“The Palestine Laboratory” is how Antony Loewenstein, the Australian-German investigative journalist, describes Israel’s practice of using the Occupied Territories as a testing-ground for experimental military hardware and techniques. In the six weeks since the events of October 7th, this practice has only intensified in the Gaza Strip—often in full view of the world. We have watched, and continue to watch, in horror as Israel dropped more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives (the equivalent of two Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs), at times wiping out entire families from this earth. We learn about the level of human depravity in coming up with war machines like the “Hellfire missile”, which, once dropped, shoots out six blades in the immediate area; a machine meant to cut through army tanks and is now being rushed by the Biden Administration to Israel where they will almost certainly be deployed to cut through the bodies of Palestinian civilians. We see with chilling clarity how the military-industrial-parliamentary complex operates.
Israel’s military capacity is made possible through global economic partnerships between states wand corporations, a system in which Canada is deeply complicit. In hopes of disrupting this global industry of death, Palestinian unions issued a call to action to fellow unionists around the world, urging us to disrupt the production, transportation, and social license afforded to corporations who manufacture weapons for the occupation and ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. In their call, they evoked the powerful history of internationalist trade unionism, examples where workers refused to arm fascist Italy, apartheid South Africa, and Pinochet’s coup regime in Chile. This history reminds us that if we don’t work, the war machine won’t either; we remember that the collective withdrawal of our labour is one of the most powerful anti-colonial tools at our disposal.
In response to Palestinian unions, on November 10th, a series of coordinated shutdowns occurred across Canada. Here in Toronto, an action organized by a number of independent labour organizations—including Labour Against the Arms Trade, Labour for Palestine, and the Naujawan Support Network—and consisting of more than 200 workers, alongside civil society organizations like World Beyond War Canada and the Tamil Freedom Coalition, picketed outside the North York offices of L3 Harris. This particular facility, nestled behind a typically suburban strip mall just off Don Mills Road (and, ironically, only a stone’s throw from the Canadian Labour Congress’ Ontario Regional Office), contributes to its US multinational parent company’s production of targeting and surveillance technology, for use on attack aircraft, warships, and other advanced military platforms.
This blockade on November 10 represents an important inflection point in the modality of struggle against Israel’s occupation of Gaza, and hopefully against the broader political economy of imperialism. As such, we offer the following analysis to highlight the importance of this type of tactic.
The military-industrial-congressional complex
First and foremost, the very existence of this L3 Harris facility is a particular example of what we’ve already alluded to as the military-industrial-parliamentary complex. Specifically, it shows how thoroughly enmeshed the entirety of Canadian society is—from the coercive apparatuses of the state, to the business elites and their lobbyists, through to the elected officials over whom they exert inordinate sway—with industries that market death. Often attributed to American President Dwight Eisenhower simply as the “military-industrial complex”, some like the president’s biographer Geoffrey Perret suggest however that the original formulation was the “military-industrial-congressional complex”—a deliberate and pointed indictment of the role elected officials have in facilitating this cosy relationship, which was only dropped for political niceties.
But what is this complex, and how do we see it at work in the context of L3 Harris? We note a central transition has occurred in the production of arms from Eisenhower’s time to our current use of the concept: the post-Fordist transition. Instead of consolidated and large production sites that manufacture B52s from tip to tail, the contemporary arms industry is radically dispersed, nationally and at times internationally. A targeting systems facility in Don Mills and Waterdown, an Integrated Platform Management System development site in Montréal, and the list goes on; the web of the arms industry spins itself out into more and more communities.
This transition to dispersed and piecemeal production processes should be understood as a strategic and deliberate pursuit by arms manufacturers for a few reasons. For one, it makes for a more innocuous existence within the communities where production occurs. Who would think that just behind the bubble tea shop on Don Mills people are manufacturing vital component parts for mass death? But this same sense of banality is also at work within the conditions of labour themselves. A piecemeal approach functions to depoliticize the relationship individual workers/workplaces have to the products of their labour—if alienation is the generalized condition of labour under capital, this is a particularly motivated effort on the part of industry to solidify and mobilize that process. It is all too easy to imagine how (amidst this alienation and absent active workplace organizing) workers in such facilities could rationalize their labour: “I don’t build weapons, I just build high altitude laser systems.”
Other economistic objectives also drive the transition away from the Fordist factory toward piecemeal production. Even as the transition has caused the arms industry—like many others—to become reliant on a dispersed, logistically-dependent manufacturing process, this is viewed as both more flexible (if one is down, another can supply) and, therefore, less prone to total failure in the production process.
This transition to dispersed production has also necessitated the creation of contractual relationships between arms manufacturers and logistics companies. Indeed, on the November 10th picket lines, the near-constant stream of FedEx, UPS, and other delivery trucks (the drivers of which often indicated their solidarity once they saw the reason for the line) highlighted just how reliant upon logistics networks this industry is. But this reliance creates deeper and thicker links of co-dependency across a number of industries that find increasing profits from their partial role in the war machine. Ultimately, this creates the material basis of solidarity amongst bosses across these industries.
