The Docile American

The Nexus of God, Labor, Health Care and the Fear to Strike
by Zbignew Zingh
www.dissidentvoice.org
February 13, 2007

A perplexed European asked me a question: Why, she asked, have there been no general strikes in
America to end its aggression in the Middle East? Why, she asked, are Americans so unwilling to force
their government do what must be done?

These are not new questions. Everyone with an inkling of history and a modest awareness of international
news realizes that Americans, completely contrary to the foundation myth of the American Revolution,
are incredibly docile. It stings, however, when someone from the outside points out an obvious weakness.

Citizens of other industrialized countries are able to organize national actions to achieve common goals.
Americans at the university, labor, middle class and working class levels, however, seem to be utterly
impotent and thoroughly disorganized in any long-term, coordinated endeavor that extends beyond
electoral politics. We literally struggle to organize coordinated national events.

A general strike is one of the most powerful tools of non-violent civil disobedience. In a general strike all
work stops, businesses shut down, consumers do not spend money, teachers and students stay away from
school, employees call in sick, lawyers do not try cases, assembly line workers do not assemble, teamsters
park their rigs, pilots do not fly, doctors practice only emergency medicine, and commerce grinds to a
halt. General strikes are not violent, but they cause tremendous economic hurt. When properly
coordinated and prepared, they are very persuasive. General strikes have toppled governments, such as in
Argentina, and they have prevented the implementation of anti-labor legislation, most notably in France
and in Italy.

Some argue that Americans are simply too economically comfortable to participate in any political action
more strenuous that penciling an X on a ballot. That cannot be the answer. Indeed, the notion that
Americans live better than everyone else is part of our national mythology. Although many Americans
reside in spacious (and heavily mortgaged) houses and, by incurring massive debt, own lots of "stuff",
citizens of several European industrialized nations live, on average, healthier, more secure lives and work
far fewer hours than most Americans. Certain Asian countries are not far behind. Notwithstanding their
better living conditions, Germans, French, Italians and Spaniards, for example, are still more willing to
take concerted political action than are Americans.

There are several reasons for Americans' complacency and Europeans' engagement.

The Legacy of Slavery

Labor often takes the political lead in Europe, but not in the United States. The historical fact of American
slavery has resulted in an easily manipulable working class, particularly one that is comprised of
ethnically diverse peoples. By exploiting superficial racial phenotypes, big business interests have turned
American workers one against the other.

In the nation's first hundred years, slavery was a mechanism for controlling "free labor". After
emancipation, freed slaves (though hardly free in any real sense of the term) were used as a cheap labor
reserve that both in the South and in the North was manipulated to hold back wages all across the

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industrial horizon, from Black to White. By inciting White workers to extreme racial animus against
Black "competitors", business interests succeeded in preventing the creation of a unified labor front that
could have benefited everyone

Subsequently, poor European immigrants, women and children have been exploited in the United States
for the same reason and in the same way, just as were immigrant laborers imported from China and the
Philippines during the industrial expansion of the late 19th Century. The entire American immigration
policy of the 19th Century was an effort to control wages by bringing in cheap labor from overseas, much
as "globalized" labor is used today.

In the 21st Century, migrant workers from Mexico, Haiti and Central America now serve the government
sanctioned role of restraining wage growth among America's assembly line, service and agricultural
working groups. Contrary to the more infamous immigrant xenophobes of the Republican Party, big
business owners in the United States prefer a legalized "guest worker" system. That "guest worker"
system would permit cheap labor to temporarily enter the United States while preserving the option of
throwing that cheap labor away whenever it gets injured, old or demands fair wages or benefits.
Furthermore, the neoliberal globalization of capital permits businesses to move rapidly around the globe
pursuing the cheapest labor and the fewest regulations, thus adding to the wage-depressing effect.
Although the best defense against such wage-depressing tactics would be to improve everyone's working
conditions world wide, American labor has, instead, been led down the path of trying to protect its own
turf by defending against both immigration and the outsourcing of jobs.

The net effect of these intentionally debilitating efforts has been the lack of pan-labor cohesion that
characterizes the American working class. In a sense, American labor's class consciousness has been
lobotomized. Labor in America tends to be parochial -- it has been trained, by centuries of racism seeded
from above, to shun coordination with workers from different parts of the world. In sum, by taking the
bait of racism, American workers have repeatedly manacled their own legs and ensured their own, and all
other labor movements', feebleness as a political force.

