On The Line
Members of the United Auto Workers Local 230 walk the picket line in front of the Chrysler Corporate Parts Division in Ontario, Calif., on September 26.
(Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)
Picket lines, for a variety of reasons, are one of the most remarkable sociological spaces in this country. Inherently ephemeral, they are a site of struggle, bond, and possibility. They rotate around the poles of prolonged boredom peppered with shots of intensity–stopping a truck from crossing, screaming at scabs, having a Teamsters truck roar by honking it’s horn.
They are one of the few cross class and multiracial spaces that feel truly integrated, truly collaborative. They are in some ways the inverse of the left-liberal anti-oppression workshop; rather than sitting, pondering, and discussing injustice, which lends itself to intellectualizing and pontificating, picket lines are about acting together. The imperative of the moment strips away ideological armor and softens people to each other, creating the space for more honest conversations than the most skilled consultant could facilitate.
The picket line lifts the invisibility cloak that capital typically shrouds itself in. It creates a temporary border (an inherently violent/policed space), that deliciously lures cops into their truest form. I’ve seen plenty of white, conservative, construction workers in the course of a day transform from parroting “they’re just doing their jobs” rhetoric to screaming bloody murder at cops forcing a line apart to let a scab truck through. The line is drawn in the sand and the polarization reveals which side you’re on.
In an economy that has become increasingly financialized and digitized, many work from home, literally isolated from other workers and deceived into the notion of a world without bodies, the picket line reveals the sheer corporeality of labor and of the movement of capital. People, things, they must move across physical spaces for corporations to function.
At picket lines people are free to abandon the worst trappings of the nebulous “white culture” or “professionalism” or whatever your term of choice is to describe human interaction sucked dry by the tapeworm of constant surveillance and productivity measures. Instead of quiet, politeness, and frictionless civility being paramount, on the line people are loud and boisterous. They chant, they sing, they sweat, they dance to blaring salsa music and hug and shit talk the boss and talk politics and may disagree on the details but are drawn together by a common enemy which melts away the pettiness of our typical disagreements.
In this sense, picket lines are a little slice of utopia, not the popular imagination of utopia as a carefree world, but in the reality of utopia as an everlasting struggle. And should it look as beautiful as people sending each other physical and spiritual nourishment, taking turns rotating in and out, coming from across a region to join together for as long as it takes, something right is happening.
Picket lines are not metaphors. By that I mean they are not protests (though those are important too). While they carry symbolic value, they inflict material consequences on people used to being insulated from the rabble. I think I’ve always loved them for that reason–they are the ultimate weapon of the working class, but not violent, gorgeous in the way only something temporary can be. They offer the promise of a world to come and undermine the cynicism and numbness we are meant to internalize from capitalism.
Go to a picket line. And then another. And let your life be changed.