Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the first three here, here, and here.
The day of coordinated protests and walkouts around the country last Friday was truly excellent. More of that, please! As much more as possible.
But was it a “general strike”? And if not, do the semantics here even matter?
Rutgers labor studies prof Eric Blanc answers those questions “no” and “yes.”
In his Jacobin article How to Organize a Real General Strike in the US, Blanc writes:
General strikes are a powerful tactic that have defeated corrupt and authoritarian rulers across the world, most recently in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, Puerto Rico in 2019, and Sri Lanka in 2022. As the union anthem “Solidarity Forever” puts it, “Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.”
Unfortunately, last Friday’s national call for “No Work, No School, No Shopping,” billed widely as an anti-ICE general strike over social media, came nowhere close to the projections of its most vocal advocates. Economic disruption was minimal, though workers from Grey’s Anatomy did force production to shut down for the day.
“In fairness,” Blanc notes, “the community organizations that initiated January 23 and the student groups that initiated January 30 did not project these as ‘general strikes.’ That framing was subsequently pushed by influencers, celebrities, and left activists online.”
What happened the week before in Minneapolis and St. Paul came much closer to a genuine general strike, although even there, in vastly more favorable conditions that prevail in the U.S. as a whole, given the higher rate of union density, and the way the local community has been galvanized and united by the grotesque occupation of the city by ICE and Border Patrol agents (for reasons that transparently have nothing to do with immigration enforcement), the majority of businesses stayed open, and in particular the big corporations whose shutdowns would have had the greatest impact weathered the storm.As Blanc summarizes:
January 23 in the Twin Cities saw much more widespread workplace disruption. Schools were closed (though this was partly due to the extreme cold). Multiple cultural institutions like museums were shuttered. Organizers estimate that roughly one thousand businesses, overwhelmingly small proprietors, participated, and that roughly a million Minnesotans supported the action in some form that day.
This was a monumental achievement, further evidence of the state’s grassroots heroism and the strategic savvy of its progressive unions and community organizations. As Minneapolis Sunrise Movement organizer Aru Shiney-Ajay explained to me in an interview last week, January 23 “was a fantastic start.” But she’s also right that “we have a lot further to go to actually flex our muscles by shutting down the economy” and that “it’s going to take a lot more work” to build “real general strikes.”
What would it take?While we’ve never had a national general strike in the United States, we’ve had city-wide general strikes (most recently in the 1940s). So, what did they have going for them that more recent efforts have lacked?
The most crucial, and sadly obvious, factor is unionization. The cushier your job, the more likely you are to be willing to take a sick day to participate in symbolic one-day “general strike” like the one last Friday, but most people are afraid of the consequences of doing so. The strength of the working class lies in its numbers, and that can’t be unlocked without a good way to coordinate with your co-workers. Wildcat strikes (i.e. strikes not called through regular union channels) are particularly risky for workers, and themselves are more likely to happen (as Vivek Chibber emphasizes) in an environment of high union density when militancy and confidence are built up through a record of victories.
Blanc writes:
Recent experience abroad shows how crucial the private sector — especially its most central nodes — can be for defeating authoritarianism. Late on December 3, 2024, South Korea’s right-wing president, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law. The militant Korean Confederation of Trade Unions threatened a general strike to save democracy and began immediately organizing rolling strikes in the most economically central metal and auto factories like Kia and Hyundai. This push, together with the broader pro-democracy movement of which it was part, forced the president out of office on December 14, 2024. (Yoon has since been indicted for leading an insurrection and is imprisoned — a fate that hopefully awaits America’s would-be dictator and his henchmen.)
To paralyze ICE and stop Trump, we urgently need far more private sector worker organizing.
Beyond this basic point, Blanc identifies factors (momentum, leadership, organization) that will make general strikes more probable, and talks about what people can do in the here and now to build up the right conditions, while also emphasizing that attempts to bring general strikes into being with top-down calls from activists and influencers are unlikely to be successful. What’s crucial is having the elements in place when events can take on a life of their own.His article includes, for example, this handy breakdown of the way that every general strike we have had in American city has played out:
I started out this note by asking whether the difference between the kinds of coordinated protests, voluntary closures by sympathetic small businesses, school walkouts, and so on—all of which, I want to emphasize are really really positive developments—and an “actual general strike” is one that matters.
I think it does. The way I’d frame why it matters (which heavily overlaps with the case Blanc makes in a different way in his article) might be best expressed by going back to a short video that I posted on Instagram on New Years Eve:
In it, I encouraged viewers to imagine the worst thing they could imagine Trump doing in the coming year.
If you have a good imagination, this might not be a very fun exercise. But indulge me. Invading Venezuela. Canceling elections. Whatever. Let your imagination go nuts. You know what would stop whatever it is from happening? Like, actually stop it, for real? A nation-wide general strike.
Now, I’m under zero illusions that we’re going to go from 6.2% or whatever private sector unionization to having nationwide general strikes in the next twelve months. But my reason for indulging in this little thought experiment is just to make a straightforward point about the social power that an organized working class would have.
In other words, if you want to think about what the realistic lever of power is for the majority of the population right now, it’s our power to withdraw our labor. That’s the power that played a crucial role in building social democracy in all the countries that have won a vastly better social contract for the working class within capitalism than what we’ve got in the United States. It’s the power that, exercised in a different way (by taking over production instead of just stopping it) could take us beyond capitalism entirely in the best version of our long-term future. And a general strike, like the ones Blanc talks about in South Korea and elsewhere, would be one of the most effective ways of using that power to bring about short-term political goals.
So, there are real costs to muddying the waters about what a “general strike” is, and giving people the impression that this most powerful weapon of the collective power of ordinary people has already been used and didn’t work. It hasn’t been.
It could be, though, and we absolutely need to build towards that.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
From Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis via this RSS feed