Three waves of revolt: Where do we aim our fists to strike a death blow to capitalism's body?

[Fire Walk With Me]

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Read for the day: Three waves of revolt Where do we aim our fists to strike a death blow to capitalism's body? https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/106/three-waves-revolt.html …

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/106/three-waves-revolt.html

Muscles and Heart

The traditional Marxist answer, embraced by insurrectionaries from Bakunin to Occupy, is to hit the processes of production by going on strike. The total worker’s strike is the dream, once hauntingly imagined by socialist novelist Jack London, of the scales overturned: the rich starving in their mansions while the workers sit idle. The strike strikes at the heart and muscles of capitalism by threatening the system with the paralyzing withdrawal of our collective labor. But the transformations wrought by post-industrial capitalism, combined with decades of organizing for a grand defection that never materializes, have tattered the strike’s proud flag. The last generation to pull it off was the heroes of 1968, who instigated the first-ever wildcat general strike before flaring out.

Brains and Mind

A newer answer urges us to end economic bondage by abolishing debt. Debt, this argument goes, is modern day slavery. Unrepayable debts shackle most of us to the manic-depressive cycles of capitalism, while a decreasing number of men grow increasingly rich. Accordingly, two post-Occupy tactics make debt the bullseye. First is the debt-strike tactic, like the student loan debtors who collectively refuse to repay their loans. Second is the movement to strike debt, like the recently launched Rolling Jubilee. This project, conceived by Adbusters in 2009 and pulled off by a maverick affinity group of Zuccottis in 2012, buys distressed debt for pennies on the dollar – and then forgives it. Like the traditional strike, both angles of debt resistance target the system of production, now epitomized by Goldman Sachs rather than Ford. But such tactics also, as Friedrich Nietzsche and more recently David Graeber have argued, undermine the powerful social and moral bonds that enmesh us in the system. Anti-debt activism thus strikes simultaneously at the material and the ideological: at capitalism’s brains as well as its mind.

(More at the link.)