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Title: Intersecting Crises: Intersecting Resistance
Author: Jeff Shantz
Date: 2020
Language: en
Topics: crisis, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, green syndicalism, green syndicalist, Anarcho-Syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalist, resistance
Source: Anarcho-Syndicalist Review

Jeff Shantz

Intersecting Crises: Intersecting Resistance

Jeff Shantz

Crisis is a central feature of capitalism. It is rooted in the many

contradictions of capitalist systems. The contradictions between

collective production and private ownership, forces and relations of

production. The contradiction between working class needs, use values,

and capital’s requirements for profit, exchange values. The division

between production and consumption. The fundamental struggles between

capital and labor within production. Workers needs for the value they

produce (higher pay in limited terms) and capital’s need for surplus

value and profit. And the existential contradiction between capital’s

expropriation of nature as “resource” and the ecological necessities for

sustainable life on the planet.

Notably, these crises are not extraordinary manifestations, the system

losing its way, but rather are intrinsic to capitalist systems. Crises

erupt as more or less disruptive at periods within capitalist economies.

At certain points more than others the nature and extent of crises under

capitalism become more clearly visible or grasped.

The current period provides one such moment of clarity. The dual crises

of Covid19 and the struggles erupting over police violence and racial

inequality put a sharp focus on contradictions within capitalism but

also show the disparities and inequalities inherent in the system.

Behind them is a context of planetary ecological crises and threats to

survival.

These crises also show that struggles (not least of which involve class)

are at the center of capitalism as fundamentally—struggles over nature,

over social resources, over necessities, over the means of subsistence

and sustenance. They show that the demands of the system (ownership,

profit, relations of production) are sharply, irreconcilably, at odds

with the needs of the majority of people within it (for health, safety,

wellbeing).

Covid Crises

Covid19 has served as a concentration point brining together impacts and

effects of intersecting systemic crises of capitalism. It has

intensified burdens on working class people and communities who have

been faced with lost jobs, lost work hours, lost pay—all while having to

pay rent and being faced with possibilities of evictions (by landlords

who would never accept having to do without).

At the same time, health impacts of Covid19 have been disproportionately

devastating in working class communities, particularly for working class

people and communities of color, given the stratified and unequal

character of the labor market in countries like Canada and the United

States. Workers of color disproportionately make up labor forces in

service sector industries. They have had to keep the grocery store

shelves stocked with essentials. They have done the delivery work, both

in supplying stores but also doing delivery work for restaurants through

the falsely named “gig economy” or “gig labor” jobs for companies like

Skip-the-Dishes and Uber Eats.

Workers of color, especially migrant workers, have had to continue the

labor of planting, growing, and harvesting crops and ensuring foods are

available to make it to the grocery stores and restaurants in the first

place. The awful burden to health and wellbeing borne by farm workers,

especially precarious migrant workers, under Covid19 has played out in

stark terms in agricultural centers like Windsor-Essex in Ontario,

Canada (my own birthplace and hometown area).

The “hothouse of Canada,” Leamington, Ontario, was the location of

severe Covid19 outbreaks centered on farms employing numerous migrant

workers who were most harmed by Covid19 outbreaks.

Migrant workers in Canada are granted few rights, whether employment

rights, civil rights, or basic human rights. They are typically denied

basic workplace protections, proper and adequate housing, basic health

and safety protections. They are denied organizing and union rights.

Even more they are often made to work when sick, facing threats,

explicit or implicit, that refusal to work will lead to deportation and

ineligibility to work future seasons.

Housing conditions are often abysmal, with several workers sheltered

together in what are best described as shacks in close quarters in small

spaces that make social distancing impossible. Often thee shelters lack

clean, potable water or proper washroom facilities. All while farm

owners and operators receive subsidies from government.

Policing in Crisis

With lower paid and precarious labor, the experience for many workers of

color and with impacts of job loss and health crises in their

communities, there have been intersections with the other crisis of the

time—racist policing.

The economic crises and threats to health, housing, and

employment—threats, in no small part, to survival—in working class

communities, especially communities of color, have intensified already

incendiary conditions for a more generalized uprising against ongoing,

historic, police violence in these communities. Sparked by events caught

on camera, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the shooting

in the back of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, rebellions in defense of Black

lives, and against police brutality—but more generally against state

practices of oppression and repression against racialized working class

people.

In Canada, similar struggles have arisen in response to recent lethal

police violence inflicted on Black and Indigenous people, including

Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto, Chantal Moore and Rodney Levi in New

Brunswick. Notably, these killings occurred during so-called “wellness

checks” for people experiencing mental health distress. This too has

shown the social inequalities and lack of adequate health care and

social supports available to working class people—the very inequity laid

bare by Covid19.

At the same time this exposes a contradiction between the needs of

working class people for health, wellness, care, and sustenance, which

remain under-resourced, and the massive expenditure of social resources

plowed into policing and carceral structures, institutions, and

agencies—which are viewed by capital and states as essential. And,

indeed, which are essential for business and property owners within

capitalism. As critical criminologists have long pointed out, modern

policing has its roots as the standing force for maintaining systems of

inequality and exploitation. Capitalism could not have developed without

the police as a force for colonialism and class stratification and the

protection of property relations.

One can see all of this in grotesque form in the ignorant, uncaring

response by the Trump administration contrasted with their “law and

order” promotion of their re-election campaign and Republican National

Convention as police pageant.

