online "general strike" memes are not how we will get a general strike
Posting isn't organizing.
A comic that makes this essay superfluous, because it says everything I’m trying to say.
We need a general strike. When workers stage a general strike, we can win… whatever we want, really. It’s often a key part of successful revolutions, and even when the strike is negotiated down from complete overthrow of a government, it can win huge gains for workers.
So, when I see recurring posts about “we need a general strike,” “general strike now,” etc., I roll my eyes, but not because I disagree with the goal. It’s because I agree that we need a general strike, but these Internet posts don’t have a real plan to make it happen.
To help people follow along, and so I don’t seem to be ranting against a total strawman, here’s the latest “let’s organize a general strike” thing I’ve seen on the internet. I feel a little bad for calling out one group who is, I’m sure, well-intentioned, with broad political goals entirely compatible with mine. But criticism is needed to avoid our movement getting side-tracked by things that don’t have a chance at succeeding, and I can’t stand posting vague generalities and people are just supposed to know what you’re referring to.
What’s necessary for a true general strike, one where the entire country is essentially shut down, is an organized mass movement behind the idea, especially ones organized in key sectors of the economy. This sort of organization exists already: labor unions. But, currently, none of them would get near the idea of a general strike, for a variety of reasons:
They’re run by leadership that ranges somewhere on the ideological spectrum between, at best, Bernie Sanders-adjacent democratic socialists, and conservatives either only looking out for their own group of members, or only looking out for their own personal power.
Nearly every union contract with employers has a “no strike/no lockout” clause that legally prohibits them from participating. Sure, if the intention is for a revolution that overthrows our legal system, this doesn’t end up mattering, but it’s worth mentioning that none of them are gonna be the first ones to sign up somewhere to say, “we intend to break the law, please shut our union down.” That’s not an exaggeration; unions who endorse wildcat strikes can have their entire funds taken away, sometimes along with personal fines for the union leadership for every day they’re not stopping an illegal strike.
In probably the most important issue, unions do not have the membership necessary to make this happen. Union density in the private sector is 6%, down from the mid-30s in the 1950s.
An obvious response to this union-centric line of thinking might be: what’s stopping the 94% of non-union workers from striking? Well, the fact that they’re not organized. If you could organize them into risking their jobs by going on strike, you could do the much easier intermediary step of starting a union first.
This gets at the key philosophical difference I have with the “general strike now” folks: they might say they’re trying to “organize” a general strike, but what they’re doing is not organizing. It is posting. Organizing is a long, difficult process; it is talking with individuals about (as the comic says) what’s important to them. It is building a durable, lasting organization by developing leaders to take action.
Getting people to click a button on the internet that says, “I’m going to strike!” is so different from getting that person to actually strike that the two are almost unrelated. Who is going to follow up with them to confirm, yes, this person is really going to do that? How are they going to get their coworkers to join them in doing so? The idea of “get a certain number of people to commit” has no consideration that certain people are essential for a general strike to succeed, and certain people don’t matter as much to that success.
The linked explanation says that 3.5% of people can have a successful general strike. I’m sorry, but that’s total bullshit. Their citation isn’t a study of strikes, or even general strikes, but people engaging in protest, in the context of the authors making an argument in favor of nonviolent change instead of violence. (Even that claim I’m skeptical of: the anti-Iraq War protests were the largest protests in history and completely unsuccessful.) Say you’re in a factory with 200 workers. How many of them need to go on strike for it to be successful? A supermajority. Even with a full 50% walking out, that’s 50% crossing the picket line, and a company can probably find enough scabs to keep the factory running, even if not at full productivity. Saying that seven people out of 200 can walk out to have a successful strike is delusional. One might respond, “well, maybe with the right seven people,” but again, that would mean organization to target the right industries, the right people to join in a strike.
An important part of workplace organizing is escalating actions. Strikes are great, but they’re not the only tool in our kit. It’s like preparing for a marathon: if you decide you should get off your couch and be a long-distance runner, you don’t just sign up for the next marathon and show up with new sneakers and a hope, you train for it. In a workplace, how you train for a strike is by doing smaller actions that escalate toward it: start with something small, like just getting people together to talk outside of work. Then, you can do something like write a letter to the boss. What this does is it builds leadership among workers, by giving them practical actions to do (like talking to their coworkers about signing on to the letter), and teaches them important things about their workplace: that the boss can’t just fire everyone who signs on to a letter, because there’s power in numbers. People who focus entirely on the strike action, whether “general” or otherwise, aren’t just missing a bunch of great things to do while building up power for a successful strike, they’re missing all the things that can be won (both from the boss and in internal development) from actions that come before a strike.
As a Seattle leftist, it’s my solemn responsibility to talk about how cool the Seattle general strike was. That was about 65,000 workers on strike, or about 20% of the city’s population at the time. And that wasn’t a random 20% of citizens, it was the 20% most crucial to the work of the city. What was the crucial aspect that led to the strike? More workers had unionized in Seattle!
Similar to how every tech bro’s transport innovation is just reinventing the city bus, every new idea about general strikes is just reinventing the old IWW. They, too, wanted One Big Union that would pull off One Big Strike, then build a new world in the ashes of the old. But instead of focusing on that strike first and foremost, they organized workers and won things from the bosses in the short term. When workers realize the power they have- not from reading theory, not from a social media post, but from using their power to improve their own lives- they become capable of revolutionary action.
A general strike isn’t going to happen because someone undemocratically decides on a day when it will happen, and everyone sees it and goes, “oh, okay.” It will happen when we build the organizations capable of making it happen. The good news here is that you can do this. You may be doing this already! To counteract the list of reasons why unions won’t join a general strike, here’s a series of steps to make it really happen:
You, me, and other leftists organize our workplaces, working with our coworkers to improve things in our day-to-day lives.
We take escalating actions in our workplaces to build more pressure against the boss, while building confidence and leadership among the rank-and-file.
We lock in those gains by making long-lasting organizations who can make sure our bosses don’t roll them back. This can mean either making new unions or joining existing ones.
We lead the labor movement away from complacent, conservative business unionism into a revolutionary direction, one capable of organizing all workers.
We organize all workers.
General strike!
Some people might see a list of steps we have to do as daunting or discouraging, but I don’t. A series of things to work on is so much more encouraging and engaging than clicking a button and hoping somewhere between ten and 300 million other people click it also.