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notes on the general strike in spain
personal reflections on the june 20th general strike in spain
General Strike. Imagine! At midnight last night, in every modestly-working-class neighborhood in the country picket lines closing the few bars and shops that remained open. and picket lines camped out in the industrial zones and in the bus lots and in the train lots and at the airports to ensure that at dawn no factories would ignite, no buses would pull out of the lots, no trains or planes would move. almost every single rural worker in andalusia simply staying home.
the radio says everything is normal and that -- never fear! -- the police have guaranteed order but: look! step out the door and the street is empty, there are no trucks delivering, there are no buses, the intimidated employees of big stores open and then are shut down by neighborhood pickets. the cotidian is interrupted. today is different.
many go to work. we spent all day today interviewing women: housewives, domestic workers, shop girls, waitresses, prostitutes, artists, small-businesswomen etc. women who were and who were not participating in the strike about how those of us who do not fit into the classic masculine fordist image of the worker and the union -- because our work is part-time or precarious or immaterial or reproductive or affective or illegal -- how we live the situation of a general strike.
there is so much fear. so much isolation and fear, so little capacity see present reality as an accumulation of history and not as simply 'the way things are.' daily lives spent in fear are revealed by shopgirls who confess thier terror of walking out as soon as the manager turns his back.
but the genius of a strike is that -- whereas in so many other things one can sit comfortably on the democratic fence -- in a stike there is no middle ground. you are working or you are not. it is a moment of crystalization, decision, risk. the leap of faith that if you walk out you will not be alone. the challenge of being able to imagine a community, imagine a multitude to which your risk is relevant when daily life seldom affords any sense of such a community, especially in these post-factory days of decentralized and non-contracted work.
and it is a moment in which consumer-democracy's articulation of the 'individual vs. collective problem' is brought into crisis. the picket lines are closing bars. you are there having a drink and argue, 'its my choice. i respect your choice to be on strike, you should respect mine to not be.' (more often than not this sort of argumentation is accompanied by a reference to that panacea-word 'democracy': i.e. 'thats how democracy works') but there is a point at which the i'm-ok-youre-ok equality ideology doesn't work. first of all, your individual choice fucks up a big project that a whole lot of people are trying to move. their big project simply is more important than your drink. second, it is a strike, a day in which the cotidian is explicitly politicized, like it or not; you don't have a drink in a bar (or go to work, or join the skinheads) 'because you feel like it.' and let us not be naive with respect to intimidation. it is not like everyone does exactly what they feel like and therefore reality reflects a democratic consensus of the greatest good. people are constantly intimidated into obeying and into conforming in all manner of systems: work, family, state. some counterintimidation seems justified.
and, moreover, the strikers are right and the strikebreakers are wrong, and its not a matter of miscommunication, its simply and frankly a matter of difference. a tough nut for those of us raised on friendly relativism and deeply appalled by the rather maoist sound of this. but i challenge you to come to a different conclusion.
which leads to the questions (infinate) about tactics, about violence, about the possibilities and limits of dialog. none of which is merely abstract because there we are, in the street, feeling the strength of ourselves, debating our own ethics and tactics, inventing new ones on the spot.
i still have no idea to what extent the strike stopped the country. the national radio and tv, controlled almost entirely by the ruling PP, say that tout va bien and that the strike was a nothing thing, but from all over the country the independent media wires are hot with reports to the contrary. whether anyone at a decision-making level gives a shit is another question entirely: this fall 90% of professors and students walked out of the universties and they passed the education reform law anyway.
what i do know is that it was thrilling. the streets ours, the city a carnival of pickets and picnics, no one at work except the police, multiple demonstrations of hundreds of thousands in various parts of the city. old folks dumping buckets of water from balconies onto sun-baked demonstrators, groups of migrants without papers cheering and banging pots and pans from their balconies (out of reach of the police). bewildered tourists. and our little tribe of tough girls, so smart, so wild, there singing our (very clever) songs to the astonishment and delight of the (otherwise rather uncreative) crowds.
a very different thing from these massive global resistance demonstrations (Sevilla, tomorrow) simply because it is the city we live in, and because it is a strike.
