We Have The Power To Stop This: General Strikes 101

Hey all. I'm going to be honest, I'm having a hard time writing the newsletter this week. I'm on day 2 of staring at an empty text file, trying to find an approachable loose end that I can use to start untangling the giant snarl of emotion, information, and possibility in my brain and turn it into something useful to share.

I've spent most of my life studying the history of white supremacist movements, and tracking their current incarnations online. Some of you have been around for one of my impromptu lectures on the difference between the Groypers and the Boogaloo Bois, or the links between Henry Ford and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I've seen things doing that work that have permanently damaged both my faith in humanity and my overall mental health. But it felt important to know about those horrors so that I could help stand guard against them. So I stuck with it.

Over the last fifteen years, I have watched white supremacist ideas, and even openly white supremacist people, move from the fringes of our society to positions of real governmental power. I've worked myself into the ground over, and over, and over again, trying to do whatever I can to stop it. I've had people wearing swastikas threaten me with guns, and I've had my own "polite" liberal relatives interrupt that story to tell me that "nazi" is a polarizing word, and that if that sort of thing was happening they would have read about it in the New York Times.

I am very tired.

And very angry.

And very sad.

But that doesn't mean I'm hopeless.

Because I think we're on the verge of a general strike.

A general strike is basically the non-violent equivalent of a revolution.

Violent revolutions buy in to the idea that power rests in the rulers, and that the rulers need to be killed for that power to be ended.

A general strike recognizes that the true power lies in the people doing the actual work that makes society function.

If every C-Suite executive in the country stopped showing up for work tomorrow, their secretaries would have to forge their signatures on some things, but otherwise life would carry on pretty much as normal.

If every worker in the country making less than $150k stopped showing up for work tomorrow, the country would immediately grind to a halt.

Violent revolutions, even when they start out with broad popular support and a just cause, almost always end with the most corrupt and bloodthirsty faction of revolutionaries murdering their former comrades and establishing authoritarian rule. George Orwell described this pattern in Animal Farm after witnessing it first hand in Russia and Spain. (Next time we're hanging out in person, get me to tell you more about Orwell and the Spanish Civil War. It's a really interesting story.) From France to Iran, it's a pattern that has played out time and time again, and given strength to the narrative that true change is impossible.

By contrast, general strikes have a much better record of ousting dictators and replacing them with elections. When the entire population of a county joins together and says that the dictator isn't in charge anymore, there's not a lot that the dictator can do about that. He can order the cops and the military to quell the dissent through violence, but the police forces and military are made up of human beings. Every cop has someone in their life that they won't pepper spray, and every soldier has someone in their life that they won't shoot. If all of those people come together and say that it's over, it's over.

On Friday, the people of Minnesota held one-day general strike. Businesses closed, workers walked off the job, and students walked out of school. They demonstrated not only their opposition to the violence being meted out to their neighbors, but their power to bring the economy to a halt if that violence doesn't stop. They don't plan to stop there. And we have the opportunity to join them.

The Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation has been collecting a strike fund, and even a sitting congressman is starting to come around to the idea that a general strike might be necessary to maintain free elections. (There are also a lot of grifters out there trying to gain clout or money with scammy general strike sites, so make sure you separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm happy to help vet orgs/websites you're not sure about. Stand With Minnesota is a good place to start. It's a directory of organizations and mutual aid groups that was put together by a Minnesota organizer that I've known for years.)

While we wait for organizers on the ground in Minnesota to call for the next strike day, we can start getting ready to meet their call.

Now's the time to ask yourself what you could do to help a general strike succeed.

• Could you take a vacation day that day? Could any of your other coworkers? If enough of them did, could you convince your boss to shut down the office for the day?
• Could you get together with other local parents and grandparents to take turns offering childcare if the schools shut down? Could you help make sandwiches to feed all those kids and make it easier on the parents who are hosting?
• If you earn profit from rental income, would you be willing to forego that profit to help your tenants go on strike at work?
• Could you host a striking family over for dinner once a week to help with their food bill? Could you cook up a giant batch of food once a week and distribute it to striking families in your neighborhood?
• Could you set up "office hours" in a local restaurant or cafe and just be there for people to talk to?
• Could you help make sure your friends and family who don't follow the news closely get a chance to hear about the strike before it happens?

There are more than 340 million people in the United States, and that means there are more than 340 million ways to contribute to a general strike. If you want help figuring out what that might look like for you, I'm happy to get coffee and talk it over.

In other news...

So, that's most of my writing energy for the week, but there are a few other things I wanted to highlight:

• We now have Dry-Pods available over in our webstore! These are little sachets of desiccant made from reclaimed fabric. You stick them into drawers and storage boxes so that they can suck up any moisture that gets in and prevent the contents from getting moldy. I've been having a lot of fun making them, and I've been taking a lot of video along the way, so if the outside world calms down enough to let me get around to it, I should have a full write-up of the project in the next couple of weeks.
  • We're going to be doing a lot with reclaimed fabric this year, so if you've got any ripped or stained clothes/sheets/other fabrics that aren't fit for the thrift shop but still have some useful parts left, hang onto them for now! We're going to have a turn-in system at the Artisan Market this year, and that work shirt that lost a fight with a pen could get you a free Dry-Pod or a couple of stickers.
• I'm going to be giving a presentation for Common Ground on Tuesday about digital privacy and how you can reduce your footprint online. We'll go over the difference between digital privacy and cybersecurity, how to distinguish between different types of privacy threats, and what tools are out there to help protect your digital life.
  • It's in the big meeting room at White Lake Community Library on Tuesday from 5-7pm.
  • If you bring your laptop, you'll have the opportunity to tighten up your browser settings as we go through them. I'll do my best to list all the steps on a handout for folks with desktops at home, but there's no substitute for being able to ask questions along the way.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, so you get to see this week's nails! Decided to go for some 90s Riot Grrl energy this week. My camera really wants to make the color look salmony, but it's actually a bright neon pink, so you'll have to come to the presentation on Tuesday to get the full effect 😉

Stay safe in all this cold weather! I know it's hard on the humans but it's exactly what the Maples and other native plants need. If I don't see you at the Weathervane protest (Fridays at noon) or Tuesday's talk, I'll see you back here next week.