Tomorrow, November 2, will be a general strike in Oakland. The move was approved nearly unanimously by the roughly 1600 people voting at last week's Occupy Oakland general assembly, held the night after police from Oakland and several surrounding areas attacked nonviolent protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, beanbags, flashbang grenades, and nightsticks.

The plan is to gather at 9 am in Frank Ogawa Plaza - renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by the folks occupying it - and protest. Different people will surely come focused on protesting different issues, but the major theme is sure to be the outsized influence of corporations and the wealthiest people on society. This may arise from environmental concerns, concerns about the rising unemployment rate, the growing gap between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of us, or about foreclosures. There will surely be protests against crime and against police abuses; if you think there's no link between income inequality and crime, the inability or unwillingness of police to stop crime, and police brutality (against protesters last week and against minority youth all the time), I would suggest that you take a closer look.

Ultimately, though, it should be remembered that a general strike like this is not aimed at some narrow set of immediate demands. A general strike's aim, as Michelle Ty writes eloquently at zunguzungu, is not to say that "work will not resume once this or that concession is made; instead, people will show their 'determination to resume only a wholly transformed work'. In a characteristically wonderful phrase, Benjamin writes that the general strike 'not so much causes as consummates.'" (quoting Walter Benjamin).

There's a compelling case to be made that, at this moment in 21st century America, the problems we face are not modest, not amenable to piecemeal solutions, and that the moment demands comprehensive reform. The forces at play are varied, including bank-friendly bankruptcy reforms, endless wars, unregulated pollution (much of it emitted from sites in low-income communities), illegal foreclosures and foreclosures on mortgages which should never have been offered, unemployment and underemployment that persist for years on end, economic policies which privilege multinational corporations over our fellow citizens and families and neighbors, a drug war which has repeatedly and catastrophically failed and which has left behind a legacy of broken families and unbreakably poverty and a permanent underclass. The causes of these problems are equally varied, but the unavoidable factor tying many of them together is growing power of corporations - their ability to buy influence in elections and the casual assumption that their concerns should take priority in matters of public policy.

These problems are a long time coming, and certainly stretch back to the last general strike in US history, a general strike in Oakland, CA, in December, 1946.

Historian Robert Self describes - in his excellent American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Post-War Oakland - the setting was a post-war nation where price controls have finally been lifted, thousands of GIs are returning to jobs, and labor unions were seeking ways to maintain the advances they had gained during the war and the New Deal. The strike also grew out of the divide between

Oakland's business and political establishment, in which power and decision making lay in "downtown" institutions while the city's working-class neighborhoods remained passive wards. "The city of Oakland is not going back to the jungle," Oakland's mayor declared after the strike's declaration ... When workers formed picket lines on downtown streets, battling police for control of the sidewalks, and marched downtown during the general strike, they politicized the metropolis, refusing to see it as neutral.

I can't read that without thinking of Occupy Oakland, which has fought a battle to retain control of a public park in front of Oakland's City Hall and surrounded by skyscrapers hosting corporate offices, a movement whose battle cries include choruses of "Whose streets? Our streets!"