something from the notes

Context

We are not just seeing the emergence of new technologies in this age of humanity but also the emergence of new ideas.  

Not only the ability to quickly reproduce works of art and literature but also to dig much deeper into the strategies that move populations to act and think.  

Somewhere in the sea of information you can find every day some instance of data, some fact or observation that has been harvested so early it shapes the development of public awareness long after the anonymity of the passing time renders the source of the idea unknowable.  Something will show up, and it will be a few months or so, or longer, and it will show up again, but with more force of one kind or another.  And of course the question that it raises is what is happening in the meantime between when ideas first show up and when they become popular at least for a short time and the answer is that it is changing the narrative in someone’s brain about how they perceive themselves in their relation to the world through how they see each other react to the idea.  We have seen profound shifts in the narrative in the past year and one of them that I would like to discuss tonight is the idea which has entered public consciousness recently, that everything should be seen in the context that it appears in and also the context in which it was created.  More than ephemera from the campaign, this was a profound statement from Mrs. Harris that may have opened up some minds to contemplation.  

Nothing happens in isolation.  Even that remark about context had context, which was that it was about a study to figure out the context in which there are large numbers of immigrants coming to our country.  That’s three layers of context - that it was about context, it had context and that was about figuring out the context.  And they figured out, by the way, that the context was the cause of the immigration.  Context generally means that nothing happens in isolation.  Things that happen, they’re usually related to something else or else totally enmeshed in the fabric of reality, depending on where you stand.  But it’s all the same thing.  It means you have to consult the conditions that gave rise to something, the network of relations it has with other things, and the environment it exists in, if you truly want to understand it.  And still when we look at the context of the immigration situation we are in it turns out that we are part of the context for that because through an overbearing use of foreign policy power we have destabilized governments in Honduras, Bolivia, and Venezuela just to name a few that have happened in the past decade.  It turns out that you can find a lot of evidence that the U.S. is a corporatist state that backs up its economic demands on other countries in the arena of foreign policy with military force.  We have a large number of immigrants from Latin America and the context of why they leave is the reason they’re here: sometimes it’s violence or instability, state violence or else an artificially deflated standard of living.  Sometimes, when you look at the entirety of the immigration system, they are of a repressed minority in their own country and they have nowhere else to go.  At the very least we should let them in.  I believe we should take seriously the old American idea that immigrants should come over and help us.  Often times these decisions are not practically accountable to the population but are accountable to elites.  At least we can prove that their needs are most peculiarly attended to.  And that’s why there’s so many immigrants.  We sent U.S. corporations into those countries with military protections so they could exploit people and resources there and get away with it, which, by the way, they would do just as well here, and this was so damaging to the economies and governments of those countries that so many left.  

But even though context was in all evidence in these situations pointing to systemic or structural reasons for immigration they suffered from longstanding conservative narratives that obscured the narratives that would have led to the context and therefore the true facts from being discovered.  A lot of these obscurantist narratives have to do with emotionally potent oversimplifications, and they are a manifestation of population control.  And I think context is generally speaking the best way to approach these problems if you want to understand them truly and without facade.  So we’re not going to escape the power of context to shape our world.  It’s going to be, it already is, foundational to our ability to analyze and get along in an increasingly globalized, interconnected and interdependent world.  Along with that we’re going to have to understand these narratives and how to change them and that starts with context.  But you will notice that when you start paying attention to context you experience something called cognitive dissonance.  You start to notice that people say one thing and do another.  Do you follow me?  If you want to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk.  I experience cognitive dissonance a lot more when I’m not walking the walk, or talking the talk.  Sometimes not talking the talk is why you have cognitive dissonance.  Because it’s part of the way you experience the context you are in.  Sometimes if you talk the talk, you are not walking the walk, but sometimes if you’re walking the walk, you should talk the talk more too.  And if I am allowed to say one more thing on this subject I would just say that human beings interpret situations better than they interpret people.  And so we should think, I think it is important to think, about the situations that give rise to all these issues that we talk about and not the least because truthfulness is hiding behind limitations we impose on ourself, on what we can’t see, fields of knowledge far removed from the eye.  I said before that immigrants should come over and help us.  It is part of the context that that was on the original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, so it has been part of our country and its fundamental values since the beginning.  Written on there plain as day is the message that all the demonizing of immigrants today would have to you be rendered obscure.  The founding group of people of this country wanted to populate this land with all the peoples of this earth.  There was actually a lot of talk in the beginning about destiny in a really stupid and obvious way but you have to remember that it was new at the time that no one from Eurasia knew precisely that the Americas existed and suddenly to our limited historiography the West had been linked to the East and America’s destiny from this perspective was to be a metaphorical bridge between the geographic West and geographic East.  There’s an interesting quote from an actual bridge builder, the architect of the Brooklyn Bridge who wrote, “As the great flow of civilization has ever been from East towards the West, with the same certainty will the greatest commercial emporium be located on this continent, which links East and West, and whose mission it is in the history of mankind to blend the most ancient civilization with the most modern.”  

Well, we are getting on a bit so let’s talk about that commercial emporium that we are apparently living in.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed in liberty and free will, once said that the state, and he was talking about America, served two interests and those are agriculture and commerce.  Of course those are two ways of doing something, somewhat of a duality held together in a balance.  They make up two bodies of elites.  I believe this is what Paul Potter spoke on when he said “name the system.”  The reason that hasn’t changed since the sixties is because the system is designed to hold two opposite views.  So we still should be systemic in our thinking and identify how the system is working because it’s designed to work and we have to figure out how it’s working and who it’s working for.  The reason that hasn’t changed since the sixties is because no one thought to update it.  

