Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: In capitalist societies, few moments bring to the surface already existing class divisions more than a strike.When the poor, the dispossessed, the disadvantaged, and all those who work for wages engage in mass protest -through the withdrawal of their labour or by the mass disruption of bourgeois normality -the everyday struggles of people navigating already existing oppressions erupt into broader public consciousness. 1 The historical significance of these struggles will vary depending on time and space, but these conflicts continue because, as Bryan Palmer and Gaétan Héroux argue in their exceptional history of Toronto's poor, class inequality is produced structurally as a relationship to capitalism and its unequal division of the surplus derived from human labour power.Yet, because class is built on a foundation of power predicated upon unequal exchange, it is shaped and moulded by "the crucible of struggle and resistance." 2 In that crucible, Marx and Engels observe, the bourgeoisie may produce "its own grave-diggers" because it creates and is dependent upon the misery that compels working people to resist.3 Strikes can take many forms, including prisoners refusing the orders of the guards, women refusing to perform culturally imposed domestic labour, Indigenous peoples placing their bodies between their lands and colonial development projects, and working people walking off the job to pressure a recalcitrant employer.While strikes can occur in isolation over issues pertaining to wages or workplace conditions, they can also break out into broader challenges to existing social relations.In these moments of crisis, strikes expose and break down the contradictions on which capitalist societies are founded.While strikes occur in all capitalist countries, the Canadian state has always been defined, in the words of Leo Panitch, by its particular "commitment to private capital as the motor force of the society." 4 These early commitments, 1. Bryan Palmer, "'The New New Poor Law: A Chapter in the Current Class War Waged from Above," Labour/Le Travail 84 (Fall 2019): 53-105.
Source: Labour / Le Travail
Author: Charles Smith
Institution: University of Saskatchewan
Language: French
Topic: Labor Movements and Unions
Subfield: Public Administration
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3110150320