, and everyone is going crazy with visions for new prosperity. It’s the new gold rush there, with lots of new jobs having been created. But I have been having this scary feeling about it, and here it is. Sharing.
Talk about a rock and a hard place.
The way our capitalist class society jams, capital needs to extract surplus value (profit) from workers in order to expand itself and keep growing. That’s what “drives” the economy. To ensure a steady supply of people from whom to extract surplus value, the owning class needs plenty of workers: the proletariat. These workers (or non-workers, the unemployed proletariat) don’t have private homesteads to grow our kale, build our huts, weave our blankets and sustain ourselves, so we need jobs and money in order to eke out an existence.
Pretty much since this coercive system took over the world’s economies (replacing other, differently coercive systems), people who need to sell their labor-power to live have been taking on dangerous and unhealthy jobs — from crab fishing to combat, mining to manicures, un-self-determined sex work, etc. You do what you gotta do to get by under capitalism.
But some of these environmental dangers smell to me like a whole new type of terrifying. Like, Unit 4 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility has already sunk 31.5 inches since the earthquake and tsunami, and if it collapses, could cause a fire in the atmosphere. Bad news for Japan; bad news, evidently, for everywhere the sky reaches.
Could Japanese labor have organized itself as a biocentric actor and refused to construct nuclear power plants in the first place? Obviously we’ve seen locals intervening against nuclear energy, and indigenous people resisting the accumulation of their land for ecocidal and literally shitty exploitation. Realistically, though, when it comes to organized labor, it seems next to impossible (please tell me I’m wrong!) to collectively reject employment in entire industries on the basis of their longer-term environmental consequences — no matter how mind-numbingly horrible those consequences may be. As Stephanie McMillian writes on Kasama, no one wants to champion short-term sacrifices. Socialist / communist struggle is supposed to be Helpful now and lead to Splendor later, right?
Yeah, so…about that post-revolutionary socialist productivity…
On the left, the theory of productive forces has led to a widespread productivist/mechanical view of reaching socialism: by developing and fully mechanizing production, we will reach abundance and the end of labor itself. It is increasingly obvious that this scenario is at odds with the reality around us, yet there is a general reluctance to tell the truth: that a lot of production, everything not necessary for survival, simply has to end. No one likes being the person who brings the bad news that we have to make do with less. It’s harder to organize around.
And so the idea of socialism, the common ownership of the means of production and equitable distribution of goods, also doesn’t go far enough. We need to change our relationship with the natural world. It is not there for us to use, but instead we are part of it and depend on its overall health. We need to define a different relationship with it than as a set of resources. A sustainable economy can only involve production that is subordinate to nature and that fits within its physical limits to reproduce itself — that is determined not by human desires and whims, but by our actual needs, which are dependent on a healthy planet above all.
Okay, so maybe it depends how we define post-revolutionary Splendor. Current U.S. middle-class standards: clearly unsustainable if generalized. But still, hopefully there will be enough for everyone, and everyone will be able to access what feels like enough. (Questions of contentment and scarcity in Marxism is a whole nother subject I’m working on for later.)
That hope for abundance, though, seems to wane more and more each day, while a sense of urgency escalates. It seems that the historical task of the working class may not only be organizing to overthrow capitalism, but also (and there is definitely overlap here) organizing to help stop the irrevocable fucking up of the planet, ASAP. Coral reefs and their food supply supporting millions of poor people? Doomed. Lungs of the earth? Wheezing. Edible biodiversity? Less than robust. Drinkable water? …okay now I’m depressing myself.
So fill me in. Do you know of any examples of what I’m provisionally calling environmental strikes? Meaning: not labor struggles over immediate safety conditions in the workplace, but more on the level of political strikes in that they attempt to impact entire environmentally destructive industries or operations, perhaps with a broad or long-term perspective in mind?
Do tell.
Kloncke 