Human beings interpret situations better than they interpret people.  Down through the ages that has been the best and only way to get men on the right path.  Well I want to say one more thing on this topic which is that as long as they have been around people have read books in the hope that they would find there the complete context to structure their lives.  But real ideas come from the great world outside and they ever will because no one book can give you all the context you need to understand how your life is working.  I would tell you to read widely but even that is table stakes for the enlightenment period we are going through as we live and breathe on this Earth, right now.  Turn on your computer and you know it to be true.  What matters now is the play of forces for progress matched against the power of the state.  Now this is important because context won’t get you out of a jam mentally if you don’t understand that your actions are the context for these tense deliberations with power and it also stands to mention that to those who don’t recognize that we are in a negotiation constantly with state power about our rights, our agency, our dignity: our system is set up to promote this.  You can say we need big and fair government and also believe it needs to be responsive to the needs of everyday people, and in fact you should.  The state is not accountable to the people unless the people hold it to account.  Power concedes nothing without a demand.  The state gathers power to itself continually until the people take their power back and demand that the state act in their interest.  Now, note that I said interest; the people’s interest.  The interest of the population.  These are not the economic interests whose needs are always served by power.  I am not speaking to what Emerson called the interests of agriculture and commerce.  All through history the people’s interest has only ever been served when people stood together and made a demand.  Any measure of economic, social or racial justice we have is because unions stood up, the oppressed stood up, at the ballot box, the picket line and the protest march, and stood together in solidarity in denunciation of the misguided agenda of the interests of the powerful. 

I was listening to a lecture on the internet the other day.  Rick Roderick was speaking about the Information Age and he said something I’d like to share with you.  He said there’s probably more information in one building in Washington, D.C. than in previous human history up to the start of our nation.  This is very important because since he made that statement, it has only become more clear that the hoarding of information by our government poses a real risk to our unique rights and privileges.  What turned Boston into a seething hotbed of discontent a scant few years before our Revolution and sent the Sons of Liberty out into the streets is just as evident now.  Illegal searches and seizures of “persons, houses, papers, and effects.”  Something may be illegal before God and man before it is illegal before a state.  But right now, it is illegal but it is still going on.  I say to you now, mass surveillance, is a Fourth Amendment violation.  It must be.  Internet communications are a paper and an effect.  They are just so new that they are not protected effectively.  But let’s also apply some context here and make some progress on this narrative.  What was the history of mass surveillance?  It turns out it has a concrete history that can be studied.  It has to do with the mistaken foreign policy choice of the U.S. to get into a colonial occupation of the Philippines.  It was a decision of the Republican McKinley administration to occupy the Phillipines, but I’m sure a lot of people opposed it, and we contested the Philippines from 1898 to 1946, whether they wanted it there or not, and this was probably already unjust.  But right around the time when we were back then fighting off the Moro Rebellion which had predictably risen up on those shores, there was a massive modernization of surveillance.  And that is the root of the modern surveillance state.  

This is the context for why we have bulk collection or targeted collection or whatever else we have going on that is surveilling people and intercepting communications.  And it is a Fourth Amendment violation.  This is what they did: they put names and faces in a database and used it to surveil, intimidate and coerce.  You would never know if you were being followed or someone would come looking for you or your associates or your family if you were someone who lived there.  And then what they did to them and to us is they computerized it and they brought it home to us in the U.S. in the form of militarized policing.  And this is why you see the barbaric way the police react any time people figure out what’s going on and go out in the streets like when George Floyd was killed: they are always escalating.  And this is what happened and what continues to happen whenever there is some sort of disaster and we don’t stand up: they escalate and they introduce more and more surveillance.  That is how we got warrantless wiretapping and PRISM.  And it is a Fourth Amendment violation.  And this is all, like they like to say about cyber, all ancient history by now.  There have already been massive escalations in surveillance and cyber due to China’s intimidation of Taiwan.  From the context you can see that this system wasn’t meant to regulate us.  Militarized policing and surveillance are incompatible with our system of government: they are colonial systems.  

Let me be very clear that there is no evidence that can lead to any conclusion about the whole matter at hand other than that mass surveillance was the product of a colonial project.  What we’re talking about is war about foreign territory that quickly becomes through a radical shift in strategy a project of population control because the opponent is so asymmetric and devious, so committed to being on the right side of history, and drawing such strength from the population.  Remember, the people of the Philippines did not want us there with troops and administrators.  They only wanted what anybody would want in that situation: freedom and an opportunity for a decent life.  But we are looking at the thing to solve the problems of today, and so we have to admit this was not a proud moment in our nation’s history.  But we are looking at context.  So the Moro Rebellion set off a colonial project taken up with special fervor to quell the insurrection.  The area of the Moros was excluded from President Theodore Roosevelt’s proclamation ending the Philippine Insurrection.  The area was put under combined civil and military administration.  The system of repression was optimized to the point I have described, where the whole thing was computerized and the state could basically observe anyone as they see fit.  It was a panopticon.  If you were suddenly put under such a situation, would you not rise up?  The problem is, that system has steadily been being actuated here in the U.S. in the years since.  If there was a time to rise up, it’s now.  But we can do something about it.  We can try to get Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act, because the Fourth Amendment is not for sale.  You can see there’s some cognitive dissonance in the way that our government has espoused its principles and in how it has acted when it came to other states.  At the very least its actions have not been in line with its words internationally, and that’s bad enough, but when it tries to bring back from its failed foreign projects new institutions that are contrary to the principles of which this country was built, it is a betrayal of our true purpose as a nation.  Few of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights are as American as the Fourth Amendment, which came out of the widespread opposition to the British use of writs of assistance to raid and seize goods and papers in the colonies.  This was a major cause of the Revolution and a rallying cry and motive force for our Revolutionary Sons of Liberty.  To now allow the government to now in effect issue digital writs of assistance based on a discredited colonial theory is unthinkable.  We should take good notice of the context in which some support escalating the surveillance state and others support denying any government on these shores from contravening the rights of Americans.  I’ll take the Sons of Liberty any day.  

