Agitating for the “General Strike”: a shortcut to nowhere
An anonymous group of activists have gained some traction with their call for a “general strike” on October 15th. Such a reckless proclamation ignores the lessons of history, and can only set the labor movement back.
If you’re plugged in to progressive social media pages, you might have heard the buzz around the date October 15. Apparently, there is going to be a general strike! According to the strike organizers’ website (https://octoberstrike.com/), workers will be refusing to show up indefinitely as they demand a 25% corporate tax rate, free healthcare, 12-weeks paid paternity and maternity leave, a $20 minimum wage, a 4-day work week, and “stricter environmental regulations on corporations”.
In spite of these lofty goals, the “organization” of this would-be strike does not inspire a great deal of confidence. So far, it consists of little more than the website referenced above and a change.org petition. Other than a simple call to action and the list of demands, the website contains some basic information on the right to strike and links to various associated social media pages which post essentially the same information. The activists or organizations involved in calling this action are not identified anywhere on the website or on any of the social media pages, leaving would-be participants to wonder who exactly is calling on them to forgo their wages and risk their jobs, and on what authority.
The page makes a vague reference to behind the scenes effort to get support from major unions – apparently no thought was given to achieving such support before setting a date for the strike. Plans for a strike fund or organizing picket lines are completely absent from the website and social media pages. There is no thought given to targeting key industries where many workers could be won over to the strike or where the bosses are especially vulnerable. Even the legal information provided is dubious.
The website observes that “NLRA [National Labor Relations Act] Protects your right to strike even if you are not a union member because you are engaging in concerted activity,” and claims that “Companies have tried to retaliate before, and it doesn't look good for them.” This is a rosy view of what labor law actually says. The website fails to point out that striking for political demands such as those proposed (as opposed to workplace demands) remains illegal. It also doesn’t mention that workers who go on strike as a minority of their workplace (which would certainly be the case in a strike organized online) are highly vulnerable to employer retaliation.
Unsurprisingly, the number of people engaging with this call to action does not even approach the numbers that would be required for a real general strike. As of July 30, the petition has 17,000 signatures. For comparison, a petition to make LeVar Burton the next host of Jeopardy! has over 260,000 signatures. If the number of petition signatures grows by 10 times between now and October, and every one of those signatures translated to a real striking worker (a nearly impossible proposition!), that would still constitute only about 0.1% of the American workforce.
If you set out to “lead” a strike that was destined to fail, you would be hard pressed to find a better blueprint than this one. The website and petition will not be able to reach enough people to actually facilitate a general strike, but they could reach enough to do real damage to the labor movement and to the budding class consciousness of the working class in general. The organizers’ posts on TikTok get tens of thousands of views, and the popular progressive YouTube channel Secular Talk got over 50,000 views on a video positively covering the strike. If thousands or even tens of thousands of workers, recognizing the urgency of the demands and feeling a responsibility to act, take up the call to strike only to inevitably fail and face the consequences, what lessons will they draw?
Looking at their fellow workers who failed to join them, it will be easy to come to the conclusion that the rest of the class is hopelessly apathetic, and that mass action is impossible. Some of them will lose their jobs, where they could have become leaders building up the organizational muscle necessary for a real mass strike. In short, a working class which has only recently re-entered the political scene in a self-conscious way will again lose some of its most idealistic members to a combination of cynicism and chronic unemployment, with the crushing poverty that accompanies it.
Gore Vidal once quipped, “We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.” This certainly applies to the people behind the “October Strike”. They are far from the first clique of self-proclaimed leaders to call on the masses to follow them into a general strike, and they surely won’t be the last.
Ever since the Occupy movement reintroduced class politics into the US mainstream, calls for a general strike have been a regular occurrence on social media. The phenomenon goes back much farther than the advent of Facebook and Twitter, though. As early as 1906, Marxist theorist and (at the time) German Social Democratic Party activist Rosa Luxemburg wrote the pamphlet “The Mass Strike,” which addressed debates over the general strike which had been ongoing on the socialist left for decades. “The Mass Strike” could almost have been written today. Luxembourg argues:
The mass strike is not artificially “made,” not “decided” at random, not “propagated,” but… is a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitability. It is not, therefore, by abstract speculations on the possibility or impossibility, the utility or the injuriousness of the mass strike, but only by an examination of those factors and social conditions out of which the mass strike grows in the present phase of the class struggle – in other words, it is not by subjective criticism of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is desirable, but only by objective investigation of the sources of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is historically inevitable, that the problem can be grasped or even discussed.