anyway. some reflections, far from complete, on a very full, very singular day. its not all the time one experiences a general strike. news and photos (poor ones, alas) available in spanish on
http://acp.sindominio.net
For more information:
http://acp.sindominio.net
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in response to these reflections, a friend wrote:
. . . for this reason
i have to continue to disagree with christina's
professed opinions on spanish unionism (about which,
incidentally, i asked a puertorican cowroker of mine
in new york who had applied for jobs with unions in
spain and who insisted that yes, indeed, even spanish
unions negotiate contracts that govern particular
workplaces and set legally enforceable rules in the
interests of wage-earners, though i must admit i still
don't know the details and am interested in at what
point a mutual confusion of such could have arisen).
. . .and what about extra-masculinist-fordist
economic production? an interesting question no doubt.
i don't know. but one thing i think is that whatever
one says about it, it doesn't undermine the
significance of power relations that do structure more
'conventional' production with its undeniable
importance in the daily lives of millions (i.e. the
significance of unionism, among other things), and
that to shy away from such questions, whether backed
up by rigorous poststructural sophistry or not, is,
well, the prerogative of what one less judicious than
i might call the petty-bourgeois intellectual (though
i must admit, i *hate* label-slapping ad hominem
bullshit such as this, and wish i could express the
point more fairly). anyway, the last thing i wanted to
do was to go on an ideological rant (aren't those days
behind us, one might hope?) all of which means, of
course, not that i think people should ignore the
issue of unremunerated work, black market work, etc.,
but that i am waiting to hear what anyone has to *say*
about it that gets to the point, i.e. what is to be
done? adam, incidentally, was on some kick about
autonomism which i (perhaps unsurprisingly) did not
fully understand from what he was telling me, but
which seemed to involve a lot of 'making work not the
central thing in life' and doing little about the
degree to which it would remain so, at least for most
people, regardless. . .
. . . for this reason
i have to continue to disagree with christina's
professed opinions on spanish unionism (about which,
incidentally, i asked a puertorican cowroker of mine
in new york who had applied for jobs with unions in
spain and who insisted that yes, indeed, even spanish
unions negotiate contracts that govern particular
workplaces and set legally enforceable rules in the
interests of wage-earners, though i must admit i still
don't know the details and am interested in at what
point a mutual confusion of such could have arisen).
. . .and what about extra-masculinist-fordist
economic production? an interesting question no doubt.
i don't know. but one thing i think is that whatever
one says about it, it doesn't undermine the
significance of power relations that do structure more
'conventional' production with its undeniable
importance in the daily lives of millions (i.e. the
significance of unionism, among other things), and
that to shy away from such questions, whether backed
up by rigorous poststructural sophistry or not, is,
well, the prerogative of what one less judicious than
i might call the petty-bourgeois intellectual (though
i must admit, i *hate* label-slapping ad hominem
bullshit such as this, and wish i could express the
point more fairly). anyway, the last thing i wanted to
do was to go on an ideological rant (aren't those days
behind us, one might hope?) all of which means, of
course, not that i think people should ignore the
issue of unremunerated work, black market work, etc.,
but that i am waiting to hear what anyone has to *say*
about it that gets to the point, i.e. what is to be
done? adam, incidentally, was on some kick about
autonomism which i (perhaps unsurprisingly) did not
fully understand from what he was telling me, but
which seemed to involve a lot of 'making work not the
central thing in life' and doing little about the
degree to which it would remain so, at least for most
people, regardless. . .
to which i replied:
i would take up the point of autonomist, petty bourgeous (sic), post-unionist complaints. for all my delight in the general strike and all that i recognize that without the massive organizing power of the unions it would be impossible to pull off, and for all i recognize that yes, the unions do, to a certain (limited) degree serve as a means of generating power for a substantial block of the population, i would emphasize that:
- every year a smaller portion of the population works in the kind of work to which union structures are relevant
- correspondingly, a larger portion of the population, including key groups like women, youth, migrants and intellectuals, work in precarious, non-contracted, decentralized or immaterial work. or don't 'work' at all, in the remunerated sense, but who's going to tell me that the housewife or the shopper are not contributing to the production of value?
