Let's start talking about general strikes

We need mass movements, not electoral campaigns

There’s a lot of “zomg what do we do?!?” I think what it really means, at least in many cases, is, “isn’t there anything we can do that won’t be really hard and even risky and possibly physically and emotionally dangerous?” You know, like losing your livelihood or being attacked by armed cops with attack dogs and water cannon — you’ve seen Selma, right? Or read The Letter from Birmingham Jail?

And then people like Ezra Klein (love you, Ezra! but no) tell us to just buckle up and hold tight. This is not just denialism. It’s a messianic faith in the institutions that utterly fails to reckon with the institutions’ reliance on the good faith of institutional actors. Just like early Christians are told in Revelation “only hold fast to what you have until I come” (Rev 2:25, for example) with “patient endurance” (Rev 2:2), Klein wants us to trust in The Lord Our Insititutions and just “not believe” the devil.

I know the slander on the part of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Beware, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison so that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have affliction. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life. (Rev 2:9b-10)

Try substituting “American patriots” for “Jews” and “Trump” for “Satan.” At what point are our lives going to be on the line? How long should we wait to find out? Aren’t many people’s lives already on the line? Everyone likes to quote that “when they came for x” poem, but when push comes to shove, x is only seen as x in retrospect. When it’s happening, it’s “identity politics.”

That’s why it fucking works.

What I’m trying to say is that Klein’s argument feels to me like a kind of secular messianic-apocalyptic response to state persecution. Our job is to have faith, not to fight. But that will not work, because there is no secular God to save us. As I’ve been arguing for a long time, the institutions are vulnerable to people like Trump who use them for their own purposes when the institutions work, and ignore the institutions when the institutions get in the way.

Playing nice, playing by the “rules,” trusting in procedure, in the Constitution, in electoral democracy, has gotten us an authoritarian in the White House who learned from his first try not to leave anything to chance when has a second shot. He has absolutely abandoned the pretense of propriety that characterized his first administration, where he felt he had to prove he was serious, had to have pretty conventional people in powerful positions, etc. Now instead of appointing and firing dozens of administration personnel, he’s appointing hardcore loyalists from the get-go, firing everyone else, and doing everything he possibly can to get things he wants through. Yes, “muzzle velocity.” But the answer to muzzle velocity is to put a stop to the shooting, not wait for him to run out of ammo — he absolutely will not.

We laud the people in the civil rights movement who broke the law when the law was unjust in order to change the laws. I haven’t been in an elementary school in several decades, but I’ll be surprised if many kids are not still taught what patriotic heroes the Boston Tea Party false-flag property-destroying vandals were. Much of what is happening now isn’t even a breaking of a law (as with Musk’s rampage), but it is still wrong and still needs to be stopped. And then there are the illegal things that we are supposed to, what, wait for the courts to stop? Expect the cops or the army to stop?

You can’t be serious. Think about what you’re saying.

I haven’t seen any signs as yet of really serious mass organizing, and I admit I am not sure how to start it, but maybe starting to talk about it as something we really need to do is a way to get some movement.

American unions are probably not going to organize a general strike, because by and large they are committed to keeping their contracts. I understand that, but their contracts won’t be worth the paper they’re written on if things keep going the way they’re going.

Even Bernie Sanders isn’t talking general strike, at least not that I’ve heard. I’m dubious of Chris Murphy, but he at least has the singular virtue of trying to simply gum up the legislative works. It’s not enough, but it’s not nothing, either. All that being said, I have not yet seen — and do not expect — any indication that Democratic government officials will be interested in mass movement organizing. That stuff can get out of their control. Has AOC been talking this way, and I’ve missed it? I doubt it.

And so a movement has to come from somewhere else. That’s why I’m thinking general strike. I’m happy to have other ideas, but I haven’t seen anything else, and there are general strikes happening now in Greece.

Start reading up on general strikes and how they work . . . and don’t work. Because the history of general strikes is not that they always win. Indeed, they mostly seem not to. But they are nevertheless examples we can learn from. It having worked before wouldn’t mean it would work now, and similarly, it not having worked before doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work now. The devils are in the details — and sticking our heads in the sand waiting for the messiah is, frankly, more devilish.

Here’s a pointed example: The Kapp Putsch in Germany in 1920. The Encyclopedia Brittanica article — which I’m quoting because no one can say it’s just the “radical left” story of what happened — notes that it was stopped by a general strike.

Kapp Putsch, (1920) in Germany, a coup d’état that attempted to overthrow the fledgling Weimar Republic. Its immediate cause was the government’s attempt to demobilize two Freikorps brigades. One of the brigades took Berlin, with the cooperation of the Berlin army district commander. Reactionary politician Wolfgang Kapp (1858–1922) formed a government with Erich Ludendorff, and the legitimate republican regime fled to southern Germany. Within four days, a general strike by labour unions and the refusal by civil servants to follow Kapp’s orders led to the coup’s collapse. [emphasis added]

Jacobin has a recent article on this strike, which concludes thusly.

Even if the councils failed to live up to their aspirations, they and their supporters in the years between 1918 and 1920 should not be forgotten. They represented, if only for a brief moment, a real alternative to the staid reformism of Social Democracy and the authoritarian brand of Communism that would later crystalize in the KPD — showing that the most effective tool for defeating right-wing reaction is the political mobilization of the working class. Their defeat — and the end of the kind of unity they represented — would ultimately lay the political foundations upon which German fascism could be built.

In These Times has a solid short history of the Oakland general strike of 1946, and the ending is not happy, but I think the author is right when he says:

Neither strike was successful, but we remember them as moments of incredible worker solidarity when it seemed massive changes were about to happen. They need to be seen as part of the larger struggles of working people to achieve basic rights, decent wages, and safe living conditions in this country.

Whether a general strike succeeds or not is less important than the public stand it takes against the exploitation of working-class people. The general strike is not the end of the road but rather one step on the path to taking back our country.

Finally, I want to encourage everyone who identifies as progressive to deeply read labor history and the history of social movements. Knowing about your ancestors is great, but the past offers a more direct lesson: understanding how various tactics and strategies have worked in the past, and how they can work in the present.

Loomis is talking about worker struggles for unions and the benefits unions bring.

We are talking here about fighting off fascism.

Maybe it’s not a strike, but it has to be people in the streets, people gumming up the works, people publicly opposing the regime and its efforts to consolidate its grip on power. If the record-high levels of voter participation in the last three elections are any indication, Americans are more engaged — even if they don’t know more — than they ever have been. If the close elections of 2016 and 2024 are any indication, the public is deeply divided. And if Biden’s uniquely decisive win in 2020 is any indication, Trump is just not that popular, despite the intensity of his cult following that can make it feel like the whole country loves him.

They don’t. He can be beat. But he is not just going to lie down, and the institutions are not designed to stop him.

So we are going to have to at least try. Or we will be lying down.