Lesvos. Greece. April 7, 2020. The prisoners detained in Moria pre-removal detention centre (PRO.KE.K.A) in Lesvos have been on hunger strike since 5th April 2020. The PRO.KE.K.A hunger strikers demand their immediate release to avoid the disastrous consequences of a virus outbreak in the prison. Originally published by Deportation Monitoring Aegean. According to the hunger strikers,…
The strike wave is here. The strike wave is real. Can workers take the next steps toward a General Strike?
The current crisis is a rare opportunity for us to build a movement both outside of electoral politics and based on an organizing model. That matters because the biggest shortcoming of the left and the social movements is our lack of organizing.
Organizing can do what good intentions or radical theory or electoral campaigns cannot: turn solidarity from a dream into a living thing. But without some serious solidarity, all our hopes for a General Strike will fail to materialize.
.@PaydayReport is proud to launch an interactive map tracking the growing strike wave across the US.
The map has links to stories on over 30 Wildcat Strikes that have happened since COVID-19. https://t.co/LLoY3txU83
As we build the solidarity infrastructure needed for a General Strike lets not lie to each other. It’s called “class struggle” for a reason. Strikes are painful with workers pitting their sacrifice and suffering up against the bosses’ profits. Strikes are no party.
But, general strikes, while rare, are a good match for the unprecedented interlocking crises we face. There is an answer to our problems. It’s the age-old working-class answer: “solidarity forever.” But, never forget that solidarity is forged in sacrifice too. Solidarity is not simply passing a resolution or staking a claim — it is actions like boycotts or mutual aid efforts or sending money to those at the front lines or going on strike yourself.
The Strike is Back
After a long period of retreat, the strike has returned with a vengeance. In 2018 West Virginia teachers kicked off a strike wave the likes of which we have not seen for decades. And like today’s strikes, the leadership is coming from the rank and file — not union officials.
In this moment of pandemic panic strikes and unrest are focused on immediate demands. We want a general strike and that is a great thing but we have to pave the way between the largely defensive strikes that actually exist and the political offensive that is the heart of a general strike.
General strikes contest for power by explicitly raising class consciousness and proposing system-wide reform, economic democracy, maybe even social transformation. The political task is to build the transition between the defensive strike wave and the offensive general strike we need. We can find the path by starting down the trailhead right in front of us.
If we want to engage people we have to listen carefully to what they say and do. The strongest currents of resistance that I see are actions, demands, and tactics around the immediate life and death questions of safety, protection, and survival:
Protective equipment, sick benefits, hazard pay.
Strike as “sick out” that withholds labor until we break the back of the pandemic.
Strikes, slowdowns, rolling job actions or staying home. Let the workers decide.
Increase wages for essential workers.
The conversion of production to ventilators or masks or tests.
Universal health care
No rent, no evictions, no vacancies
Mutual Aid to serve the people
These may be immediate demands but in them we can imagine the possibilities of the General Strike. In these demands, (and in the bosses’ rush to get us back to work) we can see that labor creates all wealth. We can see that workers are essential and bosses are disposable. When workers demand that they switch production to ventilators or masks — the seeds of worker control are taking root. Housing and health care are revealed as demands of direct interest to everyone, not just a moral stand. If the General Strike is the front-line Mutual Aid is the quartermaster providing aid and comfort to the troops and showing us what a democratic economy looks like.
Taken together these actions and demands are the beginnings of a struggle for economic, workplace and community democracy. Call it Freedom and Democracy, call it Socialism or Revolution, call it Reason or call it Treason — I don’t care what you call it.
Its Solidarity Forever or General Strike Never
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” ― Lilla Watson
Solidarity is not simply good intentions or the fine speeches that politicians sometimes make. Solidarity grows by acting on the principle that “your liberation is bound up with mine.” With solidarity, a new world is possible — without it we surrender to corporate power.
By all means, have your steering committee pass a resolution but real solidarity can only be achieved by organizing and activism. Here are a few possibilities:
We need to coordinate strategic boycotts targeting Amazon, Whole Foods and other corporate criminals. We need a huge email list and a website updated daily to select targets and coordinate timing. Who will take up this work?
In 2016 the Sanders campaign proved that a presidential campaign could be crowdfunded by millions of small donations. Can we set up a funding mechanism to funnel money to striking workers trying to last “one day longer” than the boss?
Solidarity with strikers means building networks, coalitions, Mutual Aid and communal efforts, and Unemployed Councils.
The Crisis Cannot Be Resolved by Normal Means
When compared with the narrow vision of the electoral arena (with the vast majority of politicians from both major parties still opposing universal healthcare) even these initial spontaneous uprising are full of ideas for redistributing wealth and power. Even in the depths of the crisis, unanimous Congressional action could deliver nothing greater than temporary cash payments so meager as to exaggerate the very wealth inequality that made our world unsustainable in the first place.
These tasty crumbs are welcomed aid to workers but were also a good move by the ruling class to calm things down. Without real resistance, our rulers got away with tossing us the bare minimum necessary to engineer consent so they could gain a far bigger prize: the further consolidation of 40 years of corporate power.
It’s not that progressive Democrats produced nothing. They moved the discourse in important ways. But the unanimous consent to the corporate bailout signals the limits of even well-meaning electoral activity under existing conditions. And that is why the strike wave is so important. Direct action gets the goods. And, the torch is passed back from celebrities and politicians to the unknown everyday people that were always the true leaders of the working-class.
The left needs Ella Bakers’ vision. Do we have the capacity to “pick up the pieces or put together pieces?”
What will help the millions move? What will build the capacity for self-organization? We need to learn and quick. Because it is when millions move — then and only then — that we will unleash the enormous creative energies of the people. They will find the way forward.
