berniesrevolution:JACOBIN MAGAZINEFollowing the massive Women’s March and the surprising partial suc

berniesrevolution:JACOBIN MAGAZINEFollowing the massive Women’s March and the surprising partial success of protests against Trump’s immigration ban, many feel that the logical step is to escalate. Seize the momentum, put more pressure on the administration, disrupt and paralyze as much as possible.I feel it myself. There are ways in which there is more possibility in the air than there has been in a long time, and Trump has wasted little time going about his authoritarian business.That, no doubt, is the reason why the idea of calling for a general strike — a general national strike — has caught the imagination over the past few days. After Francine Prose put the idea out in the Guardian, it spread rapidly throughout social media, and split into multiple proposals and counter-proposals.Some, including Prose herself, see themselves carrying on in a venerable tradition of mass social disruption. But as much as these proposals look like a natural response to the moment, they are severely disconnected from reality.Calling for a general strike now bears no relation to what mass strikes have meant in the past. The flight from reality shows up in activists’ blasé attitude to history and their very distant relationship to the working class.The United States has the most violent labor history of any major industrial country. General and other large-scale strikes in the US have nearly always been met with major repression, from police, National Guard, even federal troops.For instance, the general strike in San Francisco of 1934, which developed out of a longshoremen’s strike, led to running battles with the police, National Guardsmen setting up machine gun nests and tanks for strike suppression, and a number of deaths.The massive strikes in the period of 1919-1922, involving more than one million workers in industries like railroads, steel, and mining, were met with enormous violence. One of the most famous is the coal mining wars, which culminated in the Battle for Blair Mountain. It pitted armed and organized miners against a private militia, federal troops, bombing runs by employer-hired aircraft, and some of the first post-war uses of military planes. Hundreds of miners died in the battles. (Continue Reading) -- source link

More pics about