UNITE HERE Local 23 member D. Scott submits the following piece on the character of the #MayDayStrong coalition, it’s call for a general strike and the problems Virginia workers face to achieve this as we celebrate another International Workers Day.
The Democratic Party network has finally jumped on the bandwagon of calling for a general strike as many do when International Workers Day rolls around. While it’s preferable for the ultraleft to make such premature calls (they don’t carry the baggage of liberal illusions), it’s a major disservice to the working class for the well-funded opportunists tied to Indivisible and 50501 to propagandize for this type of action.
As others pointed out with the call for a general strike in Minneapolis, these efforts have defaulted into a consumer/shopkeeper boycott where the working class is missing and not heeding the call to strike. Rather than step back to evaluate why we’re in such a situation, the opportunists frolic along hoping to memeify a general strike into existence with union bureaucrat endorsement.
That the union bureaucracy would sign onto #MayDayStrong is an indicator of how unthreatening and unserious this coalition and call to action are. If there was a realistic potential for a general strike among the US working class the union misleaders would be doing everything in their power to stop it. Again, as we saw in Minneapolis, union leadership (such as ATU Local 1005) supported protesting, but made it very clear they were not going on strike for fear of violating their collective bargaining agreements which feature no-strike clauses during the life of a contract.
The ultralefts make the mistake of calling for a general strike when the working class isn’t organized and doesn’t have the capacity currently to meet this call to action. They aren’t doing it with the intention to mislead workers into the dead end of voting for more liberals as the #MayDayStrong opportunists are. This fact alone makes the ultraleft more virtuous than their counterparts.
The primary task at hand is organizing the unorganized, fighting the union misleaders to depart with large sums of union money to accomplish this, and preparing workers for a general strike when their capacity and objective conditions are right.
Of course we can’t discount the spontaneous potential of workers to take mass action, but with no independent working class leadership and organization that spontaneous potential is limited by the subjective factor where US workers have internalized liberalism as their ideological framework. From such a starting point any spontaneous worker mass action can easily be captured by the Democratic party machine and neutralized as we saw during the George Floyd protests or even the West Virginia teachers strike of 2018.
What’s needed now more than ever is a grounded, sober analysis of our current conditions and how to transform them with a viable socialist labor program, not hyperbole and platitudes which imagines that we are in a period of fascism requiring a popular front with liberal capitalists and the labor aristocracy.
The Virginia Worker 
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