I’m curious why I don’t see more outright solidarity from the self-proclaimed “reds” in the city with local striking workers. I’ve seen them attending every possible kind of demonstration, but never supporting strikes (like some west coast anarchists have done in recent years in the ports), taking actions against scab sites and employers (like some of the union members with some sort of teeth), or reaching out to the frustrated at more reformist rallies (the way the insurrecto-oriented have been doing against prisons and the police, locally).
I don’t find any promise in the possibility of the (ever-dwindling) working class uniting and rising up to overthrow anyone, let alone even pursuing a non-hierarchal society —and even if I did, I don’t believe unions would be the medium to achieve this. But, red anarchists purport to believe just that, suggesting it would be in their interest to participate in such a way. Yet, they seem more likely to be organizing with college kids and liberals at a $15 & a union rally — or so it seems to me.
This crosses my mind with the passing of May Day, as I remember picketing workers infiltrating a car show and trashing it at the convention center, as I watch the CWA striking against verizon again, and further reports of sabotage unsanctioned by said union against Verizon’s fiber optic infrastructure circulate. Whether the CWA does not, in fact, condone the sabotage or is trying to keep its hands clean begins to illustrate its limitations, and the complete absence of radical unions like the IWW from anything substantial since the first red scare illustrates theirs. The last local news of note we’ve had from the IWW, in fact, includes an absolute failure around organizing a South Street Workers’ Strike (was that in the ’90’s?), to scandals resulting in the booting of certain “esteemed” local anarchists over financial discrepancies, to an article in support of striking Santander Bank employees in Spain. This is hardly the stuff of a restless, growing, anticapitalist mass.
The Prison General Strike this September, as called for by some Texan prisoner wobblies, could bring about the first functional endeavor of the IWW in almost a century, however, and I’m excited to see it happen. Maybe this is the long overdue tactical transition the reds have been searching for in response to the recuperation of workers as increasingly comfortable consumers?
I would love to be proven wrong in such a way. I don’t agree with many red anarchist goals or tactics, but please make a go of it and prove me wrong; show me why these things are a good idea. Don’t tell me, I cut my anarchist teeth on Berkman and Goldman and abandoned a union that proved useless to my needs, but try to make these things happen if that’s what you actually believe in.
And sometimes I wonder what it would look like for such ideas to come to fruition. For red anarchists acting in kind with striking workers against fiber optics developing a temporary, tangible, action-oriented affinity with green anarchists, for instance. What other avenues might we find intersections on?
