On Leap Day, Natasha Lennard, who covers the Occupy movement for Salon.com, looked at some of the challenges facing calls for a nationwide general strike on May 1. In the course of this brief glance she raises a provocative question or two: How does a service-based workforce compare with an industrial workforce vis-à-vis the general strike, historically, and internationally? What about the people who already have ceased production—the unemployed—how do they strike?
Read the article here. Caveat lector, however, when she mentions Occupy’s role in “the ILWU contract victory” with EGT in late January. A Local 21 rank-and-filer calls the contract “worse than concessionary.”
The primary reason for pointing to the article is that Lennard ends it by reminding that “strike is a verb, not a noun,” going on to draw from Georges Sorel, the French philosopher who applied his thesis of the power of myth to the general strike—an aspiration as well as an action.