But the legacy of slavery is not enough, by itself, to explain the docile American.

The Conspiracy against the Working Class

In the late 19th and early to mid 20th Centuries certain active labor unions (like the West Coast
Longshoremen led by Harry Bridges, the early Steel Workers, the early UAW, United Mineworkers and
Cesar Chavez's United Farmworkers) were able to coordinate industry wide or regional strikes. The
assertiveness and the successes of these activist unions scared the pants off the ownership class. As
documented by Alex Carey in Taking the Risk Out of Democracy and by Australian university professor
Sharon Beder in her books and articles about corporate and professional power relationships, business
interests in the United States, such as the Business Roundtable and the National Association of
Manufacturers (NAM), embarked on a long-term program, a true conspiracy to "educate" the American
public about the benefits of capitalism and the evils of democracy, socialism and unionism. It was a well-
oiled, well-financed campaign, and, in part, it was a counter-reformist reaction to the increasingly
socialized community that was evolving in Europe after WWII. The decades-long propaganda (1) effort
continues today through the efforts of NAM's sister organization for the services industries, the ISM
(Institute for Supply Management). Joining the pro-capitalism propaganda campaign are many of
America's best known reactionary "think tanks" like the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover
Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Discovery Institute and various large and ostensibly benevolent
"funding institutions" on whom so many non-profit organizations depend financially.

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The concerted effort was highly successful in subverting the American school curriculum, the mass media
and American popular culture. By the 1950s, a majority of Americans thought it proper for the federal
government to intervene on behalf of big business to "break" national strikes. The most well known
modern example of these types of manipulation was Ronald Reagan's mass firing of the air traffic
controllers in the 1981 PATCO strike and his use of military air controllers and non-union controllers to
destroy the union. Reagan's aggressive use of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act -- a thoroughly labor-hostile
statute that persists even to the present day -- was actually applauded by the majority of Americans who,
thanks to many years of cultural indoctrination, identified more with the interests of big business than
with their own class interests.

Whereas many labor unions in Europe have socialist or communist affinities, contemporary American
labor unions have been cowed by the well financed and ceaseless barrage of pro-capitalist propaganda. As
a result, they avoid any political alliance more meaningful than the slightly less business-oriented
Democratic Party.

Thus have the ownership class in America, through a concerted campaign of "education" and
misinformation, succeeded in steering the American public away from the allure of European style union
activism.

But the legacy of slavery and the conspiracy against workers alone cannot account for Americans' lack of
political focus.

Religion as Antidote to Politics

Religion holds the greatest sway over the least politically thoughtful peoples. This is not an accident. The
particular flavor of religion that dominates in the United States generally preaches doctrines of pacifism,
obedience to authority and a focus on rewards in a life after death. It promotes a culture of minimal
secular resistance and maximal secular resignation.

With a strong focus on otherworldliness, passivity and subservience, it is no mystery why American
culture and class politics favor religious institutions. In absolute violation of 1st Amendment prohibitions,
churches are granted tax concessions; they receive federal funding through "faith based" initiatives and
are otherwise supported as the main social structure of American society.

Curiously, notwithstanding its overt religiosity, American society is extremely violent in sports, sexual
relationships, and crime. More curiously, beneath the religious veneer of submission, self-abnegation,
sacrifice and spirituality lies a capitalist economic system that rewards violence, aggression, materialism,
colonialism, self aggrandizement, selfishness and duplicity. The right wing "muscular" religious
movements that have manifested themselves from time to time in United States history are amalgams of
all of the social vices described above, plus racism wrapped in "patriotism", together with the traditional
religious submission to secular authority. These "muscular" religious movements often work in silent
partnership with ownership interests in the spheres of big business and politics, often to the disservice of
the very people who make up the majority of these movements' lay membership.

