Workers Power 
I was pleased and honored to be asked by Workers’ Power to write a few thoughts about the upcoming “general strike” one-day action planned to protest the election of Donald John Trump as US president. I have been on strike four or five times; once I was locked out for 27 months at Bridgestone Firestone. The company had sent half of us letters stating we were being permanently replaced, whereupon, predictably, we began to turn on each other, like a scene from Lord of the Flies.
The president of the local was a narrow-minded, conservative bastard, but he never erred on the side of capitulation to the hated Company, I’ll say that for him. He tried to keep the crowd together, but there was a vibe of anger that some had crossed the picket line to sign a paper saying they’d return to work “unconditionally”. He explained that some had been duped by the company and were sorry for having done it, but then something incredibly dramatic happened: one guy stood up and said, “My family has suffered as much as anyone else’s, and I say that anybody who signed that list is just like those who went to Canada to avoid Viet Nam, they are traitors!” Then another guy stood up and said “I went to Viet Nam and I signed that list. Those of us who got that letter are done, but the rest of us have got a lot to lose.” A key thing to note is this guy was a leader of the pipefitters and mechanical trades. One thing you learn is that the higher skilled workers will be the first to surrender— which flies in the face of the old trope that with enough education and skill you can go out and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and easily get another job. That is a lie. It’s another thing you learn from a strike that you wouldn’t learn from a one-day action.
Well the next thing that happened was, about six big guys stomped that guy’s ass right there, and he was only saved by another big guy who dragged him out the side door. That senior pipefitter led all his men across the picket line the next day.
Where am I going with all this? Well, a strike is something that, if it goes on very long, will turn violent, which is bad because it usually means the strike is lost along with public opinion. A one-day “mobilization” is not a strike. A strike is where you actually come up against the ruling class and you have high personal stakes in the fight. A strike has the kernel of socialist revolution, whether the strikers are conscious of it right away or not. A one-day so called “general strike” against Donald John Trump is easy – you don’t stand to lose your car, home or marriage over it. It is an example of failing to call things by their right names.
In the vernacular of historical materialism, Donald John Trump is what is called a “Bonapartist”, a reference to Napoleon’s feckless nephew who was elected in France on a platform of authoritarianism – he claimed to be a strongman who would get things done by ignoring civil niceties and solving all the social problems for you; even if his tactics were crude and brutal, he would “do the necessary” in the name of the forgotten little man and make France great again like it was under old uncle Napoleon. Donald John Trump is a Bonapartist.
I call him by his full Christian name so as not to allow him to ingratiate himself with the workers by using the folksy “The Donald”, or simply Trump, as if he was a good old buddy of the workers – think of “Jimmy” Carter, “Dubya” Bush, they try to obfuscate the fact that they are representatives of the enemy class. I don’t play that, because I see things through the lens of historical materialism – which for me at least is a “way of seeing” – Jodi Dean talks about the “Communist horizon,” the real material baseline that never lets us down.
The fear that workers might take power terrifies the ruling class; they still invoke the slur of “communists” in their propaganda, as if Barak Hussein Obama was a communist, etc. There is power in the word, and Jodi Dean wants to name it and claim it, take back the banner of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” from the Stalinist past and wield our power in a dictatorship of the proletariat – although I’m not painting her position fairly: she thinks the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and other Marxist terms are outmoded and suggests building a party with the slogan “sovereignty of the people.”
The good news is that we workers can take power and break all the rules and run things in our own interest just like Trump did. Bonapartism is the mirror image of what workers rule might look like, only instead of cutting through the red tape to make life miserable for workers like Trump does, we could take power and force him and his class to heel.
Adam Kotsko on the blog An und Fur Sich recently wrote a short think piece on the idea that the Democrats need to “fight like the Republicans,” and how in order to do that, it would take a revolutionary party that would forcefully repress the GOP, and the Democrats are not that kind of party. He slammed his point home with a historical materialist idea: when two rights are in conflict, force decides. That means, if I say I deserve a good job, a home, and health care, and you say that imposes on your right to lord your private property over me and your right to exploit me, force will decide. How much political, collective power can we amass to counter our class enemies, and how much force can they amass? These are issues of historical materialism.
Since the halcyon days of the victories of the civil rights movements and the Viet Nam victory over imperialism (by the way, you notice I never say “we” when referring to “our” country – the bosses and landlords want us to think “we” are all in this together – another historical materialist take), the Left has slid into a mode of operation that focuses on representation rather than actual labor militancy. (Btw the “mobilization” is a good thing; it is the false “representation” of it as a strike that is problematic.)
Adolph Reed Jr. is great for explaining how it is that the unions cannot teach workers working class economics – I’ll call that “historical materialism” – because if they did, the workers would begin to question capitalism. That would endanger the union bureaucracy’s uneasy place of privilege as mediators of the day to day struggles, and they also fear the union could be crushed if it came to scorched earth combat. And so workers only hear the boss’s idea of what economics is, through the radio and internet propaganda systems. No wonder they voted for you know who.
I recall trying to get a modest loan from the Firestone credit union – which was named after the union! – the “Local 310 Credit Union,” and was turned down (due to bad credit) by a kid who asked me how long I’d worked there. I said six years. He told me he’d only had three months on the job. Later, when on strike, I saw the parking lot filling up with repossessed strikers’ cars. It came clear to me that the credit union wouldn’t exist without the workers, and now when we were fighting for our livelihoods, the bank showed no mercy.
You begin to see how capitalist exploitation is reified. Fredy Perlman wrote an essay “The Reproduction of Everyday Life,” where he explains how capitalist social relations reproduce themselves, reify themselves, each day as we go to work. To reify something means to take something from the abstract and bring it to the concrete; capitalism is reified anew each day that we accept these relationships as unchanging and sacred.
We must fight the notion that the bosses create wealth. No. Labor power and nature creates wealth, and the capitalists parasite off our labor. Marx once said “a bird’s more free than a man, as it has to build its nest but one time, whereas (under capitalism) a man can build ten houses and still not have one of his own.”
The workers I know who voted for Trump (and yes I am angry with them for abetting racism knowingly!) did so mainly in response to their feelings of precarity, uncertainty – it was actually poignant to me the way they hoped against hope that Trump would “bring back coal” and give them a measure of security. Never mind that he seems to be an insane liar; he painted a picture of himself as a savior of the “forgotten man.” But Adolph Reed scoffs at the ludicrous notion of the “precariat” as a new thing. Precarity was and is the default state of workers already – always. He says, in effect, that we should call things by their right names and not make up fancy new words to obfuscate and depoliticize, to regress into “representation” as substitute for real, bare-knuckled struggle.
Remember, even if you do nothing, the struggle will come to you anyway. The rightists understand the stakes – and we need historical materialism to help us see through the fog and resist capitalism.
(by Robert Allen)