this is not by accident. the cycles of antagonism go round and round, and capitalism learns, transforms. looking, for example, at inditex, the spanish textile giant (zara, pull&bear, stradivarius) we see that their astonishing success in the last several years has been entirely based on their crafty decentralization and precarization of all productive work (no factories, all at-home workshops) and their massive deployment of totally precarious work in consumer-surveying. not to mention the animating, immaterial labor of creating the compelling imaginary which drives millions of shoppers (consumption-workers) to starve themselves (self-discipline-workers) in order to squeeze into Zara's never-more-than-size-10 garments. this is all work. and in textile, that classic unionized-factory sector! remember the Lowell mill girls! the unions don't recognize any of it, and inditex prospers.
(more on inditex/Zara forthcoming on
http://www.sindominio.net)
so the players transform, and though the unionized industries remain important, it is perhaps doubly important to be thinking a couple of steps ahead. (antagonism proposes and capitalism runs to catch up! NOT the other way around! one must insist.) the horizon is work which is not separated from life. just as the factory was a space of social discipline and creation of citizen-subjectivity in one moment, the miasma of deregulated immaterial and self-disciplinary work has become the new terrain, most evidently here in the 'first world,' but far from exclusively. in other areas the fordist-unionist worker subjectivity was never particularly widespread, and affective decentralized work or 'unemployment' more to the point all along, as is is also the case of women and, in many countries, ethnic minorities in the first world. keep in mind that the problem of the picateros in argentina, for example, was not that anyone wanted to ‘exploit’ them as workers but quite the contrary: they wanted to make them disappear. they were, in terms of production, irrelevant. which is why the cutting off of highways was such a brilliant tactic. the ‘lumpen’ population is massive and ever growing. the question is not exploition nearly so much as exclusion: of collectives as diverse as laid-off workers, large portions of the female and black-american population, almost all of africa. . .
it is difficult to articulate a revindication of 'workers' rights in this context, but we rise to the task.
this is the project of the autonomist movement and of the social centers, in its own little way, in its own little corner of the world.
risky, the possibility of being a 'vanguard so far ahead no one can follow it,' (as scdt.marcos says) but worse yet dozing on the job.
so what? free money! why not? a shout of disgust at the misery and fear of daily life. a creation of joy and potency erupting out of the dreariness of privatized public space. breaking this agonizing interiorization of a work-ethic by which you are what you 'do' (ie get paid for) and the market determines all value. and more. the image (oh my heart!) of us singing our precarious, audacious story there amid the stolid union masses.
and later:
i just went downstairs to buy bread and the newspaper. in the news kiosk, three of the four nationally distributed papers (the same ones that came out yesterday, the same ones that are quite overtly controlled by the PP and OpusDei) cheerfully announce the total failure of the strike, and cite a 13% participation before moving on to more pressing issues like football.
El Pais however reports 84% participation, the total shut-down of major industries and transportation, 2 million in the street.
At 8am yesterday a minister had already announced the failure of the strike and broadcast it on all national radio and tv. what better way to guarantee that whoever was doubting hurry up and get to work?
this is the real battle. like so many things, the total transformation of the country for a day can be made to simply disappear. even those who experienced it can be made to doubt or discount their experience. and so we plod along, convinced that 'there is no alternative,' each affirmed in her solitude.
how miserable, how miserable.
they will make this day disappear and then they will pass the new labor law, effectively eliminating unemployment salaries, making firing cheap and contracts non-obligatory.
and then they will go to the european summit in seville and they will pass a european accord to augment police powers against migrants without papers and punish the countries who do not cooperate in supplying a cheap labor force to europe in the manner and to the extent to which europe decides.
among other things.
and there we will be, hundreds of thousands, strong and intelligent and different. and we will be invisible.
what is to be done?