There has never been a more effective weapon than context to discern the truth and combat political falsities.  So I want to present to you another thing you will find when you start thinking seriously about context that is not cognitive dissonance, and that is intersectionality.  Simply put, one singular identity can contain multiplicities of the political, or social or economic categories by which unscrupulous political actors would divide us and hold us separate and not united.  You will find that you and those you know have more than one social or political identity and that old political trick of dividing the population against itself contradicts the very fiber of who you are or someone you know.  With intersectionality, we build bridges between issues, between people and between populations.  Because who you are and what you care about can’t be confined to the little box that systemic factors may want to leave you in.  You can claim multiple affiliations and you have the agency to do so.  If power consists of the ability to transcend divides, then intersectionality is the power most dear to a democratic polity.  You see the field of struggle now as coalitions attempting to solve complex issues.  Let me give you an example.  There is a concerted effort to shut down Enbridge Line 5 which poses a danger to Michigan’s Great Lakes.  This effort is about fighting climate change, but it is also about combatting corporate greed.  The context shows that both of these motivations are true, and that is what intersectionality means.  There have been reports made of police who seized cameras used by Enbridge Line 5 protestors, taken them away, plugged into a device for a time, presumably downloading the pictures, absent cause.  And these protestors had noticed being surveilled on the internet in the past.  And it is a Fourth Amendment violation.  The time will come when everyone understands this, when we lift high our heads to see the coming dawn, and the word on everyone’s lips is “I am my brother’s keeper.”  Yes, there will come a day, brothers and sisters, when solidarity will ring out through the land and that day, if it comes, when it comes, will come on the wings of intersectionality and with the understanding of context.  For in all the travails of humankind one thing has been certain and that is our deepest desire is to not be alone, to build bridges not walls, to construct beauty and justice out of the intersectionality of our lives, and with that, I earnestly commend to you the study of context as the basis for informed citizenship and participatory democracy.  

Mayday reflections

I want to say some words about Mayday and the proposed general strike.  What should be more widely known about May 1st, Mayday, is that it was a festival to celebrate those heroes of the past who protected economic and social justice.  In the classic Saturnalia fashion, where all societal order was decalcified and turned on its head, Mayday was the proof in those inegalitarian and repressive times that a more democratic and egalitarian society was possible.  If you can do it for one day, you can do it for two, then three, then a week, a month, a year; to the whole live long time.  Fast forward to now, and the times are slightly improved, but still, sure as can be, inegalitarian and repressive, but I say this about the general strike: if you can do it for one day you can do it for two, then three, then a week, a month, a year.  The only way to live in that egalitarian and just world we desire is to bring that feeling of labor strife and working class anger to further shaking loose the traditional social order which is positively medieval.  

The truly incisive critic would say that we live in a constant saturnalia that has disrupted injustice and created modernity.  The only way to further improve is to further disrupt.  

To further the goal of Mayday 2028 we need to embrace the dramatic side of labor action.  The Mayday plays provided the intellectual fuel to disrupt feudalism, however, we need to challenge and re-conceive the modern social order, by releasing its discontents,  and thus rekindling the spark of sympathy and solidarity amongst the victims of rapacious capital in as many places as it can go.  We need adept storytellers in words and language to either transcend technical jargon and eliminate the need for it in communication, or find ideas upon which we can think or work.  The spirit of the Mayday plays updated to modern times may therefore be encapsulated by that comment by Wendell Phillips: “Easy men dream that we live under a government of law.  Absurd mistake!  We live under a government of men and newspapers.”  

A government of men and newspapers.  Surely that couldn’t be the case.  But remarkably it is. And you will see from the history of the modern Mayday that a government of men and newspapers is what we want and the best safeguard against distress, labor distress or societal distress. Law is the scaffolding around the structure upon which these actors work.  Of course the word men is generic. Of course the word newspaper is broadly construed.  And of course it’s a government of men and newspapers.  Men of course can live anywhere and newspapers can be anywhere.  Why does that make it a government?  Of course it’s influenced by state action.  You have both a government of men and newspapers and you have a government of state action. So that leaves us an interesting question which is what is a government of men and newspapers going to do to push back against a government of state action?  Mayday exists in the spectrum of things that can be done about it.  

The long corruption of capital is a done question as far as Mayday is concerned.  Capital will find nothing for it here; on this day anarcho-syndicalism sets the rules but there are no rulers.  In London, a committee formed for the purpose revived Mayday over the year between 1998 and 1999.  On January 18th, 1999 the first Modern Mayday began.  A leaflet was distributed which named the problem as “endlessly repeating the same patterns” and stated in part: “Today we attempt to take over the tube, but we do so in solidarity with the tube workers.”  The first principle of Mayday is there shall be no collateral damage.  They created a worker-tube rider alliance that controlled the subway for the day.  And there’s no reason why that had to stop. The second principle is to build coalitions for solidarity and to go on strike, withholding your labor, which the pamphlet rightly named as the best course of action in all worker cases.  

This is because of carried interest. The partners take a little off the top for to account for your labor, however those are your lost wages.  If you withhold your labor you can get back your carried interest as collateral and use it as leverage in the negotiating process. (As the Fifth International reminds us, “only when the bosses are scared of losing everything can a breach be made”).  

However anyone going out on strike should know their Fourth Amendment rights. They can not seize or search you absent cause without a warrant. I want to comment on recent news of SEIU members in Nevada seized in a police van that pulled up right in front of their picket line.  It was a Fourth Amendment violation.  SEIU members deserve their wages and even more so they deserve fair recompense for their violated rights.  And I know the SEIU is working hard to make this right. 

The fact that state action is backing up capital in a fight over carried interest shows how important it is to stand on the side of Labor in this fight, and how the very people we on the side of labor are calling out and challenging are feeling fear over the increasing power of organized labor. But they have only begun to feel the pain.  

The resistance and solidarity that are intrinsic to this holiday are reflected in its complex relationship to nature.  Having a meeting “on the green” was an old tradition on Mayday.  From the early 1770’s through the early 1900’s Jack in Green, dressed in wicker to make him appear as a tree, would present himself while milk maids or the chimney sweeps of London danced around him.  This was a reference to the Green Man, which often featured in church carvings from the time.  

In the Americas, when the first settlers erected a maypole in Quincy, Mass. and drank copiously of beer while dancing with the natives, the Puritans shut down the party with military force.  

However the spirit of saturnalia which remained in those revelries continued, and the revelry continued to draw repression from the authorities, until that repression stopped. The most effective way to suppress the riotous common folk on their day of jubilee was to build over the sites where they had held their meetings and celebrations and passed their messages.  In London the powers that be built houses over the green where the celebrations had been held and gentrified the neighborhood to stifle the people’s voice.  