In precisely the same way as the German advocates of the mass strike in Luxemburg’s day, the activists of the “October Strike” believe that a general strike can be conjured out of thin air by an act of will. Instead, it’s necessary to examine the concrete conditions that could facilitate a general strike.
What are the objective conditions we find ourselves in? Despite some recent signs of life, the labor movement in the United States remains historically weak. Less than 11% of US workers are in a union, after a more or less steady decline from a high of around 30% in the 1940s and ‘50s. Unlike in Rosa Luxemburg’s Germany, no mass socialist party exists in this country which can wield influence over the labor movement. Instead, the unions are almost entirely beholden to the capitalist Democratic Party. While individual unions such as the Chicago Teachers’ Union, LA Teachers’ Union, and International Longshore Workers’ Union have shown a willingness to strike for political demands, the official cross-industry labor organizations (the AFL and the CIO) will not dare approach such an illegal action. In these circumstances, the notion of a nationwide general strike is pure fantasy.
This is not to say that we ought to oppose a general strike in principle. The problem with the “October Strike” is not that it is overzealous in its esteem for the general strike as a weapon in the arsenal of the working class, but that it does not take the general strike seriously enough! A general strike in this country is possible. The Day Without an Immigrant protests of May 1st, 2006, offered a glimpse of something like it. Around 1.5 million people demonstrated nationwide, with over 1 million marching in Chicago and Los Angeles alone. The protest was not a weekend or holiday demonstration like we have seen so often during the Trump years. Although it was framed as a “boycott”, it was really a strike: the protest called on participants to not only abstain from buying products, but from going to work or school.
Unlike the nebulous October Strike, the Day Without an Immigrant strike had widespread organizational support from immigrants’ rights groups, Latinx religious groups, and Spanish-language media. Labor unions outside the US joined the boycott in solidarity with strikers. The strike was able to leverage the concentration of immigrant workers in certain industries (restaurants, delivery, and meat packing) and geographic areas (Chicago and LA) in order to put enormous pressure on specific sections of the capitalist class, as opposed to spreading the losses out across the whole economy so that they could be more easily absorbed. As a result of all of these factors, the strike was able to stop the passage of the astonishingly reactionary anti-immigrant bill HR 4437, which would have made it a felony to cross the border without papers.
Even with such a courageous show of force by the immigrant working class, the results were a long way off from the kind of general strike advocated for on the October Strike website. Rather than an indefinite strike to be carried on until demands are met, the Day Without an Immigrant was exactly that – a one day show of force. The strike was only able to win one defensive struggle, but unable to win an amnesty for undocumented migrants, and the trend toward greater and greater repression of migrants only continued. A general strike which brings forward much more sweeping demands, which includes a much broader swath of the working class, and which aims to go on indefinitely, would require a level of organization and preparation on the order of years rather than months.
…obstacles to building workers' power can only be confronted and overcome through mass politics, not circumvented with a hashtag.
The fact that tens of thousands of people are engaging with this idea shows that there is a will to fight back in the class war. Instead of leading those people off a cliff, it is the responsibility of socialists to build up the forces of the working class through our institutions: labor unions, tenant organizations, and ultimately a mass socialist party. The attempt to call strike without the participation of the official labor and progressive political institutions implicitly recognizes an important fact: that the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party hangers-on are an obstacle to the workers’ movement.
But these obstacles to building workers' power can only be confronted and overcome through mass politics, not circumvented with a hashtag. A long hard fight must be waged against the labor bureaucracy which seeks to keep the union movement within limits acceptable to the ruling class, and the Democratic party machine which seeks to co-opt any and all resistance movements. At the same time, we must oppose those who, either through cynicism or naivety, seek to lead the working class movement up blind alleys disguised as shortcuts. We cannot hope to conjure some Great Day of Reckoning by setting a date and shouting it from the rooftops. Only an organized working class can overcome capitalism.
Zack Frailey Escobar is a communist dock worker and sociology student living in San Diego. You can find more of his work at redhorizon.home.blog.
