The Chaos You Control

I’ve talked about a general strike a pretty fair amount in the last few years. It’s generally not seen as practical by most people. 

Part of the idea behind it is the ability to decide who gets to instill some level of order. Trump’s shutdown is in many ways no different from a strike. His idea to institute national emergency protocols is no different either. The shutdown creates the chaos. Instituting emergency protocols means he gets to institute the order he wants, which is why he likes the idea. 

Fascists create chaos so they can then institute the order they want. They’ve been eroding what semblance of order followed the sixties since Nixon was elected. They went full throttle when Obama was president, because they understood that some degree of chaos, whether Obama was responsible or not, would be blamed on him. It’s why none of the red states expanded Medicare until it threatened to bankrupt them or completely erode their ability to access power. Create chaos, blame the Black president, presto-chango, the person who tried to give more people health care, gets blamed for the inactions of people purposely keeping people from getting health care. It’s why there really aren’t any good faith arguments to be made with or against them. Good faith has established parameters, chaos is exactly the careless transgressing those parameters. When the goal is chaos, the parameters of how to get there don’t matter. Everyone and everything is collateral damage. 

That’s been the real trick of conservatism for the last 70 or so years. They’ve even actually convinced many people who think of themselves as conservative that the entire conservative project is about preserving order, when really it’s about instituting chaos so they can create a new, different order, no matter the consequences or collateral damage. 

A general strike takes all of that out of the hands of conservatives attempting to create a new order and liberals trying to preserve an order too naive or too arrogant to understand its weaknesses, even as fascist continue to demonstrate their ability to exploit those weaknesses to their benefit. It puts that power in the hands of the majority of people who have to live with whatever order is established. 

Our answer could certainly be, “Go ahead. Shut down the government. Institute an emergency. When we shut everything down, we’ll see who is better able to survive in a cooperative environment.” Trump and his fascist friends are relying on the fact that we’re going to cooperate with each other. He doesn’t expect every government employee who can’t make rent or a house payment to get evicted. He expects us to work together, to get him through the chaos he caused. If everyone got evicted, it would result in a de facto strike he can’t control. We get this on some instinctual, gut level, but we don’t really bring it out in the open. It's using our instincts to preserve order against us. 

That's another way that a general strike comes in. It removes the fear of chaos. If we've demonstrated we can not only impose our own order on that chaos, but that we can cooperate in a way to survive it and come out with a better foundation for an order that serves us, we can't be threatened with it anymore. It takes away one of the things that gives power to Trump and fascists like him. 

It also demonstrates that our cooperation with each other, down here on the ground level, is where the real power actually is. If we were able to do that, we'd be making good steps toward not having a few hundred, out of step politicians dictating what is and what isn't important to the rest of us, which is also a preventative from further authoritarian power grabs.