Not all religious institutions are the same. Since the end of the anti-war movement of the Vietnam War
era, the stamp of the moderately "liberal" religious wing has marked many of the "activist" movements in
the United States. Although there is nothing wrong with polite protest, modest acts of very civil
disobedience and cordial petitions to government authorities to do the right things, they have been, more
often than not, ineffective. The mythology of meekly petitioning the government to seek redress comports
well with the predominant American church mainstream and it has completely overshadowed the concept
of the civil servant as the people's servant. In other words, the moderately liberal church-led form of civil

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protest prays for relief just like supplicants would pray for God's intercession -- on bended knee. They
demand nothing and they would never dream of organizing a national general strike any more than they
would threaten their ministers or God herself.

Unfortunately, nations like the United States that have a strong religious bias are also more oriented
toward arguments of faith than reason. If a people are brought up to accept miracles and mysteries at face
value, then they are also susceptible to believing the miracles and mysteries of 9-11, the official (and oft
changing) rationale for America's Wars of Middle Eastern conquest, and political authority generally.
Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's is not a good foundation for demanding a better material life for
the here and now. Faith in a higher authority also marches with faith in political authority, faith in
elections and the judicial system, and an unwillingness to believe that leaders are anything less than wise
and well-meaning. Faith can lead one blindly to accept the mysteries of religion and, when exalted to a
level of jingoism, can cause one blindly to accept the mysteries of foreign and domestic policy.

Thus religion, as currently practiced in the United States, no matter how ennobling of the spirit, is
frequently a brake on political activity and not the slightest threat to established power. It tends to
dissipate resistance to authority while celebrating the wholesomeness of non-confrontational and
supplicating appeals to the other side's rather dubious souls. Over time, the spiritual approach to politics
can leave people out of practice, exhausted and wholly unused to more vigorous (but still non violent)
resistance to authority. Eventually, as they unavailingly beat their heads against institutional walls,
citizens' aspirations and organizational skills may atrophy, they may lose their collective social memory,
lose their momentum and lose the self-confidence necessary to assert control of their own destinies.

In many polite American street demonstrations, church groups are in the forefront of organization. In
every European general strike, by contrast, churches rarely play a secondary role, if any at all.

The Fear of Unemployment

Although all of the preceding causes partially explain Americans' political timidity, probably the single
biggest reason why Americans do not take more direct actions like a general strike is their legitimate fear
of losing their livelihoods.

In those European countries where the citizens are most politically engaged, they also enjoy the strongest
social safety nets. Whereas Americans depend on their employers for their retirement pensions,
unemployment benefits and health insurance, Europeans are generally guaranteed all of that as basic
entitlements of citizenship. These guarantees make Europeans freer than Americans to express their
opinions and demand redress from their governments and their employers.

The European social safety nets -- socialized medicine, free or heavily subsidized higher education,
public transportation and rich unemployment benefits, among others -- are paid for by compressing the
range of income between the working and the management classes, taxing excess personal and corporate
income, taxing the added value of manufactured or processed goods sold in commerce (thus placing the
highest tax burden on those who consume the most), and by NOT spending a lot of money on the military.

It is no coincidence that when American workers were the most strident (during the early days of the
union movement), they also had the worst working conditions and the fewest employment benefits to lose
if they were fired. Currently, any American worker who participates in a general strike stands to lose his
or her job in an anemic economy where many jobs are low-paying service positions that provide dismal
benefits. The American striker risks not only her job, but the loss of retirement benefits and, most
importantly, health insurance for the worker and the worker's family. European workers simply do not
have to take that risk. Whether employed or not (and their job protections are vastly stronger than in the

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United States), Europeans tend to have extended unemployment and health care benefits that mitigate the
fear of unemployment.

Indeed, we should ask: Why was the American health care system designed as a system of private
"insurance" in the first place? Why should the American health care system be tied to work?

Insurance makes sense for allocating risk among people who choose to participate in certain electives like
driving a car or owning a house. Insurance is also appropriate if, upon your own death, you wish to
provide money for your family. Insurance is not a requirement of life because you can live without a car,
you can live perfectly well without life insurance and you can rent if you will not own property. Health
care, however, is different. No matter who you are, no matter how you live, sooner or later you will
become old, sick and need medical help; when you need medical care you will be the least able to afford
it. Why should this be a matter of private insurance? And why should this "insurance" be tied to your job?
Why do Americans always think of health care as a matter of employer provided "insurance" when this is
not the way it works elsewhere in the world?