i would take up the point of autonomist, petty bourgeous (sic), post-unionist complaints. for all my delight in the general strike and all that i recognize that without the massive organizing power of the unions it would be impossible to pull off, and for all i recognize that yes, the unions do, to a certain (limited) degree serve as a means of generating power for a substantial block of the population, i would emphasize that:
- every year a smaller portion of the population works in the kind of work to which union structures are relevant
- correspondingly, a larger portion of the population, including key groups like women, youth, migrants and intellectuals, work in precarious, non-contracted, decentralized or immaterial work. or don't 'work' at all, in the remunerated sense, but who's going to tell me that the housewife or the shopper are not contributing to the production of value?
this is not by accident. the cycles of antagonism go round and round, and capitalism learns, transforms. looking, for example, at inditex, the spanish textile giant (zara, pull&bear, stradivarius) we see that their astonishing success in the last several years has been entirely based on their crafty decentralization and precarization of all productive work (no factories, all at-home workshops) and their massive deployment of totally precarious work in consumer-surveying. not to mention the animating, immaterial labor of creating the compelling imaginary which drives millions of shoppers (consumption-workers) to starve themselves (self-discipline-workers) in order to squeeze into Zara's never-more-than-size-10 garments. this is all work. and in textile, that classic unionized-factory sector! remember the Lowell mill girls! the unions don't recognize any of it, and inditex prospers.
(more on inditex/Zara forthcoming on
http://www.sindominio.net)
so the players transform, and though the unionized industries remain important, it is perhaps doubly important to be thinking a couple of steps ahead. (antagonism proposes and capitalism runs to catch up! NOT the other way around! one must insist.) the horizon is work which is not separated from life. just as the factory was a space of social discipline and creation of citizen-subjectivity in one moment, the miasma of deregulated immaterial and self-disciplinary work has become the new terrain, most evidently here in the 'first world,' but far from exclusively. in other areas the fordist-unionist worker subjectivity was never particularly widespread, and affective decentralized work or 'unemployment' more to the point all along, as is is also the case of women and, in many countries, ethnic minorities in the first world. keep in mind that the problem of the picateros in argentina, for example, was not that anyone wanted to ‘exploit’ them as workers but quite the contrary: they wanted to make them disappear. they were, in terms of production, irrelevant. which is why the cutting off of highways was such a brilliant tactic. the ‘lumpen’ population is massive and ever growing. the question is not exploition nearly so much as exclusion: of collectives as diverse as laid-off workers, large portions of the female and black-american population, almost all of africa. . .
it is difficult to articulate a revindication of 'workers' rights in this context, but we rise to the task.
this is the project of the autonomist movement and of the social centers, in its own little way, in its own little corner of the world.
risky, the possibility of being a 'vanguard so far ahead no one can follow it,' (as scdt.marcos says) but worse yet dozing on the job.
so what? free money! why not? a shout of disgust at the misery and fear of daily life. a creation of joy and potency erupting out of the dreariness of privatized public space. breaking this agonizing interiorization of a work-ethic by which you are what you 'do' (ie get paid for) and the market determines all value. and more. the image (oh my heart!) of us singing our precarious, audacious story there amid the stolid union masses.
and later:
i just went downstairs to buy bread and the newspaper. in the news kiosk, three of the four nationally distributed papers (the same ones that came out yesterday, the same ones that are quite overtly controlled by the PP and OpusDei) cheerfully announce the total failure of the strike, and cite a 13% participation before moving on to more pressing issues like football.
El Pais however reports 84% participation, the total shut-down of major industries and transportation, 2 million in the street.
At 8am yesterday a minister had already announced the failure of the strike and broadcast it on all national radio and tv. what better way to guarantee that whoever was doubting hurry up and get to work?
this is the real battle. like so many things, the total transformation of the country for a day can be made to simply disappear. even those who experienced it can be made to doubt or discount their experience. and so we plod along, convinced that 'there is no alternative,' each affirmed in her solitude.
how miserable, how miserable.
they will make this day disappear and then they will pass the new labor law, effectively eliminating unemployment salaries, making firing cheap and contracts non-obligatory.
and then they will go to the european summit in seville and they will pass a european accord to augment police powers against migrants without papers and punish the countries who do not cooperate in supplying a cheap labor force to europe in the manner and to the extent to which europe decides.
among other things.
and there we will be, hundreds of thousands, strong and intelligent and different. and we will be invisible.
what is to be done?
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