Faced with the terror of being fatally sickened and spreading the virus to others, unemployment, starvation, and being sacrificed for the capitalist economy, workers are not being organized—they are self-organizing.
If food production, preparation, and logistics stop, all other workers stop by default.
With tourism on hold due to the Corona crisis and the grounding of many planes, this transport link to get food into the country is under stress.
As news of each local wildcat strike instantaneously circulates, other workers become inspired and launch their strike elsewhere. Like the children’s arcade game “whack a mole,” the global working class is popping up in one place and as capital and the state seek to whack it back down, pops up simultaneously in numerous places all along both up- and down-stream of the now fraying global supply chain.
emerging strategies of capital and the state for dampening the circulation of these struggles with the same intensity it seeks to dampen the spread of COVID-19. the role unions tied to capital and the state will seek to play in attempting to dampen and diffuse self-organized workers.
“universal basic income,” an idea that originated in US libertarian thinktanks as a way to gut social democratic social wages, shrink government employment, and attack public sector unions
capital and the state resorting to nationalization of both the financial and production sectors
These are my notes from Robert Ovetz, Ph.D. “The Working Class Pandemic in the United States,” pp. 53-67 https://www.academia.edu/42904761/Workers_Inquiry_Network_Struggle_in_a_Pandemic_A_Collection_of_Contributions_on_the_COVID-19_Crisis
and Angry Workers of the World “Empty supermarkets: The food supply-chain from a workers’ perspective” https://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/empty-supermarkets-the-food-supply-chain-from-a-workers-perspective/