Denver General Strike

Juan Conatz, an IWW member from Minneapolis, contributed an article to the May Day issue of the IWW’s newspaper, International Worker. In “Some Objections To Occupy May 1st,” Conatz confronts what are perhaps the most common quibbles about the wisdom of a general strike this May Day, from “Organized labor was not/is not being consulted” to “What about May 2nd?”

Yesterday, Conatz posted his interview with Burnt Bookmobile, a Milwaukee blog,

run by some people influenced by various anti-authoritarian tendencies, including insurrectionary anarchism, left communism, and nihilism, among others. During the spring of 2011, when the ‘Wisconsin Uprising’ or ‘#wiunion movement’ was in full swing, they put out a number of flyers, leaflets and posters that pushed the occupation or general strike concept forward and contributed to the more militant atmosphere that Madison saw traces of.

Earlier this week, in The Guardian, Slavoj Žižek asked, “Occupy Wall Street: What Is To Be Done… Next?” He points out the fallacy of attacking greed without attacking capitalism, and of protests that “express a spirit of revolt without revolution,” i.e., creating that which will fill the shell of the old world (to quote from the preamble to the IWW Constitution).