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Solidarity Rally at Workers Occupation of Republic Windows
Class Struggle & the Crisis in the U.S.:
A Look at Social and Economic Effects
Restructuring and Methods of Adapting
By Henri Simon
Introduction
The text below first appeared in ECHANGES, No, 130, Autumn 2009 as part one of a three part series on the social effects of the crisis in the U.S . We’ve shortened the original French, cutting background material on US public sector finances and social programs and correcting minor factual errors. With its focus on actions not usually considered “political” in the traditional use of the word, we think this text makes an important contribution to understanding the full ramifications of the crisis and the responses to it within the US.
We hope the question at the end, “what weight should be put on the proliferation of resistances?” stimulates wider debate, discussion and research on the larger question which frames it: do these actions in some way, despite “not following traditional paths…testify by their existence and forms to (changing) something in the capitalist system” or “are they only adaptations, helping the system overcome the crisis without changing basics?”
Most events described here took place in the earlier phase of the crisis. For several months, roughly beginning with the first bank bailouts and in the fall of 2008, through the Republic Windows occupation and ending in the spring of 2009, it seemed like a larger social explosion was building. However, even as unemployment, foreclosures and evictions remain at record highs, little in the way of the open mass action predicted by many in the traditional left has taken place. Many actions mentioned in the text, like the bank occupations, have since died out, or are no longer as visible.
But if traditional forms of class struggle can’t yet be detected, there are signs that on the micro-level, in the areas where individual resistance merges into the collective so well identified in this text, subtle but real changes are brewing. A good example is the May 31, 2010 New York Times article, “Owners Stop Paying Mortgages and Stop Fretting,” describing how, “ A growing number of people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. They use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by.
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