The answer is precisely because it ties Americans' health care to their jobs, and by that tie so are they are
also tied up. Americans are understandably afraid to do anything that might jeopardize their employability
because there is far more at stake than just a paycheck. That fear rules out making too many demands on
employers, it rules out doing anything that risks the stigma of arrest or criminal prosecution and it
certainly rules out the possibility of a general strike. Americans have been chained to their jobs by the fear
of losing health benefits for themselves and their families just as medieval peasants were tied to the land
that they were forced to work for others. The system has been rigged, brilliantly so, to make sure that
American workers are forever serfs and forever politically hamstrung.

Polls show overwhelming public support for socialized medical care (2) in the United States, yet
politicians step gingerly all around the subject. The most that the majority of politicians are willing to do
is to expand in tiny increments the preexisting private insurance system. For that they expect applause,
but deserve none. Retaining the existing health care structure is not just about preserving the profit gravy
train for the insurance industry. Most importantly, it is a well crafted political system that was designed to
keep American workers in thrall, in a state of constant insecurity, tied to their paychecks and politically
blunted. For these very reasons, the American system undoubtedly appeals to those in other parts of the
world who also would like to weaken or dismantle their own socialized health programs in order make
their citizens as tame as Americans are.

Big business will resist any wholesale abandonment of the current American medical care system of
employer-based private health insurance unless, in so doing, it can slough off the cost of employer
provided medical insurance and put yet another financial handcuff on its employees. For small and
family-owned businesses, however, socialized medicine is a necessary equalizer that gives them the
ability to compete in a business landscape that is otherwise heavily weighted in favor of huge
corporations.

The European model shows that socialized medicine is essential for a democratic society. That model also
shows that it is affordable in the United States if, as in Europe, we more tightly compress the range of
compensation between the working and the management/ownership classes, eliminate the frictional costs
associated with the private administration of health care (3), fairly and appropriately tax individual and
corporate income especially at the highest ranges, impose a value added tax on consumer items, eliminate
hidden government subsidies for the likes of energy conglomerates, agribusiness and Wall Street, and,
most importantly, drastically reduce military spending.

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So long as their necessities of life remain tied to their jobs, Americans will remain docile and there will
never be an American national general strike. So long as Americans are incapable of organizing a national
general strike, they will lack one of the most useful non-violent democratic tools to bring their own
government to heel. For the very reason that the present system perpetuates the status quo, those people
and entities who profit the most from it will fight tooth and nail to preserve it. But for that reason alone, in
order to begin the process of freeing the American people from a culture of political servility, everyone
else should fight tooth and nail for socialized medicine and other basic needs that are totally and
unequivocally independent of employment.

Zbignew Zingh can be reached at: Zbig@ersarts.com. This article is CopyLeft, and free to distribute,
reprint, repost, sing at a recital, spray paint, scribble in a toilet stall, etc. to your heart's content, with
proper author citation. Find out more about Copyleft and read other great articles at: www.ersarts.com.
copyleft 2007.

ENDNOTES

(1) The word "propaganda" derives from the Latin and is related to the verb "to propagate", or to multiply,
disseminate or breed. In the 17th Century, Pope Urban VIII instituted a college of Propaganda constituted
to educate mission priests around the world. "Propaganda" was a more or less neutral term until the last
century when, as part of a pro-capitalist counter-propaganda campaign, it was "negativized" and
associated with communism or socialism.

(2) Socialized medicine in the United States is known as either "universal" health care or "single-payer"
health care. The words "socialized" or "socialist" are strictly taboo in American politics due, in large
measure, to the success of the "educational" campaigns of the ownership class described above and the
antipathy of the religious institutions to any coherent political creed that challenges their own cultural
hegemony.

(3) The notion that the "private sector" is always more efficient than the public sector is another myth
propagated by business interests. Because the private sector requires that "owners" extract "profit" from
an enterprise, that profit must come from someplace. It usually comes from reduced wages of workers,
higher worker "productivity" at the cost of employee layoffs, higher consumer prices, a reduction in the
quality of goods or services or, most usually, a combination of all four. Privatized public utility companies
with their history of providing less service at higher prices are a good example of how the reality of
private enterprise rarely matches its hype. In the field of private health insurance, William McGuire, the
CEO of UnitedHealth Group Inc., left office last year with a retirement package worth about $1.1 billion.
That represents a lot of health care premiums and it is but one example of the private sector's diversion of
assets from the commonwealth to personal wealth.