The people are telling us where to find them. Can we catch up? Its due time for all organizers to engage, listen, learn from and stand with our new leaders. There is no greater solidarity than this.
The strike wave is here. The strike wave is real. Can workers take the next steps toward a General Strike? The current crisis is a rare opportunity for us to build a movement both outside of electoral politics and based on an organizing model. That matters because the biggest shortcoming of the left and the […]
Received and translated on 06.04.2020, text originally appeared in the 1st issue of Madrid Quarantine City.
The Covid-19 crisis has once again highlighted that this world belongs to them because they took it from us. The rich and powerful will emerge from it stronger, supported by the State. And we, poorer than we were before. And if we are, it is because there are rich people. The crisis only intensifies these processes.
They take everything away from us because there is private property, property of land, of housing, of space…And on the basis of this property right, regulated by the State, they force us to pay for the most basic things: (food, housing…) and they force us to work for them if we want money to survive. Why else are there millions of workers going to work during full confinement?
And meanwhile, while trying to balance things, listening to politicians and journalists talk about moderation, unity and responsibility with a looming horizon of evictions, layoffs and uncertainty, because the health crisis will end, but the conditions of exploitation and misery to which we are subjected to will prevail and increase exponentially. A health crisis that raises another question: Does anyone believe that Amancio Ortega or Esperanza Aguirre, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump or Bolsonaro will be denied an ICU bed when they catch the virus? Exactly.
We can’t go back to normal, there is no going back. Power is preparing for what’s coming next. Let’s do it ourselves: rent strikes, strikes in the workplaces and the schools, wildcat strikes, away from the parties, unions and stagnant structures. And let’s take, not wait, let’s squat the empty properties that are the grazing ground of capitalist speculation by real estate companies, banks and investment funds. Let’s build networks of solidarity and mutual aid.
And let’s do it knowing that the State is already prepared with thousands of military, police, cameras and drones to protect order, to protect property and work, because authority is a guarantor for the exploiters to continue to subdue the exploited.
We will take to the streets, we will not forgive, we will not forget, there will be no government, no ballot box, no vote, no military, no police, no judge capable of containing the epidemic of rage and revolt. It is up to us to strike back. Loot the rich.
What good news am I talking about? How about this news: Three US hospitals use of IV vitamin C and other low-cost, readily available drugs cut the death-rate of COVID-19-without the use of ventilators! A press release dated March 30, 2020 stated: “If you can administer Vitamin C intravenously starting in the Emergency Room and […]
After 288 days of hunger strike, the singer Helen Polik who is a member of the
music band Yorum Grup, lost her life. She went on hunger strike to protest against the Turkish authorities’ arrest of members of her group and demanded their release from prison, in addition to allowing them to continue the music, but the Justice and Development Government rejected her demands, which made her continue the strike until she lost her life on Friday in Turkey’s prisons.
Shamefully the long fight by the Yorum group for the right to sing, for their music and physical survival, has been largely ignored by European social movements. Their extermination is part of Erdogan’s bloody war against women, gays, anarchists, Kurds and anyone who speaks out for freedom or democracy.
Turkish Islamist President R.T. Erdogan mobilized thousands of agents who have occupied the town of Armutlu where Kurdish singer Helin Bölek was buried. Regime police dropped fired water cannons and tear gas at the mourners even inside the cemetery.
In Istanbul, the rally in memory of the musician has been aborted by Erdogan police who have arrested the civilians involved. The number of people detained is unknown.
ANHA
Turkey: Jailed Grup Yorum musician on hunger strike force fed and tortured
Mustafa Koçak, a jailed member of the Grup Yorum band who has been on a hunger strike for 254 days in an İzmir prison, was removed from his cell and brought to a hospital where he was subjected to involuntary treatment as well as torture, the Bianet news website reported..
Adolf Trump is going for Venezuela .. A leap to nowhere?
By Stella Calloni..shared and translated with thanks
In the midst of a devastating scenario, when the United States has become the country with the highest number of deaths and infected by the corona virus, President Donald Trump and his team of serial criminals such as Elliott Abrams, Cuban-Americans Mauricio Claver-Carone, Marcos Rubio and others of the same ilk, communicated that his country and 22 other nations would launch “a powerful operation against drug trafficking in the western hemisphere, deploying military reinforcements of the Navy and the air force in the Caribbean Sea and the South Pacific. “.
From Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro denounced this situation to the world, in an extraordinary letter to governments and in other memorable speeches, while most countries in the world and even the United Nations request that the US lift sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and other countries, in the face of the very serious emergency of a pandemic of these characteristics.
So far there has been no positive response and the most serious thing is that the threatening military displacement does not stop and in the last hours journalists and humanitarian organizations in Colombia denounce the presence of US troops in their country where there are 9 US military bases. .
#RentStrike2020 ANNOUNCEMENT – On a recent national call on @BRRN_Fed’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, members agreed to endorse calls for rent strikes and a coordinated campaign in each of our respective cities. (1/6) pic.twitter.com/N5DotJxsA8
With the threat of homelessness looming in many people’s minds throughout March as the crisis moved from back page news story to global pandemic, calls for a rent strike grew from viral memes into a real world movement. Despite attacks in the corporate press, on April 1st, the rent strike officially kicked off across the US and Canada, as entire buildings and apartment complexes announced their refusal to pay and support grew within the wider population for a rent freeze.
By the evening of April 1st, CNN was even running an entire segment on the strike, showcasing the degree in which the campaign has exploded into the popular imagination of millions of people. This in itself is a testament to the hard work of grassroots organizers, the massive proliferation of flyers, posters, graffiti messages, and the now iconic white sheets which have come to symbolize the rent strike, and the countless hours spent between neighbors in meetings and online discussions.
The Free 