Reply #44: General Strikes are Violence [View All]

[Moochy]

In the Adam Smith frame of mind, Taxes are violence, anything that interferes with optimal profitability conferred to shareholders is violence.

So in that vein, General strikes could be rightly considered directed economic "violence" against the factory owner. I agree with your earlier point re: the "boycott consumer product X" efforts having little or no effect, as it's effect as violence on the producer is not harmful enough to change whatever offensive practices are involved in the production of said goods. These boycotts are never total, so there is a diminishing effect on one's individual or local group efforts when they are directed at the end product, and not at the choke points where the goods or services are manufactured and distributed.

The harm done by individual workers to their own well-being was the first imbalanced system to correct itself, through the strikes and organizing done in the late 19th and early 20th century. These days it is far more difficult for labor to organize and prevent the harm that many industries do to the commons and to disenfranchised people. I think that the TV news organizations are an example of a toxic source of misinformation that the market can not act to correct due to the market's lack of rules against monopoly and cartels. ( Darn Clenis for that FCC reform bill! That act has done far more harm than any other compromise he got passed! )

Like a soldier who must be conditioned to kill, and to overcome ones base nature through the artifice of psychological conditioning and the distancing power of technology, the corporate worker must too be kept confused and unaware of their own collective and individual power, toiling away silently, toiling away without dissent. Desperately saving up for the new plastic patio set manufactured by the lucky falun-gong members in a dystopic prison labor camp that is several shades of grey darker than that of corporate America. The fates of these two workers are invisibly and inextricably linked, by an economic interdependence that is not often seen.