Some Thoughts on the Transit Strike

Brad Spangler http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/219#comments posted positively about the transit strike in New York City, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. The strike doesn’t have any impact on me since I drive to work every day and my wife takes Metro North, but some of my conspecifics at the office rely on the subway system. They’re pissed. Strangely, they blame the striking workers rather than the obdurate managers for the strike. They align themselves with the gazillionaire mayor and the thieves on the Transit Board rather than their fellow working men and women.

Roger Toussant, head of the TWU Local 100, was on Riley’s show on Air America this morning, and I think he said it best. To paraphrase, he asked for the patience of the people and urged them to trust their fellow working men and women, their neighbors, the people who safely move them around the city everyday rather than the mayor and the board who, he said, “don’t know a train from a bus.” Why wouldn’t a working person feel solidarity with the transit workers notwithstanding the inconvenience caused by the strike. It takes two sides to reach deadlock in a labor negotiation, so why would a working person automatically side with management and blame the workers?

An NYPD officer called in to Riley’s show and argued that transit workers got more money than he did. He would rather have seen his fellow working men and women worse off than to see them improve their lot.

I have been thinking a lot about class consciousness lately, and seeing the sides working people have taken in this strike is leading me to believe that class, for revolutionary purposes, must be constructed less with a view to being scientifically robust as a concept and more with a view to facilitating the kind of class consciousness that promotes the revolutionary agenda. Certainly Mayor McDuck and the transit board are doing all they can to drive a wedge between the strikers and other working people.