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The Less Docile American
Further Reflections on an American General Strike

by Zbignew Zingh

copyleft 2007

A few weeks ago, “The Docile American (The Nexus of God, Labor, Health Care and the Fear to Strike)”
was posted at DissidentVoice? and subsequently at other sites on the web. The responses ranged from
“huzzahs” to some pointed skepticism about the viability of a general strike in the United States. Because
many of the comments raised valid issues not directly addressed in the original article, I want to address
some of them here.

Geography – Does Size Really Matter?

Is the United States geographically too big to hold a general strike? My answer is no. From a practical
perspective, general strikes happen in urban, industrial and transportation centers. The strike that shuts
down the shipping and rail centers of coastal Italy, for example, affects the entire country, including the
interior. A strike by Canadian rail workers shuts down all production centers in Canada. Similarly, a strike
on the East, West and Gulf Coast port cities of the United States (an admittedly tall order) would
effectively shut down the entire United States.

It is not the geographic size of a country that makes it vulnerable to a general strike, but the degree to
which it is commercially integrated. The US economy is now completely interwoven. That is why when
shipping and oil refineries in Louisiana and Texas went down due to Hurricane Katrina, the economic
ripples were felt everywhere. For that matter, the globalized nature of capitalism has made the US and all
western “democracies” more susceptible to a general strike anywhere on the planet if it were to shut down
major centers of finance, manufacturing or energy production. So whereas size matters for Internet
spammers, size does not matter in terms of bringing the global economy to a halt.

Who Needs a General Strike When We Have the Peace Movement and Elections?

Is a general strike necessary in America where we have a viable peace movement? I do not believe that
any peace movement, in and of itself, has stopped any war. More importantly, no “peace movement” has
yet to prevent any war from starting (as in the impending assault on Iran).

Although the Vietnam era peace movement in the United States contributed to the ultimate cessation of
the war, it gained traction because of the ferocious determination of the Vietnamese people themselves to
rid themselves, at their own extremely bloody personal cost, from the yoke of foreign occupation. The
armed resistance of the Vietnamese people, together with the GI resistance movement, the economic
destabilization caused by the war, and the peace movement collectively ended the conflict. However, it
might have ended sooner if American labor, students and peace activists had had the ability to coordinate
a national strike.

Likewise, the primary credit for the shift in American public opinion regarding the occupation of Iraq
belongs to the Iraqis who have sacrificed themselves by the hundreds of thousands for the principal of self
determination. Their willingness to shed their own blood (and the blood of their occupiers) has given the
impetus to the domestic peace movement that it would not otherwise have. It is sheer hubris to deny
primary credit to those who have sacrificed the most for the sake of their own resistance movements.

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Not for one moment do I denigrate the sincerity and good intentions of the peace movement. I question
tactics of permitted weekend marches in parts of town where mild acts of very civil disobedience are not
seen and quickly forgotten. A demonstration has to marshal a huge number of participants and have (or
threaten to have) a significant economic impact for it to register on the rock-hard consciousness of the
ownership class. Somehow, one gets the sense that the ownership class has “figured out” the peace
movement, learned new tactics and learned how to let people harmlessly let off steam through harmless
parades in obscure “free speech zones”. Meanwhile the American peace movement, as though nostalgic
for the 60s, seems to have learned nothing new. Politics, although it is very serious business, is played by
the usual game rules. If your opponent evolves and changes tactics, then so might you, too, have to evolve
and change tactics.

Americans, particularly those in thrall of 'liberal' religious doctrines, seem immobilized by the
canonization of Gandhi and his “non violent” approach to anti-colonialism. Mr. Gandhi's tactics, however,
though technically “non violent”, deliberately incited violence by the British occupiers and mass civil
disobedience by the Indian people in order to increase media pressure for an end to the occupation. A
general strike would be similar to Gandhi's targeted salt strike of the 1930s. But what worked for India
and a post-WWII Great Britain that was militarily and economically prostrate may not work for a
bellicose United States where, as in the old USSR, the Administration is deaf to public opinion and the
media work hand in glove with business and government to pimp for war.

