Defining a General Strike
What do we talk about when we talk about general strikes. Here's a working definition.
A general strike is a social earthquake. It reorders the tectonic plates beneath the existing hierarchies that define the relations of class antagonism and capitalist rule. They arise when a space opens between ruling blocs of society and the countercultural forces pushing against the status quo. They are countercultural events because their participants aren’t trying to reconcile themselves to the existing order of things, but seeking to overturn them.
The general strike unsettles entrenched arrangements of domination, oppression, and exploitation. It’s not so much a case of the working class rebelling alone as it is the emergence of a new social configuration through an ephemeral cross-class dynamic. Pillar after pillar of civil society begins to shake, finally freed of the old orthodoxies that had locked it firmly in place. The social glue becomes undone.
The small business owner makes temporary common cause with their workers. The faith leader joins the call for action, lending moral validation from the pulpit. Pressure from below ruptures layer after layer of civil society, producing an upsurge that envelopes the whole of society and spills into the ruling apparatuses of the state until they can reestablish control on a new basis.
The general strike may begin in the workplace but must move beyond it into the neighborhood, the schools, the church, and ultimately the legislative houses of the state. That’s its endpoint because it’s a direct confrontation with the capitalist state. The general strike is the dialectic of crisis and opportunity. Does new a ruling bloc arise to assert hegemony? Or is the mass uprising brutally suppressed and the dark night of reaction grows longer?
The general strike is that briefest of moments when a new self-confidence seizes the working class and emancipation appears within grasp. It shares an emancipatory horizon with slave rebellions of the past. That great mass of humanity we call today workers can transition from passive spectators into active protagonists, generating social movements and a demonstration of class power: workers vs. bosses. When they speak about their interests in various tongues, workers do so in the grand aspirations of the polyphonic novel. The general strike is as much a cultural event as it is an economic and political one. It’s not the sigh of the oppressed. It is the belting outcry of the potentialities inherent in all of us workers finally realized.
For more, please consider reading my long article in Labor Notes about the Minnesota general strike. You can also read my earlier article, titled, “Will ICE Ignite a Mass Strike in Minnesota?” This brief missive is a bit abstract, but these articles get to the concrete analysis of the concrete situation.
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