Of course if you’re going to have a party you’re going to have one.  And there were some traditions that the state could never shut down. Taking group walks down the common paths was one example, because they by ancient law had to be kept open as long as they were used once per year.  That is still the law in most states and Michigan so far as I know.  It is where the common law right of way comes from, after all.  Well dressing or dressing of springs and water sources was another animal with ties to ancient laws and which has special modern relevance as citizens try to take back public control of water resources in an effort to stop climate change.  Navigable waters are common highways in the old Northwest Treaty states under the equal footing doctrine, so they would have to remain open so long as they are used once per year; however they are navigable by right in those states, at which point they become common paths, that is is to say legally they become trails.  As to what a trail is, the National Recreation Trails Program says “Definitions can be really broad or quite specific.”  And reminds us that it is “established either through construction or use and is passable”.  In Michigan any trail can be named a “Pure Michigan Trail” so therefore there must be something called a trail if there was a capacity to name it something.  It establishes the right of way through postulation.  For you never know if there is an ability to change the name, if there is a higher way.  

The American way is the will of the people and the people’s right to exist.  That is dogma.  

But the people used to ignite wooden wheels and roll them down the hills and crags into the fields to celebrate Mayday.  This practice was banned by the Catholic Church in the 1700’s but continued. 

What the people don’t understand is that the Robin Hood of the Robin Goodfellow plays wasn’t Robin Hood.  There was a criminal named Robin Hood, but Robin Hood wasn’t Robin Hood’s real name, it was a name he adopted after the crusades.  Was it Robin Goodfellow or was it Herne the Horned God that starred in the play and Diana was the Queen of May on Mayday?  I’m pretty sure Robin Goodfellow returned what was stolen to the people by becoming Herne the Horned God while the people gave flowers to the May.  And I remember that because someone said “flowers to the May” to me once, it was out in the street, I don’t remember remember that.  Although by the way I saw that there was a case in Star Court in the medieval year books that said men dressed as Robin Hood were arrested for being disorderly as a mob of men; this was a trend and it was struck off, it was a guilty verdict, they or men dressed like them had been disorderly in connection with Mayday; in any case Robin Hood was not Robin Goodfellow.  Robin Hood was an imitator of Robin Goodfellow, who was also a character in a complicated drama illustrating life.  How far back does this go?  As far back as he knows.  It is not his fault for wanting to act like Robin Goodfellow but he chose violence instead of class uplift and that was the trap he fell into.  Still he was one of many imitating the great mystery play.  And he was drunk and upset.  And so if you want to know the truth of the Robin Hood story it is that it ends at Mayday as merely the imitation of a greater truth so much more of which is revealed.  

Cernunnos, Cernach or Cunavalas, Saint Cornely, Esta Navi Wog, Amanai are the other names of the Horned God Herne who was mentioned by Shakespeare.  It is related to the horned serpent art cave in South Africa and possibly the dicynodont fossil.  It has been incorporated into education we all got in school. It teaches us to always be faithful to our God and our conscience in equal measure, and conscience is king.  This is a whole nother story but at Mayday someone was crowned King whether that was King of sawing boards or fixing drainpipes or what have you and anybody could be king and they stayed king, but that is another story.  It tells us that there has always been resistance to injustice among the people.  They satirized the king. We should focus on building movement power.  The medieval craft guilds paid peculiar attention to the Feast of St. John on the Summer Solstice and to Mayday which was a fun time, and they were both Quarter Days.  “To Peebles, to the play” reads a Scottish poem about the Mayday celebrations.  That’s why the UAW pays close attention to cultural power and should continue to build bridges with movement power: Labor has no shortage of stories to tell.  

But taking into account the historical instances of 8 year olds protesting for an eight hour day and safe working conditions and being beaten down by the police and other atrocities that have happened on Labor’s long walk, something has to be said about securing the power of the protest or picket.  The report from the year after J18, when the roses and flowers were planted, from the front lines was the police tactics deployed against protestors of all kinds in this new era that had been established by the anarcho-syndicalists would be to “pen protestors in”.  And that is why you always flank your maneuvers.  A picket line should take up two sides of a street for more than double the impact.  Not only does it command attention and the police are more likely to check it out, but the police themselves are bound to interpret situations that concern the movement of goods and services with an eye that is more favorable to our cause.  Some people operate in the vicinity of the police with exactly this objective so it is best to be skeptical of them as they might be involved in some deal with the police over lost wages.  We don’t go to the police about lost wages. They can’t get it back for us and we know better than to think so.  

Getting back to what I was saying about cultural power.  We have in this age a lot of capacity to reforge traditions in workers’ favor. There are some examples from history to illustrate this.  The King of France was offered a Lily of the valley as a gift on Mayday; he decided to then present lilies of the valley to the ladies of the court.  Workmen’s associations have sold them by the piece on Mayday in France since or pretty much since.  The conservative psyop to replace Mayday with Law Day or even Law and Order Day is just another example; it can be opposed by the narrative of a general strike.  They are doing psyops every day; we are opposing them with narratives and we are winning.  This is another game we can win.  

We win by taking the Men of government and newspapers on strike, to complete the catechism; this is the third principle of Mayday.  A general strike would awaken sympathies we couldn’t imagine.  One of the immortal Haymarket martyrs declared, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle here today.”  Well that silence is here today and it is time for it to be silent no longer.  When a Haymarket era pamphlet read “War to the Palace, Peace to the Cottage, and Death to LUXURIOUS IDLENESS” that does mean something different for every age.  It is necessary to break with the continual adaptation to the logic of the bosses, says the Fifth International about organizing at Stellantis at Termoli.  It inevitably leads to overproduction and dismantling.  The age that we are in presently has something serious to say about the lost wage problem and I do believe it is the end of carried interest one way or another.  Men have fought, killed and died needlessly for carried interest and it has to be ended, and I don’t just mean the loophole but the entire corporate structure has to be changed because they are hiding your lost wages inside carried interest.  You have to withhold your labor to get it back.  When you withhold your labor you can get carried interest that really belongs to you as collateral to use at the bargaining table.  The other thing you can do with carried interest is if you really get it back, you can use it to pay off your loan on training, making you a better person.  Now, what I think happened in the Nevada picket line was that some workers got their carried interest back but they and it were seized before they could stake it as collateral in the negotiations.  So now we know what to fight.  Your Fourth Amendment rights should suffice to retake your collateral, thus police should not interfere in collective bargaining in order to repress workers any more.  We have to turn it to a rights-based discourse.  We live under a government of men and newspapers.  The Men of government and newspapers go out on strike and a new saturnalia begins to disrupt the old economic order.  

