How an Oakland Teacher's strike can be won

1. An Oakland teacher's strike can be won. The Oakland Unified School District can be rapidly compelled to settle, and to settle to the overwhelming advantage of striking teachers -- if this strike immediately leads to a city-wide school kids walkout.

2. The word for this should be spread by people who aren't strikers, and aren't employees of the school district.

This will prevent any individual strikers from being singled out and victimized later.

3. An action waged in this manner might result in some working people getting a better deal that we get when we play by the pro-capitalist rules of trade unionism. It may also tend, in a very slight way, to politicize the strike and give it something of a more general character.

4. Now, I don't have any kids, and I don't hang out with the under-18 set. So I have no idea of what the level of class consciousness is among kids these days. An appeal for a mass student walkout should certainly be phrased in terms of class solidarity. Most kids in public school are future or current wage slaves. And besides, in any case it's just the right thing to do.

But the real effective appeal of this might be a more amorphous anti-authoritarian one -- kids hate school; my guess is most do. I did, back when I was a kid.

This also suggest another problem in communicating a message that resonates, which is that a lot of schoolkids may percieve of teachers as coercive authority figures.

So the appeal of this should be couched as a jumbo-sized holiday for school kids.

The resulting city-wide chaos, or, let's say, "adultist" fears of vast numbers of unruly young people flooding into Oakalnd's downtown and fucking up the city's bond rating, and the appeal of Oaktown condo living to yuppie gentrifiers might bring the OUSD back to the bargaining table on bended knee at speeds approaching that of light.

My impression is that young people have a tremendous and consistently proven ability to engage in self-organization; witness the tremendous proliferation of cliques among high schoolers. Under the right circumstances this capacity for self-organization can take off in a very different and positive direction. It might be a bigger learning experience for future (and current ) wage earners than anything they will get in the classroom during normal business hours.

Harassment of strikebreakers may be one small part of a winning strategy. But this also has the potential to sidetrack the strike away from bigger and better tactics that could cause the conflict to spread. A strike can only be won if it tends to move beyond the limits of a sectoral struggle. Harassment of scabs may be emotionally satisfying for the people who do it, but that's not a measure of how useful it is in winning this strike -- or other strikes, either.

Only new tactics that jettison virtually the entire framework of the classical, social democratic workers' movement are going to be effective in the short term -- and more importantly in the long term.