SF Bay Area Flying Picket Historical Society

The Bay Area Flying Picket Historical Society workshop, during the 10-11:30 AM slot in Room 3, will include a 45-minute powerpoint presentation on the 1946 Oakland General Strike, the last general strike to ever occur in the U.S. Although not well known, there were 6 general strikes that year and 4,985 strikes, involving 4.6 million workers, and both are still all-time records for a single year in U.S. history. Soon after, in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act prohibited the kind of solidarity strikes that made general strikes possible. I was also the beginning of mass consumer culture, TV, and suburbs that spread like an ecocidal cancer due to highway construction and the exploding numbers of affordable private automobiles.

But the legacy of Oakland's 1946 "Work Holiday," itself based on earlier episodes in the class war in the Bay Area like IWW agitations and SF's 1934 general strike, informed later radical iniatives from the Black Panthers to the "Draft Holidary" of the Stop the Draft Week in 1967 on the very same streets of downtown Oaktown. And the state's repression of these rebellions continues to this day, a more recent example the unprovoked attack on anti-war protestors at the Port of Oakland on April 7, 2003, with rubber and wooden bullets shot and tear-gas grenades thrown by the Oakland pigs.

This workshop will also include a discussion about the Bay Area radical history project we are beginning, where we hope to keep the lessons of this history alive to inform our own invovlement in the class war today. The presentation will include accounts of recent solidarity actions some of us participated in with striking, then locked-out, hotel workers in San Francisco. Although of only minor significance to the 4,300 picketing hotel workers, we saw it as a model of solidarity, completely within the tradition of the tactics that used to be able to mobilize the entire working class in a community to effectively fight the class war offensively and, at times, victoriously.

With the continuing Waltmartization of our lives, where the service industry economy offers us low-paid precariously unstable and marginalized work at the same time as making available easy credit, capital offers pseudo-survival with all the banal consumer goods made cheap by the hyper-exploitation of the new industrial proletariat in places like China. We see the need for true internationalism to unite in solidarity with those workers on the factory floors in China and the developing world, as well as with those refusing the increasingly alienated forms of work--and alienated consumption--on the retail floors of the Walmarts that are spreading these social relations from the advanced sites of capitalism, like the U.S., to every corner of the globe. Then we can truly begin to struggle to overthrow work and all the other exploitative, oppressive and alienating relations of spectacular capitalism.

Our workshop will explore how we can use the lessons of history to frame our strategies in this fight.

gifford