Like a fish to water

There’s a story that there’s two fish that are swimming together one day and one said to the other the water sure is nice today and the other fish responded well what do you mean when you say water?  And I have been pretty well understood that I think we are like that other fish when we don’t critically investigate the facts that hold us all together or actually consider the facts of existence. Like for both fish, there’s plenty that makes up the social existence of lived reality that we consider so essential that we miss mentioning it so much that we somehow don’t pass on knowledge of the mere facts of its existence: mere facts like War is destructive, or Technology requires consumption and waste, or Productivity measurements depend on how we decide to measure it, all get washed out without attention to them in the defenses against everyday processes of alienation.  Some have said that alienation is part of everyday life.  David Foster Wallace said to remember the phrase “this is water” when alone in the alienation of capitalist existence.  But some of the unfinished work that he left undone and will never be done by him is where do we continue off of that statement, “this is water”.

I say we should respond by saying “water is life”.  It means we should question premises and investigate everything from the position of integrating first principles into our lives.  It was either Thales of Miletus or someone I know that started off all western philosophy when he declared that water was “the source of all understanding of mankind from the brute to the sophisticate.”  The importance of irrigation to the development of civilization should not be discounted, and its existence as a passive allegory for literacy is attested to by the ancient allegory of the dry well which links the internal world to the outside world; The links to ancient near east histories of civilizations that first flooded and then dried up are clear, meaning that since earliest records water has been the lifeblood of civilizations.  

Truly this allegory has existed at the liminal space between facts and actuality.  Consider this placard from Hong Kong: “Be water. We are formless.  We are shapeless.  We can flow.  We can crash.  We are like water. We are Hongkongers.”  Water inflects on social movements, and is poetically constitutive of the way, and it understands social change.  Water, moreover, is linked to dreams and wishes, by Gaston Bachelard and others, a whole law of the sea, and intertidal waters.  The sea stands for freedom in fact.   In actuality it is more inclusive.  In the laboratories of the democratic imagination there is an emerging consensus that we need to move from dreams to reverie and the sea is one of several common locations that embodies reverie.  Others have to do with water too: rivers, lakes and streams; dry river beds known as wadi;  However, there are others: intersections of thoroughfares when and where not in use by traffic; bridges at all times whenever wherever underneath or above; any landscape showing terrain or topography — any walkable path.  And any and all trails have to be kept open if used once per year (and are kept on Mayday). A friend of mine said “dams” and I said “not all but then again why not.  Why not imagine spaces that way” — as we have already done with spaces tied to anarchist organizing.  There are places around the world that are tied to ancient symbolism and monuments and they induce reverie.  The open road in a good mindset and setting with a reliable car induces reverie in the right dappled sunlit light.  Driving the speed limit but really speeding over smooth road through the lush pastures of southern Wisconsin ridin’ high on a barrel with wheels; nothing can compare, brothers, to cruising on four wheels and you’ve hit fourth gear.  Except, it is claimed, Pyramid 11.  And the feeling is you want that to go with the reverie. The road represents freedom, it is also idyllic; it is freedom, and it is a reverie.  

I might as well take a minute to talk about the common law right of way.  The government has wide latitude to deploy right of way, but that is because the laws give wide permissiveness to creating rights of way, not because it is restricted to government but because it’s  scripted and original for the Union to be more united.  I would note here that I’m not talking mostly about easements in gross which is how such common paths get laid into law but rather about floating easements particularly about access.  It’s actually true that you can get a floating easement for any path you use like to skip the curb on your walk. Isn’t that fascinating?  I find that fantastic.  In actuality I would simply extend the common law rights work being done on navigable rivers to trails.  so the story is the ancient custom is you keep common paths open by using them once a year but not on Mayday proper where you seize all the right of way you have taken by using your common paths and bundle it with a bunch of other things into a bouquet which is given to Diana the Huntress with the bow and arrow to sort it out.  In other words you have a parade down the main streets.  Then you make a map along with a full construction of the rights of society and then return it all to the people with the understanding that the people are the root of any law, any government, and any unjust authority is not derived from them.  Usually this was done through literature in the figure of Robin Goodfellow, often stylized as Pan, but known more properly by another name.  So you do not walk the paths you want to keep open on Mayday, you walk main paths. But part of the celebration involves the reconstitution and return of the people’s knowledge including the whole entire thing of the common law.  So of course, trails and workman’s comp and those sorts of things, all included in ways we are only just starting to learn about in a rigorous manner since J18. 

You see, dreams are more limited than reverie.  Just like we want to expand our understanding of common law about rivers, streams, and waters to paths, trails, and rights of way, we want reverie and not just dreams in order to conceptually grow and spiritually advance.  Water is, as plenty academics and thought leaders have pointed out by now, a political category.  Water is the hammer, but politics is the drill.  

So I want to continue investigating the original situation because I don’t think we are done with it.  I have said Water is Life but My second response and second overall original statement which is the third bar of the stanza would be “life is thought, like a fish to water”.  

I subscribe to the Promethean notion that language rose up at the beginning of thought and spread among the human species from a single individual.  And when Bachelard says “water is the mistress of fluid language” that does not imply that water is everything any more than it implies that fluid language is everything.  So of course in a capitalist society we want to demonstrate using some analogous organizing principle to the medieval Robin Goodfellow plays that the people are the origin of all government, and laws exist for the preservation of the people’s will, rights and progress toward racial, economic, and social justice.  However the good news is that this play exists and the means to enact it while focusing and enhancing its power are known to IWW and brothers of the trades. The key to increasing the power of the solidarity myth is to actually spread solidarity.  Someone has to go on strike, and we take their carried interest in the negotiation and leverage it across all of our contracts collateralizing the debt that is owed to workers due to our lost wages of work. This actually operationalizes the very essence of solidarity. Then we hold on for dear life as they count and sort the accumulation.  Then like I said after returning the substance of the argument to the people, showing the people that they are the root of all government and all laws, Labor will with labor’s ways build a topography showing the true knowledge of the people.  This can actually be accomplished and examined by solidarity organizations.  After the collateralizing of the debt you can make central demands and the corporations have to listen to you because you have seized back their ill gotten and unfairly held gains which are really yours by right.  You can get some money from this with profit sharing but it is really about the whole bag of intangibles; of honor and dignity at the worksite and the visible gains from your labor; workers run the world and they have yet to see that only because of the lost wages of work problem; if you seek evidence of that look first at carried interest and to change it turn your attention to the various ways it can be leveraged in negotiating for better contracts. 