Is a general strike unnecessary in the United States because voters can change their government through
the ballot box? I disagree, even assuming, for the sake of argument, that all votes are counted, that no
voters are discouraged from casting their ballots, and that nobody tampers with the voter lists.

In the first place, elections matter only if there is a real choice of candidates to choose from. Due to
political gerrymandering by both the Democratic and Republican Parties, most congressional seats are
simply uncontested affairs. They are more like coronations than elections.

In the second place, elections in the United States will matter only if there is a plethora of alternative
political parties. Unfortunately, it is on that issue – the destruction or marginalization of any third parties
– that both the Democrats and the Republicans agree. Moreover, the cost of running for national public
office is prohibitive unless you are independently super wealthy or you have sold your soul to corporate
Mephistopheles.

Lastly, national elections tend to suck the life out of anti-war movements. In 2008, just as happened in
2004, the pressure will be on activists to line up with one mainstream candidate or the other in order to
elect, yet again, the lesser of two evils. Even now, otherwise earnest anti-war candidates like Dennis
Kucinich (who knows his party will never nominate him for executive office), serve more as the Pied
Pipers of Denver. Like at Boston 2004, they will lead the little lefty mice to the Democratic Convention...
where, just like in Boston 2004, they will be turned over to fat cat political bosses and brow-beaten into
getting with the program.

A general strike, on the other hand, is tough business. Practicing for one also makes one tough. European
socialists and unionists, for example, through years of experience and education, have learned how to
negotiate with their political class. Most importantly, they have learned when to stop negotiating and
when to go out on strike.

Americans in this century, and especially labor unions, students and working class people, have either
forgotten or failed to learn that type of hard nosed negotiation. It does not grow out of being the volunteer
grassroots water bearers for the mainstream parties. It does not come from humbly begging for political
breadcrumbs. True democratic strength comes from exercising it. Peacefully, yes. But as aggressively as

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circumstances require. And experience teaches that strength often translates into a general strike, a
deliberate, universal withholding of one's labor.

Media Matters – or Does It?

Is a general strike impossible in the United States because of the soporific effect of the corporate mass
media? Ten years ago I might have thought so, but not now.

It is true that a majority of the media serve to entertain and distract. They are the modern equivalent of the
Roman circus. Like the Roman circus, the major commercial networks also strive to barbarize the general
population and thus acclimatize them to a culture of hatred, violence and self-indulgence. Self-indulgent
people are egoists and they tend not to organize politically. Therefore, they are the ownership class's ideal
antithesis of democratically engaged, strike-capable citizens.

Although the mass media targets one segment of society, other specialized media target another segment.
There are definite opinion makers among the corporate media, like The Washington Post, The New York
Times and, especially, The Wall Street Journal. Their primary target audience is the leadership cadre of
society. They speak for the ownership class to the management class. These “newspapers” (I use the
cautionary quotation marks around the word “newspapers” because of their predilection for uncritical
amplification of official government policy and for blatant propaganda) seek to shape the opinions of the
upper “management” echelons of society: the mid-level business executives, professors, lawyers, judges,
teachers, doctors, other regional news editors and publishers, and government administrators. They, in
turn, are expected to disseminate these approved opinions down into society in general (1).

Although that has been the pattern for many decades, something new has evolved: the Internet and the
Web. I am not a starry-eyed futurist who spouts inanities about how technology has changed the world.
Neither am I a back-to-the-Stone-Ages Luddite. All of us must recognize, however, that technology,
notwithstanding its abuses, has given us a tool for communicating with one another much more powerful
than the military progenitors of the world wide web ever anticipated when they first created it.

Many of us daily read news from around the world(2). We have access to encyclopedic knowledge at the
scroll of the mouse, courtesy of the Wikipedia and thousands of similar sources. Some have direct RSS
news feeds from far flung sources and know long before the Main Stream Media what is happening
where, and why. We know which radio programs to listen to, and which to eschew. Many of us receive
news, information and analysis from trusted sources who have mini distribution networks of their own.
The readers of this website are themselves participating in an exercise in alternative communication.
Better still, although the bloggers of the Web are a mixed lot in terms of wisdom, garbage-mongering and
communication skills, they are undoubtedly a highly democratic phenomenon. Like Arlo Guthrie's
“Alice's Restaurant”, you can, indeed, get anything you want from the Web, and it is entirely up to you to
pick and choose from the huge a la carte read-all-you-want menu.

