One of the most tangled questions of our time, I think, is how we pitch the idea of resistance to ordinary people. It is often said that the government is weak. This is true and yet it often sounds so false. Weakness is relative. The government is 'weak', yet its plans for austerity and privatisation roll on.
There is a lingering weakness that is perhaps ratified by an uncritical reading of Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet on the mass strike (it's a thin observation, I know - there's more to it than this, but...). In her design the mass strike carries a lot of weight. It is a solution to working class division and (all but) a cure all for the weaknesses of organisation. This is true, but the pamphlet separates out valid observations about mass strikes from the importance of long-term organisation. This is because the pamphlet was, effectively, an SPD internal document. It was not necessary for Luxemburg to argue the importance of the party in 1905 - that would have been stating the obvious. In the same way Gramsci did not have to add to his prison notebooks, whose first readership was senior PCI cadre, "by the way, we must smash also the state".
Things can change just like that, yet they don't seem to. The mass strikes of 1905 were a culmination of half a century of seemingly almost fruitless revolutionary activity. Mass strikes are always welcome. We want another good strike day on March 28th, but plenty of people can see it will not be enough to get the government on the run - simply pumping the action up won't cut it.