It often comes to my mind how, we frequently don’t consciously acknowledge the source of fortune, accomplishments and successes because the source is so bound together in the realities of our shared and discovered existence, like water from the perspective of a fish.  We have to interrogate that immense complexity, but although it is life too, our propensity to take to it like a fish to water brings thought to life by the great empirical Standard.  Ascertaining where we got access to the great common walkway of life shouldn’t be harder than imagining a fish thinking about water.  Being much more intelligent than a fish, I like to think a human being could do one better and figure out when he was made aware that he is more than the fish. Or just when he was made. On most occasions requiring self consciousness that will do. 

When someone references “This is Water” they are referencing metaphors for the population, surging, cresting in waves, agitated in ripples and currents, as well as the boredom of just another day waiting in line.  When someone declares “Water is Life” they might as well say that they want more than information about the facts about what is going on, they want belief about what is actually going on.  But we should drive the point home that water has always been a literary reference.  Unjustified power has always been fearful of a populace that has understood this which is so true more reason to say it: life is thought, like a fish to water.  

Origins and History of the General Strike

General strikes are older than capitalism. 

When we think about general strikes we have to take into account this is a strategy with multifarious roots and sources and it is also pretty common sense too, so it should not be wrong to list all the possible things we could consider from the past to inform any action we may take.  I am here not to say this or that thing in the past was or was not the precursor to the general strike as it is contemplated now.  I mean even when they were building the royal necropolis at Deir el-Medina in ancient Egypt they walked off the job on strike.  So there are many examples from history to choose from. 

When we look at the roots of the custom, it traces back to several streams of ancient history.  We can name for sure Jewish, Roman, and Egyptian sources for the custom of the general strike, and, as for China, the old tale is that when they were building the Great Wall, the workers went on strike and created the concept of China.  I don’t know much more about that than what they said.  

The Jewish origin tradition is based on the similarities to the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee year.  Based on ancient traditions, upon completion of the seven-year Sabbatical cycle and the fifty-year Jubilee cycle debts were forgiven, land redistributed, there was manumission, and so forth. 

The Roman tradition is the secessio plebis by which was meant the mass strike of the lower class against the ruling class by way of removing themselves from the city to a nearby hill where they couldn’t be bossed any longer by the rich and powerful, thereby also withholding their labor and gaining leverage to demand more representation and rights, which resulted in some reforms.  

Then of course the Egyptian strike was a very important precursor to the general strike.  The workers in the Valley of Kings during the New Kingdom at about 1170 BCE, were paid in grain, oil, and wine by the custom of the time, however in this year the shipments were delayed, sometimes by weeks, for several months in a row.  And so the workers one day laid down their tools and walked off the site of the royal tomb to the town that they lived in which was inside the Valley of Kings, so this was an entire town on strike in the very ancient past.  Their supervisors had no idea where they went.  They marched to the town officials and demanded payment.  The ones they talked to agreed they should be paid, but were unable to provide the rations.  So the next day, the workers marched to the temple of Ramses II and sat down right there demanding to the Vizier they be paid.  According to some sources one among them said: “It was because of hunger and because of thirst that we came here. There is no clothing, no ointment, no fish, no vegetables. Send to Pharaoh our good lord about it, and send to the vizier our superior, that sustenance may be made for us."  They were successfully paid out some bushels of grain.  Also whatever corruption that had befallen their supply of wages in kind was banished for several years.  

Some medieval strikes shut down entire fiefs: the Walsham Manor Strike of 1353 although small, shut down operations on the Manor, and more to the point, percolated through society and was the precursor to the 1381 peasant’s revolt.  Wisbech, also in England, where in 2025 workers are in fact on strike at Princes Food Factory, was the site of a 1538 cobblers strike.  Journeyman cobblers walked off the job, and set up on a neighboring hill where they made two demands: one, for the masters to come join them and discuss ameliorating their wage problem; two, that no one from out of town come to work at the struck business lest the strikers take from them an arm and a leg.  This is the origin of the phrase “they are charging an arm and a leg for it”.  They would take the left arm and the right leg.  Although this threat was made it was not carried out upon anyone actually. 

In the Americas, where the settlements by early companies were run like medieval fiefdoms, Polish workers who made glassware, pitch, potash, tar, resin, turpentine, clapboard and frankincense went on strike against the company in Jamestown in 1619 because they were denied the right to vote, and because of the economic leverage they were able to bring to bear, they beat the company which gave full voting rights to continental workers.

Enlightenment thought had a debate about the general strike. On the one hand you had La Boetie, who said: “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.”  On the other Jean Meslier said: “Humanity will not be free until the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest.”

The concept of the general strike was widely embraced and had no peer in that nothing could compare to the strike when it came to building power towards democracy. 

We might put it this way: whenever superstition is banished from the body politic there arises a need in the human animal to withhold his labor and address directly the question: what is his stake in the functioning of society— and he will conclude after long reflection that society owes some debt to him as part of the social contract. And that is what happened in France during that period. 

Of all the accounts of this, the most spectacular was the account of Volney, under the heading “The New Age”, in chapter fifteen of his Ruins, where, translated by Jefferson, he relays the spiritual apotheosis of a general strike movement.

A note on the page attributed to Jefferson reads: “Compare the Mamlouks of Egypt, the nobility of Europe, the Nairs of India, the Emirs of Arabia, the patricians of Rome, the Christian clergy, the Imans, the Bramins, the Bonzes, the Lamas, etc. etc. and you will find in all the same characteristic feature. — “Men living in idleness at the expence of those who labour.”  

I will briefly explain what made this general strike so perfect and complete in the eyes of Volney.  The people raised a “discriminating standard”, said to the privileged classes “form a nation apart, and govern yourselves”, said to the state “only tyrants rebel, a nation cannot rebel”, said to the soldiers “would you strike your brothers?”, and at last said to the priests “we crave the law”, and went on to win in brave fashion. 

