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In the era of globalization and neoliberalism, strikes by particular groups of workers have turned out to be less and less successful at wresting gains from immediate employers. Instead, strikes have increasingly ended with contract concessions at best, if not the shutting down of workplaces or the hiring of permanent replacement workers. When employers can shut down their workplaces and produce elsewhere around the world, or receive government sanction for laying off an entire workforce, the power of the strike is greatly diminished. The problems facing working people individually and collectively are less amenable to solution by the action of individual employers. Even the best union contract can do little to rectify global recession, growing inequality, economic insecurity, the global race to the bottom, degradation of democracy, debt, war, ecological devastation, and deteriorating life prospects. Either people must acquiesce in those problems or develop new forms of action to contest them.
The 2006 immigrant-rights demonstrations, one of the largest ever in the world with nearly five million participants, drew in unions, churches, students, legal immigrants, and the entire Latino community, as well as the legally undocumented immigrants themselves. The Wisconsin Uprising of 2011 protests against the dismantling worker rights in the public sector public employees were supported by private sector workers, farmers, students, and a wide swath of the public. The Occupy movement took over parks and other public spaces in 600 US cities and towns and refused to leave which initiated solidarity demonstrations on a global scale in more than a thousand cities in eighty-two countries. All were colored not just by immediate grievances but by concern about the future well-being and prospects for working people in general. The realization that very different people had parallel thoughts and feelings and were prepared to act on them collectively led to the rapid escalation of revolt. All made visible the pervasiveness of discontent and the possibility of collective action.
These mini-revolts have manifested self-organization and self-management on the part of their participants. These events did not happen because somebody gave orders for them to happen; they happened because people developed ways to collectively control their own activity. Occupy its General Assemblies. The anti-WTO protests, the Wisconsin Uprising, and Occupy Wall Street all improvised ways to provide food, shelter, medical care, sanitation, and other necessities.
The future tendency of these mini-revolts is difficult to predict. But the conditions that gave rise to them seem unlikely to go away. So some kind of popular response to those conditions is likely to continue. Such response could lead primarily to chronic internecine conflict and demoralization. It could lead to something like the Tea Party, a pressure group within the political party system. It could conceivably lead to some kind of insurrectionary climax—a “Tahrir moment”—followed perhaps by repression and authoritarian rule.
Alternatively, these mini-revolts might develop into low-level but ongoing nonviolent insurgencies. Movements like the fight for public education in Chicago might establish growing power within institutions like schools, communities, and eventually workplaces. These insurgencies might win victories that would improve people’s lives long before they were able to challenge more central institutions of power. They might make successful appeals for the minds and hearts of the 99%. Like Occupy Wall Street, this resistance might link up horizontally around the country and around the world. Eventually they might undermine some of the pillars of support for inequality and domination. Whatever may happen in the future, the heritage of worker self-organization will therefore continue to be a resource that we can draw on to construct collective responses to the problems we face.
Abridged and adapted from an article by Jeremy Brecher
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