So-called “experts” and “pundits” and highly credentialed talking heads mean very little in this free-for-
all cafeteria of ideas. Justifiably so. If there is one “free market” concept that we can endorse (and which
the Wall Streeters and established political leadership deride) it is that we all can educate ourselves to
figure out for ourselves what makes sense and what does not. The anonymity of the Web is as democratic
as the world wide free software movement in which the quality of the programming is evident in the
product itself, and not in the size or advertising of the company that churns it out.

Although the number of people who regularly read this particular website are vastly fewer than those who
subscribe to the mainstream infotainment networks, one suspects that you who read this website tend to
have a lot of opinions of your own... and you tend to communicate these opinions to others. In short, the

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highly democratic nature of the Internet has permitted each of you to become small ink splotches on the
dirty fabric that represents your world, real people providing real content of your own. Sometimes these
ink splotches spread. They do not always spread too far, but when there are many of you, reposting,
forwarding, linking people together, spreading by osmosis, sometimes the ink splotches can transfigure
the whole fabric.

In a nutshell, the mainstream corporate media still dominates and propagandizes, but it is no longer
absolutely dominant over the formation of public opinion. Indeed, the anonymous web users and bloggers
are now a sufficient part of an alternative opinion-shaping media to actually have an incremental, but
statistically significant effect on politics. Thus, too, will the American attitude toward a general strike
eventually be shaped from below and not from the top by the traditional media venues.

Precisely because of this, there is an ongoing effort from the top to consolidate the Internet into the hands
of the largest corporations. All members of the ownership class regard absolute Internet dominance as
equally, if not more essential than the manipulation of the actual election process. The overall effect of
aggregating the control of the Internet and of regulating the speed of its delivery based on content or
provider, would be a political body blow to the very democratic possibilities that the ownership class
most dreads. “Net democracy” is a better term than “net neutrality” to describe this technical phenomenon
that now is a small counterbalance to the previous hegemony of the anti-democratic corporate media.

Does the Lack of Community In America Preclude a General Strike?

Yes and no. From one perspective, nothing makes a general strike more difficult than the fact that, in the
USA of the past fifty years or so, people have no “roots”. Unlike in Europe where people may live and
work among colleagues that they have known since childhood, Americans tend to move all over the place.
Business interests describe this as “flexible labor”, that is, they can make you move wherever they want
you to go in order to get a job. The only “community” that the ownership class wants you to have is
lonely communion with your television set or while sitting in the highly choreographed spectacle of a
sports-temple where folks are trained en mass to scream, stand up, sit down and salute the flag on
command.

Nowadays, however, for the reasons described in the preceding section, “communities” are actually more
meaningful than they used to be. Precisely because of the explosion of information, you can become part
of like-minded communities wherever you live in the United States. Whereas a “community” used to be
geographically defined, it no longer needs to be. This website is a community and we have never met. The
entire network of like-minded people reposting articles and emailing viewpoints and opinions to their
friends and acquaintances is a community.(3)

The notion of “communitarianism” also has some potential dangers against which we should all be on
guard. A “community”, of course, can be nothing less than nationalism on the local level. If the sole
criteria of your “community” is where its members live, then it has no more rationality than a nation of
people bound by the accident of where they were born. It must be an idea that glues a community
together, rather than any accident of race, religion, work or residence, otherwise it can slide into politics
of exclusion. Many of us believe, in fact, that our community is not just “local”, but includes the
international community of all like-minded people wherever in the world they reside. You and I may have
as much (or more) in common with someone living in Mumbai or Buenos Aires or Munich or Barcelona
than we have in common with our next door neighbors.

So long as the Internet, as it is, is permitted to exist, there is greater potential for true “community” to
emerge than ever before. It is that type of community that is fertile ground for a general strike (4).

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We Can't Agree On Anything in America Let Alone a General Strike!

Clarity of purpose, resolve, coordination and planning are essential for any general strike to succeed. A
general strike that fails for lack of adequate preparation only demoralizes and is worse than no strike at
all. Although it may be impossible for the national community to unify on the essential strike criteria, it is
not necessary that everyone agree to participate for the strike to take effect. In the Industrial Age, it was
sufficient for coal miners or steel workers to strike, or for railroad employees, longshoremen or teamsters
to go out on strike.