Nor did this strain die out in French politics.  Look at how embroiled the very idea of a general strike is in the events of the July Days of 1830 through to the French Revolution of 1848.  The coal miners struck in 1833.  The tailors created a “national workshop” to provide work for the strikers.  The next year a solidarity strike of workers who were members of mutual aid associations came in defense of coat makers in Lyon who got a wage cut.  Then the tailors struck again in 1840 against the worker’s passbook calling it an abbreviation of rights.  Almost 30,000 were on strike by September.  1844 saw the miner’s strike in the Loire.  The Paris carpenters struck the next year, 1845, and then in 1846 the repression could not contain the revolutionary urge and so there was a revolution in a few short years. It’s not hard to understand how someone like Blanqui could exist in this environment.  That brother was jailed by every regime governing France during his tumultuous lifetime, mostly for advocating for democracy and syndicalism, and history will continue to reverence his name as a martyr hero in France. 

Some who don’t look at the French side of this history or just believe that the French and English cases are too different cite William Benbow as the originator of the general strike idea.  Benbow was a radical reformer who had written a pamphlet encouraging the working people of England to take a month-long labor holiday to establish workers councils throughout the land.  When he held a demonstration that was meant to be a dress rehearsal for his labor holiday, he was arrested and tried for treason.  When released he moved to Australia and ended his life advocating for land reform.  However his ideas were picked up by the Chartist Movement which wanted a bill of rights for England.  And after the failure of the second Chartist petition, a general strike was launched in 1842 in England beginning in the coal mines and spreading throughout society. 

In this survey of history we have only arrived at the dawn of capitalism and already evinced a long and proud history of the general strike.  What remains is to sketch out the current field and situate our current reference points. 

General strikes spread across the United States after the introduction of capitalism, with general strikes in Philadelphia in 1835, the great slave revolt during the Civil War, St. Louis in 1877, New Orleans in 1892, Seattle in 1919, and Oakland in 1946.  But of all these which were all great  the greatest was the St. Louis Commune of 1877.  No other general strike compared so favorably to the Paris Communes where Paris was seized and governed by the people—with surprising efficacy—because in St. Louis in 1877 workers seized the town and the railroads and some of the most important work on workers’ self governance was done as they administered the civil government.  I don’t see anything in civil government that can’t be fully administered by workers themselves. It’s when combined civil and military rule is brought into effect that workers begin to see repression of their ideas.  And the St. Louis Commune wouldn’t last precisely because military administration would be brought to bear on their nascent workers paradise. But as far as if everything would work if workers and only workers were in charge of the means of production, history has shown that time and again that it would work better and be more profitable, but it is the rank and superiority of management from the middle to upper levels that would be vastly devalued and that is what the companies really want to hide away from the public when it comes to the idea of worker ownership, not profits.  

The whole schedule at the rail yard and depot could be reworked so it was better for workers and for profits but the better system could eliminate most of the middle and upper management and make the management obsolete.  Bakers could secure more direct supplies of flour through a syndicate and achieve higher margins. Shoemakers could secure better pay through syndicate deals.  The St. Louis Commune established all this and more.  We have the St. Louis Commune to thank for providing the proof that general strikes can pave the way toward worker-owned enterprises; in fact, it may be the only way to establish them widely. 

The popular sentiment is, it appears, on the side of a general strike once more, and we have to realize that while the specific challenges may be as different to those of known history as are the times we live in as compared to those of past eras, the capacity to carry out general strikes is present to the degree that there is an urge to do it; we are not limited by lack of historical precedents as we would be limited if we had a lack of imagination and candor about the issues facing us now that we can unite to solve. Fortunately I do not think we are limited in that aspect.  

I want to talk about it in context of the First and Second Battles of Blair Mountain. The first was in 1921, when miners and their families prepared to march on Logan in West Virginia but were prevented from descending Blair Mountain by 2,500 US soldiers and 14 bomber aircraft.  The second, in 2011, walked the same trail in an effort to save the battlefield where the miners in 1921 laid down their visions of a workers crusade atop the mountain, which the Massey Energy wanted to blow up with mountaintop removal.  Or as one activist put it bluntly, “the coal industry owns the WV government and they have cut a deal with the National Park Service to reduce the historical importance of the Battlefield so the coal industry can blow it up through the process of Mountaintop Removal.”

Unionists remember the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, but also the Second Battle of Blair Mountain which happened in 2011 preventing the strip mining of the mountain on which a sacred vow was taken by strikers to never forget what movement met that day upon which a flying squadron under the colors of the US of A, when the whole might of the government was against them at their moment of greatest strength; and this second battle fought nearly a hundred years later by nonviolent means was successful in raising consciousness as linked visions of the expanding role of labor in society through expanding the nature consciousness. 

When we think back not so long ago to the teachers strikes that started in West Virginia and spread across the nation the impetus for that organizing would not have been there if not for the preparatory work done by labor during the Second Battle of Blair Mountain. 

Labor and the environment, for a time bogged down in disagreements over Labor’s role in fighting climate change, are now building bridges toward each other. You see this on Labor’s side as they reach out to environmental movements through collective action movements such as the one to save Blair Mountain, and through education.  You see it in the Green New Deal and the Sunrise Movement, where the environmental movement is touching base with Labor.  It’s work like this linking Labor to elements of society that makes a general strike general.  

The power of a general strike is that it is general.  The power of a general strike is that it seizes the levers of traditional power structures and replaces them with the changes demanded by workers, and opens a third reality where ideas of experimentation, social reality and lived experience are heightened to the point where they become liberatory: every idea on earth about human organization has been preserved by working people and will be recalled the moment anyone who knows it enters that third space, as any one among you who have gone to a rally, demonstration or picket line will recall; there is a subtle shift into a mental space where anything is possible that is really the expression of the people’s will being second only to the power of God.  I had a priest tell me once, “The power of the general strike is second only to God.” And, he added, “if only they could use it.”

And it will be in the union hall where, in the fullness of time, all illusions are swept away and revealed to be economic trickery, when men stripped of their superstitions will figure out how to use it.  Among the halls of power on earth the Union hall is second to none. 

