Like Mr. Yglesias, I’ve been living in a news bubble the past couple of days and only discovered belatedly (i.e. this morning, via a flyer posted at my street corner) that a general strike has been called on behalf of all immigrant workers in the country.
I’m all for people flexing their collective economic muscle, particularly when the big political problem they face as a class is that the work they do is often invisible or taken for granted. But what kind of strange, postmodern times do we live in when a call for general strike is met with the widespread notion that it’s the duty for nonimmigrant, middle-class folks to take a vacation day in solidarity? I use the term postmodern advisedly: it’s as if the middle-class “strikers” are nostalgic for the Marxist-Left political maxim that the workplace and relations of production are the proper sight of social struggle and change, but don’t actually trust the work-based resistance to do the trick, instead relying on symbolic-mobilization politics aimed at the mass media. And what’s more, the slippage from material to pomo-symbolic politics goes on with hardly anyone remarking on the historical change. Instead of general strike we get “general strike.”
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