A public meeting was held in Seattle, on December 28, 2013, at the Black Coffee Coop, on the subject of “Class Struggle Along Global Supply Chains III”. The presentation’s aim was to promote a website, Empire-Logistics, “designed to be a platform for mapping the goods movement infrastructure and documenting strikes and other militant actions within its many distribution nodes”. The comrades involved in this project have already formed two working groups, with the aim of making the website more user friendly, making it easy to log on and “to add data for some part of the supply chain where they live, whether it’s a port transportation, infrastructure (ships, railroad, highways, airports, etc.), warehouses, factories/sites of production, etc.” The long-term goal would be to collaborate with “others doing similar things around the world”.
The presentation was given by G., well-known in the pro-revolutionary milieu. He has been active for many years hosting annual Class Struggle Meetings, with pro-revolutionaries attending from all over Europe, North America and Canada. He was involved in the Occupy Movement and played an active role in the Port of Oakland shutdown, in November of 2011. This past summer he, along with several of his close comrades, visited one of the summer camps in Europe, met with individuals active in the group, Mouvement Communiste, and set up individual meetings with other pro-revolutionaries. His presentation in Seattle was preceded by one given a week earlier in Los Angeles.
In the introduction he briefly outlines the idea behind his presentation:
“One of the forms in which the working class exists today is at the various nodal points along commodity chains. Global production is based on a systems of “factories without walls,” where components are manufactured using an inventory-less subcontracting system that scours the globe for the “leanest” costs of production – especially cheap and compliant labor. Yet these just-in-time chains are vulnerable and this presentation identifies the nodes where class struggle offers the greatest possibility for solidarity to spread down supply chains – and across oceans and borders.” And further he states that “this presentation will focus on logistics hubs, especially West Coast container ports in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Oakland and Los Angeles/Long Beach — and grain ports along the Columbia River and Puget Sound, to show the usefulness of the Empire Logistics project for mapping the geography of struggle and facilitating militant action across the region —and beyond. Connections will be drawn between textile worker strikes in Egypt, bread riots worldwide in 2008, the Arab Spring, Occupy West Coast port shutdowns in 2011, strikes by Hong Kong dockers, troquerowildcats, and the attacks on longshore workers at Columbia River grain ports.
G. asked me to send my comments and thoughts on his presentation. What follows is my email to him:
To be honest, my comments were intended to try to ‘nudge’ the discussion towards what I found missing in your presentation, which I think is the “subjective question”, the question of class consciousness. While I found your presentation to be interesting and an excellent “map” of how capital’s global supply chain functions, as well as showing multiple vulnerabilities in how the collective worker could potentially exploit the “choke points” as you call them (and I agree), what I asked you after your presentation was how you saw the development of class consciousness of the diverse labor forces at the different points in the supply chains “meshing”. I didn’t go into detail about this but what I meant, and would have liked feedback on from you, or anyone in the room that might have been thinking along the same line that I was thinking: How do you see links being made between the container workers on the dock and the “big box” workers at stores like Wal-mart, let alone the worker in Bangladesh or Cambodia? My other comment was that “I don’t think that the coalescence of class consciousness can be taken for granted.” If it can, then, no worries, right? But over the last few years with these different movements we have seen how difficult this process of struggling on “common” ground is, and how the ideologies of American populism, Islamism, nationalism run deep in the working class itself. What I was intending with my comments was to provoke a discussion around the subjective “choke points” that block the pro-revolutionary slogan of “internationalism” from becoming a lived reality of the collective worker.
G. has promised to post his very interesting response to my email on IP’s blog.
C.