The Spirit of the Laws incarnate

It’s a bit peculiar that we have to discuss the right to walk.  A friend and I had this discussion once.  “I cut across there all the time,” he said to me about a particular patch of lawn.  He was 19 at the time.  The context was important.  He had been walking to cross country practice when he was pulled over for walking on the sidewalk. “Not once did he look at my lit cigarette,” he confided in me.  He followed that with “It felt to me at the time that I was being profiled for looking Jewish.  I’m not,” he told me, “but it was giving all the stereotypes.”

The thing that could not stop bothering him was that he had cut across his patch of grass on his way and wondered if he had been under surveillance at that moment, and if so, what rights he had at that moment to cut across the grass. I told him I would come up with something. Basically it is called a floating easement which can be a number of things including access or cutting across a lawn on your walk to soccer practice. 

Not only was my friend detained but he was taken to the station and failed a drug test and charged MIP.  “So not only were your rights violated—“, I said.  “Which ones?”, he asked.  “Fourth Amendment,” I replied.  “And so?“, he asked again.  “But they were violated twice,” I continued.  I later had to come back and clarify that his rights were actually violated three times in that respect. 

They have to pass a certain threshold to detain you.  Cops need reasonable suspicion to detain you.  Or so we thought.  It turns out there is something called a stop which is not a detainer and for that the cops only need probable cause. However, when you are stopped you can go about your business and the cops can’t hold you there to talk to you.  To hold you there they need to escalate to a detainer which can only be granted with reasonable suspicion.  My friend was actually told that he could move but after he moved on just a few steps he was told to stop and that he couldn’t move. However, that was an escalation of the situation by the police officer without reasonable suspicion because the act of moving away when you are told you are free to go cannot be pretext for reasonable suspicion.  At that point they had seized the body of my friend without reasonable suspicion which was another Fourth Amendment violation. 

This same cop later showed up at school a lot as this case wore on.  I marched up to him and just asked him once, “why do you do detainers?”  And he said, “We don’t like to do detainers. The people don’t like it but they make us do it.”  To which I responded “Why? Who is they?” And he gave me a significant look and said, “They.  The higher ups.  They make us do it.”  

The case was later decided as a case of police overreach. Everything was dismissed, to our relief, but my friend had to do court-ordered drug school.  My first encounter with injustice in policing right there.

Police need reasonable suspicion to detain someone. There was no complaint that could be seen as reasonable suspicion in this case. 

Without escalation, the police had no cause to detain my friend.  There was no complaint made about him either.  If there is no complaint made about you to the police there is no probable cause to stop you.  However they can’t stop you without probable cause and can’t detain you which means stop you from going about your business without reasonable suspicion.  They can’t take you down to the station and book you without reasonable suspicion which is a higher standard than probable cause.  That is to say as far as understanding police procedure enough to know your rights they can question you, but they can’t stop you going about your business without reasonable suspicion and they can’t stop you from resuming your business without taking you down to the station, and once they take you down to the station they have to book you.  But in this case they didn’t do that.  They only gave him a drug test and didn’t book him.  Which is not according to procedure. In fact that is another escalation bringing this whole saga into the realm of legal crimes.  This whole situation has the flavor of nothing else more than extraordinary rendition.  An extraordinary rendition is three Fourth Amendment violations. That’s my theory on that.  

And as in this case if there has been no complaint about you made, there is real reason to ask whether police had reasonable suspicion at all.  

Well, that case being resolved, my friend had a logical and cogent, reasoned follow up question: can a floating easement be granted for temporary structures?  The answer is yes with a writing specifying the details.  It’s usually a temporary construction easement. You do need a writing that satisfies both parties.  It cannot be adversely possessed because you can’t adversely possess an easement.  Custom can dictate how you get a writing for such a particular construction and the nature of temporary structures means that they are peculiarly short-lived by the very nature of their issue.  But you can get a writ for those structures you see in the woods on college campuses from College of Natural Resources on almost all campuses because it’s part of the essential fabric of working class society provided to the public at large to encourage that kind of constructive behavior too.  

I want to open a new discussion on the common law.  Can you possess private spaces like a coffee shop or bookstore or tavern for a certain private use?  It turns out that you can through something called an easement in gross, otherwise known as an appurtenance in gross, which is established through mutual consent of the parties to the proposed use.  You just have to convince the business of your value and there are basically no restrictions as long as you don’t do a crime.  So there’s that, and when I look back on it it looks like my friend did not sacrifice himself needlessly to gain the entrance to that freedom.  Sometimes it could not be clearer that the most patriotic and moral thing someone can do is get in trouble with the law for a good cause. 

Think back to it please if you can: would we not have had a revolution if we hadn’t had the rights to floating easements for Revere to ride, temporary construction easements for the camps of Minutemen, and an appurtenance in gross for the Green Dragon Tavern?  Yes— Any attempt to deny in succession those rights to walk, build and do business must be defeated in order for freedom to persevere in the realm!  We cannot have this country without its revolution, the spirit of which in this instance proves to be the spirit of the laws incarnate. 

One final thought: what is the equivalent of the appurtenance in gross for public spaces?  That question goes straight to the heart of what the Fourth Amendment means:  you have the right to be secure in your persons, houses, papers, and effects, and this references a positive right.  You cannot be deprived of things you possess in public spaces absent cause; you have a right to them and your person that is inviolable by unreasonable forces.  This also means we have a right to privacy in public spaces that maintains decency, but more important than that, it means that only reason can deprive you of your right to be secure in your person, houses, papers, and effects, and if you have been deprived of them without reason, by rights you have not been deprived of them at all, for the same reason that an unjust law is no law, and so it will be returned to you. 

So I think I will end there except to say that the genius of this country has been that it never stopped improving itself because it gave us the tools we needed to fight tyranny.  We should take notice of the rights that tyrants, be they small or petty tyrants, would try to deny, and we should take account of the progress that can be made by defending those same rights that tyrannical persons would strive to deny us at every step. 

How about we stop caring about police and start caring about media?  Then the doctor becomes the teacher and the lawyer becomes the judge. 

OK, you can have technical assurance that certain aspects of the car are meant to be upgrades. 

However if seized in civil forfeiture the value is assessed without the upgrades. And the document with assurances is disassociated from the personal property. 

You can give the possessory deed to personal property to another party and you can reap the benefits of the personal property, however if you give that object into the possession of someone else it can become theirs.