The Reverse Shrug – Withdrawing the vital support needed by dictatorial government, large corporations, and Wall Street.

Republicans and other right-wingers have recently been in the business of accusing liberals and left-wingers of fomenting class warfare. Those on the left should stop attempting to deny this. They should openly acknowledge that class warfare is indeed the reality, accept that reality, and act accordingly. The following is an outline of a proposal for “acting accordingly.”

The original point of labor unions was to be able to withhold a vital input from the economic system, namely, labor. They employed this leverage to gain benefits. With the destruction of unions and with mass unemployment, labor no longer has any leverage. Since “labor” is made up of ordinary folks, i.e., the lower and middle classes, this means that ordinary folks have no leverage: they must support themselves somehow, and the means for doing this lies in the hands of the enemy. The only way that labor can regain leverage is to own and operate the businesses and enterprises that produce real wealth (food, shelter, clothing, energy, and so on) and that provide services. This does two things: it provides labor with a means for supporting itself without having to sell itself to the enemy, and labor can then purchase products and services from its own organizations, bypassing the enterprises owned and run by the enemy. Thus, ordinary folks can now deny the enemy a critical input – labor – and refuse to buy its product as well. This is a new Atlas doing the shrugging: now Atlas is ordinary folks.

The enemy will respond, obviously. There are several ways that it can respond.

Since the enemy controls the banking industry, it can withhold the capital required by worker cooperatives to invest in and run their businesses. Thus there must also be worker-owned banks.

Since even worker-owned banks can be shackled, by the enemy's limiting the amount of official currency in circulation, there will be a need for an alternative currency, so that the amount of money in circulation can be controlled by the people, not by the enemy's banks. The enemy will attempt to make this alternative currency illegal, so there will be no alternative money actually printed or minted. All transactions will be represented by electronic bookkeeping entries.

Once the “shrug” begins to have its effect, the enemy will attempt to use force to crush the worker-cooperatives, worker-owned banks, and so on. Ordinary folks need to be well-armed. During the Depression, when banks attempted to foreclose on farms, the local farmers showed up in defense of their fellow farmers, armed, to prevent these “transactions” from taking place. In many cases, they were successful. Ordinary folks need to be aware of this model and be prepared to replicate it.

A significant potential obstacle is that worker-owned cooperatives will be dependent upon enemy-owned suppliers for inputs of raw materials. And those suppliers may refuse to supply the cooperatives. It will be important that many cooperatives be established more or less at the same time, so that one cooperative can be supplied by another cooperative. (There may be less of a problem here than I am suggesting, since the enemy is, at bottom, greedy. He/she will sell his/her stuff to anyone, as long as there's a profit, even if only in the short term.)