Crisis States

Crises do not occur as natural phenomena. They are wielded in various

ways politically, economically, and culturally. What is sometimes called

the neoliberal period has been effected through what I have referred to

as Crisis States1. This analysis examines political shifts from the

welfare state to the repressive states of the neoliberal offensive on

behalf of capital.

Through Crisis States, capital and governments impose various crises on

working class communities, transforming labor markets and production

relations to benefit capital more completely. Dismantling the Planner

State (the social welfare projects of the post-war decades of

Keynesianism) from the 1970s onward. Crisis States have involved a

destruction and retooling of social services and programs that have some

utility to the working class and poor (welfare, rent controls, health

care, etc.) while building up the repressive functions of the state

(police, prisons, military). This has all involved a transferring of

social resources, from health care to housing to utilities to media over

to capital through privatization, P3s (public-private partnerships,

etc.)

It is no coincidence that this is the period of mass incarceration. The

1994 Crime Bill is an expression of Crisis State lawmaking. The War on

Drugs is its cultural form. This has significantly coincided with shifts

in production relations, movement of production centers out of “the

rustbelt” in the US, moves to service industries, increased

unemployment, poverty, and homelessness, especially impacting blue

collar Black workers and communities. The rise of prison industries and

private and for-profit prisons are also part of this Crisis State

transformation.

Crisis States have also involved outright attacks on organized labor

through anti-union laws, strikebreaking, intensified policing of strikes

(and other working class mobilizations), etc. These have created

intersecting crises within the working class. The response to these

crises from the state has not been social commitments to health and

wellbeing, but rather anti-social commitment to state violence, force,

and repression.

The Other Side of Capitalist Crisis: Resistance

Like other aspects of capitalism, such as the labor market, wages, the

working day, production, or profit, crisis must be viewed from two

perspectives. Crisis States, and the push for increased accumulation of

capital, represent the perspective of capital. But crises under

capitalism must also be viewed from working class viewpoints. The

working class standpoint (and intervention in) is grasped through

resistance and social struggles. In this, the present period of crisis

poses important challenges to the unilateralism of capitalist crisis.

The Black Lives Matter movements and mobilizations against state

violence offer the most striking, and noted, of these. But we must also

recognize ongoing Indigenous struggles for sovereignty and return of

land (“Land Back”). And the widespread, growing expressions of workers

rebellion, including wildcat strikes and calls for general strikes that

have emerged with a vigor not seen in generations in state contexts like

Canada and the United States.

Not only have these uprisings moved politics beyond the realms of

electoralism, representational politics, and a politics of appeal (to

hegemonic authorities). They have started to form and shape new

infrastructures of resistance, the more enduring, generative, resources

that sustain struggles over time and allow for the move from defensive

to offensive struggle.

Perhaps most significantly in the context of the current crises are

mutual aid and solidarity organizing as people have worked collectively

to support their neighbors and communities. From the mutual aid

societies preparing meals and care packages of essentials (toilet paper,

sanitizer, soap, etc.) for people isolated under Covid, to those

distributing tents, clothing, food, etc. for unhoused people in

collective tent cities, mutual aid groups have stepped forward to assist

with medical care and self defense during street uprisings against

police.

There have also been examples of rent strikes and anti-eviction defenses

in numerous cities as working class people collectively oppose the

brutality of landlords demanding rent (even as governments have offered

mortgage relief for owners) while people are without work or have

reduced incomes.

Wildcat strikes in and against workplaces have also happened, including

strike actions by service workers and delivery drivers (such as Amazon

and Purdue Farms workers). One telling example saw miners walk out at

Hudbay’s Lalor mine in northern Manitoba over their COVID-19 concerns

after contractors were flown into town even after a request by the town

council that the company suspend air travel into the region.

This has resonated too with longstanding concerns of Indigenous

communities resisting resource extraction industries on their

territories. Some Indigenous communities in British Columbia (unceded

territories) set up blockades to stop tourists from entering their

territories during the crisis.

Already dots have been connected and there have been calls for a general

strike. This is a potentially transformational development for a

radical, revolutionary, working class rising, putting forward the idea

of the general strike and making it familiar to new generations of

workers in ways that have not been seen in contexts like Canada and the

US in decades. #GeneralStrike was the top trend on social media for a

couple of days in mid-March. It returned in August when a stunning

wildcat strike by National Basketball Association players spread to

professional baseball, soccer, and perhaps most surprisingly, hockey.

While the strike was undercut by professional politicians (acting in the

service of owners) to defuse and divert the strikes into electoralism

once again, there was a moment of some anticipation.

Conclusion

Crises are always in the end about struggles. The intersecting crises of

the current period have been met by struggles bringing together working

class communities across lines of stratification, if incompletely yet.

Organizing remains a key. Capital organizes. That is what the Crisis

State projects represent and manifest. The working class organizes too,

if under conditions of duress, desperation, even despair. The moment of

Covid authoritarianism, of pandemic and policing, shows renewed forms of

working class organizing beyond the conventions of stabilizing,

reactive, politics.

Organized labor remains quarantined in part in the ossified structures

of business union managerialism. Might the emerging politics place

revolutionary unionism, syndicalism, back in the heart of working class

resistance, as its tools, wildcats and the general strike, become more

familiar? Might the new struggles raise the specter of class

solidarity—of class struggle? Might the terrain of crisis shift, with

force, to become not a crisis of capital but a crisis for capital?

Note

1. Jeff Shantz. 2016. Crisis States: Governance, Resistance & Precarious

Capitalism. Brooklyn: Punctum