Signing up for picket shifts, getting ready for a boycott, industrializing at UPS, these are all incredibly helpful and useful ways to relate to thr upcoming strike. These are the legal and advisable ways to engage with the UPS strike.
I worry though that the left's relation to the strike will extend beyond these legal means though Having come out of BLM a few years ago, the tools of mass demonstrations, occupations, mutual aid, and barricades are in the popular tactical lexicon. I wonder how people will relate to the strike in this context.
Just like the UC strike, it's possible that militants will link labor and BLM, industrial action and mutual aid. Drawing on the looting of target in Minneapolis, the distribution of aid in Portlandand the blocking of highways in Oakland, student activists during the recent University of California strike blockaded roads, occupied cafeterias and distributed food for free.
I of course am not advocating it, but I wonder if insependant groups are going to intervene in the UPS strike the same way people broadened the UC strike, beyond a single labor struggle and into a class struggle.
After all, Fredy Perlman wrote that in France 1968,
the regularities of French society, and it cannot be explained in terms of those regularities. The social conditions, the consciousness of students and workers, the strategies of “revolutionary” sects, had all existed before May, 1968, and had not given rise to a student revolt, a general strike, or a mass movement determined to destroy capitalism. Something new appeared in May, an element which was not regular but unique, an element which transformed the “normal” consciousness of students and workers, an element which represented a radical break with what was known before May, 1968.
The new element, the spark which set off the explosion, was “a handful of madmen” who did not consider themselves either a revolutionary party or a vanguard. The story of the student movement which began in Nanterre with a demonstration to end the war in Vietnam has been told elsewhere.The actions of this student movement were “exemplary actions”; they set off a process of continuous escalation, each step involving a larger sector of the population.
Today, UC students get COLA raises and the grad student movement is growing. FedEx and Amazon workers will be watching the UPS strike and taking notes. It seems like just a few people putting out the call for this kind of action could make folks recall BLM. I wonder what's going to happen.
That doesn't seem relevant?
The strategy used depends on the extent to which you can work with union organizers. Academic UAW and Teamsters organizers are often very different, and the locals' leadership in particular.
I would approach BLM, UAW, and Teamsters with totally different strategies, with the later operating under the expectation that leadership may want nothing to do with socialists, so socialists' actions would need to be prepared to work around local leadership, not with.