A Day Without the 99%

A day without the 99% is the part of the slogan used by OWS for its May Day action that has not been discussed enough. While even the New York Times has run a plodding exposé of the low chances of a mass observation of the general strike (no, I’m not linking, you can make it up), the day without us is much more than that.

In 1974, the Italian activist Mariarosa Dalla Costa already saw that a general strike was in fact no such thing

Let’s make this clear. No strike has ever been a general strike. When half the working population is at home in the kitchens, while the others are on strike, it’s not a general strike. We’ve never seen a general strike. We’ve only seen men, generally men from the big factories, come out on the streets, while their wives, daughters, sisters, mothers went on cooking in the kitchens.

Perhaps today some male-identified activists might question that 50% figure: I suspect not many of the female-identified ones would do so.

Indeed, tonight at 16 Beaver, Ana Méndez de Andés from the Madrid-based Observatorio Metropolitano, a militant research collective, made an almost identical set of observations. She recalled discussing with the organizers of the Spanish strike what those who were unemployed or involved in domestic labor should do. The answer was simple: show solidarity.

In the U. S. context, the “big factories” are among the least likely venues to strike because they cannot call a solidarity strike due to anti-labor legislation. Manufacturing has been able to increase productivity while using fewer and fewer human workers by means of automation. So, as we all know, the workforce is susbtantially composed of dispersed individuals from the unemployed, part-time and casual labor, to those working as freelances, without documentation or on piece work, none of whom can visibly “strike.”

The OWS kitchen in action at Liberty Plaza

How, then, could a “day without the 99%” offer a visualization of the refusal to accept the neoliberal privatization of everyday life? Writing for the new Occupy.com aggregator site, Chris Longenecker suggests that the day should involve:

mobile street kitchens, free stores and free medical clinics, as well as occupy their schools and workplaces and make their goods and services available to all who need them.

Now that finance capital has withdrawn from the housing sector, it is eager to privatize health, knowledge, education, music and art (or to accelerate the existing tendencies to privatize). It is as if they will not be satisfied until no one can even imagine an alternative.

So a well-attended and highly visible union march and Occupy-style disruptions to the normal practice of expropriation and dispossession are excellent and important gestures. In Occupy-speak, these are “direct actions” and highly valorized, rightly so. What Dalla Costa, Mendez de Andes and Longenecker are calling for is usually known as “mutual aid.” It’s been crucial to those actually occupying space in providing food, health care and other services but it is less prestigious, if that’s the right word within an activist movement. There needs to be a leveling so that each form of action is seen as equally important.

So far OWS hasn’t been able to cater to all needs. A few days ago I remember a young woman intervening in a discussion about activism, saying that she can’t be active because there is no child care provision for her two-year-old. While efforts have sometimes been made (though not enough), there is a thicket of law around child care that makes such work really complicated. This is a recurring issue. The first radical event I was involved with in the U.K. called “Left Alive,” which took place just after Thatcher’s crushing second election victory, provided fabulous child care: which no one used because they hadn’t expected it to be any good.

So, no, there won’t be and can’t be a general strike on May 1. Certain duties of care will continue and should do so. Still more people can’t strike because they will be fired if they do. And many others have nowhere to withdraw their labor from, other than domestic situations.

So we need to become in Ana Mendez de Andés’s phrase “traficantes de sueños,” traffickers in dreams: what would make people’s day better on May Day that doesn’t involve work, housework, banking, or school? What do we have in common that we can share? How can we reclaim time from the compartmentalized day, just as we have struggled to reclaim public space? How do we make May 2 seem like a positive beginning to something for each and every day, rather than a return to the chores of the everyday?