Define it as broadly or as narrowly as you'd like, I'm speaking in a broadly historical (almost historical materialist) lens here.Dooey Jo wrote:define "group" and "violence", as with standard definitions of these terms the statement is historically problematicStraha wrote:no group fighting for recognition and respect has ever been able to achieve it without using violence, or by acting in such a way so as to compel the state (or other powers that be) into violence against them that also legitimizes the users of those violent acts.
Organized labor won the right to strike across the world through intense and bloody conflicts. Inside the United States the history of unionization comes on the back of organized violence and destructive activity (see: the mine wars, the Morewood massacre, the Haymarket affair, the 'redneck massacre', etc. or Unionizers like Mother Jones, John Mitchell, or Thomas Lewis, etc). In the present a strike, or a threat to strike, is not inherently a violent act (though I know quite a few capitalists who disagree, and quite a few Lefties who wish it were) but that's only because of a history that could fill rivers with blood.this is a false dilemma. the alternatives are not passivity or violence. striking workers are not asking their employers to do anything out of "the goodness of their hearts", nor are they threatening anyone with violence.To simply expect them to roll over, or to ask the oppressors to change their ways out of the goodness of their hearts, will always re-entrench new forms of structural inequality.
I'd go into a global history, but you know how I feel about beating a living horse so imagine what I'd think about beating a dead horse.
