Cold and ache-inducing. But more on that later.

I’m on strike for the first time in my life. I’ve walked other picket lines in solidarity, wrote letters to the editor supporting strikes and, of course, based my political philosophy on the working class coming to power. But I’ve never actually been on strike until now. After a few days on the picket line, it's reinforced a number of ideas for me.



The working class can only resist capital by withdrawing its labour. Since I work at a university, not only do classes stop, but contractors and on-campus services like private schools, colleges and health clubs are disrupted. Future ‘consumers’ – students – start questioning their brand loyalty and switch schools. Other institutions look on with fear, lest we’re successful and their own workers can demand more. What kind of public services we want becomes an issue.

Going on strike builds social relationships. ‘Socialists-from-below’ have always emphasized that through a strike, workers learn to cooperate in new ways. I’m not part of the strike leadership or even the union cadre. But even just walking the line for a few days, I’ve met new people and reconnected with others. I’ve had fascinating conversations with them all – often about the strike, but also about their research and the world at large. Strikes make us social.


Granted, my picket line is a little smaller than this

Being on strike has also revived the socialist whipping boy: consciousness is contradictory. I was expecting angry students who feel they’re being ripped off, since they’re not going to class. There are some of those. It’s unfortunate: undergraduates already feel like cogs in a machine, and forcing the people who do 50% of the teaching to live below the poverty line isn’t going to help. If we get a good settlement, we’re happy and secure, and we teach better. But I understand why, if you’re paying close to $6000 a year for tuition, you feel like you’re buying a degree, rather than participating in a collective learning process, in which the workers who teach you deserve a decent standard of living.

However, I wasn’t expecting fellow grad students, walking the line with me, to believe that we’re not workers. According to some of them, our massive debt & below-poverty-line wages are a sacrifice for future jobs. I call it the ‘guild mentality’: just like an apprentice at a medieval guild, you think you’re getting training for future earnings.



But in capitalism, the wage relation doesn’t stop just because you go back to school. The university saves a lot of cash by making grad students do most of the teaching work. This lets the university focus on public-private partnerships, prestige projects and building fancy new facilities for ‘marketable’ degrees like business and medicine.

If you believe education should be a personal sacrifice, that lets the university provide its services on the cheap, cut out full-time tenured jobs and take the pressure off the government to fund education. Which, in turn, reinforces the idea that education is a privilege, rather than a right.



For those who question public spending priorities, I’ve got two words: $700 billion. That’s a portion of what the U.S. government can cough up for banks who got burned trying to rip off poor people. The bail-out is coordinated across different national banks, which Canada contributed to. Imagine spreading that kind of cash around for international public services.

Encountering these attitudes, admittedly, has flummoxed me. It’s not that the socialist argument is wrong, or even that it changes significantly: the capital-labour relation, and everything that stems from it, has been in place for a couple hundred years. But the way it expresses itself changes constantly. Nationalism, patriotism, moral sacrifice – there are a thousand ways to say, “Please exploit me!” Normally, my crimson-tinted glasses filter those out, but being on a picket line forces me to confront them.


Umm... have you read Capital Volume One?

My formative years in a far left group made me think the job of socialists is to march up to right-wingers and “make the arguments” till they see the error of their ways. But it’s far more complicated than that. Firstly I have to understand where they’re coming from; secondly, I have to see how their arguments reflect reality, however distorted; and thirdly, I don’t expect to convince everyone, or all at once.

Being a socialist is counter-intuitive: you have to see things as they might be, not just as they are. Relationships of power aren’t right in front of your eyes; rows of frustrated, inconvenient people waiting to cross your picket line are. Faced with that, I’ve sounded less like Trotsky battling the Centre & Right Oppositions on the Bolshevik Central Committee, and more like Alan Partridge trying to run a talk show.


Think about your job security, brothers & sisters!

Finally, my image of picket lines as places of dramatic confrontations has had to change. Yes, there are idiots who have tried to provoke picketers. By and large, however, walking a line is tedium.

That doesn’t translate well into a story, so I understand why all the Ken Loach movies I watch focus on the exciting bits of class struggle. But there’s nothing exciting about your calf muscles aching after 4 hours of walking up and down a little piece of asphalt.


But at least give them some ibuprofen

Then there’s the cold – even a 10 degree November day can turn your extremities to ice if you don’t layer with wool, goose feather and long underwear. I drink hot liquid to keep warm – but most of the hot liquid available is coffee or tea, so I end up jittery from all the caffeine. For all the people who call strikers ‘lazy’, believe me, I’d rather be at work: sitting in a warm office is way more comfortable and less tiring. When the revolution comes, I’m going to request a mid-May start.

Labels: consciousness, strike, working class