Thoughts on the General Strike of March 22

Bullet points to reflect the nature of my immediate reaction coming out of witnessing the general strike on March 22 that swept the country:

• The obvious thing that provoked the strike is that people here are absolutely miserable living in a free-falling economy; with a bloated government cutting pay, reducing benefits, and contributing to the declining economy by reducing its spending to European Union "kosher-certified" levels; corruption, both perceived and real; and the offensive nature of their leaders claiming the need for reductions, liberalization, privatization, and so on, while living extremely lavishly themselves. The mood in the country is one of hope that things can get better but bitter, painful frustration at the situation and, indeed, a desperation to go back to better times.

Variously, "No to Privatization!", "More Social Justice, No Inequalities", "Unemployment is Exclusion, It is Not a Solution!", "No to Forced Work!", "Austerity is Poverty, Work is Progress", "To Fight is to Invest in the Future", "Bigger Salaries, Better Hours". 

•  At the same time, the message emanating from the strike was very abstract and contradictory. On the one hand, they want more work, a better-functioning economy, and the benefits that come from those things. On the other, they are entirely opposed to working more for the same or reduced pay, something common among all public-sector workers across all countries affected by the crisis in order to boost productivity, and they want the government to provide the jobs for them. They oppose private-sector investment in goods and services currently provided by the government for no particularly clear reason except that it would mean the government could afford to reduce the workforce it is directly responsible for, and in turn cut costs, costing them jobs that the government added (in many cases recklessly and excessively) during better times to begin with. They don't want inequality, but they want to maintain their own standard of living, as long as the government is providing for it. We all know how hardline planned economies have turned out in the past half-century (the Soviet Union is gone and faced economic hardship, Cuba is crumbling, and even China embraced the free market so that it too would not collapse), so why is the precedent being ignored? I do not support these messages, in their basic forms, coming from the strike – I do not see any credible reasoning behind the vilification of the free market.

• If the message is "to fight is to invest in the future", why is the message not tuned to the things that will safeguard their future? I did not see a coherence of focus during the strike, instead it appeared to be more of a general forum of complaint. The strike seemed lacking in sensibility, since the energy spent could be better focused on working harder, making better products, investing political capital to hold those necessary accountable and effect real change, and so on.

• I find "fascism of the market!" to be a laughable message at best, when the government cannot afford to pay the salary guaranteed to public sector workers now or before, despite how god-sent and permanent those jobs seemed to be. I do empathize with the message that ordinary people are getting screwed out of robbed of their pensions, because here we have people who thought they were paying into a system to guarantee their future under a system not designed to be able to afford them what the government was selling while its very leaders were profiting from government euros and the private sector. This is much more a matter of political accountability, in my view.

• The violence that erupted by the police at the end of the rally was entirely senseless and unacceptable in a strike that seemed no more sensible in and of itself, except as a barometer of public sentiment.