Finally, while Eisenhower named the military-industrial complex at the height of Fordism, his desire to implicate the ‘-congressional’ component has only found greater urgency in the post-Fordist transition. While data specifically mapping the location of arms industry facilities onto Canada’s electoral system is not yet readily available, the sense amongst monitoring groups is that there are very few ridings without at least some form of ‘upstream’ facilities—like L3 Harris. The dispersion of manufacturing into countless communities throughout the country serves to increase these companies’ direct political influence, as an increasing number of MP/MPP find themselves invested in defending, maintaining, or even expanding these jobs in their riding, rarely asking what the consequences of the work are.
Finding the weaknesses in the arms industry
But for all the ways this dispersion strengthens the arms industry, it also creates vulnerabilities. The type of action that these labour and liberation organizations carried out on November 10th, coordinating pickets and shutdowns across four locations, highlights to other workers that the so-called “logistics revolution” has dispersed the production of death throughout our neighbourhoods. This makes them profoundly targetable by labour, grassroots, and democratic actors opposed to the war machine and the death it brings around the world.
Just as we learned about our neighbourly arms manufacturer, we see with hope that networks of trade unions, civil society actors, and working class peoples around the world are rising up in response to the Palestinian unions’ call to action. In the UK, on November 10th, trade unionists and protestors blocked the country’s biggest military supplier in southeastern England, BAE systems, who produces interceptor systems for F35 fighter jets and components for F16 fighter jets which are then supplied to the Israeli war machine. In the US, we’ve seen multiple blockades of the MV Cape Orlando, a vessel that carries military equipment for Israel.
Likewise, in Sydney, Australia, a flotilla of activists prevented the docking of Israeli cargo ships. In Belgium, trade unions have explicitly refused to load arms shipments destined for Israel as this genocide continues. And, finally, the Central Trade Union Organizations of India—a body representing nearly 100 million workers—has defiantly condemned the Modi regime’s effort to collaborate with Israel by replacing murdered or kidnapped Palestinian workers with Indian migrant labourers.
Internal and external crises
It’s worth noting that two different forms of worker-led actions are emerging around this tactic. While all the examples cited are worker-led, those like the action in Belgium or a similar refusal by dockworkers in Barcelona are a form of strike—the withdrawal of labour. This can be interpreted as creating a crisis that is internal to the process of accumulation upon which these arms industries depend. By contrast, the actions targeting L3 Harris were characterized by workers intervening to block workplaces that are not their own. Rather than an internal crisis, this might be understood as an external crisis.
Traditionally, socialists have privileged the former tactic over the latter. This is with some good reason too, firstly because of the durability of internal crises—if workers are sufficiently organized to down their tools en masse, it is much easier to maintain this state of refusal within that workplace than it is to, say, coordinate sustained picketing that relies primarily on workers who remain compelled to go and give labour elsewhere for their survival. In addition to that, the strike is a form of worker self-activity that produces a heightened consciousness of workers’ class power. By collectively refusing to carry out the work that is expected of you, it becomes fully apparent that labour is prior to capital and that while the workplace might be ‘owned’ by the capitalist, it belongs to the workers.
Nevertheless, while we must strive towards bridging the tactics of creating both internal and external crises for the arms industries, we want to uphold the importance of actions like the L3 Harris shutdowns, even in the face of more orthodox critiques. As noted, these actions were worker-led, and represent a profound advancement within the struggle to build working class power that is internationally engaged and anti-imperialist in its orientation. Led by grassroots organizations and coalitions, we see in the L3 Harris example the self-activity of workers as conducted outside of the ‘traditional’ apparatuses of the labour unions and beyond our individual positions in relation to processes of production.
If we don’t get it, shut it down!
Syndicalist commitments aside, this is an important development of self-conscious protagonism amongst working people, that can be the basis of both (1) appeals to fellow workers within the arms industry to join the struggle to free Palestine and (2) creating the real conditions through which those who build the capacities of worker-led activities here carry them back to their own workplaces. At a time when organizations like the CLC and many—though importantly far from all—of the biggest unions refuse to even make the necessary calls for a ceasefire (let alone act to create the internal crises that they have the capacity to organize by striking), the sorts of worker-led actions at L3 Harris create the conditions upon which to build class power that is autonomous from a labour bureaucracy, which is too often stymied in the niceties of industrial relations.
We’re sure that nearly everyone reading this can quickly and easily find companies similar to L3 Harris not far from their own backyards, wherever they are around the world. Organizing to shut down such operations at the point of production is the concrete work of internationalism and of building a peace movement worthy of the name. At the same time, we urge everyone to take precaution as the level of repression grows with our organizing. Find local organizations (such as Toronto Against Fascism for folks here in Toronto) who offer tips and resources on how to protect yourself at an action and against police violence.
We, as workers, are the economy; we can shut it down. The work of freeing Gaza begins by making business as usual here impossible. No arms for apartheid. End the occupation. Free Gaza now.
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