In North America, those who work for a living have found themselves worse off year after year due to capitalism’s incessant drive for higher profits. Stagnant wages, layoffs to save the bottom line, attacks on immigrant workers, and increasingly precarious work hours are the reality for the working class in America and beyond. What are we to do in the face of our immiseration at home and in the workplace? A general strike across North America, one that cuts across entire swaths of industries, unions, and workplaces in continuation of the heroic history of past general strikes of the North American working class that have given our class the collective leverage to fight against attacks affecting the whole working class.
While productivity (i.e. the capitalist classes increased ability to exploit us) and the cost of living has significantly increased the last 50 years, wages have remained stagnant and suppressed through attacks on unions and the State’s economic policy. This is happening alongside the fact that the USA’s imperialism, ruling class, and capitalism in general is in a crisis that promises to only worsen. As this profit-driven system of chaos progresses, booms are seen and progressively larger busts take place, rooted in capitalism’s overproduction crisis. Since the 2008 bust, capitalism has never truly recovered and its life has been extended through imperialist war, state intervention, debt, and the suppression of wages. All of which mean attacks on workers and immiseration for the working class. As the crisis continues and deepens, the capitalist class in order to maintain profit accumulation needs to show more and more of the true face of its regime, which is that of fascism. The current executive management of the interests of the ruling class, through successive governments alternating between Democrats and Republicans, reflects this need. The result is increasingly authoritarian action, brutal nationalism, bigotry and violence against transgender people and immigrants, and the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers. If Trump marks a step forward in this direction, future anti-Trump, “Democratic” bourgeois politicians will not mark a backward step; it is the capitalist regime that marches in this direction and the ruling class parties adapt to it.
Immigrant workers suffer attacks as the bourgeoisie seeks to further create and maintain a hyper-exploited section of the the working class kept in a state of fear and control through a precarious legal existence, policing, and deportations. For the ruling class, immigrant workers also serve as a convenient scapegoat for native workers’ problems thus increasing nationalist sentiment and avoiding the rightful placement of blame for the working classes’ problems on capitalism and the ruling class.
In the face of these general and widespread attacks by capitalism and the capitalist class, the answer is not to turn to legislative reforms, elections, or to business union leadership who is more close to the boss than the workers. We need united working class action in the form of a general strike! At its core, a strike is the removal of the source of profit for the capitalist, our labor, thus forcing them to concede to our demands. And a general strike brings the widespread, coercive attack on the capitalist class as a whole, that is necessary in order to effectively fight for the interest of all sections of the working class, across all divides by leveraging the large scale removal of our labor. While such a strike may seem like an impossibility we must remember, general strikes have a history in North America from Seattle in 1919 to St. Louis in 1877 to Winnipeg in 1919 and beyond. And in the present day we can see the possibility of general strike action in places such as Greece. It’s time to build a movement of forces for a general strike in North America! Let us set our sights higher! Let us not fall into hopelessness, cynicism, and despair! Towards the general strike!
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