John Clarke, former major organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), recently posted the following on Facebook:
When we think of the class struggle, we usually focus on major strikes, social upsurges or big attacks from employers or the state. However, it’s important to note that the cut and thrust of the struggle is actually fought out in the day to day lives of millions of people.Today, someone will finally stand up to the supervisor who has been making their working days a misery. Someone else will tell a cop that he has no right to look in their bag. In some highrise building, a group of tenants will gather round a kitchen table and take the first steps towards collective action against their landlord.In someone’s home, an informal gathering of workers will float the idea of contacting a union because their employer gets away with too much.The balance of class forces in society can never be precisely measured because it is so fluid and complex but it conditions all our lives. The struggle continues even as a subterranean under the most unfavourable conditions of repression and defeat. It expresses the fundamental contradictions that shape capitalist society and that produces opposed interests and an unending conflict that must ultimately be played out to a conclusion.
This view expresses only a half-truth–which social reformists take advantage of often enough. Of course, resistance to oppression and exploitation forms a necessary aspect of creating a socialist society. However, just as a set of points does not constitute a line, isolated points of resistance do not constitute by any means a unified movement that “must ultimately be played out to a conclusion.” Surely we should have learned by now that such isolated points do not necessarily do so, but rather end in a dead end or be coopted into reformist measures.
Points that form a line constitute the raw material for the constuction of a line, but without a unified process that unites them, they may well remain just that–points. Similarly, isolated resistant points may form the raw material for a socialist movement, but without a unified process that unites them, they may well remain just that–isolated resistance points.
Let us not underestimate the difficulty of the task that lies ahead of us.
The Abolitionary 