In our times there is one – albeit mostly unorganized, generally apolitical – professional group that
unknowingly holds the most power in our society: the computer programmers, hardware engineers, web
masters, hackers and system analysts. Veritably nothing functions anymore in the 21st Century if these
people withhold their services. Everything from the world banking system to retail commerce to
manufacturing to the federal government to college campuses to air traffic control to intelligence
operations to the military depends absolutely on the daily massage therapy of the world's millions of
computer geeks. If they do not work, then nothing, absolutely nothing works. Indeed, short of Nature
herself whacking humankind upside the head with catastrophic global climate change and petroleum
depletion, nothing other than the international community of digi-sophisticates has the power to redirect
the course of humanity.

I do not pretend for a moment that this is a homogeneous group – its personality and politics range world-
wide from all flavors of libertarian free marketeers to anarchistic Black Hats, from socialists to capitalist
freebooters, from sexually insecure alter egoists to arrogant flamers, gamers and crackers. Nevertheless,
those who are interested in the dynamics of the general strike should understand where the critical
pressure points are in their society and who has their laboring hands and minds on those pressure points.
In the information age of the 21st century we should ask: who would constitute the equivalent of the coal
miners, steel workers, railroad employees, teamsters or longshoremen of the past century? The answer is
staring you in the face from your computer screen.

Practice Makes Perfect

My purpose in writing “The Docile American” was not to provoke an ill-conceived general strike. My
purpose was to identify some (though certainly not all) of the historical factors that have led to the
impotence of America's citizens and which need to be addressed before an effective general strike could
be organized (5). One hugely important factor that coincides with overwhelming current public opinion is
the need to radically change the health care system in the United States.

We should not be charmed by either the Democratic or Republican parties and their game of musical
power chairs. However, to the extent that either party needs our votes or our money, then socialized
medicine, not incremental fixes to the existing privatized health care system, must be one of the first non-
negotiable demands we make. It is one of the most economically emancipating steps toward creating the
next democratic tool: the power to make a general strike.

In the meantime, Americans should consider how to exercise their democratic muscles. Like a fighter who
trains by lifting weights and shadow boxing to build strength and stamina, so should we, as citizens, be
training, laying the groundwork for seeking fundamental changes in the future that will require more
strength and stamina than we now have.

******

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ENDNOTES

(1)These thoughts are loosely borrowed from the writings of C. Wright Mills, author of the classic text
The Power Elite (1956).

(2)Some news is harder to get than others. Google, for example, has stopped indexing news headlines
from Uruknet.net apparently because it is too stridently opposed to the American occupation of Iraq. My
perspective is that informed citizens need exposure to all points of view and it is highly improper for a
search engine like Google, which seeks to establish its own flavor of pervasive Net culture, to exercise
censorship over what we can read.

(3)Neither, however, should we fall into the antithesis of jingoism by believing that everything American
is bad and everything non-American is good. People are people. They are good and awful, and everything
in between, in equal measures across all cultures and societies. There are saints and bloodsuckers in every
religion, in every political system, in every community on earth. Although some economic, religious and
political systems have proved to be consistently worse than others in that they naturally lead to extremes
of injustice, the essential thing is to pick and choose the best from all societies and systems and to discard
the detritus.

(4)Nothing published in clear on the Internet is confidential and we should assume that this site, and
every other interesting website in the world is being monitored. That is why no one should write or post
anything these days that s/he would be embarrassed to see offered as an exhibit at trial. On the other hand,
there is nothing that prevents you from reaching out even to those on the other side of the divide. Most
police and nearly all soldiers come from the working classes. They should be your natural allies. Even the
folks who are paid to monitor this site may not necessarily identify with their paymasters. The concept of
democracy is truly ecumenical. Those who know how to bear arms are as entitled to participate in it as are
those who loathe them. And the day could one day come when the one will need the other.

(5)One significant shortcoming of “The Docile American” that some readers pointed out was the choke-
hold of consumer debt and how that contributes to the economic shackling of the people. I totally agree. It
is a significant topic that I want to address in a separate article dedicated to that one issue.

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