The Working Class Pandemic: Wildcat Strikes and Working Class Self-Organizing in the US
Published 2020
15 Pages
1 File ▾
by Robert OvetzIn
In Lizard Talk , historian Peter Linebaugh provided a history of ten plagues stretching back to the biblical era, as close as anyone has gotten to an epidemiology of class struggle. Linebaugh names this little book after Zora Neale Hurston’s notion of how folk knowledge of tactics and strategy is passed along from worker to worker. Plagues, pandemics, and outbreaks have been the mechanism for reimposing control of an unruly working class, what he describes as the “utility of the plague to the maintenance of class discipline.” But they have also been the openings for expanding and circulating the tactics and strategies of worker struggle which we are seeing around the US today.
During the 1793 plague in Philadelphia, Linebaugh reminded us, servants deserted their masters, demanded huge wage increases, freed prisoners, and self-organized care for the stricken. The1831-2 cholera plague attacked multi-racial working class neighborhoods like Five Points in Manhattan, which also happened to supply the critical longshore workers for a key choke point in the international supply chain. Likewise, the 1918 flu pandemic corresponded not only with a WWI strike wave but a revolutionary circulation of struggles and general strikes from Russia, Mexico, Germany, and the US that lasted until the early 1920s.
If capital established a “pathology of the class relation (workers are sick, rulers are healthy),” the working class responded in ways that recognized that “pestilence, in its social dynamics, contains a possibility of liberation.” According to Linebaugh, struggle was the workers’ own vaccine during deadly pandemics and even foreshadowed them. “The struggle for justice became the therapeutic treatment of choice upon the part of the slaves, the poor, the afflicted.” With the explosive spread of wildcat strikes across the US, we are seeing another class struggle over the use of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s become increasingly clear how capital’s dependence on the “essential labor” of now unruly health care, food service, transport, cleaning, and logistics workers in key sectors of the economy has made it extremely vulnerable to disruption. How vulnerable is marked by the once “unorganizable” Amazon/Whole Foods tracking worker organizing at every store. While these strikes are mostly defensive, for the time being, the US
working class has shown some signs that is relearning how to “walk the talk of the lizard,” whispering its warnings of global insurrection. This is especially amplified by the nationwide protests
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